Parks! America Q2 FY2026 Earnings Call - Macro Headwinds Hit March, but Core Operations Remain Resilient
Summary
Parks! America delivered mixed results for its second quarter of fiscal 2026, with strong January and February sales entirely offset by a sharp March downturn driven by macroeconomic headwinds. CEO Geoff Gannon highlighted that rising gas prices and broader economic pressure on the company’s core $50,000-average-household demographic have severely impacted discretionary spending as the peak season begins. Despite the macro friction, underlying park operations are sound, with management attributing prior growth to improved organic marketing and local goodwill rather than paid ad spend.
Management is navigating a complex capital allocation landscape, constrained by limited liquidity and a shareholder base heavy in physical stock certificates. While the company remains debt-light and open to strategic acquisitions—particularly in the wild animal safari sector—the primary bottleneck is cash on hand. Gannon emphasized that the board is actively exploring long-term solutions, including potential tender offers and a dematerialization initiative, to unlock share repurchase flexibility and position the company for value-accretive M&A when the right opportunities arise.
Key Takeaways
- Sales growth in Q2 FY2026 was driven entirely by January and February, with March showing a sharp decline as the peak season began.
- Rising gas prices and macroeconomic pressure on the ~$50,000-average-household demographic have created significant headwinds for discretionary spending.
- The company’s core customer base is rural and lower-income, making it highly sensitive to inflation in travel and fuel costs.
- Marketing has been centralized at the corporate level, with plans to hire two part-time social media coordinators by mid-June.
- Inflationary pressures on physical costs like animal food are moderate (~1.5-2%), but insurance costs are expected to rise ~5% due to hardening liability markets.
- The company has no plans to accelerate debt repayment, viewing cheap, long-term debt as a better use of capital than paying down balances.
- A $500,000 investment in centralized digital signage is planned across all three parks to improve marketing efficiency and drive in-park spending.
- Liquidity and physical stock certificates are the primary constraints on share repurchases, with management exploring long-term solutions like tender offers.
- Acquisitions are a priority, particularly in the wild animal safari sector, but are limited by the company’s small cash war chest.
- Management compares acquisition targets based on forward-looking EBITDA multiples relative to their existing parks, prioritizing value over stock price performance.
Full Transcript
Operator: Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Parks! America’s second quarter fiscal year 2026 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 laws. 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 measure is included in our Form 10-Q.
Yesterday, 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. In a few moments, I’ll turn the call over to our President, Geoff Gannon, for opening remarks. We will respond to questions previously submitted via email, after which we will 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 hand feature on the bottom of your screen at any time to indicate you have a question. When you are called on to ask a question, your line will be unmuted.
When you are finished asking a question, please state that you have no further questions. Your line will be muted afterwards. We will take as many questions as possible within a 30-minute window. That concludes my instructions. Now I turn the call over to Geoff Gannon for opening remarks.
Geoff Gannon, President and Chief Executive Officer, Parks! America: Thank you. I thought I would start by just explaining some of the results, and mainly having to do with changes in the macro environment that we’ve seen since the start of the Iran war. The results that you see are for our quarter that ended in March. All of the positive results that you see there in terms of increases in sales year-over-year were really achieved January and February. Essentially none of them were achieved in March. March is a much larger month for us than January or February. You have blended in there very good results for January and February, more consistent with the results we’d seen at several of the parks over much of the off-season, which for us is basically like October to February.
Then the start of our season is in March, and starting in that, we’ve seen a real change in terms of the macro environment that’s very clear. Our average household probably makes about $50,000 or so. It’s more rural household. I’m sure you’ve heard about the kind of buzzword of the K-shaped economy. They’re often talking there about $125,000 plus as doing really well. $50,000 is not doing so well. The increase that we’ve seen in gas prices has I mean, that adds up each month to about what it costs to go to our park in terms of what that cuts into discretionary spending for the kind of households that come to us.
It’s very clear that since we saw a change in gas prices, and we’ve seen some numbers in consumer confidence reflecting this, that we have a major change starting in March. I have no idea how long that change will persist for, whereas, you know, since I’ve been here about 2 years, I’ve said that we, where you’ve seen positive results, they’re entirely park driven because they are specific to the parks and there’s no macro tailwind. I would say now there’s a significant macro headwind, that started in March. That’s really it for comments on that. Just that the results that you see are not broken out by month, but the strong months were January and February, March was not a strong month.
Operator: Okay. Terrific. Geoff, we have a couple of questions here, a number that were presented to us by a shareholder by the name of TJ. The first one that he has for us is, can you provide any updates about hiring market directors for each park?
Geoff Gannon, President and Chief Executive Officer, Parks! America: Marketing is centralized at the company now. I basically head up the marketing team in the sense that they each report to me, the internal marketing people. We have 3 employees at corporate right now. When you see results, those are allocated directly to the parks. When I talk about corporate employees, they’re on the corporate payroll. They work with me. They’re remote from the parks. Marketing costs of each of the parks is allocated into the segment expenses that you see for each park. Their salaries are allocated.
What we are going to do is at two of the three parks, we will add probably the title will be something like social media coordinator or something like that, which will be part-time positions to help the people who are centralized but remote, in basically gathering content and carrying out some of the things that they need on the ground all the time. We won’t be doing that at one of the parks because one of our internal marketing people, is actually local to one of the parks, to Missouri. That person had worked at Missouri before, joining corporate. We’ll add two, and they will be probably part-time roles.
I would imagine that we will probably start the hiring process in about 2 weeks, and they should be filled sometime in, let’s say mid to late June, you know, within June. They’re much lower paid, fewer hours, jobs that are about gathering what they need to be directed to gather really from people who are making strategy decisions who are really the people at corporate already. These are much smaller additions than what we have in place now. Together they won’t even add up to, you know, half of like the positions that we have in terms of cost or something like that. I’d say mostly the marketing situation is centralized and filled out now.
Yes, we are adding that, and that will allow us to be on some apps that we’re not on right now, that’s a little younger. Yeah, they’ll be hired by June, but they’re smaller positions than what’s kind of described here. They won’t be marketing directors.
Operator: Got it. I know you did touch on some inflationary concerns in the opening remarks. This is, as it pertains to things like insurance costs, animal care expenses, and perhaps any other aspects of the business that may be impacted by inflationary pressures and if you’re seeing any moderation of that.
Geoff Gannon, President and Chief Executive Officer, Parks! America: Sure. We have seen moderation in inflation pressures on wages. But that’s kind of, I think, slowing of real wage growth. We had probably more pressure on wages a year ago or something. At Missouri, we do have a situation where the minimum wage is actually very close to the maximum starting wage we can really do given the productivity there. That’s the only place where we do feel pressure from like laws of, they had it set to escalate each year for a while. While that’s not directly inflation, that is significant. And that will end soon, but that is something to keep in mind that that’s kind of separate.
The other two parks don’t have that issue because although they, on average, don’t pay lower than Missouri at all, they don’t have high minimum wages, so they pay well above minimum wage. Whereas at Missouri, they pay very close to minimum wage. That’s just the result of minimum wage being almost double in Missouri or being double in Missouri versus many other states. In terms of You can see some of the physical things like one of our biggest ones is animal food and those things. I think much of the physical stuff that we have broken out the year to date and the significant expenses is up maybe 2%, maybe 1.5%. Not significant, and that’s on higher attendance. Much of the physical stuff hasn’t been inflating that much.
We did have tariff surcharges with inventory, meaning gift shop inventory, last year. you know, through this year is when we’ve been experiencing it. I don’t know that that will be more severe in the future. That’s really related to tariffs and the fact of where things are sourced from, basically. Other significant costs are like hay and things like that which have their own cycle and isn’t a big issue. Insurance costs, we are coming up on our renewal cycle in the next three months, basically. My guess, if I had to guess now, the broker just presented it to me and everything, is that we might see those go up maybe 5% unless we change, make meaningful changes to the program. Most insurance costs are pretty soft market right now.
Liability, which is by far our biggest category, is a bit hard. I think we could see like a 5% increase or something. Insurance costs, very possible, purely driven by just liability with everything else flat or down. Animal care expenses and things like that, honestly, those are very specific to how well-managed the park is, and we see that as a much bigger factor than we do inflation. Overall, we don’t see a lot of inflation pressure right now, but obviously inflation and the overall economy is heating up a bit now, so we might see in the future. I really don’t know. It has not been bad in the last in this fiscal year so far.
Operator: Okay. In general terms, how are you thinking about the balance between reinvestment, acquisitions, debt reduction, and share repurchase?
Geoff Gannon, President and Chief Executive Officer, Parks! America: I’ll start with debt reduction. We don’t have any plans to reduce debt. If debt is available on terms that are similar to like a commercial mortgage type terms, if we can finance properties on that basis, then we see nothing wrong with having a meaningful amount of debt. We have, you know, in terms of gross debt, and then in terms of net debt, we have virtually none as you’ve seen on the balance sheet because we have cash that’s about the same as our debt. In terms of gross debt, you know, if we have, say, $3 million-$4 million in gross debt or something, all raw land at our parks combined would probably appraise for about $11 million or something, you know, in that neighborhood.
This isn’t really a very high percentage of debt versus like land value, nor is it a high amount with debt versus EBITDA, right? If it’s termed out enough and it is slow to amortize and factors like that, then we don’t see any need to reduce debt. It generally, you know, after tax and everything, has a much lower cost to us. If we’re able to get debt on the kinds of terms that you’d be able to finance commercial properties and things generally, then that would be something that we have no plans to pay down on any accelerated basis, I would say. You shouldn’t expect that at any point in the future that we would accelerate debt repayment faster than it’s contractually required.
In terms of reinvestment in the parks, we do have plans to reinvest related to some marketing things. We do currently have in the planning stage, investment in digital signage. The parks don’t currently use digital signage. Some of them have signs that are locally set. They look like digital signs, but they actually aren’t set centrally. We do have plans, and I don’t know if it’ll be extended over fiscal year 2026 and fiscal year 2027 or all into 2027, but where we would invest a significant amount there. That’s the only unusual reinvestment that I would think of, and that could be as high as half a million dollars, like $500K, across all three parks.
We had expected a return on that. I don’t think we would necessarily expect heavy reinvestment in parks except for things like that, which is very marketing-driven, and we think that can increase spend in the park and can take advantage of the centralized marketing that we have where it’s controlled from corporate with videos being cut for that, promos, whatever things, and all that being then supplied to the parks on digital signage, which relieves them of having to do anything at the park and allows marketing specialists to really focus on that. I think that could have very quick returns on that. That’s the only reason why we’d have heavy reinvestment due to that. I don’t think generally there’d be heavy reinvestment. Share repurchase is limited right now by the logistics of doing it.
We can get into that more later maybe, but specifically where we’ve had a bottleneck, it’s really been in the fact of most people are holding physical shares, our shareholder base, things like that. You shouldn’t read into it that we’ve been very timid about buying back shares where they’re available and the process is streamlined enough for us to do that. It’s just that we aren’t a big liquid stock that can go out there and buy in the open market. You shouldn’t assume that our, what you’re seeing in terms of buybacks that are recorded in this quarter is indicative of, like, how much we would do that way. I talk to the board about it at every, you know, month basically.
They, you know, they’re aware of how much progress we’ve made, and it’s I’m sure that they would be happy with more repurchase than has been done there. That’s very possible. Acquisition, I think size and cash is the biggest issues with that. We’d obviously like to do an acquisition that is more meaningful to the company in terms of relative to our enterprise value and things like that, and that is a well-performing park that’s performing the way that we’d kind of be able to look at it and see that this already has some economic goodwill that we’d be able to, even if there are some synergies and things, we’re basically buying something that already is offering adequate returns.
I think that’s harder to do in the, like, amount of cash that we have, let’s say a $3 million-$4 million type purchase, than it is, like, a $6 million-$8 million purchase or something like that. With that, the key constraint is really cash on hand because in the industry, people generally who are exiting are, like, founders and people like that, and they would just like to be cashed out, generally. We’re the only one that has publicly traded stock, so no one’s thinking about, "Oh, I’ll get stock instead." No one’s eager to have, you know, long sellers notes and things like that. I think that is really a question of what’s available. We have looked at some deals, and we’ve seen more deals, you know, in the last year or something than before then.
Either a seller or buyer, you know, a potential buyer, us or a seller or something, has named a price at times. We’re active in looking at things and considering them, but it’s really just a question of if the right thing at the right size becomes available. I really say we’re always interested in looking at acquisitions, but that you can be very interested and go a couple years without doing anything.
Operator: Yeah. On that acquisition, so nothing really specific, in terms of what you find, most attractive at this current moment?
Geoff Gannon, President and Chief Executive Officer, Parks! America: Well, I will say in terms of pricing, and especially pricing of what we’d be able to likely achieve in terms of EBITDA going forward a year or something, it is true that a wild animal safari would fit the company better than any other kind of acquisition in terms of the rate of return that you’d likely have. Because the multiples are often reasonable on those and, then depending on if they have land and things, there’s some financing possibility, which means that it’s not all equity-based.
Even on leverage, returns on that generally look very attractive to us when we consider that we’d then be having our systems in place afterwards, so our marketing in place, our financial reporting, but also point of sale things and all sorts of other things, and some of the volumes involved with that and stuff. It’s not unusual that when we see something that’s an animal park, it looks real attractive looking forward a year or something when we think about what changes we would implement and what that EBITDA might look like in a year versus kind of the price that they’re interested in, I would say. I don’t think that you’re gonna get better prices for us in terms of forward returns expected on it than you would in the same sort of parks that we do now.
That doesn’t mean that that’s what we would do, but I just think if you’re saying as a category, yeah, animal parks are the most attractively priced category for us, especially after, you know, whatever you wanna call them, synergies or changes that would be made.
Operator: Okay. Following the reverse split and the up-listing efforts, do you have any next milestones that could be helpful in improving trading liquidity as a way of attracting institutional investors going forward?
Geoff Gannon, President and Chief Executive Officer, Parks! America: Yes. We don’t have anything to announce on this, but it’s something that we talk about all the time with shareholders who are interested in selling and everything, which is and just shareholders who approach us, which is the issue of them having physical certificates is 1 of the biggest factors. I would say with, as an example, the share buyback, to my memory. Every shareholder who’s approached us with that, there has been some hitch in the process of them not having or not being able to have easily, each of the things that you would need to be able to, not just sign an agreement to sell your stock, but also then to get that transferred, with the transfer agent and everything.
That’s often that you might not have the physical certificate anymore, or you don’t have a medallion signature guarantee, or they’re just different things where it would be a little bit more complicated for additional steps that they have to take. You know, similar to like it’s not the same thing, but similar to having to go get something notarized and do this and that with it. There’s extra steps that they weren’t expecting. Honestly, the thing that would be most helpful, I think, is what is a dematerialization or sometimes transfer agents call it DMAT. What that would be is trying to get as many people. It’s voluntary, so I have no idea how many people would actually take us up on it.
That would be moving shareholders as much as possible from holding shares in physical form, which they got it many years ago, to holding it in a non-physical format, which then makes it, with other steps, a lot easier to have with a broker and all of that. That kind of thing would probably be something that, you know, would be a more involved process that would be planned out over a period of time and associated with a, working with a transfer agent that really wants to get that done, and the company covering costs associated with that. I’m thinking probably multiple approaches to shareholders to try to get an uptake on that because, you know, like I said, they’re free to opt out and just do nothing about it.
It doesn’t I mean, the physical certificates are as good to them, you know, as if they have no interest in selling them, if they just wanna hold them indefinitely. It doesn’t really make much of a difference, and they could just ignore us on that. I do think that moving as much of all shares as possible over to non-physical formats that people are much closer to what they’re used to holding all their shares in and stuff, is the big change and is something that we’ve been exploring and have been exploring for a long time, honestly. It’s not something that we’ve are doing now, and I have nothing to announce on that right now.
Operator: Got it. At the current scale, what does management believe is the biggest obstacle preventing material, materially higher shareholder returns?
Geoff Gannon, President and Chief Executive Officer, Parks! America: I’d say there’s 2 parts to that. 1 is with the current assets that we own, 3 parks. It’s very clear that the operational, the financial performance issue now for the existing assets in terms of determining what kind of margins they have and also, the key number for us, which is really EBITDA divided by their non-cash assets is what we really focus on, which is really sort of a more cash-based, park level of return on capital kind of thing. What holds that back right now is ineffective marketing, which is, but ineffective marketing in terms of paid ads that are served up online.
Our ads on things like Facebook and Instagram and that sort of stuff is a very big part of our mix and has been for years now. It in different formats, they weren’t. There was online ads done in different ways, digital ads done in different ways before I came in, not always on Facebook and Instagram and things like that. Similar in that they were done through other agencies and online in some way. Not billboards, radio, things like that. Those have been, for years, very poor performing in terms of Return on Ad Spend, and they’re the most significant part of our advertising.
From an operational perspective of whether the segment income of the, of the, you know, the individual parks and everything could be higher in the future, with the least amount of change, it would definitely be a higher Return on Ad Spend for online advertising, basically. We have better returns on things like billboards, but we spend less on billboards, and to some extent, things like that can’t absorb as much spending. You can spend a lot, though sometimes not at good returns online. That’s the biggest one there. In terms of bigger than that probably even is what we talked about with M&A essentially, which honestly is a question of just how ample is your liquidity.
It is very possible for us to consider situations where we might have an attractive acquisition if you’re talking about just price and fit with the company. I will say that, like, as compared to larger acquisitions you’re used to seeing with public companies, these are really small business type acquisitions from like owner/operator types. We if we had twice as much cash on the balance sheet as we do now or had the ability easily to borrow amounts conveniently with no complexity to it to finance something, that would probably change things because we could have a pretty value-added type acquisition if it was just a question of having enough cash on hand.
I think that’s the biggest thing that people probably, from talking to shareholders, that’s the biggest thing that is a little different than they expect in the M&A thing, is that price is sometimes less significant in this space than just being able to close a deal with plenty of cash. We are fine for our continuing operations of what we have, but we don’t have a huge war chest for doing the kind of M&A which would create the most value right now. I would say that’s the key constraint, is just cash on the balance sheet.
Operator: Got it. Okay. Next we have a few inquiries from an individual investor named Victor Jaspe. Geoff, what were the reasons behind your move into the role as a full-time CEO? Was the level of involvement required greater than initially expected, or were there other factors behind this change?
Geoff Gannon, President and Chief Executive Officer, Parks! America: The factors behind the change, there wasn’t a big change in terms of involvement required or anything like that. The big factors were that earlier in this year, I had sudden personal changes, family matters that meant that I went to the board and basically said, "Look, I either need to have it where the, we explicitly decide this is an interim type thing, that there’s a end in sight for working unpaid for this position, or that this is a permanent type thing." I was very open to the idea of staying on for a time in an interim way, but not permanently.
That would mean, do we wanna go search for another CEO, or I presented some internal candidates and said, "Here are the pluses and minuses of this for each of them." That’s really what the factor was. I would say in terms of the role full-time versus not, there’s not a difference there because I was working that time before. It’s a question of the paid versus the unpaid aspects of it. The level of involvement is greater than when I first was there in the first year in some ways, but that’s just the reason why the level of involvement is different now is simply because everyone that’s at corporate, with the exception of some people that our CFO, Becky, has hired, other than that, you know, they’re all people that I hired.
There is a greater level of involvement simply because I have more people reporting to me to some extent, and also they’re people that I chose for that as opposed to people who were already in those positions before I came in. There is more involvement, more direction of some things that way. In terms of the position, I should be clear, it’s a CEO type position. It’s not COO, even though we, you know, have the even though I use the title President and stuff, that’s just for having it as an officer to say that makes it the cleanest for everything that we do. I’m not involved in operational things to a significant extent at all. The parks are really very self-sufficient in terms of operations.
I do handle all the marketing type stuff, which is centralized, like we’ve said. One other difference that we have is with the CFO that we have, Becky, she’s doing a lot more directly herself on financial reporting than at larger companies than they would be. We don’t want an overly big, you know, accounting staff and everything. Becky is very focused on financial reporting. I would be doing some of the financial strategy planning things, I guess, that would often be a CFO type role.
It is a position where I’m a lot less involved in operations than people might think, but am more involved in marketing and finance, some things that are often a CFO thing and a Chief Marketing Person, I guess, at big companies, but we’re not a big company. Those things, and then all the other things that you’d expect that I’ve kinda gone over here, whether that’s insurance and transfer agents and whatever things like that of course the CEO would be doing that stuff. That’s basically what it is. In terms of time, the highest time amount spent on it directly in meetings and things like that is actually marketing.
Operator: The next question from Victor is in regards to the material increase in quarterly revenues across all locations. From your perspective, was this mainly driven by improvements in marketing and positioning during weaker months, more favorable weather conditions, or perhaps some other external factors?
Geoff Gannon, President and Chief Executive Officer, Parks! America: Sure. We do break down in the MD&A, in the Form 10-Q, like the direct year-over-year comparison. Anything that’s said there is definitely accurate in how it’s describing it for SEC purposes and everything year-over-year. Now, I will make a distinction there that when I look at the results, I’m looking more at what is this week, let’s say week 20 out of 52 or whatever, compared to that same exact week in each of the last five, six, seven years for the park, right? That really eliminates the weather factor in that. Well, if we talk about weather, truthfully, on a year-over-year comparison, weather is always pretty significant. Because even if it’s not an unusual weather year this year, it will have been an unusual weather year last year a lot of the time.
That word is gonna keep showing up, even though I don’t think it’s that critical. We actually had bad weather at Texas for their critical month, for the critical week in Aggieland. They have 1 week in March, which does about 5 times a normal week for them and is a very significant part of their earnings and stuff for the year is during that period. We had a couple days that were rained out there. It could’ve been worse, but it’s about as bad as it has been historically ever been. At some of the other parks, like take Missouri or something, the weather was better this year than last year, but that’s more that last year was particularly poor then, you know.
The weather comparison sites, they are mostly a year-over-year type thing, and I would not put much stock into weather conditions normally unless we really call them out as important in places other than just in that MD&A in the Form 10-Q. In terms of improvements in marketing, they weren’t improvements in paid ads. We actually cut those a bunch, especially in January and February, and had already been cutting them, I think, it depended on the park, but there might have been some reductions around Christmas too. There has definitely been a big improvement in organic marketing things that we’ve done, which are costs that we take on internally, you know.
As opposed to, like, paid ads, the actual advertising that we pay for, especially that’s really online that we’re talking about because we don’t flex a lot in things like billboards and stuff like that. That’s very stable spending. The positioning stuff during the weaker months, yeah, that is, in some cases, the biggest factor, which is what is the how well is the park liked and what is it offering especially to the local base of guests. In some cases, it’s like, and we call this out sometimes in the Form 10-Q, but it’s increased in things like encounters, animal encounters.
you know, we have little things that can really improve results in the off-season more so than during the season because the base of sales is so much smaller. Real improvements in things like animal encounters or sales of annual passes or whatever things can really drive that higher spending by guests in there. Those are often things that are improvements in the park itself. We have done some events and things like that too, but they’re very, very small in those months because the attendance is so small then. I would say generally higher local goodwill because we think we have a better offering generally at each of the parks and a better reception by the local people who could be going there. I think that is the biggest factor really.
It’s also driven a bit by our internal marketing things, which are honestly things like social media and that kind of stuff, which don’t do anything overnight. They have grown so much over time that there is some awareness built in there that really isn’t associated with direct ad spending or anything, and those have been growing nicely during those months.
Operator: Okay. And I know you did touch earlier on, you know, some of the constraints of a share repurchase program, given the limited liquidity. In that context, though, Victor would like to know, is the board also evaluating alternative strategies such as a tender offer, to facilitate a more effective return of capital to shareholders?
Geoff Gannon, President and Chief Executive Officer, Parks! America: First of all, if we were considering a tender offer and stuff, I wouldn’t be telling you about it on the earnings call and things like that. That’s similar to when we announced the buyback program, where I think we had an earnings call quite close to when we announced that, and I said, just, you know, if we do it, I’ll tell you in the future. Same thing here. Like, something like that is gonna be You’ll hear about it when it’s with the SEC, and then you get, you know, something in the mail or something because we just wanna talk about that without having the exact details and things of that and wouldn’t wanna talk about it that way if it’s an offer like that. I’ll talk more generally about that.
We are looking at ways that it could be done at scale more in the future. I will say we are also looking at ways in which it can be done, most cost effectively and most, best administratively in the long run, and that there might be a certain order to how you do that. That is not necessarily, trying to go out there and buying a lot of stock from a lot of people who are holding physical certificates and, not in contact with the company in a lot of ways, all that regularly. There are other steps that you probably want to improve, to make it more possible to do that at scale.
In the long run, we are interested in having the flexibility to buy back plenty of stock, as always a choice to do that. I’d say that probably isn’t one of the first steps of the process, but it’s a process that we’ve been moving down in that direction of how to do share repurchases. How to have the ability to do larger scale share repurchases is something we’ve been thinking about for a while.
If you look at the share repurchase authorization that we have, it’s very broad, kind of general, and obviously, those caps and everything were set within mind of a long-term option to be able to do that, not with, like, a plan to go out and immediately buy back stock at such and such amount and price and everything. It was really to have that as a long-term option to use on an ongoing basis whenever it would be attractive to do that. Improving our ability to do that is definitely something that we’re working on. I would say it’s a longer-term thing and has multiple steps.
Operator: Okay. That actually concludes questions that had been previously submitted via email. We are touching up on this half-hour window. I did see one question come in from a shareholder during the call. Perhaps, Geoff, we can close out on this, and then you might finish up with some closing remarks. This question was from a shareholder by the name of Daniel Corey. Again, it touches on what we’ve just been talking about. If the major obstacle to value creating M&A is cash on hand, can you discuss how you see the trade-off between trying to buy back shares, or pursuing a tender offer, and piling up cash from the earnings refinance proceeds?
Geoff Gannon, President and Chief Executive Officer, Parks! America: I mean, that’s okay. Pretty simply, the way that we look at that is a little bit different than how you might look at the stock price, okay. What we’re doing when we’re looking at that is we’re looking at basically buying more. I’ll explain it this way. There are a lot of costs that don’t change a lot corporate, whether we have 2 parks or 3 parks or 4 parks, let’s say, right. When we’re making a decision about, do you sell a park? Do you buy a park? We are looking a lot more at what you see in that, what I’ll call the, you know, park level EBITDA really, which is how we talk about the segment. EBITDA that we have for each of those, which we break out as segment being Georgia, Missouri, and Texas.
Remember, those are each just one park. We’re looking at those parks and what multiples of EBITDA, and also values of the land and everything those are, versus what we would do with buying another park. We’re essentially comparing what is it to buy more of our existing parks versus what is it to buy a totally new park. We’re only considering situations in which we are finding it more attractive given the future trends we would think if we were operating the park. The current levels of EBITDA and all that of a park relative to the parks that we already have. Now, what we are not factoring in in a big way though is the corporate expense part of that, because that is going to be much the same in either case.
I mean, the corporate costs will be higher if we have more parks, but the level that you see if you go into, you know, a financial website and it says what the EBITDA for the overall company is not necessarily what our main focus is on when thinking about what parks to buy versus buying back our existing parks. The way that I would say we think about it really is, we compare what it would be. Do we wanna own more of the parks that we already own? Or do we want to own this other park because it’s available at a better price and has more favorable future prospects than the parks that we already own? That’s really how we look at it.
Now realistically though, you know, at present certainly, and even longer term I think realistically, there is a limit to how much we could buy back our own parks because there’s a limit to how much we can buy back our own stock. But I will say that we’ve certainly not considered any situations where we would say that buying back our own stock is more attractive than the acquisition would be. We’re basically talking about, we think that on average the park that we’d be looking at would be as attractive or more attractive than some of the parks that we own, and would be available at a lower price relative to where our stock could be bought back, right? That’s really what we’re looking at is those kinds of things.
You could simplify that and say that we’re looking at what’s the EBITDA multiple on our stock, right, and what’s the EBITDA multiple on the parks that we’re looking at. In addition to that, we are really thinking about what does EBITDA look like 1 year ahead, and what does it really look like on a go forward basis a bit. We’re not just looking at necessarily what the previous management or something was doing in EBITDA like last year or something. Remember that, you know, the insurance, the finance, the marketing, all that stuff will transition over at the time at which we were to buy a park. It will look different if we were to do that. That’s the trade-off.
we’re definitely I would say if we, if it was a decision where we’re deciding to buy back, if we had the opportunity to buy back stock at in a meaningful amount at less than what we see acquisition targets show up for, then we would be happy to do that. I think that it is definitely possible that there are from time to time, acquisition targets that are, you know, if you have the cash, are available for lower multiples than almost all stocks trade at usually.
Operator: All right. Terrific. Well, I think that should conclude the second quarter earnings call that we have today. Unless Geoff, I don’t know, you have any other final remarks that you’d like to make in terms of wrapping this up?
Geoff Gannon, President and Chief Executive Officer, Parks! America: no. I don’t have any other remarks.
Operator: All right. Well, terrific. Well, thank you again to everyone for dialing in. Have a great afternoon.