As I look ahead, I’m holding the guidance range at $60 million to $80 million for this year, consistent with what I did before. And again across the two-year period, now, with the beat in 2023, that’s a net positive over a two-year period, we’re driving more free cash flow. But as I look ahead right now in this moment, after having just come off a really strong fourth quarter. I walk it down this way. I think about the $98 million we just delivered in 2023, we have to, off the top, take off estimated impacts from the business exits, which on a cash basis is roughly $15 million. I then got to look at that working capital picture I just took you through, and while it was a fantastic source of cash in 2023, at this point in time, I’m planning it to be more of a net neutral, not an inflow, not an outflow.
On the lower end of my range, it would be an outflow. But on the upper end, it’s neutral, and I think there’s an opportunity to maybe drive more. So, just set that there. And then lastly, we do expect, as we’ve said before, to spend a little bit less cash restructuring, call it, roughly $10 million, but again, it could be a range. We don’t have perfect visibility to restructuring spend as you would anticipate through the kind of one-time nature of it. But, right now in my construction, I’m assuming it’s about $10 million lower. So, that leaves room for the operations to still improve, to get us into that range. And my view would be, give us time in the year to start to execute and see how we do. And I think the levers to drive it upwards would be continued improvement around working capital as well as potentially lower restructuring charges.
And then, the lower end of the range that we’ve set here, I think is a very responsible place to be. And the last thing I’ll just call out is, again, I just want to reiterate across that two-year period, how we’re ahead of where we thought we’d be in December. And so, we ended the year at 3.6 times leverage. In December, we estimated that would be 3.8 times, getting to 3.7 times by the end of this year. We’re already at 3.6 times. So, very pleased with where we are on that journey. If you take in the mid-point of our free cash flow range, you take in the mid-point of our EBITDA range, that would suggest we’re going to end this year between 3.6 times, 3.5 times, depending on the round. So again, just really pleased with that progress, getting ahead of a critical strategic priority for us, it’s all positive.
Charles Strauzer: Great. And just, segue into the balance sheet, if rates were to come down, are there opportunities potentially to refi some of the debt or do some swaps, whatever to reduce your interest expense?
Chip Zint: Yeah. So, keep in mind right now, with the swaps we did throughout the last five quarters, effectively we’re at approximately 75% fixed rate, which removes a lot of the current volatility in the markets. As we plan this year, we are planning no change in the interest rates. We, of course, are remaining very cognizant of what the Fed is doing and staying really in tune with what their updates are. But the way we put our guidance out, we’re assuming no change in the rates. And obviously, if they start to come down, that would be a reason why we would go into the lower end of our $120 million to $125 million range. We don’t see them going up. The reason we would drift upwards would be if free cash flow timing across the year was a little bit more back-end loaded and we had to draw down on revolving debt earlier in the year and just drive more incremental cash costs.
To your direct question about just the refinancing side, what I would say is, we still sit here with ample time. So, our next major maturity on our credit facility, our Term Loan A and our revolver is not until the end of June of 2026. We will obviously not let that debt go current. So that gives us effectively the better part of the year to just start to get educated on what the market situation is, see what our alternatives are, and really leverage our bank group for advice and guidance and a perspective on what we should do. So, we don’t have a crystal ball on what interest rates will be come that period of time a year from now, or what the market will look like from a capital markets perspective. But rest assured, we’re going to get working on it early so that we address that well ahead of that debt becoming current.
And obviously, the hope would be that we can do that in a way that our weighted average interest rate cost comes down. But if not, we’ll continue to delever and bring the debt balance down and continue to bring our debt costs down over time.
Charles Strauzer: Excellent. Thank you for taking my questions.
Operator: [Operator Instructions] Your next question comes from the line of Marc Riddick from Sidoti. Please go ahead.
Marc Riddick: Hey, good morning, everyone.
Barry McCarthy: Hi, Marc.
