Aarons Holdings Company, Inc.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Aaron's Company Q3 Earnings Call. My name is Charlie, and I'll be coordinating the call today. You'll have the opportunity to ask a question at the end of the presentation. If you'd like to register a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. And I'll hand over to your host, Keith Hancock, Senior Director of Corporate Affairs, to begin. Keith, please go ahead.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to the Aaron's Company third quarter 2022 earnings conference calls. Joining me this morning are Douglas Lindsay, our Chief Executive Officer, Steve Olson, our President, and Kelly Wall, our Chief Financial Officer. After our review of the third quarter, we will open the call for questions. Many of you have already seen a copy of our earnings release issued yesterday afternoon. For those of you who have not, it is available on the Investor Relations section of our website at investor.erins.com. With our third quarter release, we are updating our reporting format. This simplified look provides an efficient and easy comparison of important metrics against previous quarters and includes additional commentary about our results. Our accompanying PowerPoint presentation, also available on the website, is also focused on results from the third quarter. During today's call, certain statements we make will be forward-looking, including those related to our financial performance outlook for the remainder of 2022. Please refer to our Safe Harbor provision for forward-looking statements that can be found at the end of our earnings release. 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 SEC. for a description of the risk related to our business that may cause actual results to differ materially from our forward-looking statements. On today's call, we will refer 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-GAAP measures are detailed in the reconciliation tables included in our earnings release and the supplemental investor presentation posted on our website. Now, please welcome the Aarons Company CEO, Douglas Lindsay, to share more about our third quarter results. Douglas?

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us and for your interest in the Aarons Company. Today, we're pleased to report our consolidated company results for the third quarter of 2022, which closed on September 30th. This quarter, we delivered solid results for both revenues and adjusted earnings in what remains a challenging economic environment. And as a result, we are raising the midpoint of the full year 2022 guidance we provided on July 25th. Within the errands business segment, high inflation continues to impact our core customer. While gas prices fell during the quarter, food and housing costs remain high. Despite these headwinds, merchandise deliveries to our customers steadily improved during the quarter, resulting in revenue and earnings for the Aarons business coming in line with our expectations. Our third quarter performance benefited from ongoing investments in lease decisioning and digital payment and servicing platforms, as well as continued investments in our key growth strategies, including Aarons.com and our GenNext store program. These platforms give our customers increased flexibility in where and how they shop either online or in a beautiful Aaron store. Meanwhile, we remain focused on driving efficiencies in our cost structure and leveraging our data analytics and technology platforms to drive profitability. We're also executing on our previously announced real estate repositioning and optimization program. And this quarter, initiated a new plan to further reduce expenses. Turning to BrandSmart, we continue to be pleased with this acquisition. BrandSmart USA is the low-price leader and retailer of choice for appliances and consumer electronics in the markets we serve. We believe our competitive position in both price and selection is a meaningful differentiator in attracting new and repeat customers from across the credit spectrum. In the third quarter, BrandSmart once again performed at a high level, with both product sales and e-commerce channel performance surpassing our internal expectations. Moving forward, we remain confident in BrandSmart's growth potential and optimistic about capturing the synergies announced at the time of the acquisition. In particular, we are excited to open our first new BrandSmart store in 2023. Finally, I want to thank all of our team members at both Aarons and BrandSmart for helping us deliver positive results this quarter and for remaining focused on our key initiatives. Together with our strong balance sheet and liquidity, we believe our focus on innovation in both businesses enables us to deliver our market-leading value proposition to a large and diversified customer base while positioning us for future growth. Before I turn the call over to our president, Steve Olson, I want to particularly recognize the hard work and dedication of our teams in responding to Hurricane Ian. Through their efforts, we were able to ensure the safety and security of all impacted team members and to reopen our stores quickly. I will now turn the call over to Steve.