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. With us today, we have Yesway's Chairman, President, and CEO, Tom Trkla, as well as CFO and Treasurer, Ericka 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. For background for all of you, Yesway was established in 2015. It's the 15th largest convenience store operator in the U.S., with 450 stores. They're the proud owner of the famous Allsup's 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 EBITDA guidance range. Now, before we begin, 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 risks, please see its final prospectus, dated April 21, 2026, as filed with the SEC on April 23, 2026, and other filings with the SEC. Any forward-looking statements represent the company's outlook as of today, and the company disclaims any obligation to update these statements except as may be required by law. Okay.
Now that that's out of the way, 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 might not be as familiar with you and your business. Could you maybe take a minute to introduce yourselves, maybe your background, and then ultimately what led you to this stage today as a public company?
Sure. Thank you, and thank you for having us, and thank you all. It's a pleasure to be here. We're a bit unique because we sought this business out. 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 2008, and then took a couple of 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-store 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. 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 the 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. I use the term gobsmacked, if you guys have heard that term from Britain. We started the business and got hit by a pandemic, and then the aftermath and put, what, $8 trillion liquidity in the marketplace then.
Now the war in Iran, and as Ericka 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. 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.
Then we basically picked the part of the country. We are very fortunate. We are very selective about where we picked in terms of the country. We didn't want to compete with Wawa, Rutter's, and Cumberland Farms in every corner. We understood the impact of fuel margin on the 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 affects 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 Allsup's transaction, which is a 305-store portfolio in November of 2019.
In summary, we chose the business, we chose the location, and looking back now, 10 and a half, 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. Going public is a whole different story.
Yeah.
A whole arduous process where you're largely dependent upon markets and bankers and things you can't control. Probably the best advice I gave my internal team is markets may revert. Run your business well, markets will come back to you. If you run your business well, you get rewarded for it. So, yes, it was a pain to go public.
Yes.
And yes, it took a lot of time. I will say this, though, Bonnie.
Yes.
The beauty of these conferences, you guys come to us in a room. When you're doing a roadshow, you have to get in a car and drive all over New York and Boston and other places. So we actually like this.
True.
This is a lot better.
Good point.
Hopefully that's a good predicate.
Yes
for our business.
Yes. Well, on that point, thinking about your business, because I've known you for a few years now, Tom and Ericka, can you maybe frame for us the industry and some of the drivers of growth that you see for your business?
Certainly. I think the first and most important thing is it's an essential retail business. You're locationally bound. Most people who come to c-stores live 5 mi from a c-store.
Yeah.
You sell things, you are convenient, and that gives it a leg up. Probably most of you know this, but about 85% of all fuel, you will notice especially, sold in the country is sold in gas stations with convenience stores. We have something that Jeff Bezos can not deliver.
Yeah.
You have to come to our store to get fuel, and you really can not deliver coffee and some other things.
Yeah.
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. They would go to get their brakes-
Yeah
fixed and put the car up on a lift. You don't see that anymore. The real estate itself, which is some of the best real estate in the country, that even was ahead of Ray Kroc and McDonald's and a lot of the fast food chains, changed. The nature of what used that real estate changed. Now it's basically moving into food service. 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-
Yeah
I know Darren sells 46 million pizzas-
Yeah
in [inaudible], so we actually sell more items per store than Wawa and Casey's.
And Casey's. Wawa.
We'll knock on that.
All right.
But we sell 24 million burritos. The biggest thing is that we're convenient. The second is food service, basically, as a destination
Yeah
as a convenience store, which we're certainly benefiting from. Third, which is probably the most significant driver of EBITDA, is something that we call a deus ex machina, for those who remember your Latin, the gift of gods, which is fuel margin.
Yeah. We're going to talk
Okay. Minimum wage legislation has pushed up prices, so the individual operator needs to have higher prices, so you have almost a doubling of the break-even cost of fuel since we got in the industry. That's a gift. We take it, but we're all benefiting from it, and I think you know that in spades right now as well.
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 the sustainability of the industry's margins. I do think there's a structural change in the industry, as you just touched on. I think I understand that, but maybe touch on this for us, how sustainable you think these 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 again.
I'm going to let Ericka answer this.
Okay
If that's okay.
Sure.
She's answering all the meetings.
Okay. Okay.
I'm going to let her do it. Go ahead.
Sure. 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? Tom touched on the idea of the smaller individual operators, so those more on the 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 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 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, 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.
That's really a function, Ericka, of the volatility that we're expecting to see and the continuation of that?
It's hard to understand how the supply chain right-sizes itself in the near term.
Right.
Right? We would anticipate some level of volatility to continue. The big question is how much and for how long, right? We would certainly anticipate that happening. But even absent that, we would expect inflation- in and of itself to continue to push CPG.
Yeah. It's one of the hardest things I have to do as an analyst is try and forecast fuel margins.
Yes.
Then maybe touch on how you think your fuel business is advantaged 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.
Sure.
Go ahead.
Yep. 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. From a CPG perspective, we generally are beating, if you think about OPIS and our geography in the broader 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.
Generally, they are 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. We are seeing that certainly as a tailwind for us in particular in this environment.
If anything, we also made a conscious choice to lean into it. As Ericka said, we have commanded historically up to $0.14. It was disclosed in our SEC Form S-1 $0.05. There has 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 c-store chain that is not Love's or Pilot. We are about 38% right now.
38, yeah.
Our new builds, of which there are 92 new stores we've built in the past few years, those are all coming in over 40%. The weighted average of our portfolio should inch up as well.
Right, over time.
In terms of its percentage of diesel. Obviously, we're doing it because it makes more money. Our geography makes sense for it. We've made a conscious effort to basically own the land, buy land next door, put in high-flow diesel lanes to take advantage of that opportunity.
Then sticking with fuel, I wanted to talk about fuel volumes. During Q2, you reported same-store volumes that were quite impressive. They were up 1.4%, while July, I believe same-store fuel volumes were also positive. Just want to understand how you're able to manage balancing really both volume, fuel volumes, and then the impressive fuel margins, especially in this difficult operating environment.
Go ahead.
Sure. A couple things. On the portfolio in general, so diesel, again, 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. Many of them are coming to market. They're coming into our comp set following that 12th month, so month 13, they're in our comp set, but we're seeing them continue to mature. 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. 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's 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.
Makes a difference. Thinking about the conversion, as you're getting the traffic, consumers filling up, how have your conversion rates been inside the store? 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. I think about your inside sales and what you've been reporting. What are you seeing in terms of recently the conversion traffic trends? What are you doing to kind of increase traffic into your store?
Sure.
All right.
Yep. What we've seen from a conversion rate perspective, we certainly see on the fuel side of the business, folks in a high price environment coming more often. That doesn't always translate on a one-
Right
for one conversion, so the rate may have shifted slightly. 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.
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. That has certainly been meaningful. Again, those new to industry stores continuing to mature has certainly helped as a tailwind as well.
The only thing I would add is it really does help to have a destination food service platform. People will come to our store to eat food. The other thing, too, which we're finding out, which we've held as sacrosanct, we acquired Allsup's. As you know, Allsup's is also a 70-year-old chain, close to Mexico, World-Famous Burrito, and we have not touched that price. I was telling Ericka just before I got on the plane last night, I saw my first L Catterton Subway ad on TV. They're all up to the $6- $7 loyalty package meal, and we're at $4.99.
We're already known as a value shop, so we also believe that that has a correlation in terms of our inside sales. People will come to us more because we're already known as a value shop, and all of our strategic price analysis and increases have not touched the Allsup's Burrito.
We're not touching that. Everyone else is in search of getting down to a number we're already at, and we understand that in our market. We're also primarily low to moderate income consumers in our marketplace, so it matters a lot. We attribute that to a reason why we have good inside sales, even in this high inflationary environment. Or certainly positive ones when others don't. Ericka's right. You look at the Nielsen data and the Circana data- We're clearly taking market share.
Yeah.
I think that is another thing we talk about internally as a driver.
Yeah. No, that is helpful, and maybe frame for us, because certainly I wanted to talk about the iconic Allsup's Burrito, and I did taste it. It is good. Frame for us how much more runway you have for rolling that out, and then I know, I think, you have talked about maybe entering into some other food service items. How have you supplemented that burrito?
It is a great question. One of the things about us that is juxtaposed to our brethren is our industry basically has moved very heavy into the QSR heavy, 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. When we bought the burrito, we shut it all down and made that our platform and centerpiece. We are a frozen to fried 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, and my late father would have killed me if I said that. Even though I think it is 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 wrap with registers, is in 300 sq ft. We went the other way. We understand the impact of minimum wage on margins.
Obviously affecting everything in your everything you analyze right now, whether you are a grocery store o r whether you are a QSR, or whether you are a restaurant, it is affected by high minimum wage. We expand. What we say about food service ideation is at the margin. We are looking at pizza, we are looking at other things. Our third best-selling thing right now behind the burrito are chicken nuggets. We will 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 are not going to become Texas Born or Rutter's or Casey's.
Sure
in terms of full, because that would lower our model. We also, it gives us greater white space. I can buy a smaller store for 1,000 sq f t and put an entire food service operation in there. Most of our competitors can't. 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. 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 footage.
You touched on this, and that's a good point. To some extent, you're also rationalizing some SKUs, I believe. Then maybe go back to the pricing. Remind me, have you implemented some pricing or limited pricing on the burrito? If so, have you seen that that has been sticking? Because it's still very affordable.
Yeah, let me handle the first part.
Okay.
We're probably about two-thirds done with what I call SKU 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. We're just about done with all that integration right now, including SKU 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. We're cutting back things. This is not new. This is Famous Dave's. This is Chick-fil-A. They want you to buy what they want to sell you. We're doing menu optimization and SKU optimization as well. The second point, I'll let Ericka answer.
Yeah.
Okay.
As far as where we could go from here, I would think that the first place is we are never going to change that burrito. What I mean by change that burrito is the burrito platform. Our beef and bean burrito is by far our biggest seller, and we will never touch that. The way we think about it is how do we augment that? I think there's opportunities for add-ons.
Which will be hopefully a really strong addition to somebody coming in for a burrito and a cold dispensed beverage. Tom has talked about one of our top sellers is chicken nuggets. How do we get into augmenting there? As we mentioned, it is really about at the margin. Understanding that the beauty of the simplicity in what we do from the vast majority of our food being frozen to fried to customer is not something we are going to
Yeah. To your second question, we had one small price increase to the burrito years ago in response to a vendor increase. It is all formulaic and algorithmic. We have not taken any proactive price increase and do not plan to.
Okay. That is interesting.
And do not plan-
On that top item.
On that top item.
We've certainly, in food service and in total, done some pricing adjustments too.
Right.
But as I mentioned, not on that top.
Yeah.
Okay. 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. On the private label for the categories in which we participate, that would exclude things like cigarettes and those categories, it's about 9% of inside sales. So 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?
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 brands. 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 some opportunities on those sort of outside categories.
Okay, then outside of food service, what merchandise categories or initiatives do you think are going to create the greatest opportunity for you?
Aside from the answer she just gave on optimizing our private label, we are ideating, what Ericka says at the margin. 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. 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 sq f t store. Our typical stores are 5,600 sq ft- 6,000 sq f t. 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.
We could put a 3,900 sq f t store in and still have 100% of our food service. And we're actually testing something at our first grand opening of our store coming up, where we're actually going to shift dispensed beverage, 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. We're pretty tight in terms of what we sell where.
Yeah
We're looking at things like that to highlight where that is in terms of the store, to augment. Really, we're just about done with our rationalization and food service ideation, SKU optimization, and private label. A few things. We've got good plans in the food service side, but it's at the margin, as said. Other than the dispensed beverage, anything else you think we missed?
Nope. I think you've hit the highlights.
No. What about-
Sure
just thinking nicotine. It's such a big driver inside sales for the convenience store
Right
industry. How are you positioning yourselves there? I think from conversations you're shifting more of your focus to smoke-free, where the consumer's
Right
trending. Anything else there?
Other tobacco products has absolutely been something that has been a growth engine for us. If you think about, we see, like many of the retailers, cigarette units declining. That has more than been offset by other tobacco products. If you think about things like vape pouches, et cetera, that's absolutely been both a top-line expansion, but also from a margin perspective.
Margin. Right.
Absolutely.
Yeah. I think you can earn almost 2x or maybe 3x more margin on some of those products versus cigarettes.
Exactly.
I know everyone's shifting. Let's shift topics now into 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 were supposed to be through your capital light build-to-suit program. Could you touch on the return profile of building versus buying for us?
Sure. It's the same target. We actually started shifting to building after we bought 27 because of the expansion to multiples.
Okay.
We still have the same hurdle rate.
Okay.
We can build right now. We've built just under $1 billion of the stores, the net new stores. Our target hurdle rate's a 15 unlevered, and then a 30 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. What we said in the SEC Form S-1, we'll always own the majority. There's a trade-off 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?
Yeah.
We have good runway to do so. In our model, most of our short-term builds are build-to-suits. Not just from the fuel margin expansion, but also from our outsized performance, and we do not have a lot of deferred maintenance in the portfolio. It is all being directed towards moving stores up later in the cycle. We have reaffirmed the guidance at 130.
Yeah.
But at some point, we will be able to talk about what we are doing in outer years to the builds. But in the short term, we will do the build-to-suits. We did move, is it three? Two or three of the build-to-suit NTIs just to deploy more capital sooner. We like owning real estate. We'll always own the majority of it. My guess is it'll have six in front of it, okay? 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. We don't want to lose that flexibility by owning somebody else's store or having it built-to-suit. 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.
Yeah
over 15s.
Right.
Same thing on the buys. You probably read about, and I am sure you did, Bonnie, because we talked to you on our calls, but we are now ramping up again buying.
Yeah.
We have nothing to disclose yet.
Okay.
Obviously, when I do, we will. We are very active, including incorporating a whole new department within the company. Right now, I have eight guys in the field that do nothing but unearth land. We do not go compete with a QuikTrip or a Casey's for a site. We try to get the site by talking to a farmer. Things like that. So we are in market. We are doing the same thing on the acquisition side. We are going to basically have people in market who target ones and twos. We are going to see every big deal like everyone else will.
Yeah.
We are going to see the medium-sized deals that will come from the Matrix Capital Markets Group and the Raymond James. But we also want to go get because I can get better multiples.
Yes.
As Ericka 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.
I know.
It's harder to be the small guy.
Yeah.
It's harder to be mom and pops, and so we think there's more opportunity. I can buy those at multiples. We're not going to buy to buy unless I get the same 15.
Yeah.
But it's hard for me to buy a 13 or a 14 multiple.
Right.
Darren can do it when he's trading at a 19. And when we trade that way, we'll talk.
Yeah.
We're not there yet.
Yeah.
Okay. I'm kidding, but I'm not.
No, right.
Okay?
To be clear, because you and I talked about this the other day, just in terms of your efforts there. When you say one to twos, you're looking at small operators-
Exactly
you're going to do a bunch of those, almost bolt on, tuck in. You can do that easier.
Right.
Does 130 new stores consider that?
No.
That would be potential.
This is all.
Yeah.
We can't announce it yet, obviously.
Okay
because we are a public company. When we have something to announce, we will. But we basically cannot say. 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 are ramping up again only because we have tremendous amounts of excess liquidity. And again, as you know, Bonnie, we paid down
Yeah
our revolver. I mean, our balance sheet is the best it has ever been. So, like I like to say, EBITDA soonest.
Yeah.
It takes me 12 -1 8 months, by the way, to build a store, so I cannot just flip the switch.
Yeah.
I am trying to load up things. We are buying more land right now.
Okay
To load things up. The acquisitions will allow me to get EBITDA quicker.
Okay.
So we are ramping up. The ones and twos is simply if I could buy at a single-digit multiple, I can synergize those down to a number that's equivalent to a build.
Okay.
It's hard to do when you're buying at a 12 or a 13 or a 14 multiple.
Yeah
to try to synergize it down. So it might happen.
Right.
We'll see. But that's what we're focusing on. But it's small ball. I mentioned this before, we have the added white space because we could buy a smaller store and do food service, and our competitors can't. They need bigger square footage for pizza kitchens, things like that. So we're targeting it deliberately.
Yeah. Okay. The flexibility and optionality.
Exactly.
One of the things, Tom, that I do get questions on is, in terms of the 130 new stores, your guidance for this year is to have six to eight new store openings.
Right.
Sometimes investors will ask me, "Why not 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?
It's actually a straightforward answer, and it's really, I don't want to say your fault, but it's your fault.
What?
We deliberately slowed down our building pipeline to pretty our balance sheet up to go public.
Okay.
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.
Yes. Love it. Yeah.
It's all self-inflicted.
Okay.
We're ramping right back up.
Okay.
What we're saying in the call is to not get into trouble with Latham & Watkins.
Yeah.
Is we reaffirmed the 130.
Yep.
And in that 130 is a much-
Okay
much more rapid per year store count. We reaffirmed our guide for this year, the six to eight, and we reaffirmed the 130. But we have certainly the proven capability of building 20, 30, 40 stores a year. That's why. And it turned out to be great because we did certainly get a lot of credit for our balance sheet-
Yeah
going into the IPO.
Makes sense. Then as you think about whether it is build, buy, maybe frame for us some of the areas of focus. I think you touched on this earlier, what is appealing to you in terms of geographic placement. Would it be still stores focused in the Texas region? I feel like that has gotten so competitive.
Great question, and really two things. You may have read we are selling Iowa and Kansas
Yes
for very specific reasons. We are basically disadvantaged because of the tax credit for those that could sell E15, and we could sell those stores that go to multiple, redeploy the capital. Our entire area of focus in the 130 stores is Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Oklahoma. Now, I say that because we like a dense portfolio. It is much easier to supply fuel
Yeah
to supply merch, as well as to site my people. Okay? It's much easier to run when I'm more proximate, so all of our growth is in those states. That's also where we're looking to, by the way, buy.
Okay.
We're not looking outside that right now. Our primary driver for buying or building is fuel margin. We have the entire country, every c-s tore in the country, geospatially mapped, and every single grade of gas, from diesel down to the lowest grade of gas, as well, which is why we don't buy center cities.
Yeah.
Okay? We are basically rural suburban. We command higher pricing power, which is why we have one of the highest CPGs of any c-s tore chain in the country. That, as well as the diesel mix as well. Anything you want to add to that?
No.
Okay.
No. Really quick, how willing are you to lever up for the right deal? I think you've previously mentioned four times, I believe. Would you consider-
Yeah. I think what we said is, as a public company we'd want to operate under a three-time.
Okay.
For a transformational deal, we would consider something temporarily higher.
Okay.
But we certainly like where we are now much, much lower than that.
Those are harder to come by, aren't they? The transformational ones, given the industry and how-
That's right.
Yes.
Yeah.
Exactly.
A lot of those are for sale.
Yeah.
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?
Sure. If we look at even just our history, you're probably talking about high single digits EBITDA growth. I think in our medium-term algorithm that we had put out there, we are probably something lower than that because we were giving some nod to understanding we would be delivering only six to eight units for 2026. Obviously, from our recent reporting history, that will lean much more heavily beyond that. We have some very outsized growth here from operations more recently. I certainly wouldn't expect compounded 30%+ growth every quarter, but certainly, mid to high single digits is realistic.
Okay. Thank you. Thank you both so much for your time. It was a pleasure having you.
Thanks.
Appreciate it.
Thanks, everyone.
Thank you all very much.