EMERGE Commerce Ltd. (ECOM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone. Your host today are Ghassan Halazon, Founder and CEO of EMERGE Commerce; and Maurice Finn, COO of EMERGE Golf. Before we begin, I'm required to provide the following statement respecting forward-looking information, which is made on behalf of EMERGE and all of its representatives on this call. Certain statements made on this call will contain forward-looking information, which is based on our opinions, estimates and assumptions in light of our experience and perception of historical trends, current conditions and expected future developments as well as other factors that we currently believe are reasonable in the circumstances. Actual results could differ materially from a conclusion, forecast or expectation in the forward-looking information. We caution investors not to rely on the forward-looking information. And during today's call, all figures are in Canadian dollars unless otherwise stated. And with that, I'm going to pass the mic to Ghassan Halazon.

Thank you very much, Dasha. Good morning, everyone. Hope summer is going great so far. We really appreciate you taking the time to tune in to our corporate update webcast here today. Again, my name is Ghassan Halazon. I'm the Founder and CEO of EMERGE Commerce. And with that, let's jump right into the update. So there's a fair amount of newcomers. There's over 50 people on this call and growing here as I look at it. So it's great to have a nice attendance of what seems like a mix of old and new investors. And so we're excited to share more about our progress. For those of you who don't know, I'll spend a minute on our background. EMERGE Commerce is a Canadian portfolio of premium brands across grocery and golf verticals. We're primarily Canadian play. We also have some U.S. business as well. EMERGE pro forma revenue is about $27 million right now. We have a target gross margin of about 40%. We are a meaningfully EBITDA positive -- adjusted EBITDA positive company. We came out with our Q2 preliminary results earlier today. We'll share that in a second. But we are now -- we've now crossed the positive territory on the adjusted EBITDA front. We have four brands across two verticals, those being grocery and golf. Let me touch on our preliminary highlights, the big news today and sort of a glimpse at our early preliminary unaudited Q2 results. As you can see, Q2 revenue increased to $8.3 million. That's a 79% growth year-over-year. Of course, that does include Tee 2 Green under EMERGE for its first quarter since we acquired them on April 5. Adjusted EBITDA is expected to be between $900,000 and $1 million, which is a $1 million-plus swing year-over-year, tremendous momentum on the profitability front. Cash at June 30 was at $3.5 million. For reference, we were at $2.7 million at the end of Q1 '25, which is March 31, and $2.2 million in Q2 '24. Notably, this increase in cash is despite the fact that we dished out $1.1 million for the upfront to acquire Tee 2 Green. So cash flow generation in Q2 is in full swing. Now just to touch on our core brand portfolio. truLOCAL on the grocery side is really sort of our flagship brand. It is our Canadian market leader in meat and seafood subscription. We deliver grass-fed beef, organic chicken, seafood direct to consumers, what we call D2C. We're the only national player. We operate three regional hubs across Ontario, BC and Alberta and with shipping across Canada. truLOCAL is EMERGE's largest brand by revenue. And to give you a sense of the split, we're roughly around 55% to 60% on the truLOCAL side and about 40% to 45% on the golf side overall. The business is seeing accelerated growth throughout this year as well as on the revenue side, but as well as tremendous profit growth now that we've both rightsized the business and really driven top line. We've seen a lot of e-commerce companies through the years, both at EMERGE and externally. truLOCAL has one of the best customer lifetime value to customer acquisition cost ratios. We are -- which, of course, as many of you know, is the holy grail of building a sustainable, growing, profitable e-commerce business. So just to give you a sense, the CLTV at truLOCAL is approaching $2,000. This has continuously been going up as more and more people spend and stick around. It's only costing us about $124 to acquire a customer. If you looked at a few presentations ago, that number was closer to $154 per customer, and the CLTV was closer to $1,700. So things are trending exactly where we want them to be and frankly, better than our expectations. The big gorilla in the meat and seafood subscription space is butcherbox.com in the U.S. They are not in Canada. There's a smaller Butcher Box company that is unrelated to them. But the Butcher Box of the U.S. is really the market leader. It's a $500 million revenue business. It's private and it's mostly bootstrap, which is a testament not only to the team there, but really to the model, the stickiness of the model that allows for such growth and profitability at scale with relatively minimal funding. So it is rumored to be between $500 million $1 billion valuation in terms of some of the secondaries and things that they've been doing, but we don't have the exact information. But nonetheless, it is a 1x to 2x revenue business. Just to touch on the special trend or acceleration we're seeing this year, of course, is in part to the growing support local movement that's sweeping the country. A lot of brands, as you may have all seen and heard and read about, have piggybacked or bandwagoned on the buy Canadian trend. I see a lot of sites adding the -- by Canadian logo and sticker and that sort of thing. And that's great. I would probably do the same if I were them. The reality is that there is no other brand in Canada that represents the face of being true to the local game that truLOCAL does, right? It's -- heck, it's in our name. So we are one of the faces of the Canadian -- the buy Canadian movement. We've been talking that talk all throughout. We've actually sacrificed other growth avenues that allowed us to potentially grow in other directions, for example, taking on Wagyu beef from Australia. We've decided against that throughout the years, we stayed dedicated to our mission of supporting local farmers and health-conscious audience that really cares about the transparency of their food source. So we've done that, and now we're reaping the rewards from both the customer side and suppliers, and we're seeing that across the business. We've revamped our site. We've doubled down on high ROI marketing opportunities. And our slogan of nationally loved and locally sourced seems to be resonating. We don't view this as a moment in time only. We think this is the way Canadians feel and their sentiment is a permanent shift and is something that we stand to gain from. Now moving to the golf side, and I'd like to introduce the COO of EMERGE Golf, which entails our three golf brands. Maurice Finn, who I've known for many years now, probably 12, 13 years, we've been together. We've been in battle together across e-commerce in various -- across various brands, some of which we've sold for 2x, some of which we've cleaned up. And of course, he's led the charge and done a phenomenal job on the golf side and including with the recent Tee 2 Green acquisition. Maurice, I'd love for you to jump in and give everyone some background on our golf portfolio and then jump into the acquisition performance.

Yes. Thank you, Ghassan, and thank you, everyone, for joining. As Ghassan mentioned, I oversee EMERGE Golf, and I'm here today to give you guys a bit more insight into our golf business. Up first is Tee 2 Green, our latest acquisition, which is a profitable golf and apparel equipment business with a 30-year-plus track record with diversified streams of income. They have two retail stores, one in Barrie and the other in Orillia, Ontario, where they're headquartered along with their warehouse. They do about 60 to 70 pop-up retail golf shows in Ontario throughout the golf season. They have their own online Shopify store, which is tee2green.net. And they also do custom fittings and simulator rentals at their retail stores. And they are an authorized retailer for some of the biggest names in golf like Callaway, TaylorMade, Adidas, Cobra and more, and they've had long-term partnerships in place with these manufacturers. And they have their own private label brand, Northern Spirit, primarily focused on golf bags and accessories, which drives a lot of high gross margin for the business. Next up is JustGolfStuff. This is our discount golf apparel and equipment marketplace, allowing retailers across Canada to sell their goods online, where we're providing the audience and logistics to facilitate those sales. And this has been EMERGE's fastest-growing brand over the last five years. This has grown at 10x. And then finally, UnderPar, this is our golf experiences marketplace. This allows golfers access to discounted green fees as well as stay-and-play packages and international travel, where we're primarily focused in Ontario, Canada, where we're the market leader as well as California in the U.S. This business has seen a bit of a comeback over the last couple of years. We've seen double-digit organic growth as well as improved profitability in 2024, and we're seeing those trends continue in 2025. We actually do see a weakening economic climate has been beneficial to UnderPar. It was a business that was actually borne out of the recession in '08, '09. And golfers are also going to continue to golf, and they're going to just find more affordable ways to do that, and that's something that UnderPar allows them to do. Next slide, please, Ghassan. So a bit more about Tee 2 Green and obviously, the overview of the transaction and why we looked at closing this deal. First of all, Tee 2 Green in 2024, they generated $6.4 million in revenue, adjusted EBITDA of $1 million and unaudited net income of $700,000. We closed this deal in April 2025, as Ghassan has mentioned, and we paid 2.2x trailing EBITDA for the business. The purchase price was $2.2 million, including $1.1 million cash at close, $900,000 deferred consideration over five years and $200,000 in merged shares. And as part of the deal, we also acquired $2.4 million in golf inventory, and we're able to renegotiate an 8-year repayment plan on this inventory, which has given us a great cash flow boost in '25 and beyond. Now why do we close the deal? Well, we knew that there'd be a lot of synergies, obviously, between our existing golf businesses, UnderPar and JustGolfStuff with Tee 2 Green. Tee 2 Green is more of an old-school business. So the first thing we wanted to unlock was basically scaling digital ads through our digital marketing team in-house. There's a lot of cross-sell opportunities. leveraging our UnderPar audience and e-mail list to drive traffic for Tee 2 Green. As part of the transaction, like I mentioned, Tee 2 Green is an authorized retailer. They have these licensing agreements with these major manufacturers that we've now inherited and they apply now to JustGolfStuff, which gives more validity to that business as well as that there's some savings between the business using Tee 2 Green shipping volume to combine with EMERGE to get more volume discounts and using EMERGE as shared resources for further OpEx savings. Next slide, please, Ghassan. And I guess, how do we do in our first 90 days owning Tee 2 Green? I think we'd like to call it a home run first quarter with much larger-than-expected growth, really tremendously exceeding management expectations, which were more in line with the business being flat or showing slight growth. Our preliminary numbers are showing $3.3 million in revenue for Tee 2 Green in Q2 '25 versus $2.5 million in 2024. That's a 34% year-over-year growth. Our net income is showing at $800,000 versus $567,000 in Q2 2024, which is 41% year-over-year growth. And what's also been really exciting is we've been easily comfortably able to recoup the $1.1 million purchase price we paid at closing within the first 90 days of ownership. And really, the early unlock for us has really been those digital ads. Our digital marketing team in-house has done an incredible job of creating some golf ad data sets, which are primarily driving a lot of traffic to Tee 2 Green's retail road shows as well as their retail stores. And we've actually seen a great conversions when we utilize that underpart e-mail list to also drive traffic to these road shows. I think another thing to mention is the team worked tremendously hard to close this deal in April. The timing was essential, getting this closed just in time for the Ontario golf season. And although we've unlocked these early synergies in Q2, we do feel there's various other ones we can lock in Q3 and beyond. So we're really excited for what comes next. So thank you all for your time. I'll pass you back to Ghassan.

Thank you, Maurice. And I must say that we were all taken by surprise seeing some of those ads that the brilliant marketing team have come up with. Some of these ads have had 800 shares individually, and we just -- it's phenomenal to see that we can actually take sort of an old-school cash flow business and apply these ad sets and the playbook that we've had and learned from the golf team and to achieve these sorts of ROIs early on is phenomenal. So credit to you and the team.

Thank you.

All right. Moving back to the overall picture. So we're introducing essentially what we're calling EMERGE 3.0 at this stage. And for those following the journey, EMERGE was once upon a time a diversified portfolio of pretty eclectic group of brands. We were decentralized by design. We had low synergy. We had a large HQ team and an M&A team sourcing all sorts of different businesses. We were working with various founders, and we took on a fair amount of debt at the peak of the cycle and what ended up being a very unfavorable macro with interest rates going up with all these businesses and most of e-commerce coming down. It was the perfect storm. That took us to EMERGE 2.0, ushered in the era of heads down, quiet, let's get s*** done type of work. That was our sort of turnaround 2.0 business playbook that said we're going to centralize. We're going to really focus on streamlining HQ and ops. We're going to parachute into running these brands with myself leading the truLOCAL business, with Maurice leading the golf business. And then we're going to essentially sell all noncore assets and pay down debt with the cash received. We've eliminated over 80% of our debt exposure through these tough exercises, I might add. And then importantly, with the heads down work, we wanted to return to organic growth, something we achieved in 2024 and, of course, continue to accelerate in 2025. And of course, the climate has been more favorable, at least to emerge. Interest rates have come down a fair amount, not quite where they once were, but they're definitely starting to come down. But also the macro, as we said, we're starting to see the support Canadian trend really push truLOCAL to new heights. And then on the golf side, that's a recessionary thriving style business. So 3.0 is where we're at, which is the era now of going back to strategic growth. And I might add disciplined growth is at the forefront of this new chapter. So we are, of course, focused on remaining centralized, focused on our core competencies and our areas of expertise within grocery, golf and applying our e-commerce and digital playbook to various brands within these two sectors. Tee 2 Green was basically our first tuck-in an accretive, well-negotiated, well-executed transaction, both in closing it and ultimately here in the early going with Maurice and team in Q2. The focus in this new chapter is cash flow generation above all else. We are really zoned in on driving and growing cash flow and ultimately growing up as a company. And of course, with profit, with cash flow comes the ability to secure longer-term, cheaper credit facilities that we believe will be meaningful for cash flow -- further cash flow improvement and ultimately open up the door to future M&A. Of course, we're finally at the point where I know a lot of businesses, especially in Canada, are going through a tough time, and this is a tough macro for many between the tariffs, between the recession. We're fortunate enough at this stage that EMERGE has a portfolio that actually not only resists in these sorts of times, but is actually thriving, growing and both top line and profitability as well as cash. So let's zone in a little bit on our sort of capital-efficient acquisition criteria and sort of starting to think through reigniting specifically tuck-in acquisitions within grocery and golf. What are we looking for? Well, I think Tee 2 Green fit the bill perfectly. We're looking for durable businesses that have had long-standing track records, been around for a while, been through ups and downs, have been tested and are here today and are generating cash flow today or will under EMERGE pretty immediately. That is critical for anything we touch. stable organic growth. They don't need to be growing too fast on their own. We have our playbook to apply them. So Tee 2 Green was more of a flattish business. And obviously, it's still early, but driving high double-digit growth is something we were able to do by applying our expertise in technology and specifically in digital ad technology. So that is an exciting thing to do, and we want more of that. Recurring relationships goes without saying we want something stable and consistent from a customer profile. Target EBITDA right now, pretty much the sweet spot, I will say, is $1 million to $2 million in EBITDA. Could we go a little below $1 million? Yes. But of course, we want to make sure there's enough meat on the bone and that there's immediate synergy. unlike with EMERGE 1.0 or the original model, we weren't expecting or factoring in any meaningful synergy. One business was a pet business. The other one was an experiences business. The other one was a groceries business. So they had nothing to do with each other. And we didn't have -- and plus, we had other management folks running those businesses. The founders were continuing on. And I think we've established that we want a more centralized strategy where we're bringing our people with deep domain expertise to come in and run and grow these businesses alongside folks potentially that may bring great knowledge in their own respective companies. So we just want to be involved. In other words, we're not looking to be hands off as some roll-up plays are. And then lastly, in general, what we're looking for is a very reasonable price. We think this is a buyer-friendly market. We want flexible terms that allow us to not only grow this business but to cash flow it and ultimately find a reasonable payback. So we feel that unlike in the old cycle or the, let's call it, the pandemic times, we were buying businesses anywhere from 5x to 6x EBITDA. We're kind of looking at about 0.5x that range. We've proven it with Tee 2 Green that these types of businesses exist. And at the same time, I think we represent something to a lot of these founders. Let's take the example of the owner sole proprietary at Tee 2 Green was a retiring founder is looking to move to Florida and wanted a real custodian of the business. That's the word he used when he called me. for this deal. And he believed in us. We'd worked with him on the JustGolfStuff side through Maurice and essentially was looking for a way to get a reasonable deal and with trustworthy people that are hardworking, that will respect the staff, respect the brand. And I think they saw that in us. So that's more the intangible of how we deal with people, how we treat people. Of course, shareholders that have been with us for a long time know that we've been here through thick and thin. We treat people the right way. We communicate, we're transparent. So a lot of that philosophy we bring to M&A as well. So now let's just talk a little bit about setting the stage about -- around the types of businesses we'd look to acquire just from a holistic sense. I take truLOCAL on our side. Obviously, there are a number of smaller competitors. truLOCAL is the largest in Canada by a fair amount as well, I might add. probably almost 2x the next largest competitor. However, there's multiple $2 million to $7 million to $8 million type players. Some are regional in certain markets. And as I said, we are the only national one per se. But there's some really good competitors that we like that we're in touch with that we think could make a good complement, good geographical expansion, classical, apply our playbook, also potentially learn something from them. We're also interested in the adjacent pet food space. So think truLOCAL for pets in a way. Actually, interestingly enough, Butcher Box in the U.S. actually has a butcher box for pets box that they've come up with. They didn't acquire anyone, but we certainly would consider that, and we've spoken to a number of pet D2C subscription brands. That's a space that we like and know well actually. We once upon a time owned a business called WholesalePet, which we sold to Tiny was on the B2B side, it was in the U.S. It was disparate from everything else. And we thought the debt paydown made that sale make sense at the time. There's other logistics vendors, suppliers, folks in our network. If you think of the truLOCAL chain, when we ship these boxes out, we put dry ice in them, for example. So there's a lot of dry ice companies that we might consider looking at. There's corporate gifting. We talked about the 400,000-plus corporate order for a single client late Q4 and corporate gifting in the U.S., the equivalent of Butcher Box, some of you may know or have heard of, there's a company called Omaha Steaks. They do Butcher Box just for corporate, and they are also a $500 million to $1 billion company. So in Canada, we are the truLOCAL. We are the Butcher Box of Canada, if you will. I say that humbly, but we can also be the Omaha Steaks of Canada as well, right? And so that is a really exciting opportunity. When you start adding all these different facets up, it's easy to see how truLOCAL can be a $100 million-plus opportunity in Canadian grocery/food tech. We think we have the perfect anchor business and brand and team, I might add, to do so. Likewise, on the golf side, we've already gotten the engines rolling. We have a 3-brand portfolio with 400,000-plus subscribers across North America. And of course, under Maurice's leadership, we have a track record of acquiring and accelerating these golf brands with JustGolfStuff growing 10x. You got Tee 2 Green off to a great early start. And there's various areas within experiences, products, media, offline and golf technology that we believe we can form the next $100 million frontier and the next golf leader. So very exciting opportunities, two verticals, $200 million opportunities plus that's mostly in Canada. I will add, as Maurice mentioned, UnderPar is also in the U.S. And so we have a presence there that could parlay into bigger business in the U.S. over time. Now next up, when we acquire these businesses, this is just a quick primer. I'll only spend 20 seconds on this one because many of you know it. That is sort of the heart of what we look to do once we acquire a business, right? So we apply our payment processing savings towards new brands. We implement them into our e-mail marketing system. A lot of people say e-mail is dead or about to be dead. We humbly disagree. We have an amazing database of e-mail customers, and we drive traffic in all sorts of ways. So we are experts at the e-mail game. And plus, if you think of our portfolio, golf is a bit, I should say, older demographics, and it happens to be that truLOCAL is the same as well. So e-mail is actually a perfect fit for our boomer portfolio, if you will. But of course, we welcome all ages to the various businesses we have at EMERGE Commerce. So as you can see, you can go down the list, there's a lot of different savings areas. I will say this, -- when we buy within each vertical, so say, the next golf acquisition, the fact that we have these businesses together, we can leverage the golf mailing list, we can leverage our knowledge and our data sets on the advertising side. Synergy is a real thing here. We didn't have synergy before. And so we're excited to actually deep dive. The real synergy comes when you have brands that fit within a certain segment. And it's likewise with truLOCAL. Once we start acquiring competitors or adjacent brands in pets, I think there's going to be a lot of potential for synergy, both savings and growth. Now to touch on the team. In addition to myself and Maurice, of course, Dasha is on here as well. She joined as Interim CFO earlier in the year, and she's doing an excellent job. And of course, we've made significant strides as a business in no small way as a result of her work and the department's work in catching us up and lining us up for great success. I think the world of Maurice, as I've already said, he is a special operator, and we've partnered for north of a dozen years, I think. And it's great to have the type of trust and the chemistry and the complementary nature of our relationship, the Ying and the Yang. And we're surrounded by other great folks that have been with us for years as well that are not on this slide. I will also add, and I'm happy to report, we have a very well-functioning strong Board. We have Drew Green from INDOCHINO, the custom suit company that many of you, I'm sure, have heard of. Ian McKinnon, who is a former Director at Constellation Software. He was on that Board for a good 16 years. The poster child of growth by acquisitions. Ian has been a tremendous mentor and supporter of ours and of mine. As well as John Kim, who sits on the Board of WELL Health. He joined us around the time we went public. He's been a tremendous mentor as well. He's been very thoughtful with structuring and ensuring we work closely with Dasha and the finance and accounting team. He heads up the Audit Committee. In terms of sort of our share price is something we don't often comment on, quite frankly. The only thing I'll say up here on the chart up right is we're pleased after multiple years of being in the basement, so to speak, doing the work that we have some eyes on EMERGE and really people starting to pay attention to what we believe is worthwhile progress to pay attention to. And we appreciate all the outreach that we've received over the last week or so since announcing the Tee 2 Green preliminary results. It feels like a new chapter there. Obviously, we focus on doing the work, driving the results. Ultimately, the market is going to do what the market is going to do, but good to see that sort of volume and interest again in EMERGE Commerce. Notwithstanding that we're in the middle of July. So I'm really grateful. -- again, I see about 59 people on this call right now, which is a lot to ask for here, but thank you very much. We ourselves had to dust off our suits. I said to Maurice and Dasha, listen, we've got to get in front of our people. We've got to talk about what we're seeing, what we're doing. There's a lot of great action going on. And it's our obligation to come out here and spend some time with folks. By the way, we're going to be taking Q&A in a bit, so you can drop any questions in the chat. I see some already on the way, and we've received a few through investors at EMERGE Brands e-mail. So -- but if you have anything, you can drop that in because we're almost ready to take some questions here shortly. In terms of the cap table, let me just touch on -- obviously, share price is going to fluctuate, but just at a high level, we have about just under 147 million shares outstanding. RSUs options and warrants is based on the treasury method or in the money method, that's $2.9 million as of yesterday, and we have about $3.5 million cash on $7.2 million in debt, which we consider the senior debt and the convertible note. Okay. Just to recap here before we jump into a few questions. A couple of investment highlights here. We got the accelerating double-digit revenue growth, both, by the way, due to the Tee 2 Green acquisition, but our organic growth is also going strong double digit as well, which we'll report on later in August. Positive adjusted EBITDA, our strongest cash position in years, growth quarter-over-quarter in cash despite the fact that we spent $1.1 million on Tee 2 Green. We are tariff-proof, recession-proof for the most part. We are -- after all the "bad luck" that we got through the years and coming down from the pandemic and interest rates going up, it's nice to have a few cards in our favor for a change, but we're also making our own luck with doing the work and partnering across EMERGE to drive these results. We have what we believe are impeccable starting points for a bigger play, both in Food Tech under truLOCAL, our hero brand and the Canadian market leader in D2C and meat and seafood. EMERGE Golf is now a pioneer and a leader in -- a leading golf portfolio in Canada with a presence in the U.S. We have significantly lowered debt. We've wiped out almost 80% of our debt and senior debt, almost 77% of that. That means that we have a near term -- with that, combined with our profitability, we have near-term possibilities to refi the facility at a substantially lower interest rate. We have a team that's been together for a while, been through thick and thin, rolled our sleeves up, cleaned things up, brought back the growth, driven profitability. And now we've shown that we've done an accretive acquisition. We've learned from our mistakes. We've done things very carefully, very flexibly. We're driving growth here in the early going. It's very exciting. And then we're sitting on a terrific acquisition pipeline. We're starting to advance more discussions now that things are opening up. Obviously, a stronger currency for e-com means that, that also takes shape and starts making more sense to spend time here. We have multiple acquisition candidates between $750,000 to $2 million EBITDA each, and we believe we're going to be able to do so in a buyer-friendly way as we've done with Tee 2 Green. And finally, as I've said, we have a major opportunity times 2 $100 million-plus niche vertical opportunities in grocery and golf. With that, we will conclude the presentation and open it up for questions. It's a good sign. I still see 59 of you, which means no one's really dropped off, which is awesome. So thank you for that. And with that, we're going to jump into some questions. I'm going to open it up here, try to take a few and go from there. Just give me a second.

Okay. Tom B. Thank you, Tom. Amazing results. He says, does AI play a role in becoming smarter on your obvious skill sets in customer acquisition? Absolutely, we're zoned in like everyone else is and like everyone else should be on AI and what's possible. I will say that one of the reasons Meta or Facebook, Instagram, et cetera, is trading at near all-time highs is because they have done a phenomenal job of baking in AI into their ad technologies. And so what's happening is when you go niche like we are, we are seeing disproportionate gains. That's why Facebook is making more money and growing and being the success that it is today, the $1 trillion behemoth. So interestingly, when you go niche, we're finding great success with AI baked into tools like Facebook, right? And when you think Tee 2 Green, when we say an ad gets 800 shares, what's actually happening is we're targeting a certain demo, let's use the example, 40- to 65-year-old males, just as an example of an ad set in Ontario, and specifically in Sarnia, which is where one particular roadshow was. And we want them to be interested in golf. That is the level of targeting using AI algorithms and using how people click on ads and how we test these ads. So it's all being made possible by these tech giants. And so for niche opportunities like ourselves, AI in the ad space is a disproportionate strong upside potential. But I will say we are also dabbling and testing like many others are. We're testing things on the chat side for customer experience. We're testing things on the data analytics side. I know Dash has been a big proponent of working on tools to streamline our finance and accounting. And so there's a lot of that stuff that we are pretty excited to keep bringing. Another message from Jimmy K., would you consider acquisitions of any meal plan companies given the potential synergies with truLOCAL. To that, I would say, yes, we'd look at them. I think the biggest thing here is to keep in mind that we want a, as I said, a solid CLTV to CAC ratio. The problem with meal kits and meal plans and not to name names, you guys know the space well, is that they churn a lot. And the reason they churn a lot is because R&D is a big deal in that business. They got to keep reinventing the recipes and telling you, making sure every little thing in the meal kits perfect, which makes it a challenging model where people end up quitting 2x or 3x in. The beauty of the truLOCAL model, and let's take the bigger elephant, the Butcher Box $500 million bootstrap model. Why are they able to do $500 million? It's because the model -- sorry, to do so profitably, I might add. It's because the model is a sticky model. You buy your organic beef, so rather grass-fed beef, organic chicken, your seafood, you buy them every month for your family or for yourself. And you do it on autopilot and it arrives to the door and the experience is near perfect. And if you have to have -- you happen to have any sort of hiccup, the customer experience is impeccable. I encourage everyone to go check our reviews on all of our brands, by the way. We really focus on customer experience. So that is a long-winded answer, Jimmy, but we would look at a meal plan if the stats on it, if the metrics really made it stand out and made it stickier than what normal meal kits and meal plans look like. Great quarter on growth in revenues, Albert, and positioning on balance sheet. congrats. How much interest in borrowing costs does EMERGE save with each 0.25% drop in prime rate? And how does that affect EBITDA? That's a fair question. I would say that interest rate reductions are always helpful. I mean the senior debt is $5.85 million. So it wasn't -- it isn't the $25 million that it once was. So essentially, it's 0.25% of that on each rate reduction. So obviously, depending on where you are on the spectrum, I happen to think, obviously, there -- personally, I think there are going to be some additional interest rate cuts. It might be -- take a bit more time than people anticipated with some of this inflation data. I don't think we're relying on this to be a major catalyst anymore. It was helpful. We got a good chunk out of it. We have way less debt than we once did. We will welcome interest rate cuts with open arms. But the math sort of from a dollar amount perspective, maybe if we end up getting a full point or another point, we're not talking huge dollars anymore, probably 100-something thousand all in. But I think if you can save -- I think the more interesting aspect to this question is because of our profitability rising, if we can save 4 points, 4 percentage points on refinancing our current debt with, say, a bank, right? Banks tend to look at the net debt to EBITDA of the business, right? And the fact that we now have much higher EBITDA and much lower debt means the opportunity to refi this debt with groups like RBC, BMO, Scotia and National Bank, this is the type of facility that could drop 4 or 5 points. Now you're talking hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars in interest rate savings. So that's the bigger catalyst for us. Any analyst coverage yet, says anonymous attendee. What is the plan for getting the word out on the stock? Any fundraising plans? Just so you see that I read things live, right? There's no -- I wouldn't just choose a question like this for fun. So you guys can ask anything. I'm trying to get through these and give you guys as much value as I possibly can and keep things as transparent as open. We do not have any analyst coverage as of yet right now. I think certainly, the conversations are happening at these levels and at this rate of progress. It's been nice to see, I will say, generally, as a student of the small cap space, it's been nice to see a resurgence of small cap. And I think a story like ours, if you call it that, us going through the turnaround, cleaning up, starting to grow again, starting to generate cash. I think this is exciting. At the end of the day, we can only control what we can control. In terms of plans to get the word out for the stock, I think we've always been proponents of letting the work, do the talking, keeping fully accessible and transparent with investors as we are doing here in a nice mid-July update. I will also say and proud to share that we have not spent a single cent on any promotions or PR or IR driving the stock and driving the volume that you're seeing. I think all of that stuff, stuff you have to press release. And we're just happy that the work is starting to get noticed. Of course, we do think that now that our story is post turnaround mode and into strategic growth mode or I'll call it, EMERGE 3.0, we certainly want to be in front of folks. So things that we stopped doing for a few years, we're going to be doing. We're going to be in front of investors. We're going to be at conferences. We're going to be sharing our updates more regularly to the extent that we have material information and updates. So you can expect us and expect me to spend a significant amount of time in front of investors and to do so with proper organized IR initiatives. That's all I can say. But we're not -- we've never been big believers in short-term gains or any of that stuff. I'm not sure that that's what you're asking. And then in terms of fundraising plans, there are no imminent fundraising plans. We are feeling great about our cash position, our largest in years at $3.5 million, growing Q-over-Q and year-over-year and even growing versus Q4 peak season, which is still coming up. So we feel great on our cash side of things. We feel like we have some cash to explore different acquisition opportunities, maybe not a $2 million acquisition, but we certainly still feel like we're in good shape, and we're not looking to raise any capital at this time. Okay. I'm going to -- we're at 11:44. I have one more that I want to pass to Maurice because that came through the investor at Emerge Brands e-mail. Maurice, this is for you or at least it should be for you because it's about Tee 2 Green. He says, nice to see T2G's 34% organic growth. Are you able to share historical growth rate there? I'll answer for Maurice. The answer is no, we can't share, but he can hint at it. Can this growth be expected to continue?

Yes. Thanks for the question. I think as I mentioned earlier, Tee 2 Green's 30-plus years of consistent performance. This business has generally been flat or showing some slight growth. And really, what we saw in Q2 has really far exceeded even our most positive forecast, right? So I think for us, we're seeing excellent momentum again in Q3, which we're really excited about. But our aim is to always just aim for double-digit growth, and that's what we're going to shoot for, and we're excited to see what comes next. So thanks for the question.

Wonderful. 11:45 on the dot is what we had allotted for this time. I want to say thank you. We have 57 attendees left. So two people have dropped off. Maurice, maybe I ran my mouth for a little too long. You're used to that. But as I say, let's keep talking. We want to be in front of you guys. We want to be accessible. We want you to reach out if you want more updates or have more questions at [email protected]. We thank you for your time and support. And a special thanks goes out to all our original older shareholders that have been with EMERGE through the ups and downs have worked with us through E-Com 1.0, 2.0. We usher in 3.0. We want to focus on strategic growth. We want to do it openly, transparently and with great discipline. Thank you very much, everyone. That concludes our corporate update webcast at EMERGE Commerce. Have a great summer, and thank you for all your support and attention.