Advantage Solutions Inc. (NASDAQ:ADV) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Greg Parrish: Okay. Great. And then I was going to slip in one more. Any updates to your strategic review and sort of assets that you’re looking at? And then maybe to get a little bit more specific, because this has been coming up, but thinking about marketing specifically the sampling business and why that fit. And I understand I think when Daymon was bought there was a real rationale for a large retail — a large retailer-preferred provider. But as you’re sitting here and there’s clearly some opportunities to pay down debt like does — why does the sampling business really fit with sales? If you could kind of walk us through that?

Dave Peacock: No, Greg. Appreciate that. Yeah, I think as we get into our November meeting, we’ll talk a little bit about where we’re headed from a strategic standpoint and then even more so as we get into early next year. I’d like to let our actions speak for us and our results more importantly. And so you can see already and again, it’s very early for the team where we’re focused and how we’re trying to bring discipline around cash generation and paying down debt and getting our balance sheet in a good spot. And we’re very pleased with the results thus far. Now the sampling business or demonstration business, it’s interesting. It’s a good business in the sense that there is a certain level of consistency and demand for that type of service especially when you see 98% plus of manufacturers really dialing up innovation and some of those are doing so in a significant way and you’re finding retailers more receptive to innovation.

And you compound that with the fact that you’re seeing private label grow at about half of share point if you will total store. Private labels are often in many retailers part of what you’re sampling. So we’ve seen consistency in demand and it’s a business for us that from a kind of working capital or cash flow standpoint is also a good one. But that’s as far as I’m going to go as it relates to talking about anything related to our strategic review, but we remain bullish on the demonstration business and see opportunity both for growth and a little bit of better margin realization.

Greg Parrish: All right. Very helpful. Congrats on our results. Happy Friday.

Dave Peacock: Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Jason English with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Dave Peacock: Hey, Jason.

Jason English: Hey, guys. Hey, sorry for the delay. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for having me in for the question. A couple of quick questions. You mentioned that retailers are still facing really tight labor conditions. Are you still facing really tight labor conditions? And does this remain a gating factor in terms of how quickly you can recover your sampling business?

Dave Peacock: We’re seeing a continued tight labor market, but you saw that we’re seeing pretty strong net new hires. We are I think over 75,000 teammates now. So we’ve seen that slowly build back obviously in the last year or so. We saw turnover down 10%. And that’s actually really important. I mean for us the more we can retain — and if you can imagine in some of these businesses, we had had people serving for a long time and then the pandemic hit and some of those businesses virtually shut down. So it’s rebuilding that. But the good news is we’ve had a successful track record of retaining people and we want to continue to leverage that. And we have a lot of talent management efforts underway to give people as many opportunities as possible to advance within the company which is one of the key enablers to retention.

But it is — I won’t sugarcoat it. It’s still a tight market. You saw the unemployment was down to 3.5%. The US added another 200,000 plus jobs in the report that came out today. So it’s one we see worth watching, but we’re pleased with our retention rate so far.