iMedia Brands, Inc. (NASDAQ:IMBI) Q3 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Eric Wold: Thank you. Good morning Tim. A couple questions. I guess first off on the sale-leaseback, can you maybe kind of talk about how that played out versus what you may have expected when the board first approved going forward, that if anything come out better, worse than you may have thought, and then is there a plan–you know, the press release alludes to a fourth building that was not included in this. Any plans for that separately?

Tim Peterman: Eric, good morning, and yes, great question. Let’s talk about it. Taking a step back again, when did we start? We started in, I would say, August-September, we were looking at the large disconnect in our market cap and some of the risks out there in the market, and obviously there was a concern at that time that we felt around our liquidity and debt, and even though we’d pre-announced that we were going to be moving forward to reduce our debt by $25 million, my belief was there’s two ways to walk out of the woods when there’s such a large disconnect, and that’s continue to operate and then demonstrate that the balance sheet and the company’s liquidity is much stronger than what the market’s giving us credit for.

Taking buildings that were a fair market value of $45 million, all four of them, and turning that into cash and deploying that cash at a higher return was obviously the answer, and so we moved into that time frame of August-September and as we had more and more inbound traffic and interest in our buildings, particularly in the Bowling Green area where, as you know, those distribution centers there are very valuable, that’s the one area of the country where you have all the distribution networks because that’s the area of the country that reaches the highest percent of customers in the U.S. in one day. Those were driving all sorts of velocity of offers. We partnered with B. Riley, who obviously their real estate firm has sold many of the buildings, believe it or not, right around us in Eden Prairie, so having them partner with us and then even expand the reach and make it more competitive was where we moved into in the October–really the September-October time frame, so we’re very happy with the partner that we have, that’s also very important.

We’re with this partner for a good chunk of time, so you want to make sure it’s a partner that you know and that has a good body of work that you can trust. Once we had that and we had a good price, and remember, when you look at a price, you have to look at the balance between the price of the sale-leaseback and the lease payments that you’re making. We’ve restructured our business in Q2. We always continue to maximize our cost structures to make sure that when we bring that lease in, it’s not really lowering our margin level. But as we move into closing, you’re right – we are doing a sale-leaseback transaction with three of the four buildings that we own. There’s a second building here in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, office that we really don’t need, and we will be putting that up for market in Q1, and that has not been part of the sale-leaseback transaction because it doesn’t need to be.

We’re just going to sell that building outright.

Eric Wold: Got it, helpful. Then secondly on inventory levels, obviously it moved up in Q3, expectations for inventories in Q4. I guess more specifically, as you think about–you’re reaffirming positive EPS in the fourth quarter and EBITDA in the $16 million range, can you connect the dots between that EBITDA and what you think cash flow, operating cash flow could look like in the fourth quarter on the core business?