Barry McCarthy
Analyst · Buckingham Research
Thanks, Keith. I've now been the CEO of Deluxe for almost five months, and we've made substantial progress reviewing our strategy and operations during that time. Before I outline our future strategy, I want to provide a brief update on the four new day areas of focus I discussed on our last earnings call. First, sales. We've launched a national search for an enterprise chief revenue officer and hope to give you an update on that search soon. We believe we have significant opportunity to sell more to our existing customers; they value our relationship and would deepen that relationship if they know more about our extensive offerings. Accordingly, we're in the final stages of selecting a new enterprise-wide CRM tool and expect to begin the initial scoping very soon. We're confident having a single view of our customer will be critical to unlocking our potential. Second, products and innovation. We've added a new role and hired a Vice President of Strategy and Planning, Amanda Parrilli, who has joined us from Home Depot. Earlier in her career, she had executive roles at Citi and First Data. Amanda has been in her role for about eight weeks and is off to a great start. We've also begun to build out enterprise innovation and product development teams, with processes to ensure we are all well-positioned to translate the insights we gain from customers into tangible, innovative products and services that address their needs. Third, efficiency. Our teams have identified millions of dollars of savings from a structural redesign of our systems architecture, a rationalization of our real estate footprint and many other items. I won't provide specifics in this area yet, but we have identified the areas where we need to become more efficient and are taking action to realize these savings. We'll be hearing more details on this as we progress through the year. And the fourth area of initial focus was culture. We've hired a new Chief Human Resources Officer, Jane Elliott, who most recently was the CHRO at Global Payments. We're glad to have Jane on board to guide our HR activities and help shape our culture. We've initiated a process of education and communication to ensure that every employee understands the importance of our customers and the shareholders. And we've made substantial progress breaking down our internal silos. Our end goal is to develop a culture to fully transform the company from its check printing and manufacturing legacy into a trusted technology-enabled solutions provider. During our last earnings call, I told you we had engaged one of the world's foremost management consulting firms to help us assess our current business and strategic direction. We have now completed the first phase of that review. Our strategic assessment validated what we consider our core competencies and key assets. For example, over the past 10-plus years, Deluxe has done a great job acquiring companies to diversify revenue beyond printed checks and forms. The collection of these assets provides us a great foundation, upon which we will transform into a trusted tech-enabled solutions company. Let me summarize our key competencies and assets. First, we have a fantastic base of existing customers and partners. We're a leading provider of solutions to nearly 5 million small businesses and 4,600 financial institutions. We host more than 4 million websites for small businesses directly and through partners and serve 180 of the top 200 financial institutions. Next, we're a proven, trusted partner in the markets where we operate and are one of the few organizations that leading financial institutions trust with sensitive, personally identifiable information, also referred to as PII. Third, we have a highly respected brand which we can leverage. As I said earlier, our customers want to do more business with us and consolidate spending with fewer, more strategic partners. Fourth, we're a cost-efficient service provider. We produce solutions at massive scale with great security and reliability at low cost with continuous improvement. For perspective on our scale, we ship over 100,000 secure packages every day. Fifth, we have an extensive catalog of products and services that creates a unique advantage when compared to less diversified competitors, and we have an extremely dedicated workforce eager to win. Finally, this is supported by solid financial structure with low leverage and high cash flow. Deluxe has a great foundation of competencies and assets. The primary strategic questions are: how will we leverage these assets and core competencies to become more than a diversified company of companies? And what needs to be done to transform into a trusted tech-enabled solutions provider? I want to be clear. Our next chapter goes much deeper than what the company's revenue diversification has achieved to date. Instead of relying exclusively on acquisitions to deliver growth, we will now focus, first, on accelerating revenue growth organically. Then, we will supplement with selective strategic acquisitions. This is a significant difference that will require us to fundamentally change our go-to-market strategy, operating model and organization design. Fully integrating past acquisitions and consolidating and standardizing technology platforms will enable us to operate as one Deluxe and sell all of our products and services to any customer. So where is the new Deluxe headed? We intend to focus on growth businesses with the following characteristics: one, recurring revenue stream; two, scalable business models; three, attractive cost structures; four, data-rich; and five, strong PE multiple. And while we'll continue to sell to enterprise, small business and financial services customers, our business will not be segmented by customer type in the future. Instead, we will focus our efforts on four primary business areas: one, payments; two, cloud; three, promotional products; and four, checks. Our intent in late 2019 is to realign, manage and report our business in these four areas. We expect to reinvest our stream of reliable cash flow from promotional products and checks into our two primary growth areas, payments and cloud. During our transition period, we will implement our strategy, while delivering our annual plan, and importantly, paying our dividend. We believe just modest success in our new strategy will provide for an incremental $300 million of profitable, new net revenue in 2023 after offsetting future expected check declines. This specifically excludes any M&A. We expect this strategy to deliver sustained mid-single-digit organic revenue growth with adjusted EBITDA margins in the low to mid-20% range. While we don't have enough time on this call to get deep into the strategy, I know you have questions, and I'll provide a little insight into why these markets. The first growth area, payments, is a multibillion-dollar market growing at 10% to 15% annually with healthy margins and high PE multiples. Deluxe was founded as a payment company, and many of our customers continue to think of us as a payment company. We believe we can leverage existing competencies, including our extensive distribution channels in this space. Clearly, payments is a large and very diverse market, and we don't plan to compete everywhere. We intend to narrow our focus to areas where we have confidence in our ability to win. For example, integrated receivables, where we can leverage our treasury management solutions. Card-based payments and fraud control, where we can leverage our reach with SMBs; payroll and disbursements and e-payments can be sold across a broad base of customers. The second growth area is cloud-based solutions, which includes data services. This too is a multibillion-dollar market, growing at double digits annually with healthy margins and high PE multiples. No, we are not expanding into cloud storage or cloud distributed computing. We will focus narrowly on the cloud areas where we have the right to win. For example, Deluxe already has a leadership position in data services and data-driven marketing solutions, with FMCG, Datamyx and DMS. Additionally, we have strong assets in website design and hosting for small businesses, where we already host over 1 million small business sites directly and over 3 million sites through resellers. We have strong offerings in both, do it for me, DIFM, and do it for yourself, DIY, logo design. And we offer a host of loyalty solutions, digital profitability, management dashboard and management of bank account switching tools. And the third area, promotional products. We'll focus our efforts on profitability and cash flow. Product services in this area include print, retail packaging, banners, business forms and other promotional products, designed to help customers manage and promote their brands. We believe there are untapped opportunities to leverage promotional products to help drive revenue growth in our other businesses as well. The fourth area is checks. This area already generates strong margins and cash flow. Here, we will manage profitability by making smart investments to maintain our business and capture new market share, where possible. Our customer base in checks provides us with unique, trusted access to both small businesses and financial institutions that we believe is unmatched in the marketplace. Execution of this strategy will obviously require significant change throughout our organization. We're actively building project plans to advance the process. We've established a transformation leadership officer, or TLO, and we're supplementing our existing team's knowledge and expertise with external resources, as necessary, to help us through the transition. We intend to provide updates on future earnings calls. We will now go to market as One Deluxe. You've heard me say, Deluxe was a company of companies. In the future, we'll approach the market as a company of products. This is a significant change that will allow us to sell all of our products to all of our customers. This new go-to market strategy will be led by a world-class chief revenue officer to be announced soon. As Keith mentioned, acquisitions will be a strategic element of our growth plan. Going forward, you should expect to see us make fewer, more meaningful acquisitions in our strategic growth markets. New for Deluxe, we expect to augment growth through strategic alliances and through partnering with third parties that have capabilities or competencies that we can leverage quickly. This is a significant departure from the past and will allow us to progress faster with much greater capacity than before, allowing us to leverage the partner's capital and investment. We will also invest in our infrastructure. As Keith mentioned, we expect to incrementally invest between $30 million and $60 million in each of the next two years to build out our technology platforms. This includes investment in sales technologies that will enable a single view of our customer and provide greater cross-sell opportunities. Additionally, we'll invest in our human capital management and financial management systems to enable integration of duplicative and aging collaboration tools and platforms. These enhancements should deliver productivity gains and substantial cost savings. Strategically, these infrastructure upgrades will also make it easier for us to engage in M&A and quickly integrate future acquisitions. We've already begun to transform our enterprise-wide culture. We're on a pathway to be less like a manufacturing company and more like a technology company by focusing on customer needs and developing solutions to address those needs quickly. No, we don't aspire to become a Silicon Valley company, but we will be laser-focused on deeply understanding the markets and customers we serve, strengthening our alignment with customers, employees and shareholders. Technology companies are responsive, deliver rapid prototypes, constantly test new ideas and are nimble in their execution. That's where we want to go. Like technology companies, we need each employee to think and act like a shareholder, with a shared goal of stock price appreciation. As a result, effective April 1, we took a very bold step and announced every North American employee have received restricted stock unit grants in Deluxe, making them all shareholders. Additionally, our senior leaders will earn a higher portion of their annual compensation in stock with less reliance upon cash compensation. Every employee now has the same goal as shareholders, stock price appreciation. Last week, the executive leadership team completed a roadshow at our major sites to congratulate and share with our employees how they could impact our business as new owners of Deluxe. The reception has been outstanding. We're already seeing the green shoots of ownership culture emerging, and I'm confident this ownership mindset will have a transformational impact on our culture. I know we covered a lot of ground today, and some of you may have more questions about our strategy. I'm pleased to share that we plan to host an Investor Day in the second half of the year. At that time, we'll provide more details on the strategy, how we intend to realign, manage and report the business in the future, and we will provide you with an opportunity to meet our key leaders. We will send out a save-the-date notice soon. In closing, we have a tremendous opportunity to fundamentally transform our company to accelerate growth, and we look forward to updating you on the progress of our transformation in the coming months. Now Keith, Ed and I will open the call for questions.