Universal Technical Institute Inc

Good afternoon and welcome to the Universal Technical Institute first quarter 2026 earnings conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. If you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star, then two. Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Matt Kempton, Vice President of Corporate Finance and Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Hello and welcome to Universal Technical Institute's Fiscal First Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. Joining me today are our CEO, Jerome Grant, and CFO, Bruce Schumann. Following our prepared remarks, we will open the call for your questions. A replay of this call, its transcript, and our investor presentation will be archived on the investor relations section of our website at investor.uti.edu, along with our earnings release issued earlier today and furnished to the SEC. During this call, we may make comments that contain forward-looking statements as defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, which, by their nature, address matters that are in the future and are uncertain. These statements reflect management's current beliefs and expectations and are subject to a number of factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from those statements. These factors include, but are not limited to, those discussed in our earnings release and SEC filings. These statements do not guarantee future performance, and therefore undue reliance should not be placed upon them. We do not intend to update these forward-looking statements as a result of new information or future developments, except as required by law. Please note, unless otherwise stated, all comparisons in this call will be against our results for the comparable period of fiscal 2025. The information presented today also includes non-GAAP financial measures. These should be viewed in addition to and not as a substitute for the company's reported results prepared in accordance with U.S. GAAP. All non-GAAP financial measures referenced in today's call are reconciled in our earnings press release to the most directly comparable GAAP measures. For more information regarding definitions of our non-GAAP measures, please see our earnings release, financial supplement, and investor presentation. With that, I will turn the call over to Jerome Grant, CEO of Universal Technical Institute, for his prepared remarks. Jerome?

Thank you, Matt. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. In just a few minutes, our CFO, Bruce Schumann, will go into more details from a financial perspective. Prior to that, I'd like to share some thoughts in our three areas of focus. Performance of the company, execution of our North Star strategic plan, and finally, opportunities we're exploring to move beyond that plan. First, performance. As we begin fiscal 2026, we're performing with clarity and momentum against a well-defined strategy. We entered the year on strong operational and financial footing, and the first quarter tracked in line with our plans and exceeded our expectations for discipline execution. Revenue for the first quarter grew 10% to $221 million. Our baseline adjusted EBITDA was nearly $35 million, including over $7 million in growth investments. Our reported adjusted EBITDA was $27 million. Average full-time active students increased 7%, with total new student starts growing roughly 3% year-over-year, which is right in line with our and broader market expectations. These results position us well for acceleration as fiscal 2026 unfolds. Overall, we delivered a strong start to the year, and the progress we made this quarter reinforces the durability of our North Star strategy. With that strong performance in the first quarter, we remain confident in our expectations for the full year. To reiterate, In fiscal 2026, we expect revenue to be between $905 and $915 million, reflecting approximately 9% year-over-year growth at the midpoint. Our baseline adjusted EBITDA is anticipated to be approximately $156 million. With approximately $40 million in growth investments related to launching and scaling new campuses and programs, our reported adjusted EBITDA is expected to range between $114 and $119 million. New student starts are also on track and are anticipated to be between 31,500 and 33,000. As Bruce will discuss in more depth, our guidance appropriately reflects the balance between near-term performance and long-term value creation. It is important to note that while driving double-digit growth in revenue and baseline EBITDA, as well as strong student start growth in 2026, our team remains intensely focused on delivering the impressive student and employer outcomes that have been the cornerstone of our over 60 years history. Moving now to our strategic execution during the quarter, which is guided by our North Star strategy, we are continuing to build and further scale a durable, repeatable growth engine through our discipline and proven operating model. This approach is guided by a refined and continually evolving playbook for launching campuses, replicating and expanding programs on our existing campuses, and optimizing performance, which allows us to reproduce success with consistency as we grow. Our most recent campus launches, UTI Austin and Miramar, are excellent representations of this strategy's success. Both Austin and Miramar continue to meet and exceed our expectations, validating our approach to site selection, program mix, marketing, and ramp timing, all while driving strong student outcomes. In Miramar, we have over 600 average full-time active students. We are adding additional sessions for the automotive program and are actively pursuing expansion of the capacity-constrained aviation maintenance technology program at that campus. Austin continues to perform significantly beyond our expectations with over 1,000 average full-time active students, which is 70% higher than we modeled. The performance of our campuses gives us confidence that our new facilities can scale efficiently while generating attractive long-term returns. As we announced on our Q4 and full-year 2025 call, over the next several years, we plan to open a minimum of two and up to five new campus annually, pending regulatory approval. The first of our fiscal 2026 campuses, our Hartlett-Concord co-branded campus in Fort Myers, Florida, just opened in November, Demand has already exceeded our expectations with programs filling to capacity within two weeks of opening. We already have waiting lists in place. In San Antonio, we are approximately a month away from opening the doors to our new skilled trades and aviation-focused campus. Our recruiting efforts are going quite well for the initial start in March. As a matter of fact, we already have over 300 students ready to start. There's particularly keen interest in welding and HVACR in San Antonio. To remind you, this campus is slated to train over 600 students annually and generate approximately $32 million in run rate revenue at scale, and it further diversifies UTI's geographic footprint in high demand region. We are also preparing to open our UTI Atlanta location, a comprehensive campus in a Greenfield State. This facility will offer a comprehensive collection of our strongest UTI programs, including auto, diesel, aviation, and the trades. The UTI division team is projecting to enroll over 1,200 students and generate upwards of $45 million in run rate revenue at scale. And the campus remains on track to launch in the second half of the fiscal year. The Atlanta campus has been actively recruiting for approximately one month and student interest is quite impressive, indicating strong interest in that market. Looking beyond this year, our next wave of campuses slated for fiscal 2027 are also tracking well. To date, for fiscal 2027, we have announced our intention to open comprehensive UTI campus in Salt Lake City, as well as comprehensive campuses in the Houston, Atlanta, and Phoenix metropolitan areas. As always, the exact launch timelines on these are based on securing various regulatory approvals. We look forward to providing further updates on these and our other planned future locations as we continue to execute on our North Star strategy. Alongside new campuses, we continue to scale our rich program portfolio. Throughout phase two of North Star, we plan to launch between 12 and 20 new programs across the UTI and Concord divisions annually. This year, We'll be launching over 20 programs, with at least 10 coming from each division. Across our UTI campuses in 26, we plan to launch 12 programs, two HVACR, one aviation maintenance, and nine programs in our electrical suite, which includes industrial maintenance, robotics and automation, as well as wind turbine technology. Adding UTI programs continues to optimize the legacy UTI campuses. These in-demand skilled trades programs were brought to us through the MIT acquisition and are addressing the diverse interest expressed by the nearly 600,000 young people who inquire at UTI annually. One example of this optimization effort is our October announcement, which we outlined the new programs being launched at UTI Dallas campus. At scale, the expanded Dallas campus, which currently offers auto, diesel, and welding to nearly 1,200 students annually, will now be able to serve an additional 1,000 students and will offer HVACR, aviation, and electrical programs beginning in the coming weeks. With the Concord acquisition-related growth restrictions in our rearview mirror, we're now set to launch at least 10 new programs in high-demand areas on the legacy Concord campuses in 2026. These include eight radiation technology programs as well as one surgical technology program and one diagnostic medical sonography program. All of our program replication initiatives are tightly aligned with employer demand and workforce shortages and build on capabilities we already know how to deliver well. In addition to opening new campuses and replicating programs on existing campuses, We remain focused on executing on our plan to continue to optimize our 33 facilities to enhance operations, maintain high-level outcomes, maximize our resources, and ultimately improve margins. Specifically, this work focuses on expanding capacity for popular programs that have waitlist building, programs such as aviation, HVACR, and welding on our UTI campuses, and dental hygiene on our Concord campuses. To recap, The business is performing quite well, and the North Star strategy is progressing on track due to our continued focus on execution and strong market demand for our graduates. I'll conclude my remarks by addressing a question that we're consistently getting while we're out talking to both new and existing investors. What else? Acknowledging that performing at a high level and executing on our aggressive organic growth strategy needs to remain the primary focus, we're also keeping our eyes on future opportunities we see on the horizon. First, on the regulatory front, with the new level of collaboration in Washington, we're now actively participating in dialogue as rules, guidelines, and policies are being developed that foster the opportunity to accelerate closing the gap with respect to the American skilled labor workforce in new and innovative ways. For example, The success of our Heartland partnership is already spurring evaluation of collaborative expansion opportunities with Heartland and other dental service organizations, as well as other large-scale employers across both divisions who are experiencing similar labor shortages. Furthermore, this administration has acknowledged us as a leader in this space and the critical role we play in securing America's workforce for the future. That recognition, combined with the level of engagement in Washington, supports our ability to open new campuses and expand program offerings and innovate thoughtfully within a highly regulated environment with greater speed and consistency. From an inorganic standpoint, we continue to actively evaluate opportunities that align with our North Star strategy, particularly in the areas that enhance our healthcare portfolio. In conclusion, We are executing from a strong operational and financial foundation, and we believe fiscal 2026 represents an important year of both investment and execution that sets the stage for accelerated returns in the years ahead as these initiatives take scale. With that, I'll turn the call over to Bruce, our CFO, to review our first quarter financials and provide you with further details on our guidance. Bruce?