Motley Fool Money - The Business of Nightclubs

Episode Date: September 25, 2023

RCI Hospitality CEO Eric Langan on consumer spending, capital allocation, and getting into the casino business. (00:21) Jason Moser and Deidre Woollard discuss: - The wisdom Amazon’s bet on Anthropic. - Why Amazon is getting into charging for streaming. - If check-out-free technology is finally reaching its tipping point. (12:25) Ricky Mulvey interviews the CEO of RCI Hospitality, Eric Langan on his view on consumer spending, capital allocation, and his journey to the CEO seat. 5 Stocks Under $49 report here: http://www.fool.com/report. Companies discussed: AMZN, WMT, DIS, RICK Host: Deidre Woollard Guests: Ricky Mulvey, Eric Langan, Jason Moser Producer: Ricky Mulvey Engineer: Dan Boyd Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Maybe don't fear your AI overlords. Go to a nightclub instead. Motley Full Money starts now. Welcome to Motley Full Money. I'm Dieter Willard here with Jason Moser. Jason, how you doing today? Hey, doing great. How about you? Doing great. Good. Well, the big news today was Amazon investing up to $4 billion in Anthropics. So Anthropic, the Open AI rival created by former Open AI employees. This is a deal that includes Anthropic using the AWS Cloud, of course. and Amazon's training chips, which are things like Trinium. What do you think Amazon is hoping for with this deal? Well, I mean, they're certainly looking to make inroads in the AI space

and sort of establish their own little corner, right, of dominance, so to speak. And that's, I think you see them getting in there with their own chip designs, right? I mean, like you noted, I mean, they're going in there and using their own chips in order to be a part of this? I mean, I think it's interesting to see Open AI. All of these are connected, right? I mean, there are all these former executives from OpenAI, and they're all kind of going their separate ways.

And so you see Amazon making its own little bet here in Anthropic. I did a little digging. I was looking at Anthropic because Anthropic is not a publicly traded company, but it's interesting to see the other investors in Anthropic, because it's not just Amazon in this case, right? Google is an investor in Anthropic. Salesforce and Zoom video communications as well through their ventures arm. So, again, you kind of go back to how these are all connected. I think it's very, very interesting.

I do think that Amazon making this investment with the goal of using their chip designs, right, the Traneum chip. I think there's another chip design. Yeah, in Ferensia. Yeah, in Ferensia, that's it. I'll be interested to see sort of how that plays out against Invidia, right? I mean, that's kind of their answer to all of this NVIDIA hype. And so I think it's going to be interesting to see how that plays out. Because just because you have all of the money in the world, companies like Amazon and Apple,

I mean, designing chips and then implementing those chips to do very specific things is very difficult. We're seeing Apple having a lot of difficulty in designing that modem chip, that they want to be able to stick into their phones and ultimately displace their relationship with Qualcomm. So I just think that's a little bit easier said than done, but generally speaking, I like the idea. It makes a lot of sense. Yeah, it's interesting, the interconnectedness that you mentioned. It reminds me a bit of what we saw before the dot-com bubble. It's all happening in San Francisco again.

I mean, Anthropica is leasing Slack's former HQ. All of this seems very connected. And I'm an old PR person. I like to look at the bottom section of the press release where you see the like about Amazon and about Anthropic, because it tells me not what the company does, but what the company wants us to think they do. And they call themselves Anthropic. They call themselves a safety and a research company. And they say their AI assistant, their big AI assistant is Claude. And Claude is focused on being helpful, harmless, and honest.

Right? If they say it enough, then maybe it'll be true, right? Right. This feels like I don't fear your robot overlords line to be. So does AI need spin at this point? I think it does to an extent. I mean, it's funny, what you said about the bottom of the release. It made me think of like when you interview leadership of any company, right? Their one job is just to tell you how awesome they are. At the bottom of this release right there, it seems like their one job is really, let's assuage

any concerns that people may have regarding AI and the potential drawbacks. We're honest. We're safe. We're careful and all that. I don't know that that necessarily is going to cut it. I think it's going to take a little bit more than just that. in time is something, I think, ultimately, that it's going to take. When you look at the general sentiment out there with consumers isn't all that great when it comes to AI right now,

if you look at Pew Research, overall, right now, 52% of Americans say they feel more concerned than excited about the increased use of artificial intelligence. You have just 10% saying that they are more excited than concerned. But what's interesting here, the share of Americans who are mostly concerned about AI in daily life, it's up 14 percentage points since December 22, when just 38% expressed that view. So the trend is going in the wrong way, right? Americans are becoming more and more concerned about the drawbacks and risks of AI as opposed to the opportunities. And that's going to be something that's going to be very difficult to balance because as the social media,

kind of things, information moves just at the speed of light. Not everybody's fully honest out there. You get all sorts of funny stories and disinformation and misinformation and things that can lead you down rabbit holes and conspiracy theories and whatnot. So it is a, I think this is going to be a long-term trend that is going to be full of challenges. And it's going to take a lot more than just language at the bottom of release to make people feel better about the potential. positive impacts that AI can have on our future. Yeah, and to throw it back to the early aughts, again, we felt the same way about the internet.

There was a lot of concern at the start of the internet. This is going to be a bad thing. This is going to put people out of jobs. This is going to end the world. We're seeing that with AI. Certainly, I was reading Wired's all-AI issue this weekend. And it was very, everything from like the world is going to end in eight years to This is going to make a sort of new utopia. So, you know, opinions are all across the board.

The disparity of the outcomes is impressive. I mean, going from from a panacea to full-on world destruction, I mean, you can't get much more polarizing than that. Yeah, absolutely. I want to pivot a little bit to talk about another part of Amazon. We may have an end to the writer's strike, hopefully, fingers crossed. But meanwhile, let's talk about Amazon Prime. So Amazon announced on Friday, they kind of snuck this out. They're adding ads to Prime. They say not a lot of ads, not just a few, nothing worry about here. And you can opt out of the ads for about $2.99, about $3 a month. So it's small, but, you know, 200 million Prime users that does add up.

What do you think? Are you paying for the Amazon ad-free tier? Are you going to wait? I probably won't. I don't know that I use Amazon streaming enough to really, justify that. But honestly, I don't know that they want us to pay to opt out. And, you know, we've seen from companies like Netflix and Walt Disney here over the last several quarters, they've been talking more and more about these ad-supported options that they've introduced

into their models. And ultimately, those ad-supported models can be more profitable for the businesses, right? So they actually like being able to incorporate ads as long as consumers will tolerate them because they can be very profitable. And consumers will tolerate them, particularly on a global basis. When you look at the advertising support of video on demand, that is a really fast-growing market on a global scale there in Connected TV. I mean, it really is something I'm a little bit surprised. We didn't hear this announcement from Amazon sooner.

I like it. It gives consumers a choice. And I mean, if you're someone that uses the Amazon Prime streaming service a lot, then maybe this is something you'll consider. Like, I'll say we use a lot in our house. We use the Hulu Live offering, and we pay for the ad-free. version of that so that anything that we're streaming on Hulu, any of the on-demand stuff, we can just get all that stuff with minimal to zero ads.

So I think it really just boils down to what platforms you use the most to where, you know, is the value proposition going to be there? But I think, generally speaking, most of these companies, they don't want you to opt out because those ad-supported models can be quite profitable. Well, I mean, with Amazon especially, advertising is a bigger and bigger and more profitable part of that business already. It is. And, you know, they distribute content in so many different ways.

ways, right? They've already got a little bit of this going with that free-vy offering, right? I mean, that is essentially TV with ads right there. I mean, that's an Amazon property. And so this is just taking it one step further. So when Amazon, you know, they distribute content so many different ways that this is just a natural fit. Maybe the $3 is just to bring awareness to the idea that there's going to be ads. Who knows? It's a very good point. One last Amazon question. I noticed on the bottom of the press release, I'd love to do that.

The Just Walkout technology was on their list. of the things that they are talking about. So this is the technology where you can basically go into the store, pick stuff up, and just leave. And, you know, we surveyed our listeners last week on X. About 78 percent, they said they're willing. They're willing to do it. Amazon has struggled with integrating this tech for a while. They had those go stores.

They tried this out with Amazon Fresh. That's not, that hasn't been going so well for them. Do you think the tipping point on this is coming soon? I mean, it could be. I mean, I kind of like in this, to self-driving cars in that. To me, it feels like the technology is on a much faster pace here than actually figuring out how to handle the tech as a society, right?

I mean, there's infrastructure investments that need to be made. I mean, they're sort of educating the consumer, right? I mean, once you get kind of stuck in your old ways or your habits, those can be difficult to break. I mean, I think this is, it's interesting technology. I would certainly try it. It's not like it's something that scares me, but kind of like that old trust-but-verify saw.

I think I'd be going through my receipt to make. sure I was getting charged with the right stuff. And furthermore, the store owner, I mean, in this case, whether it's an Amazon fresh, whatever, but let's assume this technology gets rolled out to stores and shops everywhere. I mean, as a store owner, I have to imagine, you're kind of wondering, I mean, you're just going to take this on blind faith that everything is getting charged. That can be a little bit of a leap of faith right there. And so that'll take a little bit of time ultimately to play out there.

So I don't know. I mean, I see it playing a role. I'm just not sure how quickly we're going to get there. I think it's going to take probably a little bit longer than maybe people think. Yeah. Yeah, the checking out thing is interesting because, I mean, now, you know, if you leave like the Walmart, they at least look at your receipt. Not sure if that would happen if you're using the checkout-free technology.

Well, and that would be the idea. The whole point is convenience and zero friction. Well, if you're going to introduce some friction and say there, well, check out free, but we're still going to check your receipt. seat, well, let's not really check out free then, so it's kind of false advertising. As a consumer, hey, you know, you're checking out, you probably don't really have much to worry about, and maybe you're not getting charged for everything. Maybe you are. Maybe you care. Maybe you don't. But if you're the shop owner, you care. You want to make sure you're getting charged

for every single thing that that consumer's walking out with. And whether this technology can really do that consistently, I guess, remains to be seen. Yeah, I think that's true. Thanks for your time today, Jason. Thank you. We just talked about Amazon. We think there are a lot of great companies out there that are back at levels not seen in years. And that's why our analysts have rounded up five companies that have dipped below 49 bucks to share. And we're giving way that list for free. You can grab your copy of this report, five stocks under $49 for free at full.com slash report.

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tweeted he was grabbing dinner at the Grange Food Hall in Denver and was happy to meet up. The company operates restaurants, nightclubs, and soon casinos. RCI shareholder Ricky Mulvey took him up on it and brought his recording equipment. Mulvey talked to Langen about consumer spending, capital allocation, and his journey to the CEO seat. I know you've told this story on X or Twitter, whatever you want to call it. It's got to be an interesting journey to, I think you had maybe one club and then to be the CEO of a publicly traded nightclub restaurant, gentleman's club, cabaret, business. Yeah, I mean, I started out. I was dating and entertainer. I was 19 years old. I got married and divorced at 19. Friends started taking me to a club to hang out to try to keep my mind of my ex-wife.

It ran off with my daughter, so I didn't really know where my daughter was. So I was kind of, you know, I was young and crazy. but they started taking me to club. So I started dating one of the entertainers at the club, and then didn't really like the way things were going there for her. So I decided to open up. We were going to open our own club up. And sold my baseball card collection. I opened up my first club was about 1,600 square foot,

little tiny place, just sold beer and wine, no hard liquor. But then parlayed that into another club and another club. And now we have, you know, almost 70. He went public in 97, merged with Ricks, who did an IPO in 95, then bought out the founder in 99, and basically been CEO, chairman of the board since 19. That's incredible. Yeah, we had seven locations, I think, or six locations in 1999.

So we have 70 locations right now. We have 14 different projects in various phases of construction. Our next one that will open, it will be in Stafford, Texas, which is a southwest Houston suburb area. That one should open in the next two or three weeks. We're building a flagship location in Rollette, Texas, which is between Mesquite and Rockwall, right on the lake. I have a 3,800 square foot outdoor patio, really fantastic location, part of a huge 108 acre or 180 acre. I can't remember how big it is, a development with, you know, all types of business there. Our neighbor's going to be Margaritaville. Give you an idea. Jimmy Buff is Margaritaville, so hotel and resort. One thing I've heard you talk about on earnings calls is you talk about capital allocation more than a

lot of publicly traded CEOs. And you've drawn inspiration from a book called The Outsiders. Just maybe broadly, how that book has affected you as a CEO and also how you just maybe generally think about capital allocation at RCI. Well, in 2014, we were supposed to do this big acquisition, and I found some accounting irregularities. I didn't like. The more I dug in, the more I realized there was some type of fraud going on. I didn't know what it was at the time. I found out about 18 months later when the owners were arrested for money laundering. basically they were their sales didn't make any sense versus the inventories i was watching the inventory so

basically on the one club i finally when i when i finally said okay no we're not doing this deal they would have to been selling beer for about uh 120 bucks a piece wow you know and beers were like 450 back then right so i was like how can you have this much beer sales but you only bought this much right you can't have you know you can't have a hundred thousand dollars in sales and you only bought enough beer at your $450 to make, you know, $20,000 in sales. So where's this other $80,000 in beer sales? Yeah, you're paying the tax. Yeah, you've, you know, everything looks normal, right, on the surface. But when you, when I dug into their inventory purchases, the actual purchases of the product, they didn't buy enough product to have that much in retail sales. So, and I'd been to the

club multiple nights and it was always slow, you know, and then, you know, compared to the, what the revenue numbers they said they were making. So it kind of threw me off. So we walk that deal. When I did, my bankers, who were getting ready to do a about $14 million raise for us didn't get their 6%. And so they started pressure me, hardcore. No, just buy it. You can fix it. You know what you're doing. I'm like, no, I'm not paying for something that just doesn't make sense. This is not right. Something, you know, something's wrong here. I can't do it. And so we backed out of the deal and so we got into a big argument with them. I ended up firing all my financial advisor, or five people who were raising money for us about mid-2014.

And then about a month later, a group from California came out to me and said, you know, hey, we've got a proposal. And they hand me this book, and it's called the Do Nothing Proposal. I'm like, I'm good at doing nothing. I like this. And I, you know, I open it up and it says, you should do nothing other than buyback your stock as long as your free cash flow yield is over 10%. And your free cash flow deal today is 32.6% or something.

something like that at the time. The stock had, because I didn't do the deal, the stock had gotten, you know, had gotten beat up. And so I was like, hmm, okay. And so I started looking. I was like, you know, and then they explained to me how the deals we had done in the past with equity had been the most expensive capital that we could use. And so because of the free cash flow yield. And so we started looking and really got me into it. So that's why I know how it started. I was like, okay. So basically within, I don't know, probably a month, we had kind of settled everything down. We stopped looking for acquisitions. We kind of closed down anything we were doing. And we literally took all of our free cash flow every week and started buying back stock.

So if I had $500,000 in extra cash that week, I would call the broker on Monday, say, buy me $500,000 of the stock this week. I'll talk to you next Monday. And that was my job for the week. So like I said, I was really good at that doing nothing. As we did that, you know, we started buying back lots of stock. If you look originally with fully diluted basis, we had 10.8 million shares outstanding, and today we have 9.4. We've used half a million on one acquisition, 200,000 on another acquisition. But the 200,000 that we used at $80 a share on this acquisition in March, we bought back at an average price of $65 a share over the period of time after we did the first acquisition. So we've been very lucky on timing and following the strategy,

it really works. So if we set a hurdle rate for ourselves, if we're going to invest money, if our free cash flow yields at 10%, then we want anything money we invest that's not buying back our own company, we want a 25 to 33% return on, cash on cash. And, you know, I don't worry about levered returns. We have bank financing now. Until 2017, we didn't have bank financing. Everything was cash or seller financing or super high interest, you know, 12%, 14% money from hard money lenders. So that's really changed the ballgame for us between 2017 and now. And like if you look at our stock today, we close it a 52-week low today, which, you know, I'm just in shock over because, I mean, I guess not really because we've been weakening and people have misunderstood or misunderstanding where we're going because they're looking at our post-COVID numbers. And I say, I tell everybody, we have to throw the last three years away.

There was no normality to anything. there was no seasonality where in the summertime when numbers were supposed to get down we start running record numbers when the numbers were supposed to go up our numbers were off it's like there's no normality to anything because you know you'd get open and then we'd get closed a COVID clothes on then there'd be another scare oh we got to put your mask back on oh you got to do this you got to and and so there was no real normality and especially like the restaurant side you know you look at the restaurant association what they say like 40% of mom and pop restaurants and went out of business during that that two year three year period of COVID right and what we've had

in the last 12 months is new operators leasing all those buildings or renting all those buildings opening new stores so we had the big bump because everybody was closed then we get this dip because now everybody's reopening different stuff but it's new and when anything's new it has a honeymoon period that's why if you look at most restaurants including bombshells we don't include them in same source sales for 18 months because the first six months are abnormal numbers you know because you're boosting because you're in your honeymoon period and so we were really going against outrageous comps from a year ago and getting hit by all these new places opening up. They're in their honeymoon periods that didn't take just their business back, but took a little

bit of our business as well. And we probably could have been a little quicker on raising some prices and doing a few other things. At the same time, we had labor squeezes, so we had lots of overtime, so our labor costs got out of whack. Food costs were fluctuating. So, you know, we played these games. So right now, bombshells is running. I think we had a 15% margin. We had 12.9% in the last quarter. I'm not sure what this quarter is going to be. We did raise some prices at the end of June. So it should help and stabilize, I think, but we should be back to our 18, 20%, 22% margins. But what people were looking at before was 28% margins, 32% margins. And you can go back and listen to earnings conference calls. I talked to one of our largest shareholders. And he'd say, oh,

you know, we could extrapolate this out. And over the next three years, you're going to, I said, no, those margins are not doable. on a long-term basis. Yeah, I think one of the things that often affects stocks is when a Wall Street analyst has to change his or her model. And you must be in a tough environment where the denominator isn't going back to 2020 or 2020-levels. Now it's at 2022, the post-pandemic reopening boom. And I would say a lot of not long-term investors, but traders are just looking at that one-year same-store sales number. Well, if you look, it's computers that are selling our stock.

Yeah. Right. I can't remember it's dimensional or renaissance, but they're both computer-ran funds, right? Computers do all the buying, all the selling. And they, you know, they were a net seller in the last quarter based on their 13F filing of 300,000 shares, which is a huge part of the volume for that quarter. And so, you know, I look at the, I look at our shareholders' lists and I look at the 13. You know, the humans that own our stock are holding it.

The computers are doing a lot of the selling right now. And so when the computers run out of stock, and they will, I mean, their, their counts are all-time lows. I mean, at one point, dimensional, 985,000 shares of the company, which, because of our buyback at that time, you know, that same quarter, we bought back a bunch of stock, and so they ended up being, you know, a little over 10% of the company, so they, I'm sure they sold immediately after we filed, sold down under 10%, but they also kept right on selling. And they've continued to sell. So you can look at their 13Fs, like I said, and see that they're very, very small portions of our holdings now. And as those computers

run out of stock, eventually we will turn. I think as early as first quarter 24, which is our October, we're a fiscal year, so maybe October, November, December. So by February, the computers, you know, could flip because we started down about mid-October. Last year, the blue-collar customer started getting hit in mid-October. We stabilized that customer by April. And then in May, our high-end customer started planning European vacations, Mediterranean vacations, and this summer our super high-end customer, in the casino terms, they call them whales, but our big spenders were all gone. They're all out of the country. And so we saw our big tickets just shrank. I went to, you know, went from 25 plus a week to, you know, at, you know, 5,000 plus to 1 a week at one of our

top locations in the country. And so we started looking as like, wow, we're really being affected, you know, to tune of a couple million dollars this quarter of top-end customers. And that top-in customer is, you know, VIP room, you know, high dollar champagne, bottle services that are super high margin for us. So not only do we lose the total revenue, but we lost a much larger share of our, you know, of our bottom line margins through that, but they're coming back. You know, they're back from vacation.

Kids are back in school. Weather's changing. You know, it's getting dark earlier, and we'll start seeing that customer. And I really think the turning point is this next quarter. And for sure, January, February, March. So sometime between February and May, all those computers are going to switch their models. Oh, the quants, as they call them. And the quants are going to go, oh, we better start buying the stock again.

and I think, you know, the stock will rebound pretty nicely, especially as we continue to get out on X and get out and put humans in the stock. You know, we hired Equity Animal out of New York to bring us in, and we went from a little over 6,000 shareholders to a little over 9,000 shareholders now. Sure, smaller shareholders, but, you know, I always say it's real simple. I need, you know, 900,000 people to buy 10 shares, or I need 90,000 people that can buy 100 shares. right or 9,000 people that can buy 1,000 shares.

And so I just started playing there as a numbers game. I used to be in door door to sales as a kid. And I started, we just got to knock the doors. Let's just keep knocking doors, knocking doors. And it's working. We're seeing those shareholders come. And, you know, they're holding. They're buying.

They're holding. Yes, the stock was 90-something in January. You know, it's back down to 60. The market's up 15 points. We're down 30%. But we were also at an all-time high in January. Right? I mean, not just a 52-week high.

I mean, all-time. Like, we'd never traded at that valuation before. And so I always thought it would return to the mean. I thought the stock was, say, between 70 and 80. When it dipped below 70, I was kind of surprised. We held 68 for a long, long time. We finally broke through that 68 support recently, which, according to Charts, sequins charts puts us at 64.

We've now broke through that. So the next support level, I think, is 58. so we'll see if we can hold 58 here uh i mean i like i said the humans that i talk to or and the people that i've known me for a long time they're all calling me and saying hey is your stock a buy i said you know look based on our cap allocation strategy you can do the math and you know we're we're buying and i put it out there you know pretty publicly that basically we buy about a hundred thousand dollars worth of stock a day as part of our deal we don't buy every day and and sometimes we do it It really depends on our total cash and where we, if we have places to put that cash,

if it's a 10 or 12% yield, but we have place to put it that we think we can earn 30% plus. It makes more sense to invest it at a 30% plus ratio. But we get a certain amount of cash on our books, which typically right now that number's about $25 million. If we're over $25 million in cash on the books, we will buy every day. If we get between $20 and $25, we may skip a day here or there trying to let it catch back up. For the humans invested in RCI hospitality, how do you want the? them to judge the health and growth of your company?

Well, I think you have to look at 2023 as a growth year for us because we didn't do any acquisition, we did acquisitions, but we didn't do any new builds. Like we didn't build more bombshells. We found these casino properties. We're building three nightclubs right now, Fort Worth and Lubbock, Texas. So we have some clubs under construction as well. So with all these projects, there's a lot of, you know, I call them anchors. There's some drag, right?

There's drag on stuff. So our margins, we shoot for 30. percent EBIT of margins, 20 percent free cash flow margin on total gross revenues. And we were at 19 and change, and we hit 29 in change in this past quarter. But there's a lot of drag with all these projects that we're doing, you know, architects being paid and attorneys and, you know, carrying costs for whether there's property taxes or utilities. So there's a lot of little things out there that we're spending money on, travel to go to these sites and meet with people and get construction started and get the GCs working. All that's going now. And it was really,

because of COVID we stopped right we got closed down we didn't really know what was going to go on we finally got some stuff open in may we struggled for that six to eight months you know and then we finally got open we and we started doing so good we were so busy that we didn't really have the time to go hunt new projects uh but then you know last year we started hunting the projects uh from the time we start to the time we opens typically 12 to 14 months uh so the first one will open you know in October that's of this of these 14 that are in line right now we'll probably open six or seven of them this year and six or seven of them in fiscal 25 and I don't have to look for anything right now until the end of calendar 24 so after December 20 24 early early 25 I'll start looking for stuff

that's going to open in 26 you know we're in pretty good shape there and I think this these things come online the drag goes away and they start income producing we're going to be back in If you look at our five-year K-Gar rate through June 30th, we're at 20% free cash flow for share growth in the previous five years. That's through COVID. I think overall, you know, our growth has been solid from when we started the capital out case strategy eight years ago. We were doing 15 million of free cash flow. I project that 2024, we're going to come in over 70 million in free cash flow. So, you know, that's not bad growth for an eight-year period. In my opinion, I take it. As always, people on the program may have interest in the stock. they talk about. And the Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against. So don't

buy ourselves stocks based solely on what you hear. I'm Deidre Wald. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow.