Aveanna Healthcare Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ:AVAH) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Jeff Shaner: Thanks, Raj. I’ll hop it to Dave here in a second. I think it’s just important. Dave and I are both very confident in our overall liquidity position. And I give Dave credit, a couple of years ago he hedged all of our debt. Virtually all of our debt is hedged. And we have a great lending group. We have great equity partners that are fully committed to Aveanna. So as we think of overall liquidity, I think Dave and I both feel very confident. I do want to give Dave in his collection team’s credit they’ve done an unbelievable job in collecting our cash. We just ended 2022. We basically collected 99.99% of our revenue for the year. So 100% of our revenue was collected in cash in ’22, which is a phenomenal outcome in this business.

And then Dave just does a really nice job managing our cash position, making sure that we’ve got ample room for borrowing capacity. So that we can manage our business and invest in the business so as I talk today, I just want to say, I’m as a new guy, as a new CEO, I am very confident in our overall liquidity position, and just that we’ve got a great team with a lot of tenure managing the important parts like collections, like cash management. So I think we’re in a great position as we start the year, and we’ve got opportunity to invest in our company as needed.

David Afshar: Thanks Jeff. And just to add on with regarding the question on CapEx, we’re judicious with the CapEx dollars this year. So in the past, we’ve seen CapEx at around 1% of revenue. I think we’ll see lower than that this year so judicious with the CapEx dollars. In terms of operating cash flow, our goal is to turn operating cash positive in the second half of the year. So we’re working towards that. And we think we’ll make significant improvements from where we landed last year, both on operating cash and free cash flow. The one thing I will call out is as we look at our cash flows as we go across 2023 is based on how we account for our derivatives since we don’t use hedge accounting, the benefits of our interest rate caps will come through operating cash flows. Benefits of our interest rate swaps will come through financing cash flows. And that’s one of the reasons why we focus on free cash flow to incorporate the benefits of our interest rate swaps in 2023.

Unidentified Analyst: Right, thank you very much.

Jeff Shaner: Thanks Raj, appreciate you.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question is from Pito Chickering with Deutsche Bank. Please proceed with your question.

Benjamin Shaver: Hi guys, we have Benjamin Shaver on for Pito. Thanks for taking the question. So when you’re looking at the leadership at the central level and also at the divisional level, do you guys believe you have the right team in place or do you think there needs to be some adjustments in 2023? Thank you.

Jeff Shaner: Hi Benefit, good morning. Great question and Ben, I think as you think about our organization, I made the comment about our – the experience and maturity we’ve got at our cash collections, RCM, as I look out in the business and actually all three of our business divisions, our division presidents or our region presidents, they average between a low of 20 years of experience in the high of 30 to 35 years of experience, most of those years have been with us or with companies that we’ve run in the past, whether it be Gentiva, Health Field, PSA. And so, as we think down in the business, both at the payer relations, government affairs, sales, clinical oversight, operating side of the business, all the way down through the business down to the actual branch locations, we’ve got a tremendous amount of tenure, both on the Medicaid side, the private duty side, on the home health and hospice side as well as our medical solutions team.