All right, music stop. It's a little chilly in here, so we're gonna rely on everyone to warm it up, keep it conversational. Hi, everyone. I think this is maybe the second afternoon, so keep it going. I'm Simeon Gutman, Morgan Stanley's hardline, broadline, and food retail analyst. It's my pleasure to welcome Valvoline, represented by Lori Flees, CEO and director. Been a staple at this conference for many years. I think it's the first time we're doing fireside, so thank you for doing it. I'm gonna read a quick disclosure, sit down and ask some questions, and again, feel free to raise your hand. For important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley Research disclosure website at www.morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. If you have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales representative. Thank you. All right, thanks for being here.
Thank you for having me.
First question is, the story's evolved a bit over the past few years. It's now a pure play oil change services business and evolving, new capital structure, new CEO. All carry some disruption, opportunity as well. Can you talk about how the organization is adapting, and how you're evolving the organization to adapt with the change, and then how you're positioned to drive further growth?
Sure. You're right, 2023 was a pretty transformative year for Valvoline. We worked hard over the last year to complete the separation and sale of the Global Products division, which is about half of the business, which is very unusual for a company to do. But that created a pure play, high margin, high growth retail business now. And while we were doing that, the retail business delivered our 17th year of same-store sales growth. We grew sales 17% for a system-wide sales of $2.8 billion, and we grew our EBITDA 20%. And so incredible year, while also returning $1.5 billion through share repurchase to shareholders. So pretty transformative year, and yes, we did make a leadership change with me becoming the CEO after being with the company a year and a half.
I would say that when you look at our leadership team, about 3/4 of the team are legacy Valvoline employees and leaders. Some have more than 30 years of experience with the company, those operating, leading our operations in particular. And about a 1/4 of us come from other retailers, not even on the automotive service side. So you have Walmart, Amazon, Wingstop, McDonald's. So really bringing in retail-focused capability to try to drive our business to the next level. So it's really taking, injecting some retail, you know, industry experience combined with legacy Valvoline, which I think is making a really great transition. The entire team is gelled and very excited about the future for growth.
When we first met, I was picking your brain on e-commerce strategy and marketplaces and incubation business models, and stuff that was above what I could comprehend. You've been at Valvoline for a year now.
Mm-hmm.
Third month as CEO, if the math is right?
Yeah. Yep.
Can you talk about what you got excited about the move to Valvoline, from president of retail services now to CEO, and anything that surprised you, good or bad, that you didn't fully appreciate?
Yeah. I mean, when we met, we were talking about how industries evolve and change, and how leaders in those industries have the blessing and the curse, right, of trying to drive change when you have the legacy strength. I think Valvoline is very similar to that. When I looked at Valvoline as an opportunity, what I saw was tremendous growth in front, in front of the company. Valvoline is the leader in its industry, but it only has 5% market share. It's incredibly fragmented. Valvoline is a little bit more than 50% franchised. Those franchisees have at least, you know, on average, 20-25 years of relationship with Valvoline. So that kind of strength, combined with the track record of growth and so much more upside, was exciting.
I think then, like, general retail with e-commerce, our business and preventative maintenance is gonna evolve with the electrification of the car park, and those kind of innovation challenges are ones that I gravitate to, particularly when you've got a strong team, a strong orientation around customer service. Those are the companies that have the opportunity to win in those changing marketplace. So I was very excited about that. I think there are two things that I learned. One is, like many legacy businesses that have been in operation for a long time, technology maybe hasn't evolved as fast as the company has, and so there's a lot of opportunity to leverage technology at Valvoline, both to make the experience better for customers, but also to make it more efficient and drive more efficient growth. So that's a great opportunity.
The other thing I learned is that the secret sauce really starts with the team. There, the consistency of our customer experience across the entire network of over 1,800 stores is impressive. We get a very high, you know, 4.6 star out of five rating consistently, and it's consistent across franchise and company. And it comes down to one, the way we construct our process with the team, and it starts with our people. It's the training that we give them consistently, 270 hours just to start the service, combined with the technology that guides it, and those three things are consistent, and the customer benefits from that with an amazing, quick, easy, trusted service.
When we visited the headquarters, I think it was late September, we got to watch organizational change in motion, and then some of the insights, you being in the field a lot, and then seeing how strategically the business is already evolving.
Yeah.
So now, you came from a retail behemoth.
I did.
Business, it's a lot of scale, did well. This business you're at is... I don't wanna say the word dominant, for, for-
Yeah.
It's not a good word, but it is the highest comping business, I think, in its sector. So it has what looks like a huge advantage over the industry. Bigger advantage than the predecessor company had. So what, what makes it special? How do you, you know, not touch what makes it special with, you know, evolving it in your own way?
Yeah. Well, the same-store sales performance preceded me by a long shot, and there is something around the operational execution that has been driven in Valvoline, and it starts with the way we recruit and train people, but then how we promote. So, similar to other retailers, we promote from within, and it's really apprenticeship business. And so we have area managers, market managers, regional managers, and then our vice president of operations that have more than 30 years of experience with the company. And it really starts with investing in the people and creating a fun environment where the team works together to win, and we have competitions, and we call it our Vamily.
So it's about not disrupting that, but augmenting it with both more efficiency, so that the teams can deliver the service faster and then get more cars through the stores or through the bays. And then it's about taking what is already, I think, a best-in-class marketing capability for our sector and looking at retail more broadly and saying, "That's what best-in-class marketing, consumer marketing, and B2B marketing can look like," and so raising our game to that. So we drive same-store sales. Some of it comes from tailwind, like premium mix and pricing, that we can... You know, our pricing power in the market. But a lot of it comes from non-oil change revenue, which is around driving that process and excellence in presenting services.
And then it's the marketing to drive the new customer acquisition and just maintaining that relationship with the customer to remind them when they need service. And being able to do that sharper and sharper by looking at other retailers who are, you know, at the next generation of using digital marketing in ways that our peers... You know, if we just compare ourselves to peers-
Yeah
... we wouldn't do much else. When we compare ourselves to high-growth retail, we still have a lot of opportunity there.
Do you think you're better at, like, the consumer centricity part or the marketing part today?
I actually think it's operation execution-
Yeah
... and marketing, that the customers get the benefit of.
Right.
It's not that, you know, you talk to our people, and it's all about customers number one.
Yeah.
It's about our people, it's about following the process and about aiding it with marketing, and that creates the results.
And just to give an opportunity to gloat about the performance, oil changes per day far exceed the next by a big-
By a lot.
By a big margin.
Yeah.
We spoke about what, I guess, what drives it, probably location as well. But, I mean, I think that gap, you don't see that in retail.
No. I mean, the average quick lube operator sees about 30, plus or minus, customers a day. On average, we're seeing 50 or more, and we still see plenty of opportunity. Most folks are looking at vehicles per day. We look at vehicles per bay, and we have stores that are doing, you know, 40 vehicles per bay. So when you multiply the number of bays-
Yeah
... you get a much bigger number than 50. So we see a lot more opportunity even in the stores that we currently have.
The share is coming from where?
Share is coming... Well, when we open a new store, we take it pretty much from, you know, a significant share from quick lubes in the market. But with same-store sales, we take it from dealerships, about 30% from dealerships and about 40% from other automotive service providers that are not quick lubes, and then about 30% from quick lubes. So, it's so fragmented. 40% of people still use their dealer to get their cars serviced.
Right.
And they pay a lot of money for that, and it's not very convenient. And so that's a very attractive pool of customers that we can serve very well. But we also serve folks that may get their oil changed from a tire center or a brake and general mechanic or other things, where they either can't get in and/or it takes a long time, they have to wait in a waiting room. There's a little bit of when they, when they come out to offer you something, did you really need it? You know, they... It's not very transparent. So we have a lot of opportunity. It's very fragmented, and with us only having 5% share, it's funny when people say: Where do you take customers from? Well, 95% of customers go elsewhere.
There's a lot of opportunity.
Yeah. So great same-store sales. The other neat feature about the business is the return profile, the unit economics. So can you talk about the return on new stores, the payback periods, day V maturity curves? I'll leave it at that, and then I'll come to the rest of this question... because I think there's a lot there.
Yeah. We have invested as a company in retail real estate analytics, and I think the store execution, combined with the real estate analytics, has enabled us to deliver some very attractive returns on new units. For both us and franchisees, we expect our new units to deliver at, you know, 15% or higher IRR consistently, no matter where we place the store. Over time, you know, our stores mature at about three to five- years of brand-new construction. Now, we have done some really smart things, testing out marketing that will improve the first-year ramp, and that, combined with the real estate analytics, has created a very low-risk profile for new store development, both for us and our franchisees. But we're always looking for ways to drive higher return on invested capital.
So we hired a new head of real estate and construction, Brian Tabb, from Wingstop. And he also has a history at McDonald's. But he's brought in a lot of tools, both to, you know, and partners, to both improve the execution of our real estate pipeline, but also to drive down and look for ways to drive down the upfront capital cost, as well as just the permit, site permitting cost and the, and the building cost. So we expect return on invested capital continue to be well in excess of our cost of capital and deliver great returns to franchisees.
I'm sure that's correct. But now CapEx is rising. We've talked about it. How does that impact the return profile?
I think operational execution has also improved, and our volume per store has improved year-over-year, such that our new unit economics have not deteriorated, even in the face of increased construction costs.
Mm-hmm.
Now, that doesn't mean we want to accept construction cost inflation. We want to actually bend the curve. And so we're doing a zero-based new design just to see if we can take unnecessary costs out. Things like we build out a ceiling, but nobody gets out of their car, so why do you need to build out a ceiling? That's tens of thousands of dollars to build out a ceiling and insulate the water lines and other things that we don't need. So just taking a zero-based, fresh look at it will allow us... It's not gonna. I wouldn't say it's gonna cut the cost in half, but if you cut 10%-20% out of our capital cost, that's significant.
Mm-hmm.
So that's what we're trying, that's what we're working on.
3,500 stores we've talked about as a potential target. Can you talk about getting to that number, timeframe, and then potential upside to it?
Yeah. It's the one thing when I started at Valvoline, I asked, what is our-- what do we think? How many stores could Valvoline have? Is it something that we'd set an aspiration or a target? And there hadn't been. And so working both bottom up and top down, we talk about 5% market share. Our stores only cover 30%-35% of the population, and while our average market share in a DMA could be 5%, it's three times that in certain markets where we're well penetrated. So when you just do the math, we only cover 30%-35% of the population with the stores we have. We have markets where we're three times bigger. It became a how, how big could the network be? I think it could be well in excess than 3,500. At the time, that was double.
Even just getting the team to recognize we could double and how we would get there, both with company and franchise growth, and putting the plans behind that was energizing. So we feel very good about the 3,500. I would argue it'll- it could be beyond that, so we say 3,500+. But at the time we said it, more than a year ago, that was a doubling, which was a pretty... Felt like a pretty aggressive statement for the team, but we're well on path to hitting it in the near term. So when I say we, we've talked about getting to 100 units on the company side by 2025 and 150 on the franchise side by 2027.
Mm-hmm.
If you kind of do the math, you'll know roughly how long it'll take us to get there.
When you put it in the terms of market share, it seems logical. You can have a lot more share. But when you think about the industry changing and evolving-
Yeah.
and certain things coming and going
Yeah.
And who knows what that looks like, how does that factor into 3,500?
I don't, I don't think it factors in much. I think the car park will electrify. The question is when, how, you know, how fast, where, and how will that happen? But the reality is even if you talk to EV customers today, the EV that they own, while the prices will come down over time, will still be a significant part of a household balance sheet.
Yeah.
People are gonna wanna maintain that asset. Now, the services that they'll need to do will be different. But, A, they will want to maintain that asset and the value of that asset. Two, is they are not going to want to do it in an inconvenient way. So the drive for convenience in taking care of their car is still gonna be high. And OEMs, as well as the new EV OEMs, are not providing a service that is quick and easy.
Mm-hmm.
It's actually anything but quick and easy. So I think the combination of customers will want to maintain, they'll want something quick and easy. We have a network that is accessible, and the skills and the training, which we believe we'll have to serve any vehicle, we'll, we'll become the provider of choice for EVs, just like we are for ICE and hybrid.
New units, buying, building, franchising... How do you think about it? I feel the journey of your commentary has given me some time to think about franchising to, "Yeah, we like this idea of franchising when we're ready." That's, that's my perception. So anyway, just making the question a little more loaded in how to think about this.
Yeah, yeah. I think we've said there's so much white space. The return on invested capital is important for shareholders, and we continue to get a great return on company stores. But there is so much space where our franchisees currently operate that has more opportunity as well. And so we've, with the leadership team and I, have really invested in how do we grow our franchise unit base faster than what we already have? And it hasn't been a focus. And so we've changed our incentives to drive growth. We've put more resourcing. We've kind of shifted resourcing towards supporting franchise growth. We have spent more time talking to new franchise potential prospects than we ever have in the last 6-9 months than the history of the company.
Maybe in the early days, 20, 30 years ago, but in the last 10 years. And part of it is because there is. It's such a great opportunity. It's very fragmented, it's high margin, has a great return on capital invested, and it's very resilient. And so you don't have the economic swings in our business that can create some uncertainty. And so as we've gone out to say, we're interested in scale franchise a handful, we don't need hundreds of franchise partners. We'd like to add a handful. We've taken inbound, and we've outreached both family offices that focus on franchising businesses, as well as private equity that's focused more in our space or in and around our space. And the interest is really high. And so when you talk about wanting to drive your network growth with speed-
Mm-hmm.
the franchise growth becomes a multiplier effect
Right
... on how fast you can go. And, and so that's really been the focus. When you, when you set the goal, and it's let's not worry about who grows, let's just worry about growth.
Right. Yeah, I think the investment community sees the multiple that franchise businesses get: higher margin, higher return.
Yeah.
Natural push. But I think you said it's the speed, and that gives you the dexterity to move quicker.
Correct.
That's where I think, I guess, the logic comes in.
Right.
Right. Okay. franchise relationships-
Yeah
... and how it even relates to the 35, 3,500, thinking about master planning and-
Yeah
Where all the units are gonna come from.
Yeah.
How do you ensure that that pipeline is there, and where, where are you in that process?
So when we've laid out our goals for new franchise unit, we've said 150 new units per year by 2027. And over the last year, we've been talking to our, our existing franchise players and feel that about two-thirds of that are gonna come from our existing franchisees. And, you know, part of where the rubber meets the road is, as we changed incentives, our conversation around new development agreements, bigger development agreements, has been kind of a fun change of, change of discussion.
And so we feel about two-thirds will come from existing, and about one-third will come from those handful of franchisees who we will add to our portfolio, either taking existing franchise partners who have gotten to the end stage of their career and are looking at capitalizing on the wealth that they've created and ready to turn the business over to someone new, or even entertaining some company markets, where when we cap ourselves at 100 new units a year, we can't develop all the territory that our company stores are in. So can we carve out pieces where another party can come in and grow much faster? Better for the business, better return on capital, better for our people.
Mm-hmm
... because they have more opportunities to grow without moving cross country.
Can you remind us how many franchisees exist today? Is it an 80/20 rule, where a certain small percentage represent the-
To do the math, it's actually more extreme-
Yeah
... than the 80/20 rule. So we have about 40 partners in, in the U.S., which is where most of the franchise units are, and the top five make up 70% of the units. The top seven, or not seven, the top seven developing-
Mm-hmm
... they may not be the top seven in size, they make up 80%-90% of the new units that are delivered.
Hmm.
It's very consolidated in terms of where the growth is coming from.
I would think that gives you more flexibility in a higher rate environment, larger, more sophisticated.
Absolutely.
Right.
Absolutely. I think a lot of other players, either in our space or others, where they're looking for single unit operators who often do personal debt to buy into the business-
Right
... they're struggling because the debt markets make that pretty challenging. But for us, we have well-capitalized partners, and when we talk about recruiting new partners, again, just a handful, we don't need many. We want them to be well-capitalized, looking to, to drive growth as a way to drive value of a business.
Yep. We're at 15 minutes, so maybe at 10, if you'd like to ask, feel free or feel free any time. I want to ask about competition.
Yeah.
We spoke about it a little bit. The way I wrote this, we juxtaposed the car wash, which has a lot of new entrants and attention. This industry, not so much. Maybe it's because of terminal risk, maybe because they're afraid of going against difficult or tough competitors. So how do you describe the environment? Getting tougher, neutral, getting easier?
Yeah, I would say it's not getting easier. I wouldn't say it's getting tougher, but like car wash, a quick lube or preventative maintenance space is very fragmented, so there's roll-up opportunities, right? There's we drive a lot of our growth from acquisition, both us and our franchisees, as do our competitors. And it's high margin, like car wash. The only difference is it's very resilient to the economic swings, which car wash is not, and is proving to be more challenging in the current landscape. So we're when you look at all the players on the quick, all of us are growing units and consolidating the market. And what that means is, any new realist- and they're also developing new construction. So it's not just a roll-up, there's also new construction builds across almost all of the top players.
And so what that means is that when you're going to look at a site, there may be more competition for it, but that's been the case for the last few years. So I'm not really seeing it getting worse, but also see it still maintaining in competitive intensity.
Newer locations are ramping, and you're rolling out in markets, and those continue to ramp with-
Correct.
No issues.
Like, as long as Costco is still building or, Sam's Club is now still building sites, there's new retail development-
Right
... that needs a quick lube, by the way, and a car wash, but,
Right
... and that's where people are gonna be, and that, those stores do great.
Yeah. Yeah, we had a lull for a few years, but we seem to be-
We did
... building some, yeah.
We did.
Margins. You're ending 2023, I think, at the low end of the-
Yeah
... 26%-29% EBITDA margin range. What are the levers that will drive us either higher end of this range or outside of this range over time? And why shouldn't the margin steadily approach the four wall that you're doing at the store level?
Yeah, you know, it's important when you look at 2023, we landed at 26.3. That was a 50 basis point increase from the year before, so, you know, pretty good improvement. There are really three things that are gonna drive that EBIT margin from the low end to the high end over the next three to five years. First is we're gonna continue to get SG&A leverage. We still have to grow our SG&A. A lot of that comes with new store marketing, that once we get to 100 units on the company side, will actually maintain and will not grow at the same rate that it has been.
Then, you have a lot of the other just basic general and administrative costs, which again, will have some pockets of capability investment, but those aren't gonna grow in the double digits, you know, like our total sales will grow. So we'll get leverage out of SG&A that will drive that up, and that'll happen every year, right? Every year, we'll get better. Second is on the company store. One of the things... You can't have spent as much time in a win on price retailer focused on lowest cost. You cannot leave that environment and come into an environment like Valvoline and not see opportunity for more efficiency on the company-operated stores. So that'll drive some incremental leverage as we get more efficient, as we scale.
They've been focused on scaling and driving top line, less focus on efficiency and getting more juice from the squeeze. So that'll be an opportunity. And then, the biggest one will be that maturity of stores. As new stores become a smaller piece of the base, that'll improve, but also the mix shift towards franchise. The margin being three times what it is for company, that will also lift the margin towards the low end, and all of those things working in concert will deliver some really strong margin improvement.
Makes sense. Base oils, demystifying it a bit.
Mm-hmm.
The legacy company, we have a little, I guess, post-trauma from-
Of course
... base oil volatility. Can you talk about... How does base oil affect the business today?
Yeah.
What should we think about? What should we worry about? What should we be excited about?
Yeah. I think be excited that it doesn't have the same kind of impact-
Yeah
... as it would on the product side. If I think we're very clear in our last earnings call that a $1 increase on base oils is about a $0.50 cost increase per transaction or 50 basis points. So it is really quite small in comparison to what it was before, and part of that is because a 50% of our base oil increase, it gets passed on to franchisees. Whether it goes up or down, it passes on penny for penny to the franchisees, so it is not a tailwind or a headwind. There might be some timing gaps, but it's very muted. And then, within the company operations, we actually sell the waste oil to offset any increase. So as base oils go up, our price for waste oil goes up, and it offsets.
It's a natural hedge up and down, and that's the reason why it's so muted in terms of the impact. So you think about $1 on an annualized basis, it's like $5 million-$10 million of EBITDA. So it's so small, and for us, we're looking at pricing all the time-
Mm-hmm
... and we're optimizing our discounting for consumers and fleets.
Right.
$0.50 is an easy thing to actually make a change on if we, if we needed to.
Right.
The good news is, as base oils drop, no one in our industry drops pricing because the lubricant price is such a small part of the overall cost equation. Labor and labor inflation is really what we should be talking about.
Okay, we'll get there. Waste oil, base oil, waste oil.
Yeah.
Do we have to... How do we think about the waste oil?
Just don't even-
Okay.
We shouldn't even be talking about it.
It's a waste.
It's a waste.
Okay. Won't go there. Okay.
Thank you.
I'll, I'll get to labor in a second. One more question. Non-oil change revenue, it's been trickling up?
Right.
Yeah. Where is it as a percentage of the business? What are the opportunities? Where can it go to?
Yeah, it's a little bit less than 25% of our ticket today, and most of the reason it's, it's dropped a little bit is because our oil pricing has gone - our oil change pricing has gone up, and the synthetic mix has gotten greater. So that part of the ticket is growing faster than the non-oil change revenue part of the ticket. But it - non-oil change revenue penetration has been a good 100-150 basis points of same-store sales growth. And as we look at just... We - a lot of what we did this last year was low-hanging fruit. We hadn't focused on it during COVID. There were a lot of things where there was one significant thing, cabin air filter, which we stopped doing during COVID, because we didn't want our employees to go into the car-
Mm-hmm
... to make the guest nervous and/or our employees nervous, given COVID. And so restarting that in a consistent way gave us some uplift. We've also created tools, and the retention of our staff gives us a boost. And so I think all of these things in concert. But we still have a huge range between top quartile and bottom quartile stores.
Mm-hmm.
We've got market trainers now focused on bottom quartile stores to uplift the training and improve the performance. We still see several years of that kind of tailwind to capture.
I'm gonna ask about labor and then EVs-
Right
... unless there's any questions in the last, call it, seven or so minutes. So labor.
Yeah.
Teed it up, and it's my fault it wasn't even on my list. But I guess, tailoring the labor model, but we've seen a lot of inflation-
Yeah
... in wage rates. Where, where is that? And then how have you managed operationally-
Yeah
... to balance the service side of it?
So obviously, coming out of COVID, with the war for talent, there was massive inflation on the labor side just to keep stores staffed. That has definitely dissipated. Our attrition rate is at, for October, was the lowest we've experienced in over 24 months. And so we... One, some of that is the market, but some of it is very specific initiatives we've put in place around onboarding, some of it in recruiting, in terms of setting expectations, scheduling for new members of the team, and then training, how we train them and when they have to stand on their own. We saw a big drop-off in new employees on day seven, 'cause that's when we expected them to do the job on their own. And it's a. If you've been in the store, it's a complicated job.
Mm-hmm.
And so just making some tweaks in that kept people longer, and the longer you stay, the attrition rate just falls off. So we feel, we feel really good about where the market is, where there's still opportunity for us to improve, but, that has really helped us focus on, training and just around the process execution.
Okay. And then EV-
And-
Yeah.
I think inflation will... Inflation of wages are gonna keep going, but not at the rate they were.
Yeah.
I think right now, most of the economic indicators that we've seen-
Right
... is it's somewhere in the 3%-4%-
Right
... is what we're expecting. What we're doing is all of the efficiency piece I talked to you about before. We're assuming that those counter-
Right
... some of that wage inflation.
Most or many of your store managers there are getting promoted from within?
Yes. So, no store manager is a store manager until they've
Right
... don't start as a store manager. We don't import-
Right
... store managers. The most senior we'll hire in, and it's about 3%, or 2% or 3%, is assistant store manager.
Right.
They have to learn the process, and then they get promoted. Our average store manager tenure is at least three years.
Right.
Area managers is the next rung. They're five to seven years. Market managers are 10-15 years on average.
Yeah.
Regionals, around 15-20, and our VPs are 30+.
Right.
It's an apprenticeship model.
Yeah.
Because of the growth, there's so much opportunity.
Yeah
... and it creates a great dynamic.
Right. But I think it insulates a bit from war on talent, because you can't hire-
Right
... someone else's manager to then plug into your system.
It does. It does make that challenging, but interesting. The company a while ago realized that when they put two store managers in a store, they more than pay for the second store manager.
Hmm.
That actually creates a feeder for when you have a store manager leave and/or a new store open, and then you backfill, and they train under a more seasoned store manager. There are things that the company had done and trialed for different reasons that are now serving us well with the attrition that we had been facing in the last two years.
Yep. On EVs, unless anyone has any questions, so, you know, even related to your prior role-
Yeah
... you can model out a food business.
Yeah, you can.
With, you know, decent amount of conviction.
There's some good analogies there.
Right. Here, you know, you know, you have a business that at some point changes profoundly. You know, there's a lot of time until that happens. You know, how do you spend your, how do you spend your time even thinking about it and spending, you know, the energy-
Yeah
...strategizing how to pivot? And then, yeah, I don't know, open-ended of when there starts to be changes that you're enacting to take advantage of that market.
Yeah. So similar to e-commerce, physical retail, it's about what customers go away from the proposition you have today. And, you know, if you assume you did nothing else, how much time do you have? And the reality is because of the difference of 50 cars a day versus 30-
Yeah
... just like happened in electronics, there are companies that will go out of business and allow retailers like Best Buy a lot of runway to figure out how it will evolve to meet the needs of the customer, changing customer dynamic. So we do have time. That said, we believe it will happen. Whether it happens to get to 100% of the market or 20% of the market, it doesn't matter. We're gonna have customers who move from an ICE or a hybrid to an EV, and they're still gonna need preventative maintenance service.
For us, it's about figuring out what the service mix will look like, figuring out how we train our team and make sure that our stores can service those vehicles and the services that we would provide, and two, really understanding what the ticket might look like and the frequency for the customer. And that's the piece that's still unfolding. So just looking at the largest vehicle producer, EV producer, they charge for a service package that's between $250 and $350 a year, and has either one or two maintenance checks per year. Most of the customers don't like to go to that OEM because they can't get in, it's not timely, it's not convenient, it's not easy. So I think for us, you know, you'd have to say: Are people gonna still wanna maintain their cars? Yes.
Are they gonna want it to be quick and easy? Yes. Are the OEMs gonna change the way they do it to be a better service provider than us? I'm not sure. I could say yes.
Right.
Probably no. Will the ticket be significant enough, and can we provide value?
Right.
Likely, yes. Then it becomes down to what services will it be?
Right.
There'll be more wheel well, but there'll be also some parts replacement.
Right.
and I put odds on us-
Sure
... that we'll be able to figure it out, and we'll have the customer experience. Fortune just came out with their first, customer experience, Best Customer Experience list. Across all brands, we're 11.
Congratulations. Yeah.
So-
Yeah
... I think I'd bet on Valvoline to be able to be the preventative maintenance provider of choice.
Quick and easy, and EV, is... There's enough boxes that you can check off of services?
Yes.
Yeah.
Yes. Yes.
I don't know, I don't know how to change oil on an ICE, so. Perfect. Well, with that, we will end there. Thank you very much for being here. Good luck.
Okay.
You started your next fiscal year, so good luck.
Thank you.
Thanks.
Thank you.
Yeah, appreciate it.
Thank you.