Mark Moran: Hi, Scott. We can’t hear you, if you have another question.
Scott Buck: Yes, sorry about that. Went back on mute. Yes, so, on Bombshells and the strategic review, you talk about a potential sale or at least exploration. You guys hired some outside help to kind of speed that process along, or, at this point, are you still kind of looking at opportunities internally to do something?
Eric Langan: We are working with an outside group right now as well as, you know, on a few things on our own as well. So, when we say we’re exploring everything, I mean, we’re looking everywhere, we’re talking with lots of people. But as far as getting ready to — as far as listing and what not, we haven’t gone as far as listing them for sale at this point because, right now, we are really kind of hoping we can find either the right partner like we did with AdmireMe or, you know, giving our — making the changes we’ve done internally and seeing if that is going to make a difference in a quick enough time period for my liking.
Scott Buck: All right, great.
Eric Langan: So, those are — that’s where we’re at with it.
Scott Buck: That’s helpful, Eric. And then just last thing, quickly, what’s the timing look like on the cash-out loan? And are you, you know, kind of in conversations with folks already about potential acquisitions?
Eric Langan: We’re pushing the loan because we have been in talk with several outside operators and would need significant cash-down payments. So, we’re going to just try to get that cash sitting on our books. We’ve been working on this for about five weeks. We had to get appraisals and environmental studies on a couple of the properties because they weren’t current. That’s all updated, and we should be going to loan committee in the next week or so.
Scott Buck: Perfect.
Eric Langan: So, I would look for — our hope is to close sometime either the last week of February, first week of March, to close the loan. So, hopefully, we can stay on that timeline as long as nothing comes up or nothing comes out of committee that was missed in the betting [technical difficulty] ran casinos in Black Hawk, ran casinos in Central City, both, for the past 20 some years, is very knowledgeable, is very well-known by the Department of Gaming as well as many of the other operators, employees and whatnot in that Central City Black Hawk area.
Robert McGuire: Great. And I’m sorry, you broke up a little earlier, but can you talk about what do you see your budget for the casinos, to the point where — what do you believe the budget will be when you complete the casinos?
Eric Langan: I’m sorry. Can you repeat that? I’m sorry.
Robert McGuire: Yes. Can you give us an idea of what the budget will look like to complete the casinos? I believe, you mentioned that earlier, but it was — you kind of broke up.
Eric Langan: Okay. Sure. The budget for the casinos is probably overall about $20 million for both properties, including the real estate purchases. We spent about $2.5 million on the deal, the real estate purchase are about another $8 million. So, we’ve got about $10 million more to spend. But it depends on how we’re going to spend — how we’re going do the machines. If we pay all cash for the machines, that would be a very significant amount of money. But it looks like we’re going to do — there’s some terms we can get that are like 12 months, same as cash. We don’t have to start making payments till after the machines are installed. With some operators, we can also do rev share. That will also create some, you know, cash outlay savings for us. We’ll still have to pay, but we’d have time to do that.
Robert McGuire: Great. Thanks, Eric. And then lastly, with regards to the macro-economic uncertainty that you’ve been discussing, I take it that — can you just confirm if it’s still in the blue collar, how’re your white collar customers are holding up? And then kind of in general, what do you think we have to see to move beyond this area or time period of macro-economic uncertainty?
Eric Langan: Well, I mean, we have to get rid of the uncertainty in the marketplace. You know, it’s funny because you read, you know, stuff in the media and you hear how great things are and jobs and this and that, but that when you go out into — on main street and you start talking with people, they’re uncertain. Even the people that are doing very well in their jobs right now are uncertain. Is my job still going to be here three months from now? Am I still going to be doing as well? You know, what are interest rates going to be? And we’re seeing that in the customer. You’re seeing the customer trade down, so — which is typically recessionary behavior. So, we’re definitely seeing the customer trade down. We’re seeing the customer maybe not come as often.
So, our Mondays and Wednesdays are becoming slower. And you’re going to start seeing us do some, basically what I call recessionary discounting on other days, which is kind of like dynamic pricing on — you know we do it on certain days rather than all the time. So, we’re going to see that happen as we’re moving forward. We’ve already got a lot of these things going into place right now. And, you know, until that customer’s confidence is back, I think we’re going to have to figure out ways to bring that customer in and get that customer to, you know, to continue to spend money.
Robert McGuire: Thank you. That’s it for me.
Mark Moran: Thanks so much Rob. We appreciate the questions. Next up, we’re going to have [Orchid Wealth], and I’d like to encourage everyone who has a question to raise their hand. And we’ll bring you up to the speaker spot. Orchid Wealth, take it away.
Unidentified Analyst: Hi, guys. Let’s go into the AdmireMe 2.0 that you guys are going to be doing. How long have you been dealing or engaging with this partner that you’re bringing on?
Eric Langan: Sorry, I better unmute myself. We started talking with them at Expo in Vegas in August, and we’ve kind of developed a relationship. We had to get comfortable with each other. We’ve laid out the foundation of expectations from both sides and done that. We’ve — we probably signed the agreement about three weeks ago, I believe, and they’ve been working on some skinning ideas and how they’re going to — what it’s going to look like, what the site is going to look like, have registered the domains and purchased the domain. So, we have those all ready to go for the new launch, and they’re very excited. You know, like I said, we’re shooting for basically some testing, which — we don’t need to do a lot of testing. The software is really just making sure that everything flows properly with design, so that we don’t end up with like you click on a link in our — on our site and actually end up, you know, seeing content or something from their previous website.
So, it’s basically just going through and make sure everything is working properly, and then we’ll be ready to launch. We’ll start a couple of specific clubs, putting on entertainers from those clubs first, getting everything rolling, and then basically do a full company-wide launch, hopefully, by May and June.
Unidentified Analyst: And then how long has this partner been in the business of doing this, in terms of like, they’re going to handle the credit card processing or all that aspect of the business, you’re basically supplying the performers or the entertainers?
Eric Langan: Kind of. I mean, yes, it’ll still be through our company. So, it’ll be our processing our stuff, but we’re going to be working with different banks than we work with, with AdmireMe, who they have a much longer and stronger relationships with, as well as other vendors that they’ve been doing. They’ve been in the business since the early 2000s, back when — it’s funny because we started talking about different people throughout the industry from back when Rick’s had dancer dorm back in ’99, early 2000s, and we all kind of knew the same people, and it was kind of funny that we were both in the business at the same time back then and didn’t really meet up back then. So, you know, I’m very optimistic and excited to see where the concept will go when it has the right software, because I think we have the right idea, we just didn’t have the right medium to basically put the entertainers and the customer base together.
And with their software, we’re going to be able to do that. And like I said, with full video streaming, that seems to be the big thing these days. So, very excited about when that’s going to go.
Unidentified Analyst: How many entertainers do you think you’re going to be able to at least offer this as an option by being an independent contractor within the firm? You know, how many..
Eric Langan: Well, I mean, we had — in 2023, we had over 25,000 contracted entertainers nationwide. So, I mean, if we can get 5% of them, that’d be 1,250. If we can get 10%, we’d have 2,500 and so on. So, I don’t really know. And that doesn’t count waitresses or any other front of house staff, whether, you know, there’s some bartenders or, you know, door girls, whatnot, that might be interested in being on this site. And then, of course, other clubs and outside people as well. So, I think, it’ll grow relatively quickly. We were doing pretty decent and growing it when we were pushing it, the few times we tried to push AdmireMe. But as soon as we start putting any people on the site, it would — we would run into bugs and problems that we’d have to stop and hold back and then try to fix the software.
