I mean, I hear this story all the time about you guys don’t have the finances and to hire a CFO. You don’t have the finances to hire these people. You don’t have the finances to arrange to have the company go public. Yet the collateral — the cost of the collateral damage that’s inflicted by this attitude and this mentality, I think, is significantly worse. And I am just wondering if we add all that up, including the $600,000 that management received for bonuses last year, wouldn’t it be better to be a bit more pre-active — proactive and hire finance people, purchasing people, operations people before we need them as opposed to triage? That’s serious.
Jess Jankowski: Sure. I mean — in hindsight, you could answer that question, yes, really. Regarding the $600,000 in bonuses, that’s the stock compensation calculation based on Black-Scholes and part of that has to do with our volatility, part of that is effectively gone for now until the stock moves back up. But those are non-cash. They certainly cause dilution which, in many respects, is the same as cash. But for this company, it isn’t spending $600,000 and then going to raise $3 million, just to put that out there. I agree that the — it’s really a question of prioritization, and at this point, a couple of things. At the investor level on the calls, everybody wants a lot of information and that information is gettable, but it’s not always available on a timely basis.
It’s available timely enough for us to run the business. It’s not always available in time to talk to you about it and some of that is hard because everybody wants an answer to a question that doesn’t involve, I don’t know, not sure, need to get back to you. I understand that frustration.
Ryan K: Well, let me just ask, wouldn’t a CFO solve that problem? Isn’t it a CFO’s — okay, to have…
Jess Jankowski: I don’t. I think…
Ryan K: … to have that information readily available to make decisions going forward instead of trying to catch up with mistakes already from the past?
Jess Jankowski: I think it’s an issue. Yeah. Go ahead.
Ryan K: Guys, look. There is — let me — I have been an investor for over 10 years, okay? And every time I think we are out of the woods, we inflict another self-inflicted gunshot wound to some part of our organization. The — we made a hire now in the — on the Board of Directors of the guy who looks like, I don’t recall his name, but the most recent guy, looks like he has some experience with visibility of peeking around the corner. This issue of confidence, okay, in management is significant and it is one of the things I feel that is the iron chain around management’s leg that keeps shareholders from wanting to invest and so I don’t get why we are making the same mistake over and over. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Gentlemen, I am sorry. This was absolutely and totally, in my opinion, unavoidable — avoidable, I am sorry.
Jess Jankowski: Okay.
Ryan K: And I am just sickened and disheartened by the lack of ability for management and the Board to grasp the gravity of the situation, take hold of the reins and make some preemptive strikes and avoid this stuff, because confidence is nowhere to be found. Woke up this morning to the stock at $0.72. I just don’t — I don’t see the confidence in management’s ability to get a firm grasp on the numbers to know where they are, to know where they are going and so I can’t help but feel I have a confidence issue with management’s ability to handle the BASF thing. I know everybody is saying it’s all right, we have got this just around the corner. Well, guess what? I am just waiting for the other shoe to drop. And you know what, guys, it — this has got to change.
I have — I cannot be more specific. I am trying to be as judicious as I possibly can, but the lack of shareholder confidence and I have to totally disagree with Mr. Lieberman about your ability to navigate these issues. I think you guys have done a horrible job and I think you have done a job predicated on, oh, my God, our house just burned down. Now what do we do? What is going to change? Why do I want to stay in the stock?
Jess Jankowski: Well, all we can do, we are taking what we believe is the most rational of course. We are focusing on the cost side of the business in a big way. Part of the reason I think that we have been running with our hair on fire has been that we grew so quickly and we did it with failing wire and duct tape that we are paying the piper for that to a degree. That said, we also grew really quickly, which is remarkable in the business we are in. So I think that I understand your frustration and I certainly don’t like repeating myself quarter-after-quarter when I can hear the melody is similar even if the lyrics are slightly different, but I do think that we have some opportunities here to turn this. I think that our profitability in 2021 showed us that we could do it with a much less efficient organization than we are working toward now and I think that’s a big piece of it.
I mean, it’s the volume. We still have the ability to turn up the accelerator on the volume. We don’t want to do that right this second, because we want to make sure that we are taking home more of what we are pulling in than been spending on growth. And that’s a legitimate — given the results, obviously, it’s a legitimate criticism and we are working our way through it. I expect to have better things to talk about at the next meeting and I certainly don’t dismiss your concerns or your commitment to the company. I know you and I have been involved pretty much the whole time that you have been an investor and I am not ignoring what you are saying. So it’s about all I could say without putting some results down to actually show a difference.
I think at the end of the day, for us to be as credible as we want to be in that every good management team should be, we are going to have to deliver results and that’s where we are — obviously, we have been struggling. The results on the topline have been good. The results in the market have been good. Those things we have proven we are good at. That’s the flood of awards we keep getting is we are good at that and catching up on the rest of it is something that we think we can do, we think we have known how to do it, it’s a matter of getting our organization to do it and it’s going to be a critical next number of months.
