Love to introduce our next presentation here at the Planet MicroCap Showcase Zone in partnership with MicroCap Club. We're doing a fireside chat hosted by Mathieu Martin, Portfolio Manager at Rivemont MicroCap Fund, and it is with Covalon Technologies. Okay, thank you, Bobby. Okay, let's start with the elevator pitch, Brent. You know, tell us more about what Covalon does. Sure. Hey, thanks a lot, Mathieu, and good afternoon to everyone here. So, Brent Ashton, I'm the CEO for Covalon Technologies, and really we're all about helping patients heal faster with less pain, and we'll talk in a bit about preventing complications and how important that is. So, we're about a 20-year-old company. We're headquartered here just outside of Toronto in Mississauga, and trade on the TSX Venture Exchange as well as the OTCQX in the U.S. In our last 12 months, we've done about CAD 33 million of revenue and about CAD 4 million of Adjusted EBITDA. And yeah, you know, on the preventing complications front, it's really a big part of our focus, and all of us want, you know, a lot of these companies have different plays in different spaces. One of the things that's unique about medical is everyone here in this room watching online, you will probably be a customer of ours at some point, or you have or will be, and that's our goal for sure. But these complications can be really challenging. These are things like infections and skin tears caused by adhesives, and we really help our customers, clinicians, different medical providers prevent those from happening, saving lives and making the overall patient experience a lot better. That's awesome. Great, great mission. Brent, tell us more about your background. You know, I like to get started with an overview of the management team. So, you know, how did you get involved with Covalon and what did you do before? Yeah, so, you know, I've spent most of the last 20 years, almost 20 years in med tech. The majority of that time prior to Covalon with two really large multinational healthcare companies, 3M Healthcare, which is now known as Solventum. They spun off from 3M a couple of years ago, and Becton Dickinson, BD. And so, at those companies, I was running $200 million to $500 million individual businesses, and then the last, call it five years before joining Covalon, kind of portfolios in the range of $1.5 billion to $2.5 billion. So, big, large multinationals, very global businesses. But when I was trying to think about, okay, well, like what do I want to do next? I really felt there was an opportunity to make a bigger impact with a smaller company. I'd known Covalon for about 10 years, dating back to when I was running 3M's vascular access business. I always saw them as a company that had some amazing technology, some really cool technology, some very loyal customers making a big impact, but they just hadn't quite unlocked their full potential. I really felt like I could help guide our team to achieving that. So, I joined Covalon almost two years ago, and it's been an amazing journey. It's obviously going from, you know, billion dollar, two billion dollar slices of 20, 30 billion dollar companies to a company the size of Covalon. It's a big difference. I've learned a ton. I think I've made a big difference, and it's just been great working with the team, working with our customers. It's one of the benefits of the med tech world. I've also worked in electronics, and in the med tech world, nurses give you hugs and high fives and just are so grateful for the products we bring to them to help them, you know, save lives and make the patient experience better. The electronics side, you know, I didn't get a lot of hugs. I got, you know, maybe a firm handshake was the best I got. So, it's been a great journey. What were some of the key lessons that you learned at, you know, 3M Healthcare and BD that could apply to Covalon and that you've applied to Covalon so far? Yeah, it's absolutely a case of having been applying them, and I'd say there's a few. One that really jumps out was around prioritization and focus. And, you know, at 3M, at BD, this was critical. It's even more critical at Covalon. I'll share that in a bit. But, you know, it was kind of an adage of just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. And I'd say where in my past I've seen things get off the rails, it was when you were trying to do too much, spread too thin, and just really not knocking a smaller number of things out of the park. And when I came into Covalon and talked to our management team, existing team, that was a theme. There was a lot of, like, so many things we could do. We were candidly spread too thin doing too much. Pretty early on, we really focused down. We put a really big focus on our U.S. product side of things. That's on the wound care side and on the vascular access side. It's paid off. We've had some really strong success there. That prioritization of focus is one key. I'd say, and this is kind of a yin yang thing, optionality is another thing I learned. I'd say, you know, I was running a surgical business at 3M. It was about a $1.5 billion portfolio of different surgical products and consumables, hardware, whatnot. That was in like 2020. What happened in 2020? COVID. Prior to getting into the surgical space, I wouldn't have guessed, but elective surgical procedures in the U.S., and maybe to a lesser extent around the world, 60% of the mix. Overnight, 60% of my business just went away. But fortunately, we had some other things. We had a hand sanitizer business, and that obviously picked up, and we were able to quadruple our manufacturing output within, I think it was four months. So, having those options is key. And so, fast forward to Covalon, I'd say it's been really helpful, even though we're really dialing in the priorities and focusing, having options for the future. And we've built up, I think we've doubled or tripled the size of our kind of idea pipeline, and there's so many things we could do in the future. And, you know, things change, circumstances change. I certainly hope we don't go through another COVID. But as things change, I think we have some good options for the future. So, those are a couple of the big ones. Totally makes sense. Okay, let's give people a bit more details on, you know, your two businesses, you know, wound care, vascular access. What's the difference? Tell us more about those. Absolutely. Thank you, Mathieu Very different businesses, and I've been fortunate at my time at 3M, and then BD was a little bit on the vascular access side as well, but I ran both those businesses at 3M Healthcare, so know the industry well. You know, the wound care business for us is, it's a bigger part of our revenue than it's more than half our revenue, the vascular access side, a little less than half, and it's one where in the U.S., which is, you know, a very, very high percentage of our geographic mix for that business, small, you know, mid-single digit number of customers, so we make products. You can see them on the screen there, the far right, so we make a collagen dressing that really helps wounds heal. Wounds, chronic wounds that aren't going to heal on their own. It'll jumpstart their healing. Small number of customers, OEM type model, which was smart. It was predated my time in the business, but it was a great decision by the company because that business is really fragmented, especially in the U.S. where care gets given. It's wound clinics, hospitals, podiatry offices, general, you know, long-term care, et cetera. Having someone else with a broader portfolio that can help cover has been really helpful. That's a low SG&A model, which fuels a lot of EBITDA for our company. It's a massive space overall. You know, it's like a $10 billion space. The market we play in directly is probably around $150 to $200 million. There's still a lot of growth, a lot of headway there. We've had a lot of success in that space. On the vascular access and surgical side, very different business, different model. And for us, it's more of a traditional med tech model where, you know, we own the sales and marketing. We drive that. So, it's a little more within our direct control. And it's one that has really grown super strong. I think our CAGR over the last three or four years is like in the high 40s. So, some really strong growth there, making a huge difference. But that's more of a hospital business for us as well. A very high, I think it's 90% plus of our customers are today our hospitals, and that's been our area of focus. We do see a lot of growth opportunities outside the hospital that we're looking to crack as we go on. So, two very different businesses. We've had a lot of success with both of them, but it's kind of that optionality as well. It's good to have kind of different business plays to consider for the future as well. And to follow up on that, can you talk about the competitive landscape in both of these businesses and, you know, what makes Covalon unique in the space? Yeah, for sure. It's an interesting mix on the competitive front. It's a mix of large companies and small companies. Some overlap between the two spaces, even though they're different. So, you know, my old friends at 3M, Solventum, are big players in both of those spaces. Medline, Smith & Nephew, J&J Ethicon, BD, Allplay. And then we also see some smaller players, a number of them kind of coming out of China, and that's been an interesting evolution for them that have emerged. So, it's a mix, large and small geographically, you know, a lot kind of headquartered in North America, some in Europe, some in Asia. You know, when I think about what really makes us unique, I'd say three big things. One is on a product level. Our products have some really unique differentiation. Our wound care product, as an example, has four main ingredients that combined just make a really big difference, a different way of jumpstarting that healing. Excuse me, then the competition that in some cases are just a single collagen. So, we have four different ingredients there that really drive strong outcomes for our providers. Then we have some products like our ValGuard, where there really isn't, that's on the vascular access side, there really isn't any direct competition. There's some alternative uses of different products, but really a big greenfield opportunity. And that's a product that's done really well for us over the past couple of years. I think we've had seven of our last eight quarters have had quarterly sequential growth, not just annual growth, quarterly sequential quarter on quarter growth. And it's averaged 11%. So, that one is really scaling, and we're really excited about the future for that. And then the third, I'd say, is more of a company level. And that is, you know, as we compete with these larger players, they're the aircraft carriers, we're the destroyers. We can pack a pretty good punch, but we're not as big and bulky as they are. We don't displace as much water in the ocean. But we are also a lot more agile. And so, we can respond to customers a lot quicker than they can. And so, that's been key. And then I'd say another one that's emerging is we're really going hard on the AI front. And so, or these larger competitors, I see them using artificial intelligence more on a cost, not cost out. They've got a, you know, 100-person customer service team, and they want to use AI to get that down to 60 or 50 people. We're using it, and we're in the early stages, but we're using it as a massive force multiplier on the revenue line. And how can we show up, you know, we have a small team. How can we show up as a much larger presence for our customers? And again, it's early, but we're seeing some really cool things. And I think there's a bright future there. So, a little bit around how we're different and unique. Super interesting. I didn't expect to hear about AI in a Covalon presentation. I want to talk a bit more about your ValGuard product. You know, you've published some recent clinical evidence on this product, and I think it might be something that people have overlooked a little bit, this announcement. So, tell us why it's important. Yeah, this is huge, and this is another area I learned from my past that I've brought to Covalon. That's the area of market development, so that includes generating clinical evidence. It includes working with key opinion leaders, and on this specific ValGuard example, I guess it starts with the problem we're trying to solve, and the problem that our customers face are bloodstream infections caused by catheters, catheter-associated bloodstream infections. And these are just, these are not, you do not want to get one of these. These are all too common. If you get it, best case, you're going to end up with another two weeks in the ICU in a hospital getting fed antibiotics intravenously, and you've got probably a 15% to 20% chance of dying, just flat out dying. That's obviously your worst-case scenario, so best case, worst case, it really sucks. These infections cost hospitals $40,000 to $50,000, and they don't get reimbursed. In the U.S., they don't get reimbursed by Medicare for it. So, it's a big cost driver as well. And we were fortunate to partner with The Children's Hospital at Montefiore, a big hospital system in the east in New York City. And they collected data pre using our product and after. And, you know, to get down, it represented a 50-something% decrease overall in their two acute care units, a 100% decrease in infections in their pediatric critical care unit. So, those are just numbers, right? I like to put things in terms of kind of the human element. So, on a numbers basis, these were just three departments. The bloodstream infections went from 13 to two. So, 13 bloodstream infections in the kind of year before, two in the year after. And so, that means 11 babies, little kids, newborns to a couple of years old, but 11 babies didn't get a bloodstream infection. So, you do the math on that, right? 11 families didn't have to stare down a really challenging pathway. The math would say of those 11, one or two would have died. So, that's when things start to get real. It's a big part of why I joined Covalon as well was the mission we're on. And you start multiplying that across lots of different hospitals. It's a huge, huge, huge impact in society. And it helps our providers, our customers. It's a win-win when we implement our products. That's great. I want to talk about the U.S. exposure, if you will. You know, you have a high percentage of your revenues in the U.S. We all know there's a lot of uncertainty with tariffs, with fiscal policy, all that stuff. So, how are you navigating these circumstances? Yeah, you know, in my adult life, I don't know if I've ever seen a period of greater uncertainty. And I think to the earlier point on the destroyer versus the aircraft carrier, being a smaller company allows us a little more nimbleness as things change. You know, the tariff thing was really concerning. Less than a year ago, we were staring down a 30% tariff on product manufactured in Canada and shipped to the U.S. That came to pass and, you know, we're tariff-free and a good chunk of our revenue, more than half our revenue is product that's made in Canada and sold in the U.S. So, you know, knock on wood here. Hopefully, that stays the way it is and we're tariff-free. You know, we actually see it as a competitive advantage now because on that collagen product on the right there, we believe we're the largest North American manufacturer. About, I think it's about 70% or 80% of the competition make in either China, the U.K., or Germany. Take your pick, 10%, 20%. China, like I even tried Googling it last night. I think it's 30% right now, but there's like threats of 50%, 100%, could go back, could go up. There's a lot of uncertainty and we see big opportunities. We've seen some pickup and we think it'll be even more in the future on that. All right. I think we only have a few minutes left, so we're going to open it up to questions. Any questions? Can you please go through the thought process on the special dividend that you just announced? Yeah, sure. So, for those of you that aren't aware, we yesterday announced a special dividend of CAD 0.15 a share. So, that's what we've released. And just a little context, right? As we thought about how to best use our cash, we're in a great position. We've gone from six quarters ago having CAD 7 million, just over CAD 7 million in the bank, to as of pretty recently, just under CAD 19 million. Portion of that was from about CAD 4.5 million-CAD 5 million of warrant proceeds. So, insiders from five years ago exercising their warrants. And we had like a 99-point-something% redemption rate. And then, you know, about two-thirds of that increase, just a little under two-thirds was from business results. So, we put ourselves in a great position. We're investing some of that back into our company in the form of manufacturing and automation to drive cost out, but we've also had a lot of conversations with shareholders and advisors, and there was definitely a great push on our board to how do we, you know, use our cash in some different ways. Share buyback is something that's often considered, and we did. Ultimately, you know, as we talked to our, you know, some advisors and different people in our orbit, we settled on the special dividend. We thought it was a good way to return cash. We've had a lot of shareholders that are long-term that have been key parts of getting us to our company where we are today and wanted to return that via the dividend. You know, we may or may not do another one in the future. All options are still open. We're still, even with that, represents about $4 million, so, you know, still a lot of cash left for different purposes, and we're looking at how we might use that. Okay. Yeah, so we've talked about as part of kind of our strategic alternatives in the future. That's something that we see down the road. No update today, but certainly when we look at kind of the different markets and the U.S. is definitely a larger market. It's also, you know, the med tech focus is a lot greater, and so, you know, we're certainly looking for opportunities where we could get to there, but nothing in the imminent future. Given what you just said about the special dividend, are any bolt-on acquisitions and future buybacks discarded? Yeah, no, nothing's off the table. I mean, that's a portion of our cash for sure, but we are actively looking at different acquisitions, tuck-ins, bolt-ons, and there's a lot out there. It's kind of an interesting time in the markets for sure with valuations and where, you know, where companies are looking to go to. But we're definitely, you know, we're going to continue driving our business forward, generating more and more cash, and always looking at where we can best use that, investing back in the company, investing in other companies to acquire them, looking at all sorts of options, future share buyback, dividends, et cetera. Everything's on the table, and we'll just consider that on a go-forward basis. I think we're getting the yep, time's up. Happy to answer any other questions outside or in one-on-ones. But listen, thanks so much. Mathieu, thank you for leading the fireside chat here. There is no fire, but we've got a little bit of air conditioning coming up. And I just close with, really appreciate everyone coming here, listening. Hopefully, you've left a little more informed about our company, where we're at, where we're going, really bright future, making a massive difference in the markets we serve. And hope that we can have some further conversations and talk to those of you that are investors to invest more and those of you that aren't to join in the bandwagon because we've just barely scratched the surface and there's a ton of upside here. So, thank you. Thanks, Mathieu.