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.

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