Franklin Covey Co. (NYSE:FC) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Paul Walker : Nehal, it’s not 50% greater than their contract they are in. 50% greater than their single-year contract peers. So, the analysis is single-year contract clients versus multi-year contract clients, how much more valuable are they and what happens to them relative – the point is not on that specific client. It’s the value of multi-year versus single year why we’re pushing so hard to get multi-year because they are – not only is that revenue guaranteed during the term of the multi-year contract, they are 50% more likely upon renewal to expand. They’re not expanding by 50%. One day, we hope that will happen. We love to – we’re doing everything we can to make sure that our customer engagement models and customer success teams are treating them, those clients in a way that, that could be possible. For some, they do, but that’s not what’s happening. It’s not 50% growth in the contract value. It’s compared to their peers, single-year peers.

Nehal Chokshi: Okay. Okay.

Paul Walker : Thank you for clarifying that. Great clarification.

Nehal Chokshi: Yes. And then just to be clear, that 50% improvement relative to a single-year contract peers, there’s generally two components, right, renewal rate and then upsell, which one is the bigger factor here?

Paul Walker : Renewal rate is the slightly larger factor because multi-year clients are more – they’ve been with us longer, and they are more likely than to sign up for the next journey with us. But – so it’s slightly more because of renewal rate, but we do see greater expansion of those clients as well, again, because we’ve had a longer time with those clients to establish the relationship to look for and sell to expanded populations tee up additional journeys that we can go on with that client. But the larger driver is the likelihood that they are renewing versus a first year client, for example, that may not renew.

Nehal Chokshi: Got it. Okay. Great. Thank you.

Paul Walker: Thanks Nehal. Good questions. Good to talk to you.

Operator: One moment for our next question. Our next question will come from the line of Dave Storms from Stonegate Capital. Your line is open.

Dave Storms: Good afternoon.

Paul Walker: Hi, Dave.

Dave Storms: How’s it going? Just wanted to kind of start, I saw the education EBITDA margin, adjusted margin had a nice jump sequentially. Is there a story there that, maybe it’s a sign of good things to come or is that just more seasonal factors or macro driven?

Paul Walker: Okay. The sequential Q2 to Q3?

Dave Storms: Yes.

Paul Walker : Dave, good question. What the driver of that – first of all, education business is really doing great and really thrills what Sean and team are doing there. The specific answer to that question is that in Q2 – we do these, what we call, client symposiums, and there are events where we bring together current and prospective clients as a way to expose them to a Leader in Me process. And we charge for attendance of those, so it comes in as revenue. And in the second quarter, we did more of them than we did in the third quarter. And so – but we don’t – we’re not making money on those. We’re just charging a little bit to help defray some of the costs. We’ve got revenue coming in with no profit attached to it and we had more of that in the second quarter than we did in the third quarter, and that caused a sequential bump there in gross margin.

Dave Storms: Understood. Very helpful. Thank you. And then the other thing, I know you mentioned in your comments that adjusted EBITDA for the quarter came in – the total company level came in higher than expected, was there anything that really been right there you could see going forward or is that just some of the revenue retention stuff that you were talking about earlier?

Paul Walker : Steve, I think you want to…