Cintas Corporation (NASDAQ:CTAS) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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And as a result, we’re able to redirect those dollars to us, in many cases, save the money. So don’t think of it all as, oh my gosh, is there an end to that because if the economy — there’s any stress in it that they’re not going to be able to sell know programmers there, quite the opposite. We’re — we see a very, very long runway there. So that’s attractive. As far as the competitive set, I mean, we operate in a very competitive industry, a very competitive environment. I would say I haven’t seen any changes to the competitive landscape from that standpoint. So I’ll leave it at that.

Manav Patnaik: Okay. And then just one quick follow-up I had, I think I understand that the Google partnership the benefits it potentially brings with any sense of time line? Like when does this start happening, when you get the data on the cloud and then you start seeing some of these benefits?

Todd Schneider: Well, it’s certainly going to be a process. We just entered into our relationship with them recently. We’ve had meetings with them to talk about where we’re going to go here. And as I mentioned, it’s not an event. It’s a process. But we see some low-hanging fruit, I guess is the best way to say it. But as we have gone down this path, more ideas are coming out. So we think we can benefit for years to come with this opportunity. And I won’t go into too much detail just because we see some competitive advantages there. And so as a result, we’ll keep those to ourselves. But we think the runway is long and attractive.

Manav Patnaik: Okay. Thank you.

Operator: And our next question comes from Josh Chan with UBS.

Joshua Chan: Hi, good morning, Todd, Mike and Jared, congrats on a strong quarter. My first question, when you are selling First Aid and Fire, basically those adjacent businesses, how much of that growth is selling to existing customers? And how much of it gets you kind of entirely new customers that don’t run uniform from you?

Todd Schneider: Yes. Josh, it’s a good question. It’s a mix. Cross-sell has been very helpful for us over the last number of years and will continue to be. But we love new customers. And the Fire and First Aid, there is some overlap, but not complete overlap. And so it allows us to get into speaking to customers about that. And the first time they may have done business with us at all. So — and then we — separately we have an enterprise sales organization that will call a customer or prospect. And frankly, it doesn’t really matter to us what they start with. It’s whatever the customer is interested in. If a customer doesn’t do any business with us and they want to start — their interest is in Fire, wonderful, or if it’s in First Aid, wonderful, or rental garments, then we go where the interest is and then we expand out that relationship from there.

So we love the fact that there isn’t complete overlap, and it gets us into new opportunities and then we cross-sell like crazy.

Joshua Chan: Great. That makes sense. Thanks for the color. And I guess for my follow-up, if I look at your incremental margin, it’s climbed pretty steadily through 2023. I assume if you got better alignment between price and cost. So how are you thinking about the cadence of incremental margins looking into 2024?

J. Michael Hansen: Josh, our incremental margin for the total company in fiscal ’23 was 26.8%, a little bit up from the previous year. And Josh, it’s — there can be ups and downs from quarter-to-quarter in the way that we invest or in the cost that we see. And so we don’t necessarily try to predict one quarter at a time. We do certainly believe we can get incremental operating margins in that 20% to 30% range from quarter-to-quarter generally, but it’s going to go up and down, again, based on what we are doing within the business, some initiatives that we may or may not roll out. So the bigger focus for us is on the full year, and our goal is to get those incremental attractive enough that it improves margins over the year. So I wouldn’t call it linear at all, I wouldn’t call it flat. It’s going to be based on how we’re managing the business.

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