Shake Shack Inc. (SHAK) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Thank you. Morning, everyone. Welcome to the Second Day of our Consumer and Retail Conference. I'm Brian Harbour, cover restaurants and food distributors at Morgan Stanley and very excited to have the Shake Shack team to start us off today. Randy Garutti is CEO; Katie Fogertey is CFO. Thank you guys for being here.

Glad to be here.

Maybe just a bigger picture question to start. You've had a very busy year, of course, right? A lot of different initiatives going on. How would you kind of rate your progress overall on those? What do you think is has really stood out as most impactful this year?

Thank you. Yes. Look, it's been a really good year. We set out last year, end of last year, with a really clear strategic plan. It was focused on retaining our team, our guest experience, having a great class of new Shacks and development team going forward, improving our margins and being disciplined with capital. That was the plan. That's what I really feel, looking back at the end of the year now, that we've executed. Let's start at the top. We were -- it was this time last year or not long before that, that it was really hard to staff a restaurant. We're all here in our suits right now, and we're in Midtown, and it feels busy and like we kind of feel normal. But like it wasn't that long ago that that was really hard. And we were having some of the biggest retention turnover challenges we've ever had in the history of the company. And today, we're proud to say, and we've reported this a couple of quarters in a row, that our turnover retention of our team has been some of the best it's been in many years. That right there is a foundation for everything. We can't do all the other things without holding onto our team. Every time you flip out team members and they're not staying, and they're constant new training, it's hard and expensive. And we feel like we've done that really well. So really proud of that. When you look at our class, we have a strong class of '23, varied, lots of formats. We can talk more about that. If you look at our guest experience, a couple of big things this year. We rolled out kiosks at nearly all Shacks. It's one of the biggest things, both for margin, for guest experience, for higher average check, all the things, kiosks one of our best channels, and we love it when you come into the restaurant and use our digital tools. We also flipped our service model a little bit. This is something we haven't talked a lot about, but when we think about guest experience, anyone who's been at Shake Shack knows, it can be a little stressful sometimes, and it's busy, and -- is my order ready? And it's not just a Shake Shack thing, it's everywhere, especially in this digital universe, where do I go? How do I do it? As we've added kiosk and technology, we know we need to add back different hospitality. And now most cases at most Shacks, when you order, we will actually run your food to your table, and [ add ] another added level of service and hospitality and guest connection. Margins. I'll let Katie talk about the details, but we've expanded our margins in a big way, 400 points in the last quarter year-over-year. We think there's still room to go there, and we're really excited about the opportunity there in every way that the team has set up, improving our margins, putting work in place. We've seen line of sight to that continued improvement. And then our capital discipline. Being disciplined with our G&A, I mean just on where we're making capital investments as we head into next year, we can talk about that quite a bit, making sure that we've got -- we've rightsized that. We have a super strong balance sheet that we took the opportunity during COVID, at a very, very low cost of capital, to fortress our balance sheet. We feel really good about where that is, and we're going to continue to be disciplined in that so we have years of growth to come without needing to worry about needing access new capital. So all in all, sitting here at the end of the year, we feel amazing about what the team has taken care of. We feel good about the plan looking forward, and we're excited about continuing on the path of each of those things in a new and exciting way to continue to improve margins, drive sales and strengthen the company. Not to mention, we had strong same-Shack sales all year. We've had a strong overall sales environment and it's pretty good.

Yes. Sounds good. And we'll talk about each of those things. One question before we do that. I think you do still have a COO position open?

We do, and we have John Vandegrift, who's been with us for 21 years, is our leading VP of Operations. He is leading operations today, we feel great about that as we continue to search for a COO and we'll look forward to bringing in the right person at the right time. But today, we have an incredible group of tenured operators who lead our restaurants. And Katie and her team working more closely than ever with our operators on all of these initiatives, and they're executing. And in the meantime, I'm quite connected to the restaurants, as I always am. I'm an operator at heart, since I was 13 years old. So that plus Katie's involvement and our other tenured leaders, we feel good about where ops is, and we'll keep you posted when we finalize that choice.

Okay. Makes sense. And then maybe just digging into the sales side a bit. In the shorter term, you did talk about how there was some improvement into October. I think you're back to flat traffic. Was that pretty uniform across your store base? Were there some lagging regions that perhaps improved? Could you tell us more about that?

Yes. I mean we had a pretty great strength coming out of September into October. Some of the pressures that we felt in September were really around more return to normal seasonality. So prior to COVID, the restaurant sector in general, and us included, tend to see a much bigger drop off from August to September. Last couple of years, it's been a little bit more muted. We saw more of that normal type behavior in September. And then in October, we opened up some additional funds while still leveraging G&A to do some really exciting sales-driving initiatives. Some of them in our own channels, some of those were leveraging opportunities more broadly. And we were really excited by how successful that was. There are some regions, and we're not going to go into too much detail, but we talked about the West being a little bit more pressured by infill, so that is continuing to be a theme as we just kind of work through some recent openings.

Makes sense. And then as we look ahead, I think you did call out kind of the tougher comparison in the first quarter. Part of that was LTO driven. Could you remind us of the timing of that last year?

Sure. We launched White Truffle last year in the middle of the first quarter. It was extremely successful. This was our White Truffle Sandwich. We had white Truffle Fries around it. One of our most successful, if not the most successful LTO that we've ever had. It's also our most expensive. So we're going to be lapping over that in the first quarter. It was so successful, however, it did sell out early. And so we had a little bit of a blip in our LTO schedule in the second quarter. And we believe we felt some traffic and definitely some mixed pressure from just running out of that just key banner product early. And throughout the summer, we had various points where we were running without a marquee LTO. We currently are running a Hot Sandwich LTO and very pleased with kind of what we've been seeing on that front. But we are comparing over last year's very successful Hot Ones. And so we've called that out as well. But what's really great, and we're excited about the culinary calendar for next year, we're supposed to have a much more consistent calendar. We're going to be having -- a fan favorite will be launching in the first quarter, which we know we're going up against White Truffle, but we're really excited by the slate that we have heading into next year.

What's a typical uptake of LTOs? Do you find that's a pretty significant driver for your kind of regular customer?

It depends. It's always hard to measure exactly what caused the person to come in, right? We do believe it's a frequency driver. We do believe it's -- we do know for sure, even in our digital channels, a lot of our strategy when we launch LTOs is to give it a couple of days in our channels only. So our most frequent guests in our channels get access. And we generally see our frequent guests have a return there in these early moments. So we do believe there are frequency drivers. We also know they are generally mix drivers, right? You generally have a trade up. But again, you start to lap these things. Sometimes they're a trade up, sometimes they're, by design, not. So we always see them as a reason to talk about Shake Shack, right? Just getting out there, making noise, talking about, obviously, Shake Shack can do things that most other brands can't like White Truffle, not a whole lot of brands at our level who can execute that kind of premium ingredient, culinary-driven food menu at a hamburger joint, and we do that. And that's part of the story that I think has always been part of the strong brand opportunity that Shake Shack has, which is how we use our LTOs. Right now, we're doing a deal with Universal Studios where the Trolls movie, if you've seen the Trolls movie or your kids have seen it, we're doing Troll Shakes. And those are really fun, and that gives you an opportunity to access mass media channels with Universal Studios. We had -- last year, we had The Hot Ones media channel. So that was really cool. And we'll do that from time to time. So when we can team up on a great offer that has a media connection, those can be really strong. So look, we love LTOs. I think they're just part of the experience. As we move forward, how do we think about LTOs? We want to keep doing them, probably going to run fewer LTOs in total, but for longer periods of time. We've learned that they generally stay strong. People like them. There's not some big fall off generally, depending on the LTO, and it's operationally simplified when we don't have as many changes. So we'll keep a strong slate but probably extend them a little bit, depending on the LTO, when we think they're appropriate. So we have fan favorites that will come back. We've got new innovations that will be added, and we'll keep learning over time what resonates with our guests. Sometimes it's surprising in one direction or another what really hits.

Yes. And how is the plant-based burger?

Yes, we have a great -- so we have a vegetable burger. We try not to call it plant-based, because we're definitely not serving what everybody else did, which was a named product that was more of a science fiction project. We created a vegetable burger made of vegetables, and quinoa and farro and all the thing, carrots and mushrooms, and really good true veggie burger from vegetables, and it's done quite well. So something like that, obviously, it's never going to be your top seller at a place like Shake Shack. We generally sell hamburgers, fries, chicken sandwiches. But what we're trying to learn over time, of course, with an item like this is, can you add that [ veto ] vote, can you get that visit, I myself order it a lot. I eat a lot at Shake Shack, as you might imagine, a lot. And sometimes when I just have probably had it a few times in a week or in a couple of weeks or we had a big [ tasting ], I might get our new veggie burger in a lettuce wrap or having an opportunity to eat lighter that day. And it's been a really nice item for that. We got a lot of feedback from fans who like it. And now the question is, where does it land? And how much -- it's not going to be a massive traffic driver, I don't think. But it's something we like, and we're glad we executed across the nation on that.

Yes, makes sense. Your point on marketing, you have -- it seems like you've done more of that, right? You do disclose annually how much you spent on marketing. What's been most effective there? I mean -- and do you think that you can still kind of grow that as we look into 2024?

Yes. I think marketing to me is one of the really big things I want to talk about with our shareholders, help people understand. Shake Shack, we all know it, and we're sitting here in New York, and we have this gigantic brand, right? And we way punch above our weight, everyone that says, like, I can't believe you guys are actually that small. The reality is we haven't really had to market very much. It's not been part of our strategy. Shake Shack has been a beloved brand since day 1 and had this incredible ride. Well, now we're at a scale where it's on, right? And we're not big enough. This is the challenge, right? The challenge and what will we do about it. The challenge is we're not big enough for the Shake Shack TV commercial on the Super Bowl. We just don't have enough doors to take back that investment. But we need to market more. We're widely geographically dispersed. And there's a lot of people who don't know. One of the things that always amazes us in certain places, we know we have a lot of work to do to build true brand awareness and trial. There's more people than we think that don't know what Shake Shack is or are entrenched in their local habits or burger or whatever. So what's been most successful and what are we leaning into now? First of all, we're going to increase our marketing funds. You should expect to see that this year, into next year. That will happen in as many directed personalized marketing channels as possible. Really strong performance marketing, return on ad spend. We're seeing really good returns there. Various types of connections, offers, things that we're doing, both on our channels, sometimes in third party, and we've seen success in all of it. We just did a really fun promotion where we connected with some NFL players and said, if anybody in a game a few weeks ago -- some of you may have seen this -- if you score a touchdown and do a chicken dance in the end zone, we'll give free Chicken Shacks for a week. We didn't get our guys to do the dance. They didn't get the chance of scoring a touchdown, but a blogger, a podcaster did, so we did that, okay? So for a week, we gave away free chicken sandwiches. Now so what happens there? We have a minimum spend and what turns out, and this is, I think, the strength of Shake Shacks higher income guest. The average order value in that promo aside from the free sandwich remains really high, really profitable offer, drives traffic and some really fun stuff. So like we're going to keep doing those kind of things, and you'll see us pop up. And from time to time, we may try connected TV in localized places. If we have a region of the country where we know we need to build brand awareness, we may try really popping up with directed performance marketing and personalized marketing. So you're going to see more in our channels and all our digital channels in ways that we need to increase the brand. So I think as we look ahead in the next 3 to 5 years, we should be looking to continue to increase our marketing spend in smart ways where we see return.

Yes, makes sense. Okay. Just on pricing, I mean you took, I think, a very small amount in October. It seems like you'll be fairly restrained on that. But how do you kind of think about that into next year, if there is still kind of healthy food inflation, I think we know that there's still labor inflation in -- or maybe other things offset that? And also maybe just comment on California if you have done anything on that?

Absolutely, yes. While we've done a lot operationally to help offset some of the inflationary pressures that we are facing today, and we anticipate to face into next year, pricing will be part of our strategy into next year. And we have room to take additional price, in particular, in certain channels and in certain markets. And it's going to be one of the things that we lean on next year as a way to -- as we've talked about, building margins higher next year than this year. In California specifically, we have kind of a mid-teens percentage of restaurants there. Some of those are in areas where we already pay kind of close to $20 and others are in areas where that leap is going to be a little bit greater. And so we'll be compliant obviously with the local laws and take the price that's needed to offset that pressure.

Okay. Makes sense. Maybe let's move on to store development a bit. You'll do roughly 40 owned stores this year, suggesting a similar number next year, mostly existing markets, I think is what you said. Any sense yet for how many of those will be drive-thrus or kind of alternative format stores? How do you think about that?

Yes. And in addition, I always want to remind everybody we'll also do about another 40 in our licensed business, which I think is one of the most less talked about, undervalued parts of the business that we want to make sure we're talking about. So we're going to build about 80 Shacks this year and a similar amount next year per our guidance. When we think about formats right now, we've learned so much in these last few years. And another important thing, everybody should hear this, we've opened about half of our restaurants, half, since COVID. I mean when you really think about the growth of this company and the opportunity forward, like this is still a very new company, and we are learning a lot. We've not perfected anything. We have a lot to learn. We think we have this amazing company and brand. And as we have learned about formats and other opportunities for development, it's really opened up a great opportunity. Yesterday, we had a 3-hour real estate committee meeting where we were looking at next year and 2025 pipeline. We feel really good about building the pipeline. So this year, we'll do a lot of drive-thrus. It's just -- that was the first initial push. We have not talked about the number that we will guide through as part of the 40, but it will probably be just a few less than we did this year. I think we'll get between 17 and 19 drive-thrus this year, of the class. That's a lot. Part of why the overall build cost is much higher this year as well. But we feel great about bringing that build cost down, by the way, there's lots of initiatives in our overall unit economics to bring down build costs; we've committed to a 10% reduction next year in overall average cost as well as a 10% reduction in our preopening costs. So we're making commitments to improve our unit economic model. We're really excited about the drive-thru business, and we've been in the drive-thru business for 1.5 years. So we've got a lot to learn, and we're tweaking quickly. We opened a drive-thru this week and another one last week. So we've got another one in New Jersey opening hopefully around the end of the year, maybe early next year. So that will be our first kind of coastal close-to-home market that'll get a drive-thru. So we're excited about that. But we also continue to see success in outlet centers, in core model Shacks, which will be the majority of our builds and in other types that we think we can find success. So really excited about the development future. The team is deeply committed to building the appropriate amount of Shacks next year with lower cost, same or better guest experience and really continue to simplify, more prototype, more templating so that we can gain from the economy as a scale we're now starting to get to.

Yes. Maybe talk about that. What do you think drives some of those build cost reductions? Is there a size difference? Is this something that maybe we don't see, it's more of a back-of-the-house?

I don't think you'll notice. I think you'll still say, that's a really cool restaurant and it looks different than your average fast food. What's happened, backing up over the last few years, obviously, with the whole construction industry, costs have massively inflated, labor, materials, everything. That's still true. We're still, still, getting out of -- and we're not the only company. You talk to other companies, you know. There's -- people are still struggling to get that final piece of electrical equipment or HVAC equipment. I believe we exit that at some point next year, right? We're starting to get to normalized supply and demand curves on construction things. So I do think the competitive environment for bidding and overall cost will get better next year. In the meantime, we're then going to -- we have been really attacking the prototypical designs of Shack. Now that takes time. you're not going to see that all happen next year. But as you look at '25, '26 and our path of our new prototypes, you will see things. So what kind of things will you see? You might notice maybe a little smaller in certain cases -- Shake Shack is a community gathering place, like, we're not going to give that up, but there will be certain Shacks that we can take in a little bit. Our drive-thrus, they're going to come in a little bit. we've learned how big they -- well, I shouldn't say we've learned anything yet, but we're starting to learn how big they can be and achieve our sales goals and take [indiscernible]. You're going to see -- you won't notice things behind the scenes of how we build out the guts of a restaurant that we can just do better. And in truth, of the kind of 500-plus restaurants we have, we've employed a pretty bespoke model of designs to be of your place. We'll continue to do that in our flagship new locations and in places that need it. But generally, there's a lot of places in this world where we can start to much more often lay out a prototype and execute that at a better cost, faster, and -- do it. And in the meantime, by the way, we continue to be a coveted tenant for landlords. So we -- getting sites is not a challenge for us, right? But we know this moment and the work we've done this year, and it will take some period of years is to continue to tighten up that model so that we can do things better. The last thing I'll say, and this is our -- as we get into '24, we said this on our last earnings call, our #1 operational goal is consistency. And you're going to see that in kitchen design. You're going to see that in the way we move food, not in how we change, how we cook or bring in the same premium products, but in how we move things in a better way that we think can shave off a little time, can make our teams more consistent that can contribute overall to our improving margin goals. So there's a lot happening behind the scenes.

Don't worry, I have questions about that, too. But -- and -- just in terms of kind of better balancing the opening calendar, has that been just a matter of getting ahead of things more, or anything different?

Well, you can ask any restaurant or retail company, for some reason, everybody always has a back-weighted schedule. There's something about the universe -- and it's not just us, by the way, or other companies, it's also landlords and dependency on landlords and everybody rushes to get it in. We've traditionally had back-weighted development schedules, and it's frustrating and we do everything in our power to not make that happen, and it often happens. Last year, we had an extremely back-weighted schedule. We had, I think, 22 or 23 of our company-operated Shacks opened in the fourth quarter of last year. Good news, that didn't happen this year. We were much better spread out. We still have a bunch. I mean, we've still got a bunch of restaurants, we're going to own between now and Christmas. But we're getting better. We'll get better. There will years where it's back-weighted again. And that's just -- that's just part of our work. We have to continue to get better at that. It is always better when you can spread these things out, when you can. We get it done, but it is tougher and there's cost associated with it. We had some of that in the previous years. So hopefully, we'll keep setting things up to be more balanced.

Yes, makes sense. What have you observed so far about the drive-thrus? Throughput, customer use? It's still early, but what have been...

We've observed and we've been part of surveys, too, national surveys, where we've observed we get really high scores on guest experience, really high scores on order accuracy and the things that really matter. We are not the fastest. Now by the way, the #1 couple rated drive-thrus in the country also happen to the slowest in other brands. That's not a goal of ours to be slow. Our goal is to give you a great product. And I think what we've observed is we got to keep improving that. We've got to keep moving our speed. We know it matters. We got to keep thinking about everything about Shake Shack as you drive up and experience the menu board. How do people think at drive-thrus differently? And do we need to think a little bit differently about how we present our menu, so it's easier, quicker, you see and feel the value? We're doing various things to win that. We continue to see a significant amount of our guests come inside. So this is really encouraging for us because we love the idea of adding drive-thru as a convenience when you want it, but we're still Shake Shack. And we want to be the place where you want to come and you want to bring your kid for a shake, and it's not only about driving around the back. When you want that, we got you, but we're still a community gathering place. And we've seen a significant percentage of people still coming in, and we love that. And we know that what we built is big and expensive and we had to rein that in. So I think that's the work.

Yes. You still see roughly -- I think you previously said like half and half, drive-thru/in-store?

I don't think it will be -- oh, sorry, of the mix, about right. We haven't reported that in a while, but that's the last time we've talked about it. We have a lot of drive-thrus opened since then and many of them are brand new, so we're still shaking out where that lands.

Okay. Why don't we talk about licensing a little bit, right? I think it's interesting because that's actually, I think, faster growing right now in unit growth terms. I mean could that eclipse the owned stores over time? How long will that [indiscernible]?

Well, we -- today, we're about 60-40, company-owned to license. Why do we license? Well, first of all, we love our returns, and we have for 20 years and we like to keep those for ourselves, so we generally like to own our restaurants in this country. We think that's the best. In places here like airports, stadium venues, roadsides, we see a great opportunity to team up licensees who can get those locations. We've had an amazing year in our airports, amazing. We see a lot of growth there, we've had new growth that we're super excited about in roadside, anyone driving down the New Jersey Turnpike or Garden State Parkway and now up the New York Thruway, we're going to be in most of those centers and we're super excited about that. I think it's a great unlock and a great way to just exceed expectations in moments when your expectation is that food is going to be bad. And when we look at the world, we are growing a big business in China and Asia, we have a maturing business in the Middle East, in the U.K. In Mexico, we just opened our first drive-thru last week in Mexico, super excited about that. So we love it. It's really important to remember for the license business. It is an asset-light, highly accretive, very profitable part of our business that also is massively brand-accretive globally. And I'm not sure how many brands at our scale and though this journey have ever created that opportunity. This drive-thru we opened in Mexico, it's 2 hours outside of Mexico City, 2 hours outside of Mexico City. There were 250 cars lined up. 250 cars lined up down the street to get there. I don't know how many brands can continue to cause that to happen at scale all over the world. And that's the brand power we have. So we're leaning into licensing. I think as Katie and I have said, China is going to be interesting. We don't know right now, we have a massively growing business in China. But like the economy is going to do something next year. Nobody is quite sure. You see people talk about this all the time, and I think we're going to have to watch that in the near term because that's a big part of the business, but we see a big opportunity there as well. So I love the licensing part of our business and really like the balance.

I assume that's more kind of -- that comment is more specific to demand. You still have licensees that I assume are committed to growing there?

Absolutely. Absolutely. We have more than 30 restaurants in Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, it's a real business and it's going to continue to grow.

Right. Anywhere that's been somewhat less successful? Or what do you think is kind of like worked best as you've gone into..?

Internationally?

Yes.

I don't know about less successful. I would say slower growth maybe -- Japan, we have 14 Shacks, 13 or 14. Japan is a different place, and we do really well in the Shacks that we have, and -- but it's not a massive, let's grow, grow, grow culture like China is, like Korea has been for us. So that will be slower growth. The U.K. has been kind of slower growth for us, but recently we've added some really good Shacks in the U.K. this year, and we're adding more. So it's less about that than it is about it not hitting. I think as we look at next year, we've got some exciting openings in Canada as well as Kuala Lumpur. So Singapore has been a great market for us. So -- if you really want to understand the totality of the Shake Shack story, you should really go see some Shacks in Asia and around the world and understand that part of our culture. It's pretty cool.

Yes. I have been to some in Japan. They're very impressive.

So cool.

And very crowded. Maybe let's talk just about the margin side. You have gotten back to your targeted store margin range at this point. Maybe -- and you've provided quite a bit of detail on this, but talk about where you are on some of those key initiatives there. What's going to be most impactful in '24? Maybe labor scheduling has been a topic you've talked about, leaning into the kiosks, trainings, throughputs, supply chain, whatever you think is kind of most important there?

Yes, I'll just kind of start top down and work through. But we've had a number of initiatives in place to not only improve our margins but also grow sales and improve the guest experience. And I'll just really start with kiosks. So kiosks, we've retrofitted. Nearly all of our Shacks now have kiosks in them. And we're seeing at least a high single-digit check lift on the back of that. It's also our most profitable channel. And when we talk about kind of what we're doing on labor, part of what we're doing is now, kind of in that next step now that we've done the kiosk rollout, is then adjusting and getting more tight and bespoke on the scheduling to adjust for that plus a whole host of other specific factors at each of the Shacks. And so that work is ongoing, and we'll kind of -- we'll update you as it goes into next year, but we're pretty optimistic by what that can do, not just in -- it's not just about taking hours out of the Shack. It's about really making sure that we are optimized for staffing for peaks. So it's about making sure that we are capturing more sales and also providing a great guest experience. So it all kind of holistically goes together. And as Randy had talked about, consistent guest experience. That is absolutely what our teams are primed for, and there's kind of a 2-pronged benefit -- or there's more than 2 prongs, but 2 main pronged benefits to a consistent experience, a consistent time for people to move through the Shack. First of all, not only if you are able to be more efficient and improve your throughput in the restaurant, you're able to process more people and get sales that way. That's all great. But for a longer-term driver of frequency, we think that's absolutely essential. People have a better understanding of what that time commitment will be for them to come into the restaurants, and it's a more consistent experience. Our research has shown that they're just more willing to come back and increase their frequency on the back of it. On the supply chain side, our teams have been deep, deep, deep in the weeds on a whole body of work around the supply chain. And it's about both professionalizing and kind of maturing that team and their process and expanding the number of suppliers we're using, moving around distribution and rethinking some things in order to just be more efficient and help offset the inflationary pressures that we face. And then also, next year we're looking at -- there's going to be some areas where we're expecting to have inflation. So beef is the biggest risk that we've called out. But fries, buns, all of these things are still going up despite the broader commodity landscape, some areas looking a little bit more favorable. But it's really the work on that side of the team and then also the close collaboration between finance and operations to help our team members understand how we can best navigate and expand margins within that framework. And then on other OpEx, we've done a lot to shore up profitability on that side, whether it is improving the profitability in our delivery channel itself, but also importantly, recapturing a lot of those sales through our own channels. Our in-Shack business is growing substantially. And we're really taking back a lot of that margin that was kind of lost when COVID hit. And we've had just greater discipline around T&E and certainly a more even opening schedule is helping on that side. But there's other things that we've been doing. We've had benefits from R&M and really across the board. So we've improved margins a lot this year. We talked about 400 basis points of improvement in the last quarter. And we're setting up for next year to be another year of margin improvement.

Brian, I just want to jump in, and just overall, I think it's so important, and I [indiscernible] this whole time, and we've been public for almost about 9 years now. And there's a lot of the story that I think is important to make sure people understand. I'm sure most every -- I don't know everyone you cover, but I'm guessing they have many more thousand restaurants than us. We only own and operate about 300 restaurants in this country. The opportunity for us to acknowledge that we're not perfect, understand that everything we've built we've learned from, and we have this tremendous opportunity moving forward to capture economies of scale. When we think about everything Katie just said in supply chain, and we had -- up until recently, we had 1 restaurant in all of Portland, Oregon, right? Now we have 3. We had 3 restaurants in Seattle, now we have 5. All of a sudden, we've gone from 4 restaurants to 8 in the Northwest. And that entire thing radically changes everything. Imagine when we have 15 instead of 8. And that's true. And I think it's always important to connect with our shareholders to make sure people understand, like, we're actually still kind of small. We've got a lot of work to do and we're expressing what that work is, clearly, but it is going to continue to take some time for us to truly benefit from the economies of scale that so many other big companies have. And we're on that road. We're on that road. It's a $1 billion revenue company this year, and that's pretty awesome, a lot more when you add up our total system-wide sales, and that's the body of work that we're super excited about and see very clearly how, over time, we can continue to capture some of those bigger economies of scale in a lot of places in our P&L.

Yes. Yes, it makes sense. And I mean you haven't guided '24, but I assume that directionally, you still expect Shack margin improvement next year you're committed to -- to finish out, maybe I'll just ask my lightning round questions, which we've asked of everyone here. It's the same question. First is demand backdrop for the year ahead compared to recent trends. Would you expect accelerate, hold, decelerate?

I wish I had a crystal ball to truly understand the consumer right now. Everybody all day, we're all talking about it. Good news, people are employed, seem to be spending. Shake Shack generally tends to have a higher-end consumer. But I think you've seen general industry traffic for the most part, in most places, be negative, right? And made up a little bit by price. And I think we have to be cautious. We -- I don't think any of us in the industry, Shake Shack included, knows exactly what the next year will bring. I think we're all hopeful based on signals that we've talked about and shared. But we've got our own ups and downs in traffic sort of at the end of third quarter and then improving in October. And I think our tactics on that will be everything we just talked about: increasing brand awareness, smart marketing where we can, smart all the tactics that we can against what is going to be, I think, a uncertain backdrop for a little while, and I couldn't tell you how long, but we think Shake Shack generally will be well positioned in this environment over the long term.

Okay. And second, margins year ahead. Up, down neutral, and I just talked about this, presumably, you think that there's expansion next year. The third question is not really relevant to you on capital allocation because you're a growth company. Question was CapEx, buybacks, dividends, debt paydown, you'll be investing in growth, so...

No current plans for buyback -- we've never done a buyback, dividend, no current plan for that now. We have a strong balance sheet and we're going to use it well and we have. If you look at our history, and we will continue that even more discipline. Looking at G&A leverage, as we've talked about, where we can capture some of the better improving unit economics and making sure we're good stewards of the very strong capital position that we're in, we intend to be.

Okay. Great. I'll end it there. Thank you, guys.

Thank you.

Thanks, everybody. Appreciate it.