Our next presenter is Jeff Geygan from Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory, ticker RMCF. Jeff, off to you. Thank you, welcome everyone. Glad to have you here today. I'm going to move to the safe harbor statement for everyone to take a look at. While you're reading this, I just want to thank you for joining us today. It's an honor to be here presenting to you. It's an exciting story, and one that we're really glad to tell. We're in a transformational stage right now. This dates back about two years when Carrie Cass and I joined the company to really do a turnaround, but more than a turnaround, it's been a transformation of the business. Despite us being 45 years old, it feels like we're somewhat of a startup here. From a description perspective, we have 250 locations across the U.S. and internationally. About 140 of those are Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory stores, of which the company owns four. About 110 of those are co-brand, primarily Cold Stone Creamery. We are continuing to grow the brand through a series of steps that we've taken including selling more product into existing locations, as well as developing new store locations. The company started in Durango, Colorado in 1981. By 1986, we had a public listing. The company experienced rapid growth throughout the 90s and into the early 2000s, then came a period of about 10, 15 years where that slowed down and ultimately declined to the point where in 2024, I was brought in as an existing board member. As a board member, was asked to step in as CEO, at which point the transformation began. During the last two years, we've raised equity twice. We refinanced our debt. We've exited some of the unprofitable businesses that we were in, including making some strategic decisions about where we produced. Most importantly was really the cultural shift that was occurring during this whole time, which included the concept of continuous improvement of critical thinking, of paying attention to detail. The first thing that had to change here was culture. In the meantime, we brought in an executive and leadership team. 100% of the executives that were here two years ago have parted the company, a good percentage of our leadership team has changed as well. With every additional individual we bring in, I've joked with Carrie how it seems that we can just continue to improve the skill set and the talent that's here. It's important that we get the culture right, we get the right people aligned with what we're trying to accomplish. When Carrie and I first showed up, we really set up the four pillars of the transformation, which included data and analytics, revenue growth, operational efficiencies, and financial stability. To the first point, we immediately began with the new ERP system, as well as rolling out POS across the entire system. Today, of our 140 stores, about 125 of those have our new POS system, which is enabling us to capture data and analytics at the stores that we've never had before. A precedent to that is we needed to get the economics of the business correct, which meant we needed to get our gross margin right. During the last few years, commodity costs, labor costs, and so on, have gone up quite a bit. We spent probably 18 months through a series of price adjustments and really rethinking what the economics of the store needed to look like, what the economics of the factory needed to look like. We're pretty close to that right now. In fact, a couple of weeks ago, we had a separate conference, and we'd indicated that we thought that the economics were currently about where they needed to be, and overlay that on the revenue growth side. We've added roughly 40 stores to area developments, which are agreements with individual franchisees where they commit to over a four to five-year period, adding incremental stores. Currently, we have 40 stores under contract over a five-year period, representing about 30% of our existing 140. We're continuing to develop those stores all under a newly modified logo and brand that we've only rolled out in the last 12, 18 months. Most recently, we opened a store up in Chicago, Illinois on the corner of State and Madison. It's a beautiful location, which is proof positive that the market not only likes it, but our customers are really excited about it as well. When it comes to the executives of the company, I mentioned Carrie Cass, who joined me in August of 2024. I was originally brought in in May of 2024, and notably among the executives and leadership team, we've tried to attract individuals with experience in both franchising and retail, which has made a huge difference for us given that our primary business is that of being a franchisor. We happen to sell premium confectionary products, but we're a franchisor at our heart, and we're really trying to be excellent in that area. This is evidence of the decline in store count over the years and more or less a flat line of the average unit volume, which is a measure of the amount of retail sales across the entire system. Last year, per our Franchise Disclosure Document, we had about $613,000 of AUV. We haven't put out our 2026 Franchise Disclosure Document that will evidence that our AUV has gone up modestly from here. The challenge for us on a forward basis is to increase sales at each of the locations and improve profitability for the benefit of the franchisees, which we're working on right now. Again, we're bringing in financially sophisticated, well-capitalized, and entrepreneurial new operators. When Carrie and I arrived, the average number of stores per operator was about 1.35. Today, that's increased to about 1.40. It's a metric that we track closely, believing that if we can help each franchisee own multiple locations, that's a path for them to greater profitability. Evidenced are 40 stores across five operators under our area development agreements. That would be an average of eight stores per operator. Our goal is to continue to drive that ratio of stores per operator in an attempt to create more profitable stores. Our belief is that if we can get operators that are generating more profitably, they'll probably have an interest in expanding to a second, third, and fourth location. Or at the very least, they would tell their friends that they should become a franchisee of Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory. Back to the four pillars, the most important one was really data and analytics. With that in mind, shortly after we arrived, we rolled out a new ERP system that replaced our roughly 20-year-old system. This has been a wealth of financial data that's allowed us to make very strategic and informed decisions based upon facts that the company never had. I also mentioned we have 125 of our franchise locations are now connected to our new POS system, which gives us daily sales and analytics around what's happening in the stores, which has been extraordinarily valuable to us. In addition, number two is we needed to grow revenue. Part of that was seeing how we can impact customers, not just in the store, but out of the store. To that end, we rolled out a unique website for every store location, which was a 180-degree shift from the previous company management, where we're now giving each of the franchisees the ability to have a unique website that describes their team, a little bit of the culture of the local site, and attached to that is what's called DoorDash Storefront, which is zero commission buy online option, which our stores never had individually. At least, well, some of them had, but this is really across the system, we're saying to all stores, "You ought to use some kind of third-party delivery. We can give you a white labeled version of DoorDash, which is very profitable for you." In fact, in many of the locations, we're finding that third-party delivery transaction value is twice that of someone just walking into the store, which is notable. In addition, we rolled out all the major third-party delivery, which would include DoorDash, Grubhub, Uber Eats, Instacart, and ezCater, to across our system, which is really just going live right now. I mentioned the DoorDash average transaction value can be 2X the average store. What's really interesting is the ezCater transaction can be in the hundreds of dollars, and your typical transaction's in the $20, $30, $40 range. We're really looking at ways to drive more traffic into the stores, and the presumption that a third-party delivery is necessarily us going out into the community delivering to someone elsewhere. Surprisingly, in many instances, in fact, one retail location reported to us that about half of their third-party delivery were people coming and picking up, fulfilling at the store location, which we found to be interesting. With all the data and analytics we have, we're learning a lot more about the business and what levers we can pull to help the franchisees sell more and become more profitable in the process. On the right-hand side, we have fourth quarter results. As I've informed investors, this is a transformation or a turnaround, and it's not going to be linear necessarily. We're going to have quarters where it doesn't quite meet our expectation, but we believe we have a really great long-term strategy that's driven by let's get the economics of the business right. Let's put disciplined pricing actions in place, make sure that whenever we're selling product out of the Durango facility, that we're selling at an acceptable margin. Let's work to develop more and more franchise locations, given that we have somewhat of a captive universe. We have 140 stores we can sell to. We can sell more product into existing stores, then we can increase store count, which we're doing right now. As I mentioned, we have 40 new stores under contract under an area development agreement. All these are really important precursors to we've got the economics right, followed by now we're going to scale it. It's the old nail it and scale it strategy. In terms of strategic opportunity, Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory, really, it's a little bit of a niche business here in terms of who are our competitors. Although over a meeting today, someone said, "Chocolate must be a very competitive business," which I responded to, I think we have a unique positioning based upon the experience that our guests have when they come in the store, the five senses, whether it's the aroma, the taste. The feel, touching our product and coming into the store. There's a little bit of chocolate theatrics going on, watching a caramel apple being made, watching fudge being made or cherries being dipped in chocolate. It's a fun experience. There's the Rocky Mountain moment, and even today, we had a one-on-one with someone who described their first experience at Rocky Mountain when they were younger, and they tried the product, then years later, they're bringing their kids in and they're trying the product. That is a very common story for us. We know we've got 45 years of people who've tried our product. They love our product, and I can hardly travel anywhere in the United States or outside the United States, and I say to people, "I work at Rocky Mountain." They say, "I love your brand." I say, "How can you love our brand? We're only in 26 states. We only have 140 stores." They say, "Well, it was Denver International. It was Minneapolis, St. Paul. I love the brand," and my experience, this is common. I think, oh, there is something. I can't put it in an Excel file, and I can't bottle it, but that's real. The opportunity for us is to lean into that, to leverage it, and part of it's the theatrics. It's what happens to you when you go into the store. Then part of it is what happens with the product that we sell. When Carrie and I showed up, I said, "There's a lot that we need to change here, but the one thing we can't touch is the chocolate, because the chocolate is excellent. Let's stay focused on that." Simultaneously, of course, we need to drive top line. We also need to manage our internal expenses. Carrie and I have found that even two years later, there are still places where we can cut costs without compromising on quality. Probably most importantly here is within the last 12 months, we really did a rebranding. We have stores in Charleston, Chicago. We just opened a store up in Tinton Falls, I think Asbury Park, New Jersey, which is just miles from our Long Branch store, all under a new design. Sometime in the next week, we're opening another store in Folsom, California, all under the same new look and design. It's fantastic. If you have a chance to look at it online, and if you've been to an existing store and you contrast this to the new store, you're going to say, "Wow, this is really nice." This fall, we have a store down at Houston International Airport, IAH. In the new United Terminal B, we'll have a new store. We have others under design right now. We have two stores opening up in Miami that should be open sometime in the next, probably six to nine months. It's an exciting time for us. In terms of the long-term strategy here, it's really, number one, is modernize operations. We talked a little bit about that with ERP, POS, getting other data and analytics to drive decisions. Number two, we've got to get our margins right. We believe we're there right now, but it's a dynamic process. We just have to keep at it, and commodity prices continue to change, so we need to be alert. We've done the brand redesign. Now we need to really go out to the existing stores, not the brand-new stores, but the current stores. Talk to franchisees about we're putting a new sign up. We're going to put new paint. We're going to do new cabinets. We're just going to do a remake of the store inside. That's rolling out right now. The early signs when we do a rebrand is round numbers, 10%-15% instant pickup in sales, which is important. We're trying to improve the franchise network, attract multi-unit operators, guys that are well-capitalized, because it does cost a couple of bucks to build one of these. We want to make sure that the people that are our business partners are good business partners and have the wherewithal, not open just one, but open up a six or a 12-pack with us over time is what we're looking at. There are no shortage of places for us to expand. We're primarily west of the Mississippi. One of our competitors, Kilwins, is primarily east of the Mississippi. We're not in Boston, New York, Philly, D.C., Atlanta right now. We're just recently going into Miami, but there's a lot of white space out east for us to build or to add on to. Never mind, there's still pockets out on the West Coast that we can expand into. Did I turn that off by going red? If you just hit back on the laptop. Oh, that works. Okay. Internally, we've got to be good about managing our P&L and managing operation and expense and just running the business more efficiently. Our goal, of course, is get back to profitability as quickly as possible. As we mentioned earlier, the transformational cornerstones, the better data and analytics, got to drive top line. We need operational efficiencies and then financial stability. I think we're pretty close on all these. It's a work in progress, for sure. Why would you want to make an investment here? Number one, you've got a motivated and aligned management team. I'm really big on using equity as an incentive. I tell the guys, my company, Global Value Investment Corp., where I was previously CEO, owns about 20% of this. The company has about $6.6 million of debt on its balance sheet today. I personally am $600,000 of that. I'm highly motivated to get this working, get it work right and quickly, and all of my executive management has equity stake in the business. In fact, we've been giving out equity to our employees. This is a great story. Maybe three months ago, we were giving out equity to guys who have really made a difference. I went down to the production floor, and I gave one of our lead production guys 500 shares of stock. He said, "What's a stock?" I said, "Okay. You're going to help fix this thing. You got to participate." Culturally, we're really changing how people think about it. Our business model is highly scalable. As a franchisor, we slough off some of the capital risk in terms of opening stores. The operating lease sits with the franchisee. The labor sits with the franchisee. Inventory sits with franchisee. The labor sits with the franchisee. Inventory sits with franchisee. The prospect for us to expand and expand pretty rapidly is very high with a minimal amount of capital. We've got good momentum going right now. I would say, on here I put this, our current pipeline is the strongest in decades. My guess is it's probably the strongest in the history of the company. I don't know that for a fact. We've got 40 stores queued up right now, which is about 30% of our existing base. I'd be a little surprised if the company ever had that, and we're not done yet. The guys that are running our franchise development have tall marching orders in terms of continuing to grow that. There's a very large and growing addressable market. Kilwins is a great company, so is See's. Those are kind of our traditional competitors. As I've said to our franchisee, I think we make a terrific product. We're not going to fool around with the formula. We'll change everything else but that. I think we could expand this company from where we are to 2x, 3x where we are today. With that, I'll pause. I assume we're pretty close on time. I don't see a clock. Oh, we have five minutes. Yeah. I'm glad to take questions, so please. I noticed that you're using NAFTA to expand into Canada, Mexico. Well- Would you like to expand the Canadian and Mexican markets? Do you want to expand to other markets like the Middle East, India, Asia, or you want to focus only on the U.S. market? Yeah. The question is, in here, we specifically call out NAFTA. The question is, how far would we expand? Could it be Asia? Could it be Middle East? Could it be India? Yeah. The company's been in the Middle East in the past. We've been in Panama. We've been in Korea. We're in the Philippines right now. My initial approach would be, let's go somewhere we can drive a truck. I can drive south of the border, I can drive north of the border. There was a former franchisee who's in Canada right now with 48 stores. We don't have any presence in Mexico today, but one of our recent equity investors, who is of Mexican descent, added a director on our board, who is Mexican and U.S. citizen, who's given us some unique perspectives on Mexico. I really think we have an opportunity in the U.S., and this is hypothetical, but I think it'll be pretty easy to see in the U.S., you go from 150 to 300 to 600 stores, and then you go north of the border, and you add another 50 and south of the border into Mexico. Mexico is a pretty big country. I think for the next five, 10 years, we can stay pretty busy just being in North America. Yes, sir. I was just curious, footprint on average per franchisee, and would you be open to the opportunity of a split franchisee having maybe another brand and also having your brand in the same location? Yeah. The question is, would we do a co-brand or have more than one brand inside of a store? We have 110, what we call co-branded. Technically, it's a licensee versus a franchisee relationship. That's primarily with Cold Stone Creamery, and ice cream and chocolate go very well together. The economics of it are a little bit different. My preference would be to stay with straight franchising, but Cold Stone's been a great partner for us. They have close to 1,000 stores. We're only in 110 of them, so I think there's other opportunity there. It would have to be the right mix and match. I'm just giving you an opinion there, you got it. Yes. On average, what's the franchisee footprint? Yeah, the average franchisee footprint. An ideal store for us is around 1,000 to 1,200 square feet, although I will say our smallest store is a 200-foot kiosk. It's in Houston. That store does about $7,000 a square foot in sales, which is notably above the average. Ideally, to really have that chocolate theatrical experience in a store needs to be about 1,000, 1,200. Chicago is about 1,200. Charleston's about 1,200, maybe plus or minus. That's right. We have some stores that are 15 or 2,000 square feet. That's too big. Just the economics of it don't make as much sense. I'm sorry, the gentleman in the back had a question. [audio distortion] My question is this, is that with what's going on in the world today, with the economy, with the price of oil and gas going up, has that affected the cost of bringing in the products that you have to make the chocolate with? Has that increased the price of the products? Yeah. The question on the table really is with rising inflation and commodity prices and uncertainty, how has that affected us? The vast majority of the product that we source is sourced in America. Arguably, cocoa beans come from somewhere else, but we buy that from a U.S. processor on the West Coast. We haven't directly been impacted by the cost of importing tariffs. Maybe 12, 18 months ago, we were emphatic to say we're a U.S.-sourced company. We could have gone to Asia for supplies and so on. We didn't. We elected to keep all that in the U.S., which was fortuitous for us at the time. There's no denying that gasoline at $5 a gallon is going to curb demand. Frankly, in proportion to the amount of increase in some of the energy costs, I don't think it's had a measurable impact on what we're trying to do. We're the masters of our destiny here. I think if we continue to discipline our franchisees and work collaboratively to drive sales, talk about the in-store experience, and manage our costing, I think we can grow this company for a long time. One other thing I'm-- Sure. [audio distortion] Also, with the advent of now all these drugs, the GLP-1-- Oh, yeah A lot of companies that are in the food industry, whether it's desserts, restaurants, making smaller portions. People now want smaller portions. Is that something that you guys are exploring? Hey, that we don't want to lose the customer. Hey, we don't need X. We want something a little bit smaller. Yeah. The question on the table with GLP-1s, has that impacted our outlook or even demand? Yes. Yeah. We actually do have what we call packing size versus regular size. We're already positioned to have that. Anecdotally, someone said to me a couple of days ago they'd read that with GLP-1 and by product name, that people are now losing weight, so they feel that they can indulge themselves a little bit more often. Yeah. Yes, sir, right here. [audio distortion] What is the store-level economics between, like, Asia stocks, sorry, the AUV versus your store-level margin and cash on cash and The question is, what are the store-level economics, which we haven't disclosed. I would say to you, if you're a business owner and you're putting your capital at risk, minimum you should accept is a 15% pre-tax margin. I'm not saying that's what's happening. I'm just saying if you were going into business, I can tell you we have stores that are really good operators that generate returns in the 20%-25% range. I'm not saying that's everything, but these stores run right at scale are very profitable. The AUV today on average is $613,000. I can say our largest store is about $3 million. We have a long tail with three $400,000 stores. If you think about this, today, we've said we'll only approve the opening of a store that we believe can do $1 million. Chicago recently opened. Four months later, it's averaging about $1.1 million, $1.2 million. We think that if we can open a $1 million store, that gives us the flexibility to try and slough off some of the lower producing stores, which those stores inherently are more expensive to service. There's a little bit of a brand reputation there. The image of a store that's only doing $200,000, $300,000 probably is not up to snuff. We're not eager to shut down stores, but there are stores that if they called me up and said they want to shut down, I'd probably say, "Understood." I believe the gentleman in the back had a question. Is the company planning on offering different types of products? I know some of your competitors are like in ice cream. Is there any projections that you're looking to get into something that would offshoot to what your traditional product is? The question is, would we look at other product offerings? I'll tell you right now, about half of our stores are selling ice cream. It's just not our brand. Apropos of Cold Stone Creamery and us having this relationship for the last 15 years, we're going to roll out our own brand of Rocky Mountain Chocolate branded ice cream before the end of this year. Similar to Kilwins? Correct. Yeah. The comment was similar to Kilwins. Kilwins has their own brand. It's very good. I go to Kilwins all the time. I know the guys there. Just to check the competition. It's logical because ice cream goes along with chocolate very well. I'd rather sell our branded rather than building someone else's brand. Okay. Yeah. Yep. Apropos that we're also going to do our own coffee, because about 40% of our stores sell coffee. We'll source coffee either out of Mexico. Oh, the coffee's limitless in terms of what we can do with that. We'll do a lot of cool stuff. Yeah. I've been given the hook here, guys. Anyway, thank you. You've been a great audience. Appreciate your time today. Sure.