Quest Resource Holding Corporation Q4 2025 Earnings Call - Industrial Volume Drop Masks Operational Gains, Cash and Debt Moves Buy Time

Operator: Afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Quest Resource Holding Corporation fourth quarter 2025 earnings call conference call. At this time, all lines are in listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. If at any time during this call you require immediate assistance, please press star zero for the operator. Please be advised that this call is being recorded today, Thursday, March 12, 2026. I would now like to turn the conference over to Dave Mossberg, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Dave Mossberg, Investor Relations, Quest Resource Holding Corporation: Thank you, operator, and thank you everyone for joining us on the call. Before we begin, I’d like to remind everyone that this conference call may contain predictions, estimates, and other forward-looking statements regarding future events or future performance of the company. Use of words like anticipate, project, estimate, expect, intend, believe, and other similar expressions are intended to identify those forward-looking statements. Such forward-looking statements are based on the company’s current expectations, estimates, projections, beliefs, and assumptions, and involve significant risks and uncertainties. Actual events or the company’s results could differ materially from those discussed in the forward-looking statements as a result of various factors, which are discussed in greater detail in the company’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. You are cautioned not to place undue reliance on such statements and to consult SEC filings for additional risks and uncertainties.

The company’s forward-looking statements are presented as of the date made, and the company undertakes no obligation to update such statements unless required by law to do so. In addition, this call may include industry and market data and other statistical information, as well as the company’s observations and views about industry conditions and developments. The data and information are based on the company’s estimates, independent publications, government publications, and reports made by market research firms and other sources. Although Quest believes these sources are reliable and the data and other information are accurate, we caution that Quest has not independently verified the reliability of the sources or the accuracy of the information. Certain non-GAAP financial measures will be disclosed during this call. These non-GAAP measures are used by management to make strategic decisions, forecast future results, and evaluate the company’s current performance.

Management believes the presentation of these non-GAAP financial measures is useful to investors’ understanding and assessment of the company’s ongoing core operations and prospects for the future. Unless it is otherwise stated, it should be assumed that any financials discussed in this call will be on a non-GAAP basis. Full reconciliations of non-GAAP to GAAP financial measures are included in today’s earnings release. With that, I’d like to turn the call over to Perry Moss, Chief Executive Officer.

Perry Moss, Chief Executive Officer, Quest Resource Holding Corporation: Great. Thanks, Ryan. Thanks everyone for joining this afternoon. Our fourth quarter financial performance reflected a continuation of the soft volume environment we have been navigating for the past year. While our fourth quarter always presents a seasonal slowdown, we observed a more pronounced sequential decline this year than we’ve experienced in years past. The soft manufacturing and industrial output environments continue to weigh on volumes from our industrial customers. Importantly, we have not lost any customers in our industrial end market, which lends us confidence that we will see much improved financial performance when this sector recovers. At the same time, areas of the portfolio that typically perform better during the fourth quarter, such as retail and restaurants, also observed lower volume levels. As such, they exacerbated the decline rather than provide the usual offsets we see.

This environment also has a dampening effect on new business pipeline. Our sales cycle with current prospects is elongated relative to more recent history, and most companies remain in a wait and see approach. The overall pipeline remains very healthy and potential clients have not fallen out, but economic uncertainty continues to lead to some decision delays. We saw better new business wins in the second half of 2025 compared to the first half. We’ve seen many opportunities that have been pushed into 2026. We remain very engaged with these prospects, and we believe that we will be able to successfully win and onboard many of these potential clients as the macro backdrop improves and confidence returns. In response, we are focused on controlling what we can control.

We continue to execute the operational excellence initiatives we’ve discussed in recent quarters, and we’re very encouraged by the results these efforts are delivering and intend to continue to drive additional efficiencies into our future. Our operating foundation is strong, and we have built a resilient team that is prepared to take on challenges like those we’ve faced over this past year. Earlier last year, we placed added emphasis on share of wallet opportunities with existing customers, which remains a central focus of ours. We are methodically evaluating every existing key account and are prioritizing our largest opportunities with the highest probabilities of winning.

Over the past few quarters, we’ve seen encouraging progress as we are broadening the number of waste streams that we’re handling for individual clients, adding new value add services to existing client accounts, and expanding our coverage with large multi-location customers to handle a larger portion of their waste. One great example is the addition of several hundred new locations to an existing customer in our automotive services end market. This customer recently made a large acquisition, and the acquired company’s network is now being added to our scope of service with this customer. This is a strong testament to our asset-light model, breadth of our vendor network, and overall value proposition as it demonstrates our ability to deploy assets and solutions nationwide as circumstances change quickly. Our progress to date leaves us confident that these initiatives will contribute to greater levels of organic growth for us going forward.

These are customers that know our services well and should be a shorter sales cycle given the pre-existing relationship. They will also be strong contributors to gross profit dollar growth as we add and optimize services and further our commitment to expanding our business in non-industrial end markets like retail, hospitality, grocery stores, healthcare, and more. These are all markets that we anticipate will provide a good counterbalance to our earning profile and seasonality as they help to offset the typical slowdown in industrial production in Q4. Meanwhile, we also continue to onboard wins from the past 18 months, which are progressing as expected. The large retailer and restaurant chain that we discussed on prior calls are launched and up and running. They are becoming more meaningful contributors to revenue.

Although, as we’ve discussed, the initial buy-ins from new business wins tend to be lower margin given the one-time start-up cost associated with adding new service lines. We also continue to make advancements in our operating platform to better leverage our technology and data. These investments are designed to improve customer experience and continue to improve the record low service disruption rates we are currently experiencing. Our portal is a single point location where customers can view the full scope of services provided, waste materials generated and handled, associated cost, and the ultimate destination. The value of this data is undeniable for Quest and its customers, and it empowers us to drive meaningful operating efficiencies in the form of cost reduction or avoidance, as well as streamlined service that is tailored to their unique needs.

Our zero-touch capability will drive real efficiencies for their operations while improving profitability and customer service levels for Quest. It will also help to improve our cash cycle, given the end-to-end visibility from service request through billing and payment. These operational excellence initiatives are driving better visibility into our customer needs, enhancing the productivity of our sales team, elevating our vendor management practices, maximizing efficiencies for our operating teams, and improving cash generation. Overall, 2025 was a challenging year for Quest as volume declines from our industrial end market led to revenue declines. Additionally, we divested an underperforming business, making year-over-year comparisons difficult. Despite the difficult operating environment in these specific portions of our business, we drove growth across the majority of our business in 2025 by adding approximately $29 million in new revenues from the prior year.

These gains came from the full year impact of client wins from 2024, incremental new wins in 2025, and wallet share expansion of existing clients. There is progress being made as the operational excellence initiatives we’ve implemented are delivering real results and creating a much stronger foundation to grow from. Our sales function is more focused and effective, and our value proposition of driving operating efficiencies and cost savings for our customers continues to resonate. We are confident that the business is well-positioned to deliver improved results as the macroeconomic environment lends incremental confidence for our customers and activity picks up. Looking ahead, our key priorities remain unchanged in 2026. We remain focused on growing the business with new and existing customers, driving margin improvements as we execute our operational excellence initiatives, continuing the development of our operating platform, improving cash generation, and reducing our debt balance.

With that, I’d like to turn the call over to Brett to review our fourth quarter financial results in greater detail. Brett?

Brett, Chief Financial Officer, Quest Resource Holding Corporation: Thanks, Perry, and good afternoon, everyone. Revenue for the fourth quarter was $58.9 million, a 16% decrease from one year ago and a sequential decrease of 7% compared to the third quarter. The decline compared to the prior year was driven by clients in our industrial end market, where market conditions remain challenged, as well as from the divested mall-related business. Both factors combined to account for a $10.7 million reduction in quarterly revenue compared to the prior year. Sequentially, revenue from the industrial clients declined by approximately $4.3 million compared to the prior quarter. The sequential revenue decline this year was larger than expected, driven by a more pronounced reduction in industrial volumes than we had anticipated.

Additionally, we saw reduced volumes across the larger portfolio where we expected to help offset this impact. In the fourth quarter, we also launched a new customer and a couple of wallet share initiatives, which we expect to get the full benefit of in 2026. Finally, from a full year perspective, isolating the industrial client headwinds and mall-related divestiture, the remaining two-thirds of the business saw modest growth of $7.4 million, or about 5%. Our partnerships with our industrial clients remain very strong, but macroeconomic conditions and continued softer levels of manufacturing activity in 2025 drove lower overall volumes. Importantly, these customers remain active and engaged. As a result, we fully expect to continue to support these clients when conditions normalize and return to growth. In the meantime, we’ve greatly elevated our focus on share of wallet opportunities with these clients.

Moving on to gross profit. In the fourth quarter, gross profit dollars totaled $9.1 million, a decline of 15% compared to the prior year, and a sequential decline of 21%. This resulted in a gross margin of 15.5%. The sequential decline in gross profit was more pronounced than the outlook we provided on the Q3 call and was the result of the following factors. First, we saw reduced gross margin leverage driven by the decline in overall volume. We also had lower margins isolated within the industrial sector, which contributed approximately $1 million to the reduction in gross profit. Finally, we had some one-time costs of approximately half a million dollars, mostly from implementation costs for the new clients and wallet share launches in the quarter.

The impact of these was factored into our outlook, but were more pronounced than expected, and again, reduced volumes across the broader portfolio inhibited our ability to offset this pressure. However, we were able to partially offset the decline with optimization improvements and other efficiency measures. As a reminder, contributions from newer clients and wallet share expansions are typically minimal in the first few months of launch due to one-time costs, the timing of optimizing those, the initial book of business and initial lower margins as we execute a land and expand strategy. We believe we are well-positioned coming into 2026 to get a full year of gross profit contribution from these recent launches. Additionally, we still have a previously announced new client win and a wallet share expansion win that are both expected to launch in the first half of the year.

As we are now well into the first quarter, we are confident that sequential comparisons for gross profit dollars will improve. Our outlook is based on a slightly improved volume environment in Q1, especially compared to a seasonally low Q4. Continued execution of our commercial and customer initiatives to optimize the business and improve contributions from our new client and wallet share wins launched in the fourth quarter. We expect to continue to experience some margin pressure in 2026 in a challenged industrial volume environment and from the mixed impact of our land and expand strategy. However, we anticipate we will be able to help offset these pressures through optimizing service levels, growing our share of wallet with existing clients, optimizing the client wins from the previous years, and continuing to drive operational improvements across the business.

Moving on to SG&A, which was $7.7 million during the fourth quarter, a 24% reduction year-over-year, and a 17% reduction on a sequential basis. The declines year-over-year are primarily related to reductions in headcount, bad debt expense, and other costs specifically related to the divested RWS commercial property management business and the reduction in workforce in the first half of 2024. We also had reductions from increased efficiencies and the aggressive takeout of costs across the organization throughout the year. These were partially offset by severance and retirement expenses in the quarter. In addition, subsequent to the year-end, we finalized an agreement to sublet our office space and rationalize the physical footprint for our headquarters by securing a new office lease in a more cost-effective space.

With this, we expect to realize an annualized cost savings of approximately $400,000 in 2026. Looking ahead to the first quarter, we would anticipate SG&A to be below $9 million, with the sequential increase driven by the resumption of our normal bonus accrual. Moving on to a review of the cash flows and balance sheet. At the end of the fourth quarter, we had $1 million in cash, which was roughly unchanged from the prior quarter and approximately $37.7 million of available borrowing capacity on our $45 million operating borrowing line. For the fourth quarter, we generated just over $1 million in cash from operations and $1.7 million of free cash flow.

As we’ve discussed on past calls, we’ve taken steps to optimize our payment and collections process with vendors with the goal of improving our order to cash cycle and overall working capital management. We’ve been able to homogenize this process and are now paying the vast majority of our vendors to term. We also have shortened our invoicing time and will continue to optimize our cash collections process. Our DSOs finished the quarter in the mid-70s, which was a modest increase of a few days from the end of the third quarter. Unfortunately, the larger than expected sequential revenue decline masked improved receivables management as our AR fell sequentially by $1.7 million. Stepping back, the trend in DSOs remains downward, falling from the low 80s one year ago, and we continue to implement measures to improve our cash cycle.

We would expect these systems and process improvements to contribute continued cash generation and further DSO reduction in the coming quarters. Our underlying progress can also be seen in our reduction of working capital days, which declined from 23 days at the end of Q4 of 2024 to 11 at the end of the most recent quarter. We also paid down approximately $2 million of debt during the fourth quarter, bringing our full-year debt reduction to $13.2 million, a 16.4% reduction for the full year. As of the end of the fourth quarter, we had $64 million in net notes payable versus $76.3 million at the beginning of the year. We expect to continue to aggressively reduce debt as cash generation continues to improve.

Lastly, we continue to look for proactive measures to improve our financing costs and give ourselves greater flexibility on our lines of credit as our initiatives to improve profitability and cash flow take hold. To that end, we recently refinanced our ABL with Texas Capital Bank to replace the prior ABL with PNC. Concurrently, we negotiated with Monroe Capital, who holds our term debt, to provide both fixed charge and leverage covenant easements across 2026 and into 2027. These combined efforts will provide ample cushion to operate in this challenging operating environment while we continue to focus on the execution and completion of our initiatives to drive efficiencies and operating leverage across the business, while also investing and driving growth through new clients and wallet share.

Additionally, the new arrangement with Texas Capital Bank gives us more flexibility to swap ABL debt for term debt and to reduce interest expense as we execute throughout the year. With that, I’ll turn the call back over to Perry for some closing comments before we open it up for Q&A.

Perry Moss, Chief Executive Officer, Quest Resource Holding Corporation: Great. Thank you, Brett. Our fourth quarter was not the finish to the year that we would have liked or expected. 2025 was a year of considerable change at Quest, and we made tremendous progress on several key initiatives that span the entire enterprise, from standardizing and streamlining our internal processes, enhancing customer engagement, elevating our go-to-market and share of wallet focus, reducing cost, improving our cash cycle, and more. We know that these initiatives are working and that Quest is without a doubt a leaner and more productive operation. We began to see the fruits of these efforts in the third quarter, but the reality is that the volume environment remains difficult and is masking the full benefit of the team’s hard work.

In the meantime, we are controlling what we can control, remaining highly engaged with our customers, establishing a foundation that can generate shareholder returns in difficult environments. We know that we are well-positioned to accelerate our financial performance and drive shareholder value as conditions improve. With that, I’d like to turn the call over to our operator to move us to Q&A.

Operator: Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question and answer session. Should you have a question, please press star followed by the one. You will hear a prompt that your hand has been raised. Should you wish to decline from the polling process, please press the star followed by the two. One moment, please, for your first question. Our first question today comes from Aaron Spychalla, Craig-Hallum. Please go ahead.

Aaron Spychalla, Analyst, Craig-Hallum: Yeah. Hi, Perry and Brett. Thanks for taking the questions. You know, maybe first for me on, you know, just some of the KPIs that you’ve implemented. Can you just give an update there? You know, maybe what’s been going better versus plan and anything that’s been a little bit more stubborn? Any lessons learned on that front thus far?

Perry Moss, Chief Executive Officer, Quest Resource Holding Corporation: Yeah. Hi, Aaron. It’s Perry. How are you doing? Look, as we stated in the call, you know, the KPIs, the operations, the operational efficiency initiatives, all of those are on track. The business is performing surprisingly well in this, you know, very difficult volume environment. You know, as you can see from you know, our SG&A, you know, we have been very intentional about how we’re managing this business. We intend to continue to control what we can. The one thing that I can’t control is the volume from our customers. As their businesses struggle, so does the volume that they provide to Quest.

What we can do is we can manage our efficiencies and our costs, and we’ll continue to do that regardless of the environment. All of the KPIs and initiatives that we’ve talked about are order to cash or procure to pay and source to contract are all continuing to progress very well. All of our KPI trending is positive. We haven’t lost any ground in those areas whatsoever. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to see. As I said, it’s masked by, you know, the disappointing volume that we’re currently experiencing.

Aaron Spychalla, Analyst, Craig-Hallum: Okay. That’s good color there. On, you know, source to contract, can you just maybe give a little bit of an update there broadly? You know, how is the health of the vendor network, just given, you know, the macro and things like that?

Perry Moss, Chief Executive Officer, Quest Resource Holding Corporation: Yeah. I think I said on our last call that, you know, our vendors are beginning to ask for business again, and that continues. You know, a number of things have continued to improve. Certainly our relationships with those vendors. We also conducted a project with our vendors to, you know, continue to lower cost, and that delivered some very positive results for us. We have our vendors now accepting payment to term, where in the past, they were pushing Quest to pay them ahead of schedule. We continue to experience the lowest service disruptions, really, in our history. The importance of that is obviously service interruptions are problematic for our customers.

You know, we greatly appreciate that, you know, we’ve made a lot of progress there, but there are associated costs that come along with those service disruptions, and those associated costs are at historic lows as well. All things are going very well with our vendor base. In fact, we continue to grow the vendor base that we currently have, you know, vetted and within our network.

Aaron Spychalla, Analyst, Craig-Hallum: All right. Thanks. Then maybe one last question. You know, saw one of your industrial customers, you know, potentially opening up a couple plants here in 2026. Just curious, you highlighted some, you know, cross-sell opportunities and focus on expanding market share. Just wondering if you could elaborate a little on, you know, some of those opportunities as well.

Perry Moss, Chief Executive Officer, Quest Resource Holding Corporation: Yeah. Well, you know, we don’t. As you know, Aaron Spychalla, we don’t cite or talk about any specific customers. I will tell you that if any of the industrial base is adding plants or, you know, if the macroeconomic environment, you know, turns around, we certainly stand to benefit from that because, you know, our relationships with these industrials is extremely healthy. You know, I sat in on a quarterly business review just last week, and this client could not be more pleased with the services that we’re providing. You know, their business itself continues to struggle. I would tell you that if these businesses, you know, begin to improve either by building plants or, you know, improving or increasing production, we stand to benefit from all of that.

Aaron Spychalla, Analyst, Craig-Hallum: All right. Understood. Thank you for taking the questions. I’ll turn it over.

Perry Moss, Chief Executive Officer, Quest Resource Holding Corporation: Yeah, of course.

Operator: Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call over to Perry Moss, Chief Executive Officer, for closing remarks. Please continue.

Perry Moss, Chief Executive Officer, Quest Resource Holding Corporation: Great. Thank you, operator. Thanks to everyone for joining this afternoon. We really appreciate your continued support and interest in Quest, and we look forward to updating you all next quarter. Thank you.

Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today’s conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.