Thryv Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:THRY) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Zach Cummins from B. Riley Securities. Your line is open.

Zach Cummins: Hi. Good morning and thanks for taking my questions. Joe, can you just talk about the SaaS adjusted EBITDA improvement here in the quarter? I mean, what was really driving the decision to pull back on some of that marketing spend and see that efficiency really flow through? And now that you have additional products offer, how does that change your approach to some of your inbound marketing efforts as you go forward from here?

Joe Walsh: Look, we have been a three funnel business and we have talked about it ad nauseam, the zoo, referrals and the inbound-outbound motion. We have just added the fourth funnel, the most efficient funnel and that’s allowing small businesses to discover our tool without any help from us, download it and get real value from it, like meaningful value from, without ever talking to us, no demo, no explanation, no meeting, no marketing, no nothing. And then after they have experienced a lot of value from us, they can then self-upgrade and just right within the tool, they can go ahead and upgrade themselves. We have had a couple of do it already, just in the beta, that we are already seeing those sales flow in. Not sure if I was asleep or not, I have to check, but definitely coming in.

So we think this fourth funnel is the most important thing that we have done in the last four years or five years, adding this fourth funnel and we think it opens up the marketplace to us in a really important way. As far as delivering EBITDA out of our SaaS business, for better words, you guys know that, as you know, all of our work, we are a SaaS company that actually carries a little bit of debt and debt become a little bit more expensive lately. And I have Paul Rouse working with me, who is very conservative, he loves his cash. And so there is a real drive toward efficiency in our organization and making sure that everything we do is profitable and shifting our emphasis towards higher and higher margin activities. And that, I think, showed great promise.

I mean, how many companies do you follow that have a 10-point swing at the EBITDA line? We are pretty proud of that and we hope that you are impressed by it and you can see the profit-making power of this business.

Zach Cummins: Understood. And my one follow-up question is really just around the dynamic for customer growth versus ARPU expansion. I know customer growth has really been kind of a stronger portion here in the first half of the year. But how do you anticipate that, that dynamic will really sort of normalize as we go over kind of the next 12 months to 18 months?

Joe Walsh: It’s funny. These things never run perfectly in sync. What I would anticipate is, you are going to see ARPU take the baton and jump back in front a little bit going forward. I think, as we begin to have multiple centers to sell people, we have more to sell now. I mean, it was hard for our six-figure earning professional sales force to really make a very big sale of our software before because we really just had one software element and a handful of small add-ons. We now have the ability with what Ryan and his incredible product team have created to go in and sell a pretty big suite of software into these customers and there’s even more add-ons to sell them. So you can actually make a bigger sale today. So it may not be instant, it may not hit in one quarter. But when I think about like looking out over 2024, I would expect that ARPU will catch a bit and start to really move now because we have something to sell.