Dave Williams: There’s really not much to talk about. There’s nothing that stood out in October. Seasonality, Joanna, kicks in about mid-November, really, through the end of the year. So, it’s too early to see what kind of seasonality we have. If you look at the exact change we did to the guidance that we issued at the end of Q2 versus the end of Q3 now, we really just tightened everything up to the higher end on the Roto-Rooter side, effectively. So, it’s better margin improvement, which is also an example of expense control at the Roto-Rooter level. And it’s those that are really kind of resulting in about a $3 million pop in EBITDA for Roto-Rooter in the second half of the year than we were first initially anticipating. So it’s really coming down to margin performance and just slightly better revenue trend lines, but still not up to where we think it should be.
Joanna Gajuk: And I guess that leads me to a similar question I had on VITAS. How to think about next year? Can you grow, I guess — continue to grow? I guess, I understand it’s probably the answer depends on where the economy lands, but any kind of framework or things you would be looking at as leading indicators for how to think about next year in Roto?
Nick Westfall: In Roto or VITAS, Joanna, or both? My apologies.
Joanna Gajuk: Roto-Rooter, yes.
Kevin McNamara: It’s about Roto-Rooter. I mean, the only thing — I’ll give you an example. Ferguson Supply, huge supplier of a lot of devices, but including repair plumbing devices, pipes and what have you. First year, they’ve broken it out, so we can track it. The people who buy those are people like Roto-Rooter, go to a store, buy them, buy the pipes and the plumbing materials, do it yourselfers, rival plumbing companies. They recently indicated the sales of those — in that sector are down about 12% for the year-to-date. Last year, they were up 22%. In other words, the point I’m making is, first of all, that’s very broad, that’s an indication that it’s consumer-driven, it’s not — we’re not losing the business to competitors.
The point there is that it changed very quickly on the downward side. That suggests to me that it could improve very quickly on the positive side. As far as what causes consumers to put off these less-than-emergency jobs, and that’s an unknown. But I would say that I have some confidence that what we’re dealing — looking at — it’s a cyclical economic problem that has indications to me that it could improve as quickly as it devolved. So, when we make our — those are the kind of issues when we go through the budget for Roto-Rooter, we’re going to try and analyze. It’s a little bit unknowable, but you’ll get a lot — you’ll get our best thinking when we give our guidance in February for next year. But I wouldn’t rule out some improvement. But I bet when you see our guidance, you’re going to see a — unless something changes significantly between now and let’s say the middle of January with regard to consumer demand, you’re going to see relative — some conservatism, but at the same time some optimism, because as I say, it looks like we’ve already kind of hit bottom on that and have normalized.
Dave Williams: Yeah. If you think about it, Joanna, we really want to see what the fourth quarter turns out to be to the impact on Roto-Rooter from what I’d call softened consumer demand. To the extent that we really achieve a soft landing in 2024, I suspect Roto-Rooter will have a very, very good year in ’24. If consumer headwinds kind of nag spending throughout next year, I think we’re set up for an incredible 2025, because as Kevin keeps reminding people, these jobs that are not coming in for the industry as well as for us, they’re not going away, they’re getting deferred. These problems don’t fix themselves. You might delay it, you might push some big clogs down the line, but all this work eventually has to be done, and we’re positioned for it. I have a fair amount of optimism on 2024, but it really just comes down to how much extra cash consumers have and how much longer they can defer some of these jobs. But we anticipate there will be growth next year.
