Robert Philpott
Analyst · Noble Financial
Thank you, Jeremy. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Harte-Hank's first quarter 2015 earnings call. As usual, Doug Shepard, our CFO, joins me on today's call, and in a few moments, he will take you through the detail of our earnings release. I am speaking to you from the 3Q Digital offices in San Francisco today. And I am also joined by David Rodnitzky the CEO of 3Q Digital. As many of you will recall, Harte-Hanks acquired 3Q Digital in March and I thought this would be a good opportunity for David to introduce the business and to explain its part in the evolving Harte-Hanks story. And obviously we’ll give you an opportunity to put your questions to him later on this call. But today we’ll focus on our performance in the first quarter of 2015, where the impact of the 3Q acquisition was not financially material as the deal closed very close to the end of the first quarter. At first glance we’re presenting a challenging set of numbers today, particularly in relation to revenue. However, I don’t believe that this reflects the underlying progress that we’re making towards our goal of leadership and smarter customer interaction. And it’s important, therefore, that I spend some time upfront on our call to explain why I believe that there is a fundamentally more positive interpretation on how we’re rebuilding the business for longer term success. And I’ll comment here separately on our Customer Interaction Division and Trillium Software Division. I think it’s fair to say that I’ve been consistent in my view that sales is the life blood for any organization and therefore this is my starting point in looking at the performance in Harte-Hanks. In the first three months of 2015, our Customer Interaction team has built a strong sales pipeline and that’s whether you look at it from the perspective of our ability to attract brand new clients, whether you look at it from our ability to retain existing clients or even our ability to develop new lines of business with existing clients. So let me expand on these points and provide you with some concrete examples of the types of work that our clients have awarded to us recently. First, let’s talk about new logo wins. In the first quarter, we doubled our win rate that is versus 2014 in attracting new clients to the Company. Just let me repeat that, that we’ve doubled our win rate for new clients attracted to the Company. And we were able to achieve this because we now have a more extensive salesforce which offers us expanded coverage in both geographic terms and across industry sectors. An example of this new logo win was a well known cellular provider where we design, track, analyze and then take action on data to help our clients acquire and retain new customers. And that involves Harte-Hanks in database set up, data analytics, create a digital print and direct mail. And our work on this multi-stage program will take place throughout 2015. Now let’s consider the retention of existing clients and most importantly our ability to secure ongoing work for the next 12 months. Our sales organization has been successful in getting earlier and longer term commitment from clients than was the case in 2014. And the result of this is that our secured revenue, by secured revenue I mean here work that has already been committed to us by clients and that level of secured revenue is about the level we saw this time last year. In fact we now have good visibility on more than 90% of the revenue total we achieved in all of 2014. An example of this type of win comes from the financial services sector where wealth management organization chose to renew our contract early and without competitive bidding due to our executional excellence. Then finally a key part of our strategic focus is that we develop relationships with our clients across a much wider base of our capabilities. In early 2015 we saw some great instances of this strengthening of the linkage between Harte-Hanks and our clients. But again the best example of this comes from the financial services vertical too. In this case our prior experience with the division of one of the largest U.S. banks led our appointment as agency of record for additional services in the retail banking. And all of these client wins are on strategy and illustrate the alignment between our goals and our clients’ needs. However new clients, earlier client commitments and new types of projects have a longer on-boarding process than expansion of existing one. And the assignment of -- for the cellular provider that I mentioned earlier is an example of this. New clients and new projects require greater set up time often involving the development of statements of work for example, sometimes visits to our facilities and the piloting of initial ideas. The natural consequence of winning more of this type of business is that our lead time from sale to revenue has increased in 2015. But by understanding our business in this way we are positive about the outlook for the financial performance of the business in 2015 even though it is not yet reflected in our revenues. The other factor impacting first quarter 2015 comparative revenue performance relates to a non-recurring 2014 online streaming video project which boosted first and second quarter revenues in 2014. Now Doug, will give you more details on this shortly. But the nature of this work meant that sales and revenue occurred almost simultaneously in 2014. And of course our 2015 plan calls for us to replace this work, but this is with projects that have a more conventional sales to revenue lead time. In other words we’re highlighting a timing issue. So in customer interaction I’m confident that our top-line sales activities put us in a positive position to achieve our full year target of growth in the business. In Trillium Software we continue to experience revenue performance issues and this is not related to the marketing opportunity where there is evidence of continued growth. We remain excited about the prospects in enterprise data quality and in the broader data governance sector. And nor is there an issue with the Trillium product, where we’ve invested strongly, in bringing the software into line with industry standards. The revenue challenges related to a more fundamental weakness in the sales pipeline. We’re actively recruiting sales professionals to bolster the existing team. And this new talent will enable us to regain our share of the market growth. The new service offerings from Trillium that I mentioned in last quarter’s call relating to cloud or software-as-a-service and Big Data will take some time to impact revenue performance. But again I believe that we have invested wisely in the future of our solution. Our pipeline of Trillium is building but there is some distance still to go and I don’t anticipate catching up to 2014 revenues until much later in the year. Now before I hand over to Doug for the detailed financial information I do want to point out the continued excellent cost control in the business. We’ve demonstrated prudent control on expenses both in terms of their magnitude and timing. It is clear that we have managed our cost base effectively in the first quarter, benefiting from the corrective action we took in the second half of 2014. We’ll continue to monitor expenditure closely and we’ll only commit to additional resources when the revenues increase. I also want to update you on additional initiative we have begun to deliver even greater business efficiency. Already in 2015 we have established a relationship with a major BPO outsource specialist to provide cost efficient back office and operational support. But we're now also underway with a project to establish our own capital outsource center in India. The set up of this center will take approximately six months, which means that the work will begin to transition from our onshore locations in the U.S. and U.K. principally, to our offshore center before the end of the year. Initially this will involve further back-office support but this will not be the only role for the Indian center. It will also provide us with access to talent, especially for future development work for Trillium Software. Later in the call, I'll introduce you to David Rodnitzky but before that let me now have Doug walk you through the detailed financial results. And I'll rejoin the discussion a little later. Doug?