Jared Oasheim: Yes, good question. Whenever we put out guidance, we’re looking at a lot of different factors, right? And we’re always being prudent to make sure that we can put out guidance that we’re able to go out and achieve. And so I think — we take all of those points into consideration when we put that guide together of $11 million to $12 million for the first quarter.
Alex Nowak: All right. Excellent. Thanks for the update. Thank you.
Operator: Our final question comes from the line of Frank Takkinen with Lake Street. Please proceed with your question.
Frank Takkinen: Great. Thanks for taking the questions. And I’ll echo everybody else’s comments related to your succession plans, Nadim. Maybe following up on the question string related to balancing growth aspirations and cash burn. I think there was a comment at the end of that string related to, if we elect to grow more aggressively, we’ll think about the strategy to do so at that time. Can you maybe walk through some of the different areas you would think about prioritizing if you did elect to more aggressively invest? Is it faster headcount growth, more aggressive on AIC activation, direct-to-consumers, maybe think about the — or help us think about the prioritization if you did grow faster or attempt to grow faster.
Jared Oasheim: Frank, and just to reiterate, right, I think our plans are always to try and treat as many patients as possible. And we have a lot of people out in the field today with our current number of territories to be able to go out and help more and more of those patients. And so we think we’re going to continue to see growth just from the team that we have out there today. . Where could we invest faster, right? If we had an open checkbook, there’s plenty of opportunities. And Nadim talked in-depth about the new indications and how this is a platform technology where if we were able to go out and run clinical trials and get approvals from FDA, it opens the door to a whole bunch of new patients that could benefit from this therapy.
In the more immediate term, yes, I mean it’s all of those areas, right? It’s — do you invest more in — more sales reps out in the field? Do you invest more in DTC. And the key thing for us is doing it in a thoughtful way, right? We don’t want to just throw money on things and hope that it works. We’re being very prudent on how we’re utilizing our cash to make sure that we — there is no need to go raise more money. We can do this on our own without having to go do another financing. And if there is a decision to ever raise more money in the future, it’s us being opportunistic because we’ve been able to prove out some of those additional tests that we’ve run as a business.
Frank Takkinen: Okay. That’s helpful. And then maybe just one more, sticking with the commercial organization. As companies progressed through this model, there’s always an initial influx of onboarding new centers that are implanting this technology. And then as utilization catches up, sometimes you see a shift to incentivizing the sales force to more aggressively go after improving utilization, just given the leverage effects of doing that once you have a large network of active implanting centers. My assumption is you’re still focused probably more on the activation of implanting centers, but maybe talk to how you think about that progression versus new centers versus eventually being more aggressive on pulling the utilization lever.
Nadim Yared: Frank, excellent question. So in our case, it’s a little bit — a little bit different because when we activate a center, that’s the implanting center, but the referral network is all around that center. So yes, we need to ensure that our sales force is focused on training and educating cardiologists in the community to send their patients to that implanting centers. That’s part of the market development that we do. So I’m not going to go into detail about incentive plans as we have the global sales meeting next week. And our sales doesn’t know their incentive plan yet. But I think I’ve given you enough hints about it. It’s all about not only activating the implanting centers but also building the referral network around it. So this is after we activate a center, they do their first few implants. Then the key here, the name of the game is get as many referring cardiologists around this hospital to send their patients to the hospital.
Jared Oasheim: Yes. And Frank, I’ll just chime in, too. As I mentioned with the guidance, the expectation is to continue to add new centers on a quarterly basis as well at a similar pace to what we had seen historically. So we’re going to — we expect to continue to see growth from both aspects. Number one, seeing new centers come on board. Number two, seeing those centers get more and more experience. And history has told us the more experience they get, the more patients they’re treating on average. So seeing higher productivity.
Frank Takkinen: Got it. That’s helpful. Thanks for taking the questions.
Operator: That concludes our question-and-answer session. I’d like to hand it back to Nadim Yared for closing remarks.
Nadim Yared: Yes. Thank you, operator, and thanks again to everyone for joining us for our fourth quarter earnings call. We appreciate your ongoing support, and we look forward to updating you on our next progress — on our next update, actually, next call.
Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today’s teleconference. Thank you for your participation. You may disconnect your lines at this time, and have a wonderful day.
