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

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George Tong: Hi, thanks. Good morning. You mentioned there hasn’t been much change in customer behaviors based on what you’re seeing. Can you elaborate on how customer budgets, sales cycles in the sales pipeline are evolving with the current environment?

Todd Schneider: Good morning, George. It’s a pretty — the environment hasn’t changed significantly. The health of customers is varies based upon geographic, what type of business they’re in, small, medium, large, those types of things. But generally speaking, the sales process and has not elongated the sales pipe looks very good. We like the spot we’re in. And we have invested appropriately. We’re in the right — we’ve got the right products and services. We’ve got the right focus on our customers, and we think that we’re well positioned for the future. And we certainly are trying to make sure that we’re planning for the long term. And we’re — as I mentioned earlier, not trying to be an economic forecasting business, but we are making sure that we’re watching our business very closely and hoping for clear sailing ahead with the economy. That being said, we will find a way to be successful as we have in the past.

George Tong: Got it. That’s helpful. And then I wanted to drill down further into your healthcare vertical, which you touched on earlier, COVID certainly provided a notable lift to the health care business. Can you talk a little bit about how quickly the health care business is growing, what new business trends there look like and what mix of revenue we currently represent?

Todd Schneider: Certainly, George. The healthcare business has been strong for us for a number of years. And is large part not just having a sales focus, but organizing around those customers, products, services, our service organization. So it’s more than just sales. It is making sure that we look at it as a business. And it’s growing — it’s accretive to our growth rates. We see very long runway there. As I mentioned earlier, the demographics are really attractive. But the pipeline of sales growth looks robust. And that’s because of years of investment in making sure we’re really well positioned, and we see that continuing.

George Tong: Got it. And just the mix of revenue?

J. Michael Hansen: I don’t have that in front of us, George, right now. In the past, it’s been about 7%. And it’s — I’d say that it’s growing faster than average.

George Tong: Got it. Thank you.

Operator: Your next question comes from Tim Mulrooney with William Blair.

Tim Mulrooney: Yes. Good morning. On the First Aid business, specifically, pre-pandemic operating margins were closer to 15%. They went down several 100 basis points. I know from the sell through a lower-margin PP&E in ’21 and ’22. But now it looks like you’re sitting at 19%. I mean that’s a big jump from pre-pandemic levels. Would you expect, I guess, Mike or Todd a little bit of a give back at some point? Or do you expect to keep and build on those margin gains that you’ve made this year?

Todd Schneider: Yes, Tim, we do not expect to give back, we expect to maintain and build on those improvements. And we’re leveraging certainly the total growth, the benefits of health and wellness being important to people in the marketplace. The mix of business being attractive and we’ve fundamentally focused on extracting out inefficiencies in the business. So — and we’re not giving those back. So yes, we see the future is bright for that business.

Tim Mulrooney: Yes. Okay. It was more than just sales mix. It sounds like you did some structural things.

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