Deluxe Corporation (NYSE:DLX) Q3 2023 Earnings Conference Call November 2, 2023 8:30 AM ET

Company Participants

Brian Anderson - Vice President, Strategy and Investor Relations

Barry McCarthy - President and Chief Executive Officer

Chip Zint - Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Lance Vitanza - TD Cowen

Charles Strauzer - CJS Securities

Marc Riddick - Sidoti & Company

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the Deluxe Third Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] And today’s call is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to your host, Vice President of Strategy and Investor Relations, Brian Anderson. Please go ahead.

Brian Anderson

Thank you, operator, and welcome to the Deluxe third quarter 2023 earnings call. Joining me on today’s call are Barry McCarthy, our President and Chief Executive Officer; and Chip Zint, our Chief Financial Officer. At the end of today’s prepared remarks, we will take questions.

Before we begin, and as seen on the current slide, I’d like to remind everyone that comments made today regarding management’s intentions, projections, financial estimates and expectations about the company’s future strategy or performance are forward-looking in nature as defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Additional information about factors that may cause actual results to differ from projections is set forth in the press release we furnished today in our Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2022, and in other company SEC filings.

On the call today, we will discuss non-GAAP financial measures, including comparable adjusted revenue, adjusted and comparable adjusted EBITDA, adjusted and comparable adjusted EBITDA margin, adjusted EPS and free cash flow. In our press release, today’s presentation and our filings with the SEC, you will find additional disclosures regarding the non-GAAP measures, including reconciliations of these measures to the most comparable measures under U.S. GAAP. Within the materials, we are also providing reconciliations of GAAP EPS to adjusted EPS, which may assist with your modeling.

Now, I’ll turn it over to Barry.

Barry McCarthy

Thanks, Brian, and good morning, everyone. We have some important updates to share today, so our prepared remarks are a little longer than usual. We have two primary topics we’d like to cover this morning. First, our solid third quarter and year-to-date performance and increased 2023 earnings guidance. Second, the launch of an exciting enterprise-wide initiative to deliver $100 million of incremental run rate free cash flow and $80 million of increased comparable adjusted EBITDA, with the results ramping through 2025. We call this initiative Project North Star. North Star will begin delivering an increased adjusted EBITDA in Q4 of this year.