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 a quarter that ended in March, and all of the positive results that you see there in terms of increases in sales year-over-year were really achieved in January and February, and 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 results we'd seen at several of the parks over much of the off-season, which for us is basically October to February. Then the start of our season is in March.

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 is doing really well.

$50,000 is not doing so well. The increase that we've seen in gas prices 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, but whereas, since I've been here about two years, I've said that where you've seen positive results, they're entirely park-driven because they're specific to the parks and there's no macro tailwind.

I would say now there's a significant macro headwind, and that started in March. That's really it for comments on that, but just that the results that you see are not broken out by month, but the strong months were January and February, and March was not a strong month.

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 three employees at corporate right now. 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, but marketing cost 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 would be something like social media coordinator, 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, and I would imagine that we will probably start the hiring process in about two weeks, and they should be filled sometime in let's say mid to late June, 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 strategic 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 half of 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, but yes, we are adding that, and that will allow us to be on some apps that we're not on right now that skew a little younger.

They'll be hired by June, but they're smaller positions than what's kind of described here. There won't be marketing directors.

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 it has 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. They pay well above minimum wage, whereas at Missouri, they pay very close to minimum wage.

That's just the results of minimum wage being double in Missouri versus many other states. 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 in 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, 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 is really 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 make meaningful changes to the program. Most insurance costs are pretty soft market right now, but liability, which is by far our biggest category, is a bit hard.

I think we could see a 5% increase or something in insurance costs, very possible, purely driven by just liability with everything else flat or down. Then 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 in the overall economy is heating up a bit now, we might see in the future. I really don't know.

It has not been bad in this fiscal year so far.

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 commercial mortgage-type terms, if we can finance properties on that basis, then we see nothing wrong with having a meaningful amount of debt. 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, if we have say $3 to $4 million in gross debt or something, all raw land at our parks combined would probably appraise for about $11 million or something in that neighborhood. This isn't really a very high percentage of debt versus 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, 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 an accelerated basis, I would say, and 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 and stuff.

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, $0.5 million, $500,000 across all three parks.

That we'd expect the return on that, and 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, but 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 what you're seeing in terms of buybacks that are recorded in this quarter is indicative of how much we would do that way. I've talked to the board about it every month basically.

They're aware of how much progress we've made, and I'm sure that they would be happy with more repurchases 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, 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 amount of cash that we have, let's say a $3, $4 million type purchase, than it is a $6 to $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, no one's thinking about, "Oh, I'll get stock instead," no one's eager to have long seller's 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 in the last year or something than before then, and either a seller or buyer, 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 in and go a couple of years without doing anything.

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. Then depending on if they have land and things, there's some financing possibility, which means that it's not all equity-based, but even unleveraged returns on that generally look very attractive to us when we consider that we'd then be having our systems in place afterwards.

Our marketing in place, our financial reporting, but also point-of-sales 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 going to 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 whatever you want to call them, synergies or changes that would be made.

Yes. So, 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 one 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.

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.

So, honestly, the the thing that would be most helpful, I think, is what is a dematerialization, or sometimes transfer agents call it de-mat. What that would be is trying to get as many people, and it's voluntary, I have no idea how many people would actually take us up on it, but 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 that, 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 to, shareholders to try to get, an uptake on that, because, like I said, they're they're free to opt out and just do nothing about it, and it doesn't the physical certificates are as good to them, as as if they have no interest in selling them, if they just want to hold them indefinitely.

It doesn't really make much of difference, and they could just ignore us on that. I do think that moving as much of all shares as possible over to a 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, but is not something that we've, are doing now, and I have nothing to announce on that right now.

I'd say there's two parts to that. One is with the current assets that we own, three parks.

It's very clear that 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 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 in different formats. Digital ads done in different ways before I came in, not always on Facebook and Instagram and things like that, but 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 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 a 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, as compared to larger acquisitions you're used to seeing with public companies, these are really small business-type acquisitions from owner-operator types.

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, 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'd say that's the key constraint, is just cash on the balance sheet.

The factors behind the change, there wasn't a huge change in terms of involvement required or anything like that. The big factors were that earlier in this year, I had family matters that meant that I went to the board and basically said, "Look, I either need to have it where 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 want to 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, 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 are already in those positions before I came in. There's more involvement, more direction of some things that way.

In terms of the position, I should be clear, it's a CEO-type position, not COO, 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.

Then also, 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 that they would be. We don't want an overly big accounting staff and everything.

Becky is very focused on financial reporting, and then 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 kind of 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. Then

Sure. We do break down in the MD&A, in the 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 5, 6, 7 years for the park, right?

That really eliminates the weather factor, in that. Weather, when if we talk about weather, truthfully, on a year-over-year comparison, weather is always pretty significant, cuz 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's word is going to keep showing up even though I don't think it's it's that critical. We actually had bad weather at, Texas for their critical month, at for the critical week in Aggieland.

They have a 1-week in March which does about five times a normal week for them, and is a very significant part of their, earnings and stuff for the year is during that period, and we had a couple days that were rained out there. It could have been worse, but it it's about as bad as it has been historically ever then.

So, but 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 the weather comparisons, I'd say, 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 as important in places other than just in that at MD&A in the 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 and February, and had already been cutting them, I think, maybe, or, it depended on the park, but there might have been some reductions around Christmas, too.

So, but there has definitely been a big improvement in organic marketing things that we've done, which are costs that we take on internally, as opposed to like paid ads, the actual advertising that we pay for, especially and that that's really online that we're talking about, because we don't flex, a lot on term and things like, billboards and stuff like that, that's very stable spending. Then 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 when we call this out sometimes in the 10-Q, but it's it's increased in things like, encounters, animal encounters. We 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 the attendance is so small then. I would say generally higher local goodwill because we think we have a 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, and then 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, but 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.

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. It'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 if we do it, I'll tell you in the future.

Same thing here, you'll hear about it when it's with the SEC and then you get something in the mail or something, because we just wouldn't talk about that without having the exact details and things of that, and wouldn't want to 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, but I will say we are also looking at ways in which can be done most cost-effectively and best administratively in the long run. 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 process that we've been moving down in that direction of how to do share repurchases, and 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 there's caps and everything were set within mind of a long-term option to be able to do that, not with 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, but I would say it's a longer-term thing and has multiple steps.

Yeah. 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? I'll explain it this way.

There are a lot of costs that don't change a lot corporate, whether we have two parks or three parks or four 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 what I'll call the 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 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, and the current levels of EBITDA and all of 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. The corporate cost will be higher if we have more parks, but the level that you see if you go into a financial website and it says what the EBITDA for the overall company is, 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'd say we think about it really is, do we want to 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, 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. 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 a 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 last year or something. Because remember that 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, and we're definitely, I would say, if we had the opportunity to buy back stock 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, if you have the cash, are available for lower multiples than almost all stocks trade at usually.

No, I don't have any other remarks.