Ian Zaffino: Hi guys. Thank you very much. Hey, Bobby, can you maybe give us a bridge on EBITDA, how you’re getting from ‘23 to ‘24 guidance? I don’t know if you could do the best you can as far as bucketing it between, what you think you might get from M&A or conversions, or organic, and then I know there’s some investment you want to make. So that’d be an offset, but I don’t need to have exact numbers, but by just direction, can you help us out? Thanks.
Bobby Lavan : Yeah, so, I mean, this year we did $355 million of EBITDA, right? And next year we’re 15% revenue growth. And that flows through at, a 30%, 35% margin. I mean, it’s a little bit more complicated than that like M&A, you’ve got Lucky Strike, you’ve got Mavrix, Octane. Both of those are going to be big part of it. You, and ultimately though, it’s, you know, the flow through game is pretty straightforward for us, from an organic basis, we are saying that we think our centers, the core centers will be flat. But then we’ll have, a significant growth from M&A and the acquired centers that we acquired throughout the year of FY ‘23.
Ian Zaffino: Okay. Perfect. Thanks. Thank you very much. And then, if I could squeeze in maybe one more, on the M&A, how are we thinking about M&A going forward? is it going to be pure bowling? Are you going to be looking for other opportunities? Maybe kind of give us a holistic sort of, description of like what you guys are doing. And if I could sneak in just Bobby cash interest, what should we expect for next year? Thanks.
Bobby Lavan : I’ll take the M&A part. I mean, there are probably 500 to 700 viable acquisition candidates in the US. And to build opportunities on the bowling front. So, we don’t have any current plans to expand beyond bowling. People made a big deal out of the Octane acquisition in Scottsdale. Octane and Mavericks were co-located it was one business, in two buildings with a shared courtyard. So, it wasn’t like we were moving whole hog into something new. Now, it may be that we learn things in the Octane acquisition that, that makes us bullish on some product line extensions, but bowling’s a great business. And, the weakness that we’ve seen lately in our comp number, came in the slowest part of the year and was largely driven by experimentation.
And frankly, I have no regrets that we did that because the things that we learned are going to power the company for a very long time to come. Incremental spend from the special is very powerful. We now have food specials. We’re actually selling our products for the first time in the company’s history on a retail basis. As mentioned, the event business continues to be strong. That is we think there might be as much as a hundred million dollars of upside in that business over the next couple of years, and we’re going to add on order of a $100 million to $110 million of revenue just from the stuff that’s announced and closing in very short order. So, the bowling business is a very, very extremely profitable business, that has proven to be much more resilient than our peers, certainly over the last couple of months.
And we feel very bullish. So, we’ve looked at every other business in the entertainment space. We’ve never found one that we liked from a margin perspective, from a return perspective, from a stability perspective. And so that’s a long way of saying we remain extremely bullish on bowling, with no plans to really move beyond it.
Thomas Shannon: And interest expense is 140.
Operator: Our next question comes from line of Jason Tilchan with Canaccord Genuity. Please proceed with your question.
Jason Tilchan: You talked a lot about a lot of the capital investments plan for fiscal ‘24. I’m just curious, as you contemplate stimulating demand and getting traffic back in how you view the marketing budget this year, and also how some of the recent digital strategies have impacted either demand or uptake of some of the additional bundled offerings over the past few months. Thanks.
Thomas Shannon : Yes, we’ve always viewed, our business is a very captive walk-in. We are investing in the website and we are evaluating a changing some center’s names to Lucky Strike. So, we’ll probably invest a little bit more in marketing. We budgeted that, but I don’t think you’re going to see us go outright double-triple marketing. Like we just, we’ve never seen the return. The website change is probably the only place that we could potentially ramp up dollars if customer acquisition is very profitable.
Jason Tilchan : Great. That’s helpful. And just one follow-up. Is there any color you can share on how demand trends and traffic trends varied in different regions across the country, both during Q4 and also in the period since then? Thank you.
Thomas Shannon : Yes, I would say probably the weakest was in the Midwest, which was the Midwest, if you look at it, is probably our highest promotional requirement region. The northeast was pretty strong. And so, Northeast responds less to promotions, central responds more to promotions. We did see a little bit of weakness from the heat in the past few months. So, heat is okay for our business, too much heat means people don’t go outside. But really the weakness in our business was mostly in central where there it’s just a heavy promotional environment.
Jason Tilchan: Great. Thank you, very much.
Operator: Our next question comes from line of Daniel Moore with CJS Securities. Please proceed with your question.
Daniel Moore : Most of mine have been answered, but maybe a little bit more detail on cadence as we think about fiscal ‘24. Q1 guide, very helpful. In terms of same-store sales, would you expect them to remain down slightly through Q2, and then perhaps an improvement as we look at the back half of the year, getting to kind of flattish and similarly EBITDA margins on a year-over-year basis. Any color on the cadence there would be helpful. Thanks.
Thomas Shannon : Yes, so it’s, minus five for first quarter should be flattish in the second and third quarter, and then up in the fourth quarter. As it relates to EBITDA margin, like the cadence from last year is the one I would follow. So, it’s obviously, we have high incremental, and so we’ll have much higher EBITDA margins in the second and third quarter than we do in the first and the fourth quarter. And it’s — we’ve given a range 32% to 34%, and that’s we feel good about that, for now and going forward.
Daniel Moore : Very helpful. Thank you, again.
Operator: Our next question comes from line of Eric Wold with B. Riley.
