Membership Collective Group Inc. (NYSE:MCG) Q3 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Operator: The next question is from Stephen Grambling with Morgan Stanley. Your line is open.

Stephen Grambling: Thanks for taking the questions. Congrats, Andrew and Nick happy to hear about your recovery and wish you continued health. You all mentioned some record trends from Scorpios and you didn’t really spend as much time on some of the other categories. How should we be thinking about future growth and investment in some of these other areas, whether it’s HOME+ digital works, et cetera?

Nick Jones: Hi, Stephen, we expect to continue to see growth in the other revenue. We’re continuing to expand in our management contracts. As we said, we opened up the line to San Francisco in the quarter. We recently opened up another net this week actually. Home is continuing to grow — and so we’re going to continue to see that other revenue line grow. I think our key message, though, is that we’re trying to be more focused and really simplify the story. And so more of our more of our focus and efforts are really going to be on the core Soho House business.

Stephen Grambling: Got it. And then one other follow-up. I guess, you mentioned the reduced editorial. I guess, how did you generally think about the value of content historically? And how do you anticipate the reduction will either impact the number of member touch points, or is it more about pruning in effective content?

Andrew Carnie: Yeah. Great question. So following our global member survey, what our members told us is that they — we spend a lot of time recapping our events globally. So when we have like Kendrick Lamar, who recently played in our houses, we would record it professionally, edit it and then put it on our app. That’s quite a big cost for us. Our members don’t want that. They — let’s just say, we’re less fussed about that. We actually won event programming going forward and you too actually personalize it on our app, which is just written. Just tell us what events coming up and what ones I should like based on what you know about me. So there’s other things like that that we can do that will actually help us streamline a lot of our expenses in our support offices.

We made the decision recently to stop pursuing digital membership. After speaking to our members, they want us to focus on them. They want — they do want connectability, but actually, they want connectability more in the physical spaces and more in our houses, more than ever before. So that’s what we’re going to focus our efforts on. So it’s all based on what our members are telling us and what they’re selling is that they like some of the stuff that we’re doing and some of the stuff we’re not doing. And that’s great news because that’s what we should be doing. I hope that makes sense.

Stephen Grambling: Yeah. Helpful. Thank you.

Operator: We have no further questions over the phone at this time.

Thomas Allen: We have one question that’s send in over the survey. What did you learn through the surveys and focus groups? Andrew?

Andrew Carnie: We learned a lot. So the first thing that we learned is our members love us. They love what we’re doing. They really value when we open new houses. They want us to open more around the world, which is — reflects on 80% of our members being every house members. They love the events that we put on, both in houses and out the houses and want us to be better about communicating that to them in the future, like I said. They’re really satisfied with our app that we’ve obviously put a lot of investment over the last three years, but they want it out to be fantastic at booking and paying, booking events, spa classes, bedrooms and dining room reservations globally. They care less about the connectability and the content that I just mentioned.