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BrightView Holdings, Inc. (BV)

Q4 2013 Earnings Call· Wed, Jun 5, 2013

$12.29

-0.20%

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day, and welcome to the Bazaarvoice Fourth Fiscal Quarter and Full Year 2013 Financial Results Conference Call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Brian Smith, Vice President of Finance for Bazaarvoice. You may begin.

Brian Smith

Management

Good afternoon, and welcome to today's conference call to discuss Bazaarvoice's financial results for the fourth fiscal quarter and fiscal year ended April 30, 2013. I'm joined today by Stephen Collins, our Chief Executive Officer; and Jim Offerdahl, our Chief Financial Officer. Following prepared remarks from Stephen and Jim, we will have a question-and-answer session. Please note that we are simultaneously webcasting this call on our Investor Relations website at investors.bazaarvoice.com. The earnings release with our results for our fourth fiscal quarter and fiscal year 2013 was issued earlier today and is also posted on our Investor Relations website. Please remember that certain statements made during this call, including those concerning our business outlook and guidance, growth plans and opportunities, potential acquisitions, sales execution and our ability to capitalize on our opportunities, are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks, uncertainties and assumptions that are described in our SEC filings, including the Risk Factor section of our Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended April 30, 2012, our Form 10-Q for the fiscal quarter ended January 31, 2013, and our Form S-1 as filed with the SEC on July 12, 2012, and other documents that we may file with the SEC in the future. Should any of the risks or uncertainties materialize or should any of our assumptions prove to be incorrect, actual results could differ materially and adversely from those anticipated or implied in these forward-looking statements. In addition, forward-looking statements are also based on currently available information, and we undertake no duty to update this information. Additional cautionary language regarding these forward-looking statements is further described in today's press release. Finally, some of the numbers that we will discuss during this call will be presented on a non-GAAP basis. Today's press release, together with the accompanying tables, contains the calculations of these non-GAAP financial measures and a full reconciliation between each non-GAAP measure and its corresponding GAAP measure. I would now like to turn the call over to Stephen.

Stephen R. Collins

Management

Thanks, Brian, and thank you for joining us today. I'd like to start by thanking and congratulating the Bazaarvoice team for delivering a solid quarter of performance. The team did a great job in several important ways that are fundamental for our success that I will review on today's call. But first, a quick rewind. Last quarter, I outlined our key objectives for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2013 and for fiscal 2014. These are: to dramatically increase global new account acquisition for not only our core review solutions but also Media and Connections; to expand our leadership team with exceptionally talented and experienced professionals to complement the existing leadership team; to invest aggressively in growth opportunities for our network, including Connections, Media, data analytics and global expansion into emerging markets; and to migrate our clients to our new technology platform that will unlock a number of opportunities around network connectivity, data, content management and analytics; and to win our litigation with the Department of Justice. We made great progress on each of these priorities during the fourth quarter, excepting that we are not in control of the DOJ outcome. With regard to our DOJ litigation, all I can say is that we remain set to go to trial in September, and that will run for several weeks. We are vigorously pursuing our defense, and we look forward to having our day in court. On to operations. I am delighted to report that the build-out of our executive leadership team is now essentially complete and this was, in my view, the most important accomplishment for the quarter. In the last 6 months, we brought on our President, Gene Austin; Executive Vice President of Client Services, Marc Cannon; Chief Financial Officer, Jim Offerdahl; and General Manager of EMEA, Cedric Pech; along…

James R. Offerdahl

Management

Thank you, Stephen, and thank you to everyone who joined the call today. As a reminder, we are on a fiscal year calendar ending April 30. But today, we are reporting results for our fourth fiscal quarter of 2013 and all accounting periods discussed will be fiscal. Unless otherwise noted in my remarks, I will cover our non-GAAP operating results to correlate with adjusted EBITDA as a measure of operating profitability, including discussions of cost of revenue and operating expenses. Investors should refer to our press release for a complete overview of our financial results, including the reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP operating results, comparative information to prior periods and key operating metrics. I will first provide commentary on our fourth quarter and full fiscal year 2013 performance, and will then conclude with our outlook for the first quarter and full fiscal year 2014. We achieved total revenue of $43.3 million in the fourth quarter, up 38% year-over-year, exceeding the high end of our guidance range of $42 million to $42.8 million. This year-over-year growth rate was helped by our 2 acquisitions during the year. So on a pro forma basis, our year-over-year growth rate was 22%. We achieved SaaS revenue of $42.3 million, up 35% year-over-year and up 22% on a pro forma basis. Net media revenue was $1 million, up 46% on a pro forma basis. Note that we acquired Longboard Media in the third quarter. Net media revenue was down sequentially from $2 million in Q3 as the majority of our media revenue occurs then, consistent with heavier online shopping traffic during the holidays. Adjusted EBITDA for the fourth quarter was a loss of $6.9 million and in line with our guidance of a loss of $6.5 million to $7.5 million. Our EBITDA loss increased sequentially from…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] And we'll take our first question from Jennifer Lowe with Morgan Stanley.

Jennifer Swanson Lowe

Analyst

Maybe, Stephen, going -- at the outset of the call, you outlined some of the initiatives that you focused on in fiscal '14 -- in '13, so just building out the management team and reorienting the sales force around new customer acquisition. Is the goal for '14 to just stay steady as she goes on those initiatives? Or are there any new areas of focus that you're planning to turn to in fiscal '14? What should we be looking for, for you over the next few quarters?

Stephen R. Collins

Management

I think steady as she goes is the best way to answer that. I mean, there's a lot of things on that list. Focusing on expanding our client base globally takes a total company commitment, and I want to ensure the team is, in many ways, singularly focused around that objective. Obviously, we're rolling out our new platform. There's a lot of amazing things that we can unlock in doing so, and that's a challenge as well. So I think we have an ambitious plan, and don't really want to change it all the time. And we want to stay really focused on executing to the best of our ability this year, and I think we've got a team in place to do it now.

Jennifer Swanson Lowe

Analyst

Great. And looking at the metrics that you gave earlier, and it was helpful with the contrast between the net new customers signed in the quarter versus what's actually going to the reported customer count in terms of go live. But you talked about the 170 new customers that were booked in the second half of the year and obviously, that's a big focus of a lot of the changes you've made. Where do you think that, that number can go? Do you have any aspirations in terms of where you'd like to see new customer count be once everything is kind of running as it should be running in the sales force?

Stephen R. Collins

Management

Well, in the -- in my remarks, I said that our sort of first step goal, our objective, is to double the pace. So the implication of that is that if we added, let's say, 250-ish client this year, if we're on that kind of a pace, that you'd want to get to a 500-client pace. I think we began making that transition in the second half. But the levels we're shooting for are let's get over 400 and get over 500. So love to see that double in this fiscal year.

Jennifer Swanson Lowe

Analyst

Great. And then just one last one from me. You mentioned growing sales capacity 40% last year, looking for a similar rate this year. Just comparing that to the overall rate of hiring more on a quarter-over-quarter basis, but the overall headcount has been more flattish on a quarter-over-quarter basis. Actually, it looks like it may even be down a little bit. What's sort of the delta there in terms of the heads that you're adding on customer-facing roles verses overall headcount not growing as much?

Stephen R. Collins

Management

Well, I think it was either last quarter or perhaps 2 quarters ago, I mentioned that the total number of employees of the company wasn't likely to change a lot over the next couple of quarters as we reallocate and focus on sales and marketing away from other areas, and that played out exactly as we expected. So we actually were adding quite a lot of sales capacity, as you can tell now. I think my remarks at the time were misinterpreted as saying we were pulling back, and it was really more about focusing on growth. As to the areas that -- where we've been able to scale, gross margin continues to expand. There are large number of employees in that group. So we've been able to get them doing some different things and focusing them more on selling. We're at a bit of a plateau right now in R&D, although we expand -- plan to expand that, but we really didn't need to add a ton of people there in the second half. And of course, we want to continue to scale on G&A. It's not client-facing and that should provide some fuel to invest in the sales and marketing team. So we want to just get more and more people in the field, more and more people touching clients and fewer and fewer people who aren't client-facing. And generally speaking, that's what we accomplished to a good degree in the second half.

James R. Offerdahl

Management

Yes, and this is Jim. Let me pile on there just a little bit. I mean, we've demonstrated increasing gross margins over the last number of quarters and plan to continue to do so as we gain the economies of scale. And so as we improve our margins and get economies of scale in G&A as well, that enables us to invest more on the sales and marketing and R&D line, at the same time improving our EBITDA. So it's pretty major -- or it's a reallocation of resources is what we're doing actually.

Stephen R. Collins

Management

I hope that answered your question.

Jennifer Swanson Lowe

Analyst

Yes, that was great.

Operator

Operator

And we will now go to Greg Dunham with Goldman Sachs.

Gregory Dunham

Analyst

A couple of questions. I guess following up on that gross margin dynamic, because I do want to ask that. You have shown that to expand pretty dramatically. Is -- how much of that is due to Conversations 2.0? And when we think about the new platform launch, what is the tail of those kind of benefits to the gross margin line? When should we expect them?

Stephen R. Collins

Management

Well, the majority of margin expansion initiatives to date have been more in around process and improvements to our moderation system. So we have really 2 major platforms. One, of course, is the ratings and reviews platform that our clients use but also, behind the scenes, the platform that we use to moderate and structure all that content. And since every piece of content is moderated, there's a marginal or variable cost associated with it, and we've continued to push that cost down and expand margins there as a result. We think we still have a good amount of room to run to lower implementation cost as the rollout of our new platform accelerates, especially over the course of this year. So really not a lot of that improvement has come from that area yet. So that should help continue to support margin expansion for the foreseeable future.

Gregory Dunham

Analyst

No, that's exactly what I was hitting on. And then I guess the follow-up question on -- with the ramp in customer adds or the hope to ramp, you also mentioned that the pricing per customer would come down. Is that just the initial dynamic? Is the profile of these new customers that you add going to be any different than the overall base? And how should we think about that over time?

Stephen R. Collins

Management

Yes, it's really mostly a scope issue. If we look back at our history and look at our cohorts or the class of 2007, 2008, et cetera, when you go in and you give them a bite they can digest and you deploy the solution, that tends to lead to more successful client growth going forward. And so we want to get back to that more healthy approach and really focus on that to accelerate our ability to acquire clients. But it is also true that as we look globally, whereas we had a very extreme focus, I would say, on the larger enterprise clients in the past, as we have come to understand our opportunity to build out a network, from our perspective, we want as many folks in the network as we can possibly convince to join. And so through the acquisition of PowerReviews, we're now in the small -- the SMB market and the mid-market as well, and we want to just get better at that and also expand globally as well. And the price points and new geographies are likely to be less, which has been true in Europe and in my experience, on the Web generally. Other geographies don't have the same price points necessarily that the U.S. has as they adopt technologies more slowly.

James R. Offerdahl

Management

And Greg, this is Jim. Just a little pile on there. As eCommerce goes into some of these smaller accounts, we'll follow as part of that as well.

Operator

Operator

And we will now go to Nandan Amladi with Deutsche Bank.

Nandan Amladi

Analyst

Going back to the reference you made about adding -- continue to add sales capacity up 40% year-on-year, but you're also planning to double the number of customer adds. What approach do you have to -- how differently do you have to approach that process this year with this, relatively the same number of people, essentially?

Stephen R. Collins

Management

Well, obviously we've got more people. You've got to ramp them. Some of the additions that -- we've got a fire alarm in the building that seems to be starting, so I apologize to everyone. This is -- I'm just going to keep going. So in any event, the people we added this year are still ramping in many cases, and we expect them to scale up and ramp up more in the fiscal year. The key, well, is really about focus, really adjusting our compensation plan, our management team and our processes around new account acquisitions. So that's what we're going to do differently. And I apologize if that answer was not discernible with the background noise of the fire marshal.

Nandan Amladi

Analyst

That's okay. I'll save it for later.

James R. Offerdahl

Management

It was only a test. That's a good thing.

Stephen R. Collins

Management

I think we're now in a good place in terms of our process. We just completed 2 weeks ago a week-long global sales training, and that was fantastic. Really got everybody dialed in on messaging, on explaining the value proposition, worked with a great partner in force management. So everybody was really excited and pumped coming out of that, and I think we've got great alignment right now and we understand the message and the marketplace and the disciplines around -- that will drive success.

Operator

Operator

And we will now go to Brendan Barnicle with Pacific Crest Securities.

Brendan Barnicle

Analyst

I wanted to drill down just a little bit more on the operating expenses going forward. So based on the guidance, it sounds like you're expecting operating expenses to be down sequentially Q4 to Q1. And do you expect that to be sort of equally across all? It sounds like sales and marketing is going to continue to be a priority. And Jim, would we see even a sequential decline in G&A despite being in Q1 because I know for a lot of companies, Q1 you typically see at least flat or even an increase Q4 to Q1?

James R. Offerdahl

Management

Yes, I won't go into specific lines, but obviously, we expect our revenues to continue to grow as per our guidance. So on a percentage basis, it's a combination of margins and just a variety of the other lines. I mean, we are -- part of our reallocation of resources was to spend less money on a go-forward basis on non-people costs and concentrate more of our investments on people costs, and I think you're seeing part of that in our guidance for Q1 and for the full year.

Stephen R. Collins

Management

Yes, I mean, there are -- as you might expect, we're entering a new fiscal year, and we took a hard look at various areas of spending and whether or not we thought it was smart spending. And the team really stepped up to the challenge of looking at their budgets and finding ways to drive more operating leverage while allocating more resources to client-facing roles. And as you also note, we've expanded revenue per employee pretty significantly over the last several quarters, and we'd like to see that fall to the bottom line and think we can do that with just better disciplines around how we spend our money.

James R. Offerdahl

Management

Yes, Brendan, this is Jim. To pile on, from a sales and marketing standpoint, in Q4, our sales and marketing popped a fair amount because of commissions and year-end accelerators. And obviously, we're going to have more commissions in Q1, but it's not a year end. So I think we'll see an impact of that in Q1 as well on the sales and marketing side.

Brendan Barnicle

Analyst

That's helpful color. Stephen, one of the things we heard at the user conference is customers who were thrilled with the existing product, but they were still a little bit on the fence on the newer products. What's sort of changing in the marketing strategy to try and move that installed base more closely over to the new products?

Stephen R. Collins

Management

Are you referring to our new platform or other products that we might have that are incremental?

Brendan Barnicle

Analyst

More the incremental products, but I think -- but the platform as well, but more the incremental.

Stephen R. Collins

Management

Well, first, the platform is essential to our innovation efforts. What we can accomplish for our clients in terms of analytics and connectivity on the new platform is vastly superior. And I think as we educate the client base, and we're actively doing that through things like the summit that you attended, they're seeing these benefits. We will continue to build more case studies. But the truth is that even with our core solution, there's still a lot of education and evangelism that has take place in the market as CMOs try to figure out how to incorporate word-of-mouth content into their marketing strategies, and that's kind of the same story as it ever was. Our focus remains on adding new clients and building out the network more so than it does looking for add-on solutions at this time. With that being said, we've got a lot of opportunity in what we have to sell, and I think the sales team is -- understands our solutions better and is going to continue to do a better job getting out there and explaining the benefits. So I'm pretty confident that we're going to continue to improve in this area. But I want to reemphasize that the sales team knows very clearly that their job #1 is new account acquisition on our core solution, which is the foundation of the value that we provide to our clients, and all good things in the future emanate from success on that front.

Operator

Operator

And we will now go to Mark Murphy from Piper Jaffray.

Mark R. Murphy

Analyst

Jim, you noted that sales commissions increased in the quarter due to a good bookings quarter. I realize you don't go into detail on this, but can you provide any more color on that, maybe what do you attribute the bookings strengths to? Were bookings above plan? Were they up year-over-year? Just is there anything else you can provide us with there?

James R. Offerdahl

Management

Yes, you're right, Mark. As you know, we don't really talk about -- much about bookings on a quarterly basis, certainly not on a quantitative basis. Qualitatively, we did have a good quarter. We had a couple of significant deals that came in and which is not -- and that doesn't happen every quarter. And so that was helpful. I think the focus on new client adds as well, that Stephen has portrayed in the last couple of quarters, is helping our bookings performance as well. And on a go-forward basis, we continue to add even in the fourth quarter -- we've been adding sales reps throughout the year, so that's helpful as well.

Mark R. Murphy

Analyst

Okay. Great. And then Jim, do you have any inclination to take a stab at a multiyear revenue growth rate trajectory that we should or could expect for Bazaarvoice? Just if you take into account the pipeline, the new personnel, the new strategies, the attempt to improve the cohort in the coming year, is there a thought that the multiyear revenue growth rate would be getting back above 20%?

James R. Offerdahl

Management

At this point, Mark, we're not guiding anything beyond 2014. We had the midpoint of guidance at 16% for 2014. But we did say that if we execute like we think we can in fiscal 2014, our revenue growth rates should reaccelerate up, and then it's a question of how we execute thereafter. We don't believe that there's a market limiter here. This is about how we go after this market, the go-to-market strategy and execute.

Stephen R. Collins

Management

The only thing I'll add to that, Mark, is I mentioned in my remarks that eCommerce is growing 20% per year. The kinds of things that we're doing, where we're positioned, there are a lot of exciting growth opportunities even though it's still a nascent, new market. And so I think conceptually, I certainly feel comfortable saying that looking at growth rates in excess of 20% is where we ought to be. And again, I think the opportunity is there and we just have to execute successfully and we're just going through this transition year. So without specifically putting a number on it, sure, I think revenue growth rates above 20% are achievable and desirable.

Mark R. Murphy

Analyst

Okay. Stephen, I wanted to ask you as well, do you have any inclination to make any material change in how you price the products? For instance, perhaps you want to align more directly or more tightly with traffic growth or volumes of ratings interviews, or just in general try to align more closely with the value that you're adding to clients. I think the sense we've gotten is the value you're adding to clients in some cases is orders of magnitude more than they're paying you for the services. Or do you fundamentally believe at this point that your pricing mechanisms are fully optimized and that everything is as it should be?

Stephen R. Collins

Management

Well, I sure wouldn't say that they're fully optimized and everything is as it should be because the market is changing and evolving. And there's a tremendous amount of competition selling into the CMO and competition for budget. We've also said -- I've also said many times that however we ultimately arrive at a price for a client, it's a performance-based solution. And if we're not adding value and generating a positive ROI for a Chief Marketing Officer or head of eCommerce, that pricing will adjust, and does. But the question that you're asking, and we talked about it before in terms of variable pricing or volume-based pricing, we continue to conduct a controlled limited set of experiments around variable pricing, but it's really I would characterize it more as an R&D effort and has driven several platform-level and data-level innovations, some of which are complete and some of which are still in process, simply to give us the option of looking at these models if we feel they are appropriate. But I think from an investors perspective, investors should not expect material drastic changes to how we're going to market in terms of pricing, certainly not as we contemplate FY '14 guidance. I don't think that would be prudent, and -- but the more we understand about the value we create and the better we can illustrate that for our clients, that -- I think the happier everyone will be and the more aligned we'll be with the success of those that we serve.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] And we will now go to Karl Keirstead with BMO Capital Markets.

Karl Keirstead

Analyst

I wanted to focus for a second on the 29 net new clients, and I've got 2 questions. One is, is that a clean number? Because I remember last quarter, the plus 70 number was skewed by some, I think it was 48 adds from a small PowerReviews unit. So I just wanted to make sure that, that 29 is clean. And then secondly, Stephen, did I hear you say that of the clients lost, there were 22 from the IR 500 list? Maybe I misheard you, but if that's right, it seems...

Stephen R. Collins

Management

No. So I knew that was a -- I was trying to explain the dynamic nature of the IR 500. We didn't lose any of those clients. They just aren't in the IR 500 anymore. It was a testament to the fact that, that list is not like the Fortune 500 and that there's a significant amount of fluidity to it. And it's interesting because another great way to grow our business is to find clients who are going to be IR 500 clients or IR 1000 clients in the future. It's a really exciting marketplace. So that's what we were pointing out there. So the 29 clients is a clean number. It's pure organic as far as I'm aware. Obviously, the gross number of adds, I believe, was 58 that I mentioned there. And our retention was 97.5%, which was very consistent with history. So on balance, it was solid. We'd like to add a lot more new clients and think we're heading down the right path in that regard as the fiscal year will unfold.

Karl Keirstead

Analyst

Okay. Great. And then if I could ask a follow-up to Jim. Jim, in fiscal '11 and '12, I know that was before you arrived, Bazaarvoice was tracking at operating cash flow breakeven. That dynamic changed this year. As we think about operating cash flow for fiscal '14 in the context of your adjusted EBITDA loss improving, can you give us any flavor for what operating cash flow might look like this coming fiscal year? Any guidance?

James R. Offerdahl

Management

Yes, Karl, we're not giving specific guidance on that. However, if you look historically how our adjusted EBITDA and operating cash flow track with one another, it should be relatively similar to that, barring any major balance sheet changes.

Stephen R. Collins

Management

Yes, I mean, obviously, the DOJ spending is quite material both in terms of our GAAP loss and in particular, cash flow. Trial's in September. So we hope that, that won't be a factor as we get beyond that. But yes, I think tracking -- as EBITDA tracks, as EBITDA improves, you should expect cash flow to improve.

Karl Keirstead

Analyst

Okay. Solid numbers, given that I know you had a lot going on this quarter.

Stephen R. Collins

Management

It was a busy -- very busy quarter. It was, Karl.

Operator

Operator

And it appears there are no further questions at this time. Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today's conference. We thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.