Skip navigation
Good Times looks to grow beyond Colorado

Good Times looks to grow beyond Colorado

Good Times Burgers & Frozen Custard, Bad Daddy’s Burger Bar plot expansion

Good Times Restaurants Inc. plans to expand its Good Times Burgers & Frozen Custard and Bad Daddy’s Burger Bar concepts beyond their home base of Colorado.

The Golden, Colo.-based company completed in May a $21 million acquisition of the casual-dining concept Bad Daddy’s Burger Bar, expanding a stake it initially took in 2013.

The decision to buy out the brand came after a couple of years of operating the concept in Colorado, president and CEO Boyd Hoback said.

“As we got deeper into the concept, we got more comfortable with its potential,” he said.

Good Times operates three Bad Daddy’s units in Colorado, with four more expected to open this year.

With the acquisition, the company now has another seven Bad Daddy restaurants operating in North Carolina. Another two units are franchised, and one is a licensed airport location.

The company also operates and franchises the 38-unit quick-service chain Good Times Burgers & Frozen Custard, which it plans to grow from its home base of Colorado. Next year, the company plans to start seeding states around Colorado with the quick-service brand, then expand franchising.

The company does not currently plan to franchise more Bad Daddy’s units, Hoback said.

“We’re reluctant to hand that over to franchisees too early in the process,” he said. “We want to have a larger platform of company-owned restaurants first.”

The goal is to build Bad Daddy’s out of both Colorado and North Carolina over the next two years, then expand to concentric states.

Hoback said Bad Daddy’s has the potential to become a national brand, if not super-regional.

“It’s so small, that’s certainly blue sky,” he said. “There’s a lot of gourmet, chef-driven burger concepts out there, but nobody has scaled that.”

What makes Bad Daddy’s unique is its small-box format. Units are typically about 3,600 square feet — about half the size of typical casual-dining restaurants.

Within that small box, restaurants average about $2.7 million in sales, Hoback said, with 15 percent to 20 percent of sales coming from the bar.

Much of Bad Daddy’s business comes from larger, burger-focused casual-dining brands like Red Robin Gourmet Burgers, Applebee’s and Chili’s, Hoback said.

“We offer something different in terms of food and experience,” he said. “It’s more high-energy and has an edge to it.”

The Bad Daddy’s and Good Times brands will be operated separately, but will share some overhead and infrastructure for information technology, accounting, human resources, marketing and development, Hoback said.

In early May, Jim Zielke joined the company as chief financial officer. He was previously president and CFO for F&H Acquisition Corp., parent to the Fox & Hounds and Champps restaurant concepts.

Bad Daddy’s competes with growing regional brands like 14-unit Eureka!, which recently received an investment from private-equity partner KarpReilly Inc. to fund growth.

Other competitors include seven-unit Hopdoddy Burger Bar, based in Austin, Texas, which plans to double its unit count this year, as well as Zinburger, a concept developed by Phoenix-based Fox Restaurant Concepts, which The Briad Group is growing on the East Coast under a licensing agreement.

Contact Lisa Jennings at [email protected].
Follow her on Twitter: @livetodineout

TAGS: Finance News
Hide comments

Comments

  • Allowed HTML tags: <em> <strong> <blockquote> <br> <p>

Plain text

  • No HTML tags allowed.
  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
Publish