Hey kyle welcome aboard, thank you so much for joining as the chief fighter from smile direct how's it going what's going well, how are you doing good to be here? We good! Thank you so much for being here. This is so cool. I we've got so many questions for you and i hope, if you don't mind, we'd love to just get kind of get right into them. Yeah.

That sounds great love. It awesome. Thank you, throw you right into the line of fire. So what is your opinion? Why are so many folks, shorting smile direct? It seems like you're you're, like 34 short right now, the stock has gotten pummeled.

I would imagine much by these short sellers kind of align these things here. What's going on, what are people complaining about tough questions from the start and quickly since, since this is all about clean teeth, i'm going to drink through the straw here my coffee but yeah go ahead, perfect! Yeah! Well, look, i think, um, you know anytime. You do something uh disruptive, as with many other disruptive businesses out there. It takes time to understand the business model and and the complexity, and i think if you look at our story, uh - and it's been a short one at that with you - know - incredible success over over a very short time period.

But it's a difficult business to understand and so there's a lot of noise um, certainly from an investor perspective. If you look at what's been out there since we've gone public - and i think the important part for us is - is really continuing to focus on the mission that we have as a business, we're a very mission driven brand and a company and i'm sure we'll talk. We'll talk a lot more about that and we've got to. We've got to stay focused on executing against that plan and so uh.

You know, i think, if we do that, the the short volume that we have on the stock will will take care of itself in time. But a lot of that is just associated with purely the the noise that we have around the business very similar to many other disruptive brands that you see out there in the market today got it. That makes a lot of sense. So there there was uh talk about uh.

You know some folks, because i mean one of your competitors. I believe is - and i imagine you do as well - is invisalign, but the difference with invisalign is that people have to go to a dentist and correct me where i'm wrong here. They've got to go to a dentist and they get the professional molds done or whatever smile direct. My understanding is is more of something that that you could do from home.

This is why your company name is smile direct because you're you're, bypassing that that normal dentist chain, which is very expensive, i mean i had invisalign. I think it was like five or six thousand dollars or something crazy right. Uh, and so can you speak a little bit to uh those differences, uh and then maybe also some some touch on. Why some folks have said, maybe there's a downside to skipping that dentistry are certain people's gums, not capable of maybe receiving aligners and could those cause problems? Yeah, let me be, let me be clear: there is 100 percent of dentists involved in every single one of our cases.

The only difference is, dentists are orthodontists right. The only difference is with us uh, our members have the option to do it 100 remotely. They could also start their journey in person at a dentist office, but we uh have come up with a tele-dentistry platform so that you can interface with your dentist completely remotely very similar. You know quality of care, standards of care, clinical outcomes, clinical efficacy, but you can do it all through our television platform versus having to go in person every couple weeks to see your ortho, and so i think i think the decision that people are making in the Marketplace today is: do i want to have that in-person experience every couple of weeks or do i want to use a tele-dentistry platform if they use a teledensity platform? We are we win today, the vast majority of the time and one of the initiatives that we're focused on which the launch of of selling, through the dental practice uh, is actually starting to take share from those people who actually want to go in person.

And i think, if you look at you know, go to our website, you can you can see directly on there, the y. You know why smile direct club versus invisalign and, i think, there's a lot of very compelling points there. That will help people understand that they can get a safe and clinically effective outcome, but do it at a price of 19.50 instead of five to eight thousand dollars or three times more expensive, and so all of that is is made possible by the tele-dentistry platform that Our doctors use the tele-dentistry. Are you using tele-doc to set this up so we're not? But it's a similar platform, it's our proprietary technology that we created and our doctors uh.

You know use that portal. They can video uh interface directly with uh with their patients or our club members through that uh platform got it now. Uh these, the dentists, who uh answered the call so to speak, are these uh employees or they subcontractors. How does that work yeah, so we're set up legally as what's called a dental service organization uh, so we contract with your professional corporations that are independently owned by dentists or or orthodontists, and we provide a range of of uh.

You know non-clinical services to those professional corporations, so they're, not employees uh under the strict uh sort of legal standards that we have to abide by, but there's uh. You know lots of dental service organizations that are have operated for a long time in brick and mortar practices and we're structured in a very similar fashion to that it's just all done using our tele-dentistry platform to the consumer. It's it's no different right. They view they view uh when they come to our website and and uh they choose if they want to go to a dental practice or if they want to order an impression kit or if they want to go to our smile shop.

You know they view that dentist all part of our network and and view the entire experience as part of smile, direct club god. Okay, now what about the pandemic? The pandemic seems like it. It hit revenue uh a good amount. You know i lost about 100 mil compared to what the 750 that she had in the prior year.

Um. How have things come back? Has it been slow growth coming back, you know what is it taking to get people to come back to smile direct after coveted and you'd? Think that hey it's, you know you could do it online. You don't have to go to a dentist office, but it seems, like maybe people care less about dental care right now during the pandemic. How has that been hitting y'all yeah? So you know i'd say that if you look at the pandemic, when it initially happened for us as a business, i think what it really just highlighted is the the agility and flexibility that we have from a business model perspective.

So you know people come to our website. We've got almost five million unique people per month that are coming to the website every single month and they're choosing if they want to order an impression kit or go to one of our smile shops prior to covet about 90 percent of people were going into a Smile shop, you know we had to get all of those down in the early stages of cobit and 100 of people were going through impression, kits and so just a complete pivot uh in the business model and as we've come out of covet, we've been able to Rebuild our smile shops in a way where we're operating them at a much higher utilization and so pre-kobit. You know, let's say maybe the the shops were 20 utilized today, they're closer to 60 utilized, so the shops are much more profitable. We've rebuilt it in a much more scalable way, as we think about the the longer-term trajectory and we've also built uh partnerships with dental practices.

We're in about 500 practices today and that's rapidly growing as well. So i think covet has enabled us to you know: change the the business model from a perspective of where consumers are going and how they're interacting with us, uh. You know from a revenue perspective uh as you as you mentioned, down about 100 million. I think if you look at it uh from a quarterly perspective, you know we really saw the biggest impact of that this past quarter in q2, uh of 2021, and you know if you look at our core demographic, our core demographic, and it goes back to the Mission of the business and and what we're so passionate about our household income on average is about 65 70 000 in household income, so we average well.

Household income is actually on the lower side, actually, because regular individual income is is somewhere around. I feel like 59 000 in the united states, or something like that. You're saying household income, okay, gotcha, so lower demo household, so it's a lower demo and and that's you know what the mission is all about. It's about.

You know democratizing access to care, making it affordable to everyone making it convenient for everyone, but that demographic in particular in q2, from a macro perspective, is hurting right, a lot of uh. You know a lot of the stimulus packages have have worn off. If you look at the impact of inflation in particular, it's hurting our demographic, so we don't believe, there's any sort of long-term fundamental changes to the prospects of the business as a result of that, but certainly some some near-term headwinds. If you look at q2 in particular as a result of some of those macro factors, and that's why you're moving upstream to someone who can afford to pay five to eight thousand dollars, but they realize you know, why would i pay that three times markup when i Can get you know safe and clinically effective outcome that smile direct club is going to guarantee for life? You know why would i do that when i could pay 19.50, and so that's why diversifying our demographics is so important long term? Now? What about uh? I'm just looking here, it seems like you've got um long-term debt as of the last filing here of somewhere around 733 mil lisa's, only about 26 million of that where's.

All this debt from and and how does the debt affect your? You know the potential for having to raise capital looks like what last quarter you had about 376 million in cash receivables about 214.. Do you have any trouble getting people paying uh for your receivables or any any issues with the with the liabilities you have? No. So if you look at the as you point out between cash and the receivables that we have, you know well over 500 million of of liquidity, and we think that certainly gives us uh. You know enough liquidity on the balance sheet to get us to cash flow profitability, and you know the debt that we raised.

We did a convertible offering uh in uh march of of this past year uh and that offering uh you know comes due in in five years: uh. It was a great deal uh where, where the uh current shareholders took on minimal dilution right, so we put in a a clause in there where our shareholders don't take on dilution uh until the stock was up a hundred percent so into the high 20s. Before the the existing shareholders would take on dilution there, so because that was done around ten dollars or so yeah we struck it uh. It was actually slightly higher than that, but we put a cap wall.

Where is up 100 before there was any dilution. So it's a really low uh cost of capital. The all-in cost of that debt is about two percent a year: uh zero percent cash, coupon bonds, so very efficient cost of capital for us to grow the business and uh you know. Certainly, finance is the cash burden that we have over the next several years.

If you look at the burn that we have, all of that is associated with just the sheer growth initiatives and opportunities that we have as a business. So you know we're in what we believe to be the the very early stages of a massive market opportunity. You know we think there's 500 million people globally that have some type of crowding or spacing issues within their teeth and can also afford to pay for treatment. As well, less than one percent of those are treated annually, so we're investing heavily with a brand to be able to to capture market share there long term we're also yeah.

It looks like you spent like three times as much money on marketing this last quarter than you did in 2020. Is that where most of the money is going to or like, how do your manufacturing costs scale? It actually looks like your cost of revenues went down. Despite your revenue, going up uh substantially from 2020 to 2021, at least on the three months ended in june yeah, so we've automated a significant portion of manufacturing. You know, if you look at our our long-term target for our gross margins.

Uh we've got an 85 gross margin target out there. A lot of that has to do with the automation that we've built around manufacturing and we're pretty close to to achieving that target today, so gross margin. You know we at to to your point: we've we've come a long way there in a very short period of time, yeah. So how do you do that? I mean? Is it i mean because you're manufacturing a product uh so yeah? It looks like right now you're somewhere around uh, you know 79, but how do you? How do you go from uh? Well, let me rephrase my question.

My understanding is, you sell products, but you also have the service. Uh is: is the product just very high margin, then i mean i imagine it must be. I mean because they're molded uh, like essentially plastic. It can't be that expensive to actually make the individual product.

It's more the marketing and acquiring the customer and getting it to the customer, or maybe the the service of of uh, providing the teledoc experience right. Well, i shouldn't say: telehealth experience, that's right and look that's what we found so fascinating about this industry right. The car, the plastic in perspective of the cost of the total system is very, very small. So you know an invisalign would sell the the aligners for maybe 1250 to the dentist or the ortho.

They mark that up three times and sell that back to the consumer, and so that's where we saw the opportunity for us to come in with a product. That is, you know, from a clinical standpoint, safe and efficacious, but cost three times less than 1950., so there's the cost of the product itself and then there's everything that wraps around that, so we're investing heavily in the brand today, one one and two consumers uh. If you were walking down the street and asked them if they're familiar with smile, direct club would say yes, so our aided awareness today is very, very high and we're building a brand there to support long-term growth uh. But it's also the growth initiatives that we have.

As well we're investing heavily into uh, you know innovation, research and development to continue to disrupt themselves on the product side, we're investing heavily in international expansion. We just announced france, that's our 14th international market in just over two years that we've expanded into uh and so there's a lot of areas across the business that we continue to invest in, which is where you see the the the cash burden that we have quarter To quarter coming in, it's really to position us for the longer term growth that we see just given the massive market out there. That makes sense how uh i mean so you mentioned earlier inflation. Where are you seeing inflation? I mean the cost of plastic going up.

Can't be that much of a burden to y'all uh is it are like ads getting more expensive or the people more expensive, uh the people that you're doing the telehealth with uh. What's going on, yeah that that's more uh of a direct impact on our core demographic? So i say open porter. If you look at revenues uh, you know being off of where we expected them to be a core part of that was just the impact that we saw on our core customer, so non-discretionary items so the cost of gas. As an example was up significantly, if you take a household, that's making 65 70 000 and inflation's up six or seven percent year over year, you know that's several thousand dollars that has a big impact in that household, which would equate to the cost of a liner.

So it was a a near-term impact. Inflation was one example that we saw on the cost of, or the impact to our core demographic. There again, i think all that's transitory. I don't think there's anything out there.

If you look at the long-term potential of where we go, we don't think there's anything there from a long-term perspective that impacts the growth. I remember, and it might be slightly off on exactly the statistic, but i remember reading something from the federal reserve that forty percent of those making less than forty thousand dollars, which would probably be within your demographic uh, forty percent of people making less than forty thousand Dollars are uh in either retail or hospitality, or some form of uh service industry affected by the pandemic. Uh and a lot of these folks are still unemployed. Even though companies are rehiring, some of them have lost their skill set uh.

They haven't gotten vaccinated the more people in this demographic are, unlike uh, or unlikely to get vaccinated right so uh, it almost seems like it's gon na take longer, and it's gon na be harder for this potential demographic to get back uh to profitability, so to speak. Uh and potentially being a customer uh. What what can you do to scale up i mean? Is there? Is there a reason? Maybe the demographic is lower? What's what's stopping people who use invisalign from from using your product yeah? That's it's a great question and it's all part of the you know the strategy that we you know we positioned ourselves for so i think i think you know we've recently launched what we call the challenger campaign right, and so what that is, is it's starting to Go directly head-to-head against invisalign and it's to help people understand. As i said before, why would i pay three times more when i can get a safe and effective outcome? Uh, you know using smile direct club in their tele-dentistry platform, and the goal over time is for people to truly understand that messaging, and so that's exactly right.

Over time. We've got to continue to move and expand our our demographics to be able to take share from people who you know could afford to pay five to eight thousand dollars, but choose not to because you know our platform is more accessible for them. It's more convenient. They can do it all remotely uh and it's much more affordable as well, so you're giving them the value for the product.

So that's all part of the longer term strategy that we have that takes share uh within the broader orthodontic category, and i was thinking about that too. How maybe this is more of a technical thing, but how does a tele-dentist evaluate my gums uh, for example like do i mirror it like? How does that work yeah, so um? You know they have if you go through the process, if you order an impression kit or if you go into one of our small shops or if you go to one of our our dental practice, partners uh, you know they're doing an initial assessment and review based On oral pictures, so you take a variety of pictures where they can see the structure of the gums. They can see your teeth and the position of them uh. So it's not zoom they're, actual pictures, that's good.

Okay, that's good they're actual pictures and then, if they need more information uh, you know so a dentist who effectively the process would be - and let's say you ordered an impression kit right. So you'd order a kit to your home uh. You would do the mold directly in your home and it creates a a mold of your teeth and you would take the pictures you would send those in to us that effectively creates a digital image file, no different than if you went into a dentist practice. They're going to do a scan of your mouth and that creates a digital image file from that we map out how your teeth are going to move throughout treatment.

All that information is going to your state licensed dentist or orthodontist. There's a quality check. We have a clinical team over 100 dentists inside that are employed by sdc, where we do a quality review prior to it, going to your state licensed ortho or dentist for them to review, but they're. Looking at all that information, they're looking at your medical and dental history, they're looking at the oral pictures, they're looking at the the scan itself or the impression and the treatment plan, and so based on all of that, they can push it back to our team and Say i want to make these changes to the treatment plan and move these teeth in a different way.

They can approve the plan and say yeah. This looks great. They could deny the plan and say you're, not a good fit for orthodontics for a variety of different reasons, or they could push it back to the patient and say you need to go for clearance and so clearance would be. You know i need an x-ray or i need you to go for a perio test.

They see something in the gums they didn't like and so with the pictures that we get and load into our television platform. There's so much the doctor can can do with that, and so today we can treat about 90 of the cases that are coming to us from you know, just from the information that we're uh, you know we're gathering and if needed, that the clinical team, the dentist Can get on the phone as well throughout treatment with the patient, actually go through the video chat and understand how the aligners are fitting triage. Any problems bring them back in if needed as well. So the the clinical outcomes, clinical efficacy, is no different than if you're going to go into uh.

You know brick-and-mortar practice and you know that's been a critical message for us to get out there for people to understand you're going to get a safe and effective outcome. Uh and - and you know, we - we actually guarantee that for life now, we'll guarantee the outcome of your smile as long as you're compliant with treatment. You wear your retainers uh. You know what will guarantee that the outcome that we're providing people, what what's it been like? Trying to partner with uh with actual dentists uh who have their practices.

I don't i shouldn't say actual dentist to say that your dentists aren't actual, i mean like for existing practices right who may already have invisalign uh units or whatever. What what's that like? How do you bridge that gap? Yeah look, i mean we're if they want to provide invisalign at the same time, we're not against that by any means. You know, i think you know if you look at orthodontic care historically, as i said before, less than one percent of the market is treated annually, there's such a massive opportunity out there and the gp market that you know when i say gps, meaning general practitioner dentists. You know in particular only about a third of all dentists, prescribe any sort of aligners today at all, and so it's pretty low volume in the big picture of the entire dental population and the ones that do are very low volume.

So you know you're going to have some that are high volume providers. You could have some that almost do not, but on average they're only doing three or four cases: every single quarter - oh wow for invisalign. That's it exactly! So it's a very small percentage in terms of revenue for their practice, so what they love about our offering is that we're bringing incremental revenue into their practice. It's highly profitable for them, because there's very little chair time involved in our model, which is so important in a dental practice.

It's all about chair time, and then we also bring the added value of our leads as well. So we'll go into a partner practice and we'll host a pop-up event, and so what that means is, you know, we'll bring a hundred patients over the course of a weekend into their practice that are interested in smile. Direct club and they'll have the opportunity to convert those members into dental patients, and so we we put out an example with one of our biggest partners: uh smile brands. Last quarter, parties we've already scheduled a thousand uh referrals, be it through hygienes or other types of appointments, since we've launched in a pretty short period of time.

The lifetime value of that for them is three to five million dollars, and so there's there's a massive opportunity from from partnerships and leads that we're pushing into these dental practices as well, which is another thing that they're excited about. So it's been very well received. You know, i think, there's an evolution there, where we've got to continue to help dentists, understand that clinically our product is no different than other products on the market. Today, uh and and uh, you know continuing to deliver that message to help them understand our value proposition and the impact we can have on their practice.

That's interesting, yeah to change that is it. Is it like the the name or something or or what what has created? That impression i mean, have you you know if if this was like, i don't know if the name was different, would that make a difference or is it just a matter of you're building the company and i'm not i'm not banging on the name? I'm just wondering like why: why is that impression? There is it because it's online and just the price is lower, maybe yeah, i think it's uh. Look. It's disruptive right! Take the industry.

That's been disruptive. The status quo was going to push back on that right. So uh it's it's viewed as competitive to uh. You know the the the bottom line of of orthodontists and and clearly they view that as competitive and so the dental.

Oh, i see okay, okay, so sorry to interrupt. But what you're saying is: if, if you sell invisalign in your office, you know they're selling you the kit for 1500 bucks, you're selling it for five six thousand dollars. The dentist is like hey sweet. This is 35 4 or 5 000 bucks a profit here.

Uh. You know: what's what's the profit with with the smile direct? Is it is it then? Potentially i mean you said it's 1900. What would their profit potentially be? I mean yeah, it's a it's a fraction of that. So our price is our price.

Is the same. You know it's 19.50, it doesn't matter if you order an impression kit or go to a dental practice, and so that's all about the you know what i said at the start. It's about the mission democratizing access, making it affordable to everyone, and so a lot of that noise. That's out there to your point is because of that sort of confrontation and what's seen as competition, i think the reality.

Is you completely understand that as an orthodontist as a dentist, we've been very good for the industry right we've we've, you know risen awareness over all of the category uh we've spent a lot of money on marketing, which has has continued to drive more patients into dental Practices we've got great partnerships with dental practices, so that's a perception that we're changing over time. It's not going to happen overnight, but i think we're making good good progress there. We've got a really strong clinical advisory board as well uh. That's helping us make sure we get that message out there properly and help dennis understand that we can be a great partner for the practice that makes sense what um, what about these - and i know, there's a limit to what can be said here, but so i'm Going to phrase this uh, i think appropriately do do.

Investors need to be worried about these lawsuits yeah, i think, there's you know sort of another uh. You know misperception right, that's out there yeah. If you look at the lawsuits, we're generally the plaintiff uh right and so yeah uh we're not the ones, and there are some where we're not, but we're generally the plaintiff in the suits. And so i think when you look at uh, what's out there on the legal side and there's not too much, i can say given um, you know we're in litigation on a variety of them, but you know we think we're in a very good position across all Of them, the important part is, you know, we're not going to let someone harm our brand, which, at the end of the day, is going to go against the mission of what we're trying to do, which is, as i said, about democratizing access to care making it Affordable for everyone convenient for everyone, and so if someone is is trying to damage the brand, we've got to take exception.

To that, i think that's what a lot of these suits that you've seen have been about. If you look at it from a regulatory perspective, we're in a great spot, you know: we've we've won in almost 30 states since the 2020 legislative sessions. The broad acceptance of telehealth and tele-dentistry is something that was already underway. Pre-Covered.

It certainly accelerated post cobit and we think we're in a very good position. There. Uh we've had some some good uh wins on the legal side as well. If you look at the history of the business and where we've you know where we've won, that's had a big impact on the business and uh.

You know we think we're in a very good position with the cases that are out there today as well. Any buybacks planned yeah, so you know it's always something we're thinking about right, i mean, what's the best use of our capital uh, you know, i think for us, as we look at the cash that we have on the balance sheet and just the sheer growth opportunity That we have the best use of our cash, at least for right now, is to continue to invest in the growth initiatives that we we have out there. So you know: partnerships with dental practices, international expansion, the teen market, continuing to get our brand awareness out there uh help. People understand that you know the clinical safety.

Like we've talked about so uh. We we think that's the the highest and best use of our cash right now, but it's always something that we're looking at you know. Does it buy back uh, you know. Make sense.

Is that a better use of cash and obviously acquisitions as well we're always looking at you know, technologies that we can bolt onto the platform that will continue to disrupt what we've built here over time got. It makes sense, so uh gosh. What what else haven't? I asked i mean, that's been pretty thorough. It answered a lot of the questions that i have uh.

What what am i missing? I mean, i know you also uh, because i don't own any of your stock uh, but i i do have uh two toothbrushes and two tooth washing things. So so thank you for that. What do you think uh? I you know: is it that can't be a big part of uh of of revenue, though, is it how? How does that fit in? Is that sort of part of the kit that you buy yeah, it's really um. So if you look at all the ancillary products, uh it's about 10 of revenue today, that includes uh.

You know all of those products are really about two things. So one the biggest client there is walmart, so walmart does close to 40 of all oral care sales. Around the country go through our walmart today, you know we're in uh, 4, 000 plus doors around the country in walmart's and so from a brand awareness perspective. It's great.

You know great lead, gen capability for us and so uh it's introducing someone to the brand. It doesn't take a big conversion downstream of people who go from you know, buying a toothbrush to buying aligners for that to have a very material impact in our p l. So there's a brand building lead gen aspect on the front end of that, but then, on the back end as well as someone has finished treatment, the ability to have recurring revenue there and own the bathroom through toothbrushes and paste and other oral care products gives us A recurring revenue stream increases the lifetime value of you know of those club members, so it really does both of those lead gen on the front end recurring revenue on the back end and sort of wraps around the uh, the the core aligner uh business. That makes sense.

Okay got it uh what what else uh? What else do you think i'm missing here uh, it seems to me, like my understanding, is your biggest challenge is really convincing dentists that they can do more business more efficiently. Working with you all and therefore make more money uh by selling the aligners and creating that sort of relationship uh, it does sound like a hard uh hard sell. So i i wonder what percentage may be of your revenues. Come from dentists, with individual practices versus people going through your website, yeah, the dental side is very, very small today.

So that's a new, that's a new growth initiative that we've only launched. You know. If you go back to last fall, we were still in a pilot. We only launched you know, call it this time last year, a little bit later out of pilot mode with our first practice.

So it's a newer growth initiative. We've grown that to about 500 practices. Over the past year, uh we've got close to 2000 total in our network, and so you know it is. It is growing rapidly, but it's a smaller portion of the business today.

You know we think important for for longer term growth, but something that we're in the early stages of building got. It got it so most mostly online that so then, what's your most effective sort of uh advertising, is it just? You know, search engine uh. You know ads uh or or what do you like doing yeah, i would say all the above, so you know our strategy broadly is about driving people to the website. So, if you think about how they, how they get there uh about 20 percent of the business today comes through referral and so pretty meaningful portion is referral driven a large portion is organically.

We've got over 50 percent, aided awareness, so if you were walking down the street, you know one in two people are familiar with the smile, direct club, brand and so organically are are coming to us when they're thinking about straightening their teeth and the third part of That is marketing, but we're driving all of those to the website, empowering them to order an impression kit book at a dental practice or go to a smile shop and on the marketing side. It's pretty broad we're about 60 percent of our spend is online. We've got about 40 of our spend is a combination of offline, so tv out of home things like that and online it's it's all the platforms that you would think so google's a big part of that facebook and instagram are big parts of that. But it truly is a multi-touch approach where we'll touch a consumer across multiple platforms.

You know, if you think about the uh. The journey that someone has been on you know having crooked teeth, has been a lifelong problem for most people, and so 90 of people have crooked. Teeth could never afford to to straighten, and something has happened to say now is the right time. It could be a new job or a wedding or a divorce or a birthday whatever it is, but there's a an event that drives them to say you know.

Now is the time for me to do it and so for us, it's really about generating the lead and then cultivating that lead over a long period of time to get them to ultimately convert to buying a liner. So it's a pretty complex. You know marketing strategy. We do almost everything internally: we've got about 100 team members on our marketing team, uh and - and do you know pretty much all of our creative and marketing in-house today? What's the uh time frame, if somebody wanted to you know, start the process, i'm sure this is on your website, but i'm just going to ask you yeah.

So, on average uh the treatment length is four to six months on average and so there's not a definitive line within there, but that's an average treatment of about four to six months, uh that someone would go through okay - and, i think, probably the last question. I have is what what do you all project in terms of uh path to profitability? I think bloomberg uh. Has you all uh as an estimate here of uh? These are analyst expectations somewhere around 2024 - maybe maybe profitable, right 25 somewhere in there. So for us, i i think the important metric for us is really adjusted ebitda, so we're a growth business we've spent so much in in capex and other growth initiatives that you'll see that depreciation and amortization.

You know hitting you know more so than other businesses. So right, when you think about it for us as adjusted ebitda, the only real adjustment to that is stock comp. So there's not a there's, not a whole lot of things that flow through there uh, as you might see in in um uh. You know other private equity type businesses as an example, but from an ebitda perspective, we've actually been profitable for a while.

We weren't this past quarter with the down quarter that we had, but we've turned profitable in q3 of last year and uh obviously very focused on on getting back to that even a profitability. But that's that's the main metric that we're focused on. If you look at the long-term metrics that we're going after there, top line is 20 to 30 percent. Annualized growth is what we're focused on achieving uh and adjusted ebitda margins off of that would be about 25 to 30 percent nice, nice yeah, okay, yeah that that uh, it seems pretty consistent at least uh, with with uh bloomberg, they're they're they're conglomeration of all the Analysts, they seem to put you between that yeah, that 20 to 30 over the next few years of growth, so that's exciting uh and then that makes sense on uh focusing on the ebook, which then they're suggesting getting back to ebitda profitability by 23.

uh. You think you can make it happen in 2022. Look we're uh we're not giving forward guidance um! You know right now, but what i will say is the long-term targets that we put out there. Uh is what we're focused on executing sort of year in year out.

If you look at the next five years, the goal is to ramp to that 25. 30 by the end of that time period. That makes sense. That's awesome, man, okay, any! What else did i miss anything? I mean this.

This was really unsafe. I really appreciate you coming on. I think it's worth just a quick disclosure, i'm not paid by you all and i don't only see your shares yet, who knows maybe we'll buy some shares uh, but i always i like to put that out there. Otherwise you get the troll comments, people like how much did you get paid for the interview right.

I got two toothbrushes and two tooth cleaning things. That's it okay, we'll get the feedback on the brush; we'd love to have it um all right all right. I think, in terms of you know things we missed, i don't think so. I think we covered it.

I think that, just to kind of recap for us i mean you know, our belief is we're in the very kind of early stages of what we think is just a massive market opportunity out there yeah as a company very mission driven. You know it's all about democratizing access to care, like i said we're disrupting a category that, for a very long period of time, has provided a 3x markup associated with care, we're removing that consumers making it affordable to everyone, making it convenient for everyone uh, and on Top of that guaranteeing you know guaranteeing that outcome for life, so uh, you know just remain incredibly excited and optimistic about where we think this this brand can go over time and uh. You know doing it by by at the same time, solving a very important problem for people which is which is fun yeah. No.

I love that. I think that's great yeah. I think uh, probably what one thing if folks are really excited about investing in uh new opportunities. One of the best things i always suggest is just try the product yeah, so uh.

You know that i might have to sign myself up for a four to six month there and uh uh. You know, i think, when you're a user of the product, it all makes so much more sense, yeah, absolutely yeah, we'd love that we love feedback too. So you know, if you do go through treatment, definitely send in feedback, and we for our investors as well. We do have a stock perks program where they can get discounts and other things like that too, which uh, which is a nice perk.

Oh that's, interesting. Okay, awesome awesome. Well, hey! Thank you! So much! This was a pleasure anything else. You want to add any shout out.

You want to throw in there, but otherwise i'm done! Thank you so much. I'm gon na go make myself another cup of coffee all right, perfect! Well, thank you so much smile, direct cfo here, thank you again and uh folks, i'm gon na end the live stream. I will post this video separately, so it's a standalone smile direct as well later today. So thank you, everyone for being here.

Thank you again and uh shout out to smile direct thanks again. Everyone.