Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the Crown Electrokinetics Corporation Investor Conference Call. This conference call is being recorded. A replay of today's call will be available on the Investor Relations section of Crown's website. I will now hand the call over to Jason Assad for introductions and the reading of the safe harbor statement. Please go ahead.
Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Crown's Investor Conference Call. With us today on the call are Doug Croxall, Crown's Chief Executive Officer and Chairman; Joel Krutz, Chief Financial Officer; and David Martinez and Mike Sullivan of the company's Fiber Optics Division. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that today's call contains certain forward-looking statements made by our management within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. Words such as may, should, projects, expects, intends, plans, believes, anticipates, hopes, estimates, and variation of such words and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements.
These statements are subject to numerous conditions, many of which are beyond the control of the company, including those set forth in the Risk Factors section of the company's quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the Q2 of 2023, filed with the SEC. Copies of these documents are available on the SEC's website at www.sec.gov. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. The company undertakes no obligation to update these statements for revisions or changes after the date of this call, except as required by law. Now, at this time, it's my pleasure to introduce Doug Croxall, CEO and Chairman of Crown. Doug?
Thanks, Jason, and thank you everybody for joining the call today. Traditionally, we do our earnings call at the end of each of the first three quarters, and then a call at the end of 3/31, it's our 10-K call. This call is in lieu of the Q2 call that typically would be in August. We wanted to wait and do the call later in September because we knew we had a lot of activity that we wanted to be able to talk about publicly, and we're gonna do that today. We've broken up the call into four major sections. The first is what we're calling corporate events, and that's gonna include things like the financings we've been through, the Nasdaq compliance, balance sheet cleanup, debt reduction, et cetera. Joel's gonna handle that part of the discussion.
The second topic will be the Fiber Optics Division update. Both Mike and Dave will talk through that. The third section will be the Electrokinetic Film Division update, which I'll handle. And then we're gonna finish with a discussion on short selling, naked short selling, and what the company is trying to do to combat that. We have asked that investors to make questions, and we've received quite a few questions through our info@crownek.com email, and at the very end, I'm gonna go through some of those questions. A lot of them are repetitive, so we've tried to create a list that captures everything that all the questions that have been sent in.
Okay, let me start, though, by saying that we are well aware of our stock price, and later in this presentation, we're gonna talk about what we're doing to combat what we believe is illegal naked short selling. With that being said, the best way to prevent shorting or to hurt the short sellers in a company's stock is to effectively execute your business plan. So today, we're gonna walk through some of the things that we're going to do in order to create what we think is a very great, robust, and valuable company. Things like achieving our revenue and our earnings as close to the guidance that we put out as we can. Hiring the best possible team to, and empowering them to reach their potential. We want to put our customer first. Our customer is the most important thing that we have.
We want to give the best product and service that we can at a price that makes sense, not only for Crown, but for our customer. If we do those things, our revenues and earnings will take care of themselves, and our share price will start to reflect the true value of this company. It's really only recently that management has been able to fully prioritize and focus on our operations due to the work that we had to do to regain Nasdaq compliance, reduce our debt, clean up our balance sheet, put the finances in order, as they say. In that short period of time, I'm happy to report that we've made significant progress towards those goals, which Joel will walk through with you here in a bit. We're also gonna talk about the fiber construction in our EK film division.
But before we do that, I wanna go over what's happened over the past year from a very kind of 60,000-foot standpoint. It was September first, 2022, that we received our first letter from Nasdaq telling us that we were out of compliance with the $1 bid price rule. That was followed by another letter we received from Nasdaq on April 4th, 2023, in which we were no longer, w e were deficient in our shareholder equity levels being below the $2.5 million threshold. As most of you know, exactly one year later, meaning, three weeks ago, we regained compliance with Nasdaq. We went through a lot of work in order to achieve that, a lot that is not always obvious to our investors.
So I want Joel to walk us through what we've done in order to regain not only Nasdaq compliance, but what we did clean up the company's balance sheet, get rid of restricted covenants, et cetera. Joel?
Thanks, Doug, and thank you everybody for joining us for today's update. As Nick, like mentioned, I'm gonna provide a little context around each of the major transactions and the restructurings that Crown has executed over the last 12 months. In October last year, we raised $3.5 million in a convertible note round, led by a follow-on Crown investor. The notes, which had a one-year maturity, provided the company with essential bridge financing. We opted to pursue debt financing at this stage, as we were not carrying any debt and wanted to minimize shareholder dilution. Two major implications of the note, October notes round were: one, as is common with debt notes, there were a number of restrictive covenants attached, which created operational challenges, particularly around raising future capital.
Secondly, there was an understanding with October note investors that Crown would be open to exploring M&A to identify complementary business targets. That M&A process led to us identifying Amerigen 7 as a target, which would allow Crown to expand its offering into distributed antenna system installations, particularly valuable to our REIT customers, and also a communications construction business, with which to take advantage of the federal and state infrastructure investment levels. With consent from October noteholders, we closed on an asset purchase agreement, or an APA, in early January, and simultaneously raised a small amount of new debt, again, through our existing investors. That note was to be repaid in 90-120 days.
The APA allowed us to now own assets greater than the purchase price of $645,000, and we also inherited a prime customer relationship in the Great Lakes region. That Great Lakes work proved challenging due to a number of factors, not least of which was significant weather delays. So throughout the early part of the year, we executed new agreements, announcing new customers diversifying into the Southwest and Northwest U.S.. These customers represented significant opportunities, but each required material capital investment in order for us to acquire the equipment and crews necessary to unlock those opportunities. In February, we entered into a line of credit for $100 million. This is a critical new facility, as it gave Crown credibility in the fiber construction market that a new entrant typically does not possess.
We immediately drew down $2 million on that line of credit in February, but critically, was subsequently only able to draw a further $350,000 due to financial tests the lender had insisted upon, and which, if failed, meant that the line of credit could deny requested draws. This, in combination with the restrictive October and January note covenants, meant our ability to raise meaningful levels of new capital were limited, leaving the company in a challenging financial situation and frustratingly unable to fully exploit the customer opportunities we were rapidly generating. Compounding the situation, when we reported our 10-K financials in late March this year, our December equity balance was $500,000, below the $2.5 million Nasdaq listing threshold.
In April, after publishing our 10-Q financials and just prior to our Nasdaq panel meeting, we received the expected notice of our stockholder equity non-compliance from Nasdaq. Now, we'd known early in Q1 that this was going to be an issue and had started taking whatever equity improvement measures were available to us. This included incenting the October noteholders to exercise warrants and opportunistically accessing our At-The-Market or ATM facilities. These measures had not yet become known to the market or to Nasdaq, but when our 10-Q for the Q1 was filed in mid-May, we disclosed that our March 31 equity balance was now $7.7 million. It was clear, though, at this stage that the debt was weighing heavily on Crown from both a restrictive covenant and a balance sheet pressure point of view, and would need to be retired as soon as possible.
This was confirmed shortly thereafter, when we had our Nasdaq panel hearing to maintain our continued listing on their platform. At that meeting, Nasdaq agreed that if we accomplished a long list of milestones, all of which had to be finished by August 28th of this year, that we could maintain our listing. The following series of events, which I'll label numbers one through seven, were then required to both maintain our equity levels and to achieve and maintain a stock price above $1. Number one, we had to eliminate balance sheet debt, including October, January, and the line of credit notes. All, apart from a small line of credit balance, which will be cleared by Q3, were successfully redeemed, converted, or exchanged by the end of July. Number two, create a new series of preferred equity.
We closed on Series F on June 4th, in which multiple securities, primarily debt, were exchanged for the preferred equity. Additionally, two consecutive follow-on rounds of Series F-1 and F-2 were closed with just under $1 million of new money. Number three, we were to establish an Equity Line of Credit or ELOC. Investors consented to our establishing an ELOC facility to complement our ATM as another relatively low-cost means of raising capital. And on August 7th, our $50 million ELOC went effective. Number four, raise equity through an S-1 follow-on. We filed our S-1 registration on August 14, received SEC approval on August 18, and were poised to close our S-1 raise within Nasdaq's timeline.
We knew, however, that this would be a heavily diluted raise, and with the ELOC effective and our June 30th shareholder equity balance at $4.6 million, we were able to convince Nasdaq that we needed to rescind our S-1, feeling that it would be detrimental to shareholders. On August 30th, the S-1 was withdrawn. Number five, we had to gather shareholder consent for a 1-to-60 reverse split through our definitive 14A. The bid price was our final hurdle, and Nasdaq required a 1-to-60 reverse split to ensure that we had the necessary headroom above the $1 threshold. And on August 11th, shareholders approved the larger reverse split ratio. Number six, affect the 1-to-60 reverse split. On August 15th, immediately following the shareholder approval, we affected the 1-to-60 reverse split.
And then finally, number seven, we had to maintain a $1 bid price for 10 straight trading days. The August 15th split left us exactly 10 days to trade above $1 in order to meet Nasdaq's bid price compliance. And on August 28th, we accomplished that. So after successfully achieving these milestones, on September 1st, 2023, we received confirmation that we were now fully compliant with Nasdaq's listing guidelines. Additionally, Crown was virtually debt-free, had removed the restrictive debt covenants, and had quick access to capital that didn't require detrimental terms and 200% warrant coverage. We're now extremely well positioned to take advantage of the opportunities offered by our fiber business and the continuing developments in our EK film business. Crown is now in a better position to succeed than at any other point in its history.
I'm now going to hand back to Doug to take you through a business update.
Thank you, Joel. We're moving into our third section, which is the fiber Construction Division update. In the spring of this year, it became obvious that we needed new senior management to lead the Fiber Optics Division . Shortly after that point, about a month later, I met Dave and Mike. That was right, like, mid-May of this year. We spent a few months getting to know each other, talking about backgrounds, experience, operating plans. Wanted to make sure there was a good corporate culture fit, that culminated in the hiring of both Dave and Mike in July of this year. While we've announced many purchase orders, all of those were dependent upon appropriate levels of capitalization, as Joel had just mentioned, but also experienced management to lead the growth of that division.
Mike and Dave come to us, and come to us with a slightly different plan. Instead of expanding quickly to various states, which we had effectively done from the Great Lakes to the Southwest to the Northwest, their plan was, let's focus on one market. Let's go deep in the market that is the best that we can approach. Let's differentiate by adding some fast-growing technology like micro trenching, and let's go find the best customer in that market. I'm happy to say that we've done all of those things. If you saw the announcement today, that was the first step in that direction. At this point, I'm going to hand the call over to Dave and Mike, and I'm going to let them go through their backgrounds and an update on what we're doing in the fiber optic division.
Thank you, Doug. Hello, and good afternoon, everyone. I am David Martinez, and it's my pleasure to be here with you today. Before we get into the opportunities that are ahead of us for Crown Fiber Optics, let me just share a little bit about myself and what I can bring to Crown. I have been in the IT infrastructure and technology industry for the past 30 years, since mid-1980s. During this time, as you can imagine, I have had various experiences. I have led multimillion-dollar programs, international teams for top-tier organizations and customers such as IBM, Sprint, Honeywell, TransCanada, for the financial, local government, aerospace, and oil and gas energy sectors. During this time, I've held roles of team leader, senior management, business owner, entrepreneur, visionary, and chief operating officer.
In 2014, I started a satellite telecommunications company as the chief operating officer, supporting the oil and gas energy sectors across the United States and Canada. Between 2019 and 2021, the company was recognized by Inc. 5000 [Inaudible] as one of the fastest-growing companies in the U.S.. In 2021, I joined a telecommunications outside plant fiber construction company as advisory and acting Chief Operating Officer, building and supporting the company from the ground up. I've had many successes in my career with leading startup endeavors, driving operational growth, leading maximum business opportunities, all based on data-driven decisions to focus on the revenue growth, profitability, operational, and customer excellence. I'd like to take this opportunity at this moment to introduce my counterpart, who is also from Arizona, and together, we will build out Crown's fiber optics organization.
Mike Sullivan.
Thank you, Dave, Doug, and Joel. Hello, and good afternoon. It's a pleasure to meet with you today. I'm Mike Sullivan, and it's
It's really good to be here. Let me tell you a little bit about who I am. I've been in the communication space for over 35 years, starting at Frontier as an Outside Plant Lineman working in the field. I worked my way up through AVP of outside plant design and deployment with Frontier. 2013, I left Frontier and have held VP positions at various companies such as Zayo Group, West Telecom, and UniTek, to name a few. In that time, I've led corporate initiatives in deploying fiber nationally and internationally, resulting in the successful deployment of many multimillion-dollar projects, accumulating over 14,000 miles of fiber network placed in service. During this time, I've held the role of team leader, senior management, business owner, entrepreneur, visionary, and chief operating officer.
In 2010, I partnered in the formation of a defense firm as COO, leveraging my military experience and executing on over $1 billion in contracts internationally. I oversaw the sale of that company in the Q1 of 2023.
Thank you, Mike. Quite impressive. So together, Mike and I will be focusing on initially growing the Arizona market, not only because we live there, but we also understand the market opportunities. Arizona is one of the fastest-growing markets in the country for fiber construction and was recently announced as the 5th fastest-growing city in the country. Our newest customer, also in Arizona, has a five-year scope of work, and there's a real strong possibility potential for Crown to become their single-source vendor for micro trenching. That, Mike, would you like to cover further why micro trenching?
Yes. Thank you, Dave. Why micro trenching? But first, let's say, ask why fiber? The demand for bandwidth is so great that this market is a very stable market for the construction industry. Really, no matter what happens with the economic temperature, there is always gonna be work in this industry. So why micro trenching? Well, let's talk a little bit about micro trenching. Not brand new, as much as we'd like to say we're at the, we've invented it. No, it's a, it's a mature technology. It's been around for about 10, 15 years, and many advantages of it. Main being, it's what it costs per foot to deploy fiber using the micro trencher. Why is that? It's low risk. All the other technologies and methods that are used, you're digging much deeper.
You're running the risk of hitting other utilities, gas, electric, sewer. Micro trenching is a shallower depth, it's a smaller footprint, and it's so much more productive because of that. Almost 3x or 4x the productivity can be achieved with micro trenching than you could with traditional or horizontal directional drill form. Potential for profit is typically 2x-3x that of using HDD, horizontal directional drilling. So why not? Why isn't everyone doing that? Started 15 years ago. Well, it took a long time for the permitting authorities, the government, that give you permits to accept micro trenching. So what you've had for the past 10 years is companies like Google trying to use this technology, and I like to say they were on the bleeding edge.
They were the ones figuring out everything you shouldn't do with a micro trencher, and now we're at that state where we can jump in on the leading edge. Municipalities have finally accepted it. Not only accepted it, but it's now the preferred method in about 20%-30% of the cases, and that's only growing. In addition to the traditional fiber placement, rural broadband, working within urban areas, even the ADOT, Arizona Department of Transportation, is favoring micro trench over any other method of installing fiber. And that's huge because typically the DOTs didn't want anything near their roadway or the right of way, and now they're asking for something that we've embraced.
We've bought the equipment, we're ready to roll, and they're asking for that technology, and it's the first choice. Timing. Again, micro trenching is now becoming the mainstream, as opposed to that alternative method of deployment. So what's our plan? Well, we've already talked about it a little bit. We're gonna staff with industry experts and tools. We've already purchased micro trenchers, and they're hard to get. We got a head start on that, and we've got them ready to deploy in the field. We're gonna hire the. We're in the process of hiring crews. Both Dave and I know this market.
One of the reasons we decided to focus on this known market is not only do we know the clients and the permitting authorities, but we also know the labor force out there, so we're working towards that. We're leveraging our existing networks with clients, and we've already secured a major contract or a major MSA with one of our partner companies. With that, we're going to expand. We're going to work in the tier one and tier two space, which are the front tiers, Verizon, T-Mobile, all those guys, and there is the opportunity is in the billions with these companies. In addition to that, we can look into non-communications. A big effort, a $2.5 billion proposed by the Biden administration for electric vehicle charging stations.
Micro trenching is a perfect method of getting power from the right of way into these private facilities. Traffic control, traffic cameras, wind and solar farms are all another way of doing that. Good question: Why wouldn't the competition do this? There are plenty of other companies doing it as well. A lot of the competition has spent the last five to 10 years buying directional bore rigs at $350,000 a pop. The last thing they want to do right now is go out and buy some more equipment and have their directional bore rigs sitting idle. So we've got to jump on this, and the market is huge, the technology is there, and the acceptance is there.
Yeah. Along the lines of the acceptance, I just also want to mention that, ADOT, Arizona Department of Transportation, recently completed a 200-mile project connecting Phoenix to northern Arizona. 67 miles of the project was completed using micro trenching. ADOT went on to state that they chose micro trenching for this section to help address challenges posed by hard rock and to deliver the project in a safer, faster, more cost-effective manner with minimal impact to the public. So with all these items that we're looking at, micro trenching is the direction that we're taking. We're going to be focusing on within Arizona. We're going to be expanding on that throughout various different markets. I, I see a lot of positive, strong potential growth that we will be, looking at and capturing over the next, three, six , 12-month period. So, yeah.
Perfect. Thanks, guys. Just a couple of follow-up points on what they said. The micro trenchers that we've acquired, we have more that we're going to bring into the company. They're very difficult to get. There's really three primary manufacturers. Two of the manufacturers, it's anywhere from a 16 to 18 month wait from when you place the order to receive the actual trencher. The relationship that we have developed and secured with the third manufacturer allows us to have an ongoing supply of trenchers, which really is important when you're sitting in front of the customers that we're talking to. The reason that we were able to get the contract that we announced this morning on our purchase order was because we already had trenchers, and we had more coming. So cannot stress that enough.
The other thing that I wanted to talk about that's coming out of the fiber group is the ability to forecast our operating margins. Mike and Dave have used a model for many years that has been refined many times over, you know, the past decade. That forecasting model will allow us to give pretty good accuracy as far as guidance is concerned to Wall Street. We have given guidance in the past based on some of the contracts that we've already signed, and that the announcement today, it's really about a $40 million piece of work and about a little over $30 million piece of work.
The reason that we're not going to revise the guidance right now, but we will on our November earnings call, is because we're waiting to get confirmation from our customer as to how many trenchers we can have active at the same time on a given project. There are limits based to put on by the municipalities about how many crews you can have in a given location at a given time. So if we're able to put 10 trenchers to work, we can get the project done very, very quickly. If it's three trenchers that are working in a given area, then it's going to take a little longer to get it done. We're right now estimating that we should be able to generate and realize that full $70 million of revenue over probably a six to nine month period.
But again, we're going to give you finite details on that once we know them ourselves, and that likely will come on the earnings call in November. If we can deliver the guidance earlier, we will, but we want to be very accurate with that guidance, and so we need, we need a little bit more time with our customer before we can give that new revised guidance. That's two things that I wanted to talk about. The other thing that I wanted to talk about is that, you know, the opportunities in the fiber market are not just being hired for construction. There are opportunities to own the fiber, and that's not something we'll do in the short term, but that might be something that we'll look at over the, for the next couple of years.
We will continue to add management throughout the organization on the fiber side. Obviously, we have two rock stars with Mike and Dave, but we will continue to add experienced, talented people on that side to build the business. Then finally, I want to touch upon one other point that Mike mentioned. This customer that we've recently announced, and yes, we're not permitted to announce their name, or we clearly would have. You know, they've got a pretty big vision, not just in the state of Arizona, but in 20 other markets that they're very active. And they've already started talking to us about at least one of those markets. But I want to reiterate, our plan is to go deep in Arizona.
We're there, we've got equipment, we've got a lot of crews, we've got a lot of work. Per our customer, they think they've got five years of micro-trenching work for us in that market alone, which, you know, we're going to absolutely take advantage of. Okay, that's the fiber side of the business. Now, moving into the electrokinetic film side, just to give everybody a quick update on where we are here. For those of you who aren't familiar, we make our film on a roll-to-roll machine. There's a critical step that we call the embossing step, and it is a cylinder that has the alternate design of what we emboss in our film.
The design that we emboss in our film is a cellular structure that has the little walls that separate each cell, and on the floor of the cell, we poke little wells, and we're talking about seven to 10 micron in depth, so this is incredibly small, distances that we're working with. The process of embossing that design, that cylinder is created from what we call a mastering process. We have a couple of vendors in the United States. We have a couple of vendors in Europe that we have used to create our masters before. We are limited in how wide that master can be for two reasons. The first is that our vendors are limited in how big of a master they can make.
The second is that even if they could make a big master, we're limited by the size of the cylinder that can be put on our roll-to-roll line. As I have explained in the past, we're limited to a 12 in width, so we can make our film at any length, but the width can only be 12 in. Over the summer, we have actually, starting about almost two years ago, we worked on an initiative internally, which we call stitching. I'm not going to get into the details of how we do it, but what I will say is that effectively, we can take, for example, which we've done this summer, we've taken a 1 in by 1 in master, and we've been able to connect those together.
When we start adding enough of those together, we can actually create a pretty wide master that we can convert into a cylinder, that we can now emboss our image onto our film. We've demonstrated our ability to do that with a 1-by-1-in master. We are in the process right now of having a, I believe it's going to end up being about a 7 in-by-9-in master that will be made from one of our vendors. We will then start stitching those together, and we will be able to create 12-in width film on our current roll-to-roll machine in our facility in Corvallis, Oregon. That will allow us to build our first generation smart window insert and ship that product and bill our current customers for that. Our expected timeline, I would love to have it done tomorrow.
It's a process with our vendor. Best case scenario, probably three months. Worst case, four or five months. So we're looking at late this year, early next year, from a timing perspective, to be able to make 12-in film, create our Smart Window Insert, and ship it, and book revenue. So that's our update on the film side. You will, if you've noticed, we added a new board member, Scott Hobbs. He comes out of the commercial real estate industry. He has already been incredibly helpful in connecting us with a number of building owners. The demand, not only with our existing customers that we've announced, you know, a year ago, but the demand from new customers that are US office building REITs, is still pretty significant. It's still a great solution. It's a great replacement for shades.
It saves the building money by lowering the HVAC draw. It saves the building, reduces their carbon footprint because of that. So we'll continue to make headway in our development. We'll continue to make headway with our customers. And, you know, quite honestly, we've had a couple of companies come to us that have said, "Hey, we're interested in applying your film in a residential setting, garage doors, front doors, windows, skylights." So we know that we have a product that customers are willing to pay for in the U.S. office building market, but we also know that we have other markets that we eventually will get to as well. Skylights, garage doors, residential windows and doors as well. So that's the update on the EK Film side.
Okay, before I go through some of the questions that were submitted online, I wanted to talk briefly about what we're calling market manipulation, and I have to be very careful with what I say. Our attorneys have given me a pretty narrow lane with which I'm allowed to move, but we are aware that there's been a lot of short selling in our stock. We've heard it from multiple shareholders. We've been getting screenshots from shareholders that are in different chat rooms. We've seen people brag about what they're trying to do, you know, to harm the stock. We've shared all of that data and evidence with a reputable third party that will help track naked short sellers in our- in companies like Crown.
We've been in numerous discussions with our SEC attorneys and other lawyers who also specialize in preventing illegal naked short selling. The one thing that all of our advisors have told us is to keep our discussions with our investors on this topic to a minimum. So we're here to tell you that we take this very seriously. We're doing everything that we can within our power to hold those accountable that need to be held accountable. When we have further information that we are allowed to share, we will share it. But do not confuse our silence on this matter with a lack of effort and determination. We're simply following the advice of those that we have hired and the experts in this field.
And as I said at the beginning of the call, the best way to positively affect our stock price, and the best way to combat short sellers and the pressure they bear on our stock price, is to effectively execute our business plan. That is exactly what this senior management team will do. Okay, I'm gonna run through some Q&A here real fast. And look, we got a ton of questions that were submitted by a number of different investors. We have summarized those because there was a lot of redundancy, so I'm just gonna work through some of those questions. Here's question number one. When you mention debt-based financing for projects, do you mean traditional bank loans, or will we continue with convertible notes?
So, as Joel had mentioned, we removed the S-1 because we thought that was putting a lot of pressure on the stock. We've been pretty successful in rebuilding our balance sheet. We have the capital we need to execute on the deal that we announced today, and we're moving in that direction. We will not be seeking any convertible notes at this time. That may change in the future, but definitely not doing that now. As Joel had also mentioned, we work really hard to eliminate all of those convertible notes, the covenants that come with them, which can be very restrictive.
The time and the energy it takes to work through the convertible notes, to get the proper consents to move forward as an operating business is immense, and so we're not excited to jump back into that. And certainly not at this point. Debt-based financing, yes, we are in discussions with debt-based financing, for example, for equipment purchases. And we'll see where things go. As a management team, we wanna get the first revenue booked. We wanna get really good guidance out there. We wanna understand what our trajectory to cash flow positive is, and we will be in discussions with our line of credit and potentially other bank financing that might be, you know, less expensive.
Okay, question two: Guidance said $15 million EBITDA for the year, but when do you expect to turn EBITDA positive, Q3 or Q4? So the whole issue of guidance, as I had just mentioned, we will revisit hopefully before mid-November for our Q3 earnings call. But we will revisit all of guidance in one fell swoop. Another question: Once we have a working prototype for window inserts, will we find a partner for mass production? Since we don't have a facility anymore, how many potential customers have we found? We still have a facility. Our facility is in Corvallis, Oregon, where we've always made our film and will continue to make our film. There's enough space there to also assemble our smart window inserts, which is what we intend to do. Would we partner with someone for mass production?
Ideally, what we'd like to do is make film. That's what we're really good at. That's where our core competency lies. The process of creating and assembling an insert, we buy all of the raw materials that create the insert. We buy the glass, we buy the frame, we buy the electronics, we buy the solar cell, we buy the batteries. You know, that's someone else's product that we're putting together in the insert. It'd be great to have someone else do that for us, so all we can focus on is manufacturing our film. We have really good margins on our film. But in order to convince somebody to make the inserts on our or their behalf, we have to prove to the market that this is a product that companies want.
So I would estimate sometime in calendar year 2024, when we have product going out the door and we can, we can extrapolate on some data points, we should be able to be in a position where we can start having those discussions where we have third-party partners that do the production of the insert, and we'll, we will focus on the film production. That also allows us to move into other markets sooner, if we're not, you know, bogged down by the, assembly of all the inserts. Okay, next question. What is the process on getting analyst coverage? I mean, you know, we're a pretty small company today, so it's gonna be tough to get analyst coverage. I am in discussions with analysts that have, that are interested, but it's a process.
It's also typically tied to banking fees, even though they claim it's not. So, there's nothing on the horizon. When we think we're gonna have one, you, you'll know, because they'll pick up coverage. Okay, on the contracts, the company has had one, very little cash, two, few employees. While I'm sure the question of the upfront financing needs, where needed, will be discussed, I'm also wondering how Crown sees the execution of the large multi-million-dollar contracts it has already won from the point of view of the qualified staff. Does it rely on subcontractors or does it have another solution? In the fiber optic market, you can do it yourself, or you can hire subcontractors to do it. Typically, there's usually a split.
You know, Dave and Mike, do you want to talk about what that split typically looks like?
Yeah. You typically want to staff up for your steady work and you ramp up for a bubble of work with, with subcontractors. And, we've developed, as Dave and I both, over the decades of our work in the industry, trusted, vendors that we can, trust to do the job the right way, on stack, on time, on budget. And so as we grow in the, the micro trenching space, we'll initially be building up our own organic forces. The reason behind that is there just aren't many other subs that do, micro- trenching. So we're basically gonna own the market in that space.
As the environment gets stronger and grows more nationwide, we'll develop those partnerships where we can have a 60/40 split or a 30/70 split or something like that. But initially, we plan to own the micro-trenching market in the areas we deploy in.
Perfect. Thank you. Okay, so I'm gonna move. That summarizes most of the questions that we received. There were some questions we just simply can't address because of SEC guidelines and material non-public information guidelines. So I'm gonna draw this meeting to a conclusion. There are some points that I'd like to reiterate that were talked about earlier. Number one, this company is debt-free and free of restricted covenants, which means we're able to actually operate the company the way we would like. The fiber division has proven experienced leadership. Fiber division has a tremendous supply of very hard-to-get micro trenchers that will complement our existing equipment. We've also got very strong customer relationships, not only in Arizona, but in other states as well, but primarily in Arizona, and we're gonna focus on Arizona.
Our revenue and EBITDA, it will be significant. It may not be significant in the month of September or the month of October, but it'll start to ramp in November, and it will continue to ramp this year and next year. I'm excited to give you the guidance to what we see once we're able to provide that. Our EK Film, it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when. We know the path that we're on, and we know the path that we have to achieve in order to finally make our film to a quality that we can be proud of, to a market that we know is ready, willing, and capable of buying and distributing our film. We care about our shareholders, and we want your input. We get a lot of emails, we get a lot of calls.
Jason Assad, Joel, and myself do our best to respond as quickly as we can and as meaningful as we can, and we will continue to do that. And finally, our culture dictates that customers, they're our priority. If our employees focus on our customers first, and when our employees take care of our customers, the P&L is enhanced and maximized, and that creates value and wealth for those of you on this phone call and for those, the rest of you who own shares in Crown. I would like to thank everyone for dialing in to our call. We look forward to communicating more wins through press releases, shareholder letters, and we look forward to talking to you in November when we report our Q3 financials. Thank you very much.