Earnings Labs

Good Times Restaurants Inc. (GTIM)

Q4 2014 Earnings Call· Tue, Dec 9, 2014

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good morning ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Good Times Restaurants, Inc. Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Yearend 2014 Earnings Call. As a reminder, a part of today's discussion will include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws. These statements are commonly identified by words such as "anticipate," "continue," "plan," "expect," "intend," "should," "will," and other terms with similar meanings. These statements include but will not be limited to statements that reflect the company's current expectations with respect to the macroeconomic and competitive environment. The financial conditions of the company, results of operations, plans, objectives, future performance including the company's initiatives and strategy, sales growth, operating margins, cost, expenses, the point (ph) of capital, restaurant development and their remodels, new market development, franchise development, and other expectations, within the course of this call. Although the company believes the assumptions upon which preliminary or initial results, financial information and forward-looking statements are based are reasonable as of today's date, these forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and therefore investors should not place undue reliance on them. Also these statements are based on facts known and expected as of the date of this conference call, and the company undertakes no obligation to update these statements to reflect the events or circumstances that might arise after this call. Participants on the call today should refer to the company's Form 10-K and other filings with the SEC for a more detailed discussion of risk, uncertainties and other factors that could impact the company's future operating results and financial conditions. The company has posted it's fiscal fourth quarter and yearend 2014 press release and supplemental financial information related to the quarter's results on this website at www.goodtimesburgers.com in the investor section. And now I would like to turn the call over to Mr. Boyd Hoback, President and CEO of Good Times. Please go ahead, sir.

Boyd Hoback

President and CEO

Thank you, Shannon and thanks everyone for joining us this morning. With me today are Su Knutson, our Controller and Scott LeFever, our Chief Operating Officer for Good Times. After we deliver our prepared remarks, we will be available for questions. As I stated in my shareholder letter of January 8th earlier this year we believe we are at a historic inflection point as we continue our transition to a more broadly held emerging growth company and we continue to make significant progress in 2014 with both our fundamental financial performance as well as setting the stage for what we believe will be accelerated growth in fiscal 2015 and beyond. Our restaurant level sales, margins and unit economics are performing well. We've successfully curbed a unique niche for our Good Times concept in one of the most competitive markets in the country. And our goal now is to accelerate our unit level growth in both of our concepts. We are continuing to put in place the requisite management and overhead structure to manage that growth. Almost a 100% of our series A and B warrants were exercised. So we've got a very strong balance sheet with cash representing approximately 20% of our total market cap and a clean capital structure with minimal long-term debt. We continue to see very robust same-store sales growth in Good Times. This was our 17th consecutive quarter of same-store sales growth with double-digit increases on top of double-digit prior year increases in the fourth quarter. During our first quarter of fiscal 2015 we continued to see double-digit comps in October but those decreased to single-digit in November primarily due to the impact of eight days of the polar plunge when sales were off by over 20% for those eight days. Those have rebounded subsequent to…

Scott LeFever

Chief Operating Officer

Thanks Boyd. This year our primary goals for Good Times are to maintain our same-store sales growth, complete most of our remodeling of older restaurants and build new Good Times in Colorado market. I will speak briefly to each of these. This summer we instituted a new feedback mechanism from newBrandAnalytics that gives us the capability to aggregate all customer comments being made on social media, not just on review sites. It allows us to identify themes for areas of improvement and where we can develop more significant competitive advantage in both execution and product quality. We augmented the social media feedback tool, the new customer survey tool that's provided us with a new level of detail on daily executive at every restaurant. Surveys inherently tend towards both extremes of good and bad feedback which allows us to identify where we are at developing a true brand avocacy as well as where we have gaps in our execution. This tool augments our secret shopper program whereby we shop every store seven times per month for the very diagnostic analysis of execution of what we believe are the core drivers of excellence. Food quality and temperature, speed of service and employee friendliness and cleanliness. With these combined tools, we think we can identify ways to continue to grow our same-store sales simply through improved day-to-day execution. We continue to make good progress on our remodeling and re-imaging of older stores to bring all of them up to current brand standards in the market most of which to-date have been on upgrading our older double drive-through stores. We spend approximately 500,000 during 2014 on recurring and remodel CapEx. We anticipate we will spend approximately 1.7 million on recurring and remodel CapEx during 2015, which includes equipment upgrades to our grills and fryers…

Boyd Hoback

President and CEO

Thank you Scott. In addition to the new Good Times that opened on November 21st this year we have another restaurant scheduled to open in early spring 2015 and we are working actively on other sites in the front range of Colorado for Good Times. Our limitation in Colorado is the availability of prime real estates in the key trade areas we've identified. But we estimate that approximately 8 to 10 additional trade areas for development along the front range on top of the 35 stores that we have opened in Colorado. And our objective is to develop 2 to 3 stores a year based on the availability of high quality sites. And return on investment profile for Good Times is very attractive with the sales of 1.2 million. While we are not an owner of real estate, we can purchase the land and develop a store, our plan is to sell off that real estate into a sale leaseback and that leaves us with a net operating investment of approximately of $300,000 with 60,000 of pre-open cost. With a store level cash flow margin in the high teens at that sales level, a new Good Times developed under the sale leaseback model should produce a restaurant 4-wall level cash-on-cash return on investment of over 50% in the stores second year. In fiscal 2014, we've been focused on setting the stage for Bad Daddy's expansion. We are also evaluating the feasibility of a larger platform for Good Times our of Colorado as the concept continues to perform and as we continue to deepen its differentiating brand attributes that we think can be exported to new markets where we don't have the brand equity and awareness we have in Colorado. I will take a minute now and turn the discussion over…

Susan Knutson

Management

Thank you Boyd. We are primarily focused on our restaurant level performance while we add infrastructure, and general and administrative expenses to support expanded growth in new restaurants. Good Times same-store sales increased 11.9% for the fourth quarter on top of 18.2% last year. And as Boyd mentioned that double-digit trend continued into our first fiscal 2015 quarter until the cold weather hit. We do anticipate a mid-single-digit same-store sales increase in our first fiscal quarter of 2015. Restaurant level operating profit as disclosed in the supplemental information in our fourth quarter press release increased 208,000 over the prior year to 1,172,000 for Good Times and 108,000 for Bad Daddy's. Our pre-open expenses for the initial Bad Daddy's development have been very high. But we expect those to begin to moderate as we have a larger base of stores in which to develop management and train team members. The largest component of pre-open expenses is crew and management training. We are carrying some excess management so that we have seasoned managers for our new stores. The growth in same-store sales continues to translate into expanding operating margins for our good times locations. The non-GAAP presentation of our restaurant level operating profit margin increased 170 basis points in the fourth quarter to 16.7 from the prior year of 15% despite food cost increasing by 80 basis points in that same period. For the fiscal year Good Times restaurant level operating profit margin expanded 450 basis points from 12% to 16.5%, and the restaurant level operating profit increased by $1.5 million over the prior year. We are facing continued commodity cost pressures primarily from beef costs and expect to show higher food costs to our first quarter of fiscal 2015 as a percentage of sales. Bacon and dairy costs have begun to…

Boyd Hoback

President and CEO

Thank you Su. I will get to questions here in just a minute. We are very exited about the future of the company, our continued momentum at Good Times and laying the foundation for accelerated new store growth in both concepts. We will be adding some key people in key roles this year and are focused on execution of the growth plan. We have approximately 12 million in cash, minimal long-term debt, two brands that are performing well and a new pipeline of new sites developing and we look forward to reporting our progress in fiscal 2015. With valuations in the restaurant industry, what they are for emerging growth concepts, and with our return on investment model and growth prospects, we believe there's opportunity to create significant added shareholder value as we move forward. If we can position the company to access the capital markets for a larger, more accelerated growth platform, we would certainly like to put those strategic pieces in place this year. This is our first earnings call and it coincided with the end of our fiscal year, so the call is necessarily a little bit later than it will be as a matter of course. We plan to schedule our quarterly earnings calls to coincide with our quarterly earnings releases and our Form 10-Q filings. We just presented at the LD Micro Conference in LA, and we plan to present at the ICR conference in Orlando in January as well as continuing to tell our story to other institutional investors and continue to increase liquidity for the stock. We appreciate your time with us today. With that operator, we will open the call for questions.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. (Operator Instructions) Our first question is from Alex Fuhrman of Craig-Hallum Capital Group. You may begin.

Alex Fuhrman

Analyst · Craig-Hallum Capital Group. You may begin

Great, thanks for taking my question and congratulations on a really fantastic quarter and fiscal year. Wanted to touch on -- little bit on both concepts on the Good Times side, particularly interested in what you are talking about in terms of adding more messaging around the all-natural menu and communicating that better. Can you give us a little bit more sense on what you've done so far with that and what we should expect to see in the future? Is it mostly in-store, signage and messaging, or is it playing a larger role in your external advertising and is that something we might see more off in the future?

Boyd Hoback

President and CEO

Yes, Alex, thanks for the question. We are -- most of that's going to be at the store level. We feel like, particularly for new customers to Good Times, they maybe not get that -- they don't get that message as quickly as we would like, and it's not as big an impact at the unit level. So we've got some plans both in our lobby remodels that we are doing as well as through the drive-through lane as Scott mentioned to be just a lot more specific and a lot more alert in the all-natural positioning. I think that's been a big core driver of our sales momentum over the last three years. We've included it in our television advertising, but we feel like we've been a little understated and it may be a little bit too clever in our messaging at the unit level, and we could be a little bit more in your face with that message.

Alex Fuhrman

Analyst · Craig-Hallum Capital Group. You may begin

That's great, and just real quick follow-up on Good Times. What do you attribute the recent strength of some of the new openings at Good Times. Is it better site selection, is it just the matter of having more of your existing units remodeled and with better marketing that they are just keyed up to open stronger? Or is there something more about the site selection or the approach of the real estate that has really been helping that as well?

Boyd Hoback

President and CEO

So this last one we opened, we knew it's going to be a good trader for us. We've been trying to get into that area for probably the last 10 years. Demographically it's a great match with higher incomes. We tend to index pretty well against Chick-fil-A, and we know they've got a very-very high volume store basically across the street. So we anticipated that would be a good one. I think we are seeing the benefit of all the things that you just mentioned, the heightened brand positioning that we've been banging on for the last couple of years, a brand new design that we think is pretty compelling that really takes us almost out of the kid fast food category from a perception standpoint and yet we still have a fast food price point and I think then the overall imaging or re-imaging of the stores which were really only about half way through, that's been helping our presence in the market overall.

Alex Fuhrman

Analyst · Craig-Hallum Capital Group. You may begin

Great, thank. And then if I can just switch quickly over to Bad Daddy's, would it be curious to the extent you are willing to size up the relative performance of the two units. I mean in total clearly very strong results for the quarter and then given everything that's been going on in the Cherry Creek neighborhood with traffic and construction, you would have to think that that Northglenn property was really performing off the chart. I mean I am thinking about future opening and considering I would imagine the construction and Cherry Creek is certainly specific to that location. It there anything you are seeing in your internal metrics in terms of average check or anything like that? Do you think that Cherry Creek store could get up to the Northglenn level a year from now and that construction has abated and how should we think about potentially the productivity of future units for that concept?

Boyd Hoback

President and CEO

I think Northglenn was a little bit unusual because we had the opportunity to do the rooftop, and that's, I think, added incremental volume. Our expectation is not for Cherry Creek to get to that sales level. Our expectation is for Cherry Creek to be able to get up to the system average but I think we've got more brows to hold there before that happens. So fundamentally I think the difference that we are seeing is that the Northglenn trade area is middle and upper-middle income whereas Cherry Creek North is extremely high income, and we think that the Bad Daddy's concept, the sweet spot for it is that upper-middle income suburban consumer, they are kind of tired of casual theme. They can go and get cool concepts if they want to go into Downtown Denver or the Highlands or float hours (ph) or even Cherry Creek. But it's really not available in a lot of these suburban markets. And so we think fundamentally from a site selection standpoint that's given some pretty good guidance it's perhaps not as much an urban concept as it is a suburban concept. And so as we move forward, if we have the opportunity to do small rooftops, we will certainly take advantage of that because we think it's a great set for the concept and has resonated really well in Northglenn. But overall the small box, 3,600 square foot prototype is still the model. And if we can crank out $2.5 million out of those, it's a great return model for us.

Alex Fuhrman

Analyst · Craig-Hallum Capital Group. You may begin

That's really helpful. Thank Boyd and good luck to the whole team.

Boyd Hoback

President and CEO

Thanks Alex.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question is from Tony Brenner of ROTH Capital Partners. You may begin.

Tony Brenner

Analyst · ROTH Capital Partners. You may begin

Thank you, good morning. Boyd you mentioned that you are about half way done with the Good Times Burgers' remodel program. I wonder if you could indicate how many of the company stores will be re-imaged in 2015 and what typically sort of sales bump you are getting from the re-image stores when they reopen?

Boyd Hoback

President and CEO

Hey, Tony, it's a good question. So far we've remodeled about 10 of our stores. All of those have been our older double-drive-through stores, and frankly it's been impossible to parse out the results of that just because we've been on such a steep growth curve. That said, we have about another 10 stores planned for 2015. But included in that is some major remodels meaning that they are not just exterior spiffs but some very old stores that need more major work done to them and we are anticipating that we will hopefully see a 10% plus pump from the investment in those major remodels. In addition to the major remodels we do have some more drive-through exterior re-images, and again we think there's been kind of a synergistic effect as well as what's happening at each individual location as we bring all stores up to the current brand image.

Tony Brenner

Analyst · ROTH Capital Partners. You may begin

Okay. And franchisees are proceeding at a slower pace for remodels' point?

Boyd Hoback

President and CEO

Yeah, we've -- in the last couple of years we actually bought back a few franchise stores which have been great transactions for us and we've remodeled those stores. The franchisees, we still have in the system, have more recent stores and they are not in as high need for remodeling, but we are planning on having them remodel alongside ours here over the next two fiscal years. And particularly as we move to the dining room stores which are newer stores we wanted to get this new store opened with its new designs so that we can then work backwards to the system with a consistent platform on a new lobby design. And as we do that those franchisees will participate.

Tony Brenner

Analyst · ROTH Capital Partners. You may begin

Okay, question on Bad Daddy's. I know that Cherry Creek obviously is skewing the margin for the Bad Daddy's concept but just taking Northglenn as a standalone, I assume that start-up costs, high labor, expenses and so on have accepted margins. How long do you think just for the Northglenn store, it would take to get up to that objective mid-teens 4-wall margin?

Boyd Hoback

President and CEO

We are already there. I mean what's impacting the way that we segment the data in our release is really Cherry Creek, and some of the extra management that we are carrying but the 4-wall margins of Northglenn are already there where we talked about in the high teens.

Tony Brenner

Analyst · ROTH Capital Partners. You may begin

Okay, that's it for me. Thank you.

Boyd Hoback

President and CEO

Okay, thanks Tony.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. (Operator Instructions) Our next question is from Andrew Groin of Dorothy and Company. You many begin.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst · Dorothy and Company. You many begin

Thanks guys, congrats on the great quarter.

Boyd Hoback

President and CEO

Thank you Andrew.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst · Dorothy and Company. You many begin

First question for you just in regards to the Good Times concept. So there seems to have been a possible shift in your mindset about potential expansion for this concept. I know initially you had just discussed a potential 8 to 10 new locations within Colorado which would all be company owned locations. But with the stores producing cash and cash returns, where they are at right now, I think if you actually talk out the number you gave, it actually is north of 60% even. Can you speak to maybe where you see new market potential and maybe the approach you are taking to evaluate that, either you or potential franchisees?

Boyd Hoback

President and CEO

Yes, it's a great question, and I don't want to overstate that just because we are really on again. Our strategic plan has been around continue to grow Good Times in the Colorado market while we lay the platform for Bad Daddy's growth. Good Times is performing, I think, beyond our expectations and ahead of our expectations. And as a result we are evaluating its expansion potential out of market. I think in QSR Burgers there's two components; there's the free standing real estate component which is a little bit different animal and then there's also just the positioning of the concept. But we are looking at other markets that demographically and psychographically match up to Denver, and if there's an opportunity for us to go in and seed a market or two with our own capital, that may be one option, or to go in and develop with the franchisee is another option. I don't want to misrepresent that that we do not have anything that is on the boards definitively yet but strategically our board is looking at that and what the opportunities to expand Good Times potentially out of Colorado might be.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst · Dorothy and Company. You many begin

That's helpful. Thank you, and moving over to the Bad Daddy's concept. So with beef pricing where it's at, I think our index shot an all-time high last week. You mentioned price increases over at Good Times in January. And you briefly mentioned menu engineering that might be going on. And I am wondering if you can maybe provide any color on what you are doing at the Bad Daddy's locations maybe in terms of menu engineering or just promotions, shifting focus away from beef items?

Boyd Hoback

President and CEO

Yes, Bad Daddy's is a little bit less beef intensive in terms of it's overall cost structure than Good Times is just because it has a broader menu. But we are working with Tim Kast and with Frank Scibelli and Bad Daddy's on not only menu engineering from a cost standpoint, but really optimizing the menu in each one of the categories. So we've taken a couple of high cost of sales items off. We've put some lower cost items on. Probably most importantly is we are developing a calendar of local chef specials that will be over the roll-through and our plan is on a bi-weekly basis, and as a part of that chef special strategy, is to focus on as we move sales away from core menu items to move into the chef specials that may have a better margin structure. There's not a menu overhaul in plan in any means. We run about a 30% higher bar mixture in Colorado than what they do in North Carolina so that actually helps our margin structure on cost of sales. We also have a happy hour menu that they don't have and can't do in North Carolina. So there's some things that we are doing but we are really trying to just parse down category by category, what's working and what's not working and where are the opportunities for us to move cost of sales and average check. And we look at it two ways; we look at it both from a margin standpoint and what our percentage cost of sales are. We also look at it as penny profit standpoint and it certainly makes sense sometimes to have some prior cost items if we are gaining a bigger check and a bigger gross profit, penny profit contribution.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst · Dorothy and Company. You many begin

Okay, great. I am not sure if this is a data point that you have available or could share, but do you have any same-store sales data from with NBDI's core base that I think last time -- last quarter there were three within their same-store sales base. Are there any updated numbers that you could provide on that?

Boyd Hoback

President and CEO

I don't want to -- we don't report their sales, so I don't -- I can't tell you definitively what they are other than that they continue on a really strong trend. The first Riley stores, as soon as they had lapped its first year and a second store opened in the Riley market over in Carrie (ph), the first store bumped up significantly to the tune of 20% or 30% and it's maintained that. The other core stores in Charlotte continue to have single digit same-store sales growth.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst · Dorothy and Company. You many begin

Okay, I appreciate that. And then last question for me. Just in terms of overall G&A spending, I think we had talked previously about G&A peaking this year and then potentially going down a little bit in fiscal '15. So obviously G&A was fairly high this quarter. I am wondering if maybe any at all of it was kind of a one-time spend or how you are thinking about G&A heading into 15 if it's a targeted percent of sales rates or what not?

Boyd Hoback

President and CEO

Yeah. As Su mentioned there were some one-time hits in our fourth quarter related to some stock compensation expense and some on-time bonus and to some investor relations expense and then the pre-open cost on Bad Daddy's. Obviously we will continue to have relatively the small size of Bad Daddy's fairly high pre-open cost as a percentage of total sales. But G&A by the end of 2015 we do anticipate will begin to come down as a percentage of our overall sales. That is somewhat dependent on the pace of development and as we add a couple of key roles particularly a CFO and a vice president of real estate development, there maybe some near-term increase in G&A but we anticipate as we move into 2016 that it will continue to come down as a percentage of our revenue.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst · Dorothy and Company. You many begin

Thank you very much Boyd.

Boyd Hoback

President and CEO

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. Our next question is from John Ziegelman of Wolverine Asset Management. You may begin.

John Ziegelman

Analyst · Wolverine Asset Management. You may begin

Hey Boyd. Hey guys.

Boyd Hoback

President and CEO

Hi John.

John Ziegelman

Analyst · Wolverine Asset Management. You may begin

How is everything going?

Boyd Hoback

President and CEO

Good.

John Ziegelman

Analyst · Wolverine Asset Management. You may begin

Great, excellent quarter. I missed the first 20 minutes so if you gave guidance, could you just quickly re-give it?

Boyd Hoback

President and CEO

Sure. We didn't give hard revenue or earnings guidance. The guidance that we did give was on store development. We got an edition of the Good Times store that just opened. We have another one that will open in early spring. We have our third Bad Daddy's that will open in January, and we expect to open another four to five Bad Daddy's on top of that this fiscal year, and we have other good times that we are looking at putting in the pipeline, the difference being the lead time on free standing real estate development is significantly longer than in-line for Bad Daddy's. And so not sure exactly how those new stores will fall. We are also the tail on the dog on a lot of those new developments for Bad Daddy's meaning that that development is not up to us, it's up to new shopping center development and remodels that were in line for. So we haven't given, and it's particularly difficult after really small base that we've got factoring in the timing of when those openings will be. But I think we are comfortable in saying that we will have another good times and another four to five Bad Daddy's open.

John Ziegelman

Analyst · Wolverine Asset Management. You may begin

Excellent. I get totally that there's a ton of moving part. So I guess the follow on question and really probably should have asked this first that I know you didn't was when do you think you will start to have enough visibility to not give quarterly guidance but say annual guidance with some margin expectations as well?

Boyd Hoback

President and CEO

I think as we move -- as we get a couple of stores open particularly on the Bad Daddy's side, I think we are very comfortable on where we are in projecting forward on the Good Times piece. I think by mid-fiscal year this year as we have a little bit harder timeline on the development pipeline, we can start giving a little bit firmer guidance as we look to the fiscal 2016.

John Ziegelman

Analyst · Wolverine Asset Management. You may begin

Got it. Okay, the other question I had has already been answered, so I will jump off. Thank you.

Boyd Hoback

President and CEO

Hey, thanks John.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. I am showing no further questions at this time. Ladies and gentlemen this concludes today's conference. Thanks for you participation, and have a wonderful day.

A - Boyd Hoback

Analyst

Thank you all.