Joseph A. Walsh
Analyst · Scott Berg with Needham & Company
Thanks, Paul. Before we wrap, I want to reiterate our conviction that we are on a good path. The business is progressing nicely. The modest adjustment in SaaS guidance is isolated to softness in the Keep business, specifically within the demand generation side of the Keep business. We didn't love the economics that were there. And as we were facing the pinch point, we took the opportunity to kind of cut cost there and didn't really invest in those sales because they weren't as profitable on a lifetime value to cost of acquisition basis. But the Keep business is helping us tremendously across the SaaS business, and I want to take you through that in just a minute. Before that, I also want to comment that please note that we increased our SaaS EBITDA target. So we are delivering really where it counts. I want to talk about the Thryv for HVAC. We recently announced Thryv for HVAC, and this is a product that we worked very closely with a very successful large HVAC business and designed automations by HVAC for HVAC using Keep's powerful automation tools. One of them, I guess, sort of knocks against Thryv might be that well, Thryv is horizontal. They have horizontal software. That's how they got to over 100,000 subscribers so fast, because they're working horizontally. What we're doing now is working to deepen our engagement by going deeply vertical in our most powerful verticals where we've had the most success. And HVAC is a real big winner for us. And so we've rolled this out. We already have an impressive number of sales so far coming in from that HVAC vertical, and we'll be following with more verticals, working with a successful leadership company in each vertical sort of mapping processes and then rolling that out more broadly. And I want to be clear, this is not the back office. So we're not doing the filters and the wing nuts and tracking the trucks. This is a focus on the marketing side, the outside, managing the funnel of how you get work, how you get repeat work, how you get followed up. So actually, in some of these larger accounts, we're working with ServiceTitan or with some of the other back-office tools. We're working closely with them, and there's a connection between the 2. So we've had a lot of success with this, and we're excited about strengthening our vertical positioning going forward. We've been asked about growth after the Zoom. What happens when you get done with the Zoom? And I just wanted to comment briefly on this. We are working on a variety of initiatives for '26 and beyond, starting with a free trial motion for one of our products, which will be kind of a product-led growth motion. We've been leaning into the new partner channel that we acquired from Keep, investing in that. And we believe that, that will bear a lot of fruit in the future. We're excited about the feedback we're getting from the partners and the partner channel. We have a franchise channel that we're leaning into investment there, and we believe that there will be a lot of application and the -- Keep tools have added a lot there in terms of being able to provide interesting offers for those franchises. We have an agency channel. We own an agency called BNI. We work with some large national brands. And we've had some success and expect a lot more success going forward, working with those agency clients and beginning to automate some of their processes, with the new tools that we have. So we believe that, there's many vectors to our growth in the future. And we actually see a smaller percentage of our sales and our growth in the future coming from our direct channel, and more broadening out into other channels as well. We also rolled out a new product. We just recently announced, and that's Workforce Center. Workforce Center is designed to help a small business pay their employees and contractors in an easy way, stay up on all their tax compliance and all the rules that they need to follow. And it's a scalable solution that whether you're hiring your first employee or you have a whole bunch of employees, you're able to offer. And what most small businesses find is that, there's plenty of payroll operators out there, but they really want people that have lots of employees. It's kind of hard if you just have a couple. And with Thryv's Workforce Center, it's ideally suited for our small business customer. It integrates right into your Thryv platform, so you can just work right within the platform and you don't have to log in or out. And we've already had a number of sales in the product, and we've got small businesses paying their employees on the product. So, we're excited about this, and we feel like there's going to be a lot of potential success here. And furthermore, I think the broader we make the platform, the more sort of locked-in customers get and the less churn there is over time. And when you're dealing with small businesses, there's always going to be a little more churn. So that's an important item for us. Last comment I'd like to make is on our Global Industry Classification Standard, the GICS, where we're positioned as a company. Currently, Thryv is classified incorrectly. We are classified as a -- under advertising under media and entertainment within the communication services. So we're not in software at all. So, when people screen and look for Thryv, they don't see Thryv. They we don't even show up anywhere in the league tables of software. And that's just a mistake that's being made by the GICS group, and we expect that, that will be rectified at some point in the future. It is something that I think is important, and I wanted to just mention it here. And that's it. Let's open it up for questions, operator.
Operator: [Operator Instructions] Our first question will go to the line of Arjun Bhatia with William Blair.