QuinStreet, Inc. (NASDAQ:QNST) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Doug Valenti: Yes. We’ll continue to be opportunistic and active. We’ve made a few small acquisitions over the past year or so, smaller. We are always looking, we’re always open, for things that add meaningfully and, to our verticals, and we’ve got a couple in the hopper right now that we like a lot. Neither of them are real big, but they could be really impactful. We like those best. Of course, it’s great to find a company that has done well at their scale that we can kind of plug into our network and ramp and scale much more rapidly, and that’s kind of our favorite opportunity. And we’ve got a couple of those in the hopper right now that we’re pretty excited about, and I’m sure there will be more. We’re also being conservative because of the insurance environment and the fact that our adjusted EBITDA is kind of at the breakeven level, so we’re not replacing the cash we’re using.

We’re mindful of that. But it hasn’t caused us to pass on anything that we’d really like to do yet. And as I indicated, we expect to return to pretty robust cash flow levels in the second half of the fiscal year.

Operator: Our next question comes from Bruce Goldfarb with Lake Street Capital. Please go ahead.

Bruce Goldfarb: Are you guys planning any changes to the cost structure to drive margins higher and take advantage of the ramp?

Doug Valenti: We already have. We’ve positioned ourselves to take great advantage of the ramp, including being very mindful of cost over the past few years. I would point out that if you did the math on the top-line leverage that we lost over the past few quarters, we should not have done as much EBITDA as we did. We did that because we have been very focused on margin, costs in order to make sure that we were able to sustain positive adjusted EBITDA margins due to the period where we lost so much top-line but also to be prepared to really bounce up very rapidly as auto insurance comes back. So, short answer is we have and we will continue to. But we’re trading that off against making sure that we’re continuing to invest in great growth opportunities too. And I think we’ve made a — I think we’ve done well balancing those two competing objectives. In fact, I’d say we feel like we’ve done about as well as we can. We’re very good about where we are.

Bruce Goldfarb: Great. And I don’t know if you break out customers, but could — what percent was Progressive in terms of percent of revenue for the quarter, if you’re willing to do that?

Greg Wong: This is Greg. Progressive was 3% of revenue.

Bruce Goldfarb: 3%. Okay. Great. Thank you. And then, just my last question. Some of these larger insurance programs that you’re talking about, do they give you visibility for almost the whole year? I mean, do you get like a — some of your bigger customers?

Doug Valenti: They give us general objectives for the year and general plans for the year, subject to stuff happening, like how bad is the hurricane season. So I would say they give us general views of what their objectives will be and how they’re thinking about the coming year, and then, varying degrees of detail couple of quarters out, and then pretty good detail coming — before a coming quarter. And then, typically those are decently accurate subject only to, again stuff coming up that they didn’t expect.

Operator: Our next question comes from Chris Sakai with Singular Research. Please go ahead.

Chris Sakai: To start, a question on the revenue guidance that you gave of 5% to 15%, I just wanted to know, is that somewhat of a downgrade from the previous quarter when you said that you would expect revenue and adjusted EBITDA to grow at double-digit rate?