3 Updates From Yesway’s CEO

FORT WORTH, Texas — Tom Trkla has his eyes set on the future. The CEO of convenience-store chain Yesway said his primary focus over the past few years was to integrate the Allsup’s brand into the company. The majority of that is now done, he told CSP in a recent interview.

“Our future’s going to be about buying portfolios and building stores,” Trkla said.

And it’s already started.

Yesway, Fort Worth, Texas, recently acquired nine Tres Amigos Convenience Stores, opened the first Allsup’s Express and is ready to move forward with its initial public offering (IPO), once the markets open up, Trkla said.

• BW Gas & Convenience Holdings, which owns Yesway and Allsup's, is No. 21 on CSP’s 2022 Top 202 ranking of U.S. c-store chains by store count.

Here’s a look at what the company has been up to ...

It has been nearly a year since Yesway filed a statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for a proposed $100 million IPO of its stock.

When Trkla (pictured left) spoke to CSP on Sept. 14, he said Yesway’s S-1, or the initial registration form filed with the SEC when a company first goes public, is still on file with the agency and will be updated and refiled within a week.

Encouraged that the markets are beginning to open up, Trkla said Yesway will be able to launch “very quickly.”

“There’s a shot it could be this year, or more likely next year, but we’ll be ready to go when the markets open up,” he said.

U.S. IPO volume hit a low point this summer, due to market volatility, inflation and fears of a downturn, according to Bloomberg. IPOs are expected to return in the fall, though, as the stock market rebounds.

Yesway recently acquired nine Tres Amigos Convenience Stores, San Angelo, Texas, and it’s already looking at another five-store acquisition in the area, Trkla said.

Yesway has ambitious goals for growth—it will have opened 48 new stores and raise-and-rebuilds this year, and is slated for 64 in 2023, Trkla said.

“Since we acquired Allsup’s in November 2019, our center of the universe for our immediate expansion are going to be in New Mexico, Texas and southeast of Oklahoma because we have the majority of our stores there,” he said.

Stores in the south will be branded Allsup’s while stores farther north, like in South Dakota, Kansas and Iowa, will be branded Yesway.

When it comes to what type of stores Yesway will acquire, it needs to make sense geographically and be somewhere it can implement the Allsup’s foodservice program, known for its burritos.

“Anything we buy or build, we’re basically going to put in the Allsup’s foodservice platform in those stores,” Trkla said.

Allsup’s Express, a 3,000-square-foot, bodega-style store on the Texas Tech University campus in Lubbock, Texas, has been open for less than a month. And so far, it has exceeded expectations, Trkla says, “so, as the CEO, that makes me very happy.”

The main difference between a college-campus store and a regular Allsup’s is that the express store has double the fryer and cooler capacity and doesn’t have fuel.  

“The real driver is to take our foodservice platform out of our c-store and take it to another place. We’re one of the few chains in the country that can actually do that, because we’re not a big QSR, it’s very definable, we don’t need a lot of square feet to do so—and frankly, college kids like burritos,” Trkla said.

Trkla said they already have their eyes on other potential locations—four of which they’re negotiating leases for now.

“I want to see how the first one goes before I go too fast,” he said. “And we’ll make the tweaks to the concept, and we’re already doing that. We already have great learning models from the first three weeks—hours, labor models, all those different things. We’re learning and able to adapt, but the primary driver of the SKU items in this portion of foodservice and dispensed beverage will be commonplace in the stores.”

Owned by BW Gas & Convenience Holdings and an affiliate of Beverly, Mass.-based real-estate and private-equity investment and asset management company Brookwood Financial Partners, Yesway is a multi-branded platform that acquires, transforms and enhances portfolios of c-stores by leveraging expertise in real estate and technology and by implementing data-driven decision making. Its portfolio consists of more than 400 retail outlets in Texas, New Mexico, South Dakota, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Wyoming, Oklahoma and Nebraska under both the Yesway and Allsup’s c-store brands.