Parks America - Earnings Call - Q3 2025

Executive Summary

• Q3 FY2025 revenue was $3.48M and net income was $0.82M ($1.09 EPS). Revenue rose modestly year over year (+0.8%), with strong segment income and a material benefit from reversal of previously accrued proxy-related legal costs; consolidated “income from operations” jumped to $1.12M.
• Mix shift: Texas delivered a sharp turnaround on new pricing and marketing (revenue +45.8% YoY; attendance +44%), offsetting weather-driven weakness in Georgia (revenue −8.6%; attendance −16.2%) and minor declines in Missouri (revenue −1.8%).
• No formal revenue/EPS guidance was issued; management emphasized pricing changes at Texas, marketing effectiveness, and CapEx normalization after completing a large Georgia restroom project (one-time, unusually high CapEx), with the effective tax rate observed at 24.0% in Q3 and 25.5% YTD.
• Wall Street consensus for PRKA Q3 FY2025 EPS and revenue was unavailable via S&P Global; investors should focus on park-level momentum (Texas) and execution on marketing/price strategy as the near-term stock narrative catalysts [Values retrieved from S&P Global].

What Went Well and What Went Wrong

What Went Well

• Texas Park performance accelerated: revenue +45.8% YoY to $761,047; segment income +$226,445 to $333,531; attendance +44.0% driven by new admission pricing (safari/adventure passes, family four pack) and more effective marketing.
• Consolidated profitability expanded: income from operations reached $1.12M; segment operating margin improved to 44.3%; Adjusted EBITDA rose to $1.27M, underscoring operating leverage as seasonal volume returned.
• Management emphasis on returns and marketing: “The biggest things to grow EBITDA/free cash per share…improve marketing effectiveness,” and better pricing; near-term focus is improving existing parks over acquisitions given superior payoff from execution.

What Went Wrong

• Georgia Park headwinds: revenue −8.6% YoY to $1.98M; attendance −16.2% on consecutive rainy weeks and increased local competition; animal food, food service, and vehicle rental sales were pressured.
• Missouri Park softness: revenue −1.8% YoY to $656,191 as full food service was discontinued; segment income −$5,965; adverse weather also impacted results.
• Interest expense ticked up: $53,970 (+$7,047 YoY) due to the 2025 term loan at a higher rate; other income fell with lower interest income after CDs matured.

Transcript

Speaker 1

Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to Parks! America's third quarter fiscal year 2025 earnings call. My name is Doug Jaffe, and I will be your operator for today's call. Today's call is being webcast and recorded. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that our comments today will contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Federal Securities Law. These statements may involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ from those forward-looking statements. For a more detailed discussion of those risks, you may refer to the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In addition, we may reference non-GAAP financial measures and other financial metrics on the call. More information regarding our forward-looking statements and reconciliation of non-GAAP measures to the most comparable GAAP measures is included in our Form 10-Q. Last Friday, we filed our quarterly earnings release and our 10-Q with the SEC.

In our quarterly earnings release, you will find summary information related to our segment financial results. We encourage all of our shareholders to read our complete 10-Q. I will now turn the call over to our President, Geoffrey Gannon, for opening remarks, which will be followed by our Q&A.

Speaker 0

For this quarter, I just wanted to update on the reverse stock split, because I promised to give the final numbers on that. The total cost that was funded to the transfer agent was $141,168. That reduced the number of shares out by 3,663 shares, which had the effect of being a stock buyback of 0.5% of the shares outstanding at an average price of $38.40 per share. Any other information about that you can find in the 10-Q, but that basically gives you an idea of what effect it had on the number of shares out and what it costs. That's it for prepared remarks.

Speaker 1

Okay. For our Q&A, we're going to first begin by responding to some questions that have been previously submitted via email. We will then take any follow-up questions from live participants on today's call. For those who would like to ask a follow-up question, you can use the Raise Your Hand feature at the bottom of your screen at any time to indicate that you have a question. When you are called on to ask a question, your line will be unmuted. When you are finished asking your question, please state that you have no further questions. Your line will be muted afterwards. We'll take as many questions as possible within a 30-minute window. Now for our first question from a shareholder by the name of Ed. I wanted to congratulate you on the profit in the first quarter. It's a three-prong question regarding ticket prices.

The first part of it was what was the % increase in ticket prices at each of the three parks since present management took over? The second involves how that has changed the % attendance, the % change in attendance, either upwards or downwards since the prices were raised, to get an understanding of how that has impacted the attendance. Finally, if you can discuss if there's more room for increases in ticket prices without hurting attendance.

Speaker 0

Sure. The first thing, this will be kind of a longer answer because I want to clear up some things. The first thing is, though, although we talked about changing ticket prices, generally for the business, per capita spend is more significant. Sometimes you can have a higher ticket price, but lower amounts of per capita spend on other things. We have gift shop. We sometimes have food service at some of the parks. We have animal feed. We have encounters. On the other side, sometimes you will have lower ticket prices or even certain promotions that actually are profitable because of the associated spend on other things. It is actually very easy if you go to the 10-Q to get an idea of whether per capita spending is going up or down because we give you both revenue change for the parks, so park revenue, not including animal sales.

We also give you attendance change. If you look at that for this most recent quarter, you have Georgia, you have Missouri, you have Aggieland. We talked about price increases at Aggieland. Aggieland actually had, rounded off, a revenue increase of 46% and attendance up 44%. Very, very, very minor increase in per capita spend, right? The difference is almost insignificant there. On the other hand, Georgia was down in terms of revenue by 9%, but attendance was down 16%. Even though we did not talk about any price increases in Georgia or anything like that, you can see that per capita spend increased there. Missouri was the only park that had the reverse where attendance was up 7% and yet the park revenue was down 2%. The reason for that, there are a few that can happen. One is mix, just the guest mix.

If you have more field trips, that is the main thing that would cause it to decline in any period. Weather is the other one, which throws that off sometimes because if we have different business during the week versus weekends. I cannot give detailed information about since present management took over just because of when that was. We have the nine months there and we have the quarter. Obviously, I took over a year ago, but that was before the beginning of the next fiscal year. I cannot really do a year for you that includes both fiscal years. In general, with Aggieland, what you could see last quarter and this quarter is that there has not really been much of a difference in terms of revenue really outstripping attendance growth. Not a lot is attributable to a price increase.

You could argue attendance would have been up more or you could argue anything that way. The yield on has basically been the same where you can see that those two numbers are running similarly. I'd expect that probably in the future at some point you'll see those diverge, but they haven't yet. In other words, I think that at some point you'll see revenue hold up better than attendance because of the price difference, the price being higher. Is there room for increasing ticket prices without hurting attendance? It depends. It's not the most significant competitive aspect. We talk about competition. I do want to stress that competition in this industry is somewhat different than other industries you might be familiar with.

When we talk about, say, Georgia, that we have increased competition, what we generally mean is that a park that did not exist before is now located closer to guests, potential guests than we are. Proximity to the guest physically in drive time is the biggest competitive factor. There are also things about how effective awareness and marketing is and also in the long run, how good the guest experience is. I would say that while initially price increases in the month that we make them may not have an immediate effect on attendance that we can measure, it's just true in general that you will get lower attendance if you have higher prices.

However, it tends to be the case, it's not a perfect rule, but it tends to be the case that if we increase a ticket price that you see it go up by X% or we decrease it and you see it go down by X% in terms of the published price, it will not affect our per capita spend by the same amount. There will be some sort of offsetting factor usually in the long run that if the more people spend on tickets, the less they want to spend on everything else, the less they spend on tickets, the more they are willing to spend on other things while they're in the park.

It's good to think of a park as being an experience that they have, sort of a box that they go into, and then they can spend on all different things over a period of a couple of hours, and then they come out of that. Although we compared to some attractions do get a lot from tickets, compared to most industries, we are not a single price type thing. We're making profit off of a variety of different things, and it's really per capita that matters. I would compare the revenue and the attendance for every period, a park revenue and attendance for every period, and see how much they diverge by. Like I said, although we talked about Aggieland being due to higher prices, those numbers are really actually very close recently.

That kind of just indicates general demand for people wanting to be at Aggieland last quarter and this quarter and not so much just that there was some huge price change. If it was just driven by a price change, we'd see revenue up a lot and attendance not. That would be what it would look like if it was purely driven by price.

Speaker 1

Okay, terrific. Next up, we have a shareholder by the name of Rich, and he has three individual questions. Start with the first one. Since you've been running the company for a while now, can you lay out some of the issues or items that you think work to the advantage of the company or disadvantage that you may not have understood before taking on the CEO role? Are there any actions that you've taken to address these items?

Speaker 0

Sure. There are advantages and disadvantages compared to what I was expecting, I guess you could say. The advantages are the park management, the GMs, which are much stronger than I expected. However, the degree of autonomy that they had on a couple of measures is lower than I thought, mainly having to do with advertising, CapEx to some extent, and merchandising, purchases of inventory and things. Those were more driven top down. I mean, not entirely, but more top down than I realized from being on the outside. I had attributed more of the concerns about performance of a park or something to thinking that it might have to do with management at that park and just employee morale and how things were working. That really hasn't been the case nearly as much as I thought.

The people in place at the parks, the teams there are much stronger than I thought. I was also aware that there was not much of a marketing focus at the company, but the extent of that is greater than I realized. I think historically, I'm correct in saying that historically the company has not had anyone whose primary job was involving an area of responsibility being marketing or anything like that. To address that, we have made some changes and are in the process of making some changes, which is we are taking on internally some costs that had not been internal costs before, and that hasn't shown up yet in the results, but it will eventually, which is putting together a team of people who have a background in a small team.

We're talking like two, at most three people, who have a background in advertising, marketing, things like that, but more than that, promotion of the parks, meaning social media, events, general things like that. The area in which the company is weakest is promotion of the parks. The area in which it's strongest is operations of the park. It's actually operated quite a bit more efficiently than might be expected. If you look at how far attendance has declined in Georgia and stuff, it's actually a very efficiently operated park to be able to post some of the results that you've seen from that on those kinds of declines. Not many sites could do that. Operations of the parks is better than I thought. Promotion of the parks is not as good as I thought.

In the offseason, really, but in the next few months, I think that will be an area of real focus, improving promotion of the parks and really helping them out in driving more, basically, footfall to their sites, getting them more people attending them that they can drive the per capitas and the profits the way that they have, but just having more attendance.

Speaker 1

Okay, terrific. The second of three questions from Rich is if you can speak to whether the plans focused compounding proposed during the proxy fight still apply and anything that you feel no longer makes sense. Rich understands that nothing is cast in stone and this is not intended to be a critique, but more to find out future plans to grow shareholder value.

Speaker 0

Sure. In the last quarter, I believe it was last quarter, someone had asked basically a question about sort of the benchmarks of what the model looks like in the industry or for the company. I kind of laid that out in terms of margin. I said in that that actually what's more important in the industry often than the margin that people are focused on is basically turns, by which I mean the relationship between revenue and assets. The goal is definitely, and you can see this in the financial statements that we have now and hopefully what we'll be aiming to be doing looking forward, the goal is to drive increases in sales that exceed increases in assets, basically. Improving that capital intensity of it is really key. This relates to the questions about future plans in a case like Aggieland, right?

If you look at Aggieland last quarter, this quarter, if you're seeing increases in attendance and/or revenue of 20%, 40%, while those are not sustainable forever because no attraction is going to grow at rates like that, they do indicate a responsiveness to better promotion of a park, to better marketing, to different things that could cause sales to grow a lot without causing assets to grow a lot. I think you saw how much of the sales increase at Aggieland dropped to the bottom line. It's not always going to drop at that rate, but I mean, it was at a very, there was not much of a difference between how much sales increased this quarter and how much EBITDA increased. You did see there was no CapEx.

There will be CapEx in the future, but it's really a question of how much you can grow revenue versus how much you can grow assets. Our concern would be at a park where we don't see a relationship where we think we can increase revenue much more than assets. Where I said about what decisions are made about buying a park, selling a park, etc., they're based on expectations of future returns on capital. I think you can see that that is more of an open question where there is more potential positive outcomes at Aggieland now. They're more within possibility that they could be in the range of possible outcomes than maybe had been imagined by people on the outside. I will say that the increases in Aggieland are actually not unexpected by internal management.

These did not surprise me or some other people at the company based on what was done in the offseason and kind of expectations for what would happen. It's not a shock that way, but there was no confirming evidence until the season started.

Speaker 1

Okay, terrific. The third and final question from Rich is if you see any value to the company in maybe partnering with local universities that offer wildlife, conservation, zoology studies, and maybe enhancing exposure for the parks and quality of the operations.

Speaker 0

Yeah, so this is something that's done at the park level, and it is something that we do to some extent already and would like to do more of. The gym at Aggieland is an exotic animal vet, and it is beneficial to people really anywhere in the area, students, that can get out to one of the parks to be able to see, to train, to work with vets who are able to interact with exotic animals. They're not that common, and in some parts of the country, there's not many exotic animal vets. It's actually an issue that we have at some parks more so than others that we don't have a lot of choices in terms of who can kind of attend to the park's needs that way. Because we don't have a vet, you know, on staff doing that.

That's someone that you hire for with the exception, like I said, of Aggieland where you have someone who's both a vet and also running the business. It's something that we do and want to do more of. We do some fundraisers and things like that for things, and it would make a lot of sense to have that be both animal-focused and community-focused. Those are kind of the two things for the company. We have raised money at times or partnered with animal causes that are more, you know, across the globe. We've also had community things that have nothing to do with animals, but the best partnerships, of course, are anytime that we can have a conservation, wildlife, zoology, any of those things that are somehow tied to the local area.

The one where that possibility is strongest is, of course, in Aggieland because you have Texas A&M there, and that's very possible. That's something that we'd be happy for any of the gyms and any of the parks to develop more of over time. There is some of it going on already.

Speaker 1

Okay. With that, that concludes the questions that have been submitted in advance. As of right now, I do not see any additional questions that are coming in across the Zoom. I don't know, Geoff, if you have any final remarks that you'd like to include to wrap things up?

Speaker 0

No, I don't have any remarks other than to say that the main thing that I focus on from quite just because we got a lot of questions about price type things is I would reinforce the idea that it's important to look at the relationship between revenue and attendance to think in terms of per capita instead of just going to the website and checking what the ticket price is. I think that's a much better indicator for that going forward. I would hope that people look more at that kind of per capita type number than just the ticket price number. I probably should have guided more towards focusing on that number in past calls, but it's not really something that came up.

Speaker 1

All right. Terrific. With that, that concludes our call for today. We want to thank everyone for dialing in and for your interest in Parks! America. We hope that you have a wonderful afternoon. On that, we will be concluding the call.