Tennant Company

Good morning. My name is Chris, and I'll be your conference operator today. At this time, I'd like to welcome everyone to Tenant Company's 2020 third quarter earnings conference call. This call is being recorded. There will be time for Q&A at the end of the call. Please press star 1 if you'd like to ask a question. After the Q&A, please stay on the line for closing remarks from management. If you have joined our call today by telephone and logged into the conference call presentation on your computer, Please mute the audio on your computer to avoid potential quality issues during the call. Thank you for participating in Tenant Company's 2020 Third Quarter Earnings Conference Call. Beginning today's meeting is Mr. William Prate, Senior Director of Global Financial Planning and Analysis and Investor Relations for Tenant Company. Mr. Prate, you may begin.

Thank you, Chris. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Tenet Company's third quarter 2020 earnings conference call. I'm William Freight, Senior Director of Global Financial Planning and Analysis and Investor Relations. Joining me today are Chris Killingstad, Tenet's President and CEO, and Andy Sabula, our Interim CFO. Our Chief Operating Officer, Dave Hummel, is tending to a family matter today and is not able to join the call. On today's call, we will update you regarding our third quarter performance and full year outlook. Chris will brief you on our operations and the progress we're making towards our enterprise strategy. Then Andy will cover the financials. After their remarks, we will open the call to questions. Please note a slide presentation accompanies this conference call and is available on our investor relations website at investors.tenetco.com. Before we begin, please be advised that Our remarks this morning and our answers to questions may contain forward-looking statements regarding the company's expectations of future performance. Such statements are subject to risk and uncertainties, and our actual results may differ materially from those contained in the statements. These risks and uncertainties are described in today's news release and the documents we file with the Securities and Exchange Commission. We encourage you to review those documents particularly our safe harbor statement, for a description of the risk and uncertainties that may affect our results. Additionally, on this conference call, we will discuss non-GAAP measures that include or exclude certain items. Our 2020 third quarter earnings release includes the comparable GAAP measures and a reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to our GAAP results. Our earnings release was issued this morning via BusinessWire and is also posted on our investor relations website at investors.tenantco.com. I'll now turn the call over to Chris.

Thank you, William, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today. We hope that you and your loved ones are managing to stay safe through this pandemic. As you may have seen, in September, we celebrated Tenant's 150th anniversary. While our current operating environment could not be more different than what our founder, George Tennant, encountered in 1870, the company has always maintained a tradition of innovation and resilience, demonstrated by our ability to adapt and stay relevant to our customers. When the pandemic started, we were quick to respond and establish three guiding principles to keep our employees and customers safe, to manage our costs and cash flow, and to stay in a position to ramp up quickly when markets recovered. At the same time, we honored our commitment to provide our customers with the innovative solutions they needed to keep their facilities clean and safe. We continued with that approach in the third quarter and saw encouraging signs of recovery across all of our regions. Our global teams have worked hard in overcoming the unprecedented sales and operational challenges resulting from the pandemic. And we've worked closely with our customers, supply chain partners, and carriers to avoid operational disruptions. Furthermore, the execution of our enterprise strategy yielded improvements in our operating performance with third quarter EBITDA growth. despite a year-over-year COVID-19-related decline in organic sales. While the pandemic continues to pose considerable macro-level uncertainty, especially as some markets see spikes in COVID-19 cases, we have a high level of confidence in our near-term business outlook. As Andy will speak to in a few moments, we are reinitiating our full-year guidance for 2020, which not only reflects our revenue and profitability expectations, but also our commitment to investing in our business to support our long-term enterprise strategy. That strategy includes winning where we have competitive advantage, reducing complexity and building scalable processes, and innovating for profitable growth. While the global pandemic impact or the economic impact of the pandemic is nothing anyone could have predicted a year ago, it has not diminished our ability to execute on our enterprise strategy because the key elements are all within our control. For example, while innovating for profitable growth might sound like a lofty ideal, for Tenant, it represents how we take customer insights and leverage our tremendous engineering capabilities to solve real-world problems. A recent illustration of this commitment is our October 1st introduction of our new Key 380 AMR, which complements our current robotic offering by providing a smaller-sized machine that enhances maneuverability and navigation to help customers with smaller footprints. This new product and our continued partnership with Brain Corporation enabled us to finalize agreements in the third quarter to provide two national retailers and a separate regional retailer with our full suite of autonomous floor scrubbers. Additionally, we are starting to achieve wins in additional verticals like logistics, education, and aviation. Following our initial rollout with Walmart earlier this year, wins like these demonstrate how we're continuing to lead with innovation and deliver value to a more diverse customer base. In support of our enterprise strategy, we recently hired Dan Klusick as our Senior Vice President of Operations, reporting directly to our COO, Dave Hummel. Dan has broad enterprise leadership and deep functional expertise across all aspects of manufacturing operations, supply chain management, and enterprise transformation. And he brings more than 25 years of global operations leadership experience to Tenant. Dan is an important hire and will play a critical role in the implementation of our enterprise strategy as we advance our supply chain and optimize our operations to support our product standardization and local initiatives. In short, this is an important area of focus as we position tenant for success in a post-pandemic world. Lastly, given the improving demand trends that we've seen since May, and our confidence in the improved trajectory of our business, we recognized the need for strategic investments to support the continued execution of our strategy to backfill key leadership roles and to recognize and retain our best talent. This is core to the guiding principles we outlined at the start of the pandemic. We began making such investments in Q3 and will continue to do so in Q4. They are essential to how we can support our customers, emerge strong as markets recover, and continue to drive shareholder value. With that, I will now turn the call over to Andy.