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

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David Bellinger: Got it. Okay. And then my second question is on guidance and the EBITDA margin compression that’s baked into 2023. So on the low end, we are close to about a 30% rate there. And just understanding you haven’t been as focused on margin expansion, you are still in this member and new unit growth mode, where could we see EBITDA margins ultimately bottom? There is much more competition in the space. You have got the softer retail business. There is a lot of promos out there. So, do you see 30% as sort of this lower bound on margins over the near-term, or is there something else behind that?

Jed Gold: Yes. David, we believe that the fundamentals of the business remain intact. And as we have said all along, we are looking at this over the long-term. We still believe that 30% to 35% margin that we have shared still holds true. As you think about margin in 2023, I do think it’s important to emphasize that a couple of headwinds, right, that rent expense, as you think about the sale-leasebacks that we closed on in 2022 and those being pro forma, which is why we have shared the $12 million in the prepared remarks. We also have a little bit of bonus reset when you look at 2022 and underperforming just relative to our internal expectations and resetting those bonuses back up to 100% payout, create a little bit of a headwind.

And then some €“ as we look at unemployment rates relative to historic averages, we believe that there is going to continue to be some pressure on the store-level labor line in particular. And so we built in a little bit of a headwind. It’s consistent with what we saw in 2022 going forward into 2023. Hence, that’s creating a little bit of margin compression in the guide. We are going to be able to offset some of that through some productivity initiatives. We really haven’t talked much about yet, just the team, and they have done a great job of scheduling labor even better. And the number of people that we have on the clock, when we have them on the clock, and this is something we have talked about in the past, but we continued to look at and refine, looking at it through a lens of both interior clean and express and tightening and getting better going forward.

John Lai: Yes. Jed, if I can add too, I think that the cool thing about this story is that we are looking at this thing through a long-term lens, and we are making investments, particularly on the human capital side in people, in future leaders to help support our growth opportunity. And so what we have not done is pull back on those investments in managers and training, and our OLP program and making sure that we are continuing to invest in people that are going to help us support our growth. But those investments continue throughout our facility maintenance organization where many of our competitors are outsourcing their facility maintenance. For us, it’s a competitive advantage where we have taken it in-house. And we now have the best trained and the largest facility maintenance infrastructure in the entire industry with the best coverage ratios that we have ever had in the history of our company.

So, it’s really set us up nicely. So, we could obsess about margins and margin expansion. We are not €“ again, our margins have grown beautifully through top line growth. We are managing our business responsibly, but we are not going to pull back on doing what we know we need to do if our opportunities get to a thousand stores, that would be very shortsighted. David, are you still there?

Operator: Our next question will come from Justin Kleber with Baird. Please go ahead.

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