Raj Grover: Sure. So good morning, Fred, and thank you for your question. So the company-wide initiative that we launched about six weeks ago is really evaluating all of the systems that we have company-wide and we have many. We acquired six companies in 2021 alone. On top of that, we’ve acquired a lot of bricks-and-mortar stores which is more of a plug-and-play situation for us, but anything at an entity level that we’ve been doing in the U.S. and the U. K., the three CBD units and the three consumption accessory units, they all use different systems. They all use different processes. Now, Dankstop came with a New Jersey office and warehouse, which we’ve shut down now. FABCBD came with the Wisconsin office and that’s in the process of shutting down and moving everything to our Denver, Colorado office.
But there is a lot to evaluate when it comes to our systems, our processes and our global warehousing and office consolidation. At the moment, we are too spread out. We are generating some fantastic results. But imagine what we can achieve when we can further tighten up our ecosystem with some of this low hanging fruit that we have. So this company wide initiative that we launched, we are very, very hopeful that we’d be able to find some really nice savings and really good efficiencies for our people to work smarter, not harder because at the moment using spreadsheets on top of four or five different systems are just not ideal. It’s just a product of necessity that we are dealing with because of these acquisitions. But now that we have some downtime from growth, we are not looking to buy entity level businesses.
We are not looking to do unlimited M&A in Canada on the brick-and-mortar level. I call this, you know, calm before the storm again. We get to review each and every part of our organization, systems, processes, workflow, and get some really good efficiencies out of it. So I remain very excited about it. And, you know, things are looking good on that front Fred.
Frederico Gomes: Thank you. Thanks for that. And then maybe you have pulled back your guidance off new stores, but I understand that you will continue to expand your footprint at a slower pace. So can you talk about maybe what sort of base of expansion should we expect this year, absent any M&A that’s compelling enough that may come along the way. You mentioned you have some leases in place already and will that expansion come from Ontario mostly or any other provinces you want to highlight? Thank you.
Raj Grover: Sure. So Fred, we may still add a couple of stores this quarter towards the end of this quarter or at least one store. And then you’ll see a bit more growth towards the latter half of the year, the second half of the year. And this is simply again because we want to keep an eye on our cash flow number, free cash flow number and see where it’s headed at the end of this quarter, the current quarter that we are in. I think we would still be able to add 10 to 20 stores by the end of this calendar year. Again, I don’t want to put any fixed number in place because we want to remain fluid with this strategy, but we have a lot of beautiful organic research that we currently have in our hand that we’ve slowed down on the build, but we will build them throughout the course of this year and bring them to the market and start realizing great revenue out of these sites because they’re located in some amazing power centers.
So that will happen. On the M&A question, the M&A opportunities have to be absolutely compelling. When I say absolutely compelling, it needs to be a lot lesser than what we were even paying in the past. And if that’s not going to happen, I don’t have interest at the moment to issue more shares or to part away with cash, cash which is basically the need of the hour for every company. So we will let them come to us. We’re not going to chase any deals. We’ve always been very disciplined when it came to our M&A. But I think through organic store openings minus M&A, we can add about 10 to 20 locations by the end of this calendar year.
Frederico Gomes: Thank you for that. I’ll hop back in queue. Thanks.
Operator: Now, I’d like to turn the session back over to High Tide’s Chief Executive Officer, Raj Grover for final comments.
Raj Grover: Thank you, Operator. And thank you to everyone for your interest and continued support for High Tide. We are very proud of what we’ve achieved this quarter and remain excited about the road ahead. With that, I will ask you, operator, to close the line. Have a great day everyone.
