Hello, everyone. I'm Ghassan Halazon, for those of you who don't know me, CEO of EMERGE. I'm joined by Jonathan Leong, our CFO. Great to be with you all for this year-end webcast. Really appreciate you taking the time. I know everyone's probably quite busy wrapping up loose ends ahead of the holidays, and hope you've all been in good health, been keeping busy as we have and looking forward to spending some quality family and friend time here over the holidays. Today, you know, we wanted to sort of spend some time with you all and wrap up the year, giving everyone key updates around the business, as well as talking through our priorities for 2023. It's been a very busy, active year. In many ways, it's been a tricky year in the macro climate, in the markets, as you all know and are seeing, not only with EMERGE, not only with e-commerce, not only with technology, but really broadly and globally. Pertaining to EMERGE specifically, we thought it would be a good idea to spend a bit of time updating everyone on where we're at right now in the roadmap, what are the things we're focused on and what we have in store for 2023. With that, I'm going to share our presentation and dive right in. Just a quick recap for newcomers, and I should say all your attendance and taking time here. It's always nice to see the following that we have and the support and really at the end of the day, the interest in EMERGE. Thank you for that. Today, EMERGE is sitting north of CAD 100 million in gross merchandise sales. That was a milestone that we had announced last year that we think is a big starting point into the big leagues of e-commerce. Gross merchandise sales, as we've said before, is the total amount of dollar value we process across our platform. Today we have about 94 employees, which we continue to focus on that metric of CAD 1 million+ per employee in gross merchandise sales. I've been a student of the e-commerce space for a decade plus, really 12 years at this point. We really pride ourselves on our ability to keep things lean and mean. We encourage e-commerce investors and interested parties in the broader sector to really compare what that looks like, how that shakes up as a ratio. It's something we look at. Frankly, we think that employee to GMS ratio is key to continue to operate efficiently, especially in markets like these. nine brands, five verticals across Canada and the U.S. We have a good mix. We continue to look at sort of the pet business that we recently acquired, which is going very well. Our subscription businesses, as well as our consumer marketplaces in areas like grocery and golf. You guys are generally aware and up to speed on our portfolio, so I'll keep going. Let's talk a bit about sort of the performance of the business through Q3, which ended September 30th. Those are our actual results here. As you can see, just to sort of benchmark a bit, 2019, as most of you recall, is the sort of last pre-pandemic year. That was an end of an era, so to speak. For e-commerce specifically, we like to benchmark against 2019 and really sort of get a directional sense as to where we are post pandemic. The thing to keep in mind, with these numbers are these are actual EMERGE numbers. Obviously they are not inclusive of pro forma results of the vast majority of our portfolio from prior years. Here's a number for you that gives it a more apples to apples comparison, 'cause obviously it's very clear that just purely on EMERGE numbers, there's been significant growth and progress. You're looking at, you know, revenues of CAD 4 million back in 2019 and sort of, you know, kind of growing all the way up to, you know, through 3 quarters of this year, CAD 42 million+ on track to achieve, you know, anywhere between CAD 55 million-CAD 60 million in revenue, right? Same story, you know, GMS carries through that logic. Really the big story this year is sort of our switch from marginal EBITDA profitability to very meaningful EBITDA profitability. You know, having almost achieved CAD 3 million heading into Q4, which puts us on track if you take sort of a general run rate north of or in and around sort of the CAD 4+ million range in EBITDA is plausible. You know, as you look at that and compare where we've come from, you know, when we went public, you know, it's kind of a major difference. I don't know if any of you track this, but I'll give you a fun fact of the day and today's actually 2 years on the dot for EMERGE since going public through the RTO in December 14 in 2020. That was a very different time, of course. The stay-at-home craze, so to speak, the e-commerce peak craze, all of that was in play, and of course, that's reversed tremendously, especially this year. If you just compared actual P&L results, the company, EMERGE, in 2020, was a CAD 9 million revenue company. This year, inclusive of Q4, normally our largest quarter for holiday shopping season for various verticals. You know, you're looking at, you know, a business that has significantly grown almost sixfold by the end of this year versus the time we went and IPO'd at CAD 0.75 a share. That's the revenue side of the formula. The EBITDA side of the formula says that in 2020, our last private year, for the most part, with the exception of the last two weeks of the year, EMERGE with CAD 800,000 in adjusted EBITDA factor. Now, you know, we're on track to be in and around that CAD 4 million mark, depending on sort of Q4 and so forth. Tremendous, another 5/6x growth in EBITDA since those periods. Now, going back to my pro forma point, something we don't have here, but just generally an interesting number for all of us to look at and keep tabs of is that EMERGE pro forma, inclusive of all of our brands, nine brands that we have today, and our verticals and our businesses. In 2019, if we collectively added all of those up on a pro forma basis, our revenue at that time would have been CAD 36 million. Okay. Whether we end the year at CAD 55 million, CAD 57 million or CAD 60 million, wherever we end up, that is a good benchmark for investors to keep in mind as to when we hear pre-pandemic and then we hear peak pandemic, call it a year ago or a year and a half ago, and then we say brands have come off. That's the sort of historical, or at least the headline news that kind of has brought e-commerce down to earth. You gotta remember that EMERGE, I can't speak for other e-commerce companies, but EMERGE's brands pro forma in 2019 did CAD 36 million. You can do the math and see where we end this year and compare that, you know, sort of growth over a two to three-year period. Let's keep moving. A bit about sort of key investment highlights, and some of these are implicit, and for those of you who know us, you've heard these in one way or the other, but I did want to sort of connect a few dots. Firstly, in e-commerce, scale really does matter, and so does it matter in other industries as well. But especially in e-commerce, you really don't get that benefit of synergies and savings without that scale. You need volume, right? And that's that minimum entry point scale of CAD 100 million that we recently eclipsed last year and have maintained slash, you know, potentially can grow depending on Q4. We feel that that's very much in check. We have the volume to start moving on synergies and savings, and in fact, we have started to, as we'll talk about. The majority of what we're buying, if you look at, since going public, and I give Wholesale Pet as an example, which is about 45% of our overall sales, is very sticky. It tilts towards B2B in Wholesale Pet's case because, you know, those are really long-term tenures on these key clients. Some of them have been with us for 10+ years. Imagine that. We're really trying to zoom in on the stickier side of e-commerce. Not all models are equal, and nor are we perfect. We're honing our model. We're figuring out what makes sense, what we buy that looks longer term and better, and we wanna do more of that, right? Diversifying has always been a strength of ours in this market. Some days you have, you know, in this case, the pet industry doing great, offsetting maybe something else that's taking a bit more time. You know, we talked a bit about some of the golf and the discount challenges during the pandemic due to limited supply. We actually now think that in a world that's cooling down, in an economy and a consumer wallet that's weakening, we actually think discount golf and discount experiences could come back into play. We're starting to see some signs of that in Q4. Another important point I'd like to make here is that we've actually spent the last five, six years, but really the last few years honing our model, making those investments in HQ and in the team, in our data setup and in our infrastructure. When you're sitting on an asset base like ours that does anywhere between, you know, CAD 7 million-CAD 8 million in EBITDA, excluding our HQ and our overheads and ultimately our holdco. That holdco cost, that public cost, that setup cost, kind of weighs down on something that's, you know, CAD 7 million without it. That, you know, CAD 2 million or CAD 3 million brings you down to CAD 4 million. That's very meaningful impact on your overall picture. EMERGE continues to grow, we do not foresee that HQ and public cost growing proportionately. We think the majority of those costs have already been taken, and that level is not gonna grow in proportion to the EBITDA growth from future acquisitions and so forth. I wanted to point out that we've made those investments. In fact, we've fine-tuned them. We found some savings, if anything. Now we think that that baseline is there, and we wanna layer on that EBITDA and ultimately that cash flow. You know our team quite well. We'll spend a bit more time. You know this is obviously despite the bringing back down to earth effect, that where Shopify itself is down 80%. Full disclosure, I'm still a shareholder there. Despite Amazon's woes and Wayfair's woes in the sector, you know, this is a tremendous opportunity worth 5.7 trillion today and on track to double as you start thinking 5 years out, 7 years out. E-commerce factually is only heading in one direction. If the pandemic sort of moved it, but not as fast as we thought. That's not a bad thing. That's actually a net positive versus pre-pandemic, right? The CAD 36 million or CAD 37 million in pro forma revenue that we had was growing at a more standard clip. We probably wouldn't have been, you know, in the 55-60 zone, which is where we are now. Speaking of the sector, this is super interesting. We all know big numbers. We know the space is large and growing. I kinda wanna zoom in a bit on this point that the reason EMERGE exists is what's happening in what we call the long tail of e-commerce, right? We have these small to medium-sized e-commerce companies. Shopify says has in excess of 1 million merchant stores. I actually saw the other day it's close to 2 million lately. Amazon has 6 million third-party sellers on their little, what they call FBA stores on Amazon. This long tail of mostly bootstrap, profitable little businesses, and when I say little, they may have CAD 1-2 million, CAD 3 million, CAD 4 million, CAD 5 million in EBITDA, so they're not actually little. They're little in the context of overall e-commerce. That opportunity is what EMERGE decided we were gonna go after. As you probably heard by now, if you follow the sector, one of the biggest themes in the space is that of what they call e-commerce aggregators or consolidators of e-commerce assets, right? These are buyers like EMERGE that leverage scale to put pieces together, to buy businesses together in e-commerce and put them into a bigger portfolio that gains from the savings, the synergies and upsell and so forth. That's where the similarities end. If you think of really the two types of dominant aggregator models out there, you have on the one end, the Amazon aggregation model, which is led by companies like Thrasio. You know, a unicorn has raised $1 billion to buy little Amazon stores. You have folks like OpenStore more recently that are doing a methodical roll-up on Shopify stores. The way we always envisioned EMERGE was, number one, we were not about the number of deals we were acquiring. We were less interested in a lot of these little small ones that were disparate and that were reliant, frankly, on big platforms like Amazon. If you notice, EMERGE has gone after what we call niche market leaders with a track record of organic growth and EBITDA today that's meaningful. We tend to say we look at CAD 1 million-CAD 5 million EBITDA opportunities. In the end, the biggest thing for us is that stickiness factor, and we're getting more and more focused there. We don't wanna buy EBITDA for the sake of it. We wanna buy platforms that have stood the test of time. As I said, Wholesale Pet, you might have never heard of it. We hadn't. It landed on our desk, and it was a 20-year business with 20% CAGR over that period, and it was in an excellent industry. Pets is only going in one direction, one of the few largely resilient sectors, in e-commerce post coming down from the peak. You had the customer tenures through the roof, as I said, 10+ year tenures. You had a core management team that's continued on with us and a plan to continue to grow this vertical. That's very different than buying a 3-person shop on Amazon that does CAD 200,000 in EBITDA and buying 50 of those in 2 years, right? Our mindset has been, let's buy fewer, higher quality brands and businesses with inherent cash flow advantages, which we haven't perfected quite yet, but we are getting better and better, and Wholesale Pet is kind of that latest frontier that we've shown is the function of our evolution in terms of our capital allocation. I won't spend too much time on this slide. It already recaps kind of our approach and our growth. You can see the post-public acquisitions that we've made. They're on the subscription and B2B side, versus prior to going public, we acquired some consumer marketplaces in previous years. Main thing to highlight, today our revenue is about anywhere or let's call it our sales volume overall, you know, tracks 55%-60% U.S. and 40-45% Canada. We expect U.S. to continue to be a big part of our business. This is one of the advantages we highlight a little later that I might as well touch on. Obviously, as a Canadian-based first company, our HQ is here. Vast majority of our resources at HQ and support resources, and frankly, teams are based in Canada, largely in Ontario. We do have a presence and we have tight, dedicated teams in the U.S. To that extent, selling in USD right now with a cost base in CAD is obviously a favorable thing and a nice tailwind that we've continued to benefit from. In fact, that's one of the reasons we saw net income positive in Q3 was driven by that sort of ForEx. Same thing with EBITDA. On an adjusted EBITDA basis, we factor that out. Just wanted to point out that that's been a good tailwind for the business. I don't know what your thoughts are on currency, but we think, you know, we're in a good spot to continue to benefit here in the near term. This is a slide that we've expanded on since last time. You all know the types of businesses we acquire. Obviously, we've been heads down this year, and focused inwards on savings and synergies and on the balance sheet, which we'll talk about. That's obviously a key priority for us. These are some of the reasons, and these are some of the ways we structure our deals. You know, at EMERGE, and we think this is the same playbook that will continue once we, once we're ready to resume our M&A. Let's deep dive a bit more into some synergies and savings, and let's chat a bit about some corporate updates. Our model all along has been to build up scale so that we can extract synergy and savings. There are multiple live examples here. I can highlight a few. I had talked previously for some of you that may have tuned in about payment processing as a potential area of huge savings. The logic is when we bought these companies last year, we bought three of them, which comprise the majority of our sales. Each of them was on a different payment processor, whether it would be Stripe or Braintree or Moneris. We've yet to put all of these on together. Obviously, this is a live project. To the extent that, as the team believes, we can extract even a 0.5% improvement in credit card fees. If you take even let's simplify, you know, CAD 115 million, CAD 120 million in sales that we process across the network. Once this is technically fully completed, 0.5% of that, CAD 600,000 in EBITDA, right? That's just one example. It may not come in one piece. It may be in a few parts. We may move a few brands for certain reasons. We may integrate something a bit later. Overall, there's that sort of potential for a 0.5% improvement, which, by the way, has been confirmed to be a possibility. Logistics, you know, we are now moving towards all at least our Canadian brands, which is about, as I said, 45% of our sales. We are really making a push to get all logistics under one warehouse and, you know, 2023 is definitely the year for that. We've already made moves with a few of our brands. We've already consolidated a bunch of customer service teams and brands under one roof. Same with marketing. We've made a lot of progress behind the scenes quietly in a difficult macro year, which I think has served us well. I think that part of the thesis has been all along that we can actually accelerate these brands. What's interesting when you look at these examples that we've talked about before, which make a lot of sense on paper, but take a bit more time, is when we went and acquired these brands, most of them last year. You know, it takes time. You know, our philosophy has always been decentralized to partner with management long term. So we wouldn't be pushing them while they're chasing their own goals to try these other areas that we think are conducive for organic growth. In a market like this now, where we're doubling down, and we've been with these groups for a year, you know, 1+ year, 2 years, you know, we're really starting to zoom in on where these areas can be extracted. I think we're doing a much better job in recent weeks and months preparing and planning to extract value for starting Q4 and into the new year. We're very excited about those possibilities. I feel like a lot of what we've been doing now will only start showing up from Q4 onwards, right, in terms of savings and improvements. Just touching on Q3, which is to some extent old news by now, but we'll do it quickly for those of you who are new to the story. You know, GMS, revenue, EBITDA, as you said, all speak for themselves. The net income is obviously, largely driven by Forex and by a reversal in contingent consideration. Wouldn't read too much into, you know, the strong positive net income, but we like to highlight things transparently. You know, the EBITDA is really sort of the biggest thing to highlight in that we moved from Q3, which is traditionally a seasonally down quarter for a number of our brands. You know, in the summer, you know, subscription brands especially, they tend to either pause the service when they're traveling, they don't get that monthly inbox, the box delivered. Q3 has always been a trickier quarter, but we've really moved from -CAD 0.5 million to +CAD 800K in EBITDA, which I think is positive. It's our tenth out of the last 11 quarters of positive EBITDA. I think that's now becoming the norm, which is good. You know, sort of that next frontier is how we start converting EBITDA better to cash flow, which we'll talk about here shortly. The other thing that we completed recently was that CAD 2.78 million convertible debenture, which was co-led by Echelon and Raymond James. You know, they did a great job considering the macro climate. We've seen a lot of smaller cap companies unable to do this. We're pleased and we're glad we were able to close on CAD 2.78 million. It goes towards what would be a cheaper interest rate versus our current senior debt. Most of the proceeds are intended to reduce our senior debt or in this case, cheaper interest and longer term component, which is a three-year note. It's a starting point, frankly, in a bigger discussion and a bigger strategic plan to really start improving the balance sheet, reducing interest payments, and ultimately delevering the balance sheet to give us the benefit of converting all that EBITDA to bigger cash, right? Right now, I feel, and we believe a lot of our EBITDA, when you look at a company that's been forming an EBITDA, you say, "Well, where is the cash?" Right? Where is the cash going? The issue is that with our interest rates on our current debt facility, which we paid down by CAD 1 million recently, we're gonna continue to pay that down as the plan. You eat into a lot of that EBITDA, right? That model that we built in a low interest rate environment where e-commerce was flying and M&A was flying, has now switched on us. What do we do when something switches on us? We recalibrate, and that's what we're doing. We're bringing in cheaper interest, we're paying down some debt, and we're doubling down on what's working so that we can really size back the balance sheet to match our goals for tomorrow and for 2023. One of the areas that we're pushing to improve cash flow, not necessarily interest, but to improve cash flow, is operationally through the CAD 1 million or so in savings that we announced, which have taken effect starting Q4. On top of that, during earnings, we talked about there's another up to CAD 1 million in savings under review that we're being, you know, extremely focused on, extremely aggressive on. We think that these are largely non revenue impacting changes. You know, in any case that we've eliminated revenue, it was specifically because we felt that was what we call empty calorie revenue. In other words, if there were resources and there was some revenue, but that revenue wasn't profitable, we really don't want it. We're not interested in it. We don't care what the market says about that, right? We care that if it makes sense for the bottom line, it makes sense for cash flows, it will be good for shareholders long term. These are the types of, you know, logical decisions that we need to double down on and focus on. We think that ultimately long, you know, long-term folks and long-term businesses will prevail. We're very focused on making sure those savings start hitting the bottom line and ultimately start improving cash flow conversion. A quick update on Q4. The only thing that we have shared, that I'm able to share here is our Black Friday results. We saw organic growth, again, meaning non-M&A-driven growth of 17% year-over-year in GMS. Multiple brands achieved double-digit growth. WholesalePet.com, UnderPar, JustGolfStuff, and WagJag. Black Friday isn't as big for our subscription brands for obvious reasons. You know, it's a bigger commitment. It's a bigger, sort of long-term membership type base. In one case, it's groceries with truLOCAL. This isn't typically the biggest time of year for them, that weekend and so forth. We were quite pleased with it. You know, I think overall e-commerce, the e-commerce sector, and the retail sector, I think there was an article that we referenced in our PR, that was through the Adobe annual study, showed that the sector was up 2% on Black Friday. We're quite pleased with these results. You know, obviously we still have a good half of December last, and it's a big season for us, so we haven't closed Q4 yet. You know, this is going to be our final push here to wrap up with strength. Management team, you know us well by now. You know, I think this is a tight group that's working very well together as a core group from an operational perspective. Wanted to highlight Ian McKinnon for those of you who had not heard of him joining the board back in June. Ian notably was on the board as a director of Constellation Software from 2006 to 2018. He had a front row seat to Mark Leonard's genius and really sort of one of the most prolific, not only technology, not only roll-up stories in Canada, but really one of the most prolific Canadian companies of all time. It's been amazing having Ian not only doing his sort of board duties, chair, comp committee, chair of governance, you know, helping us grow up in various areas, but he's actually had a very hands-on approach in supporting management and supporting and mentoring myself into thinking through how to, you know, grow the org chart up, how to double down on field-level analytics and capital allocation strategies. I think we're doing a lot of growing up and a lot of thinking around how this scales, you know, and it's great to have his experience on board. I wanna point you to the cap table on the right here, and we'll wrap up this presentation in the next couple of minutes, take some Q&A. Feel free to plug in some of your questions. I can see a few starting to come in. Type them in and I'll try to address as many as we can in the last, you know, 15 minutes or so. I wanted to talk about price, and I wanted to talk about sort of the overall equation, because I think that's on a lot of people's mind where I get these comments around, we're seeing EMERGE, we're seeing the operational performance, we're seeing the revenue growth and the EBITDA growth and pretty clear communication, but it's just the share price thing has continued to lag. You know, for the most part, we like to say we're very long-term focused. Share price is detached from fundamental, et cetera, et cetera. I think it's important that you guys all get context as to the way we see things. There's a few things that have impacted share price since we went public two years ago when we were 1/6 the size, right? One is the untangling of the stay-at-home e-commerce trend. This is a pure macro trend. We may have never deserved to be a $1+ or $1.40+ stock at the time that we were being rated that way prior to all of our acquisitions, right? You know, Shopify is down 75%, 80%, so forth. That's one effect that's hit us, and of course, we largely attract the small cap industry. That's a macro thing. We don't talk about that. We don't control that. If things go back and they do very well on the macro and e-commerce is super hot, which we expect it will be at some point, that's not our doing either, right? Up or down. That's part one. Right. I think part two of the equation is really sort of this balance sheet discussion, right? I talked about it, so I don't wanna rehash too much, but the fact is that our balance sheet, our debt facility, and thankfully, we have a very good relationship with our lender. We've never skipped a payment. We've never breached a covenant. We've been with them for 3+ years, and they've continuously lent us capital to deploy towards our plan of scaling the business. At the same time, we're in a year now where we are committing to start to pay that capital down. I think that as the markets and slash investors weigh, you know, what was a largely debt-driven M&A strategy in a higher interest rate environment, no doubt that's causing strain on the share price. I think to the extent that you as an investor get to know us, get to know how we're performing, get to know how we're communicating, if you believe that we're gonna, you know, work things out on the balance sheet, that's where we think there's value, right? To the extent that we come back with, you know, a refinancing of a partner or figuring out other ways to plug at the balance sheet via savings, operating savings, agreements with the lenders that give us more room, as we've shown we've been able to do, all of these things mean that the equity, which today is valued at CAD 10 million market cap or thereabout, you know, stand to be in a position to transform substantially if you believe that the company's balance sheet can be in good shape. That's more something an investor has to weigh. We're not gonna tell you what to think. We're certainly not gonna tell you what we're working on that we're not allowed to or not permitted to share. Certainly, like, we're not just sitting back here, just, you know, looking at this and saying, "Let's just put our heads down and not tackle the balance sheet." That is a big, big priority, and that's what we've been focused on. We've been very vocal about that. That convertible note, even at face value, may not look like it. It is a first step, right? Where we've sort of started to attack, you know, capital towards paying down the lender, getting this new debt at a cheaper rate than we had with the lender, and now plotting a path to paying it down. We made the announcement that our goal was to drop the debt from the senior debt from CAD 25 million to CAD 19 million in 2023. You know, our goal is to increase EBITDA on the other side of the spectrum, right? Via savings, via organic, via all these initiatives. If you think EBITDA is going up and debt's going down, and we achieve our goals, then our ratio of debt to EBITDA is much, much more conducive to what the market's looking for. You ask yourself, if that happens, what happens to the equity value of the company? That's an answer only you can determine by doing your own analysis, of course. Just to wrap up, we aren't here just to buy EBITDA and revenue. We're really here to take all of that asset base and leverage really new, exciting things that we haven't had a chance to talk about because we're so, as I see it, so early in the journey that, you know, there are areas of loyalty. That's a big area of interest. Why should our brands not gain from shopping on... as a user shopping on different brands? If you have a truLOCAL box, would you be interested in golf? you know, would you be interested in a ski resort on WagJag? Would you be interested in, you know, do you have pets, and will you do more with pets over time? Like, there's a lot of areas here where this becomes super exciting, but you gotta get your basics in order, and I think that's what we've been doing this year, in preparing for that sort of next phase of growth. Normally, I say if I've done my job right here to conclude, you will have heard of all of this already. Focus has been inwards this year, in a year like this. Getting those savings, getting those synergies, driving that, you know, core baseline business. We feel like the P&L is in good shape. We feel like it's a big mandate, and we prioritize getting more of that EBITDA to convert to cash flow. It's part more savings and improvements in EBITDA operationally. It's also part tackling the balance sheet and the interest payments and the rates we're at and lowering our overall debt, but also potentially lowering our interest rate, right? I think the idea of... that I leave you with is, we always talked about the CAD 100 million revenue, and really more importantly, the CAD 10 million EBITDA mark. We still very much believe that keeping our heads down for the next while, making sure we are prepared, our balance sheet is strengthened, that we are now then in a position to tackle the next couple of acquisitions, putting us in that CAD 10 million EBITDA business. I always say getting to $10 million EBITDA at the end of the day, no matter how you spin it or how what multiple you apply to us, we certainly don't believe a $10 million EBITDA company is a $0.10 stock. You know, we think that there's still quite a ways to go to get there. A lot of hard work, a lot of execution, frankly, has to happen. That's the ultimate bet you're making because so many companies have been hit down 70%, 80%, 90%, especially in small cap, especially in Canada. The real question is, who deserves to come up? Who deserves to emerge really back and rise again? That's something only you as an investor can watch in diligence, and ultimately, we've always been available to answer your questions. With that, let me take some questions and see if anyone has anything that we haven't touched on here that I can help you guys with. Okay. I'm collecting... I see a few of these here. Firstly, which verticals are working really well for you? Do you see yourself doubling down there and maybe selling a non-core asset in this market? It's a good question, and it's a fair question. We did touch on this a little bit during our earnings call. I think the thought process is that, no secret, we've been very pleased with the stickiness and the retention and the cash flows of our pet business, WholesalePet.com. Believe like we do that the world is cooling and the consumer wallet is cooling even for golf, which sounds hard to believe for the avid golfers out there. That tends to be good for our business. That's when golf courses need us for the discounts. We think there's value there as well. Overall, yeah, we will be pragmatic. We are being pragmatic and exploring what asset mix makes the most sense in the next phase. I think that there are some real brands. There are some real market leaders slash some incredible brands and teams, and ultimately TAMs that, you know, could yield significant value if it made sense for us. Another question. Where do you see the cash position and the debt level being early next year? Are you looking to resume acquisitions next year? It's a good question. It's one I frankly anticipated. Obviously we had closed, 2 3 in and around the CAD 4 million mark in cash. We subsequently raised CAD 2.78 million, you know, in November. Of course, we've made different payments out. One of the things that we've been actively reducing, you know, working out some of these deferred payments for some of our existing brands. In some cases we've, you know, worked with them. We have great relationships with all of them. We're working on, you know, good schedules that have given us some freedom, but we are chipping away at some of those and reducing our liabilities there. We also have high season in Q4. There's multiple moving parts as to where cash ends up. We don't give guidance on what we think cash will look like. I've given you a sense of a few moving parts. We feel like we have a cash position that ended at CAD 4 million in Q3, and we're probably higher than that right now just given the peak holiday season. Again, every season is a little different. In terms of our debt level, our goal is to continue to pay down that debt. We paid our senior lender down by CAD 1 million bucks. That's now down to CAD 24 million. Our goal is to bring it down to CAD 19 million in 2023, as we've outlined. Thank you for connecting with the shareholders. Is there a plan to keep the shareholders informed on a frequent basis given how the stock has reacted? Thank you, Yogi. I think we absolutely wanna do it. I don't know if other small cap companies that have been hit as hard as we have put themselves in front of investors like we have here to end the year. We thought it was important, and we thought we owed it to you all, to spend some time to answer some questions to keep you guys abreast. You can expect that to continue. You know, we are looking at whether more webcasts of this nature make sense. I would like to hear feedback. If we get enough feedback that this webcast is useful, then surely we will invest more in it. Generally, yes, we are for more communication to the extent that we're able to, not less. Thanks for the question there. Did your M&A employee leave? Yes. Thanks for your question. Yes, George Marouchos, who head up M&A and joined us at the time of go public, is no longer with the company. I think part of the thinking... We really like George. I have a great relationship. I actually have a great personal relationship with George. I've known him for many years. I think the thought process on both sides during a year like this one was that we knew that we were not gonna be doing M&A. As part of our bigger communications last discussion to think through the cost side, I think the decision that was arrived at made sense. You know, once we reignite M&A, as I said, even if we're looking at some stuff in the background, you know, probably not looking to do M&A till early as spring of next year after we tackle some of the work that remains in front of us. Probably more like second half of next year is when we wanna double down on M&A. I think that made sense, and it's in line with our bigger thinking of, you know, cutting some costs and making sure that we're very prudent with our capital. Given share price lag, would it make sense to sell EMERGE at a premium? Who are prime strategic buyers for EMERGE? I'll tell you something, guys. You know, obviously, we had a press release the other day about us terminating our investor relations contract. That's another example of savings that are meaningful to the company. That means that we don't get to screen these questions now. I just read them on the fly, and you're getting it live straight from me, which I hope you appreciate is, A, transparent, and B, at the very least, entertaining for you guys to see how I address these. At the end of the day, you know, the space is heated up. It is what it is. To my point earlier on the slide about, you know, Shopify roll-ups, Amazon roll-ups. I'm speaking to companies, I know companies that have CAD 100 million-CAD 200 million in funding. I know companies that have CAD 500 million-CAD 1 billion in funding. We speak, and of course, these mostly private companies have yet to really be recalibrated. A lot of them are valued on revenue multiples. A lot of them don't have real EBITDA. In fact, some of them that have CAD 100 million or CAD 200 million in funding are smaller than us in every measure. That's partly 'cause they started after us. Where this gets interesting and the types of outreach we're getting is, you know, "Hey, well, EMERGE is, you know, kind of has the GMS, has the revenue, has the EBITDA. But, you know, the balance sheet isn't great, but, you know, could there be that sort of interest?" We're not actively running around shopping the company. I wanna be super clear about that. It's natural that in a space that's super well-funded, I think CAD 15 billion have gone into roll-ups. There are more interesting opportunities out there and, you know, we'll leave it at that. You know, I think aggregators, if I had to pin it into who would be a strategic buyer, you know, aggregators of that sort are the probably the prime candidate. The other candidate, obviously, in any EBITDA play is sort of the PE crowd. I would say that, again, we are not formally doing any of these things. We know a lot of people in the sector naturally, and we know a lot of folks that are paying attention to EMERGE and kind of where we are, you know, from a market cap perspective. We have nothing to report, and we will always do what's in the best interest of shareholders long term, one way or the other. How are you thinking of acquisitions in 2023? I kind of answered that a bit. That's more like a second half of the year, where really only thing I'll say is, ironically, because of this, sort of, I guess, messy year, if you could put it that way. Not Messi, Argentina, which I'm a fan. It has been a messy 2022, for most. But I would say it's been a blessing in disguise in that it's allowed us to focus inwards. If we were under the traditional setup that we were when we went public, it's go, go. It's buy, buy other acquisitions. No time to digest, no time to integrate. I feel like we've done a very good job of, frankly, getting to know this existing asset base, getting to know the teams, the management teams, to think through synergies, get these org charts and these incentives in line. This is a lot of work that frankly breaks in many cases in M&A plays that are rushing. I feel like that's been good for us, and we will take another probably one to two quarters to really focus on ops, focus on the balance sheet, get ourselves set up, and then hopefully be able to resume our M&A after that. Another question, this will be the final question. Actually, I see a few popping by. Let me see how many I can take. From what I understand, EMERGE shares could be very well trading below their intrinsic value, given the numbers you've outlined. When does the repurchase of shares make sense as part of the EBITDA conversion to cash flow process? I think it's a fair question. People have raised, you know, sort of the NCIB and the repurchase of shares before. I would say that, it's something in the long-term best interest we imagine, that is a good fit for EMERGE. Realistically, in the short to medium term, even if the optics are nice, and we're trying to really steer away from optics and PR versus actual results in line with what we need to be doing. It's probably not a good use of cash short term to be buying back shares when a lot of that cash could go to paying down debt and reducing our interest to the extent that it is made available. I would say part A, focus inwards, focus on ops, focus on the balance sheet, whether that's a refinancing at a cheaper rate and a longer term as we think may be available or potentially a non-core asset that we don't need, disposing of those and bringing in more cash to double down where we're winning. Doing all of these things first and foremost is key. As the company starts freeing up cash, and as we are in a better balance sheet and debt position that, you know, we feel compels us to have that free cash to report back into repurchase of shares, we think that makes a lot of sense, and it has worked wonders for companies that have done it with discipline and with continuity, rather than just to sort of put it out there as a program and do a bit of it, but really not be a good use of cash. Hopefully that answers the question. What would get you more excited to do more M&A? What's the bottleneck now? Is it capital? Are prices too high? Are you simply focused on improving assets? Very similar to what we've touched on. We're excited about M&A. It's the best buyer's market I've ever seen in e-commerce over the last 12 years of being in this space. Listen, I've bootstrapped, I've acquired, I've sold, I've restructured. We've gone through this cycle in many ways, even prior to EMERGE. I can tell you definitively, this is the ultimate buyer's market. Sorry, let me sort of say that the ultimate buyer's market, the multiples seem to be coming down. We used to see 4x, 5x, 6x. We are even seeing 2x, 3x, 4x now, right? They've definitely come down. You've gotta be buying the stuff that's the most quality. You've gotta be doubling down on, you know, the assets and the business models that work best from our learnings. We have more learnings than anyone or most anyone in this space. We started aggregating e-commerce businesses way before any of these big names that I've mentioned that have all taken private money and big debt. Big debt that they've taken compared to EMERGE. You know, we feel that we have the learnings to pour back into M&A. We think it's a terrific market, and we think the next two years will be an absolutely phenomenal market for buying top-notch assets at a discount. I'm going to conclude there. There seems to be some more flowing in, and I think we're about seven minutes over the 45 minutes allotted time. I will say this. Please, as always, send your questions to investor@emerge-commerce.com. Myself and Jonathan, the CFO, and a few others around us, we do our weekly get-together and look at all of these types of questions and make sure we answer them, whether through our team or ourselves directly, you will get answers. We really appreciate all the time and the patience and the terrific attendance here to wrap up the, you know, the year and wrap up sort of what is a 2-year milestone for the company as a public company. We feel that we've grown this business by 6+ times in revenue. We've grown it by 6+ times in EBITDA, if not more. We feel like we've done a really good job on the P&L. The balance sheet is the next frontier. We're taking the necessary steps, we believe, to unlock that value. We'll always communicate clearly and transparently. We really appreciate all your support, and your partnership and your questions, at any time. Thank you. Happy holidays from the EMERGE family. Have a great end to the year. Good luck all in 2023 and beyond. Take care.