RCI Hospitality Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:RICK) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Q €“Unidentified Analyst: Perfect. All right. You guys — this presentation had a lot of good disclosure that you didn’t have in the past. So I just want to go through some sort of logistical questions and then talk bigger picture. So on Slide 15, you have a whole thing about club acquisition and development and on Slide 16 Bombshells acquisition development. And as you know in restaurants and sort of club business, when you’re doing a lot of remodels and your — Bradley talked about maintenance CapEx and repair and maintenance, but I suspect a lot of the clubs that you had to shut down, clubs that you had to reformat, the grading or the beer haul, I mean you’re running a lot — you were running a lot of stuff through the P&L that is going to be a cost center that will be a profit center as you roll in 2023.

I mean do you — and then on top of that, you have all the legal and transaction work associated with Baby Dolls and whatever you’re doing on the casino front. And can you try and sort of give us a sense of sort of how much sort of — I don’t call it onetime, but sort of how much sort of preopening or growth CapEx or sort of onetime stuff that sort of will be reversed in the coming periods? Is that — we sort of have our arms around sort of $2 million or $3 million EBITDA, is that sort of a good place to start in terms of sort of not recurring sort of inflation hit, but more just sort of onetime cost investment that will manifest itself in revenue in future periods.

Eric Langan: Yeah. So make it real simple, okay? Other than the San Antonio franchisee location, every one of these properties involve real estate that we now own. And so we purchased that real estate ahead of time. So there’s carrying costs. Like you said there’s legal costs, survey costs those types of things. Those are not capitalized. Those are expensed for the most part. And so yes, there’s cost. You also have interest carrying expense, right? So now these things are carrying interest. And so we’re having — it’s not a lot of expense. But when you look at this many properties, it starts to add up and it becomes a larger number. And what you’re going to see, as we move into the end of 2023 or second half of 2023, definitely I think in the fourth quarter of 2023, you’re going to see these — the early units of Heartbreakers, Jaguar, San Antonio the acquisition or maybe I certainly hopefully closed by March 31.

I mean I will be all over if we’re not open — we’re not done with this by then, but they should be able to get this work done. Our side is done. We — like I said we’re just waiting on the state of Texas and the seller to work out a couple of issues they have with each other. The Jaguars club in Lubbock which is under construction in the PT sub. All those are taking cash out right now, but that’s going to reverse as soon as they open — as soon as those locations are open and it’s a double source. So let’s say we are spending $0.50 million or $1 million a year, and now of sudden you got units to start making between $0.50 million and $2 million each unit here, all the sudden you’re going to see those big swings, right. So if you’re losing $0.50 million you make $1 million or $1.50 million swing in the EBITDA.

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