Randy Fields: Well, let me give you my opinion as CEO. John mentioned it, and I think it’s important to recognize that each year, and even within a year, we’re going to take several looks at where we are from a cash flow perspective. The intention is really still the same as we’ve stated historically. Half of each year’s cash flow will go on the balance sheet to strengthen how we look to our customer set, because our customers are getting bigger, the world is getting weaker, and our customers want to see a strong partner, so we owe that to them. The other half of our cash flow, free cash flow each year, we’re going to decide between one of several possible levers. Are we going to pay an increased cash dividend? That’s certainly under consideration.
No decision yet, but it’s under consideration. Are we going to buy back more stock? That’s certainly under consideration. We do that every year so far. And then finally, how much are we going to spend in terms of paying back the preferred? We’ve given ourselves three years to get that done, redeem the preferred, so all of those things are on the table, but definitely an increase in the cash dividend could be in the cards. You agree?
John Merrill: No, I agree. I mean, I think the other element too is M&A. We’ve talked about that. So if there’s something that comes up strategically, but to Randy’s point, we have these levers, so we put up nine million for fiscal 2023, so call it four and a half in the bank, and four and a half going forward, too. We don’t have any bank debt anymore, so logically one could assume that we would, obviously we’re going to buy back the preferred. We have three years to do that. The next logical solution, to your point, as far as a modest yield on the common dividend would be to increase that, but no decision has been made yet.
Tom Forte: Great. Thank you, Randy. Thank you, John. Thanks for taking my questions.
Randy Fields: You bet. Thanks, Tom.
Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Chris [Indiscernible] who’s a private investor. Please proceed with your question.
Unidentified Analyst: Hello, good afternoon, and congratulations on the great results.
Randy Fields: Thank you.
John Merrill: Thanks, Chris.
Unidentified Analyst: I want to ask about the current quarter. Are you going to see a ramp-up of that revenue for the current quarter, or should we just be thinking about the current quarter as maybe like a quarter of that 20 million you guided from current customers?
Randy Fields: Well conceptually we’ve said, and we haven’t repeated it as frequently as we should. We’re just not a quarterly company. We don’t think about it in those terms. We think about it on an annual basis, so we are as focused I think as a business can be on onboarding traceability. As we mentioned, we’re the only company actually doing traceability. Everyone else is talking about traceability and issuing press releases. Doing it is very difficult. It is intensive from a development perspective, an implementation perspective, a customer management perspective. In every respect, it is difficult to do. So we are heads down, completely focused on how we do this number one right and we are doing that. Two, how we do it more and more efficiently.
We’re focused on that. We’re making changes literally every week to our internal processes and technology to make it easier and faster. And we have to keep our heads down doing that. So, what happens as we now are onboarding people who are actually paying us is that there will be a ramp in terms of how we go from zero to several millions a year over the next year, 18 months. It won’t be exactly equal. We just don’t know the rate at which we can bring the paying customers into the system. So, the answer is the way our numbers should run, Q1 is always the lowest of the year, Q4 is always the highest because of the growth of the onboarding, if you will, in terms of traceability. So, it will continue to increase throughout the year and hopefully for the next several years on that same basis.
Hopefully, that answered your question.
Unidentified Analyst: Oh yes, definitely. So about your traceability customers, how do they decide who to go in first? I mean, the deadline is 26. Obviously not everybody wants to be right before the deadline, but for whom is it more important to get it done now? And are you guys serving them on a first-come [Ph] person basis or are you prioritizing?
Randy Fields: That is a fabulous, fabulous question. It’s one we think about a lot. Remember, we’ve been in the compliance business for a number of years. So, the truth is we’ve developed really, really good relationships with our customers. We’ve been talking to our customers for several years about this traceability requirement, literally years. So a number of them, in thinking about their own business, came to grips with the fact that doing a full implementation of traceability is anywhere from one to two years of work. So, several of them simply, in conjunction with us, took a look at the calendar and said they don’t want to be done in January of 2026. They want to be done ahead of that so that any issues in terms of process and procedure on their part could be worked out.
