Well, good morning. Thank you very much. Thank you all for attending or joining us today. This is the third day of our 24th Annual Oppenheimer Consumer Growth and E-Commerce Conference. My name is Brian Nagel. I work at Oppenheimer as a senior equity research analyst covering consumer growth and e-commerce. I'm very pleased to have with us our next presenting company, Academy Sports and Outdoors, and three of the company's executives. CEO Steve Lawrence, CFO Carl Ford, and Investor Relations Matt Hodges. Gentlemen, thank you very much for joining us and participating in our conference. Well, thank you for having us. Very much appreciate it. So, the structure, we're gonna keep this as an informal fireside chat, with me asking the Academy team questions and the Academy team responding with answers. To the extent there are questions from the audience, just send them through the chat, and I'll be happy to work them into our conversation. So I think, guys, I think let's start. I've been, you know, hosting a number of these fireside chats now for the past few days, and where I'd like to start, you know, if we could, just given that so many investors right now are focused on the consumer and the underlying health of the consumer, you know, from your vantage point, before we jump more into the specifics of Academy, from your vantage point, where is the health of the consumer right now? How, how healthy is the consumer? How is the consumer, broadly speaking, performing? Yeah, so you know, for those of you who aren't familiar with Academy, we tend to be more of a moderate-based consumer. We certainly have some higher-end consumers, but our core customer is active young families. More kids in the house, you know, just kind of starting out their journey in sport or whatever activity. And when we look at it through the lens of that customer, I'd say over the past 12 months, they're under pressure. I mean, the data points we see, credit card debts back to where it was, if not higher than where it was pre-pandemic, and that really doesn't even account for some of the Pay -in- 4 instruments that are out there. Inflation, while it's moderated a little bit, is still high, so it still weighs on their mind. We see that really then playing out into a couple of different behaviors, and we've talked a lot about on our calls. First, you know, we're seeing customers gravitate more and more to the value offerings in our assortment. That could be, in some cases, private label, where we put them in at an everyday great price. Some cases, it could be promotions, and we run those seasonally or we can clearance. We also see them gravitating towards newness, so it's kind of a barbell, right? So on one end, they're, they're looking for deep value. On the other end, you know, they'll, they'll spend if it's something they really want that they don't have, you know, like a $45 Stanley Tumbler. I mean, that's not a cheap price for a cup, but they'll spend up for it if it's this color they want or they don't have. So if you're kind of in the middle, it's a little tougher, but if you've got something newer, you have value, it seems to be working for us. And then the third thing we've really seen is more episodic shopping. So they're aggregating the purchases into kind of those need-based times, right? They're shopping when they need to send their kid back to school, or he's getting out of school going into the summer, and they need to entertain them. They need a gift, like at a Mother's Day or Father's Day or, or Christmas, or, you know, a patriotic holiday, where they need to entertain the family and have something to, you know, grill out with. So those are really kind of the behaviors that have exhibited, and so that's really how, we've been kind of shaping our strategy. We, we posted our comps yesterday. We're down 5.7% for Q1. And we talked about how we're leaning into those tendencies as we progress through the remainder of the year. So you're gonna see us during the key promotional time windows. We've got several of those happening right now, over the, you know, the next quarter with, Father's Day, with the Fourth of July, with the back to school. You're gonna see us lean into promotions during those time periods to try to provide value to that consumer. You're gonna see us lean into our everyday value proposition, kind of in the gaps around those time periods. You're gonna see us talk about a steady diet and newness to try to incentivize that customer to come in and activate with us. And I think you're gonna see us, you know, just increase our targeted marketing. We've got a new customer data platform that we launched last year. We're getting smarter in our use of that, and we're gonna really use that as a way to target those value-based customers with value messages versus the customers activated against newness with new ideas, new things we brought into the store. Now, Steve, that's very helpful. So let me just have one question on that. You know, as you look at your business, again, we had, like you said, you reported your fiscal first quarter results yesterday, so we'll talk about that in a second. But I guess the question I have is: as you're watching this consumer dynamic play out, do you think it's getting more challenging? Yeah, I would say it's certainly not getting better. Neutral and maybe a little more challenging as I think debt continues to creep up. I think, you know, Carl and I talk a lot about it. It feels like that moderate to lower-income consumer is living a lifestyle that they kind of started during COVID, and they're funding it with credit card debt right now. And so I think as that continues to mount, I think the customer gets a little more cautious in how they spend. So I wouldn't say it's improving. I'd say neutral and maybe getting a little worse from what we're seeing. Brian, I would, I would add, look, we've got a private label credit card. We're seeing FICO scores go down on people that are applying for credit. They need more credit. And as I look at the macroeconomic on credit card delinquencies, you pick your time period, it, it appears to be getting progressively worse, and it's not reverting back, from what I'm seeing, to pre-pandemic. It's something, it's something more hearkening back to prior to that. The thing I wanna make sure I get out there is that we're not just sitting back, you know, and saying customer's tough, you know, woe is me. We've got a lot of things we're focused on in terms of what I just mentioned, driving value every day with what our ownership is and these key value items we have, driving promotions around the windows. You know, looking for new ways to deliver value. So we announced yesterday we're launching a new loyalty program called my Academy, where, you know, we already had the basis of a loyalty program with our private label credit card. You know, that's kind of the foundation of, you know, how we were delivering our loyalty program before. It has a 5% off every day for the customer that's funded by the banks, and it had other softer offers, like free shipping at a certain threshold. You know, easier access to log in, things like that, more targeted discounts. But we have a cohort of customers that either doesn't qualify for the credit card or doesn't want another credit card, and so this is our way of offering them targeted offers and a way to get them into our ecosystem by launching myAcademy. So it has most of the same value proposition the credit card has without the 5% every day, and then that gives the customer kind of an entry point into us, and if they decide later on they want to apply for the credit card, they still can do that and then get the 5% on top of that. So that's another initiative we put in place to try to drive value. So, like this, you know, as we mentioned just a moment ago, your Academy reported its Q1 results yesterday and ended up, you know, and adjusted slightly guidance for the balance of the year. So I guess, you know, the question I'll throw out to you is, you know, just as I think the market's probably still digesting these results. I mean, you mentioned the comp store sales down 5.7%, but really, what do you want us to take away that were the key takeaways from this first quarter report? Yeah, so customers under pressure. We're doing our best to navigate through this environment with the tools and things we've put in place. We have some green shoots beneath the surface we called out yesterday. First, you know, our dot-com business is on a second quarter of positive comps. We comped up 7.5% for the quarter, so that's usually a leading indicator. We're excited by that. We've seen health in our outdoor business, which candidly had been a bit of an overhang for us coming out of the pandemic. That business really exploded during the pandemic and had been contracting back, and we've now had two really good back-to-back quarters there. Beneath the surface, you know, one of the things we talk about is new stores, and that's one of our major growth engines as we look into the long term. The first vintage that we opened up since going public, the 2022 vintage stores, just flipped into the comp base in Q1, and those stores comp positive. So that was a very good sign to see that. You know, there's nine of them, so it's not moving the needle much, but, you know, as we get the 2023 vintages online, and those are already performing better in the first year than the 2022 vintage does, and those start flipping into the comps, we start building that comp waterfall that I think, you know, most investors are familiar with, that a lot of retailers get going. I think that's gonna pay dividends. So we've got some good green shoots beneath the surface. We're managing through the long... or through the short term, and we're really focused on the long term, right? I mean, we know, we've got tremendous growth opportunity. You know, Carl always points out that, that only 17% of America lives within a 10-mile radius from an Academy store, which implies 83% don't, right? And we think that our value proposition, our broad and complete assortment, the fact that we're the only truly, you know, sports and outdoor retailers, you know, some retailers focus on the outdoor side of it, some focus on the sports side of it. We carry both. We have, we have authority and depth of ownership, and those things positions us well to, to open up new stores, and we're gonna continue to do that. Our plan is 160-180 new stores over the next five years. We think that's a big growth engine that we're gonna continue to, to focus on. Our dot-com business is getting healthier, as we talked about. That's another one where we're around 11% penetration last year. We think in the short term, being the next five years, we could be at 15% penetration. You know, candidly, good retailers are at, in the high teens-low 20s, so longer term, we think we can push forward to that. And then, you know, the third one is getting better productivity out of our existing assets. And so, you know, that's where the business has been a little softer in our kind of core base of stores, and so we're always working on ways to improve our productivity there. You know, one of the things we talked about was the launch of the new loyalty. That's certainly helped jumpstart that. We're launching new initiatives that help both dot-com and our core business with same-day delivery. We announced yesterday, or actually on Monday, that we just partnered with DoorDash, so we can start delivering a same-day delivery option that we didn't have in place before. You know, as we looked at that, we felt like in the past, being able to offer customers both and being able to pick up the same day made sense. But, you know, there's a lot of customers who may be at a traveling, you know, soccer tournament and forgot shin guards and need that delivered, and so we can now offer that service through DoorDash, where we couldn't before. And in looking at that, we looked at their customer file versus our customer file. It's mostly accretive, so we think this is a no-regrets decision that we can do that can help us expand our reach to our customers and, and make their lives a little easier. Hey, I'll finish that off with some financial points of view associated with you know, the profile of the company. If you look at Academy over the quarter, over the rolling 12 months, whatever it is, we're top decile from a profitability standpoint, EBIT, net income. We're probably top quartile associated with cash flow from operations as a rate to sales. We drop a lot of that into the bank. And from a capital allocation standpoint, we've got three pillars. One is stability, two is invest in ourselves, and three is you know, stakeholder value return. So during the quarter, we generated $200 million of cash flow from operations. We invested $32 million back into ourselves in the form of you know, launching some new stores. We just recently opened our first new store in the state of Ohio. That was in the, right at the beginning part of the second quarter. Second, we bought back $122 million in stock. We feel like the stock with where it's valued, it was a, it was a good use of our cash, and we paid out $8 million in dividends. You know, our cash year over year is up $80 million to last year. Our debt is down $100 million to last year. Super low leverage company. We've got the balance sheet to invest in these long-range pillars that Steve talked about, and we're going after it. Yeah, so, and I wanna congrats you. You are managing through very well, from a profitability margin standpoint, managing through a difficult environment very well. I mean, congrats on that. So I wanted, Steve, when you talk about the business, you know, and again, at the risk of being somewhat repetitive here, just so we understand what's going on, though, are there key weak spots right now there? I mean, when you think about what's really weighing upon that comp, are there key categories, and what are you basically seeing the progression in those categories? Yeah, so, you know, we divide our business into basically four divisions. And so I already mentioned Outdoor is one of the better performing divisions. It's had back-to-back pretty good quarters. I would tell you that Footwear and Apparel were a little bit lagging in Q4. We saw an improvement in those businesses from Q4 into Q1. Still not positive, but heading in the right direction, and we're hopeful that we can start seeing some light and turn the corner there. Our Sports and Rec business is kind of the fourth leg of our business. It's kind of a catch-all across a lot of different categories, and so that business has been a little softer. Embedded in that are a couple of big-ticket businesses. So if you pull out kind of, big, bulky, long replacement cycle businesses, in aggregate, those have been a little tougher. You know, but it's not really a one-size-fits-all kind of answer there. So, you know, you take a category like, fitness, cardio equipment, that's been a really tough category since the pandemic. You know, I think people who bought a treadmill or an elliptical, you know, three or four years ago, aren't in the market to buy a new one, and so we've seen a pullback and a contraction in that business. You got a business like outdoor cooking, which, you know, you know, we sell certainly open price point grills at $99.99, but, you know, we sell $500-$1,000 smokers, and that business actually has been more healthy. It fell back a little bit in Q1, because there was a crawfish shortage, and we saw a lot of crawfish cookers during that time frame. We've seen that rebound, once we got past that, and it's actually running positive now for the second quarter, so we're excited about that. But what we looked at was what's helped that big ticket business flourish, where maybe cardio hasn't, is we had a lot of newness and innovation in there. You know, you've got Blackstone coming out and that whole flat -top griddle trend, that is kinda driving that business. You've got all the spices and rubs we've taken a leadership position in, and so we expanded our assortment beyond just the cooking surface to have, you know, the spices and rubs, the premium fuels, the accessories you need. We really created a one-stop shop. So we said, "How can we apply that to fitness, right?" And so we're rethinking our fitness assortment right now from a cardio perspective. We're bringing in some new items or categories like walking pads, which I'm not sure you're familiar with, but it's basically like a little treadmill without handles and only goes a certain speed, but it's great for people who want a low impact workout at home, or a standing desk or something like that. And so that's a new emerging category. We've got some new brands like Assault Fitness that are digitally native, that we're bringing into the store. We're leaning into some new recovery things. You know, cold therapy is a big deal, so you're seeing us lean into that. And so we're really kinda trying to take the math that we saw with cooking and really apply that to fitness to see if we can jumpstart the business. And so, you know, that would be a business that's tough in terms of fitness, that hopefully we're going to see a turnaround. And then you got a couple other ones, like, you know, Paddle, Marine, which for us is kayaks. You know, that's a business where it's been tough. I think it's very similar to cardio, where if you bought a kayak three or four years ago, you need another new one. Not a lot of newness driving that. So we're just going to manage that business to the appropriate level and, you know, look at market share. To Carl's point, you know, that's something in a declining business, we spend a lot of time looking at, and we're picking up market share there. So, you know, I would say big ticket's been a drag. I think we're working on different answers and solutions to each one of those to hopefully start seeing them move in the right direction. Thank you. Look, a lot of chatter with, you know, within Academy and frankly, the broader, you know, sporting goods space, just on footwear in particular. I know we discussed this a little bit yesterday. I want to hone in. So from a brand perspective, you know, there, there have been a couple of brands out there now that are being really, you know, anointed, if you will, as the hot brands. You know, so I guess... The question I want to ask you, I mean, you know, how is your business right now at Academy in footwear? I mean, are there key brands you want to get, will you get those in order to drive a better performance in that business? Yeah, I mean, so you're, you're asking it even more veiled than we get it asked very directly. Like, "What's the deal with Hoka One One? Why don't you have Hoka One One?" You know, listen, they're, they're two of the hottest brands out there. We, we acknowledge that, we see that. We look at market share data, just like I'm sure you and the investors do. And, you know, one of the things that is eye-opening is if you look at just those two brands within the running sector, they've tripled their market share over the last two years, right? So it's, it's clearly growing and it's taking share. We're having dialogue with them. You know, candidly, where they're at right now, they're both so hot that I think they're having a hard time filling their existing channels of distribution, so they're not looking to expand necessarily. But they're giving us indication that, you know, if and when they get to the place where they can satisfy their existing demand, they look to expand, we would be somebody they consider doing that with. So we're going to keep having those dialogues. That being said, we can't sit around and obviously wait for them to come and anoint us with their presence, right? We've gotta find ways to win with the brands we have and the brands we have access to and the product we have. So, I'd say we're doing a couple of things there first. One of the good news, for us, is our footwear assortment is more broad-based than just athletic footwear. We have a big work boot, workwear business, right? And so that's a meaningful business for us. And so we can lean into that as a category and expand our assortment and go after hotter brands that are like Ariat. We have a big casual business, and so we sell a lot of things like HEYDUDE and Skechers, which, do very, very well for us. That whole Skechers Slip-ins trend is exploding, and we continue to drive growth there. You know, we have a casual footwear business, a seasonal business, that we drive a lot of sandals and flip-flops and things like that, you know, during the spring season. You're seeing us expand brands like OOFOS or Birkenstock, which we, two years ago, didn't have access to. Last year, put it in 100 doors. This year, it's going to be in over 200 doors, right? So we're expanding the brands we can get access to there. Another hot one is Reef or OluKai, so we're really leaning into that piece of it. And then the third thing we're really doing is we're talking to our existing partners, particularly in the premium running space, like a Nike, like an Adidas, like a Brooks, like a New Balance, and we're pushing to get access to higher-end, more innovative product from them. So, you know, a great example of that is one of the hot shoes that Nike has and has had for a while is the 270s. Once again, if you go back, you know, 18 months ago, we didn't have it in our store. Last year, we had it in about 75 stores. This year, it'll be in 150 stores going into back to school, and we'll sell it online, where we could. We have more colors than that. We're getting access to another shoe called the P-6000 as we round the corner in the holiday. So it's pushing those brands to get better access to shoes. Brooks has been a great partner. Our Brooks business has been on fire. We get access to virtually everything there, and it's been one of our main growth drivers. So it's having the dialogues with Hoka One One, hopefully, so when they decide to open, we'll get them, leveraging the broader base footwear business that we have and all the categories we carry, and then leaning into our partnerships to try to get access to the better, more premium footwear that they have. That's really how we're approaching it. Brian, I would add, it's not specific in the footwear space, but when we talk with our vendors about our growth story, we've put out a 5-year target to have 160-180 new doors. If you look longer term, there's opportunity beyond just the next five years. We could see, you know, 800 stores nationwide. Right now, our sales per store is $22 million. Let's just use around $20 million. That would put us at a, you know, $16 billion-$17 billion retailer beyond five years. I'm not, I'm not saying it's gonna be within five years, but there's a ton of growth opportunity in the geographic and the channel space, and we talk about growing with a true sports and outdoors retailer, and why wouldn't you want to get in on the ground floor of that? Perfect. And so just on the footwear point, so just to understand, we talked about the profile of your consumer initially, but does your core consumer want that higher-end footwear, like you mentioned, the Nike 270 and others? Yeah, I think if you go... Yes, they do. So the short answer is, you know, when I talked about kind of that barbell effect, of where they want value, but they're also gravitating toward newness and innovation, I would say that Hoka One One fall into that newness and innovation, where it's almost agnostic to price. You know, if it's the hot shoe that the kid wants, that's what they want. I mean, I'm sure you had that growing up. You had to have a certain pair of Nikes or Air Jordans, and everybody else was wearing them. I think that's one of those things that's happening out there today. So if you go back, you know, probably five years ago, we didn't sell footwear over $100. Our answer probably five years ago would be, "No, we, we don't think we could sell it. We don't want it." The reality is, we've really built out that better, best end of our assortment over the past five years. So, you know, we, we still probably aren't over $200 in terms of athletic footwear. We kind of cap out in that 190-200 range. But we sell a lot of footwear, particularly from brands like Brooks and Nike, north of $100, $130, $150, that we didn't sell five years ago. So there's our customers have given us permission for that. In a lot of cases, I think it's allowed us to maybe reach a customer that we weren't servicing before, would leave our store to go to another store to find that. I also want to make sure you... We haven't lost focus on the value either. This has been more of an additive customer to us. When you think about five years ago, we were about a $4.8 billion company. We're on a $6.2 billion company now. A lot of the incremental volume was added in by layering on this better investment while still maintaining our good in the assortment. So yes, we could sell it, yes, our customers want it, but we also sell a lot of things in that price point now already. I gotta think, Steve and Carl, that having that better assortment of footwear also serves as a traffic driver for other categories, correct? It absolutely does. You know, I mean, broader base, the strategy is, and I think we've had this conversation with you before, you know, Academy used to be really good at the good, and so, you know, when you think about sporting goods, you know, when my kids were younger, you know, my son would wanna try a new sport. So Academy is the place in our marketplace where you come in and say, "Okay, I wanna start playing T-ball. I gotta get the bat, the ball, the gloves, you know, the cleats," and you could get out for under $100. That was really who we were, who we were. And then, of course, the next month, when he decided he didn't want to play baseball and put that stuff in the closet, we'd come in, and we'd buy the soccer ball and the shin guards for whatever the next sport was. The challenge for us in the past had been that if my son or, you know, your son or daughter decided, "Okay, I'm gonna stick with this now, and I wanna start playing maybe on a rec league team or even a traveling team," we didn't have the gear, or the product to really stay with them on that journey through sport. So layering on that better, best end of the assortment, whether it's in footwear and in running, whether it's in sporting goods, whether it's in outdoor, that's really helped us keep that customer who probably was leaving us at a certain point to go to other retailers, stay with us on that journey through sport. Now, you know, we always say is, "Listen, if you're gonna play college ball or pro, we're, we're not the place you're gonna find your gear. We can take you all the way through at least high school and a lot of these activities where in the past, we probably could, we couldn't do that. So one more near-term question. We'll shift toward the strategy. But you know, one of the key questions I'm getting from our clients, you know, particularly following yesterday's Q1 report, is you know, just how does Academy get from you know, a weaker Q1 comp, negative 5.7, you know, to that guidance, or at least the low end of that guidance of the year, which is negative 4? So maybe just discuss how you're viewing the building blocks to getting there over the next three quarters. Yeah. So when you look at our guidance for this year, it's -4% to +1%, so -4% on the low end, +1% on the high end. If you go back when we initially set the guidance, we're coming off a year where we ran down 6.5%. So we were counting on an inflection to get from that -6.5% to the, to the -4%, and that's really driven by a lot of those initiatives we talked about, leaning into newness, leaning into value, convenience, seeing our dot-com business start to inflect more positively, getting the new stores into the comp waterfall. So all those things I mentioned earlier are how we started bridging from that down 6.5% trend that we're running, or down 5.7% in Q1, to the low end of the range. The high end of the range really anticipates maybe some customer improvement, right? We only 25% of the way through this year. You know, the customer, things happen around elections. Sometimes people feel more exuberant, depending upon who gets elected and feel better about the economy and spend more freely. And so to get from the low end to the high end, it's really probably takes an improved customer sentiment out there and more free spending. But within our current range to down 4%, we think we get there with the strategies that we're talking about and have already discussed. Very helpful. So just shifting more strategically now, you know, maybe take a step back, so to say, you know, again, I've had the pleasure of following Academy for a while. I mean, you-- there's been a significant reposition. We've touched a little bit on this already in the conversation, but a significant repositioning within the business. Today, Academy is a much better-operated company than it had been historically. So I guess the question I want to ask is, on that repositioning, you know, and where are the key pieces that still need to be or you're still putting in place now to really get the company operating better? Yeah, so I'm going to use FY 2019 as the pre-pandemic year, and I'm going to use FY 2023, our last completed fiscal year. So if you look from a gross margin standpoint, we're up about 470 basis points, and that is not happenstance. Steve joined the company in February 2019. I joined in January 2019, and from a category management standpoint, I would say we're night and day compared to how we used to run the business. We exited many categories, you know, luggage and toys and electronics. We really brought what we call an open-to-buy discipline, but this is the monthly checkpoint of, you know, how we're managing markdowns, how we're managing inventory receipts, how we're managing inventory to stay on plan. We really brought those disciplines. I'll give Steve the credit there, associated with just, y ou know, there's a way to do it in the industry, and we were not doing it that way. We made some systemic improvements, I think, about a new allocation system, how you allocate specific products to specific stores, a new replenishment system. So this is more of like a learning system that says: "Hey, I've got these min and max SKU volumes. I know when I'm going to hit the min, I'm going to, you know, replenish that before I get down there." I would talk about buy optimization. This is really in inventory management. There's a lot of groups when we got here, they would just buy the same amount of stuff each year, and they would clear 30% or 40%, you know, mark it down and clear 30 or 40% of what they bought, and then buy the same amount the next year. That, from an inventory management standpoint, is not how that's done. I would highlight two other kind of systemic things. Got a pricing tool, Revionics, regular price optimization. So we look at the classes of products that we carry, and we say, for that, you know, it could be good, better, best. Private brands was an example of this. You know, when we got here, we were losing money when we sold private brands compared to a domestic national brand. Looking at what the customer was giving you permission to spend on that. On the other end of that, markdown optimization. When we got here, buyers had the opportunity to take a permanent markdown to put goods in clearance whenever they felt it was appropriate, and a lot of times they didn't do it at the right time because they couldn't afford to do it. So we season-coded all the products, and the tool that we use helps us kind of algorithmically predict what is the optimal time to mark something out of stock and then to put a promotion on top of that. So the business, I would say, on the merchandising MP&A front, is run very, very differently. That's the bulk of what's driving that, you know, 470 basis points of gross margin opportunity or improvement. From an expense perspective, SG&A, I think, is 260 basis points, so, yeah, 250 basis points leverage from pre-FY 2019. So what helps a lot with that is 25% sales growth. I'll acknowledge that, that the sales growth kind of cures a lot of your expense rate issues. But a couple of things on the store labor, that's our primary, what we spend the majority of our money on, is store labor. And so we took out a lot of tasks out of the store that weren't value-added. Some of those were linked to inventory, and some of those were just things that the merchants want done, but we couldn't really see a business case for it. The second thing is we cleaned up the inventory. We've managed inventory pretty well, I would say, in good times and in bad times. And so if you take that inventory density off of the floor, and they don't have to sign it and mark it down and move it around, it just takes a lot of work out. We put in a new scheduling system, Kronos, and leveraged that a lot more, I would say, scientifically, to match customer traffic patterns with when we staff the store and to map those tasks to what you know we're expecting. And the last thing is queuing. So we used to have, like, individual lines of customers, and we put in a queue line where everybody stands, and then they go to the next register that's available. It's favorable from a store payroll standpoint. So that's gross margin, that's expense, and I would be remiss if I didn't highlight the debt position of the company was very unhealthy when we got here at the beginning of 2019. We had $100 million in interest expense in 2019, and this year will be under $40 million. The company has done a lot to leverage that cash flow machine into a balance sheet that we're really proud of. So from Carl's recap, basically, we focused on merchandising, we focused on getting the stores' operations right, we focused on the balance sheet. The things still ahead of us, you know, our distribution centers, and you heard us talk about that. I would say we're behind in terms of our distribution centers. We've got three right now. We know that as we expand stores, we're going to have to increase the throughput. So one of the things we're investing in is putting in new warehouse management systems. We're using Manhattan, who's kind of the gold standard in the industry. We just went live with our Atlanta facility. You know, we're going to get through that, and then we'll sequentially do the next two over the next couple of years. Really getting that to be a more modern facility is going to help us in a lot of different fronts in terms of throughput and our ability to service the store growth. And then the other place where we're still investing, and I think is still in the future, is really all the work we're doing around customer. You know, we're traditional marketers. We spend a lot of money on traditional methods such as print and linear TV. We're retooling all that. We just hired a new Chief Customer Officer along with a new Chief Supply Chain Officer to help manage these two projects for us. We're busily converting to a more digitally savvy one-to-one marketing organization. So those would be probably over the next two to three years, where we're going to be investing primarily after spending the last three to four years investing in stores and merchandising. Very helpful. So I know we have only a couple of minutes left, but I did want to, and we touched a little bit on this already, but I want to maybe put a finer point on it. Just store growth. You know, I think that that's a key aspect of the Academy story here, and one that our investors are looking at very closely. So maybe I'll just start with, where are we on store growth? I know, you know, there's been some tweaks lately to the model, but how are you thinking about store growth going forward here? Yeah. So, it's our major growth driver candidly, as part of our long-range plan. So, about a year, probably 14, 15 months ago, we came forward with our first initial part wave at this, and it was, you know, at the time, we were targeting these new stores to do $18 million, and we thought we'd open, like, 100-120. The reality was, when we were looking at that $18 million, we were looking at stores that opened up in, like, 2019, a little bit in 2018. We're kind of looking at the run rate of those stores, and as you know, the problem with that is they were somewhat influenced by the pandemic, right? And so, we opened up our first wave of new stores in 2022. We opened up nine that year. And looking at it, they weren't hitting $18 million. And so what we did is we went back and looked at kind of what the run rate of stores was when we opened up in, like, 2013, 2014, and 2015, as, you know, because they didn't have in their first five years that influence of the pandemic. And aligned to, it's probably more realistically to expect $12 million-$16 million out of the first year, and then look at those in terms of exponential growth, growing, you know, in the mid-single digits for the first five years from that point forward. Based off of that, we took the first-year targets down and said instead of $18 million, $12 million-$16 million. At the same time, we found that where we're actually being successful is twofold. Number one, obviously, we're having more success in our existing markets, where we have high brand awareness versus opening up in new markets, we have low brand awareness. That being said, we've got to, we still got to expand the frontier and start growing, and so you're seeing us pushing new states. But having a better balance to that approach and saying, "Okay, we're going to open up one to one, a store in a new market as well as start an existing market." And the reason that's important is it allows us to maybe overspend in marketing to build brand awareness in the new market, versus underspending a little bit in existing markets where we already have high brand awareness. So having that balanced approach is another tweak. And then we also found we're doing better in some of these more mid-sized markets where there's an underserved consumer. And so, you know, instead of going into the heart of a city, we're finding it's better for us to ring the outside of the city and push in, because that's where our customer lives. That's where there's not as much density of competition. And so you've seen us expand the store count from, you know, 100, 120 to now 160, 180 over the next five years. And so those are kind of the major tweaks. It still gets us to the $10 million we targeted as part of our long-range plan. We're just coming at it slightly differently based off the learnings we've had. The learnings we took from 2022, we applied to the 2023 vintage. As I mentioned earlier, they're opening up at a faster run rate than the first year 2022 stores did. We're really excited about the 2024 vintage of stores now. All right, guys. Well, our time has come to an end. I very much appreciate your time. Best of luck here, and congrats. Thank you. Appreciate it. Typical environment very well. Thanks for giving us a chance to tell our story. We appreciate it. Thank you. All right. Thanks, guys. Thanks, everybody.