Joint Corp (JYNT) Earnings Call Transcript: 2014 Q3 Results

Question and Answer Session

Operator

Thank you, sir. (Operator Instructions). And our first question comes from Tony Brenner from Roth Capital Partners. The line is open. Please go ahead.

Tony Brenner, Roth Capital Partners

Thank you very much. Good morning. I wonder if you could, John, give a little bit of sense with respect to company clinics. The timing of those openings, will they be back-ended during the year or fairly even during the four quarters?

John Richards

I can start that, Tony. This is John Richards. I think we are in the process of wrapping up our execution plan as we speak and of course as soon as the offering was completed, we had a sense as to what was possible and the timing of it. And I think in general, the opening of corporate clinics will be spread evenly throughout the year. I think in this first quarter, we’ll start a little slow and then it will begin to build obviously as the system gets set up.

Tony Brenner, Roth Capital Partners

Okay. You mentioned a more focused franchise expansion. Does that simply mean fewer franchise openings or does it mean something else?

David Orwasher

No, it means – this is David, Tony. It means focusing our strategy around our cluster development to leverage and optimize both our marketing and operating efficiencies. So it’s targeting those units to fill in those territories and to the extent that they’re entirely new, it’s to enter with the cluster. Our development strategy remains intact whether it’s through franchising units or company units. It’s to gain leverage through optimal penetration in a given market and we’re going to direct the strategy in that fashion.

Tony Brenner, Roth Capital Partners

Got it. One last question. I know you’ve been setting up some sort of a marketing and advertising effort. I wonder if you could just elaborate a little bit on what we might expect on that end.

David Orwasher

Well, this is consistent with our overall strategy to bring concentration of effort, focus of our messaging, and really efficient use of resources that comes from the consolidation of not only the franchise group, but then increasingly, the corporate units as they begin to open up. I think that’s critical in any business. It’s certainly critical in a multi-unit retail business. So I think the process really have a couple of things with it. First, we’ve hired a national marketing firm, Moroch, who is also known for their efforts with McDonald’s and Midas among others. So the firm is very experienced in supporting a multi-unit businesses of our type. And I think importantly after that, we are now in the process of developing consolidated messaging of themarketing product as we go out and then we’ll begin to focus on both digitally-oriented customer acquisition tools in those markets where we have enough scale more broadcast marketing as we move forward. So a lot of concentration of that against key target markets.