Great Elm Group, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Great Elm Group Q2 2021 conference call and webcast. At this time, all participants are in the listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you'll need to press star 1 on your telephone. If you require any further assistance, please press star 0. And now I'd like to hand the conference call over to Ms. Jean Halenford. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us for Great Elm Group's fiscal second quarter 2021 earnings conference call. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded on Tuesday, February 16th, 2021. If you'd like to be added to our distribution list, you can email investorrelations at greatelmcap.com, or you can sign up for alerts directly on our website, www.greatelmgroup.com. The slide presentation accompanying this morning's conference call and webcast can be found on our website under events and presentations. A link to the webcast is also available on our website as well as in the press release that was disseminated to announce the quarterly results. I would like to call your attention to the customary safe harbor statement regarding forward-looking information. Also, please note that nothing in today's call constitutes an offer to sell or solicitation of offers to purchase our security. Today's conference call includes forward-looking statements and projections, and we ask that you refer to Great Elm Group's filings with the SEC for important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from these projections. Great Elm Group does not undertake to update its forward-looking statements unless required by law. To obtain copies of SEC filings, please visit Great Elm Group's website under financial information and select SEC filings. Hosting the call this morning is Peter Reed, Great Elm Group's Chief Executive Officer. I will now turn the call over to Peter. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I am joined this morning by our President and COO Adam Kleinman and our CFO Brent Pearson. I will begin with a general overview and key highlights for the quarter, including the corporate structure reorganization and financing transaction that we previously announced and closed in December. Brent will discuss our financial results in greater detail and then I'll return for closing remarks. For those who may not be as familiar with Great Elm Group as a whole, I'll take a brief moment to review our general structure and strategy. Great Elm is a holding company and our objective is to create shareholder value through the collective efforts driving our three verticals, each of which deploy a distinct strategy. In our operating companies, we are focused on acquiring undercapitalized companies with significant growth potential, both organic and through M&A. Currently, we manage Great Elm Durable Medical Equipment, or DME, a distributor of respiratory care equipment and sleep study services. In investment management, we seek to increase the assets under management both in Great Elm Capital Corp., the publicly traded BDC, and in other investment vehicles managed by Great Elm Capital Management, or GECM. In real estate, we're managing our existing investment in our Fort Myers property to monetize our substantial tax assets. Turning to our fiscal 2021 second quarter ended December 31, 2020. This quarter was notable for our DME and investment management businesses. As we've consistently stated in the past, our strategic goals for these businesses have been to support them with the capital necessary for growth while simultaneously positioning the whole company for future success. I'm very pleased to report that we achieved this objective for both businesses this quarter. Furthermore, with this momentum, we drove growth at both segments this quarter and more recently. During the second quarter, we established a new fund product at Investment Management And in DME, after a period of investment and working on the scalability of our platform, we were able to fully turn our focus to acquisitions and growth. I'll elaborate on both initiatives later in my commentary. But for now, returning for now to the strategic financing transaction that we announced late last year. On December 21, 2020, we announced a $37.7 million financing transaction from JPMorgan Broker Dealer Holdings, or JPM, an affiliate of JPMorgan Chase. Immediately prior to the financing, we also completed a corporate structure reorganization. I'll provide a brief recap of the reorganization and financing transaction and what this means for our company and shareholders. On December 29, we completed the reorganization of our corporate structure, whereby Great Elm Capital Group changed its name to Forest Investments and became a subsidiary of a new parent holding company that was formed called Great Elm Group. Pursuant to this reorganization, all shares in Great Elm Capital Group were automatically exchanged for an equivalent number of shares in Great Elm Group. Effectively, we have changed our parent holding company name and branding from Great Elm Capital Group to Great Elm Group, which also helps separate and distinguish us, the parent company, from the publicly traded BDC that we manage, Great Elm Capital Corp, which we refer to as GECC. As you may have noticed, we have updated our website to www.greatelmgroup.com to reflect these changes. As I mentioned earlier, we closed an aggregate $37.7 million in financing from JPM, whereby JPM purchased from Forrest $35 million in newly issued 9% preferred stock maturing in 2027 and 20% of the equity of Forrest for $2.7 million. Accordingly, Forrest will be owned 80% by GEG and 20% by JPM. The proceeds from the JPM investment were used to refinance an existing term loan at DME with a balance of approximately $24.8 million in addition to transaction fees and expenses and cash on the balance sheet to fund the growth. Importantly, DME now has the flexibility to incur senior indebtedness as well as to utilize excess cash on its balance sheet as it assesses growth opportunities, including M&A. In the near term, DME also benefits from a lower cost of capital. As part of the financing transaction and prior to JPM's purchase of its 20% common interest in Forrest, Forrest distributed to Great Elm Group its common ownership of the DME business, its ownership of the investment management business, its GECC shares, and cash. Forrest will retain ownership of the real estate business and a preferred interest in DME. Forrest will also retain its U.S. federal NOLs, which were unaffected by the transaction, and remain available for usage across the Great Elm platform, as Great Elm will continue to own 80% of Forrest. In summary, the transaction accomplishes the following for us. We refinanced the DME business, immediately lowered its cost of capital, and in the longer run, it affords the flexibility to incur senior leverage as needed to fund expansion. We also increased excess cash at DME and at our parent holding company, which will provide additional financial support and flexibility as we work to achieve our strategic growth plans. The JPM transaction represents a significant step in laying the necessary groundwork to achieve our long-term growth plans. Moreover, we hope to strengthen our relationship with JPM in order to find additional means of enhancing shareholder value in the future. Turning to our investment management segment, prior to the JPM transaction, GECC completed a $30 million rights offering that should enhance its ability to capitalize on its specialty finance strategy while strengthening its balance sheet. Ultimately, the RAID's gross proceeds of $31.7 million raised its asset coverage ratio to 176.5% on a pro forma basis. Importantly, it also left GECC with a stronger capital position with which to take advantage of attractive investment opportunities. GECC reported a strong third quarter, and we have been very pleased with the resiliency of its portfolio throughout the pandemic, as well as the potential we are seeing in our factoring business, Prestige Capital Finance. This has been an exceptional investment for GECC, generating results that have well exceeded our internal expectations. Our intention is to leverage our experience and presence in this niche segment, not just in factoring, but in the broader specialty finance arena, and pursue additional acquisition opportunities in this highly fragmented space. In the second quarter, our investment management segment also began to deploy capital into Special Purpose Acquisition Companies, or SPACs, investing $3 million of Great Elm Group's excess cash into a dedicated internal fund with an additional $5 million invested into the fund subsequent to quarter end. We believe this asset class can deliver very attractive risk-adjusted and highly asymmetric returns to Great Elm given the cash and trust structure of SPACs provides downside protection coupled with our prudent investing and underwriting process. Our goal is to provide capital to sponsors where we believe we can add significant value through operator-investor teams that offer the target both, one, industry and managerial expertise with a proprietary executive network, and two, sophisticated financial backing and capital structure advisory. The fund has been in a ramp-up period, and we are focused on acquiring SPAC units or common shares through IPOs or in the secondary market at a slight discount or slight premium to trust value, as well as investing in securities of issuers that have announced deals deemed attractive based on fundamental analysis and trade only at a modest premium to trust. Before I turn it over to Brent to go through our operational and financial results in greater detail, I wanted to touch on a couple of high-level details. Our fiscal second quarter reflected stable top-line performance by both DME and investment management, but also continued impact on both businesses from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The DME business generated revenue of $14.5 million, an increase of 1% or $0.1 million year-over-year, while sales revenue increased by $1.1 million year-over-year. This increase is offset by an increase in revenue reserves of $1.0 million. DME adjusted EBITDA was $1.9 million versus $3.5 million last year after taking into account $0.3 million in reallocation of operating expenses from GEG corporate personnel to DME and $0.2 million of increase in operating expenses related to COVID-19. We experienced strong growth in medical equipment sales this quarter, both year over year and sequentially. It was driven in large part by CPAP supply sales. This is a testament to the performance of our sales team and their ability to transition to a largely virtual environment. We experienced a slowdown in 2020 from fewer sleep studies, which experienced softened demand during the pandemic due to the in-person nature of the service. Rental revenue was also lower as referrals for new equipment setups tend to be driven by in-house or external sleep studies. However, through our sales team, efforts on supplies and equipment we believe the dme business is in an excellent position for recovery as we emerge from pandemic conditions and as i touched on earlier we are very excited to meaningfully increase our m a activity following the jpm financing transaction and believe we now have ample runway to grow the dme business our hope is to complete several new transactions each year given the current landscape and supported by our enhanced infrastructure and resources On the general corporate front, we remain very focused on maintaining costs. I'm pleased to report that over the past couple quarters, we've produced a market reduction in G&A as it relates to public company expense, which directly benefits shareholders. This quarter, we gained further improvement in part through the reallocation of certain compensation as related to resources dedicated to the management of the DME business. Rest assured, we continue to examine all aspects of our overhead and continually seek ways to reduce costs and leverage our resources where we are able to. The return potential of our entire organization is maximized, and we maintain a lean cost structure without compromising operations. With that, I'll turn it over to Brent to discuss our financial results for the quarter in more detail, and then I'll return for a few closing remarks. Brent?