Proficient Auto Logistics, Inc.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Proficient Auto Logistics First Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 11 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Brad Wright, Chief Financial Officer. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Shannon, and good morning, everybody. I'm Brad Wright, Chief Financial Officer of Proficient Auto Logistics. Thank you for joining us on Proficient's first quarter 2024 earnings call. As you probably know, on May 13, 2024, we completed our initial public offering and the combination of our five founding companies. Under SEC rules, we are required to file first quarter financial statements for Proficient Auto Logistics, the designated accounting acquirer of each of the founding companies, and Proficient Auto Transport, the designated accounting predecessor to the company. These financial statements will be filed on a Form 10-Q later this week. We are not required to provide, and the Form 10-Q will not contain pro forma financial data for the first quarter. However, our earnings release provided summary, unaudited, combined financial information for the first quarter for the five founding companies. Our earnings release can be found under the investor relations section of our website at proficientautologistics.com. Our 10-Q, when filed, can also be found under the investor relations section of our website. During this call, we will be discussing certain forward-looking information. This information is based on our current expectations and is not a guarantee of future performance. I encourage you to review the cautionary statement in our earnings release describing factors that could cause actual results to differ from those expressed by the forward-looking statements. Further information can be found in our SEC filings. During this call, we may also be referring to EBITDA. Please refer to the portions of our earnings release that provide a reconciliation of EBITDA to gap measures such as earnings before income taxes or net income. Joining me on today's call are Rick Odell, Proficient's Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and Randy Beggs, our President and Chief Operating Officer. We will provide a company update as well as an overview of the company's combined results for the first quarter. After our prepared remarks, we'll open the call to questions. During the Q&A, please limit yourself to one question plus one follow-up. You may then get back into the queue if you have additional questions. Now, I would like to introduce Rick Odell, who will provide the company update. Rick?

Thank you, Brad, and good morning, everyone. The closing of our IPO and the founding company acquisitions on May 13th represented the culmination of significant efforts over the past year by everyone from the transaction organizers to the management teams of Proficient Auto Logistics and each of the five founding companies, our legal and investment banking teams, and of course the investors who did the analysis and showed their interest and confidence in our story to become the holders of equity in our new combined enterprise. While we were pleased with the accomplishment of completing those transactions, it merely marks the beginning of the real work in front of us to execute against the plan that we describe to investors in the lead up to our IPO. There are many initiatives requiring execution over the near to intermediate term, but we are particularly focused on five. Cost synergies. The enhanced national scale afforded by our combination provides leverage in our procurement efforts that is expected to reap immediate benefits in our operating ratio. Within 10 days of closing our transactions, We had implemented an improved fuel contract with a national provider. We expect the savings to equal or exceed $3 million on an annualized basis. Increased utilization. The reduction of empty miles across our network may well be the highest impact initiative on our operating ratios over time. To that end, we're currently in the process of implementing our common transportation management system at the fourth of our five founding companies. We expect all five companies to be active on this system during the third quarter. In the meantime, our management teams are evaluating high-volume lanes with typically empty backhauls and sharing loads to fill these miles as often as possible. This will be an ongoing effort and will become increasingly efficient as the TMS systems get integrated. Increasing company deliveries. Improving our operating ratio by shifting more units and revenue to company trucks versus sub haulers is an initiative that not only improves the profitability of existing lanes, but also provides more opportunities to increase our utilization efforts as described previously. We've developed a fleet plan for the remainder of 2024 that will result in an increase of approximately 10% in company owned assets. These new units will be put immediately to use covering newly contracted business and also to reduce the sub-haul activity in select lanes where we can improve our efficiency and profitability. Activity-based cost analysis. We have initiated implementation of a third-party software that is transportation-specific and provides profitability by customer, delivery, lane, and even down to the truck level. Full implementation will take six to nine months that will allow for much higher precision in our profit analysis and our contract bidding process. Used car and fleet marketing. Our marketing team is in place nationally and has begun building the relationships in each geographic market that will allow us to grow this largely untapped revenue potential. From an operating perspective, we've been in active communication with our OEM customers describing the impact of our recent combination on our ability to deliver increased geographic coverage and the availability of increased and enhanced service capability that the new structure provides. As we noted in our earnings release earlier this morning, we experienced reduced demand early in the first quarter. However, volumes began showing improvement around the middle of February and have continued to strengthen since then. In addition, our companies continue to add new contract business with nine net new contracts between the beginning of 2024 and the end of May. There were also 13 renewals of existing contracts during that time span. While our primary focus is the integration and growth of the founding companies, we also continue to see a number of interesting strategic opportunities, and in each case we'll evaluate their potential for accelerating the achievement of our coverage and profitability goals. We are encouraged about the prospects for continued growth over the coming months, and look forward to providing you with another update when we report the second quarter results. I will now turn it back to Brad to cover key financial highlights.