Our clients really enjoy doing business with us. We actually recently did a survey where our Net Promoter Score was over 70, close to 75. So our customers are very happy with the business that we’re doing. It’s Michele’s job to ensure that we continue to do that as we grow, and put our customers first and make sure that we keep them long-term. So those are some of the biggest hires that we’ve had so far last year and beginning of this year, and we’re really excited about that. In addition to David Browner obviously being promoted to full time CFO and David has been amazing and understands our business, and this industry better than almost anyone I’ve ever met. So I’m really proud of what David has grown into as a leader within Stran, as well as the information that has been able to share with our entire organization.
Bill Jordan: Thanks. That was really helpful. You talked a little bit about M&A. What are your thoughts on M&A going into 2024, just general M&A within your industry?
Andy Shape: Sure. So M&A, as we’ve mentioned, we’ve done four acquisitions in the last just about 2 years. So although we’re not pausing M&A by any means, we’re not as active as we were in, say, 2022 and 2023 because we’ve acquired all of those companies. Our goal is to make sure that we integrate them properly as well as maximize their potential. So we’re actively looking — I’m looking within the industry. I’m looking at other types of companies that we have plenty discussions with, but we’re being a little bit more selective and patient. In terms of the industry, I think this industry will continue to consolidate since there’s so many players, there’s — it’s a $26 billion industry with over 25,000 companies within it. I think consolidation will continue to happen. And we look to be a leader within that consolidation. But just selectively — that work to increase the value of our business, both short-term and long-term.
Bill Jordan: Great. There’s just two other questions. How is your pipeline and just the general business as you swing into 2024 now?
Andy Shape: Business is — our pipeline is great. We have a lot of momentum. We’ve seen a lot of those sales efforts that I’ve mentioned with Nick and Michele in place with our marketing efforts. Really we’re starting to see some results with a lot more opportunities, large opportunities, RFPs that we’re working on that we’ve seen a lot, finding both new business as well as expanding our business. So we feel like our pipeline is very strong. We’re expecting to see growth within 2024. People are with interest rates being where they are right now, but with the hope of them potentially coming down, I think people will continue to spend. So we’re excited about our momentum that we have right now that we’re seeing within the first quarter.
Historically, our seasonality within our business, Q1 is typically the slowest followed by Q3 — Q2, Q3, and Q4. It continues to ramp up throughout the year. But we’re excited and our pipeline is pretty strong right now. So we’re excited about that.
Bill Jordan: That’s great. Last question. You experienced some impressive gross margin improvement in the fourth quarter and for the year 2023. What do you see — is this sustainable? And what should shareholders or investors expect going forward with margins?
Andy Shape: Yes, that’s — in 2023, we really made a conscious effort to identify ways to create more profitability. And there’s a couple of different ways to do that. One is increase our margin selectively where it makes sense, where we are still competitive and offering value to our customers, but also not giving away our products. So we made our conscious effort to educate and work with our team — our sales and service teams to ensure that we are charging appropriately to our customers and not working at below industry average margins. So that was the first thing that we did is worked on education as well as monitoring and enforcing actions related to working at appropriate gross margins. And secondarily, we also worked on better purchasing and buying, negotiating better pricing, negotiating better rebates and just being more conscious of where we spend and how we spend it.
So those two things combined, I think, was a result of us looking at those a little bit harder and monitoring and forcing actions related to that within our organization as well as just more visibility into that. So we do want to continue to increase our margins and see those steadily above 30%, so for gross profit margin. So that’s our goal moving forward is to maintain that. So we are hoping to continue with that and ensure our shareholders that we can continue to do that.
