Good day and welcome to the Dave & Buster’s Incorporated First Quarter 2017 Earnings Conference Call. Today’s conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Jay Tobin, General Counsel. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Noah, and thank you for joining us. On the call today are Steve King, Chief Executive Officer; and Brian Jenkins, Chief Financial Officer. After comments from Mr. King and Mr. Jenkins, we will be happy to take your questions. This call is being recorded on behalf of Dave & Buster’s Entertainment Inc. and is copyrighted. Before we begin our discussion of the company’s results, I would like to call your attention to the fact that in our remarks and our responses to your questions, certain items may be discussed, which are not based entirely on historical facts. Any such items should be considered forward-looking statements and relating to future events within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. All such forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results to differ from those anticipated. Information on the various risk factors and uncertainties has been published in our filings with the SEC, which are available on our website at daveandbusters.com under the Investor Relations section. In addition, our remarks today will include references to EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA and store operating income before depreciation and amortization, which are financial measures that are not defined under Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. Investors should review the reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to the comparable GAAP results contained in our earnings announcement released this afternoon, which is also available on our website. Now I’ll turn the call over to Steve King.

Thank you, Jay, and good afternoon, everyone. We appreciate your participation in our quarterly conference call and your continued interest in Dave & Buster’s. Today, I’ll review the quarterly highlights and provide an update on our current initiatives and plans. Brian will walk us through the key financial highlights, our increased 2017, and our new $100 million share repurchase program. Then I’ll discuss our development and remodeling efforts before we open it up to your questions. We’re off to a great start in fiscal 2017 and are pleased to be raising our annual outlook. Dave & Buster’s differentiated experience across our four platforms of eat, drink, play and watch, continues to resonate with our guests. We grew total revenue by more than 16% and EBITDA by more than 22% during the first quarter of 2017, demonstrating good operating leverage. Once again, we delivered very strong comparable store sales growth of 2.2%, led by amusement cost 6.4% during the quarter in line with our full-year guidance. This was our 20th consecutive quarter of outperformance relative to Knapp-Track. Our non-comp store performance remained strong as well, and we’re pleased with our 2017 store openings today. Of the 96 stores we opened, we operated during the first quarter, 20 stores, or 21% of the total were non-comp stores. Their strong performance in contribution to our overall revenue growth demonstrates the broad appeal of our brand, as we work towards building out our North American store potential of over 200 stores. The first store core tends to be volatile for us. This year, once again, we experienced significant week to week sales volatility due to manufacturers, including delays in tax refunds, the shift in Valentine’s Day, Eastern spring breaks, as well as the impact of weather. Fortunately, these factors were all within our quarter…

Well, thank you, Steve, and good afternoon, everyone. Before walking through the numbers, I just want to thank our many team members across the country who have made D&B one of the best experiential brands for consumers today. I also want to congratulate them for helping deliver another record setting first quarter in terms of sales, net income and EBITDA, as we continue to drive significant shareholder value. Now, in terms of the first quarter, total revenues increased more than 16% to $304.1 million, that’s up from $262 million in the prior year due to contributions from newer stores, as well as healthy performance in our comp store base. Revenues from our 76 comparable stores increased 2.2% to $248.4 million, up from $242.9 million, while revenues from our 20 non-comparable stores, including four that opened during the quarter increased to $57 million, that’s up from $20.4 million in the prior year. Turning to category sales, the mix shift to our more profitable entertainment business continued as total amusement and other sales grew 20.4%, while food and beverage collectively increased approximately 10.8%. During the first quarter, amusement and other represented 57.3% of total revenues, reflecting a 200 basis point increase from the prior year period, as we continue to feature and promote the entertainment aspect of our brand. Now breaking down the 2.2% increase in comp sales, our walk-in sales grew 2.4%, while our special events business was up 0.6%. In terms of category sales, amusement rose 6.4%, while our food and bar business was down 2.2% and 4.2%, respectively. As Steve mentioned, we were also able to extend our outperformance relative to Knapp Track to 20 consecutive quarters. On a two-year stack basis, our comparable store sales growth was 5.8%, as we cycled over a healthy prior year comp of…

Thank you, Brian. I’d like to review our recent and upcoming store development activities, as well as our remodeling program. But before I begin, let me point out that as we look forward to successfully opening our 100 store in the coming weeks, it’s a good reminder of how fortunate we are to have a strong and dedicated team led by John Mulleady, our SVP of Development. This team continues to execute on our vision, driving towards the aforementioned opening of more than 200 locations in the U.S. and Canada. We’re very pleased with the response to our recent openings. During the first quarter, we opened four stores in Carlsbad, California; Columbia, South Carolina; Overland Park, Kansas; and Tucson, Arizona. In the second quarter so far, we have already opened stores in New Orleans, Louisiana, which is a new state for us outside of Georgia, Atlanta and Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. We plan to open one additional store this quarter in McAllen, Texas, which will be our 100th location. We currently have five stores under construction and a total of 23 signed leases providing us with significant visibility on the new – on new store growth well into 2018 and the first part of 2019. As Brian mentioned, we now expect to open 12 new stores for this fiscal year, which equates to unit growth of 30%, again, at the top end of our previous expectation of 11 to 112 new stores. By the end of fiscal year 2017, we’ll have 104 stores operating across 35 states in Puerto Rico, and that’s just under half of our long-term goal. As a reminder, our long-term target is for 10% or more annual new store growth and units, including a combination of large and small store format. As always we are constantly…

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] And we’ll take our first question from Nicole Miller with Piper Jaffray.

Thank you. Good afternoon. I just had two quick questions. Thinking about the food and beverage versus amusement sales, what would you point out as similarities or differences between traffic trends? I know you give us the price versus traffic and mix for Food and Beverage and you also talked about a mix shift, I think, negative. But just wondering if you could put some color around that and how that would compare to amusement trends. I’m just wondering is there a way you can look at amusement like number of plays or any metric that compares to traffic on that end? Thanks.

Sure. First of all, as we said in my comments, I mean, we lead with amusement. It is the point of differentiation for us, really the focus of our advertising. We believe that helps to fuel footballs and really is the primary reason for the visit. We’re very cognizant of the fact that driving F&B at the expense of amusements would really be a bad trade for us, given the margin differential. So we want anything that we would do to be incremental. To directly answer your question, what we are seeing is increases in the number of card counts, for example, and decreases in the number of items sold per card, if you will. So that’s really what the issue is for us. And just to put a little context behind it, I mean, we’ve outperformed Knapp over the last two years by over 1,000 basis points. So – but having said that, we really feel like this is an area that we’re going to need to address, and over the next several quarters, we’re going to have test several F&B initiatives that particularly can’t increase that attachment rate and drive incremental food and beverage, including some things with respect to the menu at both items and number of items pricing, including promotional and some service enhancements. It’s one of the things that we just completed in the second quarter was our Simphony roll out that enables us to do things like pay at the table, some handheld devices line-busting, so really trying to reduce the friction that we have for some of our guests in having those food and beverage transactions.

Thank you. And just a second and final question, can you talk a little bit about, what you’re doing from a hiring, training or retention standpoint as you hit your 100th store opening, but you’re also still clearly at a pace of double-digit development with still the ability to double the unit base. So how are you looking from a human capital standpoint? Thanks.

So one of the advantages that we have right now is, our retention rate is substantially better than what you would see in the comparable category for people report. So where people report turnover now has risen to over 30% in management and it’s close to or not a slightly over a 100% in hourly rates for both of those have been lower and substantially lower on the management side. Now having said that, I mean, we do a disciplined succession planning process, now that we use the 9 box format, that you probably heard of, and really try to project out how we are going to staff our growth through really out into 2018 looking at the individual stores, what markets they’re in, we’re just interested in moving to those markets if we don’t have existing stores in those markets and that kind of thing. It’s also part of the reason that we said we want to grow at more than 10%, but we know necessarily want to be a 20% grower in terms of unit growth because of the need to really be disciplined with that human resource pipeline. So that’s how we approach it.

Thank you.

Thanks, Nicole.

We’ll take our next question from Andrew Strelzik with BMO Capital Markets.

Hey, good afternoon, guys.

Good afternoon.

Good afternoon.

I wanted to first ask on the EBITDA guidance. It looks like you raised the EBITDA guidance less than the beat for the quarter even though the comps were the same, you beat on margins and you raised to the high-end of the unit growth. So I’m just wondering, as we think about the next three quarters, what you’re thinking about there are seeing their that’s taking down the guidance for that part of the year?

Yes, balance sheet wise, some of the margin expansion that we saw in the first quarter we think will be more muted in the balance of the year as we had a deflationary environment and cost of goods for food and we don’t expect that to continue that way. And then we do expect occupancy cost and labor to be more pressured in the back – in the balance of the year as we bring on new stores, and we talked a bit about that in the past that our new stores are less efficient, both from a labor perspective and an occupancy perspective. So – and there are some elements of timing. I think I mentioned there’s some marketing timing in my comments. So there’s a little bit of that, that’s why you don’t see us raising the top end by the full beat of the quarter, not to mention.

Okay, that’s helpful. Thank you. And then one more…

Not to mention that is your – that is consensus and your guidance is not our internal plans too by the way, so.

Yes, that is very fair. One more question, if I could. Is it normal for you to have so many of your openings weighted to the front-half of the year? And I guess, implicitly, I’m wondering if there are opportunities that some of the stores, or maybe your plan for next year, if that gives you an opportunity to move some of them into this year later the – kind of later in the year and move that development goal up for this year?

I think, we’ve said our first call on capital will always be new stores. And if we can fit that in, you’ve just heard me talk about human capital pretty extensively, and to the extent that we can make the human capital work with that in addition to the development just the proper spacing between store openings then we would consider accelerating a store. But we’re not committing to that today. We want to see how that plays out through the balance of the next couple of quarters.

Great. Thank you very much.

Perfect. Thanks, Andrew.

Thank you, Andrew.

We’ll take our next question from Andy Barish with Jefferies.

Hey, guys, I’m wondering if I understand that the inefficiencies on new store productivity, but maybe versus planned given the volume sales appear to be better. Are you getting a little bit more flow through on those new stores than maybe you originally thought?

Well, I don’t know about – I’m not sure about that. I mean, we did obviously with the margin improvement we had in the first quarter when you adjust out the amusement tax credit was still 70 basis points of improvement year-over-year. So we were pleased with that. And I feel like Margo and the Ops team did a nice job, really trying to dial in the – this large growing base in non-comp stores. So we’re working hard to try to make them as efficient as we can as quickly as we can. So and I…

I guess another way to ask the question is, are you willing to share the sort of the unit level EBITDA contribution from the comp stores year-over-year?

I don’t think we’re going to begin to start breaking the segmentation of comps versus non-comps EBITDA contribution at this point, Andy, I don’t think we’ll be doing that making segments here.

No problem. And then on occupancy, I guess, with the continued sort of number of retail closures and such, are you surprised you’re not seeing some brakes on occupancy costs, or is that just not factoring in, in the types of malls or developments you want to be in?

So we pick the trade area that we want to go to first and we can try to narrow it down to a relatively narrow target within the trade area and then optimize for whatever the best real estate deal is within that trade area. I think that we are continuing to see a lot of flow in terms of things that are being shown to us, if you will, from the fact that Sears, Macy’s, JCPenney, Sports Authority, all these guys are putting space, if you will, on the market. But they don’t always lineup with where we want to go. And more often than not, where they want to – or where they have availability is where specifically we don’t want to go. And I would say that, we’re paying, we believe are fair market rents for the sites that we’re developing. But those are not lower rents than what we have in the historical base. So, we have a lot of new stores, as you know, 45 or 99 stores are less than five years old. But we still have quite a number of stores in that legacy base that are substantially lower in terms of their cost per square foot compared to what we’re paying today for a new lease even in this, I guess, what you might call it distressed real estate market for big boxes.

Okay, understood. Thank you.

We’ll take our next question from Brian Vaccaro with Raymond James.

Good afternoon, and thanks for taking my questions. I wanted to start off on the comps. Steve, I know you mentioned a lot of volatility in the quarter for a variety of reasons, and I know we – you don’t provide monthly comps. But can you give us some high-level color on sort of the monthly cadence and how that played out through the quarter?

We really don’t give monthly cadence. But I will say that there were a lot of shifts and it may – this is very, very typical in the first quarter where you have extreme volatility week to week. Some of it was calendar-driven, Valentine’s Day flips off a little weekend and into a – and flips into the middle of the week and that was a little bit of a headwind. Calendar wise kind of spring break, Easter, all that shifting out in general is not good for us. So having a time – spring break at a time where it’s more likely that people would be both able and want to spend time outside, again, so April spring break as opposed to March spring break is unbalanced, but on average not great growth. So those are a couple of kind of things that created some headwinds. It’s almost impossible to read any underlying trend by virtue of kind of when the spring breaks are moving back and forth between March and April. And then the last thing, I’d say is on weather, we view it as a slight positive. You had a lot of rain in California, which is typically good for us, offset by some other kind of regional issues around the country. So, kind of net-net, we look at the entire thing and say, it’s not – it’s probably not a material impact to us because it all fell within our quarter.

Okay. And if you think about the food and bev comps, specifically, and obviously, the gap widened a bit on the beverage side quite a bit lower than the food side. And just curious, is part of that driven by say outsized sales growth during dayparts where you would have lower sort of natural attachment thinking about growing your daypart during the afternoons, or resonating in some of the initiatives to drive your family traffic is part of it that dynamic, or is it more related to some of the things you talked about during the sort of the core business hours?

Brian, I think you make a great point. We do continue to see this – our strongest performance and sort of our lunch afternoon daypart and less growth kind of dinner and late night, and really feel like that’s a reflection of the increase in the family mix we’ve seen over time, as we continue to feature new games with a very broad appeal. And as I think, you alluded to, the early dayparts are characterized really by higher amusement consumption relative to food and bev, so less of tax rate, there’s less propensity to penetrate F&B during that time. So we do believe that is part of the reason for this increasing separation that we’re seeing between F&B and amusement.

Okay, that’s helpful. And then just last one, I wanted to confirm, Brian, the EBITDA guidance for the year that’s based on a reported EBITDA in Q1 of $88.2 million, correct? So that includes that $2.5 million good guy improvement in COGS?

Yes, sir. That’s correct, Brian.

Okay, all right. All right. Thank you.

[Operator Instructions] We’ll take our next question from Steve Anderson with Maxim Group.

Good afternoon. I’m calling to ask about, in your guidance of 12 new restaurants, these are all new locations, or any relocations involved with that? And do you see that being a part of the mix as you look into your 2018 store development?

First of all, it does not include any relocations. Historically, it has, if you dial back several years though, it’s probably been four, five years since we did a relo really…

Over the last...

Actually, a few years ago [Multiple Speakers] we did talk a lot about it. But none of the – we say that kind of 10% or more unit growth, we’re seeing that is new units, not relo. I don’t believe that there is going to be a substantial number of relos that we will end up doing over the course of the next several years. Having said that, there’s a couple of stores that are on our radar that if we could find the right spot, we would be trying to relo those stores.

And the other question I had, I missed, I came in late on the call. What was the comp you had for the food and beverage businesses?

We were – the food comp was down 2.2% and our bev comp was down 4.2%.

Okay 2% to 4%, all right thank you.

Overall comps were up 2.2% and our amusement comp was up 6.4%.

Thank you.

[Operator Instructions] And we’ll take our next question from Sam Teeger with Citi.

Hi, there, congratulations on the result. Just wondering how were your Texas stores during the quarter?

That was actually addressed in our remarks here, but we mentioned that our Texas stores, they outperformed the overall comp.

All right. Thank you.

[Operator Instructions] And with no further questions in the queue, I would like to turn the call back over to management.

Well, just thank you for joining our call today. We look forward to reviewing our second quarter results with you in early September. Goodbye.

And that does conclude today’s conference. Thank you for your participation, and you may now disconnect.