And so hopefully, as we move forward, we’ll continue to see more of that come through in the area of lower merchandise as a percent of revenue and start really seeing some of that that benefit. I will say, and I made comments in my prepared remarks about this. We continue to enhance the CRM. Clean had some good experience with the CRM and some applications that they had built to enhance the usability of the CRM, some of that in the area of account profitability, tracking and maintenance. And so, we think that getting some of that benefit as well. We think we can improve around the edges in the areas of price management and so on. So, it’s really customer retention, merchandise management and I’d say, management of revenue and pricing, there are the areas.
And so, it’s implicit in our results, and we’ll continue to drive efficiency of the CRM to try to pull as much out of it as possible.
Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Andrew Steinerman with JPMorgan. Please proceed with your question.
Andrew Steinerman : Hi, Shane, did you mention the intangible amortization from Clean in the fourth quarter? And could you just also give us a sense of what that amortization will be in ’24?
Shane O’Connor : Yes. Let me get that in front of me. So — so one of the things that we did do to provide that visibility in our press release, we’ve included in a footnote underneath our cash flow, what the non-cash intangibles amortization is, so that you can see that component of that. Just to call that out, that amount in the fourth quarter was $19.3 million, versus $15.1 million in last year’s comparable quarter. And the majority of that difference equates to the Clean Uniform acquisition. Right? That difference being about $3.5 million in the quarter is sort of what the run rate would project for next year as well.
Andrew Steinerman : Okay, thank you.
Operator: [Operator Instructions]. Our next question comes from the line of Josh Chan with UBS. Please proceed with your question.
Joshua Chan: Hi, good morning, and thanks for taking my questions. I guess for your core margin improvement of 20 basis points to 30 basis points next year, could you give us a sense of how that would flow through the year? Are you expecting margins to be down in the first part of the year and then you recover some of it in the back half? Just kind of could you help us with kind of the shape?
Shane O’Connor : Yes. Yes. I mean that margin realization really, I mean, aside from some of the seasonality that we see in our quarters where oftentimes, we have slightly higher profitability in our first quarter. And obviously, our second quarter is down from a margin perspective because of the timing of some costs that we incurred as well as the impact of the holidays. Right? There’s slight — or there’s a slight margin improvement, as we go throughout the year. Again, primarily driven by the impact of the merchandise continuing to moderate, as we go throughout the year as a percentage of revenues. But it’s relatively — it’s relatively nominal. Again, our profitability will trend mainly towards the seasonal experience it historically had.
Joshua Chan: Okay. Perfect thanks for the color. And I guess for my follow-up, you did mention that CapEx would be tapered off a little bit from, at least on the facility side of things. And so, could you just talk about the rationale behind that? Do you feel like your facilities are in good shape heading into next year? Thank you.
Steven Sintros: Yes. In general, when you look at the elevated CapEx, that elevated CapEx really comes from new facility, new plant processing plant builds. That’s the biggest a plant runs $20 million or so these days. And so, if you have two or three of those going on, that’s where you sort of get that elevated CapEx. And we had more projects to sort of centralizing around the last couple of years. Overall, we continue to invest in our existing facilities, make sure we’re replacing equipment, increasing automation where we can. The commentary around lowering the CapEx really is around, when you look at the outlook for this year and into next year, less large project builds going on. And a couple of the ones we had going on with replacing facilities, older facilities that we had obtained through acquisitions. So, we’re a little further along in that road map, but we will continue to invest in the facilities, just at a little bit of a lower rate on the new plant builds.
Operator: [Operator Instructions]. There are no further questions at this time. I will turn the call back over to you.
Steven Sintros: Great. I’d like to thank everyone for joining us today to review our fourth quarter results. We look forward to speaking to everyone again in January, when we expect to report our first quarter performance. Thank you, and have a great day.
Operator: That does conclude the conference call for today. We thank you for your participation and ask that you please disconnect your line.
