Earnings Labs

Good Times Restaurants Inc. (GTIM)

Q4 2018 Earnings Call· Thu, Dec 13, 2018

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Good Times Restaurants, Incorporated Fiscal 2018 Fourth Quarter and Year-End Earnings Call. By now, everyone should have access to the Company’s fourth quarter earnings release. If not, it can be found at 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 in reconciliation to comparable GAAP measures available in our earnings release. And now, I’d like to turn the call over to Boyd Hoback. Please go ahead, Sir.

Boyd Hoback

Management

Thank you, Brian. And thanks again, everybody for joining us this afternoon. Here with me today is Ryan Zink, our Chief Financial Officer. I’ll again cover a quick summary of our fourth quarter and our current developments and Ryan will provide more details on the specific financial results for the quarter and the year as well as providing some more updates on our guidance for fiscal 2019. We had a strong finish to our fiscal year with continued increases in comp sales at both brands with Good Times comp sales up a half a point for the fourth quarter and up 4.2% for the year and Bad Daddy's was up seven tenths of a point for the quarter and up eight tenths for the year. Now it’s adjusted for the impact of hurricane Florence in the fourth quarter. Bad Daddy’s store level operating profit margin a non-GAAP measure improved by 120 basis points during the year from 15.8% last year to 17% for the full fiscal 2018. Adjusted EBITDA was slightly ahead of the high end of our fiscal year guidance at $5,758,000 that’s an increase of approximately 52% over our adjusted EBITDA for fiscal 2017, and Ryan will provide more highlights of our financial performance and details around some of our revised guidance for fiscal 2019. At the very end of the quarter, we opened one store in Greenville, South Carolina and one in our third store in the Atlanta market, which gave us a total of nine new stores for the fiscal year and then subsequent to the end of fiscal year, we opened our fourth store in the Greater Atlanta market and are opening our fourth store in the Raleigh market on January 2nd right after the holidays. We have a several month gap until the summer…

Ryan Zink

Chief Financial Officer

Thanks Boyd. At our Good Times brand, for the quarter, restaurant sales decreased $466,000 from $8,378,000 to $7,912,000 in the current year. The result of two closed restaurants as well as lower year-over-year sales at our Greeley restaurant that was partially offset by a half point -- same store sales increase. For the quarter, traffic is measured by check counts decreased 5.8% of their comparable units. We have year-over-year menu price increase of about 4.3% and that translates into about 2% favorable mix shift. The traffic in mix shift is driven significantly by our lapping of the peak of our West Coast Double and Combo in the prior year. For the full fiscal year, Good Times restaurant sales increased from $30,689,000 to $31,136,000 driven by positive comp sales during the year, partially offset by loss sales from the closure of two restaurants. Food and packaging costs at Good Times were 32.8% for the quarter, a decrease of 0.6% versus last year’s fourth quarter, driven by slightly lower commodity costs and higher menu pricing. For the full year, food and packaging costs at Good Times were 32.8% an increase of 0.2% versus 32.6% for fiscal 2017. This was the result of slightly higher average year-over-year beef and bacon costs, primarily driven by the first two quarters of the year and then offset by the impact of the 4.3% average menu price increase for the year. Total labor costs at Good Times increased to 34.4% from 33.9% for the fourth quarter last year. This year-over-year increase is primarily due to the impact of a 9.6% increase in the average hourly wage, partially offset by the impact of our menu price increases. The labor market in Colorado continues to be extremely tight and has continued to put upward pressure on wages. For full…

Boyd Hoback

Operator

In spite of our revised guidance we certainly remain very enthusiastic about the Bad Daddy's brand and the opportunity for development and are looking forward to regaining our streak [ph] of comp sales increases at Good Times. So we've been on a terrific run. So we appreciate your time with us today. With that operator we’ll open the call for questions.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. We’ll now begin the question and answer session. [Operator Instructions] And it looks like today’s first question will be from Jeremy Hamblin with Dougherty & Company. Please go ahead.

Jeremy Hamblin

Analyst · Dougherty & Company. Please go ahead

Thank you. I want to start with Bad Daddy’s comp guidance for the year. I think what you said was Q1 you expect to be down 1% due to the lost days from the winter storm, not totally surprised, but prior guidance for the fiscal year was for a plus 1% comp at Bad Daddy’s. And now it looks like the guidance is for plus one to plus two for the year. So what are you seeing? That's confusing when we’re looking at the full year guidance because it looks like you're actually raising the comp guidance for Bad Daddy's even though Q1 has got some weather factors that are having a negative impact?

Boyd Hoback

Operator

Yes. Jeremy, I actually think that’ accurate. Absent the weather and even in Colorado, Bad Daddy’s same-store sales are remaining pretty strong. I think we’re little bit more optimistic and particularly given us some of the pricing there we’re going to be taking. When the sun is shining we’re popping up really nicely. And so we’re I think comfortable with that one to two for the year.

Jeremy Hamblin

Analyst · Dougherty & Company. Please go ahead

Okay. And so then, backing into the full year guidance, which is down $8.5 million at the midpoint, it's actually – it’s almost hard to reconcile the change because even if you factor in the Good Times portion of reduced guidance that's still a small, much smaller fraction of the overall change. Is this just that these two or three new Bad Daddy's locations are really performing badly?

Boyd Hoback

Operator

They’re not -- yes. I’ll tell you specifically. They are performing at around -- we got them forecasted now at about $2 million. So they are profitable. They’re cash flowing. They’re certainly not losing money. But we anticipate for them to get up to our target of 2.5 to 2.6, but it’s going to take a little bit more time. So that is impactful with three stores, you know $0.5 million each below and we had actually included some honeymoon periods which we've been experienced almost -- on almost every store. Those three stores are very impactful. And I think the balance of it is the other class of 2018 stores and we’ve annualized those and projected those for 2019. That really hasn't changed in our modeling. It's primarily the impact of our Q1 in those three stores.

Ryan Zink

Chief Financial Officer

Yes. I think I would add that some of the – if you look at full fiscal 2018 and you look at our guidance that we had originally provided for fiscal 2019 I think we have seen a little bit of an extension of the honeymoons and we’ve seen some later declines in some of the fiscal 2018 stores as well, that’s kind of flowing through into this updated guidance if that makes sense, Jeremy?

Jeremy Hamblin

Analyst · Dougherty & Company. Please go ahead

Okay. Well, let me move on to another item that just wanted to see if I could get clarification. So, understand the labor cost, but if I look at occupancy and other that seems to be another category that’s climbed quite a bit as a percent of total sales, although you’re altering your real estate strategy to lower cost environment. Is that higher projection of whether you want to look at it as occupancy and other on a store week basis? It’s clearly coming from not just Bad Daddy’s but good times as well. Is that more a factor of the third-party delivery and charges which I assume flow through there?

Ryan Zink

Chief Financial Officer

Yes. So…

Jeremy Hamblin

Analyst · Dougherty & Company. Please go ahead

Any color that you can provide on that, because it looks like for the year that was the category combined of 40 basis points for Good Times and an up 60 basis points for BD even though you had positive comps for both comp [indiscernible]?

Ryan Zink

Chief Financial Officer

Yes. So I think in terms of Bad Daddy’s specifically just during the fourth quarter we had approximately $75,000 of third-party delivery fees. So, there is a significant increase in both dollar terms and as a percentage basis in that occupancy and other that is driven specifically on Bad Daddy’s by the third-party delivery fees. The other piece on the Good Times side to note and I had mentioned this during the prepared remarks, is that under GAAP accounting we have to recognize changes in the expected lease liability associated with our closed restaurants. And so what that means is that was $48,000 occupancy charge in the third – I’m sorry, the fourth quarter of fiscal 2018, non-cash charge. And what that represents is related to one of the close restaurants that we’ve not subleased. We have approved six months of rent in accordance with kind of the GAAP guidance to -- which represents basically the additional amount before we expect to have that property subleased. So in terms of kind of a cash based look at it, I would adjust your numbers for those 48 – for that 48,000 to better understand the true margin changes in occupancy and other for the Good Times concept.

Jeremy Hamblin

Analyst · Dougherty & Company. Please go ahead

Okay. I’ll hop off and back in the queue. Thanks guys. Good luck.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] The next question will be from [Gerald Cantarina] [ph], Private Investor. Please go ahead.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst · the third-party delivery companies

Yes. Regarding delivery, how common is it to have pricing on delivery menus that differ from the in restaurant prices? Thank you.

Boyd Hoback

Operator

It’s fairly common. And I think you’re going to see a lot more of it. More and more concepts are moving to that due to the commission structure with the third-party delivery companies. And given the fact that the third-party delivery company the fee itself to the consumer is not that much, they pay a tip, but the fee typically is pretty low. You’re seeing that and I think you’re going to see the structure of the delivery business change a little bit where the consumer is going to have to pick up a little bit more of the cost candidly with the commission rate ranges typically anywhere from 20% to 30% for the operator. The threshold for those all being incremental sales without any cannibalization, the profitability on those I think has to improve. And so you’re going to see – you are seeing more and more people come to market with a 10% to 15% premium price on their delivery menu.

Unidentified Analyst

Analyst · the third-party delivery companies

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions]. With no other questions in the queue, I'd like to conclude today's question and answer session as well as today’s conference. I want to thanks everyone for attending today’s presentation and Happy Holidays. At this time you may now disconnect.