Monro at Piper Sandler Conference: Strategic Turnaround Focus

On Wednesday, 10 September 2025, Monro Muffler Brake Inc (NASDAQ:MNRO) presented its strategic turnaround efforts at the Piper Sandler 4th Annual Growth Frontiers Conference. CEO Peter and CFO Brian D’Ambrosia outlined both the company’s progress and the challenges it faces in the automotive aftermarket. Key areas of focus include store closures, enhanced marketing, and improved merchandising, amidst a backdrop of both positive financial results and industry pressures.

Key Takeaways

• Monro reported a 5.7% increase in comparable store sales this quarter.
• The company closed 145 underperforming stores, enhancing operational efficiency.
• A strategic shift in marketing focuses on digital channels and price communication.
• The company maintains a conservative balance sheet with $64 million in net bank debt.
• Future growth is expected through strategic expansion, particularly in the Southwest.

Financial Results

Monro’s financial performance showed resilience with a 5.7% increase in comparable store sales, building on a 2.8% rise from the previous quarter. Adjusted earnings per share remained steady at $0.22, consistent with the previous year. The company successfully reduced inventory by $10 million, reflecting a focus on asset productivity. Monro’s net bank debt stands at $64 million, indicating low leverage and a conservative balance sheet. Capital expenditures for fiscal year 2026 are projected between $25 million and $35 million, with lease payments and dividends budgeted at $40 million and $35 million, respectively.

Operational Updates

Monro has taken decisive steps to streamline operations by closing 145 underperforming stores, a move described as cash positive with minimal inventory write-off. The hiring of Katie Chang as the new merchandising leader marks a strategic effort to manage tariff impacts and enhance vendor relationships. Marketing initiatives have shifted towards targeted digital strategies, including paid search and social networking, alongside an expanded call center reach. The implementation of the ConfiDrive inspection tool has bolstered revenue in ride control, brakes, and batteries.

Future Outlook

Monro’s leadership emphasizes improving operating income and maintaining positive comparable store sales as key priorities. The company is focused on earnings per share growth and long-term unit growth through strategic expansion. Leveraging its existing platform, Monro aims to build a standardized base for future expansion, particularly targeting the Southwest region where it currently lacks presence.

Q&A Highlights

During the Q&A session, Peter discussed a shift from "buy one get one free" promotions to communicating the best overall price to consumers, supported by vendor partnerships. The company is simplifying its offerings to ease operations for store employees and customers. Despite acknowledging overcapacity in the tire industry, Monro remains optimistic about its service offerings and market position as buffers against pricing pressures.

For a comprehensive understanding of Monro’s strategic initiatives, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Piper Sandler 4th Annual Growth Frontiers Conference:

Unidentified speaker: Peter, I think I’d first just kick off with you. I think what’s exciting about Monro is everyone loves a good turnaround, particularly a company that’s in a solid, steady industry. You’ve been there less than six months. You came in. Maybe just share a little bit about your background as an executive, other companies that you’ve worked on in the space and have tried to turn around as well.

Peter, CEO, Monro: Thank you again. I have worked in the performance improvement industry for over 30 years. I have worked for lots of different companies in many industries, but there are two industries that I know really well: retail and the auto aftermarket. In the last 20 years, I have probably worked with half a dozen of those companies. I have probably been in the C-suite in other industries at least eight or ten times. I have specifically worked recently in collision repair, which is very similar to the problems that Monro and other aftermarket companies are facing. I have also worked in the parts industry. I was a CFO long ago. When I learned that Monro might be thinking about doing something to accelerate its improvement, I was thrilled because I have known this company for a long time.

I think it has characteristics for a turnaround that are unusual in my experience. First of all, we are a national business with locations in 32 states. We now have 1,115 locations total. We provide a service, and service is important. I will come back to that a little bit later. It is not a retailer. It is a service business. It makes it a little bit harder to run, but it is more value to the customer. We are making money. The company has made money even with several years of negative comparable store sales and profit. Those alone are attractive fundamentals. I would add that many companies that are in turnaround do not have enough liquidity or time to be able to really accomplish what they want. This company does.

We have no issue with being able to borrow as much money as we need to in order to do the things that we have. I am thrilled to be part of this management team. In terms of challenges, and I will keep it brief so you can ask other questions, I think the decline in traffic in the industry has been a problem for many. The consumer has a choice of what tires they buy, and remember we sell tires as well as provide service, such as oil changes, brake jobs, ride control, and other preventive maintenance services. There is a choice as to what tire you are going to buy. Those things have resulted in tough times for this business.

What I love about this particular company is we have a lot of tire vendors who want to do work with us, and I have talked to all of them in the last three months. We have parts suppliers who would love to be a bigger part of what we are doing. We have a lot of good employees across this large network. The fundamentals for us to be able to improve those things which are in our control to drive better operating profit this year than we had last year are all right there. We’ve worked very hard on that in the last six months.

Unidentified speaker: OK, great. There are certainly elements of automotive aftermarket that have been challenged for the last couple of years, and Monro has been part of that. Are there company-specific things that you think have been challenging to fundamentals that you’re looking to address?

Peter, CEO, Monro: When we undertook a diagnostic, which Brian D’Ambrosia and I and our Head of Stores and our Marketing team, Merchandising team, all looked at back in April and May, we came up with four things that we think are critical to focus on. In my experience in turnarounds, if you pick the right things and you can create value quickly, you can gain momentum, which enables you to then continue the improvement over a period of time measured in years. Those four things were first to look at those stores that really weren’t cutting it for us and to close them if we needed to. I think Monro, Inc. had been reluctant to close stores in the past, and there were some stores that we needed to close. Second, the industry has experienced a decline in customer traffic. We needed to address that through better marketing.

Third, in my experience, in almost every retailer and aftermarket business, there’s uneven performance across your network. We wanted to even out that performance so that both the large stores or small stores that are performing well and the stores that aren’t doing so well improve their performance this year through systematic actions. Fourth, we need to improve our merchandising. The people who had run merchandising had left the company, and we were a little bit weak there. As many of you know, in the first two months, we decided to close 145 stores. They were all closed by the end of May. We had exited all of them by the end of June. We moved most of the inventory in those stores either back to vendors or to continuing stores where we needed that inventory. Very little inventory write-off. We are now monetizing the real estate. It’s going well.

It should be cash positive. Feel really good about that work stream. For all of you who know about turnarounds, that’s done. It’s behind us. It enables us to focus on all the things that we can do in the continuing network. A second thing I want to talk about for just a minute is merchandising. We knew, and we began to interview the second week I was there for a merchant leader. We were able to hire Katie Chang, who had worked at American Tire Distributors, who’s one of our partners today, as well as at Lowe’s in her past. She had both retail experience and tire experience, almost perfect for us, known by all of our tire brands and respected. She joined us on June 9. We also felt that we really needed to focus on merchandising because we’re all struggling with what are tariffs going to do.

We felt we needed to make sure we were well armed to be able to deal with whatever tariff led to increased cost, increased prices to the customer. We have now in a team that includes senior management as well as Katie leading it, the right team to work with all of our vendors and get support for them. I can tell you we’ve had support. Increased marketing dollars for us. In fact, when we were coming down, I looked at an email from Katie, and one of our vendors has given us even more marketing support for the rest of this year. They trust us, and they see what we’re trying to do, and they want to be part of it. Merchandising is another focal point. We’re not done, but we have the right pieces in place to be successful with that.

The next two things are very important to improving performance across the network, and that is driving more traffic to the stores. We had focused in the past, even though we had played around with digital marketing, and we have a decent CRM system for past customers, we were way too promotional. What we migrated to in April and May is a very focused digital marketing effort, which includes a lot of paid search. Think of it as Google, a fair amount of social networking. Think of it as YouTube to attract a different type of customer to the store who needs tires and their car fixed. We’ve also strengthened our direct mail program for CRM and our ability to complement all this with some radio advertising.

We tested in the first quarter, and I was a little bit impatient with that because I wanted to get to an implementation that would drive incremental traffic. We’ve implemented in the second quarter. We are probably now using this more targeted effort to get to the customer that we want. The customer that we’re looking for is a repeat business customer who comes to us for service, not just tires, not just parts. They want to come to a trusted provider. We have seen increases in calls. We have seen increases in revenue, and most importantly, meaningful increase in gross margin dollars. That’s what we’re after: better profit this year. In my experience, it takes several quarters for a better marketing program to really pay off, but we’re on our way. Two weeks ago, we hired another new senior colleague, Vice President of Marketing.

Been doing digital marketing for 15 years, has worked for Valvoline and a couple of other auto aftermarket businesses. He’s a very good resource to take what we’ve already built and in the next six months and a year and a half, drive that so that we’re attracting as many customers as we can. There’s one other thing I want to call out as it relates to marketing, and that is we put a call center in place at Monro two years ago. We still have 350 stores of 1,115 that aren’t on the call center. The data that Brian and I look at every week says you put more stores in the call center, you get more traffic, you get more sales.

We are going to add in the next six weeks the rest of the stores, even if it costs us a little bit of extra money, to the call center. The combination of the digital marketing and the additional stores in the call center, it’s going to drive more traffic. Finally, a service business depends on its employees. We have 7,000 guys and gals in our 1,115 locations. We have some fantastic employees, and we have some stores where we could improve the quality of our resources. We’re doing two things right now to improve our ability to deliver great service to our guests. The first is you probably know about our inspection tool, Confi Drive, which for any customer who comes into the store for any service gets free.

With that, you get in a half an hour a look at what else in your car is going well, because we’re happy to tell guests that their car is performing well, or what things they might want to think about doing to keep their car safe. That drove incremental revenue and profit in the first quarter because ride control was up 26% and brakes and batteries were also up. Those things wouldn’t have happened if you weren’t telling the customer what they needed. We’re not perfect yet. We still have a lot of stores that don’t do the inspection as well as they could or share it with the guests in a positive way. That is a piece of the performance improvement that’s in place now.

The last thing I would mention about store performance would be we have an ability to reach out to our customer once they’ve made an appointment to say, "Hey, we know you’re coming in at 10:30 A.M. on Saturday and you’d like two tires. Can you just tell me a little bit more about what you would like? Because if we’re ready when the guest comes in after having made an appointment on their iPhone so they never talk to anybody, or making an appointment through the call center so they didn’t talk to the store, it gives us a chance to talk directly to the guests before they’re there and give them a good experience. We don’t have to be fantastic every time. We have to try to be excellent. If we’re good enough, we’re going to get the customer to come back.

That’s what’s going to drive revenue and profit this year.

Unidentified speaker: OK, all right. It’s a good overview. It seemed like to Brian D’Ambrosia that the first quarter started to show some, only one quarter in, but some signs of life. Just want to recap what you guys experienced in the first quarter.

Brian D’Ambrosia, CFO, Monro: Yeah, absolutely. We drove our second consecutive quarter of positive comparable store sales. We were up 5.7%. We’re up 2.8% in our Q4. We also saw adjusted earnings per share of $0.22. That was in line with the previous year. At the same time, on the balance sheet, we took our inventory down about $10 million, showing continued focus on asset productivity. We also ended the quarter with only $64 million of net bank debt, still adequate availability to Peter’s point earlier for doing anything and making any investments we want to make in our business.

Unidentified speaker: OK, all right. Some good signs so far.

Brian D’Ambrosia, CFO, Monro: Absolutely.

Unidentified speaker: I guess on the marketing front, as you were talking about, it’s one of the key levers to drive traffic. I’m a bit fascinated with this, looking at the aftermarket space, because I see some companies are doing it well, some are not. What are you starting to do differently to drive traffic and drive awareness that’s working?

Peter, CEO, Monro: In addition to targeting, looking specifically with digital marketing in a market for the type of customer that we want, I think we’ve improved the promotions that we’re offering. We were probably a little bit too free-oriented last year with buy three, get one free, buy one, get one free. I can tell you from talking to our vendors that they really appreciate that we’ve been able to do better in the case of some of our very large tire vendors than others in the industry. We think that the fall promotion that’s in place now, going into place right now in the stores and online, is really attractive because it’s promoting that we’re a tire destination. We have every brand you want. We have received support from a majority of our tire vendors this month for offers that are attractive that aren’t necessarily free-oriented.

Sure, you’ve always got to do that, particularly if others in the industry are offering that type of a promotion and the vendor is supporting it. I think the way we’re delivering the offers to our guests right now is improved from where it was before, and we hope it’s competitive. We’ve done other little things. For example, someone pointed it out to us six weeks ago that while we might have the best price in town when you net out all of the benefits, it isn’t advertised that way. We’ve changed a little bit the way we’re positioning the offer to the guest. I think that we, in improving our assortment, this is a little bit merchandising-oriented, but it matters a lot to marketing. We want to be clear about what it is we offer in tier one, tier two, tier three, and tier four tires.

While we’re not there yet, we will be much better at being clear about what we’re offering. That will enable us to be much more efficient with the inventory itself and I think make it easier for the guests to see, "I see what you’re marketing. I’m not confused anymore that you have all kinds of tires. I get that this is what you think is right for me as a premier tire customer." I think that we have an ability to collaborate across our functional areas in a better way. You can come up with a great merchandising program, but if you don’t train your store counter guys and gals to help the guests decide what they want, then you might confuse them.

Over time, measured in quarters, the marketing of what we think is right for guests, and obviously we’re always going to listen to the guest, will do better at translating what we decide on the front end with merchandising to what we’re actually doing in the stores to market the product.

Unidentified speaker: OK, all right. Just to come back to the merchandising too, and this could go to either one of you, when you talk about maybe enhancing your merchandising, would we expect to see, I guess, fewer SKUs available? Are you leaning in with specific vendors? Are you going to increase inventory turn? Do you get better margins with the vendors you work with? Bring us to maybe some quantification of how that will show up on the P&L or the balance sheet.

Peter, CEO, Monro: One of the great things about where we are in the supply chain, customer-facing, is that all of our tire vendors and our parts vendors deliver the products to us within a day when we ask for it. They really do it. It’s amazing to me. I was in the home office of one very large American-based tire retailer, and they said, "You know, we don’t think you need to carry as much inventory. You’ve got to remember that if you pick the right offering and we work together on that, the distributors can help you get that product to the store." You will see as time passes, Brian already called it out, our inventory coming down and our ability to still capture sales with a guest profitably and cost-effectively, that is really going to help drive our ability to generate profitable and cash-flow business.

Brian, would you want to add anything else to what we’ve talked to suppliers about?

Brian D’Ambrosia, CFO, Monro: No, I think that just to add the point to that, the reduction of inventory is very much in line with the simplification of the offering that Peter talked about. As we simplify it for our in-store teammates as well as the guest, we can also then have a simplified stocking program, knowing that with our distribution points, we can get any tire that the guest wants if they’re truly brand loyal to something that might not be in our base assortment.

Unidentified speaker: OK, all right. You mentioned tires, and I think at the beginning of the conversation, we talked about the tire industry has been a bit challenged. Could you speak to that? Is that an economic concern? Does there be any change in, I guess, tire fundamentals, tire demand that maybe get us a little more optimistic around the industry backdrop?

Peter, CEO, Monro: I love where we are in the industry. I think there’s too much capacity and not enough demand. Even though in the United States, we have 280 million vehicles on the road, and they all need four tires, at least four tires. There’s a need, but there’s still too much capacity out there. That’s what the brands are struggling with, as you can read for those who are public. I think where we sit, with a large enough scale for us to be an attractive customer for them and credibility around how we’re managing our relationships, I think we’re going to benefit from both the arrangements we can negotiate with the tire brands as well as the distribution system that both Brian D’Ambrosia and I have referenced. I think there’s still too much capacity in the business. I think some manufacturers of tires are going to struggle a bit.

We haven’t really talked in this session about tariffs. Tariffs are something we should all be thinking about a little bit. It may affect the decisions that customers make. We’re going to buy tires from Asian manufacturers as well as North American manufacturers. That may affect what pricing is for the tire industry. It’s another problem that the brands themselves will have to deal with. I’m sure most of you know that in our industry, the brands set the price for the customer with MAP or minimum advertised price. The risk, again, is that the customer will decide that they’re going to go for a different type of tire based on where the pricing is. We haven’t seen that.

In the first quarter, we gained market share in tiers one through three, but we should all continue to be wary about excess capacity in the tire manufacturing business and where the consumer goes in terms of demand. The thing that we should all love about what we do is everybody has to replace tires. If you know how to do it and you are able to sell other services as a service business like ours can, it doesn’t matter so much what the actual price of the tire is. Our services are significantly more profitable than our tires. We want to do both things for all of our customers.

Unidentified speaker: OK, all right. Just in the interest of time, I’ve got to get a balance sheet question to Brian. You guys talked about you have a lot of liquidity. For a turnaround, it’s a great position to be in. Maybe just what are some of your balance sheet metrics where you sit today in terms of total leverage? What’s your cash flow profile look like right now?

Brian D’Ambrosia, CFO, Monro: Yeah, in terms of leverage, we really look at the net bank debt. From a net bank debt standpoint, $64 million, as I said at the end of last quarter. That puts us at maybe a half a turn of leverage on our forward EBITDA. Still a conservative balance sheet that we’ve been able to continue to chip away at the revolver balance as we’ve generated excess cash on top of funding our capital allocation priorities. Those capital allocation priorities are about $25 to $35 million of CapEx for FY2026. We’ll spend about $40 million paying the scheduled lease payments for our finance leases, and then $35 million for our dividends. As we look at FY2026, we believe we’ll have adequate cash flow to fund all of those priorities, including the dividend, without doing anything on the balance sheet that will put additional leverage on.

Unidentified speaker: OK, great. Maybe the last question could be for both of you. It sounds like we’re very early in the turnaround. Really, it’s maybe the second quarter of a multi-year turnaround. What are the KPIs that we should be looking for that would say, hey, this turnaround is starting to work, and we’re progressing in the right direction?

Peter, CEO, Monro: First, operating income. I believe we’ll see much stronger operating income for the rest of this year than we’ve seen so far. As Brian D’Ambrosia already pointed out, we were equal to where we were last year, even though we went through a lot of transition, including store closings. I think everybody wants to know where your comparable store sales are. That’s another metric that you should continue to focus on. We continue to believe that we’ll have positive comparable store sales throughout the year. They ebb and flow by month, but I think that’s a good metric to be thinking about. I think that another metric that matters would be earnings per share. We think about that all the time. I think that will be a measure to see our progress. Finally, and importantly, ultimately, unit growth.

Our success this year depends on our being able to do well with the network that we have today. We’re already thinking about where should we be in order to grow this business in the long term. If you looked at a map, and I’m sure many of you have, you would see we’re in 32 states and we’re a national provider, but we’re not in the Southwest. It may not be easy to find the right way to enter the Southwest, but that sort of unit growth, I think, gets what we’re all looking for, which is in addition to organic growth with your existing portfolio, real revenue growth with incremental units. Brian, I’m sure you have some things to add.

Brian D’Ambrosia, CFO, Monro: No, absolutely. I think that’s right. I think as we think about unit growth, we’re obviously planning that that will be a big piece of the growth of the business moving forward. As Peter said, underpinned by strong performance of the existing platform. That’s why it was so important to exit the underperforming stores and really focus on elevating the existing platform with standardized processes across the four work streams and build that platform for Monro’s future expansion.

Unidentified speaker: OK, that sounds very exciting. We’ll look forward to keeping track of the progress.

Peter, CEO, Monro: Thanks for having us, Katie.

Brian D’Ambrosia, CFO, Monro: Thanks for having us.

Peter, CEO, Monro: It was a pleasure to talk with you.

Brian D’Ambrosia, CFO, Monro: Thanks, everybody.

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