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Superior Group of Companies, Inc. (SGC)

Q4 2021 Earnings Call· Wed, Mar 9, 2022

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day, and welcome to Superior Group of Companies Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2021 Conference Call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. With us today are Michael Benstock, the company’s Chief Executive Officer; and Andy Demott, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer. After the speakers’ remarks, there will be a Q&A session. This call is being recorded and your participation implies that you agree to this. If you do not agree, please disconnect your line. Now I’ll turn the call over to Ms. Hala Elsherbini, Senior Managing Director of Three Part Advisors, who will read the Safe Harbor statement. Please go ahead, ma’am.

Hala Elsherbini

Management

Thank you, and good morning. This conference call may contain forward-looking statements about Superior Group of Companies, the company, within the meaning of the Securities Act of 1933, the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, and the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and all rules and regulations issued thereunder. Such statements are based upon management’s current expectations, projections, estimates and assumptions. Words such as will, expect, believe, anticipate, think, outlook, hope, and variations of such words and similar expressions identify such forward-looking statements, which includes statements on the impact of COVID-19 on the company’s business, including inventory, supply chain, manufacturing capacity at the company’s own and contract manufacturing facilities, service capacity and customer demand. Forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties that may cause future results to differ materially from those suggested by the forward-looking statements. Such risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, the following; the effect of the COVID-19 crisis on the U.S. and global markets, our business, operations, customers, suppliers, and employees; general economic conditions in the areas of the United States in which the company’s customers are located, changes in the markets where uniforms are worn, where promotional products are sold and where call center services are used; the impact of competition, the company’s ability to successfully integrate operations following consumption of acquisitions, and the availability of manufacturing materials, as well as the risks and uncertainties disclosed in the company’s periodic filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the company’s Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2020, the Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended September 30, 2021, and the 8-K filed recently. Shareholders, potential investors, and other readers are urged to consider these factors carefully in evaluating the forward-looking statements made herein and are cautioned not to place undue reliance on such forward-looking statements. The company does not undertake to update the forward-looking statements contained herein to conform to actual results or changes in the company’s expectations, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by law. Please note that all growth comparisons that management makes today will relate to the corresponding period in 2020, unless otherwise noted. And with that, I’ll turn the call over to Michael.

Michael Benstock

Management

Thank you, Hala. Good morning, everybody, and thanks for joining us for our fourth quarter and fiscal year 2021 earnings call. Today, I will discuss strategic initiatives, review performance highlights and touch on the current macro environment. After that Andy will provide an operational financial update. Phil Koosed, our Chief Strategy Officer; Jake Himmelstein, BAMKO’s President; and Dominic Leide, TOG’s President, will participate in the Q&A session following our prepared remarks. We’re very pleased to report that we exceeded our fiscal 2021 sales guidance, reaching $537 million in net sales. As you recall, we increased our top line guidance twice during 2021. From a bottom line perspective, inflationary and other cost pressures intensified as we move through the end of the fourth quarter, which impacted results. Additionally, we incurred unusual non-cash charges, which Andy will discuss in more detail in his remarks. It’s important to note that we took a range of pricing actions and cost control measures to mitigate the impact of future cost inflation as well. As we move past 2021 and finished lapping historic revenue comps, we’re now seeing improved activity and expect normalized comparisons to resume as we progress into 2022. Investments in our people, business processes, technology and product innovation underscore our ability to withstand and excel through market uncertainty. 2021 was marked by supply chain and logistic challenges, labor scarcity and market uncertainty, which some competitors were less able to mitigate. While we also faced these challenges, were doing so with greater resilience than many. I’d like to highlight key achievements accomplished in 2021. In 2021, we established the Chief Strategy Officer role and appointed Phil Koosed, who brings his astute vision, passion and entrepreneurial spirit to the C-suite. We executed two acquisitions during the year first, welcoming Gifts By Design in January and…

Andrew Demott

Management

Thank you, Michael, and good morning, everyone. Overall, we ended the year on strong footing, both operationally and financially. We completed a number of capital investments across our distribution and manufacturing facilities to drive automation and technology enhancements, expand manufacturing capacity, reduce our costs and improve overall customer service. This includes robotics at our CID Dallas distribution center, the nearly completed upgraded robotics and our Eudora, Arkansas center and additional near shore manufacturing capacity and our third facility in Haiti. Financially, our teams executed well while managing through the effects of global macro events. Consolidated fourth quarter net sales were $142 million, compared to $145.4 million in Q4 last year. The 2.3% decline was largely due to the higher PPE sales reported in Q4 of 2020. As expected, PPE sales trended lower in Q4 of this year and $3.9 million, while Q4 of 2020 included $37.9 million. Excluding these PPE sales, our consolidated net sales increased by 28.4%. For the year, consolidated net sales exceeded our expectations up $10.3 million, or 2% to $537 million. Excluding PPE, net sales for the year increased by 26%. Turning our segment results for the fourth quarter, uniforms-related products net sales declined by 19% to $63.3 million compared to 2020. We saw returned to the more normalized legacy PPE sales levels of $1 million versus the Q4 2020 spike in PPE sales of $24.2 million. Excluding PPE sales, our net sales in this segment increased by 15.4% in the fourth quarter. And as Michael mentioned, mid-fourth quarter, we did see a slowdown activity across both healthcare and non-healthcare uniforms due to the overall market uncertainty. Our promotional product ended Q4 with sales of $63 million. Note that Q4 had less than $3 million in total PPE sales compared to $14 million in the same…

Michael Benstock

Management

Thanks, Andy. I’m glad you have to do that portion of the script and not me. So to wrap-up, we’re very proud of our 101-year old company award winning more global than ever serving some of the largest brands in America. Our core business continues to grow, posting consistent long-term growth, double-digit top line and 20% EBITDA, EPS, CAGR since 2015 in terms of our growth, our adaptability, our long-term strategic planning and our – I believe our entrepreneurial mindset are key strengths for our business. We’re executing more than ever against a clear strategic vision for Superior future growth, scaling our organization to leverage higher-margin opportunities, capturing market share and expanding our multi-channel region acquiring our branch solution offerings. I’d like to update our guidance to ensure the most accurate reflection of our outlook moving forward. We do this periodically. It’s appropriate we do it now having a pass-through 2021 with all of its diversion of PPE and non-PPE, and I know it can be somewhat confusing sometimes. But here’s how we feel about the future. Our previous guidance for the period from here and 2021 through 2025 was based on the assumption that 2021 sales would be approaching $525 million. That’s where we set the floor. With final net sales of $537 million, in fact, in 2021, our updated guidance is as follows. The Uniform segment is expected to grow organically at a CAGR of at least 10% through 2025, driven by continued growth in the healthcare portion of the Uniform segments as well as taking market share in the non-healthcare HPI division and leverage the BAMKO sales team to increase our penetration of the market. BAMKO is projecting at least an 11% CAGR during the same period, and TOG is expected to grow at an increased CAGR of at least 23% through 2025. We expect at least a 12% CAGR for SGC on a consolidated basis through 2025. And including acquisitions, we expect to exceed $1 billion in net sales by 2025 and operating margins to consistently exceed 10% by 2024. With all that said, we’ll now open the line for questions. I want to remind you that we have Dominic from TOG; and Jake from BAMKO; and Phil, who is our Chief Strategy Officer, online. So if you want to direct any of your questions to any one of us, go ahead.

Operator

Operator

We will now begin the question-and-answer session. And our first question will come from Kevin Steinke with Barrington Research. Please go ahead.

Kevin Steinke

Analyst

Hey, good morning, everyone.

Michael Benstock

Management

Good morning, Kevin.

Kevin Steinke

Analyst

I wanted to start off by asking about the Omicron variant and you obviously call that out in relation to your Uniform segment. And it doesn’t seem like it had much of an impact here, given the strong sales in the quarter. But did you see any impact at all on your other two businesses that is BAMKO or The Office Gurus in the quarter or early in 2022?

Michael Benstock

Management

Good, good question. Good morning Kevin. Let me let Jake answer the BAMKO portion and Dominic is here, he’ll answer the TOG portion of that.

Jake Himelstein

Analyst

Hey, Kevin, how are you? Certainly, as it relates to BAMKO, we saw some headwinds in the fourth quarter, right, a lot of events canceled, in-person meetings canceled due to the Omicron variant. And that certainly had an impact, right? Obviously, our results were great nonetheless. But we’re seeing that come back in a big way. We’ve never seen people as excited about in-person events, big conferences as they are right now, now that Omicron is largely past us. We think the tailwinds are huge. So the headwinds we faced in Q4 have turned into tailwinds in Q1, and we’re really excited about what that means in terms of conference event giveaways, in-person meetings, held back to in-person RFP meetings, which is all really exciting to us.

Michael Benstock

Management

Dominic, why don’t you jump in on TOG?

Dominic Leide

Analyst

Sure. Hi, Kevin. Yeah, we were definitely affected. We started seeing higher levels at TOG of absenteeism when Omicron hit our locations late in fourth quarter and some of that did carry over until just recently. We saw our absenteeism rates double or even more than double in some cases, which obviously that affects our recruiting, which limited our ability to effectively backfill for that absenteeism. Fortunately, though, like here in the U.S., we’ve seen a steep decline in COVID cases over the past several weeks in all the countries that we operate from. So now we’re back to normal absenteeism levels.

Kevin Steinke

Analyst

All right. That’s helpful commentary on both ones. Thanks. So I wanted to ask about inflation. Obviously, we’ve been hearing that it’s been worsening and is – what – how do you feel about your ability to catch up or mitigate inflation? Are you seeing any stabilization? You mentioned last quarter that you did a price increase in the fourth quarter and then you – I think you said price increases on this call. So are you implementing more and just how you’re thinking about your ability to mitigate inflationary pressures?

Michael Benstock

Management

Right. I’ll take that one for all of our businesses, really it’s – we did for the Uniform segments, put a price increase that was largely effective on December 1. And we feel that that on a go-forward basis covered all the inflationary challenges that we were seeing up to that point in the marketplace, and that we could proceed over the coming months in terms of pricing. We have seen a little bit of a settling down in prices that come down much or hardly at all. But at least they’ve settled down to a level that, that we feel comfortable that we have well covered. We’re not anticipating at this point any other price increases, but we’ll largely be watching that to make sure that we’re staying ahead of it, that’s on the uniform side. On the BAMKO side, every one of their deals is priced based on current prices that they’re able to walk in for each deal. So in their case, at least for more than 80% of their business, they’re able to cover their price on every single deal and ensure that they can have the gross margin that they hope to get. TOG raised prices to their customers. Dominic, why don’t you speak to that a little bit?

Dominic Leide

Analyst

Sure. So yeah, we were seeing inflationary pressure also. So we did, like Michael said, we implemented our first widespread price increase actually this quarter for the first time in our history, which is going to allow us to recover most of what we’ve experienced so far and then we’ll just continue to make necessary adjustments as we go forward.

Michael Benstock

Management

Jake, did you have anything to add with respect to BAMKO?

Jake Himelstein

Analyst

I think you got it.

Kevin Steinke

Analyst

All right, great. So for The Office Gurus, is that just labor cost inflation that you’re experiencing? Is that kind of the main area or?

Dominic Leide

Analyst

Yeah, good question. So labor is part of it, but it’s also technology. We’re – we were seeing increased prices from just about every vendor that we deal with. So labor is a piece of it, but it’s also from our vendors as well.

Kevin Steinke

Analyst

Okay, thanks.

Michael Benstock

Management

It’s important to note, Kevin, that interestingly, we’re not in the habit of doing price increases, right? We – apparel, you know on the uniform side has been in a deflationary cycle for the last 30 years. So for the opportunity to be able to raise prices, is what we would expect there would be some pushback in the marketplace for the fact that we’re doing that, but not in the uniform business nor Dominic’s business, nor in Jake’s business. Have we seen any pushback from our customers with respect to our price increases? I mean, they’re seeing it in everything they buy and every service that they buy, not just products, but services as well. So it’s not unheard of. It’s kind of the course of the day. We’re hoping that the effects of what’s going on in Russia and Ukraine right now, don’t wait even more price increases. But as they do, I think we’re – we’ll be prepared to do them and I think again, we’ll have very little pushback from customers.

Kevin Steinke

Analyst

All right. Thanks for that. And then so you obviously talked about the slowdown in the second half of the fourth quarter for the Uniform segment related to Omicron. And – but now you’re seeing activity pick up again. You had talked on last – the previous quarter’s call about expecting to see some significant RFP activity in 2022. Is that still the case? Do you believe is anything been or has anything been thrown off meaningfully?

Michael Benstock

Management

Yeah, I’ll speak to the slowdown and what these guys jump in on what they’re seeing. But we definitely did see a slowdown. I don’t think it was only related to Omicron. I think it was also related to the fact that many of our customers who had stockpile during the early parts of the pandemic were bleeding off some of their inventories and bringing their inventories down to more normalized levels. And we’re seeing the benefit of that. So on the uniform side of the business, we’re definitely seeing more RFPs than ever. We’re also seeing a fair amount of consolidation within that business. So we’re offering ourselves out there. I mean, the great thing is we’re sitting with pretty large inventories. So we’re able to service people, even though there’s all kinds of supply chain issues, I believe, in most instances, we’re in better shape than much of our competition is. So it’s great to be on an RFP, and also have products sitting on the shelf when your customers needed. I’ll let Dominic and Jake jump in on their businesses.

Dominic Leide

Analyst

Yeah. So….

Jake Himelstein

Analyst

I can jump in real quick, Dom. So on the BAMKO side, I think one of the things we’re seeing here is that there are a lot of procurement and marketing departments who are quite honestly just anxious about what the future holds for their providers and brand and merchandise. And I think the entire last two years of COVID has opened their eyes and now is our provider going to be here long-term. And I think we provide a really strong alternative, not just because we have all the technical capabilities, whether it be sourcing or technology or distribution, but also the strength of our balance sheet is really appealing to procurement departments. And so we really like where we’re positioned. The RFP activity has been strong, as we’ve seen in the last two years, a lot of companies going out to bid and we continue – we expect to continue to see that over the course of 2022.

Dominic Leide

Analyst

Yeah, and for The Office Gurus, we continue to capitalize on tremendous tailwind in terms of demand for our services. We continue to see a lot of activity from existing clients, who are growing their business with us, as well as new opportunities. And I think a big part of that is just one of the things that COVID made companies realize, it doesn’t really matter where the work is being performed, as long as it’s being performed well, and our team continues to step up and just do a great job in providing great service to our clients and it’s resulting in more activity.

Kevin Steinke

Analyst

Great.

Michael Benstock

Management

Yeah, I feel great for Phil to actually speak to what’s happening in the world of people trying to get their branding messages out there and how fewer alternatives they have today. So can you jump in on that and…?

Phil Koosed

Analyst

Yeah. So when you look at the overall landscape of any corporation trying to get their message out, you saw a pretty dramatic shift, obviously, over the last probably 10 years from traditional advertisement, like TV or billboard ad, or magazine ads, or newspaper ads to digital advertisement. And what we’ve seen over the last year, is actually kind of quite a dramatic shift out of some of the digital. And we look at it, we got the benefit of that earlier move over the last 10 years in the sense that people were saying TV is no longer the powerhouse that it was. And so therefore marketing dollars and corporate messaging dollars are going elsewhere. But now we’re getting the secondary benefit. I think when you look at it from the standpoint of everything that’s happening with Apple privacy laws, and how that’s affected Facebook and Instagram’s ability to actually target customers, what Google is doing with the cookies, changes they’re making, it’s just getting harder and harder to target customers, and therefore, it’s getting more expensive to target customers’ messaging. So I think we’ve seen the benefit of that. I think we’ll continue to see the benefit of that in the next year or two to come as additional advertising just becomes a bit less targeted and effective as it was prior.

Kevin Steinke

Analyst

Okay, that’s really interesting color. Thanks. And so, obviously, BAMKO has been posting strong results here and the outlook sounds very favorable. So just with regard to the updated guidance, you just very slightly lowered the outlook for BAMKO to a 11% from 12% over the long-term timeframe here. Is that just again, a function of the higher base of revenue you saw in 2021 versus original expectations?

Michael Benstock

Management

Absolutely. Yeah, you nailed it. The 11% from 2020 to 2026 that we’re now projecting is due to the fact that we exceeded the guidance in 2021. So basically, raising the floor that we’re using, just as you suggested.

Kevin Steinke

Analyst

Okay, thanks. I want to ask on the healthcare side of the uniform business, how much clinical labor shortages, especially nurses how that plays into your ability to sell into the healthcare institutions, or that that’s actually helping your pipeline, because maybe healthcare institutions view a really good uniform product as a way to attract or retain nurses and other clinicians?

Michael Benstock

Management

Al right. I think you’ve got our marketing down, Pat now, Kevin, that is absolutely so. Yes, yeah, there’s a huge shortage, there’s less healthcare workers in the marketplace, there’s been a lot of retirement and exits to the tune of recent stat, I read something about a half million less than they were up to 12 million healthcare workers, when the actual need is somewhere around 15 million. I know the healthcare nursing programs are – schools are pumping out looking to expand to meet that need, as well as the medical colleges and universities around the country. But yes, it is a strategy to increase employee retention and they use many methodologies to do so. I mean, obviously, pay scales have come up. But uniform is an important component of that as well. And whether it’s giving somebody more sets, or providing their uniform, so they don’t have to actually buy it, or providing them a more fashionable uniform. In the case of whether it’s indie or it’s CID, that’s being bought at retail, all those options are on the table. And hospitals certainly are – and healthcare workers are looking at things differently than they might have some time ago. We still feel that as well as the prognosis is for the future for TOG and for BAMKO. BAMKO and I lump with that HPI because their sales efforts are together now. But in our healthcare uniform space, particularly at CID, with international being a major focus of theirs, omni-channel being absolute focus of entering all channels and being important at all levels of a customer’s buying decision. I think you’re going to see that division of ours over the long haul be very, very – see some very stellar growth from that. We have high hopes that. We’ll certainly be talking more about that in future releases and earnings calls and so on. The healthcare market is something that we feel is growing. It’s not – we might have invested in healthcare, pretty mature business, but the market itself is not mature, it’s evolving greatly. In the price points, people are paying and the diversity of products that they’re looking for, and for the partners that they’re looking for to help them get to the next level.

Kevin Steinke

Analyst

Thanks, that’s helpful. I wanted to ask, again, in relation to the Uniform segment. Do you feel like that business is on track for 2022 specifically to be around that longer-term 10% organic growth rate? Or should we think about maybe that business more kind of ramping up towards a growth rate more gradually and over the longer-term timeframe that you’ve discussed?

Andrew Demott

Management

Kevin, our guidance really is that 10% is an average for the five years. I would say that, while we, as Michael mentioned, we’re seeing tremendous increases in the RFP activity as BAMKO sales team starts to penetrate the market as well as the number of opportunities we’re working on. But it’s going to take a little bit of time into the year for that to start hitting our revenues. So I would go with the ramping up model as you referred to.

Michael Benstock

Management

And I don’t think we’re going to be all that far off the expectation that you’re asking us to set. Our goal is certainly over the long haul to exceed all these numbers, Kevin, and it’d be nice to get started with a great year. We have some opportunities that we’re working on that could certainly get us there and some of those are later in the year, some of those earlier in the year, but we’ll keep you posted. And I think you’ll see our results as we continue the year. The – it – we spoke about the second half of the first quarter being kind of just a slow down to an extent, because of all the factors that we spoken about, we saw a little bit of that in the beginning of first quarter as well. I can tell you that by the middle of March – middle of February, rather through to date, things are looking much more normalized. And even, we’re hoping to be able to take care of some pent-up demand as well.

Kevin Steinke

Analyst

Okay, great. That’s helpful. And lastly, I just want to ask about your new efforts in Europe with regard to driving sales for CID. Any update on that and any potential disruption there, just given the events going on in Ukraine?

Michael Benstock

Management

Actually, our warehouses in Poland, where there’s been a great influx of Ukrainians, we’ve done some things, and our actual European sales lead has done some things to help some Ukrainian people who own uniform shops in Ukraine get settled in Poland and Hungary. But we are seeing a little – a lot more increased activity and interest in our home warehouse as a result, obviously, all these 2 million people leaving Ukraine and being dispersed throughout still mostly Eastern Europe, but we expect to make their way West, they’re going to need more healthcare workers to help those people. And some of those people themselves are healthcare workers who will find employment locally. But we are seeing increased activity. We don’t expect a negative impact. Quite frankly, we weren’t selling a lot in Russia. So the fact that we can’t sell in Russia now, because whatever fans there might be isn’t going to hurt us at all. Poland is a customer and we don’t expect Poland to be diminished at all Ukraine. We had a couple of relationships there. We’re working on. We weren’t really embedded in Ukraine, as we would like to we are. Our warehouse is up and running now, though. It is fully stocked with product. And it is servicing anyone in Europe who would like to see us shipped to them from Europe.

Kevin Steinke

Analyst

Okay, thank you for all the insight, as usual. Appreciate it.

Michael Benstock

Management

Okay, Kevin. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Our next question will come from . Please go ahead.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

Good morning. I was wondering two questions. First, whether you could just talk a little bit about cash flow guidance for 2022. And second, just going back to the core uniform business and you’re just talking about the 10% growth target? Maybe talk about are you expecting to gain share – market share? Are you – is customer retention going well? And when we actually start seeing more of that 10% growth materialize?

Michael Benstock

Management

So speak about the uniform side of it more, and then I’ll turn it over to Andy for the cash flow side. So on the uniform side, our retention rates are still very high. They – they’ve been over 95% on a year-over-year basis for many, many years, on average while there are more RFPs out there and even more RFPs with respect to the business that we’ve owned for a long time. Keep in mind that when you have a 5% market share approximately, and 95% you don’t have, if it’s going out to RFP, you actually have an opportunity to grow your business. And that’s how we look at it. We think we’re in a very admiral position. I don’t believe there’s anybody out there that we compete with lower cost sourcing capabilities, who has managed through logistical challenges, as well as we have, who has people on the ground to make sure that what they promised to their customers can actually happen in all these countries that we operate in. So I’m not concerned about business retention. I believe we’re going to retain as we have in the past 95% of our customer base, might lose some, of course. Will we gain more than we lose? Absolutely confident of that. So it – the second half of this year, I think Andy spoke about, particularly in our branded uniform business, you’re going to see some improvement. We know that because we’ve already won business that will ship in the second half of the year. Our sales cycles are pretty long one, but there’s – these are sales that materializes, just – revenue that will come about in the second half of the year as a result of efforts that began almost a year, year-and-a-half ago. So feel…

Andrew Demott

Management

Yeah. On the second part of your question, or the first part, actually, the cash flow, would you look at where we’re at going to the year, I mentioned, our CapEx was very high to the current year. I would expect that we would be back to a more normalized – just a little bit more than our normalized 2% number of revenues on that basis. From a working capital perspective, I think we’ve talked a little bit over the last several quarters about the substantial amounts we invested in inventory to be prepared for what was going on in the pandemic. And I think we’re definitely in a very strong position from our inventory levels that we will begin to work down in 2022, where there’ll be a much more favorable impact versus in 2021. I mean, our inventories that added $21 million. We use $21 million of cash to build inventory. I would expect that would have turned go the other direction. I don’t know if it will bring down $20 million in the year, but it will work towards that. From the other items from a cash flow perspective, and obviously we will continue to pursue acquisitions, those of you I can’t say per se what those amounts will be, but we will use money on that. And of course, from a dividend perspective, I mean, as Michael mentioned, we do recognize that as an important part of our value proposition, I would expect we would continue to pay dividends. And if our results perform appropriately, we would look to increase in at the right time, but that’s a decision the Board will make as we move through the year.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

Great. Well, maybe one final question just on TOG, that that business is at a phenomenal last couple of years and the guidance is very positive. Is there anything specific you’re doing to try to maybe it’s a little more commentary on specifics on what we should look forward to make sure that business is on track?

Michael Benstock

Management

I’m going to let Dominic jump in, tell you about some of the infrastructure things we’re doing and things are done from a customer standpoint to grow and retain jumping them.

Dominic Leide

Analyst

Yeah, great question, Tim. Like Michael mentioned last year was a record setting year for TOG, really excited about the future as well. So what we’re doing from a capacity standpoint to make sure that we can continue to support our growth. Last year, we started looking at additional buildings in all three countries that we operate from, that was our belief in Jamaica. And then we signed leases there to increase our capacity and center capacity. And we also, as Michael mentioned, we’re entering the Dominican Republic. Together, with the Dominican and the expansion in our current countries, we’re going to increase our incentive capacity by about 1,500 seats. As we enter the DR, we always enter a new territory conservatively. We’re going to answer with about a couple of 100 seats in Santiago. Once we prove that we can hire the same caliber of employees that we hire today to support our customer base, then we’ll look to expand in the Dominican as well.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

From a customer standpoint, Dominic, what are you doing to grow your customer base?

Dominic Leide

Analyst

Yeah. So we – fortunately, for us, we’ve been able, like I mentioned earlier, we’ve seen a lot of activity in demand for our services. I mean, I think nearshore in general, there’s a lot of demand. But the support that we’ve been providing to our current customer base is elevated. I think our status and our brand amongst our brokers who bring us new business. We’re seeing a tremendous amount of activity from new customers in specific industries that we’re going to look to grow this year, and then our current client base have grown exponentially with us also. So as a real testament to our team and what they do day in and day out to provide excellent service to our clients, and I just don’t see that slowing down.

Michael Benstock

Management

Yeah, I think there’s another part of this. Dominic did mention the auto brag a little bit. But it’s not just brokers who are bringing us business. Our reputation is bringing us businesses well. We – the word is getting out about what we do? What we do well? The awards we win. How well we treat our people? How well we service our customers? And whether it’s through social media that we posted, or just word of mouth, among people who could are in a position to buy our services. We’re seeing more and more opportunities and ever come to us that aren’t through brokers, that we have literally no sales expense for.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

Is the gating factor on growth, the ability to add the qualified seats?

Michael Benstock

Management

That’s…

Andrew Demott

Management

Absolutely right.

Michael Benstock

Management

Certainly. So, we’re spending a lot of time now in strategic planning on where we are next, how we grow it? How far ahead of the curve do we want to stay? I think I remember speaking about TOG and speaking about – we’re going to grow our business by 6%, by 8%, by $4 million, by $5 million, by $10 million, you know up in a much bigger numbers, which requires a lot more people. Dominic spoke about adding – having the capability of adding 1,500 seats. Well, that’s roughly $45 million of revenue, just north of $45 million in revenue. We got to stay ahead of it, at least, by 18 months, because we do get pops every once in a while with a couple of 100 seats somebody wants or 100 seats or someone wants to grow, or multiple customers each want to grow at 50 or 100 or 200 seats. It’s been a very dynamic environment. And Dominic, in every case, has exceeded whatever numbers he’s ever put out there, expect he will in the future, too.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst

Great. Well, thank you very much and keep up the good work.

Michael Benstock

Management

Thank you.

Andrew Demott

Management

Thanks.

Michael Benstock

Management

Okay.

Operator

Operator

This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Mr. Michael Benstock, for any closing remarks. Please go ahead.

Michael Benstock

Management

Thank you. I appreciate your time today. I know it’s a lot to absorb, in a short amount of time with PPE, without PPE, all the divisional differences, I think, we – we’ve done everything we can to try to make it as easy for our investors to understand where we’re headed. I look forward to speaking to you next quarter, and thank you for your continued support. We really do appreciate it. Take care.

Operator

Operator

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today’s presentation. You may now disconnect.