John Wagner
Analyst · Canaccord. Please go ahead
Thank you, Jayme, and good afternoon, everyone. I will start by discussing our financial results for the third quarter and conclude with guidance for the fourth quarter, and our updated guidance for the full year. Our revenue for the quarter was $107.6 million, an increase of 20% year-over-year. Revenue in our auto insurance vertical increased to $89.7 million, a growth rate of 20% year-over-year. Revenue from our other insurance verticals, which includes home and renters, life, health and commercial insurance increased to $17.9 million. Our growth rate of 18% year-over-year representing 17% of revenue within the quarter. Our revenue growth in the third quarter was driven by a 21% increase in the volume of quote request in our marketplace, offset by a 1% year-over-year reduction in revenue per quote request. As Jayme outlined, the performance of our auto insurance vertical in the third quarter was impacted by some carriers reducing their marketing spend in an effort to manage to their profitability targets given a sudden spike in their claims losses. Though increases in claims frequency were largely anticipated by carriers as miles driven have continued to approach pre-pandemic levels. Claims severity was significantly greater than expected. This led certain carriers to abruptly and dramatically reduce their advertising spend in our marketplace late in the quarter and in a manner that we had not anticipated. This pullback in demand directly impacted our marketplace monetization through lower revenue per quote request. We believe these higher claims losses will continue to impact carriers’ profitability in the near-term, which in turn impact their willingness to spend on marketing and new consumer acquisition. Having begun in Q3, the full extent of reduced carrier spend will impact us in Q4 and it is likely to take multiple quarters for auto insurance carriers to fully re-price their insurance book of business to current trends and for their marketing spend to completely recover. That said, our marketplace remains healthy, an increasing auto insurance rate environment will likely drive more consumer shopping over the same period. We expect continued growth in quote requests in Q4 at rates similar to those that we achieved in Q3 on a year-over-year basis, while reduced demand as a result of insurance industry factors will cause both sequential and year-over-year reductions in revenue per quote request. In Q3, we delivered variable marketing margin or VMM, which we define as revenue less advertising expense of $32.4 million, an increase of 10% year-over-year. As a percentage of revenue, third quarter VMM was 30%, down from 33% in Q3 of last year. Though partially offset by lower advertising cost per quote request, VMM was directly impacted by the decline in marketplace monetization and carrier demand. As we look forward to Q4, we expect the dynamics of the auto insurance market will continue to put pressure on VMM within our auto insurance vertical. But as our advertising cost structure is highly variable, we will seek to calibrate our advertising spend to optimize VMM in absolute dollars. Apart from our auto insurance vertical, we expect VMM to benefit from strong revenue growth within our health direct-to-consumer agency during the annual health open enrollment period in Q4. This is expected to drive an improvement in VMM operating point for the business overall in Q4 versus Q3, despite the downward pressure in the auto insurance vertical. Our DTC agency within our health, life and auto insurance verticals operates with a considerably higher revenue per quote request and VMM, which demonstrates the financial benefit of guiding our marketplace consumers through the complete insurance coverage journey through to purchase. The changing dynamics within our business, namely higher engagement, higher take rate and higher lifetime value within our DTC agency are not consistently captured within a traditional marketplace volume metric like quote request and we intend to review how we may evolve our quarterly metrics to better capture our new initiatives in 2022. As Jayme mentioned, we implemented an approximate 10% structural reduction in cash non-marketing expenses in an effort to realign our cost structure and streamline and focus our organization. As this action took place in Q4, the cost reductions will partially impact Q4 with the full reductions captured in expense run rate entering 2022. We believe this will position us to continue to target operating at positive adjusted EBITDA for as long as carrier demand remains constrained and will allow us to quickly return to higher levels of profitability when the auto insurance carriers return to their normal pattern of acquiring consumers through digital channels. Turning to profitability, GAAP net loss increased to $5.3 million or a loss of $0.18 per share based on 29.3 million weighted average shares outstanding. GAAP net loss included a tax benefit of $2.5 million from a one-time partial release of our NOL valuation allowance associated with the PolicyFuel acquisition. We delivered adjusted EBITDA of $2.7 million or 2.5% of revenue for the third quarter. Lower VMM from our auto insurance vertical and higher expense associated with the closing of the PolicyFuel acquisition earlier than planned within the quarter both impacted adjusted EBITDA this quarter. Positive operating cash flow of $2.8 million within the quarter track closely to adjusted EBITDA and resulted in $41.8 million of cash and cash equivalents on the balance sheet at the end of the quarter, net of the $16 million in cash paid at the closing of the PolicyFuel acquisition. Historically, cash flow from operations has tracked closely to adjusted EBITDA as it did in Q3. As we anticipate policy sales commissions to contribute more significantly to Q4 revenue, we also expect that operating cash flow will trail adjusted EBITDA in Q4, as we collect most policy sales commissions over the expected lifetime of the policy sold, which stretches into future periods. On August 16th, we announced that we closed the acquisition of PolicyFuel. We have been pleased with the integration and ramp so far and now expect PolicyFuel to perform above our previously stated expectations for Q4. Similar to our non-auto insurance verticals and our health and life DTC agency, we expect PolicyFuel’s policy sales-as-a-service business model will not be significantly impacted by carrier marketing reductions and will provide us with revenue diversity during a challenging period for our auto insurance marketplace. Turning to guidance, our Q4 guidance is significantly impacted by industry factors affecting our auto insurance vertical in the near-term. For the quarter, we expect revenue to be between $93.5 million and $98.5 million, variable marketing margin to be between $30.5 million and $33.5 million and adjusted EBITDA to be between negative $1.5 million and positive $1.5 million. Consequently, we are lowering our full year 2021 guidance for revenue, VMM and adjusted EBITDA as follows; we expect revenue to be between $410 million and $415 million, a year-over-year increase of 19% at the midpoint and a decrease from our prior guidance of between $440 million and $446 million. We expect variable marketing margin to be between $127 million and $130 million, a year-over-year increase of 18% at the midpoint and a decrease from our prior guidance of between $138 million and $141 million. And we expect adjusted EBITDA of between $12.5 million and $15.5 million, a year-over-year decrease of 24% at the midpoint and a decrease from our prior guidance of between $23 million and $26 million. In summary, though we foresee near term headwinds, we remain confident in our ability to manage our business during this period and to return to performance consistent with our long-term model of high growth and increasing profitability as industry demand normalizes. Looking beyond the temporary conditions driving auto insurance industry demand, we believe our direct-to-consumer agency is poised for a breakout performance in Q4 validating our strategy. Jayme and I look forward to answering your questions.