Brandon Ridenour
Analyst · Cowen
Yes. Great question. We talked about last quarter that we’ve been quite pleased with the resiliency of our business in the face of the pandemic. And we’ve seen more homeowners turn to us for help with their home care needs then really ever before. At the same time, we haven’t gone without impact from the pandemic and the industry itself has not gone without impact. A couple of key challenges that we face, one is, just service providers are fairly overwhelmed, particularly in the back half of this year. You have the period of March, April, May, which is typically a time when a lot of these providers will be scaling up or rather, as we all know this year, they were pulling back and locking down. And by June, we’ve seen a pretty massive resurgence or surge in consumer demand. And I think a lot of these companies have – are operating with a little bit less capacity than they otherwise would be. And then have been met with this sort of unprecedented surge in demand. So what we’re seeing quite frankly, is this many companies can’t take on new customers. And so that’s something that just the reality of the situation. In terms of when it resolves, the way we think about it is largely that it will – that it is somewhat tied to the pandemic and as the sort of situation at large normalizes, we would expect the operations and capacity these companies to normalize and their appetite to pay to meet new customers would rebound to former levels. The other challenge that we have faced, specifically is, we came into the year with pretty ambitious plans to grow our salesforce. We were ahead of where we expected to be going into March. But unfortunately, obviously, during the second quarter, we had to sort of freeze everything very, very quickly find a way to get several thousand people working remotely for the first time in history. And then subsequent to that, we’ve had to learn, how to hire and train new salespeople remotely, which is not easy for a variety of reasons. And so we are what I would say, effectively about six months behind where we expected to be in terms of the size of our salesforce. Our salesforce that we do have has performed well during this period, which I think is a bright note. But growing the salesforce and having those incremental sales people bring on more, more service providers and growing our overall network at a faster rate, is critical to – to at least be one contributor to solving the supply challenge. On the other side of our business fixed price, which is somewhat nascent, but important, really works quite a bit differently. And we have seen that grow very quickly. That’s an area – if on one side of our business service providers are paying us to meet customers and they’ve got a lower appetite for that, on the fixed price side of our business, we’re able to take advantage of those higher levels of consumer demand, and we’re actually paying service providers. So we saw growth there really meet our expectations. But it’s a newer part of our business and small relative to the traditional component. As we look forward to next year, there are things we can control and things we can’t, we think we’ll have our salesforce back where it needs to be by the end of this year, but those folks will be hired much later than we expected. And it’ll take time to get them fully ramped up and productive over the first part of next year. Fixed price, we expect to continue to grow very quickly and bringing on additional capacity via that platform. And then we have new products that we will go-to-market with that we think can tap into different segments of the SP Universe than we traditionally have. So is it a good problem to have? I think having lots of consumers relying on your service and having that demand, which is intrinsically valuable is obviously incredibly important and the most important thing, frankly. But we’ve got a lot of work to do to get our provider capacity back to where it needs to be. And we frankly, would like to see some normalization of the environment at large.