Welcome to the Cumulus Media quarterly earnings conference call. I'll now turn it over to Collin Jones, the Executive Vice President of Strategy and Development. Sir, you may proceed.
Thank you, operator. Welcome everyone, to our first quarter 2023 earnings conference call. I'm joined today by our President and CEO, Mary Berner, and our CFO, Frank Lopez-Balboa. Before we start, please note that certain statements in today's press release and discussed on this call may constitute forward-looking statements under federal securities laws. Actual results may differ materially from the results expressed or implied in forward-looking statements. These statements are based on management's current assessments and assumptions, they're subject to a number of risks and uncertainties. In addition, we will also use certain non-GAAP financial measures. We believe the supplementary information is useful to investors, although it should not be considered superior to the measures presented in accordance with GAAP. A full description of these risks, as well as financial reconciliations to non-GAAP terms, are in our press release and SEC filings.
The press release can be found in the investor relations portion of our website, our Form 10-Q was also filed with the SEC shortly before this call. A recording of the call will be available for about a month via a link on our website. With that, I'll now turn it over to our President and CEO, Mary Berner. Mary?
Thanks, Collin. Good morning, everyone. In the first quarter, the continued weakness of the national advertising environment to which we have significant exposure drove total revenue declines as reported of 11% year-over-year, or more comparably, excluding political and WynnBET, total revenues were down 7%, a result that is consistent with the pacing we provided on our last call. Despite that challenge, we generate significant growth in our digital marketing services business, increasing revenue 23% year-over-year on a completely organic basis. We executed meaningful non-revenue impacting cost reductions to further enhance our operating leverage, adding approximately $10 million of additional annualized cost reductions to the approximately $90 million that we've already executed since 2019.
During the quarter, we continued to enhance and benefit from our advantageous liquidity position and balance sheet, generating $16 million of free cash flow, completing a highly accretive asset sale for $7.3 million, repurchasing $1.5 million of shares, and retiring $6.3 million face value of debt at a discount. The dichotomy we talked about last quarter between a weak national advertising climate and a relatively stronger local advertising environment continues. We expect that eventually both will revert to more normal spending patterns. Until then, as we have consistently proven, we know how to optimize results in difficult environments and emerge from them in a strong position to take advantage of recoveries and when they occur.
To that point, since 2019 and through the COVID-impacted years, we've taken out more fixed costs on a relative basis, recovered more EBITDA margin, converted more EBITDA to free cash flow, and reduced our net leverage more than our peers. We finished 2022 with best-in-class 3.7x net leverage and over $200 million of liquidity, despite having been the only one to return capital to shareholders through buybacks. We believe we are in the best position to weather this current storm and capitalize on the eventual rebound while maintaining our ability to opportunistically deploy capital to the long-term benefit of our shareholders. To understand the current market's particular impact on us, think about our company as split between businesses whose revenue generation is predominantly from national advertisers and businesses who rely on local advertisers.
The national businesses, primarily consisting of the Westwood One network, national spot, national podcasting, and national streaming, make up approximately 45% of revenue. Our local businesses, primarily consisting of local spot, local digital marketing services, local podcasting and local streaming, make up approximately 50% of our total revenue. The weakness that has characterized the national advertising climate for several quarters has not abated. National advertisers continue to demonstrate significant reluctance to spend across virtually all ad categories, with that weakness increasing somewhat since the last earnings call. Given the high margin nature of our national broadcast businesses, the associated drop in revenue has and will continue to impact EBITDA as long as the softness continues. These same national headwinds have also been a drag on our overall digital revenue growth, as most of our podcasting revenue is tied to national advertisers.
Looking ahead, we of course don't have a crystal ball as to when the national headwinds are going to reverse. However, what we do know is that historically, when the advertising environment does recover, national advertising has typically been the quickest to bounce back. When it does, the same operating leverage that hurts us on the downside will be a significant benefit to us on the upswing. In comparison to national businesses, our local businesses were approximately flat for the quarter, fueled by strong growth in our digi-local digital businesses. Local spot, which makes up approximately 80% of our total spot revenue, was down about 4% in Q1. Like national, we've also seen local get a bit weaker into Q2, pacing down 7% currently. Small and mid-sized markets have been outperforming and continue to outperform larger markets.
Our portfolio management strategy over the last five years, which has reduced our exposure to larger markets, has been favorable for us.Despite these mid-single-digit declines, we are seeing some green shoots in local demand. Encouragingly, automotive continues to rebound as we are experiencing quarter-to-quarter improvement in automotive as dealer inventory levels improve. To put this upswing into perspective, in 2019, auto was about 10% of total revenue, and we lost nearly 50% of that, mostly local revenue during COVID. Even with the improvement we're already seeing, and we've already seen, there remains significant upside from auto returning to more normal levels.
The brightest spot in an area that we're really leaning into given its growth pro-profile is our local digital marketing services business, which as I mentioned, grew 23% in Q1, driven by a combination of new customer accounts and new product offerings. This business is now run rating at over $40 million of revenue. As you know, we have achieved that growth and profitable performance from day one with very little upfront investment. We continue to be excited about our DMS position, we're investing in it to accelerate its growth. Looking at the big picture, the U.S. digital marketing services total addressable market for our target market of SMBs is approximately $15 billion and growing at 5%-10% a year.
While there are many small digital agencies that have built paid media capabilities as well as several large providers of single-point solutions, there are very few companies in the DMS world that can successfully offer SMBs the full spectrum of digital marketing solutions to meet their needs. We focus on being that full spectrum provider, deploying a unique go-to-market strategy with feet on the street selling of a suite of integrated audio and digital marketing solutions. We're nimble in our sales execution because we leverage our fully distributed sales force, sales infrastructure, and notably, our ability to seamlessly add in new products and services.
This is because in addition to our own in-house capabilities, we utilize several white label providers to fulfill our orders, which has given us flexibility to adapt to a dynamic market and quickly and efficiently procure and deliver new digital products and services as they are created. As importantly, the double-digit growth trajectory we've already ramped to supports our conviction that our go-to-market strategy, in particular, its focus on feet on the street sellers, has been a good mousetrap and an important differentiator in the market. Because we have a proven ROI from adding incremental sellers who are armed with a growing toolkit of both digital and audio products, we're enthusiastic about the returns we can deliver from continuing to expand our sales force, enhance their capabilities, and generate efficiencies at scale.
To both support these types of investments and mitigate the EBITDA pressures from national revenue declines and the inflationary environment, we continue to aggressively reduce costs. Since 2019, compared to our peers, we have achieved higher cost reduction as a percentage of the 2019 baseline, and as noted, a best among peers EBITDA margin recovery against pre-pandemic levels. Year to date, we executed an additional $10 million of annualized cost reductions, we will continue to make strides as the year progresses with multiple additional cost initiatives. All these efforts continue to support healthy free cash flow generation, even in difficult economic environments such as this one.
In the first quarter, we bolstered our cash balance by generating $16 million of free cash flow and completing $73.3 million dollar sale of WFAS-FM, a station which contributed insignificant EBITDA. Given our healthy cash balance, we continued our open market repurchase program in Q1, buying back an additional $1.5 million of shares. In parallel, we were also able to complete discounted debt buybacks, retiring $6.3 million face value of debt for $5.6 million of cash.
Since announcing this capital allocation strategy in Q2 of last year, combined with our last excess cash flow sweep of $2.5 million, we have retired $92.8 million in face value of debt. We have repurchased 2.9 million shares, representing approximately 14% of the company's shares outstanding as of year-end 2021. Before turning the call over to Frank to give you more color on the quarter and our current Q2 pacing, I'll go back to where I started. Maximizing results in challenging environments is something we do well. Over the past few years, this management team successfully executed an operational turnaround while rightsizing an inherited overextended balance sheet through a restructuring.
Since the pandemic, we've driven best among peers performance with respect to cost takeouts, EBITDA margin recovery, free cash flow conversion, net leverage reduction, and cash generation. This track record should give you confidence in our ability to once again optimally navigate and emerge from this difficult advertising environment. With that, Frank, I'll turn it over to you.
Thank you, Mary. Revenue in Q1 was down 11%. Excluding non-recurring revenue received from the termination of our WynnBET partnership last year and political, revenue was down 7%. This is consistent with the pacing commentary that we provided on our last earnings call. The continued weakness in the national advertising environment remains the main factor driving the decline in total revenue. Our businesses generating revenue from local advertisers continue to outperform those dependent on national advertisers. In aggregate, our local businesses were approximately flat year-over-year. As Mary mentioned, local spot was down approximately 4% in the quarter. From a category perspective, general services, auto and home products were top-performing major local spot categories. The weakest categories were financial, sports betting, and telecom. Our local digital businesses consisting of local digital marketing services, local streaming, and local podcasting were up in the mid-teens.
Within national advertising, we continue to see strong event performance in live sports as the NCAA March Madness tournament significantly outperformed our broader network radio and national spot businesses. From a category perspective, we saw a decline across most major ad categories, with financial and sports betting showing significant weakness. Mary mentioned, we were also impacted by the continued national headwinds in the podcasting space. Our digital revenue on an aggregate as reported basis was flat year-over-year. Looking ahead to the second quarter, we continue to see significant weakness in the national advertising environment. Our local businesses continue to outperform national, led by solid growth in local digital marketing services. On a total company basis, we are currently pacing down low double digits for the second quarter.
Moving to expenses, total expenses in the quarter decreased by approximately $5.5 million year-over-year, driven by our cost reduction actions as well as lower variable costs from lower revenue. Year to date, we have executed an additional $10 million of annualized cost reductions. In aggregate, since the beginning of 2020, we have reduced approximately 20% of our 2019 fixed cost base. As always, we will continue to be aggressive in pursuing cost reductions to mitigate the top line impacts of the current environment and make room for investments and growth. In the quarter, we generated $24 million in cash from operations and $16 million of free cash flow and completed the highly accretive sale of WFAS-FM for $7.3 million, which will have a de minimis impact to EBITDA.
Cash flow generation supported our continued capital return and debt reduction strategy. During the quarter, we repurchased $1.5 million of shares, bringing our total share repurchase to date to $33.3 million. At this point, we have repurchased approximately 14% of the shares outstanding when we initiated the buyback program, with $16.7 million remaining of our board authorized repurchase authorization. We retired $6.3 million face value of debt at a discount, split between $3.8 million of term loan and $2.5 million of notes, bringing total debt reduction since the beginning of 2020 to approximately $300 million or 30%. As Mary Berner said, given our successful track record operating through challenging times and our strong balance sheet and liquidity position, we're confident we will optimally navigate through the difficult ad environment.
With that, we can now open the line for questions. Operator?
Certainly. If you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. If for any reason you would like to remove that question, please press star followed by two. To ask a question, press star one. As a reminder, if you are using a speakerphone, please remember to pick up your handset before asking your question. If you are streaming today's call, please dial in and enter star one. Our first question comes from the line of James Goss with Barrington Research. Mr. Goss, you may proceed.
Good morning. This is Pat for James. I was just wondering within podcasting, if any of you could maybe talk about like the, I guess, the environment for ad sales relationships and just the competitiveness around that and any impacts like that type of environment might be having in terms of like the overall inventory you guys have available to sell in the market.
I'll take that. Hi, Pat. Thanks for the question. you know, I start with the ad environment, as we said in the prepared remarks for podcasting, like other national channels, is being affected in podcasting. we have a very strong position and a specific position in that we our sweet spot is talk, the talk space, and six of our podcasts are in the top 30 new shows on Apple. those include, you know, big names like Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino and Mark Levin. yes, it is a competitive marketplace, but our positioning for what we bring to, you know, content partners is we believe pretty unique.
We're the only podcast partner that does not require that a podcaster give up control of their IP. We generally put the entire platform, including the radio platform, to work for our partners to help them to grow their audience. As the company that is, you know, that has Westwood One, which is the largest network, we put, you know, we're able to help podcast partners access the largest audio network and, you know, all the avails in the advertising marketplace. We're, you know, we have a strong positioning in news talk, you know, big, bold voices, and we're comfortable in this area. Yes, it is competitive, but I think we've done quite well.
Okay. With regards to sort of like capital allocation, just given the volatility in the ad market, do you guys sort of see more opportunities to, you know, kind of focus more on the debt reduction side? Do you guys have like a longer term target in where you want that leverage to be?
I'll take that. Our we've been consistent in talking about our long-term net leverage target to be at 3.5 or lower. Now we're in an environment now that obviously with pressure on EBITDA, our leverage is tracking up. On the last 12-month basis, our net leverage ticked up to 4.1 times in our last 12 months. EBITDA was $145 million. Having said that, we've been very consistent in taking advantage of opportunities in terms of repurchasing both stock and debt, given our strong liquidity positions, and also given the fact that we continue to generate positive cash flow in good times and bad. That's what you saw that in the first quarter, that we were able to buy back stock and debt at a discount.
I can't really give you any forward guidance in terms of what we may do in the subsequent quarters. You know, the one thing I wanna emphasize is, given that we've reduced our costs so much, improved our operating leverage as we have and generate free cash flow, it gives us a terrific opportunity to use that liquidity in many different ways, which includes potentially share repurchase, debt repurchase, investment in the business and potential acquisitions.
Okay. I think the last one I had was specifically with regard to the sports betting category. I know it's, you know, we had the difficult comparison with the WynnBET relationship last year. I was also kind of curious in terms of if you felt that there might be I guess maybe more of significant regulation of that sector in the future with, you know, maybe potential concerns over, I guess, externalities of that business.
I really can't comment on regulation in that space, but I will say the patterns that we've seen that we saw last year and we see this year, and this is excluding the loss of the WynnBET relationship, which was significant for us, is that the pattern that we've seen in sports betting compared to when initially became very active in the market, is that the advertising tends to move to what states are legalizing betting for the first time. The pattern we're seeing in those dollars is that as the sports betting companies establish their footprint in states that have already been legal, they cut back their spending, they have their customer acquisition costs, they have their client base, and they're spending more dollars in the newer states.
Having said that, there are fewer states coming online, and the pressure is that they have an underlying business, as a result, that results in a weaker spend. We've seen that both locally and in our network business.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you for your question. Our next question comes from the line of Dan Day with B. Riley Securities. Dan, your line is now open.
Morning, guys. Thanks for taking the questions. Mary, you mentioned in the prepared remarks, investing in digital marketing services. Just to get a sense for if you could quantify that at all, what specifically that investment might entail. Would it really just be, like, hiring more people in support of kind of selling that product? Is there anything else CapEx wise to think about in terms of that investment?
Yeah. Thanks, Dan. That's a great question. We've seen that when we put more people on the street, given the training that we're able to provide them and the range of products that we go to market with, that the payback is very, very quick. We're in the process of more than doubling our direct-to-consumer sales organization. You know, given the growth we're seeing, as I said, it's a profitable investment from day one. You know, just continuing to add people, given this payback, and we may ramp this up more as time goes on.
Mary, if I can jump in.
Yeah. Go ahead. Go ahead, Frank.
Yeah. With regard to the capital investment, it required very little to no capital investment. It's basically hiring salespeople who, as Mary said, has proven on recent hires to have an immediate and accretive payback. That's one of the things we're doing in terms of reducing our costs and reinvesting in those growth businesses. It doesn't come with a big capital investment, nor a tech capital investment, which is really important.
Understood. On the $10 million of incremental cost reductions, you found, can you maybe flesh out where those are coming from at this point? I mean, you've been very aggressive in terms of taking costs out of the business over the last one to two years. Just wondering where those opportunities are still coming from to tweak things out.
Frank, you can go through the, you know, where we think, where they've come through, generally, but you know, it's things like real estate. We're very aggressive about our management of our real estate portfolio, contract costs, you know, operational improvements. We, for example, we centralized our business manager function. We looked, you know, we're down into marketing spend reductions. Frank, am I forgetting something?
No, that's right. It's very consistent on what we've done before, which is focusing on-
Yeah.
-contracts, business process optimization, people efficiencies. For your models, just so you understand how that $10 million tracks at an annual run rate, since we're gonna be implementing it now, the number you should use in your models is roughly $8 million worth of cost savings for this fiscal year, which ramps up to $10 million more on an annual basis. We'll continue to focus on additional cost savings as we ask.
Great. Thanks. One more for me, just in podcasting. You mentioned like the exposure to national and the national side being what's sort of driving the softness there. Anything you're doing to increase the number of local advertisers within your podcasting segment? It seems like a big opportunity there to get some of these SMBs, a lot of them that are AM/FM advertisers over to podcasting, you know. Whether that's through like geo-targeting the big national ones, whether it's through, you know, podcast extensions into local shows or whatever, just whether that's a priority or not and anything you're doing there would be helpful.
Yeah. It's, we agree with you. About a year ago, we refocused our effort on local podcasting. Generally, it tends to be around a local show. For example, Dallas around The Ticket. We have a very successful local podcast called Michigan Insider. It's a sports one with all the stations there. We believe there's opportunity. Many of our programmers would very much like to do podcasting. We're walking before we run, but we're seeing initial success there because you're absolutely right. Listeners wanna hear hear from our talent, and it's a way also to do extend the content that they hear on air. That is an area of focus.
Okay. I appreciate you taking the time, guys.
Thank you for your question. Our next question comes from the line of Michael Kupinski with Noble Capital Markets. Michael, your line is now open.
Thank you so much. Thanks for taking the questions, a couple of them. I know that you operate these stations very leanly, so I'm always surprised to see additional cost cuts coming from the station groups. I was just wondering, in terms of the technologies that are out there, including AI services and so forth, that may allow the company to maybe even more significantly reduce costs. Can you talk about some of the opportunities that you're looking at and what might be the opportunities for maybe further restructuring of the company to really significantly lower costs?
Good morning, Michael. I'll take that. We are definitely looking at AI as a possibility to improve our business. I would say it's extremely early days in that looking at that, because it has a lot of impacts in terms of when you think about our business, our local business is strong because we have that local voice right to the local consumer, and that's something that we take advantage of with our local talent. You know, it's interesting, since we started the cost reduction efforts because of the pandemic, I don't think we would have thought we could take out 20% of our cost base without impacting revenue. We continue to look at that.
A lot of the cost reductions have been at the network business, in addition to the station group, given the pressures in the network business. Look, in summary, it's early days in AI. We're not gonna say at this point there's gonna be a major restructuring of the company because of AI. I think we're all learning about it, and we'll see how that goes. It's something we're definitely gonna take a close look at, and we have been looking at it.
Thank you for that. Obviously, your balance sheet is better than most in the industry, given your large cash position and so forth. I was wondering, you know, I know that you sold some assets. I was wondering, are there further assets, non-strategic assets that you have out there or that you're looking at potentially selling? Given that there are issues that many are facing in the industry, are there potential buyers out there?
That's a good question. Early on, I'd say early on, through COVID through 2020 and 2021, we did sell the bulk of our non-strategic assets, including our D.C. land sale, the tower lease, et cetera. We do have some non-strategic assets that we could take a look at, but they're not significant in size. The WFAS was an interesting case study which, this was not a station I was on the market. There are buyers out there for selective stations for their certain needs. If others like that appear, we'll analyze it very closely. Generating seven minus sales, or sale proceeds on an asset that had virtually zero EBITDA is usually accretive and gives us a benefit to return capital to shareholders and reduce debt.
I expect those will continue to happen. They're episodic. They're not planned. They come to us, but of course, we look at everything in the space. As those inquiries come in, we'll take a serious look at it.
Thank you for that. Just on the digital front, can you talk a little bit about your station listening? How much of that station listening is coming from streaming? Do you feel like that streaming as likely to continue to grow offers you more significant opportunities to monetize the listening audience? Can you just kind of give us your thoughts about the shifting in terms of audience and how they're using radio?
Sure. There's no question that streaming continues to be increased in terms of how our customers experience their listening. What we're generally seeing in some markets is as more clients go to the stream versus over the air, that increases our share and our listenership. We have the ability to increase pricing given our advocate share. As a reminder, a couple years ago, we adopted Total Line Reporting, which shifted some of the revenues geographically, which was recorded in spot over to digital once we had that measurement. Not every single station goes on Total Line Reporting, we do that when we think there's a lift potentially.
Again, we're following where the listeners are and to the extent we increase our share and we take advantage of our pricing, that's something that you'll see in streaming is a nice business. There's potential opportunities there. Having said all that, when we look at our digital portfolio, we're really, really excited about the DMS space because that's really turbocharge incremental revenues that we haven't seen in the past. The increased streaming is very nice. It's important. I think it's on the margin. The organic growth we're seeing in digital marketing services, as I mentioned, is something that's very exciting with a very low investment, high ROI.
I just to add to Frank's remarks, you know, the main areas of focus for digital for us are maximizing impressions that we generate by increasing listenership from existing listeners and also extending the platforms we're able to be found on. In 2022, we extended our TuneIn distribution deal and our iHeartRadio distribution deals. Notably we also added the NFL streaming rights. That was and is proving to be a terrific opportunity because we have new listeners that we never really had before. That's one area of focus. The second is we focus a lot on the monetization of the inventory across all the channels, local, national, network, programmatic.
you know, I think it's, as Frank said, I think the opportunity, the bigger opportunity is DMS. This is, you know, this is pacing quite nicely, as you can see.
Final question. Thanks for that color. Final question. On the local level, are you seeing any regional disparities, anything in particular that might kind of indicate that maybe local is not performing well or some issues that we might see, start to see some cracks in local? Just wondering if you can just kind of give us some thoughts in terms of how healthy local is at this point in terms of just, you know, given the economic headwinds, it seems to be holding up very well. Are you seeing anything that might give us some concern?
Yeah. It's one thing I would say is that it remains a tale of two cities, in local versus national, but it's also a little bit small versus large. You know, smaller markets are outperforming larger markets. I think that's given their relatively higher % of local revenue versus national. On the local area, you know, we have our portfolio skewed to smaller markets, and in those markets, the stations and the are more embedded, if you will, and influential, and the programming is really needed for live and local in those communities. That holds up. That is holding up better than the larger markets, the local business in larger markets. We did see a slowdown from first quarter to second.
You know, again, it's a different, it's a tale of two cities, small markets versus large even on the local front too.
Gotcha. Thank you. That's all I have.
Thank you for your question. Our final question comes from the line of Avi Steiner with JP Mo rgan. Avi, your line is now open.
Thank you, and thank you for taking the questions. Just on the ad environment, which seems to be weakening in the second quarter, how much of that is being driven by maybe the regional banking crisis, for lack of a better description, or is there some general economic malaise or whatever you can point to? Just on the overall pacing top line down low double digits, is there any one-time items in the year-ago period we should be thinking about as we just kind of build out the model or that may need to adjust for that number on a comp basis? I've got a couple more. Thank you.
Okay. I'll take that. look, the what happened with SVB and has not directly impacted us in terms of the flows in the business. Having said that, whenever you have weaker confidence, it makes me see how that ripples through the economy and our clients. The weakness that we're seeing in financial, particularly, even the insurance category where it's a big category for us, and those advertisers have been cutting back as they look at their underwriting losses and their need to help customers in this environment. Of course, with higher interest rates, a big category for us was the mortgage market. I don't have to say, there's not gonna be a lot of advertising for mortgages with these higher rates.
It's more of a continuation of the same, and perhaps a little bit accelerated, in the financial space. I wouldn't say there's anything new other than the continued uncertainty and, that's why we're seeing, continued, weaker national market. Our local spot business, as Mary mentioned, and as I mentioned in the script, is a little bit weaker, pacing in the second quarter. With regard to comps to last year, there were no significant one-time events last year. I think the way to think about it is in the first quarter, excluding midterm and political, we were down 7%. Of course, we had political last year. Pacing down, low double digits indicates just that weak environment, slightly weaker local and title, and then weaker national.
Again, it's early in the quarter. We have two months to go. We're not seeing improving trends at this point, that's for sure.
Thank you for that color and the clarification on the financial services category guide. Two more for me. Just one, the free cash flow, it's pointed out as a positive. Working capital, a fairly nice source this quarter at least as it took a peak in the Form 10-Q. Anything one time there, just how to think about that for the rest of the year. I've got one more. Thank you.
Right. Look, our drivers on free cash flow are driven by EBITDA, obviously, and then just our revenue, the revenue impact on working capital. The first quarter, we generally generate a bit of cash because seasonally the first quarter is lower revenues, and we have the benefit of collecting the sales from the fourth quarter. That's contributed to our working capital benefits in the first quarter. It's mixed. The second quarter tends to be lighter on cash generation, and then we rebound in the third quarter. The way we look at it, we try to manage and look at our cash flow on a yearly basis, recognizing we have the swings.
If revenues pick up and that generates a use of working capital, that will be temporary, with increased revenues, we have increased profitability. If you remember, in 2020, working capital was a enormous source of liquidity for us. That's for the wrong reasons, because revenues were down 25% for the full year. We'll just have to manage that. We look at all expenses. We look at, you know, CapEx and operating and put that all into the mix to generate the free cash on the business and give us confidence with our operating leverage, we're gonna be in a good position notwithstanding this weak environment.
Great. Just lastly, on the expense line to dovetail towards the end of what you just responded. Just to make sure I heard everything correctly, $8 million kind of cost saves for the balance of the year, I think is what you said on that $10 million you identified.
Mm-hmm.
I'm assuming that's going to be pro rata across quarter. Anything else to think about expense-wise as we go through the year? Thank you very much. Appreciate the time.
No, you heard it right. The $8 million more or less ratably throughout the balance of the year. Let me emphasize, we're not over on that. We look at our expense base very closely, we are in the process of identifying other opportunities that we think we may be able to take advantage of, but haven't been able to nail down in such a way that we have been putting in this guidance. We'll give you an update in the next earnings call to the extent we can take out other costs and what the implications for the balance of the year and going into 2024.
Appreciate the time. Thank you all.
Thank you for your question. That concludes our Q&A session for today. I'll now turn it back over to the company for any closing remarks. Thank you.
Thanks, everyone, for your time today, and we look forward to speaking to you again next quarter. Thanks.
This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your line.