Conference Transcript - VVV 2026-06-02

Craig Kennison, Analyst — Baird Research

All right. Well, thank you again for being here at the, I think, last presentation of the day. I'm grateful to have you here. I'm Craig Kennison from Baird Research, and we're introducing Valvoline today. Valvoline is the leading provider of fast oil changes and other services through about 2,400 locations, about half of which are owned and the other half are owned through franchises. I noted recently that as a franchise, it was listed as the number one automotive franchise by Entrepreneur Magazine, which is a high mark for the company. It's also a best idea at Baird. This is an idea we've highlighted as one of our favorite ideas. So we're glad all of you are here to hear the story. And Kevin's going to walk through some slides. And from there, we will take your questions and also engage in a fireside chat. So, Kevin Willis, the CFO.

Kevin Willis, CFO

Thanks, Craig. Great to be here today. I will just briefly walk you through a few slides. These, with the exception of one, were all used at our investor update back in December of last year. But for folks in the room who may not be as familiar with the company, this will give you just a little bit of an idea of who we are, and then we'll delve a little more deeply as we get into the fireside and the Q&A. So, we are the category leader. We're the largest quick lube chain in North America with over 2,400 units. We have differentiated capabilities, which do help us drive margin and growth. We generate a lot of cash. We reinvest a lot of that cash in the business. Unit economics for us are very strong, both on the company-owned side as well as on the franchise side. And so we continue to invest in new units through acquisition and through ground-up builds. builds. Our franchise partners are doing the same. Last year, we added around 170 units. And again, unit economics tend to run in the mid to high teen IRR. And at maturity, our stores on the company and the franchise side tend to generate around 30% cash on cash return. So it's a compelling investment opportunity. It's a very fragmented market that we live in. We have approximately 6% share. There are about $470 million do-it-for-me oil changes done each year. We have 6% share in that. Total quick lube space has around 30% share, 25 to 30%. So there's a lot of white space for us. Today, our 2,400 stores are within about 10 minutes of around 40 percent of the car park so again a lot of a lot of white space and we have significant growth plans to continue to grow our footprint to continue to optimize the business that we have in the current footprint as well as to adjust to the changing needs of the car park and very importantly our customer base we have a compelling brand the business has been around for 40 years as a quick business. The Valvoline brand has been around for 160 years, so recognized as really the first motor oil brand in the world. We have built a scale network, 2,400 stores. As we indicated at our investor update back in December, we plan to ramp that to north of 2,900 stores by 2028, driving towards our next level, which is 3,500 units across the U.S. and Canada. Our teams are very tenured. Our leadership tends to come from first day in the bay, and you look at our leadership structure across the system. People who are store managers were technicians. People who are area managers were store managers. Market managers were area managers. That's the way we have grown the business over the course of time. The business has been very sticky from a leadership perspective. We have two vice presidents of operation. One runs the east, one runs the west. Both of them started in the Bay north of 30 years ago. So it's a very dedicated team, very tenured team. We also have a very committed group of franchise partners. The average franchise partner has been with the system for over 25 years. Our two or three largest have been with the system for over 30 years. We have about, call it six to eight franchise partners that make up roughly 70 to 80 percent of our franchise store base. Total Franchise Partners number just north of 40. This is all about the customer experience as well as the employee experience. We have a process we call Super Pro. This is what guides our store team in terms of serving our guests the same way and in a great way every day. The result of that is evidenced in NPS scores that are north of 80%. Google star ratings of 4.7 on over 1 million reviews. within Google. I've already talked about this. Our strategy is really simple. It's three pillars. We want to drive the full potential of our core business. We want to continue to deliver sustainable, and that means profitable and high return network growth. And we want to innovate. We want to meet the customer where they are, provide what they need, when they need it, and how they need it. And so we want to continue to do these things in the context of creating long-term shareholder value, high returns for our shareholders as well as for our franchise partners which will keep them investing in in the businesses they have been doing we recently did our second quarter march quarter earnings call we updated our outlook for the full year raising raising the comp system-wide same store sales growth we didn't change our system-wide store additions we expect to be in the range on that net revenues we did not change adjusted EBITDA we increased we increased the range and the top end of the range as well, also increasing EPS. CapEx expectations have not changed. If you look back at our investor update, we set what we call financial commitments. We take that word commitment very seriously. The comp in the near term, medium term, three to five percent comp growth, nine to 11 percent total top line growth, low to mid-teens, EBITDA growth, mid to high teens, EPS growth, increasing margins by 100 to 200 basis points, and we'll drive that through a number of levers. It's not hope. Hope's not a strategy. We have a plan around that. Also, we plan to increase free cash flow quite significantly over the medium term, get back to target leverage. We're making good progress on that, and generate top quartile shareholder returns. It's pretty simple. It's not easy, but it's a pretty simple story to tell. So with that, we'll get started on the Q&A and the far side.

Craig Kennison, Analyst — Baird Research

Yeah. Well, thank you, Kevin. And please feel free to ask a question. You can send a question to me on the iPad as well. Let's start with the comp. I mean, it's a difficult consumer environment. This audience has been listening to a lot of different messages around the consumer today. What drives your traffic? And then also, what drives your ability to deliver a positive

Kevin Willis, CFO

comp in almost any environment? So we're fortunate to have delivered 19 consecutive years of same store sales growth. So even during the economic downturn of 2008-9, even during COVID, we were able to deliver both ticket and transaction growth during those periods. As you look at the business. I think we view what we do, preventive maintenance, as a largely non-discretionary service. People want to maintain their vehicle. For most, it's either the largest or the second largest asset that they own. And maintaining that vehicle is something that's important to most of our customer base. Providing world-class service each and every time a customer enters the Bay is also important. You know, you look at our customer base, nearly 85% of the customers that we serve, we have served before. And it gets back to those NPS scores. It gets back to the Google ratings. But it's really driven by the quick, easy, trusted experience that we provide to our customers every day, whether they're a first-time visitor or whether they've been with us for many, many years. And that is done very, very consistently, both at company and franchise stores. We have a common point of sales system that helps lead our associates through the process when a customer enters the bay to provide them with the most information, the most up-to-date information, and the best information possible so that they can make decisions about the services that we do for their vehicle. And another piece of that is, as part of that, it's a no-pressure type environment. And, you know, again, the customer experience, the employee experience is very consistent, whether across franchise or company stores. Driven by our super pro process, we provide 270 hours of training to every technician. And that's also done on the franchise side of the house. And again, providing a very positive quality,

Craig Kennison, Analyst — Baird Research

consistent experience across the board. How do fuel costs impact that consumer decision? And we're all listening to headlines today about gas prices being high. And what's the impact for

Kevin Willis, CFO

you? Sure, sure. I think to a degree, we're kind of an uncharted territory when it comes to that. But having said that, as we look back in history, we've seen little to no impact in consumer behavior in terms of miles driven. COVID was a little different on the miles driven part, drain intervals, et cetera. People still want to maintain that asset. And so they tend to continue to do that. As I look back to June of 2022, that was when we last saw national average gasoline prices north of $4 per gallon. There were a lot of other inflationary issues at the time as well. I mean, overall inflation was quite high. We didn't see a change in consumer behavior then, and thus far during this Iran conflict, we've also not seen a change in consumer behavior now. Our consumers are acting as they have been acting prior to the conflict. We talked about it on the earnings call a little bit. We saw no change in April. You know, we just finished May, and as we look at consumer behavior for May, it was just like April, which was just like the March quarter, which was just like the December quarter. Our consumer base is acting as it has in the past. We've seen no trade downs. We have seen premium mix has actually improved. NOCR penetration, non-oil change revenue penetration has continued to be strong. As we look at the comp in the March quarter, about 30 percent of the comp was transaction. We saw transaction growth across the system. About 70% was around ticket. Ticket contribution came from all three areas for us, which is net price, premiumization, as well as non-oil change revenue services. And I would say, I think it's important to note premiumization is one of those things that it's a natural tailwind for us as the car park evolves. More and more cars that are coming into our space require a more premium lubricant. And so we'll naturally see premiumization penetration increase over the course of time as older cars age out, newer cars come into the car park. But to be clear, we have not seen any change in consumer behavior. Miles driven remain consistent. Drain intervals remain consistent. Customer behavior remains very

Craig Kennison, Analyst — Baird Research

consistent for us. If we could dig into the ticket side just a little more on the premiumization trend. If you model this out, looking at the population changes in vehicles, how durable a

Kevin Willis, CFO

driver is that synthetic oil driver? Yeah, I think it has a lot of runway. The way we define premium oil changes internally and the way we talk about it externally includes really two levels of service. We offer a good, better, best. A lot of folks in the space just offer conventional and synthetic. We have an offering in the middle called Max Life, which is a semi-synthetic that consumers can choose to use, and many do. About 80% of the oil changes we do today are either Max Life or full synthetic. And of that, call it 80%, a bit north of half of those are full synthetic. So as you think about cars coming into the car park, almost everything that's centering the car park today is going to require a full synthetic lubricant, and as a result of that, we see a fair bit of runway in the full synthetic side of the house. It'll likely come from the Max Life piece, which is a semi-synthetic, but it still makes the mix more premium and adds more margin as our customer base moves to the full synthetic side of the equation.

Craig Kennison, Analyst — Baird Research

and uh thinking about price uh one of your inputs is oil and so how does the increase in the cost of oil play in terms of your cost structure and then your ability to price for it sure and and

Kevin Willis, CFO

we have we talked about it on the earnings call we have seen cost increases come through and we and our franchise partners are proactively moving on price to cover those cost increases i think one of the misconceptions is that lubricant cost is a much bigger driver of our cost of goods sold than it actually is. If you look across our network, average ticket is, let's call it around $110 per oil change. And of that, you look at the lubricant piece of the cost of goods sold, we're generating, let's call it round numbers, a 40% gross profit margin on that. Round numbers, the lubricant piece is 20% to 25% of cogs. Labor is actually the largest piece of cogs for us. And so as lubricant costs have increased, we have changed pricing, as have our franchise partners. But these are single-digit percentages in terms of price changes that need to be made. And depending on where oil goes and where the cost of base oil goes, which is the primary input to our lubricant, We'll adjust pricing as necessary. I think there are a couple of other aspects to this. Unlike a trip to the grocery store, which happens once a week or multiple times per week for some folks, people tend to get their oil changed, their car serviced a couple of times per year. And when you compare the cost of preventive maintenance to the cost of a significant repair or to the cost of upgrading your vehicle to a new or newer vehicle, given what those costs have done, getting preventive maintenance is pretty compelling. I think another piece of the equation is a lot of our customer base tends to be more habitual in terms of how they act. So if I'm going on a road trip, I want somebody to lay eyes on my car. And not only do we provide the preventive maintenance, We do an 18-point safety inspection. We check your headlights, your taillights, your turn signals, all those things that could cause you issues if they're not working properly. And people like that peace of mind. And so, again, a certain part of our customer base really relies on more timing or more of an habitual approach as opposed to the light came on and I need to do something about that.

Craig Kennison, Analyst — Baird Research

There have been some recent headlines surrounding the supply of oil and whether that could be a problem in your channel. What's the update there?

Kevin Willis, CFO

Really no change from the earnings call. I think the language we used was, you know, we don't see an issue for the foreseeable future, and I know that may be kind of a nebulous comment, but let me put a little bit of perspective around it. Our primary supplier for lubricant is a very strategic supplier. We used to, in fact, be part of the same company, and that company is now part of Saudi Aramco. And lots of resources. We are a very strategic and important customer for them. We're the largest player in the quick lube space in North America. And I think as you look at the potential for that, I think there's a large standard deviation between kind of the smallest and the largest in terms of how that supply chain will ultimately work out. But, you know, we also share a brand. So not only are we Valvoline instant oil change, but it's also Valvoline Global Operations. And brand, especially for a 160-year-old brand, is a very, very important thing. And we're working together to protect that, I would say, and to strengthen the brand. And so, you know, there's a lot of, you know, it's a very symbiotic relationship in a lot of ways. And it's a relationship that I don't think really exists in any other part of the quick-loop space today.

Craig Kennison, Analyst — Baird Research

So 2,400 stores, give or take, with clear plans to grow that every single year. Talk about the franchise side of that and the kind of commitments you have already in place.

Kevin Willis, CFO

As we talk about on the investor update, very recently, the last 12 to 18 months, all of our large franchise partners and some of the smaller ones have signed up for new development agreements. We talked about it at the investor update, I believe, and I'm doing this from memory, so you may need to check me, but I think they've signed up for approximately 650 units over the course of the next five years. those units are also tied to incentives that our franchise partners receive as they continue to comply with their commitments and and those incentives are tied to every gallon of lubricant that they buy it's not just incremental to the units that they've committed to add it's really across their their individual network so they're incentivized to to meet these commitments and earn those incentives and we want them to earn those incentives and so to the extent we we might have a franchise partner that's not you know that's not up to date and we measure this quarterly we want to work with them and help them to figure out what kind of roadblocks they're facing what kind of you know what kind of things we can do to help them be more successful because we want to pay them those incentives to grow that to grow that network and I think today about 50 percent

Craig Kennison, Analyst — Baird Research

of your stores are franchised what is the optimal mix and and how do you get to that level yeah the

Kevin Willis, CFO

question comes up a lot I think as you as you look at the business in terms of when and how it was formed and how it's grown up that that was probably something that if you were going to commit to an optimal optimal mix you probably would have done it a long time ago before we got to where we are today and so we don't think of it that way we think of it more in terms of how do we want the future to unfold. And, you know, ultimately what we've committed to is getting to a new store addition per year of about 250 stores. And we'd like to see about 150 of those come from franchise partners and about 100 of those come from company-owned stores, either acquisitions or new builds. Same on the franchise side. And we're making progress on that. It takes a while to get to where we need to be. Those development agreements are really critical to that. That's a lot of what gets us to where we need to be on that mix. But over the course of time, what we would expect is that the franchise side would commit more than on the company side.

Craig Kennison, Analyst — Baird Research

You're about six or seven months into the acquisition of Breeze. Talk about the strategy behind that decision and some of the synergies that you're pursuing today.

Kevin Willis, CFO

Sure. So in any given year, X-Breeze, we will buy 30 to 40 quick lubes that we convert to Valvoline locations. We run our playbook against these stores. We evaluate them in our very sophisticated real estate modeling tool and system, which has the history of every store we own and have opened in it. and so we can predict with a pretty high degree of certainty at maturity what these stores will do from an AUV perspective and that's actually quite accurate typically as we see stores ramp to maturity. Breeze is really like five years of that all at once so as as we looked at those stores we we were able to evaluate every location and get a get an idea about what they would do over the the course of time. If you look at the Breeze stores that we acquired, they run about a million to 1.1 million of AUV, which is pretty typical for a new ground up for us. And typically it will take, call it three to five years to get a ground up store, can be three to four, even five years for an acquired store, depending on where it starts, to get to maturity. But the idea is we run that playbook. And over the course of time, those stores go from a million, 1.1 million to our system-wide AUV average, which is 1.7 to 1.8 million per store. That's where the value proposition is created. Now, that's done through a combination of really implementing our playbook. And what does that mean? Well, first of all, it's branding, which is very important because we have a very old and very trusted brand. Second part is our point of sale system combined with the 270 hours of technician training that we do. This is what helps our team in the bays actually lead themselves and the customer through the process. The other piece of this equation is the marketing playbook that we execute. Most stores that we acquire spend very little to even nothing on marketing and advertising, and we have a very sophisticated approach to that that we implement and execute against. And so all these things in combination tends to drive that AEV over the course of, again, three to five years, depending on where a store starts. As you look at the Breeze stores, they fit that profile perfectly. The stores that we acquired are pretty much all in locations that we liked. We evaluated those locations and confirmed that prior to doing the deal. And we saw the opportunity to actually build that base from where it is to kind of the system-wide average of 1.7 to 1.8. So that's really the value proposition over the course of time is to execute the playbook and ultimately reap the rewards that that tends to provide. And that's what we're focused on doing. I think it helps that the Breeze culture is very well aligned with the Valvoline culture. You don't always find that. When we do small acquisitions, it's oftentimes a very different culture. I mean, these are lifestyle businesses. They're mom and pops, and they operate very differently. Breeze stores operate much more like a Valvoline instant oil change than not. They just haven't had the benefit of the playbook. They haven't had the benefit of the brand. They haven't had the benefit of the investment that we can make in the team and the technology to actually grow those stores to their potential. And so that's really the play.

Craig Kennison, Analyst — Baird Research

Would you say there was a misunderstanding at the time the deal was announced, or did the market react in a way that you didn't expect?

Kevin Willis, CFO

So I think the market reacted in a fairly neutral manner when the deal was originally announced, which, you know, for most M&A deals, that's actually a positive thing. based on my experience anyway. I think where ambiguity entered into the system was with the HSR second request. That was a very long, drawn-out process. There had never been anything like that in the quick lube space that had happened before. I mean, it resulted in us having to divest 45 of the 207 stores that we thought we were getting, 202 stores, I guess. And so, you know, that was a long, drawn-out, exhaustive process. And typically, in an M&A context, when you strike a deal with a seller to buy an asset, to buy a business, the two companies start working kind of hand-in-glove day one after the acquisition is announced to figure out kind of what transitions look like, et cetera. Because of the FTC process, we really weren't able to have much interaction until it was concluded. And then we jumped in and, you know, we closed the deal and really started down the day one part first. I want to make sure we got that right. And then into that initial transition of integrating the two management teams, which we did. And now we're in the conversion phase of the process, converting the oil changers, breeze stores, to babbling us into oil changers. We didn't do any of those in the March quarter, but we have started converting the stores as of this quarter.

Craig Kennison, Analyst — Baird Research

Most of your customer base would be consumers, but talk about the fleet opportunity that you have as well.

Kevin Willis, CFO

You know, fleet still represents less than 10% of our system-wide sales today, growing very rapidly. I think if you look at the last few years, the fleet top-line growth CAGR is around 17%. So it's growing at a very healthy rate. Average ticket is higher than on the consumer side, typically because of more non-oil change revenue services that we tend to do with fleet. There's also more premium mix because the age of the fleet vehicles tends to be less, and they require more premium lubricant. So all those things tend to lead towards a higher ticket. We have a very system-wide approach to the fleet business that we employ. We have a dedicated team that looks after fleet both for company and for much of our franchise business as well. And so it's definitely an area of opportunity for us that we see plenty of continued growth runway going into the future. And just as an aside, we also see that as a really nice growth opportunity for the Breeze acquired stores as well. Their fleet business is probably where ours was maybe 10 years ago in terms of penetration and et cetera. So we've already started working with the oil changers team to take advantage of what we can do around fleet at this point.

Craig Kennison, Analyst — Baird Research

And I'm sure this topic comes up from time to time, but with the change in the vehicle population, including more EV, electric vehicles, what are the implications for Valvoline and how are you going to configure the portfolio to evolve with it?

Kevin Willis, CFO

Sure. We are continuing to invest resources and better understanding, you know, not just the electric vehicles, but the overall maintenance requirements and needs of the electric vehicles. We've done focus groups to help us understand what electrical vehicle owners, you know, think and feel about maintaining their vehicles. That's evolved over the course of time. I think initially people had a misunderstanding that, you know, these vehicles do require maintenance. And I think in the end, what we want to be prepared to do when the time comes, and this is a ways down the road. I mean, it's probably been pushed out at least five years from where it was a couple years ago and perhaps more. We want to be prepared to leverage our scope, our scale, our network, and our team to provide appropriate services at the appropriate time. Today, there's not enough critical mass for us to invest in that. So what we continue to do is invest in a small internal team around continuing to understand, continuing to pay attention, continuing to keep both us as a leadership team as well as our board updated on what the space is doing, where it's headed, and how we can play in all of that.

Craig Kennison, Analyst — Baird Research

my guess is we have about 30 to 60 seconds left but maybe just talk about the balance sheet and the opportunity to get back into share repurchase mode sure happy to happy to do so

Kevin Willis, CFO

you know we were really pleased with the march quarter we were at 3.3 turns of leverage we calculate that net debt to EBITDA during the quarter we took that down 20 basis points our leverage target is one and a half to two and a half times EBITDA which we plan to get to via a combination of EBITDA growth, which we've historically done at a pretty rapid clip, as well as reducing absolute debt along the way. During the investor update, we committed to an 18- to 24-month timeline to get there, really pleased with the progress. Shaving off 20 basis points at a quarter is pretty strong, and if we can continue at a clip like that, we'll be back in share repurchase mode much, much sooner than that. And we've said multiple times, we want to get back into share repurchase mode as quickly as possible. You know, the share price is, it's a screaming buy, in our opinion, right now. And, you know, much of the team has put their money where their mouth is, yours truly included on that front. And, you know, we just think there's a disconnect, there's a dislocation in what people believe the business and the business model to be versus what it is. and non-discretionary services tend to be just that. And so we see a very healthy and bright future for this business going forward, and I couldn't be more excited to be a part of it.

Craig Kennison, Analyst — Baird Research

We are right there with you. Thank you so much, Kevin.

Kevin Willis, CFO

Thank you. Appreciate the time.