All right, good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us. I'm Joe Altobello, Lead Journalist here at Raymond James, and I'm very pleased to have with me today Senior Management from Holley Performance Brands, including President and CEO Matt Stevenson and CFO Jesse Weaver. Welcome to you both. If anybody in the room is a car and truck enthusiast, I'm sure you're very familiar with Holley. The company is the leading designer, marketer, and manufacturer of automotive aftermarket parts and accessories under several leading brands, including Holley, Flowmaster, Simpson, and Sniper, just to name a few. We do have a bit of a hybrid format today, as Matt and Jesse have some slides they wanted to go through to give you guys a flavor for the company, after which we will break into a fireside chat. So with that, let me hand things over to Matt.
All right. Thank you, Joe, and good morning, everyone. As Joe said, we're Holley Performance Brands, I'm Matt Stevenson, the President and CEO. I've been in the role about 18 months, joined with Jesse Weaver. Jesse's our CFO and celebrates his two-year anniversary with the company tomorrow, so as Joe said, we do performance parts, and the best way to think about Holley Performance Brands is we make vehicles better. We make them faster, louder, safer, you name it. When it gets to performance, we touch more parts of the vehicle than any other performance aftermarket platform in our space, and I'll touch on our space, which is about $40 billion, so the total addressable market is quite large and usually surprises folks in terms of the number of enthusiasts that are out there in the U.S. and abroad, so our general forward-looking statement, just some history about Holley.
A lot of people know us as the carburetor company, but Holley Performance Brands is actually much, much larger of breadth and depth than the name may suggest, and in fact, we even changed the name to Holley Performance Brands a few months back to recognize all the great brands and products in our portfolio. So this is just a brief history. We're over a 120-year-old company. We went public in 2021, through SPAC, but we've been around a long time. And you can see throughout those years, we've acquired some tremendous brands in our portfolio, and really, the switch of the company, the folks of the company switched after the Great Recession from being an OEM supplier to really focusing on the performance aftermarket, and we continue to double down on that strategy.
We're the leaders in numerous products, which I'll touch on in a second, and some of the more recent acquisitions, including expanding our safety portfolio with world-leading brands such as Simpson, who makes race suits and helmets, and Stilo makes carbon fiber F1 IndyCar safety equipment. As I said, we went public in 2021, and a series of acquisitions we've been digesting that occurred post-going public through 2022. Now, as we talked about, we're a lifestyle platform, and we're performance aftermarket, and we'll touch on just the size of this market. This is a market that generally is really stable because it is an enthusiast platform. You can liken it to some of the spaces at the bottom, whether it's camping or fitness or golf.
But one thing that really surprises people: the amount of folks that consider themselves automotive enthusiasts out in the United States. It's nearly 70 million. And so yes, when you're talking about the COVID bump, when people were at home and their commute was literally zero and their commute to their garage was about one minute, they spent more money because it was a passion for them. But very different in terms of some other brands that had got COVID lifts that were more one-time or five-year type purchases, our consumer enthusiasts spend annually. They plan it as part of their annual budget. And a lot of these folks even go to our events as planned vacations with their families. So it is a highly engaged group of enthusiasts that we serve out in the space.
You can see we considered about a $40 billion market in the United States as part of that that we serve. Now, we've been very much on a transformation to unlock growth. And one of the big things for us was structuring all the acquisitions and all the great products that are acquired over a year around a dedicated vertical structure to unlock that growth. At the end of the day, consumers buy vehicles. And one of the best opportunities to engage with that consumer is after they buy a new or used vehicle, that first 90 to 120 days is incredibly important because they want to personalize it to what they want out of a vehicle as an enthusiast. So we set up four verticals within our company, Domestic Muscle, where Holley has typically dominated the space.
We tend to have 20-30% or more market share in each of those. Our brands are number one and two in just about every category we serve in Domestic Muscle. But interestingly enough, it's the smallest TAM in all the performance aftermarket. So we set up three dedicated verticals with leaders that are on our leadership team to expand our presence in Truck and Off-Road, Euro and Import, and Safety and Racing. The great thing about it is we had brands that were absolutely applicable to those, but really just had not gotten the focus and attention, the marketing resources, sales support, etc., to really drive that growth. A lot of times we get the question, you know, what makes Holley think that has such a dominant space in Domestic Muscle? What makes you think you guys can excel in Truck and Off-Road?
When you come to one of our events, over half the cars come there on the back of a trailer. Our customers own a lot of trucks. And with our CRM, our database, our reach of customers, it gives us the right to really target in with the amazing portfolio of brands we have in that space and beyond. We also have leading brands in Euro and import with APR, Dinan, and AEM. And we also own some of the most prestigious safety brands in the world. And you can see some of them there: Simpson, Stilo, and then the HANS device. We have the patent on the HANS device that was introduced back with the death of Dale Earnhardt and has really become standard equipment for racers from junior racers all the way up through the professional circuits.
So you see, we touch not only more parts of the vehicle, we touch more parts of the market than any other aftermarket enthusiast platform. You see those numbers, I'm talking about a $40 billion space. This, of course, adds up to 50. Safety, we really consider it a global market. There are racers all around the world that know our brands and our products. And a real focus area for us is expanding our presence with the portfolio of brands we have across the world. So as part of this transformation, as I mentioned, I've been in the role about 18 months. Jesse's been in now right at two years. A key for us was putting together a team that could drive this to a multi-billion-dollar platform. A lot of the people that had grown up with Holley had grown up at small companies.
Our job is really professionalizing this organization and preparing it for growth with the right processes, of course, the right team, and the right marketing and sales prowess to really unlock that growth in generally a pretty unsophisticated market. We've done a great job building the team. This is right from our Q3 earnings call. The other thing we've been driving is modernization around essentially the customer journey. A big piece in our space is obviously digital. Our direct-to-consumer business in a market that's generally down anywhere from 5%-10% this year on a macro level, we're actually driving tremendous outperformance in our direct-to-consumer business. It's up meaningfully year-over-year. It's just we're a lot better at what we do, whether it's our data, our SEO, our SEM, our merchandising, our standalone websites.
We brought in the former Chief Marketing Officer of Bridgestone Americas, who leads that discipline for us. B2B sales capabilities, we run about 80% of our sales through B2B. And that really wasn't a focus of the company. We've been partnering with an outside agency who we've hired to really develop best-in-class account management and partnerships with the largest distributors in our space. And we're seeing a lot of great progress there. And a big piece of that includes our national retailer business. When we say national retailer, that's AutoZone, that's O'Reilly's, that's Advance. And the work we've done there has actually driven growth year-over-year in that channel for us as well.
Another big part of when you run a company with this many brands and products is having the discipline to bring the right products to market by listening to consumers, making sure they have strong business cases, then accelerating the product development. So we've been driving a lot of work in product development, putting in the proper phase gate system, which a multi-billion dollar platform should have. And by doing so, we're seeing new product revenue up 25% year-over-year by making sure the right products are brought to market and, importantly, have the right launch strategy engagement with consumers and our B2B partners when they're launched. And then strategic pricing. Typically, before we got into the roles, this was a cost-plus peanut butter spread business. Of course, that's not how you run a consumer model to hit the elasticity, sweet spots, and pricing.
Prior to the last, I'd say, six months, there wasn't even a pricing department. We put in a pricing department really focusing on drive competitiveness and elasticity optimization of our top 500 and then 2,500 SKUs and making sure we're really enforcing MAP pricing, which is incredibly important to our distributors for engagement and investment in our brands. These are the ones we report out at our quarterly earnings, and we show proof points of the progress we've made year-over-year in these key areas. Okay, I'm going to hand it over to Jesse to talk about Q3.
Thank you, Matt. All right, so just have a couple more pages, and then we'll get Joe up here to hit us with questions, and hopefully, you guys have a few, but I'm going to focus on the business highlights here for a second because I think it's important to note that the lifeblood of this business is new product, and the institution of development of the right new product has been a big part of the transformation. One of the things with Matt's joining the company is getting real process in place around what do we build, when do we build it, who does it market to, and how do we get all the resources in the organization to actually make those things successful, so we highlight every single quarter new product that is actually launching within the business.
And then we track one of our big things that we've been after is actually generating more new product per SKU launched because one of the big parts of this business is the free cash flow generation nature of it. And if we're launching a bunch of things that we have to buy a bunch of inventory for, that eats into the free cash flow pretty meaningfully. And a couple of stats for you guys to take back with you is this business in this interest rate environment generates around $40-$50 million of free cash flow. This is a very capital-light business. Our EBITDA is around 20%, gross margin of 40%, and we spend roughly $10 million in CapEx.
While we have the leverage is a big part of the story with us, while we have a little over four times leverage, with that free cash flow of $40-$50 in the current interest rate environment, we've been chipping away at that pretty meaningfully over time. I want to say since September of last year, we've prepaid around $75 million in debt on our term loan. I've taken proactive steps along the way to limit any impacts from interest rate exposure. I've had a collar in place pretty much since week three of me joining, which has paid dividends, and most recently just got a covenant-lite structure with our debt.
We're doing everything we can to de-risk the balance sheet in this and doing everything we can operationally, as you can see here in this operational excellence section, to maintain the free cash flow nature of this. One of the metrics I like to point to is the cost-to-serve savings. We generated year to date about $6.7 million, which you don't see is the other $25-$30 million that we generated from the prior year. This is important because we had a tough quarter. If you listen to our earnings call, there's lots of detail in sort of what that was, just overlap from last year, a combination of destocking from distribution partners. Last year, we had a tailwind from past dues.
But the takeaway is the work that we've done on making the operations much more efficient has allowed us to maintain margins that are in the 20% range for the full year, which I'll show you on the guidance page in the next slide. Because without these efforts, we would be down about 500 basis points in margin. So when I joined, I want to say the revenue was around $155 for Q3, Q4 of that year. And EBITDA was close to 10%. And so we're obviously below $155 in this quarter, and that was a couple of years ago. And we're still maintaining 16.5% on a much lower equivalent quarter. Promotional activities, as Matt pointed out, we've changed everything. I mean, this is a good thing, right?
As he joined, he's like, it's great to see all this opportunity, but we have a lot of work to do. And when you look at each one of those sections that Matt pointed out, anyone who's been to business school and understands the, what is it, three C's, STP, and four, five P's, depending upon the framework, there's not one piece of that that's not touched on that other page. And promotional activity is where we've got the longest tenured team member with Matt's prior experience at Bridgestone generating, I would say, some of the best results in the company because he's had time to diagnose, fix his team, get the technology in place. And D2C is a great bright spot for us. While the business is down, D2C is up, low teens for the year.
So we really are seeing the fruits of the labor of getting the right team in place. And some of the work he's also done is just continuing to start to monetize things such as our events. So we didn't even have a CRM in place before. I mean, that just got started within the past few months. And as a result of that, as we capture 45,000 enthusiasts at just one of our events, we get all their name, phone number, email address, ideally home address, and we're able to market to those people. So when we think about what we can do as a platform when we acquire businesses, there's lots that we can do whenever just that one event alone is valued at $2 million of marketing. And we actually are flat or make money on these.
From a guidance perspective, for those of you who aren't familiar with the story, we started the year with a bit of a more aggressive revenue target, but weren't really sure as to sort of the magnitude of this over-inventory position in our distribution partner network that came to fruition here in Q3. As we end this year, we'll end at around $600 million with the midpoint on the EBITDA of $117.5. Again, to go back to what I'd said around cost-to-serve, typically the incremental dollar flow-through in our business is about 50%. So one extra dollar in any given period should equal $0.50 in EBITDA. So you would expect us coming from last year around $660 down to $600 to be down to $100+ million dollars, give or take, off the $130 we did last year.
But we've been able to, through efficiencies that we put in place last year, efficiencies that we've gotten this year, and actions that Matt and I took proactively to help manage the balance sheet and the cash flow through activities like furloughs, 401(k) calls, et cetera, to really maintain the margin because we are dedicated to protecting the balance sheet and the equity holders in this. And we've got a great team that supports us in that. On interest expense, this is the cash piece of it. We do have the collar in place, so that'll fluctuate a bit. But we plan to end the year in the low four times on leverage.
But again, going back to what I talked about before, we recently put in place a covenant light structure, and I won't even be tested on that unless I actually have something drawn on the revolver, which the only time we've had anything drawn since I've been here was the first quarter that I was here. We quickly paid that off. We have about $50 million in cash. And like I said, we're a high cash-generating machine. So the intention of using that is very low unless there's just a perfect M&A deal that fits strategically within the portfolio.
So to wrap it up before bringing it back to Joe, I mean, I think hopefully for those of you who are getting to know the story, you can see that this is a large growing market that's got an enthusiast-based customer who doesn't treat this as anything other than really a part of their lifestyle. And when they've got extra time and money, they are spending their time in their garage for a lot of different reasons. We all have hobbies of some form. Most in here are familiar with golf. But the size of this is much bigger than golf. And I think that's the slide that Matt showed because throughout middle America, not everybody's playing golf, but they do have cars. It's hard to talk, as Matt pointed out, cars and home services in New York.
But whenever you're outside of New York, you will see that these are big parts of people's lives. We consistently are targeting at least 40% gross margin and 20% EBITDA. And like I've said repeatedly, this is a free cash flow generating machine. And Matt and I think have demonstrated that we're willing to do whatever it takes to get the team in place, grow the top line while maintaining that margin and continuing to service our debt comfortably. So with that, Joe, do you want to take it over?
Thank you, Matt. Thank you, Jesse. Appreciate that. I guess before we get started, is there anybody in the room who does have a question after that slide deck? Tom?
I have a question. The big TAM up there, where it's truck and off-road, can you just tell us what's the strategy there for new products getting in? How competitive is it? How does that affect pricing? And you mentioned the elasticity sweet spot.
Yeah. Yeah, the big differentiator for Holley is our ability to touch more parts of the vehicle than any one. So it's bringing platform solutions. So at SEMA, for example, we had a new Toyota Tacoma, which is a pretty hot platform there. Competitors of ours compete in a category. Meanwhile, we had a new Tacoma there that had our brake kit on it, that had our shocks, that had our exhaust, and then we got a couple others coming. So what we're doing is picking the new hot platforms and offering customers solutions both from the B2B and our direct-to-consumer. And so again, going to our large distributors, they'll have eight people outside the door that's selling a Toyota Tacoma exhaust for $1,000. We go in and say, "Hey, so glad to see you. We're here for our quarterly business unit review.
Let's talk about the new Toyota Tacoma. We have $15,000 retail content for your consumers, and we have these promotional ways to promote the platform with you jointly to really engage your consumers to offer solutions. So that's how we're really changing the discussion. And at the end of the day, consumers want easy. It's really an interesting market for those that know the performance aftermarket. The war's won on blogs and Reddit. That's where consumers get their information. And if you're an enthusiast, you're hunting and pecking all around for hours on a weekend or at night trying to find what works for your vehicle. We're the only company that can really show all that content to a consumer and our distributors engage in them. So that's how we win. So we got shocks, brakes, exhaust. We got a lot of categories covered.
As we look for the path on M&A, we'll start to fill out some of those inorganically where we have gaps right now on the full Modern Truck & Off-Road solution set.
How's it going with that combo?
We just launched that at SEMA, and so it's not yet hit the street, but we've seen great success when we're starting to launch these platform packages, and so we'll continue to roll that out.
Thank you.
Yep. Anybody else? Okay. So there are probably some people in this room who don't understand your industry very well. So maybe kind of help us understand where Holley fits in the value chain between distributors and resellers and jobbers and retailers, for example?
Yeah. So the market has a number of different ways consumers want to be met, right? And it's everything from, "Hey, I'm planning a build. I'm thinking about it. I'm going to do it this summer," to the enthusiast that says, "Hey, my parents have the kids this weekend. I want to work on the car in the garage, and I need to run to O'Reilly's or Advance Auto to pick up some stuff," right? So there's a very widespread thought process in how the consumer wants to be catered. Some of them also want the do-it-for-me. Some want the DIY, right? And so when you talk about jobbers and installers, they're really serving the do-it-for-me person, someone that's an enthusiast that either doesn't have the capability themselves, meaning for the skill set or the tools. Like for example, we live in Nashville in the city.
I don't have a lift in my garage. So if I want to put on an exhaust, I got to go find somebody to do it for me. And then there's the DIY person, okay, who's going to buy the stuff online, and they're going to buy it either from our direct-to-consumer platform, which engages tens of millions of people annually, or they'll go to one of our big e-commerce distributors such as Summit or JEGS or RealTruck, and they'll go and get the components from them, right? And so it's just, there's a lion's share of different ways to engage with that consumer. And our goal is to meet the consumer everywhere they want to be met, right?
Either the DIY, which frankly is the predominant portion of our industry, and we think there's a lot of ways to start to lock the do-it-for-me more to serve those 70 million enthusiasts.
You talked about a $40 billion addressable market. You guys have a revenue base of about $600 million, which I think is indicative of how fragmented this industry is. Who are the other major players in this space?
Really, when you look in the public space, there are very few. I mean, you have the team based out of Australia, ARB, that do a lot of off-road and modern truck and traded on the Australian exchange. But I think one of the difficult things, and you know this well, Joe, about our space, there isn't an industry index, right? Which is I worked in a lot of industries, and there always been an industry index of what's going on in the industry, and there isn't really comps similar to us that are publicly traded, right? And so we are the largest performance aftermarket enthusiast platform. There's some folks that are bigger in the private space, like RealTruck, that do mainly accessories. But in terms of pure performance aftermarket, we're the largest company.
Okay. I have to ask the question, and you're probably guessing where I'm going with this, but the Trump administration has talked about tariffs on several countries, including China. Can you talk about your exposure to China and what steps you might be able to take to mitigate that impact?
Yeah. So Jesse touched on a program we called cost-to-serve, and there's a lot of elements of cost-to-serve. But ultimately, it was about how much does it cost us to get that product to market, and then ultimately you ship it to the customer, whether it's B2B or D2C. There was a lot of things prior to Jesse coming in that were buried in SG&A and frankly buckets that didn't offer the granularity of where cost was coming into the business. So we kicked off a project that's generated meaningful savings already, roughly about a $10 million annual run rate, taking out just waste out of the business. But part of that is prior to us, we weren't able to identify what tariffs from what countries into what products.
So about a year ago, we got good clarity on a substantial amount of tariffs coming into our business prior to all the Trump administration, all the changes there. So we've been working on that for roughly a year to resource to reduce those tariffs because it's just waste. And so we've been partnering with a number of our current vendors to relocate production or find alternative sources. So it's yet to shake out which moves actually happen. But generally, we feel quite confident because we've been working on this for a year, and this isn't new in terms of trying to mitigate tariffs for us.
Okay. And just in terms of the exposure, how much of your cost of goods comes from China, for example?
That's about 30%, so about $100 million.
Okay. Are there alternative sources of some of that product or no?
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think those that are spending a lot of time on supply chain right now, again, this is not an overnight phenomenon in the world of manufacturing and sourcing. People have been on this for some time, including us. And so whether relocating production, nearshoring, onshoring, there's a lot of work going on right now.
Okay. As we turn the page from 2024 and look ahead to 2025, I know you guys haven't given much in the way of guidance other than to say that I think you expect revenue in the first quarter to be up year-over-year. Beyond that, at a high level, how should we think about next year? Do you see the opportunity for meaningful revenue growth and margin expansion, or is 2025 likely to be more of a year of stabilization?
Yeah. We're coming on the last earnings call, Joe, that we see we've been at this turnaround for 18 months, and typically in other turnarounds that I've done and been a part of, that 18 to 24 months is a pretty critical juncture, right? As impatient as we are to get the team in place and all the momentum to build up, that's really when you really start seeing green shoots. And what we showed in the last Q3 earnings call was a number of green shoots across the business where we've put in the right leaders, put in the right processes, and it's driving the right change and it's yielding the right results. So this is where we said we feel that momentum is building in Q1 based on all the market continuing to be stabilized that we're going to see growth.
Hey, if something else macroeconomically happens, but what we've seen is generally the market stabilized with this Q3 inventory coming out of the system because distributors were kind of holding on to it. For those that don't follow the space closely, this is an industry that always grew. Our distributors have been in this for 10, 20, 50 + years. So they were waiting for the market to come back. I think what they decided finally in Q3 was, "Hey, we're past our busy season. The run rate's going to be what the run rate's going to be. We're going to take out of that inventory." Even though we're gaining or maintaining share depending upon the category or on the sellout, Q3 was the opportunity that slack came out of the system. That's why you saw net revenue down so much in Q3.
But generally, the market has been pretty stable the last two or three quarters as all this demand has normalized out.
Got it. Okay. So in the couple of minutes we have left, I want to talk about M&A. You mentioned it's been a big part of the story for a very long time for obvious reasons: the fragmented industry, the flow-through, the 50% flow-through to EBITDA, etc. I look at your margins. They're still very healthy. And so how do we think about M&A? You talked about deleveraging, etc. How do we think about M&A as a strategy sitting here in December 2024? What's your appetite for future acquisitions given the balance sheet at this point?
Yeah. I think, Joe, the key word for us is we remain opportunistic. This is an industry where volume came off of 30%-40+% from the COVID highs. There was a lot of sponsor-backed companies that were highly levered that frankly weren't very well run, that didn't manage the downturn like we did, right? You can see we held or even expanded margins in a declining market through operating the business better, making tough decisions. So there's some good assets out there that aren't in the best condition financially, and we remain opportunistic to either acquire those where it makes sense, but only if they're solid brands and they fit in our long-term strategy of where we want to grow.
In terms of the balance sheet, would you be willing to flex back up to five times leverage, for example, for the right deal?
I don't know that going all the way up to five times is in the range of just tolerance. But certainly, if we needed to take a pause on our just continued pursuit down to long-term of three, like to Matt's point, I think all investors would just say it would be disappointed to see that we turned something down that made a lot of sense long-term for a short-term gain on the leverage target. But in the absence of seeing the right deal, I think we've demonstrated that we'll do the right thing with the cash.
How does the pipeline look today?
I'd say you go back six to 12 months ago, we probably spent 5%-10% of our time in M&A. We're probably spending at least 20% of our time, right? And just because of the nature of the imbalance, a lot of sponsor-backed companies looking for some sort of exit help, you name it, right? But again, we're very picky because we've done a lot of hard work on our balance sheet and the operational performance of the company, and we don't want to acquire anything that's not going to drive growth.
Maybe last question for you, what are some of the key priorities? You touched on a few of these already, but what are some of the key priorities for you guys as a company for 2025?
Just growth. I mean, everything's wired around growth. The key transformation, we got the right team in place. We're seeing tremendous momentum across. We give an update on those key transformation areas. Really, we think what's holding us back is Jesse talked about the free cash flow. We talked about proactively paying $75 million down in debt. The coverage from yourselves and others in the space, like people know our story, but the one thing they're looking for is top-line growth.
With a healthier consumer and hopefully, obviously, a cleaner channel, obviously, those could be potential tailwinds this year.
Yeah, and the elected administration favors our customer base, right? These are ICE engines . They're not going anywhere. I mean, you can see all the 180s, all the major OEs have made. This is a market that's here to stay. There's a huge car park out there that we still do a lot of late model and older cars. So this is a solid consumer base with a huge addressable market.
Great. Thank you, Matt. Thank you, Jesse. Thank you, everybody. I hope you enjoy.