Bob Whitman
Analyst · William Blair. Please go ahead
Thanks, Derek, and hello to everyone. We're delighted to have the chance to talk with you today. Let me just start up by saying that two years ago, as you know we determined that we could better serve our clients’ needs, substantially expand the breadth and depth of their impact in their organizations, if we were to give them access to our full collection of world-class content and offerings through a subscription-based model. Since then, as you know, All Access Pass has transformed the way in which our clients engage with us, the pervasiveness of their reach and impact in their own organizations, and the flexibility and agility with which they can develop leaders and teams in order to improve their organization's performance and results. So, it’s really fundamentally changed both our interactions with their customers, and the way in which -- their opportunity for impacting their organizations. It’s also increased the lifetime value of our customers, because these clients -- our clients’ initial purchase with the All Access Pass covers significantly larger population than it used to. Second, the annually recurring revenue retention among pass holders is greater than 90%. So that revenue sticks with us. Many of the pass holders end up increasing both the size of the population covered by their pass and extending and end up extending their passes’ duration, which gives us that income for a longer period of time with a bigger population. And fourth, the pass holders were also purchasing significant amount of add-on services to help them accelerate the results within their organization. And we feel like we’re uniquely able to provide that combination of best-in-class content together with services that help people really engage on issues where they really want to have the need to have impact. So, we are really encouraged and excited by our momentum. There are four key takeaways, which I hope you'll glean from our remarks today. As you can see in Slide 3, the takeaways are, first, that our stronger than expected second quarter and year-to-date results we believe established a solid foundation for the significant increases in revenue, adjusted EBITDA and cash flow we expect for the full year fiscal '18 and beyond. Second, the magnitude and significant growth of our balances of deferred revenue are providing increasing visibility into and the strength and foundation for accelerated future growth as that balance gets bigger and bigger. Third, the momentum of our subscription business is accelerating, really driven by the significant value our customers are receiving and their retention of their revenue and add-on services and past expansion. And finally, the inflection point that you're seeing in our results is really the -- is being driven by the interplay of four key factors which I'd like to just describe a little bit to you today. So first, let's go through the highlights of the second quarter. Slide 4 provides some quick highlights on the key results for the second quarter and year-to-date. As shown, our revenue grew 10.3% in the second quarter and 15.2% year-to-date through the second quarter. Importantly, all of the company's major operating units achieved revenue growth in the second quarter. Second, total subscription and subscription-related revenue grew 55% year-over-year in the second quarter and 57% year-to-date. Subscription and related revenue in the Enterprise division grew even more rapidly at 81% in the second quarter and 104% year-to-date, All Access Pass. Deferred revenue built on the balance sheet at the end of the second quarter was $32.1 million, a year-over-year increase of $16 million or 99%, effectively a doubling of the deferred revenue that’s unbilled. We also had a significant increase in deferred revenue unbilled. And so, the combination of those two at the end of the second quarter was $47.2 million, a year-over-year increase of $29 million, or in percentage-wise, it's a big percent at 165% compared to the $17.8 million of total deferred revenue balances billed and unbilled we had at the end of last year’s second quarter. Really encouraging is the fact that our gross margin percentage increased significantly in the quarter to 70.3%. It's 392-basis-point year-over-year increase reflecting the high profitability of the subscription revenue, and of the All Access Pass, and the membership in education, our leader in the membership offering and education. Adjusted EBITDA turned out to be approximately $700,000 better than guidance even after making even more significant growth investments. We’ll talk about that. The net cash provided by operating activities increased $2.6 million year-to-date even after making these significant investments. In addition to these factors on this shown on Slide 4, our number of paid subscribers, subscription - subscribers grew 36% year-over-year in the second quarter, and 46% in the enterprise division. I’d now like to provide a paragraph or two on each of these key metrics. If you look at slide 5, you can see revenue grew 10.3% as we said in the second quarter to $46.5 million, growth of $4.3 million compared to the $42 million of revenue reported in the second quarter of fiscal 2017. Year-to-date, revenue grew 15.2% to $94.5 million, growth of $12.5 million compared to $82 million we generated year-to-date for the second quarter of fiscal 2017. As you can see in the middle, our subscription, our total subscriptions and subscription related revenue across both the Enterprise and Education divisions grew an even more significant 55% in the second quarter and 57% year-to-date. And the subscription related revenue - our Enterprise division grew at 81% in the second quarter and 104% year-to-date driven by All Access Pass and Pass related sales. This significant growth in our subscription and related revenue was partially offset by declines in our now much smaller legacy facilities and on-site delivery channels, and so the decline is now becoming substantially less or the drag from that from declines is now much less. In Enterprise division, revenue grew $3.2 million or 10% in the second quarter to $36.3 million year-to-date. Through the second quarter, Enterprise revenue grew $10.9 million or 17.4% to $73.8 million. As I mentioned, importantly, all of the Enterprise divisions’ major operating units achieved revenue growth from the second quarter, including our offices in China, Japan, the UK and Australia along with all of the direct offices in the U.S. With the launch of our new All Access Pass Global Portal, which was just launched here last month in now 16 languages, our international licensee network has just begun to sell the All Access Pass. And their excitement level about All Access Pass is extraordinarily high, and they started to make sales of it and we expect substantial New Pass sales between now and the end of the year from them. In the Education division, revenue grew $1.2 million in the quarter or 15% to $9 million year-to-date. So, the second quarter revenue grew $1.6 million or 10% to $18.2 million. The education division added several new licensee partners to their network during the second quarter including three new partners in China. This brings the total number of licensee partners in the education division alone to 51. We believe the education division will be able to build a licensee network comparable in size to that, to at least what we currently have in our enterprise division's licensee network, which generates approximately $75 million gross revenues today resulting in royalties to Franklin Covey of approximately $10 million. And we're getting going in a really great start in the education licensee business and ultimately, we believe it could have that same potential. Going to deferred revenue growth in slide 6, our deferred revenue balance has increased $47.2 million in the second quarter. That’s billed and unbilled. Growth of $29 million, up 165% year-over-year from only $17.8 million in the last year second quarter. You can see the deferred revenue billed on the balance sheet increased to $32 million which is basically a doubling from last year’s second quarter. And the unbilled deferred revenue which represents businesses contracted, but unbilled and off the balance sheet end of the quarter at $15.1 million, which is up sevenfold compared to our $1.7 million unbilled we had at the end of last year second quarter. Just reporting briefly on just the EBITDA and gross margin. As we noted, it was higher than our adjusted EBITDA was higher than our guidance in the second quarter. You can see in slide 7 that we were pleased that adjusted EBITDA was approximately $700,000 higher than our guidance. We do expect to be giving guidance in our second quarter reported EBITDA would be, as much as a $1 million lower than that reported in the last year’s second quarter, reflecting a combination of the significant investments we were making, and the of the significant investments we were making and the fact that we would have a lot of what we're selling would be deferred. But we were pleased that our actual adjusted EBITDA was only $300,000 lower than last year's second quarter despite those investments reflecting two key benefits of our new business model. One, the high recurring and more predictable revenue, the nature of it resulting from this high level of client satisfaction with their offerings and this is indicated by our very high revenue retention rate. The other point is our higher and increasing gross margins. Our reported revenue was for $4 million higher year-over-year at 10.3% increased to $46.5 million. As is shown in the slide 7, our gross margin percent increase as we noted before 392 basis points in the second quarter to 70.4%. So, this combined strong revenue growth with the higher gross margin generally results in gross margin dollars increasing $4.7 million or 17% to $32.7 million compared to $28 million in the last year’s second quarter. And interestingly, this $4.7 million increase in gross margin dollars almost entirely covered our $35 million in planned increased growth investments which we’ll itemize here in a minute. But despite the really significant increases in investment for content, implementation, specialties et cetera, this increase in gross margin dollars almost covered it. Year-to-date for the second quarter, our gross margin percent increased 430 basis points to 69.4% from 65.1% year-to-date last year. Our gross margin dollars increased by $12.3 million year-to-date which is up 23% to $65.6 million. And our adjusted EBITDA increased $3.1 million year-over-year through the second quarter. For us, this is an important concept because you’ll hear in a few minutes, we expect our - the expense side of our business to have - to grow at a much lower rate going forward than it did this last year when we had all these big investments we make. And so, this increasing gross margin against relatively flat cost structure we think will allow us to flow through a lot of what we - a lot of increased revenue in the coming years. If you just - going down through in Enterprise, just talking about slide 24 and you can go to it in appendix, and there you can just see it broken out by division. In Enterprise division second quarter revenue was $36.3 million growth of $3.2 million or 10% compared to revenue of $33 million in last year's second quarter. Enterprise division gross margin increased a significant 510 basis points to 75% from 69.9% last year second quarter. And this combination of higher revenue and higher gross margin percentage increased the Enterprise division gross margin dollars by $4.1 million or 17.8%. This growth in gross margin dollars slightly more than offset the $4 million of additional growth investments made specifically in the Enterprise division resulting in a small growth of $100,000 in actual EBITDA after these investments for the quarter. Just to give you an idea of what these investments are, the All Access Pass investment including many other things, investment for new All Access Pass content including, including three significant new courses which we added to the All Access Pass including Clayton Christensen, Christensen new innovation course entitled Find Out Why; a new frontline unit level leader course entitled the Six Critical Practices for Leading A Team; and a new mid-level manager course entitled Four Essential Roles of Leadership, Leadership. We also in this year we have recourse, brought on, we now have with the Jhana team that came on, we have the investment there that reflects as an increased investment each quarter. And this is a very talented team which generates additional make clearing content an ongoing basis. We also made investments in the new global All Access Pass portal, which is now done, as I mentioned and then launched into that, now we’ll just be amortizing at the same level. And we also had the cost of localizing our All Access Pass content in 16 languages worldwide. And with this new portal we now can offer it for sale which is great. Year-to-date through the second quarter, the enterprise divisions revenue, as you can see there grew $10.9 million or 17.4% to $73.8 million compared to $62.9 million last year. The gross margin increased year-to-date 570 basis points to 73.6% from 67.9% last year. And this combination really driven almost tripling of the enterprise divisions EBITDA year-to-date to $7.4 million through the second quarter compared to $2.6 million last year. Importantly, this $4.8 million increase year-to-date in divisional EBITDA for enterprise was after covering more than $6.8 million of planned increased growth investments, so year-over-year. The Education's division revenue of $9 million in the second quarter reflected year-over-year growth to 14.85 or $1.2 million. The education division adjusted EBITDA in the second quarter was negative $0.9 million just about a $1 million negative slightly less than last year second quarter EBITDA point, negative $0.6 million in the quarter. As you know this reflects both the fact that the staffing and marketing investments we make in the education division during the first and second quarters, in order to be in position to generate contracts for hundreds of new schools whose revenue isn't recognized until about the fourth quarter in which - the quarter in which Education division generates nearly one-half of its annual revenue and substantially all of its annual EBITDA is one major factor. And the second, as we mentioned last quarter is there is a change in the structural leader in the subscription offering where we are now including several on-site delivery days as part of the membership offerings, charging for these training days outside of the membership. This adds real value, we think to the schools. It also results still and - the revenue from those on-site days, they get recognized - the revenue gets recognized over 12 months and it used to get recognized in the first two quarters. And of course, that'll flip over them in the last two quarters. That will benefit us a little bit in the third and fourth quarters. Net cash provided by operating activities, shown in slide 8, you can see was $9.4 million year-to-date, an increase of $2.6 million compared to last year. So that kind of covers hopefully just at least at a high level the results for the quarter. I wanted to also go - as you can see in slide 9, the second bullet - the second outline point we want to talk about is the significant growth in our deferred revenue balances provides us with meaningfully increased visibility. As you can see in slide 9, our total balance of deferred revenue build and unbilled as we’ve noted before increased to $47.2 million in the second quarter. That's really a substantial growth of $29.4 million or 65% compared to the $17.8 million in total deferred revenue balances billed and unbilled we had at the end of last year. And you can see that breaks out between billed and unbilled revenue. And we expect the magnitude of our deferred revenue balances, billed and unbilled, to continue to increase in each of the coming quarters providing us and you with greater and greater visibility into and predictability of our future revenue. The third general point was to just touch on it that our subscription momentum is accelerating and that's being driven by the value our customers are receiving as we've talked about. Our very high annual recurring revenue retention and our customer significant add-on purchase of impact driving services are indicative. We believe that the value they are seeing that we are adding to their businesses. For example, just to give you a couple of examples, client examples, one client initially purchased an All Access Pass for approximately 150 leaders in order to pilot the use of the All Access Pass generally. And specifically, to implement our speed of trust content with a group of leaders within the organization. That pilot went very well. And upon renewal, the company expanded - decided to expand the All Access Pass to cover not only the 150 leaders they already had, but to go to 1,000 leaders and to help ensure a strong implementation impact after having experienced that they also purchased more than 50 days of onsite delivery services to go with us. This is a client who had really tested it, tried it, decided it was for them and went long. Another client initially when we were looking at the other day, initially purchased an All Access Pass covering approximately 200 leaders. Again, with the success of their initial initiative, at the end of their first year as a pass holder, they expanded their pass from 200 leaders to 1,500 leaders and purchased almost 200 days of add-on services. Recently, we were talking - the other day when we talked about, they renewed their pass for these same 1,500 leaders but another division said the company who knew of the results they were getting purchased its own pass for an additional 1,500 leaders. So, this is the kind of thing. Our objective is to develop deep, which means that all levels throughout the organization, pervasive through all divisions ongoing hypertension relationships with our clients. Sometimes this pervasiveness starts at the top with a divisional leader or higher. So, that's a great place to start. But often like in these two examples, initiative starts out in the field, because of its impact moves up through the organization and gets bigger and bigger as it goes. We have literally hundreds and hundreds of customers for whom, like these clients, All Access Pass is now viewed as an indispensable part of how they develop leaders and how they drive business outcomes. I can tell you for every team, nothing is as exciting for us. Nothing is more exciting than to have pervasive client successes. I mean, that gets talked about throughout the organization. You just know that that's what we're about as an organization and it's very exciting. It's this kind of impact that's driving the significance in an accelerated momentum because when we retain all, substantially - a substantial portion of all the revenue in the past, and then add on services that take it to more than 100% of what the initial pass was, we're already in growth land even without the sale of new passes except for the declines in the legacy business which, of course, is getting less and less. So, as a consequence, the subscription business is really driving the overall growth of the company. Couple of points. First, our subscription-related growth continues to be very strong in the second quarter year-to-date and for latest 12 months. So, you can see on slide 10, for the latest 12 months, our subscription and related revenue, plus our change in deferred revenue, billed and unbilled increased to $112 million, growth of $37 million or 50%, compared to the $75 million in total subscription revenue and change in deferred for we have for the same period last year. So, moving from $75 million to $112 million, and that's really at this point without anybody - any of our offices in China or in Japan having been able to sell this or any of our licensee partners. So, we feel like we're now in a position where they can sell it or this can accelerate further. Second, we also achieved strong year-over-year growth in our number of paying subscribers. As you can see in slide 11, our total number of paying subscribers across both our Enterprise and Education divisions increased over 0.5 million in the second quarter. That's an increase of 140,000 or 39% from the approximately 370,000 paying subscribers that we had at the end of last year second quarter. You can see how that breaks out between the Enterprise and Education divisions. Slide 12, you can see the breakout in Enterprise that 360,000 of those paying members are in the Enterprise division and that balance grew by 50% from 240,000 last year. And in the Education division as you can see in slide 13, we had approximately 150,000 paying subscribers the end of this year second quarter that represents growth of approximately 20,000 subscribers or 15% compared to the 130,000 subscribers we had end of the second quarter of fiscal 2017. You should see on slide 14, we also as I've noted before achieved continued significant growth in add-on services. This has moved from only about 5% of past revenue in the first year in 2016 to about 26% of average revenue in 2017 to now a number that's close to 40% of average outstanding subscription revenue balances. And so, this is - what happened is we've mentioned those two examples, as clients get in they try it out they then find problems to which they can attach it. Some of those problems are meaningful and that’s important enough that they want us to help them implement them, and we add those services on. Finally, in this section, we're also pleased that our subscription businesses key indicators continue to place among what are considered best-in-class subscription companies. An independent study of subscription companies to which I referred last quarter included data on all 56 of the publicly traded SaaS companies identified those companies the study considered best-in-class. As you can see in slide 15, this was at least - this wasn't all of them. This was just a sampling of those they consider best in class. This designation was based on these companies’ achievement of all three of the factors you can see on slide 16 which is certain growth in subscription revenue, which is at least 20%, having gross margin that was substantial on the Pass side of at least 70% independent of services. And having growth efficiency which is the sum of their subscription-related revenue growth plus their free cash flow margin at least 30%. And so, if you had - to get the growth - for instance, if you had 25% growth and 5% cash flow margin, you'd get there. According to study these best-in-class public subscription-based countries are valued as the total enterprise value-to-revenue move between 4.2 and 10 times revenue. And we're encouraged that as indicated in slide 16, our subscription business continues to also achieve all three of these best-in-class SaaS standards. And the combination of our Pass sort of making variably initial purchases, expanding their pass over populations and extending the term of their passes, having more than 90% annual revenue retention, and then having them purchase add-on services is definitely increasing the lifetime value and customers driving the momentum of the business. Finally, our inflection point is being driven by the interplay of four key factors which I’d just like to note. As you can see on slide 17, with our transition to subscription accounting, as we know, the portion of the given contract’s value that’s recognized upfront has declined while the amount that’s deferred as increased. And we’ve also had an impact in our legacy business. But it’s really also giving, as we talked about, this great visibility with deferred revenue now being at $47.2 million. Slide 18 identifies four factors that are underpinning the inflection point that you’re starting to see in our reported results, and which has already happened in the cash flow in other words. These four factors showed on slide 18 are as follows. Notice taking on figure A, B, C and D is just - so what each is saying or at least is indicating. As shown on figure A in slide 18, during the initial transition to All Access Pass since 2017, this shows you - the green bar is our legacy - revenue from our legacy onsite and facilitated businesses versus new subscription revenue. And you can see they roughly equaled the growth in the subscription business. Even though these weren’t all the same customers. We had some of all these people converted over, but a lot of our subscription revenue came from new customers. But nevertheless, interrupted our talking about it, having over salespeople talk about it, just interrupted clients. They didn’t know exactly if they hadn’t yet bought an All Access Pass. They might, they were waiting to do anything until they could do it. And so really the growth in one was offset by the other. This year in 2018, you can see there’s a positive gap between the growth versus subscription related business and the decline in our increasingly smaller legacy business. And so, for us, this green bar is - even if the percentage decline continued unabated for the next few years. We have the same percentage decline in the legacy business year-over-year. Because it's on such a smaller base, it'll become fewer and fewer dollars will be represented by that. And the gap between the growth in our subscription business which has been obviously going at high rates as we've talked about here versus that is the first factor is that positive gap between the growth of our subscription business and the decline of legacy. So, that's an important thing that is really happening, we expect to continue to happen. The second factor shown in Figure B of that same is the positive relationship between the growth in revenue and the increase in central and support cards. They noted earlier in fiscal 2019 and beyond our incremental investments in new content and portals will continue, but we roll these small increments compared to fiscal 2018’s elevated levels. In addition, our central and central support cost we expect to remain essentially flat. As a result - as indicated, that Figure B in fiscal 2019 and beyond is significantly higher portion of increases in revenue and gross margin dollars are expected to flow through the increases in adjusted EBITDA and cash flow. So, that's the second thing driving this inflection. The third factor shown in Figure C is the relationship between the growth and revenue and the growth in adjusted EBITDA. A powerful combination of accelerated revenue growth high and increasing gross margins highly variable commission-based selling class and a relatively flat central and content cost structure mean that is shown in Figure C, a high percentage of the significant increases revenue we expect to achieve in fiscal 2018, 2019, 2020 and beyond are expected to flow through to accelerated increases in adjusted EBITDA. Then finally, as it relates to cash flow, the relationship between the growth in adjusted EBITDA and the growth in pretax cash flow as you can see in figure D in slide 18, in fiscal 2019 and beyond, cash flow is expected to grow even more rapidly than reported revenue, in fact significantly more rapidly. This is due to the fact that the accounting for subscription sales because it experienced the recognition of the amount of subscription revenue over the term of the subscription contract even though almost all of our subscription revenue is billed upfront at the time it’s contracted. It means that the accounting recognition of the deferred revenue therefore significantly lags the collection of cash. And as a result, cash flow growth is expecting to grow even more rapidly than reported revenue or even adjusted EBITDA. So, the interplay of these four factors is expected to drive significantly increased growth in enterprise value. And we believe that as these factors become increasingly visible in the coming quarters and it’s better - and are better understood that the gap between the net present value of our expected cash flows and our market value will continue to narrow. So, conclusions, going back there just to slide 19, just hitting on the points we've made. First, our stronger than expected second quarter and year-to-date results we believe established the foundation for significant increases in revenue, adjusted EBITDA and cash flow growth that we expect in 2018 and beyond. Second, the significant growth in our deferred revenue balances provides a meaningful increased visibility into the strength and foundation for our accelerated future growth that this can - the momentum is being driven by our subscription business which in turn is being driven by the lifetime value of our customers and the value they're getting from our offerings. And fourth, that this inflection point we've hit in our operating results is actually expected to accelerate because of the interplay among those four key metrics which each of which is also hitting an inflection point. So, at this point, I'd like to turn the time over to Steve Young to discuss our guidance. As I do, however, I just like to say that we truly are excited about the progress we're making with the company, in the marketplace, and with our customers. We continue to believe that we have a significant opportunity for growth as organizations, enterprises of all types, and all sizes around the globe seek to develop their leaders, improve the productivity of their frontline employees, advance their cultures, and improve the results. And we believe that we are uniquely poised perhaps to address those involved - involving these. So, thanks very much. Steve?