TELA Bio, Inc. (NASDAQ:TELA) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Roberto Cuca: Absolutely. So I’m glad you asked that question. The one thing that I think we do feel comfortable with talking about next year versus this year is we expect growth in OpEx to go down considerably, and our goal is to constrain it to a single digit. We burned $7 million of cash in the third quarter that cash burn can be a little seasonal, we ended the quarter with $58 million of cash. If you divide that by seven or by that by something higher, you can see that even straight lines, we have a pretty long pathway but that doesn’t factor in the improvement to cash burn as our revenues grow with considerably higher rates than our OpEx does. And there’s still room to for gross margin to improve even from the levels that we’ve currently been achieving.

Tony Koblish: Yeah, we understand where we are, we understand the job for next year, and we are on track, as Roberto said, to constrain that OpEx at a lower level and to start to drive leverage. We have the infrastructure in place to make the growth happen.

Michael Sarcone: Okay, thank you.

Roberto Cuca: Thanks, Michael.

Operator: And thank you. And one moment for our next question. And our next question comes from Dave Turkaly from JMP Securities. Your line is now open.

Dave Turkaly : Hey, good evening, guys. I just want to clarify one point, not trying to beat a dead horse here. But the 12 new regional managers that you hired in 1Q, were those replacements or you did not have them before?

Roberto Cuca: We had seven regional managers and we basically upgraded each one of those and added to get to 12.

Tony Koblish: One of them was promoted to become an area.

Roberto Cuca: That’s right. That’s right.

Tony Koblish: And the remainders were upgraded and that was in the fourth quarter.

Roberto Cuca: Yeah, I mean, this is a massive push for continuous improvement, and upgrade, right to set ourselves up from the $50 million, $60 million business we are now to have the talent in place to go beyond $100 million to 200 million.

Dave Turkaly : Got it. And then your comments about the incremental programs, I’d love to just get color if you could give it to us. How many of your folks are above quota and how many are not, a broad percentage stroke, if you can give it to us?

Roberto Cuca: So the quota is not by month but by quarter, so it’s projections of likelihood of hitting quota, and the majority of them would be above quota. So Tony mentioned that, as of today, we have 79 reps and 55% of them have been with us for at least six months, it’d be very unlikely for any of the 55 to be expected to be below quota.

Tony Koblish: Yeah.

Roberto Cuca: And of the shorter tenured reps, some of them are going to be in their first quarter in which the quota is essentially nominal, but the remainder should be on track or being helped considerably. So I’d say the large majority of our reps are on track for at least hitting quota.

Dave Turkaly: Great, thank you for that.

Roberto Cuca: Thanks, Dave.

Operator: And thank you. And I’m showing no further questions. I would now like to turn the call back over to Tony Koblish to close the call out.

Tony Koblish: All right. Thanks, Justin. And thank you everyone for joining us. We appreciate your continued interest in TELA Bio. Have a great rest of the evening and we look forward to talking to you again next time. Thank you.

Operator: This concludes today’s conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.

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