Conference Transcript - YSWY 2026-09-14

Speaker 2

All right. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Bonnie Herzog, and thanks so much for joining us today. It's a pleasure to introduce our next speakers. So with us today, we have YesWay's Chairman, President, and CEO, Tom Turkla, as well as CFO and Treasurer, Erica Ayles. First and foremost, I'd like to congratulate you both on the recent and successful IPO of YesWay. We can only imagine how much work went into that from your end, and I'm sure you're both happy to have that process wrapped up. So congrats. And then for background for all of you, Yesway was established in 2015. It's the 15 largest convenience store operator in the U.S. with 450 stores, and they're the proud owner of the famous AllSubs Burrito, following their acquisition of that company back in 2019. Yesway really is one of the fastest-growing convenience store operators, And they just recently posted very strong Q2 results, which included EBIT Dog-Guyne's range. Now, before we begin, I'm just going to, the company wanted me to note that today's discussion may include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Any forward-looking statements made today are based on management's current expectations, assumptions, and beliefs about its business and the environment in which it operates. For a more detailed discussion of risk, please see its final perspectives dated April 21, 26, as filed with the SEC on April 23, 2026, and other filings with the SEC. So any forward-looking statements represent the company's outlook of today, and the company disclaims any obligation to update these statements except as may be required by law.

Speaker 3

Okay.

Speaker 2

Now that's out of the way. So I wanted to kind of kick things off, and I thought it might be helpful since you've been public for a couple of quarters now. A lot of people in the room, you know, might not be as familiar with you and your business. So could you maybe take a minute to introduce, you know, yourselves, maybe your background, and then ultimately what led you to this stage today as a public company?

Speaker 1

Sure. Thank you, and thank you for having us, and thank you all. It's a pleasure to be here. um we're a bit unique because we sought this business out um we birthed it within a private equity platform i started brookwood which is a private equity firm about 33 years ago and we had the good fortune of selling our entire portfolio before the crash of 08 and then took a couple years off and i really was looking for businesses that were recession resistant but also could benefit from what i call our acumens our use of data-driven decision making our use of technology we looked at about 300 businesses chose the C-star business, looked at about 400 to 500 of our competitors, and then picked the geography, and then basically because we're private equity, raised the money. So we actually raised about $820 million. As Bonnie said, we're the fastest growing. We now have 450 stores. We're in nine states. But basically, we chose it, and ironically, we were just talking about this in a lot of meetings today and last week. One of the things we were looking for was businesses that it didn't depend on where you were in the world with regard to interest rates or price of oil or what's going on in the Middle East or who's in the White House and where the individual investor or, excuse me, the individual consumer didn't care about those things. And I use the term gobsmacked, if you guys have heard that term from Britain. But, you know, we started the business and got hit by a pandemic. And then the aftermath and, you know, put, what, $8 trillion of liquidity in the marketplace. Then now the war in Iran. And as Erica will tell you when she speaks, you look at our inside sales and look at our transactions, and every year they just creep up little by little. And so what we kind of concluded after all the work and all the research and all of the getting the business started and kicking it off and growing it was the individual consumer doesn't really change his or her behavior if your morning routine is to spend $10 on a burrito and a cup of coffee. And so then we basically picked the part of the country. We are very fortunate. We are very selective about what we picked in terms of the country. We didn't want to compete with Wawa, Rudders, and Cumberland Farms in every corner. We understood the impact of fuel margin on EBITDA growth, so we chose Midwest. We actually correlated states that had and did not have minimum wage legislation, kind of the regulatory things that affected your business, and then picked it and grew it. Our first acquisition, as Bonnie said, was in 2015, a 10-store portfolio in Iowa. And then culminating, we did 27 M&A deals to grow it with the Alsup's transaction, which is a 305-store portfolio in November of 2019. So in summary, we chose the business. We chose the location, and, you know, looking back now 10 1⁄2, 11 years later, we kind of proved our original thesis in terms of the consumer and the business itself. So we've been very pleased. And going public is a whole different story and a whole arduous process where you're largely dependent upon markets and bankers and things you can't control. And probably the best advice I gave my internal team is markets mean revert, run your business well, markets will come back to you, and if you run your business well, you get rewarded for it. And so, yes, it was a pain to go public. And, yes, it took a lot of time. I will say this, though, Bonnie. We spent the beauty of these conferences. You guys come to us in a room. When you're doing a road show, you have to get in a car and drive all over New York and Boston and other places. So we actually like this a lot better. So hopefully that's a good predicate for our business.

Speaker 2

Well, sort of on that point, thinking about your business, because I've known you for a few years now, Tom and Erica, can you maybe frame for us the industry and some of the drivers of growth that you see for your business?

Speaker 1

Certainly. I think the first and most important thing is it's an essential retail business. You're locationally bound. Most people come to C-stores who live five miles from the C-store, and so you sell things. You are convenient, and that gives it a leg up. And probably most of you know this, but about 85% of all fuel, you know this, especially sold in the country is sold in gas stations at convenience stores. So we have something that Jeff Bezos can't deliver. You have to come to our store to get fuel, and you really can't deliver coffee and some other things. So you have that location. I grew up on the west side of Chicago. My parents took us to an old Sinclair station where they gave out the dinosaurs, and they would go to get their brakes fixed and, you know, put the car up on a lift. You don't see that anymore. So the real estate itself, which is some of the best real estate in the country, that even was ahead of Red Crock and McDonald's and a lot of the fast food chains, changed. The nature of what you use, that real estate changed. Okay, and now it's basically moving into food service. So like others, and if you know Allsup's, we're one of three that are known as destination food service chains in the country. We sell 24 million deep-fried burritos. Actually, we sell more. Darren sells 46 million pizzas. We actually sell more items per store than Wawa and Casey, so we'll knock on that. But we sell 24 million burritos. And so the biggest thing is that we're convenient. The second is food service basically as a destination, as a convenience store, which we're certainly benefiting from. And third, which is probably the most significant driver of EBITDA, is something that we call a deus des machina. For those who remember your Latin, you know, the gift of gods, which is fuel margin.

Speaker 2

Yeah, we're going to talk about that.

Speaker 1

Okay, minimum wage legislation has pushed up prices, and so the individual operator needs to have higher prices so you have almost a doubling of the breakeven cost of fuel since we got in the industry. And so that's a gift. We take it, but we're all benefiting from it. I think you know that in spades right now as well.

Speaker 2

I did want to touch on that because clearly it's a key topic and, as you mentioned, one of the key drivers of your EBITDA. There's been debate about, you know, the sustainability of the industry's margins. I do think there's a structural change in the industry, as you kind of just touched on. So I think I understand that. But maybe touch on this for us, you know, how sustainable you think these, you know, stronger fuel margins are. And then how should we think about them in the current environment, given where oil is moving higher and, God knows, even higher?

Speaker 1

I'm going to have Erica answer this. She's answering all the meetings.

Speaker 3

So there's a couple pieces to that question. I think just first and foremost, we do subscribe to the belief that structurally we are in a higher CPG environment, both prior to the Iran conflict, in this period of extreme volatility that we were in during the second quarter, and then how does that get right-sized going forward? So Tom touched on the idea of the smaller individual operators, so those more akin to mom-and-pop ownership, there are very few levers that they have available to them to cover their operating costs. So those smaller operators maybe don't have a loyalty platform to augment inside sales and profitability. They may not have access to the same, you know, group of vendor funding that the larger players have access to. So they're really limited in how they can cover those outsized inflationary pressures. If you look at CPG over, you know, history, it actually tracks very nicely with inflation. There's obviously periods of volatility within that, but we do think that certainly if you look back even just prior to the Iran conflict, now we're in three quarters in what has been some robust inflation. So we do anticipate, you know, when we think about where do fuel margins go from here, we would expect, like we are hearing from many investors and many folks in the industry, to level set somewhere higher or at a minimum equal to where we started.

Speaker 2

And that's really a function, Erica, of the volatility that we're expecting to see and the continuation of that?

Speaker 3

It's hard to understand how the supply chain right-sizes itself in the near term, right? So we would anticipate some level of volatility to continue. The big question is how much and for how long, right? So we would certainly anticipate that happening, but even absent that, we would expect inflation in and of itself to continue to push CPG.

Speaker 2

Yeah. It's one of the hardest things I have to do as an analyst is try and forecast fuel margins. And then maybe touch on how you think your fuel business is advantage versus peers. I imagine we've talked about this a lot. It's just thinking about diesel and the portion of your fuel that is diesel, which I think is helping to drive the outside margins as well.

Speaker 3

So we have definitely leaned into the diesel side of our business. So if you think about our geography in West Texas and New Mexico, et cetera, there is quite a bit of truck traffic, as you can imagine. We've leaned into the diesel side of the business. So for those of you not familiar, that generally comes with a higher margin than over gasoline. Really just a simple equation of supply and demand with diesel. There is less diesel made. So that has certainly helped us, you know, from a CPG perspective. We generally are beating, if you think about Opus and our geography and the market, we're generally beating them on CPG, which is terrific. The other piece that we're seeing and really seeing it play out right now in this current environment is that diesel customer is absolutely less impacted by the street price of that diesel. So generally, they're passing that along to their customers, and then that is diffused out through the economy versus that direct relationship with the end consumer on the gasoline side. So we're seeing that certainly as a tailwind for us in particular in this environment.

Speaker 1

We also made a conscious choice to lead into it. As Erica said, we've commanded historically up to $0.14. It was disclosed in our S-1.5, so there's always been that spread of Delta where you make more. We actually have one of the highest percentages of diesel to total fuel of any Seastore chain that's not Loves or Pilots. So we're about 38% right now. And our new builds, of which there are not 92 new stores we've built in the past few years, those are all coming in over 40%. So the weighted average of our portfolio should inch up as well in terms of its percentage of diesel. But obviously we're doing it because it makes more money. Our geography makes sense for it. But we've made a conscious effort, you know, to basically own the land, buy land next door, put in high-flow diesel lanes to take advantage of that opportunity.

Speaker 2

And then sticking with fuel, I wanted to talk about fuel volumes. You know, during Q2, you reported same-store volumes that were quite impressive. They were up 1.4 percent, while July, I believe, same-store fuel volumes were also positive. So just want to understand how you're able to manage, you know, balancing really both volume, fuel volumes, and then the impressive fuel margins, especially in this difficult operating environment?

Speaker 3

Sure. So a couple things, you know, on the portfolio in general. So diesel, again, you know, we're continuing to see that benefit on the diesel customer. We are also seeing some of the new-to-industry stores continuing to ramp at a much higher clip than our legacy portfolio. So many of them are coming to market. They're coming into our comp set on, you know, following that 12th month. So month 13, they're in our comp set. But we're seeing them continue to mature. So that certainly helps. It's a nice tailwind. For the legacy portfolio, we've taken an interest in really using data to make sure that we have, we call it our pump health initiative. So we're using data. I'll give you just a small example where our FP&A team has started analyzing the start and stop time of every single one of our fuel transactions to try to identify what are slow pumps. It seems very simple and rudimentary, but I can tell you it's incredibly impactful, the speed of that transaction. We've all been at a convenience store where we're filling up with gasoline and it's taking too long and we say, forget it, we'll come back later. Oftentimes that's not met with a complaint from a customer, so our store manager may not even be aware that we have a slow pump. So that's given us opportunities to reinvest back into the portfolio. With pump upgrades, it may be as simple as we need to inform and get data in front of the operators that this particular fueling station needs to be changed, filters need to be changed out more often. It could be as simple as that. But that's just a small example of things we've been doing in our own portfolio. We've also added diesel or done fuel expansions where we've been able.

Speaker 2

Makes a difference. And then that, you know, thinking about the conversion, as you're getting the traffic, consumers filling up, how have your conversion rates been inside the store? Because I did want to touch on inside sales, because what I've seen from the broader industry, given all the pressures on the consumer, you have seen inside sales trend lower. just because of the macro and the low-income consumer. But I think about your inside sales and what you've been reporting. You know, what are you seeing in terms of recently the conversion traffic trends? What are you doing to kind of increase traffic into your store?

Speaker 3

Sure. So what we've seen, you know, from a conversion rate perspective, we certainly see on the fuel side of the business folks in a high-priced environment coming more often. That doesn't always translate on a one-for-one conversion, so the rate may have shifted slightly. But not seeing any meaningful movement. If you look at some of the Nielsen data out there in our particular geography, most of our region is actually down on a same-store basis, and we've remained positive. So what we see a few things, again, leaning on that diesel customer, What we can see in our loyalty platform is that pro-driver tier of our loyalty platform, those customers are spending three times the amount inside the store than our base tier loyalty customer. So that has certainly been meaningful. And, again, those new-to-industry stores continuing to mature has certainly helped as a tailwind as well.

Speaker 1

And the only thing I would add is it really does help to have a destination food service platform. And people will come to our store to eat food. And so the other thing, too, which we're finding out, which we've held a sacrosanct, we acquired Alsup's, you know, Alsup's also a 70-year-old chain, close to Mexico, world-famous burrito, and we have not touched that price. And so I was telling Erica just before I got in the plane last night, I saw my first Catterton Subway ad on TV, and they're all up to the $6 to $7 loyalty package meal, and we're at $4.99. So we're already known as a value shop, So we also believe that that has a correlation in terms of our inside sales. So people will come to us more because we're already known as Value Shop. And all of our strategic price analysis and increases have not touched the burrito. So we're not touching that. So everyone else is in search of getting down to a number we're already at. We understand that in our market. We're also primarily low-to-moderate income consumers in our marketplace, so it matters a lot. So we attribute that, too, to a reason why we have good inside sales, even in this high-inflationary environment, or certainly positive ones when others don't. And Erica's right. You look at the Nielsen data and the Sakana data, we're clearly taking market share, and I think that's another thing we talk about internally as a driver.

Speaker 2

No, that's helpful. And maybe frame for us, because certainly I wanted to talk about the iconic, you know, all-subs burrito, and I did taste it. It's good. Frame for us how much more runway you have for rolling that out. And then I know, I think you've talked about maybe entering into, you know, some other food service items. How have you supplemented that burrito?

Speaker 1

It's a great question. One of the things about us that is juxtaposed to our brethren is, you know, our industry basically has moved very heavy into the QSR heavy, you know, made-to-order food market. We did the opposite. I had a chef and I had a test kitchen. We wanted to ideate the next shredded lettuce hoagie sub from Wawa. And we bought the burrito. We shut it all down and made that our platform and centerpiece. We're a frozen, defried platform. One of the things you may not know about us, Bonnie does, but we have the best labor model. Let me avoid absolutes. We have one of the best labor models. My late father would have killed me if I said that, even though I think it's true. We can run a store with 2.6 employees per shift. We can actually run an entire shift, including serving food with one employee. Our entire food service operation, including cash trap with registers, is 300 square feet. So we went the other way. We understand the impact of minimum wage on margins. It's affecting everything you analyze right now, whether you're a grocery store or whether you're a QSR or whether you're a restaurant, it's affected by high minimum wage. So we expand. What we say about food service ideation is at the margin. So we're looking at pizza. We're looking at other things. Our third best-selling thing right now behind the burrito are chicken nuggets. So we'll have the basics. We have a grab-and-go, fresh sandwich, protein, hard-boiled egg section, small one because of where we are. But we're not going to become Texas Bass or Rudders or Casey's in terms of full, because that would lower our model. We also, it gives us greater white space. You know, I could buy a smaller store for 1,000 square feet and put an entire food service operation in there. Most of our competitors can't. So we are, like I said, we hold that sacrosanct. We sell 24 million burritos right now, 41 million proprietary food service items, all frozen fried. And if you ever look at our stores, they're all rectangles with a center cash wrap, two to three registers up front. And we can store it, fry it, and put it in cases all within a thin square foot inch.

Speaker 2

And you touched on this, and that's a good point. So to some extent, you're also rationalizing some SKUs, I believe. And then maybe go back to the pricing. Remind me, have you implemented some pricing or limited pricing on the burrito? And if so, have you seen that that has been sticking? Because it's still very affordable.

Speaker 1

Yeah, let me handle the first part, which is we are doing probably about two-thirds done with what I call skew rationalization. When you acquire 27 chains like we did, you acquire all their price books, you acquire all their distributors, and you have to basically do it in five years. You have to do it quickly. So we're just about done with all that integration right now, including skew optimization, getting rid of stuff you don't sell. Two of our items account for 50% of all that we sell in the food service. So we're cutting back things. This is not new. This is Dave's. This is Chick-fil-A. They want you to buy what they want to sell you. So we're doing menu optimization and skew optimization as well. As to the second point, I'll let Erica answer.

Speaker 3

So as far as, you know, where we could go from here, I would think that the first place is we are never going to change that burrito. And what I mean by change that burrito is the burrito platform, right? Our beef and bean burrito is by far our biggest seller, and we will never touch that. So the way we think about it is how do we augment that, right? I think there's opportunities for add-ons. which will be, you know, hopefully a really strong addition to somebody coming in for a burrito and a cold dispense. You know, Tom has talked about, you know, one of our top sellers is chicken nuggets. So how do we get into augmenting there? But as we mentioned, it's really about at the margin, right? understanding that the beauty of the simplicity and what we do from the vast majority of our food being frozen to fried to customer is not something we're going to Yeah, and to your second question, we had one small price increase to the burrito years ago in response to a vendor increase but it's all formulaic and algorithmic.

Speaker 1

We have not taken any proactive price increase and don't plan to.

Speaker 3

On that top item, we've certainly, in food service in total, done some pricing adjustments too, but as I mentioned, not on that top.

Speaker 2

And then sticking inside the store, private label, can you outline how meaningful your private label business is? And then maybe how you expect your private label business to trend over time. Sure.

Speaker 3

So on the private label, for the categories in which we participate, so that would exclude things like cigarettes and those categories. it's about 9% of inside sales. So, you know, fairly strong there. As Tom mentioned on the SKU rationalization, that's something we constantly look at where we can add new categories. The other thing that we would look to do is where can we be the sole source? So, again, just another easy example would be things like motor fluid, windshield washer fluid, where it's a very ubiquitous item and we can stop selling the national brand. That's not going to play when you think about chips and salty snacks, obviously, in many categories. But we do think that there's, you know, some opportunities on those sort of outside categories.

Speaker 2

Okay, and then outside of food service, what, you know, merchandise categories or initiatives do you think are going to create the greatest opportunity for you?

Speaker 1

So aside from the answer she just gave on optimizing our private label, we are ideating what I like to say is at the margin. So we are going to be introducing a chicken sandwich at some point to augment the chicken. We're looking at other categories. We're not going to go, as I said, the full panoply of food service items. So we're going to have things that will fill in, if you will, that are high quality. We don't have a whole lot to do, but we will do more. We're also looking right now, we've ideated a new 3,900-square-foot store. Our typical stores are 5,600 to 6,600 square feet. Those are the 92 that we built in the last four years, plus or minus. And one of the reasons is it gives us greater runway in markets where I can't get the same land. And so we could put a 3,900-square-foot store and still have 100% of our food service. And we're actually testing something in our first grand opening of our store coming up. We're actually going to shift to Spence BEP, which is a big category for us. But we're going to shift it from the back to the front, so we're doing an A-B test right now for it. So we're pretty tight in terms of what we sell where. But we're looking at things like that to highlight where that is in terms of the store to augment. But really, we're just about done with our rationalization and food service ideation, skepticization, and private label, a few things. We've got good plans in the food service side, but it's at the margin, as I said. And other than the dispensed dev, anything else you think we missed?

Speaker 2

No, I think you've hit the highlights. Well, what about nicotine? It's such a big driver, you know, inside sales for the convenience store industry. So how are you positioning yourselves there? I think from conversations you're shifting more of your focus to smoke-free, where the consumer is trending, anything else?

Speaker 3

Other tobacco products has absolutely been something that has been a growth engine for us. If you think about it, we see, like many of the retailers, cigarettes units declining. That has more than been offset by other tobacco products. So if you think about things like the pouches, et cetera, that's absolutely been both a top line, you know, expansion, but also from a margin perspective, absolutely.

Speaker 2

I think you can earn almost two or maybe three times more margin on some of those products versus cigarettes. So I know everyone's shifting. Let's shift topics now into, you know, NTIs and store openings. You have a target of opening 130 new stores in the next five years. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think most of those are supposed to be, you know, through your capital-like build-to-suit program. So could you touch on the return profile of building versus buying for us?

Speaker 1

Sure. It's the same target. We actually started shifting to building after we bought 27 because of the expansion of multiples. But we still have the same hurdle rate. We can build right now. We've built just under a billion dollars of the stores, the 92 stores. Our target, her rate's a 15 on levered and then a 30 levered, levered being the build-to-suit program. We're real estate guys. We like owning real estate. We own about 65% of real estate right now. And what we said in the S1, we'll always own the majority. But there's a tradeoff as well, especially when you're going public and thereafter, your first couple of quarters where you can actually augment your returns. 30 is better than 15 is the simple answer, right? And we have good runway to do so. So in our model, most of our short-term builds are built to suits, though because we're generating tremendous amounts of excess cash, not just from the fuel margin expansion but also from our outsized performance, and we don't have a lot of deferred maintenance in the portfolio. So it's all being directed towards moving stores up later in the cycle. We've reaffirmed the guidance at 130, but at some point we'll be able to talk about what we're doing in outer years to the builds. But in the short term, we'll do the build to suits. We did move two or three of the built-to-suits to NTIs just to deploy more capital sooner. So we like owning real estate. We'll always own the majority of it. My guess is it'll only have six in front of it because we like the flexibility. A lot of our profitability has come from buying land next door, putting in high-flow diesel, doing things that real estate operators would do to augment the shopping experience and the size of the store. So we don't want to lose that flexibility by owning somebody else's store or having a built-to-suit. So we'll trade off. But, again, we're CEO and CFO of a public company trying to augment returns to the extent to which we can generate 30s over 15s. Same thing on the buy, as you probably read about, and I'm sure you did, Bonnie, because we talked to you on our calls, but we're now ramping up again buying. We've got nothing to disclose yet. Obviously, when I do, we will. But we're very active, including incorporating a whole new department within the company. Right now, I have eight guys in the field that did nothing but unearth land. We don't go compete with a quick trip or a cases for a site. We try to get the site by talking to a farmer, things like that. So we're in market. We're doing the same thing on the acquisition side. We're going to basically have people in market who target ones and twos. We're going to see every big deal like everyone else will. We're going to see the medium-sized deals that will come from the Matrixes and the Raymond James. But we also want to go get, because I can get better multiples. And as Erica likes to talk about, there's also something that we just found out, discovered recently, where a lot of second-generation C-store owners don't want to run C-stores. So it's hard to be a small guy. It's harder to be mom and pops, and so we think there's a more opportunity. And I could buy those at multiples. We're not going to buy at a buy unless I get the same 15. But it's hard for you to buy a 13 or a 14 multiple. You know, Darren can do it when he's trading at a 19. And when we trade that way, we'll talk. We're not there yet. I'm kidding, but I'm not.

Speaker 2

And so to be clear, because, yes, you and I talked about this the other day, just in terms of your efforts there. So when you say one to twos, you know, you're looking at small operators, and you're going to do a bunch of those, almost bolt-on, tuck-in. and you can do that easier. And so does 130 new stores consider that? So that would be potential.

Speaker 1

This is all, yeah. We can't announce it yet, obviously, because we're a public company. When we have something to announce, we will. But we basically can't say it. We can say it as well because we started this way. We started with 27 M&A deals, buying single stores to a 305-store portfolio. So we have a history of buying big to small. But we're ramping up, again, only because we have tremendous amounts of excess liquidity. And, again, as you know, Bonnie, we've paid down a revolver. I mean, our balance sheet is the best it's ever been. And so, like I like to say, EBITDA is soonest. And it takes me 12 to 18 months, by the way, to build a store, so I can't just flip the switch. But I'm trying to load up things. We're buying more land right now to load things up. But the acquisitions will allow me to get EBITDA quicker, so we're ramping up. But the one thing, too, is simply if I could buy the single-digit multiple, I can synergize those down to a number that's equivalent to a build. It's hard to do when you're buying it a 12 or a 13 or a 14 multiple to try to synergize it down. So that might happen. We'll see. But that's what we're focusing on. But it's small ball. And also I mentioned this before. We have the added white space. We could buy a smaller store and do food service, and our competitors can't. They need bigger square footages for pizza kitchens and things like that. So we're targeting it deliberately.

Speaker 2

Okay, the flexibility and optionality. Exactly. One of the things, Tom, that I do get questions on is, you know, in terms of the 130 new stores, you know, your guidance for this year is to have six to eight new store openings. So sometimes investors will ask me, you know, why not, you know, build more this year, go faster in the beginning? Is this just a function of timing, the development? Are you being slower methodically in terms of new builds this year, and then that will continue to ramp and supplement with M&A? Or how do we think about that?

Speaker 1

It's actually a straightforward answer. and it's really, I don't want to say your fault, but it's your fault. We deliberately slowed down our building pipeline to pretty our balance sheet up to go public. We did 30-some stores a couple of years ago. We could do 50, 60 stores. We're real estate people. We have the infrastructure to do so. But they wanted us to get to a really nice debt ratio, which I think you appreciate where we are now way ahead right now. So it's all self-inflicted, and we're ramping right back up. So what we're saying in the calls to not get into trouble with Latham and Edelman is we reaffirmed the 130, and in that 130 is a much more rapid per-year store count. So we reaffirmed our guide for this year, the 6 to 8, and we reaffirmed the 130. But we have certainly the proven capability of building, you know, 20, 30, 40 stores a year. And so that's why. And it turned out to be great because we did certainly get a lot of credit for our balance sheet going into the IPO.

Speaker 2

Makes sense. And then as you think about whether it's billed by, maybe frame for us some of the areas of focus. I think you touched on this earlier, what's appealing to you in terms of geographic, you know, placement. Would it be kind of still stores focused in the Texas region? I feel like that's gotten so competitive.

Speaker 1

Great question, and really two things. You may have read that we're selling Iowa and Kansas for very specific reasons. We're basically disadvantaged because of the tax credit for those that can sell E15, and we can sell those stores if you go to multiple redeploy the capital. Our entire area of focus in the 130 stores is Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Oklahoma. Now, I say that because we like a dense portfolio. It's much easier to supply fuel, to supply merch, as well as to cite my people. It's much easier to run when I'm more proximate. So all of our growth is in those states. That's also what we're looking to by the way buy. So we're not looking outside that right now. Our primary driver for buying or building is fuel margin. We have the entire country, every sea store in the country geospatially mapped and every single grade of gas from diesel down to lowest grade of gas as well which is why we don't buy center cities yeah okay we are basically rural suburban recommend higher pricing power which is why we have one of the highest CPGs of any sea storage chain in the country that as well as the diesel mix as well anything you want to add to that no really quick how willing are you to lever up for the right deal I think you've previously they mentioned four times I believe I mean would and then yeah I think what we've said is as a public company we'd want to operate under a three time you know for a transformational deal it would

Speaker 3

you know we would consider something temporarily higher but you know we certainly like where we are now you know much much more those are harder to come by aren't they the transformational ones given the industry.

Speaker 2

Yes, exactly. A lot of those are for sale. All right, maybe my final question, because I think we are coming up on time. I did want to talk about your long-term targets for your business in terms of both unit EBITDA. We talked about 130 new stores, but how should I think about what's realistic to expect for your business for the EBITDA growth over the next five years, for instance?

Speaker 3

If we look at even just our history, you're probably talking about high single-digit EBITDA growth, right? I think in our, you know, medium-term algorithm that we had put out there, we are probably something lower than that because we were giving some nod to understanding, you know, we would be delivering only six to eight units for 2026. Obviously, from, you know, our recent reporting history, that will lean much more heavily beyond that. But, you know, we have some very outsized growth here from operations more recently. So I certainly wouldn't expect compounded 30% plus growth, you know, every quarter. But certainly, you know, mid to high single digits is realistic. Thank you.

Speaker 2

And thank you both so much for your time. It was a pleasure having you. Thanks, everyone. Thank you all very much.