Zedcor Inc. ($ZDC)

Thank you for standing by. My name is Joe Diaz, and I'll be the conference call operator. Welcome to the Zedcor Inc. First Quarter 2026 Financial Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] The conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to turn the conference over to Amin Ladha, Chief Financial Officer. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Joe. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Joining me on the call today is our President and CEO, Todd Ziniuk. Last night, after market closed, Zedcor issued a news release announcing our financial results for the 3 months ended March 31, 2026. These news -- this news release will be available on our website under the Investor Relations tab and is filed on our SEDAR+ profile. Please note that portions of today's call, other than historical performance, include forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable securities laws. These statements are made under the safe harbor provisions of those laws. Forward-looking statements are based on management's current views and assumptions. This discussion is qualified in its entirety by the cautionary note regarding forward-looking statements appended to our news release. Please review our press release and Zedcor's reports filed on SEDAR+ for various factors that could be qualified by these statements. In these statements, we use terms such as gross profit, gross margin and adjusted EBITDA in this conference call, which are non-IFRS and non-GAAP measures. For more information on how we define these terms, please refer to the definition set out in the MD&A. In addition, reconciliations between adjusted EBITDA and net income are included in the MD&A as well. One important non-GAAP measure we use is adjusted EBITDA. The company believes that adjusted EBITDA is a meaningful metric because it measures cash generated from operations that can be used to fund working capital requirements, support future growth initiatives and service future interest and principal debt repayments. Adjusted EBITDA should not be construed as an alternative to net income determined in accordance with IFRS. Please note that all 4 -- financial information is provided in Canadian dollars unless otherwise noted. Following the prepared remarks by Todd and myself, we will conduct a Q&A session during which questions will be taken from analysts. Moving on to a review of the company's financial performance for Q1. Some highlights for the first quarter include, achieve -- we achieved record quarterly revenues of $19.4 million, up 69% year-over-year from $11.5 million in Q1 2025, driven by higher tower count, strong customer demand and continued expansion in the U.S. We also diversified our customer base and reduced the contribution from any one customary revenue. In the U.S., we added several enterprise customers this quarter across homebuilding, specialty retail, commercial construction and logistics. Accounts that are either already at a $1 million annual run rate or with that, we expect to get there. We can't always name them publicly, but a few wins worth flagging, we started working for 1 of the largest homebuilders in the U.S., a top 10 logistics company and a regional furniture retailer with more than 150 locations across the South and the Southeast U.S. In Canada, our largest retail account has grown to become our biggest customer overall in that country. Our recurring revenue remains steady as customers continue to add new towers and maintain utilization of existing units on a long-term basis. We also achieved record adjusted EBITDA of $7.6 million in Q1, up 86% year-over-year due to higher revenue and expanding margins. Adjusted EBITDA margin expanded to 39% for the quarter, up from 36% in Q1 2025, due to operating cost controls and economies of scale despite higher administrative and sales investments to support continued expansion in the U.S. We deployed 475 solar MobileyeZ security towers in Q1 2026, up from 435 in Q4 2025; and 229 in Q1 2025, averaging 43 towers per week after accounting for the impacts of moving to our new manufacturing facilities in Houston. With production capacity of 45 to 50 towers per week, we are well positioned to meet customer demand and our fleet -- weak growth targets with the ability to scale further at relatively low CapEx if needed. Our total fleet size to let 3,261 units at the end of the quarter, an increase of 108% year-over-year. Notably, 1,878 units, or 58% of these units were located in the U.S., helping U.S. revenue exceed Canadian revenues for the first time in our history. Our U.S. fleet growth year-over-year of 233% highlighted the exceptional growth we are expecting -- experiencing south of the border. Diving a bit deeper into the income statement for the 3 months ended March 31, 2026, revenue was up, as previously mentioned, to $19.4 million with U.S. revenues of $9.7 million, representing just over 50% of total revenue. This marks the first time that U.S. revenues have exceeded Canadian revenues and we expect this to become the norm going forward. Canadian revenues were up 19% year-over-year in Q1 quarter-over-quarter. Revenue came in slightly below Q4 2025, and this is consistent with the Q4 to Q1 trend that we saw last year as well. And we see this in Canada at our larger locations or construction starts slow down. and municipal permitting drags. So Q1 is typically not a growth quarter when looking at it sequentially. The good news is we have returned to growth in the first half of Q2, with daily revenues running ahead of our internal plans. Gross margin increased to $11.5 million, up 58% from Q1 2025. Operating expenses, excluding depreciation, remained steady at 22% of revenues despite increased hiring and training to support the expansion of the U.S. monitoring center and maintain customer service levels, which we expect will drive higher margin revenue growth in the future. Adjusted EBITDA grew 86% year-over-year to $7.6 million with adjusted EBITDA margin expanding by approximately 300 basis points, demonstrating our platform's operating leverage. Adjusted EBITDA per share came in at $0.07 compared to $0.04 from the prior year period. This was driven by higher revenue and tight cost controls, partially offset by a higher share count due to the completed equity financings. These strong results demonstrate the significant investments we've made in our business and the competitive moats that are compounding returns to shareholders. As we position for sustainable growth in the years ahead, we expect further economies of scale, improved monitoring services, new product innovations and conversion of a growing pipeline of enterprise customer prospects to continue driving shareholder value. Turning to our balance sheet. We'd like to note that Zedcor's access to the liquidity remains robust with $1.7 million of cash, an additional $43.2 million of undrawn credit facility capacity at the end of Q1. In February 2026, we expanded our credit facility with National Bank for $50 million to $75 million, plus a $25 million accordion and also completed a $30.5 million upsized bought deal equity financing at $6 per share. This strong liquidity position provides the funding we need to continue growing our MobileyeZ fleet grow our U.S. service platform and to develop innovative products and services for our current and prospective customers and markets. Net debt to last 12-month adjusted EBITDA was 1.25x at the end of the Q1, which we view as a conservative leverage ratio that allows for expansion as non-dilutive debt financing is used to support growth initiatives. This will increase as we deploy growth capital from the financings. Property, plant and equipment ended the quarter at $112.6 million, an increase year-over-year from $52 million, primarily due to the manufacturing of new security towers, the consolidation of manufacturing facilities in Houston and the prepurchase components designed to derisk growth targets and lock in pricing. Now for an overview of our cash flow and capital expenditures for the quarter. Adjusted free cash flow before noncash working capital impacts was $6.4 million in Q1 2026, an increase of 80% compared to $3.6 million in Q1 2025, demonstrating the accelerating cash flow generation capacity of the business and in line with EBITDA growth. After noncash working capital impacts, adjusted free cash flow was $2.75 million, also up 80% year-over-year. Capital expenditures continue to grow with our increasing fleet of security towers. In Q1 2026, CapEx was $19.3 million, up year-over-year from $11.3 million in Q1 2025. Maintenance CapEx related mostly to camera replacements continues to represent a small portion of total CapEx. And a quick geographical update. As stated in the press release, it's evident that the significant investments in the business and our competitive moats are compounding returns for shareholders, continue to deliver healthy growth with another quarter of record revenue and record adjusted EBITDA. The company also deployed more MobileyeZ towers in any prior quarter. And for the first time in our history, our U.S. business contributed more revenue than Canada. Each of these milestones reflects the strength of our integrated platform and the discipline the team executing behind it. As noted, bulk of the revenue is coming from the U.S. or more than 50% of the revenue is coming from the U.S., and we expect that to continue going forward. U.S. revenue was up 189% year-over-year to $9.7 million, supported by the 233% year-over-year increase in the U.S. tower count, which stood at 1,878 units at quarter end, or 58% of the total fleet. We expect the U.S. to continue growing as a percentage of revenue given its larger market size relative to Canada with Texas serving as the base of our Southern U.S. operations. We now have the infrastructure in place to support manufacturing of 40 to 50 towers per week, in addition to our uncompromised levels of monitoring and security services with the expanded monitoring center in Houston. We will continue to invest in our U.S. growth and expect steady-state margins to reflect attractive returns on capital over time. Canada remains a critical component of our business in terms of profitability and growth, with revenue up year-over-year to $9.7 million and fleet growth of 38%, increasing to 1,386 towers, or 42% of the total fleet. Canada continues to demonstrate the profitability potential of our platform at scale while maintaining very attractive growth rates. I'll now pass the call over to Todd, who will provide an operations and strategy and outlook update.

Thank you, Amin. In terms of the growth outlook, we're very excited about the future of our business in Canada and the United States. To touch on the enterprise customers. Our pipeline is getting quite strong. I know we have a lot of enterprise clients already that are started out with pilots and now they're moving quite quickly into taking a substantial amount of towers. That's in the home building, that's across a lot of different verticals, such as distribution, logistics and retailers as well. To touch on the manufacturing, our new facility, as I've said before, we're very happy with where that's at right now, producing 45 to 50 towers a week. We see the importance of the ability to move forward if we need to step on it and build more. But the reality is, the reason we ended up moving down in '23 too, I moved out there myself to get the prototype built, which -- prototype only hit the ground 24 months ago and to see where the business is today in the U.S. is quite staggering. We're very happy and proud of what we've done as a team, but the reason for going down there was the bottleneck and not having the towers when required. And we hear that a lot in this industry that our competitors can't supply in a timely fashion. And we know the importance of if you want to give white glove service, you got to have the inventory. So we're happy to have gotten to manufacturing the assembly to where it is today at the 40 to 50 towers. To touch on the infrastructure, you've heard me speak a lot about our platform. You know what? It's been going very well from coast to coast. We're across Central U.S., touching into the Northeast corners and obviously, Northwest corners as well. We've got a great platform being built. I'd like to refer to it as with our team as the power of the platform. Right now, customer base-wise, we've got between both countries, we're serving 1,000 clients, which speaks volumes. And if you go back to the enterprise clients, something else we're doing with our customer list is we're right in the middle now of building our enterprise sales team. And what we're seeing is we're probably going to be getting around a lot of pilots and going right directly working for the clients. And a lot of them, they're putting a lot of trust in and it's Obviously, it's a fairly large spend, especially with the bigger companies. They want to test -- and know that they can trust you as well. They are going to do the right things for their company. And to even touch more on our platform. I'm quite happy with where we're at right now. We're at 20 branches across North America. We're going to be probably 4 to 5 more before the end of the year. We're strategically putting in locations to where our customers have 1,000 different clients are actually starting to take us. And like one thing I'd like to touch on when we first started in the U.S. We move into a new region, and we'd be starting from 0 towers because obviously, we're a smaller company at the time. Now we're moving into new regions in that branch. It's being added to the platform right away has got 30, 40 towers that they're actually responsible for looking after and then the growth of our client base is actually growing out quite quickly. So we're seeing our branches grow a little quicker as we open them up, and to touch a little more on the supply chain side of things and and where we are with growth. We know that we need to run this business between 80% and 90% utilization. And when you have 20, 24 branches, we don't want these guys sitting with 2, 3 towers, our branches, we need them to be sitting with 10 to 20 towers at all times. There's a lot of different clients in this industry want to start with 10 towers. Our answer to them, we don't want it to be what we can get to that in 2 weeks. Some of them want them rapidly deployed, and we have the people and the facilities and the platform to be able to do that. And so as you can imagine, 20 branches, if you have them sitting with 10, 15, 20 towers, that's 400 towers right there that you have to have in inventory. And then we also -- something we've done a great job on and it was a learning curve at the beginning was being able to back up our assembly facility with redundancies of unbuilt packages on the ground. And then at all times, any given week, we're 50 to 60 towers at the plant as well, ready to be deployed to different branches that are getting low on inventory. So I think that's a key thing that we need to stay on top of is having that inventory, having the inventory at the manufacturing plant, having it at the branches. And that's the only way we're going to be able to continue to do the Zedcor, which is white glove service and to be able to move very quickly. As far as supply chains went with the manufacturing, we've done a great job. We're getting the cost of the tower down just on volume and being ahead of the supply chain. And obviously, as we've got to be a bigger company, we've been able to put more pressure on our vendors and ordering larger volumes instead of when we first started at ordering everything at 50 at a time, now we're getting into a reordering stuff 500 to 1,000 at a time. So we've seen a really good impact on that with the cost of the tower. On the innovation side, we're going down the road, obviously, an innovation with AI and all the different components that are tied into it today. The camera manufacturers are getting stronger with that. We're doing quite a bit of internal stuff with AI right now to see efficiencies across a lot of things, our monitoring. We're using different platforms or designing some of our own, we're quite excited about. And then some of the other stuff we've evolved is obviously the Z-box. We're seeing more traction with that as well. at some really good long-term stuff we're doing with that, smaller sites, can't take towers. And then the other thing we realized is we started growing this business and continue to grow the business is, we need to have a clean balance sheet. And I'm very happy with where the quarter was. We were a 39% adjusted EBITDA. I think at the rapid growth rate that this company is growing at we can maintain between that 35% to 40% EBITDA, I think it speaks volumes to cost control in the company. We run -- keeping the guardrails on growth. I think it's an important thing. As you know, we did our last raise and let's keep the balance sheet clean when you start dealing with these large, large retailers and even other clients are maybe not in the retail space, but distribution, logistics, home building, they need to know that you can supply them with product and the ability to move fast. And we've done a great job with that. And we're happy to. I think with where the pricing is at. I mean, I think we've held out. I think there's a little bit of -- as the company has got bigger here, our new product is a certain price in the 2, 3 years ago, our first product we ever started out with, which was the original unit, the pricing on that was a little higher, but on our new prototype product, the pricing is holding very well. We're very satisfied with where that's up. I think at this point in time, I'll turn it back to Amin, and we'll turn it over to the analysts for some questions.

Yes. Thanks for the update, Todd. I'll hand it back to Joe, and we'll open the call up for questions.

We'll now take questions from analysts only. And the first question comes from Kyle McPhee from ATB Cormark Capital Markets.

Great update. Nice to see the top and bottom line momentum here. On the revenue growth, amazing growth continues to roll in from the U.S. But in Canada, sequential growth has been muted for the last couple of quarters. I mean how should we be interpreting this? Is this maybe signs of demand saturation in this relatively more mature region? Or is this all seasonality, as you briefly mentioned, or is this really more about your scarce fleet capacity? You're simply prioritizing your fleet capacity for your big growing U.S. client base, maybe even hoarding towers for some of these huge clients that maybe have big orders coming and you need to be ready with inventory as their pilots wrap up? Just any color on that would be helpful.

Go ahead, Amin.

Yes. I think the U.S. has definitely been a focus and you can definitely see that in the numbers for sure. In terms of the growth, I think we look at it more on an annualized basis, and our internal projections are in that 20% to 30% for Canada. And I think we're on track for that. We did factor in internally lower kind of expectations for Q1, and we saw that last year as well, as I previously mentioned. So that's how we look at it. And I wouldn't necessarily call it seasonality, like it still grew for sure. But yes, I think, Kyle, for sure, we're definitely focused on the U.S., but we don't want to forget about Canada either.

Yes. I think I'll even add to that, Kyle. Honestly,we moved down into the U.S. market. We've probably put, like you said, I mean, a lot of focus on the U.S. And as when you're a smaller company moving into a big market like that you're somewhat you're handcuffed to where you're growing. And I think we put a lot of focus on the United States. And when I say that, I mean into human capital as well. And as the company has grown, we've made some adjustments to our org chart. We've got directors now, a director of Western Canada, Eastern Canada, the different regions across the United States. And I think it's going to bring the focus back onto the growth in Canada as well. And you're right, it's going back to the utilization, it becomes who needs the towers, and there's a little bit of that hoarding down there for the towers as well, like you said. But I think it was off the last 24 months, there's been heavy, heavy concentration on the U.S. And I think we've done that as we've got bigger now that we are a Canadian company that moved into a new market in the United States. And now we're in a situation on the size of a company that we're, I honestly can say we're a North American company, and the focus is being put back on the whole company if that helps with that, Kyle.

Yes. I mean just to dig up -- to dig in a little bit more on build hoarding some towers for some potential big clients. Like how important is it to have big inventory of towers on hand to be able to land some of these big clients that are circling around signing up for your service. Do they seem to care a lot about speed of deployment once they do make the go-ahead decision? Is that a key factor for them, and they're going to need hundreds all at once, and you're differentiating yourself with that type of availability?

100%, that's dealing with some of these big retailers, Kyle, it's 1 of the first questions they ask. How quick can you get X number of towers to us. And we've actually been proving it out even on the smaller scale, we've had some clients taking 25 to 30 to 40 towers. And they want to know how quick we can do that. And that present quarter, that's an overnight success. We can do that very quickly. But when you start talking hunters, they want to know that as well. And they don't want to be sitting, waiting a year, 18 months. They want it over a span of possibly 1/4 to 4 months. And it's very important to have that inventory. And I think it's important for them, a lot of them want to come and see the facility. It's all part of the checking the boxes. It's one thing to say, "Hey, yes, we can get this done." But the last thing you'd want to see is, yes, we're going to go raise some capital and we'll get this all put together for you. when they come and see the facility, see the line, health of towers are being built, it's a massive impact to some of these bigger contracts. If, you want to add to anything Doug?

Yes, I'll just quickly add some specific examples like 1 of the logistics companies are kind of a medium-sized, larger customer, I'll say, we won that work because we were able to deploy units quickly while they were having dissatisfaction with the competitors. So not building units on spec, having that inventory really helps win work and some of kind of the national retailers we've been talking to some of the competitors were at the table with their business depends on landing 1 of these contracts where Lars doesn't and being able to show the customer that show them we're able to build quickly, like Todd mentioned, or deploy quickly, and we're not building base totally on them. They appreciate that and derisk them as well.

Got it. Okay. And just to round out this discussion before I pass the line, I mean, do you see potential for a scenario near term here where maybe your utilization actually surges back into the high 90s as one of these pilots shift to a full rollout with a big customer. And then you're back into kind of a pocket of time where you need to pump up more tower rebuild branch inventory, a good problem to have, but is that in the cards near term here?

Absolutely. We're not like we're not saying the business depends on this, but if one of these larger multi-hundred tower retailers, for example, hits and we're successful landing that contract the utilization would surge significantly would be close to 100%. And you're absolutely right. We're going to get that back to the levels we're happy yet. So then the next customer comes along already for them as well.

Yes. I think you add to that, Kyle, I think that's where we're in a great position with the number of unbilled packages. We carry at the assembly plant as well to just put it in perspective, 1 of these big machines hit we get up to, let's say, 95%, 98% utilization. Our goal will be to get back down to that mid-80s as quickly as we can, and we have the ability to do that with what we have on the ground. And we'll go to our suppliers as well and tell them the stuff on it to put it in perspective, when we bring our crews in on a weekend on a Saturday, we can build 10 more towers, all of a sudden, 50 to 60. And you can do that for a little bit, get ahead of it and make sure that we have inventory. And then it will catch back up, right? And no, I think we're well situated as far as the manufacturing goes, and to be able to go up to like 98% and then get it back down to 90%, because it's going to be, if you get the one, you want to be prepared as well for the next ones, right?

So you don't want to forget about the existing customer.

100%. And I think [indiscernible] really look at is 1,000 clients. That's important to look at. We've got a lot of internal growth that's going to take place over the next months just in that client list.

Next question comes from Gary Ho from Desjardins.

Sorry, Gary. You are muted.

Can you guys hear me okay?

Yes, we can hear you.

Okay. Maybe on the same tangent at Kyle's questions here. Maybe if you can kind of dig through the top line in Canada and U.S. and parse out maybe the utilization versus the pricing dynamics for both regions. What are you seeing there and trends we should expect looking out? And this is excluding kind of enterprise accounts. And I would imagine, as you build out across California, Florida, in other regions inevitably, you're going to bump into more and more competition versus that correct? And how does your offering and pricing differ versus some of your peers?

I'll answer the second question first, the second half of that question. We're definitely seeing different competitors, but nobody is really doing what we're doing in terms of offering the monitoring, building out the service, having the hardware being able to rent it. Everybody is kind of approaching those 4 or 5 different things in a different way. And other than I like maybe 1 or 2 that we know of, nobody is doing all 5 things under 1 umbrella. And I think that's really differentiating us. Yes, it takes some time for the customer to realize that. They definitely need to get a taste of our service quality and our monitoring quality and being able to deploy quickly and having that rapid service response, but once they get a taste of that, we see that they're adding more units, they keep taking us from site to site to site. So that definitely helps. In terms of the pricing question, in the U.S. other than like the national accounts that you mentioned, the pricing is pretty steady in both countries for the newer units, the electric MobileyeZ that -- or sorry, the solar ones, that's the ones that we're building going forward. So the pricing is holding steady. In the U.S., obviously, we're getting more larger customers. So we've had to give them a little bit lower rates just to get started. But on the smaller customers, we're not seeing that.

Okay. Perfect. Second question. So this quarter, you made a $2 million strategic investment in the software development firm supporting build-out of kind of AI tech. Maybe just give us a glimpse on kind of what it can do and how it improves your offerings? And maybe as a related question, why did you decide to go with this route versus buying something that's off the shelf?

I think off the shelf, we looked at it for a number of years. There's been an evolution in our kind of software monitoring from when I first started 6, 7 years ago to what it is now. And we've always kind of found that off-the-shelf stuff, we've had to take stuff that's not really designed for video monitoring. It's more either is the traditional alarm monitoring like your ADT style home monitoring alarms or it's meant for alarms that are being monitored by a traditional security yard and sitting at the bottom of a skyscraper. And we've may do with that just because of capital constraint, to be honest, to a certain extent, and we've taken off the shelf stuff, modified it, but we're getting sick of waiting for other people that this is such a key operational piece of software. We're getting sick of waiting for them. We're seeing an impact to our licensing costs and we're sick of paying licensing costs or getting them down.

I'd chime in there too, Gary. I think it's important to help control your business in all aspects. And something ZEDCORdoes is we listen to our clients. So when our client says, "Can you make this new X, we need to be able to do that for our clients. And that's all part of giving great service. It's the answer of no, this is all it can do -- and then we got to go to a third party to see if they can make the change, but maybe you're not a priority to them. Our clients at Zedcor are 100% Zedcor's priority. And that's how we run our business. And I use that analogy all the time with our team. So it's very important that we bring that in-house. We bring it underneath our controls. We're going to not -- when we're done building the first iteration of this, we're not done, we're going to spend multiple times adding to it. I think it's pretty interesting the things we're learning from our clients, what they want to see and what the tower able to -- can your tower do this? Could your camera do this? We utilize our towers this way. And that's a thing not. Everybody thinks this is a security tower. These people are utilizing the towers during the day for internal uses. And we want to get to know our client base and understand and go to them with ideas and be able to change our software to actually work in their favor. And to be, honestly, it's going to make us more strategic in the market, having full control of that, being able to move on the fly on that and not be waiting, well, this week and have this done in a year. When you hold the keys to something, you can do it a lot quicker. And that's important, I think, in any business model. And it just gives that service to your clients. And it gives us the ability to do things we want to do and innovate, right? If that answers that question, Gary.

Yes. No, absolute makes sense to me. And then maybe just a really quick modeling question. I saw that your U.S. SG&A was flat sequentially despite the U.S. expansion efforts. So how should we think about that line item for the rest of this year? Like should we see a bigger ramp-up in the second half? Any onetime benefit in 1Q's numbers to call out there?

It's definitely going to ramp up. I think the hiring was a bit slower than we anticipated and like we anticipated the margin being in that kind of 35% to 37% range, not that we're completing about the 39%. But there's definitely going to be salespeople added. Like Todd mentioned, we're building out the national sales team as well. So there's going to be G&A costs associated with that as well.

Our next question comes from Mark Neville from Canaccord.

Maybe just a few follow-ups. I guess, first on the software. How much do you anticipate, is there going to be further investment this year? And I guess, if so, how much?

The bulk of the spending on the software will definitely be like we started at late Q1, Mark. So it will be in Q2, Q3 and Q4 kind of wrapping up the first phase anyway, we'll be wrapping up in Q1 of '27. So we'll definitely see spending related to that, and that will be kind of in that USD 3 million to USD 4 million range.

Which is accounted for in our CapEx.

Yes. And that's accounted for in our CapEx budgeting.

Okay. And that $3 million to $4 million total.

Yes, For the first phase, yes. And then we'll layer on the IP piece and stuff.

Right. Okay. Then I guess on the conversation on inventory and utilization, have you started the inventory build? It doesn't really appear so sort of on the balance sheet or if it's not showing up in inventory, is where it's showing up? And if not, when you anticipate building that up.

So I think it is. It's showing up kind of indirectly. The total fleet represents where we have sitting at the location as well. And that doesn't include the unbuilt, kind of close to completion units. So I think roughly speaking, we definitely have built up that inventory, and we've ramped up. That was kind of the rationale for consolidating moving into the new facility as well.

Okay. So the inventory build, it's -- again, it's not complete, but like you've got sort of the first chunk of that done or?

And it continued into Q2, yes, for sure. I think we're happy with the utilization levels where they're at kind of the "sitting towers" that 10 to 20 per location. Obviously, we're adding new locations all the time, but we're probably there right now post Q1, and there's units sitting at the manufacturing facility ready to deploy into the locations as well.

Okay. And then just on the margin. I think last quarter, you mentioned maybe some near-term downward move in the gross margin. We saw that this quarter again, it was offset with the G&A. But just maybe just the thought around how gross margin trends through the rest of the year. And then again, just on the G&A, I appreciate it's going to go higher dollar value-wise, but in terms of percentage, again, to the last question, it sounds like it still needs to go a bit higher, but just maybe a lot on that or just a little more on that G&A too?

In terms of the G&A, like definitely as a percentage of revenue, it's going to -- our goal is to get it down, and that's what we're anticipating, like the back-end costs, the sales costs don't scale as you add units at a location. So Houston, Denver, are perfect examples, like we haven't added a ton of G&A at those branches once we kind of get past that initial 100 units. So going from 100 to 400 units at a location doesn't take a ton more G&A, and that's where we're going to realize the economies of scale, and that's where our per unit kind of operating costs, G&A costs are going to come down. and we're definitely starting to see that trend. There might be some short-term bumps in the road as we build out some more salespeople. But in the longer term, as a percentage of revenue, it doesn't scale or it doesn't even stay at the same percentage as it is right now.

Right. Okay. Right. And the gross sorry, just through the back half or the rest of the year?

Yes, for sure. The operating expenses, we anticipate kind of running in that 22%, 23% of revenue, excluding depreciation -- that's where -- there might be, again, some short-term volatility as we scale the monitoring center in the U.S., tying those people up, hire those people. But the goal would be to maintain it at these levels. in the longer -- kind of medium to longer term once we get the software going once we realize some of the efficiencies of that investment, we're hoping to get it down, but we don't want to make any promises at this point of what that could be.

Next question comes from Sean Jack at Raymond James.

Just a quick one from me. So it sounds like there's a lot of good momentum with signing up new customers. that continues to be strong. A couple of quarters back, we heard about how you guys had been identifying a lot of opportunity to increase penetration with existing clients. I'm wondering how this initiative is moving -- is this proving as meaningful as you guys thought it was? Any color you could provide would be great.

Sure. I think honestly, Sean, it gets better and better quarter-over-quarter with some of them, I'm not obviously going to say names, but we've got some clients that it went from 40 to 60. And other ones have started out with 10, they're getting close to 100. We're seeing that happen a main quarter by -- within a quarter. And I think it's growing so rapidly in the client base is coming on so quick. There's going to be more and more of those, 4 towers to 50, 10 towers to 100. We're excited about where that's going. I think the enterprise team, as you heard say earlier, Sean, that we're putting in place right now. We have pretty well switched on individuals starting with us next week. He's really going to drive that team. We're excited about it. And I think we're going to see more of it. And it's going to be more concentration on that. customer less to be able to grow that out, Amin?

Yes. Like you mentioned, it's over 1,000 customers and a lot of those customers definitely have more potential to build out. The focus has been on the easier customers that stick out like the large homebuilders the larger retailers, some of the logistic companies that do stick out like a sore , we definitely have added units like Todd said, going from 4 to 60 with one of the logistic customers, some of the large homebuilders they continue to take units. Our first customer in the U.S. has now got a national account, and we mentioned that previously, and they're taking units across multiple states. Previously, we were only working for them in a few regions in Texas, but they continue to add units. So it's been a focus on the low-hanging fruit, AKT, the larger customers, but there's definitely more data to mine and kind of in the U.S., it's mind-boggling even a small customer has 20 to 40 locations. So we definitely need to spend some time on that. And like Todd said, we're building that team out.

Perfect. Last 1 for me. So just looking on the map that you guys had in the presentation deck kind of indicates that there's going to be some new branches coming up in the U.S. Northeast. I wanted to just drill in and see how that shaping up. Did we see any of this quarter's towers inclusive of that area? Or is that going to be all new coming up in the year here?

I think with the regions we're moving into right now, Sean, I don't want to talk too much on it, but we're seeing the growth just getting started. One region we moved into -- for example, the branches starting out with close to 60 towers. The people just got put in place. The other ones right now are in the middle of securing buildings. The ones that we said we're in the middle of opening now the buildings have been secured. So you're going to see some rapid growth come out of them as well. And then it goes back to, obviously, the human capital. We're getting a good sales team put together in the area, good branch manager and then start building it from there. I'm excited about it because the brand is out there a lot more now, and we have a lot of client base overlap that's taken us in when we -- like I said earlier on the call, when we opened in Denver, there wasn't -- we didn't have a tower within 250 miles of Denver. And now that's changed in every region we're going into. And it's becoming more and more important for us to be able to have that inventory at each branch for when you get the large retailer, it helps with the rapid deployments. And also, once you get the retailer, it helps on maintaining the service levels with them as well. So I think we're going to see some pretty good growth come into Q3 and Q4 into these newer agents, which is quite exciting.

Perfect. Next question comes from Mike Stevens from National Bank.

I have couple of questions here. Just on the utilization. So it sounds like we should expect that to kind of settle in the sort of mid-80s range, pending obviously a large order coming in. But otherwise, are you seeing any risks to that with the macro environment at all with inflation and whatnot? Or do you think that that's -- this is a good level to expect in upcoming quarters?

I think it's a good level to expect. I think just for the simple reason, if let's say we get 1 big win here that takes us to that 98%. It's going to be important to get back down to that. And then like building out the platform, we always got to keep feeding the platform. So you want to feed in that mid-80s like what you're speaking about. Amin, I don't know if you want to add to that.

I think strategically, we definitely want to keep it in that range. There might be some short-term upticks or short-term downticks, but it's definitely helping us win work, having that inventory not having to build on spec, not having to build on contracts, so that's the goal. And we've definitely set up the back end and the balance sheet to be able to handle that.

Okay. Got it. And then on the sales reps, I think you guys hired a batch maybe toward the end of '25. It's been 6 months or so now. Are you seeing them sort of at full capacity? Or any color on kind of where they are in that journey? And then going forward, you're obviously going to add some more -- any insight as to how many reps you may be looking to add the rest of '26.

Yes. I think we're right on track with that. You're right. We hired towards the end of the year into getting into Thanksgiving in the U.S., Christmas. A lot of the -- and we've added some in Q1 as well. And I think a lot of these people are getting their legs under and it takes a little bit to get it going. But 1 thing I want to speak to is as we've grown as a company, we've actually got the KPIs, and we've done enough studies to order a salesperson should be producing by month 2, 3, 4 right into the 6 month. And some of these people we're bringing on are getting there very quickly. And other ones you're working harder with the on training. And that ties into the human capital side. Right now, we're at about in the U.S., close to 30%. I think with the growth and expansion into the branches, I mean we're probably going to exit around 45%.

And some of those are going to be in Canada as well.

Canada as well and then also on enterprise sales team and some inside salespeople as well. And I think we're right on track with it. And we're quite excited about the team we've got going.

Yes. And just to add some more specifics. We found that it takes about 4 to 6 months for a salesperson to fully get going. So you won't necessarily see those Q4 investments paying off in Q1, but we've seen the numbers post Q1, and we're definitely seeing those salespeople that we've added either in new locations or expanding the existing locations, they're definitely starting to meet our targets and our expectations.

Okay. That's great. And just lastly, circling back on pricing. It sounds like you guys are kind of holding the line on pricing in general. With the new software, coming in-house and all the capabilities that's going to add to customers in the future. Is that still the right way to look at it? Just hold kind of pricing and deliver more value to the customers?

Yes. I think 100%, that's exactly what Zedcor both. We're about our clients, and it's going to add value to them. And it's going to make Zedcor a better company. That's just at the end of the day, the efficiencies we're going to have in our room it's probably going to help the direct costs a little bit. It's all those different things that's going to impact. But we want to be able to make our product better and share that with our clients, and I don't think it's so much about moving pricing, Amin.

Yes, 100%, like that's been our model from the beginning is we want to get that scale in the short term. And then we're going to look at passing some of those cost savings on to the customer. We've never been about gauging or increasing the pricing like some of our competitors or some other people you see in the software space where they lock in and then it's hard to switch. And those got you for pricing even some of the consumer-based products out there. So it's definitely not our goal is we definitely want to provide the top-level service and if we can do that at an efficient cost, and we'll definitely share some of those savings with the customer where necessary.

Next question comes from Kyle McPhee.

I just want to -- on your maintenance CapEx spending, I see you started to disclose that carving it out separating it from the growth CapEx and as expected, it's a very small number, I think $53,000 of capitalized maintenance spend. Is the maintenance spend actually that small? Or is most of the maintenance spend just being expensed above the EBITDA line. Maybe you can tell us kind of what lands were and how kind of lower the maintenance spend truly is.

Yes, for sure. So small pieces within the tower like electrical components, solar panels, batteries, any of that stuff that needs replacing that goes through the P&L side. And then a kind of capital items that need replacing, whether it's the camera or the structure of the unit itself, that would go through the capital side. So the number that we have in the MD&A for Q1 and Q1 of 2025, that's mostly all related to cameras being replaced, so out of warranty cameras. So that's truly the maintenance CapEx, any small stuff that breaks day-to-day that's run through the P&L on the R&M side, and you can see that margins obviously stayed or that cost as a percentage of revenue stayed relatively steady as well. So the units are built robustly. That was one of our intentions and our goals from day 1. And we've always used high-quality products that are designed to withstand the elements and there's not a ton of kind of maintenance CapEx or even R&M as a percentage of revenue?

I don't think there's any other questions. So I'll open up. Thanks, everyone, for the time.

Thank you. Have a great day.