FitLife Brands Inc

NASDAQ:FTLF

Earnings Call Transcript 2024-Q3

[Operator]

Good day, and welcome to the FitLife Brands Third Quarter 2024 Financial Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]

It is now my pleasure to turn the floor over to your host, Dayton Judd, CEO of FitLife Brands. Sir, the floor is yours.

[Dayton Judd, executive]

Great. Thank you, Paul. I would like to welcome everyone to FitLife's Third Quarter 2024 Earnings Call. We appreciate you taking the time to join us this afternoon.

Joining me on this call is FitLife's CFO, Jakob York; and FitLife's EVP, Ryan Hansen. Today, we will follow a similar pattern to our previous earnings call. I'll provide some opening commentary about the company overall as well as the different parts of our business, and then we will open the call up for Q&A.

So for the company overall, total revenue during the third quarter of 2024 increased 15% year-over-year to $16 million, with wholesale revenue increasing 16% and online revenue increasing 14%. Gross profit increased 23% and gross margin expanded from 41% to 43.8%. Contribution, which we define as gross profit less advertising and marketing expense, increased 34%. Net income increased 25% with basic EPS increasing 21% and fully diluted EPS increasing 23%. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter increased 41% to $3.6 million, bringing our LTM adjusted EBITDA to $13.4 million.

With regard to brand level performance, let me start with an overview of Legacy FitLife. Total Legacy FitLife revenue for the third quarter of 2024 was $6.3 million, of which 61% was from wholesale customers and 39% was from online sales. This represents a 12% year-over-year decline in wholesale revenue and a 4% year-over-year increase in online revenue or a 6% decline in total revenue.

Despite the revenue decline, both gross profit and contribution increased. Approximately 8%, with gross margin expanding from 37.2% last year to 42.6% this year. On the wholesale side, we continue to see declines in retail sales of our products in brick-and-mortar locations, driven primarily by store closures and lower foot traffic. However, we are encouraged that the pace of decline has moderated in each of the past four months and the decline percentage is now in the single digits.

Also, and we make a point of saying this quite regularly, some of the lost wholesale revenue migrates to online revenue as more and more customers choose to shop online and online revenue is significantly more profitable for the company. That is part of the reason why the profitability metrics for Legacy FitLife are all up year-over-year, while revenue is down.

Moving on to the brands acquired in the Mimi's Rock transaction or what we refer to as MRC. As a reminder, this is a company we acquired on February 28, 2023. Total MRC revenue for the third quarter of 2024 was $7.2 million, approximately flat on a year-over-year basis. MRC's gross margin increased year-over-year from 44.5% to 47.7% and contribution as a percentage of revenue increased from 27.9% to 34.8%.

It is somewhat unusual to see strong increases in profitability while revenue is flat, so let me provide a bit more color on the brands within the MRC portfolio. So MRC consists of three brands: a supplement brand called Dr. Tobias, which now represents a little more than 90% of MRC's revenue and two smaller skincare brands. Revenue for the Dr. Tobias brand increased 6% during the quarter, while revenue for the skincare brands was down 33%. We love seeing revenue for the Dr. Tobias brand go up even while we continue to reduce and optimize advertising spend.

Regarding the skincare brands, at the time of the acquisition in early 2023, the skincare brands were sold in a number of countries. And unfortunately, they were experiencing negative gross margins in some markets and negative contribution in almost all markets. To address this problem, we exited a number of geographies and raised prices in all other geographies. The result of these changes is lower revenue, but much higher gross margin and positive contribution.

So this explains in part why you see strong increases in gross profit and contribution within MRC, even though revenue is roughly flat. In dollar terms, contribution for MRC during the third quarter was $2.5 million, bringing LTM contribution to $9.4 million, which approximately only 18 months after the acquisition compares very favorably to the $17.1 million we paid for MRC.

With regard to MusclePharm, and as a reminder, we purchased the MusclePharm assets out of bankruptcy in October of last year. During the third quarter, MusclePharm wholesale revenue declined slightly sequentially compared to the second quarter, primarily due to some customer orders that slipped into October. That shift of customer orders into October, along with orders from new wholesale customers that I'll describe in more detail shortly, resulted in both wholesale revenue and total revenue for MusclePharm in October being higher than in any other month since we bought the brand.

Online revenue was also slightly lower in the third quarter compared to the second quarter, but that seasonality is customary for the supplement category, and you can see the same trend in online sales in the contribution tables for Legacy FitLife and MRC. Gross margin for MusclePharm declined slightly sequentially, while contribution as a percentage of revenue increased slightly.

In our earnings press release, we announced some recent wins for the MusclePharm brand. More specifically, we have recently gained placement for the bars in a number of regional grocery and convenience chains totaling several hundred doors. We also recently signed a licensing agreement with a partner and a manufacturer in Israel. We are also very excited about our new MusclePharm Pro Series, a line of premium sports nutrition products that will launch as a pilot initially in more than 400 high-volume Vitamin Shoppe locations during the first quarter of 2025.

The line will initially consist of nine protein pre-workout and intra-workout and recovery SKUs. If the pilot is successful, the Pro Series line is anticipated to gain permanent shelf space system-wide within the chain and will be exclusive to Vitamin Shoppe for a period of 12 months.

In addition to designing the Pro Series, we've recently completed a refresh of the branding and packaging for the existing line of MusclePharm products and the new look will begin rolling out early in the first quarter as we sell through our existing inventory.

Now let me give a few more high-level comments before moving into Q&A. First, after the market closed this afternoon, the company filed a shelf registration statement with the SEC, and I want to take a few minutes to talk through that decision. Close to 50% of eligible exchange-traded companies in the U.S. have an effective shelf registration statement. These are inexpensive to put in place, but they provide a high degree of flexibility if a scenario ever arises where a company wants to raise capital. When declared effective, our shelf will permit sales of stock by either the company or by Sudbury Capital Fund, our largest shareholder, in a registered offering. You can look at our track record of not diluting shareholders over the years and be confident that if the company decides to sell shares, there will be a really good reason.

So to conclude on this topic, I will just say that while neither the company nor Sudbury has any current plans to sell equity, having an effective shelf registration statement is just good corporate hygiene, and that is why we are putting one in place.

Regarding the company's balance sheet, our financial flexibility is strong with a little more than $14 million outstanding on our term loan and no balance outstanding on our $3.5 million revolving the line of credit. The combination of quarterly scheduled amortization and the Fed cutting rates means that our annual interest expense is declining, which results in increased earnings. We ended the third quarter with $4.7 million of cash or net debt of $9.5 million, a reduction of approximately $2.2 million since the end of the second quarter and approximately $8.7 million since December 31, 2023. At current levels, our leverage is approximately 0.7x our LTM adjusted EBITDA.

Regarding outlook for the fourth quarter, as is customary, we don't plan to provide specific guidance other than to remind everyone that the fourth quarter is generally the slowest for both our wholesale and online channels. That said, we still expect double-digit year-over-year revenue and EBITDA growth as well as continued cash generation and deleveraging.

Last, I won't provide any specific commentary on M&A other than to say we remain actively engaged in reviewing potential transactions and will be selective about which opportunities we pursue. As evidenced by the deals we have previously closed, our favorite transactions are ones that are nondilutive with the potential to be rapidly accretive. What this means is that we don't do deals just to get one done, but rather we wait patiently continuing to strengthen our balance sheet until the right opportunity presents itself.

So with that, Paul, you can go ahead and poll for questions.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] And the first question today is coming from Samir Patel from Askeladden Capital.

[Samir Patel, analyst]

First off, thanks for the disclosures. Those are super helpful, the incremental disclosures on the individual parts of the business. I know you don't provide guidance, but on the last call, you had mentioned that you'd be disappointed if you hadn't managed to double the firms revenues kind of over the next 12 months. So I guess with that context, could you maybe try to contextualize a little bit the scope or scale of those opportunities? I know you mentioned the number of doors you're going to be in. Is that still tracking towards that kind of rough figure?

[Dayton Judd, executive]

Yes. Thanks, Samir, for the question. Yes. So look, this is a hard question to answer because the reality is there's a lot of balls in the air, right. There's a lot of accounts that we're going after, and we don't know kind of where we're going to have wins and where we're not going to have wins. So it's really hard to accurately predict. Now that said, obviously, we're encouraged by the recent orders that we've had primarily for the bars.

One thing to remember about the bars is they're small dollar items, right. They're not expensive for retailers to bring in. And so they don't move the needle a whole lot for us, right. But if they -- what we're looking for turns. So we'll see kind of how those sell in our new grocery and convenience partners.

Obviously, the Vitamin Shoppe, when you get nine much bigger and more expensive SKUs into an assortment, that can be a very material amount of revenue and gross profit, right, over the course of a year. So that will go a long way toward contributing to our goals.

We're working with other partners. We have other partners that -- wholesale customers that we've been selling to for some time that are talking about significant growth, right, for us in 2025. So certainly, we think the opportunity is there for us to double revenue for MusclePharm. I don't think it's outside the realm of reality. But it's really hard for me to be precise. Like I would be guessing if I could give you a precise revenue number for MusclePharm for 2025.

So that's the reason we shy away from kind of specific guidance. But I have to say we're very happy with the traction that we've had, particularly recently with both the sports nutrition line more broadly as well as with the bars.

[Samir Patel, analyst]

That makes sense. So basically, I mean -- and that's just what I was trying to get at, like -- so particularly, it sounds like the Vitamin Shoppe opportunity could be material in terms of -- not to put a number on what material is, but it would move the needle is what you're saying, obviously, if you sold through and et cetera.

[Dayton Judd, executive]

Yes, absolutely, it would be material, right. So for sure.

[Samir Patel, analyst]

Okay. Perfect. And then a second question. I know you don't want to discuss any specifics on M&A. But I think historically, you've talked about kind of two constraints on that, right. One is just the balance sheet, which obviously today is not a constraint. And the second is being a small company, just kind of your organizational capabilities in terms of wanting to have too many balls in the air. So do you feel like you're at a point where MRC seems like MRC and MusclePharm kind of doing really well? So if the right deal were to come along, do you feel like you could close on it from that integration standpoint?

[Dayton Judd, executive]

Yes, we do. Yes. And just to kind of bring everyone up to speed, what Samir is referring to is in the past, we've talked about there's kind of three things you need to be able to successfully pull off a transaction deal flow. We have plenty of deal flow. You need a balance sheet so you can do the deal, and we're in a great place there as far as our balance sheet goes. And then you need capacity, right. I need the team to be able to absorb and execute. And I think we're definitely at a point where we could do a deal. Obviously, it would depend on the size of the deal. The bigger the deal, the more challenging it would be. But look, MRC, the heavy lifting is behind us.

MusclePharm, much of the heavy lifting operationally is behind us, right, with the rebrand is done. The Pro Series is in production. So I mean, there's always more to do. But I -- look, we are actively engaged. I mean I'll just give you some data points. We negotiated two LOIs during the third quarter. Both of which we ultimately passed on or couldn't come to terms with the sellers in terms of valuation. So we are actively engaged. I don't want anyone to come away from the call thinking we're just kind of sitting back and waiting, right. We look at a lot of deals, and we get the opportunity to look at a lot of deals. And we'll do the work. And you always see numbers in our EBITDA table for merger and acquisition-related expenses, right. There's lawyers and there's real expenses that we're paying every quarter as we look at other deals.

So I mentioned walking away from two deals during the third quarter. Those aren't the only deals we looked at. And I'll tell you, there's deals we're actively pursuing right now. So it's just one of those things. We will always be looking but we will wait for the fat pitch, right. We're not going to swing at everything. We're going to wait for the right deal. And the good thing about taking your time also is that the balance sheet just gets better and better. And the better the balance sheet is, the bigger deal we can accommodate without issuing any equity, right, just by borrowing from our bank.

So we're happy with where we are, and we're actively looking and don't have anything to report and don't anticipate that there will be anything to report in the next couple of months, right. But we're actively engaged and would like to find another deal.

[Samir Patel, analyst]

Awesome. That's great to hear. And finally, with regards to the shelf, I mean, I completely agree with you that it's just a good policy to have one in place. I guess with regards to your question or your comment about you or Sudbury rather not having any plans to sell stock. I mean, have you kind of considered that if you did sell a little bit, it might help with liquidity and might even help with the company's valuation just by allowing people to have a little bit more opportunity to accumulate shares?

[Dayton Judd, executive]

Yes. So I appreciate you asking that. A couple of things. Yes, I'll go a little bit deeper on the shelf.

[Samir Patel, analyst]

I'm guessing your response is that it's still your best idea.

[Dayton Judd, executive]

So yes, yes. So here's what I would say, right? I mentioned that the shelf -- with the shelf registration, you can set it up where the company can sell stock, right, and that means dilution or you can set it up where an existing shareholder sells stock, and that means no dilution, right. Or you can do both, right. We did both.

The likelihood of us needing to raise equity as a company is very slim. Having -- look, I would be lying if I told you that I don't think once a week about whether it might be beneficial for the shareholder base for there to be more liquidity in the stock. And so the second part of the shelf that allows Sudbury to sell some stock is predominantly preparing us to do that, right, again, if it makes sense. Sudbury and I are kind of the same. I'm the managing partner of Sudbury.

You'll also note in that registration statement, I personally am not listed as a selling stockholder, right. I own a lot of stock. I have no intentions of selling my stock, right. If I did, I would be in that as a selling stockholder. So look, at some point, it may make sense to increase the liquidity. The #1 comment I get when we talk to investors is love the story, but can't buy the stock because there's not enough liquidity.

So again, it's something we think about. This takes that step to make it possible, but there's no immediate plans and nothing is imminent.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] Next question is coming from [Johnson Shi ].

[Unknown Analyst]

My name is Johnson Shi, and I'm a private investor based in Seattle. So I have a few questions for Dayton. So you mentioned over past interactions that you're open to growth, not just through M&A, but also through organic growth. So having said that, I'm not seeing the social media accounts of recent acquisitions, especially MusclePharm and Dr. Tobias, which is part of MRC, being that active. I'm seeing like MusclePharm social Instagram account not being active for a while, MRC and Dr. Tobias having one or two lights per day. Meanwhile, I'm seeing other competing brands like Built Bars, BellRing Brands and Premier Protein having lots of social engagement, and I'm not so sure how that plays into sales.

So my question is, does social media play a role in accretive growth? Or will it play a role in your strategy for accretive growth for both MusclePharm and Mimi's Rock? And any comments on your strategy on raising awareness that organic growth improves through social media leads?

[Dayton Judd, executive]

Yes. So there's a lot of questions embedded in there, and I'll do my best to answer them. So one thing I will say is, so we've been at this for -- I've been at this as CEO for about 7 years. On more than one occasion, with other brands, we have had extensive kind of social media advertising type efforts, right, where we're advertising on Facebook or Instagram, trying to drive traffic to websites and monetizing it in that way. We've done the same with Google Ads, and we obviously spend a lot of money advertising on Amazon.

What we have found, generally speaking, is that commercially, the best money spent is on Amazon, right, for most of our brands. That's where we get the biggest bang for our buck in terms of advertising. So for us, at least right now, we view social media as more of community than kind of a means to encourage people to buy, if that makes sense.

We've had some hiccups lately. If you go look historically at our Instagram account, we used to be very, very active there and posting very regularly, and we haven't for a while. There's an issue with the account with Meta that we're working through. Long story short, somebody got access that wasn't supposed to have access, and we're trying to get it back. It's not a big deal. We're not worried and we're confident that we're going to get there. But I think if you go back and look until that happened, we're posting almost every day, and there was decent engagement.

And workouts of the week are probably the most popular thing that we post, right. So every week, we post, hey, here's the workout that you can do this week and got a decent amount of engagement. So we're not opposed to social media. We want to use social media as more of a way to engage with our consumers as opposed to advertise and drive traffic. We do have Instagram influencers and whatnot that we use.

But Dr. Tobias, right, for example, if you go look, we don't have hundreds of thousands of followers on Dr. Tobias, but we sell 1 million-plus units a year on Amazon, right. So we our interactions with customers there, at least in terms of marketing have been on the Amazon platform, if that makes sense.

So I guess a long way of saying we've been more active in social media in the past. And once we get things back on track with Meta, you should expect to see more. But in terms of advertising, we have found that the best ROI is on Amazon and then some other venues.

[Unknown Analyst]

So got it. So basically, return on ad spend is higher from Amazon and at this stage of FitLife, social media accounts are primarily for community engagement. But are you open to like, let's say, when the brand reaches gains entry into Costco or some of the larger chains and there's national awareness. Are you open to revisiting social media ad spend even if it means a lower return on ad spend than Amazon because I think you could have a lower return on ad spend on social media, but the returns are much larger in terms of magnitude?

[Dayton Judd, executive]

Yes. I think for sure. And I don't want to give the illusion that we tried it once and it didn't work, and so we'll never do it again, right. It's something we've done. We probably had 4 or 5 initiatives over the 7 years where we've tried it again or tried it with a different agency or something like that. So we're always experimenting. We're always trying new things. We've done we haven't talked about this in much detail, but look, we've sponsored 2 sports teams with MusclePharm this football season. I think we can talk about it because it's been in the stadiums, but we're sponsoring Army football and we're sponsoring Air Force football.

So we do a lot of things. We try a lot of things. We try and measure the impact, and we try and redirect our efforts and our spending towards where we're getting the biggest payoff, right, the biggest bang for the buck. So yes, I would never conclude that because we tried something once and it didn't work, we'll never do it again, right. But we're constantly trying new things and shifting money around.

[Operator]

The next question will be from Sean McGowan from ROTH.

[Sean McGowan, analyst]

Appreciate that. And I apologize in advance if you've already addressed some of these because I had a little trouble getting on the call on time. But just to circle back to the question about the shelf. Was there already in place a shelf prior to this? Like is this replacing an existing one? And if so, did that also include the ability for Sudbury to sell?

[Dayton Judd, executive]

Yes, we have not. This is the first time we've ever had a shelf.

[Sean McGowan, analyst]

Okay. Helpful. Okay. A couple of other questions then. Can you give us a little bit more color on the MusclePharm Pro line. What's the point of differentiation? Is it customer different? You talked about it being in Vitamin Shoppe for the first 12 months. Is it the plan to expand beyond that after that 12-month period? Kind of what are the perhaps most importantly, what do you think the relative margins are there? Are they higher than the existing line?

[Dayton Judd, executive]

Yes. So the margins would be higher than the existing line, although I think there'd be a fair amount of promotional expense as well. So considering that, I don't know if they'd be dramatically higher. The reason -- so the Pro Series is effectively kind of higher end or higher quality or more bells and whistles, right, in terms of pre-workout with more ingredients and premium ingredients. What we've seen, and we've known this, right, GNC has been our biggest customer for a long, long time, right? The specialty retail consumer, right, a customer that's going to GNC or Vitamin Shoppe isn't looking for the mass market protein, right, or the mass market pre-workout.

I mean you can buy those in those stores, right. They'll sell the high-volume Cellucor pre-workouts or C4 or whatnot, right. But these are kind of higher end, more premium ingredients, branded ingredients that the more I don't want to say educated, but the more serious sports nutrition aficionado is looking for.

So it wouldn't be a good idea to take kind of your mass market style brand into a chain like a GNC or Vitamin Shoppe. And so we didn't want to do that and didn't even try that, right.

Again, we have 4 brands, I guess, 5 brands that are exclusive to GNC. We know what it's like to sell to that consumer. And so yes, they're higher ring, right. They're higher dollar price. They're generally higher margin. But again, we will invest pretty heavily in marketing, right. There will absolutely be digital marketing. There will probably be ads. Again, once this launches, right, ads we have the ability to place ads on streaming services within 5 miles of a Vitamin Shoppe location that's carrying the product, right. So there are initiatives like that, that we will put in place, marketing efforts to try and drive the consumer to the store.

It very well may be we don't even put them on Amazon, right, for the first little while and let them get some traction in the brick-and-mortar environment. So steady state, yes, kind of margins would be a bit higher than they would be on the mass market brand. And it's just it's a little bit kind of like there's a Toyota and there's a Lexus and different consumers want different kind of product.

[Sean McGowan, analyst]

And how about channel expansion? Like how does GNC feel about this Vitamin Shoppe exclusive? And what's the plan longer term for channel expansion?

[Dayton Judd, executive]

Yes. Look, it's hard for me to know. I think our current intention would be if it's successful in Vitamin Shoppe, then after the exclusivity period, we would take it more broadly. The reason I hesitate is, I'm sure you all know, we, again, have 5 brands that we've kept exclusive to GNC. So I think at that point, we'll look at the performance. We'll look at the facts and circumstances and other potential clients and make the decision that we think is best for the brands and best for the company. But because we have had and still have that exclusive relationship with GNC for some of our brands and maybe, right, the Pro Series stays exclusive, but we're a ways away from that.

Our focus right now is getting it launched on time and then putting the spend behind it so that it is able to gain permanent placement and can scale.

[Sean McGowan, analyst]

Right. Okay. And then my other question was you cited in the press release the decreases in customer counts at some brick-and-mortar stores. Do you have concerns about kind of the viability or the health of any of these customers?

[Dayton Judd, executive]

Yes. Did you say companies or customers?

[Sean McGowan, analyst]

These retail customers.

[Dayton Judd, executive]

The company. Yes. Look, I think we won't be naive. Look, Vitamin Shoppe, you may know, is in bankruptcy. They filed bankruptcy November 3, so earlier this month. Now they, as a company, are doing fine. It's their parent company, which was called the Franchise Group that was loaded up with a bunch of debt as part of a leverage buyout a while back. So Vitamin Shoppe is still, we have products in Vitamin Shoppe right now, right, from some of our other brands. So they're an existing customer. We know them.

Every indication from them and from everyone else in the industry that I've talked to, including people that sell to them is it's kind of business as usual. So that's more of a situation where the parent company needs to clean things up. And Vitamin Shoppe, I'm not 100% sure on all the details, but my understanding is they don't have any debt at all. They're just a subsidiary of the parent, and that's why they ended up there. So look, we do worry about some of them. And what I will say is if it's looking like there's going to be an event, we know what to do to minimize the impact on us.

And the reason I say that is we've been through this before. GNC was probably 70% of our revenue when they went through bankruptcy in 2020. So we've kind of been there, done that. And my background prior to taking over FitLife and prior to launching my fund was I worked at a very large hedge fund that had its primary strategy as distressed investing, right, the whole kind of bankruptcy opportunity set, whether that's buying debt and taking control through restructuring or how to manage the risk.

So we're pretty familiar with that. We've played in that space before. Obviously, we were there with MusclePharm and bought those assets out of bankruptcy. So we're taking steps to mitigate any impact that any financial instability of our customers might have. Now to be clear, I'm not saying there wouldn't be any impact, but there certainly will be no impact that we can't easily absorb. So hopefully, that answers your question.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] We have a follow-up coming from Sameer Patel from Askeladden Capital.

[Samir Patel, analyst]

So just a follow-up on MusclePharm. If I recall when you did the acquisition, one challenge that you had noted was that because of how mismanaged that brand had been previously, they kind of burned a lot of vendors who hadn't gotten paid, things like that. So I guess it seems like you've been sort of successful in convincing the marketplace that, hey, it's under new ownership. It's being professionally run. It's not what it was. Would you say that's accurate and that you're pretty optimistic about your ability to kind of go out to other wholesale potential customers beyond these wins that you've had so far?

[Dayton Judd, executive]

Yes, good question. And other than Vitamin Shoppe, obviously, which we disclosed and that was with their permission, I'll just tell you some of these I mentioned other regional accounts. Some of those customers are customers that used to work with MusclePharm, before it went into bankruptcy. And so we now have examples, right, of wins getting back in. But I will also say that when we talk to those guys about, hey, can we say we're back in, right, even though they place POs and they have product, they're kind of a little tenuous, right. So look, some of these, it took literally a year, right. We bought the company in October of 2023. Some of them I started talking to in October of 2023, and it took 12 months until we got POs last month.

So I guess just a long way of saying, we now have kind of situations where we've gotten brand-new customers that were never previously carried any MusclePharm products, but we've also had the opportunity to win back some of those legacy MusclePharm customers. But even then, right, they're like, look, we'll bring it in and we'll bring it into a number, 150 or 200 locations, and we'll see how it goes. So they're giving us a chance, right, which is all we can ask for given kind of the circumstances that we inherited. So we're pleased that we've got wins with old customers now, and we've got wins with new customers as well.

[Samir Patel, analyst]

Yes. And then I don't know, I'm sure you don't want to provide any quantitative details, but any sort of qualitative thoughts on sell-through. Obviously, a big part of the acquisition rationale was that this was a brand that had a lot of customers, a lot of loyal customers, a lot of money spent on marketing that brand, a lot of big celebrity endorsements. And so kind of there being this opportunity to go out and kind of monetize some of that ad spending that had already been done. So do you see from whatever data you're seeing kind of from these new wholesale partners, do you see kind of validation of that, that it's resonating with customers?

[Dayton Judd, executive]

So still too early. And the reason I say that is I think most of those new customers that I mentioned, if I'm not mistaken, I think probably all of them or almost all of them were like last month, like October kind of shipments or 1 or 2 cases, we haven't shipped yet, but they've confirmed and they have either placed or placing POs. So we plan to watch that very closely.

I mean that said, we have other wholesale customers that we've had for the past year, right, since we bought the business, and we're encouraged by the sell-through that we see there. And actually, one of those is another online retailer. And they were also a previous, in fact, a pretty significant seller of MusclePharm pre-bankruptcy. And so getting back engaged with them was, again, a win back, which was good.

The numbers are nowhere near what they were before. We're also selling at more reasonable margins for us, but we're growing, like every month, we're continuing to grow with them. So where we have had these products in market for more than a month, we're absolutely seeing good sell-through. But with these newer customers that like literally in the last few weeks have become customers, we don't have any data yet on sell-through. But like you, I will be anxiously watching that.

[Samir Patel, analyst]

Okay. That's great to hear. And then one more. Just as you're scaling some of these wholesale relationships, how do you think about the SG&A? And by the way, I like the way that you're doing it kind of in terms of the contribution and doing like the gross margin and the advertising. But how do you think about sort of the SG&A behind that? Like are you going to need what exactly goes into there, but are you going to need more people to manage those relationships? So just how you think about SG&A kind of below that advertising line or below that contribution line? How do you think about that scaling with revenue as you kind of organically grow that MusclePharm business here?

[Dayton Judd, executive]

Yes. I don't think there's a whole lot of incremental SG&A. I think if you look at just about every quarter, again, I don't have the numbers in front of me here, but we tend to be about $2.5 million of SG&A every quarter. I think this quarter, we were a little bit higher. But if you back out there was some severance. If you back out the severance from that number, which is a one-time net present value amount of kind of a one-time severance event, we're right around the $2.5 million. So there's always incremental stuff, right. There's always some pluses and minuses. There's been a lot of more testing requirements on Amazon, right. We've probably paid well over into the 6 digits. On just getting our products tested by a third party so that Amazon lets us sell them.

That was completely unexpected and unanticipated a year ago, but we are where we are. So sometimes legal is a little higher, sometimes testing is a little higher. But we don't have 5 open positions. I think we have 2 open positions right now, and one is for somebody in supply chain, and we could use another body in the warehouse, right. So we don't need $3 million of quarterly SG&A to operate the business that we have.

[Operator]

And we did have another follow-up coming from Sean McGowan from ROTH.

[Sean McGowan, analyst]

Yes. Just a quick follow-up on that last point you made on that severance. Is that severance expense added back in adjusted EBITDA? Or is it just in there and it's not added back yet?

[Dayton Judd, executive]

Yes, it's added back. If you look at the EBITDA table, I think the line item was called restructuring. So yes, you'll see it there. Again, we probably could have called it severance, but we called it restructuring. But yes, we added that back. And yes, that's done. The cash has been paid, and it's all behind us for now.

[Operator]

And we did get another question in from Alan Barkowski from ASB Consultants.

[Unknown Analyst]

In regards to the shelf registration, would another feasibility as to increase shareholder interest and liquidity have, again, a stock dividend or a split, which would bring more stock out into the marketplace and bring more liquidity for people to trade the stock. Is that a feasibility in the stocks? I'm just saying I know you don't want to go below a certain price, but it seems that people will be easier for them to take positions and since the trading recently has gotten much better. But many days, it was just like 4,000 or 5,000 shares. And people I know who are interested in accumulating said it's very difficult to purchase a stock or even to sell it.

[Dayton Judd, executive]

Yes. So good question. And yes, under the theme I mentioned before about we would love for there to be more liquidity. I'll just say that we had a Board meeting yesterday and the stock split was on the agenda for the Board meeting. And while nothing has been decided or formally approved at this point, I would be surprised if it doesn't happen at some point in the near future, but I'll probably just leave it at that.

But we're looking at all different ways that we can to increase the liquidity of the stock. Again, we're not going to want to do anything dilutive, right? I'm the biggest shareholder, so being dilutive hurts me more than it hurts anybody. But short of that, we want to do what we can. Like I mentioned earlier, I can't tell you the number of times I get to the end of an investor meeting or a potential investor meeting, and I hear they love the story, but I can't buy the stock, right, because there's not enough liquidity. So we're doing what we can in that regard. And I think we're all aligned in where we're trying to go there.

[Unknown Analyst]

As you know, I've been with you for almost the entire 6, 7 years, et cetera. And I've got some interested people, and that's the main comment that I guess. And some of them even said, a stock split would be advantageous where they would be able to do more and feel more comfortable with it. So I'm glad to hear you considering that option.

[Operator]

And we had another follow-up coming from Johnson Shi.

[Unknown Analyst]

I have a question. Have you thought about partnering with, let's say, market makers or something of that sort to improve liquidity, not just through stock splits or dividends, but partnering with market makers?

[Dayton Judd, executive]

Yes. Look, that happens kind of automatically. You can't be on NASDAQ. One of the conditions of applying to and being accepted to trade on NASDAQ is having broker-dealers willing to make markets in your securities. So we have that, right. There will always be a bid and an ask. Look, I think the challenge here is we got about 4.5 million, 4.6 million shares outstanding. About 60% of those I have and have not been too keen to sell. But look, our float is around 2 million shares. And even then, right, somebody pointed out before, I think our average daily volume is like 6,000 or 7,000 shares a day, right, out of 2 million in the float.

So I feel like there's plenty of stock to go around, right. But the situation is that I've got some and I don't want to sell and some of you have some and maybe you don't want to sell. And so as a result, we are where we are. So things though, like a stock split, potentially, maybe I'd begrudgingly sell a little bit or something like that, again for no other reason than to get some liquidity going because I think there's – we're comfortably north of $150 million market cap. And there are institutions that are interested and are having a hard time finding stock.

So yes, I'll just conclude by saying I appreciate you all asking the questions and their questions that I've been asking myself for years. And so we take it seriously, and we think a lot about it, but we'll be thoughtful before we pull the trigger on anything.

[Operator]

There were no other questions in queue at this time. I would now like to hand the call back to Dayton Judd for closing remarks.

[Dayton Judd, executive]

All right. Well, thank you, Paul, and thank you all for participating in the call. We appreciate your interest in FitLife. As always, we're willing to kind of talk to you one-on-one or answer any other questions you might have. So feel free to reach out to us. The best way to do that is through our investor e-mail, which is [e-mail]. And so again, we appreciate it and look forward to talking to you on the next earnings call.

[Operator]

Thank you. This does conclude today's conference call. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Have a wonderful day. Thank you for your participation.