Camping World Holdings, Inc.

Good afternoon and welcome to Camping World Holdings conference call to discuss financial results for the fourth quarter and fiscal year of 2020. At this time all participants are in a listen only mode. Later we will conduct a question and answer session and instructions will follow at that time. Please be advised that this call is being recorded and the reproduction of the call in whole or in part is not permitted without written authorization from the company. Participating in the call today are Marcus Limones, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Brent Moody, President, Karen Bell, Chief Financial Officer, and Matthew Wagner, Executive Vice President. I will now turn the call over to Mr. Moody to get us started.

Thank you, and good afternoon, everyone. A press release covering the company's fourth quarter and year-ended December 31, 2020 financial results was issued this morning, and a copy of that press release can be found in the investor relations section on the company's website. Management's remarks on this call may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These remarks may include statements regarding the impact of COVID-19 on our business, financial results, and financial condition, our business goals, plans, abilities, and opportunities, industry and customer trends, our 2019 strategic shift, increases in our borrowings, our liquidity, and future compliance with our financial covenants and anticipated financial performance. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by these statements as a result of various important factors, including those discussed in the risk factors section in our Form 10-K, our Form 10-Q, and other reports on file with the SEC. Any forward-looking statements, including statements regarding our long-term plans and costs related to these strategic shifts, represent our views only as of today, and we undertake no obligation to update them. Please also note that we will be referring to certain non-GAAP financial measures on today's call, such as EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA, and adjusted earnings per share diluted, which we believe may be important to investors to assess our operating performance. Reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures are included in our earnings release and on our website. All comparisons of our 2020 fourth quarter results are made against the 2019 fourth quarter results unless otherwise noted. I'll now turn the call over to Marcus.

Thanks, Brent. Good afternoon, everybody, and thanks for joining us today. We also have Tamara Ward, our Chief Operating Officer, joining us on the call as well today. We had a very good 2020, and I'm pleased to share those results. Today's call is going to be broken into two primary sections. First, a high-level financial summary. with additional supporting information available both in today's earning release and our soon-to-be-posted 10K from 2020. The second section will go into some of our initiatives and our updates on those initiatives, including expanding the leverage of our national infrastructure, tapping into our 48-state goal march, our advantage around full sales and service facilities, including the regulatory and licensing process around the sale and distribution of recreational products, both online and in-store. Businesses remain strong for the 2021 first quarter, at least so far, with positive trends continuing into February. Adjusted EBITDA for Q4 was $91 million, a meaningful improvement over Q4 of 2019. excuse me, adjusted EBITDA for the year ended December 31st, 2020 was $565 million. Continued strong demand resulted in revenue of 1.1 billion for the quarter and 5.4 billion for the year. Our balance sheet remains strong and we continue to be pleased with our liquidity position. The end of the quarter was 300 million of cash broken up between $166 million of cash and equivalents and an additional $134 million of cash in our floor plan offset account. Our working capital is very healthy at $459 million at the end of the year, which is up from $395 million at the end of 2019. Our net debt leverage was 1.80 to 1 at the end of 2020. As we think about our initiatives and updates, we continue to grow and enhance our online and our digital initiatives with investments in new and proprietary tools and technologies to not only make our company more profitable, but more efficient. Website activity across all brands continues to experience significant growth. For the year ended December 31st, 2020, user sessions grew to 187 million. and improvement of over 47 million sessions. The development of an online technology platform that would allow for the consumer online transaction of an RV to be completed along with paperless financing, that process is finished and it will continue with home delivery, similar to what you see with other exclusive online auto retailers. Our difference would be within our 48 states that we would have the ability to sell both new and used RVs anywhere in America totally online with no in-person visit required. Proud to announce that today we have successfully beta tested the ability for a consumer to buy an RV totally online at campingworld.com by simply adding the unit to their cart along with other soft goods and check out entirely with a few simple clicks. We are in the final stages of launching our beta testing of our peer-to-peer network. That will go live in late April, early May, and will reside in beta testing for up to 60 days while we test. We measure and we focus group before worldwide launch in late summer and early fall. It will be branded Camping World RV Rental, so not only tap into the strong natural search that we receive as a brand, but also the recognition of value and security that RV renters and rentees look for when they're doing this transaction. We'll tap into our 5 million-plus active customers, including our 2 million Good Plus Good Sam members, to procure inventory listings to bolster the launch. We will be launching our beta phase of our mobile service app in May of 2021. The framework and testing is underway, and we're pleased with the progress. We continue the acquisitions and investments into OEM and aftermarket providers to improve both margin and supply chain flow. That's in addition to the dealership acquisitions that we're making consistent with how we have for years. We're also prepared to launch a new concept called Electric World in late summer of 2021, which would provide both the roadmap to the sale and service of the electrification of all things recreation. We'll be using our existing footprint across the country, as well as our online platform and our call center to support those transactions. As we leverage our national footprint, we always believe that for years the database, our customer database, was the most important asset of our company outside of our associates. Over the last 24 months, we have realized with the change in e-commerce, the growing level of installed RVers in need of service and collision, and the growing trend to both buy online and pick up in stores, as well as buy online and ship from stores, that we want to continue the march of growing our footprint. It is important to us that we launch a location in all 48 states by the end of the year, either through the acquisition of the dealership, the development of already owned land, or the contract purchase to own land in those states. At this point today, we're only two states short of that qualification. In closing, I'd like to say that I'm very excited about our prospects for this year. The RV business has been robust for decades. And 2020, well, it proved that. During the third quarter earnings call, we indicated that we expected adjusted EBITDA for the full year 2021 to be roughly 5% greater than 2020. We're actually going to raise those estimates. We now expect our justice EBITDA to be between 640 million on the low side to a high side of 690 million for 2021. I'd like to turn the call over to the operator for Q&A.

All right. If you would like to ask a question, you may signal by pressing star 1 on your telephone keypad. If you're using a speakerphone, please make sure your mute function is turned off to allow your signal to reach our equipment. Again, that is star one to ask a question. And the first question is from Rick Nelson with Stephen.

Rick Nelson with Stephen. Congrats and thanks for the color, 2021. Marcus, if you could discuss the trends that you saw during the quarter and what you're seeing here in early 2021. and maybe some guideposts around what you see as the big drivers in 2021 to achieving those EBITDA levels.

Yeah, you know, we saw very sustainable and pretty stable growth throughout the Q4 period. And, you know, obviously as we headed into November and December, there are seasonal adjustments that normally happen in the bell curve of our annual year. But what we didn't see is the extreme drop-off that we normally see at the back half of November after Thanksgiving and the bulk of December. As we headed into 21, I think the biggest paradigm shift for us is that we used to get our year started with a flurry of consumer shows. And we made a decision as a company to not expose our associates to any consumer shows in the beginning of 21. And while we knew that there was financial risk, because other people were irresponsible in holding those shows, we decided to stay home and focus on driving a digital plan that would drive customer appointments using technology that we have to do virtual tours and to be able to transact with people online. And we saw a record January that we had not ever seen before, even though we did not go to any of those shows. That trend continued in the first part of February, and we saw a slight slowdown for about nine days, singularly and solely driven by the extreme weather, by us having to shut down a number of stores to keep our employees home and safe in markets that we hadn't experienced before, like Texas. We literally lost days of business. But we expect to still see a very, very strong February and to see that continue into March. Oddly enough, we aren't seeing any spike in any one segment of our business. Our call centers continue to receive record-breaking calls. Our service centers continue to receive record-breaking appointments. And so this idea that it's solely being driven around first-time buyers that are coming into the market for the first time, while it may assist to a degree, we believe our tailwinds are the ever-popular and ever-growing and ever-stable RV and outdoor industry that has been strong for years. Yeah, we saw a slowdown in a little bit of 18 and 19. But 2020 started out pretty good, and obviously it continues very well absent March and April. As we head into the year, we know that we're copying an easy number in April, an easy number in March, and that it starts to become a little bit more difficult, but easily achievable when you take a look at our margin improvement, the moves we've made on the SG&A side, and the continual strategic acquisitions that we have made and will continue to make to add to our very strong base. When you study the company over a series of years, even if you go back a decade, we have always had an average of growth in double digits. And we don't see any reason why over the next five to ten years we wouldn't continue to experience that same level of growth Yeah, there's some years that are softer than others, but we expect 21 to be one of those strong years, which is why we're putting guidance between 640 and 690. As we get to the end of the first quarter, if we feel the need to update that number based on results in the first quarter, we'll do that, but it's a little too early in the first quarter for us to provide that. But we're seeing strength across the board.

Good to be here. So we're hearing about inventory, you know, supply challenges. We see it with your inventory, you know, per store. Maybe, you know, if you could comment there and, you know, when do you see inventory normalizing or, you know, demand is an outstripping supply to the extent that it is today?

You know, if we go back to a high school economics class that circled around supply and demand, we know that the demand far exceeds the supply. And the manufacturers are doing an excellent job of both managing the products that they're making and enhancing the quality of them. They're not compromising quality. But we don't, in our estimation, see supply exceeding demand on an annualized basis anytime soon, to be totally honest. And what that does for us is that bolsters margins for both the manufacturers who make the decision to consciously not overproduce and for the retailers who make the decision to not consciously overbuy. All we can speak to is what we're doing as a company as we plan out our inventory for the balance of the year. As we sit here today, we have north of 70,000 units on order, could be a little bit more than that. And we'll continue to add to that number for a couple of reasons. not only our existing same-store sales and the growth we expect from those, not only the stores that we have under contract to buy that we need to add inventory to, but we're also in the process of acquiring land and building several stores. Today, as we sit here today, when we look at the stores that we ended the year with and the stores that we have announced in terms of acquisitions, I think we're around 176. I think there's an outside shot after we complete the acquisitions that we have LOI signed on. we complete the renovations of facilities that we have under control, and we complete the closings of land that we've purchased and the building of those, that we could scare 200 locations by the end of the year. I want to remind everybody that it isn't our goal just to add revenue and add locations for that reason. We want to make sure that we're adding it when it's smart on the market share side. And we're doing it profitably and thoughtfully in markets where we see wide open opportunities or opportunistic acquisitions. But lastly and most importantly, it is our internal goal to finish the year at 48 states where we are able to, both online and in-store, sell and service RVs to the fast-growing demand of consumers that exist. What we know for sure is that the technology platforms that we're building make no mistake about it. Camping World will be fully selling RVs 100% online by the summer of this year, which means that while we may have locations in every state, we don't have locations in every city. But our online process and our fully vetted transportation process and our DMV licensing, that is a moat in our business, gives us the ability to touch every single square mile of every state where we have a license. We will always comply with what the manufacturers require in terms of our territory, but because 30% or more of our business is private label, we have no borders. We believe that the future of this company lies in us having a presence in 48 states, fully selling online, including the finance process being paperless, fully selling online and being able to ship and pick up from store or buy and ship from store so that a consumer doesn't have to wait more than one day to receive their package from us. That is our mission right now. And we're supporting that with the mobile service app that we'll be launching shortly so that a customer who buys in northern Maine that may live in southern Maine will still be able to receive the kind of service that the RVer needs that Amazon and Walmart and all the other big box retailers cannot at this point execute. That is a big differentiator from us. And when you compare our company to other roll-up RV dealers, what they don't bring to the table is the 360-degree solution that we provide from RVers. It starts with service. It ends with the retail experience. It's complemented by mobile service and the call center and all the products and services that GoodSand brings to the table that nobody has the full suite of. And we think we can do that with world-class growth margins, as evidenced by 2020, and more importantly, world-class EBITDA margins.

That's a great update on the initiatives. Thank you very much, and good luck. Thank you.

Once again, if you would like to ask a question, you may signal by pressing star 1 If you find your question has been answered, you may remove yourself from the queue by pressing star two. The next question is from Ryan Brinkman with JP Morgan.

Hi, congrats on another strong quarter. Thanks for taking my questions. Maybe just starting with the trend in used versus new RV sales. I think, you know, used sales are typically less cyclical. And in 2019, your used sales, you know, trended stronger while the new market was softer. Obviously, a big reversal of that in 2020, but also sort of increasingly as the year progressed. So I'd love to get your thoughts on, you know, what is driving that trend of, you know, presumably, I imagine, the lower supply of used vehicles, you know, what your strategy is to source those vehicles and I see the ASPs and the margins on the used side were really incredible in the fourth quarter. Is that primarily a function of the overall tighter industry supply, or maybe the supply of used RVs is even tighter at competitor stores? I'm not sure. And I would just love to hear your thoughts on the used business, how long these conditions might continue, what happens next. Does volume go up as supply normalized, and then ASPs and gross margins come down? And if so, what do you think would happen to used RV gross profit dollars in that scenario?

Wow, that was a lot. Brad, that was awesome, by the way. We, you know, I said for years since we've been public that I'm agnostic to what the consumer purchases. I want to make sure that our thousands of associates are selling the customer what's best for them in that moment. And we're not shoving people into things. But we also made a conscious decision led by Matt Wagner's philosophy, and Matt will speak to this in a second, to not get ourselves in a situation where we're deploying capital and not maximizing our margins. And what I mean by that is we're not going to chase use inventory. We're going to be very strategic about it. We did launch our algorithm in the summer, early fall of 2020 on use values, and we like where our margins and we like where our turns are. And what we don't want to do is hurt our margins or hurt our terms by going out and just chasing the used values at the auctions, on the curb, or in any other place, because we have a new alternative that gives us a great return on capital. So when a customer comes into our store to get a lease, we have seen an uptick in our closings and our conversions. If we hadn't, we may have gone out and changed the use. But I'm going to have Matt speak a little bit more on the used terms.

Yeah, so I think it's important to point out that while we reported in that supplementary information that we were down on a same-store basis on used unit sales, our used unit inventory was actually down a commensurate amount, regardless of what we were up on a same-store dollar basis. So, in other words, we were reinvesting in more inexpensive units at different points in the fourth quarter. And what we have is real-place market dynamics at play, where we have enough proprietary tools that we lean upon for pricing, as well as for our trade-in value that we assign to each unit as Mark just alluded to. So as we roll into this upcoming year, as Marcus also said, we're agnostic to what we're selling, new versus used. But we also acknowledge that we're not quite where we'd want to be just yet on new unit inventory on a same-store basis. So we've been much more aggressive in our pursuit of used units on a same-store basis. I'd continue to have an appetite to pay up a little bit more to ensure that we're procuring as much used units from the consumers and providing the good SAM members that loyalty and that reward that they should have as being a part of our ecosystem. And that's where we ultimately see our innate advantage over all of our competitors to be able to dive into our data set using our proprietary technology to actually make sure that we're not overpaying, but rather paying what we would regard as fair market prices.

Okay, thanks. And then just lastly from me, how are you thinking about the potential for organic versus inorganic store count growth? Given how strong the industry is, I have to imagine that the acquisition multiples being discussed must be trending higher. Maybe you can just remind us about how you think about organic versus inorganic. generally. And then, you know, I know they're not the same type of obstacles for you to organically grow store count, like in the case of the new vehicle retailers. Maybe you can just talk about the decision, you know, matrix that goes on there. And then are there certain geographies? You know, I heard you talking about 48 states. Are there certain states or areas that you're more seriously evaluating for organic store count growth in the current environment?

So every decision we make, either to acquire an RV dealership or to acquire a piece of land or building an open store, is based on very deep data analysis on what the market looks like, what the trends are, what our overall offering looks like, what good SAM members exist there, where do we see white space, and all the obvious things. The multiples that we're seeing, quite frankly, are similar to, and in some cases, even less than what we've seen historically. And I think part of that is that our dominance in the space has led us to lead the procurement of inventory on the supply chain side. And our investments into things like furniture or air conditioning or a number of other things that have not been announced yet give us the ability to also put ourselves at the front of the line with the OEMs. So I'll start with that. A number of dealers have really struggled in December and January to procure inventory and have reached out to us as an opportunity to sell their business. Obviously those multiples are being suppressed. Additionally, we're finding that commercial real estate on the land side has been suppressed as well. And we have, I think, nine or ten locations on the docket today where we have either signed an LOI or closed on the land or building to open up de novo stores. We're only doing that in cases where we feel like we can be profitable in those markets within the 12 to 18 months that is our own standard. It will be true that in 2021, we will have an abnormal amount of new locations added to our footprint than we traditionally have. We're traditionally 8 to 10. We will exceed that number by a pretty significant amount. And because our cash flow is as good as it is today, and because our infrastructure has been really normalized over the last 24 months, we've made significant investments in the human capital side, we are prepared to take on those oppositions, and we will continue to scoop up more as we find new things. In terms of looking at markets, the first answer is I have to check the boxes on the 48 states. So the Rhode Island, the Maine, the Vermont, the West Virginia, the Montana, you could expect us to have a stake in the ground in every state by the end of the year. But when we look at other markets, states that we think that there is more opportunity for us, we will continue to double down in markets like Michigan. And so when you look at states like that, Pennsylvania, New York, where we see the top 10 of 15 RV registration states, where we believe there's white space, we'll continue to do that. The format of those stores may vary. In some cases, it could be a small format like we're doing in Delaware with six to eight days in an 8,000 square foot store. In other cases where it's in Michigan, it could be a large format store where it's a 60,000 square foot because there's 30 bays and the market dictates that. And so we'll continue to grow, we'll continue to acquire, and we will continue to use the shareholders' money, particularly when our leverage is where it is, to grow our market share and grow our footprint to not only sell more RVs, but to accomplish all the other things that we talked about, including peer-to-peer, including buy online, ship from store. I want everybody to really pay attention to the buy online, ship from store, because these locations that are being added act as mini distribution centers that don't come with a lot of additional fixed costs. They come with lower shipping costs, and they improve the customer experience to receiving that package within one day.

Great. Thank you so much.

All right, the next question is from Brett Jordan with Jefferies.

Good afternoon. This is Mark Jordan on for Brett. Just thinking about the company's collision strategy, can you talk about the progress that's been made there and how that might progress throughout the year?

Matt Wagner will talk about that.

Yeah, we've made a tremendous amount of improvements to our overall existing service infrastructure, and we've been actively engaged in a number of different negotiations, conversations, and we anticipate no later than the fall of this year we'll have an additional eight collision centers set up. And we're proceeding to further investigate other opportunities within our overall dealer network, where I wouldn't be surprised if we were able to find another four to five before the end of the year. More will be forthcoming. But we have recently hired a new leader over the entire business, which comes from the collision background from a larger company within the industry. So we're very confident about continuing to improve our overall position. And that collision business, I think, will continue to be a very creative proposition for the business moving forward.

That 70% plus margin business is our justification additionally for adding new locations in 48 states because when we add those locations, we're adding service space and collision centers. And we know that as the RV install community continues to get bigger every single day, it just builds and builds and builds, we know that our competitors are not investing in service facilities and collision facilities at a rate that we are. Unfortunately, the industry is still made up of some smaller dealers that don't have the capital to build 10,000, 12,000, 20,000 square foot service facilities, and we're going to go ahead and take the lead on that. While we may not sell every RV in America, our goal is to at least provide a service opportunity for every RV in America, and you have to have a footprint to do that.

Okay, great. I guess this is a bigger picture question. So thinking about the announcement with Wardstown and the electric world strategy you mentioned today, how do you see the future of electrified power trains in the RV space and how does this strategy evolve over time?

One of the things that I realized as I mentioned in my prepared remarks is that we've been sitting on this asset that we never really looked at it as one. And that's our ability to secure a DMV license. And a DMV license is a bit of a moat, because you can't just get it at your local gas station. You've got to have all the proper instruments in place, and you've got to have the facilities in place, and you've got to meet all the requirements to receive that license. I would expect that over the next several years, as we launch Electric World as a shop-in-shop experience, at our existing 170 some odd locations and growing that a customer will be able to go online to electrical and look at everything recreational that is electric powered i want to be clear about that everything that is electrified and that will not be limited to rvs Today, we sell electric bikes. We may be selling electric pontoons. We hope to be selling other electric apparatuses that are recreational in nature. We are not an electric car company, but we may have the opportunity at some point in the future to sell electric trucks, and that's good for us because we sell travel trailers that need to be pulled. We are working also to create a fully electric RV that incorporates the frame, not just adding a battery pack. We are in the process of coming up with other things, but I would expect when you come to our first launch in late July of 2021 that you're going to see a full assortment with us as the pioneers and the collectors of everything that's out there. One of the challenges that every electric manufacturer in America has today that isn't a branded OEM like Chevrolet or Audi or Tesla is that their ability to distribute is difficult. We've seen the battle between the regulators and the states and the dealer body, and we are the only company in America, in our opinion, that can provide a full licensed dealer platform to sell anything that requires a registration that has movement to it and whether that's a pontoon or a truck or a rv or a bike or a moped or an atv whatever those things are we are putting in a special team with special training with a special service experience with a full call center experience with no additional fixed overhead that will come with it because all of those things are already inside of our overhead So you could expect to see that in late July of 2021. We'll be announcing which location or locations you will be able to visit. In addition to that, we are partnering with a national supercharging platform. Our goal is over the next 12 to 15 months to have superchargers at as many locations as we possibly can for cars, trucks, RVs, and any other electric vehicle that may come to bear in the market. All of this is really part of a more responsible company strategy that we have. And so as part of that, we have drawn a line in the sand, and it is our goal to be 95% paperless by 2024. There are certain things that require paper, like tag entitling or certain financial documents. But our goal is to eliminate paper marketing by the end of 21, and be digital and social only, and to move into a full paperless company and to have that be our part of our green contribution by 2025.

Okay, great. Thanks. And I guess last question for me, I think it's something we ask or try and ask every quarter, but do you have a read on what the mix might be of first-time buyers?

We're starting to finally see an uptick in our trade volume as we sit here today. We did see a low point in the summer. Bob, do you want to give that number, Matt?

Certainly. Yeah, we bombed out about 18% trade-in rate. That was around the time frame of about June, July. And since then, we've seen a nice improvement at least year over year and sequentially month to month. We're not quite where we hope to be, which actually is quite uplifting for the future prospects of consumers going back into the lifestyle or trading in and trading up, which I'm confident by next year we'll see a higher trade-in rate, which means that you'll see in many respects that average sale price continue to improve in these lower-insured segments. And we can then, therefore, yield a greater use inventory level moving forward, too.

The internal debate in our company, and I really want to just make this point, is that I'm not intimidated by a high first-time buyer rate. it means that we're executing on the things that we want to do internally in our company. And we're going to double down on that. And a good example of that is we announced this week a language initiative to put all of our e-commerce and our store experience in full Spanish. And then we're also, in the latter part of the year, going to do the same thing on the French side as we stand at the border staring at Canada, looking at that as our next white space opportunity. It is important to us through language, through product development, both on our own and in partnership with manufacturers, and our electrification of things, to continue to drive down the average age of the buyer that enters our space. And we want to lead that charge and have a lower average age than the rest of the industry, and we know we need to spend money and take on certain product development initiatives to do that. If that first time buyer number starts to go up too high, that means we're not attracting new people that we really want. And the long-term prospects of this industry look like they did 10 years ago. They're growing every single year. And we believe and we want to remind people that while this may be perceived as the greatest RV year in history, it's still only a half a million RVs in a 330 million plus populated country. So we just want to give everybody that scope here. RVing is not a COVID reaction. People have been RVing for 40 years. And, yeah, maybe we saw some first-time buyers, and we're happy to see them, and we're happy to see more of them. And it is our goal to try to find more of them as we mine different diversities and different areas of the country and, quite frankly, of the North American content in the next 24 to 36 months.

Okay, great. Thank you.

All right. And we'll take the next question from the line of Garrick Johnson with BMO Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Great. Thank you. I wanted to ask, did you see what the trade-in number is now? I think you said 18 percent in June, July. Can I have a follow-up on used?

Matt? It was 25 percent to end the year. And heading into this year, it's been pretty consistent right around that number.

Okay. Great. And then, how do you account for your used inventory? Is it LIFO or FIFO? How do we account for used inventory? It's FIFO.

It is specific identification FIFO.

FIFO. OK. Great. Thank you very much.

All right. And your next question is from the line of Brett Andres with KeyBank.

Hey. Good afternoon. So I'm not too familiar with state-by-state regulations, but how many states can you actually sell online only in today? And then I think you alluded to this earlier, but what is the margin differential between online-only sale and traditional sales?

If you do not possess a Department of Motor Vehicle license in that respective state, you are not permitted to tag, title, or sell a unit into that customer's residing state. And so it's not like buying a pack of gum and shipping it online or putting it in a box. tag and title requirements in every single state. And so that is, in our opinion, a big barrier that we're trying to make sure we put up, not as put up in front of us.

And then the margin differential?

Same. And quite frankly, could even be higher. But not lower than. I'll just leave it at that. Not with historic expectations. Not lower than what we would experience at the store level. And by the way, we've been perfecting this buy and have delivered to your home model for about 18 months now. And it's not as easy as one would think because you're crossing state lines in some cases, and there is a whole delivery process. And I think COVID accelerated a little bit of it because we had to get better on the technology side with making an appointment, doing the walk-through, doing the inspection. doing the delivery, having the paperwork shipped to people. And what we realized is that the consumer actually preferred to buy that right. They preferred to do it in the confines of their own driveway. They preferred to have a one-on-one experience that may be digital and felt safer for them. And so we're doubling down on that experience and realizing that people want to buy everything online. They want to learn everything online. An RV shouldn't be any different.

All right. Thank you.

All right. And we'll take the next question from the line of Craig Kennison with Baird. Please go ahead.

Craig Kennison Yeah, good morning. Thanks for taking your good afternoon. Thanks for taking my question. One of the metrics that really stood out in the quarter was the really amazing gross profit per unit on the new side and the new side. How sustainable is that? And what really drove those figures?

Well, you know, ultimately, I think a good chunk of it has to do with the supply and demand of units. And if the manufacturers can stay disciplined, not in 21, not in 22, but beyond that point, where they're making what the market is asking for, I think that everybody's starting to realize that these margins are sustainable. Particularly on the new side, when the popularity of RVing has grown exponentially and the supply and the ability to manufacture on the new side and the amount of units available on the new side continues to be constrained, we think we'll see these types of margins within a range for the foreseeable future. We don't know what investments the manufacturers are making to ramp up factories and buildings and things of that nature, which could lead to an overproduction and then lead to margin deterioration both for the manufacturer and us in the future. But we don't anticipate any of that in the foreseeable near future from our perspective, nor are we forecasting that in our numbers.

Thank you. With respect to your 2025 outlook, super helpful that you provided 2021. And the guidance you provided for 2021 already exceeds what I think we thought you could do in 2025. How should we reset our expectations for 2025? Is it still an expectation for mid-single-digit EBITDA growth? And should we just reset the base at 650 to 690 in 2021 and grow from there?

I think, you know, we're living in a – well, we always know, and you know this, Craig, we're living in a very cyclical industry, and we don't ever – we're not able to ever predict where we think the soft spot is. And so we tend to internally look at it in five- and ten-year chunks, and we look at, like, how did we do on average over the last five years, or how did we do on average over the last ten years, knowing that there's peaks and valleys. And on average, we've been able to grow pretty nicely on the bottom line every single year. And I think what we're blessed with right now is a tremendous amount of free cash flow and a leverage calculation that we're very, very comfortable with. We'll be using that free cash flow to continue to grow and acquire and invest in growing the base of our business. And if you go back and you look at how the company grew out of 2010 and then out of 2016, we make these big swaths when there's a softness in the market, and we grow the base of the company pretty significantly. If the new market slows down a little bit or margins come down a little bit, then there's a dip for a year. But as we continue to build the size of the installed base of our customers and expand the product offering for our customers and continue to get better at digital efficiency and distribution efficiency and private label efficiency, and now we start to enter into the supply chain side of things, that the manufacturers are buying from us and we're selling aftermarket, we think we can continue to grow our EBITDA base on average over the long haul. That's actually how we look at it as a company. And while the street always looks for guidance from us and we hate to give it, we believe that the growth of our EBITDA over the long term will be north of what we're telling you today.

Great. Hey, thank you.

All right.

Is there no further questions at this time?

Okay. Thank you very much, and we look forward to reporting our Q1 results in May. Take care.

This concludes today's call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.