Hadi and I are going to. I'll be passing the baton to Hadi, and he'll pass it back and the like. In the meantime, if anyone has any questions, feel free to just ask the questions, either as we're presenting or at the end; either one works for us. Again, Hadi and I are co-CEOs. We've been working together for almost two decades. The company's been in business for about 22 years, roughly. If we think about the ticker, the ticker is CCLD. We also have a preferred stock that trades under CCLDO. We have, in total, about $60 million worth of preferred, plus our common share. If you're thinking about us as a company, you want to not only consider the market cap of the common, but you probably want to give some consideration to the value of the preferred.
From the perspective of what we do, we really provide a fully integrated end-to-end technology platform that helps healthcare providers increase revenues, reduce expenses, and streamline key clinical and business workflows. Our competitive advantage, really two primary bits of our competitive advantage would really be our technology platform itself, together with our global business model, which enables us to be able to, from a labor cost perspective, to be able to perform the same sort of work that many other companies perform here, completely onshore at about one-tenth of the cost. We work today with about 40,000 healthcare providers throughout the U.S. If you think about the number of healthcare providers in the U.S., the number is probably 850,000, 900,000 healthcare providers. About one out of every 25 leverages our platform. In terms of overall growth, really, there are two main parts of our overall growth strategy.
Part of it is traditional organic growth. The other part of it comes in the form of really acquisitions of portfolios of customers of other competitors of ours, other medical billing companies, where we use our competitive advantage to be able to acquire those customers. We do that at a significant discount compared to the cost of acquiring customers from traditional organic growth. If we're going to just flip over, I'll mention a few other quick things, and then I'll hand the floor over to Hadi. This gives a bit of an overview in terms of our overall platform. The overall platform really is comprised of our fully integrated electronic health records. That's the clinical version of the paper charts that providers used to use.
It also provides connectivity, not only simplifies and digitizes the overall recording of those encounters, but also provides connectivity with other players in the space, with pharmaceutical players, with other industry participants, hospitals, and other providers as well. Hadi will talk in just one minute about the AI component that's also part of that EHR. This all is based on, it's all cloud-based, and it's extended to the healthcare environment through digital health applications that are leveraged by the healthcare providers, but also by individual patients. These are some of the different challenges that face healthcare providers today.
To kind of sum them up without going through each and every one of these, it really is the net total would be the reduction in the overall reimbursements, and then the net increase in the work that has to be done from an administrative perspective in order to actually obtain that reimbursement and revenue from the insurance company. I'll hand the floor over to Hadi to talk a little bit more about our AI.
Thank you, Steve. Just a little bit more, because some of these things may not be properly reflected on the slides, that first of all, why we are excited about the AI or our opportunities in the AI. As Steve mentioned, we were founded in 2000, 2001, and we started as a conventional, old-school medical billing company. Very quickly transitioned into a healthcare technology company by launching our first generation of PM and practice management and EHR solution in 2004. We had, at that time, the first certified EHR from the CCHIT perspective. Since then, now we are on our fourth and the fifth generation of the entire technology platform. What that part has helped us over the last 20 years has been able to accumulate the very diversified clinical and financial data.
We have been serving small to medium-sized practices from a single doctor, PCP, family practice, internal medicine, to 2,500-3,000 enterprise-level clinical practices. It is a very diversified data, very representative data that we have. As we all know, it is a highly regularized industry. It is hard for someone to go and find this data to start training or building an AI. Leveraging that data, we have started to come up with different AI-based products, which one is the back-end operation optimization, which could even simply include generation of appeals through AI instead of a human person sitting and writing in appeals. When the claim comes in as a denied claim from the insurance companies, first the AI now, which kicks in and looks at all the previous patterns, can look at the claim and decide and take an action on the claim.
There is a small exception that gets in front of the user to be resolved. When it comes to the practice management or the EHR solution, if you think about the largest or the biggest challenge of any EHR for a doctor in a practice, it is effectively charting the claim. One is from the compliance perspective, and the other one is from comprehensiveness. It takes time entering everything, whether you are speaking, whether you are entering everything into the EHR manually. One of the AI products which we have launched over the last few months before is a smart ambient listening technology based on the AI.
It's an app which can listen to the natural doctor-patient conversation, converts that intelligently, takes the context out of that conversation, takes the noise out, looks at the prior patient's medical history, social history, prior diagnosis, lab results, takes all of those, and with the help of an AI, creates a comprehensive chart. Not only that, it also suggests and recommends the medication that can be prescribed, or the next procedure, the next test that can be performed. As I mentioned earlier, one of the differentiators for us is it's the combination of financial and the clinical data. It's not only we are recommending a test, we also can inform the doctor, "Okay, this much will be paid or will not be covered under the insurance of the patient's plan," and the like. These are the two.
The third thing is we are trying to tap into some of these others, like health system market, where AI-based call center auditing software, where it can listen to the recorded conversations of the different agents and can score each of the agents based on even the sentiment analysis. If the patient was an angry patient, was the patient—so the agent—was able to handle the situation well or not, or was able to answer the question effectively or not. Even though we have, first of all, an end-to-end platform, it's a unified—our thesis has always been when we walk into a medical practice's office, it should be a one-stop shop: patient engagement solution, practice management, EHR, business intelligence, many of these RPA bots that we have with the help of an AI that we have designed. Okay. I think, Steve, you can take over, please.
Sure. We're good. We want to wrap up for a moment, just a couple of moments here real quickly. Before we do that, we'll just talk about the healthcare providers we work with. If you think about the overall healthcare providers we work with, roughly about 70% of those healthcare providers are in small to medium-sized practices or large groups. About 20% of those healthcare providers are practicing in the hospital setting. We work with other industry partners as well, other billing companies and other industry partners. Our competitive advantage, we spoke about a little while ago, we've been doing business in this space for 20 years. Over those 20 years, we feel like we've really developed strong skill sets and repeatable patterns that we track.
We've taken the knowledge that we've gleaned from those 20 years, we've built that into our overall platform, together with our technology platform being another key part of that, and our global team. If we think about just for a moment, we think about last year. Last year, if we go to August of last year, we had annualized dividends, an obligation on an annualized basis of a little over $15 million. As of today, we have about $5.5 million in terms of annualized dividends. That's by virtue of the conversion of some of that preferred to common. Last year, we also eliminated virtually all of our debt. We had a $10 million credit facility balance with Silicon Valley Bank, which we eliminated down to zero. We reduced overall operating expenses by about $25 million last year.
You only see a portion of that in last year's financials because we were sequentially throughout the year, we were reducing those overall expenses. Some of that expense reduction, we've taken that money, we've reinvested that back into growth. This year, we're confident we'll be at $15 million or greater in terms of free cash flow. Another few just things to mention, if we think about last year, was a record along a number of fronts. Record free cash flow, again, of more than $13 million in free cash flow, which represented a year-over-year increase of 240+%, record adjusted EBITDA, even though, frankly, we really lean more towards emphasizing the free cash flow because of the fact that at the end of the day, adjusted EBITDA can provide more complications and questions in terms of what's adjusted.
We just say, "Let's look at our actual free cash flow and let that be the key metric that drives us." From a net income perspective, again, $7.9 million. As we think about this year, we've provided guidance of $111-$114 million, adjusted EBITDA of $26-$28 million. Also, we've provided guidance with regard to our EPS, positive EPS of $0.10-$0.13, which will actually mark the first year where we actually have positive EPS since we went public in 2014. These are some other things that we're focused in on right now, including the resumption of our accretive acquisition strategy. Again, we've acquired, since we went public in 2014, we acquired more than 20 companies.
During COVID, during the three years beginning with the mid-part of 2020, candidly, valuations grew so significantly that they were really unjustifiable in terms of being able to buy a company and pay a reasonable amount. We stopped acquisitions for about three years, and we just resumed acquisitions about 45 days ago. We have since acquired two companies since then. That is a little bit about us. Does anyone have any questions? We have about 10 minutes left.
Please. You mentioned making two acquisitions. Can you talk about what your parameters are in terms of what you're looking for and what metrics you use in making that acquisition?
Certainly. We are buying medical billing companies. These are medical billing companies that, generally speaking, do not have their own proprietary technology. At least they are using someone else's proprietary technology, or they are not using any proprietary technology. Second, they do not have a global infrastructure. They are doing all of this work onshore. The typical company that we acquire has labor costs that equate to, on average, about 75% of their revenue. The majority of their revenue, the top line, is going right out the door in terms of labor costs. It is not a sustainable model, and most of these companies are operating at break-even or even operating at a loss. If we think about the—I mentioned before that we believe that it is a more cost-efficient way to grow as we compare that to traditional organic growth.
For traditional organic growth in our space, generally speaking, the cost from a sales and marketing expense is about 1.1-1.2 times annual sales. We're able to acquire those same portfolios of clients, the same sorts of clients, in mass in a wholesale environment, generally speaking, for about 0.5-0.8 times, generally speaking, on average. We're not only able to acquire them less expensively, but we're also able to acquire them kind of at larger clips because we're acquiring a portfolio of customers all at once in those acquisitions. I'd say the final thing is, for us, the majority of our—since we've acquired so many companies, the majority of our acquisitions today are internally sourced. These are internally sourced, identified acquisitions using our team, using our connections, folks who we've met in the industry, and also through outbound marketing and the like.
There are a total of about 2,500 companies, and a large portion of them kind of fall into this, fall into these parameters and are virtually at break-even or losing money. Does that answer your question, or do you have any other questions regarding that?
Yes, that's fine. Thank you.
Sure. Anyone else? Very good. Listen, we appreciate it. Thanks a lot. We appreciate you coming, and thanks for your time and interest.