Randy Fields
Analyst · Loop Capital. Please proceed with your question
Thanks, John. The second quarter continued our momentum and validated the progress we’ve made in driving the earnings power and cash generation ability of the company. All three segments of our business grew, highlighted by our MarketPlace offering. We’ve now reached sufficient scale with our decreased and modest fixed cost base that we’re positioned for sustainable and growing profitability. As a company, this has been and remains our focus, growing profitability and cash flow. This is how we measure ourselves, and we think this is how investors should measure us as well. We’re an earnings company today. Three years ago, we signaled our strategic direction to drive the company toward higher recurring revenue, making it easier to predict and delivering structural profitability and cash flow. We’re very proud of how well and how quickly that’s come about. This year is and will continue to be a showcase for the validity of that direction. Keep in mind, we report GAAP rather than non-GAAP as most people in technology do. Generally speaking, the pandemic continues to affects our business, slowing decision-making in the sales cycle for our Compliance and our Supply Chain solutions. But at the same time, it’s illuminated an increasing customer awareness of our capability to source hard-to-find products in MarketPlace. This reality validates the strategy of having these three synergistic legs to our business stool. We’ve become the industry leaders in our specialty Supply Chain offerings and in our Compliance management. Over time, it’s our hope to establish ourselves as the go-to place for hard-to-find items. We’re making progress, but we’re not there yet. Our MarketPlace solutions has helped our customers secure products from vetted suppliers when others have been unable to supply, and our out-of-stock solution has helped customers keep better supplies on their shelf. As the pandemic abates and we begin to normalize, we expect to see increased demand from our traditional recurring revenue solutions in both Compliance and Supply Chain. As we’ve said before, the three legs of our stool provide a complete Supply Chain solution for our customers. It enables them to source suppliers, vet suppliers and transact all business in one integrated complementary solution. I don’t know of any other Supply Chain vendor, which does all of this end-to-end. But with our transition from onetime to recurring revenue effectively complete, the impact of this revenue mix is unlikely to materially diminish our ability to remain profitable. Today, we enjoy a highly visible SaaS revenue stream, which more than covers our fixed costs and enables consistent profitability. In other words, we have a business that we call structurally profitable, structurally generating cash and the most significant improvement in our balance sheet in our history. The proof is in those numbers that you’ve now seen. In our view, we’re positioned now to opportunistically resume our share repurchase and simultaneously continue to fortify our balance sheet. We don’t have to choose one or the other. In fact, we now know we can do both. Our customers demand financial strength, and we’re using it as a primary anchor in our net new business marketing, and that message is definitely resonating with our prospects. Importantly, we’re working to expand our customer relationships and our revenue per customer. We’re doing it actually in two different but related ways. Let me see if I can explain. We’re trying to get our customers to take up more modules per customer and more application suites per customer. Let me go through that. First, we’re adding additional functional modules to our existing applications and up-selling those to our existing customers. We’re in the process of adding terrific new functionality to each of the three components of our platform: to Compliance, to Supply Chain and to MarketPlace. Each one of these additions, each one of these modules will add revenue. And importantly, each is attractive in its own right to prospective new customers. We’ve already seen that, in fact. At the same time, we’re advancing our cross-selling, moving our customers across the whole platform from Compliance to Supply Chain to MarketPlace and vice versa. As John puts it, farming. Again, this will have the impact of increasingly driving our monthly revenue from each customer by adding incremental value, frankly, with very little cost on our part. The up-selling to new modules is a very important way to grow our business. For example, we have two new products targeted to our Tier 2 suppliers. Our new active quality management system, which we call Active QMS, allows quality and safety teams at manufacturing and distribution operations to simplify the tedious error-prone manual recordkeeping processes required for critical controls, things like temperature checks, swab testing, sanitation, pest control, equipment inspections, cleaning floors, et cetera. Initial market reaction to this new and unique offering is very, very strong. From our perspective, the offering typically doubles the recruiting revenue that a customer pays us. Our certificate of analysis product, which helps track certification from suppliers and matches them to distributors’ needs, is also in our new portfolio of modules. This helps create an end-to-end tracking of various elements required by retailers or distributors and provides evidence of the supply chain to ensure Compliance along the entire supply chain. Our Tier 2 has demanded a solution like this, we listened and now it’s available. It makes their job much easier. Once again, this offering, as implemented, will meaningfully increase the recurring revenue from a Tier 2 supplier. In fact, we already have a few new wins with both of these add-ons. So we have a great deal of headwind with our existing customers and we’re learning to capitalize on it. Cross-selling from one of our suites to another, like Compliance to Supply Chain, is obvious. It’s also substantially more challenging. But we’re learning and we’ll continue to learn to do it. We’ve begun to see accelerating success in our cross-selling efforts. We recently signed our first large Compliance customer for our out-of-stock management offering. Additionally, more Tier 2 hubs are adding modules driving higher recurring revenue. Our pipeline for new Tier 1 hubs for our Supply Chain offering is expanding, growing even in this uncertain time. In the interim, MarketPlace has emerged as a critical part of our platform. The pandemic has made it harder than ever to find trustworthy, compliant, vetted vendors. Shortages of PPE, chest freezers and the like and other items has created incremental challenges for retailers trying to compete with online retailers to maintain their market share. MarketPlace has solved many of these challenges, contributing to significant transactional revenue to our top line this quarter, the third such quarter in a row. The result is top line revenue growth for the fiscal year. Though in future years, we’re likely to be more focused, frankly, on growing the bottom line than just the top line as the pandemic abates and the MarketPlace revenue normalizes. We do, however, believe that MarketPlace actually will be profitable for the full year. We’ve recently added some additional talent to our MarketPlace team to drive some recurring revenue and grow out the space with additional capabilities. The industry dynamics that served as long-term secular catalysts for us have not changed. And if anything, they’ve been reinforced. Sometimes, a whole new market can appear to open for us, like Compliance Management a few years ago. Recently, we’ve been exploring government as a possible market. In that vein, we launched an inventory control grant management reconciliation platform for the critical emergency management organizations that every state government has. This expansion of our MarketPlace solution, built on the ReposiTrak platform naturally, will streamline and automate critical supply chain processes. And we expect that it will help significantly solve the challenge of complicated manual grant tracking and auditing that is going to be and in the future, increasingly overwhelming for those state agencies. This offering could increase our presence in the government market, expand our offerings, certainly well beyond our traditional grocery space. We have our first state customer now engaged in a pilot program, but it will be some months before we have a good read on the opportunity, but I’ll certainly keep you posted. Finally, a few years ago, we launched our 10x initiative, which was focused on increasing what we call internal efficiency and productivity. This program has wildly exceeded our goals, so we’re now doing more with fewer people, all the while continuing to delight our customers. Let me give you an example. When we launched this initiative some years ago, we had five people in accounting servicing 800 accounts from an accounting perspective. Today, we have a team of five people servicing 20,000 accounts. Much of this success has come from internally developed automation CRM tools, which help drive productivity. It’s, in fact, an obsession of ours. The next step will be leveraging artificial intelligence to drive even more productivity enhancements for the company as a whole. We’re growing. The goal is to grow efficiently and not spend all of the growth on added costs. We prefer what we call, again, structural profitability, carefully contained costs well below a predictable recurring revenue base. In fact, the ability to automate internally is actually an important core competency of ours, and it’s certainly a critical element in growing our structural profitability. I’m very, very excited about what we might uniquely be able to achieve in this area. It has the possibility if we can develop the tools that we currently envision of simultaneously driving our revenue and decreasing our related costs for some period of time into the future. So in summary, we’re in an excellent position with strong recurring revenue, synergistic transactional revenue, structural profitability, growing cash flow and a very strong balance sheet. The pandemic has certainly slowed some parts of our business but serves as a powerful catalyst for some of the others. In other words, we’re able to grow our top line, while expanding our bottom line even faster. So with that, I’d like to now open the call for questions. Operator?