Good day, and welcome to the Full House Resorts first quarter earnings call. Today’s conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Lewis Fanger, Chief Financial Officer of Full House Resorts. You may begin.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to our first quarter earnings call. As always, before we begin, we remind you that today’s conference call may contain forward-looking statements that we’re making under the safe harbor provision of federal securities laws. I’d also like to remind you that the company’s actual results could differ materially from the anticipated results from these forward-looking statements. Please see today’s press release under the caption Forward-Looking Statements for the discussion of risks that may affect our results. Also, we may make reference to non-GAAP measures such as adjusted EBITDA. For a reconciliation of those measures, please see our website as well as today’s press release and the various other press releases that we issued. And lastly, we’re also broadcasting this conference call at fullhouseresorts.com, where you can find today’s earnings release as well as our SEC filings. And so with that said, we can dig into it. The quarter, as you guys saw in the release, wasn’t a good one by any measure, given the weather issues that you saw throughout the company. If you start with Lake Tahoe, there was just a tremendous lack of snow in the months of January and February. That all went the other way in March, where we had tremendous snowfall that almost brought things back to normal. But there wasn’t enough to snow in that last month to fill the ski resorts and to bring in the volumes that we needed to offset what we saw on January and February. Or at Rising Star. More of the same story. We had flooding that closed the casino for several days over there. We had 21 heavy snowfall days as well. A rough quarter there as well. Silver Slipper. It’s a part of the country where they’re not used…

So I would just add that March was the best month in 10 years at Silver Slipper, as we had, I think. And a little hard to know, when you look at when – like the flooding. We didn’t actually flood our property itself but the roads getting to Rising Sun flooded, so we had to close because people can’t get to us. The gaming commission actually made us close. Then after the roads reopened, business was good. Some of that may have been people who deferred trips from the flooding period. And so if you look at the discrete periods where we had issues, like flooding or an ice storm, we were down. And if you looked at other periods, we were up. And of course, some of that might have been deferral of trips rather than cancellation of trips but that was the quarter. We were down 3.3% of revenue and EBITDA was $3 million versus $4.6 million last year. So not a great quarter but maybe we can make up for it here in the second quarter, at least gain some at the back. But ASC 606, do any of us actually understand this thing?

Sure, I can get it. I guess the other wrinkle that you’re seeing at every company out there, including ours, is the adoption of ASC 606. That’s basically a revenue recognition standard, a new revenue recognition standard. The – so we approached ASC 606 using a modified contribution approach, which means that our 2017 results are exactly what you saw last year. The 2018 results reflect the new standard. A couple of big changes there on ASC 606. One is promo allowances. So that promo allowances line goes away. Previously, we would – if you want in and you had a company with – we would put the value of that comp up in and gross revenues and then deduct it out in promo allowances. What we now do is if you’re a gaming customer and you go in, we would basically deduct the cost of that from the gaming revenue line. If you – the cost of comps is at retail – there’s other big change there.

Actually, let me check for us a little bit. That used to be that everything was recorded at full retail value, and then that was given away free was the promotional balance so you get to net revenues. Now when you accumulate points in the loyalty program or – and we figure out the value of those points and then calculate the value of those points take into account breakage and special promos we might have in a hotel and stuff. But you basically – something loses $1,000 and you look at it and say, well, they get loyalty points worth 50 and maybe some casino host outside of loyalty program bought them lunch, and that’s 20. Well, we would not record $1,000 in casino revenue, we would only record $930 in casino revenue because we had lunch and we got the loyalty points. When the loyalty points get used, the credit for them goes to the department in which they’re used. If they’re used for free play, it comes back in the casino. If they’re used for food and beverage, it goes to the food and beverage department. We also used to allocate, all casino companies did, the cost of providing complementary services was transferred from, say, the food and beverage department to the casino department. And so the logic being that you provide complementary services for the casino and casino should pick up those costs. It’s just another way of looking at things. It’s very different than the industry has looked at for 50 years, and it’s going to take some while of getting used to it. I think, at the end of the day, it’s probably better and – at least from my point of view of trying to run the company because, for example, the food…

There is a provision for taxes, it’s very small though. Actually, Dan, that was the best and simplest summary of ASC 606 that I’ve ever heard. The only thing I would add on to that is if you look at the major classes of item’s net revenue, adjusted EBITDA operating income, net income, the effect was pretty negligible.

That’s – if you’re looking at the numbers, it will matter most to an investor. 606 had very little impact on this. Balance sheet. Lewis did a great job fixing it. Go ahead.

It’s basically a reinvented balance sheet at this point. So we’re quite proud of our new lending group. It is – basically had our first and second lien facilities previously, took those out entirely, refinanced with new senior secured notes. They have a six year term the blended cost before versus today has gone down. Actually, put an interest rate cap in place just about a month ago to help hedge against the rise in interest rates for half of our debt. And so for $50 million of notional amount, we have a interest rate cap of 3%, and that goes against three month LIBOR. That goes out for three years, sort of expires at the end of March of 2021. But beyond excited for our new lending group. If you look at the signature pages on our indenture, you can see exactly who those people are. It’s KYMCO, is Sagard, and it’s our friends at Graydown [ph]. So great group. Already started talking to that group about how do we finance the rest of our expansion over in Colorado. So great group to have and it’s going to be a fun ride with those guys. From an equity point of view, we went out and we did a registered direct equity offering, much cheaper than going out and hiring a traditional bank and paying 5% or 6% or 7% of fees and discounts to your stock, to your trading stock price and everything else. We went out and issued $11.8 million of stock, it was about 3.9 million shares and expense-wise was a little over $350,000 so.

It’s just depending which days you picked. We did it at a lesser discount of price to announcement than most deals have been done by regular investment banks. So we priced it at $3, which was about a 10% discount to our stock was when we started the deal, and that’s less than the discount that we recorded by several investment banks for doing the register deal. And of course, I’m – we’re pleased that the stock has done well since then. And I remember, it was a rocky time in the market. Things were going on and market was up and down and interest rates moving around. , :

$1.8 million gross and a little above $11.4 million net.

Right. And that allows us to build the parking garage, exercising land options, refurbish the Imperial Casino and the Imperial Hotel and get all that open, which lays the groundwork to doing the bigger project in Colorado. So that’s pretty impressive. But then, probably the most exciting stuff in the quarter was we finally are making some good progress on some of these big projects. Most notably, the ferry, which has been a little bit of a point of frustration. For somebody who might be new to this, the Rising Sun Casino was the first casino to open in the region and was hugely successful 25 years ago and built up a pretty big infrastructure. So it’s got 18-hole golf course, got 300 hotel rooms and parking lots and others. And then in the interim, other casinos opened, and so it became kind of the oldest and most geographically challenged. We’re right on the Ohio River, 45 minutes from Cincinnati, 1 hour and 15 minutes from Louisville. Directly across the river. In fact, one of the first times I went there, there was a cloud deck. I looked up and I can see strobe lights and I started trying to figure out what the reflection was, what was making the – I can see the reflection of strobe lights but if the strobe lights – the strobe lights were at the end of the runway of the Cincinnati airport. The big airport in Cincinnati is actually in Northern Kentucky and not very far from us. There’s growth loss but there’s no bridge where we – there was a ferryboat there starting in the early 1800s, they used horses to walk on treadmills and doing ferry. And that ferry, there were several generations of ferry but it stopped operating around 1950…

No. No, you did a good job, Dan. I think the only other thing I’d mention is – that I forgot was a lot of the stuff we built last year is now reopened, and so we’re going to really start to see the benefit of some of that stuff going forward. So we reopened the RV Park in March of this year, and was half full. So when you were there recently, it’s starting to ramp up nicely. And we’ll have a full year, a full summer season especially at that pool complex at Silver Slipper and a full year at the Oyster Bar, which has been pretty tremendously received.

And I will mention, we – I mean, we’re now running, well, 90% occupancy on the hotel down in Mississippi, which opened two years ago. And we have designed with Brad Friedmutter, the fellow who designed Red Rock, amongst my other casinos, a further expansion of the Silver Slipper and it will be a hotel tower that goes out over the Gulf of Mexico. There’s an abandoned pier there now that’s been an eyesore and we’ll basically build over that pier and the rooms will have great views up and down but also puts the rooms very convenient to the casino and we’d add meeting room space and entertainment space and one restaurant. So it’s a pretty significant expansion of the – and then to – if you’re going to expand the hotel and you need more parking and we have quite a bit of land but a lot of it is wetlands. This is under the way of a long-term lease on the land there. If we get the rate to buy it out in 10 months, we probably will exercise our right to buy it out because the Math works on that. For $15 million?

And our rent’s like $1.5 million a year, so it makes sense to buy it out. And – but the – but a lot of that land is wetlands, and so we will seek to fill in some of the wetlands. There’s a process to do that. You have to remediate well in somewhere else and add more surface parking to the property. This is what the beginning stages of a long process of getting approvals and entitlements to do that, to build over the Gulf of Mexico, while the State of Mississippi owns the land underneath the Gulf of Mexico, believe it or not. So you need the state to do some sort of long-term lease. We’ve talked to the Secretary of State of the state and he thinks it’s possible. And so again, we’re back to the Corps of Engineers, effectively a different office and different environmental groups. It make take us two or three years to do this but I just wanted you to know that we are constantly thinking of ways we can grow and improve the company. We think we can get a pretty good return on expanding the Silver Slipper. And so we’ve started the process and it doesn’t take a lot of money to go through the entitlement process but it does take time. So we started it now and it’s something that we might be able to build in two or three years.

Did we post the renderings on the website? In the shareholder web. The renderings that Friedmutter came up with is pretty nifty looking. So it’s in that shareholder letter. That was the cover letter for the proxy. So there’s a rendering in it. all right. Any questions?

[Operator Instruction] We’ll go first to Jim Marrone with Singular Research.

It may have been already touched on but can you perhaps discuss about the impact from rising oil prices on the business as far as gas and travel and the impact on your operations?

It’s a good question. You have to put it in perspective, like somebody from Cincinnati who might go to Rising Sun, they have a 35-minute drive, so it’s each way. That’s probably roughly 1 or 2 gallons of gas each way, so it’s 4 gallon of gas. It used to cost them $8, it might cost them $10 now. And we know our average customer loses about $67 while they’re there plus whatever they spend on food, if they actually bought food or a hotel room or a round of golf. And so at the end, they’re looking at spending $80 to $100 per person for a trip to the casino and price of gas going up as it has and as it might, might add 1% or 2% to that. So – and so I don’t think it’s a huge item. It’s not like people deciding to take a vacation to Yellowstone, where they’re going to drive 500 or 600 miles or drive from the northeast down to Orlando where you’re going to drive 15,000 miles. Our customers don’t drive that far. They’re coming from fairly nearby. And so – well, I’d say on the flip side, when the price of gas came down, what was it, 4 years ago, I remember it was way higher than it is now, we didn’t get much lift. So when it goes up, I don’t think we get much pain either. So – and in fact, there’s a little bit of an onset down in Louisiana. Of course, a strong oil business is good for the economy. And so we – it’s hard to know in Mississippi whether its a plus or minus. The North certainly like punch and train a lot of people work for oil companies. It’s where the regional offices are now. And so at our most important property, a higher price of oil might actually be a positive.

Excellent thank you very much.

We’ll go next to [indiscernible].

Hi Lewis, Dan.

Hi Beth.

Lewis and I have spoken multiple times about this and I just wanted to get Dan’s perspective on it. So Dan, as you think about all the capital you’re putting into the business and the renovations you’re doing at the various properties and everything, as you look out three years from now, what type of – what level of EBITDA do you think the business should be generating?

Okay. Well, just so you know, in my head, I always try to get comfortable that we would get a 15% cash on cash return on the investment. In other words, EBDIT, once it’s normalized. And sometimes, it takes a while to ramp up but I like to feel comfortable that we’re going to get 15% return on it. Now that’s probably comfortably above our cost of capital. I mean, our cost of debt capital is 8% or maybe 9%. That leaves a margin for error, if I’m wrong in my forecast. It can be an awful lot on what something earns and still get a pretty good return. And there’s plenty of stuff out there we can do that gets at least that higher return. And so – but if you look backwards, let’s set aside the big expansion at Bronco Billy because that’s kind of a game changer in a way. If you just look at all these smaller projects we’re doing, I think the total investment is about $12 million or $15 million if you add it all up, maybe $14 million. We’ve raised $5 million of rights offering to fund it, and then we reinvested cash flow. And so if you get a 15% return on $14 million, that’s like $3 million of EBDIT. I think we do better than that. I think our run rate of EBDIT is pretty close to $20 million now, if you back out weather stuff and some of the other stuff. And someday, we’re going to have a quarter where we have good weather everywhere. And so I think we can get to the mid-20s, $25 million before building the big hotel at Bronco Billy’s and I think that hotel at Bronco Billy’s is $100 million project that produces $15…

When does the big spending then start for Bronco Billy’s, this $100 million? When are we going to start to have to worry about financing that?

Well, the Phase one is about $10 million and that will be July.

$14 million.

I’m sorry, $14 million. So the parking garage is $10 million. And then reopening Imperial and that is another $4 million. And that we have that money to do. And that garage will take about six months to build. We think we will have the final approvals to build it in July. And so it would open in the first quarter of next year. So let’s say that would position us to start construction on the bigger phase in the second quarter of next year. And look, there’s many ways we can finance this. I mean, we could – the easy one is go issue equity. Of course, that makes everybody nervous about dilution. We could sell the Silver Slipper to a REIT and lease it back. We could bring a REIT in to help us REIT this. We could bring in a partner to do this. There’s many, many ways we can do it. I don’t think we can 100% debt-finance it on our current balance sheet but I think debt will be a good chunk of it, probably 60%, 70%, 80% of it. And so – but that’s something we’re evaluating now and we’re going to do what we believe is best for shareholders. And that we may talk to some potential partners, we’ll talk to some potential REITs, and we’ll look at the stock. And at the end of the day, it’s arithmetic, what’s best for our shareholders. But if we can build something that we think it’s a 15% unlevered return and it’s not hard to see why it would. Look, there’s one million people in Colorado Springs, Pueblo and Canyon City. Their gambling is way below the national average and the demand is there, it just needs a product that people find worthwhile to drive…

The only thing I would tag on to that, Dan, is when we actually do start to work on that bigger Phase two, Beth, the cash – the spend is actually – it’s pretty heavily weighted towards the back half. So you can see a good 50% of the spend in the last six months of that project. And the

But we’re not going to start construction until we know we have the money to finish.

Absolutely right. And the only other point I wanted to make out of all this is, is the nice thing about – if we end up borrowing whatever the number is, it puts us in a different spot when it comes to refinancing this mode of debt because we’ll have gone from $100 million to pick a number but it’s going to be a number greater than $150 million. And the hurdle that we hear from bankers time and again is you need to clear $150 million of bond size to have a good markable bond security to drive down your interest costs. So there’s more good stuff to come, and this project actually will put us in a unique spot to actually bring down our interest rate.

We’re also on the cusp of $100 million market cap and I know there’s a few funds out there that told us that they would like to own our stock but we need to have $100 million market cap by their rules. And so we’ll see.

Well, hopefully, you’ll get to the stock going up as opposed to issuing equity.

I agree.

Right? I mean, we’re on the same page about that.

Yes, we are.

Okay, good thank you so much very helpful.

Thanks.

[Operator Instructions]

Okay. Thank you very much, everybody.

That does conclude today’s conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.