America's Car-Mart, Inc.

The conference will begin shortly. To raise and lower your hand during Q&A, you can dial star 1 1.

Good day, everyone. Thank you for holding, and welcome to America's Car Mart's third quarter fiscal 2023 conference call. The topic of this call will be the earnings and operating results for the company's third quarter fiscal year of 2023. Before we begin, today's call is being recorded and will be available for replay for the next 12 months. As a reminder, some of management's comments today may include forward-looking statements which inherently involve risk and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from management's present view. These statements are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. The company cannot guarantee the accuracy of any forecast or estimate, nor does it undertake any obligation to update forward-looking statements. For more information regarding forward-looking information, please see part one of the company's annual report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended April 30th, 2022, and its current quarterly reports furnished to or filed with the Securities Exchange Commission on Forms 8-K and 10-Q. Participating on the call this morning are Jess Williams, the company's Chief Executive Officer, Doug Campbell, President, and Vicki Judy, Chief Financial Officer. And now I'd like to turn the call over to the company's Chief Executive Officer, Jeff Williams.

Okay. Well, thank you for joining us this morning. We saw an increase in unit volumes for the quarter, both on an absolute basis and on a same-store basis, and absent weather challenges would have seen more unit volume increases. Doug will cover sales for the quarter in just a minute. Our volume increases are in the face of affordability challenges. and overall inflationary pressures, and when compared to the previous two years, a lack of stimulus in the marketplace. However, overall used car prices did come down in 2022. As expected, we are seeing a normal tax season uptick in the most recent months, but we do expect pricing to level off in the short term and experience a more gradual normal decline for the balance of the year. The car we do buy is expected to better hold value due to supply-demand affordability dynamics. Customers' wages are expected to continue to rise, leading to improvements in affordability and higher future sales volumes. We expect that used car affordability will shift back to historical levels over time, bringing with it an increase in customers seeking credit and the outstanding service they receive from America's car market. According to Cox Automotive, access to auto credit tightened again in January, reflecting conditions that were the tightest since June of 2021 for all loan types. There was a slight loosening for the independent dealer channel in January from December, but on a year-over-year basis, all channels were tighter, with credit unions tightening the most. We will benefit as good folks migrate down into our market. The timing of our loan origination system rollout, which we will discuss more, could not be better. picking up market share and setting ourselves up to sell between 40 and 50 cars per dealership per month over the next three years, and to eventually average over 1,000 active customers per dealership. Doug and I will cover a few specifics on some key initiatives. As to people, the recent addition of several talented people to our senior management team is allowing us to benefit from their skills and outside experiences, helping us effectively complete and leverage the initiatives and investments that we've been making in the business. We're improving processes, increasing accountability, and reorganizing work to maximize efficiency. As we've discussed, areas include procurement and inventory management, wholesale improvements, reconditioning, logistics, the loan origination system, IT, data, and digital. We're making huge strides in all these areas. It's very exciting. Our Enterprise Resource Planning or ERP initiative is progressing and is expected to be completed by the end of the calendar year. The ERP is critical in our efforts to eliminate manual tasks and improve efficiency and operating flexibility, allowing for future growth. Within the ERP is the Customer Relationship Management Module or the CRM. The continuing development of the CRM will allow us to harness visibility of customer touchpoints in one place improving the customer experience, allowing us to serve more customers at a high level while increasing the funnel of potential new customers. The CRM provides the underpinning of our new loan origination system. This investment is critical and will allow us to become a data-driven company, better supporting field operations teams as they serve our customers. As mentioned in the press release, we completed the acquisitions three new dealerships in December. These dealerships are located in Knoxville, Tennessee, and in Taylor, Texas, great towns. We expect acquisitions to play a leading role in our future plans, and we're actively talking to multiple parties. We believe we can add five or more dealerships per year via acquisitions with our current resources and more as we look forward and refine our processes. I'll turn it over to Doug now.