Saga Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ:SGA) Q3 2024 Earnings Conference Call November 7, 2024 11:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Chris Forgy - President & Chief Executive Officer
Samuel Bush - Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Operator

Good day, everyone and welcome to the Saga Communications Third Quarter 2024 Earnings Release and Conference Call. At this time, all participants have been placed in a listen-only mode.

It is now my pleasure to turn the floor over to your host Chris Forgy. Sir, the floor is yours.

Chris Forgy

Thank you, Matt. Good morning, and welcome to our corporate team, our shareholders, the writers from our industry's trade publications and our Saga employees, all who have joined us today for the third quarter earnings call. So thank you for being here.

It's been another interesting few weeks hasn't it? Today half of the citizens in the US are elated. The other half woke up yesterday unhappy and frankly concerned for their future. Regardless of which side of the aisle you're on, these are turbulent times no question about it. We are -- recently saw more layoffs in the automotive and broadcast sectors and many of our advertising partners are forced between -- to choose between meeting their payroll or putting a hold on their advertising. It's truly a Main Street thing and it's been going on for some time.

So the question is what do we do about it? Saga's approaches to turbulent times come from a passage called the Stockdale Paradox that we've shared with our leadership team and characterizes how we are behaving going through it.

It goes like this. In order to navigate difficult times, you must first confront the brutal facts accepting the current reality even if it's difficult. You must maintain faith, having an unwavering belief that you will prevail, no matter how long it takes. You must be consistent, continuing to work through pain and uncertainty. You must acknowledge your mistakes and accept that failure and bad decisions are inevitable and acknowledge it to yourself, your team and you must overcome temporary difficulties by embracing challenges as temporary constraints and develop a plan to live in the crisis. Finally, you must stay focused maintain a personal sense of spirituality, morality, values and meaning.

This type of discipline during the transformational change, we chose to put ourselves through would be painful without political unrest, massive layoffs, economic downdrafts and small business uncertainty on Main Street. And we consciously made that decision to chart a different path and expand our digital footprint in the midst of all this turbulence.