Good morning. I'm Peter Saleh, restaurant food distribution analyst at BTIG. Thank you for joining us today. This morning, I've got the team from BurgerFi with us to tell us the story. I've got Carl Bachmann here, CEO, and my old friend here, Chris Jones, CFO. So, we've got, like, a little less than 25 minutes, to, kind of go through the story here, so I'm gonna jump right into questions. Maybe you guys can give us a little bit of your background. You've been here for a short period of time. Just give us a little bit of background on your, your history, and then, Chris, maybe you can jump in. All right. Absolutely. So, as Peter suggested, I originally started off as a sell-side research analyst, covering the consumer space. I actually worked with Peter for a number of years, and then I moved over into industry. Spent several years working at Mohegan, the corporate arm at Mohegan Sun, in corporate finance and business development, both domestically, internationally. Did a lot of restaurant and F&B development there as well, and then eventually moved on to public company. I worked briefly at a small public company called Odyssey Marine, where we actually did a restructuring, a substantial debt restructuring, which went very well. And then that's where I ended up here at BurgerFi. Wow! That was pretty impressive. My background's completely opposite Chris's. I'm a restaurant guy. I've been in the restaurant business, restaurant space. I'm embarrassed to say 44 years. Right. So it's been a long time, but I grew up in the restaurant space in New York. Kinda learned the business as a kid. Went to school for PR and realized I really loved the restaurant space. And so worked for a chain in the Midwest back in the 1980s called the Brown Derby, which was a famous scratch steakhouse chain, and really kind of learned the business there after college. Then moved on to a chain called Ruby Tuesday, which was a budding chain in the late 1980s, early 1990s. Was an officer there, moved up the company and became their first franchisee back in 1998. Was a franchisee, and I think this is an important piece of my background, was a franchisee for over 12 years. Grew a nice company and sold the company, and I think that lends to kind of the experience that I bring to BurgerFi because we're a franchise, a lot of franchisees, so I understand their pain points, and I've lived in their kind of walked in their shoes. After I left Ruby Tuesday, I sold the franchise, then went on to work for a company called Bertucci's, doing some turnaround work for them up in Boston for a few years. Then I took on a leadership role at a company called Smashburger out in Denver, Colorado. I traded in New York City for the mountains and spent some time rebuilding that chain, had a very successful turnaround of that chain. I did that for about 6.5 years until I was courted to come here to BurgerFi, and so that's kind of my background in five minutes. Excellent. So maybe you can give us a little bit of background on BurgerFi, the history as a public company, and just explain the difference between the two concepts that you guys own. You got BurgerFi and Anthony's. One is more franchised, one is more company-owned. Just give us a little bit of details and explain to the audience a little bit more about BurgerFi. Give a little bit of the history. It originally started off as a SPAC. In December 2020, Ophir purchased BurgerFi under a SPAC structure. And then in November 2021, the company purchased Anthony's Coal Fired Pizza on there as well. Obviously, from a concept perspective, and certainly Carl will weigh in on this, but one's a better burger brand with a heavy focus on sort of the South and the Northeast, but, you know, sort of more generally spread out, whereas, you know, Anthony's Coal Fired Pizza, we look at as more of a better pizza brand with a heavy concentration in Florida and the Northeast. Carl, you have anything? Yeah, I think what probably drove Chris and I both to come here was the opportunity to work with two brands that stood for high-quality food and founder-created brands that were really passionate about delivering on high quality. So I think that's the commonality between the two brands. Fresh, cooked to order, high quality, it really was important to me. These are brands that have good bones, and I think that was really what kind of drove me to come here, seeing that there was an opportunity to grow these brands. We're definitely, they're definitely different in the sense that BurgerFi is a fast casual brand, and Anthony's is a full-service brand. But the other commonality piece, and I think what makes it interesting for our brand, is not only do we look at them as better, kind of a step above, but we also look at them as comfort foods. Pizza, burgers, wings, pastas, these are the comfort foods Americans love, and so we really think that's the right place and the right positioning of the company. So in your short stint so far with the company, what are some of the key learnings and some of the low-hanging fruit that you see? Carl, maybe we can start with you. Well, I can tell you that I put together what I call my 5-point plan. And that'll kind of, I'll go through that quickly, and that'll kind of isolate the questions you asked. Number one, in my five point plan, is always infrastructure, and that's really about people. And I think, I think we're all confused in the business if we think it's just about food. I think food is the table stakes, but it's about people. And so we needed to build a team, and create a camaraderie around the two brands and the corporate office and some synergies. So first step was really fixing the team element, and we've been very successful at that in the first six months. And now with, we're fully staffed, we're fully manned, low turnover for the first time in a long time. Anthony's, matter of fact, is, above the industry standards, better than industry standards, and BurgerFi has reached industry standards in turnover. So we're solidifying the team, and we're 95% staffed, which, as everybody knows, in the space, has been challenging over the last couple of years. So infrastructure would be number one thing that I thought we needed to work on. Number two was taste. Brands, they kind of lose their way, in my opinion, never do it in one decision. It's many decisions over years. I call it death by a thousand cuts. So they make bad decisions over time to save money here, save money there, maybe a better process, whatever it may be. So over time, I think that some of the high-quality things that the founders stood for were lost in the shuffle over the last few years. I mean, there was five leaders in five years. So I think taste was the second focus. We're really focused on improving the taste quality of our products, and we've done a lot in both brands over that first couple of years. Step three is defining the portfolio. We have real estate opportunities. We're very, very concentrated, and maybe even cannibalized a little bit in South Florida. Today's world with third-party delivery and online ordering, your diameter or your ring demographics change, so we have to look at how we grow. It's changing that. Defining the portfolio to me is also about the four walls, what the ambiance is, what the experience was, and the platform. How do we execute and get better throughput? How do we execute better, easier, so that we can duplicate that across the country? Step four, for me, was really putting in standards that were needed to be understood and created, processes and standards. When you have founders brands, you have a lot of creativity and a lot of great ideas, but you have very little process and very little standards. So one of the things that I brought from my background is, what kind of gold standards to really assess what the standard should be, and then our processes and our sense of accountability to hold to those standards. Step five, really, was now that we've set those four steps, tell the world. Create intentional marketing, grow our loyalty brand, grow our frequency, kinda get the word out that this is the path that BurgerFi is on. Chris? For me, from a finance perspective, it's just a great opportunity in terms of improving profitability and just overall efficiency. So starting at the very top, you know, so this is a company where, if you're in the Anthony's is a good example, where 59 different stores, 59 different ways of doing things, and we need to bring that discipline in. So we're putting in, inventory management systems that have not been there. They might have been paying for them for a while, but they were not activated. BurgerFi is just on that. We actually started that at the very end of the prior to 2023, and we're activating that for Anthony's in early 2024. So, you know, we said in our, you know, announcement earlier, I guess yesterday, a couple hundred basis points or so of opportunity there, that would be a disappointment for us. So we see a substantial improvement in overall cost of goods. Continuing to sort of working down through the P&L from a labor perspective, as Carl suggested, we have seen some stability in overall labor there as well. We had substantially higher than expected sort of training labor, which is, you know, much higher and much more expensive than traditional labor. We think that's gonna go away because the turnover has been greatly reduced there as well. And then there's some technology investments that just haven't made. For instance, here, going back to the Anthony's side, we have a 25-year-old POS system, sort of a digital abacus, if you will, that really didn't do anything. It doesn't have any sort of speed of service, any sort of analytics, doesn't have, you know, support for the restaurants as well. So we're looking to roll out our new POS system in the Anthony's business year in the next couple of months. So we see that to be a big opportunity. And then finally, just an overall consolidation. Obviously, their two brands are very different. We haven't seen. That consolidation effort is still sort of ongoing. There's a few small things that need to be done from an accounting perspective to get greater efficiency, particularly on corporate G&A. We think corporate G&A is gonna continue to improve fairly substantially into 2024. Great. So maybe you could set the stage a little bit for us. You got two concepts: You got BurgerFi, fast casual burger concept with more units, and you got Anthony's, a little bit more of a Italian sit-down concept. Can you just give us a sense, just to remind the audience how many units you have for each of the brands, how you operate both of the brands, how they're different, sales volumes, margins, just, just the general metrics that I think most investors would be looking for for these two brands. Absolutely. So we have 59 Anthony's locations owned. We have one actually dual brand franchise location, which actually just opened up a couple of weeks ago. We had dinner there last night out at Kissimmee as well. So that's doing exceptionally well. We have about $125 million in overall volume, about two point was it two point $2.2 million in AUV. So it's, you know, it's doing well. We continue to see some opportunity there. We obviously have restaurants that are substantially higher than that there as well. From a margin perspective, cost of goods is about 26% and labor about 30%, and overall EBITDA, average EBITDA margin about 15.1%. But, you know, we take out the bottom two, you know, two or three restaurants, and it's almost closer to 20%. So we're doing very well on the Anthony's side. You wanted to BurgerFi? Right. All right. For BurgerFi, it's a different one. We have about $34 million in owned revenue. We do about $105 million in franchise revenue. Their average unit volume is about $1.4 million there as well. You know, from a margin perspective, cost of goods is about 30.9%, labor about 30.5%, and EBITDA margin about 6.5% restaurant level. Here, again, we do have about three or four restaurants that we're cycling out, so we do think that, you know, we'll probably end the year substantially higher than that as well. So, Carl, what do you think are some of the biggest opportunities and challenges for both of these brands as you see it today? Well, I think we've addressed some of the real big, big issues. On the BurgerFi side, I think we have a little bit of cannibalization in Florida. So there's a big opportunity for us to grow the brand north and west a little bit. I think when these restaurants were first designed and opened, digital wasn't a big part of the business. It's now become a huge part of our business, everybody's business. So again, yeah, ring demographic that you look at and that reach is different. So we see some underperforming stores because we have a little bit of cannibalization. So I think from a financial standpoint, we're gonna make a couple changes here. We've already done quite a bit of this in the first six months, and we'll continue to do a couple of restaurants. We have one or two more restaurants, that if we close those restaurants, we'll actually get lift in the other restaurants. Historically, that's not true. In the past, when you closed a restaurant down the street, you didn't really get the lift that you always thought, and that was always this, you know, misnomer in the industry that you would get that lift. But the advent of digital has changed the business game. So now, when digital orders, you don't know where they come from. I mean, Ghost Kitchens, sometimes they come from, right? So the opportunity for us to have less concentration in a certain market will probably lift all ships. So that's on the BurgerFi side. I do think that there's an awareness challenge for us on BurgerFi. So really working on getting our word out there, and awareness, and increasing our frequency. I talked about kind of the five steps already from the BurgerFi side. On the Anthony's side, we have a very solid business, a good business, and that we need is top line. We need unit growth on Anthony's. And I joke around about it, it's an Italian restaurant, and we didn't even have pasta. I don't know how you do that. So, no spaghetti in Italian restaurants. So we've launched a new pasta program, which is selling like crazy, and we've broadened both brands. We've broadened kind of a breadth of menu, where a lot of restaurant chains are now simplifying menus, and we are simplifying the platform, so it's easier to execute our in our restaurants. So we're using our platform, simplifying it, but giving more breadth of menu so that we have, you know, more frequency, more interest to coming back for something more than just pizza and wings at Anthony's. And same on the BurgerFi side, so we've launched chicken wings. In the burger business, you should have maybe 10%-15% chicken mix, and we're sub 5%, so there's a lot of incremental growth there. So we just launched chicken wings, and it's given us growth. We're launching a sous vide chicken, grilled chicken and a brand-new crispy chicken, which I'll put against anything in the industry. And matter of fact, we're launching that this month. And that should give us growth and incrementality. We also came out with our burger bowls, which are protein bowls, salad bowls, to give us kind of that veto vote. So I think those are kind of the things from a food profile thing that we need to do on both brands, and we've started that immediately to give a little bit of a breadth of menu and then interest, so you get frequency, and people come back more. That's key to our success. Got it. And then maybe you could talk a little bit about the inflation that you guys are seeing or have been seeing, inflation, both commodities and labor, and some of the pricing dynamics that you've been taking to offset it. Just, just give us a little bit of flavor on how, how that's been working for you? Absolutely, we'll play off each other. So for labor side, certainly just like everyone else, we saw substantial labor costs, particularly at BurgerFi, in the first half, and that really did contribute to substantial increases in labor costs, as you've seen from our performance. We are seeing that burn off, really helped mostly by more stability in labor. We haven't seen the turnover, so that's a very positive story for us, going forward, and we think that's gonna continue into 2024. From an inflationary, from a cost of goods, hey, listen, we're in the beef business, you know, it's no secret to the people in the room that beef prices are gonna go up. We have done, I think, a very good job about, you know, looking to find and bring a secondary supplier. We've pretty much locked in our beef price for 2024. So that could end up being a very positive story for us, where I think some of our competitors are probably going to see some pretty substantial increases, and we don't think we're gonna see that. So we do think we have some opportunity to take some price and also some margin improvement in 2024 on beef prices. That'd probably be the biggest one. Do you have anything else? No, I think that gives us a competitive edge. It's not just beef, but we've looked at every supplier we have across both brands. We're combining some suppliers in cases where we can to get to the economy of scale, which wasn't necessarily done. 'Cause they were really running as independent from that standpoint, but we've linked our supply chain together now. So that, that's definitely a benefit. So I think that is it, the redundancy is important. We all went through what happened post-COVID with supply chain, and we never want to put ourselves in that position. But I think the industry learned that you can't have all your eggs in one basket, and so it's really important for us to have redundancy through all of our different product lines. So with two different brands, two different suppliers, distributors rather, it, it's taken some muscle to move that, but that's a huge opportunity for our brand, and we're starting to see, I think, a way to insulate ourselves a little from the inflation side. And then just to recap on, or expand on what Chris was saying, we had massive training costs because of huge turnover in our business because of the direction of the business kept changing. Again, five, six leaders in five years, and I always joke with my team, I say: "Well, I signed a five-year contract, so I think we're good for a while." So we'll keep one direction, keeping direction, I think is important, and as a result of that, we've calmed down turnover, stability, and tenure is growing. That should be a massive improvement to help us kind of counteract any labor inflationary costs. I think those are the two big things I would say. So, Carl, you mentioned you made some changes to the menu, both of the brands, some simplification. Are the menus where you want them to be currently, or do you still feel like there's more to do on the menus, either taking stuff off, putting stuff on, and how does that impact operations? Well, I think the menu, core menus are getting close to where we'd like them to be. But I believe if you don't innovate, you die. And I think that's a problem for our industry, that we have to continue to innovate, give, give people new reasons to come and try us, create trial, especially where we have such a wide space in our, both of our brands. So I think the core menus are getting close. Some of the processes, we're still working on. I'm improving some of the platforms and changing some of the equipment. There's a lot of value engineering that can be done there that can lower our entry costs. So I think from that standpoint, fixing the platform, ease of operation, we can then expand the menu from there. So it's not just arbitrarily expanding a menu, it's how do you expand a menu within a platform that you can execute it at a high level? So I'd rather do less things well than more things poor. And so it's really been about focusing on platform so that we can expand the menu that way. So I think, I think you'll see a pretty much stability in our menu and then a lot of innovation around LTOs and saying: How do we expand new flavors, new variances on what we have today? Can we touch on unit development real quick in the last couple of minutes that we have, maybe just for both brands? BurgerFi, more of a franchise system, so you gotta get the franchise economics in order for the franchisees to want to grow, and Anthony's is more of a company-owned model, so it's company capital. Can you guys just talk about the difference there and what your expectations are going forward for both of these in terms of unit development? Well, starting with Anthony's, as you know, 59 owned stores. We have our first, dual brand franchise. We'll have another one sort of in the early part of this year. We'll open up outside of the Miami world. Our plan is in 2024 is to start franchising the Anthony's, you know, brand. We finally get the POS system in there, so we think that that's an important part. Well, so we'll start looking to that, getting that done. Obviously, transaction multiples are not where we'd like them to be, but once we get some stability there, we think that's a big opportunity for Anthony's going forward. But, you know, the FDD is done, and we're ready to rock and roll on the Anthony's front. On BurgerFi, we are guiding 10-15 units, franchise units in 2024. We'd like to see that number grow. We had a lot of success, and, you know, Carl can certainly talk a little bit about this in nontraditional, which has been really, really successful for us. So we'd like to use that to be able to expand the brand breadth, and hopefully you will see some greater acceleration in unit growth. Yeah, I think the strategy around growth for both brands, and especially in BurgerFi, is nontraditional growth. It's not capitally infused. There's not a lot of capital to infuse in it. So there's an opportunity to meet people in life where they are at in life today. So I think kind of this hubris or this, you know, boasting about, "Hey, I can put up another brick-and-mortar and hope people come to me," is passé. I think the key is go to where the people are in life. So some of the things that we focus on: airports, casinos, you know, bigger train stations, nontraditional space. Our dual brand in Kissimmee and Margaritaville is doing phenomenally well because it's a nontraditional space where people are at in life, and introducing them to our brands in those spaces. A great example is we just partnered with a small company up in the Northeast called Apple Cinemas, and we opened our first BurgerFi inside a movie theater. And we're tracking close to $3 million revenue in that avenue. So we're really excited about that. So it's a full-service experience. You use a QR code in your recliner in the movie theater to order BurgerFi to your table. So there's opportunities there, and what that's done is it's seeded the market. So now I would have thought of Rochester as the first place I'm going to go. But now that I've seeded the market, and I've created demand for my product in the market, now I can go and open brick-and-mortar franchises around Rochester. That's the strategy for BurgerFi. I think for Anthony's, it's really just opening the floodgates and saying: We're ready to franchise one of the best Italian concepts in the country. I think that's where we're at. So last question, I think I have, yeah, two minutes. Carl, I think you in one of our initial conversations, you had said brands should grow like a bush and not like a vine. And I thought that was a great comment, and you know, BurgerFi is founded here in Florida, so but yet you're still expanding in other parts of the country. So what do you expect if you look at this over the next three to five years, where should the BurgerFi brand grow to, and where is it, you know, where should you not be? So for decades, growth on the East Coast have been focused on what I call the I-95 corridor. I mean, that's where 80% of American population still is today. We're very concentrated in Florida, so we've established the bush, if you will, right? And what I mean grow like a bush, I mean, take your fist and grow like a bush. So I think you fortress your brand by growing solely out from your base. I think what happened in the past is maybe we grew indiscriminately across the country, and when you do that, there's no economy of scale, there's no penetration of media, there's very hard to support it. So for us, I think growth for both our brands is up and down that Eastern Seaboard. So when you look at BurgerFi and Anthony's, we should be moving out into northern Florida, western Florida, into Atlanta, Georgia, Charleston, South Carolina, et cetera. And then we have a pocket in the Northeast, where we do very well, so we'll grow there. So maybe they meet together as we move up and down, kind of that Eastern Seaboard, and then venture into the Midwest. I think that's how you grow like a bush, not like a vine. Remember, think about economy of scale in everything you do. You know, from media penetration, to operations, to supply chain, that's important. So I think that's our strategy for growth. That's about it. The only thing I'll say is that, you know, I think a lot of people in the room are from New York City. We're reopening up our BurgerFi location on 82nd and Second, in a couple weeks, so hopefully we can see you there. With our Better Burger Lab. That's right. That's right[crosstalk] Excellent. New York City. With seven seconds to go, I'll give it back to you guys. Thank you very much. All right, thank you. Thank you.