Bob Whitman
Analyst · Barrington Research. Your line is open
Thanks, Derek. Good afternoon, everyone. We appreciate you joining us today. In these challenging times, we have been doing a lot lately to help our clients and even non-clients respond to the new changes and challenges they face. For example, as you can see on Slide 3, nearly a month ago, we created a special set of digital materials for our All Access Pass holder organizations entitled, Leading Through Uncertainty, that leaders in an organization with a guide – that provides those leaders in organizations with the guide for utilizing various of the All Access Pass resources to help them lead through change or to build the skills of proactivity and resiliency throughout the organization, lead in a remote environment, etcetera. These resources are providing clients with the ability to engage their workforces, provide team building and development opportunities for their remote workers, and utilize digital assets and training, as well as the option of having even higher engagement by having Franklin Covey training consultants facilitate these sessions live online, a capability in which we have invested for more than a decade. Similarly, in the education division, as you can see on Slide 4, we curated a special collection of family educational resources and provided them to all of our education clients. In addition, given that so many families are now in a homeschooling situation, we have also provided these resources to All Access Pass holders, organizations, and made them free of charge to the general public on our website leaderinme.org. These robust resources include hundreds of videos, articles, and tools from families to be used with their children at home, including animated videos, which are very popular to teach life skills, coloring pages, in-home activities for families, award winning videos made by students, students speaking contests, and our Leader in Me weekly newsletter, which features relevant tools and articles for schools and families in these challenging times. You might want to check out these resources yourself at leaderinme.org. Also our employees, many of whom have always worked remotely are now all working remotely. We are pleased to report that with only a few exceptions, they and their families are safe and healthy. I can’t adequately express how much we appreciate the extraordinary lengths to which our employees are going to serve our clients always and now more than ever. We are glad to have the chance to talk with you today. In this uncertain environment, really there are four things we would like you to take away from today’s discussion. You can see on Slide 5, first, that our results for the second quarter were very strong and even better than we expected. And as a result, we entered the third quarter with real strength operationally and financially and with significant liquidity. Our results for the second quarter, as you can see reflected the compounding power of the same key factors that have driven our accelerated results over the past quarters and years. Second, we are grateful that we also entered this period not only strong strategically, not only strong financially and operationally, but strategically with solutions in the business model that are really valued by our clients. While the coming months will undoubtedly contain a lot of uncertainty and challenges, this strength on all three fronts is allowing us to really provide services to our clients that they value. We have consistently invested in content, technology-based delivery, portals, micro learning, language availability with 21 languages, and a wide variety of delivery modalities in our subscription business model. And as a result, we are in a unique position to be able to serve our clients in whatever circumstance they find themselves in today. And whenever this period ends, we expect to come out of it having increased our strategic importance to our clients. Third, we expect that the same three factors that have driven our accelerated growth in adjusted EBITDA and cash flow over the past many quarters we will continue to do so as we come out of this downturn. We expect -- we don’t know when that exactly will be obviously, but we expect that these three factors namely our strong subscription offerings, the fact that we have very high lifetime customer value and retention, and the high flow-through of incremental to incremental EBITDA and cash flow which our business model has driven will continue to drive very high rates of growth in adjusted EBITDA and cash flow again in the future once we get past this period. And then fourth, we really are grateful to be in a position to provide our clients with the kinds of solutions, modalities, and assistance they need during these times. And as a result, we expect to exit this period with an even deeper, more enduring relationship with our clients. So, I would like to just briefly address each of these. I think they are all relevant to the current situation even going over the financial results here because it shows the patterns which we expect both made us strong going into this period as well as will make us strong coming out. As noted in Slide 6, our results for the second quarter were very strong; and as I mentioned, as a result we ended the third quarter with strength operationally, financially, and with significant liquidity. Our strong second quarter performance reflected the strength of the same key factors that have driven our accelerated results over the past quarters and years, namely strong high-single-digit revenue growth; second, accelerated growth in subscription sales; third, increasing gross margins; and fourth, declining operating SG&A as a percentage of sales. This has resulted in a high flow-through of incremental revenue to increases in adjusted EBITDA and cash flow. As you know from reading our earnings release and as shown on Slide 7, we had a very strong second quarter results on all four of those key metrics despite the fact that our operations in China and Japan were closed or restricted for a portion of the quarter. As you can see, revenue grew $3.4 million or 6.7% in the second quarter, grew – this also grew $8.2 million or 7.8% year-to-date, and $14 million or 6.4% for the latest 12 months not shown on this. Adjusted EBITDA increased $3.1 million. That’s obviously a big percentage, 321% in the second quarter and increased $4.9 million or 118% year-to-date and $9.4 million or 58.6% for the latest 12 months. The flow-through continued to be high. Incremental revenue to incremental adjusted EBITDA 91% flowed through for the second quarter, 60% year-to-date, and 67% for the latest 12 months, so that trend has continued. And our cash flow from operating activities continued to be strong for the second quarter increasing again 30% or $4 million to $17.4 million. And as strong as these reported metrics were excluding China and Japan which as I noted were closed down for summer most of the quarter, the company’s performance was even stronger. As you can see on the right hand side, excluding the options, China and Japan revenue grew $4.9 million or 11.2% in the second quarter, $9 million or 9.9% year-to-date and $14.7 million or 7.6% for the latest 12 months and also adjusted EBITDA grew $4 million in the second quarter and would have grown 5.7% year-to-date and 10.8%. So just stepping back from it, it’s a very strong quarter. We showed resiliency in the face of some challenges in Asia and we are really happy with it and pleased to enter this new period with those credit, with that kind of strength. Really, I’d like to briefly touch on a couple of metrics. First, as you have shown in Slide 6, we had really strong revenue growth on all metrics. Our revenue as reported grew $3.4 million or 6.7% in the second quarter, 7.8% year-to-date and 6.4% for the latest 12 months. Our total subscription and related revenue grew 24% or $6.1 million in the second quarter to $31.4 million grew 21% or $11 million year-to-date and 22% or $24 million latest 12 months for a total of $133.7 million. All Access Pass and related revenue grew 28% or $5.1 million in the second quarter to $23.4 million, it’s grown 25% year-to-date and 27% or $19.6 million for the latest 12 months. Our total invoice revenue, some of which of course goes on the balance sheet, grew 9.2% or $4.5 million in the second quarter to $53 million. This was led by the U.S. and Canada whose invoice revenue grew 15.1% or $3.7 million so that U.S. and Canada has been getting stronger and stronger driven by All Access Pass and grew 15% or $3.7 million during the quarter. Year-to-date invoice revenue has grown 8.8% or $8.3 million and latest 12 months 7.3% or $16.4 million to $242 million. Our balance of the billed and unbilled subscription revenue grew a very strong $18.2 million or 28% in the second quarter to $82.7 million compared to a balance of $64.5 million at the end of last year’s second quarter, and finally, in addition, our total value of contracts signed in the second quarter grew 9.7% or $4.8 million to $53.8 million and has grown 13% to $107 million for the latest 12 months. And the buildup of that contracted revenue is very helpful to us as we move into this period. So we felt very good about our revenue growth for the quarter. As we noted, we had very high flow-through of incremental revenue to incremental adjusted EBITDA as you can see in Slide 9, 91% or $3.1 million of our increase in revenue in the second quarter flowed through to increases in adjusted EBITDA. This resulted in adjusted EBITDA increasing to $4.1 million from $1 million in the second quarter of fiscal ‘19. And excluding our offices in China and Japan, adjusted EBITDA actually grew faster, grew $4 million during the second quarter. Year-to-date, adjusted EBITDA has increased $4.9 million or 118%. The flow-through has been 60% and the latest 12 months adjusted EBITDA increased $9.4 million or 59% to $25.5 million despite a more than $1 million negative impact from Japan and China in the second quarter and that’s up $16 million for the 12 months – for the same 12-month period last year showing a 67% flow-through. This flow-through obviously is very high and again it reflects the four factors. It was obviously the high single-digit revenue and again, it reflects the four factors: obviously, the high single-digit revenue growth which has been increased, but with the exception of China and Japan increasing; our increasing gross margin percentage, where gross margin percentage increased 171 basis points in the second quarter, 257 basis points year-to-date, and a 131 basis points for the latest 12 months; third, the fact that operating SG&A as a percentage of sales has declined during the second quarter, it declined to 64.4% of revenue which is a 392 basis point improvement compared to 68.3% in last year’s second quarter. And as you can see in the appendix in Slides 23 and 28, we also achieved strong revenue growth and very high EBITDA growth in the enterprise division in the second quarter. We had strong growth in the education division. So we were really pleased with the strength of the second quarter and year-to-date performance. We were pleased that for the latest 12 months of adjusted EBITDA had reached $25.5 million with the third and fourth quarters to go. And of course we are pleased with momentum we entered the second quarter as consequence with the robust third quarter pipeline almost $25 million of cash on the balance sheet and over $15 million available under our revolving credit line. Importantly, once this current period of uncertainty is over whenever that is we expect that the same factors that have driven our past performance will drive accelerated growth and adjusted EBITDA and cash flow again in the future. So that’s just a quick review of our results. Moving on to Slide 10, we want to talk about the current environment. So we are pleased that not only did we enter the third quarter with strong momentum and strong financially. What really is important as we entered the period strong strategically in a relationship with their customers the value they place in our solutions and as you all know for more than a decade really we have invested in creating digital courses and content, content that can be delivered live online blended impact journeys 5 years ago, we added microlearning and much of our innovations budget in the last few years has been around on demand and blended delivery offerings portals and ever since as a consequence. We expect that we will not only retain a 5% of our clients during this time, but also increase our value to them as they try new methods of delivering they might otherwise have tried and we would expect to exit this period really with even deeper stronger and more pervasive client engagements and relationships. As to the current situation obviously it is a difficult one just generally all of you are living in it and hopefully getting through it. We are all living in it and so all of our clients in our experience to bring times of significant uncertainty. Of course it is natural for there to be a period of time in which for both individuals and organizations focus energy and bandwidth is directed to getting their bearings and adapting just to the immediate circumstances. During such times, normal business and decision-making process are often interrupted in the past few weeks has seen exactly this. For the first time also of course, organizations must also adapt to having the vast majority of their employees working remotely in the context of this environment. I would like to address the areas of greater and lesser uncertainty for Franklin Covey. I will first start with the areas in which we have a lot of confidence the areas which historically have been very predictable which we expect to continue to be predictable include the following. First, our deferred revenue as shown in Slide 11, we had $47.9 million of build deferred revenue on the books at the end of the second quarter substantially all of this highly profitable revenue would be recognized over the next four quarters second our unbilled deferred revenue as you can also see in slide 11 in addition to the deferred revenue we also had $34.8 million of unbilled deferred revenue second quarter, primarily related to multiyear All Access Pass contracts, all of this revenues under contracts and the vast majority of this unbilled deferred revenue will be invoiced over the next six quarters. So we don’t see a risk to that. Third, our All Access Pass subscription renewals as illustrated in Slide 12, historically, our annual revenue retention of All Access Pass subscription revenue has been very high exceeding 90% in each of the last nine quarters and is really addressing them. We believe that most of our clients intend to renew their passes still for us All Access Pass add on services revenue. All Access Pass related services totals about $33 million a year spread throughout the year. And historically, these services on a same-store basis have also repeated year over year at a high rate of more than 90%. And fifth, leader in the memberships, historically between 87% and 91% have been more than 2,700 Leader in Me schools in the U.S. and Canada have renewed their subscription membership in a given year. Now as per the areas of uncertainty, the areas of greater uncertainty for us over this period are not therefore about the strength of our solutions or about our client impact or about client’s commitment, fundamental commitment or about the strength of our business model rather the uncertainty primarily relates to three things: first to the potential impacts which delays in decision-making caused by current circumstances could impact the timing of renewals and new sales from companies and particularly in the education division for both the annual membership renewal of the majority of Leader in Me schools and the addition of new Leader in Me schools normally takes place between May and August. We will address this more. Second, so the first is just the delayed decision-making. People not able, they go out their normal processes, the school district isn’t getting together, if they are, they are doing it by videoconference etcetera and this has changed the decision-making. Second concern is the potential impact, which the fact that people are working home could have unplanned training and coaching engagement which organizations have typically scheduled to take place on side of their offices even though they have been available live online or digitally. It now means that people sequestration means that these trading engagements now need to be done live online or digitally. Both of which are available and very capably delivered through All Access Pass and Leader in Me or they need to be rescheduled. Many of these have already been reschedules or in the process of being rescheduled live online. We believe that people do not intend to cancel a very small minority or really going to be canceled and even those who want to continue to have onsite days are rebooking them, postponing it with the hope that, that will be done later on this summer. However, the shift in the timing of delivery will cause your revenue to move from one quarter into another and create revenue gaps and uncertainty. And then the third major area of concern is as to the time required to ramp up our recently reopened offices in China and Japan following their operations having been closed or restricted for a portion of the second quarter, they are back in operations and things are generally back in the office making calls. They are going to need to rebuild their pipelines. So the impact of these factors is not expected to be long-lasting. However, it does create gaps and the uncertainty as to their timing and magnitude makes it difficult to provide accurate quarterly guidance or an update our annual guidance today. Nothing would please us more than to be able to tell you as we have done each quarter there. Our guidance for next quarter is X and for the year it’s Y. And then you go back and hope to exceed those numbers. However, in this environment and with education’s biggest quarters coming up really coming up in the end of the third quarter in May and in our fourth quarter, we can’t be confident in our guidance. So we are not providing any at this time. We expect that in 60 days to 90 days when we report on our third quarter performance we should be in a much better position to provide more guidance and we look forward to doing that at that time. Now moving forward, I would like to ask Paul Walker to talk about some recent – what’s happening with our clients in this environment in both divisions. Paul?