Stock Gumshoe

Hello out there, happy investors of Gumshoe Land! For your pleasure this weekend I thought I’d revisit a couple old teasers that have been making the rounds again, since the emails about them have been piling up and, in some cases, the companies may have gotten more or less interesting.

The first one is the “Starbucks of China”, from Green Read the rest of this entry »

This one was recently forwarded by a reader, with a tip as to the company he thought it was (he was right, too). And this is actually a company I owned a few years ago around their IPO, so this is also a nice bitter reminder that I shouldn’t have sold it.

The ad is for the Hidden Gems newsletter over at the Motley Fool, run by Tom Gardner (the email came from Paul Elliott, another Fool guy). The special report he’s asking you to sign up for — by taking a free trial to Hidden Gems for a month before your subscription begins — is entititled, “The ONE Stock You Can’t Afford to Miss This Year!”

The sell for this company is based on it possibly being the “next Starbucks” — so we”re treated to a big long spiel about what it was like to be a Starbucks owner in the early years, and how stinking rich you would have gotten had you had that kind of foresight.

I’ve said it before, but no one puts out email ads that are anywhere near as long as the Motley Fool’s — this thing would have been 18 pages if I printed it out. So there are a couple of pages talking about how brilliant Tom Gardner is … a few pages of Starbucks history … and precious few real hints about the company they want to recommend if only you’ll sample their subscription.

So what do we learn about the company, aside from the fact that it’s some kind of retail experience with huge growth potential? There are a few specific hints:

They intimate that the strategy is to grow a local type of business into a global brand.

It has “435 jam-packed locations… plans to ramp up to a thousand”

$65 million in cash and no debt.

In July 2004, you could have bought these shares for $25 … now they’re more than twice that much.

Tom recently spoke at the company’s annual meeting. (And “Suffice it to say that everything Tom learned on that trip affirmed his belief that the stock could easily double or triple again.”)

The author claims they’re more or less recession-proof because, although “the company doesn’t sell coffee, … it does sell something every bit as essential — great food… good times… and BEER.”

Well, sign me up for that.

So here are a few more quotes to get you excited:

“But what really sets this company apart is that management steadfastly refuses to take on crippling debt in order to fund its ambitious expansion plans. I can’t overstress how rare that is in the restaurant business.

“Especially for a juggernaut that is expanding bottom line earnings at a rate in excess of 25-30% per year — with firmly entrenched plans to keep up the breakneck, money-making pace.”

So who are they teasing us about here?

Sign up for your Hidden Gems free trial if you like — but thanks to the Stock Gumshoe’s mighty thinkatationizer and the input of my valuable readers, I can tell you that this company is …

Buffalo Wild Wings (BWLD).

As I mentioned, I used to own this stock … and I’m a little bitter. If memory serves, I did have some nice 20-30% gains around the time they IPOd and got a lot of attention about three years ago, but I lost faith in the concept and sold out. They have since done very well, the IPO price was in the low $20s and the shares are now at about $65. So good for me!

The company does have 435 locations, a mix of franchise and company-owned stores. They’ve used franchises to avoid piling on debt with store openings, but they’ve also raised a lot of money through equity financing to open their own stores. It’s actually a pretty old company — 20 or 25 years, I think, with a historical base in the midwest.

I still have doubts about whether a sports bar can become a national brand, and the only one of these I’ve ever been inside was apparently a poor example (it’s since closed). There are a lot of enthusiastic fans of the place, certainly, so I could easily be wrong.

The shares are priced for growth, but not to the same degree as a Chipotle in a similar business, for example — the forward PE is about 25. If you like the restaurants or the stock, let us know by commenting here. From the numbers, it looks like management is doing a great job — I think the decision about this company will rest on whether you think they can profitably double their store base.

I still like to believe there are some parts of American life, including the noble sports bar, that won’t be homogenized into a row of Applebee’s and Buffalo Wild Wings and TGI Fridays encircling every mall, but perhaps that’s just the curmudgeon in me. If you head out for some market research, have a dozen wings and a beer for me.