Randy Garutti
Analyst · Piper Jaffray
Thanks, Leo, and good evening, everyone. We ended 2018 with a strong fourth quarter capping off another tremendous year of growth here at Shake Shack. 2018 was by far our most ambitious year yet. We opened 49 restaurants; 34 company-operated and 15 licensed operating across 27 states and 13 countries. Our team put forth an incredible collective effort in the fourth quarter opening 17 company-operated and three licensed Shacks with seven of those opening in the last two weeks of the year. We grew total revenue in '18 by 28% to $459 million. We earned adjusted EBITDA of $73.9 million representing more than 14% growth from 2017 and delivered positive same-Shack sales just over 1%. In the fourth quarter, we posted same-Shack sales of 2.3% and reported our strongest traffic numbers in 10 quarters returning to nearly flat. As we celebrate Shake Shack’s 15th birthday this coming summer, I’d like to take a moment to reflect on how far we’ve come. A few weeks ago, when I was meeting with a group of our Shack leaders, I shared a memory from 2004. As we closed our doors on a busy day at the original and only Shack at the time at Madison Square Park, we achieved something unthinkable, our first $5,000 day. I remember how excited we all felt that day; a bunch of fine dining leaders and a hard working crew reaching $5,000 of sales of hot dogs, burgers, shakes and fries. Fast forward to the time of our IPO, when we exited 2014 with nearly $120 million in total revenue. In this past quarter, Shake Shack delivered our first ever $2 million day, and in four years, we’ve increased revenue by nearly 300%. I mention all of this as a reminder to ourselves where we started, and I thank and celebrate our team of over 6,000 people for all their hard work that it took to get us where we are today. As we maintain our long-term target to deliver $700 million of total revenue by the end of 2020, we expect to grow yet another 50% in just two short years and we are just getting started. I want to share with you our strategic commitments and key focus areas for this year in 2019. Our first and most important commitment remains to develop excellence in our people. Last year, we created nearly 2,000 new jobs, but what we’re equally if not even more proud of, are the 1,100 plus promotions within our teams, the ability to grow, develop, and progress is an important part of our culture, and the opportunity here at Shake Shack and these results give us continued confidence that we’re delivering on that promise. A specific area of focus for us this year is the important investment in the compensation incentive plan for our general managers. Our in-Shack leaders are critical to our continued success and ongoing growth and we’re committed to ensuring they benefit from that growth in as many ways as possible. To that end, we’ll be evolving and enriching our GM incentive plan to increase and align bonus potential even more closely to our performance targets. We’re particularly pleased to be issuing additional equity awards of $10,000 to each Shack GM. We believe we’re rewarding those critical leaders within our organization and ensuring they feel real ownership and participate in our collective future. Our second strategic commitment; to deliver a consistently great guest experience regardless of how our guests choose to get their Shack. 2018 represented another strong class of Shacks with eight new major markets including Denver, Charlotte, Seattle, Palo Alto and more. We were thrilled in Palo Alto to be able to bring Shack to loyal fans and thousands of new guests. With over 80% of our Shacks now located outside of New York City, this brand has proven itself nationally, and we’re excited for the further expansion that lies ahead both in and outside of our home city. 2019 promises to be our biggest class yet, 36 to 40 new company-operated Shacks. We’ll be continuing to roll out with a multi-format real estate strategy. The proportion of development in existing versus new markets will increase slightly in 2019 to approximately 80% to 85% existing markets as we focus on the efficiencies we can leverage as we deepen our roots in established areas. As for new markets among others, we’re excited to be entering Salt Lake City, New Orleans and Columbus for the first time. We began nearly 15 years ago as a burger joint in a city park, but 2018 saw the continued evolution of that original format into a varied portfolio of Shacks from urban high streets to free-standing pad, premiere shopping destinations in cities, big and small. We opened our first premium Food Court Shack in Aventura Mall in Miami, a format we’re really pleased with and plan to grow more of. We’ve even started rolling two Shack trucks in New Jersey and Atlanta to bring the flavors of Shake Shack to new fans in locations and events, big and small. In fact, first booking for the Atlanta truck was serving Maroon 5 after the Super Bowl, so we’re off to a pretty good start. None of this would be possible without the leadership of Andrew McCaughan who oversees all of Shake Shack’s development and was recently announced has been promoted to Chief Development Officer. Andrew began at Shake Shack when we had just three Shacks. He and his team are responsible for the incredible real estate selection, design, and construction that makes each and every Shack so unique and special. I’m thrilled for Andrew to increase his reach and impact across our company in his new and well earned leadership role. Internationally, we continue to expand and build out our business, the largest focus being in Asia. Launching in Hong Kong midyear was an extraordinary event. We now have two thriving Shacks in premier locations with more to come in Hong Kong and Macau. Japan has also grown into a strong and increasingly mature market with 12 Shacks to date. We’ll be expanding deeper this year into Osaka and entering Kyoto for the first time in 2019. South Korea has produced seven incredible Shacks and is poised for further expansion this year, albeit still going through some of their post honeymoon settling in period. And our more established businesses in the Middle East and the UK continue to be a critical part of our international footprint with both markets facing a little bit more region-specific macroeconomic pressure than other parts of our international portfolio. A few weeks ago I had the great pleasure of working with our team in Shanghai where we recently opened our first Mainland China Shake Shack. It’s impossible to find the words to describe this opening. The hard work of so many Shack leaders over so many years, the hospitality of our new friends and partners in China, our dedicated U.S., Hong Kong, and Shanghai team members, and the sheer enormity of the legions of fans welcoming us with open arms. As one of the largest and fastest developing cities in the world, Shanghai represents an important and notable milestone for us in our international expansion. This is the beginning of the first chapter of our story in Mainland China, the world’s most populous country, and a market where we see incredible opportunity for our brand in Shanghai and beyond. Outside of China, our development pipeline is robust and 2019 will be a busy year with our largest number of new international market entries to date. With new partners in Singapore, the Philippines, and Mexico, our teams are preparing for each of these important market launches this year. To further support this growth and due to the increasing importance of Asia to our business as a whole, we’ll be opening our first international office in Hong Kong this year and have permanent resources on the ground for the first time. Domestically, airports have increasingly become another part of our licensed strategy. Today, we have Shacks in 10 airports, seven here in the U.S. and three internationally. And for several years of successfully operating at JFK, over the past few months we’ve opened airport locations at DFW, Phoenix Sky Harbor and LaGuardia and I believe there is significant ongoing opportunity for growth in the airport space. We’ll also continue to grow our stadium business which has proven to be a great brand builder for us with the opening of Citizen Bank Park in Philadelphia for this upcoming major league baseball season. We’re really proud of everything we’ve achieved in our licensed business to-date and I want to take a moment to thank and celebrate Michael Kark who oversees this part of our business and was recently promoted to Chief Global Licensing Officer. Michael has led our international business since our first Shack in Dubai and has built an incredible team, established pivotal partnerships and developed an organization which has and will continue to build our business around the globe. We are bullish on our licensing business growth. And in '19, we expect to open between 16 and 18 net new licensed Shacks bringing us to roughly 40%-60% split of licensing company-operated Shacks around the world. Moving on to our next critical strategic focus this year, to cultivate a loyal and connected community. One of the most incredible things about Shake Shack is the size, passion and engagement of a community that’s grown around us over the last 15 years. I still marvel at seeing 1,200 people line up on opening day at Palo Alto last year and the patience of our fans more than 7,000 miles away showed up for our recent opening at Shanghai. The loyalty and energy from this community is something we value enormously and never take for granted. We focus more than ever on developing even deeper relationships with our communities whether they’re in or around our Shacks or if it’s one of our many digital channels. It’s an exciting time for innovation of Shake Shack and we’re building a digital toolbox that allows us to connect and engage with our guests like never before. As digital and technology become foundational across all aspects of our business, we’re thrilled to welcome two new important leaders to the team. Jay Livingston recently joined us as our first ever Chief Marketing Officer and brings a wealth of experience at scaling large global brands while remaining a local favorite, as well as in high growth consumer facing early stage companies. Dave Harris has joined our team as our first ever Chief Information Officer. He comes with a breadth of experience across digital innovation and technology-enabled growth in large multiunit environments. We’re thrilled to welcome each of these key leaders to Shake Shack as we continue to strengthen our leadership team. We’re really excited about our innovation in the digital space. People back just two short years only way to get a Shack Burger was to stand in line, order with a cashier and wait for your buzzer to tell you when your Shack was ready. Since then, we significantly expanded a number of channels available to our guests incorporating greater levels of convenience throughout the Shack experience and placing more control in our guest’s hands. Today, we have five ways in which you can order your Shack; in person in a Shack, using a self-serve kiosk in a Shack, using our newly refresh mobile app, our recently launched Web ordering platform or via one of our pilots with delivery partners. As mentioned on our prior call, all this change in digital innovation isn’t always easy. Adding more channels can at times add operational complexity to our Shacks and we’re continuing to review to evolve our kitchens, our order pickup areas, our packaging to ensure a great Shack experience in an omni-channel world. One of the things that separate Shake Shack from other brands is our ability to collaborate great chefs and high profile consumer brand throughout the country. This year we launched strategic partnerships with brands like Bumble, Lyft, American Express and brought Shake Shack to music events at Coachella, even popped up in Aspen last month serving Shack in a yurt in the St. Regis Hotel while teaming up with our pals from Eleven Madison Park. Shake Shack continues to be celebrated extensively by high profile celebrities, influencers extending our brand way beyond what’s typical for a company of our size. Expect to see us continue to create those rare and special occasions that brought awareness and create buzz and loyalty. And finally, we believe we must always be innovating our business for long-term growth. Innovation at Shake Shack is as much a mindset as anything else accepting that there is finish line and that change is a constant and a positive for all of us. The technology enabling consumers and business alike such significant levels, no strategy is finite in doing things differently to how they’ve been done before. That’s always been a core part of our culture at Shake Shack. We continue to embrace the challenge of constant innovation as a key part of how we successfully grow our business. And with that, we’re investing meaningfully in our systems for the future. Tara will provide an update on enterprise systems upgrade we referred to as Project Concrete, but I would like to take a moment to stress how important we believe this transformation will be in an effort to ensure our infrastructure and support systems are sufficiently robust and scalable to deliver upon our current and future growth opportunities. We’re investing a lot of capital in order to streamline and automate business process, all the while taking administrative and time consuming task out of the Shacks to better allow for our team to focus on delivering the highest quality experience. 2019 will remain a busy year for menu innovation at Shake Shack. We plan to focus on items that we believe will have the biggest impact allowing our teams to prioritize operational excellence in guest experience. We’ve moved to a monthly shake program, which we’re hopeful will keep our guests excited year round as we vary our flavors with increased frequency. In January, we served a delicious Tiramisu Shake and in February we’re serving salted vanilla coffee, coffee shake. We launched Chick'n Bites as an LTO at the West Village Shack in September and we’re rolling it out to all Shacks this quarter. Chick'n Bites are now available either as a six or 10-piece item and are made from all light meat, hormone and antibiotic-free, cooked sous vide and then hand-breaded order and crisp fry served with your choice of our Shack honey mustard, barbecue, shack sauce or cheese sauce. This is an LTO and we’re looking forward to seeing how our guests respond. In 2018, we made an agreement to new local burgers and our team market launches at Seattle and Palo Alto. For example, in Seattle, we teamed up with well-known local suppliers, a local bakery for bun, a local cheese as our topping and grass-fed only Washington State beef for our Montlake Double Cut burger. Working on these truly specific Shack local items continues to demonstrate another one of our core beliefs; the bigger we get, the smaller we have to act. We have another exciting slate of collabs and partnerships lined up for 2019, so stay tuned on that front. In the third quarter, our Innovation Kitchen open beneath our West Village Shack and new home office, and in its short tenure, the Innovation Kitchen has created a number of new items from cold brew floats, Mexican spice Hot Chocolate, Wintergreen Salad topped with our chicken nuts led by our new Executive Chef, John Karangis, we’re really excited about the opportunity that Innovation Kitchen will bring in the coming years. Now to wrap up my initial remarks, I want to remind everyone on the call, our commitment to Stand for Something Good in all that we do. This mission encompasses everything from working with local farm coalitions to ensuring family farmers have sustainable access to markets, to removing plastic straws from our restaurants, to sourcing real ingredients, hormone and antibiotic-free proteins and removing high fructose corn syrup from nearly all of our food, to supporting our team members in great times of need. You’ll continue to see uptick on initiatives that we believe are core to our company and resonate with our employees, guests, communities and suppliers. With that, I’ll turn the call over to Tara to share more fully how we ended the year financially and highlights of our growth ahead.