Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Our first question comes from John Heely - FTN Midwest Securities Corp.
John Heely - FTN Midwest Securities
I know you don’t give annual guidance but I was hoping you could kind of give some color on organic growth for the rental business, how we should think about it for 2009. Looking at the guidance you give, it kind of implies that organic growth stays close to the 2% range in the first quarter. Do you think that’s a sustainable level that we could see throughout 2009? I know everyone’s crystal ball’s cloudy but I’m trying to understand what’s in your crystal ball.
Richard L. Marcantonio
I’ll take part of that question and I’m going to ask Jeff to give some additional information. First of all, you’re right. Our guidance or our numbers for the first quarter suggest guidance about at the levels we’re at right now in this quarter. What we’ve done frankly within the company is focus on the controllables. We feel that real controllables in our business are our ability to drive new sales to professional sales, our ability to drive route sales increases, and our ability to increase pricing where it’s appropriate. And all those metrics we feel actually very good about where we’re at as a company. As you would probably expect, there are some quit metrics that affect us and I’m going to ask Jeff to give you some guidance on that. Those are the parts that make it somewhat uncontrollable. We’re going to continue to invest the revenue growth. It’s a couple of the quit components that we probably want to give you more visibility to.
Jeffrey L. Wright
Sure. Maybe as just a little bit of color but we mentioned in the prepared comments that we continue to be effected by customers that are having financial difficulty, that are going into bankruptcy or having other financial problems, and our customer losses in the second half of fiscal 2008 compared to the second half of fiscal 2007 are up about 30%. So the number of losses that we’re experiencing with customers due to financial reasons up about 30% second half this year compared to second half last year. And a similar metric, the other one that’s affecting us is the change in employment levels. We know that the employment situation in the US and in Canada has been difficult and again second half this year versus second half last year the net loss of wearers in our customer accounts there is up 44%. So those continue to be pushes against our organic growth metrics and as Rick mentioned earlier we’re going to focus on the controllables. We’re going to continue to drive new account sales through our innovative marketing programs, continue to drive route sales and pricing where appropriate, but we do have some headwinds that we’re fighting.
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