Parth Mehrotra
Analyst · Credit Suisse.
Yes, thanks. So I'll take them in line. Number one, just from a capital allocation perspective, look, we think about it in four buckets. First is what we think is a sleep well at night bucket, where in our business as a provider entity that is growing this fast, taking on additional financial risk, we believe we should have significant cushion and have a very conservative balance sheet, low leverage and a solid cash flow profile. That is what helps when the risk presents itself. And our view is not to rely on the capital markets when that happens is that can be very dilutive. Second is, obviously, given the significant TAM that we have, we're looking to continue to invest organically in existing and new markets. The beauty of this business is a lot of that happens on the P&L. And so EBITDA expansion may not happen, but that is part of capital allocation from our perspective. Third is opportunistic M&A. If or when the right opportunity arises. We've not relied on that historically, given how well we've grown organically. And we are fairly disciplined. But whenever that happens, obviously, you want to have some cushion. And then finally, from a completeness perspective, look, if we do have excess cash and the valuation of the business materially differs from what we think is intrinsic value, we can obviously look to return capital in accretive manners to our shareholders. So that's kind of the first part of the question you asked. The second is, the free cash flow generation capability, I think, is truly differentiated. As we articulated, the EBITDA number is fairly straightforward, not too many add-backs. We prefer it that way. It's mainly stock-based comp. And then our business also tends to have this negative working capital or a positive float, which in some periods like in 2021, the phenomena magnifies itself given the timing of cash flows from our payer partners to our medical groups or our risk-bearing entities and then flowing downstream to our physicians. And then obviously, given the minimal CapEx, there's a pretty high EBITDA to free cash flow conversion as far as we're still utilizing our NOLs. The $32 million spend was related to our acquisition of the services platform of BASS MSO in California and the medical group in West Texas.