G&K Services Inc. Q1 2008 Earnings Call Transcript

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2008-04-29 20:48:52.0

Tags: G & K Services Inc.

Question-and-Answer Session

Thank you. (Operator instructions) Our first question comes from Ashwin Shirvaikar from Citigroup.

Ashwin Shirvaikar Citigroup

Hi, it Ashwin Shirvaikar. The question is on whether you can take your comments about the June quarter forward into the following year and taking into consideration what you said about margin improvement initiatives, and new client signings and so on at this qualitatively try to build a picture for fiscal '09?

Rick Marcantonio

This is Rick Marcantonio. We don't know, we may give guidance obviously going past one quarter. But, I think it's fair to say that, we continue to invest in our sales organization, and our route sales effort and then our acquisition activity both all three of which are major drivers to sales growth. So we are investing in the drivers that drive sales growth, more committed to margin improvement. We are less focused, and we are much more focused on the long-term improvement in margins trends than we are day-to-day or quarter-to-quarter change of margin improvements because of the some of the investments we are making, but again we will be committed next year likely or are this year to improving our margins going forward.

Ashwin Shirvaikar Citigroup

In terms of the sales productivity initiatives that you have maybe you could quantify the near-term of investment impacting - how much of an investment is it?

Rick Marcantonio

Well, I could tell you we're not going to get into the specifics of how many dollars. But and maybe Jeff can take you through just overall increase in SG&A or SG&A impact, but we are investing in a couple of those – we are investing in, I am sorry, we're investing in additional headcount in our organization to put more people on the street and that's local kinds of sales management, we call those positions GSR positions. We also continue to invest on our National Account team. National Account were extremely pleased with the progress we made in National Accounts over the last the number of years and we know that the product that we're bring forward is very interesting to National Account companies, we are the footprint to service that kind of business and we'll continue to invest in that and then we look for ways to make our people more productive, now that productivity improvement can come a couple of ways. We can train our people, make them better trained, which will make them more effective in gaining the new account, and also people that are successful have a talent to stay longer, retention improves our ability to try productivity and then we look for the non-value added components in our business that drive expense, but don't bring the kind of value forward, that's exact what we saw with the sales automation tool that we were rolling out. Historically we had our people involved in non-productive activity that took away from face-to-face selling with our customer, plus we had people tied up administratively to do work for them. The new tool that we're putting in place reduces the burden in both of those areas. So that's, kind of it, what I would tell you we are making investments and we will continue to...

 

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