Eric Salzman: Yes, sure. I’ll make one more just comment on the cost. So obviously, there are a number of benefits outsourcing the general administrative activities to a service provider, one of which is, as time passes and the needs of the portfolio or the company go down, then there’s an ability to scale down the cost of an external service provider in a way that is, frankly, almost impossible, were very difficult in our current — so that’s just — so when you think about the go-forward cost, it’s the savings that Mark indicated and we indicated in the proxy. But if you look beyond that, it would be reasonable to expect that the annual operating costs 12 months or 18 months out, et cetera, should come down as there are fewer portfolio companies and fewer activities.
The — another question we have is on the remaining Bucket 1 portfolio companies, are there any that have not been out in market for a sale process. So we have five of our Bucket 1 companies, two have not been in a sale process ever since my involvement. The third has not been in the sale process in at least the past 12 plus months. And the other two have — so that answers that question. Board seats, we talked about. Can you provide any additional color on the portfolio companies, perhaps the company’s most promising for exit values? What I would say is, as we indicated, it was on last quarter, we talked about the definition of what we’re using for a Bucket 1 company is well capitalized executing on its business plan while navigating kind of the risks and opportunities, and it does not have an excessive debt level, which has impacted negatively at a couple of other companies, as you know.
So I wouldn’t call one out over the other. I think we are optimistic and constructive on all of those companies, and we’ll be working closely with them to maximize the exits over the next 2 years.
Mark Herndon: Okay. Why don’t we pause there for a second, and then operator if we have any questions come up in the queue.
Operator: Yes. We have a question from John Power with Redwood Fund. Please proceed.
Unidentified Analyst: Thank you, operator. I appreciate your time gentlemen. And my question was regarding the excess cash, which you’ve covered a couple of minutes ago in your comments. So no questions [technical difficulty]. Thank you.
Eric Salzman: Okay. Thank you.
Operator: [Operator Instructions]
Mark Herndon: We have a question on the web that is can you go into more detail as to the $25 million lower bound of proceeds? Is the $25 million split fairly equally between the five companies. So just comment a bit on the methodology of how we came up with that number. So basically, we took the low end revenue estimates, right? So projected revenues for each of those five companies between now and [indiscernible], the low end of that, we applied kind of low end revenue multiples, low meaning if you look at the market, either public markets across cycle, and then we — that would get your enterprise value is tracked out your net debt, and you would run that remaining value through the waterfall, each company has its own preferred stock and auction pool, et cetera, to come up with Safeguard’s proceeds.
That would be the future value of Safeguard’s proceeds, which is the $25 million at the lower bound. And then — so that’s how we came up with it. It’s not equally weighted among the five because of the different — the way that the cap structures work in different companies and the preferred payouts that work. It wouldn’t be equal, the revenues aren’t equal. Multiples are not dramatically different than the low end across the companies, but revenues would differ and the cap stack would differ. So you wouldn’t get the same resulting value.
Eric Salzman: Another question is — I’m sorry, Mark.
