So it’s posting, recruiting, interviewing, hiring, onboarding, then training these individuals with our given clients and then getting them on the ground. I also have enlisted a virtual HR partner as well as standard industry recruiting tools and I’m utilizing a variety of referrals from our current workforce as well through my own network to build out these squads. Building a culture is extremely important to me as we build out these teams. How we’re defining that culture of course is finding individuals that are self-thinking, motivated, that want to work as a team and developing a sense of teamwork and family within this workforce is really what we’re after and then showing these employees that we genuinely care about them. We want this to be a Job, we want this to be a career and I’m making that evident on day one and following it through the interview process so that David and Mike can keep that flow and culture rolling as they hit the ground.
So outside of that, I am doing a variety of team building events, family building events. Our benefits are top-notch as far as a competitive wage, health benefits, 401(k), ESPP, and really just branding us outside of that is another option we’re drilling into which is community events, networking through local councils and business executives as well as getting our faces out to conferences throughout the nation. Primarily in the Southwest region, we’ve already identified four conferences that we’ll be in attendance in the following year. So very, very bullish on the employment market while it does remain highly competitive here in Arizona in regards to a ton of business. I feel very confident in our market that I will be able to provide and deliver every person we need to get every one of these projects moving.
And onto Joel.
Joel Krutz: Thank you Dave, Mike, and Jeremy for those updates and good morning everyone. Today I’ll be discussing Crown’s third quarter financial results but just ahead of that, so I wanted to address the minimum price notification which we received from NASDAQ on October the 19th. We have 180 days from that date to again trade above a dollar for 10 consecutive days to regain compliance. We are confident that the progress we’re making as you’ve just heard against our strategic plans will mean that we again meet the compliance standards, but we will also prepare alternate options to ensure that we retain our NASDAQ listing. Onto the financials, Crown’s pre-tax loss for the third quarter 2023 was $2.9 million. This loss was $0.3 million lower than the same quarter ended September 30th, 2022.
We did not record any revenue or cost of revenue in Q3 as we focused on building out our organization and equipment in preparation for the Q4 projects which are now underway. And as you’ve heard, there’s a huge amount of work that’s gone into that and a huge amount of progress that’s been made. Operating expenses for the third quarter were $3.4 million, of that research and development expenses were $0.5 million. A decrease of $0.5 million compared to the three months ended September 30th, 2022 primarily due to a decrease in salaries and benefits. SG&A expenses were $2.9 million for the quarter which represents a $0.7 million dollar increase versus Q3 of last year. This was primarily due to an increase of $0.5 million in professional fees related to Crown’s significant transactional levels.
Other income was $0.6 million for the three months ended September 30th and that was compared to zero in the prior year’s quarter. Other income consisted of a $3 million change in the fair value of our warrants, notes and derivative liabilities which was related to re-measurements. This other income was offset by interest expense of $2.4 million primarily consisting of amortization expense from our lines of credit. Crown’s net cash increased by $2 million in Q3, $5.5 million was provided by from financing activities with $4.5 million from the equity line of credit and $1.8 million from our ATM. This was offset by $0.7 million of debt repayment as we eliminated debt from our balance sheet. Net cash used in operations for the three months ended September 30th was $2.8 million, $0.7 million higher than the same quarter in 2022 driven primarily again by the increase in professional fees.
Net cash used in investing activities was $700.7 million. This was dedicated to fiber optics equipment acquisition. Overall this infusion of equity driven capital has been very important for Crown’s shareholder equity levels which increased by $4.7 million in Q3 to $9.3 million leaving Crown comfortably above the $2.5 million NASDAQ compliance threshold. That concludes the financial section. I’ll now throw it back to Doug.
Doug Croxall: Thank you Joel, and again, thank you Mike, Dave and Jeremy for all your contributions both to this call and to the efforts behind Crown Fiber Optics. I just want to remind people that if you look back one year from this day, we had no business in the fiber optic industry, we had no customers, we had no equipment, we had no personnel. Today, we have three very large customers with lots of work for us to do. We’ll have more customers as well. Those customers will provide us revenue. We have equipment to handle the current customer need and we will have more equipment as the customer needs grow and we have personnel to handle the customers today and we’ll have more personnel as we grow our customer base. And I want to thank everyone for their patience and we will have some communication in the next month indicating which day in January we’ll do our next Investors Call and we look forward to talking to everyone at that time. Thank you.
Q – :
Operator: This conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today’s presentation. You may now disconnect your lines.
