John Healy: Okay, great. Thank you so much. And Alex, congrats on the promotion.
Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Stephanie Moore of Jefferies.
Stephanie Moore: Hi, good morning. I think you gave a little bit of color of the trends that you were seeing in July, but maybe if we could just flush that out a little bit. If you could just touch on the demand trends you’ve seen in July and how that’s compared to maybe normal seasonality. And at the same time, if you could discuss what you’re seeing from a competitive standpoint through this kind of busy peak season as well, that might be helpful. Thank you.
Stephen Scherr: Sure. Well, I would say that the trend in July that I took note of in the prepared remarks was looking at rate in July as being in or around 5% or slightly better relative to where we were in Q2 and July being higher than June, kind of on a month-over-month sequential basis. Typically, in Q2 to Q3, you would see a 10% uptick in rate, and you would see a more modest 5% uptick in volume. I think that we are forecasting here perhaps an inverse of the two, which is, we are expecting and are experiencing materially better volume than what is otherwise seasonal, maybe breaking with the seasonal sort of nature of it all. And we’re seeing rate sort of continue higher, but again, off of a higher base, right, than where we otherwise would’ve been.
And as I mentioned, equally looking away just from the sequential quarter-on-quarter, if you look at year-over-year, Q2 was 7% lower year-over-year. We envision Q3 to be lower than it was last year, but lower than that, meaning down, call it, 5%-ish relative to where it was, and improving throughout the year as there’s a better comparable set moving away from kind of the extremity of what was Q2 of 2022. But I think overall, very strong demand, of which we’re going to find other channels to feed it even more and continued strength in price, again, in a very stable rate environment relative to what we otherwise might have seen or cynically thought would come, again with a slightly looser availability of cars and so forth.
Stephanie Moore: Great. Absolutely. No, that’s helpful. And then maybe switching gears on the expense management side, I think you called out clearly continuing to place a lot of focus on whether it’s SG&A or direct costs. And I think you highlighted that there were some duplicative costs right now as you kind of migrate into the cloud, migrate further into the cloud. Could you maybe quantify what you’re seeing or the impact that was there on the quarter?
Stephen Scherr: Well, I would say – without putting precise numbers to it, I would simply tell you that there’s a material amount of expense that we incur in the course of a transition from operating two data centers to where we will ultimately be for the end of next year into 2025, up into the cloud with various instances on a global basis. We will shed ourselves of a meaningful number of outside consultants and other service providers that have for probably the better part of two decades, stood up older platforms that sit in physical data center. And so, the savings we will get is not just simply the kind of more conventional savings that comes with simply being in the cloud. It is the ability to move away from a reliance on third-party providers.
Now, we’re not there yet in its entirety because this is a gradual sort of move where, as I’ve mentioned, finance for example, is up in the cloud. There are other elements or platforms that will be migrated in due course, and as we do that, we’re reducing down our reliance on third parties. Obviously, there’s the cost of the cloud. There’s cost of our own employees, but this will be quite a material number in the context of what we will realize as it bleeds forward in through the latter part of 2024.
