Aarons Holdings Company, Inc.

good morning my name is candice and i will be your conference coordinator at this time i would like to welcome everyone to the aaron's company fourth quarter 2021 earnings conference call all lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise after the speaker's remarks there will be a question and answer session i would now like to turn the call over to mr michael dickerson vice president of Corporate Communications and Investor Relations for Aarons.

You may now begin your conference.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to the Aarons Company fourth quarter and full year 2021 earnings conference call. Joining me this morning are Douglas Lindsay, Aarons Chief Executive Officer, Steve Olson, Aarons President, and Kelly Wall, Aarons Chief Financial Officer. After our prepared remarks, we will open the call for questions. Many of you have already seen a copy of our earnings release issued last evening. For those of you that have not, it is available on the investor relations section of our website at investor.ehrens.com. During this call, certain statements we make will be forward-looking, including forward-looking statements related to our financial performance outlook for 2022 and our recently announced agreement to acquire BrandSmart USA. I want to call your attention to our Safe Harbor provision for forward-looking statements that can be found at the end of our earnings release and the release announcing the proposed BrandSmart acquisition. The Safe Harbor provision identifies risks that may cause actual results to differ materially from the content of our forward-looking statements. Also, please see our Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2021 and other subsequent periodic filings with the FCC for a description of the risks related to our business that may cause actual results to differ materially from our forward-looking statements. On today's call, we will be referring to certain non-GAAP financial measures, including EBITDA and adjusted EBITDA, non-GAAP net earnings, non-GAAP EPS, and free cash flow. which have been adjusted for certain items, which may affect the comparability of our performance with other companies. These non-GET measures are detailed in the reconciliation tables included in our earnings release and the supplemental investor presentation posted to our website. With that, I will now turn the call over to our CEO, Douglas Lindsay.