Portillo's Inc. Q4 FY2022 Earnings Call

Greetings, and welcome to Portillo's Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2022 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A brief question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Barbara Noverini, Portillo's Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our fiscal fourth quarter 2022 earnings call. With me on the call today is Michael Osanloo, President and Chief Executive Officer; and Michelle Hook, the Company's Chief Financial Officer. Let me also remind everyone that part of today's discussion will include forward-looking statements. These statements are not guarantees of future performance and should not be unduly relied upon. We do not undertake to update these forward-looking statements unless required by law, and refer you to today's earnings press release and our SEC filings for more detailed discussion of the risks that could impact Portillo's future operating results and financial condition. Our remarks also include non-GAAP financial measures, such as adjusted EBITDA and restaurant-level adjusted EBITDA. We direct you to our earnings release issued this morning, which is available on our website for the reconciliations of these non-GAAP measures to the most comparable GAAP measure. Any non-GAAP financial measures should not be considered as an alternative to GAAP measures, such as net income or operating income or any other GAAP measure of our liquidity or financial performance. Finally, after we deliver our prepared remarks, we will open the lines for your questions. Now let me turn the call over to Michael Osanloo, President and Chief Executive Officer.

Thank you, Barb. And good morning, everyone. We appreciate you joining us for our year-end earnings call. Portillo's had a great first full year as a publicly traded company. Our brand is synonymous with quality and value and true to form; we closed 2022 with solid financial results and we're off to a great start for '23. I'm excited to share more about what's on the horizon for us, give you a preview of this year, but before I do, let me recap our fourth quarter financial results. In the fourth quarter of 2022, total sales increased 8.6% to $150.9 million. Same restaurant sales grew 6%. For the fiscal year of 2022, total sales increased 9.7% to $587.1 million. Same-restaurant sales grew 5.4%. We ended the year with an average unit volume of $8.5 million per restaurant. Restaurant level adjusted EBITDA margin was 21.2% for the quarter and 22.6% for the fiscal year. Now Michelle will go over financial results in more detail, but let me discuss the underlying drivers of our performance as we closed out the year. People love Portillo's. Many fans bring us into their homes for holiday gatherings and celebrations, and we certainly lost a little bit of momentum during winter storm Elliott that week of December 23, but weather never keeps Portillo's fans away for very long. As you'll see in a graph provided in the earning supplement, sales bounced right back the following week and we've maintained strong sales since. Our entrees sold and transaction metrics are both up year-to-date in 2023. Now that includes some pent-up demand from the storm, but it also gives us confidence that our price laggard strategy is working well. Again, Michelle is going to give you more detail in a moment, but we feel really good about where we're priced compared to competitors and the value proposition that creates for our guests. Let's pivot to where it's a little warmer and talk about what's been happening in the Sunbelt. Recent openings in Kissimmee, Florida, The Colony in Texas, and Tucson, Arizona, get us nearly through the class of '22 with Gilbert, Arizona on deck to open, and let me express how good that little bit of sunshine feels. In particular, we're thrilled with the reception we've received at our first restaurant in Texas. Since our grand opening on January 18, The Colony has been the number one restaurant across the entire system. This location has been matching the volumes of restaurants in Chicago that have been opened for decades. Specifically, The Colony has averaged $48,000 in sales per day since the grand opening. Now that annualizes to $17 million per year, and that's a crazy number, so please don't model that. It's definitely coming down, but we feel really good that this restaurant will significantly exceed our underwriting expectations and set us up for further success in Texas as we continue to expand. We took the time we needed to make sure that this restaurant opened well, with everything and everyone in place to be successful. In its first 30 days, guest satisfaction scores at The Colony have outperformed the 30-day average of all the restaurants we've opened since 2021. This early outcome validates what we've learned along the way; that disciplined openings set up our new restaurants for success. We're also getting a really good read on our other restaurants in the class of '22. Our Portillo's pickup location in Juliet, Illinois, has just over a year of operating history now. St. Pete is about to reach its first anniversary, and Schererville, Indiana has been operating for over a quarter. All these restaurants are performing well and all are exceeding our underwriting expectations. We expect that to continue for the full class of '22. Looking ahead, we're committed to opening nine new restaurants in 2023, with a heavy emphasis on the Sunbelt. We're already out of the gate in Texas. We recently announced our next locations in Allen and Arlington, and we've started work on both sides. As we continue to navigate the new normal in the restaurant development life cycle, our '23 openings will still be back half loaded. However, we're already planning to better balance our '24 restaurant openings across the four quarters. As we continue to bring Portillo's to both new and long-time fans across the nation, we remain focused on creating value for our three core constituents. We're taking care of our guests by delivering delicious food at an unbeatable value. We're providing unrivaled work and personal growth experiences for our team members, and for our shareholders, we're committed to improving our already healthy restaurant level margins despite the flurry of restaurant openings in '23. With that, let me hand it over to Michelle.

Great. Thank you, Michael, and good morning, everyone. Before we discuss our fourth quarter financial results, let me address our November 2022 secondary offering. We completed the sale of approximately eight million shares of Class A common stock at an offering price of $22.69 per share. We used the proceeds to purchase shares primarily from the private equity firm that acquired Portillo's in 2014 and subsequently sponsored our IPO in 2021. The transaction allowed them to monetize another portion of their holdings in Portillo's. This is a common and expected course of action. In private-equity backed IPOs, sponsors will reduce their ownership over time for the simple purpose of returning capital to their limited partners. No one from Portillo's management team sold shares in the offering. We completed two secondary offerings in 2022, which have collectively increased the liquidity of our Class A common stock, and diversified our shareholder base. Since the end of Q2 2022, we've increased the amount of publicly-traded Class A shares from 50.4% of total shares outstanding to 67% of total shares outstanding. Note that these transactions only caused the ratio between our publicly-traded Class A and privately-held Class B shares to shift, but total share count remains the same. These transactions have not diluted existing PTLO shareholders. Now turning to the results of our fourth quarter 2022, where we saw strong top line growth. During the fourth quarter, revenues were up $150.9 million, reflecting an increase of $12 million or 8.6% compared to last year, driven by a 6% increase in same restaurant sales combined with the opening of five new restaurants since the beginning of the fourth quarter of 2021. The same restaurant sales increase of 6% was primarily driven by an increase in the average check of 6% and a 2.3% impact from the change in recording third party delivery pricing. This was offset by a 2.3% decrease in transactions. The higher average check was driven by an approximate 7.9% increase in certain menu prices, partially offset by lower items sold per transaction. We experienced positive trends through the quarter until winter storm Elliott significantly disrupted sales during the last week of our fiscal quarter. We estimate that the storm had a negative impact of at least 70 basis points on our same restaurant sales growth in the fourth quarter of 2022. Subsequent to the fourth quarter of 2022, we have seen improvements in our sales trends as same restaurant sales grew 12.3% in our first fiscal period of 2023, and we estimate same restaurant sales to grow 7.9% in our second fiscal period of 2023. We currently anticipate our same restaurant sales growth to be in the range of 8% to 10% and total revenue growth to be in the range of 16% to 18% for the first quarter of 2023. We expect to open nine new restaurants in the class of 2023 in the back half of this year with three to four targeted openings in the third quarter and the remainder in the fourth quarter. Now, let's look at our cost. Cost of goods sold, excluding depreciation and amortization as a percentage of revenues increased to 35% in the fourth quarter of 2022 from 32.6% in the fourth quarter of 2021. This increase was largely driven by a 14.5% average increase across most commodities, especially in beef and chicken. Additionally, cost of goods sold was negatively impacted by 1.4%, resulting from the change in recording third party delivery pricing. These increases were partially offset by the increase in our average check. In 2023, we expect our overall commodity inflation to ease and our currently estimated mid-single digit commodity inflation for the full year. As you would expect, it will start high and taper down over the course of the year. For reference, Q3 of 2022 was up 15.4% and Q4 of 2022 was up 14.5%. Q1 of 2023 will be a sequential improvement from these past quarters. Now let's look at labor. Labor as a percentage of revenues increased to 26.5% in the fourth quarter of 2022 from 26.2% in the fourth quarter of 2021. The increase was primarily driven by incremental investments to support our team members, including hourly rate increases made in Q3 2022 and higher variable-based compensation expense. These increases were largely offset by an increase in our average check and operational efficiencies. We anticipate making continued wage investments in 2023 and remain committed to providing a competitive total rewards package for our team members. Other operating expenses increased $3 million or 20% in the fourth quarter of 2022, which was primarily driven by new restaurant openings in 2021 and 2022, as well as increases in repairs and maintenance expenses. Occupancy expenses were flat as a percent of sales. As a result of the above, restaurant level adjusted EBITDA decreased 8.5% to $32 million in the fourth quarter of 2022. Restaurant level adjusted EBITDA margins were 21.2% in the fourth quarter of 2022 versus 25.2% in the fourth quarter of 2021. The 400 basis point decrease in restaurant level margins was primarily driven by the continued impact of increased commodity costs and to a lesser extent, labor investments. We partially offset higher expenses through menu price increases and operational efficiencies. We raised menu prices 1.5% in the first quarter of 2022, 3.5% during the second quarter of 2022, and 3.4% during the fourth quarter of 2022. These actions resulted in an effective price increase of approximately 7.9% in the fourth quarter of 2022 and 7.5% year-to-date. During mid-January of 2023, we did increase menu pricing to reflect a net 2% price increase as we continue to combat inflationary cost pressures and restore our margins. Our G&A expenses decreased 33.6% to 11.7% in Q4 2022 from 37% in Q4 2021. The absence of IPO-related expenses in Q4 2022 contributed to the overall decreases in equity-based compensation of $25.5 million, option holder payments of $6.6 million, and transaction-related fees and expenses of $2.3 million. Variable-based compensation also decreased by $1.7 million in the quarter. These decreases were partially offset by increases in our people and business. We will continue to make investments in G&A in 2023 and estimate that full-year spend will be in the range of $72 million to $77 million. Pre-opening expenses increased $1.7 million to 2% in the fourth quarter of 2022 from 0.9% in the fourth quarter of 2021. This increase was due to the timing and geographic location of activities related to our planned restaurant openings at the end of fiscal '22 and early fiscal 2023. We expect pre-opening expenses to be between $7.5 million to $8 million in 2023, which covers four class of '22 restaurants and the nine additional restaurants we expect to open during the second half of the year. All this led to adjusted EBITDA of $18.1 million in the fourth quarter of '22 versus $23.2 million in the fourth quarter of 2021, a decrease of 22.1%. Below the EBITDA line, interest expense was $8.4 million in the fourth quarter of 2022, an increase of $0.8 million from the fourth quarter of 2021. This increase was primarily driven by $2 million of additional interest expense on our first lien term loan due to an increased interest rate, partially offset by lower outstanding borrowings under our first lien term loan and by the payoff of our second lien term loan. As of the end of the fourth quarter, the effective interest rate on the first lien term loan was 10.4%. On February 02, we announced that we entered into a new five-year, $300 million term loan and $100 million new revolver facility. The proceeds under the term loan and revolver facility, along with cash on hand, were used to repay outstanding debt under our previous first lien term loan and transaction-related expenses. At prevailing rates, the all-in interest rate on the term debt has been reduced by approximately 270 basis points. At these rates, we expect that our annual interest expense in 2023 will be approximately $8.5 million lower as compared with our previous debt facilities. This new credit agreement provides additional financial flexibility to pursue our growth strategy and other strategic initiatives. Income tax benefit was $1.7 million in the fourth quarter of 2022 and an income tax expense of $1.8 million for the year. Our effective tax rate for the year was 9.6% versus 20.9% in 2021. Our future effective tax rate will fluctuate as Class A equity ownership increases, and as equity-based awards are exercised. We ended the quarter with $44.4 million in cash. Subsequent to the quarter, we deployed approximately $9.7 million of cash on hand in connection with the refinancing to pay off the existing term loan and transaction-related fees and repaid $5 million of outstanding borrowings under our new revolver facility. Going forward, we will be using our cash balance plus operating cash flow to support our continued growth. In 2023, we are estimating our capital expenditures to be between $70 million to $75 million. We remain committed to delivering healthy top-line and bottom-line growth in 2023 and beyond. More importantly, we're confident in our long-term outlook that was provided in our earnings release this morning. Thank you for your time. And with that, I'll turn it back to Michael.

Thanks, Michelle. Before we open for questions, I want to thank our Portillo's team members for all of their hard work in 2022. We persevered during a challenging year for the restaurant industry, and this is because we kept our focus on what matters: an unrivaled experience for our team members and our guests. And it's working. Our guest satisfaction scores continue to be the highest they've been in three years. Consumers are choosing Portillo's. Our sales and comp trajectory continue to show that. In 2023, we're focused on balancing the needs of our three core constituents. We're creating value for our guests by delivering delicious food at a great price point. We're creating value for our team members through great work experiences, and we're creating shareholder value by improving our already healthy restaurant level margins. We'll keep delivering on those promises. Thank you. With that operator, can we open the line for questions?

Our first question is from Sara Senatore with Bank of America. Please proceed.

I actually just wanted to sort of dig into the margin piece and the cost outlook and specifically, if you can give us any kind of guidance. I know you're looking to improve that. Maybe sort of talk through how much price you expect to have on the menu and also more specifically, you talked about continued labor investments. My sense had been that your wage inflation has been pretty much in line with the industry in the double-digit range in 2022. So could you talk to that? Did you perhaps get a later start to raising wages? Is it to stay ahead of the curve? Should we expect to see more broadly maybe another wage cycle in 2023? I'm just trying to understand sort of the complexion of the margin outlook and wages in particular.

Good morning, Sara. Let me start and I'll turn it over to Michelle. On pricing, I don't think, hopefully it's not lost on anyone that our pricing last year lagged our competition. And when we look at the underlying metrics—when we look at our traffic trends, our sandwich count metrics, when we look at guest satisfaction scores, speed of service scores—we feel really, really good about the value that we're providing guests. We think that we have untapped pricing power. So I'm not going to say specifically how much we're going to price this year, but we feel like we have pricing power, and it's right and appropriate to catch up to the pack in terms of overall pricing. And then I'll let Michelle talk about labor. The one thing I'll tell you is the gift that keeps on giving for us on labor is we have worked very, very hard as an organization to ensure that we are providing a great experience and a great environment for our team members. Our gap in hourly turnover versus the rest of our competitors is actually getting bigger. We have anywhere from a 40-point to 50-point gap on turnover versus other limited-service restaurant companies. Our gap on turnover with our management teams has also increased. And you know, right turnover is hugely important to this industry. There are soft costs and hard costs associated with it. The hard cost is relatively easy to measure. The soft cost is a little bit harder to measure. I think that the investments we're making more than pay for themselves in terms of team member satisfaction and lower turnover, which in turn generates better guest experiences.

I would just add on to what Michael's saying in terms of the pricing and the margins. With the pricing that we put out there with the 2% we took in Q1, we'll be at around 9%-ish in the first quarter of '23, and then we'll be lapping a price increase in mid-May. So if that falls off, you'd be at about 5.5% price if we took no action. But as Michael said, we're going to remain fluid and flexible in our pricing approach. We're not committing to anything beyond what we've already announced with the January price increase because we have to continue to see how the landscape plays out with both commodities as well as the labor environment. I mentioned in my prepared remarks that we do expect to continue to make investments in labor. I think when you look at our labor inflation in '22, we saw double-digit inflation that started to come down a bit in the back half of the year, so we were at about 9% labor rate inflation in the fourth quarter. I expect that to come down as we start to lay up some of those numbers, but we do expect to make continued investments in labor as well in '23.

Okay. I'm sorry, just to put a finer point on it. It sounds like you couldn’t take price to broadly cover inflation. So as we think about margin expansion, should we be thinking about leverage on positive transactions or is there something else that might go into that?

Yes, Sara, absolutely. We've always discussed that as we think about combating inflationary pressures, using prices as a mechanism to do that. So we'll continue to think of it in that regard. Then the other thing is our operational efficiencies that we've talked about over the course of '22. We're going to be looking to see if we can do some additional things within our restaurants to help the margin profile. The expectation is, and Michael mentioned this in his remarks, that transactions as well as our entree count have been positive year to date. I know it's early on, but it’s to be determined for the remainder of the year, but we're seeing good trends there early on.

Our next question is from Sharon Zackfia with William Blair. Please proceed.

Hi, good morning. I'm curious if you could talk about commodity inflation. I know you mentioned it's going to drop off as the year goes on and it would be lower than the fourth quarter sequentially in the first quarter, but there's a lot of room to be lower than 14.5%. So, can you give us kind of how you expect commodities to play out as the year progresses? And I don't know if I missed it, but did you talk about kind of where you are on the percent of your basket that's locked?

Yeah, Sharon, obviously the year is, you know, there's a lot of year left to play out, but I don't expect it to be the 14.5% we saw in Q4. As I said, I do expect sequential improvement, but as you can imagine, I don't expect that to fall off a cliff either and all of a sudden get us into a range that is single digits or even mid-single digits. But based on what we know today, I would expect that again, that improvement quarter over quarter. We have locked in and we do have some hedge positions. We're at about 34%, about a third locked for the full year in '23. As you know, most of the positions that we take is generally on those B flats where we do forward buys on that. So we have that pretty locked in for Q1. We've taken some positions in the remaining quarters on that particular line item, and then we're working through some other items on our basket today. But I do expect the easing in those chicken and pork proteins as most have said over the course of the year. But beef, again, expect that to be more of a pressure in the back half of the year as we continue to see on that trend. So that's what we know today. But again, a lot of year left to play out and we'll update you as we continue to get more information.

Thanks for that. And then a quick question on The Colony. Those are pretty jaw-dropping volumes. I can't even imagine what it's like to be a team member at that location. I guess just given those volumes of understanding, there's some honeymoon, but still, does that kind of accelerate any idea of opening a location that might cannibalize some of that? I'm not familiar, if you've got something in the pipeline that might take off some of that pressure.

Thank you for your comments. You're correct, these numbers are impressive, and our team has done a fantastic job. We've learned a lot and may have invested significantly in our experienced management team at Portillo's. We're very proud of their work. We had planned to open an additional four to five restaurants in Texas, aiming for that range by the end of this year. We have announced two more and may add a few more in Texas this year. I believe The Colony will stabilize, and we shouldn't worry about cannibalization just yet. It is an important flagship restaurant for us in a prime location, and I expect its performance will be similar to that of our Chicago market restaurants rather than an average out-of-core location. We're receiving numerous inquiries about our potential success in Texas and whether people will enjoy Italian beef here. Although it has only been six to eight weeks, I am confident the answer is a resounding yes. Customers appear to love our beef sandwiches, and given Texas' affinity for beef and bread, it's not surprising.

Our next question is from David Tarantino with Baird. Please proceed.

Hi. Good morning. Just first a question about the fourth quarter. I don't think you mentioned the entree count growth, if you had the entree count growth number, that would be helpful.

Yeah, David, it was in the quarter. It was negative for the quarter, but if we excluded the impact of the storm, we would have been flat. All in, it was negative for the quarter, would have been flat excluding the impact of the storm.

Okay, great. And then just kind of circling back on the new unit performance, especially in Texas. I guess Michael, based on your observations or your data collection for that location, I was wondering if you could just elaborate on why you think it was so strong in the early days. Do you think it's more related to the site you picked, or do you think it's more related to the consumer demand for your type of product? I know you mentioned the beef sandwiches are popular, but I guess what's your thought on this being a leading indicator for the rest of the market as you go forward?

Great question, David. I'm going to give you a cop-out answer because it's a little bit of everything you just said. It is undeniably a great location and we're thrilled to be partnering with the folks who've developed that area. There are world-class retailers like a Nebraska Furniture Mart there and a Shields. We have a fantastic location in a very, very well-designed development. It's right next to a business complex in Frisco. It's a mile away from all of the office buildings in Frisco. So it's great. Now that said, we invested time, energy, and money in marketing Texas. We sent the beef bus down for two tours to generate excitement, energy, and demand. We over-invested to some extent with a fantastic multi-unit manager down there, a fantastic general manager down there, and 70% of our management team and crew chiefs have Portillo's experience. So, we stacked the deck to make sure that we can handle these volumes, etc. We are, despite all that, I am a little surprised and overwhelmed by the response that we've gotten. I think that Texas can be either hit or miss for restaurant companies. If you do well, if you really approach it with a sense of humility and work hard, you can be great. If you try to mail it in and just assume you're going to be great, you might stub your toe. We are approaching our Texas expansion with a great deal of humility. We're looking for A-plus locations. We're going to continue to over-invest in management team and training of our team members. We’ll open the restaurant when it's beautiful and ready to go and the folks are ready to go. I think we did just a lot of things right and as we continue, we'll continue to get a lot of things right. My hope is that it is a precursor of what we can expect for Texas. But, look, Florida is doing really well. Our newest restaurant in Tucson, Arizona is just fantastic. We feel like we've got the flywheel working for us in the Sunbelt. There are certain elements that make it easier, I would say to work in Texas, but our first restaurant there is in a relatively high-priced location. We're paying really well. We're paying for great labor. We're expecting greatness out of our team. So I would tell you that don't think of it as coming out of the gate with Chicago-like margins.

Our next question is from Brian Harbour with Morgan Stanley. Please proceed.

To that point you just made, Michael, maybe comment on the margin performance of some of the other new locations, not just Texas, but are they coming in better than you expected or perhaps not. And how do we think directionally about the impact of those new units as we think about margins for the first quarter, and then also kind of the second half of the year where you will have quite a few openings as well?

Yeah, let me give you a sort of the philosophical part of the question—the answer, and I'm going to let Michelle give you a little bit more. But keep in mind, when we open a new restaurant, it’s—I would really be hesitant to draw any conclusions about margin in the first couple of quarters because we have a new restaurant opening team helping out. We over-invest in management. When you're running at the volumes that we have right now, you need all hands on deck to help. It's very important to provide guests a fantastic experience, right? You can, when you're first in market, you're at a new restaurant, it's really important to provide a great experience or you're going to chase people away for a long time. We over-invest, and I frankly don't even care about the margin coming out of the gate for the first couple quarters. It will stabilize over the course of the year, and then it will improve. What we think works really well is get the restaurant on the right footing, get it going right away from a guest satisfaction standpoint, from enticing crew members to stick around. Then the margin comes fast. For us, Michelle's talked about this in the past, that when we reach six to eight restaurants, there's like an inflection point on our operating margins. Once we've decided that a market's going to work for us, it is important to us to get to scale relatively quickly to start seeing that material margin improvement.

Yeah, and I think just to add on to that, Brian; Michael's absolutely right. As we talked about, the profile for a class of restaurants, right, and that's sort of how we're bucketing these. When you talk about the class of '22 or even the class of '23, the typical profile for that class is high teens margins in year one, slight improvement to flattish in year two, and then it starts to grow in year three. Scale does matter as Michael pointed out. So that's going to be important as we continue to get to scale. But I think that when you think about the overall margin profile of Portillo's, as Michael mentioned in his prepared remarks, we're committed to improving that despite the restaurant openings in '23, because we know, and we've talked about that we purposefully had margin degradation in '22 because of our price laggard approach, and so that is what we're looking to do in '23, despite the openings.

Our next question is from Andy Barish with Jefferies. Please proceed.

Hey, good morning everyone. Just wanted to dig into a little bit more on the margin discussion, just from an operational improvement efficiency perspective. I know you guys have done some good work around that over the last, year and a half, two years. Is this something we should think about as kind of annually an opportunity to drive more productivity in your business? And then secondly, just I know you're working on a new kitchen 2023 design. How does that roll into the restaurants for this year's build?

Yeah. Good morning, Andy. Good to hear from you. Here's what I'd say. We aspire to be a great company and be a great operator, and that means that you're always trying to get better and improve. While we're a 60-plus-year-old brand with a great legacy, there's a lot of things that we can get better at operationally. Operational improvement is a thing that's going to be around a Portillo's for quite a while. I think operational improvement is a thing that we can continuously pursue. We had fantastic efficiencies last year. We did a really good job of becoming more dynamic and efficient. We're doing things that I think will continue to enable that. One of the investments that Michelle alluded to with labor is what we call the Step Up program. If Andy is my rock star beef maker, but that's all he's done and he's getting to a certain hourly wage, you can go and cross-train, you can learn how to make hotdogs at the station we call table. You can turn around and work broiler and with every new station that you learn, we pay you more. With every new station that you learn, you're creating flexibility for the company in terms of staffing and utilization. That's a gift that's going to give and that we're figuring all the details of that out and our goal is to deploy the Step Up program in the second half of the year. You reference Kitchen 2023, which we saw significant savings where we tested it. It requires a little bit of CapEx and a little bit of pain to redo the restaurant, but we think we've got a really good idea on how to do that. We're going to target 15 to 20 restaurants in the Chicago area to retrofit towards Kitchen 2023 for this year. That will generate savings. We carefully look at our items for labor hour. It's a productivity metric. We look at the spread between the top quartile and the bottom quartile. There’s a lot of potential for improvement there. It's a multi-year journey, but it's also predicated on taking great care of your team members, right? You want happy, productive team members who are cross-trained and eager to work, and that's when everything works really well.

Yeah, really good color. Very helpful. Michael, and Michelle, just real quick on the other operating expense you mentioned in 4Q, what specifically is that and was there anything else that moved it up to 12%? I imagine utilities were probably pretty high in paper and packaging as well with catering and things like that. But just kind of wondering if this is a new run rate at about 12% of sales or so.

Yeah, Andy, we had some catch-up on repairs and maintenance that I called out in my remarks. Outside of that, obviously year-over-year when you layer in new restaurants, you're going to have some of that in there, which is what I called out on the new restaurant. The only other thing that I think I would call out to you that would be an outlier again, would be some catch-up that we did on the repairs and maintenance expense in Q4. But in terms of a run rate, again, I'm not going to get into future numbers, but that's what I call it for Q4.

Our next question is from Chris O'Cull with Stifel. Please proceed.

Yeah, good morning and congrats on the recent store openings. Very impressive. Michelle, given the comp trajectory in the first quarter, how should we be thinking about traffic or entree count growth as comparisons start to normalize?

I think Chris, Michael called out that we've seen positive transaction growth year to date. The thing that we continue to see is, and I've even talked to you and others about this before, is as we looked throughout '22 particularly in the back half of the year, we continued to see a negative impact from mix, which was that attachment or items per transaction. My expectation is I don't expect that to immediately turn around as we continue to live through this recessionary-like environment. So we're still seeing that as well as we come into '23.

Okay. And then it sounds like you expect to expand margin this year despite new store drag this year being more than last year. Other than pricing, what do you think are going to be the primary drivers of that improvement?

Yeah, pricing’s definitely a lever, Chris, that we're looking to pull as the primary lever. Again, I mentioned we put in the 2% in January. There's nothing else that Michael and I have aligned on moving forward. We're going to again, continue to see how the environment looks, but I would just point to exactly what Michael just said when he was talking to Andy about improvements that we're looking at in terms of Kitchen 2023, our step-up program, and as we look at our items per labor hour, which is our efficiency metric that we measure in our restaurant. We’re going to be looking to see if we can make some improvements there. Those are the two things, but pricing would be the primary lever.

Our next question is from Gregory Francfort with Guggenheim. Please proceed.

Hey, thanks for the question. Can you talk just a little bit about the recent sales trends you're seeing to start Q1? Specifically, January numbers were really strong and I think the whole industry's had a little bit of a pickup, but the industry may have easier comparisons, and I think you guys have tougher comparisons. So can you maybe talk about that dynamic and is there anything regionally that you're seeing or just thoughts on the consumer strength as a whole? Thanks.

I think January was honestly a little bit of a bounce back, some pent-up demand from that last week in December that we missed out on, so there's a chart in the supplemental that clearly identifies that. Now, even if you neutralize that, we are seeing a little more momentum in our business. I would tell you it's broad-based. It's not any individual market; it's broad-based momentum in our business. We feel really good about both the traffic trends as well as the sandwich count trends. And by the way, as our channel mix begins to stabilize, I think traffic is probably the more straightforward way to describe it, but we feel really good about that. I know I sound like a broken record, but for the last nine months, we've seen consistently improving guest satisfaction scores, speed of service scores, and value perception scores. So I attribute our step up in performance for the first two months to our price laggard strategy working; we're providing great value to our guests. They're telling us that they find great value; they're satisfied with us. Our guest satisfaction scores are now at three-year highs and I think that our strategy is working. We've lagged a little bit on pricing; we've said this—we invested in our guests in '22, and that is generating a little bit of beta when it comes to revenue performance at the beginning of '23.

Thanks for that. And then just a follow-up question on the Step Up program. I kind of hadn't heard of any restaurant doing anything like this before of paying you a little bit more as you kind of add different capabilities as a worker. I guess what drove the design of that? And I mean, are workers today in your restaurants just less cross-functional than they were in the past and you're trying to get back to a certain level? Is this going to put you at a new level of cross-functionality of workers? Just any thoughts on that and kind of where the genesis of the idea came from? Thanks.

I think it's honestly — it's rooted in a concept of pay for performance, pay for play. The first thing is when we ask our team members what they want, keeping great people, you want to keep great people motivated and happy. It's undeniable that when people are learning new things, they are actually happier. The genesis of this truthfully was that we want to keep our team members happy, we want them cross-trained, we want them to work multiple stations, multiple shifts. It's probably more important to us than some other restaurant companies because we have so many different stations within our restaurant. It's a great way of rewarding that. We can create a win-win dynamic. We can create really happy, engaged, excited team members because they're learning and growing. We actually can make our investors very happy because we can staff more efficiently and get labor productivity, and our guests are happy because they're getting high-quality team members who are super excited to be there. So it's kind of like a hat trick of wins for us.

Our next question is from Brian Mullan with Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.

Hey, thank you. Question on the balance sheet. Congrats to the team on getting the refinancing done. Michelle, with that in the rearview mirror, could you just touch on the priorities after you fund the CapEx requirement for needed for the growth of the business? Just philosophically, I'm wondering if you'd be inclined to want to pay down debt and deleverage a bit over time or whether you'd be more inclined to start to look at capital return over time. Then, is there a target net leverage ratio or a range we should keep in mind that you think is optimal?

Yeah, Brian, great questions and yeah, we're definitely excited to free up a bit more cash from the refinancing and have that in the rearview mirror. As I think you all saw during our Investor Day, we laid out where the CapEx is going to go. The vast majority of our cash is going to be funding the new restaurants that we're going to build and put investments into existing restaurants and then continue to make investments in other things like technology, etc. We've talked about digital menu boards and those types of things. Outside of that, to the extent that we have excess cash, I mentioned on the call, we’d started to pay down that revolver. We had $15 million outstanding on the revolver. I'd like to get that paid down. We paid $5 million off of that a couple of days ago. So we're at $10 million outstanding on the revolver. Outside of all that, I am open to whatever makes sense and is in the best interest of our shareholders, whether that's paying down debt or other avenues. If Michael and I and the rest of the leadership team are comfortable with dialing up growth, then we will do that because obviously that's the best investment and has a fantastic return, so that would be the primary avenue we would deploy capital. And just, sorry Brian, I didn't answer your question on do we have a targeted leverage ratio? I do not have a targeted ratio in my head. But I feel very comfortable that we can service the debt, invest in everything I just mentioned, and continue to grow.

We have reached the end of our question-and-answer session. This will conclude today's conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time and thank you for your participation.