David Maura: Yes. Look to be blunt. I’m not sure I want to quantify anything today. I think, look, all credit goes to people. We’ve made a conscious decision 18 months ago to upgrade talent, invest in people, and adopt a rigorous S&OP process at this company. And Dave Ghabrial, Bob Volmert, Steve Keller just – if I start naming people, there’ll be people get offended. I don’t name them, but we’ve built a pretty good ops team now, and we’ve got this company running efficiently. And I’d say, look, we’ve made pretty big strides, I agree with you, there’s incremental gains to go get. But again, as we’ve sold off a lot of revenue, right, through batteries and auto care, and then recently, hardware, we’ve got this advantageous balance sheet today, but we’ve also got – we’ve got to be conscious of critical mass, and we can’t get much smaller.
That’s why you see me constantly taking out costs is because you end up with unabsorbed overhead. And so as we move forward, restoring an organic growth rate, getting a real algorithm to where sales is growing, earnings is growing to twice the rate, returning to kind of throwing off lots of free cash flow, that’s really where we’re going to steer the company here in the next 24 months while continuing to make incremental gains operationally. But, yes, this journey is going to be built one step at a time, one quarter at a time. It’s a long road map to – on this journey to get back to winning, but we’re starting to make some strides. I don’t want to get into quantifying anything operationally unless Jeremy wants to.
Jeremy Smeltser: No, I think that all makes sense. I think the other thing we’re always conscious of, Steve, is inflation is coming, right? We have inflation in our labor every year. Our suppliers have inflation in their labor every year, and that’s something you’re not going to avoid. And so we always have to have a productivity target out there that more than offsets that so that we can deliver some improvement for our shareholders. So I agree with David and with, I think, what you were implying with your question, which is there’s more runway out there. And I think as we go from year to year, we’ll talk about exactly what we think we can achieve each year.
Steve Powers: Okay. Very good. If I could – I know we’re at the end of time, but I guess, squeezing one more question. Your call for sort of better revenue trends as we go forward, stands out. We’ve heard from a lot of companies talking about a more difficult consumer environment, slowing demand, et cetera. So I just – I think you’re coming from a somewhat unique place and you’ve got seasonal dynamics, which I understand. But maybe just a little bit what gives you the confidence? And then also, does the backdrop that we’re seeing broadly influence and maybe shift a bit how you plan to spend incrementally over the balance of the year to stimulate demand and what, I think, generally is a more cautious environment.
David Maura: Yes. I mean, look, I think this all starts with kind of where we baseline the business. If you look back in November last year, the market was not too happy with my outlook on this year. And that was based on the fact that interest rates have been at zero for 12 years. And I kind of view there’s two kind of giant macro experiments going on, right? You had 2008 to 2022 as a free money environment. And it would just be – it wouldn’t be logical on my part to assume that if mortgage rates go from 2.5%, 3% to 7% plus that, that wouldn’t have some sort of dampening impact. And then on the other side of that coin, we had this thing called a pandemic and $5 trillion got stuck in the mail. And that money is going to find its way out somewhere, and that’s – there’s no shot.
That’s why we have an inflation problem in this country today, right? So you just got to be cautious with all these big movements macro-wise. And so look, we think the consumer is struggling today. We see credit card delinquencies up. We see auto loans having more delinquencies. And so I think you have to be very cautious on this. At the same time, we were not running a very efficient business and we’ve made massive improvements operationally. And now that gives you the platform, right, if you’re running your business better, if you’ve got a better balance sheet and you’re not being sued by the DOJ, you can actually focus and it’s difficult to convey to you inside the type of distraction that’s selling HHI and the pressure of the government what that was on this company.
But it was real. And so to be free of that and have the balance sheet we have and have our operational house in order, we can now go on the offensive. And that’s a growth mindset that just wasn’t here a few years ago. And so I think, despite all these headwinds and despite our continued cautious outlook for the back half of the year, we believe we’re going to get more listings, and we believe we’re going to win in the marketplace. And so maybe that is a little bit more unique to us. But again, I think it has to be anchored in the view we took in November.
Joanne Chomiak: Very good. Well, thank you. And with that, we have reached the top of the hour, so we will conclude our conference call. Thank you to David and Jeremy. And on behalf of Spectrum Brands, thank you all for your participation.
Operator: This concludes today’s conference call. Thank you for participating, and you may now disconnect.
