Dave & Buster's Looking to Expand Services, Locations in 2023 and Beyond
During the company's fourth-quarter earnings call on Tuesday, Dave and Buster's CEO Chris Morris revealed Tuesday that the company has a long-term plan to "further cement our company as the undeniable leader in location-based entertainment" with plans to expand into hospitality, technology and innovation, in addition to expanding the number of their locations in the near future.
Dave and Buster's is an eatery and entertainment business that offers a full-service restaurant, full bar, and a video arcade. Dave and Buster's also owns The Main Event - a sports-based family entertainment chain - that the company aquired in 2022.
"Our approach is to provide reasonable guardrails for what we're going to call a near-term, long-term kind of view of the company," Morris said. "What we really want to be accomplishing with Investor Day is to really lay out the strategy and how we view the company on a longer-term basis. And we realize that I know you guys all have models, you all are desperately looking for a specific data point, but the reality of it is we have a great business that has some near-term opportunities in front of us that we are executing against. And we feel like there's tremendous opportunity on the upside on a mid- to longer-term basis and that's what we want to be able to highlight for you guys."
Morris said that key plans going forard include developing a new hospitality model at both Dave and Buster's and The Main Event, in addition to brand relevancy, guest-facing technology, innovations, remodeling, and global expansion efforts.
"It's that intersection of the human service model and the technology model where we're maniacally focused on enabling the hospitality experience," Morris added. "And so we think that there's just tremendous upside as we develop this. And we're able to stay more engaged with the guests throughout every step of that journey, then that gives us the advantage of being able to collect a tremendous amount of data on those particular guests to be able to tailorize our service approach just to meet their specific needs."
As of the end of the fourth quarter of 2022, Dave & Buster's operates 152 locations - including three on Long Island in Westbury, Islandia, and Massapequa - as well as 55 Main Event locations, including in ones in Farmingdale and Plainview.