Regis Corporation (NYSE:RGS) Q2 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Now completing this transition will mark a major milestone in what has been a long technology journey Regis. And ultimately, I believe we have landed on the right sustainable technology solution for our company and our franchisees for the long term. In addition to Zenoti, we’ve begun to test and use targeted promotions and loyalty strategies in an effort to drive traffic and sales. These have been mostly through pilots to find that right combination that not only drive sales but also increases franchisee profitability. After observing results, we have some examples of those pilots that are ready to be rolled out on a broader scale. They are: one, our Supercuts loyalty program, Supercut rewards. Now this has been piloting for the last 8 months in 5 metro areas, and we are seeing success with this program in driving increased frequency and retention.

And now with over 50% of sales coming through those members who are on loyalty program, we’re also seeing 90-day retention rates around 3 times higher for members versus non-members. Another example of a pilot that is to be rolled out more broadly as Supercuts Tuesdays in which customers on Tuesdays received $3 off a haircut. We piloted this across approximately 60 salons in late 2023 and saw more than 4% weekly traffic increased by shifting significantly more sales to Tuesday and subsequently freeing up those more busy days of the week. And just as of yesterday, we began our national rollout of Supercuts Tuesdays and we believe this is a promotion that our brand can uniquely own. And one last highlight here in our SmartStyle brand is our partnership with the Walmart Plus subscription program.

We launched this promotion in August 2023, in a subset of locations offering Walmart Plus members discounts on SmartStyle services and products. Having seen that three quarters of offer redemptions were either from new or reactivated guests and positive traffic impacts for participating salons, we are now more widely rolling this out in conjunction with the Walmart Plus team. And we’ve also taken steps recently to lean heavier into earn media to raise awareness consideration and trial. A good example of this, which some of you may have seen is our Supercuts high score promotion is going on currently around the big game on February 11, where if the combined score of the game is 75 points or higher, entrants can receive a free haircut. Now we see this as an opportunity to drive trial around a major event in a cost-effective manner, and we will look to explore more opportunities like this in the future.

Our core component of being able to improve our customer experience and salon productivity will be the continued support of stylists. We will continue to support stylists through our network of corporate and franchisee employed trainers to ensure they have the tools and training to successfully deliver quality hair services and an attractive price point. On our franchisees stylist support system is critical and is often cited as the reason why franchisees choose to be part of our franchise system. And we will continue to complement these efforts given the hands-on nature of our industry with our proprietary digital training platform, the Regis Education playground that receives over 31,000 views per month from the stylist community, as well as the salon leader digital training modules that we have developed and deployed last year.

Now through addressing our capital structure, improving the customer experience, increasing salon productivity and supporting the stylist community, the proper components will be in place to pursue an accelerated pace of new salon openings and advance our development efforts. A strong business case is foundational to unit expansion and additional potential capital would enable accelerated entry into international markets as well as the scaling of our current brands. In addition to allowing for potential remodel incentive program to enhance the image of our existing salon base at a much larger scale. And lastly, I wanted to touch on managing our G&A. Enormous strides have been made here to date. And over the last few years, our G&A went from $96 million at the end of fiscal year ’21 to our currently – current run rate of approximately $47 million, equating close to $50 million or 50% in savings.

Moving forward, we will continue to manage the size of our organization and ensure that any further moves do not adversely affect our business as we continue towards long-term growth and sustainability. We will continue to monitor our G&A just as we have been and adjust as appropriate. I want to close by thanking you all for your continued interest in Regis and thanking our employees, franchisees, stylists, vendors and partners for all of your hard work and contributions. I am proud of the progress that we’ve made over the course of the past 2 years, but our work is only getting started. And I am looking forward to executing on these initiatives as I have laid out today as part of the next chapter of Regis’ growth. And before wrapping up, I just want to reiterate once again that we are in the midst of a comprehensive strategic alternative process, and our comments related to this process will continue to be limited until its completion.

I will now turn the call over to Kersten to provide more detail on our Q2 and first half results. Kersten?

Kersten Zupfer: Thanks, Matt, and good morning. For this morning’s call, I will review our second quarter results. The second quarter saw positive system-wide same store sales, increased operating income, positive net income, positive earnings per share and strong adjusted EBITDA. Overall, we are continuing to see stability in our business. Reviewing the second quarter in more detail and beginning with the income statement, the second quarter revenues were $51.1 million and declined $8.9 million from the prior year. This revenue decline was expected and relates primarily to a reduction in franchise rental income, which is a gross up of revenue and expense and has no impact on profitability. Additionally, transitioning out of company-owned salons and product sales reduced revenue with minimal impact on profitability.