Let's get going. My name is Greg Burns. I'm the analyst at Sidoti, covering ARC Document Solutions. Really happy to have them presenting here this afternoon for us. From the company, we have Jorge Avalos, the company's CFO, and David Stickney, the VP of IR. We're going to run through a presentation, and we'll get to as much Q&A at the end. If you do have any questions, just enter it through the Q&A function in Zoom, and we'll get to as many of those as we can. So with that, I will hand it off to David and George. Thank you. Thank you very much. I'm going to go ahead and stop my video so I can just kind of see the whole screen here. First of all, thanks a lot for your interest in ARC Document Solutions. In this presentation, I'll be taking you through the things we do for our customers, a review of our markets and our business model, and why we think you should consider investing in ARC. The presentation contains forward-looking statements that you should evaluate by reviewing our risk factors, reconciliations to GAAP numbers, and other information in our SEC filings. ARC partners with top brands around the world to tell their stories with compelling graphics of all kinds, making us an excellent partner in visual marketing. We also optimize document workflow in our customers' offices or on their job sites. This includes digitizing existing documents to provide easy access and making on-site printing more efficient. We use advanced digital printing technology to facilitate both services. We specialize in customized short-run, quick turnaround work at a very high level of quality. The more complex a project is, the better suited we are to handle it. It's an important distinction that separates us from large commercial printers on the one hand, or walk-in shops like FedEx Kinko's on the other. Digital printing is what ties our services together. It's the backbone of our graphic production and the key to our office printing and scanning services. Whether we're helping a client reinforce their brand in an office decor project or scanning and indexing employee records, our ability to deliver the printed document or its digital counterpart whenever and wherever it's needed is the cornerstone of our business. We've got some examples to illustrate what we're talking about. We support the marketing campaigns of retail brands, universities, healthcare providers, and companies of all sizes and in locations all over the world. Lululemon, a retailer of more than 300 retail centers in North America, uses us to print and install merchandising and brand graphics throughout their network of stores, much like Nike does, as you can see on this slide. We consult on the design, procure print materials, satisfy permitting and installation requirements, and use our regional digital print centers to fulfill their campaigns. They use ARC as a one-stop shop for end-to-end visual marketing solutions throughout the country. We frequently enjoy recurring work from customers who produce multiple marketing campaigns each year. Creative interior designs and office graphics play a significant role in attracting and retaining good talent. Large corporations such as Google, Walmart, and Netflix upgrade their workspaces with environmental graphics to inspire and motivate employees, and smaller companies also recognize the need to create environments that help bring their staff together in person. Of note, we also do much the same thing in schools, gyms, and other environments where people visit or work on a regular basis. We print, install, and maintain these environments on behalf of our clients from our regional print centers around the country. Construction professionals obviously need plans to build their projects, and we print them by the thousands. But they also use colorful graphics on the job site to market to new tenants, improve aesthetics in the area, and install as part of interior design requirements. In addition to graphics, ARC provides critical safety and informational signage, and we also supply temporary barriers for rent or for sale to enclose spaces under renovation, usually featuring marketing and promotional graphics for the property owner or builder, like you see there in the photo in the upper left. Turner Construction, for example, uses ARC for all their construction site safety signs throughout North America, in addition to our plan printing services. Companies with multiple offices improve and optimize their internal print networks or outsource them entirely using ARC equipment and technology. Our work is based on a service-level agreement where we place our equipment in our customers' offices, and they pay for what they use once they hit their base minimum. Worley is one of the largest engineering companies in the world, and we provide and manage office printers for the entire firm in more than 100 locations, including ongoing project sites. Our software, Abacus, helps Worley to reduce costs, track expenses, and improve document workflow throughout their organization. In all, we manage more than 20,000 devices for its clients under our on-site print management program. Finally, ARC's patented scanning software can extract information from any size document and can be applied to a warehouse full of paper records for a large company or a single box of documents for a local business. Pfizer recently scanned their employees' records using our HIPAA-compliant document scanning centers and improved their access to critical information. We organized, digitized, and ran proprietary optical character recognition software to index more than 5 million individual documents. Once digitized and made searchable, we uploaded the new digital documents to their employee management system for easy access. We can also store them and allow viewing and finding those documents on our own systems. On the face of it, what our customers ask us to do seems simple: print a graphic at a certain size and put it up, or scan a document and give it back. But the reality is radically different. A job is often successful not because we print great images, although we do, but because we sweat the details, like understanding the location of where it'll be mounted, the environment, how long it'll be up, what are the local regulations like, or what's the available time to install graphics or capture data to prevent business disruptions. Customers begin working with ARC for many reasons, including our technology, customer service, and reputation. But they stay with us because of our ability to manage complexity, handle logistics, and visual communications consulting. ARC's 140 service centers are strategically located in major metropolitan areas in North America and in select locations around the world to support the wide variety of our clients. We serve more than 50 industry verticals, up from just 15 in 2019. Some of the largest are featured here on this slide. To print 1 million safety graphics in just 2 weeks for the Chicago Public Schools as they reopened from the pandemic, 15 of our service centers from California to Ohio collaborated to get them there on time. To install new terminal signage for Southwest in LAX and Love Field in Texas, multiple ARC service centers in each state coordinated to supply different aspects of the project. By contrast, to scan the corporate records of Duke Energy in Charlotte, North Carolina, we opened a purpose-built facility to get the job done. Our network is flexible, scalable, highly efficient, and deeply integrated. Day to day, most service centers act as our sales and operations hubs for a local market. Most of our clients can order services from their local service center and have work printed and delivered from a service center across the country in a few hours, saving time and shipping expenses. The customers we work for vary enormously in type and size, and more than 90% of our revenue comes from recurring work from our existing customers. In fact, our customers have been with us on average for 10 years and are remarkably loyal, coming back again and again with both account-based work and new projects. Reading the tens of thousands of online and Google reviews, it's easy to see why. Importantly, however, customer concentration is not a risk. No single customer represents more than 2% of our overall revenue. By generating interest across all of our markets via our corporate marketing efforts, qualifying and nurturing leads, and then distributing them to an appropriate market, customer acquisition is more efficient and less costly than at any point in our history. Our demand gen programs are driven by our website, email, events, and social media channels and increase both interest and warm leads by a factor of 8 times in the past several years. Leads are managed through a common CRM system, HubSpot, with custom dashboards to identify cross-selling services and identifying additional customers within the same account. Our revenues break down into four main categories. 60% of our revenue is generated from digital printing, roughly half of which is color printing used for visual marketing, with the other half primarily black and white and typically generated by plan printing on the construction site. Color is growing in the mid-single digit range, while black and white has been challenged by high interest rates that have constrained construction work and the ongoing adoption of technology. 26% of the business comes from our on-site printing services, categorized as managed print services, or MPS, on our financial statements. We think this line will be consistent at recent levels, with work from home now a permanent part of the culture. Scanning and digital imaging generates 8% of our revenue, but its growth is explosive. We increased sales by $8 million since 2020, and in Q1 of 2024, it grew by more than 23% year-over-year. Paper documents are everywhere, and we believe there is a long runway for this service line. Equipment and supplies, which makes up the remaining 6%, is an extension of our on-site print management services. When we sell equipment, we often set up recurring service that adds value to the customer and dollars to the invoice. These large purchases, like the construction-driving plan printing, have been constrained by the high cost of capital. Since 2019, our earnings have increased more than 22%, and we continue to demonstrate strong sales leverage, as you can see here on the table. We were far more capital-intensive just a few years ago, largely because we needed to support our on-site printing business with significant equipment purchases each year. Today, our customers are far less concerned with shiny new machines and run fewer of them. In addition to the decline in capital spending, further changes we've made over the past three years to optimize our cost structure and diversify our market have increased our efficiency dramatically. That said, inflationary pressures did have an effect on our gross margin and EBITDA in Q1. We expect those pressures to moderate for the balance of the year. In essence, the numbers speak for themselves. In 2023, on 3.3% revenue growth, we grew EPS by nearly 23%. We have leveraged our costs, decreased our need for spending, and we are confident in our ability to sustain the efficiency of our cost structure into the future. With the increase in profitability, our cash flows from operations have also increased. By contrast, we have moderated our cash outflows from investing and financing activities as we pay off historical finance leases, and our need for capital to operate the business has stabilized, as we noted a moment ago. To put this in perspective, a few years ago, we were acquiring $30 million of new equipment each year using cash CapEx or capital leases. Today, we're opportunistic with regard to equipment and other acquisitions and have decreased spending by more than $10 million. Between the decrease in our capital spending and the optimization of our operating infrastructure and other cost controls, we don't require nearly the amount of capital to operate the business effectively, and we can return more cash to our shareholders by issuing dividends and repurchasing stock. We've paid down $110 million of debt in the past six years. When we consider cash of more than $52 million on the balance sheet and just $40 million on the revolver, we consider ourselves essentially debt-free. Today, we actively manage the revolver during each quarter by using available cash to pay it down, thus virtually eliminating the interest cost during the period. Our net debt-to-EBITDA ratio is a comfortable 0.27, and relative to other companies who are highly sensitive to interest rate increases, we are enormously stable. Due to our low debt levels and the way we manage our capital structure, our interest expense will remain consistent at approximately $1.8 million annually. Our commitment to returning shareholder value continues via our dividend program and the purchasing of ARC stock on the open market. For the third year in a row, we plan to return $0.20 per share in annual dividends in 2024. In addition, we have purchased roughly 15% of our outstanding shares in the open market since 2019. We are opportunistic about acquiring shares and are typically more aggressive when our valuation falls. Our board-approved stock buyback program still has more than $8 million available for such purchases. To ensure we continue to create long-term value, we continue to expand our customer base, build on our recurring work from existing customers, and diversify our addressable market. With recent upgrades to our equipment fleets and by leveraging our cost model, we think gross margins will remain healthy, if a little lower than usual this year. And by maintaining low debt and increasing available cash, we can continue to reinvest into the business while also increasing our return to shareholders. There are many reasons why you might consider investing in ARC Document Solutions. Among them are the return of significant shareholder value, revenue growth via market diversification, and strong sales in our strategic business lines. Cash continues to grow while at the same time financing outflows are decreasing as finance lease payments decline, and we are a low-risk investment. Debt net of cash is insignificant, and historic net operating losses are effectively eliminating cash taxes at the federal and state levels for the next several years. These are among the strongest arguments for investing in ARC, and we hope you'll consider them. For your convenience, key assumptions and considerations for building a financial model are also included on this slide. As a quick recap of our performance in Q1, net sales grew by 2.7%, driven by strong color sales and more than 23% growth in scanning. FYI, top-line growth does not require growth in planned printing and equipment and supply sales. We just need them to stabilize. Dividends and shares repurchased will likely exceed 50% of adjusted free cash flow, or approximately $12 million for 2024, and our current dividend yield is in the 7% range. Detailed results are available via our website, which currently hosts our Q1 2024 earnings press release, 10-Q, and webcast. We invite you to view them. We welcome your questions, and we appreciate your continued interest in ARC. Please don't hesitate to reach me using the contact information shown on the screen, and we invite you to follow us on social media to get a feel for what we do, how we do it, and what our customers think of our work. That's about it, Greg. Great. Thanks a lot, Dave. So maybe we could just start off with your outlook for this year, the relative growth dynamics between kind of the strategic areas and maybe your legacy black and white printing, just to give a sense of the success or the positive momentum you're having in the areas where you're focusing on for growth. Sure. Yeah. Jorge, do you want to take that, or do you want me to just do it? Yeah, sure. I mean, when you look at the digital printing, roughly half of that is color printing that we continue to grow at the mid-single digit level. The plan printing side of it, the construction side of it, that's one that's a little bit more challenging in regards to the slowdown in construction and just a slight secular decline in printing volumes. But as you saw from the Q1 results, the growth areas are exceeding the challenged areas, resulting in top-line growth. Yep. Okay. And there's a question around who are your peers, so I guess who are you primarily competing against, and what are your competitive advantages, particularly in the color printing market? Why do you think you've been able to successfully grow that part of your business? Yeah. Who we're competing against? It's local mom-and-pop print shops. There are a couple regional that are a little larger in size. But by and large, the majority of the time we're competing with local competitors, which is a big competitive advantage for us in the sense when you factor in our footprint, the number of locations we have, our capacity in regards to we could scale up a large volume in a very short period of time, and the technology that we use. All our servers, especially in the color side of the equation, there's technology that we've developed that we use on a day-to-day basis to handle the logistics, handle the customers' documents, giving them access to them. There's a lot of logistics that go along with the color job. Think of a customer of ours, like a Lululemon, that has over 200 stores. If they're redesigning for the summer sales or anything they want to advertise, imagine trying to get all those documents, your new graphics, either on the wall or hanging on the wall, vinyl or frosted glass, or even banners hanging from the ceiling. Trying to organize that for an organization like that becomes very challenging for a local competitor. That's where we really excel. The more complicated it is, either because of the complexity of the actual job or the complexity of the logistics, that's where we really have a competitive advantage. Okay. And then can you maybe discuss the diversification of the business that you're seeing on the color side? I know it's very, I don't know what the last update was, but I think over 50 verticals maybe you've served now. And then could you also discuss the spending trends and what drives spending on the color printing side? Is it the ad budgets? How cyclical is that side of the business? Yeah. Maybe I'll start with the spending habits. I mean, we're a very visual society, and COVID just accelerated that, right? When we came out of COVID, it was six feet of hard signage. Now the graphics are everywhere. Everywhere you go, either for advertising a brand to telling us what to do, like in a hospital, where to go, and safety signage at a job site, which is all in color. So the spending habits of the color market, that's a part of the market that is not declining. It is growing and will only continue to grow. What are its habits? It's really kind of tied back to the general economy, right? As companies, as the GDP grows, as companies grow as well. And frankly, sometimes when they don't grow, they even advertise more, right? So that is a market we feel is robust. And frankly, we have a very small market share of that environmental graphics, if you will. So that's kind of the competitive or the opportunity in that market. I'm sorry, what was the second part of your question? I think that the diversification of the business. The diversification, yeah. So in the diversification, when we started out in the color market, we first started with our customers that were in the construction side and knew us for decades, right? That was for us, quote unquote, the low-hanging fruit. We started out with those markets where we're primarily the AEC industry, architects, engineers, construction companies, and not only what they need for, say, a project site, all the advertising and see on there, but what they need from their corporate offices if they're redesigning, if they need marketing material, if they need scanning capabilities. So that's where we first started. And then we started branching out into other verticals and other industries, and we're just getting better and better at it. Because what's important to a retailer is very different from what's important to a hospital, which is very different from what's important to the education industry, which is different from, say, the event type of industry, the conferences. So that's where we continue to play in multiple verticals, as you mentioned. And right now, we're really focused on it just getting better, more targeted advertising. So when we advertise to a retailer, it's very different than the advertising we do to, say, a hospital or education. So really, we're just trying to get deeper and deeper into those industries. And now, I mean, as you could see from our investor slide deck, you can name any of those industries, and we could probably give you two, three, four, five household names where we've done major projects for. Okay. I guess in that vein, in any given quarter, how much of your business comes from maybe recurring existing customers versus new customers? Can you talk about the lead gen or marketing strategy on the color printing side to drive new business? Yeah. In regards to our customers, over 90% comes from existing accounts. Now, what we're doing with our customer, that customer that historically only used us for the blue printing construction, now we're going after that customer to do their color graphics, to do their scanning. So we try to get it any way we could get into a customer, we get in and then try to, I mean, we know what company out there doesn't need scanning services, what company out there doesn't need color graphic services. So any way we could get into the customers, we try to expand out. The revenue we get from that customer may vary year to year, but we know that they're going to change their graphics, their advertising, if it's, say, a retail setting or even in a hospital. Is it going to happen every month? No, but it's going to happen maybe every year, maybe every other year. So we have recurring accounts in that fashion. Then the other part of our business is going after green shoots, right? Going after more hospitals, more education, more of everything, right? And that's where our marketing engine, our lead gen has become so much more sophisticated. It's very automated. We have marketing people that have an advertisement that's a campaign that would be specific for that vertical and ultimately ends up getting the leads back to our sales reps. So they're not just cold calling there all the time. Obviously, they hunt on their own, but we also give them warm leads on a daily basis to go attack some of those verticals. And as I mentioned before, there's not one vertical that we don't have a good case study in that exemplifies our right to win that new business. All right. Okay. There's a couple of questions around how many employees you've hired over the last 12 months, but then also, I guess, corollary to that, are you planning on laying off any staff in areas where business might be slower? I think this kind of goes to the leveraging your footprint with new services like scanning to better optimize the utilization rates within your existing footprint. So maybe if you could talk about that dynamic of the business a little bit. Yeah. And the quick answer to the question is yes. I mean, we optimize wherever revenues we see it declining. But the fact that I think anybody who wants to invest needs to understand is that we produce and support all our service lines out of the same service center. So that same service center where we do the black and white printing is going to be typically the same service center that will have the color department and do the color printing. We'll also have a section that will do the scanning. So we can leverage our resources. If the plan printing is declining, well, we cross-train that individual to do scanning, to do some of the color work. Likewise, the MPS customers, if they need support, consumables, paper, ink, we need to send a service tech out. It's typically that regional service center that will also help support our MPS clients. So that's really the beauty of our business, where we're able to leverage our not only physical capital, i.e., our facilities and to a certain extent, some of our equipment, but also our human capital as well. Now, the second part of the question, so we're constantly optimizing that mix, if you will. So maybe if you go into a certain service center, 10 years ago, it could have been 80% was planned printing. You go into the service center today, and 50% is the color department, and the other 20% is scanning, right? And the planned printing is a smaller portion now, and those employees will shift over and get cross-trained on some of those items. In regards to how many employees we've hired over the last 12 months, we've added about 100 employees over the last year, primarily to support the growth in the scanning business. As you could imagine, when you have with the scanning revenue, you physically need an individual there feeding the printer to get the scanning through. We've also enhanced some of our support staff to updrive the growth in color and in scanning. Okay. In terms of scanning, are all the service centers outfitted to be able to scan? Do you feel like you have the optimal footprint, or is there an opportunity to add scanning capabilities into more service centers? Well, I think the first thing that I think is important to highlight is that we've always done scanning to large format scanning. If you go back 15 years, 20 years, customers would come in with their large blueprints, and how do we get them printed? Somebody has to scan them, get them into a digital format, then the computers will tell what printer to print it on. So we've always been proficient with the large format scanning, and we've always done that for our construction-related customers. The transformations we did is getting into the small format scanning and becoming much more proficient at it, David went through some of the certifications we got. There we did optimize it. Currently, we have 18, I would call it high-volume scanning centers, strategically located throughout the U.S. The work could come from wherever, but if you win the work in a location or a city where we don't have the high-volume scanning capabilities, the network will simply go to wherever that scanning center is, a high-volume one, because there you're trying to optimize how much you drive, how much volume you drive through that scanning center. I think right now we're pretty comfortable with the footprint we have in regards to scanning centers. We do something similar as well for the color graphics too. Every location could print in color, but the high-end color that would be required in some of the graphics you're seeing, even on this slide right now, not all 140 locations have the capability to do that. Normally, would we want to spend the money to do that? There we have what's called our Riot centers that are still part of a service center network, once again, about 20 of them strategically located throughout the U.S. and North America to support that high-quality, high-volume graphics that you're seeing on the or you saw throughout the slide deck that David went over. Okay. When I look at the business over the last number of years, it's probably like 2019, you've executed a pretty strong financial and strategic operational transformation, which I think now you're ready to leverage, but you're not really getting credit for it by investors. Maybe you could end us here with your thoughts on that, what you think investors are missing and what the opportunity is here for going forward. Well, I mean, at the end of the day, I think the strategy is simple, right? I mean, I think we're showing the growth in what we think is the future of the company to continue, which is in the color printing as well as the scanning. We saw good growth over the last few years, and we think we could continue that growth well as best we can, minimizing the impact of the drop in the plan printing. That's coming. But as we saw in the last couple of quarters, the growth areas are exceeding the growth, and the two growth areas exceed the drop in the kind of legacy. The more we do that and the more consistent that investors see out there, we feel naturally the stock price will follow. Yep. That makes sense. All right. We're at the end of our time. So thanks, Jorge. Thanks, David, for presenting, answering our questions. If you didn't get them answered, hopefully you have a one-on-one with the company. And thanks, everyone, for listening in. So with that, we will wrap it up. Thank you. Thanks, all. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.
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