Forward Air Corporation

Welcome to the Forward Air first quarter 2024 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants have been placed in a listen-only mode and the floor will be open for your questions following the presentation. If you would like to ask a question at that time, please press star and 1 on your telephone keypad. If at any point your question has been answered, you may remove yourself from the queue by pressing star and 2. So others can hear your questions clearly, we ask that you pick up your handset for best sound quality. Lastly, if you should require any operator assistance, please press star and zero. I would now like to turn the call over to Michael Hance, Chief Legal Officer.

Good morning, and thank you, operator. And thanks, everyone, for joining the call today. Before we jump in, I just wanted to take a moment to thank our teammates, customers, and shareholders, many of whom are on the call today. for the incredible support over the last several months as I served as interim CEO. In particular, I want to acknowledge the employees and independent contractors and drivers who have been and continue to work tirelessly to provide best-in-class service to our customers and make this combination that we're working on a success. I'm humbled by what you do, and I am so grateful for your hard work. Thank you. Last quarter, I told you that my mandate as interim CEO was to provide the appropriate leadership while our teams continued to work through the integration of Ford and Omni. At the same time, our board's dedicated search committee was focused on promptly identifying a top-quality CEO to run the company during the next phase of our growth and development. That work is done, and I personally couldn't be more pleased with the outcome. I'm thrilled to introduce you to Sean Stewart, who began his tenure as CEO of Ford on April the 28th. The board and our advisors conducted a thorough search and are confident Sean is the right leader to drive Ford's future success. He knows this industry inside and out and has a demonstrated track record of successfully delivering growth, operational excellence, and profitability. As an 18-year veteran of Ford who cares deeply about the company's success, I'm personally committed to ensuring Sean hits the ground running as I return to my role as Chief Legal Officer and Secretary, and I know all of our teammates share that same commitment. I'll close by reiterating that we recognize these past few months have been bumpy as we navigated turbulence in the freight market and within our company. Our team is confident that is behind us, and we are all united and energized by the opportunities ahead. With that, please allow me to turn it over to Sean for his remarks before Rebecca runs us through the numbers.

Sean? Thank you, Michael, and thank you to those on the call who have provided a warm welcome and words of encouragement as I assume my new role a week ago Monday. I won't go into more details about my background, as I'm sure you've all seen the press release. But let me just say that I couldn't be more excited to join Ford at this critical juncture. The addition of Omni paves the way for the company to become a market leader in global supply chain as we leverage the new capabilities while enhancing our best-in-class expedited LTL and other ground services. I'm going to pass the call to Rebecca in a moment to provide you with details about our financial results. Given that I've been here less than two weeks, I'm not going to speak too much except to say that these results are not indicative of what you will see from us the rest of the year. We are headed up and onward from this day. I also want to share my view about the context of the company's Q1 performance, which I think is important to keep in mind. Our first quarter results were negatively impacted by two really tough headwinds, first These results were generated in a weak freight environment. Second, I'm convinced that these results reflect the impact of the distraction by the challenging circumstances leading up to the closing of the Omni transaction. I wasn't here, but you don't have to ride a roller coaster to know that people riding the roller coaster probably aren't focused on much else. Since closing, Michael and the team have done a great job pushing forward with integrating two companies and capturing synergies, which you will hear more about later. But I think it's really unrealistic to think that the ups and downs of the months leading to closing aren't reflected in our Q1 performance. Thankfully, that distraction is behind us now. As I mentioned, it is premature for me to start talking about forward numbers, but today I want to commit to two things. First, as I said earlier, we are headed up from here. When we are back on this call at the end of the second quarter, I believe we will be talking about different results that show significant improvement I need a little bit more time before we are ready to give you targets, but I can tell you that in my first days with the team, we are focused on accelerating synergy capture and identifying opportunities to eliminate significant costs from our structure. We are going to aggressively and urgently address our profitability issues, and I fully expect us to be a category leader in our space with corresponding financial results. We are going to enhance our investor communications to ensure that we are clear, transparent, and comprehensive with our data and communication. You should expect to see steady improvement in information flow over the next couple of quarters, providing you with the financial information that you need and want. Starting with our second quarter earnings release, we will provide full year 2024 guidance and information about our path to achievement. Why am I confident about these commitments? Because I did my own diligence before accepting the Ford opportunity. And I found a number of things that I liked and am excited about. First, this organization is made of great people. During these first two weeks on the job, I've been impressed with the quality and dedication of people I've met throughout the legacy Ford and Omni business. And I've been pleased to find that these businesses share a common DNA of providing excellent customer service. That will not change, and the quality and commitment of our people will serve as a strong foundation for our growth. Second, I can't stress this enough. As a result of this combination, Forward now has an incredible and unique platform for long-term growth and success. and its current areas of underperformance are very addressable. Let's talk about the platform. In the OmniLegacy business, we now have a true global supply chain network to add to our core LTL network. Remember, we run the best-in-class premium service LTL network in the U.S. with an on-time percentage of 98.6 and a cargo claims ratio of 0.04%. we are starting to see the power of the revenue synergies of these assets. Because of our combined capabilities, we were recently awarded a substantial volume of business from a Fortune 500 global technology company. We are finalizing the contract now, and we expect the business to start in June. We have similar opportunities in the advanced stages of our sales pipeline. Also, we continue to gain new business wins from existing customers. As an example, we recently renewed a contract with one of our top 20 legacy Ford customers that will generate an annualized revenue four times its historical trends. Additionally, in a tough freight environment, our intermodal team added 13 new logos in the first quarter. All this makes me optimistic about the rest of the year. Another point of strength is our broad and attractive customer base spanning our three distinct commercial channels. Let me pause to say thank you to all of our customers for your business and support. Under my leadership, we plan to drive growth in all three channels, but I want to be clear. We remain committed to our legacy Ford customers, including freight forwarders, airlines, and 3PLs. We are committed to continuing to provide them with our premium LTL services to enable them to grow their business. We have honored that commitment since closing, and we will continue to provide these key customers with that same great service. In my diligence review, I found that Omni has a strong track record with its customers and does a great job of providing them with solutions around the world. I'll name one. Omni provides critical value-added warehouse services for NVIDIA. We are honored by the trust placed on us by customers like NVIDIA. In my view, there is much to be excited about at Ford. Those are my initial high-level thoughts, and I naturally will provide more detailed comments on next quarter's call. Right now, addressing the business and financial performance will be the focus of all my energy and time. Rebecca will update you on some progress made so far this year, and I look forward to providing additional updates soon as we make even more headway. Hopefully the slides we filed along with the press release demonstrate our renewed commitment to providing enhanced disclosure of our performance and integration of Omni. With that, let me turn it over to Rebecca to run through the quarter and provide an update on the Omni integration. Rebecca?