Yesway, Inc. Class A Common Stock Goldman Sachs Global Consumer and Retail Conference

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 '08, 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.