Brian Niccol’s Venti Task at Starbucks

In this podcast, Motley Fool analyst Jim Gillies and host Ricky Mulvey discuss:

• The situation that Niccol is coming into at Starbucks.
• Why previous leadership at the coffee giant didn’t work out.
• A sporting goods retailer that may have reached the bottom.

Then, Motley Fool personal finance expert Robert Brokamp kicks off a two-part interview with Dave Hatter, a cybersecurity consultant at Intrust IT, about the Social Security database hack and how to make your personal information more secure.

To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool’s free podcasts, check out our podcast center. To get started investing, check out our beginner’s guide to investing in stocks. A full transcript follows the video.

This video was recorded on Sept. 10, 2024.

Ricky Mulvey: Happy first week of school to Brian Niccol. You’re listening to Motley Fool Money (MUSIC) I’m Ricky Mulvey. Joined today by Jim Gillies. Jim, good to see you.

Jim Gillies: Good to be seen, Ricky.

Ricky Mulvey: Well, yesterday, former Chipotle CEO, Brian Niccol, he grabbed his lunch pail. He hopped on his private jet and started his first day leading Starbucks. Interesting company to look back on, because it sort of long, long term. Starbucks has been a fabulous performer, but over the past just five years, it’s just been paying dividends. On Mr. Niccol’s first day of school, what’s the situation he’s walking into this new high school with new friends, new opportunities.

Jim Gillies: I’m going to suggest, well, I like that you said that Brian Niccol’s taking his lunch pail, because I would suggest the first thing is it’s a good thing he’s not eating at Starbucks, because I’m of the opinion that Starbucks has never gotten food right, unless you like pre-made sandwiches made a month ago in a factory in Denver. I think that might be something that he’s walking into. I think he’s also walking too. Starbucks was famously always the so called third place between work and home. A third place where you could gather, maybe if you’re like me and a remote worker who sits at a desk and needs a little bit of downtime from sitting at the same desk always, so I go to a Starbucks to sit at a different desk.

The third place has disappeared. Starbucks has evolved under the leadership, and you can insert in air quotes if you want there. The leadership over the past six or seven years, has evolved from a coffee shop, more low key to get in slash get out with your sugary fruit fruit beverage of choice rather than the focus on coffee. My take is I think there’s a lot of things he’s going to need to do to get back to where they were. I’ve got a Beatles song in my head, get back to where you once belonged. I think that would probably be a a good start for Mr. Niccol. But he’s going to have a bit of a slog, I think.

Ricky Mulvey: You’ve got British bands on the brain. We’ll see why in a little bit (laughs) There’s one person he needs to make a fan of. The former CEO, Laxman Narasimhan, definitely did not have a fan in Starbucks founder Howard Schultz. What does Mr. Niccol need to do to make Mr. Schultz a fan of him as CEO?

Jim Gillies: Oh, boy, Ricky, can open worms everywhere. Thank you for that setup. I don’t give a rats hindquarters what Howard Schultz thinks of Brian Niccol. I think we are in the spot where you have to hire Brian Niccol because Howard Schultz messed this up so thoroughly, he needs to sit down, shut up and count his money. You say the last guy, Howard Schultz wasn’t a fan. I say the last guy was hired scouted and worked at the feet of Howard Schultz for 18 months. Howard Schultz cost Starbucks through that last ego-driven. I’m going to hire the next rockstar that’s going to take Starbucks into its next phase of growth. He scouted him. He had a six month internship where he was sitting at the feet of St. Howard, and then he was released into the wild. Then he was gone in less than a year. That’s Howard’s fault. Brian Niccol is here to take over from the mistakes of Howard Schultz. Not quite the take I think you were expecting me to give you.

Ricky Mulvey: Well, you know what some might say. This is a little bit like first one was General Electric after Jack Welch. You got Bob Iger in the notes here. Anytime you have these force of personality CEOs, I think there’s something in their brain where they want someone to come in and do a competent job because no one can really do the job as well as they can. Maybe there’s a little sandbagging going on. Next question.

Jim Gillies: I was going to say, do you want me to lead it a bit more Bob Iger, but I think we’ll leave him alone for now.

Ricky Mulvey: Yeah. We can set that aside.

Jim Gillies: I will just say, I don’t think Niccol needs to make Howard Schultz a fan. I think Brian Niccol, look, he’s already got a really good track record with first Taco Bell, and then later Chipotle, obviously, he’s already made a boatload of money. He can tell Howard to go pound sand if Howard gets a little too familiar. But it’s important to realize, Howard’s no longer on the board even, I think. He’s pretty much out. Yes, he’s got a big equity stake. But I think we need to walk away from the Howard Schultz era of Starbucks. He did a fantastic job for decades. But his time has passed, let Brian Niccol cook.

Ricky Mulvey: The investors are certainly excited about Brian Niccol. He got an 18% pop when he was announced as CEO. But he’s got some problems, and I wonder if one person, one CEO, can take care of all of this, which is, as you mentioned, the loss of a third place identity across 35,000 stores, and also not great worker morale. What do you think about that?

Jim Gillies: Well, first, I want to remind folks, and this sounds terrible. I’m a Brian Niccol fan. I’ll say that. But realize this is a different situation than Chipotle. When Brian Niccol was appointed Chipotle 2017, I think, it was met with derision. They’re hiring the guy from Taco Bell to come in and lead the company whose famous tag line is food with integrity. There was met with very, very healthy skepticism. With Starbucks, as you say, 18% one day pop, he’s met with, oh, he’s the savior. That’s a very different setup. I think investors should realize that and realize it’s probably going to take a little bit of time for that to come back. I don’t even count Laxman, and he was the wrong guy. That’s not a sin. Again, I lay that right at the feet of Howard Schultz, actually. He was the wrong guy to lead this company. But I think under Kevin Johnson, who was there from 2017-2022, and then he left and Howard came back for his third CEO. The company became a capital returns guy. I became almost a financial engineering or a financial returns company, and that can be death for a company with a specific culture. You’ve already mentioned GE.

I’m going to throw out a lot of the problems Intel is facing today is because two decades ago, they went from an innovative culture and Intel inside. We are a technology company first and foremost. They were one of the four horsemen, and that’s a compliment, by the way, one of the four horsemen of the Tech Bubble, them, Cisco, Microsoft, and Qualcomm. That covered Tech at the time. Intel is today considerably lower than the high price it hit almost 25 years ago during the Tech Bubble. So when you stop focusing on what you are, and start focusing on just dividends and buybacks and capital returns. I love those things.

But those have to be the secondary thing that’s coming from the business. And we’re going to talk about a company that I think still has it in the proper order in a minute. But I want to see Niccol return to let’s make it the third place identity. Let’s not just set out two little two person chairs to get people out as fast as possible. This is going to maybe be controversial with some people. Stop focusing on unionized stores. Stop focusing. If some stores unionize stop picking fights in that area. If some stores unionize, that’s fine, if some stores don’t. I am from a background in industry, in my engineering days.

There was a lot of industry, and we proudly were a non-union shop because we talked about very frequently when other industrial companies in our area, where I live, would talk about unionizing, or when we would talk about unionizing, we’re like, hey, we’re going to pay you what the union shop gets down the street. We’re going to pay you the same as them. Oh, and you don’t have to pay union dues. Problem solved. A little rapprochement with your employees, and 35,000 stores. Maybe think if you need 35,000 stores today, maybe you can cut back on a few of the outlets. You don’t have to have a Starbucks in the washroom of another Starbucks. Maybe think about strategically reducing the store count so you can later grow the store count. Basically, focus on what the Starbucks promise has been prior to Howard Schultz’s return. Probably, I would say, Howard Schultz was there from 2008-2017 after kicking Jim Donald out. He then passed the reins to Kevin Johnson. That ’08, 2010, 2012 focus on what you’re doing well there and try to replicate it.

Ricky Mulvey: We’ll see if it happens. Certainly, a company I’m keeping a closer eye on now. Let’s move to a company we’ve talked about a little bit on the show, which was reported this morning, Academy Sports and Outdoors. You’ve pitched it, and it’s basically a value conscious Dick’S Sporting Goods. The major theme here is that sales for the company are slowing and decreasing, in fact, but the cash flow number is up by 60% year on year. I know you’re a cash flow guy. What’s happening with those cash flow numbers, Jim Gillies?

Jim Gillies: Very good, thanks. I’m going to make a bold and probably stupid prediction. I think the bottoms in on this stock, because that earnings report was terrible. As you go down, and look, it was largely expected to be terrible, I will say that. I have said very much the same thing. But when you have quarterly, sales are down, 2.2, comp sales are down almost seven. Net income is down about 9%. Earnings per share is only down about 3%. That’s the result of past buybacks. We’re going to get back to that. If you look more at the first half of the year, things are down even worse, except for the top line sales. They reduce their guidance. Guidance went from sales growth. Can’t pronounce syllables, apparently. Sales growth was originally expected to be negative 1.5 to 3% this year with comps -4-1. Now comps are expected -6-(-3). They’ve reduced their free cash flow expectations a little bit. That’s mainly due to decreased capital spending. This was a terrible quarter, or it was a really bad quarter, except for those cash flows as you talk about. The stock is up, as I speak about 6%. The stock is up after just a brutal quarter, which suggests to me that everyone was expecting things to be bad. I was certainly expecting things to be bad. However, I have a bit of a longer-term view on this one, and I have a case study where I think this one is tracking.

Ricky Mulvey: I think we can focus on why things are bad, management highlighting. We had hurricanes, we have a tightened consumer. I think it’s also worth pointing out when you look at this company next to DICK’S Sporting Goods. DICK’S Sporting Goods had comp sales growth of 4.5%. Academy Sports had a 7% comp sales decline. They’re still opening stores. Before we get to the case study, what’s happening with that disconnect, do you think?

Jim Gillies: I think DICK’S is a better-viewed brand. DICK’S has a far more reach in terms of their branding. I believe they’re in all 50 states or at least the 48 continental states, whereas, I think Academy might be in 19 states now. I think they just re opened a store in Ohio for the first time. They’re doing a lot of green fields research, which as you point out with negative comps, might not be the best application of it for now, but I think there’s increasing brand awareness. I think there’s a lot more brand stickiness with DICK’S, and I think you need to see Academy doing that increasing brand awareness. Now, they have done this move before. They have chased this. This is a company that, as you say, they talked about having issues in the quarter from hurricanH hits, which knocked off, I believe, about $16 billion off sales. They had issues with conversion of a distribution center a warehouse where they had a bit of a hit because they chalked up to about 30 or $35 million in lost sales. There’s $50 million in lost sales from this quarter that they at least have an explanation for. Whether you buy the explanation or not is up to you. But they were very good on the conference call as well, just talking about this didn’t work. This wasn’t great. We are seeing some green shoots.

Green shoots being they’re talking about more recently opened stores are outperforming the legacy stores are doing well. What little we have on 2023 vintage stores. Those are outperforming 2022 stores, which are just now entering the earliest stores in 2022, are just starting to enter the comp sales, you calculate your comps. You don’t use all stores because a store opened last week. We’re not going to include that in comp sales. I think things are going to turn. It might suggest to you that some of their legacy stores might need a bit of a refresh if the newer stores are indeed out performing to that level. When I look at the overall business going on here, and I look at what they’re talking about, this is a company that famously had a five year plan that went from 2018-2022. They hit all the targets in that five year plan ahead of schedule. They’ve now got a second five year plan. That is running through 2027, where they want to get sales over 10 billion total. They want a net income margin about 10%, adjusted operating profit, 13%. They want to increase their inventory turns, yada, yada. They want to increase their digital sales. When I look at that and give it a very, very healthy haircut. I’m trying to be very, very pessimistic with my forecasting on this company. Because, if they outperform my pessimistic estimates, I think we’re all going to do very well, frankly, on this one. I am a shareholder. After the numbers they’ve reported, after the very, shall we say, negative numbers, I expect for the next year, year and a bit.

Jim Gillies: Modeling all of this out, and particularly what they do with their cash flow, because the cash flow story is very good here. What do they do with that cash flow? They’re doing all of their gross spending on new stores. That is all covered in by self-ganar cash. They pay a very modest dividend, but it’s still there. It’s still something. They buy back a lot of stock and they’re very aggressive at buying back their shares at today’s prices. I will suggest to you the reason they’re doing it at today’s prices is because very, very modest sales growth conversion of so called GAP profitability. You are either to EBITDA or adjusted EBITDA pick your poison there. To free cash flow, I assume it’s going to take a hit. For example, over the last four quarters, adjusted operating profit to free cash flow has been converted at about a 60% rate. I don’t have it any higher than 49% rate going forward. Historically, it’s been well over 100, if you do cumulative. I run through my modeling exercise. I try to be very pessimistic.

I make sure I account for all of the debt they’ve got. I make sure I account for all of the options and other shares and things that are outstanding that are going to be a drag on value for shareholders. I’m struggling, Ricky to get the fair value, the intrinsic value of this company below $80 of my estimate. The stock is trading at about 55 or 56 today, I think. Frankly, at this point, the fact that they’re buying back shares as aggressively as they are while not impacting their growth plans, they’re not borrowing to buy back stock. They do have some debt, but they’ve got almost much cash as they have debt. I think it’s about $150 million differential. They’ve been slowly taking their debt down. There’s a lot of really good stuff happening here under the hood. I’m going to keep on pounding the table because I don’t see any reason. Even with this bad quarter, which was expected, I don’t see anything that’s derailing my long-term thesis here and this is very undervalued in my view.

Ricky Mulvey: Well, I’m a shareholder as well, and I know we talked about this company a lot. I hope it’s undervalued. Jim Gillies, we do not have time for the ticket master story. Hope we get to it another time. I appreciate your time and your insight on this.

Jim Gillies: No problem. Thank you.

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Up next. As many as 272 million Social Security numbers are out on the dark web after a background check company was hacked. What can you do to protect your information? My colleague, Robert Brokamp caught up with Dave Hatter, a cybersecurity consultant for Intrust IT and a regular on 55KRC the Talk Station in a two-part interview. We’re playing Part 1 today, Part 2 tomorrow. Also, as a heads up for newer listeners, Brokamp’s nickname at the Fool is Bro, so you’ll hear Dave call him that throughout the conversation.

Robert Brokamp: Last month, we learned that national public data, which is a data broker had been hacked and the personal information of hundreds of millions of Americans began showing up on the so called dark web. Dave, what do we know about how this happened and what types of data were stolen?

Dave Hatter: Well, Bro, thanks for having me on first off. This is a major breach probably based on what we’ve seen so far, if not the most significant because it appears to be the culmination of a bunch of different datasets put together. It’s billions of records, hundreds of millions of people, primarily in the US, the UK and Canada. It appears so far. But it’s got a lot of really sensitive data in it that potentially is very valuable to hackers and identity thieves. That’s really part of the problem until we have a national privacy law, which we don’t. There’s roughly 18 states that have one now. You as a consumer continue to be the unfortunate victim of these things. Usually, even if they pay a fine, very nominal penalties to these companies, these data brokers, again, whose entire existence is built on absorbing your data, compiling your data, aggregating your data, and selling it to other people where they make gigantic amounts of money. When you see these breaches, again, you as the consumer are now the one that’s fraught with peril. You’re the one that has to worry about. Is your identity going to be stolen or your bank accounts going to be hacked. It’s a major problem, unfortunately. Again, when you look at the types of sensitive data even though it doesn’t all appear to be correct, it’s things like Social Security numbers and passwords. The stuff that makes it really valuable to bad guys who want to steal your money. The thing I try to get across to people all the time who say, too small, I don’t have anything worth stealing. Your money is worth stealing. They will steal it if you make it easy for them. Sadly, this is just like rocket fuel for them.

Robert Brokamp: Unfortunately, this isn’t the first data breach right back in 2017, a breach at Equifax, one of the major credit ratings agencies affected more than 147 million consumers. Again this won’t be the last. Let’s talk about the steps people should take to protect their identity, their credit score, and their accounts. Your first recommendation is to not ignore a data breach notification.

Dave Hatter: Generally speaking, once these companies step up and acknowledge that this has happened to National Public data has, you’ll end up getting some letter from them. Sadly, I’ve gotten several of these. Chances are you have two and I’m sure all your listeners have from various data breaches that have occurred like the one you mentioned previously. When you get these letters, you need to open them, you need to read them carefully, you need to understand what they’re telling you has potentially been stolen because not all data is equal to the bad guys. Having a Social Security number is a lot more valuable than having your street address. Having a password, they know people use the same passwords on multiple accounts. That’s why 104 Hat Nerds like me are always warning. You’ve got to get a password manager, you need to have a strong, unique password on every account. They know people use the same password or some slight variation like, hey, I’m going to be super secure on this account. I’m going to make it 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. They know this. When they get this data, it’s super valuable to them. Again, not all data is equal. Read the notification, understand what it says, and then the rest of these steps you can apply in different orders depending on what data was stolen. But in this particular case, again, it’s a lot of super-sensitive data. You really need to act on this.

Robert Brokamp: Reading about this breach, I had read about some websites that supposedly, you could go to that website, enter your information, and see if your information was stolen. But my first reaction was, I don’t want to go to these websites and enter my information. They were npdbreach.com and npdpenester.com. Do you think people should go and use those sites?

Dave Hatter: In general, no. Let me say this. There are legitimate sites out there like, Have I Been Pwned, which is created by Troy Hunt, a Microsoft guy, where you can go and search the dark web and see if your information shows up. The concept itself is legitimate, but the bad guys know people don’t really understand how this works and they will often set up fraudulent sites to prompt you. Think of it like a honey pot for bad guys. Hey, you can come check and see if your data has been stolen. While again, the concept itself is legitimate. I would strongly encourage people to not use any of these sites that pop up unless A, it’s mentioned in the data breach notification letter you get from the company that informs you of the breach or B, it’s been well vetted by someone like a consumer reports or a CNET or a ZDNET or someone like that. There are organizations out there that have experts and editors that will look into this stuff. Again, if the FTC, for example, or the FBI on their public website, say, use this site to see if your data has been breached, I would trust that, but I certainly would not trust any emails. I would not trust anything I stumble into. I would only use a tool like that if it was thoroughly vetted or presented to me through a legitimate source like in a data breach letter.

Robert Brokamp: Another one of your top recommendations is to freeze your credit.

Dave Hatter: Honestly, Bro, I don’t know why people don’t do this in general. I just keep my credit frozen. The minor inconvenience of having to unfreeze it when I need to perform some credit related activity it just makes it so much more difficult for bad guys to go down the identity theft route. Now, again, with the data that’s been stolen, there’s all different ways they might try to scam you. But in this particular case, because it contained things like Social Security numbers and other sensitive information that would make it easy to impersonate you, I would strongly recommend, as I have many experts since this have come out. Just go ahead, go into the credit bureaus, freeze your credit. Again, it’s painless for the most part, takes a little time. Then if you need to do, go get a loan for a car or whatever, unfreeze your credit, do what you need to do, refreeze it. I think it’s just good advice in general. But if you get the data breach notification letter, it would be one of the first things I would do.

Robert Brokamp: Those three agencies are Experian, Equifax, TransUnion. You go to the websites, you sign up, you freeze it. It’ll take you 15-20 minutes total to do it. Then if you ever need to unfreeze it, it can be unfrozen and is little as an hour if you just do it on the website or you.

Dave Hatter: It’s pretty trivial compared to the protection you get as a result.

Robert Brokamp: Another recommendation is to initiate a fraud alert with the credit bureaus maybe while you’re there on the website.

Dave Hatter: While this will make it a little more painful potentially once you’ve done this, especially if your data has shown up in one of these breaches to your point Bro. Just go in there. While you’re freezing your credit, initiate a fraud alert. It’ll stay for a year. It’ll roll across all three credit unions. It just makes it that much more difficult for the bad guys who are trying to impersonate you and open credit in your name for them to take that action. Again, it’s fairly easy to do. Once it’s in place, you’re going to be a much more difficult target. That’s really the thing folks need to get in their head. Yes, I know, I said this before. I’m too small. I don’t have anything worth stealing. Why would someone target me? Your money is worth stealing. Sometimes the way they get to that is through identity theft. Thankfully, while I’ve never been the victim of identity theft. I know several people that have, and I can tell you it can be extremely traumatic, painful, and time consuming, and costly to unwind identity theft. By doing these simple things, again, you’re going to make yourself a much more difficult target, and in most cases, they’re just going to move on to the software targets who aren’t implementing these protections.

Robert Brokamp: Another type of information that people can get is maybe your credit card information, or your bank account information, so you suggest that people should stay alert and monitor their financial accounts for unusual activity.

Dave Hatter: This is good advice in general as well, because a lot of times if they do get their hands on that, they’ll run a couple of small transactions to see if you’re paying attention and then if those go through, they’ll swing for the fences. If though you get that data notification letter, then you should be on heightened alert. You should be extremely vigilant, you should monitor your accounts, and hopefully you’re going to do some of the other things we’re about to talk about here. But once you’ve shown up in one of these breaches, whether it’s this breach or the recent AT&T data breach or any of the others. Again, I’ve gotten several letters from different organizations over the last three or four years telling me my data has been stolen. Once you get one of those, you should be on heightened alert because there’s no guarantee they’re going to target you. But if there is a guarantee, they have information that would make it easy for them to target you, whether it’s identity theft or trying to get into your bank accounts or some other sort of impersonation where they’re going to attempt to social engineer you into doing something and steal your money.

Robert Brokamp: People have likely seen commercials for identity theft monitoring services, what do you think of those?

Dave Hatter: Well, in general, I’ve had a lot of people push back when I say, I think this is a good idea. If you’re super disciplined and you have a lot of time on your hands, can you monitor all of your accounts and look for fraudulent activity and so forth? You can. You can’t do it at scale, like their advanced AI platforms can, but you can do some of these things on your own. The big benefit though of identity theft monitoring companies. In my opinion is A, they can operate at scale that no human being can. None of it’s perfect, none of it’s a guarantee, you’re going to be protected. But B, in most cases, as part of your subscription to their service, they have experts and attorneys who can help you.

Once you are the victim of identity theft, again, speaking from people I know that this has happened to, it was extremely difficult for them to recover from that. Very costly, very painful. They have PTSD afterwards because it can be so hard to undo the damage that’s been done. Again, if you’re staying vigilant, if you’re freezing your credit, if you have some of identity theft monitoring service and they detect that, hopefully, they’re going to be able to stop it very quickly and then even if they can, you can rely on their attorneys for advice and guidance on what to do next to try to recover from that with the least amount of pain. In my opinion, it’s worth it, but even more importantly, in so many of these cases, once these data breach notification letters go out, that’s why it’s so important to read it. They’re going to offer a year or two years of free identity theft monitoring.

It’s absolutely crazy not to sign up for that free service and take advantage of it and let them do their thing. Again, you’re trying to build defense in depth, multiple layers of protection so that, ultimately, if they don’t get stopped at one level, they get stopped at the next level and then if there is a successful attack of some sort, you’ve got experts there that can help you try to recover.

Ricky Mulvey: As always, people on the program may have interests in the stocks they talked about and the Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against so buyer sell anything based solely on what you hear. I’m Ricky Mulvey, thanks for listening. We’ll be back tomorrow.