Regis Corporation

Good morning, and thank you for joining the REGIS Second Quarter 2023 Earnings Release Conference Call. I am your host, Biz McShane, Vice President, Corporate Controller. All participants are in a listen-only mode. The prepared remarks by our 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 raise your hand feature to ask a question. Please note this conference is being recorded. I would like to remind everyone that the language on forward-looking statements included in our earnings release and 8 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 any reconciliation of any non-GAAP financial measures mentioned on today's call with their corresponding GAAP measures. Today's slides are located in the investor presentations and supplemental financial section of our The Investor site. With that, I will now turn the call over to Matt.

Thank you, Biz. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for your interest in Regis. For today's call, I will highlight our second quarter fiscal 2023 results and reiterate our strategy and the priorities we have for the business as we enter the second half of our fiscal 2023 year. I am pleased to report continued business progress that resulted in a strong quarter for Regis and our best start to a fiscal year in quite some time. We have built upon our positive start to the fiscal year by delivering further sales and EBITDA growth. With Q2 2023 adjusted EBITDA of $8 million, more than double our adjusted EBITDA of $4 million that we reported last quarter. These results come just 18 months after we reported an adjusted EBITDA loss of $77 million for our full fiscal year 2021. In the last two quarters, we have reported adjusted EBITDA of 12 million, which is a testament to the progress made by the Regis team and our franchisees. It is worth mentioning again, as I have on previous calls, that I am proud of the progress we are continuing to make in a relatively short period of time. Coming out of fiscal 2021, we utilized 2022 as a year to stabilize Regus through the winding down of our legacy businesses, streamlining our GNA, selling our technology platform, and amending and extending our credit agreement while simultaneously aligning on a go-forward strategy with our franchisees to drive our business forward, all of which required a tremendous amount of work and execution And that work continues to come through in our results, not only having turned the corner on profitability from an adjusted EBITDA perspective, but also accelerating it. We will continue to focus and execute against our strategic initiatives of stylist retention and recruitment, customer retention and traffic driving initiatives, and the rollout of our technology partners and NODI salon management platform in an effort to grow top line sales and franchisee profitability, which will in turn drive Regis sales and profitability. While we have come a long way, we still have a ways to go and work to be done, but I continue to remain excited and encouraged by the strides we have been making in our business and the future of our scaled, fully franchised platform. I will now speak to some of the highlights of our second quarter and year-to-date results. Kirsten will be diving deeper into the results in her section, and I think it is important to note the details and nuances Kirsten will mention as there are a number of one-time items that had an impact on the quarter. That being said, the overall theme of progress and strong results continues to hold regardless of the one-time impacts. For the quarter, same store sales rose 4.5% versus the prior year's second quarter. Adjusted Q2 23 EBITDA on a consolidated basis was $8 million compared to 3 million in the prior year's quarter, a $5 million improvement. Adjusted EBITDA on a six-month year-to-date basis improved by 14 million year-over-year at $12 million versus a loss of 2 million a year ago. Our franchise segment EBITDA was $8 million for the quarter, increasing $2 million as compared to the second quarter of fiscal 2022. On a year-to-date basis, our franchise segment EBITDA is up over $10 million versus a year ago at $12.5 million year-to-date versus $2 million during the prior year period. We reported our second quarter in a row of positive operating income of $1 million versus an operating loss of half a million in Q2 fiscal 22. Operating income on a year-to-date basis has improved by almost $9 million versus the prior year, at $3 million for the six-month end of December 31, 2022, versus a loss of $5 million during the prior year period. And finally, from a cash perspective, we continue to make strong progress in decreasing our cash use as we've come a long way from the cash use over the past two to three years and are getting closer to cash flow breakeven. Our liquidity position and capital structure remain healthy as we ended the quarter with total liquidity of close to $44 million, providing us ample runway to continue investing in and improving the business. Turning now to our business initiatives. Much of what I will be talking about will be a reiteration of the strategies and priorities I have mentioned on previous calls, as they remain the same, and they will continue to remain the same for the foreseeable future. All of these items we view as foundational to our business and our plays for the long term. Given the velocity of our business, with customer visitation cycles generally between one to two months, combined with how important increasing our franchisee stylist workforce is, these are not factors that will change overnight, but rather require the repeated investment of time and effort, in addition to testing and learning. We are confident that our areas of focus are the right ones, and we will continue to bring the right balance of urgency, discipline, and patience as we execute on our business initiatives to move the needle on sales and franchisee profitability. Now regarding our region-specific business items, our team continues to do a great job of tightly managing G&A and winding down our company-owned salons. These actions remain instrumental in continuing to provide us the runway needed to drive the turnaround and position for Regis for growth as we implement our sales driving initiatives. From a G&A perspective, over the last several quarters, we've provided revised guidance to our range of go forward G&A. And during this quarter, we have continued to make improvements. We are pleased with our efforts here. And Kirsten will be providing another update on a revised range during this call. I also want to make it clear that while we have been optimizing G&A to match our current business model, it is not affecting the manner in which we support our business and our franchisees. In fact, we're actually increasing our field level support and the programs our franchisees have access to, and will continue to do so as we are on the path of being a strong franchisor. In regards to our company-owned segment, we ended the quarter with 75 company-owned salons. While our company-owned segment was positive for the quarter on an EBITDA basis, largely due to a one-time COVID relief payment that Kirsten will touch on, this is an area that continues to provide a drag on our profitability. And due to the hard work of the team, we now have clear line of sight over the next 12 months to wind down another 55 to 60 salons. And with those rolling off, we will have mitigated the majority of the negative contribution these salons have on our business by this time next year. Now, as we move ahead, we will continue to monitor our G&A and our company-owned portfolio very closely. Moving on to our salon-level initiatives of technology, stylist retention and recruitment, and customer marketing. On the technology side, our key initiative here remains consolidating our system onto a singular point of sale software system. Through the sale of our Open Salon Pro software platform in June of 2022, we have partnered with Zenodi as our main technology partner. And as of December 31st, 2022, we've had over 500 salons actively using the product and many more signed up to migrate. Currently, the main priority for us in Zenoti is to engage with and stay close with our migrated user base to ensure the experience and functionality meets the unique needs of our brands, our franchisees, and stylists. We are listening intently to the feedback, and we are deploying the requisite resources to address any issues raised in short order, with the goal of accelerating signups and migration when our franchisees' needs have been met. We believe the product is close to being properly tailored for all of our brands, and we look forward to tapping into the many benefits the Zenoti platform will provide. We believe having Zanotti rolled out across our franchisee base will allow us to better engage with customers and connect deeper through digital channels. We'll also be able to drive the many initiatives we have around lifecycle marketing and loyalty, which should further unlock the benefits as our size and scale, as well as being and bring greater uniformity to our brand promotions. Zanotti will also provide us and our franchisees the ability to make an even more personal approach to getting to know our customers, their preferences, and ultimately provide a better service experience across our salons in addition to increased stylist productivity. On stylist retention and recruitment, I've spoken on previous calls about the labor challenges which has been putting pressure on our sales recovery. We are constantly thinking through with our franchisees how they can best attract, hire, train, and retain stylists. We are working on refining each of our brand's unique employer value propositions to ensure we have impactful reasons why a stylist should join one of our Regus brands. Not only is it important that we have clear messages, but another key initiative will be ensuring that the message gets out to meet the stylists where they are. This includes us and our franchisees taking time to cultivate and build relationships at beauty schools, as well as being active on social and digital channels. In addition, we have spoken at length about our increased investment in education as a tool to attract and retain given the importance of ongoing education to stylists. I am very pleased at the foundation we have been building through our various programs that include our in-house artistic directors and field-based technical trainers. We want to build the largest and most impactful educational platform in the industry. And we have grown our collective training team significantly over the course of the past year to over 1,000 trainers across our system versus less than 150 at this time a year ago. Given the recent exponential growth, we have only scratched the surface regarding the impact this team can have on elevating the technique of stylists, driving the latest trends, and ensuring customers are receiving the quality services that they are seeking. We have ramped up the number of in salon classes across all of our brands, as well as the digital training support we are providing to our trainers and stylists. We believe this will go a long way in keeping stylists engaged and is a critical touch point that we uniquely provide. In addition, we're about to launch salon leader and manager training this month to build soft skills on the non-technical side. And looking at data from the past few months, early findings suggest that those salons that have a dedicated technical trainer are outperforming the rest of the system on a sales basis. We look forward to not only rolling this out further, but also developing programs to fully optimize the use of this valuable team and resource. We've also brought back in-person advanced education award trips in a big way, with our most recent one having just taken place in Las Vegas for the Supercuts brand in early January. The entire leadership team, along with many other Regis employees and franchisees, attended this event that hosted around 850 trainers, managers, and stylists. It's events like this that are differentiators and will be key to rewarding top performers, drive further engagement, and retaining our franchisees' top talent. These events are also critical to enhancing brand culture and providing stylists the sense that they are part of a community versus an individual salon. Taken together, we believe all of these components will truly differentiate our brands and set us apart as a destination to work for both stylists that are looking to start their careers, as well as those with experience. On marketing, we continue to prioritize retention and building further loyalty to our brands. I've previously mentioned the shift in media spend, which we are continuing to make to optimize those channels, providing the highest ROI. We have test campaigns out in market with various lifecycle and CRM messaging, and we will seek to expand on the ones that are driving the most traffic. Our loyalty programs are getting closer to being piloted, and refreshed brand campaigns are in the works. We are finding the right balance between performance-based traffic driving initiatives and overall brand strategy, as it is important that neither one of these get lost. The goal of all of this is to create a stronger relationship through more communication with our customers. And I am encouraged as we test and learn new tactics utilizing the rich data we have and will continue to gather. And I look forward to gaining further insights and landing on high impact programs to drive traffic and awareness to our salons. I will wrap up our initiatives here, and while this was not exhaustive of what we were doing, I wanted to provide you some examples and insights into the work streams we have in place and how they can impact our business across the entire system. As we look forward to the third quarter and beyond, I want to ensure that I set the proper expectations of what our results may look like. And I want to give the impression that our Q2 results are the new benchmark for quarterly run rate from an EBITDA perspective, at least not at this stage of our turnaround, given that there were some one-time items and timing that contributed to the quarter. That said, I want to be very clear that our results thus far have been in line with where we have expected them to be, and that nothing has been a surprise to us. Staying with the theme of expectations and no surprises, given the timing of certain expenses, such as the Supercuts education event that took place in January, as well as the seasonality of sales, we expect the next few quarters to come in below Q123 adjusted EBITDA, which still represents continued year-over-year improvements. I want to not only give you that visibility, but also let you know in advance that from our perspective, a dip over the next few quarters does not signal a step back, but rather what is fully expected and planned for given the timing of investments that we will be making. Taken in totality with our first two fiscal 2023 quarters, we are on track to deliver significant EBITDA growth over the course of fiscal 2023 versus our prior years. I would like to close by reiterating the excitement for the future of Regus. We have all of the elements in place to continue building on the momentum we are gaining. We have strong conviction around the industry that we are in, our positioning within the industry, our revamped and more streamlined business model, the stabilization we have achieved for our platform, the positive results we are delivering, and the strategy we have in place to address the challenges our business faces in order to drive sales and franchisee profitability. I am proud of all of our team members, our franchise owners, and business partners for their resilience, passion, and dedication to Regus. This is an exciting time for us. i want to again thank the entire regis system for their contribution to our results and thank you for your continued interest in our company with that i will now turn the call over to kirsten to review the financials in more detail kirsten thanks matt and good morning we are pleased to speak with you to share our second quarter and first half fiscal 2023 performance

The quarter marked our best start to a fiscal year in five years when measured by GAAP operating income and demonstrates the future of Regus as an asset-light franchisor. Our operating income improvement is driven by our focus on controlling G&A, the wind-down of loss-generating company-owned salons in our distribution centers, and to a lesser extent, the benefit of some one-time items, which were partially offset by one-time costs. Reviewing the second quarter in more detail and beginning with the income statement, on a GAAP basis, total second quarter revenues were $60 million and declined $9 million from the prior year. This revenue decline was expected and relates primarily to a reduction in franchise rental income and the wind down of our company-owned salons. Franchise rental income flows through both revenue and expense, and therefore has no impact on profitability. We believe a better reflection of our revenue performance is system-wide same-store sales, which grew 4.5% in the quarter. We continue to believe our initiatives to drive stylus hours and customer traffic will support continued improvement in system-wide same-store sales. As I mentioned, we posted another quarter of gap operating profit and a strong start to the year. The increase in GAAP operating profit was driven by the wind down of loss generating company-owned salons and our continued focus on managing GNA. Additionally, I'd like to call your attention to one-time expenses and benefits in our GAAP operating income for the quarter. On the expense side, we had a $2.6 million depreciation charge driven by the consolidation of our office space and a $1.2 million inventory reserve charge As it relates to benefits, we had positive insurance adjustments, which lowered GNA in the quarter by $600,000. Now let's turn to our adjusted results, which eliminates the noise in the reported results. On an adjusted basis, second quarter consolidated adjusted EBITDA was $8 million compared to $3 million in the prior year's quarter. The $5 million improvement was driven by our lower GNA, which included a $600,000 positive actuarial insurance adjustment, the wind down of loss generating company-owned salons, and a $1.1 million grant from the state of North Carolina related to COVID-19 relief. Our core franchise business achieved adjusted EBITDA of $8 million in the quarter. A $2 million improvement compared to $6 million in the prior year quarter. On an adjusted EBITDA basis, our company-owned segment was just above breaking even for the quarter and improved $3 million from the second quarter last year. The improvement is driven by the $1.1 million grant from the state of North Carolina related to COVID-19 relief and having fewer loss generating company owned stores in the current period as we are closing stores at the lease end and negotiating early buyouts where appropriate. For the first half of fiscal 2023, revenues were $122 million compared to 146 million in the first half of fiscal year 2022. Similar to the second quarter revenue decline, this decline was expected and relates primarily to a reduction in franchise rental income and the wind down of our corporate-owned salons, as well as lower product sales to franchisees. Adjusted EBITDA for the first half of the year was $12 million, a $14 million improvement compared to a $2 million loss in the first half of fiscal year 2022. Adjusted EBITDA improved primarily due to our lower G&A, the wind down of last generating corporate-owned salons, and a $1.1 million grant from the state of North Carolina. Breaking this down further, adjusted G&A was $25 million for the first half of the year. This is lower than our expected run rate in the second half of the year due to our investment spend on training, recruiting, and retention, which will increase as we accelerate these initiatives in the second half of the year. As Matt mentioned, we continue to optimize our GNA spend and last quarter revised our expected normalized GNA spend to $57 to $60 million from 60 to $63 million. Even with the plan's strategic spend in the back half of fiscal year 2023, we are now reducing our GNA outlook further and expect GNA to normalize between 54 and $57 million annually. with fiscal 23 trending towards the low end of that range. Turning to liquidity, as of December 31st, we had $44 million of liquidity, including 34 million of available revolver capacity and $9 million of cash. In the first half of the year, we used 7 million of cash from operations, of which 5 million was used in Q1 and 2 million was used in Q2. Over on a year over year basis cash used in the first half of 2023 improved $17 million from the prior year. The $2 million cash used in the second quarter includes two and a half million of deferred social security payments and another 500,000 and payments to complete our obligations. related to our transition services agreement with our former point of sale provider. These cash uses were offset by the $1.1 million of cash received, as I mentioned earlier. Adjusting for these cash uses, second quarter cash used in operations was flat. We expect to use more cash in the back half of fiscal 2023 as we further invest in training, recruitment, and retention. With the sale of OSP, our capital expenditures have decreased by approximately $3 million this year, which is in addition to the cash saved on G&A. Given our working capital and modest capital expenditure requirements, we believe we have ample liquidity. This concludes my prepared remarks. I'd like to thank you again for your continued support and interest in Regus. With that, I will turn it back to Biz, who will lead us through the Q&A.

Thank you, Kirsten. Please remember to use the chat feature or raise your hand feature to ask a question. The first question we have is through the chat. Kirsten, this is for you. Please give an update on the NYSC compliance.

Great question. We are currently in compliance with the New York Stock Exchange stock price requirement, as well as the market cap requirement. We're just awaiting the final compliance letter from the exchange.

Thank you. All right. On the line, we have Eric Beder from Small Cap Consumer Research. Eric, please remember to unmute your line.

Good morning. Can you hear me?

Yes.

Thank you. Congratulations on a solid Q2. Thanks, Eric. You guys have made a lot of progress. When do you see the potential to start adding more salons to the franchise mix? Obviously, you've spent a lot of time cleaning the base up. When do you look at it going forward to potentially start adding to the mix?

Hey, Eric. It's Matt. Good morning. Thanks for the question. I think you had mentioned a lot of time cleaning the base up. I think From our standpoint, we're just continuing on focusing on executing on the business and all the initiatives we just mentioned. That's really where it starts and ends right now on just continuing to move this business forward, continuing to bring stylists back into the equation, continuing to drive our customer traffic because that's really where the conversation starts getting a lot easier amongst franchisees and even folks who are on the outside who have shown interest in growing. But our focus right now is ensuring that franchisee profitability is optimized to ensure you have the right business case. That is ongoing. And I see that to probably be the case over call of the next year. So we're really going to really continue to focus on the turnaround, which again, we'll unlock those conversations, make it easier for the franchisees who have expressed that interest. We do have an interest from the outside, but really just want to focus on the business model as much as possible right now. And kind of, as we mentioned on calls in the past, along with that cleaning up is coming with some cleanup of the footprint. You know, I mentioned on the previous call and I'll say it again, you know, right now what we're seeing is a bit of a cleanup of salons of underperforming salons, which has been a drain on resources and time. And I think that has a benefit to the system as well. So as we continue with, you know, kind of winding down those that are underperforming, we can start putting our focus back on, you know, getting into growth loads.

You talked about the franchisees. You had this event last month in Las Vegas. What was the feedback you were getting from the franchisees in terms of what they're looking to see going forward and how they are dealing with what's going on in the world?

Yeah, no, absolutely. It was a fantastic event. I can't speak to that enough. And by everyone who was in conjunction with putting that on, That came through a big collaboration with our franchisees, actually. The even concept of the idea of that event came out of our regional roadshows we did last year, and we asked, how can we better ensure that we're engaging and retaining our stylists, rewarding top talent, ensuring that we have some more essence of the brand culture, excitement, bringing that back amongst the stylist community. And this is something that we aligned on with them as being a key tool as part of that initiative. So it was awesome to see, you know, that was a conversation that happened, you know, beginning middle of next year. And for that to come to fruition around six months later after that, and to have an event where 850 plus stylists, managers, trainers, franchisees, vendors came and, was pretty incredible. So it was an awesome event from that standpoint, stylists and managers left super engaged. We also had an owner track to your point, uh, on, we use it as an opportunity as a further touch base with them to get their latest feedback on, Hey, here's what's going on from a recruitment marketing perspective. What are your reviews on that? Here's what's going on from the latest brand campaign re uh, Mark Benthien, ECA- revamps that we're going through showing some previews where your views on that. Mark Benthien, ECA- here's the latest with to know to give us some feedback on what you're seeing and what can do to improve that platform. Mark Benthien, ECA- So really, it was a time of a ton of constructive dialogue on the heels of engagement with them and an event that we came together to really put on in conjunction with the franchisees so. Overall, just a great sense of collaboration on what they feedback on our key priorities, which we're going to take into account. So it was very productive from that standpoint. And I think the approach of trying and making a more concerted effort to bring them in to those major decisions and the major things affecting our business are greatly appreciated, even in the face of some, you know, as we're looking to get the business back on track.

Thank you. When you step back, we've gone through COVID, we've gone through now people coming back to work. What are your franchisees seeing in terms of the customer, how often they're coming? Is this business recession resistance or economic slowdown resistance? How should we be thinking about the changes that have happened for really in the customer base being affected and flowing through into your business?

Yeah, no, absolutely. It's a good question. And Yeah, we are seeing some stretching of visitation. Things are different now, right? I think I've kind of mentioned, you know, people ask of the dynamic. It's just different. And even so, I would say regardless of that factor, there's still a ton of opportunity. I mean, what gets me excited is the fact that everything that we've just talked about, you know, the momentum we're gaining, the progress we're making, you know, they're largely, you know, coming without the effects of the strategic initiatives that we're talking about. fully taking hold and what I mean by that. Now, a lot of the work has been done to this point on those to get us in the position to execute. Customer data cleanup, foundational groundwork, research, talking with our franchisees, piloting various messages, testing and learning various channels. I mean, we're getting smarter every day on what's going on now. So from my perspective, we haven't even scratched the surface regarding the impacts we could have on these yet are still moving forward. Given that I think the incrementality of those initiatives can have, there's plenty of customers out there. There's plenty of opportunity for us to increase our relationship with our customers, drive further retention, drive traffic. And you kind of mentioned a little bit about the industry. And I mentioned that as a highlight, you know, this is kind of the most subscription-like model without being an official subscription due to the fact that hair care is more of a need versus a want. And people look to get their hair cut and colored, whatever have you. And they prefer to do that with trained professionals. So, you know, regardless of the time, regardless of customer behavior, I think there's really a lot of space for us given that dynamic. And I really like our positioning and prospects to capitalize that given our scale, convenience, value for money, quality of service, our salon supply to the attractive price points. But I think this will be resilient through all economic cycles and the incrementality these initiatives can have. Regardless on the stretching out of cycles here, there's a lot of customers to go after, attract, keep, and retain, and build loyalty to our brands.

It's still pretty difficult to cut your hair online.

Yeah, that's absolutely true.

And the last question here, I know this is longer term. Look, where do you want to be longer? You've obviously made great progress in cash flow. Where do you want to be longer term with the debt? in terms of potential annual ratios or levels? How should we be thinking? Obviously, I don't think this is a fiscal 23 question, but how should we think a longer term in terms of where the right level of debt should be here?

Yeah, no, that's a good question. And I think it comes back to kind of what I said on earlier, you know, what we're focused on, just what's going to bring us back to growth. What's going to end up leading to debt pay down is ultimately, well, it's two things. The first and foremost is It's continued execution on the business. You know, as we look to increase our top line, as we look to continue to drive profitability, you know, a lot of and generate cash flow, a lot of that will go down to paying debt. That is a big piece of the value equation here, unlocking further value for stakeholders. So, you know, that is ultimately a place that we're looking to get through in the way that we get there is ultimately continuing on the path we're on. continue to grow that top line and essentially be able to get in a position to start paying that down. The other piece that comes along with this as well that I don't want to lose sight of that may be a bit of a 23 thing is the payment stream that we could be getting from Zanotti as part of our earnouts from migration. So that is something that We'll come in way over the course of 23, probably towards more towards the back half, just a little bit of a color on how that works. So, you know, we received an upfront payment from Zanotti and that kind of covers off the first, you know, X amount of salons. And then after a number of salons migrate, we start getting payments for the rest of incremental migration beyond call it what that increment, that first payment covered. So as you start to see additional salons migrate over, we'll start to be able to get proceeds from that, which will go directly towards debt pay down. So between that, which could be a 23 thing and the execution on a business, which to your point is a little bit longer term. Those things will help us de-lever. In terms of a target we're looking to reach, we haven't put that out there at this point yet, but maybe it's something we'll consider in the future.

Great. Good luck for the rest of the year. Thanks, Eric.

Thanks, Eric.

All right. Next, we will go to Sydney Wagner from Jefferies. Please remember to unmute your line, Sydney.

Hi. Are you guys able to hear me okay? Yes, you can. Perfect. Well, thank you for taking my question. So my first question was just around the labor market and stylist retention and recruitment. Where do stylist count levels fall relative to where they were pre-COVID? And then I'm just curious on any early reads or feedback you have from the stylist recruitment initiatives.

Sure. Thanks. This is Matt. I appreciate the question. Where they fall versus pre-COVID, it's pretty interesting. I think we've talked about this at length. It kind of matches up pretty much with kind of traffic declines that we're seeing. So this is around 20% down from an hours worked perspective versus pre-COVID. And again, that is something that recently has been fairly stable. And any incrementality of just increasing those hours worked, even just one hour, one and a half hour, per salon per day can have some significant impact on our franchisees profitability and on top line. So the various factors that have been moving this in a positive direction where we see it, a lot of different things, franchisee pay plans, commission structure, salon culture, access to training, all the things that we're here and we've seen, which is why this is where we're putting so much of our focus in to one, get the story out there, to ensure our training leaders and managers are trained on the soft skills to provide a great culture. So we know how important managers are. So when we talked about salon training and education, we really felt this was really a very important place to put some time and effort, given we know, like a lot of industries, stylists leave due to bad managers. So we can't overlook that piece of the education side. And so we're excited to start rolling that piece out. And other things, you know, regarding the technical trainers that get hands-on in our salons. I had mentioned some early findings that those salons and technical trainers are outperforming the system. Yeah, I'll add some more figures and context around that. And some of the data that I'm quoting is November and December results, just given it's been early days since we've scaled that up so fast. But from a level of sales outperformance, On an overall brand perspective, we're seeing that range from salons that have these trainers in them from anywhere from 4% above the rest of the system in one brand, up to 14% in another. And we're also seeing that requisite outperformance in stylus hours and 90-day retention for those who have those design team members. Some are retaining 4% better from a 90-day retention sign, and even up to 7% more stylus hours work. So these are things, early figures, encourage that they're seem to be working on the right path regarding that investment. And we're going to continue to do so in an effort to move the needle on that recruitment and retention side.

Got it. That's helpful. And then just another one kind of on the customer wait time. So I think you'd called it out is one to two months. So just curious, like what your target time is. And then if you're seeing any shifts in spend per visit, I'm curious on any color there.

Yeah, I think it's less so on target how often we're getting folks to visit. I think we're going to be okay with stretching cycles out as long as we're increasing our traffic base. So, you know, that's between two things. One, just keeping those who are coming in, whatever cycle they're coming in, at a better rate. which I think we have a ton of opportunity to do and probably the highest ROI and focus we can have right now. We have a lot of traffic coming through our system. Let's just keep them better. And that'll go a long, long way in something that's in our control through the development of As I mentioned, CRM, loyalty, bringing that stickiness, that's going to go a long way from the traffic we already have, regardless how often and the various reasons are coming through. And then, obviously, there's the opportunity to drive additional. So we can drive additional folks, and that'll just add to that pool, which will go a long way into effectuating that traffic number, kind of regardless of where that cycle is. In terms of spend, yes. You know, spend has been up and that's just been a product of price increases that franchisees and our system has been taking, which has been quite in line with other industries and retail and what have you. So kind of we're seeing, you know, anywhere from 20 to 25 percent higher tickets versus a pre-COVID level due to the price that has been taken here.

Got it. That's helpful. And then just my last question is just about the same source sales at four point five percent and the trends that you're seeing there and then how those may be varied by region and concept.

Yeah, I would say probably more so by concept than region. And I'd point you to our press release where you can have kind of the breakdown of the various brands. So you can see, you know, Supercuts and portfolio brands being up, you know, anywhere from six to seven plus percent. And that's really kind of in those couple groupings of buckets. And then the SmartStyle brand is actually down, on a year over year perspective. So I will say, you know, disparities is really kind of driven by those brand perspectives. Regionally within the brands, we actually see fairly uniform performance, which, which actually, that means that we can effectuate on kind of a overall layer across the brand. So really taking more of a brand approach than having to take a regional approach.

Got it. Thank you so much.

Thank you.

All right. We're going to go now to a question from the chat. Matt, talk about the health of the franchise system and where do we see our franchise system going?

Yeah, no, it's a good question. Appreciate you asking. As I mentioned, you know, this comes back to just continuing on the recovery. The franchisees have gone through a couple of years of a difficult time given what's happened through COVID. And we're just focused on getting that business back on track. I had mentioned Stylist Hours worked per a previous question, about 20% down. So we have a lot of opportunity to drive our sales, to drive franchisee traffic, to drive franchisee profitability through increasing that workforce, to making them more productive. I think that'll go a long way for franchisees businesses to And really kind of everything we're doing here, every program that we're looking to roll out from the technology platform perspective, as I mentioned, from our efforts around recruiting and retention perspective, from our customer marketing and 90-day retention, that is all in an effort to look to increase franchisee sales and franchisee profitability, which we know is the most important thing right now.

Thank you, Matt. Those are all the questions we have for now. Thank you for joining the Regis call.