Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Flow Beverage Corp.'s Fiscal Q2 of 2023 conference call. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded today, June 15th, 2023. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question and answer session, and instructions will be provided at that time for research analysts to queue up. Before we begin, we would like to remind you that today's presentation and discussion contains forward-looking statements that involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties, and other factors that could cause actual events to differ materially from current expectation and may cause actual results, performance, or achievements to be materially different from those implied by such statements.
The forward-looking statements are based upon and include the company's current internal estimates, plans, expectations, opinions, forecasts, projections, targets, guidance, or other statements that are not statements of fact. Any statements contained herein or discussed during today's session that are not statements of historical facts may be deemed to be forward-looking statements. A number of factors could cause actual events, performance, or results to differ materially from what is projected in the forward-looking statements. A more complete discussion of the risks and uncertainties facing the company appear in the company's annual information form dated January 29th, 2023, and the company's management's discussion and analysis for three months ended April thirtieth, 2023, which are available under the company's profile on SEDAR. Listeners are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which only speak to the date of this presentation.
The company disclaims any intention or obligation, except to the extent required by law, to update or revise any forward-looking statements as a result of new information or future events for any reason. Any forward-looking statement contained herein or discussed during today's session is expressly qualified in its entirety by the above cautionary statement. I would now like to turn the conference over to Nicholas Reichenbach, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Flow. Please go ahead, sir.
Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone, thank you for joining us today. I'm joined by Trent MacDonald, Flow's Chief Financial Officer. I'll begin today's call with a summary of our recent strategic and operational milestones and pass it over to Trent to review the financial performance and valuation. We'll open our call to the questions from our analysts. Today, Flow is laser-focused on achieving our path to profitability. To deliver profitability, we are transforming Flow into an asset-light operation, and we've identified four strategic steps to execute our goal. Number one, the sale of our Virginia production facility, which was achieved last November. Number two, securing strategic financing from our Aurora facility, which happened in January. Three, simplifying and optimizing our entire operation, and as announced this morning in our press release, the execution of our strategic alternative to our Aurora production facility.
Trent will provide more details to update on all four bullet points as he prepared his remarks. Since the execution of the first two steps, Flow brand has delivered excellent growth. Most recently, we reported 98% Flow-branded net revenue growth in fiscal Q2, which brings us to 68% year to date. We also made progress with increasing our gross margins closer to our potential, increasing to 18% in Q2 and 23% year to date. We are moving quickly to streamline our operation, bolster our balance sheet and demonstrate profitable growth. We've just begun. As of April 30th, Flow was located in 54,000 stores in North America. Our biggest addition to the store count has been our club channel with household names like Dollar General and Family Dollar.
We've also added 2,000 Albertsons- Safeway locations across the United States, which is one of the largest grocery chains in the U.S. Looking at Flow-branded revenue on a quarterly basis, you can see that we're achieving significant breakthroughs in Q2. Our growth in store count, product innovation, and food service business has led to a record quarter net revenue growth of 98%. We are also seeing in the market today that our retailers, food service companies, and consumers are demanding sustainable products. Flow remains the highest B Corp certified beverage company in the world. When it comes to sustainable beverages, Flow is second to none. Our market share in the carton format water in the U.S. has also reached over 51% in Q2. This is a significant increase from 45% in Q2 2022.
This gain in market share against other beverages in similar packages, we think that this means consumers are choosing Flow because of its amazing taste, our zero-calorie flavors, and of course, our innovation with our vitamin-infused water. Not only is revenue growing from our food service partners, it's also promoting trial for new consumers with a transferring to a high-margin channel after trial. Most recently, we introduced a strategic partnership and have become the official water of Live Nation Canada, whereby Flow will be available this summer to over 1.8 million annual concert goers in 825 concerts across Canada every year. This multi-year partnership will continue the momentum of Flow in our food service segment, will also provide an amazing opportunity for sampling and brand partnerships. We are delighted to partner with Live Nation and its Green Nation Touring Program.
Our partnership with Live Nation is a natural fit, given our roots in music and entertainment, Flow's influencer relationships with artists, and our strong sustainability goals and joint core customer base. Vitamin-infused water continues to be very good in its growth and performance. Our innovation is now in over 5,000 stores across North America. As we've seen in the past decade, there's been very little innovation in this space, and with our water as the base, a high alkaline, naturally occurring mineral water with electrolyte levels that are higher and at par with most hydration products, plus the fact that we're infusing daily doses of vitamin C and zinc without sugar, juices, or any artificial products, we will continue to see growth in this product innovation and expand its product line. With that, I'll pass it over to Trent.
Thank you, Nicholas. Flow, I'm gonna talk about our financial results. Flow branded net revenue increased to CAD 9.5 million in Q2 2023, or 98% from Q2 2022. The growth can be attributed to the success of our food service strategy with partners like Starbucks Canada, where we launched in the second quarter, and Norwegian Cruise Line, which continues to be a great story for Flow. While food service does have, as a lower gross margin, it does promote trial, with customers then coming into higher margin channels over time. To this end, we also saw growth in new retail locations and e-commerce, while the recent launch of vitamin-infused water has also been very, very successful for Flow. Consolidated revenue increased 56% in Q2 2023, to CAD 14 million.
Not only did the Flow brand growth come in as above what we had anticipated, we also successfully transitioned co-pack agreements from our Virginia production facility and saw higher order volumes from our key partners. Gross margins improved 18% in Q2, 2023. We also incurred lower relative trade spend as compared to Q2, 2022. While this was an improvement from prior year, it is not where we want to be. That said, we believe we have a path to much higher margins in the latter half of this year and into fiscal 2024.
As mentioned, the expansion of our food service business resulted in temporarily lower margins, as over the long term, we believe food service will help drive revenue growth at retail locations and over our eCom platform, as we are getting thousands of customers to try Flow, and then when they pick up their morning coffee or to quench their thirst while watching their favorite band, as we just announced Live Nation. We've also incurred additional costs at Aurora, our production facility, as we transition from moving production to seven days a week from five days a week. This ramp in production costs came prior to the realization of the underlying sales.
The production team at Aurora is getting more efficient by the day, and we believe that they will be operating at their potential in the very near term. There are also material optimization initiatives in logistics and warehousing, which we've not yet executed on, that we believe will help to improve margins once completed. EBITDA loss improved to CAD 7.1 million from CAD 8.5 million last year due to our higher gross profit and lower stock-based compensation. Turning to a more detailed review of our income statement, you can see that sales and marketing is coming in at a lower percentage of net revenue.
General admin expenses include about close to CAD 800,000 in costs relating to our operational transformation and new IT ecosystem, which will help to simplify our business going forward. Our transformation and restructuring is a massive endeavor, we've been incurring some CAD costs ahead of the anticipated benefits, which we feel are only a quarter or two away. Salaries and benefits also increased from the prior year as a higher volume of Flow sales. Again, logistics, distribution, warehousing, and shipping has not yet been optimized, and we believe there are going to be further cost savings in this area going forward.
All told, adjusted EBITDA loss improved to CAD 6.6 million from CAD 6.9 million in the prior year, as we still have the conviction that most significant improvements to profitability are ahead of us. Currently, Flow is still trading at 0.6x our revenue, as compared to our publicly traded beverage peers, trading at a multiple of three to five on a weighted average basis. With the progress we've made against our strategic initiatives, there remains a great deal of shareholder value left to unlock.
As we continue to deliver on our operational transformation and move ahead along our path to profitability, it should be pointed out that we are a growth company and have been regularly outpacing the industry average revenue growth rates by a very wide margin, having grown the Flow brand by 98% in Q2 and 68% for the year to date. Given the revenue to enterprise multiples associated with our peer group, we believe we can achieve a greater valuation for our shareholders in the future. Which brings me back to our four-point plan to achieve profitable growth. As previously disclosed, we have completed the first two pillars with the divestiture of the Aurora production facility and through securing a CAD 20 million credit facility January 2023.
With respect to the third pillar, which is Flow's comprehensive cross-functional optimization, this morning we did announce the elimination of 30% of our non-production, non-logistics corporate roles as we make Flow leaner and more focused on where we truly excel, marketing and selling Flow branded products. I would like to thank all team members who were impacted for their contribution to building this company. Although this was a part of pillar three, we still have yet to completely streamline our logistics, warehousing, shipping, and distribution, which is a very material cost for the company. We anticipate this happening in Q4, where we believe we'll start to see meaningful financial benefits in the P&L from that point forward. The last step in our four-point plan is to realize full value for the Aurora production facility.
You will see in our financial statements that the Aurora production facility is now categorized as held for sale. In April, we initiated a strategic review of this asset. The Aurora facility operates at a very high utilization and is a profit center and has a lot of ability to expand its production capacity. We believe that a successful transaction for the Aurora production facility could garner a much higher value than the Virginia facility and secure our path to profitability even further. Given the steps we have completed towards our transformation thus far, we now are happy to say that we have improved our estimates for annual cost improvements to CAD 23 million-CAD 26 million as compared to the base of fiscal 2022. That said, we appreciate all your support as we work diligently for Flow to demonstrate its full potential.
With that, operator, please open the line for questions.
Thank you, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question-and-answer session for research analysts. If you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If your question has been answered and you would like to withdraw from the queue, please press star followed by the number two . If you are using a speakerphone, please lift your handset before pressing any keys. One moment, please, for your first question. Your first question will come from Luke Hannan at Canaccord Genuity. Please go ahead.
Thanks, good morning, everyone. Nicholas, you had mentioned in your script there, it sounds like that food service is strategically an important channel to you guys because of the capability to reach a wider audience and then bring them into those other more profitable channels. Can you give us an idea of what the conversion metrics are like for, you know, some of those new customers that you would have had in food service and then getting them into those other channels, how successful you were there? Also, as a follow-on to that, what's your estimation of overall penetration in food service? How much more runway do you have to grow there?
Thanks for the questions, Luke. Definitely looking forward to the Canaccord tour of our facility tomorrow, which is exciting and happy to host you guys here. Yeah, to answer the first question, we are defining the core metrics of conversion, as we roll out food service in a much more strategic way. On a top level, we saw a significant bump in core SKUs associated with our Starbucks listing when we went live in Q2. Notably, Strawberry + Rose is a flavor that they carry at Starbucks, and we saw a significant double-digit growth in our e-commerce and a significant growth across all of our retailers with our core SKU, we call it OG, of the high mineral, high alkaline, non-flavored water in both, you know, the 500 mil and 1 liter.
We also saw specific SKUs that were impacted, that were dedicated and listed at Starbucks, and that gave us the level of confidence in that particular retailer and the conversion rate being very high. Further that, you will see on the Flow pack this summer, a QR code that will be leading to a link to a dedicated landing page to inform Flow new customers and Flow old customers on the values and attributes of drinking Flow, both from a health perspective and hydration, but also from a sustainability, along with links to our retailers and direct links to our purchases off of our website, flowhydration.com. This will, in the quarters to come, give us very quantifiable data associated with how food service is impacting the overall brand experience and Flow growth.
I'll look forward to reporting more on that as we roll out these important steps in our package design, but also our overall consumer experience.
That's good color. Thanks.
Thanks.
Second question here is just on the, one of the components of the...
The size.
Yeah, one of the components of the path to profitability here is the launch of this new IT ecosystem. I'm just curious to know, what are the capabilities that you're getting with this new system that you didn't have before? I mean, I know there's only so much color that you can give on this particular initiative, but what would be the related margin benefits that you'd get from these new capabilities?
Sure. Let me answer that one. You know, look, when we came in, the IT ecosystem we had had never been optimized. It's not that the software platforms that were in place were bad platforms. In fact, they were world-class platforms. They weren't optimized, and it was like getting a, you know, a Bentley when you really needed, you know, a Toyota. For us, because they were never optimized, they didn't speak to each other the way they should have, and they didn't have key components for tracking, you know, granular information on cost of goods and margins and product movement, things of that nature. We really weren't using it to make great decisions, didn't have the information. Not only that, they were very, very high cost again.
The new IT ecosystem, while much more simplified, is actually tremendously comprehensive. We have our, you know, we have our, obviously, our ERP finance, but we also have, you know, manufacturing software and, you know, sales software, in addition to what we are implementing as a BI tool, as an add-on, which becomes sort of the source of all information that is true and the one source of the truth. We have data. We've really spent a lot of time on defining our data, and it all comes out of the ERP, the manufacturing platforms, and goes into the BI tool. That allows us to...
Will very soon, allow us to track, you know, full cost, the inner cost associated with any movement across any customer geographic area, and really look at better making better decisions around profitability, pricing, obviously, what is and what is not profitable to invest further funds in, and resources, in the development of the brand. It's a very comprehensive platform, and we also are doing a lot of things on just even ICFR and controls, on period-end close and quarter-end close software that's really gonna help us make things more efficient. You know, it reduces labor and workarounds, so you can do a lot more with fewer folks, having to spend time on it. It's a very comprehensive project, and most of it's gone live. It just went live literally, you know, four weeks ago.
Okay, understood. Last one, then I'll pass the line here. One of the tailwinds for gross margin that you had during the quarter was lower relative trade spend. I'm curious if that was a deliberate choice, if that was a reflection of something that you saw in the market, or if that was just simply comping against a period where there was simply higher trade spend, or just give me some idea of what's going on there? Also maybe what was the magnitude of that tailwind to your gross margin?
Yeah. Again, it is actually very much a strategic initiative of ours, and it was very purposeful. Our sales team has been doing a tremendous job at controlling our trade spend. Look, you know how it goes. As you develop your brand and consumers are making it a destination shop, looking, going into retail locations, looking to buy Flow, rather than it being more trial or a treasure hunt. You know, retailers, we're getting more and more retailers who are picking up our brand, without the need for us to overinvest. While we still have, you know, a large bucket of trade spend, it has come down significantly, you know, multiple percentage points over last year.
We're starting to get leverage out of a lot of the trade spend that we used to spend on. It's still going to be an important part going forward, you know, like program listing, merchandising support, you know, whether it's loyalty program support, flyer support, whatever it might be, in and of course, in-store marketing. It's all going to be an important part of developing the Flow brand. It's not a place we're going to shy away from investing in, because it does allow such. It's a big component of velocity. For us, it is, you know, we don't see it ever getting sort of back to where it was two years ago and one year ago. We think we're doing a much better job, and consumer demand is helping that.
Yeah, I think I'll add to that, to answer your first question, Luke, part two, is the food service channel is a very strategic channel and growth strategy for Flow. Because it is a little bit of a lower margin business, but it does not require the same trade spend or TPR, temporary price reduction strategy, that you're gonna see at a local grocery store or drug channel or even mass channel. For that, it also has another very strategic effort, which is, it is a brand-building exercise as well as the trial exercise.
You're achieving a lower trade spend with this channel, but you're also getting the benefits of the marketing power of brands and partnerships like Starbucks and NCL and Live Nation, to really start to build brand marketing at the same time as having that margin and sale accompanied by a lower trade spend. That's why we feel in the future, and we've mentioned numerous times, that food service will be expanded, and we are really at the start of a very large journey with food service. You know, I wouldn't even call it single digits penetration, even Canada or the U.S., on how much volume can be achieved and how many great partnerships we can add on to the existing partnerships we have. We feel like this is a growth area for the company, for the years to come, not months.
Understood. Thank you very much.
Thanks, Luke.
Your next question comes from Chip Moore at EF Hutton. Please go ahead.
Morning, Chip.
Good morning. Hey, Nicholas and Trent. How you doing?
Great.
I wanted to ask about, you know, some of the moving pieces the next couple quarters on the, more on the warehouse and distribution side. Trying to just help us think about margin trajectory next couple quarters into 2024, and then, you know, when I dovetail that with your comments on the food service side and mix, and I think the investment and strength there makes sense. Just help us think about the margin trajectory.
Yeah, great question. Look, we know, 'cause we've gone through this pact, this engagement of really redefining our go-to-market strategy on the logistics, warehousing, distribution side. You know, we'd thought originally going into the fiscal year, when Nick and I first came in, we knew this was a large sort of black hole of cost that we had to get our arms around. We did bring in a great consulting group that have helped redefine, again, that go-to-market strategy, and it's just taken a while. Now we actually are going through a very defined process of execution. We believe by, you know, by late August, early September, we will have fully optimized our this go-to-market strategy.
The dollar value of the savings that are gonna come from that are significantly, I mean, like, for us, very, very much, significantly more than what we'd anticipated. So we think our margins, while, you know, yes, there was mix, but there was also a lot of other things going on in margins this particular quarter, as we sort of ramp up and invest. We think in Q3, you'll still have a little bit of lumpiness. I said this at the end of the last quarter, when it was 30%. I said, There's gonna be lumpiness in the near term. Don't expect every quarter it's gonna be close to 30%.
We do believe coming out of this fiscal year, sort of if you think Q4, Q3, there should be, there should definitely be some improvements from where we are right now, Q2. Q4 should get better again. Our goal is to get up well over 35%, going into the next year. To go beyond that, we think there's a path to really ramp margins in a, you know, pulling on a lot of levers, going forward. We, we anticipate, like, higher than we had expected earlier and what we were sort of talking about. We weren't guiding, but we're talking about where we wanted to be. We're now thinking we can be even higher.
Excellent. That's great color, Trent. Maybe for my second question, just Aurora, sort of timelines and what to watch for there. I assume you've had some discussions based on your confidence, but just any more detail on that process?
Yeah. Look, we identified this a while back as part of the pillar, you know, the four-part pillars. It's a valuable asset, as we say. It's a profit center, has very strong EBITDA as a standalone production facility. Yes, obviously, there's a lot of good things about that particular facility beyond just the profit center, geographic location, to major distribution routes in the middle of a very populated area with a great labor force, expansion capabilities that can get... You know, we have three lines in there. You could probably go up to eight lines in there. Warehousing is right beside it. A lot of great things.
So we do have, you know, like, we can't get into exactly what's transpiring in the background, but we do have a large number of very, very interested parties that wanna come into that facility. We've had several ongoing negotiations and conversations with certain parties. You know, we're not sure which form and format it will take because there's multitude of different ways to unlock value there. A straight sale of the facility, some type of joint venture. We're not sure yet which it will take, but we do know there's value to unlock that is going to allow us to put, you know, funds in our bank and be able to have the wherewithal to grow this brand the way we want to and invest in that growth.
I think I can just add to that the number one consideration for Flow is that it will continue and will partner with a company that will continue the strategic growth of Flow over the years and years to come, thus achieving what growth that we're already achieving year to date, and our penetration in the U.S. and Canada just growing there. We are really going to partner with a strategic company to be able to continue that growth of Flow and the Flow branded products. As we move to an asset-light model and streamline, we wanna make sure that we ensure the quality of the Flow product, and the partner has the capital resources and the know-how to be able to continue our growth path as we penetrate more into Canada and ultimately invest heavily against our U.S. growth.
Excellent. That's great to hear. Maybe just the last one on vitamin-infused water. Any more color or metrics you can provide on that launch? I think you had some new packaging and a lot of things going on, but curious to hear how that's ramping.
Excellent, excellent question. You know, as we stated before, we are very pleased that this innovation is being receptive by both the customers and the retailers, with our penetration up above 5,000 stores, and the velocity is well above the category average. This category, as a whole, has not seen a lot of innovation, and we're delivering a daily dose of an organic certified vitamin C, and zinc, along with those organic flavors of Elderberry, Citrus, and Cherry. We are producing as much as we possibly can to keep up with it. Even, as our e-commerce, we literally sold out a Cherry and had to up our production to be able to get it back into circulation very fast.
We believe that this franchise of vitamin-infused products is something that we can grow in the years to come, to provide not only the amazing quality of Flow's water and the organic flavor combinations that we do, but the increase in functional attributes to each one of these vitamin-infused products are really satisfying our core customer's need to get hydration plus functionality. We'll be investing heavily against this product line in the future, and we see that this is a great category for us to grow and play in. We know this because our consumer and our retailers are accepting the product and writing incredible reviews, both on and off line, about the experience they're having with the product and the flavor combination and the taste profile. Yeah, we're very bullish with our continued growth as well as our continued expansion of that product line.
Great to hear. All right, I'll hop back in. Thanks very much.
Thanks, Chip.
Your next question will come from Mathieu Gauthier at Stifel. Please go ahead.
Morning, Mathieu.
Hi, good morning. A couple of questions on my end. Maybe if we can start with the revenues for the Flow brand, which were up a strong 32% sequentially. Could you maybe expand on the main growth drivers behind that strong performance? Maybe if you could also give us the proportion of those revenues that maybe came from one-time initial channel fill.
Yeah, look, we don't, we don't typically give, you know, the breakdown of all of our sales in terms of percentages, we can say this. You know, obviously, there are, when we launch a new channel, or with a large new partner, like in this case, Starbucks, as an example, you always have that fill-in, to your point. I can tell you, thus far, you know, I think, you know, from what everything we can see, that it has been outperforming what Starbucks thought it would. There have been like a monumental amount of pre-order or, sorry, post orders after the fill-in. We have had repeat purchasing, repeat purchasing, repeat purchasing like crazy. That has been.
We see it coming into Q3. We're in Q3 now, we've seen that. Yes, there is a proportion of that just on a couple of key partners that we took into in Q2. You know, look, other channels, like I mentioned in my prepared remarks, Norwegian Cruise Line is doing extremely well for us as a food service and again, promoting more trial. That's been around for a while, and that continues to grow, as do most of our other channels. E-commerce, you know, was up, you know, over 40%, 45% year-over-year. We don't normally disclose that, but I just wanted everybody to know that this is big. That's e-commerce, and it's up, it was up over 45% year-over-year. That, you know, we're seeing growth in a multitude of different channels, and not just in food service and in, you know, the first initial orders.
Yeah, we're definitely going across all channel with that growth. I would say, Trent, you correct me if I'm wrong, but the majority of our sales are coming from our core repeat customers and retailers as they grow into the brand and expand the product line across their retail shelf and into their channel and cold vault fridges. That's where we're achieving a lot of growth. Initial orders are not a substantial amount of one-time reoccurring revenue for us. Never have been either. What we're seeing is very strong repeat purchases on regular occurrences across all channels that support the growth of the Flow brand.
Great. That's helpful. Thank you. Maybe if we move on the gross margin. Maybe if we could better understand the puts and takes on a sequential basis, given the sale of Aurora. Maybe if you could give us a margin bridge, I guess that would be helpful. I guess the drivers behind the lower margin and what you see as structural and maybe as temporary.
Yeah. Look, one of the big things is that we did move from a 24/5 model at Aurora to a 24/7. That's a lot of volumes going through there. We did that in, you know, I'd say the first month of our Q2. You know, obviously, production and inventory buildup, you know, comes before the ultimate sale. So we incurred a lot of costs at Aurora, as a, as an investment in COGS. A lot of that hit, you know, goes in because of the way we allocate. Goes into COGS. I know there's a matching principle here, we, you know, there does, a lot of that does end up going into COGS.
Our logistics, our volumes were up tremendously, as you could see it. Our volumes were up tremendously, both here in Canada and the United States. That carries a lot more cost. Unfortunately, we don't get a lot of leverage off of our current logistic structure. It's almost linear. I would even go so far as to say it's actually beyond linear. It costs more per unit of production in terms of logistics than we get actual benefits of economy of scale. As volume goes up and all those logistics costs, a lot of them go into both G&A and salaries and, of course, COGS, because there's an allocation.
You know, that we see as temporary because we're, again, we're in the midst of execution mode now. We've done all of our homework. We've looked at all different types of partners and everything else, so now we're in execution mode, and you'll see that again, in the next quarter or two. For us, that's all fairly temporary. You get into the food service as well, which is, you know, lower margin, but that's also temporary because the...
You know, you're right, there are some order-ins for things like Starbucks, as repeat purchases come in and new SOs come in to restock, and people come into the newer better channels after trialing, which we again are seeing in not only e-com, but conventional, as Nick just talked about, that improves margins. In the U.S., look, there were some problems we had this quarter, you know, as our partner down there begins to ramp up and get used to the operations, that caused us to have some lower margin in the U.S., certainly lower than we'd anticipated, and we had some logistical issues. There's a lot of things going on in margin this quarter that, you know, we would have liked to have not had happen.
We also see a very bright path to ensuring that that doesn't occur in the future, with some of the things that we're doing. I think, you know, Q3, Q4, there's a reason to believe that we're gonna get back to much better margins, especially coming out of the current fiscal year.
Great. That's helpful. Thank you for the color. That's it for me.
Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, once again, if you would like to ask a question, please press star one at this time. Your next question will come from Sean McGowan at ROTH MKM. Please go ahead.
Morning, Sean.
Thank you. Good morning, guys. Morning. Are you able to hear me okay?
Yep.
Yes.
Okay, good. My headset's been weird. Trent, you called out the CAD 800,000 in salaries and benefits. Does that go away in Q3? Is there anything else in salaries and benefits that you would characterize as, you know, kind of unusual or non-recurring? There's a few things, you know, that happen in Q3 in salaries and benefits that... Or sorry, Q2, that we know aren't going to happen Q3 and specifically Q4 as well. There's a lot of things that just happened. As you know, we just announced today, 30% of our corporate layout teammates have been exited from the organization that are non-logistics, non-production.
They go through salaries, and so you can see that that's going to decrease salaries going forward. Also, you know, like, we're doing a lot of things around production, logistics, and of course, put some of that salary, a lot of that salary in logistics and to some degree, production, go through salaries, and they all ramped up in the quarter. We see that coming back quite a bit in the quarters to come. Then, you know, and even in G&A, I know you're asking about salaries, but G&A was the same way. We took some a couple of provisions, and we did some things around the IT ecosystem, which all hit G&A and to a degree, salary, some of that was salary cost.
All of that sort of goes away, you know, as we go through. There's still going to be some cost into Q3. In Q4, that levels back, it comes out. There's a lot of things that are happening. It's a bit of a moving thing. We're really, I said it, I guess the best way to have said it was that we were investing in what we knew was going to be the optimization and streamlining of our business. You see a lot of that investment coming through in salaries and G&A in Q2. We anticipate that's gonna start coming back down significantly in Q3, especially in Q4.
Okay. Thank you. Can you give us a sense of what we should expect, you know, consistently on a quarterly basis for interest expense?
Interest?
Yes.
Look, we have.
What we saw in the quarter was obviously a big increase because of the loan, but is that kind of, is that a fully flushed out, or are we gonna see that number go up, as, you know, as we go throughout the rest of the year?
Yeah, it's a bit of a complex answer, to be honest. You know, Sean, you know, we have this Aurora strategic, you know, review happening, and we have, again, negotiations and discussions with many interested parties in a multitude of different potential structures. With that being said, you know, coming off the backside of any kind of potential transaction, you know, there's a question of what debt will remain. You know, I can tell you this and to be, you know, to be open about it. Our goal is not to carry a lot of debt servicing, you know, in the future. I don't anticipate, if you looked at our financials right now, Q2, you look at Q1 of next year, which is only, you know, two, three quarters away, I would not anticipate you're gonna see nearly as high an interest.
That's why I asked. Okay, that makes sense. On, ERP switchover or, you know, that whole system, you said that some of that is already live. You know, these switchovers are notorious for certainly causing glitches. Do you feel like you're kind of past the critical point and everything's switched over enough that you know, kind of in the clear for a sudden disruption?
You know, that's a great question. You know, the short answer is yes, but you're right. You know, like, we had some time pressures for certain things I won't get into, but we had some time pressures in terms of when we made the decision, we're going in a different path, which we knew we were going to, you know, whether it was optimizing with the people we had, with the software providers we had already or going with a different set of software providers. We knew we were gonna go down a different path, shortly after I actually came into the organization. We had some time pressures to get it to go live once we finally made the decision of where we're going and with whom.
We didn't have a lot of time to, you know, parallel the two systems. There have been some, you know, some headaches and pains from go live to up to this point. Although I can tell you, it's gotten a ton better, and we're getting to the point where we're pretty much there on the core systems, and now we're getting into the BI and some great software on quarter-end close processes and month-end close processes. I think that most of the pain is behind us for sure, but it'll be another probably four, six weeks before we're really where we need to be.
Okay. All right. Thank you very much. That's it for me.
Thanks, Sean.
Ladies and gentlemen, at this time, there are no further questions. This will conclude Flow's Q2 2023 conference call. We would like to thank everyone for participating and ask you to please disconnect your lines.