Deluxe Corporation

And just in checks, just a kind of a follow-up, I think, off of Charlie's question, the frequency, you know, you've talked about that a number of times through the pandemic. Is the frequency level pre-pandemic, or are we still trailing that a little bit, just kind of given variants and different things like that?

Honestly, I think it's a bit early to tell. The reorder cycle, we have plenty of reorders that would indicate that the cycle has not particularly changed. But given, you know, the weakness in Q2 for the whole economy, it's just kind of hard to see exactly what that looks like on a run rate. But we're pleased to see continuing reorders and, you know, pleased in particular to see new small businesses that started during the pandemic in the middle of last year are already into the reorder cycle. Overall, we think that's encouraging overall.

great and then one just one last question just on the guidance and uh reiterating that this morning it assumes a bigger step up in the margin profile can you just talk about the changes from q3 to q4 especially given the environment of you know the inflationary pressures supply chain disruptions you know what drives that improvement thanks

You know, look, we think about this business as being, you know, the guys are given a 20% to 21% EBITDA business. If you look over the course of the last five or six quarters, I think with the exception of Q3 2020, which is a real outlier as we pull back and we had some COVID-related costs, temporary COVID-related cost savings initiatives, we've pretty consistently been in that range. We do expect to get back to that level in Q4, primarily as I referenced before, because inflation was pressured to the tune of 100 basis points. And so we think we'll have mitigants for that in place to really help us get back to that kind of low 20% EBITDA target. Now, as we think about the balance of the year, we issued revenue guidance at 10% to 12%. On a revenue basis, we do think we'll be towards the high end of that range. And on an adjusted EBITDA basis, we think we'll be to the low end of the 20% to 21% range. So we still feel like we can have meaningful improvement on a sequential basis as we mitigate some of the pressures that we saw in Q1. And feel confident in, you know, this important milestone that we attained last quarter of having legacy deluxe have sales-driven positive organic growth. And we expect to see that. And we saw that again in Q3 and expect to see it again in Q4.

Great. Thanks for taking my questions. Congrats on the quarter and good luck in Q4.

I will now turn the call back over to Tom Moravito for closing remarks.

Thanks, Tamita. Before we conclude, I'd like to mention the following conferences that management will be participating in. The Citi FinTech Conference on November 18th, the Stevens Annual Investor Conference on November 29th, the Wells Fargo Fifth Annual TNT Summit on December 1st, Needham's 24th Annual Growth Conference on January 12th, 2022, and the Sidoti Winter Small Cap Conference on January 20th. Thank you again for joining us today. Please stay healthy and safe, and we look forward to speaking with you in February as we share our fourth quarter and full year 2021 results.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.