EverCommerce Inc. (NASDAQ:EVCM) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

EverCommerce Inc. (NASDAQ:EVCM) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript May 11, 2024

EverCommerce Inc. isn’t one of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of the third quarter (see the details here).

Operator: Thank you for standing by and welcome to EverCommerce First Quarter 2024 Earnings Call. My name is Marvin and I’ll be your operator for today. After this speaker’s presentation, there will be a question and answer session. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded today, Thursday, May 9, 2024. Now, I’d like to turn the conference over to Brad Korch, SVP and Head of Investment Relations for EverCommerce. Please go ahead.

Brad Korch: Good afternoon, and thank you for joining. Today’s call will be led by Eric Remer, EverCommerce’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and Marc Thompson, EverCommerce’s Chief Financial Officer. Joining them for the Q&A portion of the call is EverCommerce’s President, Matt Feierstein; and EverCommerce’s Chief Operating Officer, Evan Berlin. This call is being webcast with a slide presentation that reviews the key financial and operating results for the three months ended March 31, 2024. For a link to the live or replay webcast, please visit the Investor Relations section of the EverCommerce website, www.evercommerce.com. The slide presentation and earnings release are also directly available on the site. Please turn to page 2 of our earnings call presentation where we review our Safe Harbor statement.

Statements made on this call and contained in the earnings materials available on our website that are not historical in nature may constitute forward-looking statements. Such statements are based on the current expectations and beliefs of management. Actual results may differ materially from these forward-looking statements due to risks and uncertainties that are described in more detail in our filings with the SEC. We undertake no obligation to publicly update or revise these forward-looking statements, except as required by law. We will also refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures to provide additional information to you, our investors. A reconciliation of non-GAAP to GAAP historical measures is provided in both our earnings press release and our earnings call presentation.

Before we discuss first-quarter results, I’d like to highlight the presentation of results in KPIs included in the earnings call slides and our prepared comments. As discussed last quarter, we announced the sale of our four fitness industry solutions in early March. The sale of the two North American solutions closed simultaneously with deals signing. While the two international solutions are expected to close in the third quarter, they have been classified as held for sale prospectively from the date of signing. As we also discussed last quarter, the revenue guidance given excluded the fitness solutions, and we noted that the EBITDA contribution of these solutions was near zero. As a result, the revenue, revenue growth, and operational metrics such as customer count, TPV, and customers enabled more than one solution that we will discuss today have all been adjusted to exclude the fitness solutions on a pro forma basis, except where specifically noted as GAAP reported revenue.

We will continue this basis of presentation for the remainder of the year. I will now turn it over to our CEO, Eric Remer. Please continue.

Eric Remer: Thank you, Brad. On today’s call, I will highlight first-quarter 2024 results, discuss EverCommerce’s presence in the SMB market, our continued strategic transformation optimization initiatives, and finally, end with a discussion of our key customer trends before turning the call over to Marc to dive deeper into our financials. Turning to our first-quarter results, our Q1 reported revenue exceeded the top end of our guidance range with growth of 6% year-over-year. Within this, core subscription and transaction revenue grew 9%. Adjusted EBITDA grew 28% year-over-year, beating the top end of the guidance range and exceeded the midpoint of guidance by $3.9 million. Adjusted EBITDA margins expanded more than 420 basis points to 24% compared to 19.8% in the first quarter of 2023.

With continued growth and profitability, we are creating the opportunity to invest in our higher growth, higher-margin, large market opportunities. Payments revenue grew 11% year-over-year, driven by 9% growth in TPV and modest take rate expansion. Driving payments adoption continues to be a key element of our strategy. Last week was National Small Business Week, and given that, I wanted to take a few moments to highlight the scale of our customer base, all that we do to support our customers, and the tremendous market opportunity in front of us. Service-based businesses is the backbone of the economy and small businesses employ the majority of service professionals. There are more than 450 million service-based small businesses globally, which translates to a total addressable market of well over $1 trillion.

EverCommerce provides business management software to support end-to-end business processes for service SMBs. Our SaaS solutions support highly specialized workflows in each of our verticals, enabling our customers to automate manual processes, generate new business, and create more loyal customers. We enhanced the value of our business management solutions by upselling and cross-selling additional features such as robust payment integration, customer engagement solutions, lead generation, and group buying programs. The products and services we provide are focused on the biggest areas of opportunity. The global addressable market for our business management software solutions is $900 billion, and the payment processing represents an additional $200 billion.

Moreover, in most cases, the opportunity in front of us is greenfield. We estimate that the penetration of service SMB market with fully integrated software solution is in the very low double digits. We continue to focus on simplifying the lives of those service providers that support us every single day. Our goal has always been to empower the rapidly growing and evolving SMB market. EverCommerce offers tremendous value to our customers by providing solutions tailored to the unique workflows and interactions that various services require. Our software solutions not only provides a system of action necessary to run the daily business processes, but also the marketing solutions to attractive business to billing the payment solutions to collect effortlessly and the customer experience solutions to create predictable convenient experiences.

Our solutions are cost effective, easy to implement, and purpose-built for service businesses. We provide end-to-end solutions that our customers need to compete and grow in a marketplace that is rapidly transforming. As we discussed last quarter, we’re taking steps to transform and optimize our operations. In the fourth-quarter 2023, we engaged a third-party advisor to help us assess our operations and identify specific initiatives and strategies to simplify, optimize, and better scale our operations, with an eye towards sharpening the customer-centric vertical market focus that will better position us to accelerate growth. With respect to the optimization, defined initiatives will provide a long runway for continued margin expansion and free cash flow generation.

Embedded in our 2024 guide is just a small fraction of the overall expected benefit, which should phase into full run rate by the end of 2026. These initiatives include optimizing third-party vendor spend, which will continue through the end of the year as well as operationalizing other significant cost-saving opportunities. These savings will not only fund key growth investments, but also allow us to continue to deliver long-term margin expansion and significant cash flow generation over the coming years. With our transformation initiatives, we’ll be taking the lessons learned from our ongoing EverHealth consolidation and apply them to the rest of the company. This includes simplifying our organization structure and sunsetting certain legacy brands, as well as investing in key sales and go-to-market gaps that have impacted our growth rate.

Given our focus on executing these initiatives, we expect 2024 to be a transition year. While growth may be more tempered, we’ll work to further expand margins and profitability. A portion of our efficiency gains will be used to reinvest in our products with the goal to accelerate growth in 2025 and beyond. Turning back to our first-quarter highlights, we continue to progress well against our land-and-expand strategy. We land with the core business management software and then upsell, cross-sell our existing customers’ additional features, services, and products. This enhances the value of our customers receive from their relationship with EverCommerce and drives additional revenue. The KPIs we regularly share our earnings call illustrate our progress.

As a reminder, these KPIs have been restated in both our current and year-ago periods to exclude our finished solutions. As of the end of the first quarter, we continue to see an increase in customers utilizing more than one solution to approximately 83,000. In addition, the number of customers that have contracted and onboarded for two or more products grew 27% year-over-year to approximately 191,000. The payments-enabled customers in this quarter represented significant near-term opportunity for payment processing and payment revenue growth for our EverCommerce. Customers that purchase and utilize more than one solution are naturally some of our most profitable and stickiest customers. This is because we’ve provided significant value to them and their businesses.

This fact presents itself through the strong net revenue retention. Looking back over the trailing 12 months, our annualized net revenue retention, or NRR, for core software payment solutions with 99%, embedded payments is the most accretive cross-sell solution and stands to be a long-term driver for EverCommerce’s revenue growth and margin expansion. Year-over-year, our pro forma payments revenue grew 11%, accounting for approximately 17% of overall revenue. We report our payments revenue on a net basis. And as a result, payments revenue contributes approximately 95% gross margin and is a meaningful contributor to our overall adjusted EBITDA margin expansion. First quarter annualized total payment volume, or TPV, was approximately $11.7 billion, representing 9% year-over-year growth.

We expect TPV and overall payments revenue to grow as we continue to embed our payment solutions in our core system of action. Now I’ll pass it over to Marc, who will review our financial results in more detail as well as provide second quarter and full-year 2024 guidance.

Marc Thompson: Thanks, Eric. Total reported revenue in the first quarter was $170.1 million, up 5.6% from the prior-year period. Within total reported revenue, subscription and transaction revenue was $134.7 million, up 8.8% from the prior-year period and revenue from marketing technology solutions was $30.3 million, a decrease of 4.7% from the prior-year period. We managed the business for a sustainable organic growth and selectively utilize strategic acquisitions to augment the trajectory of this growth. As a result, we believe it is important for investors to evaluate our business growth on a pro forma basis, which is how we measure and manage the business internally. We calculate our pro forma revenue growth as though all acquisitions and divestitures closed as of the end of the latest period were closed as of the first day of the prior-year period, including before the time we completed the acquisition or divestiture.

We believe the pro forma growth rate provides the best insight into the underlying growth dynamics of our business. For the first quarter of 2024, pro forma revenue was $164.7 million, up 5.7% year-over-year. Pro forma subscription and transaction revenue was $129.4 million, up 9.1% year-over-year. The solid performance in subscription and transaction revenue was largely due to continued execution of our growth strategy to provide customers our core system of action software solutions and driving expansion by promoting cross-sell and upsell opportunities leading with payments. While we believe that our Martech solutions are stabilizing amidst continuing headwinds, their results negatively impacted consolidated revenue growth in the first quarter.

Excluding Martech, pro forma revenue growth would have been 8.3%. As Eric noted, we also exceeded the top end of our adjusted EBITDA guidance range. First quarter adjusted EBITDA was $40.9 million, representing a 24% margin versus 19.8% in the first quarter of 2023 and 28% growth in adjusted EBITDA year-over-year. Adjusted EBITDA outperformance in the quarter was underscored by our focus on actively managing our operating expenses, driving operating leverage, and cash flow generation. Adjusted gross profit in the quarter was $113.3 million, representing an adjusted gross margin of 66.6% versus 65.3% in Q1 2023. The increase in gross margin is partially attributable to an increasing mix of higher-margin payments revenue and a decreasing mix of lower-margin marketing technology solutions revenue.

Now, turning to operating expenses, which are reconciled in the appendix for this presentation. Adjusted sales and marketing expense was $27.7 million, or 16.3% of revenue, down from 18.1% of revenue reported in the prior-year period. There was a timing benefit to sales and marketing expenses in the first quarter, which we expect to increase for the remainder of the year. Adjusted product development expense was $19.6 million, or 11.5% of revenue, in line with the prior-year period. Adjusted G&A expense was $25.1 million, or 14.8% of revenue, down from 16.1% of revenue in the prior-year period. Adjusted G&A expenses declined both as a percent of revenue and in absolute dollars as we continue to optimize our operations. We continue to generate significant free cash flow as we invest to grow our business.

Levered free cash flow was $8.5 million in the quarter, which was up approximately $600,000, or 7.9% year-over-year. Levered free cash flow growth was negatively impacted by the timing of items related to the sale of the fitness solutions and certain working capital items. For the trailing 12 months, levered free cash flow was $82.1 million, which represents a 12% margin and a 78.2% increase in levered free cash flow over the prior year, continuing to underscore the efficiency of our business enhancing our balance sheet flexibility. Adjusted unlevered free cash flow was $29.8 million in the quarter and $118 million for the last 12 months, representing 27.4% and 25.7% year-over-year growth, respectively. Strong free cash flow generation allows us to continue to invest in our growing business and deliver strong returns to our shareholders.

It also allows us to efficiently allocate capital across the spectrum of opportunities, including the outstanding buyback authorization and M&A prospects. In the first quarter, we repurchased approximately 1.2 million shares for a total cash consideration of approximately $12.1 million at an average price of $9.65 per share. As of March 31, 2024, we had approximately $27.9 million remaining on our repurchase authorization that runs through year-end 2024. We ended the quarter with $90 million in cash and cash equivalents, excluding cash and cash equivalents related to our international fitness solutions. We maintain $190 million of undrawn capacity on our revolver. Our debt is a combination of floating and fixed rate. And total net leverage as calculated per our credit facility at the end of the quarter was approximately 2.5 times, consistent with our financial policy.

We have no material maturities until 2028. I’d like to finish by discussing our outlook for the second quarter of 2024. For the second quarter of 2024, we expect total revenue of $169.5 to $173.5 million, and we expect adjusted EBITDA of $39 million to $42 million. We are leaving our full-year 2024 guidance unchanged. We continue to expect revenue of $676 million to $696 million and adjusted EBITDA of $167 million to $176 million. Our guidance assumes near-zero growth in our marketing technology solutions business on a full-year basis. Before we begin the question-and-answer portion of the call, I want to once again thank the EverCommerce team for their efforts in delivering both top and bottom-line results that exceeded expectations. And I want to thank all of you for participating on today’s call.

Our focus is on continuing to execute our strategic priorities and deliver consistent profitable growth that we believe can generate significant value for our shareholders. Operator, we’re now ready to begin the question-and-answer section of the call.

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Q&A Session

Operator: [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Bhavin Shah of Deutsche Bank. Your line is now open.

Unidentified Analyst: Hi, everyone. It’s Nick on for Bhavin this evening. Thank you so much for taking my questions. I guess to start us off, Eric, can you give us some insight into what you’re seeing in the overall macroenvironment? Anything standout as changing or particularly getting better or worse?

Eric Remer: Thanks, Nick, for the question. Today, we’ve actually — it’s been kind of — from a pipeline that’s kind of we measure the macro, we have enough quantity of pipeline coming through. It’s really been done business as usual. We haven’t seen anything material both from the tailwinds or headwinds. So I’ll let Matt add that to that. But from today, at least to the first quarter, and as we consider today, it’s kind of similar as we saw Q4 through to Q1.

Matthew Feierstein: Yes, I would echo Eric’s comments. Certainly, stability, as we look at our demand trends, no significant changes quarter-over-quarter or towards historical periods, and we kind of see that throughout all of our funnel metrics that we would typically see any macro impact across. So definitely echoes Eric’s remarks on stability.

Unidentified Analyst: Got it. Thank you very much. And then just as a follow-up, I mean, the quarter and the full-year guide left unchanged, is just there anything we should be thinking about for how you’re thinking about guiding for the rest of the year? Anything changed that we should be thinking about just as sort of we look at towards the back half of the year?

Marc Thompson: This is Marc, Nick. I’ll take that question. So I think guidance starts with being prudent, first and foremost. And I don’t think we see anything for the balance of the year that’s different than we saw when we issued that guidance, which wasn’t that long ago. I think as it relates specifically to EBITDA, there’s probably some real timing in there, just from getting into the year, with respect to timing of investments that we have planned for the year, which is part of what you’re seeing in our Q2 guide.

Unidentified Analyst: Great. Thank you very much for taking my questions.

Operator: Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Samad Samana of Jefferies. Your line is now open.

Mason Marion: Hi, guys. This is Mason Marion on for Samad. Thanks for taking our questions. So, marketing technology was down year-over-year, but perhaps not as much as we expected. Any notable trends to call out throughout the quarter? Are you starting to see green shoots in this segment? Or are you expecting it to remain under pressure for some time?

Eric Remer: So thanks for the question. I think nothing has really changed since, I would say, the last two quarters of the year. So when we reported year-end results, we talked about a persistent headwind, but also a stabilizing operation against that headwind that I think that’s what we continue to see. It is down quarter-over-quarter — or excuse me, year-over-year, but that is consistent with what we had expected and obviously consistent with our guide. To your last point, though, I do think part of our language around stabilization does include seeing some green shoots. We are starting to see a lift in demand activity in pockets that have been more dormant, particularly in the first half of last year and the back half of the prior year.

So I think that stabilization amidst a continuing headwind is kind of the way we think about the business. We’ve, again, been trying to be prudent in our guide for the year, flat year-over-year, to make sure that’s consistent with trends we’re seeing and we’ll adjust if we see things different.

Mason Marion: Understood. And then last quarter, you discussed steps, you are taking to streamline and reorient the organization with a sharper focus on your core verticals. Can you talk about some of the progress you’re making here? Any key milestones you’ve reached and what else needs to be done?

Matthew Feierstein: Yes. Definitely, we’d love to. Obviously, I think, again, I think last quarter as we talked about this, certainly from a vertical perspective, we’ve been talking to you about EverHealth for some time. And obviously that’s where we’re furthest along in that journey. I’d say we’re pleased with our progress. We continue to move towards that consolidated state. I think last quarter, as an example of some of the benefits of consolidation and with that consolidation from a product perspective, really being able to sell through to customers in one go-to-market motion more of the EverHealth stacks. I believe last quarter we mentioned new sales, ASP’s up by about 13% quarter-over-quarter — or actually year-over-year.

And so, again, progress like that — again, nice progress in EverHealth. We’re still in the early innings in other places of our vertical transformation. So I wouldn’t say necessarily any key milestones that are reportable in a similar way to EverHealth, but really making progress from an organizational standpoint, really orienting around that move towards that vertical transformation and doing the, I call it, pre-planning to consolidation in other verticals outside of EverHealth. But really, again, I can’t stress enough, very pleased with our progress in EverHealth consolidation as kind of the beacon for where we will go with the rest of the organization.

Mason Marion: Appreciate it. Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Matt Hedberg of RBC Capital Markets. Your line is now open.

Simran Biswal: Hey, guys. This is Simran on for Matt Hedberg. Thanks for taking your question and congrats on the quarter. I have one just for either Eric or Marc. On some of the mandated payments you did last year, can you give us an update on how that worked out? And then more broadly, can you just speak to payment traction overall and what you’re seeing in the business?

Eric Remer: You want to take it, Marc? Well, why don’t I pass that to you?

Marc Thompson: Yes, I will. And Evan here was introduced on the call, he’ll follow me. From a mandate perspective, yes, that’s accurate. And Evan will follow along with some of the specifics. But pleased with the progress in the mandates that we tested in the back half of the year. We are doing that across several other programs in the front half of this year, and that will continue into the back as well. We think payments mandates is certainly one strategic initiative in the quiver we have in terms of enabling — or driving that payment enablement rate of our software customers, which, again, is obviously what we call top of the funnel from a payment standpoint. We’re obviously also focused on taking those payment enabled merchants, driving them into a greater level of processing, opening the wallet shares, so that once they start processing, we’re getting more of their available wallet.

Obviously doing that for things like expanding our payments product ecosystem so that we can meet — we can help our customers meet their customers where they are in terms of accessing more of their payments capability. So quarter — again, I’ll let Evan speak to some of the specifics on the mandate progress. But yes, mandates and other initiatives are obviously going well for us from payments penetrations. Evan?

Evan Berlin: Yes. Thanks, Matt. I would just add to that that we rolled out a specific mandate strategy against one of our main programs in 2023. We’ve expanded that set of tests and initiatives to eight programs across the ecosystem in our 2024 plan. So, expanding not only the specifics around what we’re doing with each program, but actually taking those learnings from one specific program and applying that to many more components of the ecosystem. So we are well into that execution today in Q2.

Eric Remer: And then just to sort of wrap on that question, from a consolidated results perspective, you’re starting to see that not starting to. You continue to see that pull-through into our results really as reflected as payments as an overall percent of revenue, which has been increasing over the last four to six quarters, as well as our gross margin, which also has been increasing over the last four to six quarters. That really is a manifestation of these programs and action.

Simran Biswal: Thanks, guys.

Operator: Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from a line of Alex Sklar of Raymond James. Your line is now open.

Alex Sklar: Great. Thank you. Eric, maybe a multi-part question here, but can you just elaborate a little bit more on the potential magnitude of some of the transformation initiatives you referenced in the prepared remarks? Is that on top of some of the brand consolidation activity that’s already been in progress? How many of your solutions or maybe percentage of revenue are you looking at in terms of ranges that might be subject to those efforts? Thanks.

Eric Remer: Appreciate the question. We’re not giving guidance on the full savings, just some acceleration at this point. But I can say the transformation activities really touched every part of the company, every solution, both field solutions as well as our centralized operations as we’re looking at opportunities within our existing ecosystem to streamline our costs, working with third-party vendors to reduce costs, and then working with the variety, as we talk about the brand, to consolidate those brands to get more value on the marketing spend that we’re actually having. So we’re seeing value truly across the board and not just on the cost side of things, but also how we operate, how we organize around the business. We’re spending a lot of time focus as we talked about, as Matt just talked about in EverHealth, in EverPro, and in EverWell, organizing the business more effectively so we can get our sales and our product and our customer-centric people closer to the customer.

We think that’s going to have better value on the products we build, our abilities to provide more value to our customers, and also we generate more revenue, more profits for the organization.

Alex Sklar: Okay, great. We’ll look for more to come there. And then maybe this is for you, Eric as well, or Matt, but I just wanted to dig into the go-to-market motion a little bit more for the nearly 200,000 customers that are enabled for multi-solution. I know we talked about payments and a kind of a separate payments team in general, but can you talk about the team broadly that’s focused on selling multi-solution? And are those mostly self-serve kind of as far as enabling that second piece? Or is it really a good percentage coming from kind of direct effort? Thanks.

Matthew Feierstein: There’s definitely a good deal of self-serve enablement for sure, going back to front there. But certainly, we’re not — whether it’s self-serve and that’s at the initial time of purchase. Obviously, we’re trying to — through our consolidation efforts, again, core to what we’re trying to do at EverCommerce, which is still more of the value chains of our customers’ operations. We want to do more of that upfront, but we will put the appropriate resources, whether that’s in product or direct engagement through follow-up sales efforts, follow-up customer success, follow-up customer support to add those second products as well. So it’s certainly a mix. It depends on the solution to your point. Some of our solutions are definitely PLD.

We’re going to rely on more of a self-service touch. Other of them are certainly more sales-assisted or a heavier sales pipeline in those cases, from front to back in the sales process or through customer success touches. That’s how we’re going to drive the go-to market on the expansion of that 190,000 out in the future to obviously a greater number and a greater percent of our overall software customers taking multiple products.

Alex Sklar: All right. Great. Thanks for that answer, Matt .

Operator: Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Ryan MacWilliams of Barclays. Your line is not open.

Eamon Coughlin: Hey, Eric and Matt. This is Eamon Coughlin on for Ryan MacWilliams. Thanks for taking the question. Great to see the continued focus on the strengths while improving the operational efficiency. I was just curious if you could describe the core business demand right now and maybe what you’re seeing from a new logo perspective within SMBs? Any relative changes to call out in demand for Pro or Health?

Eric Remer: Do you want to take that?

Matthew Feierstein: Yes. Thanks for the questions, Eamon. I would say no. As Eric talked about earlier, we really haven’t seen any change in demand. We’ve seen in some of our core solutions accelerated sales cycles across Q1 versus last year. And we’ve seen that with increased ARPU as we’ve continued to drive home not only price increases, but also effective bundling to Matt’s point around trying to drive more than one solution at the point of sale. So we’ve seen pretty solid trends there.

Eamon Coughlin: Perfect. And then maybe, could you describe what is implied in the guidance in terms of macro and then maybe what is required to reach the top end of range? I’m just curious how to get there?

Marc Thompson: Well, why don’t I start? So let’s start with something we’ve said is absolutely implied in the macro, which is Martech, which we have in flat year over here. Obviously, bringing down consolidated growth rates overall in there. I should have said earlier, while we see stabilization against a sort of a persistent headwind, our team is executing well there. We are certainly trying to position ourselves, not only take advantage of green shoots, but also outside opportunities that we think may present themselves through the second half of the year, particularly based on investments that are being self-funded within the operation against a variety of initiatives that we think will both reduce volatility of the revenue streams in that solution, as well as drive some increased profitability.

So that’s that piece. What’s implied on the guide on the other side is really continuing to lean into those really big trends that we see around embedded solutions. That is leading with payments first and foremost, driving investments in the right parts of the organization. Some of that, what Eric referred to around our transformation initiatives is designed to really sharpen that focus. So we’re putting our dollars in the right places. And when you look at our top solutions, they’re all growing well in excess of our current growth rates. And those are the primary drivers of both revenue growth rates, software growth rate, and TPV growth. We’re going to continue to lean into those. We’re not assuming anything different from a macro perspective, but what we’ve built into our guide is our continuing investment in those initiatives and really driving execution against those initiatives.

I think we might want to add a little bit more color to that. Anybody?