JD Durkin: Lori Flees, President and CEO of Valvoline. She and her team from Valvoline just rang the Closing Bell right here at the New York Stock Exchange. It is really nice to see you and welcome you onto the broadcast today.
Lori Flees: Thank you so much for having me.
JD Durkin: Valvoline now celebrating 40 years in retail service. Take us back. Everyone is familiar with the brand. How did this whole thing begin, and how did it grow to the scale it is today?
Lori Flees: Well, the origins of the Valvoline brand started 160 years ago this year, so we’re celebrating a lot of milestones. But our business now is focused on retail services, preventative maintenance.
And we started 40 years ago with an acquisition of stores in Minneapolis, and now we’re over 2,500 stores. But today, we celebrated 10 years as a listed company on the New York Stock Exchange.
JD Durkin: Over these last four decades, I have to ask, what is the same and what is different about the vehicle maintenance business?
Lori Flees: Well, one thing that is different is cars are older than they were when we were in business 40 years ago. People are keeping their cars an average of 12 years or longer, and cars are getting more complicated, which means people need help maintaining them.
The part that hasn’t changed is we’re a people-focused business, and we offer our customers an exceptional service of quick, easy and trusted. We want to simplify vehicle care so our customers can do what drives them.
JD Durkin: Can you talk to me a bit more about what this milestone means to you, means to your team? You and I were just saying it’s not just 40 years, but like you said at the start of our interview, and you and I were discussing before we came back live, also 10 years here as a publicly listed company. There’s a lot to celebrate for your team.
Lori Flees: Yeah, my time as CEO in the company is a very small sliver of that 40 years, and even a small portion of the 10. So really, we’re celebrating the people and our franchise partners who have helped build and grow this business to what it is today.
JD Durkin: And certainly a lot of customers out there are well familiar with the 15-minute, stay-in-your-car oil change. It really sets you apart, maybe, from a lot of other competitors in the space. How important has that development been to really winning and maintaining customer trust, Lori?
Lori Flees: So our service is quick, easy and trusted. It’s fast, but it’s also very high quality. Eighteen-point safety check for every customer. That gives people peace of mind as they’re using their vehicles to get their families wherever they need to go, or for them to be productive in their work.
JD Durkin: I’m really grateful for your time. Before I let you go, give me some sense. I’m sure you and your team, you’re always cooking up a lot of things you can’t quite yet reveal to us. But give me some sense of what the next chapter of growth looks like and how that relationship with your customers, you most hope, continues to evolve from here.
Lori Flees: Listen, we are about ready to celebrate 20 years of consecutive same-store sales growth, but we’re still young. Our stores only reach 40% of the car park, and we have around 6% share. So that growth is going to continue. That’s the exciting part of our story.
JD Durkin: And you’re joining us here at the New York Stock Exchange to kick off October, kick off Q4. You brought some green to the S&P 500, and shares are up 2.1%. Congratulations on everything. Thanks for chatting with me today.
Lori Flees: Thanks for having us.
JD Durkin: Of course. Lori Flees, President and CEO of Valvoline.
