Sameer Joshi: Understood, thanks for that. And then one last one on costs. Will you remind us what constitutes other operating expenses? I think they were slightly elevated this quarter. How should we look at it if we are projecting it for the rest of the year?
Michael Rama: Yeah, I’ll jump in on that. We had over $2 million, we had $1.7 million that ran through operating expenses for adjustment to fair value, I’ll call it an accounting adjustment towards fair value of bringing up the consideration payable to Envoy that’s in stock, so that we had increased that liability. So that was another $1.7 million. We pulled that out from an adjusted EBITDA standpoint because it’s really not an operating, it’s a GAAP adjustment if you will. And so then we also had another $0.5 million that we had to take a charge on underperforming assets related to a subsidiary. So that in conjunction is about $2.5 — $2.2 million just in the quarter that’s non-recurring.
Sameer Joshi: Okay. And the $6.4 million other operating expenses likely elevated related to like $3 million to $4 million in the previous quarters?
Michael Rama: Yeah, it could be timing on some activities and stuff like that. So we had a little bit more probably in the T&E that we may have, and some trade shows that you had that we were at in the first quarter and some of that. But the meaningful items is the — the items that are — that I just alluded to.
Sameer Joshi: Got it. Thanks a lot and congratulations on the great quarter.
Brendan Jones: Thanks, Sameer.
Operator: Thank you very much. And your last question is coming from Noel Parks of Tuohy Brothers. Noel, your line is live.
Noel Parks: I just had a couple. I wanted to just touch back on maybe a little bit of what’s happening on sort of the grants function. And I just wondered if you had any updates you could share around NEVI funding and just maybe where that’s showing up in your business, what sort of visibility you might have there.
Brendan Jones: Yeah, we’ve won a couple NEVI sites already, But there’s a key thing as a covering statement that we should use. All of our forecasting and data analysis right now that we’re looking at, it’s devoid of winning grants in the future. We believe that to become a sustainable company, we can’t rely on government funding because it may or may not be there. And there may be less opportunities or more opportunities depending on how we fit into particular programs and RFPs that the states or the federal government put out there. So with that said, we do look for NEVI opportunities that really fit Blink. And what I mean by that is we will not be a plant, a flag company. And what that means is we win an award we put a station there just because we won the award.
If the site doesn’t have positive station economics and we don’t get a positive return for our shareholder in a set amount of time, we will pass on the NEVI opportunity regardless of the state and the amount of funding provided. The ones that we have won and there’s only a few of them that we’ve won, they already passed that litmus test, meaning that we’re going to get a return on that investment and we can show positive growth in revenue over a period of time to our stakeholders. Now, we do participate and we’re already heavily involved in the second part of, it’s not the NEVI, but $7.5 million and there’s another $2.5 million set aside for other projects and we’re already fully engaged. Thanks, Mike. And Mike, actually you’re better to answer the CFI part.
So you want to follow up there?
Michael Rama: Yeah, yeah, no problem. So there’s — as Brendan indicated there’s two pieces to NEVI. There’s the DC fast charging side. And then there’s this other $2.5 billion for what’s called CFI. And the CFI money is thought to be geared towards Level 2 community charging. That money is not just — it’s not allocated in the same way that the DC money is. So what happens is local municipalities, states et cetera, they apply for these funds, they have a project or projects in mind, and then they get approval, they get funding, and then what they will do is RFP out to companies like Blink to win those projects. So those are starting now, and our real focus as a heavily focused L2 company is to pursue those. So those are just right at the very beginning cusp of money being released, those RFPs being issued. So while we’re going to continue to pursue the DC side, we are most definitely running hard at the CFI side.
Noel Parks: Great. Thanks for that detail. And, I was just wondering, thinking about the network and sort of the, as you have more time operating a broader set of networks, as far as the customer charging experience, just wondering what sort of feedback you might have had in recent quarters. And were there any goals or enhancements on the horizon, I don’t know, either for the app or the onsite software that you have in mind?
Brendan Jones: Yeah, continuous improvement. We’re analyzing feedback from everywhere. We’ve analyzed equipment that we may need to sunset because it’s not functioning properly due to firmware or software issues. We just launched Blink Care which is a preventative maintenance program that helps improve the quality of stations out in the field that just launched the other day. We’re also working on an effort to consolidate platforms as Mike spoke to earlier, and what that does, it limits your problems with points of connection between software, firmware, and a multiplicity of platforms, vertical integration is helping with that. So we have a plan that is both operational and technology-minded to day over day, week over week, year over year, improve our quality scores.
We’re already signing them to tick up, but we’re paying attention to the industry, the feedback. We’re very, very active in the space. Mike is leading that effort. So, Mike, any comments from you on quality and quality improvement initiatives?
Michael Battaglia: Yeah, so one of the hottest issues in the industry is charger uptime, customer experience charging, obviously mitigating and eliminating broken chargers. So as Brendan indicated, that falls under my purview, and it is something that is reviewed, analyzed constantly, literally on a daily basis where we look at the population of chargers that are healthy, that are unhealthy. We have — we do deep dives into the nature of the issues that are causing a charger to be down, offline, whatever it might be. But this is a multifaceted issue which sometimes folks overlook because there are some challenges associated with someone else owning the charging stations. So we have a lot of control over the charging stations that we own ourselves and our uptime is very high on those stations.
