But I wouldn’t underestimate to the power of the excitement around those products, bringing surgeons to medical education right now and reminding them of other products that they might not have either been aware of or they weren’t top of mind. And so that the power of new products and the energy it generates has always been really good for us.
Operator: Brandon Vazquez, William Blair.
Justin Lin: Hi, good afternoon. Guys. This is actually Justin Lin on for Brandon. I’m thinking kind of beyond your short term EBITDA commentary here. Longer term, what are some of the levers you can pull to maybe make the business more profitable? Is that as simple as kind of increasing volume and naturally growing into that fixed cost infrastructure or is it more nuanced?
Albert DaCosta: Hey, Justin, I’ll pass that one to Krissy as well.
Krissy Wright: Justin, nice to meet you. I think you’re on the right track as it relates to leveraging our operating investments that we’ve made historically in G&A as the company became public. We had to make significant investments to upgrade our systems and processes. And over time, we’ll be able to leverage those investments to a greater degree. Selling and marketing obviously has some opportunity for leverage as well. But as we grow, we’ll look for those opportunities to be as efficient in the fixed cost structure there. And as Albert has mentioned multiple times. Our focus on investing appropriately in innovation and technology will continue to be a focus for us. And I would expect us to have consistent investment as a percentage of revenue on R&D for the foreseeable future.
Justin Lin: Got it. That’s helpful. And I guess, can you maybe talk about your hiring plans for 2024 in the U.S.? So the accelerated investments that you talked about. Does that include maybe hiring more reps than you were originally thinking? I think the street models have you adding a little more — a little bit more than I think 20 reps this year. Curious to hear your thinking behind that input?
Albert DaCosta: Yes. The one thing we don’t normally communicate is the number of reps that we’re anticipating bringing on, if you remember the reported information that we give is the producing rep count and then there can be some seasonal fluctuation in that number. But that’s really where we see the impact. Sometimes when you bring new folks on, there’s a period of no productivity as they’re getting situated, they’re learning the products, they’re getting familiar with the hospital systems. And so we really look at when people start becoming producing reps. And that number, if you remember, is a person who sells a product in each month of a quarter. And that’s the number that you see that we measure and we communicate out that we think is really meaningful to a direction about where we’re going.
And there’s still a lot of room for us to increase that number. I wouldn’t say doubling where we are today. It’s short of that likely, but we still have a lot of opportunity to keep expanding our salesforce in the U.S. And honestly, geographically and internationally as well.
Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Dave Turkaly with Citizen’s JMP.
Dave Turkaly: Hey, good evening. Albert, maybe just to push a little bit on the bundling commentary. I know you don’t typically speak a lot about the subsectors specifically, but I’m just curious if you think market is still that one of the highest growths of the five, let’s say, subsectors. And I was wondering if you might be able to comment like was that a double digit grower for you in the quarter?
Albert DaCosta: Yes. Hey, Dave, and thanks for the question and maybe the best way to answer this. I think kind of going back if one of the things we’re really becoming sensitized to more than ever is the pathway to bunion is pretty unique. There’s a lot of different pathways that lead to a bunion, right. So some people are born with them. Some people develop them later in life from Wayne, around shoes, some people or a flat foot derivative of the bunion. You’ve got a what’s called a medidocs category of bunion people who are born with club feet. And so those pathways each have very different considerations and honestly, very different deformity patterns, right. And so Paragon’s approach to bunion solutions has always been it’s not one size fits all, but it’s really tailoring solutions to the needs of each of those unique pathways.
I think there’s probably no one better than Paragon 28 in that particular sense. And I think that concept is working and has worked for us really well in the absence of reporting the exact growth for us. I could say all of our subsector segments continued to see really strong growth in all of our investments in R&D still our blended across all of the subsegments of foot and ankle. That’s one of our proudest moments, right. The bunion market happens to be a really complicated and a very big market that is growing nicely on the ankle market is also a really nice growing market, flat foot and PCFD. So none of my babies, I don’t call any of my children favorites. And it just so happens that we’ve launched a really nice cluster around the bunion and forefoot segment over the last few months, and we happen to be and feel a lot of great energy around that.
Dave Turkaly: Thank you for that. And then I have two quick follow ups. I think for Krissy. Any other days changes that we should be aware of 2Q, 3Q and 4Q. And interest expense of $2.6 million, is that kind of what we should expect as we move throughout the year? Thank you.
Krissy Wright: Do you mind repeating the first part of your question? I think I missed one of the words while you’re thinking of perhaps what it is? I’ll answer the second part of your question first. Yes, I would model interest expense consistent with Q1 in terms of our outstanding debt for the remainder of the year.
Dave Turkaly: Yes, the first one was just the number of days, I think you said there was one fewer in 1Q and I’m curious, if there are any other deltas in 2Q, 3Q or 4Q that we should be aware of in terms of selling days?
Krissy Wright: In Q2, yes. Thank you so much. I was curious of whether it was days sales outstanding or days of inventory, but billing days as it relates to Q2, there are two billing day difference between 2024 and 2023. And for the remainder of the year, it’s pretty consistent year-over-year.
Dave Turkaly: 2Q has two more or two less days.
Albert DaCosta: Two more. We added a headwind in Q1 of about 200 basis points and we expect a tailwind for the remainder of the year.
Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Caitlin Cronin with Canaccord.
Caitlin Cronin: Hi. Thanks for taking my questions. And just a quick one to start off. You noted that the Lapidus client base currently in limited release, when do you expect full launch product?
