Spark Power Group Inc.

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Spark PowerCorp Investor Call and Webcast. At this time, all participants have been placed on a listen-only mode, and the floor will be open for questions and comments after the presentation. It is now my pleasure to turn the floor over to your host, Richard Perry, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Sir, the floor is yours.

Thank you. Good morning, and welcome to our 2021 Fourth Quarter and Fiscal 2021 Conference Call. I am joined today by Spark Power's President and CEO, Richard Jackson, Chief Investment Officer, Eric Waxman, and Tom Duncan, Chief Operating Officer. Rich Jackson will begin the morning with remarks on the current state and outlook for the business, and I will follow with a review of the fourth quarter. We will then have our usual Q&A session. Before we commence the review, I would remind you that our presentation contains certain forward-looking statements that are based on current expectations and are subject to a number of uncertainties and risks, and actual results may differ materially. Further information identifying risks, uncertainties, and assumptions, and additional information on certain non-IFRS measures referred to in this call can be found in disclosure documents filed by the company with the securities regulatory authorities and available on CDAR.com. Further, these forward-looking statements are made as of the date of this call. and except as expressly required by applicable law, Spark Power assumes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statement, whether a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. With that, I will turn the call over to Spark's President and CEO, Rich Jackson, for his opening comments.

Thanks, Richard. Good morning, and welcome to Spark Power's fourth quarter and fiscal 2021 earnings conference call. Thank you for taking the time to join us. Overall, 2021 was a year of steady growth across most of our business segments. However, our fourth quarter faced significant challenges with the surge of COVID-19's Omicron variant, in addition to the continuous global supply chain disruptions and rapidly rising inflation, all of which put significant pressures on our growth margins. Despite these setbacks, I have full confidence that as these global events begin to normalize through 2022, we will see gradual margin recovery and the momentum of business operations continuing to support our organic growth and market expansion opportunities. Looking back on Spark Power last year, we experienced strong organic growth across our Canadian and U.S. markets and saw just under 13% growth year over year as compared to 2020. We're very proud that this was accomplished 100% organically through our growing footprint, specifically in our U.S. market and the growing demand for our services, the quality of our field work talent field worker talent, and the collaboration and breadth of services we continue to bring forth to address the diversity of our customers' unique needs. While the last few years of the pandemic have been a challenge, I remain deeply proud of our employees for their ongoing resilience and focus on safety, our leadership team for their very strong commitment, and our board of directors for their continued support of and confidence in the business. Of course, it goes without saying we continue to value the deep and growing relationships with our customer base across North America, as they too navigate these unprecedented times. In 2021, we completed our first formal customer survey with significant response rates, resulting in industry-leading net promoter scores. 2021 was also a year of laying down the right pathway to support the continued growth and maturation of the business. As part of laying this new foundation to support the next stage of our growth, we introduced a new flat management structure in early 2021 as part of the business's focus on field operations and scalability. These senior leadership enhancements include Richard Perry, who succeeded Dan Ardilla as our EVP CFO, Tom Duncan as EVP and COO, and additionally, we were pleased to share the promotions of Grayson Swan to Executive Vice President of Renewables, Najla Roth to Vice President of People and Culture, and Suha Jesilal to Vice President of Sustainability, leading our Bullfrog business unit. In early 2022, we also welcomed April Currie as our new Vice President of Sales and Marketing, John Marcello as Vice President of Finance, and John Krill, succeeding Tom Duncan as our Senior Vice President and General Manager of Canadian Technical Services. The completion of the founder transition in Q1 in 2021, followed by the transitional succession and strategic replacement of our senior leadership team, brings a renewed focus on business operations and a more experienced and mature structure to SPARC's operations. This newly organized management structure will help guide capital allocation decisions and position us well as we navigate the next stage of our maturity curve and execute on the next strategy for the company. As we have reported previously, SPARC has continuously sought new sources of capital to support our growth strategy. And while we conducted and closed off our strategic review process in Q4, we continued to seek capital and launched our rights offering towards the latter half of the quarter. Our rights offering and private placement closed in early Q1 2022, and generated a combined total of $39 million in new capital for the business. This injection of capital provides us with the necessary funds to execute our 2022 operating plan, which includes continued integration activities, which also includes our Project Darwin initiative, working capital support, and our ability to continue to grow sustainably. To this point, SPARC experienced strong and rapid growth around our renewables business segment in 2021. This growth was equally supported by strong transactional and long-term US-based demand for the development of wind, solar, and energy storage assets. Based on this opportunity, we expanded our footprint and launched a new branch in Albany, New York, to service the Northeastern market with a particular focus on renewables. Our footprint also expanded with new branches launched in Bakersfield, California, and Houston, Texas, both of which focus on our technical service segment of the business. In 2021, we launched a set of new company values with a focus on our field focused operating model that prioritizes field efforts and customer service. The five values that we identified are aspirational and serve as our guidepost for everything we aspire to be and do going forward as an organization. These five values, which were developed with the help and insight of all SparkPower employees across the business are trust, community, team, excellence, and sustainability. Together, these values support our purpose, which is to be our customers' trusted partner in power, and reflect the direction that Spark is headed as we reshape and build upon our business platform and transition into a more mature enterprise. Continuing on our focus on business integration initiatives and scalability, we completed our brand integration, uniting our Spark acquisitions across Canada and the U.S. under a cohesive, singular OneSpark power brand. This project was a two-year endeavor, and the completion of this milestone makes us incredibly proud. Going forward, when our customers see a SparkPower fleet vehicle or a SparkPower service provider, they will know that the breadth of services that can be offered to them reaches across various divisions from low voltage, high voltage, renewable storm services, engineering, and sustainability. We really are one of North America's leading independent providers for power solutions and our customers' trusted partner in power. As we are well into the first quarter of 2022, and as we strategically transition the business into the next level of maturity, the investment and development of our newly integrated enterprise-wide business process and technology platform, what we refer to as Project Darwin, remains a critical objective and a key priority of ours. This implementation of Project Darwin was a two-year endeavor that we began in early 2021. Its purpose is to bring key business processes and system enhancements and standardizations to our Spark Power operations company-wide. In conjunction with Project Darwin, we have also launched operational excellence as a key business function and philosophy within Spark. OpEx will drive consistent business KPIs, standard management reporting, and continuous improvement initiatives that align well to our new set of standard business processes. Darwin is a phased project, and we look forward to our first go-live at the end of Q2 with our second go-live at the end of the year. Thinking ahead in terms of our growth, we continue to commit to talent attraction and retention initiatives for the skilled trades. We were pleased to be awarded a $5.3 million grant for the Government of Ontario Skilled Development Fund in Q2 of 2021, which supports the launch of employee training and advancement initiatives such as enhanced on-the-job training for electricians, technicians and apprentices, community outreach programs that promote skilled trades work in Ontario, and the launch of our Be Powerful Scholarship program for underrepresented students to enter the trades. In addition to this, we have launched our new learning management system and our Spark U virtual platform in support of providing all Spark employees the opportunity to grow in their careers as we continue to grow. Looking ahead, and with 2022 well underway, our priority remains focused on gradual margin recovery, scalability, and a sustainable level of organic growth while completing the final pieces of our integration. We remain focused on operational excellence and enhancing our growth margin performance. Richard Perry can speak to this in more detail, but operationally speaking, these gradual improvements will come from some of the reduced impacts of the pandemic as COVID measures reflect the expected change from pandemic to endemic. We expect to naturally experience some improvement just in terms of our own operational efficiencies related to the pandemic. More focused pricing actions and introducing fair but necessary increases to absorb some of the costs caused by the significant rise in inflation. Transitioning to value-based pricing, SPARC has a reputation in the industry for being the choice service provider, and as our customer surveys have reaffirmed, we provide extensive value to our customers. Our ability to implement more focused pricing actions and provide prices based on the value we provide is very important. Stronger commercialization of our business and a more intentional approach to how we go to market, focusing on market segments both geographical and service line oriented, focusing on what we do best and where we create value versus our buildup of market presence and critical mass. And enhancing our supply chain management. We are continuing to look at ways we can enhance our vendor relationships and seek out better and more beneficial opportunities as we continue to consolidate and negotiate our supply chain. And lastly, a continued focus on OpEx and building strong leaders and driving strong project management. We have over 180 project managers across North America who do good work every single day, and we will continue to provide the training and the necessary development opportunities to help them in turn and help our business grow profitably. I would like now to turn it over to Richard Perry to share our financial results.