P10, Inc. (NYSE:PX) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Operator: The next question comes from Ben Budish of Barclays.

Benjamin Budish: I wanted to kind of follow up on Ken’s question from earlier about 2024. I know you gave guidance for ’23, but last year, you kind of gave us a combined ’22, ’23 fundraising guide. And I’m wondering given the sort of momentum expected in the back half of this year and your optimism around some of those areas, are there any kind of early thoughts you can give on what 2024 might look like?

Clark Webb: I love that. This is a forward, forward guidance. This is great. Yes, so I think that other than saying we expect Fund XI from WTI in 2024 — and you can see the cadence. If you look at our returns page which, again, we always encourage folks to go see, you can see kind of the differential in the cadence of launches. So you can kind of estimate when you think the next vintage is going to come about. But the only one we’ve specifically targeted is that Fund XI. I think beyond that, we’re probably out kicking our coverage right now. Give us a couple of quarters, let us hit these targets first. And then I’m pretty sure we’ll come out with something that talks about ’24 and beyond.

Benjamin Budish: Fair enough. And if I could maybe one more on just kind of guidance for this year. It seems like the EBITDA margin profile came in a bit lower than what we were expecting. Anything to call out there? I mean, you talked a little bit about sort of the mix shift and the sort of structurally lower margins at WTI. Is there anything else to keep in mind? And I guess kind of alongside that, is there any opportunity to increase WTI margins over time? Or are there sort of enough moving pieces that that’s going to be hard to parse out on our end?

Clark Webb: Yes. So it is absolutely related to the fact that we added a lower-margin business in WTI and the fact that our direct strategies are significantly outgrowing the business as a whole. And those do require more boots on the ground. We think that that’s wonderful. These are high-fee paying, great strategies, and we think there’s a lot of runway. But they are lower margin businesses. Do we think long term those margins can structurally increase? We certainly hope so. We think so. But as these businesses right now are growing faster than the enterprise as a whole, we think the 51% to 52% is the right way to look at it. And remember, WTI we don’t expect to necessarily be in the market in ’23. So we haven’t talked about the incremental margins on a potential Fund XI as presumably that would hit 2024.

Robert Alpert: We have better fee revenue on those products with lower margin, but the dollars continue to increase, and that’s what we really care about.

Operator: The next question comes from Chris Kotowski of Oppenheimer.

Christoph Kotowski: Most of mine have been asked. I just wanted to follow up a little bit on the fee rate. I guess the prior guidance was always around 100 basis points, now is around 105. So presumably, the main difference is WTI, but you had — historically, you had kind of indicated there was a bit of a seasonality with impact of boosting the fourth quarter and less in the early quarters of the year. Is that still there? Or is it by this point, given all that other strategies you’ve added so muted that it doesn’t — that there should be no seasonal pattern anymore?