BrightView Holdings, Inc.

Hello and welcome to the Brightview Holdings Q1 2024 earnings call. My name is Elliot. I'll be coordinating your call today. If you would like to register a question during today's event, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. And I'd like to hand over to Chris Stosko, Vice President of Finance. The floor is yours. Please go ahead.

Good morning and thank you for joining Brightview's first quarter fiscal 2024 earnings call. Gail Asplund, Brightview's President and Chief Executive Officer, and Brett Urban, Chief Financial Officer, are on the call. I will now refer you to slide two of the presentation, which can also be found on our investor relations website, and which contains our safe harbor disclaimer. This call may include forward-looking statements subject to certain risks and uncertainties. In addition, during this call, we will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures. Please see our 8K issued yesterday for the reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures. I will now turn the call over to Gail.

Thank you, Chris. And good morning, everyone. I will start today's call on slide four with some highlights for the first quarter and then provide an update on our strategic initiative. I'm pleased to report that we are off to a solid start in physical 2024 as we achieve meaningful progress on our objectives outlined under one bright view. On our last earnings call, we set a clear and refreshed strategy. prioritize our employees, align our core businesses while ensuring our customers come first, focus on profitable growth, and unify the company under one bright view. During the quarter, we began to successfully execute on this strategy by aligning our Salesforce to our local operating branches, reintegrating core self-performed businesses back into our branches, de-emphasizing non-core portions of our business, and continuing to focus on pursuing higher quality, profitable business. While these actions led to a modest impact on our land maintenance revenue for the quarter, I am confident we are taking the necessary steps to ensure growth in the medium and long term. I'm also pleased to report that for the sixth quarter in a row, our development business once again showed significant growth and margin expense. Additionally, We are proving our commitment to becoming more efficient and removing cost with improvement in our corporate segment. I'm encouraged by the underlying momentum in our business as we execute our renewed strategy. And as a result, we are reiterating our financial guidance for the full year. Additional evidence of our strategy in action was the sale of our U.S. launch franchise business in January for roughly $52 million. This was a non-core business that did not align with our strategy around self-performance and capital allocation. This move underscores our focus on the core business, but also highlights the value of achieving profitable and reoccurring growth. We have attained a substantial valuation in the private markets, well above our current trading multiple, providing proceeds that we intend to reinvest in our core business. The enhancements we have made in our business align with our overarching initiatives to operate as a unified Brightview. Throughout the quarter, we made progress implementing our strategy across the entire organization. We believe successful execution of our one Brightview strategy will unlock significant long-term shareholder value. This starts by focus on becoming the employer of choice. And we are doing this by reinvesting in our core businesses and our employees. We are making investments in our fleet and investing in the health, safety, and development of our team. We are also streamlining and optimizing organizational structures at the branch level, resulting in a revitalized go-to-market strategy. And we renewed our focus on improving how we service our customers. with the goal of increasing retention and growing profitably. Alongside these efforts, we took measures to better align our capital allocation priorities with our branch level needs and our broader initiatives throughout the organization. On slide five, we show one bright view in action and provide a few specific examples of the improvements we have made in the early stages of this value creation journey. Under this, we realigned our sales efforts and implemented incentive plans to ensure the entire organization, from the branch to our corporate office, is focused on driving profitable growth. Furthering the collaboration throughout the organization, we put in place a cohesive, customer-first, go-to-market strategy. We also enhanced our customer survey, which resulted in improved response rates and is helping us to gain an even deeper understanding of our customers and their needs. We are leveraging these findings to further refine and strengthen our go-to-market approach. An example of this go-to-market strategy was the reintegration of our tree and golf services into our core maintenance branches. This streamlines operations internally, but also helps us deliver more efficient, collaborative, and unified services for the customer. We are focused on becoming the partner of choice and taking actions to enhance our positionings which will allow for opportunities to grow our business with existing customers and win new customers. As the nation's largest provider in our industry, there is tremendous opportunity to leverage our size and scale to drive efficiencies across the business, while improving essential functions such as safety, training, and the centralization of operations to better align and support our core business. Moving to slide six, and before turning the call over to Brett to discuss our financial results for the quarter, I want to remind everyone that the focus of One Bright View begins with becoming the employer of choice. We do that by putting our employees first and by developing a culture where people seek to achieve individual and group success. We prioritize our employees so they have the capabilities, training, and equipment required to do their jobs at a high level. Doing this materially impacts the level of service provided to customers and leads to an exceptional customer experience. By making these investments in our employees, and in turn, employees taking care of our customers, we will become the partner of choice in our industry. We are focused on improving customer retention and accelerating profitable growth by bringing on new customers and expanding relationships with existing customers. Once we have established a strong foundation for profitable growth and a unified bright view, we will be in a position to expand strategically. M&A can be a powerful lever to growth and generate meaningful returns on capital, but only when it fits strategically, culturally, and financially. As one bright view, we have the best at what we do, and I'm confident that we can continue to deliver on these goals. With that, I'll turn it over to Brett, who will discuss our financial performance and outlook in more detail.