Doug Black
Analyst · Nishu Sood with Deutsche Bank. Please proceed with your question
Okay, terrific. So I'll take the first part of your question, the EBITDA impact of the hurricane, we figure it's about $2 million to $3 million EBITDA, 2% of our sales, 2% to 3% of our sales in Houston, about 10% in Florida and when you take it all in that’s what we figure was the impact. So obviously that pulled us down into the bottom half of the range. And then the investments, this year was designed to be kind of a last heavy building unit, as you know we've been building in 2015, 2016, and 2017, and we've added terrific capability. I mean and we had planned in 2017 to try to get a little bit of gearing flattish on the SG&A as a percent of sales and then all along our plan in 2018 is to get them more meaningful gearing. I think that's what's happened is well first of all we're on track with our major investments in supply chain, IT, e-com, those investments are on track and we feel good about those. We're seeing a little bit slower organic growth than we had planned; obviously the hurricane is part of that. The other part of that is pricing. Last year we got about 1% pricing lift, it looks like this year we'll have about a negative somewhere between negative one and zero in terms of pricing. Again these aren't huge movements. But if you take the hurricane and that together that clips a couple of percent off your overall growth rate in that. So the investments that we had planned and that we are doing send us into a slightly, slightly greater SG&A as a percent of sales and slightly less. The other thing that I would talk about is on the salesforce I would say we probably have added more sellers because we're excited about what we see as we add sellers, we're also, we're doing two things with the salesforce, one is we're adding talented sellers and two we're moving to kind of an inside, outside sales structure. The inside outside part of that gives us good gearing right because the inside sellers are net-net lower cost and outside sellers and you get good efficiencies there. And we've made some pilots here and we're going to continue to move stronger for that in the second half. But we're adding sellers where we see the need and to some extent, you'll see the benefit of that more next year than this year. So when you take that altogether kind of hurricane, pricing, our major investments and targets, maybe a little bit more investment in our salesforce anticipating some terrific productivity out of them in 2018, that adds up to slightly dilutive 2017 but we feel very good about our trajectory for next year.