The Cheesecake Factory Incorporated

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the Cheesecake Factory First Quarter Fiscal 2020 Earnings Conference Call. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Stacey Fite. Thank you. Please go ahead.

Stacey Fite Thanks, Adarius. Good afternoon and welcome to our First Quarter Fiscal 2020 Earnings Call. On the call today are David Overton, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, David Gordon, our President, and Matt Clark, our Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. We are dialed in from a remote location, so we appreciate your understanding as we work through this call. Before we begin, let me quickly remind you that during this call, items will be discussed that are not based on historical fact and are considered forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. After results could be materially different from those stated or implied in forward-looking statements as a result of the factors detailed in today's press release, which is available on our website at investors.thecheesecakefactory.com and in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. All forward-looking statements made on this call speak only as of today's date, and the company undertakes no duty to update any forward-looking statements. In addition, throughout this conference call, we will be presenting preliminary results on an adjusted basis. Preliminary financial results do not include impairments of the company's long-lived assets, goodwill, and other intangible assets, and the revaluation of urgent considerations associated with the acquisition of box restaurant concepts, as well as corresponding tax effects, as a result of the impact of COVID-19, all of which are currently being evaluated. While these items are non-cash in nature, the impact on reported results is expected to be material. The filing of the company's quarterly report on Form 10-Q will be delayed due to this impairment analysis and revaluation. An explanation of our use of non-GAAP financial measures and reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP measures appear in our press release on our website as previously described. David Overton will begin today's call with some opening remarks and David Gordon will provide an operational update. Matt will then briefly review our first quarter results and provide a current financial update. With that, I'll turn the call over to David Overton.

Thank you, Stacey, and everyone on the line for joining us this afternoon. We hope you and your families are staying healthy and safe during these trying times. It goes without saying that COVID-19 and the containment measures are having an unprecedented impact on the restaurant industry. This forced us to change the way we do business overnight. Our teams have done a tremendous job shifting to an off-premise only operating model and executing in the face of significant adversity. We have seen these off-premise sales volumes accelerate and I want to thank all of our staff members for their commitment to keeping our business running and continuing to serve our guests. I also want to extend our gratitude to our international partners as well as our vendors for ensuring that our restaurants are supplied with our key ingredients and the necessary items to keep our staff members and guests safe. We have implemented meaningful cost savings measures, none more difficult than the furloughing of a significant number of our staff members. We have also reduced board, executive and corporate support staff compensation, eliminated non-essential spending and suspended new unit development for now. We have balanced these actions with planning for an eventual reopening of our restaurant dining rooms, although social distancing restrictions are expected to impact on-premise dining for some time. By maintaining our restaurant management teams, field leadership, and adequate corporate support, we believe we are well positioned for a strong restart. With a number of states now reopening or communicating their plans to soon open, we have shifted to planning for the reopening of our dining rooms We will execute our plans within the guidelines of local jurisdictions at a varying pace across the country and with an enhanced focus on social distancing and other appropriate health and safety precautions. The size of our restaurants and our flexible seating layouts will uniquely enable us to ensure ample levels of social distancing while maintaining sufficient seating capacity to generate what we believe could be meaningful sales volumes. Our teams have been nimble and innovative in the COVID-19 environment, and we believe their execution of our reopenings will be similar. Given the dynamic situation, we are constantly reevaluating our reopening schedule and currently plan to open several Cheesecake Factory restaurant dining rooms in multiple geographies as soon as next week. We will share key learnings and best practices across our system as additional relaunches are phased in. At the same time, we will continue to focus on generating the strong off-premise sales volumes that our restaurants have been producing. In the over 40 years since our founding and our tenured leadership team has weathered numerous economic downturns, including 9-11 and the Great Recession, while we have never experienced anything quite like this, Thank you, David.