Good Times Restaurants Inc.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Good Times Restaurant, Inc. Fiscal 2023 Second Quarter Earnings Call. By now, everyone should have access to the company's earnings release, which is available in the Investors section of the company's website. As a reminder, a part of today's discussion will include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance, and therefore, you should not put an undue reliance on them. These statements involve known and unknown risk, which may cause the company's actual results to differ materially from results expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Such risk and uncertainties include, among other things, the market price of the company's stock prevailing from time to time, the nature of other investment opportunities presented to the company, the company's financial performance, and its cash flows from operations and general economic conditions, which could adversely affect the company's results of operations and cash flows. These risks also include such factors as the disruption to our business from the COVID-19 pandemic and the impact of the pandemic on our results of operations, financial condition and prospects, which may vary depending on the duration and extent of the pandemic and the impact of federal, state, and local governmental actions and customer behavior in response to the pandemic. The impact and duration of staffing constraints and wage increases for employees at our restaurants, the impact of supply chain constraints, the current inflationary environment and the uncertain nature of current restaurant development plans and the ability to implement those plans and integrate new restaurant restaurants delays in developing and opening new restaurants because of weather local permitting or other reasons increased competition cost increases or shortages in raw food products and other matters discussed under the risk factors section of good times the annual report of form 10k for the fiscal year ended September 27, 2022, filed with the SEC and other filings with the SEC. During today's call, the company will discuss non-GAAP measures which they believe can be useful in evaluating our performance. The presentation of this additional information should not be considered in isolation or as a substitute for results prepared in accordance with GAAP and reconciliation to comparable GAAP measures available in our earnings release. And now I'd like to turn the call over to Ryan. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, David. And thank you all for joining us on the call today. As mentioned, everyone should now have access to our second quarter earnings release and our 10Q filing. It is exciting for us to again report growth in same-store sales at both brands this quarter, and additionally, to be able to report traffic increases compared to the prior year at Bad Daddy's. We are also pleased to report improvement in restaurant-level margin this quarter compared to the prior year, driven by improved food costs at Bad Daddy's and continued strong labor productivity at Good Times. As both of our brands have meaningful seasonality, the March quarter generally reflects the lowest restaurant margins of the year, and we expect both brands to have sequential improvements in the June quarter as we leverage higher average weekly sales. This is particularly noticeable at good times where the concentration of our restaurants in Colorado results in weather-driven seasonality that is greater than we find at Bad Daddy's with greater geographic diversity. We have continued to prioritize product quality, hospitality and service, and reinvestment into our facilities, including addressing long-term deferred maintenance items. This is a bet that continuing to improve our existing operations will translate into strong long-term financial returns compared with aggressive unit level growth at the cost of deferring repairs on existing restaurants or compromising on the guest experience, which may generate initially strong but short-lived financial benefits. Nevertheless, we've begun construction on our new Bad Daddy's restaurant in Madison, Alabama, which is greater Huntsville. and we expect to open late this fiscal year. We also completed our remodel of the Greenville, South Carolina Bad Daddies in early April, and it has reopened to stronger sales than prior to closure. We treated this remodel and reopened like a new unit. We retained team members by having them work shifts in our other Greenville Bad Daddies, hired additional employees, and retrained all of our hourly team members working in the restaurant, whether new or returning, in our typical new unit training program and have reflected those and other typical opening costs as such in our financials. Further, as we discussed last quarter, we purchased the interest in five Bad Daddies in North and South Carolina, previously held by affiliates of the concept's original founder, and we could not be more pleased with the continued strong results from this portfolio of restaurants. We purchased interests which ranged from approximately 25% to 75% ownership in individual restaurants from these partners, and continue to see this acquisition as incremental to earnings and free cash flow. At good times, we have continued to see strong sales, and we continue to make investments in the form of creating signage, of which we expect to have approximately half of our system completed by the end of this fiscal year. As we have shifted from a speed at all costs model to one where we are balancing the need for speed, a price of entry in the QSR space, with improved friendliness and higher quality levels through improved product holding targets and procedures, refinements to our burger cooking procedures, and elimination of one of our fried potato products, we expect to both benefit speed and quality. We also have a plan to replace the menu panels in our few restaurants with dining rooms and at our walk-up ordering windows at our double drive-throughs with digital menus, similar to what has already been completed in the drive-through. This will serve to further communicate a modern and contemporary brand and eliminate one key element that currently communicates outdated and antiquated. Finally, we've balanced these investments and programs with returning cash to shareholders in the form of our share repurchase program. We purchased approximately 167,000 shares this quarter. As this program is executed under the safe harbor rules, our purchase volume is limited by those rules, and the most significant of which is related to trading volume. And so we expect that due to increasingly limited float and reduced trading volume, for our repurchases to be of similar or lesser shares in future quarters.

I'll now pass it over to Matthew to review this quarter's results. Thank you, Ryan. It's a pleasure to be on the call today.