Lincoln Educational Services Corporation (NASDAQ:LINC) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Scott Shaw: It’s not having the impact on our starts, I mean, I think if anything we started more students as we mentioned than we anticipated. So we still are working out some bugs in that area to make that more efficient. It’s not nearly where we want it to be. But our objective is to make the whole process around financial aid much more user friendly for our students and their families. And we’re going to continue to work in that direction.

Brian Meyers: And Eric, to highlight what Scott mentioned, in our earnings release, we do disclose the transportation was up 7.6% and healthcare was up 5.8%.

Eric Martinuzzi: Okay, appreciate the clarification there. The cash, Brian, we finished out September at $70 million. You did say that that includes the $10 million that was spent for Levittown, but you expect to get that back and then turn that into investment in Levittown with the sales lease back and that there’s some Atlanta build out in there. But how do we think about kind of a normalized cash balance post the puts and takes for Levittown and Nashville investment and remaining Atlanta investment?

Brian Meyers: Right, so at year-end, obviously, we’re going to put out what our CapEx is going to be, which is going to be significant last year with the announcement with Houston and building out national and Philadelphia. What I’ll say is, you know, for the fourth quarter, even with significant capital expenditures and like we mentioned that we’re going to be looking to do a sale lease back, to get the purchase price for Philly, I think our cash balance will be similar to the nine months. So it’ll be approximately $70 million we’re anticipating, even with the capital expenditures in the fourth quarter.

Eric Martinuzzi: Got it. Okay. And then the tuition, I know it’s probably planning stages for 2024, but you’ve benefited, your revenue growth has benefited from tuition increase this year. What’s the plan for next?

Scott Shaw: But we’re looking at tuition increases right now. There will be tuition increases. It might not be across the board as it was in this year, but we’re looking by program, the ones that have significant enrollments with smaller gaps, so we’re analyzing that today, and we will have tuition increases. Probably it could be anywhere from 2% to 5%.

Eric Martinuzzi: Okay, congrats again on the quarter. Thanks for taking my questions.

Scott Shaw: Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. [Operator Instructions] And our next question will come from Raj Sharma from B. Riley. Your line is now open.

Raj Sharma: Hi, thank you for taking my questions. Again, a solid performance, congratulations.

Scott Shaw: Thanks, Raj.

Raj Sharma: Sure. I wanted to ask you about just sort of the overall operating margin. How should we look at, you know, given the transition to the hybrid model, overall operating margin increase or change going forward. Can you talk about that, what you see — what you expect, and also related to that or the operating costs per quarter, we had higher costs per quarter this year, are we tracking to your model and what should we see that going forward?

Scott Shaw: Sure. So, I mean, certainly our objective is to move this company to a higher profitability than where we are today with getting it up to the mid-teens EBITDA margin in a couple of years. As we highlighted in this current year, we have some increased costs as we make some of the investments that we believe are necessary to help us achieve those goals. And with the new program replications and new campuses, and as we increase our top line more, we will start seeing more drop to the bottom line, but you really aren’t going to probably see significant amounts into the latter half of next year going into 2025. And so certainly from quarter-to-quarter there could be some variances, but there’s no reason why this company won’t be in the mid-teens from an EBITDA perspective in the coming years.