For joining us this morning for NuPath's Q3 results, the company will be making a presentation and discussing their business and their financial results, and then we will be taking questions from the audience. Please type your questions into the Zoom Q&A function and I will read those out to management.

Please try to keep the questions clear and tight. It makes everything a lot better.

Sometimes it's literally hard to understand what the question is. With that, we're going to get the show officially on the go here.

NuPath is Canada's largest provider of healthcare services for the treatment and assessment of chronic pain, back injuries, sports-related injuries, and concussions. The company just released its Q3 results with over 26% revenue growth and adjusted EBITDA up 98%.

CEO Joe Walewicz and Stephen Lemieux, the president, are here to discuss the results. I'm Martin Gagel with Market Radius Research.

Please remember this is neither a recommendation nor investment advice. Gentlemen, welcome back, and congrats on another strong quarter.

Thanks, Martin, and thanks for the intro there. I'm Joe Walewicz.

I'm the CEO of NuPath Health, and I'm joined here by Stephen Lemieux, our president. I apologize for those of you who know the story.

I'm going to go over a little bit just background, for those who are new to the story can get a little sense of what we do. As Martin mentioned, we're Canada's largest network of chronic pain treatment facilities.

Next slide, Martin. We will be making forward-looking statements today.

I encourage all investors to have a look at our AIF and all our other documents filed on SEDAR. We do also use non-IFRS measures, and, just so everyone knows, all our details are in the financials and everything is there, and if you have any questions, just give us a call.

Why invest in NuPath? First and foremost, we do run, I mentioned regulated healthcare facilities, in the past we've talked a little bit about, sometimes some of our peers talk about clinics.

These are regulated facilities, we are a private provider of public health operating healthcare facilities that augment and supplement the public system. These require specialized personnel and training and very expensive equipment, and a decent amount of CapEx, although we've put that behind us, I think, for the most part now.

We have had a great organic growth profile, as you can see from our numbers. We've not made any material acquisitions in some time.

The numbers really driven by patient visits and doctors adding more time and spending more time with us. As of today, unfortunately, this is a large, growing market, and there's lots of people out there who are underserved and need our help.

More importantly, we think that as the business has grown stronger, we have lots of opportunity for inorganic growth. Finally, growing cash flows, you can see the balance sheet, a few years ago we had over $5 million net debt, we're now down to under $2 million, $1.7.

We've been really rejigging that balance sheet and using that cash flow to buy back stock and other things. We're able to invest in new initiatives.

What do we do? People always kind of wonder what does chronic pain treatment mean, and people are going to imagine a bunch of different ways, but I think this helps to simplify it a little bit.

We do injections, for example, Botox if you have a migraine, you may get a Botox injection, which, for people don't know that, Botox can be used for the treatment of chronic migraine. Things like prolotherapy and PRP for sports injuries, you get nerve blocks for people who have sciatica, these are things that you can do.

In addition, we do things like infusions, IV infusions of lidocaine for people with systemic pain. Ketamine can also be used for pain, and I just want to be clear this is not a field trip kind of situation.

What happens when you get ketamine in our clinics, it's usually lower dose than you would get for the psychological treatments, these are lower dose for the treatment of chronic pain. Then, of course, there's other things, radiofrequency ablation is a very important treatment modality for people with chronic lower back pain.

We have physical therapy on-site in Edmonton. We have one of our doctors actually does acupuncture, we do cognitive behavioral therapy, we make that freely available to our patients, we do sessions every couple months.

Then we have a massage therapist who comes in once in a while. All these things are ancillary to what we do, but the core business is really kind of the injections, infusions, and things like radiofrequency ablation.

Next slide, please. There.

For those of you don't know, we are currently in Ontario and Alberta. We're in Ontario from Ottawa to Windsor and most places in between operating under two brands, InMedic and NuPath Centre for Pain & Spine.

In 2021, we entered the Alberta market with our Healthpointe acquisition, which led to our expansion to Red Deer, and that site began operations really 2023, but really accelerated in 2024 and is one of our fastest-growing sites now. Steve, I'll pass over to you.

All right. No, thanks, Joe.

Just looking at our results for the quarter, as Martin mentioned, our Q3 revenue was up approximately 26%, and this is mainly driven by higher patient volumes at all of our clinics across all of our brands. On the year to date, we're up roughly 20% to $65 million compared to $53 million last year.

Again, that's mainly driven by higher patient visits, and we did have a one-time revenue pickup we talked about in our Q2 results. On the next slide, looking at our adjusted EBITDA, strong adjusted EBITDA growth both in the quarter and year to date, and this is really driven by our operational improvements, looking at optimizing the available time that doctors give us to maximize the amount of patients we can get through the clinics, IT investments to help improve the doctors' efficiency with respect to using artificial intelligence in their EMR systems, and as well as optimizing our real estate footprint to get the most out of the square footage we have, expanding where we need and contracting at clinics where we had additional space.

To our balance sheet, as Joe mentioned, our balance sheet is in great shape. We finished the quarter with $4.6 million in cash, our net debt is $1.7 million, and we've been growing that cash balance while we've been investing in our facilities across the country.

This puts us into a great position to start growing the business. We've got a good cash balance that's growing, and we've got a great partner with National Bank, we have the availability to increase our leverage and use acquisition lines to move forward as we continue to look at opportunities to grow our business in new markets.

With that, I'll turn it back to you, Joe.

Sure. I think, people for those of you who have been following us, we've been talking about this for some time.

Step one, increase capacity utilization, better use our facilities. In that case, we've been, and one of the best ways, of course, is onboard new doctors at underutilized clinics, doctors adding hours.

We always say add doctors, but it doesn't really quite that way. If I have a doctor who's working one day a week and they add, two more days, that's three days a week, that's it that that significantly increases our our ability to serve our our patients.

As well, adding new services, we did we started with Arthrosamid this year. We've been doing PRP and prolotherapy for some time, and we're adding the ketamine infusions.

Adding these new services, augments our revenues. For example, we've done approximately 100 Arthrosamid procedures already, at $4,200 an injection, it's it's been a significant part of our revenue given that we just started in March.

Expanding our network, so as we know, we we expanded to Alberta, we expanded to Red Deer. We're looking at additional opportunities to expand both within our two core provinces as well as additional provinces.

Then finally, we've always talked about other specialties, radiology, orthopedics, things that would be able to to that fit hand in glove. Every patient that comes into our clinic has probably had imaging done, it's a great idea to kind of think about some of those.

If you're a candidate for surgery, we can send you over there. If you're referred for surgery and not a candidate, maybe you still have pain that needs to be treated.

That there's kind of these are the three areas we view as as important for the future. Inorganic growth, that's really kind of our now our focus.

Stephen joined in in on May 1st, and what we've been doing with that, we got our National Bank new credit line in place at the end of March, Stephen on May 1st. Now we've been spending a lot of time evaluating a lot of new opportunities for using our existing cash flows and our balance sheet to be able to allow for some tuck-in acquisitions.

Lots of things, we won't I know some of our peers, talk about the actual numbers and when they're going to close and whatnot. We know we have we have certainly more than a dozen things on our desk right now that we're actively evaluating, and always timing is very difficult to predict.

We're super excited about our ability to do so given our our financial state and looking at all of these things here, new nicer facilities in our core markets, new facilities in new markets like, for example, in cities in Ontario and Alberta that we're not in, as well as, things like BC, Quebec, et cetera, where we can get in as well on a different location. Next slide, please.

I want to talk about the cap structure, too, because this is interesting. I talked about how we cleaned up our balance sheet, but, we've really cleaned up our entire cap structure.

When when I took over, we had we we had some high-yield debt, we had related-party debt, we had broker warrants, we had other warrants. It's clean.

We have common shares, options, RSUs, and that's it. We we've cleaned that up over time and we got rid of all the debt.

We have one bank facility. We have a bank facility, debt sorry, one debt facility, shares, options, warrants, RSUs, and that's it.

I'm really proud of kind of cleaning this up. We've been busy buying back the stock.

As you can see, over the last year, you've seen me buying in the market, you've seen the company's been buying in the market. We continue to believe if you look at our last nine months year to date, if you look trailing 12 months, sorry, adjusted EBITDA of almost $6 million, we're trading at, well as of whenever two days ago, $23 million in in terms of enterprise value.

We we think the board and myself, both as a shareholder, board member, and as an executive, are very comfortable that the company is undervalued here. We're we're very pleased to continue with that of returning capital to shareholders in that manner.

Next slide, please. For those of you don't know, I I joined about three years ago, took over as CEO, but I was with the company since I joined the board of directors in 2020 as part of the RTO.

I've been almost 30 years in healthcare with multiple successful companies in the pharma and and biotech space. Jeff, our CFO, he was controller until he was our controller, was promoted to CFO in '21 on an interim basis, and we loved him so much we asked him to step up and and take that full-time.

Then Stephen, we brought him back in in '25. Stephen?

Rejoined the company back in '25. As well, I've been CFO at a variety of pharma commercial companies up on both sides of the border.

No, I'm just excited to join the team here at NuPath again and sort of continue to grow and build it.

Next slide. I think, we don't give guidance, but just kind of give people a good sense of our outlook and what we see.

We think continued high-single, low-double-digit organic growth for the base business is very achievable over the next 12 months. We're seeing the increased physician hours resulting in more patient volume growth, which is really, I'd say probably the fundamental thing we want to keep an eye on.

This Arthrosamid has been great. We're looking at other procedures like that where we can kind of add in new novel therapies that just make our service offering more unique and differentiated from our peers.

We're under the hood, we're tinkering, drug costs, scheduling of staff, right-sizing clinics. We keep tinkering away to work on all the pieces of our expense structure.

Then, finally, we definitely expect over the next 12 months we'll be executing on a couple of these transactions. In summary, we are Canada's leader in chronic pain treatment.

We're a private provider of public health, as I mentioned, which means we support and augment the system, we're not a private-pay business. These are regulated facilities.

There's a large market for this. We have I think in Edmonton now are 18-month wait lists.

I have a clinic in Ontario with probably 1,200 patients that's waiting to be seen. We have a lot of people who are waiting to get care from us, and the bad news is if they go to the public system or go to a public hospital, it's even worse.

We're all trying to better serve patients, and we think that we'll be able to do that over the next 12 months. In terms of health policy, I think that the comment there is really around the idea of what we do, and I always say this to investors who don't know us, is what we do you can also get done in the hospital, right?

We're kind of hospital-light, to speak. The difference is that I'm downtown Toronto today, and if you want to fight traffic and pay $30 for parking and get to the hospital and you wait two years to get through the wait list, whereas we're providing it in the community, in Brampton, in Mississauga, in Scarborough, in Oshawa, where people can actually readily access this.

I think we're providing better access to patients, and that's what I think the government like to see, things that are not required to be done in the hospital done out of hospital. That's, whether it's Doug Ford, whether it's other premiers talking about, how do we do some of these procedures like corneas or cataract surgery, things that don't need a hospital shouldn't be done in a hospital.

I think you're going to see more and more Canada's probably 10-plus years behind other countries in doing this, and I think we're just at the nexus of that. We've had really turned this business around, I told you two, three years ago that I was going to turn this around, and I think you can kind of see what we've done and just judge for yourself.

We know we're undervalued because we know what our multiples are and we know what the multiples are of the acquisitions we're looking at. We're going to continue to returning capital to shareholders in the manner we see fit.

I think that's it. That's from our MD&A.

Great. Thank you.

All right, gentlemen. Thanks for that overview.

I just want to make sure you are a private provider of public services, you're largely government-paid, although some of that knee procedure you do, I believe, is a private-pay thing, but for the vast majority of services, you get paid by the provincial government, correct?

Yes. Currently, Alberta Health and OHIP primarily cover 97% to 99% of our revenues.

It's changing now, as PRP is a procedure that's done for sports injury. For example, you've probably heard of a hockey player or a baseball player has got injured and they get a PRP shot.

Those are things that I think the, as we call, the aging warriors here, people like to keep active in their older age, do those kinds of procedures. The government doesn't pay, we were able to provide that to patients for a fee, things like Arthrosamid.

I think we'll start seeing some more of that. I don't see this ever going to a full private pay, but basically, we're not allowed to provide anything that the government provides for a fee.

If the government doesn't want to do that, or doesn't see value in that, or is unable to pay for it, then certainly you'll see those kind of procedures. That's not just in chronic pain, it's everywhere.

There's procedures government just refuses to pay for, there's drugs for cancer they won't pay for. Then patients have to find their own way around that.

All right. I noticed on your cap table things have, as you highlighted, cleaned up.

What's very noticeable is you said that there're no more warrants on the cap table. What happened there?

If you look in our filings, you'll see the details there, but basically, we paid a very nominal fee to retire those warrants and get rid of them essentially in line with what we're doing with our buyback is trying to minimize we didn't want to dilute shareholders, almost 10% at a at a price of 25 cents. I think we we are very confident where the stock is today, we're undervalued, we think we're even more undervalued at 25 cents.

Being able to pay a nominal fee to to retire those does two things: one, it minimizes dilution for us for shareholders, and two, it removes an overhang, I think, that was out there, a perceived overhang. We're very pleased to have done that at a very really a very low price.

If you look at the number, it was, about $180,000, if you do the the premium to 25 cents, you'll see that it was a very nominal fee and very attractive use of capital for the company.

As well as signaling you don't need that capital right now, your cap structure and table is just A-OK.

That, too. Yes, as we mentioned on our other slide with the balance sheet, we're very comfortable with where we're at right now.

Yeah. You've been growing organically quite substantially over the last few years with essentially the same footprint.

You've optimized it a little bit. Can you talk about your capacity utilization, and how much more internal growth can you do before you just start hitting up against the natural limits of walls and doors and that without having to open new locations?

That's a good comment. First I'll just say that one of the things you've heard from me over the last two years is we've been really kind of consolidating our sites, and so we had closed Toronto, we closed Oakville, we shrunk Mississauga, we shrunk London, but now you're seeing two other things.

We now grew Windsor and we grew Brampton because they're at capacity, and so they're busy. When we look at our capacity utilization, it's across a network of 12 sites.

What we've done is with those other closures, we've been able to consolidate physicians into sites, that helps on the capacity utilization, but now we're at the point where some of the sites actually need a little extra space. We're going to do that.

In January we have two more sites we'll probably be adding a few treatment rooms because, as you can see, our organic growth is there. That being said, just in terms of capacity utilization, there's different ways to look at it.

We've historically looked at it more as kind of an operational capacity utilization, not a footprint-based utilization, which is kind of a little different. What I want to message to investors is we have more than enough footprint to grow organically over the next few years, and we're going to provide some updates on that, provide more detail in the new year.

We'll be talking a little more about footprint and operational capacity so people can kind of better understand that. Basically, bottom line is, for example, if I have a site, but there's no doctors there, then the functional or operational capacity isn't there, right?

We'll provide more detail on that in the new year, but I think when you see our capacity utilization, I think some people had some concern about being over 80%, then it gets to be a problem recruiting and retaining doctors. We don't have that.

One, we've been expanding, as Brampton and Windsor, I mentioned, for example, and two, that physical space, we have a lot of physical space still available, we just have to use it better. I'm not worried about the growth profile organically for now.

Is the rate-limiting factor right now the number of physicians that are there, and it's a matter of hiring, and that'll expand your total capacity, and just then tweaking how it's used and so forth? Do I have that right?

Martin, you do. As we've said in the past, there's a lot of patients that need to be served here, and really finding doctors has been the biggest priority of the business.

We do work with recruiters and through our physician network to expand the doctor footprint. We do have probably about half a dozen new doctors that will start into the new year.

It does take time from when the doctors leave their existing contracts to when they can start joining us, and some will come on one day a week and then expand to two or three days. That's what we're doing.

We're looking at new doctors both in Edmonton at the clinic and we have there as well at Healthpointe, and as well across some of the clinics we have in Ontario.

Martin, just on that, for example, people do ramp up, right? Even though we have a backlog, a doctor will start, we had a few people started earlier this year in 2025, in the Q1 and Q2, and now you're seeing kind of them ramping up their practice.

It does take a little bit of time for people to ramp up their practice when they join.

All right. There's an audience question here.

I think we've largely covered it, but if there's anything else you'd like to add: can you please talk about how you at the clinic level optimize retention of staff while incentivizing growing revenues and margins?

I think on the staff, we do pay attention to the culture we have at every clinic, and every clinic's culture is different. It's kind of like they're each their own little family, you really have to focus on making it a good place to work, get good interaction, you really want your MOAs and your nurses and the doctors all working together, understand how the doctors work.

The more we can do that, and we've put clinic managers in some of our clinics as well to run it, they can learn how the doctor practices, make sure they can optimize that schedule, and then working with our technology group as well to look at different ways they can use AI, how can we make charting more efficient, and those little steps where they can add one or two patients a day to a doctor's schedule, then that helps grow our revenue organically, makes the workflow in the clinic much more efficient, and you can see that in the numbers we've been reporting over the last few quarters.

Just to add to that, from a staff point of view, you think about, for sure, we have a radiation tech, a rad tech, or a nurse, or an MOA, they can work in hospitals, right? The difference is that, like my daughter working 12-hour night shifts, it's not for everybody, and so there is an environment to be able to work in the community in a community care setting, which is, I would say, the way the hours work, it's definitely we pay almost the same as hospitals, but they have a slightly better work profile for people who are looking for that.

That's kind of the environment, but I think that idea that these are small little islands, they work together in teams. We've been busy trying to work on training as well, we do our surveys of staff.

We did one last year, and one of the things came up was opportunities for training and learning, we've been adding that. We are able to kind of respond to them in a manner and try and get them to feel part of the team.

Those are ways we retain, and we don't have a lot of turnover, to be honest, on the staff side, which I'm very proud of, because everyone's short-staffed on nurses and MOAs and rad techs, we were very pleased that the turnover's been relatively modest.

All right. Changing the topic back to your cap table.

You have been buying back shares and I believe your share buyback program expires in the near term. Given the recent rise in the share price, are you continuing the share buyback?

What sort of action should investors expect from the company right now?

I think that the message right now is that the board and management all believe that we continue to be extremely undervalued, and we'll reevaluate that over the coming weeks, but definitely we think returning capital to shareholders in this manner is a great way, a great use of funds.

With your inorganic growth strategy, you've said that you expect to have some acquisitions over the coming year. Can you discuss a little more about what the pipeline looks like, how you're seeing the visibility in that sector right now?

On the inorganic side, Martin, or?

Yes, on acquisitions and M&A.

On acquisitions. We probably have approximately about a dozen or so opportunities that we're looking at from various stages, like early discussions into the LOI phase.

We're looking at growth opportunities within both the province of Alberta and Ontario, as well as some of the new markets, like Joe mentioned, into BC, Saskatchewan, and we're looking at Quebec as well. I'd say there's healthy interest.

The appeal for some of these smaller doctors who are managing a clinic business as well as managing supply channels, HR, their finance, the appeal of being able to go focus more on medicine and less focus on all the back office administration has been some of the appeal for some of the doctors that we're in current discussions with.

All right. With all the budgetary talks going on right now, is there any risk about changing in the method of payment that could be negative on you or positive on you to try to find a more efficient manner to deliver healthcare in the various provinces?

Oh, go ahead, Joel.

Oh no, I was just going to say, look, I think that one way I step back and look at this is that these changes happen all the time, sometimes for good and sometimes not as beneficial, and so we've managed through that over time, and so I think that we're comfortable. We don't believe there's a strong interest on the part of payers to see these patients in the street, right?

This is the challenge, and when I talk about the patients, people often think about chronic pain, they're like, "Oh, you got a back injury, person's got a shoulder injury, was playing squash, ran into the wall." It's not that.

These are people who are probably out of work, who don't have insurance, who have been out of work for some time. There's a lot of our patients who are really suffering, and I don't think there's a strong interest on the government side to really play with that in a big way.

Certainly we see that. You can answer the question yourself if I say, where do you think these patients end up if they're not getting treatments from us?

I think the answer is probably not anything any public payer wants to see going forward.

All right. We've covered a lot of topics here.

There are no more audience questions at this point. Are there any final comments or areas you'd like to highlight before we wrap it up here this morning?

No, I think in summary, I think just look, we've told you we're going to deliver, we're starting to deliver. You're starting to see what happens when doctors start adding time with us, when the microscale starts bubbling up to the top, when each of our clinics is running really smoothly, you see that kind of come up to the top.

I think we're pretty pleased that all of our clinics are doing pretty well, some are doing better than others, but we see great opportunity in just on our inorganic side as well to be able to add to that.

All right. Gentlemen, thank you very much.

Congratulations on a solid quarter, and I look forward to seeing future progress from NuPath. Thank you.

Thanks, Martin.

Thanks, Martin.