Kimberly McWaters
Analyst · Piper Jaffray. Please go ahead with your question
Thanks, Jody, good afternoon, everyone. We appreciate you being with us today. For those of you who are new to the company, UTI is the nation’s leading provider of technician training for the automotive, diesel, motorcycle and marine industries. We have graduated more than 200,000 technicians in our 51-year history. Our pledge to our students is to give them a quality education that prepares them for good job and helps them build rewarding careers in the growing transportation industry. We are exceedingly proud of our 88% graduate placement rate for 2016. We believe our strong student outcomes are the result of our quality programs, our dedicated intelligent employees and our partnerships with select industry leaders such as BMW, Cummins, Ford, Freightliner, GM, Harley-Davidson, Honda, Infinity, Mercury Marine, NASCAR, Peterbilt, and Porsche just to name a few. Our commitment to our shareholders is to return the profitability and create long term value. As part of our work to deliver on that commitment we announced our financial improvement plan in September 2016 and since that time we have accomplished quite a bit. We generated 9.2 million in cost savings and improved operating income by 3.6 million year-over-year in the first quarter. Of course, we still have work to do primarily on the front end of the business and we will continue to optimize our marketing mix between traditional and digital media and balance our advertising investment on a national and local basis, all the while ensuring we made adjustments based on macro factors and student trends. Today’s marketing environment provides us with opportunities and challenges. It enables us to reach our target demographics more efficiently through a variety of media, but it also requires a constant orchestration between technology, people and third party agencies to deliver results. During the first quarter, we encountered some challenges with inquiry [ph] volumes and conversion rates which translated into lower than expected results. From these challenges we learnt a great deal and made some adjustments in December that are positively impacting these volumes. We continue to dial in our marketing strategies to cost effectively increase, increase in new student enrolment as we are dedicated to strong student outcomes, we are squarely focused on balancing the quantity of increase with the quality of candidates. We will continue to optimize our marketing mix to support our goal to grow starts in the second half of the year and we remain commitment to striking the right balance between maintaining a prudent cost structure while also investing in our future. The macro environment remains challenging but we are very focussed on what we can control. We have several initiatives underway to support new student growth in the back half of 2017. Our first initiative pertains to high schools where we are working to get in front of perspective students and their families, often in concert with local employers to clearly articulate UTIs value proposition and the benefits of the technician career path. In addition to discussing employer’s unprecedented demand for skilled technicians, our admissions team is giving prospective students and their families’ powerful real world examples of their career opportunities available to them and just how UTI education can pay off. For parents and prospective students, the department of education’s college scorecard provides compelling data and demonstrates that our outcomes including our student’s tenure median earnings compared quite favourably with other educational institutions including most community colleges and many four year liberal arts universities. Our second initiative is in the military segment where we are working with congressional leaders to help us regain access to the military basis so that we can educate transitioning service members about the great careers available in transportation and our industries partners’ preference to hire our nations heroes. Our third initiative is to grow, develop and promote our tuition reimbursement and incentive program. An increasing number of employers participate in this program which helps mitigate concerns from parents and prospective students about the cost of the UTI education and their ability to repay student loans. The program is also a highly effective tool for employers to recruit and retain UTI trained technicians. Our fourth initiative is to grow our graduate pipeline. To support this effort, we successfully transitioned our admissions teams to our new graduate based compensation plan and we did that in October. While it is early in the transition, we believe that this change will benefit our students, our employers and our business. Our fifth initiative is to improve student show and retention rates, which are critical to the success of our students and our business performance. We have initiatives underway to identify and support at risk students and to help them stay in school, complete their education and get the support they need as they embark on their new careers. Our sixth initiative is to continue our focus on strengthening relationships with industry partners and delivering value to our students. To that end, our infinity manufacturer’s specific advanced training program will launch at our Long Beach campus this spring. Like our other manufacturers who offer paid programs, Infinity will give free tuition to students who are accepted into the program and agree to go to work in Infinity dealerships once they complete their training. Infinity is the first Asian manufacturer to invest in a paid advanced training program at one of our campuses. I’m also pleased to announce that we are expanding our relationships with one of our key OEM Partners. For many years we have worked with this partner to train entry level technicians and we are now helping to train their existing workforce in geographies where technician demand is far outpacing the supply of entry level technicians. We believe that this opportunity exists with other OEMs and many other industry partners enabling us the ability to create additional continuing education platforms which can be attractive opportunities to generate non-Title IV revenue. Another key business initiative we discussed previously and talked more about last quarter is to open commuter campuses in locations with strong student and employer demand. We believe this initiative will support our goal of generating profitable growth even during difficult cycles. Commuter campuses attract a local population of students who can work and live at home without incurring the cost and uncertainty of relocating to come to school. Our newest campus in Long Beach is performing well validating the benefits of the smaller campus size. As a reminder, we estimate smaller campuses should be accretive to earnings within the first 18 months of operation and cash flow breakeven by year four, and we believe Long Beach is on track to achieve these estimates. We have identified priority markets for additional small campuses and are in the midst of sight selection. Our next campus is still planned to open this summer or fall of 2018. On our second quarter call we hope to be able to announce its location. Our final initiative is to invest in new program offerings including welding and CNC machining which are complementary to our core business. They serve our student population and they address strong market demand for skilled workers. These programs give us opportunity to attract new students to UTI and can help us better utilize excess capacity at our existing campuses. We are still awaiting DoE approval for both the welding and CNC machining programs but were poised to launch these programs very rapidly. And now, I’ll turn the call over to Bryce to review our operating results. Bryce?