Fat Brands, the serial acquirer of franchise concepts, on Wednesday named James Neuhauser its executive chairman and added a new independent director in Lynne Collier.
Neuhauser is a veteran financial executive who has served on the Fat Brands board since its inception in 2017. He is a former senior managing director in the private capital markets group of Stifel Nicolas & Company and before that was the chief investment officer of FBR & Co. He has more than 30 years in financial and strategic planning experience.
Fat Brands, which owns Johnny Rockets, Fatburger, Twin Peaks, Fazoli’s and several other chains, said Neuhauser will oversee Fat Brands’ accounting and legal departments and will focus on the company’s publicly traded equities and its relationship with investors.
Ed Rensi, who had been chairman, will move on to the vice chairman role. “Jim and Ed have been tremendous assets to Fat Brands over the last five years as we have reached a whole new level of scale,” CEO Andy Wiederhorn said in a statement. “I look forward to tapping further into Jim’s deep expertise in the public-equity markets.”
Collier, meanwhile, spent 25 years in equity research as a sell-side consumer analyst and most recently was managing director in the investor relations division at ICR Inc.
The change comes months after Fat Brands acknowledged that Wiederhorn, the company’s majority shareholder, was under investigation over transactions between the company, Wiederhorn’s Fog Cutter Capital Group, and Wiederhorn and his family. Fat Brands has said it is not a subject of the investigation and Wiederhorn himself has vehemently denied the allegations.
The change also comes after Ken Kuick, the CFO, was given a retention bonus if he stays through the first quarter of next year.
Wiederhorn has said that he expects a slower pace of acquisitions this year after engineering a flurry of deals worth nearly $1 billion in 2021. Those deals have required a heavy use of debt to complete.
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