KinderCare Learning Companies, Inc. (KLC) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. Great. So good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the KinderCare session of the Morgan Stanley Consumer Conference. Before we get started, I'm required to state that for important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley research disclosure website at www.morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. If you have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales representative. So with that out of the way, I'm Toni Kaplan, Head of U.S. Business Services Equity Research at Morgan Stanley, and I'm happy to be joined by CEO -- KinderCare's CEO, Paul Thompson; and CFO, Tony Amandi. Paul has held many executive roles at KinderCare since joining the company in 2005, and Tony joined KinderCare in 2009 and has been the CFO of the company over the past 5 years. KinderCare is the largest private provider of early childhood education in the United States by capacity in which they can accommodate over 200,000 children. And they have over 1,500 centers in 40 states and just the largest day care operator in the U.S. So thanks so much to both of you for joining me. I have a number of questions. I'll get to. But first, let me just give you an opportunity to share with the audience some background on the company and your strategy.

Yes, absolutely. So as Toni just mentioned, we are the largest provider for early child education. In the U.S., we operate in 40 states and D.C. We're really excited about where we are right now with KinderCare is more focused on in communities, in suburban and partnering with parents to have their children set up for success in kindergarten and beyond. We recently acquired Creme as a premium brand 2 years ago, which opened up a new total addressable market for us. And then on the B2B side, we have Champions, which is a before and after school program and summer programs. So we see -- have seen double-digit growth and continue that to expect to continue. And then on the B2B side, we have a lot of flexibility that differentiates us on how we show up for clients. And give them a great solution for care for their employees across the U.S. So that's probably a quick run-through for where we are as an organization and what we're excited about.

That's perfect. And before we get into the more substantial part of the discussion, one of the recent topics that I have heard from many investors just following the recent earnings was around the forward outlook. And so you've said that nothing has changed since the IPO, but I did want to give you a chance to provide any specifics either on 4Q or the outlook, anything that you wanted to provide incremental would be helpful to everyone.

Yes. I appreciate that. So definitely taking feedback and all the time from our investors about what helps them have visibility and transparency into our organization. The main headlines we want to share is we had just come out of the IPO. We had shared our thoughts on 2024 and our long-term growth algorithm. Everything we saw in the third quarter and as we look to the full year of 2024 is in line with management's expectations. So that's encouraging to us. We had a good back-to-school, which is in the September time frame. So that's another encouraging data point for us. We did not want to get into -- our philosophy or approach was not wanting to get into quarterly guidance. We wanted to give annual guidance and then give the investors updates throughout the quarters as we did do that. So that is the intention. As we come into our full year financials in the beginning of 2025, that's when we will give full year guidance to 2025. And then maybe if I could just go into our growth algorithm because I think that's so helpful to understanding what we're excited about as an organization. And there's really 5 main pieces to our growth algorithm. It begins with enrollment, which is a 1% to 2% revenue increase for us. Pricing and through tuition is 3% to 5% revenue improvement for us. And then our B2B businesses of Champions and with the Employers is another 1% to 2%. Greenfield new center openings, another 1% to 2%. And then our acquisitions, tuck-in acquisitions that is, is another 1% to 2%. So all that adds up to high single digits for growth on revenue, which we feel very good about as an organization. And then in addition to the top line revenue, we believe because of our operating leverage expansion opportunity, that we will see our EBITDA margin continue to expand because our EBITDA dollars will increase in low double digits.

Terrific. Let's get into a few of the pieces there. So maybe just to start out with price increases. Your public daycare competitor talked about price increasing potentially by 100 bps less next year than this year. We're coming off of a period where you've had sort of higher-than-expected price increases for the last few years. How should we be thinking about price increases across your business as we think about '25?

Yes, that's perfect. So Paul mentioned that kind of 3% to 5% range and still very comfortable moving within that. And to your point, Toni, we saw upwards a 7% price increase for kind of full year '23 coming off of some investments we had made in the business, and the right times to do some of those investments. So I'm not going to do comparisons out to them, but see us right there in the middle of that 3% to 5% range this coming year, and we'll tighten that up as we get a little bit closer, but seeing us right in that range still.

Terrific. And then maybe looking at utilization, so a big driver for potential future growth there. You're already back to pre-COVID utilization levels. You were at, I believe, 69% before. You had even gotten to 72% ex Creme in the third quarter and then 69% again in the third quarter. So within the bottom quintile of centers, there is that table in the prospectus, and everyone loves that table. Just maybe talk about sort of some of the commonalities between the centers in that fifth quintile. What you're doing to address that? And you talked a little bit about it on the call, but anything that you think can improve with those fifth quintile centers?

So first, kind of at a higher level, we expect enrolled growth in all 1,500 of our centers and every one of our quintiles. The reason that's important is the more enrollment we have in our top performing centers, the more that profitability flows through because of the operating leverage inherent in that. So we have different playbooks depending on where a center is at in each one of our quintiles because that strategy worked so well for us in 2016 through '19, now reinvigorating that here in the middle of 2024. So specifically for the centers in the bottom, let's say, our bottom 300 centers, we know that Tony's team took a look and made sure the demographics around those centers are still at the right sufficient to fill up those centers and run a high-performing center. So that was kind of check #1. Check #2 is, do we have sufficient inquiries coming into those centers? And is the pace of those inquiries at levels that we know we can continue to enroll and improve the occupancy, that was also true. And so now it becomes just good operational practices of a multiunit organization of looking at this talent of the center director and see if that person needs more training or skill development. That being true, then it's about doing the weekly and daily practices of moving a family from inquiry to enrollment. And we've got great playbooks to make that happen consistently. And we've got great ways of monitoring the activities that a center director is doing over the course of time. And so that's what we'll continue to push on in those bottom centers. Another piece that we're really excited about, and for those of you that we talked through the IPO process, we've made investments in digital. And so that any type of digital tool we roll out is either enhancing the experience for our center directors or for our parents. And it's all around the umbrella statement of making it easy to do business with KinderCare and strengthening your relationship with us as a customer. So a couple of examples of that are through the enrollment process as a parent first comes in and has their first tour and the multiple touch points that they have with us, it's a much better experience with the tools that we've launched over the last few months that then require the center director to focus on relationships with the teachers and relationships with the families because that's what grows enrollment for us in our centers, grows our occupancy. And another indication or another example is online tour scheduling. So instead of you having to call up a center director, find them in their office, in front of their computer to schedule a time that work for both of you, you can now do that online, which is a better experience with the center director, better experience for the parent as well. And we'll continue to roll out enhancements to that digital experience that all in the course of trying to make it easier for that parent to interact with us, which then frees up time for the center director to build better relationships with their own teachers and with the families as they're coming into our centers. So just a couple of examples of the playbooks that encourage us for continued occupancy and growth in every one of our centers.

Yes. The other point that I sometimes make when talking to investors is if it's impossible to get a center to improve, you can also -- another option is to close the center. And so I guess should we be thinking about center closures as being more elevated in this past period post COVID and maybe still a little bit remaining to go? Or is this sort of -- are we back to a normal level of closures? How should we think about sort of net new centers?

Yes. No, I think we're definitely back to kind of a normal level of closures, right? And I kind of think about that, it's about 15%, so about 1% of the portfolio as we're looking at lease out dates and option renewals and kind of really looking at that. We took the opportunity through the pandemic with some of our landlords to do a few more closures that strategically made sense. And so I think we're now really at a really normal level. So you see some of that 15%. And then to your net question, right, we think about adding new centers in 2 different ways: One, through builds through greenfields and then the other through tuck-in acquisitions. So on the greenfield side, you saw this year is about flat kind of our new greenfields versus our closures. I think you'll see probably pretty similar next year as we kind of ramp back up to where we were historically. So in 2019 through '21, we averaged about 25 new greenfields a year, and we'll see us get back to that by '25 -- by '26. We took some decisions during the pandemic, some capital decisions, and we're still feeling the impacts of those, which are the right decisions at the time, I probably wish I would have made new ones, different ones back then, but they're the right decisions at the time. And so seeing a little bit lower greenfields now, but we'll ramp back up to that. And so they actually -- they should surpass our closures. But then just as importantly for us, the tuck-in acquisition. So we're out buying a group of centers, usually between 1 and 6 centers that's owned by someone and we're pulling those in. And we're using the same heat map that we are for our greenfields as for acquisitions. And we see those as kind of just kind of a capital allocation path. Not everyone sees it that way as far as organic or inorganic revenue. But we really see it that way and increasing the fleet. And so with those acquisitions and those tuck-ins, we'll definitely far surpass the closures between those two going forward.

And then on the new center growth, when you think about traditional ECE versus Creme, should we expect -- how fast are you going to be growing sort of the Creme...

Yes. I mean I think you're going to still see us in single -- you won't see us in double digits in the next couple of years. So we have developed a new prototype for Creme. So the Creme that we purchased were 25,000 to 35,000 square feet. And as a comparison, the average KinderCare is about 11,000 or 12,000 square feet. We've developed a prototype of about 16,000 to 18,000 square feet that we think fulfills the Creme promise of rotations and wow-worthy centers. We're still just trying to build those out. So we want to get a couple up and going before we are sure of that. And so we'll still be growing them, but we'll go a little slower than that. But then we'll also be doing some tuck-in acquisitions on Creme as well, and we've already brought a few in. So you'll see us in the, hopefully, middle single digits, maybe middle high for Creme in the next couple of years. And then hopefully, once we concrete that and kind of get some confirmation, we'll ratchet that up even faster.

Yes. And then just on the Creme point, like when you think about start-up cost for Creme or profitability profile for Creme. How should investors think about the impact? Or maybe it's so small that you won't see an impact within the financials. But on a per unit basis, everyone likes to sort of do that math and...

Yes, of course. Yes. I mean I think pretty much -- you said it, Toni, but I mean we're at a little over 40 centers right now. So you have 40 centers on 2,500 total sites and centers. If you include Champions, it doesn't make that big of an impact center by center. Currently, the Creme Center is about the same profitability as a KinderCare with where they're sitting now. For our new ones, we believe they will surpass that and be more profitable because we'll be able to go in with the right tuition pricing. The founder had previously not taken price increases for a few years during the pandemic. And so we're now slowly catching them up. And we see them surpass the profile. But not materially, materially better, but they definitely will be better kind of unit by unit. And then your other question was...

Like per unit start-up kind of...

Start-up. Yes. So they're a little bit more, but it's pretty much in line with the cost because we're still using developers to build those. And so we're not putting very much capital into them ourselves, that goes into the lease rates going forward. So you'll see a little bit more, but not dramatically.

Okay. And just when you think about the premium opportunity overall, do you view that as sort of one of the most important sort of longer-term opportunity? How do you think about the overall opportunity for Creme?

We, number one, are very excited to be in the premium total addressable market because of the size of that brand today at 40 centers based on the work that we've done on demographics and looking at different points throughout the U.S. We see the potential in the long term to be 300 sites or centers for the Creme brand. So obviously, that's very encouraging. What -- the way we structured our team is we can go extremely fast with the Creme brand expansion. We can go and continue to do tuck-in acquisitions and new center openings around the KinderCare brand. And we can go quite strong on Champions and our foreign employers businesses. So not only do we have the flexibility of the different growth levers and our growth algorithm with the way our brands are set up and the total addressable market that they expand to, it's -- there's not a limiting factor for us. It's more about just continuing to activate our strategy across each one of those because we're still in such a great growth period on all of them that the runway is quite long.

Yes. Great. And I wanted to talk about another one of the areas that you have a lot of growth runway, the B2B business. So 20% of the business now. How fast has it been growing when you go after new business? Are you displacing existing providers? Or are you going after sort of new employers that don't have a child care benefit?

Yes. It's 2 interesting things. Well, there's many. But to start with, Gen Z, the number one benefit they're asking for is affordability and accessibility to child care. So that's really opened up the conversation where the employees are coming to the employer to come up with a better solution. Because of our flexibility, because of our brand, we can bring a solution to a client that no one else can satisfy because we can do an on-site if that's important to the client for their employees coming Monday through Friday. If they're more hybrid or employees are more inconsistent about how they're coming to the office or they're not anywhere near the corporate office, they're spread across the U.S., then those employees have access to our 1,500 community centers. So that uniqueness to what employees are asking for, for employers wanting to spend more to retain and attract their own talent and for the flexibility and differentiation of our model, that's why we're really pleased with the growth that we've seen coming out of the pandemic, but also for the growth potential that's in front of us. And it varies by vertical for where it resonates. So if you are coming in the office Monday through Friday like manufacturing or universities or health care or a first responder, that's why when we're focused on those verticals, our on-site business is back to 80% occupied. So future opportunity of growth, but recovered very nicely for that. For other employers that want more flexibility of how people are coming in the office or so forth, then that's where our tuition benefit program where they can go into our 1,500 centers has resonated well. And then kind of a layer on top of that is what we call Tuition Benefits Plus, where the employer is actually subsidizing the tuition of their own employees. That really didn't occur except for a couple of clients in 2019. We're seeing more and more employers that want to contribute to the subsidy because it's that important to their employees, and the employees want the flexibility of our network. So really pleased with the performance here in 2024, but also more excited about, as you said, the future growth opportunity for our B2B relationships.

Yes. And I think that is a really important differentiator that you have, having: One, the large center footprint; and two, that sort of flexibility of being able to provide to employers the ability to go anywhere. And like just if you ballpark it, like do you see that growing faster than sort of on-site traditional way of providing daycare?

We have seen more growth from our Tuition Benefit and Tuition Benefit Plus percent as our total revenue than our on sites. And we'll keep doing on sites where it's the right solution for that population of clients, but I love our versatility and how we show up for the clients with that flexibility.

Yes. That makes a lot of sense. And then everyone loves backup care because it is a really good profitable model. And so I understand you do have a backup care offering right now, likely pretty small. But I guess, can backup care be meaningful for you? Is it a priority in the near to medium term that you're going to go after? Or do you think that there are other opportunities elsewhere?

So in the near term, not for backup care. It's something we'll continue to evaluate because we have other -- so many other great ways to grow our top line revenue in a very sustainable way. One of the things with backup care to bring a child -- back-up care child into one of our centers can be a bit disruptive for the day and what we rather with a center director, as we talked at the beginning, is focusing on full-time enrollment and growing total occupancy above our current 70% because that's where we'll continue to have even greater operating leverage. So that's the right focus for us right now. And then if we continue to see great performance of backup care and even though it might be more tilted to in-home solution, then that's something we'll evaluate. But right now, our focus is on doing the other things that are building greater benefits for us.

Yes. And it's sort of operational...

Yes.

Okay. Great. And then I think one other topic that's been very top of mind since the election has been a big focus on government expenditures, about 1/3 of your business is from government subsidies. Maybe just give some additional color on what the subsidies are for that the parents are getting, how you're helping them? And how much subsidy does an average family get and basically the risk of sort of this getting changed?

Right. The couple of things we feel very good in the durability of our subsidy revenue, currently 30%, 32% of our top line revenue. And the reason that is, is childcare development block grant is the most significant funding for children and that's been around for decades. It's grown in bipartisan support throughout the years. In the first Trump administration, it grew double digits. So all that is encouraging to why it should continue to grow. Today, on the House and Senate floor, there's a bipartisan bill for both, as I said, Senate and the House to increase the block grant further. So again, tells you the support for the block grant. And then regardless of what side of the aisle on, if you want a thriving economy and you want the next generation educated, you need parents to go be able to go back to work, and you need children to be even a strong childcare industry. So all of those things are reasons why we're so confident in the future of the childcare development block grant continuing to grow. And then for those that even are concerned about, well, will it be reduced, you're taking money away from children in care. So their parents can go back to work. That would be -- that's a difficult story for a representative or a senator to share with their constituents. So I do not see that happening either. And then we've also gotten questions about with DOGE and the efficiency focus, should we be concerned about that for the block grant. And what people should recognize is the block grant is funded by the federal government. But once it's dispersed, it's dispersed to the states. And then through the state agencies is how the dollars ultimately are approved to individual families. So there isn't an inefficient number of federal employees working through these disbursements of funds is another reason why you hear confidence from us in continuing that block grant and those families and children being in our care and being a great part of our future growth as well.

Paul, the only thing I'd just add really fast for those that don't know the story to remind a few, that's a super important part of our income for 2 reasons. One, the mission-based part of that where we are founded, right? We do want to care for every child and that is truly important. That said, we can do it very profitably. And it actually has a little bit of a moat to it because, unfortunately, for the United States, it's actually hard to go through that subsidy process as a provider and get paid for it. But we have a team of about 150 people across the United States that gets us paid timely, accurately without fail over and over again. And as we do a lot of tuck-ins and talked to a lot of other providers, they're not doing it because it's a hard process to go through, unfortunately, but it's a nice moat for us and nice great income source and a great way to serve those children.

Great. One other topic that's come up post election is the topic of tighter immigration and the impact it could have even indirectly on labor supply or wages. And so I think recently, you mentioned that you weren't expecting an impact, but is there any additional color maybe on recruiting or current labor supply or anything like that, that you could share with us?

No, I kind of echo what we said before, all our employees are W-2 employees. We do federal and state background checks on all of them. And so we feel really good on that. I think to the indirect one that you kind of brought up there, Toni, the thing I think about is echoing that we're very conscious when we do wage rates that we're creating the differential between our wage rate and our tuition rate as we do that. And so should there be an indirect impact on wage rates, we've shown time after time to be able to impact tuition rates along with those. So should wage rates need to move one direction or the other, we can move tuition in the same way and also time after time, whatever we do at tuition rates, families are generally very receptive as long as we're providing the care, we should be providing them. If they're highly engaged, if we're providing them great care, they're ready for kindergarten, parents are usually generally willing to pay even more than we're asking just with increases as long as we're taking care of their teachers.

That's great. I'm going to soon ask for questions from the audience if anyone has. But first, before I do that, I'll let you think about your questions. And so I wanted to talk about Champions. And so it's a great business for you, very light on CapEx to build a new site. How fast has that been growing? And when you think about the opportunities there, how are you thinking about that?

Yes. So I really do love that business. So it's roughly 7% of our top line revenue today. We're at 1,000 sites we recently announced externally. So to the opportunity that's there, we've quoted that there's 90,000 elementary schools throughout the U.S. So it just speaks to the total addressable market as we continue to expand champions as a before and after school. In many cases, when we're winning a district or a site we're -- they're either not offering the program today, so there's no before and after school. So that's a great turnkey solution we can drop in for them at a high quality. In some cases, they're self operating, which also is a great benefit that we take kind of all the burden of that away from them. And even in the cases where somebody might be offering before and after school because of our curriculum, because of our focus on quality, because of kind of the whole background on curriculum that KinderCare Learning Companies can bring to Champions. It's a higher quality experience from -- for what the principals and superintendents are seeing. And maybe 2 things that are interesting to all of you to open up a Champion site, it is a low capital. It's around $15,000 if you -- when any site that we open. And if we were to close that site, that's easily transferable to another location. So it's not as if you even would ever lose that equipment. And then we have -- you look at last year and this year, we've added about 150 to 200 sites each year. And we've built the infrastructure around that business so that we can successfully open up that number of centers, many of them open at back-to-school time period, so that July, August and September window. Some do open up in the middle of the school year at January, but that's a little bit more unique. So again, it's important with an organization with the resources we have to be able to open those on time for the principals and superintendents. And then the other part I just wanted to share, so many of our new sites, the last 2 years have come from existing referrals from current -- where we currently operate, which is another phenomenal way to kind of complement our existing sales organization that it isn't all just kind of cold call or conference activity. It really is truly a principal or a superintendent relocating to a new location or them referring us to one of their peers across the U.S. So that's why we're just so encouraged about it's a double-digit growth business. It will continue to be a double-digit growth business. It's a good profit model as well. And we know just the differentiation of our higher-quality resonates with the parent experience.

Yes. And that makes a lot of sense on the sort of differentiation front. Who competes with Champions?

The other providers are fairly -- I mean it's as fragmented in before and after-school program as it is in early child education, so there's some other operators that are probably around half our size that operate. On the other side is more the not-for-profit, so Boys and Girls Club or The Y. But even for them, they've been more challenged coming out of pandemic than beforehand, where in the case of Florida, the YMCA, I think it was, just kind of pulled back from an entire district. And so it was a great opportunity for us to drop in there and bring a solution very quickly because -- again, because of our recruiting, because of our back-office support, we could drop in a solution for those schools quite quickly. And so albeit that's kind of the largest nonprofit operators out there, if you really want a quality extend of day, learning day experience, if parents are worried about learning loss, you would 99 out of 100 of times pick Champions, and you would some of the other solutions that are out there.

Paul touched on his opening comments, too. But the other big competitor that we're doing takeovers of are self-ops, right, where the principal is actually running it with their own teachers. More often than not, the principle doesn't want that headache and those teachers don't want to save the extra hours either, right? And so it's usually a pretty easy win once you get going with that, but that's another one that we're getting a lot of success with, too.

Yes. And then on Champions during the quarter. I guess, was that maybe shy of expectations? I know you mentioned sort of double-digit long term and continue to expect that. But like how should people think about sort of the quarter and how -- where we are now versus expected?

Yes. I mean -- so it was a little bit of a miss on what we expected and kind of the 2 call-outs there are: one, close -- well, I shouldn't say close. We opened a few less sites, right? So we didn't get quite as many deals as we thought by a few. And then we actually pruned a few more centers than we thought we were going to kind of in the middle of the summer. And so Paul touched on it. The biggest pruning usually comes by we win a district and we win a district of 8 sites. And when we go through the enrollment process, if it doesn't make sense to open a couple of those, we won't open a couple of them, and we had said after school district of bus children. Usually, when you do that, pretty slower ramp for what those 2 revenues would have been. And so those were the 2 primary drivers there. We believe even into Q4, but into 2025, we're right back on track where we'll need to be.

And that's -- I think the key part for us is it was a minor for what we saw in Q3. We know we can continue to grow the penetration of all 1,000 sites with more enrollment because of penetration at every school site is such a great opportunity for us. We also know that our site growth continues to perform extremely well. So as we look to 2025, it continues to be exactly what we want as a strong double-digit growth business.

Great. Let me give the audience a chance to ask questions. So if anyone has one, please raise your hand. Otherwise, I'm happy to continue on. Let me ask about the margin drivers next. So we've talked about -- a little bit about the quintile utilization opportunity earlier, but I wanted to give you a chance to just talk about additional margin levers and how you're thinking about scale and operating leverage?

Perfect. Yes. So I kind of usually talk to 4 -- 3 primary ones, but I'll give you a fourth too. So start on occupancy, you mentioned that. So we have out there our calculation right now is every 2% of occupancy, everything else being equal, adds about 1% to our EBITDA margin. I mentioned earlier, we're very conscious of driving our tuition increases ahead of our wage increases. So starts that labor is about 50 cents on the dollar. So even if they were equal, we'd be driving margin, but we make sure that's about 50 basis points ahead. The other one kind of in the short or medium term is in '23 and '24, we're at our high points of G&A as a percentage of revenue. We made some of those investments, Paul was talking about, in digital, made some investments on our sales team and our growth teams, and we know that we're at a high point there, and we won't need to grow G&A nearly as much as continue to grow revenue. So we'll get some leverage out of that. And then the other one is just the offset of the new centers and acquisition centers versus the closed. So those new centers and acquisition centers are definitely coming in at a higher point than our closed ones. And so that's going to cause a few basis points of expansion as well.

Great. Let me ask you about M&A. So there's a lot of opportunity, I guess, as the government subsidies from COVID have now rolled off. How are you thinking about the M&A opportunity? How is the pipeline? How are valuations looking? Anything around that would be helpful.

Yes. I mean we're really encouraged by the tuck-in opportunities right now. So we're just adding a fifth person to our M&A team right now, and I think we actually just started this week, which is exciting. And then we also utilize a broker network out there that we believe we're a first call on that. The pipeline is as robust as we've seen it. And I think it is directly influenced by that stimulus that you're talking about, Toni. Those monies are now gone, October 31, all those checks have to be written and sent out. And so we're really seeing that come in a lot higher. Historically, we've seen EBITDA multiples of about 4% to 7% on our tuck-in acquisitions. This year, it's been down a little bit. It's been more in the 2% to 5% range. So we'll see if that continues much longer term, but with the stimulus dollars going away, we think there's some there. So we're definitely leaning harder into that and see a lot coming in the next 12 to 18 months.

Great. I wanted to ask also on capital deployment. So you have talked about your goal of a leverage target under 3x. You're basically right around that level now. And so just maybe talk about your capital deployment priorities on a go-forward basis from here?

Yes, of course. Yes, we're able to use those IPO proceeds and do a repricing also, which helps on our rate. First one will be continuing to invest in all our growth levers. And we've been able to do our acquisitions. We've been able to do our NCOs just off of our operating cash flow already. So we'll be able to utilize that more if we see more opportunities, like I said, with M&A being hotter, we can know confidently we can lean into those. After that, we'll continue to deleverage, right, as it makes sense and get that down a little further. More into the future, we'll kind of come out with what our plan is as far as buybacks or dividends. We're not set on that yet, but we'll come -- over the years, months or quarters go by, we'll come out with our plan as that. But definitely, first 2 priorities are growth in the business and what makes sense for shareholders and then deleveraging continuing.

Makes sense. Last chance for anyone to ask any questions. All right. So one last question for you. And then I'll give you a chance if you want, if there's anything that we didn't cover that we want to talk about. I wanted to ask on new center growth. So going back to that point. Within the industry, obviously, we've only had 1 public company out there for a long period of time. And their new center growth algo is adding 1 to 2 points from new centers, but also closing centers subtracts about 1 to 2 points. So net, it's basically about flat. Is there something different about your model that you think that sort of allows for sort of a net plus 1 to 2?

Yes. So I'll go back -- 2 things give us kind of some confidence to that. One is, as I look out to '26 and knowing what we have in the pipeline as far as leases and stuff under construction, getting back into that mid-20s of growth. And so I feel pretty confident we will just outsize it as far as just number of centers that we're opening versus closing. And again, I'm taking out acquisitions because I know lots of you want to look at it. So that alone will outsize that there. But then also, like I look at our own business instead of calling out our competitors, at a time when we ever have to close a on-site business, usually, they're still a profitable business because of the arrangement there, whether it's management fee or known families on site versus if we're closing the community center, they're virtually always one of our underperforming centers. And so a new center far surpasses the close center as well. And so as far as EBITDA and cash flow and revenue, it's not a one-for-one relationship alone. I think we'll out surpass it as far as count anyway, but all the things that are also important, will far surpass it as well.

Great. And just in the 1 minute that we have left, is there anything else that you want to share with the audience?

No, I think I would just reiterate with our total addressable market that we have so much flexibility behind our brands. Each one of our brands is very intentional about meeting parents where they need us, whether it be before and after school or at their employer or in their community. Tony talked about the operating leverage is real very near-term or ongoing capabilities that we've been doing well over the recent years. So just continuing to execute on what we've been doing well the past few years is our growth algorithm for the future. And we've continued to build out the structure and support around that so we can continue to accelerate the productivity loop, if you will, of what we're doing. And then the final part I would just say is that flexibility of offering that we have around both the community business and the on-site business and the way that we show up for parents and for employers is unlike anyone else in the industry. So that's important to note. And probably the final -- not trying to do it in 10 seconds, but 30% of our revenue is subsidy. We feel very strong about that. More than 20% of our revenue is employer-sponsored revenue. We feel really good about that. Another 5% is our premium business, and we know there's growth there. 7% of our business is before and after school, which is a lower spend per week for a family. And so you're really just as you kind of continue to fill in that equation, just speaks to the durability and growth potential for our organization, which is why we're so excited about the future.

Terrific. Well, thank you so much for coming, and thanks for the presentation and thank all of you for coming as well. Thanks.

All right. Thanks, Toni.