Ted Wahl: No, it’s a great question, and I know I touched on it at a higher level in the prepared remarks, but I wanted to emphasize again that internal investment and organic growth continue to be of the highest priority. And we’ll be making obviously sustained investments, but in some cases, increased investments in some of these organic growth drivers. And Matt mentioned it as part of an answer to one of the earlier questions. But when you think about the untapped market, again, less than 20% in EVS – less than 10% in dining using a third-party contract company, the opportunity and the runway within our core market, it’s easy to forget how long and strong that is in light of the challenges over the past few years. But with the demographic trends and our market-leading position, we’re more optimistic than ever that certainly, with the growing pipeline we have and in the year ahead and beyond, we’re going to be able to – grow our core business for many years to come.
But in terms of internal investments, I mentioned talent development and employee engagement, certainly, more important today than it’s ever been in this fiercely competitive labor environment. And those investments will continue from the leadership level all the way through our associate level employees. I mentioned customer and resident experience, and we’re preparing to launch what I would consider almost like a moon-shot type initiative around customer and resident experience in the coming months. We think it’s going to be transformational to the experience of our customers and our ultimate customer, the resident and really differentiate us that much further into the future. Brand positioning is another one, increasingly critical from – in our view, not just for external stakeholders, but internal stakeholders as well in this again, competitive labor environment.
So we’re going to be moving that from what I would describe more as a neutral today to a core company strength. And then R&D, you don’t hear us talk about innovation and invention and a lot of other things where – we’re exploring, but that will be a big point of emphasis for us in the future as we rewrite the post COVID playbook. I think of a few examples that we have underway right now on the R&D side, a client portal, which creates transparent and an integrated platform between us and our client partners. We have central kitchen type pilot programs underway. We’re also exploring robotics in a more intentional type of way in both EVS and dining. So again, all of these items are central to our business. And we’re going to just further enhance those in the future.
And of course, we talked about already on the call, the inorganic opportunities tapping in what I believe is – like an organizational super power, i.e., our business resilience and tapping into that – with more intention and leveraging that in the future. In some inorganic opportunity that are highly attractive and then obviously, opportunistic buybacks so, all of the above, more holistic strategy than what we’ve had in the past, but we are excited to bring it to light, that I can tell you.
Unidentified Analyst: Great, appreciate all the color there, thank you.
Operator: Your next question comes from Brian Tanquilut with Jefferies.
Unidentified Analyst: Thank you, for taking my question. This is on for Brian. So to start, I just want to go back to the gross margin commentary. You brought down cost by more than 4%. So just curious, I know you called out favorable workers’ comp and AR reserves, but – can you comment any other levers that drove that change? And can you discuss the sustainability of that gross margin in the current operating environment?
