Basic forward. Two buttons.
Hopeful. Right? Is going forward?
Yeah.
All right.
And then you have timers right here and back there.
All right.
Minutes, and you can leave five for Q&A.
Yeah, we probably...
No. Yeah.
Yeah.
So.
It's. I don't need to talk into that?
You don't have to.
I can walk around?
Yeah.
Okay.
Got a few minutes?
Oh! Yeah, let's do it.
There's something in the corner, or we need to be on the mic for this.
Are we-
Oh.
Are we webcasting?
I'll stay here.
Oh, we are. Okay.
No, I-
He has a-
If you like walking around. Yeah.
That's right. I'll stay here.
Okay.
All right. Good? All right. So our next presenter is Universal Technical Institute. It is traded on the NYSE under ticker symbol UTI. And to tell you more about the company is CEO Jerome Grant. Jerome?
Thanks for having me.
Thanks.
Good morning, everyone. I am Jerome Grant. This is Matt Kempton, VP of Finance and Investor Relations. He's going to do some of the financial pieces of the conversation. There's a few slides on there that he'll jump in for as well, and I'll frame who UTI is for those of you who don't know us, and we'll hopefully leave ourselves five or 10 minutes for some Q&A at the end. Total non sequitur is for-- I'm 61 years old, and for the first time in my life, I got contacts on Friday, and you all are looking very fuzzy to me right now.
We are fuzzy.
We'll get through it. There we go. There we go. All right, so who's UTI? UTI is the leading provider of technical education in two specific areas. Transportation, skilled trades, and energy is one of our groups, and healthcare is the second. We operate 33 campuses over 35 programs. We're actually approaching 30,000 students now and have some great retention and employment dynamics, which, by the way, is the key to being successful in this business, with nearly 70% of our students graduating within the allotted time by accreditors and the government, and 80%-85% getting jobs in market in the first year. We've got a strong financial outlook.
Our guidance for the year has been $720-$730 million, net income $37-$41 million, and you know, somewhere around $102-$104 million in Adjusted EBITDA. Our last conversation, we believe we're going to come in on the high end of the range of these this year. And then the other benchmark that we put out, not guidance, but a projection, is that we believe 2025 will be approaching $800 million with a 15% margin. We have a 14% margin this year. That math between the two of those is right there. Very strong business, moving in the right direction with some great trends. Q3 highlights, revenue was $177.5 million.
We have a beat on all lines. Momentum, the first line of my speech for this was momentum continues to build, both from a macro standpoint, a lot of energy moving in the direction of people, considering the trades as opposed to traditional four-year education, and the investments we've made over the last five years in new campuses, new programs, and our diversification strategy is paying off nicely. You can read the pieces there, and they're in our comments as well. The last point, which is, you know, we absolutely remain confident in our finishing of the fiscal year. We actually only have one start left.
For those of you who are part of our investment family, one start left, and we feel very, very good about where we're finishing the year and how 2025 is shaping up. So we always like to show some pictures of what we do. We're the strong value proposition around UTI is in that industry-aligned technical education. There's a lot of technical education out in the world. 500 community colleges teach what we teach around the country. And what sets UTI aside is this industry alignment. We've been a leading manufacturer partner.
We've got over 35 OEM partners that we work with that manifest themselves in manufacturer-specific programs, that also manifest themselves in having access to the best technology and the most forward-thinking pieces of what's going on in the market. We have over 13,000 employer partners around the country, and what we mean by partners is that employers register with us to get access to our students. We believe the students that we graduate are one of the largest assets that we have because they are in such high demand, and we work very closely with our industry partners to gain access to them. These are some, you know, great statements around what sets us aside in an investment thesis.
You know, healthy balance sheet, strong student outcomes, consistent meeting of expectations. We set plans in place, and we've done a very good job of executing on them. And what we've created now is a very strong platform for continued growth, whether it's new campuses, new programs, or acquisitions. We're set for that for the next phase. As I said, there's two divisions, Universal Technical Institute been in business for over 60 years. Sorry, he's recording this. I've got to stay right here. For over 60 years, focused in the tech trades and transportation.
Concorde, the way to think about Concorde is that there's really two areas of focus for Concorde Career Colleges, which actually leaves an opportunity for us, but very focused in dental, about 40% of the business in dental, dental hygiene and dental assisting. Dental is a fantastic program. Hygienists graduate a two-year program with starting salaries in the $80,000 range. For those of you who don't know, dental hygienists are the gateway to making money in a dental office. They're the first person in your mouth, and they're the first person that sees everything that's there. Very high demand. About 40% of the business is dental. The rest of it we would consider to be sort of allied health or the other things outside of nursing that surround a doctor.
Think physical therapist, think, radiology tech, surgical tech, those types of things, which leaves an opportunity for us to move more aggressively into the nursing area. Only about 15% of our students at Concorde are in any kind of nursing, and only about 5% of them are RNs. The rest are vocational nursing students, so there's a great opportunity for upside there in the nursing areas. Matt, you want to jump on this one?
So this is a quick snapshot of where we've been, and we'll get to a slide in a minute on where we're going from here, but you can see the trajectory without going too much into the detail that the company was in decline from 2011 to 2016. We received a large capital infusion by way of a preferred investment in 2016. Part of that investment requirement was to put an independent chair on the board. Jerome was brought on in 2017 as a COO, became CEO in 2019, and has since really revamped the management team and the trajectory of the company, as you can tell, as we continue to grow as an EBITDA loss in 2018 to growing EBITDA and net income over that time frame.
Again, back to the numbers at the top of the page, with $725 million revenue at $100 million EBITDA this year.
Yeah, and I think the points here on the left side of the page are really the part of that same investment thesis, which is: What did we do to move the needle from $317 million and really no EBITDA to where we are now? We revamped the way we look at marketing and the way we acquire students. A couple of examples of that, if everybody can get a $20 an hour job when they graduate from high school, you want to talk to more people while they're in high school. Therefore, we went from about 90 high school reps to we're going to approach 160 high school recruiters now.
So we're spending a lot of time talking to kids when they're 16 and 17 and forming opinions about what they're going to do after high school and introducing them to the trades and the opportunities that are there. Our military presence has been beefed up significantly. We now have 24 recruiters on military bases, and we started partnering with the military by putting programs on their bases. Prior to that, we were probably no different than a Styrofoam cup salesman to the military. As a matter of fact, our agenda did not coincide with their agenda. They wanted to keep people in the military, and we were showing them great opportunities when they left, right? So now we started programs on bases. We have a BMW program on Pendleton.
We have a Penske Premier Truck program on Fort Bliss, and a BMW program on Fort Bragg, and we've become quite a partner with helping people both while they're in the military and then as they transition out. We moved to this blended learning model, which, about in the days of old, a UTI student was on campus for six hours a day, five days a week, for a year to a year. You had to drop everything, right? That was what. So therefore, working adults or people who had families, et cetera, found it too big of a steep climb for it. The blended learning model takes about half of the learning experience online, and you're only on our campuses three hours a day, so you can keep your job.
You can have the flexibility to do the rest of it online, and that actually helped our adult enrollment and grow and continue to prosper.
The point of this slide is not only number by number. It is just the consistency that we have delivered over the same time frame. With all the initiatives we're going to talk to in Part K, with the pandemic, acquisitions, that Concorde a little bit of growth already, and how we've executed on this over time. The guidance we've set over that time frame, that we've seen, get the best comfort in that guidance. We've increased that along the way, and you can see we continue to deliver on that. As you'll also know, that the top comfortable about and where we believe we will customize over the years, and we just need to make more and more history.
One of the things that sets us apart is sort of the maniacal focus on only markets that have this huge problem of supply and-
... We are not an online MBA school or online education vendor or, or the like. This is meant to illustrate the demand characteristics of the product lines that we have. All of them have significant projected and current supply and demand issues. For instance, one of the things we say about auto diesel is that there are three jobs on the job board for every one of our graduates, and that's continuing to grow. It creates a great environment for us to continue to expand our campus footprint and expand our product set as we continue to look at courseware in these areas. Some people ask: Why did you buy Concorde? What's the deal with healthcare?
It's a very consistent message to what UTI had for such a long period of time. There's three jobs on the job board for every UTI graduate. There's more like eight to 10 jobs on the job board for every healthcare graduate. It's just a much larger market, a little bit lower of a margin, but more opportunity for growth. So, by adding Concorde, we moved from $419 million to $725 million, and as I said, in 2025, we'll be approaching 30,000 students across it. It also helped us diversify our customer set. The general customer for a UTI division is an 18- to 24-year-old, primarily male, although we have a lot of aggressive programs bringing more females into the trades now.
The customer set for healthcare is a 25-26 year-old woman, right? And so one of the things we wanted to do was continue to diversify our target market. This shows you where we are around the country. The reason I put this slide up here is there's a lot of gray space, right? And many of these markets are very local, right? Welders do not travel across the country to learn to be a welder. And frankly, they're less than 1% of the Concorde population comes from more than 20 minutes away from the campus. So there's a lot of opportunity for us to continue to invest and grow in these high-quality, high-demand programs.
All right, so, the big things that we've done in the last three or four months is give you a snapshot of what 2025 is gonna look like, reiterate our confidence in 2024, but also launch this next phase of our North Star strategy. The 2019 to 2024 phase ends with the movement from $300 million and no profit to $700 million, about a hundred and two million dollars in profit. And there's a lot of people who saw the escalation of the stock, it was $1.86 when I got here, to where it is now, to where it is, and said: "So is it all done? Am I too late? Is the party over?" And that's a good question.
And so one of the things we wanted to do is get out into the market, the plan we have for the next five years, and we've renewed the next phase of our North Star strategy. And these are the basic characteristics of what renews it, and we wanted to make it pretty straightforward and digestible. What we've got out in the market, first of all, is only organic growth. Anything we did inorganically, any acquisitions would be in addition to this. But it's pretty straightforward. We don't tend to get out over our skis in terms of promising organic same-store growth. We're in the low to mid-single-digit range. From a price standpoint, maybe 2% or 3% a year, in terms of price.
In that organic growth thing, the thing that you're believing is that they can continue to grow in a conservative, low single digit student growth, same store. And then on top of it, there is a series of announcements we put out about what our projection is over the next five years in two main areas, which is new program launches and new campuses. From a standpoint of new program launches, by way of the acquisition of MIAT College of Technology, UTI acquired about six or seven new programs in unique high-demand areas that are not on the UTI campuses. So UTI campus tended to be auto diesel, maybe welding, and a manufacturer program. And now, you think about the UTI campuses are transformed into much more of sort of a tech trade center.
What that means is they now have HVAC. They now have aviation. They now have an electrical suite, which includes wind energy, so renewable energy, robotics, industrial maintenance, and electronics training. Therefore, we now have a wider product set to appeal to that 18 to 24-year-old who maybe just doesn't want to fix cars, right? But is very interested in going into the trade. New expansion programs, primarily on the UTI campuses in this time period, make up that second piece, and then new campuses. What we've showed successfully since 2018 with Bloomfield, then Miramar, then Austin and then Miramar, is that we've been very successful in finding locations and locating the right campuses.
And what we put out into the market is that from 2026 through 2029, we'll open at least two new campuses a year. For those of you who've looked at our investor materials, we put pro formas in there of what campus looks like, so you guys can do the math. They tend to be about 100 to 110 thousand sq ft. Now with that complete suite, somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,000 students and about $40 million-$45 million, with a really nice contribution margin associated with it.
So therefore, by 2029 , doing the math on this, you've got a company that's somewhere in the neighborhood of $1 billion-$1.2 billion, and that we believe that we can move the margins from 14% this year to, you know, somewhere approaching, if not touching 20% by 2029 . The leverage we get off of continuing to grow in the areas that we have really kicks in as we move through that time period. And again, you know, this is without any significant acquisition opportunity. These are sort of the. Do you want to say anything about this? Yeah, of where we're finishing in 2024 .
This is all in our deck of materials, and I think that's really all we had for it, and then we talked about twenty twenty-five. Just wanted to give you a you know quick overview there, and now we can open for any questions that you have.
Yeah, any questions?
Um,
Hard to call a recession, isn't it? Or what a recession is. In the you know nine, 10, 11 time frame, in that time frame, the big recession, we saw double-digit growth for about 24 months before things started to normalize. It was 10% the first year, 15% the next year. So we do get a tailwind. As people lose their jobs, they come to us for training, right? And so, you know, any significant movement in the unemployment market of these demographics, by the way, you got to think about these demographics, is that, you know, candidly, the 18 to 24-year-old male demographic did not see a big dip in unemployment in this time period. It was the 30 through 35-year-olds that went down to almost no unemployment.
But as you see unemployment rise in unskilled labor and construction and things along those lines, you see our movement up. It does. It makes us unpopular at cocktail parties, but it really does favor our company. Yes.
Um,
Everything that we laid out in terms of a minimum of six new programs a year, two, a minimum of two new campuses a year, can be funded out of our operating cash moving forward.
Right.
Right? And so, you know, a campus is somewhere in the neighborhood of somewhere between $10-$20 million, so two of those a year. Programs are about $2-$3 million apiece, so eighteen, you could do the math off of that. So a significant portion of our operating cash in the next couple of years, we're going to go towards reinvesting to get to where we are there. But we have plenty to do that. If we were to do an acquisition of size, that would be a different question about how we would finance something along those lines, but we have what we need for this.
Just a really quick one. Do you guys have like, what's the average revenue per student? I'm kind of did the math out here. Is it around $28,000? Like, just-
Yeah, when you blend them together.
Yeah.
It's around $28,000. The UTI side's about $35,000 per student per year, so $8,500 or so per quarter. It's more the Wild West on the healthcare side. It's about $26. Yeah, about $26 on average, but you've got a wide range of courses. You know, dental hygiene is $85,000 for a two-year curriculum, and phlebotomy is $6,000 in eight weeks. So you got a lot of. We do. We're fully federally backed. We have. Just like going to any other college, most of the students are Pell eligible, which means they qualify for $6,000 or $7,000 a year in free money, and then they have federally backed loans.
And then from there, we've got some gap financing options that we offer to students, but that tends to be only around in the $10,000 range on average or so. One of the important parts about financing is something we worked on very, very aggressively over the last five years, is actually bringing employer money down the funnel. Got an early employer program where students go to work while they're in school with us, and to qualify to get access to our students, you have to agree to at least a $10,000 tuition reimbursement program. So our biggest competitor, to be honest with you, is apathy and parents' mindset about going into the trades, right?
And so everything we can do to break down that stigma and also take the risk out of the equation for student financing. It helps us a great deal. And the key to that is actually bringing the employer's money down the funnel.
So normally, whenever you see in industry such a huge gap in supply and demand, you almost always see a ton of new players come in, new campuses, new programs. Is that a possibility here? You know, could this get flooded? And even after your growth plans of six new programs and two campuses, how much of the overall market are you scratching, or the potential are you scratching?
It's a great question. First of all, you have this thing that sort of is a stopper in it, which is public education, right? They don't have the means to ramp up public education. Community colleges' budgets continue to be cut, et cetera, and they're very small programs. So we don't see any huge scaling in the public sector around trying to address this problem. Then the other half of the market is broken up in the private sector. On the UTI side, the other half of the market, we have about half of it, UTI does. But frankly, we don't think that much about the pie of how much of the market we have because so much of the market is unserved, right?
If only a third of the market is being served right now, our aim is to get out to the places and serve much more of the market, right? And there are no numbers that I've seen from BLS or any other federal source that says that anything I do can even make a scratch in it, in that period of 2024 to 2025 through 2029. If anything, the gap's gonna widen because of aging population and healthcare and in the trades, and so we're just being logical about where we go first. And the most important thing to us is not letting our outcomes lag, 'cause that's when you get in trouble.
If you look at any of the companies out in the market that have fumbled on this, it's really tied to moving too fast and letting your outcomes go down. That's the killer. The government then is looking over your shoulder, and your reputation goes in a bad direction. And so that's why we're not gonna build five campuses a year. We're not gonna start 20 programs a year. And the reason is that we don't think we can do it effectively and keep 70% graduation rates and 85% employment rates if we do that, although we would still not satisfy the need in the market if we did it. Some other companies may do it. You know, Lincoln's a few years behind us. That's really it. They're a great company.
They're now launching a program or a campus a year, et cetera. Frankly, they just didn't have the cash to do it up until the last couple of years, and they're moving in that direction. But even when we enter a market where Lincoln is, we don't even notice each other. That's frankly because the demand is so high, and we have the ability to reach different audiences. One more question. Hi.
You, can you talk about how you're gonna approach the opportunity in nursing and specifically how you're going create the relationships to do the, I assume, the in-person clinical requirement?
We do have, we've got 7,000 clinical partners right now, clinical employers for other clinical areas, and the number one thing they ask is: Why don't you have nursing programs? Because we do have a ton of clinical programs. We've got 12 different clinical programs, and so we have relationships with the major healthcare providers already. We're just not providing them what they need, which is nurses. You know, the reason we're looking at acquisitions in nursing is actually because it takes a while to ramp up.