Kenneth Seipel; Chief Executive Officer; Citi Trends Inc
Heather Plutino; Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer; Citi Trends Inc
Nitza McKee; ICR; Senior Associate
Jeremy Hamblin; Analyst; Craig-Hallum Capital Group
Michael Baker; Analyst; D.A. Davidson & Co
Operator
Greetings. Welcome to Citi Trends fourth-quarter 2024 earnings conference call. (Operator Instructions) As a reminder, this conference is being recorded.
It is now my pleasure to introduce Nitza McKee, Senior Associate, ICR. Thank you. You may begin.
Nitza McKee
Thank you, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us on Citi Trends fourth-quarter and fiscal year 2024 earnings call. On our call today is Chief Executive Officer, Ken Seipel; and Chief Financial Officer, Heather Plutino. Our earnings release was sent out this morning at 6:45 AM Eastern Time.
If you have not received a copy of the release, it's available on the company's website under the Investor Relations section at www.cititrends.com. You should be aware that prepared remarks today made during this call may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.
Management may make additional forward-looking statements in response to your questions. These statements do not guarantee future performance. Therefore, you should not place undue reliance on these statements.
We refer you to the company's most recent report on Form 10-K and other subsequent filings within the Securities and Exchange Commission for a more detailed discussion of the factors that can cause actual results to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements.
I will now turn the call over to our Chief Executive Officer, Ken Seipel. Ken?
Kenneth Seipel
Well, good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today for our fourth-quarter earnings call. At Citi Trends, we continue to make significant progress on our strategic journey. We delivered fourth quarter comparable store sales growth of 6.4%, a sequential improvement from the third quarter and strong acceleration on a two-year basis.
This performance reflects the strength of our highly differentiated position in the marketplace as an off-price value retailer focused on our African-American customer, which, in combination with the 591 neighborhood-based stores creates a defensible moat against competition.
The strategic advantage, combined with our renewed focus on delivering trendy fashions, great brands, and amazing prices has resonated strongly with our customers, who have shown remarkable loyalty and responsiveness to our improved product offerings.
We leveraged recent extensive customer research to sharpen our focus on understanding both the demographics and ethnography of our African-American customer base. We now have a much better understanding of customer income profiles. And as a result, we have learned that we have a significant group of average and higher-income customers, creating a tremendous opportunity for expanding our product assortment to meet their fashion and style needs.
As I shared at the ICR conference in January, our business journey is structured around three distinct phases that prepare us to become a strong growth company. First is the repair phase, where we focused on reestablishing fundamental practices and foundational improvements.
This includes implementing a three-tiered product plan with opening price points, core value products, and familiar brands while also developing our extreme value product capabilities that enable us, excuse me, to offer well-known brands at 50% to 70% below competitive pricing.
The repair phase also included building on improving foundational retail processes across the organization from merchandise allocation and planning to standardizing reporting and metrics. We're still in the early stages of all these improvements with significant opportunity ahead.
As we enter 2025, we are a much stronger company, and we're ready to move into the execute phase with the majority of our business initiatives. In the execute phase of our turnaround, we're focused on developing consistent execution capabilities and best practices.
During this phase, we expect our core product selection and value equation to improve and our supply chain speed to increase, which will measurably reduce our working capital requirements and improve inventory turns. We'll do this while leveraging SG&A expenses across all areas of the business to ensure sufficient flow-through from sales to profit.
The final stage is the optimization phase, which prepares us for business acceleration. This means creating systems and processes that allow sales to flow through efficiently to EBITDA while simultaneously developing our new store expansion capabilities. The combination of these three phases, repair, execute, and optimize creates the foundation for accelerated growth and it positions Citi Trends to capitalize on the significant market opportunity ahead of us as we expand into both existing and new markets.
Now turning to fourth-quarter results. We delivered total sales of approximately $211 million. As I mentioned, we registered comparable store sales growth of 6.4%. This top-line growth was driven by strong customer traffic, transaction growth and an encouraging increase in basket size. Our strategic good, better, best product initiatives, and compelling off-price offerings helped us to deliver gross margin rate of 39.7%, a 60 basis point expansion as compared to Q4 2024.
And importantly, we ended the period with inventories down 6% compared to the prior year. Our inventory is significantly fresher than last year as we remain committed to liquidating aged inventory quickly. With the health of our inventory position strong, we're turning faster and preserving a significantly higher level of liquidity to react to in-season opportunities.
For the quarter, we're pleased with the results of our off-price extreme value product test, which featured well-known brands at 50% to 70% of suggested retails. This exciting product drove foot traffic in the quarter and created buzz with our store associates and with customers.
We achieved sales increases in nearly all product categories. In non-apparel, our top performers were giftables, stocking stuffers, family basics and sleepwear and home categories. On the apparel side, we achieved continued growth in children's and our men's division experienced a strong sales trend improvement over the prior quarter.
Our only significant miss was in plus size apparel, which was driven by internally controlled execution issues, which have been repaired, and we expect to see an improving trend in plus size in Q2 of this year. We registered high single-digit growth in our footwear business due to strong customer acceptance of an extreme off-value price branded buy.
Going forward, we have significant room for expansion of the footwear category, and the team is working hard to advance and enhance the offering of both core goods as well as branded market buys. As we look ahead, we strategically identified key product intensification areas for 2025, which include big bins, women's plus size, family footwear, consumables and extreme value off-price deals, all categories with substantial growth potential where we can better serve our customer.
Our comprehensive three-tiered product strategy is gaining traction, creating a consistent balanced assortment that resonates with our customer base across income levels. We know it's important to have a selection of opening price point good product categories for our customers who might be on the limited income. In the coming months, each department will have opening price point products positioned at the back of the departments with visible signage, ensuring that our value-conscious customers can easily identify these value options.
While we remain committed to price accessibility for customers with limited budgets, our research confirms that our core customers have good disposable income and our higher income customers have responded very positively to recognizable brands with a willingness to trade up as we validated with our product test in Q4. This insight has guided our branded merchandise strategy at amazing prices.
We will continue -- which we expect, by the way, to more than double in 2025, eventually reaching approximately 20% to 30% of our merchandise mix. To be clear, strategically adding well-known brands is an additional opportunity to complement the already successful product we are already known for. In addition, our skilled buyers have demonstrated their ability to negotiate extreme value deals with retail pricing that's at least 50% or more below MSRP while maintaining higher-than-average gross margin rates.
Customer response to these extreme value branded additions has been incredibly strong, driving both increased traffic and transaction size. As we execute this strategy, we anticipate an upward movement in our average unit retail mix through these better brands and improved quality, further enhancing our margin profile while delivering the compelling value our customers expect.
We're also excited about the opportunity to expand our home and lifestyle categories, particularly in the consumable space with our pantry and snack offerings. This category is currently underpenetrated compared to the industry averages, presenting a significant growth avenue. Our strategy involves adding well-known snack foods, utilizing our off-price deal capabilities to secure compelling value on recognizable brands like Cheez-Its, beef jerky, Oreos, and other similar snack products.
These items are showing good early results with our customers, driving frequency by providing them another reason to shop with us while reinforcing our value message. This category expansion aligns perfectly with our three-tiered product strategy, ensuring that we meet all the needs of all of our customer segments from our value-conscious customer shoppers seeking opening price points to those customers with higher disposable incomes who respond well to branded offers.
We expect the pantry and snack category to become an increasingly important driver on our go-forward growth strategies. From an operational perspective, one of our most promising initiatives involves the testing and implementation of artificial intelligence-based product allocation system. In our repair phase this past fall, we made significant strides in our manual product allocation methodologies by reducing complexity and consolidating store clusters into three straightforward groups; high, average and low.
This foundational improvement has already yielded measurable results, but we're now moving beyond these basics toward a more advanced technique. The new AI system enhances our ability to accurately place product based on localized demand, driving sales while simultaneously reducing markdowns. Early test results are encouraging with the system demonstrating superior accuracy in predicting store level demand.
We expect this technology to impact our business in 2025 and beyond, creating what we believe will be a game-changing improvement in inventory efficiency. This initiative, combined with our supply chain enhancements, will significantly reduce time from vendor to store and position us to respond more quickly to sales trends while improving our inventory turns and working capital efficiency.
Turning to our real estate strategy. We're making good progress in our remodel program and are planning to remodel at least 50 stores in 2025 to continue bringing our fleet up to our current standards. In fact, we've already remodeled 18 stores since the start of 2025.
In total, this investment is showing solid returns, and we're seeing strong customer response to refreshed environments. Looking at our longer-term growth, we're conducting detailed market studies to identify priority MSAs for expansion.
Our strategy will include both backfilling existing markets with new locations alongside remodels of current stores to maximize market share as well as entering new select markets. We expect to ramp up new store growth in 2026 and beyond.
I'd like to highlight our strong financial position, which provides us significant flexibility to execute our strategic initiatives. As of quarter end, Citi Trends maintains a healthy balance sheet with $61 million of cash, no debt and no drawings on our $75 million revolver. This debt-free structure with ample liquidity allows us to take advantage of opportunities in the marketplace while navigating any potential macro disruptions.
In fiscal 2025, we are focusing on working capital improvements, particularly in the area of inventory efficiency. For the first time in recent history, we are anticipating positive free cash flow generation in the upcoming year, which is a critical milestone in our financial transformation.
As we announced last quarter, our Board approved the resumption of our $50 million share repurchase program. Since mid-December, we have invested $10 million in share repurchases, which includes 395,793 shares at an average price point of $25.23. Share repurchase will remain an option in our overall balanced capital allocation strategy.
Going forward, our primary objective with capital allocation will be in strategic investments to drive growth. Turning to the first quarter sales performance. I am pleased to report that midway through our first quarter, we are achieving mid-single-digit comp performance.
And although we've had our share of temporary store closures due to the weather and so forth, in addition to late tax refunds and other macro uncertainties, our customers have continued to validate our strategy. As you all know, the new administration has introduced many potential changes in tariffs, taxes and government programs that create a good deal of uncertainty for the economy.
At this time, it's hard to gauge the specific impact or nonimpact to our business and our customers. But to address the changing environment, we are closely monitoring and anticipating changes we need to make to ensure that we hit our financial objectives.
In regards to tariffs, our off-price business model limits our exposure to the impact of tariffs. However, we're also actively working with our vendors to monitor the situation, and we're finding ways to make sure that we keep cost changes of product to a minimum. In addition, I see the improved operational process that I've outlined earlier as another avenue for helping us achieve our gross margin targets this year.
Plus, the addition of off-price to our business model gives us significant opportunity to make high-margin deals on surplus product brought on by this disrupted macro environment. This year at Citi Trends, we plan to stay aggressive and flexible.
We are aggressively driving sales, leveraging our cost base and maintaining a healthy open to buy for flexibility. As I mentioned earlier, we're fortunate to have a healthy balance sheet that allows us to stay aggressively driving sales and gives us the flexibility we need to react.
Our customers is showing resiliency, our strategies are resonating. And as I mentioned earlier, we are pleased that we're maintaining solid mid-single-digit comp sales quarter-to-date.
With that, I'll turn it over to Heather for a review of our fourth-quarter and full-year results, along with our outlook for fiscal 2025. Heather?
Heather Plutino
Thank you, Ken and good morning, everyone. First, I'd like to echo Ken's comments about the recent positive momentum building at Citi Trends. Our refined strategy and focus have resulted in a fundamental shift in our business that led to another quarter of positive results, building on our success in the third quarter.
The fourth quarter featured sales momentum with 6.4% comparable store sales growth, coupled with gross margin expansion to last year. While we still have a lot of work ahead of us, our strategic initiatives, supported by our healthy balance sheet, have positioned Citi Trends for continued improvement as we head into fiscal 2025.
Turning now to the specifics of our fourth quarter results. Our product assortment updates were more pronounced in the quarter as we focused on delivering exciting products at great value for the holiday season. The resulting 6.4% comp represents the second quarter of sequential improvement.
Importantly, top-line momentum was driven by broad-based improvement across our retail metrics with strong gains in traffic and conversion, along with basket growth. We also saw a positive inflection in AUR as customers showed a willingness to trade up into higher ticket extreme value products procured as part of our strategy shift.
From a cadence perspective, comp store sales were positive each month of the quarter, with the strongest performance during the nine-week holiday period in which comps were up 7.1%. We estimate that weather disruption in January had a 250 basis point headwind to comp sales for the month. Adjusting for that impact, January was only slightly behind holiday sales performance.
During the quarter, we closed two stores as part of our ongoing fleet optimization efforts, bringing our quarter-end store count to 591. Gross margin in the quarter was 39.7%, a 60 basis point expansion compared to last year.
The primary driver of the year-over-year margin expansion was lower freight, partially offset by higher markdowns as we follow our updated approach to take more in-season markdowns, keeping our inventory fresh. Gross margin was also helped by continued improvement in shrink due largely to improved results from the physical inventory counts taken in the quarter.
As we've discussed in many of these calls, we remain intensely focused on improving our shrink results and driving toward a baseline rate that is more in line with our historic performance. Moving to SG&A. Adjusted SG&A expenses totaled $76.7 million in the quarter, an increase of $2.6 million versus last year.
During last quarter's earnings call, we cited a number of strategic investments and one-time items aimed at driving future growth that impacted Q3 with some anticipated spillover into the fourth quarter. To be clear, these expenses are included in reported SG&A and were not adjusted out.
And in the fourth quarter, these one-time items totaled $1.5 million. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was $7.1 million compared to $10 million in Q4 2023. When normalizing each year's results for one-time strategic SG&A costs and certain accounting adjustments, the comparison is $7.4 million this year versus $7.6 million last year.
Tax expense in the quarter was $15.8 million, including a noncash valuation allowance of approximately $15.5 million. This valuation allowance relates to deferred tax assets, primarily associated with net operating loss carryforwards generated in fiscal year 2023 and 2024. The valuation allowance was recorded due to uncertainty about our ability to fully utilize these tax benefits in the near term, a test that is performed on a quarterly basis.
Going forward, we will continue our quarterly testing to determine the ongoing need for this allowance, and we will make adjustments as warranted. And as long as the valuation allowance exists, most of our tax expense or tax benefit will flow through the balance sheet rather than the P&L via adjustments to the allowance.
Importantly, these are noncash accounting adjustments and do not impact our ability to utilize these tax assets for future tax filings.
Turning to the full year. Fiscal 2024 was a tale of two halves for the company. While Q1 and Q2 were sluggish, with a combined comp of 0.7%, our new strategies began to be implemented in Q3, driving significant improvement in both traffic and basket, resulting in second-half comps of 6.1%. The details of our full-year results are as follows: Total fiscal 2024 sales were $753.1 million, an increase of 0.7% versus the 53 weeks of 2023.
Comparable store sales calculated on a 52-week to 52-week basis increased 3.4%, adjusted gross margin was 37.5% for the year, and adjusted EBITDA was a loss of $14.2 million. Both of these metrics were negatively impacted by items considered one-time in nature, including markdowns from our large strategic inventory reset in Q2 plus shrink results, both impacting gross margin.
EBITDA also includes strategic expenses, including consulting to fuel our transformation initiatives. In total, these one-time items represent a $16.5 million drag on EBITDA for the year. During the year, we opened one new store and closed a total of 12 as part of our ongoing fleet optimization efforts. We also remodeled 35 stores.
Now, turning to the year-end balance sheet. We continue to maintain a healthy financial position with a strong balance sheet, including no debt at the end of the quarter, no drawings on our $75 million revolver and approximately $61 million in cash.
With liquidity of approximately $136 million, we believe that we can more than sufficiently fund our business initiatives. As we mentioned last quarter and as Ken touched on in his remarks, our Board of Directors recently approved the resumption of our share repurchase program.
In the fourth quarter, we repurchased approximately 145,000 shares for a total spend of $3.8 million. And we continued our share repurchase activity into the first quarter of 2025, repurchasing an additional 250,000 shares, spending $6.2 million. In total, to date, we've used $10 million to repurchase about 396,000 shares, leaving about $40 million remaining on our authorization.
As Ken mentioned in his remarks, looking ahead, we'll continue to assess share repurchase versus other investment opportunities, but our primary focus will remain on investments that will drive accelerated profit improvement and growth for the company. Total inventory dollars at quarter end decreased 6%, inclusive of a 17% increase in our opportunistic pack and hold buys to fuel future sales.
Average in-store inventory at quarter end was down 6.7% to last year. Importantly, inventory aging has improved greatly as we focus on in-season markdowns to keep our assortment fresh for our customers. We are pleased with our inventory position, composition and freshness ahead of the first quarter selling season.
Now, turning to our 2025 outlook. As Ken mentioned in his remarks, in 2025, we will transition from the repair phase to the execute phase of our transformation. We will continue making strides in our product strategy with a keen focus on our African-American customers to drive top-line growth.
We will also continue our work on margin improvement while leveraging SG&A to support improved EBITDA flow-through. The details of our 2025 outlook are as follows: expecting full-year comp sales growth of low to mid-single digits.
Full-year gross margin is expected to expand a minimum of 220 basis points versus 2024, consistent with our stated goal of gross margin dollar growth outpacing sales growth. SG&A is expected to leverage in the range of 30 basis points to 50 basis points versus 2024 in spite of inflationary pressures and the reset of incentive compensation accruals with the new fiscal year.
Full-year EBITDA is expected to be in the range of $5 million to $9 million, a $19 million to $23 million improvement versus fiscal 2024. The effective tax rate in 2025 is expected to be approximately 0%, and any tax expense or tax benefit in the year will result in adjustments to our valuation allowance, as described earlier.
We plan to open up to five new stores and close up to five stores. We plan to remodel approximately 50 locations in the year, and as Ken noted, have already remodeled 18 stores in the beginning of fiscal 2025. Finally, full-year CapEx is expected to be in the range of $18 million to $22 million.
Before I turn the call back to Ken, let me reiterate how pleased we are with the improvement we've seen in the business throughout the back half of fiscal 2024. Ken's leadership, strategies, and the resulting foundational improvements have reinvigorated Citi Trends and positions the company for continued improvement into 2025. While there is much work and much uncertainty ahead of us, I am confident that the continued execution of our refined strategy will serve us and you, our shareholders, well in the months and years ahead.
With that, I'll turn the call back to Ken. Ken?
Kenneth Seipel
Thank you, Heather. Before we open the call for questions, I want to take a moment to express my sincere gratitude to our dedicated team members across the organization. Your tireless efforts in implementing our renewed strategy have just been instrumental in the progress that we're seeing today.
I'm particularly impressed by how quickly our teams have embraced the fundamental changes we introduced from improved allocation practices to enhanced merchandising strategies. With our focus on the African-American customer, our strengthened product value proposition, our expanding branded assortment and our operational excellence initiatives, we have a very clear path to restoring EBITDA into the $40 million to $50 million range long term.
We have a line of sight to achieving these targets, and we're excited about the substantial upside potential. The combination of these strategies position Citi Trends to generate meaningful free cash flow and drive significant shareholder returns.
And with that, I'd like to turn it over to the operator to open the lines for questions.
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Jeremy Hamblin, Craig-Hallum Capital Group.
Jeremy Hamblin
Thanks and congratulations on the impressive momentum here. I wanted to start by talking about sales trends. You guys, on a two-year stack basis, you've seen about 2,000 basis points of improvement over the last year on your two-year stack trends.
And I wanted to just get a little bit more color on what you see as Citi Trends doing different from the industry that's allowing you to sustain that momentum here into 2025, while you've seen a lot of other retailers reporting softening results.
Kenneth Seipel
Thanks, Jeremy. I appreciate your questions. I think I'd say about what we're doing a little bit differently. First, as you know and probably heard me talk a lot about because I do speak about it quite often, the addition of off-price to our business model and really sharpening up the overall price value equation across the board in our core product has been really one of the key unlocks for the business. And our customers really have resonated quite well.
And I believe that we are in fact, there's no question we're gaining market share as a result of this sharper improved assortment and pricing strategies. And the other piece that I believe, and I mentioned at the very beginning of the call, our competitive position in the marketplace, we have 591 stores, very strategically positioned in neighborhoods and literally around our customers. And so we become their first alternative. And once we get it right, they are clearly responding. So there's more work ahead for sure.
We're just really in early innings of this, but I think it's pretty crystal clear that our positioning in neighborhoods, along with our price value equation being sharper is really resonating and will be an opportunity for us to continue to get market share advances for sure.
Jeremy Hamblin
Great. And as a follow-up to that, on the off-price portion of the business, you noted as a key driver. Where was off-price let's say, a year ago, where is it today? And where do you expect off-price as a portion of your inventory, let's say, maybe a year from now or at some point in 2026?
Kenneth Seipel
Yeah. I try not to cut this with too fine of a scapel, Jeremy, because off-price is a large term that has been used in a lot of different ways. like, for example, sometimes it's referred to as end of-season closeouts. And in that regard, the company has always participated in-season closeouts. What we're doing now when I'm defining off-price is really looking at more in-season, pretty aggressive deals, in fact, where we're getting extreme value.
And right now, we're doing about between 1% and 2% of our business in these extreme value items. We're really just getting started. It's adding a lot. It's adding a lot of energy to the business and a lot of energy to our customer base for sure. I see long term that growing to around 10% of what we do, and that will be all additive.
That's not a replacement business. So just this one extreme value portion. Then on top of that, the other portion that I mentioned earlier, which is end-of-season type deals, which the company has historically done, our entire merchant team is more acutely aware of those opportunities and are getting sharper at their negotiations.
And we expect that in addition to be another growth avenue. I don't even have a firm number on that, but it's pretty clear that, that will be the two ways that we attack off-price, extreme value and end-of-season closeout type deals, both of which will be additive to the overall business.
Jeremy Hamblin
Right. And I want to follow up. You're also pursuing a bit more brand name deals, which is a strong motivator for your customer. I think probably in looking at maybe footwear and apparel as two areas to attack. Any color you might be able to share on the types of brands that you might be looking at? I think you had some new brands in stores in Q4. But any color you can share there?
Kenneth Seipel
For sure. Yeah, because of other relationships that we're developing with some of these larger brands, I'm prohibited to really speak directly about the brand names externally. But I would say this, that we are paying very close attention to your favorite brands, the brands that you would know as top of mind across the board, whether it's in shoes or outerwear or denim or what have you, think about your top-selling brands.
Those are the brands that we're focusing on. And in many cases, we have deals either in the pipeline or in store or about to head to stores that would be a composite of those particular brands.
And what makes them unique and special for us is the fact that they're often done at extreme pricing that is very unique to the marketplace. Because of our size of company, we have the ability to access these deals, and we're a little bit more nimble, and we can get some pretty good preferential opportunities that way.
But from a brand portfolio, we're fairly flexible, but just know that we're only going after the big names, and we're only going after the great deals. We're pretty selective. We frankly, probably pass on more than we can even look at right now. There's so many out there. But certainly, that is the focus is to be really, really high aware brands.
Jeremy Hamblin
Great. Last one for me. So you noted this longer-term adjusted EBITDA target $40 million to $50, that's obviously a pretty significant uptick from where you're looking at in '25. I wanted to get a sense to get even to the low end of that range, the $40 million, what's the sales level that you need to achieve, do you think, to get the business up towards that, let's say, $40 million range on EBITDA?
Kenneth Seipel
Yeah. We're working through our long-range plan right now, Jeremy, to get more specificity of that, and I get that in front of the Board for their approval. So I'll speak a little bit more generically. But if you can think about it this way, the EBITDA margin of our business is really below industry standard right now.
And I'm thinking about getting it north of 5% in that 5% to 7% EBITDA margin range, and that would be essentially the top-line sales, if you can think about it in that regard.
That's generally the range that we're going to. And obviously, we have to go beyond that, but that's step one is to restore that $40 million, $40 million to $50 million, and I want to do that at a rate that's in that 5% to 7% margin rate initially.
Jeremy Hamblin
Great. Thanks so much for the call and best wishes on the continued success.
Kenneth Seipel
Thanks, Jeremy I appreciate it.
Operator
Michael Baker, D.A. Davidson.
Michael Baker
Okay. Thank you. I'll ask one question and one follow-up. Question is, can you just walk us through the building blocks of the EBITDA increase of $19 million to $23 million? I mean you get $15 million just by showing up because of cycling the onetime issues and low to mid-single-digit comp, let's say, that's going to add $25 million, $30 million in sales.
So what's the flow-through of that incremental sales? And are there any givebacks or investments such that the $15 million one-timers, the flow-through from the sales increase minus something? Thank you.
Kenneth Seipel
Yeah. I'll give you a little bit of a high level, Mike, on how we're approaching this in terms of turnaround, and I'll let Heather fill in some of the specific numbers that you're asking about there where we can. A couple of things that we've taken a look at this year to get started is we set up an operating budget that's a fairly low base, calls for a low base of sales, it calls for a low base of expenses.
And that really is just truly a foundational number that we have to basically bear bones, operate the business. And then from there, we've put together a sales plan that we believe is higher than that, which actually is higher than that, that will generate something in the neighbourhood of about a 25%-ish flow-through once we hit those numbers.
And then we have a stretch plan that's above that even that has a much higher flow-through rate. So the point here, as you've heard us talk a lot about, is that the handicap of the business maybe in this case, it will be our advantage now is we have a fixed cost base. And so as we are starting to grow the business, we can get pretty substantial flow-through. And so part of the math works that way. It's really a generation of the top line.
And I'll turn it over to Heather to fill in any facts there.
Heather Plutino
Yeah. The only thing I would say, Mike, is, yes, sales growth, margin expansion, let's not forget that, too, right? We'll continue to drive improvement there with a minimum of 220 basis points in the guide. So that flow-through strength, as you mentioned, is there.
And then to Ken's point, and as is included in our guide, we'll continue to leverage our SG&A base being very careful about that in 2025 to make sure that that flow-through is at the levels that he mentioned.
So that's it. No other secret sauce, just all the hard work embedded in doing those three things: driving sales; expanding margin; and leveraging SG&A.
Michael Baker
Okay. Great. Well, I guess the perfect follow-up then I'll just hit on that. So that low base of sales, low base of SG&A, is that the comp guidance that you gave of low to mid-single digits? Is that the baseline? And then the sales above that 25% flow-through, is that needing to comp above that low to mid? Or does that added sales and then the stress plan, is that within the low to mid-single digits, if that makes sense?
Kenneth Seipel
It kind of does. Let me tell you how I'm thinking about that. And then again, I want Heather to fill in anything there that I may have missed. But in terms of the guidance that you have out there, we're saying low to mid-single, and that really encompasses that portion that I mentioned earlier, where we're sitting a fairly low sales base to make sure that we can achieve that number. We don't get our expenses overboard.
That's really the point is we've got a point here where we have a business SG&A base that can handle that minimum sales. And then we have a little bit of that range that we have in EBITDA is based upon the flow-through, right?
It's not all of it, but that's how you go from low to a high on our range is just simply looking at that second tier of sales that I mentioned earlier. And then we have available to us another tier of sales above that. And I don't want to get too over our skis yet.
It's early stages. The business is looking really, really good. But as we talked about earlier, there's some uncertainties. So I'll have more confidence as we go -- as the year progresses. But we are hopeful that we'll see the range for sure that we've put out there, and then there's a potential that we could outperform that if business continues to move at its current pace.
Michael Baker
Got it. Thank you.
Kenneth Seipel
Thank you, Mike.
Operator
We have reached the end of our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Ken for closing remarks.
Kenneth Seipel
Well, I just want to simply say thank you, everybody. We really appreciate your continued interest and support of Citi Trends. We look forward to talking with you next quarter. Bye-bye.
Operator
Thank you. This will conclude today's conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time, and thank you for your participation.
