Rob Mason: Yes, good morning. Ken, you may just in framing the outlook high single digits, as well as you go forward. You did make a comment around — it won’t always be linear, which I understand as well. And I suppose we saw that in the fourth quarter with fewer shipping days that you had called out as well. I’m just curious as we go forward, is there anything to think about here in the first quarter that’s anomalous like that? Or just maybe how we should think about it from a linearity standpoint to start the year?
Ken Bockhorst: Yes. So I would think over the long-term, I think everybody appreciates the nonlinearity piece. The only piece I’d highlight about the first quarter is, obviously, during 2022, as we delivered the roughly $704 million of sales, there was a ramp Q1 to Q2 to Q3. And so the only thing I’d call about Q1 2024 is it’s against an easier comp, but that’s one quarter within four.
Rob Mason: Yes. Okay. Fair enough. Also, for the year, you finished up with capital spending it was up year-over-year like you had thought, but at a level that’s — was a good bit above recent history. I’m just curious how we should think about your level of investment as we enter ’24 around that number, would it go down, sustain at that level?
Ken Bockhorst: Yes. So Rob, while the number is up on a year-over-year basis, it’s still pretty small. I think if you compare it to anyone else in the industry or just in general industry. So I think we are at a period where we’ve had significant growth, and we’ve had to make some investments in capacity in certain product lines that I would suspect we’ll continue at about the rate that we are at, but we are not certainly not looking at any significant increases from where we are today.
Rob Mason: Okay. Just last question. Ken, you touched on the new assets that you’re bringing in from Trimble, could you speak about the go-to-market capabilities there that come with that? What you’re maybe able to overlay with that? And just trying to think about opportunities for sales leverage or sales synergies with this business with you.
Ken Bockhorst: Yes. Yes, sure. So while — again, as I pointed out, it’s relatively small. Having said that, it’s really powerful. So this is just a really nice extension of how we build out the water quality. And then as Bob mentioned before, we integrate that into our utility business and our sales channels. We followed that with Syrinix with the pressure monitoring and pressure loggers and more software. And now Telog is just another example where RTUs have been on our strategic roadmap here for a couple of years. So we are really excited to bring in the RTUs to add more collection points throughout a distribution system or a wastewater facility. So the ability to integrate this won’t be that won’t be that difficult. So we’ve already begun working through it.
Our distribution partners, our sales team really understands what it takes to make this part of the business. We’ve been extremely happy with how we’ve integrated water quality and Syrinix. I think we have a model to do this, and I think we’ll hit the ground running quickly with Telog.
Rob Mason: Very good. Thank you.
Ken Bockhorst: Sure.
Operator: [Operator Instructions] Our next question today comes from Ryan Connors from Northcoast Research. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.
Ryan Connors: Great. Thanks for taking my question. First off, I wanted to congratulate you on your clean numbers again. It’s really appreciated that you guys don’t resort to a lot of the non-GAAP stuff. And I think your numbers are particularly impressive when you consider a lot of your peers are trying to adjust their way to success. So it’s good to see the way you report cleanly. But my couple of questions were, first off, in regard to — going back to the prior question on kind of channels to market, has your approach to channel to market changed at all, Ken? I know that a few years ago, Badger was very aggressive on buying forward and vertically integrating down into the channel. And we’ve heard some talk recently that the company is actually going back to third-party distribution in certain targeted territories. Are those just one-off things? Or has your perspective there changed and you’re looking to go back to broader third-party footprint.
Ken Bockhorst: Yes. Ryan, one of the things I think you’ve come to know about us is we talk a lot about continuous improvement and regular cycles where we review the business, and we tweak as required. Our strategy hasn’t changed at all. There are certain areas of the country where perhaps picking up a distributor for a particular region might make sense. There’s other cases where we take things direct because it makes more sense. So our overall mix of how much is sold direct versus how much is sold through distribution hasn’t changed at all. These are just minor tweaks.
Ryan Connors: Got it. Okay. And then my other question was just on the competitive environment. And obviously, it’s been a very noisy time for the industry. I think Badger Meter performed exceptionally well in terms of your supply chain management relative to some of your peers. But now that, that whole situation is normalized, I know there’s something, well, maybe some of those peers will be tougher competitors going forward than they had been for a while when they were really struggling with that aspect of things. So I wonder if you can comment on that in terms of the competitive environment? And also in terms of the new entry, I know [indiscernible] has been getting a lot of press and out there and a lot of the trade shows making noise about what they’re doing. And I’m curious whether you had any comment on just the competitive landscape and how it’s evolving.
