Hear from Regis Corporation CEO, Matthew Doctor and CFO, Kersten Zupfer Live at ICR Conference

Yes, absolutely. I'll give a little bit of a background on the tractors. So I started my career in finance. I was an investment banker at Virginia Morgan to start my career, not even in retailing. I was in the financial institutions group; we covered specialty lenders in crisis. Decided I wanted something completely different, entered the franchising world and have not looked back. I had the unique opportunity of really seeing franchising from both sides. I was part of a larger global franchise award or Iran Global development and franchising performance for the foreign development efforts there. And actually I became a franchisee also, stepped on the other side of the table. Always wanted to be an entrepreneur and got to do that after selling the treatment of large-scale franchise ownership for so long. Became the largest Tim Hortons franchise in the system thanks to that in 2020 and found my way to Regis actually originally as an independent contractor. I was brought in to lead our transition business model. We are historically an operator of response and we're moving to fully franchise business. Valued quite well for my background. And when I got here as a consultant, I was like, 'Wow, there is an incredible platform.' No doubt it's going to hit a little bit hard by the pandemic, but underlying are incredible brands, strong awareness, the risky background, a new business model that I thought it felt for the new day, actually really, really vulnerable part of kind of Regis 2.0.

Yeah, no, absolutely. So really the last year was about prioritizing. As I mentioned, the pandemic hit hard, and so kind of look to prioritize it alongside two lenses: one, getting Regis stabilizing right. Everything so what that looks like a lot of last year was focusing on streamlining our G&A, focusing on storing for a balance sheet, focusing on our business. We sold out of a proprietary technology, which came as capital for a balance. We had a credit agreement brief finance that was coming due in March of 2023. We did an extension on that, pushing its maturity. I know by the way last year, after losing 70 million dollars in 2021, we broke even internally. So the big thing on the stabilizers in the background, prioritizing again what it is that we're going to do sort of going forward, sort of accelerating our salon business. So we put in place a great strategy with our franchise owners after listening to them, really focused on priorities moving forward of retaining and recruiting stylists, shifting customer marketing to retain our customers better, rolling out our new tech platform, and engage.

Unbelievably resilient, bold, and passionate. Those are two things that came extremely well from everything that I've seen from here going through the pandemic. You have a group of people who are so proud, and they're just so proud of the brands, they're so proud to be here. We want to bring this company back to prominence. That has really energized me, I know it's energized Kirsten, and that's kind of the end.

Yeah, no, this is a company that's been extremely resilient through recessions. And I didn't ask this question, it has proven that's not necessarily a pandemic group, but from a recession standpoint, people looking to get their haircuts even wanted to get done outside of their home, they wanted to be done by trained professionals. We have even our brands have offered an incredible price point playing in the value sector, 20 to 25, so that's going to be attractive. It's an opportunity and it's true. Maybe a little less like having great values. The things that we're doing to brand loyalty, stylist loyalty, resilient. So we think that we're building on top of the basement, it was already a very well recession-ready business.

Yeah, we're putting a lot of investment into school waivers of English, and that's what mission not only especially here in Arkansas, our employee base facilities. New detention campaigns, ability to better live through the data. So we're making a lot of investments happen again to support our main campus.

Yeah, I'm really excited about executing. Like I said, 2022 was an amazing year stabilizing, leading the company up, getting on path of property. We did all of that without even really scratching the surface of the fire over. So we're on this path now. We're at the beginning stage, so I executed one that's best for making an education customer retention, and when that shows them in our results.