Every time Mediterranean fast-casual purveyor Cava has reported earnings lately, something’s clearly going right. The numbers speak for themselves—but they need CFO Tricia Tolivar’s deft hand to really sing.
And that’s where her earnings day preparation comes in.
The power of prep. On paper, it would appear that Cava’s first earnings call took place in August 2023, not long after the company’s June 2023 IPO. But Tolivar’s belief in the power of earnings prep was formed long before that call.
For five quarters leading up to the company’s IPO, Tolivar and her team hosted mock earnings calls, running through would-be analyst questions and preparing scripts “so that we weren’t entering the public environment in that way for the first time,” she explained.
Tolivar cites that pre-IPO prep work, and the mock earnings calls in particular, for a “much smoother transition into the public environment” than might’ve happened otherwise. Now, many earnings reports later, she says her team hasn’t “changed much about what we’re doing.”
Even as they stick to a relatively similar formula each time, she’s hesitant to boil the process down to a science. “I don’t know that there’s a magic to it, or a specific science,” she stressed, adding that it’s mainly about “having a great team that works like a well-oiled machine.”
One key aspect of that well-oiled teamwork: Prep for a given quarterly report doesn’t start at any specific time, she explained. “I would say it’s almost an ongoing process,” Tolivar said. “But certainly as you get close to the end of the quarter, you’re already beginning to prepare what you think the messaging is going to be, thinking about guidance and how does that look, making any adjustments you need, and then really laying things out.”
Once they’re in a good place, and have shared, refined, and revised all data “over the course of a number of weeks,” the team is set for the “collective effort” of actually putting earnings materials together, she added. At that point, the key players include Cava’s “VP of communications, our SVP of finance, our head of investor relations, our CEO, myself, members from the strategy team, as well as the FP&A team,” Tolivar explained.
“We pull all of our thoughts together,” she said. “We create an outline and then align on that outline, then work on the scripting, and then go through a number of iterations.”
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There is some science involved; Tolivar noted that they follow “a very detailed timeline and cadence [on] how frequently and often we meet, and it’s several times per week around the script, as well as the Q&A.”
Even so, she finds that earnings prep “doesn’t consume a significant part of [her] work day,” adding that “on certain days, it might be 20%, and other days it might be very little,” ultimately allowing her to focus on long-term commitments and strategy.
And while most of the prep work makes earnings days relatively easy, there are still moving parts—namely, the question and answer portion. To that end, Tolivar says some of the most effective preparation takes the form of listening to other earnings calls to “understand what’s being asked out in the marketplace, [and] obviously [to] stay up to date on what’s happening in business and the environment in general, to be able to understand what might come our way.”
Her team also typically looks at questions they’ve previously been asked, as well as prior questions for “others in the space,” to add to “a fairly large document that keeps track of that information over time, as well as in the current period,” she said. “That gets updated on a regular basis, so it’s a living, breathing document that we can refer to and refine as appropriate.”
Pencils down. Still, there’s such a thing as over-preparedness. “We also found that it’s really good to have a definite pencils down moment,” Tolivar noted. “A day or two ahead of earnings,” her team officially agrees to “no more changes, so that we can just relax and prepare and go in feeling good about how we’re going to communicate,” she said.
After all that prep, her day-of rituals are as calm, cool, and collected as you might expect.
“I like to keep the routine pretty stable,” she said of earnings days, noting that she maintains her usual morning workout routine of “strength exercising and a good 30 minute walk.”
And even though it’s nowhere in the job description, she likes to dress the part. “[It’s] a little bit quirky, but I usually tend to dress up a little bit more on earnings day,” she said. “I know no one else can see what I’m wearing, but I just feel better, better prepared and confident, and ready to hopefully perform in the best way possible.”