Good morning. My name is Jeff Bernstein. I'm the restaurant and food service distribution analyst here at Barclays. Thrilled to introduce our next presenting company, BJ's Restaurants. With us this morning from Huntington Beach, California, we have Greg Levin, President and CEO, and Tom Houdek, CFO. I feel like I'm pretty well-versed on the name, having just attended their 2023 Investor Day in Boston just a couple of weeks ago. By way of background, for those not familiar in the room and on the webcast, BJ's is a polished casual dining chain. They have 215 U.S. company-owned restaurants, and actually are talking about accelerating new unit growth from the 2% range to closer to 5% over the next couple of years. Management is very confident in their long-term guidance for 425 U.S. company-operated units, so still room to effectively double their store count from where it is today. I wanna thank BJ's for joining us. I've got a handful of questions, but then, I will open it up to the audience if there's anybody who'd like to chime in. With that said, Greg, pleasure. Yep, nice seeing you. Tom, nice to see you- Yeah. - two weeks in a row. Happy holidays. Thank you. I feel like starting these meetings and presentations with a little chat about the broader consumer. I know there's been surprising resilience from a consumer spending standpoint, especially in the restaurant world. Things did soften a little bit, we felt like from industry data in August and September, and there was really a debate of whether or not it's a slowing consumer with a variety of headwinds that we're all hearing about every day. Or maybe there was just a little bit of a return to seasonality that we hadn't seen in a while. And it does seem like from industry data and from others in casual dining, that things have gotten better. I know you echoed that from September going into October, that there was a little bit of an uptick. So I'm just wondering how you'd, if you didn't have all this macro data at your fingertips and you're just looking at your business, how would you describe the health of the U.S. consumer today? Yeah, look, I think the health of the U.S. consumer is, I don't know if the right term, is probably in the middle. Meaning, they still got good balance sheets. They like to go out and do experiences, go out and eat from that side of things. And we've seen, at least in our restaurants, we haven't necessarily seen any check management. At the same time, then we start to look at it year-over-year, there tended to be things that we just talked about that maybe seem more seasonality based. We historically don't see an increase in sales. Weekly Sales Average from July into August into September usually goes the opposite way, and that's what returned this year. And September and October, Weekly Sales Averages are very similar. So as we got into October and they normalized, we saw more of the seasonality return and saw comp sales move forward. So when we look at our business, we tend to look at it on the incidence. We tend to look at it versus happy hour. We look at it versus lunch specials and other daily brew specials to see if we're seeing any movement of our guests. And we really haven't seen much of that. We've talked in the past that we've seen them come off of a high alcohol incidence of a year ago, but it's still above 2019's levels. At the same time, and we discussed this earlier in some of the meetings, I do think the consumer is looking for or wants deflation, right? That is, they still remember 2019's prices, and they're, and even 2020's prices. So they're used to going out and getting a value meal in QSR under $10, and now it's in the teens, or getting X, Y, and Z for a certain price, and it's now up. And I think they're still adjusting to that. And while overall they've got a solid balance sheet and they're out there spending, I still think there's a little bit of like, "Ooh, I used to pay X for something." And I think what we're gonna have to see in the industry is maybe over the next couple of years, more moderate pricing or less pricing, per se, so the consumer catches up to where we are today. I feel like that's often a joke in the restaurant industry when people say, "Well, maybe companies will lower prices." I presume you've been doing this for a long time. There's no lowering of prices, or at least we haven't seen it. Is there a period that you can compare to this? Or, I mean, how are you responding... I think it's quite incredible that you haven't seen any check management the way you define it. You would think that there would be lots of one less appetizer, dessert, beverage or whatnot. So, are you doing something differently to drive that incentive that you're able to hold on to that, mix shift, or? Yeah, I think it's probably how BJ's plays being more polished, casual. And, you know, I know you were at our analyst day, and we talked about more of the, what we call, the wow side of, upgrading our food and the presentation and so forth. So that when you're coming to BJ's, you're coming for this more experiential dining, and therefore, you know you're gonna get a drink. You know you're gonna get an appetizer, so therefore, our attachment rates have held in there. What I saw back in, again, doing this for a while, you and I talked, back in the Great Recession, you did see check management. You saw people start to not order a soft drink, and they went to water. We saw a movement from beer and liquor, or from liquor and wine to beer, because you got a 16 oz pour. We haven't really seen much of that this time. And again, I think it's the consumer a little bit better in their pocketbook versus the recession, Great Recession, meaning they've got jobs, they've got money. They're just, when they're going out, they're being a little bit more discerning, going, "Okay, I am gonna go out, so I'm gonna do X, Y, and Z from the spend. Got it. With only a month left in 2023, and you guys have talked a lot about your, your thoughts for 2024. Just wondering, what would you say you're most excited about in 2024? What you think will be the biggest positive to come out of your business 12 months from now? Yeah. I still love the remodels. I know we started on the remodels today, but continuing to invest back into the remodels is something that continues to differentiates us, keeps us relevant, and keeps guests coming to our restaurants. So I'm excited about that aspect of it. It's only been half a year since we rolled out the smaller menu, but I like the smaller menu that we've got right now. It's still 100 items, so it's still a lot, but I like the food profile of us going forward. We set up that slide at our Investor Day, talking about the fact that we wanna touch 50% of our menu items. I know it's over more of a three-year timeframe, but we've got a strategy for next year to upgrade the look and presentation on some of those items. And then, at the same time, I like the fact that we're going after the bottom 20 in regards to providing value. So I think as we start to end 2024, we're gonna end up with a menu, more or less, we're to say maybe a little bit smaller, but better presentation on certain items, maybe a little bit more value in certain other items on our menu. Right. On the flip side, it seems like we're moving past a lot of the greatest concerns that at least we know about from a consumer uncertainty or from inflation and outsized pricing. But is there something that, as you look to 2024, that perhaps is concerning for you besides the broader macros or anything that you're looking out for or watching for? I'm not sure there's anything. Tom mentioned it as well, that we're looking out for, except obviously the broader consumer part of our business and seeing where the consumer goes. I like the initiatives that we've put in place here to continue to improve margins and drive our sales. I think some of the things we've done within the middle of the P&L have really helped us without taking away from the consumer. I know we've talked in the past, things like the wings, which are better wings today, or you got to experience some of the newer menu items or the different plating and the investment back in that to differentiate us. So I'm really excited about those continuations and how we're just moving the concept forward, per se. But I think we always continue to look at the consumer and the broader picture of what's going on with them. Yeah, and really, if you rewind over the past few years, there's been, you know, everything. Obviously, COVID impacted top line, and then it was hyperinflation after that. There's a lot more normalcy in the business, things you can plan around now than before. So, we'll put that in the positive camp, and it really is the consumer backdrop. If that changes, then it'll impact us all. But as we're planning the business now, we have to be winning in all different environments. So we've got to make sure we're keeping the strong value proposition on the high end of the value end of the equation, as well as the low end. So things like Daily Brew specials, things like our lunch value. Even when we do menu innovation, we wanna make sure we have craveable items across the value spectrum. So that's, as we're planning for next year, it's really, you know, planning for any environment. This was the year where even going into 2023, there was a question on the consumer at the beginning of the year, and we've seen it hold in well through the year. But we just have to be prepared for whatever next year brings. I feel like I don't. I wanna have a company with as great a California penetration as you guys. So as the experts on California, just the FAST Act implications, it seems like a lot of companies have a much more diversified national footprint and maybe have to think about it slightly different than you. But how do you think about it, just factually speaking, what the implication would be or how much price you'd contemplate taking? Or whether you look at it just as a let the nation deal with it more broadly, or whether you just focus on California. Like, how do you think about the FAST Act, just because you have such outsized exposure? Yeah. So for those that aren't familiar with the FAST Act, and probably everybody is, but California legislation decided that the fast-food restaurants have to pay a minimum of $20 starting April 1st. And that is—it's gonna have ripple effects to all restaurants. Certainly, it's gonna have ripple effects to retail in general. It's almost setting a new minimum wage out there for a lot of companies, both within restaurants and, as I said, in retail starting April 1st. Now, for us, it's not gonna impact the dining room because of tips and so forth from that standpoint. Obviously, it's not gonna impact casual dining, but it does have implications towards our business. And we talked about this before in a couple of conference calls, and that is, one, we have restaurants in areas like in our Huntington Beach area, where a brand-new In-N-Out restaurant opened, and they had a sign outside that said, "Starting at $22." We didn't lose people to that In-N-Out. And I don't know where exactly what we're paying in that Huntington Beach restaurant there, but it's about building the culture in the restaurant. But generally speaking, even taking a step back here, most of our kitchen team members are at 20 or above 20. I think the entry-level positions around the dish, so you go from a dishwasher generally to a prep cook to a line cook. Dishwashers might be below that, so we'll have to look at that side of it, and determine how much we wanna increase or, or not increase, our team members. The other side of it that we're looking at is: How do we adjust tipping? Do you start to do more of a tip pool and tip the back house, so they're now incentivized with the dining room to offset some of that wages? So we're looking at some of that as well. Taking that out of it, though, you are gonna see restaurants take menu pricing. It, it's across the board. I've talked to a lot of friends that I know in the industry that run QSR restaurants, and they're all expecting to take some fairly large pricing come, April 1st. I think what that's gonna end up doing for us is putting a better or narrow the gap between what our pricing is, BJ's, for a burger versus what you get in QSR, and I think that makes us actually, in casual dining, be a little bit more competitive in that regard from like, "Wow, I'm getting this burger sit down at the same price that I'm getting at some other, fast-food restaurant." So from that aspect, I think it's a net benefit for us. And then, as I said before, it's not gonna impact our team members as much because a lot of them are already over $20, and then we have the ability to kind of look at how we want to adjust some of the staffing in there. But generally speaking, you'll see pricing in fast-food restaurants. You'll probably see it in fast-casual restaurants, but I do think you'll see it in some casual dining restaurants. ... And also, on the flip side, too, or at least on the demand side of the equation, this is de facto minimum wage increasing. So if you think of who spends their discretionary income, you're gonna have a lot more people with some extra income. So there is, you know, that element, too, where you have, you know, again, through the food industry and wherever it spills over to, there will be some extra discretionary spending in the state as well to be considered. Glass is half full. It's positive. Talking to your friends in the restaurant industry, I mean, is there anticipation that over time, the California Act is gonna be the New York Act and the Florida Act? I mean, is that something that you see spreading to restaurants in other markets where there's just a big push for further significant wage increases, or not as much, and California is more unique from that regard? California tends to set the tone for some of the other states that tend to have similar labor laws as California does. So I wouldn't be surprised if it comes to other states. Right now, I haven't paid attention, honestly, if other states are looking to adopt it or not. But I do think casual has a little bit, or sit down, might have a little bit more of a benefit on that with the ability to look at how tips working, how tip is working, tips are working in the restaurant. I know we talked about. Well, I feel like from the Investor Day, there was a very clear message, which was drive comps, improve restaurant margins, and if those work, accelerate the unit growth. So I think we touched on the comp side of things. From a margin standpoint, I know you talked about exiting the fourth quarter north of the full fourth quarter, which would be in the +14% range. How do you think about the margins as we look to 2024 as the precursor for the ability to accelerate the unit growth, which, again, you'd have to start planning in 2024 to do for 2024? So your confidence level on that accelerating margin opportunity in 2024. So I think taking a step back, if you look at our P&L, if you look at the cost of it, both cost of sales, labor, and then operating occupancy. What we've seen is obviously inflation in all three of them, and that obviously delevered our margins. Going into, even into Q3, I think going into Q4, what we're starting to see really a much more return to historical margins on what we call the prime costs in our business. And the prime costs in our business are labor and cost of sales. Those are your prime input costs. Those are really pretty much normalized. Historically, we ran cost sales somewhere in the mid-25s. I think we finished Q3 at the 25.9% range or so, and I do think that some of the things that are rolling in here in Q4 will continue to move us down into that area. The adjustments we made within the middle of the P&L in regards to the how we prep items, a little bit of a smaller menu, using AI forecasting, some of those tools have allowed us to start to move our labor closer to where it was historically, in 2019 in the past, and that's getting it into the 36% range. The biggest challenge for us right now has been the operating occupancy line, and some of it's a change in the structure of our business, where pre-COVID, we did $10,000 or so in off-premise. We're now at 20,000, 21,000 or so in off-premise, and the lion's share of that is third-party delivery. So you've got those commissions, as well as additional marketing funds that go to it to keep you relevant in the kind of portal out there, or the carousel, as they call it. And we've added some, I think, somewhere in the 150-200 basis points in operating occupancy costs just for the third-party delivery part of our business. So as we exit this year, we've got some initiatives in place on the operating occupancy side that actually are starting in November. We'll roll through December and some other things going into next year. That's our biggest opportunity, is start to move that number down a little bit, and that moves our margins back into the mid-teens. So that's kind of where our focus is going forward, and that starts to give us that better confidence in regards to the mid-teens. And then you said it exactly right, and that is, it's hitting one and two, driving sales, improving margins, gives us the opportunity to invest into new restaurants. And we'll continue to keep that optionality as we go forward in our business. Yeah, kind of back to the other point I was making, too, of what we can plan for. It does seem like we haven't set all of our contracts yet on the food cost side, but we still should be, call it, low single digit inflation, maybe 2% or 3%, and maybe some upside to that, just from what we know now. On the labor side, maybe it's mid-single digits and a little bit more if there's some impact from the FAST Act. But those are more normal levels that we were used to seeing, and we're planning for it in the business. We can take the pricing at regular intervals like we can. So that's the, you know, as we think about managing margins, that's the right way to do it. This is, you know, something we can plan for, and it's not the plan, and, you know, the consumer backdrop has to be there. But as we look through next year, that's the plan, is to kind of work through the, you know, getting both top line as well as some more efficiencies to keep improving and closing the gap to where we were pre-COVID. Got it. So if we were to see, recognizing you're not fully contracted, but if it was only 2%-3% food and mid-single-digit labor, I mean, right now you're running 7%-8%, I believe, menu pricing. Like, what's your objective with menu pricing? Is it take what is necessary to achieve the margin, or is it... We have some companies that say: "You know what? I'm gonna take less. I'm gonna underprice my competition, maybe with the hopes of driving traffic at the expense of some risk to the margin." Like, what is the objective of price? Like, how do we think about price going into 2024, when obviously you have a lot less inflationary pressures? Yeah. I think—well, the way we're looking at pricing. We wanted to catch up with inflation a little bit, and we were behind the curve on that. And then probably took more pricing this year to catch up for 2022 and so forth, where we kind of held off on it. Going forward, I think you're gonna see pricing that'll be more normal going forward. Now, if you look at 2024, because there's going to be the layover or the lag effect, it's still gonna be—seem like higher pricing, but we're not necessarily gonna replace 2.5% pricing with 2.5% pricing at a time. It'll probably be more in the 1%-1.5%. So the exit rate coming out of 2024 will probably be more in the 2%-4% range or 2%-3% range, which has been a little bit more of the historical pricing. Separate from that, though, we wanna continue to go down that good, better, best strategy. That best strategy being something like we have now, the surf and turf. You got the surf and turf you saw that with the filet and the shrimp, and then at the same time, go after the value side. So as you start to think about menu pricing going forward, it's gonna be: Do you do it more or do we do it more on the polished items that set us apart and differentiate us, that when guests wanna splurge, come to it and hold off on, like, our lunch specials, hold off on the happy hour, hold off on our Daily Brewhouse Specials that provide that value? And I think you gotta continue down that good, better, best strategy. If we can get to your point, though, as you said it, where it's low single digits inflation cost on commodities, labor outside of California, the $20, we'll have to look at that and determine how tip pooling might work for us. We have some other things that we're looking at changing in the, the kitchen and the other areas as we continue to drive efficiencies there. Outside of that, if that continues to move itself down back into, let's call it, mid- to low-single digits, and operating occupancy starts to flatten out a little bit, you get back to more normal historical inflationary pressures, which then comes down to 2%-4% pricing, is more than enough to, to offset it. Coming out of COVID, I mean, you got hit with all three areas. Cost of sales, labor, and operating occupancy all went up in the 30%+ range versus 2019. So again, if you, if we get back to more of a historical pattern, you'll tend to see much more historical pricing levels. We were talking to another restaurant company earlier today that was talking about the promotional activity in the industry. Not that anyone's lowering prices on the menu, but obviously, we're coming off of Thanksgiving and Black Friday and whatnot, so maybe this is not the best time to look at rational behavior. But have you seen any change, like, how would you characterize the current environment in your world of your polished or traditional casual dining, the behavior of your competitive set? Are you seeing anything unusual or surprising? Well, I think there's two parts to that question. One is, your first point of lowering menu prices. Rarely do you see that. What ends up happening is you discount it or you promote it back, and you kind of move it from there. And I think that's what will end up happening as people continue to seek out value, whether it's this fourth quarter or going into the next year, and always the consumer concern versus purely taking a lower menu price. If you do take a lower menu price, and we've done this at BJ's historically, it would be more like a newer menu item versus a historical menu item. Might be creating new lunch specials, might be looking at daily brewhouse specials and things like that, that play into it. As far as the second part, we're definitely seeing more marketing activity overall. Some have tried to stay out of just the pure discounting and promotion, talk about it from a branding standpoint, but I think you're starting to see people come back and adding more of a discount back into their business. I don't think it's been irrational. I think the businesses have tried to be very thoughtful about it. Maybe they've just, they've done something that used to be, you know, at $20, get X off. Maybe now they've done it at $25, get X off, or excuse me, $30 and get X off. But you are starting to see people shift back towards more normalized marketing cadence to drive traffic in there, and it's a combination of brand building as well as the value play. To Greg's point, if you think of menu design and strategy, we launched a pretzel this year. It's a soft pretzel, but with beer cheese with it and a spicy mustard. We could do that and still get the right dollar profit on it at $10, and we actually saw it in test. We added incidents in the app categories. We didn't see trade down. It actually grew the category. Similarly, when we looked across our menu and saw we had a lot of nice higher-end items in the 25+ area, we launched a Brewhouse Chicken that has, you know, kind of this lemon butter sauce over it. It's a great dish, very craveable, but you can sell it at $20 and still make the right dollar profit on it. So there, there's menu design elements, too, where you can drive the good price point value, but it, you know, it's still the right items for us to be offering when we think about the menu mix or how people trade between items. So when we look at going into next year, I think that's gonna be some more things we focus on, just to make sure we're doing the right things for the business, but giving the guests what they want. Right, I feel like, the sell side community and investors are all rooting for the first two things to be achieved in terms of the consistent comp sales growth and then the improvement in the margin to allow the unlock for the accelerated unit growth, which for a company of 200+ units on a pace to four and change, it would seem like that is a big opportunity. We've covered you for a long time. Back in the day, the unit growth was 5% or 10%, and now it's come down to four or five units a year on 200, which will get you to 2% or so. I think the message coming out from a couple of weeks ago was use 2024 as kind of a testing ground because it takes a while to open up a new store. If things progress the way you'd like by 2025, you'd be at 5% unit growth, which would be a pretty significant uptick. And I know you mentioned that that would, in your view, drive top line and therefore drive valuation. So because it does take such a long time to set up new units to open, like, what are you looking for through 2024 that would really allow you to unleash that, that accelerated unit growth? ... Yeah, Yeah, it really is those first two, and that is the consistent comp sales and then really, truly the movement of the margins up and consistent. I think when we get those two in there, it tells you that the base continues to do really well. We'll always evaluate our new restaurants and how they're returning, and if we see a change in ESOP and we've, you know, for those that want to see it, our investor deck's out there. Our new restaurants are performing well. They're doing great margins, better than, you know, the base margins from that standpoint. So we'll continue to evaluate those restaurants as well, but it really comes down to those first two coming through there for us to build that pipeline. And then we'll always, as I said, keep that optionality in the business, so that therefore, if we have to pull back or push out restaurants, we can. But based on what the plan that we laid out, the things that we're working on in regards to executing both from a menu strategy and the culinary side of it, what we're doing in regards to increasing some marketing and some awareness, we've got that ability with something like 9 million guests that are within 10 mi of BJ's, never even heard of us 'cause we're not a large marketing company, but we know that there's ways for us to reach them through connected TV and social and digital, that that gives us something to go after those guests and drive that aspect of it. And frankly, the things we've done in the middle of the keynote have really moved us that much closer to where we wanna be, and we've got some other things there that we're gonna be tackling here right now, actually in November and December, but going into next year, really around that operating occupancy line. I would add one more thing we need to see before the acceleration. This coming up year in 2024 will be the first year we'll be opening a new prototype. So we took $1 million out of our build. So what we'll be opening now is actually looking a lot like what we opened a number of years back, which is a lot simpler of a build, a rectangle. It has a back bar instead of an island bar, but with that back bar lets us put in basically what we're doing in our remodels now, the 130-inch TV. It's more efficient for staffing with it. It gives it a big kind of wow centerpiece for the restaurant. Some less seating, not a lot less, but it is a smaller footprint. More space for off-premise, just given the mix. So there's a lot of, you know, things that we like about this new prototype, but we need to build them. We need to make sure they're operating like we're expecting them to. Great confidence that they're going to be successful, but that's another piece that this year we'll be measuring to make sure we're seeing the right, you know, one, the build cost, and two, the right type of demand that we can drive into these restaurants. Plus, we'll be looking at even more efficiencies going into 2025. So this was the right first step to do to take this cost out, but we're looking at things back in the kitchen. We're looking at other ways to gain more efficiencies that might give us even a bigger improvement going into 2025. But that's the, I would say, the other element that we need to make sure is fine-tuned before we step on the accelerator on the new builds. Tom hit upon that exactly right with the new prototype. We feel highly confident on it because confident in it because it's what we used to build. And we know the volumes that it can do and the margins that it can do on that build there. And then being able to do that and then take what we learned from when we did all the guest focus research of the 130-inch TV that Tom talked about, having a little bit more of the brewhouse theater in there allows it to still have that, you know, that polished feel, but it's $1 million less and should be significantly more efficient. But to Tom's position or point on that, we wanna make sure that that executes at the level that we expect it to execute at, given that gives us another arrow in the quiver, so to speak, in regards to accelerating growth. The fact that we're pretty much wrapping up 2023 right now, and you'd be presumably 12-18 months out lead time to open up a new store. At this point, you feel the confidence to start that rolling, and presumably it would be a pull back if you weren't seeing it, but you've already kind of started the development team going on the premise that this is gonna play out the way you think, and therefore, 2025 should see that accelerating in our growth. That's, that's correct. Now, as we've built that pipeline, though, it doesn't necessarily mean that we have a bunch of leases signed, that we're more in letter of intent or non-binding contracts on certain ones. So we haven't necessarily locked in 25 yet, in that regards, but we're building that pipeline and working with different landlords in different areas. Yeah, it's definitely optionality. So when you think about the real estate pipeline as well as the talent pipeline, we wanna make sure we have the restaurant managers, the restaurant leaders, ready to go as well. So we feel good about both of those. If we are in the place where we want to accelerate it for 2025, we'll have that option. I feel like that's historically being a growth company. When you slow down that growth, it's obviously keen to reaccelerate it when you think the time is right. And then there are some investors that say, maybe step into more of a maturity mode. If now is not the ideal time, why not use that cash and return to shareholders or buy back stock or whatnot? So how do you contemplate that? Because it does feel like you have some optionality there, but it does seem like you guys are keen to get back to the unit growth side of things, rather than stepping into the more return of cash maturation curve of them. Yeah. Well, I think it's a little bit of an and statement. So, and, and we even lined this up a little bit at the Investor Day, and, and that is, it's not, "Hey, we're gonna go out and build restaurants and not return share, not return capital to shareholders." Ultimately, in our view, it's, you know, we can do both, from that, from that side of it, because building at five restaurants still will generate a lot of free cash flow for us, and that free cash flow, we would like to return to shareholders or find other ways for capital allocation to continue growing the business. So it's, it's an and statement as we look at it, and that's the way we're kind of approaching it going forward is under that and statement. If we're not moving forward on one and two, and we talked about, then we would continue to slow down the growth, continue to work ourselves forward from that standpoint, and use the excess cash for either back into more remodels, which I think are really important and doing well for us, or as a capital allocation and return to shareholders. So I've got a handful more questions, but recognizing we have about five minutes left, I just want to see if there's any questions from the audience. No. Looks like it's back to you. I will keep going. I mean, you talked about the remodels. It seems like that is a... I think you said you're getting, well, 35 units next year. You're getting, like, a $150,000 sales lift, which is pretty strong. I think it's a 20%+ cash-on-cash return. So what, if those are accurate, like, how many more stores can you do in 2024 and 2025? And what would keep you from just accelerating that in the short term, if those are the returns you're going to be getting? Yeah. So first of all, when we look at that, we had to go through and really three different remodel phases, one with the back bar, one with just the dining room, and the other, what we call the expanded capacity, and get some learnings out of those. And what we've come back to is, we know the back bar makes a big difference. Sit-down restaurants, you need to see the energy within there. And as we put together our plan for next year, it'll include more of the back bar, more of the outside painting, to let guests that are driving by know that something different has gone into the restaurant. And to that point, depending on what we spend, ends up having the commensurate return. So a back bar is gonna cost a little bit more with the dining room, but it's gonna have a higher weekly sales average. It's something that we consider to be really important for us to going forward. We probably have somewhere... How many restaurants think we can remodel? I think it's about 70% of our restaurants, about 140 or so. Could still use a remodel. Yeah, well, could use some element of a remodel, especially around the 130-inch TV, going in there, into that back bar. I think that's about right. I think there's 70 that we can expand capacity on, over time. But you had to think about before we started building the current prototype with the island bar, which we probably have about 40-50 of those or so. You can go back into those other ones and do some type of, of remodel in there. And again, there's gonna be some are gonna have higher returns than others, from that standpoint, so we wanna be judicious in how we spend that money. All of them always wanna be upgraded, but not all of them necessarily are gonna need the full back bar expand capacity and ambiance enhancement that we would do in some of our bigger booming restaurants. When we go into it, we're sizing the scope of the remodel with what we're expecting to see as the sales lift. So when we go into a Cerritos, for example, in California, one of our old big restaurants, it made sense to spend the most as possible, to do the whole bar and reconfigure the dining room to get more capacity in there and paint the outside. And it was the full potential of everything we could do in that restaurant, and we saw sales shoot up accordingly. If we're going to more of a mid-tier restaurant, we wouldn't do all of those elements. So we're testing now, boiling it down to the most critical that we think drive traffic and really impact the guests. And we've talked about it. It's really that bar statement, and it is taking off the dark wood that is more ornate and it looks a little older generation, to do more of this lighter woods, cleaner lines, but it gives space for that 130-inch TV there. And that alone, plus some outside paint, costs a lot less than some of these bigger remodels we've been doing. But it has the elements that matter the most to the consumer that we've heard from them. So those, as we think about going forward, we're going to see some more of those decisions we need to make on the right scope for these remodels. So, you know, the number of remodels and the amount spent might look a little different in complexion in the next couple of years as we size them accordingly, but still think there's some great opportunities there. It might not be the exact sales lift you mentioned because we're gonna spend a little less per restaurant, but you know, what we'll do is we get the right returns. And I feel like it's appropriate to end with having just spent time with investors and getting feedback over the past couple of weeks, it would seem like you guys are very well versed in what you might believe. What was the question you got most, or what do you think is most misunderstood as you think about the BJ's story looking into 2024? You know, I still think it comes down to consistently driving comp sales and getting the margins up. And I think on top of that, the fact that there is so much white space for us to go after. And so it really is on those three key things. What gets misunderstood, I think, is more the long term of what we're trying to do. Everybody in this business, and I get it, as a public company, we look quarter to quarter versus what we're trying to do long term. And sometimes people want to know why the menu can't be adjusted tomorrow. We'd rather take the time to make sure that we are measuring twice, cutting once, so to speak, to know that when we rolled out the smaller menu, what would it do to average check? We want to spend the time understanding our guests to make sure that we're putting the right things on for our guests. We wanna spend the time, and Tom talked about even going into next year, to make sure that the remodels work and that what's the right aspect of the remodels. And that sometimes I think is harder for consumers to understand, that it's gonna take more than one quarter to find some of these things out and move it forward. And as we look at this year and going into next year, a lot of that's been things that we have uncovered, feel very confident in regards to the remodel plan going forward. Actually, feel confident on the newer prototype because we're able to look at other prototypes come through, but we still wanna watch it. And if all those things come through, it does allow us to have this really nice pathway going forward, but it's us building it back. Understood. Well, we have exhausted our time, but we want to thank BJ's Restaurants and Greg and Tom for joining us, and hopefully you have a good day of meetings. And thank you guys all for joining us. Thank you, everyone. Appreciate it.