Clint Jones
Analyst · Evercore. Your line is now open
Thanks, Jay. Good evening everyone and thanks for joining us for our second quarter earnings call. This is our first as a public company and we're excited to announce GoHealth's results and share with investors our unique positioning in the marketplace as well as their future vision for the Company, as we focus on our mission to improve access and healthcare in America. I plan on covering two main topics today including; first, a quick review of our second quarter results in fiscal 2020 outlook; and second, a summary of how we actively manage our business to achieve the right balance of top-line growth, profitability, and cash returns. So with that, let's start with the second quarter results. No surprises here as results came in largely as expected. Total net revenue grew 71% in the quarter, powered by 169% growth in our Medicare Internal segment. This revenue growth is driven by additional agents and increased efficiency, which contributed to 106% increase in Medicare Advantage commercial approved submissions are Medicare CAS. Revenue growth in the quarter was held back due to COVID-related state licensing delays that we experienced from April to June. As of August 1st, we're on track from a hiring standpoint for this upcoming AEP, making up substantial ground on licensing and carrier appointments during July. Despite these significant investments in our workforce, we delivered EBITDA growth of 56% in the second quarter. The Medicare Advantage market is very large and growing quickly, as seniors are increasingly interested in evaluating their plan options, with the expert advice of GoHealth and our agents. COVID has helped to accelerate the secular shift towards our business model as a traditional field force slowed down due to social distancing concerns. We partner closely with carriers to help them grow their member counts and we have a track record of exceeding expectations through educating consumers and providing with the best policy options to address their own unique needs. We also are able to deliver high customer service levels and post-enrollment engagement through our TeleCare team. They ramped up dramatically over the last 12 months. First half revenue increased 87% thanks to a 242% growth in Medicare Internal and 156% growth in Medicare CAS. Internal Medicare margins increased 300 basis points to 49% on a TTM basis. Given the rapid growth we delivered in the first half plus the momentum behind our business initiatives, we believe we're well positioned to deliver net revenue of 840 million to 890 million in 2020. We expect efficiency gains at a continued focus on our Medicare Advantage segment to help us maintain industry leading adjusted EBITDA margins, well above 30% in 2020. Despite an aggressive investment posture in people and technology that positions us for future growth. This will allow us to deliver adjusted EBITDA of 265 million to 290 million. These high margins are driven by a laser focus on LTV to CAC. As many of you know, LTV to CAC represents the lifetime value of commissions divided by the customer acquisition cost that allows us to calculate how much we're willing to spend for a particular consumer based on their expected value, effectively deleveraging the market and delivering high quality volume growth. It's similar to GARP investing. Rephrase it, growth at the right price. I'm proud to say that the team continues to build on prior year momentum with trailing 12 months LTV to CAC, up almost a point as of June 30th to 3.69, and towards the high end of our optimal range of 2.5 to 4 times. This optimal range allows us to scale growth by shortening our payback period to roughly one year on Medicare policies. With a correlation of 95%, the relationship between TTM LTV to CAC and Medicare Internal margins is very high, validating the relevance and LTV to CAC as a correct guideposts for delivering quality profits. This is further validated by our ability to be cash flow positive, from a unit economic standpoint at the end of the first year. This leads to my second topic, the how behind delivering high gross margins and superior cash returns. We distinguish ourselves from the competition through utilizing technology and data to power our decisions and excellent execution. As you know, the majority of our costs are variable relating to the marketing activities and agent costs. Our vertically integrated funnel allows us to optimize our results, balancing supply and demand in real time. Put another way, we work towards certain desired goals and metrics including LTV to CAC, by modulating levers. Let me use a few examples of the various levers at our disposal to win in this market. The first example I want to share is around volume growth. We can adjust the volume of lead generation we've produced for our agents through deleveraging the market and micro targeting. Because we focus on internal lead generation, we know a lot about our targeted customers before they even make a call. This enabled us to be surgical in our approach, spending a predetermined amount for a specific consumer because we already have an expected value for them. Our approach is precise and methodical, driving top tier LTV to CAC as we work backwards from our known cost to acquire the LTV. Our anticipated future conditions streams can vary to a carrier mix, customer segments, geographies, enrollment time of the year amongst other factors that we incorporate into our LTVs. Over the last several quarters, we've enjoyed strong, high quality growth, driven in part by targeting special needs plans known as SNPs although SNP plans tend to have a lower LTV that pulled down our average LTV. We can achieve our target LTV to CAC levels, because of our marketing efficiencies, and the higher agent conversion rates that we deliver for these policies. The second level we control is the investment in our own internal team of agents and how we schedule their time to match the demand that our marketing team creates. Given a specific number of lead generation opportunities, we can determine how many agents we need working during various times of the day. When COVID first hit, we were able to transition to a work from home environment within 72 hours with minimal disruption. We've now adjusted how we onboard, trained and licensed new agents and are continually optimizing through improved lead score and call routing technologies to drive higher conversion rates of consumers are the best fit claims with shorter handle times. Our data tells us that agent engagement with consumers is supportive of happier customers, better plan usage, and ultimately better retention. In 2019, we more closely aligned our agent compensation around the long-term dynamics of these commission streams not just at the point of sale. Our expanded TeleCare teams can then take over post-enrollment to educate consumers about their plan benefits and help minimize unexpected surprises during the two highest periods of churn, the first 90 days and during the next annual enrollment period. Throughout TeleCare data, we've been able to develop safe strategies for when members call to cancel their plans whether due to shopping for zero dollar premium plans or some other significant life event like a move or a new health issue. We have seen as retention strategy helped keep over a quarter of those same customers enrolled on the GoHealth platform, either their original plan or helping them find a new plan. In addition to increasing persistency, the TeleCare team also administers innovative offerings, such as health risk assessments and pharmacy benefit management programs for our carrier partners, positioning us to generate other revenue streams incremental to commissions for GoHealth to become the go to health insurance marketplace for consumers. To be clear, our agent additions are an investment in our growth over the coming years. The third and final example of our levers has been a rifle shot approach to adding new carriers. From 2016 to 2018, we use our technology and data science to fine tune our Medicare business model with a few strong carrier partners through deep technology integrations and a consulting like partnership to help them grow their enrollments. As their Medicare business has grown, we've been methodically adding new carriers to the platform. This approach has enabled us to maintain high margins at our integrated marketplace and increased LTV to CAC through more plan choices and better consumer fit. Our LTV to CAC and retention rates are the highest and markets where we offer broad coverage of the leading plans verse markets with less carrier coverage. As we look towards 2021, we will have expanded coverage with many of the top carriers including United, Aetna Kaiser and some other reasonable. While there's an initial ramp up period for new carriers with forecasted lower LTVs as agents learn about new plans, adding policy choices over the long-term supports higher LTVs and lower customer acquisition costs. Clearly, there are several macro factors that are our control, such as potential impacts from COVID-19, unemployment and regulatory changes. We believe that most of these are also tilted in our favor right now, which when combined with our proven business strategy positioned us very well for future growth. And we expect our growth will be significant over the coming years given the size of Medicare Advantage market, its underlying trajectory as consumers need traditional fee for service plans, not to mention secular shift towards a virtual marketplace. Additionally, we believe they are meaningful first mover advantage for those that can build scale. The bigger we get, the better our model optimized. More consumers provide more data insight, which allows micro targeting allows us to hire more agents to specialize and better match those agents with prospects. This flywheel effect supports being more aggressive on the growth side during this COVID disruption with a careful eye towards our LTV to CAC ratio. This should allow us to generate industry leading even to growth through scale efficiencies, as we build a book of business that will generate strong cash flows for shareholders in the future. As we think about cash management, balance is the word that comes to mind. Brandon Cruz and I found a GoHealth two decades ago with our own money and maintaining 30% ownership stake post-IPO because of our focus on minimizing unnecessary dilution through cash burn. So, we care a lot about these cash returns the result from our business decisions. Rather than to steal Travis' thunder on 606, I'll simply say that paying your agent and marketing costs upfront and then waiting for the cash commissions to be collected create some cash challenges, but we have found ways to fund our high rates of growth through a combination of existing cash flow, a seasonal revolver, and long-standing carrier relationships. Because of the depth of our relationship with carriers, we have been able to create programs where carriers pay upfront cash to GoHealth to cover agent cost and enrollment fees as well as marketing programs on the frontend where the margins are lower than the commissionable business and it's helped reduce our reliance on external capital. Now post-IPO, we are at strong position to reevaluate the balance of creating value for the carriers from traditional growth and generate additional revenue streams from these relationships. Non-commissionable revenue shows other revenue on our P&L has been and will continue to be an important way of supplement the profitability of commission streams, including the rollout of some of the incompetence initiatives to enhance member utilization and drive value based care engagement. More frequent customer interactions will help ensure member plans satisfaction and better health outcomes, creating a strong connection between provider, payer and patient. I will spend more time running through our unconscious opportunities on future earnings calls. But for now, we are encouraged by the favorable response from our carriers. We can offer programs on behalf of carriers at a time of enrollment with compelling margins, leveraging our marketplace and TeleCare team. In the meantime, we aim to continue our legacy of over delivering on our growth objectives and will do so through controlling what we can control and creating a visible path to value creation. We will continue to thoughtfully allocate our resources, invest ahead of the curve, and make sure that GoHealth earns more than our fair share of a very large, fast growing Medicare Advantage market. Let me now turn the call over to Travis for some additional color on our financials and key metrics.