Brian Casey: And I would just follow on with that Mac and point out that in the first quarter we had nearly $1 million of non-recurring items that impacted our earnings namely the aforementioned $280,000 of deal cost, legal expenses of $421,000 a headcount reduction and force expense of $205,000 and then a small loss on a seed money investment of $91,000. I’d also like to report that we held our Annual Shareholders Meeting today and all items were approved. I would like to thank our loyal long-term shareholders for your support and we’ll endeavor to deliver results for you in the year ahead. And finally, I want to close with a few comments on performance sales and sales technology. Performance for our US value has been excellent.
They’ve really delivered especially in the growth areas of SmallCap and SMidCap. Not only did both of these products have great quarters, but their trailing one year performance is over 1,100 basis points ahead for SmallCap and over 600 basis points ahead for SMidCap. So this sets us up really well for increased search activity in both products, and we do hope to see more flows from the OCIO channel for our SMid product. And with respect to sales most CIOs and strategists out there are calling for a recession and lower equity market levels from here and buyers of equities have retreated from buying equities in favor of brokered CDs, high-yield cash management, fixed income. And most of our products are equity-oriented so sales have been slower in this equity risk off environment.
But our internal work suggests a shallow recession and our sales team is outlaying the great groundwork for when flows and buyer preferences shift back towards equities. So our prospect and adviser engagement is higher than it’s ever been. And our sales technology has improved remarkably with the integration of Salient. Salient literally spent millions implementing a sales force-driven system. And it allows us to see number one all our flows from mutual funds to SMA, UMA, private funds, separate accounts all in one place. It allows us to see focused rep lifts and meeting tags to improve our efficiency and our tracking, sales lead generation tools like Dakota Magnifi and AMP and a dashboard for activity by region and by rep in real time every day.
So this improved data set has allowed us to be more collaborative in attacking institutional intermediary in a new category, which we call InstaMediary, which is really the large RIAs or asset owners who behave more like institutional allocators than one-off product sales. And we’ve installed a firm-wide travel calendar now to help our sales and client service teams maximize their meeting opportunities by making more efficient use of our portfolio managers travel time away from the office. And what we have ended up with together now is an opportunity set that’s more diversified than it’s ever been split between wirehouse, broker-dealer, RIA, clearing firms, TAMP and institutions. And we have the largest sales force in our history. We’re excited to see how this unfolds in the years ahead.
April has been a better institutional flow month. We’re now positive year-to-date on institutional flows. And we’ve recently uncovered some new search opportunities. So we appreciate your time. I don’t know if there’s any other questions operator?
Operator: No more in the queue for questions.
Brian Casey: Okay, very good. Well thank you all for your time. And please call myself or Terry if you have any further questions or visit westwoodgroup.com. Thank you.
Operator: Thank you. This concludes today’s conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.
