Joe Gomes: Thanks. Congrats on the quarter. Just wanted to go back to Bombshells for a second. I know we’re kind of beating the dead horse here. But maybe Eric can you give us a little more color and detail as to how the San Antonio operator kind of left so to speak? And even though Bombshells is performing better than pre-COVID, it has been somewhat negative on a same-store sales basis here, I don’t know the last four quarters or so. How is that impacting your efforts to attract additional franchisees?
Eric Langan: Yes sure. I mean right now with the current economy we’re not getting a lot of franchise calls because it’s a $6 million-plus investment. And people are €“ I guess at the psychological €“ I call it a psychological recession, where people €“ nothing’s really changed for them other than maybe the gas and foods up for especially for maybe your top 50% of the population your bottom 20 probably getting very squeezed by those things. But there’s plenty of jobs for €“ especially in the even €“ with the tech layoffs, if you read the reports, most people are laid off in the tech reports were back to work within one week. Unemployment claims did go up. On as last time hundreds of thousands of people were laid off in a recession and unemployment payments went down.
So there’s plenty of jobs. And so when I say psychological, I mean people are expecting things to get worse and so therefore they are changing habits. And those changing of habits are what we have to adjust our business model too. I think we’re doing a fantastic job of that. As far as being the Bombshells look, we’ve expected €“ we knew we were going to get very hard comps. We knew that as all these new restaurants and all these spaces were being leased and we saw the construction going up that we were going to be effective for a period of time at those locations. We’re adjusting our model. We’re doing the things we need to do to get Bombshells back to their 18% to 22% margins €“ excuse me. And I think it’s just going to take time. We have to work through it just like €“ when everything €“ back in 2008, 2009, when we saw the €“ our earnings dropped $0.08 per share from the 20s.
And that was the first time we had experienced anything like that. And so, we had to adjust our models that took us a little longer. And I think this time, we’ve adjusted our models very quickly. Instead of globally, because of the information systems Bradley has put in place for us, we’re able to do this on a regional and club-by-club basis and that’s why we know that the recession — or I say recession — the slowdown, whatever this period of end, the consumer trying to decide whether you want to keep spend their money as they have in the past or save in case it slows down has been to the point where it’s affected certain clubs and not other clubs. And so instead of switching the model at all of our clubs across the country, like we did in 2008, 2009, we were able to target specific locations and make those adjustments.
And you’ll see the clubs are still positive. Our clubs are still comping positive. The Bombshells is a little different market and it’s not as geographically diversified as the clubs are. It’s all Texas-based, mainly Houston, where the majority of our locations are in Houston Texas. And so, like I said, we were affected. We’re affected by sports because we’re a sports bar. So when the Texans are winning three games in a year and one of them shouldn’t have been won, because they lost first-round after, those are the kind of things that are effected the Bombshells market a little bit. As we move into March, we’re going to have Mark Madness, the Suite 16 in Houston Texas this year at NRG Stadium. That’s going to be a huge event for us 1st of April.
