Brinker International, Inc. (NYSE:EAT) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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The labor investments they’ll complete by the end of this year, the ones that we talked about last year. And then the repairs and maintenance. So it’s just not as big a priority, as some of these other things, but I would anticipate revisiting that discussion, probably a year from now assuming we have the results that we expect to have.

Chris O’Cull: Okay, that’s helpful. And then, Joe, I had a question on the guidance, the revenue growth guidance was roughly in line with the multi-year targets you guys provided at Investor Day, but per share range implied growth that was much wider than that 13% to 17% range. Can you give us a little detail or as to what’s causing the range to be wider from a bottom line standpoint, and maybe what assumptions gets you to the low and the high-end?

Joe Taylor: Yes, again we did widen the range a little bit relative to the target, the longer-term targets. I guess, we’ll obviously be able to give you more perspective on this as we move through the year, but again macro is probably the biggest issue as it relates to the lower-end of the guidance and as we kind of work our way through what the economic realities will be. We expect relatively stable, but you still have a sector that is functioning from a negative traffic standpoint. So we want to be respectful of that on the low-end for this initial guidance range. And then the high-end is going to be incremental success as it relates to some of our initiatives, particularly the traffic driving initiatives from an advertising standpoint, coupled with the ability for the management – operators to manage the P&L a little bit tighter, as they can get more muscle memory into the system as we kind of go forward.

So, those are really the two biggest things that will drive those two ends of the spectrum, there.

Chris O’Cull: Okay, great, thanks guys.

Operator: Your next question is coming from Andrew Strelzik with BMO.

Andrew Strelzik: Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking the questions. My first one and kind of revisiting a topic that was brought up earlier, as you’re rapidly ramping the advertising spending with a focus on the value messaging, what gives you the confidence that you’ll be able to use the in-store merchandising to drive the check and not lean too much into the value side of the equation. Is there any texture or incidents metrics you can share kind of so far, what you have seen on that front?

Kevin Hochman: Yes, I mean that’s been a real big bright spot. The way we’ve – structured menu merchandising and PLP inside the restaurants since we started the new strategy. So number one, it’s about making sure that the customer that comes in, for3 for Me or whatever that value messages, they can find it somewhere on the menu, but we don’t want to make it so obvious where the guests that didn’t come in for that trades down from a Fajita or any of our other items that would drive more check and provide a better experience for that guest at higher price. So, the results of what we’ve seen on that is that the 3 for Me mix has come down pretty significantly, even as we’ve taken pricing. So typically when you take pricing and you do couple waves of it, you typically would expect to see more mix start to shift into the value parts of the menu.

We haven’t seen that, in fact we’ve seen just the opposite where 3 for Me over time has actually gone down from when we started this journey. It looks like it’s about flattened out now. So we’re not, it’s not like we’re seeing a bunch of folks now, as we’ve seen the macro change a little bit, we don’t see customers trading into the3 for Me, and I think it’s part of it is, because of the way we are orchestrating the menu merchandising. The one area, I think we can do a little bit better job of actually providing some more presence on value inside the restaurant is our Margarita of the month, where we do – we’ve seen overall Margarita sales increase, because of the premium margaritas, but we feel like we can get better incidents by just driving a little bit more menu merchandising of Margarita of the month, at the point of purchase, to make sure we get that incidents with all guests.

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