Enhancing guest experiences and profitable growth through workforce planning

Now playing: a fireside chat featuring Cinemark's finance manager. Get a behind-the-scenes look at how the movie-going experience is evolving, and see how strategic workforce planning helped this large movie theater chain stay agile and grow sustainably in a volatile landscape.

Kyle Robinson 0:00:07.8:

Hello, my name is Kyle Robinson and I'll be leading the session today with Jay Samples. We can start with some introductions. So I'm a sales leader here at Anaplan, relatively new to Anaplan. I've been here about two months. I've been in the advanced technology space for about 17 years, and really excited to share the stage with Jay Samples. My team at Anaplan focuses on the technology vertical, and we heard this morning - Jim, our CMO, shared that our mission here at Anaplan is to help you outperform your peers within your industry, which is very true. It's been great to meet Jay and learn about the movie industry, which is very different than technology, but I think that's something that we can all focus on while you have your time here at the sessions, learning from other industries as well. So, Jay, do you want to do a quick introduction yourself?

 

Jay Samples 0:01:03.4:

Sure, my name is Jay Samples. I work for Cinemark, and I'm a finance manager. I have been with Cinemark for a little over 27 years, and I've been in the finance department for the last 10 years, so done various roles in supporting the business.

 

Kyle Robinson 0:01:23.6:

Great, and so we're going to focus on how Anaplan and Cinemark - as far as the workforce planning project, how we help drive better customer experiences and profitable growth, but before we jump in, we're in my hometown city of Chicago and we're talking about a movie theater business. I figured I'd start with a hard-hitting question. Jay, what is your favorite Chicago-based movie? I have some options for you if you want, but… So I have four. The first one is Ferris Bueller's Day Off, the second is The Fugitive, the third is my personal favorite, The Break-Up, with Vince Vaughn and - I forget the actress's name.

 

Jay Samples 0:02:09.1:

Jennifer Aniston.

 

Kyle Robinson 0:02:09.5:

Jennifer Aniston, and then the fourth one being Home Alone.

 

Jay Samples 0:02:09.5:

I'd have to go with Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Just one I remember from growing up, and particularly the scenes in the art institute, seeing how far we could zoom into the Seurat painting before it got meaningless.

 

Kyle Robinson 0:02:28.0:

Yes, it's a good one. It's actually incorrect. The correct answer was The Break-Up, but [audience laughter] we'll keep going.

 

Jay Samples 0:02:28.0:

I remember when that movie was showing, but I've not actually seen it.

 

Kyle Robinson 0:02:39.3:

There's also a rumor, depending on the Q&A session and the crowd involvement, Jay may also share with us a hidden talent that he has. Not really hidden, but a talent that he has. I'll give you a clue. It rhymes with opera singer [audience laughter]. So for those who don't know Cinemark, could you please share some words just about what's unique about the company beyond just being a movie theater business, and your work experience and role there.

 

Jay Samples 0:03:08.2:

So Cinemark is the third largest domestic exhibitor in the North American box office. As you see, we have a little over 300 theaters in the United States. I can't remember how many states. It may say that. Oh, there. Good, it does. Particularly, we have large markets in Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, but spread out over a lot of the area. We also have a very large Latin American business as well with the 194 theaters, principally in South America, with some in Central America, so there's a lot of challenge that comes with that in providing films for multiple countries, because what one place likes won't play well in other locations.

 

Kyle Robinson 0:04:02.0:

Awesome. Yes, massive business, massive scale. I think all of us grew up going to the movies and loved the experience. I think new technologies and innovations, they impact all of our businesses, but specifically, we've seen the impact in the entertainment industry, especially over the last five to ten years, so I'd love to hear your point of view in terms of how Cinemark has been impacted, and if you have any thoughts on the direction that the movie theater business is going in.

 

Jay Samples 0:04:29.1:

Going back just to relate somewhat of my experience with this, as I said, this is 27 years. I don't look that old, I don't think, yet, but I did start with Cinemark when I was 17 years old in high school, working at the movie theater, selling popcorn, tickets, doing all of that. Then it became my college job. I do have a bachelor of music degree in vocal performance, which, clearly, I'm making a lot of use of in finance, but sometimes things change and so, out of college, I just determined that I was going to go ahead and stick with Cinemark as a career. I became a general manager in 2004, and I did that for about ten years through 2014 when I moved over to the corporate office, first starting in operations, finance, focusing on food and beverage finance, and have had a couple of other roles since. Around 2019, I moved to focusing on Anaplan when we did our initial install right before 2020, so it was great timing. So clearly, I've seen a lot of things come and go over that time, from when I started, we were still in the midst of the stadium seating wars, to finding what new food and beverage options we can get. I never thought I'd see the day we were selling beer and wine out of the concession stand at a bunch of theaters, but here we are.

 

Jay Samples 0:06:00.6:

Then we've got into the projector wars where we went from the 35-millimeter film to the digital projectors. We used to have to have two people upstairs to run the projection booth, and now there's no one up there because all the films are just downloaded via satellite and get pushed to the correct projector, and built up and run automatically, so there are always changes, of course. Going into the pandemic, that created new challenges. What can you do when you can't show movies? Well, nothing really, so it was - we closed down all of our theaters for about four months, and then we had probably about six or seven that we reopened in Dallas. We tried to reopen as we spread out where we could with restrictions, and even in some places, we reopened and then had to reclose. So there were so many different things moving - different moving parts of that that we needed to find a way to help keep control of what we were doing with that, so that was when we turned to - as I said, we had done our initial Anaplan install in 2019, and that was for our finance planning, just typical FP&A, but during the downtime, well, I didn't have a lot else to do, so I started working on incorporating some of our labor planning into Anaplan as a way to practice skills and see what we could use.

 

Jay Samples 0:07:39.5:

As we got more of our theaters reopened in about 2021 was when we really rolled it out to all of our theaters to do their weekly business plans because we need to make sure that we have the right number of people to help the guests coming in, but not too many, particularly as we were adjusting operation hours and everything around that.

 

Kyle Robinson 0:08:04.4:

I was going to say, yes, the pandemic created a lot of new variables, a lot of new challenges that you could never have expected. As someone from outside the movie industry, something I noticed during the pandemic was a shift from movies being released in theaters as a primary method to actually seeing now movies released sometimes over streaming technologies or streaming providers. I'd love to get your take on how streaming and other technologies have impacted the movie business as well.

 

Jay Samples 0:08:32.4:

Clearly, there's a lot of impact, and that had really started before the pandemic, but that just, of course, heightened it, particularly as during that time, the studio partners were concerned about only releasing in theaters with so many of them closed, so there was a lot of movies that were released day and date on streaming, and at the theaters at the same time. We saw some that, of course, just bypassed theaters altogether, but as things changed, we found that people still wanted to get out of the house and have that bigger screen communal experience that you can really only get at the movies, and we've seen, as we've gotten past that, with everything opening up, a theatrical release actually helps digital releases. They do better afterwards if they've had an initial theatrical release, so even some of our studio partners who had not been doing a lot of theatrical releases have started to look at more of that. I know Apple has done some of that with [?Air 0:09:41.9], and there are a few others. We're always working to find ways to do that, to create that experience for our guests in the theater, and then, like I said, they found that it elevates the in-home experience later as well.

 

Kyle Robinson 0:09:55.3:

I certainly agree, yes. For certain movies especially, you definitely want that big theater experience. So you highlighted having been fully shut down for four months, and then having a reopening process after the pandemic that was very unique in terms of the location and the timing, right. Opening and then closing again. So with over 300 theaters, having 25 markets, what were some of the variables, or what were some of the inputs that helped drive your workforce planning within these different regions and markets?

 

Jay Samples 0:10:28.3:

So when we set up Anaplan, we created the weekly business plan that each theater would fill out. The first variable was the hours of operation. Typically, I think everyone knows, when you go to the movies, there are times of the day that are busier, and days that are busier, and there were a lot of theaters that we had to pick and choose. It's like, some of them might only be open one round of shows for the seven o'clock round, even on Friday and Saturday. We had to look at some of them, were we even profitable if we opened during the week, and there were some theaters that - and this was something I never thought I would see, that we just didn't open on the weekdays. They were only open on the weekend, and some of the smaller theaters might only be open for two hours on Friday, and maybe four hours on Saturday, and two hours on Sunday, to try and keep everything profitable, because that was what we kept running through. While they were creating the business plan, we could get the input of what labor they should be using, look at our other costs and see, to make sure that we were getting as much variable profit as we could. Obviously, there's a good bit of high fixed costs that we couldn't hope to overcome at that time, but we were trying to keep our cash as much under our control as possible.

Kyle Robinson 0:11:46.2:

Sure, yes. I think, something that we talk a lot about at Anaplan and in technology is, obviously we have a lot of features and product capabilities, but we want to tie those capabilities to use cases and ultimately business outcomes, and business outcomes are being typically either how the company makes money or saves money. Any data points you can share in terms of the workforce planning project, and how Anaplan, amongst other things, helped drive some business outcomes for Cinemark?

 

Jay Samples 0:12:13.5:

Yes, our biggest focus tends to be labor hours. Because we're in so many markets, there's a great variability in wage rates that we have to pay between say Texas and California, and East Coast, so we focus on getting the hours. Since we started the implementation, along with a bunch of other things that our great workforce management team is doing, it's looking like savings of about eight per cent on hours, compared to what we were using before, and about five per cent total on labor costs, and that's an EBITDA impact. So it's shown great results. It took a little bit to get the theaters on board with it, but now it's just part of their every week process. Even though we've picked up, we're still trying to keep an eye on things, particularly with the writers' strike that happened last year and has limited our product somewhat this year, except this weekend. It went a little in the opposite direction where we weren't concerned about conserving our labor, and we're happy about that.

 

Kyle Robinson 0:13:24.6:

That was with a movie release, right?

 

Jay Samples 0:13:26.1:

Yes, Inside Out 2 just blew the doors off, so we're hoping this next weekend, we might hit our actual first weekend forecast [laughs], since I think we about doubled it last weekend.

 

Kyle Robinson 0:13:26.1:

We love to hear that. Eight per cent, and that's eight figures in millions and millions of dollars in ROI, which is fantastic. So it's great to hear where the partnership started. Could you share with us perhaps how it's evolved over the years?

 

Jay Samples 0:13:54.4:

Well, we started initially with these minimum templates that basically - this was the minimum the theater needed to operate, but then we needed to spread it out based on how many hours they were going to be open. So clearly, you need different hours if you're open for two hours than if you're open for eight hours, so we worked with the ops team and the WFM team to create those, and allow them to flex and say, 'Okay, we're going to be open this many hours.' Okay, you have this many hours scheduled to work with your teams. Once we got past the really strict limitations, we started to work this in then to our regular labor budget and forecasting process, in which we actually create a series of five templates based on different attendance ranges. Most everything that we see in the theater is going to be driven by the number of tickets sold, so the number of people coming in. Because we're a movie theater, we don't get to control our main product, which is the movies. We're dependent upon that. So we have to go off that, what we think that attendance will be, and so then we use Anaplan to scale among those templates.

 

Jay Samples 0:15:05.6:

They can still put in variances like, oh, I'm going to open less, or I'm going to open more, as well as saying, 'I don't think I'm going to sell alcohol at 8:00 am on Sunday morning; I think I'll just close that during that time,' or, on the weekdays, I don't think we're going to be profitable, so we're just going to close that completely. Give all of those options for the theater managers to schedule what they needed, and then get the information to their regional vice-presidents who can follow up with them and make sure that the weekly plan is set. So we've got this habit of going in weekly to update it, and then updating the templates yearly with the budget. Now in addition to that, we also keep adding new dimensions to it, particularly with - during the pandemic, our CEO was really pushing that we needed to get our mobile concession ordering out. We had started mobile ticket ordering long ago, and so tickets were - I think my theater that I was at, we started doing some type of online tickets back in 2000, very early on, but we had not gotten to concession until about 2020, and that's when we started our Snacks in a Tap program that is now called Mobile Ordering. So we needed to have a different way to derive labor for that because it's very much tailored to each theater.

 

Jay Samples 0:16:38.5:

The performance of the Mobile Ordering at each theater is very different. We had to turn it into KPIs we could measure, and then use their history to predict how many orders they're going to have, how many of those are going to be delivery orders to the theater, how many are going to be pick-up orders. So our workforce management team created labor standards for all of that to say how much time it should take, and then we used our predictive attendance to turn that into the number of orders based on a percentage, which varied greatly from theater to theater. It's normally, on average, about two per cent, but some theaters were as high as six per cent compared to attendance, and some were as low as one per cent. So we granted predicted hours based on what we thought they would do, so that they could plan that, but then they're also held accountable to their earned hours, which afterwards, we say, 'Okay, here's how many hours you actually earned for it.' That's a performance management tool we use to help keep them following up on the hours and keep them where they should be.

 

Kyle Robinson 0:17:43.8:

So you highlighted how the business is much more than just ticket sales today. You highlighted how mobile ordering, and the mobile app has impacted the business. What else is going on with the concession business? What other things are you doing to help drive new revenue streams?

 

Jay Samples 0:17:59.9:

Well, our food and beverage offerings have, of course, increased greatly, and that had even started before the pandemic. As I mentioned, our bars have greatly expanded, whether it's a full bar or just beer and wine. We've also entered a partnership with Pizza Hut and sell that at a good number of locations, but that - because of the standards that Pizza Hut has for their product, it became rather labor-intensive as well to make sure that the pizzas were not made too early. They cannot stay out past a certain amount of time, so you've got to have the staff to make sure to get them available to guests, but also to take them away when they're not able to be sold anymore, and also, pre-plan them. I also created a labor model for Pizza Hut by time of day, looking back at their sales over the past ten weeks, to predict when they're going to have the most sales, and when it would be the most profitable, based on the amount they're going to sell and the hourly rate of the employees in that area. The theater managers can then fill out a schedule that's individual to their theater and plan the employees as to when they're going to be there, and it will also then predict, okay, here's what your sales should be. Hopefully, they can exceed it. We also encourage that, just because you don't have dedicated labor to something, as much as possible, we always want anything open we can have open, so how can you maximize and share your labor?

 

Jay Samples 0:19:37.6:

Can the concessionist run and hop and put a pizza in for someone if they need it, or can a manager be running them out during the slower times to make them available, but always trying to maximize that availability to the guests at the right time, while, of course, minimizing our labor cost.

 

Kyle Robinson 0:19:57.0:

Yes, it sounds like a lot of data points, a lot of locations, but being able to be very specific and drive a lot of efficiencies. So it's great to hear where the partnership started, how it's going. What's next for Cinemark?

 

Jay Samples 0:20:12.7:

We've actually started working on our international FP&A integration into Anaplan. It's going to take a little bit of time to get everything in there because we're also still completing Workday installation with all of our international countries, so that's going to extend our full implementation of Anaplan until we get that done, because we are going to have to do some change management. We've already got it set up to where we can get all of the actuals in, and we're working on getting forecasting, and that's just done at the office, so that's a big piece that's in planning right now. We're also looking at getting our long-range modeling in there. A lot of the times, we'll have a disconnect because our long-range model still lives in an Excel spreadsheet, and the numbers will end up slightly different from what's in Anaplan, even though they're pulling the data from Anaplan, but there are formula errors here and there or something that doesn't get caught. So we're wanting to bring that into Anaplan, so then it will inform everything, when we're telling the CFO, these numbers all match. Beyond that, we're also looking at it for our CapEx planning, trying to figure out what we can do with that, particularly as we do get the films back, hopefully next year, to a reasonable level. How can we manage investing back in our theaters and making sure that we're monitoring that and keeping an eye on it, so that we have the right levels, but keep it under control.

 

Jay Samples 0:21:55.1:

Almost anything is in play right now, but our VP of FP&A also wants us to focus a little more on some driver bases in the budgeting, so probably, when I get back, we'll be starting to look at that as we go in to get ready for budgets in October. To put a little more to that, and then hopefully carry over - I'm trying to get more of our budget process to mirror our forecast process, so it's just like you keep using it, and then you get to budget, and everyone is not like, what do I do, whereas we've had separate processes before, and I'm like, that doesn't make sense. So trying to impact change as well.

 

Kyle Robinson 0:22:35.5:

I love it. For those in the crowd trying to impact change, what guidance or advice do you have for anyone that's taking on a workforce planning project?

 

Jay Samples 0:22:45.2:

The biggest thing is you really have to understand what your workforce does. I found, as we were looking at this, and I was working with our ops team who - of course, a good number of them worked in the theaters as well. I didn't have the challenge of language understanding with them because I could speak their language. So if you're starting off outside of that, it might be helpful, wherever you can, to go and get a little better idea of what's going on in your business, understand what the teams are doing out there, so that you can address it when you're doing the planning. I was comfortable speaking with theater managers because I used to be one, and it allowed me to assuage their concerns, and they could honestly understand that I'd been where they were coming from. If you don't have that advantage, you've just got to make sure that - listen to their concerns. Obviously, you can't implement everything, but make sure that there's enough that they know that they're being heard, because if your team out in the field doesn't buy into what you're trying to do, then it's not going to work.

 

Kyle Robinson 0:23:51.8:

Sure. Yes, it's not just technology. It's the people, it's the process as well. What a great story, having been with Cinemark for 27 years, starting in the field and working your way up. It's a great story. Now our partnership has been ongoing since 2019, so about five years. Anything that you would share to the audience in terms of what's made that Anaplan partnership so positive for you?

 

Jay Samples 0:23:51.8:

I think one of the things that's helped me the most, particularly over the pandemic was having all of the online training available because I didn't really have anyone else I could ask for stuff at the time because we weren't going to be able to pay for consultants to come in and help us with anything. So I and the other folks working on it at the time were able to use that training to get ourselves leveled up, as it were, to make sure that we understand. I enjoy these events that you all put on because every time I've been, I learn something new, and immediately take it back and figure out how I can incorporate it into what we're already doing. I have a good relationship with our Anaplan team, and they're always supporting - we have monthly calls just to update what's going on, to see what they can help with, and so I never feel like we're just out on our own. I know that if we need help, I can send an email or call, and the team will be there to help with either technical or - helping me find something if I'm like, I know this is here somewhere, but can you point me to it? So I feel that the support that is given makes it easy for me to learn more and improve what Anaplan is doing for my company myself, but knowing that I always have the help there.

 

Kyle Robinson 0:25:38.3:

Awesome. Well, it's been great to get to know you through our preparation process for today's engagement. We're going to open it up to some questions. Please ask some good ones because I want to hear Jay's pipes at the end [laughter].

 

Unknown Speaker 0:25:52.8:

I'm going to kick us off quickly. What's the difference between your US and your international markets? Obviously, I think a lot of here [?is what you are doing is 0:26:01.5]. What are some of the differences and maybe challenges behind that?

 

Jay Samples 0:26:06.5:

I'm still learning the international more, because we've just started more getting involved in their FP&A, but I know that their film is much different, and that while they do play a lot of the major Hollywood product, there's a lot more local film that is worked into the mix in the international theaters. They also have very different food and beverage offerings. I remember that from my time in food and beverage. It's also the timing of when everything happens. You can't predict it the same way. I was actually in South America in January, and I didn't get a chance to swing by a theater to - because I wanted to look inside, but I know that they're built differently as well. So it's just, that team has to think in multiple countries. Really, the US, we can treat like a monolith. You can't treat Brazil and Argentina the same as Peru and Colombia, and then Central America. So it's really like they're managing seven, eight different businesses at once, as opposed to we really have one similar business we're running in the domestic market.

 

Unknown Speaker 0:27:20.4:

Lots of nuances. Questions in the audience.

 

Audience 0:27:31.7:

Hi, so I'm actually a Movie Club Platinum member [laughter].

 

Jay Samples 0:27:31.7:

Glad to hear it.

 

Audience 0:27:37.7:

I love Cinemark. There's been a lot of change and innovation that it's done over the years, like being able to reserve your seating, and doing all the online tickets and the refunding is just really user-friendly. I was curious as to, are there any other innovations in the pipeline, or even at a concept stage that you could foresee being able to do?

 

Jay Samples 0:27:37.8:

I don't know a lot on the marketing front because our marketing really handles the Movie Club Platinum. I know we're definitely always looking for that because that has been a focus on our marketing team, is building up the Movie Club because we want to have that VIP experience as much for our regular movie-goers. More of what we're looking at are broad-brush. We're trying to look at some different concept theaters. We've got a couple of family entertainment center-type theaters that we're going to be opening by the end of the year. Construction willing, of course, which is always a key thing, but I do know that they're not considering Movie Club a done deal. It's always something they're working with, and I've actually got a project to help work with our marketing finance team when I get back, so I might learn a little more as I'm starting to build up their budget, but I don't have any info on that, unfortunately, right now.

 

Unknown Speaker 0:29:07.1:

Question over here.

 

Audience 0:29:12.9:

Thanks again for taking the time to talk about this. You mentioned the user inputs for - I believe it was your labor planning. Can you talk about any findings or tips you had, and is there anything you use as far as governing the data? For example, are the users putting in the right data? Are they putting in good data?

 

Jay Samples 0:29:30.2:

That came as we went along. The first thing we ask them to do is to forecast the attendance because that's going to drive everything. We provide them our attendance forecast with the understanding that it is a very top level. We explain to our theater managers, we're not in your market, we don't know what the high school football game is going to do. We don't know if there's this festival or something that's going to kill your attendance on Saturday, so take that with a grain of salt and put it in. The next input we have to get from them is what we call their showtime window. So basically, when is your first show, when is your last show? That one took a little validating. I had to set it up so that they couldn't accidentally put one before the other because we don't specifically have time in Anaplan - I had to create a list, and then map the AM, PM, but only give them a subset of the list in each one because I foresaw early on mistakes happening if we did not. After that, then we have those positions for our restaurants, our bars, and our Pizza Hut. We have what we call service windows, which could differ from your showtime window, being when do you start serving, and when do you stop serving? I had to start putting limits on that because I found out they were saying that they were going to start serving at their bar before they opened.

 

Jay Samples 0:29:30.2:

I'm like, well, that won't work. So as we went, we've had to keep finding what errors were made, and put those bumpers back on them. Most of them, I could handle through a formula, and we could update to our team to say, 'Hey, we saw this is happening, but you don't get extra hours for that, so please stop doing it.' We just keep looking at the results. I've talked with a good number of the region vice-presidents when they have concerns. We get a lot of calls where it's like, 'Hey, I don't think these hours are enough,' and I go back, 'Well, you all created the templates, but let's look at it and see how we can help.' The nice other thing we created with this - by doing this in Anaplan, there's also the ability - if something changes, we can go and update their labor templates, whereas in our prior way of doing things, it was like, you were stuck for the year. This is what you're going to be held to. Now we can actually go and - oh, you've got Pizza Hut. You didn't have it before. Well, let's go in, and let's make sure you have the right hours for that, rather than just, you're going to have to work around it. So we've actually set up a whole process to say, 'Okay, we'll go in, and copy in new templates so that you can get more hours,' or in some cases, you're not using these hours; we're going to give them to someone else. So we're going to take some back. So having that flexibility to work with the theaters, and update those, has helped us a lot too.

 

Audience 0:32:30.0:

Piggybacking off of that, because he took my question a little bit [laughs], for the - so you're saying these templates that you were building out, those were in Anaplan, filled out by the regional vice-presidents or regional presidents. What did adoption look like at the beginning? Were you first building Anaplan, the modeling out, then building the templates, then saying, 'Here you go?' How did that work, enabling your team?

 

Jay Samples 0:32:53.8:

Yes, the templates were at least somewhat familiar to our theater teams because their original implementation was via Excel, when they just had to go in and fill them out, and we had to do a whole lot of calculations and stuff to pull 300 files together. Actually, the theater managers fill out the templates, with the region vice-presidents reviewing them, and the workforce management team helping with review and saying, 'That's too much, can we really look at it?' So at first, as always, there was a little resistance to adoption. I had to send lists to the ops team. Okay, here's who has filled out their Anaplan weekly plan this week. When we started off, it was probably about ten per cent didn't do it every week, and had to get that list, and lo and behold, once you started getting lists over to them, and they got called out, now I'm surprised if I see one or two that haven't filled it out. Typically, what will happen is the GM is on vacation, and the person at the theater who was supposed to take care of it forgot the password, so it just doesn't get done, and they call their RVP and say, 'Oh, I'm sorry.' So once we got over the initial hesitation of it, and worked on explaining the program to all the theater managers - when we set it up, we had a large number of 'ask me anything' calls with all the teams. We scheduled them at different points during the budget process, so that they could ask questions.

 

Jay Samples 0:34:28.7:

Maybe if they had more later on, they could come back to us. Being very open and transparent with the communication, and like I said, even now when they come back with questions on the templates, my team tries to help answer them, and we work with the ops team, the region vice-presidents, or any of the workforce management team to look at them and say, 'Okay, maybe you're right. We maybe need a few more hours.' The key is rightsizing the labor. It's not just cutting it. Like I said, this weekend was great, but the biggest problem that we had is we probably didn't have enough labor this weekend because we were so over what we forecast. So unfortunately, that impacts the other way in that the concession lines get longer. So that's why we want to make sure that hopefully, we plan right, but then give them the ability to say, 'No, this is wrong, let's fix it.'

 

Unknown Speaker 0:35:25.7:

Jay, thank you so much. What an interesting documentary. A box office hit, if I would say so myself. We really appreciate you sharing your story with us today. If you have more questions for Jay, I'm sure he'll be hanging around. Please do ask. We'll be kicking off our next session at 2:30. Thank you.

SPEAKERS

Jay Samples, Finance Manager, Cinemark