Franchise Group: fka Liberty Tax, Franchise Rollup

Franchise Group (FRG) is the result of the odd conglomeration of: 1) Liberty Tax (old TAXA); 2) Buddy's, a franchised chain of rent-to-own electronics and furniture stores; 3) Sears Outlet business; and soon to be 4) Vitamin Shoppe (VSI); that is being orchestrated by Vintage Capital's Brian Kahn who was recently named the CEO of the newly launched platform company.  Andrew Walker posted two excellent write-ups (here and here) on the situation a couple months ago, I won't do it the same justice, but I'll run through my thoughts anyway as I took a position in it.

Liberty Tax is the third largest tax preparer, well behind both H&R Block and Jackson Hewitt, the tax preparer market is a highly fragmented business with a lot of mom and pops.  It is the type of franchise business where you effectively own your job and you outsource the marketing and back-office infrastructure to the franchiser.  Liberty's business model is mostly targeted at lower income taxpayers who are unlikely to purchase TurboTax or do-it-yourself type software, they want someone else to do it quickly for them and assist in getting their refund as fast as possible, it's a decent business that should be relatively stable.  However, in 2018 Liberty Tax's founder and CEO was forced out after a sex scandal was uncovered and his shares where sold to Vintage Capital that July.  The company understandably struggled through this upheaval and EBITDA dropped 17% from 2017 levels to $35MM (9/30 fiscal year end).  Then in November 2018, TAXA received an acquisition proposal for $13 per share from a private equity buyer that ended up going no where.

Concurrently with all that, Vintage Capital was wrapped up in a bizarre failed merger with Rent-a-Center (RCII) which competes in the same rent-to-own market as Vintage's Buddy's chain with Vintage forgetting to execute a routine extension to the merger agreement that allowed Rent-a-Center to break the deal and force Vintage to pay a substantial break up fee.  Presumably Vintage was going to merge Buddy's with Rent-a-Center and continue to pursue a franchise model.  With that deal off, Vintage moved to Liberty Tax where they already had a substantial holding and offered to recapitalize the company and give existing shareholders an option to tender their shares at $12, a substantial premium to where the shares had fallen after the $13 buyer had backed away.  As part of the transaction, Liberty Tax bought Vintage's Buddy's chain of stores and created "Franchise Group" to pursue a rollup strategy of franchised or "franchisable" businesses.

Since the creation of Franchise Group, Vintage isn't wasting time buying additional struggling businesses, since the merger with Buddy's, they've entered into two transactions but while both Liberty Tax and Buddy's are primarily franchised, the next two fall into the franchisable category.  The first announced was with Vitamin Shoppe (VSI), a struggling vitamin and nutrition retailer that is being disrupted by internet shopping.  The second transaction announced, which just recently closed, is with Sears Hometown and Outlet for the Sears Outlet business and the 8 Buddy's stores that SHOS operated.  My guess is overtime these Sears Outlet stores more or less end up looking like or being re-branded to Buddy's stores as they sell similar household durable type items to the lower income segment.

There's a lot going on here, its a complex situation that I'd guess very few people are looking closely at, volume has been minimal and it just today uplisted back to the NASDAQ under the FRG symbol.  I'm sure there are quite a few mistakes with the below, so do your own homework as well, but I tried to come up with a proforma look at what the combined company might look like once the dust settles.

Most of these numbers are pulled from the recently completed tender offer and the VSI proxy statement.  Alongside the closing of the Sears Outlet transaction, they went ahead and franchised 5 stores to "A-Team" for $15MM (they have 120 more stores).  The tender offer closed this week with just under 4 million shares participating at $12.  Throwing it all together on an admittedly back of the envelope fashion, I come up with the proforma company trading at roughly 5x EBITDA.  Franchise businesses trade all over the map, but generally well above 5x -- a rent-to-own comp like RCII for example trades over 7x EBITDA and they are still mostly company operated stores.  It's hard to put an exact value on FRG, but I'm guessing there are a lot of value levers to pull here and if it works out (and the economy doesn't rollover) could be a multi-bagger.

Disclosure: I own shares of FRG