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

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So I think going forward, we’re looking at easier comps because now we’re comping against a period where we had a bunch of new locations for other businesses opening in honeymooning, going against very strong comps. And like I said, I just like to remind everybody that the Bombshells segment, while our margins are a little off right now, we’re making some adjustments to get those back in line. But our overall revenues are still up 3.6% on a same-store sales basis from 2019 pre-COVID. So overall, the brand is still as solid today as it was in 2019, maybe not as strong as it is when you’re the only one selling liquor in town, but still very strong overall. We’ve just got to get like I said some of the costs in line. It’s very difficult. Your beef prices change daily, your chicken price has change daily, your labor costs have had creep, that is loosening.

I think our — like chicken has come way down in cost, but it may go back up with all these egg shortages and whatnot they can end up having chicken shortages at some point. So, we’ve got to watch those things. We got to adjust to them and keep our prices in line and keep things working in the right direction.

Rob McGuire: Thanks, Eric. One more for me here. You didn’t talk anything at all today about admire me. I was just wondering, maybe give us an update on where that program stands today? Thanks.

Eric Langan: Sure. So as of January 1, we have replace our developers. It was a very tough decision. And our developer was a Ukraine-based company. Ukraine is in a war as everyone knows. We tried to stick with that group and they’ve just been unable to perform and meet the standards and the time lines that we wanted. The new company came in on January 1. They took about six weeks to basically learn all the code, get the code together. They’re now making a lot of the — what we call bug fixes, they’re getting the bug fixes fix everything works correctly again. I would suspect that in about three months time, they will get us a viable product. That’s our hope. I think, the problem with all the bugs and things that just weren’t working properly, we were just spending money trying to get €“ we pay them to fix something and while they fix that they break something else, because they weren’t a coherent team.

The new group we have is a very coherent team. They’re working very well together. We’ve seen some major improvements in the site as far as the things that didn’t work are all fixed. I would €“ I guess, I suspect about three more months, we’ll have €“ maybe next quarterly call we’ll have some much better news on that front. But that’s a problem with technology but at least we’re not billions of dollars in like Meta. We’re keeping our cost relatively inexpensive relatively low number for the company on that transaction..

Rob McGuire: Great. Thanks for the insight Eric. Congrats again on the quarter.

Eric Langan: Thank you.

Mark Moran: Thank you so much for the questions Joe. We actually just got interrupted by a few individuals who walked into the office. We have large Tyler Moore and Dave Portnoy of Barstool Sports. Thanks for coming guys. Tyler, do you €“ you look like you got a question do you want to ask anything?

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