And we’re being very calculated about that we can make sure that we remain free cash flow positive. But I think our pace is very healthy. The $3.3 million that was generated, that was despite the $5.4 million that we made for accounts payable and accrued liability. So we brought it down a lot. If we wouldn’t have done that, we would have probably beaten our record of free cash flow from the last quarter. But we very clearly provided this disclosure that it’s going to be lumpy from one quarter to another, working capital requirements and this is going to go up and down, but things are looking pretty good right now.
Unidentified Analyst: Great. I appreciate that color. And then just second one for me. I wanted to build on the M&A side. Just wondering how you’re evaluating the environment going forward, considering the strength of your balance sheet and that free cash flow you mentioned. You have your 300 store target out there in Canada. There’s regulatory progress in the U.S. Germany potentially coming on board here. Just your sense on how you’re looking at the M&A opportunity and kind of weighing all these options.
Raj Grover: Look, Nick, historically, we’ve been the largest acquirers in Canada. We’ve built our portfolio very carefully, very selectively. Organically, we’ve added maybe about 60% of our locations and roughly about 40% through M&A. That is kind of the future trajectory as well on how we see this. When an M&A opportunity comes, it comes very quickly. But the two main reasons we’ve been very slow on M&A. One, we were very, very focused. We are very focused on free cash flow generation. And we didn’t want to get distracted by again, adding locations. We wanted to tighten up our stores, tighten up our cost, as you can see through our G&A print. We came at 4.4%, lowest in dollar terms in many, many quarters, I couldn’t be more happier.
So we wanted to tighten up the operations here. The issues that we see on rapid M&A is a couple of things. One, we need quality companies to acquire. When our national revenue run rate is $2.7 million, and our peer run rate is only $1.2 million, you can see that it’s not an easy trajectory for us to get out there and then acquire a whole bunch of stores and get them to our level. Otherwise, our average per store starts dropping. The other problem is redundancy because we’re so big and we’re in so many towns and so many cities, and we have multiple stores, we love to do big block M&A. But in that big block M&A, we can’t waste shareholder money. We can’t just spend shareholder dollars just for the sake of doing M&A. So we don’t want redundancy and most operators don’t want to just sell their winning stores.
They want to sell their entire portfolio, which has a lot of losing stores. And when we are trading at 4.2x, 4.5x annualized last quarter EBIT to EBITDA multiple, it just doesn’t make sense to give whatever someone is asking for. So we don’t like overpaying. There are some groups in the country that have been driving these prices up. But the reason High Tide is successful is we’ve been very, very disciplined on these things from day one. We don’t chase anything. We look for high-quality locations. We’re not going to pay for redundancy and we’re not going to overpay for things. And we’ve got a ton of runway ahead even through organic growth. So M&A will pick up. M&A is in our DNA. It’s not going anywhere. It’s also going to happen for the German market, for the American market eventually when we get into the USA.
We’re not going to wait on opening one store at a time. But Canada, we’ve got a playbook sorted out. We’re growing organically in healthy locations. We have good M&A opportunities that we’re capitalizing on, and we’re not overpaying for this opportunity. I do want to mention there are some competitors out there that are driving these prices up just for the sake of it or maybe to keep up with us, but that is not our theme.
Operator: [Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from Mike Regan from Excelsior Equities.
Mike Regan : I was just wondering if you could comment on the potential for the standing finance committee and the House of Commons just recommended lowering the LP excise tax from the $1 a gram, which is about 30% to 40% of value to 10% of value. I was just wondering if you could share any thoughts you have on how this could impact your business or sort of any insights into the process or timing or what have you?
Raj Grover: Mike, thank you for your question. So Mike, although we are not LPs, we’re keeping a very close eye on everything that’s going on in terms of excise taxes. We do know that Health Canada’s expert panel is reviewing Bill C-45 and is expected to make some recommendations in April. And these recommendations are not binding and the government will take their time to decide which ones to implement or not. So we don’t really know what will happen, but let’s say if the excise tax gets better, to the extent the LPs become healthier as a result, this is also going to be good for us and the whole industry. We believe we have always had the guilt by association problem where the poor financial performance of larger LPs have cascaded into weaker investment sentiment for the sector overall, notwithstanding our continued excellent performance showed again this quarter.
So we’re really hoping that any positive momentum for LPs is good for us as well. And we feel that, that can absolutely happen. There’s a lot of conversations and the government is not blind. 50% of all cannabis that happened last year where cannabis — 50% of all bankruptcies that took place in Canada last year were cannabis bankruptcies. So there’s a lot of conversation around making the landscape healthy, and this can absolutely happen.
Operator: Our next question comes from Chris Damas from — apologies, the question has been withdrawn. So I’d now like to turn the session back over to High Tide Chief Executive Officer, Raj Grover, for any final comments.
Raj Grover: Thank you, operator, and thank you to everyone for your interest and continued support for High Tide. We’re very proud of what we achieved this quarter and remain excited about the road ahead. With that, I will ask the operator to close the line. Have a great day, everyone.
Operator: That concludes today’s High Tide call. You may now disconnect your lines.
