MNRO - NASDAQ

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Monro Inc.’s Earnings Conference Call for the First Quarter of Fiscal 2024. [Operator Instructions] And as a reminder, this conference call is being recorded and may not be reproduced in whole or in part without permission from the company. I’d now like to introduce Felix Veksler, Senior Director of Investor Relations at Monro. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us on this morning’s call. Before we get started, please note that as part of this call, we will be referencing a presentation that is available on the Investors section of our website at corporate.monro.com/investors. If I could draw your attention to the Safe Harbor statement on Slide 2, I’d like to remind participants that our presentation includes some forward-looking statements about Monro’s future performance. Actual results may differ materially from those suggested by our comments today. The most significant factors that could affect future results are outlined in Monro’s filings with the SEC and in our earnings release. The company disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by law. Additionally, on today’s call, management’s statements include a discussion of certain non-GAAP financial measures, which are intended to supplement and not be substitutes for comparable GAAP measures. Reconciliations of such supplemental information to the comparable GAAP measures will be included as part of today’s presentation and in our earnings release. With that, I’d like to turn the call over to Monro’s President and Chief Executive Officer, Michael Broderick.

Thanks, Brian. We’re optimistic about our outlook for fiscal 2024 and beyond. Although we still have important work to do, we remain well positioned to execute our growth strategy and deliver long-term value creation for our shareholders. With that, I will now turn it over to the operator for questions.

Good morning, Brian.

So the first question I have; I’m just looking, we’re just running through the numbers here and looking at the monthly comps. And as you discussed in your script, I mean, June did slow down but I mean not just on a one-year basis, but really over even a multi-year stack. As you look at what caused that? I mean I know you had mentioned you have the inflationary pressures, but it seemed like something just given the trajectory of the business, something even more specific to June may have occurred?

Yes. Brian, this is Mike. I’ll take that. What we saw was across the board, industry-wide, significant slowdown in tire, tire units. Just the overall compression on tires, and I would look at tires as a high-ticket item, and then I moved right into some of my service categories in the high-ticket service categories. What we did see was actually a decent balance of our customer transactions, so our invoice count was okay. It was just low-ticket invoices, all driven by the lack of, I would say a healthy tire unit. And what we see, Brian, it was pretty much in our footprint. It was pretty much across the board on the tire category – in the tire category.

Got it. And I guess – and I know we talked about this a lot, Mike. It’s the ongoing kind of repositioning that you’ve spurred here at Monro. But as you look at the business now, in the release day you reiterate the kind of the longer-term guidance in that longer-term objective to get to consistent mid-single-digit comps. What leverage do you, I mean what – clearly there’s an unfavorable backdrop. We’ve discussed that, but what specific levers or are there incremental levers you can pull here to really to get the business up to where you want it to be?

Yes. That’s a good question. Everything we’ve been doing is preparing ourselves to create a Monro that’s very nimble for the marketplace and the customer environment that we have – we’re dealing with. We divested and we’re now out of that divestiture. We’re full year passed so we don’t have to talk about that anymore. But all the work that the teams are doing are creating a better assortment for our teams to be able to sell, managing payroll to a point where we can manage payroll no matter what the circumstances are. As sales improve, we can really lever up. As sales decline, we can actually take payroll out. I’ll give you an example of the team and the work that they’ve done on over time. And that’s, I would say, is – has been pretty significant over the tenure that I’ve been here is really getting an emphasis on controlling payroll. As we invest in our people agenda, it’s going to be really important and especially in the wage inflation that we’re dealing with is managing every hour for every store so that we can maximize productivity with our technicians. I would say the biggest lever that we have to pull right now is really fixing our small stores. Although those stores were never supposed to be linear, it took years for these stores to be underperforming. My expectation is that we deliver double-digit comps in these stores. But when I look at these stores, most of them are low-volume stores. So when they have missed one or two transactions a week, and these were maybe tire transactions, which is a good ticket, it really has an adverse result – adverse impact on the comp. And Brian, I have to tell you, when I look at the low-volume stores, it took several years to get there, it’s going to take me some time in order for us to have consistent results. I think secondly, a lot of the work that the team is doing is really creating a different culture, a sales culture, making sure that we just have a better environment for our customers that are coming in. And with a little bit of help in the backdrop, I think that we’re well positioned to go after that mid-single-digit number.

Appreciate the color. I’ll pass it on to next question. Thanks.

Thanks Brian.

Our next question comes from Daniel Imbro from Stephens. Your line is open.

Hey good morning everybody. Thanks for taking the question.

Thank you, Dan. Good morning.

I want to follow up on Brian’s second question there on the underperforming stores. I think the outlook that Brian gave kind of implied low-to-mid-single-digit comps, but it was driven by a better improvement this year in those 300 stores. I’m just trying to marry that with the comment in the release about you need the consumer to turn before things really get better. So I guess; how much of that improved underperforming store maybe in your control? And then maybe more specifically like what are the things you’re changing right now to drive that improvement over the next six-ish months?

Yes. So I would say the – in these stores a lot of it is the people focus on the people. So the people agenda that I started with from the very beginning coming on with the organization, I would say is the foundation for improving these underperforming stores. We’ve got to get the right team to create the right experience for our customers. Now what are we doing holistically to support that initiative? Obviously, we’re creating training. I’ve walked everybody through in the past, creating a better environment. We’re attracting better technicians so that we are able to do better work and we have better customer retention. Now overall, when I look at the category on the tire assortment, now that we’re a full-year outside of the divestiture of our wholesale business, we have a better tire assortment. We are able to manage our margins. In the past, I’ve talked about the fact that we sold a lot of OPP tires. I’m actually very happy with our entire performance looking at the market share data and how we’re holding our own, looking at the margin that we’re producing and looking at the mix of tires that we’re selling. It’s a very healthy mix of tires, and I feel like we’re meeting our customers with the right assortment. I’ve talked about breaks in the past. There’s a lot of work being done on our service categories. I still think we still have a lot of work in front of us that we’re executing in 2024 to be able to help us drive sales and margin. These are all things to help these stores, the underperforming stores as well as the rest of the chain. These underperforming stores, it just takes one or two transactions and their trajectory changes significantly in a week’s period of time. And we’re really managing that, type of conversation every week when I’m focusing on these focused stores.

Got it. I’ll follow-up offline. Appreciate it. Thanks.

[Operator Instructions] We now turn to Bret Jordan with Jefferies. Your line is open.

Good morning, Bret.

Did you talk about car counts in the quarter, I mean, to give us some sort of feeling for what a same SKU price contributed year-over-year versus traffic?

I brought up the fact that our traffic was low-single-digits decline, low-single-digits. So when I look at our comp it was driven by very low improvement in ARO. And I actually feel like that’s maybe I can even give more color into that. That is part of what we’ve been focusing here on Monro is making sure that we have a healthy customer traffic trend. Even though we had a significant backdrop, even though when I look at the industry data and I look at our units and tires to actually have a very low-single-digit unit decline, invoice decline, I feel like we’re really waiting or we’re managing the business in an appropriate way. We just didn’t have the tire business that came in, Bret. We just didn’t have it.

Thanks Bret.

This concludes our Q&A. I’ll now hand back to Mike Broderick, President and CEO for closing remarks.

Thank you for joining us today. This continues to be an exciting time to be part of Monro. We have a strong foundation to build upon to create long-term value for all our stakeholders. I look forward to keeping you updated on our progress. Have a great day.