Mister Car Wash, Inc. (NYSE:MCW) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Michael Lasser: Good evening. Thanks a lot for taking my question. So currently looking at the UWC membership base, the growth of 13.8% is as slow as it has been in the last 4 years. You mentioned the attrition has been stable. So obviously, that means it’s been difficult to attract new customers, assuming that’s because the retail business is down. So can you give us a sense of how the curve is going to look from here? Assuming that retail business remains under pressure, what will the growth in UWC membership look like over the next couple of quarters, especially if the macro gets worse from here?

John Lai: Hey, Michael, this is John. You had to throw that last piece in with the macro gets worse. So we’re hoping that the macro gets better, but we’re also managing this business as if hope for the best, but expect the worst. So we have, on the cost side, batten down the hatches, and we’re running as efficiently as we need to. But as we look at our UWC member growth, you hit the nail on the head. With a slowdown in retail as a top of the funnel kind of input to our UWC member conversion, we’re also anticipating a slowdown in UWC member growth in the near-term. And so really, we’re focusing on how we can drive retail traffic to help us accelerate our UWC member growth. And we €“ I can spend some time talking about some of the things we’re doing there. But the bottom line €“ short answer to your question is that it’s going to be relatively flattish over the next several quarters. And we’re not anticipating any significant growth.

Jed Gold: Yes. Michael, just to add a little bit more color there and how we’re thinking about it as we put together the guide and the model, right? We still believe that consumers, they are still very pressured. And when you look at economic indicators, balance sheets are running thinner, savings rates are declining relative to previous periods. And so from a UWC perspective, as you know, we don’t provide a guide on actual UWC members that we expect in 2023, but we did assume that similar year-over-year trend that we saw in 2022 continuing into 2023, given the softness on the retail side of the business.

John Lai: Michael, if I can just add one more comment. I think €“ just if we zoom out for a second and just say, hey, 70% of our revenues are subscription. So they are recurring, they are predictable with a really beautiful margin profile. We feel very fortunate that we have built what we believe to be the largest carwash loyalty member base in the entire industry. And I think one of the things that I was kind of waiting for you to ask, so I’ll just go there. When we look at attrition or churn, that’s remained relatively constant and so one of the things that I think some people were anticipating was an uptick in churn in a down economy, and we haven’t seen that, which again speaks to the loyalty and I think the strength of the member base that we’ve built.

Michael Lasser: Understood. My follow-up question is going to be in two parts. Number one, how much have you assumed of a contribution from the rollout of the titanium offering to your same-store sales growth this year? And then my second part is if your same-store sales fall short of what you’re guiding to, how much de-leverage will you see on that shortfall? Obviously, a defining characteristic of the car wash business is that the marginal profit on an incremental wash is fantastic given the modest costs €“ incremental costs associated with each incremental unit, but that can cut both ways where you lose out on some washes and that falling revenue can have pretty sharp decremental margins as well?

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