Earnings Labs

Good Times Restaurants Inc. (GTIM)

Q1 2018 Earnings Call· Sat, May 12, 2018

$1.27

+0.00%

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Good Times Restaurants, Incorporated Fiscal 2018 Second Quarter earnings call. By now, everyone should have access to the company's second quarter earnings release. If not, it can be found at www.goodtimesburgers.com, in the Investors section. As a reminder, a part of today's discussion will include forward-looking statements within the meaning of federal securities laws. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and therefore, you should not put undue reliance on them. These statements are also subject to numerous risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from what we expect and, therefore, investors should not place undue reliance on them and the Company undertakes no obligation to update these statements to reflect the events or circumstances that might arise after this call. The Company refers you to their recent SEC filings for a more detailed discussion of the risks that could impact our future operating results and financial conditions. Lastly, during today's call, the company will discuss non-GAAP measures, which they believe can be useful in evaluating our performance. The presentation of this additional information should not be considered in isolation or as a substitute for results prepared in accordance with the GAAP and reconciliation to comparable GAAP measures available in our earnings release. Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Boyd Hoback, President and Chief Executive Officer. Please go ahead.

Boyd Hoback

President

Thank you, Gary, thanks everybody for joining us again this afternoon. I have with my today Ryan Zink, our Chief Financial Officer. And as usual I'll cover a summary of our second quarter and current developments and Ryan will get into more details on our financial results for the quarter and as well as some updates on our guidance for fiscal 2018. We do expect to provide initial fiscal 2019 guidance on our next quarter’s earnings call. In terms of the sales results for our first quarter, they were excellent in both brands with Good Times up 7.1% and Bad Daddy's up 0.7% on same store sales factoring out the Cherry Creek. Bad Daddy's was slightly below our guidance but as I mentioned last quarter, we opened our firth store in the Charlotte market at the beginning of the fiscal year and it continues to be just do exceptionally well and significantly above our expectations. Where we saw a little bit of canalization, two other stores in the market particularly which impacted our total same store sales. We had the same thing happen in Raleigh, we opened a very high volume store, our third store in that market which impacted another very which impacted another very high volume store and the good news is both of those stores are continuing to trend over $3 million. We opened our fourth Bad Daddy's of the year in Chattanooga, Tennessee on April 2nd and we closed the original Bad Daddy's restaurant in Charlotte for about two and a half weeks in April for a remodel which also impacted our overall same-store sales. Our ten new Bad Daddy's that have opened in 2017 and early 2018 continue to average above our system average weekly sales during the quarter which is very gratifying. And Good…

Ryan Zink

Chief Financial Officer

Thanks, Boyd. At our Good Times brand restaurant sales increased 7.2% from approximately $6.9 million last year in the second quarter to just under $7.4 million in the current year, driven by 7.1% comps which was better than our guidance of 0.3% to 0.5%. For the quarter traffic is measured by check counts increased 2.0% at our comparable units. We have a year-over-year menu price increase of approximately 4.5% with then approximately 0.6% of favorable mix shift. On a year-to-date basis, Good Times Restaurant sales increased from $13.7 million to just shy of $15 million, driven again by a combination of strong comp sales and sales from our Greeley Restaurant, partially offset by lost sales from the closure of one restaurant. Food and packaging costs at Good Times were 32.4% for the quarter, an increase of 0.7% versus last year second quarter but a sequential decline of 1.4% from the first quarter of this year. At our Good Times concept we began to see our purchase prices for our all natural beef fall and coupled with an approximately 1.9% price increase taken in January. Year-to-date food and packaging costs at Good Times were 33.1%, an increase of 1.1% versus the last – the same period last year. And that’s the result of slightly higher year-over-year beef and bacon cost on a year-to-date basis coupled with a little bit of mixed shift into the West Coast burger and kids meals as well as improvements, the cost of improvements to our core products throughout the system that we made in the third and fourth quarters of 2017 which we've begun to lap in that year-over-year impact should phase out over the next two quarters. Total labor costs at Good Times increased to 36.2% from 35.7% for the second quarter of last year.…

Boyd Hoback

Operator

Thank you, Ryan. Obviously it takes a lot of talented people and a lot of hard work to execute our growth in both brands. And I'd again like to make sure I thank our management team for their focus and dedication in making that happen. We appreciate your time with us today. With that operator, we'll open the call for questions.

Operator

Operator

We will now being the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] The first question comes Jeremy Hamblin with Dougherty & Company. Please go ahead.

David Burdick

Analyst

Hey guys this is David Burdick on for Jeremy. Thanks for taking my questions. And congrats on a nice quarter.

Boyd Hoback

Operator

Thank you.

Ryan Zink

Chief Financial Officer

Thanks David.

David Burdick

Analyst

So just starting out on unit development, I know a couple of the Q4 units were planned to come on late in the quarter. Just wanted to get an update on where those stand and I know it's still early but how is your pipeline for FY’19 looking as well?

Boyd Hoback

Operator

We'll – answer those in reverse order I guess. Our pipeline for 2019 is looking really strong. I mentioned the markets that we got lease is either signed or pending which is really everything in the southeast including quite a bit of expansion into South Carolina and entrants into Alabama. So Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, South Carolina with one additional, one or two additional stores, in North Carolina and that pipeline is really strong and, again, we'll provide more guidance on what that cadence will be. We expect a fairly even cadence over the course of the year and we've got a couple of those that will open in the first quarter of 2019 as well. The balance of this year to get to our nine total, those are all underway in various forms of development. We had one store that has been delayed by the landlord on the renovation of an existing strip center that's taking longer but other than that, we're pretty well on schedule. Our next store that will open will open the first week of June in Smyrna, a suburb of Atlanta, our second store and then we've got two more coming in Atlanta before the end of the year.

Ryan Zink

Chief Financial Officer

David just in terms of kind of your model four that would be opened in the fourth quarter I kind of think about those and one each month and then one in the last months or a second one in the last month of the year. I think we feel very confident that we will get all four of those in. We're in construction, I believe, in all of our units for this year except for one which is out to bid and so absent any very unexpected delays, I think there's enough cushion in the guidance that will get all of those and if by chance one of those were to push over into the next fiscal year, it really wouldn't affect the P&L very much at all.

David Burdick

Analyst

Okay, great. And then just wanted to touch on commodity costs. It seems like they're easing a little bit and then I know you've been refining the labor model at Bad Daddy's locations, have you seen any improvements there and how should we think about labor in the back half here? Boyd E

Boyd Hoback

Operator

Yeah, in terms of the commodity environment, it is easing particularly sequentially from fourth quarter last year and the first quarter of this year and some further easing even from the second quarter. We're still, you know, if you remember, it was the last five months of the last fiscal year and our first quarter that things really spiked particularly with beef and bacon costs, it impacted us by about $800,000 in the last five months. That's not the case this year and we feel really good about the projections for the balance of the year particularly on beef, bacon and chicken. And so there really isn't anything on the horizon that we're terribly concerned about. We think that we'll be overall lower as we lap that spike from last year in our third and fourth quarter. Do you want to speak to labor?

Ryan Zink

Chief Financial Officer

Yes and I will just clarify the cost of sales comments a little bit because I agree with Boyd. I think we've seen recently some slight lifts in our angus beef that we use at Bad Daddy's. And so kind of in the guidance is an assumption of sequentially slightly higher cost of sales or we think that's a conservative view. In terms of labor, I think we are managing the hours very effectively. I think what we're seeing from a – just an overall challenge particularly as we're looking at the back of the house, is that for a lot of the things that we're able to make up on the hours front and improve the efficiency, we tend to be losing that almost in a complete offset in the hourly wage that we're having to pay and that's not just in Colorado, that's also in North Carolina and to a lesser extent in Georgia and Tennessee and we don't think that we're alone in that in the industry. We think that's kind of an industry-wide and maybe kid of countrywide phenomenon is just there is increasing wage pressure but I would say to the extent that we're – we have a heightened sense around that and we are managing wage to the best that we can and then we're doing a lot around hours, management and efficiency to be able to offset that.

Boyd Hoback

Operator

I alluded to in my comments, we are implementing at both brands a forecasting tool that helps us get a little bit tighter and a little bit more refined on the man hours by position, by half hour increments throughout the day based on the historic 30 minute sales history that we've got. So we're I think putting as much technology as we can, as I – when I blanked in our last quarters call, we really are committed to the full service model on Bad Daddy's and as others are making much more aggressive moves on labor, we have a really compelling unit economic model on Bad Daddy's that we don't want to compromise and so we're continuing to refine but as we look forward, as Ryan mentioned, I think there's kind of an offset between wages and the hourly efficiencies that we're finding.

David Burdick

Analyst

Okay, great. Thanks guys and good luck.

Boyd Hoback

Operator

Thank you.

Ryan Zink

Chief Financial Officer

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

The next question comes from Stephen Anderson with Maxim Group. Please go ahead.

Stephen Anderson

Analyst · Maxim Group. Please go ahead

Yes, thank you and thank you for answering my questions actually on the revised unit outlook at Bad Daddy's. A couple of questions I do have on sort of the broader outlook and just want to see, with regard to Bad Daddy's, what kind of impact are you seeing particularly in states that have maybe seen tax reforms, some of the refund checks come in, maybe a little bit of a lift from tax reform, lower tax, in some of these states. Have you seen that result in maybe increased traffic? And I have a follow-up?

Boyd Hoback

Operator

Boy, it's almost impossible for us to parse that out. You know, overall, we've got quite a wide range excluding the impact of the cannibalization that we had in North Carolina, we're still running positive in our same store sales, flat more or less on traffic to down a little bit. That said, we have stores that are up high single-digit, low double-digit on their sales so trade area by trade area that may be some impact from the tax reform but broadly we really can't tell.

Stephen Anderson

Analyst · Maxim Group. Please go ahead

A similar question, look at the broader bar and grill segments, I know you don't compete directly with that but are you starting to see some pretty significant discounts on some of the items like $1 drinks or $2 drinks and just want to see if that has affected traffic at all since those have been implemented?

Boyd Hoback

Operator

That's a good question and again, it's kind of hard for us to parse out cause and effect directly on that. We don't think that we compete that directly and I think we're more impacted by other upscale polish casual competition that opens around us. As an example in Colorado Lazy Dog came into the market with two really nice restaurants that are very close to two existing high-volume stores. We felt the short-term impact from that but we're also now seeing that come back. We operate literally next door and down the block from all of the guys you're mentioning on Applebee's, Chili's, Red Robin. We really don't see a lot of week-to-week, period-to-period, quarter-to-quarter impact from their discounting. I know that overall I think the casual dining traffic has gotten better in these last couple of weeks particularly there's been better traffic trends then in the last several months which is encouraging and I think that will help rising tags floats all boats. I think that will help us as well as everyone. But similarly on Good Times, we just don't – since we don't play in that game, we're not a value player, I don't think that's the way people think of us and so I don't think we're impacted by that directly.

Stephen Anderson

Analyst · the guys you're mentioning on Applebee's, Chili's, Red Robin

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

The next – pardon me. [Operator Instructions] The next question comes from Will Slabaugh with Stephens. Please go ahead.

Will Slabaugh

Analyst · Stephens. Please go ahead

Okay, thanks guys. I apologize for the background noise. I had a question on Bad Daddy's and I appreciate the commentary on the successful new openings you've had. Curious if you can talk a little bit more about the different cohorts within Bad Daddy’s. You touched on this in your remarks, but can you talk about the performance there from a high level, have they been open for kind of one, two, three years and how that looks versus your expectations?

Boyd Hoback

Operator

Sure. I think I understand your question. I'll do the best I can anyway. You know, I think the stores that have been opening very recently have been opening at very high volume and certainly some of those honeymoon but we're seeing even as they settle in, settling in above our expectations and that includes several of the stores in 2017 as well as the 2018 stores. You know, I think we had our last couple of stores in Colorado and then very successful and those are the older stores that go back to a little more than two years ago now but we have one that's still trending towards $3.5 million, in the low threes anyway so we have another one that's treading over our system average. Those were the last two that were opened in Colorado. And then everything opened – we've had a couple of bar burners that I've alluded to; one in Charlotte, one in Raleigh. We've had one in the new market outside in North Carolina and it's a little bit lower demographically, it's running a little bit under our average. That's really been the only one. Atlanta and Chattanooga have come out of the shoots hot. We had expected those to take a little bit longer to build but they've come out at really attractive sales volume. So, that's really the commentary on all of 2017 and 2018, the class of those stores that we're averaging above our system average, even factoring out the honeymoon periods.

Ryan Zink

Chief Financial Officer

Yes, well I'm not sure if I – I'm not sure if I was understanding your question correctly but in terms of kind of stratifying the stores into different age buckets, I would say that I don't think there's really a meaningful – any sort of meaningful correlation that can be drawn there because we have, you know, very strong performing stores in units of all age groups, stores that are three, four years old are doing – we have stores that are doing extremely well and we have new stores that are doing extremely well. I think some of, you know, some of the variation is just in trade area by trade area and market by market. I would say that we've seen particular strength in Colorado and we – when we opened up some of these restaurants in 2015, 2016, some of those restaurants performed kind of below our expectations in terms of new unit volumes and we've seen really strong comp store sales in some of those units as we've executed well and continued to build awareness around our brand in this market.

Will Slabaugh

Analyst · Stephens. Please go ahead

Yes, that's helpful. That's what I was getting at so thanks for that. And then also curious on the labor scheduling tools that you mentioned, what all does that involve, I guess, from a day-to-day perspective from a manager or hourly perspective, what does that involve versus what they're previously and what might we see as the benefit from our perspective?

Boyd Hoback

Operator

I'll give a broad overview and Ryan can jump into the details on it but historically we've scheduled based on projecting kind of daily volume and projecting our front of the house and back of the house at Bad Daddy's particularly labor based on that expected volume. The next step that we're implementing helps us to forecast on a day-by-day basis but also then within that day, half hour by half hour and we have a matrix design then on the number of servers those bartenders, wine cooks that it takes to execute a certain level of volume and so it will help us to compare our forecasted versus actual scheduling on a half hour by half hour basis. It's really just a tighter refinement from what we've already been doing. Ryan, do you want to add onto that?

Ryan Zink

Chief Financial Officer

Yes, I mean I think – I'd break it into what we're changing at the Good Times Brand and what we're changing at Bad Daddy's and so we're implementing hot schedules which is the kind of the industry leader in terms of restaurant scheduling and labor management software and at Good Times we did not have that before and so it is – it's the adoption of not just kind of advanced forecasting capability based upon an automatic feed into this tool. It's actually the ability of the servers and the managers to create the schedule using this tool which should improve their efficiency, improve their use of time as well as provide just a better experience for employees. But on top of that is what comes with that that we had not implemented at Bad Daddy's before but are implementing now. We had hot schedules at Bad Daddy's, we used it basically as scheduling templates. And so now we're implementing this advanced forecasting where the hot schedule software takes the data out of the POS and applies logic that we've defined including things like minimum servers on a shift or minimum shift link and then number of people per dollar of sales; takes those metrics and spits out an actual schedule. This should be optimized based upon the rules that we built. That's kind of what we're designing, that will go into place. It actually has gone into place at Good Times and we're in the process of implementing it for Bad Daddy's.

Will Slabaugh

Analyst · Stephens. Please go ahead

Got it. And then lastly I wanted to ask a clarification question on delivery. You mentioned – obviously it's early there but I'm curious on your initial takeaways, do you talk about if you've seen any sort of same store sales list or either a lift in check and then also curious who you're using there?

Boyd Hoback

Operator

We're using DoorDash and we're in formal tests with DoorDash in stores here both in Colorado and in North Carolina. So far I would characterize the results as generally very positive. We've got some stores that are doing a lot of delivery business that appears to be very incremental to the takeout business we were already doing at that store and it appears to not be cannibalizing any dine in business or existing takeout business. So, it varies quite a bit in terms of the absolute volume we're doing on the delivery business based on the style of store and trade area dynamics, level of daytime employment for example, you know, I think it's a big driver to that and just the sheer density within the immediate area around the store. We want to make sure we can execute that at our food travels as well as they can and so we're continuing to dial in those things but we anticipate we're going to continue to expand that test and really try and measure as best we can. As you know, it's not an inexpensive proposition, the delivery cost is very high so it has to truly all be incremental sales for it to be profitable. But so far I think we would say it is largely all incremental or probably 80% at least incremental.

Ryan Zink

Chief Financial Officer

Yes, the one thing that I would say is I think we have a lot of variants in terms of the initial off premise, primarily takeout business in our restaurants ranging from very low single digits to high single digits to even low double digits. And the thing that's been consistent is we've rolled out delivery and we've rolled out generally with DoorDash is the partner that we've used. We've generally even a lift in our total off-premise of somewhere between 50% and 70% within a 90-day window of launching this service. And as Boyd mentioned, very, very little of that we have seen so far to be cannibalized or cannibalizing, I should say.

Will Slabaugh

Analyst · Stephens. Please go ahead

Great, thank you.

Boyd Hoback

Operator

Thanks Will.

Operator

Operator

The next question is a follow-up from Stephen Anderson with Maxim Group. Please go ahead.

Stephen Anderson

Analyst · Maxim Group. Please go ahead

Yes, just – want to switch gears to talk about Good Times. I know you've been spending most of this year looking at some of the underperforming locations but going back to last year when you opened the new prototype in Greeley, Colorado, I just want to ask if you're essentially looking at sites perhaps for fiscal 2019 or 2020 pipeline?

Boyd Hoback

Operator

We're looking for additional opportunities in the Colorado market. Right now we're not looking at taking Good Times outside of Colorado, we are working on a couple of new site opportunities here in Colorado as we can find them. So we'll be opportunistic on that with 38 restaurants along the front ranges there's not – we're fairly well penetrated and particularly given our demographic and so that's kind of the short answer. We’ll continue to - there's a couple, as Ryan mentioned, kind of marginally profitable stores that we may be able to sublease at a profit and will continue to work on those. At the same time, there are some new store opportunities in trade areas that we think we have an opportunity in.

Stephen Anderson

Analyst · Maxim Group. Please go ahead

All right. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Boyd Hoback for any closing remarks.

Boyd Hoback

Operator

Thank you all again for joining us and appreciate your questions and your support. Have a good day.