Regis Corporation

Are we going to stop in between them or do you want to just, are we giving it right back to Matt? Should I sit next to Matt? Mine's so short, I can sit next to Matt.

Yeah, sure. I mean, we can just do it all in one and that'll probably make it easier for Amy to sync it up. Make sure you speak into the logo. Audio recording starting now for sync purposes. Whenever you're ready.

Good morning, and thank you for joining the Regis third quarter 2022 earnings release conference call. All participants are in a listen-only mode. The prepared remarks by newly appointed President and Chief Executive Officer Matthew Docter and Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer Kirsten Zupfer are accompanied by slides to help participants follow along. After the prepared remarks, we will have time for questions. Please use the chat feature or the raise your hand feature to ask a question. Also joining Matt and Kirsten on this call is Jim Lane, our Chief Operations Officer. I'm your host, Biz McShane, Vice President, Corporate Controller. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would like to remind everyone that the language on forward-looking statements included in our earnings release and 8K filing also apply to our comments made on the call today. These documents, along with our presentation today, can be found on our website at www.regiscorp.com forward slash investor relations, along with the reconciliation of any non-GAAP financial measures mentioned on today's call with their corresponding GAAP measures. Today's slides are located in the supplemental financial section of the investor site. With that, I will now turn the call over to Matt.

Thanks, Biz, and good morning, everyone. Today, I will walk you through highlights of our third quarter results and the status of some of the key initiatives we highlighted on the last call, as well as how we are refining our priorities and areas of focus. Kirsten will cover our results in more detail, in addition to addressing a few one-time items, as there continues to be some noise in our reported results as we work through the shift in our business model. Our third quarter same-store sales and adjusted EBITDA improved year over year. Total adjusted EBITDA came in around a break-even for the quarter, and franchise EBITDA, which represents a proxy of our go-forward business model, was positive compared to a loss in the prior year and positive for the second quarter in a row. Our sales remained well below pre-COVID levels. Oh, I got to try that again. Sorry, I'll go back to the beginning of the paragraph. Our third quarter same store sales and adjusted EBITDA improved year over year. Total adjusted EBITDA came in around break even for the quarter and franchise EBITDA, which represents a proxy of our go forward business model, was positive compared to a loss in the prior year and positive for the second quarter in a row. As sales remain well below pre-COVID levels, the organizational moves we have made to streamline our GNA have helped mitigate losses during this period of slower-than-expected sales recovery. As our legacy businesses continue to wind down and sales eventually improve, we will benefit as our GNA remains largely fixed. While our results reflect progress on the path to profitability, they remain below where we want them to be. There were several factors during the quarter that affected our results, some on time and some related to ongoing issues. The Omicron variant had an impact on sales throughout the quarter, as we had articulated it would on our last call. In addition, several themes continue to affect our business as we drive towards recovery. Our sales continue to be challenged by labor issues with active stylists and stylist hours remaining significantly below pre-COVID levels. The labor shortage translates to an outsized effect on our results, given the specialized labor pool and the fact that stylists are the direct link to our revenue generating capabilities. Lower customer counts due to remote work and longer haircut cycles continue to impact our sales as well. I want to be very clear that even though we have made progress towards mitigating losses, we need to grow the business. We know our sales levels are not close to where they need to be, and as we go forward, it is critical we start making meaningful strides in this area as a key driver for the health of our business. In addition to the stylish shortage and lower customer counts impacting sales, our business model shift is also affecting near-term profitability as we continue to wind down our legacy businesses. Our transition away from our wholesale product distribution business and remaining company owned salons were an EBITDA drag. For reference, these businesses impacted our adjusted EBITDA by contributing a loss of $4 million during the quarter and a loss of $13 million year to date. During the third quarter, we have taken steps to ensure we'll be out of the product distribution business in the beginning of fiscal 2023. And while progress continues to be made, we still have work to do. By fully winding down product distribution and continuing to run off company-owned salons, the effect on our EBITDA will be minimized and we will be able to squarely shift our focus to the core business. Now, while I mentioned being disappointed in where we are, I'm not at all surprised that our third quarter results landed where they did. Our results reflect the fact that we have not yet implemented the initiatives we know are needed to improve our performance across key areas of the business. Let us turn to what those initiatives are. I've been in the seat for four months now, and I want to help you understand some of the work we've been underway that will improve our performance. On our Q2 call, we had articulated priorities for the balance of the year, split between Regis specific and Regis brand initiatives. Right off the bat, we took action tackling our top Regis specific priority, which is addressing our maturing revolving credit facility. Last quarter, we mentioned that we are working with our advisors to seek out new sources of capital with the goal of a refinancing. I think we had the least amount of words dedicated to the largest priority, but I hope you can all appreciate that this is by design. And the reality is there is only so much we can say here, given we are in the midst of identifying the appropriate solution. However, I want to make it very clear that this continues to be our most important business priority. And our efforts around evaluating our capital structure is not something that is just beginning, but rather that has been underway for several months. I also want to emphasize that we are keeping the go-forward plans for Regus and shareholder value top of mind as we drive towards a financing solution. Turning to our company-owned salons, we reduced the number of company-owned salons to 117 from 150 during the quarter. As mentioned on the last call, we continue to scale down the rest of the portfolio through either sales, buyouts, or runoff, at least expiration. These will continue to wind down, and even in the event that there were no further sales or buyouts, the vast majority of these will naturally run off within the next two years. As far as initiatives relating to our brands, strengthening our partnership and relationships with our franchisees is critical to this effort. The best strategy will fall flat without their trust, and we felt they needed to be heard and involved in shaping our areas of focus as it relates to the critical areas of the business, especially stylist recruiting and retention and customer traffic. It is critically important to us to gain shared alignment and ensure that we are the same side of the table, especially as we'll be executing on these plans together. We wanted to hear from our franchisees firsthand to get a sense of what's happening on the ground level, to test some hypotheses, and to get a sense of areas of opportunity that may not fully be on our radar. So four days after our last earnings call, we did something that had not been done at Regis in the past. 13 of us, including the entire leadership team and functional department heads, embarked on a five-city tour visiting Orlando, Dallas, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Minneapolis to meet with our franchisees. We did not present, but instead hosted intimate roundtable discussions so everyone could provide feedback and everyone could be heard. Across those five cities, we met with over 220 franchisees, representing more than 3,200 of our US salons. We held 110 of these round table discussions that resulted in many learnings, which we have taken into account in our action planning. This connection communication with our franchisees will be fundamental to our business and ongoing behavior, as our involvement will be key in improving our collective performance. To further these efforts, we are in the beginning stages of setting up priority specific committees and we will be making our way to Canada in June. We wrapped up the U.S. franchisee visits in mid-March, and since then, we've been working diligently on the action steps we will be taking. We are pushing ourselves as an organization to focus on the most meaningful drivers of our business. At our business core, we need three things. Trained stylists, satisfied customers, and the ability for stylists and customers to seamlessly interact with our brands through technology. We laid out our priorities relating to this during our last call, but we have refined our focus even more on the heels of discussions with our franchisees and further deliberation by the leadership team. We are seeking to identify the root cause of our current business challenges and have arrived at three major initiatives as it relates to technology, stylists recruiting and retention, and customer traffic. Number one, ensuring our franchisee base is on a single technology platform. Two, increasing our commitment to stylist education and events to drive our talent brand and improve recruiting and retention. And three, refocus on our marketing on more digital, direct marketing efforts. Let me address each of these a bit more. On the technology front, just as being in lockstep with our franchisees is critical to our success, so is the right technology. And the reality is we are in a situation right now with our franchisee base being split between two platforms, the legacy pro point and our new open salon pro point of sale systems. While it's not uncommon to have this dynamic, what makes us a little more complex is we are in the middle of a wind down of a legacy system and a ramp up of a new one that candidly needs to improve its functionality to ensure that it is a platform we can fully stand behind. We are taking the necessary steps to provide our franchisees with the right solution for their businesses. And our goal is to have the system on a single point of sale system by the end of the calendar year. There will be more to come on this effort, and I look forward to keeping you all updated. On stylist recruiting and retention, we look at this through the lens of what can we do as a franchisor that will have the most impact? We have an AI recruitment tool that we have rolled out to help franchisees process stylish applications. Now, this has been a fantastic tool for our franchisees to aid in the process. However, it does not fill the applicant funnel, nor does it address retention. For that, we need to better articulate our value proposition for franchisee salon employees and define why the Regis Salon brands are a great place to work. To address this, we are increasing our commitment to in-person stylist education and relaunching national and regional stylist events. We know from the research and conversations with stylists and franchisees just how much this matters, not only to stylists coming out of beauty schools looking to learn, but also experienced stylists who are continually seeking to advance their craft. Well, having a strong digital platform for education has been a great development It cannot replace the importance of in-person training and events. Furthering education allows stylists to uphold our brand promises of delivering quality, consistent hair services. It also addresses the top two purchasing criteria that matters to consumers, which are receiving a quality haircut and feeling that their stylist is trained and knowledgeable. Ulstering this piece touches all facets of our business. And as a franchisor in the haircare space, can be a major differentiator at scale versus our competitors. We are a people business. And what better way of investing in people than providing the best in class education platform with a large network of in-house educators, complemented by the largest network of trained trainers and a top-notch digital platform. And our education curriculum will go beyond technical education. It will also include manager training and soft skills development. We aspire to be the landing spot not only for stylists at a beauty school, but experienced stylists as well. While recruiting is key, retaining top stylists and trainers is equally important. We will be relaunching national and regional stylist recognition events to create excitement, drive engagement, and build community to improve retention. Through our current salon data, we can see just how much this matters to the performance as salons where stylist hours are down less than 20% versus 2019 levels have outperformed those that are down by more than 20% by 25 percentage points on a same store sales basis in the third quarter. We are excited to launch a revamped approach to education for all our brands. And we are equally excited about the ability to bring them to life through marketing campaigns. as they are worth promoting and can form the basis of future marketing initiatives in a very authentic manner. Transitioning to marketing. We plan to refocus our efforts to meet both the stylist community and consumers where they are at with a stronger focus on digital marketing. Our customers and stylists are living on social media and digital channels more than ever, and we need to build our presence and strategies and connect there in a meaningful way. We will work to build stickiness and loyalty to our brands through direct marketing initiatives powered through CRM and branded loyalty programs. We have solid traffic coming through our salons, which is a great starting point to create repeat business. We've seen the data, the effective customer retention works, and it is worth an area of our focus. Our system right now is roughly split 50-50 between the salons that have greater than 40% 90-day customer retention and and salons that have lower than 40% 90-day retention. For Q3, those salons that delivered 40% plus 90-day customer retention had a 12.5 percentage points better same-store sales versus those under 40%. Moving to a more digital and direct focus enables us to be more agile with the use of our ad fund dollars to address both stylist and customer retention, as well as new customer growth. I expect that our marketing and technology teams will be working more closely together than they have in the past in order to build a traditional marketing function that can help return us to growth. While these may look like three distinct work streams, they are all very much connected and driving results. Efforts around hiring and retaining stylists ensures the ability to generate salon sales and provide consistent quality hair services. Tenured, trained stylists combined with direct marketing will help drive customer retention and new traffic. Technology will continue to build loyalty and engagement with our brands before, during, and after each salon visit. Before turning the call over to Kirsten, I want to set the stage and expectations regarding the timing of implementation of these priorities, given that they are major shifts and foundational in nature. We are currently laying the groundwork now and expect to launch these items by the end of fiscal 2022 and early fiscal 23. I have always been confident in our priorities, but I have even more conviction now that they've been shaped with feedback from our franchisee partners. The measures we have underway, combined with our fully franchised business model, have the ability to lead to stronger profitability collectively for our franchisees and for Regis going forward. I will now turn the call over to Kirsten to provide more detail on our Q3 results. Kirsten? Great.

Good job, Ed. Well, yeah, you set the bar high. No, I can't stop.

I did stop once.

Right away. That was impressive. I think the hardest thing is when you do fumble a little bit is to not get hung up on it, right? Because it's real and it would happen if we were doing this live, but you get kind of... As long as, yeah. I think it's hard for me because I have so many, like keep saying $50 million numbers.

And you can go whenever you're ready. I've just left the recording going, so it matches up with what Amy's recording.

Thanks, Matt, and good morning. Yesterday, we reported on a consolidated basis third quarter revenues that reflect our transition to a fully franchised business model and the continuing challenges across both customer traffic and the labor market. Total revenues of $65 million declined $36 million from the prior year, as expected due to the 98% of our salons now franchised compared to 87% in the prior year and the transition away from our product distribution business. These business changes caused revenue to decline by $41 million, offset by $5 million of improved royalty and advertising revenue. Third quarter royalty revenues were below our expectations and reflected the impact from continued labor shortages and the persistence of the pandemic, including the Omicron variant that impacted our results in the quarter. Same-store sales growth was 9% in the quarter compared to the third quarter 2021, but still lagging behind pre-COVID levels. As Matt noted, addressing labor issues and engaging customers through digital marketing are our priorities that will address revenue growth. While Matt addressed headline EBITDA figures earlier, I want to put into context the results and progress compared to last year. On an adjusted basis, third quarter consolidated adjusted EBITDA was essentially breakeven compared to a loss of $20 million in the prior year's quarter. Adjusted EBITDA improved due to higher system-wide sales and management's efforts to lower our cost structure. On a year-to-date basis, adjusted EBITDA loss of $4 million is an improvement of $52 million from a loss of $56 million in the fiscal 2021 quarter. nine-month period. Our core franchise business achieved adjusted EBITDA of $3 million, a $10 million improvement compared to a loss of $7 million in the prior year. This is the second quarter in a row that our core business has been profitable. This improvement is driven primarily by higher system-wide sales and the right sizing of our G&A structure over the last year. Compared to the second quarter of fiscal year 22, franchise adjusted EBITDA declined. But as I mentioned on the last call, there were some one-time benefits in Q2 that did not occur this quarter. Adjusting Q2 for the one-time benefits of $3 million, the third quarter improved by half a million dollars compared to the second quarter. The company-owned segment recorded an adjusted EBITDA loss of approximately $3 million, including a charge to increase the inventory reserve by approximately $1 million, which is a $10 million improvement in adjusted EBITDA for the same period last year. The improvement is primarily related to having fewer company-owned salons in the current period, and we expect losses associated with the company-owned segment to mitigate as we continue to reduce the number of remaining locations. We reported an operating loss of $25 million during the quarter, which includes two non-cash impairment charges related to Goodwill and inventory, totaling $23 million. Excluding these non-cash impairment charges, our reported operating loss was $2 million, a $17 million improvement when compared to an operating loss of $19 million in the prior year. As Matt noted, the transition away from product distribution has taken longer than expected, and the inventory write-down resulted from an accelerated inventory reduction plan initiated during the quarter. We don't expect any future material inventory write-downs as we plan to monetize the remaining inventory in the next four to five months. Additionally, the company-owned segment with 117 salons remaining reported operating losses of approximately $4 million, which includes approximately $1 million of inventory reserve noted above. Excluding non-cash impairments, the year-over-year improvement results from an increase in system-wide sales, our G&A savings initiatives, and the wind-down of our company-owned salons. Our adjusted GNA for the quarter was $15 million, which was lower than our expected run rate due to personnel vacancies and the timing of professional fees. On a run rate basis, we continue to believe our end state run rate GNA will be in the range of $65 to $70 million annually, likely at the low end of that range. Turning to liquidity, as of March 31st, we had $128 million of liquidity, including $82 million of available revolver capacity and $26 million of cash. Our net available liquidity as of March 31st was $53 million, which reflects our minimum liquidity covenant requirements and the permitted add-back of the shortfall in certain refranchising proceeds in accordance with our credit agreement. In the third quarter, we used $10 million of cash from operations, which is a $2 million improvement compared to our cash use in the second quarter and a $4 million improvement from Q3 of 2021. Adjusting both the second and third fiscal quarters for one-time cash outflows in each quarter, our cash used in operations was approximately $7 million in each quarter. Even at this rate of cash use, we still have ample liquidity and we expect our cash use and operations to continue to decline as sales and customer traffic improve. As Matt mentioned, we have been working with an outside advisor to find alternative financing arrangements to address our revolving credit facilities maturity date of March 2023. Be assured that addressing the revolving credit facility continues to be our top priority. But in the meantime, we have sufficient liquidity to navigate our recovery and operate as a pure asset light franchisor. This concludes my prepared remarks. I'd like to thank you for your continued support and interest in Regis, and I will turn the call back to Biz, who will lead us through the Q&A. Good. Excellent.

Hey, guys, I have one question for you. During math part, somebody sniffled in one of the paragraphs, and I don't know if that's going to bug you or not. I did. I actually think it was him. It was me. Are you okay with it?

It won't be as loud on that recording.

Okay.

Yeah. That mic's a lot more directional, so it's not going to be as bad as whatever Amy heard.

I think it's real.

It happens.

And there's a couple of times the door opened and you could hear a little bit, but that's real. That's like not in like a soundproof.

I know I was trying to hear, I don't know if you could actually hear that on the recording. I was trying to listen, but it was hard.

I mean, even if it is, if we were, people do this live, right? So it's not uncommon to do it live.

Yeah.

And you know, it's going to be even harder to probably hear through that audio as opposed to the room audio too. So.