Greetings, and welcome to the IZEA Worldwide Second Quarter 2023 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A brief question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Ryan Schram, President and Chief Operating Officer. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to IZEA's earnings call covering the second quarter of 2023. I'm Ryan Schram, President and Chief Operating Officer at IZEA. And joining me on the call are IZEA's Chief Financial Officer, Peter Biere; and IZEA Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Ted Murphy. Thanks for being with us today. Earlier this afternoon, the company issued a press release detailing our performance for the second quarter of 2023. If you like to review those details, all of our investor information can be found online on our Investor Relations website at izea.com/investors. Before we begin, please take note of the Safe Harbor paragraph included in today's press release covering IZEA's financial results and be advised that some of the statements that we made today regarding our business, operations and financial performance may be considered forward looking. And such statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. We encourage you to consider the disclosures contained in our SEC filings for a detailed discussion of these factors. Our commentary today will also include the non-GAAP financial measure of adjusted EBITDA. Reconciliations between GAAP and non-GAAP metrics for our reported results can also be found in our earnings release issued earlier today as well as in our publicly available filings. And with that, I'm pleased to introduce IZEA's Chief Financial Officer, Peter Biere. Peter?

Thank you, Ryan, and good afternoon, everyone. I'll review our operating results for the quarter ended June 30, 2023, compared to the prior year's quarter and discuss balance sheet highlights. Total revenue for the second quarter of 2023 was $10.7 million, 15% or $1.9 million lower than the prior year quarter. Our net cash loss or EBITDA was negative $637,000 for the quarter compared to a gain of $254,000 for the prior year quarter. Our net loss in the current quarter totaled $1 million or $0.07 per share on 15.5 million shares compared to a loss of $170,000 or $0.01 per share on 15.6 million shares. These share counts are adjusted for our June 2023 four-for-one reverse split. Managed services bookings for the second quarter of 2023 totaled $7.3 million compared to $9.3 million for the prior year's second quarter, a 21% decline. Early this year, we announced that we are parting ways with one large customer, which I'll refer to as our non-recurring customer. Bookings from this non-recurring customer were approximately $70,000 for the current quarter and totalled $3.5 million in the prior year's second quarter. Stripping out bookings from this non-recurring customer, ongoing customer bookings, which include both new and existing customers, totalled $7.3 million in the current quarter, 24% above the prior year's second quarter total of $5.8 million, and which represented 99% of total bookings in the current quarter. Our order count from these ongoing customers was 25% above the prior year quarter and the average order size was unchanged. Importantly, bookings from ongoing customers also grew 25% sequentially from Q1 2023, showing strength in our core demand and that we're well on our way to replacing the sizable historic demand from our non-recurring customer. Managed services revenue totalled $10.6 million during the second quarter of…

Thanks, Peter, and hello again, everyone. In our last two earnings updates, I shared that our management team was focused squarely on finding signals from the noise surrounding our broader advertising industry and keeping the organization accountable for things that we could control amidst contradictory macroeconomic indicators, and our understandably distracted brand clients who are being faced with many of the same challenges. Yes, budgets unexpectedly shifted or paused on certain initiatives, and timelines were challenged by these factors overall. However, our long-term view on the creator economy, paired with our resolve to meet our clients at their respective need state with an unmatched level of flexibility and value, has made a meaningful difference in the front half of 2023. Our team utilized the first two quarters of the year to drive new logo acquisition for our managed service business in particular. Said simply, we were not satisfied with our client concentration risk coming out of the 2022 fiscal year, and our sales leadership believed there was greater opportunity for IZEA to expand our team, our geographic footprint, and categorical breadth and depth if we took advantage to prudently invest when others in our space were pulling back. These efforts included recruiting senior-level sales personnel, along with added investment in higher-profile demand generation activities, many of which we highlighted in our last earnings call. We're pleased with the initial results that we're seeing from the front half of 2023, with 40% year-over-year bookings growth from new clientele and an average deal size increase for first-time projects nearly doubling in that same period. IZEA also produced an increase in sales pipeline, or the total dollar value of proposals placed in front of clients, in the first half of nearly 50% year-over-year, with the month of May setting an all-time record for…

Thank you, Ryan. 2023 continues to be a period of transition on multiple fronts as we lay the foundation for our next phase of growth. In the first half of this year, we made a strategic decision involving trade-offs regarding near-term revenue and customer counts in order to focus on more sustainable, diversified and profitable growth long-term. We are early into the back half of the year, but have growing optimism that our changes are going to bear fruit, particularly in managed services, where we are seeing large year-over-year pipeline growth, as Ryan mentioned. Managed Services is what drives nearly all of the revenue for our company today. We will continue to make investments in our team in the U.S. and see significant global growth opportunities as well via our emerging markets workgroup. Foundational to our managed services team success, is the technology that powers our campaigns, from identifying influencers and benchmarking brands to making payments and measuring results, but we do not intend for our managed services to be our only significant business unit of IZEA. Earlier this year, we decided to accelerate the transition from IZEAx for our managed services team and SaaS customers, which was originally slated for the end of 2023. We made this decision with the long view in mind. It was our decision to deal with the challenges in a period of economic downturn, so we could be unencumbered when strength returned to the market. The IZEAx managed services and SaaS customer transition completed at the end of Q2, and it had an outsized impact on our SaaS revenue this quarter. The drop in SaaS revenue was due to a combination of materially lower licensing fees for customers who made the transition, refunds to customers who had IZEAx licensing agreements into the future, as…

I would like to turn the floor over to Ryan for closing remarks.

We would like to thank each of you for joining us this afternoon, and as a friendly reminder, you can find all of IZEA's investor information online on our Investor Relations website. That's at IZEA.com/investors. Have a nice evening.

This concludes today's teleconference. You may disconnect your lines at this time and thank you for your participation. : :