Redishred Capital Corp.

Thank you for standing by. This is the conference operator. Welcome to the Ready Shred Capital Corp. First Quarter 2022 Financial Results and Business Update Conference Call. As a reminder, all participants are in listen-only mode and the conference is being recorded. After the presentation, there'll be an opportunity to ask questions. To join the question queue, you may press star, then 1 on your telephone keypad. Should you need assistance during the conference call, You may signal an operator by pressing star and zero. I would now like to turn the conference over to Jeffrey Hashim, Chief Executive Officer. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Arielle. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the first quarter of 2022 ReadyShred update call. As everyone knows, we released the first quarter results yesterday afternoon, just before our annual general meeting. I would like to very first and foremost, before I get into the numbers, because they were quite solid, is to thank my team, our board, our shareholders. None of this happens by itself. Everyone did outstanding work during a pretty challenging quarter to produce results that exceeded expectations. and we'll talk about some of the challenges that we faced and what we did to overcome them, because for every challenge that's out there, we do believe that there's a solution or an opportunity embedded in that. So I wanna thank the team, our employees, our franchisees, our board and our shareholders, because we'd all do it together. Just at a very high level, our consolidated EBITDA was $4.1 million. That was, that grew, almost 100%, almost double the last year. And I'm going to speak high level to some of the drivers. And then what I will do is I'll pass this over to Harjeet in a moment to discuss these items in more detail. I will also do a little bit of a twist just to refresh everyone on our strategy and the execution of our strategy because we're well into executing the strategy that many of you have heard from me many, many times over many, many years. And I think what we're seeing here now is the results of executing the strategy, which is excellent. And again, that doesn't happen by itself. It happens because of a great team and great execution. So again, $4.1 million in EBITDA. All around, we had great organic growth in the shredding business, the scanning business, the e-waste business. We also have to acknowledge that paper prices were at, again, all-time highs. If you refer to our MD&A at some point, you'll see that we've put an extended chart to outline the paper prices from 2018 to today because what you'll see is the peaks and the valleys. like anything we've in my career here at 17 years we've seen peaks and valleys in the paper prices so we're back here at another peak and nice to be at again close to historical highs on paper prices irregardless and Harjeet will explain we'll go through this in more detail irregardless of the paper operationally the business performed despite a number of headwinds such as Omicron such as fuel prices and I'll let Harjeet get the the good stuff in terms of why that happened. That $4.1 million in EBITDA was generated from $12.5 million in revenue. Again, another record, and that grew 71% versus the first quarter of 2021. So EBITDA was 98% up. And of course, revenue was 71% up. I do want to speak a little bit just to the drivers of our growth and our strategy here. Because it's been a while, I think, since I've done that on this call, so I want to take a few moments. And really, three items are very important to us as we drive our growth. And I'll talk to the growth drivers and how we're executing on them. Number one, and you can see this in the results, is driving same location revenue in EBITDA. We focus on recurring revenue streams. Not only in the paper side, but even in the scanning side, we're looking at repeat and trying to get recurring clients. And again, small mean size enterprise tends to be an underserviced market. So that doesn't mean we don't have large clients, but it's an underserviced market. These sticky clients are great because they're the perfect base to grow from. They're the perfect base to go and offer other services. If we do a good job in one service, why wouldn't they trust us to do a good job in other services? And as we all know, the more complementary services, the more entwined you are with the client, the more sticky they are. And we've certainly found that. So it's number one. Number two, accretive acquisitions. We all know we've conducted a lot of acquisitions over the last four years. We'll talk a little bit more about that later. We're going to be continuing to purchase franchisees when they wish to exit or retire. And, of course, independence. In these independents, there's 750 of them, and many of them are in markets that we are operating in, and that provides an opportunity to realize... Pardon me, this is the operator.

Please stand by while we reconnect Mr. Hashim.