Biglari Holdings: 2015 annual meeting notes

Summary

  • Attending the annual meeting is the best way for investors to learn about Biglari Holdings. CEO Sardar Biglari takes all questions and provides insights into all the company's holdings.
  • This was my first chance to attend the annual meeting, and I managed to take detailed notes. The notes are broken out into sections to make them easier to digest.
  • This first installment will cover questions relating to the proxy battle, Biglari's compensation, and its stock price.
  • Clearly, not everyone left the meeting happy, but I personally feel extremely confident in the decisions that Biglari is making, and expect current stockholders to be happy going forward.

Last week, I went to New York to take part in the 2015 Biglari Holdings (NYSE:BH) annual shareholder meeting. I thoroughly enjoyed my first meeting, and hope to continue going annually in the future. As promised, I did my best to take notes on the entire meeting (although it did get challenging towards the end). There were over 60 questions asked, and the company had answers for almost all of them. Due to the amount of material, I've decided to break up my notes into multiple sections, which I'll publish over the course of the next few days. I've done my best to capture the words used as well as possible, but note that any "quotes" are most certainly paraphrases. The sections will be as follows:

  • Initial Statement and Proxy Contest
  • Maxim-related questions
  • Steak 'N Shake-related questions
  • First Guard and BH investment-related questions
  • My Main Takeaways from the Annual Meeting

Going into the annual meeting, I was wondering if we would experience a tense set of final remarks from both Biglari and the Groveland Group on why major stockholders should vote for their sets of directors. As it turned out, that part was a formality. All the major holders had cast their proxies ahead of time, and all of the incumbent board slate ended up winning. Thus, the formalities took all of five minutes, and after some initial remarks, Biglari took questions from about 1:10 to 6:45 pm.

Read the Full Article

Members help make our journalism possible. Become a Restaurant Business member today and unlock exclusive benefits, including unlimited access to all of our content. Sign up here.

Multimedia

Exclusive Content

Operations

Hitting resistance elsewhere, ghost kitchens and virtual concepts find a happy home in family dining

Reality Check: Old-guard chains are finding the alternative operations to be persistently effective side hustles.

Financing

The Tijuana Flats bankruptcy highlights the dangers of menu miscues

The Bottom Line: The fast-casual chain’s problems following new menu debuts in 2021 and 2022 show that adding new items isn’t always the right idea.

Financing

For Papa Johns, the CEO departure came at the wrong time

The Bottom Line: The pizza chain worked to convince franchisees to buy into a massive marketing shift. And then the brand’s CEO left.

Trending

More from our partners