Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator instructions) Your first question comes from John Healy – FTN Midwest Securities.
John Healy - FTN Midwest Securities
When you gave some of the reasons why the tax season was a little bit tougher than you thought, you mentioned regulators impacting some of the return levels. Could you provide some color regarding that? I was hoping you could explain that a little bit more.
Mike Yerington
One, I referred to a comment I made in the remarks about the fact that franchisees were getting a lot more training and compliance programs to work with and I think probably that had some bearing on the returns being down.
I think that that was probably critical that they were spending more time and maybe being even more focused on that area and probably some of the preparers were maybe focusing too much on it, I don’t know. But it seems to be that’s one of the issues.
John Healy - FTN Midwest Securities
When you look at the 2009 tax season, I know return count is probably a wild card but I was hoping we could talk a little bit about pricing.
I know in the past you and your competitors have been able to get mid to high single digit pricing, when you look at the company today and you look at the industry, do you think the pricing opportunity is still there and is kind of the mid to high single digit pricing, is that a strategy that you guys still think makes sense for the company as you pursue to try to get the price increases on an annual basis?
Mike Yerington
I think there’s two things there. To answer your question directly, I think that there probably is the opportunity for mid single digit price increases year over year, it seems to be that’s been pretty standard throughout the industry and I think we believe that we can attract that kind of price increase in our own franchise and company owned stores.
I think the other thing you need to look at though is that there may be opportunities to sell other products to our existing customers that may also improve the value of the, I referred to as share of wallet, that we get from our customers. We’re also looking at that as a strategy going forward.
I think that our customers like the Jackson Hewitt brand, we have a high retention rate. We think certainly we can charge a little bit more for our services each year but I think we can also sell other products and services to the same customer base.
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