Driven Brands Holdings Inc. Common Stock Goldman Sachs Global Consumer and Retail Conference

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having us here. I think if nothing else, it helps illustrate the strength of the Driven platform, which is both growth and cash. I think as you think through the three elements of that, I think they all come to life there. If I walk through the three, as you mentioned, and we put out in the press release, first is continuing to grow Take 5. Take 5 is a great business. It is a growing business, and we see really strong unit-level economics, both for our franchisees and the company-operated stores that we have. We are talking EBITDA margins north of 40%, sub three-year payback, and a lot of opportunity to grow. That was the first bullet point there in our capital allocation priorities because it is so important to us as a growing business.

How do we continue to find ways to grow that business, both in existing markets and identifying new markets, so we can continue to drive that growth going forward? The second is the leverage target. As you mentioned, we had committed to getting to 3x by the end of the year. We were able to do that by the end of Q3, which is great. Going forward, we plan to operate within a 2x to 3x net leverage area. We believe that is reasonable. We believe that is wide enough to reflect the strong cash flow characteristics of our business, and gives us the right level of flexibility and strong balance sheet going forward. We generate so much cash that even between the growth and the potential accumulation of cash, we will still have more. That is what anchored the share repurchase authorization earlier today as well.

It is about $100 million. It is exactly $100 million. That is about 5% of our market cap. We think it is a really good first step to help us assess what this does with respect to the float, that 5% market cap reflects roughly 13% of the company float, and assess how engaging in that will impact the float as we move forward.

I do not think it will come from debt reduction. The next couple of tranches we have in our securitization are very low interest, and that is very attractive. I am not interested in paying those off until the day before they are due. I do think we will generate cash, given our strong free cash flow characteristics. And so it is possible that leverage ratio will drift down as we continue to generate cash. But I think that is really what we are looking at, is it gives us a tremendous amount of flexibility, enables us to lean in growing that Take 5 business, and then again, helps us assess the best way to go forward from a return to shareholders, of which the $100 million is really that good first step.

Yeah, I think the beauty of the Driven platform is we do not have to. We have access to both. This is a strong cash flow business. As a reminder, our outlook for 2026, $125 million-$145 million. That is inclusive of restatement costs that we will not necessarily see in the subsequent years. So we generate a lot of cash flow. And so the beauty of this is we get to do both. We get to grow our Take 5 and return capital to shareholders. And again, that target between 2-3 gives us some flexibility to lean in where we need to and pull back if we do not. But in general, we see the ability to do both. It is really an and, it does not have to be an or.

Yeah, it's a great question. I think you underscored a lot of the fundamentals in the industry and why it's such a lucrative industry. At the end of the day, if you think about it, there are more cars on the road today. Miles driven is up, car complexity is going up. It's not going down. You've got a bunch of tailwinds. I think, and something that's often overlooked from a consumer perspective, it is the one area in automotive where you can innovate. If you go back to our business and to the roots of our business, we invented the stay-in-your-car 10-minute oil change, and it's something that at the time was new and different and actually attracted customers. It's a neat space to innovate. I think it's a great industry.

To your points, the crown jewel of Driven Brands, it is the growth engine at Driven Brands. Mike and I tend to talk about Driven Brands as growth and cash. When we're talking about growth, it's really about Take 5. If you unpack that a little bit, sitting here today, we're at 1,400 locations. If we do a quick history lesson, we bought the business back in 2016. At the time, it was 40 locations. You fast-forward to the day, 1,400 locations. We'll continue to open 150 plus locations a year. We have our eyes set on 2,500 locations over time, and we have a really strong pipeline of 800 locations sitting here today. Not only has it been a great growth juggernaut for us historically, but we're also relatively early innings, which is really interesting.