Greg Gibas: Hi, good morning, Jonathan and Aaron, thanks for taking the questions. . Just wondering maybe kind of high level how it’s changed relative to maybe your sentiments on kind of the Q3 earnings call and maybe what factor has changed the most?
Jonathan Shepko: Yeah look, I mean, I think it’s a ray, we saw a little bit more softening in specifically Flatbed than we did before. I think we said we’d be, modestly up from an EBITDA standpoint, now we’re saying flat to modestly up. So I think that within a — if you had to quantify within a couple of percent probably of where we may have €œguided€, on the last call. So it’s not meaningfully different but, Flatbed has changed, I think we’ve highlighted some of the mitigates to that. I’m still optimistic, we’re going to have a good year. But I think that would be the delta, where we kind of stepped back just a little bit on what we talked about this last quarter.
Greg Gibas: Sure. And then I guess, with regard to your comments on commitment to accelerated deleveraging in 2023, is that kind of reflective of change in strategic priorities as a result of those rates changing or maybe M&A expectations changing at all or was that kind of the plan all along?
Jonathan Shepko: No, I mean, I think we’ve been pretty vocal about bolstering the strength of our balance sheet for the last couple of years now. I think that the market created certain opportunities, namely the buyout of Mr. Daseke, which we thought was very opportunistic, and very attractive. And so we kind of staged that as priority one that when an opportunity came about, we had previously announced the $40 million share repurchase. So, directionally we feel like we ended up in a good spot there, but that’s always been one of our stated priorities. I think that when you look through — when you look through things now, you’ve absolutely — you absolutely can’t ignore the incremental cash cost of our debt. I mean, it’s going to be an incremental 16 million or so this year of cash expense.
So we can’t ignore that but I think that again, we continue to look around at our peers, look around at our valuation and go what do we need to do to get our shareholders more comfortable that Daseke is going to be able to weather storms, and to take certain things off the table. Certain, I think, adverse things off the table that disadvantaged us from kind of a valuation standpoint relative to our peers. And leverage continues to be a consistent theme. And so we’re, in light of some of that feedback we did a massive share repurchase, so doing an open market share repurchase now doesn’t make sense, and it wouldn’t move the needle. And, so now our priority is really repaying debt. And as we talked to Jason about, we feel like even net have a pretty meaningful pay down in debt.
We can fund 2023 — the 2023 M&A pipeline that we have in front of us with incremental debt. Again, think about incremental debt as, look incremental debt, but still not funding acquisitions with more than that, one and a half to two terms of leverage and with the rest in cash or cash and equity. Let me say cash, I don’t want to say equity. I want you to think we’re going to issue equity for those but half cash half debt. We think we have plenty of runway with the acquisition pipeline we have in front of us today to do that and still have cash left over and still allow for a meaningful pay down in leverage. So we’re looking for things to slowly take off the table to give potential investors, current investors excuses that we should trade at a discount we are to our peers.
