DATA Communications Management Corp. (DCM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. So welcome. Welcome, everybody that is here at our new offices here at 60 Adelaide Street East, a warm welcome. And a warm welcome to everybody that's attending virtually. I think we've got 74 confirmed virtually. I don't know how many are on the line right now, but welcome to all those participating virtually. Hey, just a little story about this office just to -- so that our shareholders can understand how we think at DCM. We actually consolidated 2 offices into 1. We had an office out in Etobicoke that came with the acquisition of Perennial. And we've got an office which is our downtown commercial office to really service our [ FI ] clients. So we took the opportunity to consolidate 2 offices into 1 and introduce a hybrid work model, and that will save us $800,000 a year in rent. And not only that, the office you're in today -- I'm sorry. The folks that are virtual can't see it. This is a sublease from a cannabis company that was looking to significantly reduce SG&A., so everything you see in here other than the graphics on the walls came with the office, so literally 0 leasehold improvements. And I think it's a good reflection of how we're thinking at DCM. We're turning over every stone and every pebble to look at building a better business as we work to build a bigger business as well, okay? So welcome. A quick introduction to the leadership team that is here today: obviously, myself. James will be speaking later, our CFO. We've got Phil, our Chief Revenue Officer, down the back here. We've got Shelly, who runs emerging markets, and she'll be speaking on ASMBL as well today. We've got Sharad, our Head of Strategy, down the back. We've got Karen, VP of Technology, and she's going to be talking today about our DCMFlex platform. We've got Barbara, our Head of Marketing. And we've got Jason -- where is Jason? Jason, our commercial acceleration -- and we've got Christine, who runs our operations. Christine? And we've got Asem, who is the Head of Procurement. And on the phone, we've got [ Gen Gravel ], who is our Head of HR; and Patrick Aussant, who is our Head of IT. So you see quite a sizable leadership team, and that was very intentional because we're very focused on driving SG&A productivity. And I have 2 very strong beliefs: reduce layers and increase spans of control or spans of responsibility. So as you know, when I came into the business back in March, we took a layer out. And we significantly increased span of responsibility, hence the 12 people on this leadership team, okay? So a warm welcome to the team. And listen. They're all around for conversations after the formal event today, okay? And also like to welcome 4 Board members in attendance today: Kingsley Ward, our Chairman; Greg Cochrane, who I replaced into this role -- so thank you, Greg. And Merri Jones. I don't think Merri is here quite yet, but she will be here. And we've got James Murray back in here. So welcome to our Board members today. And again, all the Board members are around for Q&A after the session, okay? So a warm welcome. So as my team likes to -- or as my team knows, I always like to start off meetings on what success looks like, all right? Almost every meeting we start is what does success look like, and then we always end on did we achieve success. So this is what I would say success looks like for today. First, we want collectively to understand better knowledge and challenges of some -- opportunities and challenges that face some of our clients. We're going to hear from our guest speakers today about some of those opportunities and challenges. A clear appreciation of what we call our digital workflow and the strategy and capabilities we have as a company. And as I've said many times, there's more clients that are unaware of our capabilities than are aware of our capabilities, right? And there lies the opportunities. You're going to see those capabilities unpacked today. Clarity of DCM's, what we call, print-first to digital-first strategy; and also our operational drive to build a better business and a bigger business. And you'll hear a lot from James Lorimer on that as we progress through today's discussions. And finally, understanding how we're well positioned at DCM for both short- and long-term success in the market. So that's what success looks like, at least for myself and our leadership team today. Hopefully, that works for you guys, okay? So that's the agenda. I don't plan to review it. It's all posted for people in the office. And of course, we [ set it up ] online. In addition to myself; James, our CFO; Karen; and Shelly, we're also going to have Natalie Mohamed talk to the team a very quick review on our ESG strategy. So it's the first time we're actually going to reveal that strategy to shareholders. So it's just a 5-minute quick reveal, okay? So those are the speakers today. And I'm going to start now with an introduction of our guest speakers, and first is Brad Jakeman. And well, Brad, first of all, thank you for being here today. And welcome to [indiscernible]. Brad is in from New York. So Brad has over 30 years of extensive marketing, advertising, general management and board experience. Just to name a few of the companies that he's worked with and led: He was a senior partner at Ogilvy & Mather, massive advertising agency, as we know, globally; a managing director of global advertising at Citigroup; Executive Vice President of Marketing at Macy's. And Brad also was the President of PepsiCo global beverage group's for 7 years. And during his 7 years there, the market cap, I believe, almost doubled, right, in those 7 years. So significant leadership experience from Brad, and he's now the senior adviser of Boston Consulting Group. So welcome, Brad, and thanks for being here today. So you'll hear from Brad in a minute. And the second is Jim Brennan. And Jim Brennan is the Managing Director and Senior Partner of Boston Consulting Group. Jim has extensive experience in go-to-market strategy, in revenue management, in M&A and including a lot of post-merger integration. Former partner at McKinsey and senior adviser to The Carlyle Group, he most recently has focused on the future of the CPG industry and implications for its leading companies. And Jim and I have actually worked together in the past, in my past, in the consumer goods -- in my consumer goods years. So we did a lot of post-merger integration and some pretty significant revenue management projects as well. So welcome to both Brad and to Jim. And I'll turn it over to Jim -- or to Brad, rather. Sorry.

Thank you very much, Richard. Good afternoon, everyone. It's an absolute pleasure to be here. And it's a pleasure to actually talk about what's happening in marketing globally at the moment and how it connects with the super exciting changes and strategy that I know Richard is going to talk to you about a little later on. What I thought I would do is just really set the table for what's happening out there in marketing. I -- even though I was an operator at PepsiCo running the global beverage group for 7 years, I describe myself as an operator where the market is hot. My hip pocket strength is marketing. And as Richard said, I spend a lot of time -- and that's also my personal passion. And following where the industry is today is more exciting and dynamic than it has ever been. I describe marketing today as one of the most exciting disciplines to be in and one of the most treacherous. It's exciting because, every day, because of the pace of change, you're learning so much. You're upskilling all the time. As a CMO today, your day -- your calendar would look more like that of a CFO or a CTO given the intersection points that have to happen in major companies and how marketing is connecting the dots across the C-suite in most major companies in order to drive growth. I often describe the Chief Marketing Officer as the Chief Integration Officer or the Chief Collaboration Officer of most companies because, apart from probably the CHRO or maybe the CFO, the CMO now needs to work horizontally across the C-suite in order to execute the growth agenda for which they're principally now becoming increasingly accountable for. So just to kind of set the table for marketing. It's never been we -- it's never been easier to reach people as marketers now. We have a whole bunch of technologies. We have a whole bunch of platforms beyond the traditional print, television, radio, out of home, direct mail that we had maybe 20 years ago, but despite the fact that it's never been easier to reach the consumer, it's also been never more difficult to connect with her. And that's because, over time, our marketing efforts unfortunately have been perceived by consumers more as pollution than they have value add. And technologies and behaviors have emerged over time to screen out that pollution, whether they be business models like subscription-based content viewing, i.e., Netflix; or the ad -- then rise of ad blockers. We have almost -- we have as marketers created the predicament that we're in right now, which is we have a reputation for being the discipline that creates content that consumers want to screen out and not seek out. And I think there's an incredible inflection point that's going to take place there. In my day, when I first started in marketing, the way you developed your marketing plan is you look backwards. You look back and you listed all of the initiatives that you did the year before and what they delivered. And then you would replicate them, all the ones, obviously, that worked, and kind of do that over again. It was kind of a cut and paste. You discard the things that didn't deliver. You'd repeat the things that did. That whole dynamic has changed now because the operating environment that we are executing in, the consumer environment, this -- our society is moving at a pace right now where there is no guarantee that what worked last year is going to work this year. And that's kind of exciting and daunting all at the same time because it drives a much greater need to innovate. And so what I'm going to go over very briefly today -- and I apologize. The slides are probably a little more wordy than the time allocated for me to present them, so I'll probably stay at the very top line, but I think there are 6 major trends that are happening in marketing today; and by the way, from an external perspective looking in, all of which, I think, represent huge tailwinds for the DCM business. And so I think that's very exciting given the changes that are taking place. The first thing is that marketers have always been the innovation engine of a company, but now the burden of that is even higher. We have seen business models -- it used to be, in my view, businesses used to grow or decline logarithmically. Now that doesn't happen anymore. Businesses grow logarithmically for a while and then they hockey stick, but more importantly, they decline logarithmically for a while and then they drop off a cliff, largely as a consequence of digital disruptors entering your category. So marketers, more than any other group in the organization, have to be constantly understanding not only what their consumers want but what the competitive environment is looking like, so innovation is more -- is really more important than it has ever been but not innovation as we have historically known it. Innovation in big Fortune 100, Fortune 500 companies has always been a long and laborious process. The consumer insights process alone took months and months and months. It was incredibly expensive. Companies like Nielsen made huge amounts of money from understanding the consumer. Now there is neither the time, the appetite nor, frankly, the budget to execute a consumer understanding plan using those methodologies. Now we understand consumer behavior in real time. We have to understand the marketing action that goes into the market, what behavior happens in that moment in time; and then optimize and refine that marketing behavior for the next effort. This isn't a process that takes months now. This is a process that needs to take seconds. And framing up how we think about getting the consumer insights that we need to drive innovation is now a completely different, AI-driven, digitally driven operation now. That has given rise to a whole new skill set. In my day, it used to be that you could put any great marketer in charge of innovation. You took your [ Hypos ] for marketing; and you said, "Hey. You [ rotate in ] innovation. Run innovation for a while." And then you [ shop in those jobs ], and go, "Okay, I guess I just go out and hire a great innovation agency." That is neither the case nor the necessity right now because, I think, what is happening is innovation has formed itself as such a deep and narrow specialty that more and more companies are hiring externally people who know how to innovate. And by innovation, I'm not just talking about new product development. They're not synonymous terms. One isn't a subset of the other. We're talking about innovating your business model, innovating your communication channels and certainly innovating your products. We used to live in a world that was tell and sell. So when I first started in this business, you used to create communication, content. And you used to then pay somebody who had even better content than you, typically a television network, to overlay your content that nobody actually asked to see on top of their content, which lots of people wanted to see, at a cost. That was the kind of marketing industrial complex, if you like. And that worked for a while until consumers kind of figured out that they could skip that content that they actually didn't want to see. And they started to increasingly view that content as pollution to the content that they actually really did want to see, hence the rise of streaming services and subscription services and ad blockers and so on and so forth. This has fundamentally shifted. We have moved in marketing from this kind of one size fits any -- many. I produce a piece of content. I throw it out there. I get a lot of eyeballs, and X percentage of people take action. And I wash and repeat that process again to much more personalized experiences based on the insights that I talked about before, where we can understand what consumer behavior is happening and we tailor the marketing and tailor the content of our marketing specifically to that. That has given rise to an explosion in content needs, digital content needs. And I will talk about that in a little more detail, but we now have to deliver personalization at scale but personalization in a very meaningful way. I gave the anecdote, in a talk that I just gave, about when we talk about personalization, we think we're really smart as marketers, but I think we have a long way to go in really making personalization meaningful to the consumer. And I gave the anecdote of, over COVID, a friend of mine was looking to buy a car and she asked my help. So I was sitting in my house. She was sitting in her house. She was interested in a mini. We were both on the mini website. I was only on there to help her. She was on there to help -- to buy a car. The next day, I was overwhelmed by messaging from mini. I'm like, "What?" And then it just was relentless. And it kept going and going because they had -- I describe it as they had enough information about me to be creepy. They knew that I was looking on their site, but they really didn't dig any deeper to figure out why I might be there. And had they dug deeper, they would have figured out that I recently just bought a car. I've never bought a car of that size in my entire car buying history. I've only ever driven SUVs, so it would be very, very unlikely that I was on that site to buy a mini, but they started communicating -- me and overwhelmingly communicating with me in e-mails, in -- every time I went on to Facebook, I suddenly had a mini popping up on my page. Directionally, that's where marketing is going, understanding my behavior and delivering the appropriate content, but we have a long, long, long way to go to make sure that we truly understand and interpret the behaviors that we're seeing digitally in the right context and from the consumer's perspective. This term has arisen, which I can't believe I'm using in a presentation because I personally dislike it, called performance marketing. It's a whole segment of marketing. I'm yet to find the marketer who says, "No, I don't want to work in the performance marketing group. I want to work in the group that creates the marketing that doesn't perform," but nonetheless there is this group called performance-based marketing. And essentially it's -- I know I'm going to date myself here, but it's no more detailed than what we thought about back in the day where direct mail was a channel, except it's executed in digital and we have a lot more data about the consumer. So this is driving to this relationship and communication with the consumer at a highly personalized level where we understand or we think we understand what they're looking for and we tailor messages to that. That means that the skill sets in the marketing department are profoundly different than what they historically have been, which marketing was typically populated by creative businesspeople, for want of a better term. Now, coming into marketing, you have people with analytics capabilities, people with technology capabilities and people with creative capabilities because of all the content and the analytics around that content that need to get developed. This has -- I talk about when I -- let's take a brand like Pepsi for example. 10 years ago, if you were the marketing manager on Pepsi, you probably had to produce 5 pieces of content a year. They were typically television commercials. You had about a 6-month development cycle for those 5 pieces of content. And the unit cost of those pieces of content was between $1 million and $2 million. If it was a Super Bowl commercial, it would probably be higher. Now 5 pieces of content is more like 500,000 pieces of content per year for a brand like Pepsi. And by the way, by content, I'm referring to social media posts. I'm referring to video on social media and so on. So 5 has become 500,000. 6 months has become 6 seconds and $1 million per unit has become [ $1, $0.01 ], and so it has profoundly reshaped how we think about content as marketers. It has led to an explosion in content and it has led to explosion in complexity around that content. And so as we think about kind of what marketers are looking for right now, it -- how do I manage all of this content that I have to publish in an efficient and effective way? And how do I significantly reduce the complexity? Because I think the story -- hopefully, the story that I will leave you with after we go through these is the operating environment and the world of the marketer is exponentially more complex than it has ever been before. And companies that can come along and offer me solutions to reduce that complexity are the first companies that you take a meeting from -- or at least I did when I was running Pepsi. So again, we also see shifting -- the other big trend is this shifting roles within the value chain. It used to be -- again I will use Pepsi as an example. Pepsi used to have 4 or 5 agencies. You have a creative agency. You had a media agency. You had a design agency. You might have another backup advertising creative agency. Now brand Pepsi would probably have 60, 70 agencies. By the time you add in content partner -- and by the way, they're not agencies as we would historically have categorized them. They're more like content partners, but they're social media people. They're people who specialize in analytics. They're people who specialize in producing personalized content at scale that I talked about before. That complexity of just managing the partner roster is -- has been an explosive and daunting challenge for marketers to manage. And that has actually led to the phenomenon of insourcing. Because if I have a very complex external partnership model, why not just insource it, where I have greater control over the capabilities that I bring in? I can manage it better than I can if it was externally. And we are seeing a mass movement, I will say, at this point into insourcing what has historically been outsourced, particularly around content. Most major brands have either implemented or are in discussion about implementing some form of in-housing of content at mainly digital content, although television is more and more coming inside as well. Again, huge opportunity. You think about all these assets. I think digital assets that are getting created. How do they get managed? How do you make sure that you're not replicating the same thing over and over again when there could be something in your vast library of content that you can repurpose, retool and redeploy? So this is becoming a major movement in marketing, and the whole value chain has been disrupted here. One of the biggest changes that I've seen over the last 5 years is this movement toward purpose. It used to be that consumers were kind of interested and -- kind of they were fascinated when you said you worked at PepsiCo. And they would say, "Oh, wow. I didn't realize you made Quaker Oats," or, "I didn't realize you made Tropicana," or, "I didn't realize that you had Frito-Lay." Consumers are a lot less interested now in what a company makes and a whole lot more interested in what makes the company, meaning it used to be that a company like PepsiCo or Unilever or Procter & Gamble or any company -- consumers were just -- they didn't want to do business with you if you were having a net positive -- a net negative effect on society. Now that has moved on. They expect the brands that they do business with to have a net positive impact on society. And that can come in many shapes or forms, whether it be D&I, whether it be fair trade, whether it be environmental sustainability. The data that's available to consumers today to understand the behavior and societal impact of the brands that they do business with is more accessible and vast than it has ever been. And consumers are more and more making the choice on the environment as one key driver in their decision making. This is the rise of plant-based meats, as an example, as a category. People are eating plant-based meats not because they taste better than meat, not because they're less processed than meat, not because they're better for you than meat but because there's a perceived environmental benefit of eating something that doesn't create the greenhouse gas emissions. That's a whole category that's being driven by impact on the environment. We are seeing the rise of the conscious consumer now. And if you're a brand that doesn't have a robust ESG strategy and you're publishing vast amounts of content around that, then you're in a lot of trouble. And I think, unfortunately, this continues to be an area that lots of people talk about, not a lot of people execute on. I was cautious about including it in this presentation because I hate it when purpose and ESG is relegated to the marketing folks. That's a big warning signal because that just tells you that companies want to talk more about it than actually embed it into their business model and their business operations. And when I was at PepsiCo, Indra Nooyi, who I had the good fortune to work for there, was one of the very early architects of a business that oriented itself around purpose. We used to make the distinction between CSR, corporate responsibility; and purpose. Corporate responsibility is how you spend the money. You make a whole bunch of money and then you hand it off to the CSR people, and they spend it on some charitable things. And people think you're nice guys, and you keep going on doing bad things. Now purpose is more about how you make the money. How is purpose embedded into your actual operating model? Are you having a net positive impact on society as a consequence of your business operations, not how much money you're giving away to charities? That's ESG, still important but very, very different than -- or sorry. It's CSR, very, very different than ESG. The next is the rise of diversity. I mean we have talked about diversity in marketing and in business now for a long, long time. Finally we're making progress on the visible signs of diversity, gender and race in particular, but in marketing now there is a much greater drive for intellectual diversity. And what I mean by that is it used to be that there were [ sort of ] very predictable and reliable talent sources that you could go after when marketing was somewhat of a homogenous group of people, but now marketers have to be great at the creative side, great at the growth side, great at the analytics side, great at the tech side. And so you're getting a very diverse marketing set here and again adding to the complexity. Managing that kind of diverse group of people, figuring out their compensation strategies, figuring out how to motivate them as a leader, figuring out how to progress them through the company all adds to the complexity that marketers have today. And -- but on the upside, marketing is a much more dynamic area to be in today because you have to upskill like every -- it feels like every month. I was joking this morning: Just when marketers figured out that they had their social media figured out -- like I'm feeling pretty good about my social media. I've got Instagram now and I've got Facebook now, and I'm communicating with my consumer. Now these metaverse, NFTs have cropped up. And I saw an article this morning, "the 16 best CMOs that have mastered NFTs." I'm like, NFTs, it's taken me this long to figure out what the acronym stood for, let alone what it is. And now we have 16 CMOs who've mastered NFTs. This is the pace and the expectation that marketing is moving at, how it's becoming digital. All of these things connect to an exponential growth and explosion in the need for greater content and different types of content, but most of all, all of it is adding to this incredible complexity for the CMO in terms of executing her role, which is the slide I kind of want to lead you -- leave you with. As I said earlier, when -- there were -- many people. When you're a marketer at a big company with visible brands, lots of people want to meet with you all the time. And most of them, you don't meet with, but anybody who can promise you a reduction in complexity, particularly as it relates to all of your kind of digital assets and media partners and content partners, they're the ones that rise to the list in the -- in terms of the people you want to meet with because it's hard being a CMO. Most CMOs are kind of roughly in my age bracket. We didn't grow up in the world of NFTs and the metaverse. We didn't even really grow up in the world of having kind of -- having digital. We've -- had to learn this every single step of the way. There was huge insecurity amongst major marketers that they haven't figured this out. There's huge FOMO around missing out on the next big thing. I'm sure there are thousands of CMOs around the country, after the article this morning, going, "Well, I don't have an NFT strategy. What's an -- NFTs?" I'm calling up their next in line. "Let's have a meeting about what's our NFT strategy." I guarantee you that's happening all around the country today because everything is moving at such an incredible pace. Everything is digitizing at a rate that is overwhelming, quite frankly. And the complexity of the role of marketing today has never been greater than it is. So I'll leave you with that thought. I think I'm going to pass over to -- for Jim right now. And then I think we're taking questions at the end.

Thanks so much, Brad. Thanks, everyone. And thanks again, Brad and Richard. I wanted to follow up 1 or 2 points as mentioned when Richard introduced, the -- Brad talked a lot about public companies today. I spend a lot of my time also working with private consumer companies, private investors in the consumer space. And I think 2 of the topics that were hit on by Brad very much are things that those folks are focused on as well. So as you think about building out companies today, you can't do anything without focusing on ESG at the moment, all right, both from a risk perspective as well as then a go-forward growth opportunity when exiting a private company. In the past 6 months, it's become an absolute blinding focus for folks, and we see that every day in our work. And I think the second is the complexity of just managing marketing elements. Actually, [ Zach ] and I -- my colleague who's here with me, we're on the phone with some of our clients [ who's the CEO ] of a beauty company this morning, privately invested in, who was talking about how to figure out how to use TikTok, all right, as a way now to market, the changing elements of marketing; and on a call 2 or 3 days before, was talking about how to manage historical marketing assets to reuse to relaunch the brand in the market, right? So this -- I think the thing that we see every day in our work is how these are popping as themes. And so if I were stepping back for a second. If you think of all the themes that were talked about today that Brad hit on and you think about their applicability to DCM, which obviously Richard and team will go into much better than I will -- but I think 4 of these seem to resonate very clearly, right? So the fragmentation of the media and marketing platforms that we talked about, with a real twist towards digital. How do you get away from mass messaging to more personalized messaging? You have to be able to manage that through content management, through managing your assets, through thinking through how to do that. That obviously ties very clearly to what DCM is focused on. The sheer quantity of content and how to manage it and how to reuse it, the example I just gave about the beauty company that was thinking about that. That's exactly where their strategy is focused, and how you do that in an efficient and effective way. The move away from -- you can't have -- if you can't have 50 to 70 agencies working with you and you're going to pull more things in house, you need a partner to help you operationalize that. We think that's a trend that we're going to see coming quite a bit going forward, and we've seen it already. And then the ESG point, clearly a friend, right, moving towards digital marketing. The ESG element there is pretty obvious from an environmental perspective, [ so we should run those as ] -- wrap them up as kind of a few different themes [ that will be ] popping from what Brad talked about to tie into the rest of the Investor Day. And thank you for having us.

Thank you. So we've got a few minutes for questions, if anybody has got any questions. Of course, Brad and Jim will be around during reception as well. So any questions from anybody virtually or physically [ in the office here? Mr. Cochrane ]?

[indiscernible] during our years, [ they were always being cut ] and more efficient, while you talked about you may have had 5 agencies. You now have 60 [ data banks, whatever ].

I would say that, as a percentage of net revenue, which is typically how you think about relative marketing spend, we have not seen those go significantly up, especially relative to the content required now. I mean my example of 5 pieces of content over 6 months at a unit cost of $1 million. The absolute budget hasn't changed, but the amount of content and capabilities that, that now needs to encompass has exponentially increased. So I think they've remained flat and the demands on marketing budgets have exponentially increased.

And the need to make them work harder...

Right.

Okay, any other questions? Again Brad and Jim will be around. [ Jason ]?

Just a focus on reducing complexity. So how can it impact an organization's P&L? I can see it potentially impacting operating costs and SG&A, making things easier, but is it just about creating efficiencies? How can reducing complexity really help drive revenue?

Do you want to go...

I mean I'll give one thought. And then -- and Brad, you can jump in. Because I think particularly in companies that are -- the speed of reaction that's required from a marketing perspective these days in the market -- because everything is digital and happening so quickly, the reduction in complexity and the ability to manage your assets and respond quickly, I think, is a real driver for performance. And I mean I've seen that, the example I mentioned before, where the reaction time, right, at -- when you're a company, around either a trend or potentially even a public relations issue -- I think the cycle time is faster than I've ever seen. So the ability to do that, I think, is a real competitive advantage...

Absolutely, and a potential issue around share as well. In almost every category, there's a digital disruptor out there. And so all these things that I talked about in the context of my background, which is the to, from, they've never had a from. Their to is their from. They're on to the next thing. And so as we are increasingly operating in a world where consumer brands are not dominated by the big manufacturers but digitally enabled emerging companies are the ones probably stealing the most amount of share in each category, that's where I think about these capabilities and these trends as part of the P&L dynamic.

Using the example of complexity, are you looking at ways to deal with crisis management if you now have 500,000 pieces of different content that could all be super embarrassing to you that you'd like to change overnight? Is that something that you're building in perhaps as part of your ASMBL product? Or your other clients are [ dealing ] with that.

So it's -- brand risk is a major topic of conversation. You have 2 issues. You have the content itself. And in the highly divided society in which we're publishing content in now where millions of people are -- have access to communicate their points of view about your content to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people through social media is a major point, but also media adjacency. As we're publishing all of this content, where do we end up next to? And in the consumer's mindset, if you're in a news article that's talking about a particular thing and you're advertising right next to it, there's this implicit idea of endorsement. Facebook, YouTube, all of the platforms have had this issue of media risk. It is a giant problem. I don't think it's a problem that people have gotten their arms around yet. AI is helping exponentially, but even at Google, with YouTube, you would think, right, Google, YouTube, they must have the most complex technologies available to screen out unpleasant content. They have teams of hundreds of people, thousands of people, as does Facebook, who actually look at content, human beings viewing pieces of content and then determining whether they represent content that's harmful for society and therefore potentially harmful for brands. So I wish I had a great answer that everybody is doing it right. I think AI is helping us more than it ever has. The thing that is impossible to implement is the old-fashioned review process internally that you went through for perhaps a television ad, where you shipped it off to the legal department. They signed off on it. You shipped it off to the operations people. They signed off on it. Maybe the CEO looked at it. She signed off on it. I mean that's just impractical now. So I think it is a huge problem, and I think it's one of the problems that marketing and companies need to grapple with.

Yes. And you'll hear a little bit more when Shelly talks about our ASMBL platform. And as Brad said, just the sheer number of assets that need to be managed today and matters with the compliance and governance around that, you can't do that with SharePoint in today's world, right? SharePoint doesn't work. You will definitely have noncompliant communication if you're using a SharePoint or using some type of shared drive. So you'll hear more about that when we talk about ASMBL. And that's a huge value that we're delivering to clients and, quite frankly, anybody that's in the digital asset management solution business is delivering to clients in today's world, so...

[ Anich Hasnik ]. You've given some really good examples of Pepsi and other companies. I was just wondering. Do you have any examples of recent marketing initiatives that you've done that really bombed; or really were successful, like, quickly? Like whether it was for Facebook or that kind of stuff.

Well, it actually is a great connection into the last question. And I have a massive one in my career, which happened under my watch, where the marketing team in North America thought it would be a really great idea to get Kendall Jenner to film a piece of content and then hand a can of Pepsi to a policeman standing by the [ side ] of what was being portrayed [ as a march ] but was interpreted as a Black Lives Matter protest. And I found myself -- I was flying over the Atlantic at the time on the company plane, and suddenly the satellite phone kept going off like crazy. And by the time I landed, I got off the plane. And as I'm walking through [indiscernible], I looked up and there was Pepsi all over CNN and CNBC and so on and so forth, massive fault. How did that happen? Well, it didn't happen because PepsiCo is populated with a whole bunch of racist people who didn't ever hear Black Lives Matter. That, I can assure you. It happened because the methodologies that the company was using at the time to assess the efficacy of marketing were just too blunt. We were trained as marketers. You kind of do pretesting of marketing. You put it out there. And we were trained as marketing. You look for major trends. You look for whether the majority of people like it or the majority of people don't like it. Public opinion isn't formed by the majority anymore. Public opinion is formed by the keyboard warriors that have a particular view on a particular issue. And overnight, you can become an infamous brand as Pepsi became for almost a month. So that's an example of a really bad idea. Let me give you an example of a really good idea. And I'll use an example of ESG and how it's baked into the business agenda. Patagonia, I happen to think, is doing an amazing job as a brand. They are dealing with this, frankly, "the #1 or #2 polluter and contributor to landfill." Surprisingly, it's not the beverage industry which you would think. It's the fashion industry. This movement toward fast fashion and disposable fashion away from kind of enduring style has caused a massive environmental crisis, frankly.

Zara and H&M...

Zara, H&M, Uniqlo. Go through the list. What Patagonia have done is really tackle that issue head on. And they encourage people that, when you're not ready, when you don't like your clothes anymore, bring them back to us. They refurbish them and they sell them again in the store, and so there's a whole section of Patagonia where you can go with pre-loved Patagonia. They close all of their stores on Black Friday, which is the largest retail shopping day of the United States, because they're like, "If we're a brand that stands for the great outdoors, if we're a brand that stands for leisure, why would we let our employees take that day off after Thanksgiving?" These are actions -- I mean there was a very famous advertising person who once said a principle isn't a principle until it costs you money. And when Patagonia do something like that and consumers go, "Wow, they closed on Black Friday. That must have cost them a lot of money." That must mean they're really serious about this," the long-term impact is significant.

[indiscernible] question...

One more question. [ Brad ], the example that you gave, the mini example that you gave in your personal journey, looking at a car. Is there a point where brands can become annoying? What you described to me, the first thing that jumps to mind is, wow, that almost has a -- feels like a negative impact for mini on you. How do you deal with that as a marketer?

Most brands are annoying, vast majority of them. Think about like -- remember I use -- I often say people hate advertising in general but love advertising in particular. And what I mean by that is, if I went around the room and said, "Name your favorite television commercial," every one of you would be able to give me one, but if I said to you, "Do you like the advertising as you're watching a hockey game?" you do, "Hell no. Get rid of it." So absolutely. Why? Because as marketers, we became lazy. And we paid for the privilege of eyeballs by overlaying our content on top of content that people actually wanted to see, and as a consequence, it gave rise to ad blockers. It gave rise to non-advertising-supported subscription models for content. That's all our fault. That would never have happened had we been creating advertising content that was as compelling, entertaining, engaging, uplifting and as exciting as the content that went over it. So I would say, yes, it's a cultural issue with marketing. I would say that we have to solve for that because technology will just keep beating us out. And I will give my last rant on this topic: It drives me nuts when you're sitting in performance marketing meetings and people come to you and say, "We ran this piece of content and it got a 3% click-through rate or a 3% response rate." Now 3% is a giant number in marketing. People used to come to me at PepsiCo all the time and say that. My response will be, okay, that's nice. What did the 97% of other people think? And how many of them did we really annoy? And how many of them did we annoy to the point where they don't even want to consider buying us anymore because, every time they go on to YouTube, they're served a piece of Mountain Dew pre-roll even though they no -- have no interest in Mountain Dew? And so I think it's a cultural move. I think brands need to think more like content companies and less like pollution companies, frankly.

Richard, we have one question online from Michael Lang. Brad, he said your thoughts are spot on. However, not every industry adopts change at the same time. Which industries are likely to be attractive to DCM? Your thoughts on financial services versus metaverse.

Wow. So I think, financial services in particular, look -- it's hard for me to say there's a particular category that would be attractive to DCM. I think this idea that different categories have, for some reason, a hall pass to move more slowly on innovation. I don't necessarily see that -- it's happening now. There are some oligopolistic categories that are dominated by 2 or 3 really big players who could potentially move slower than maybe categories that have multiple competitors in them. Financial services might be one of them with the rise of fintech. They may be able to move a little bit slower, but ultimately those oligopolistically-structured categories are precisely the ones that digital disruptors have their eye on to go after. So I think that this idea of a different pace of change by category is -- it may exist in some places, but it's not a sustainable one.

Yes. I would add any industry that wants to grow and has regulation, which is everyone...

Absolutely, exactly.

All right. So Brad, thank you very much, and Jim.

[ Thanks, everyone ].

[indiscernible]

It was very insightful. We really appreciate it. Brad and Jim are around after for questions. Okay, we are I think exactly on time right now, guys, so how is that for -- I lived in Germany for 5 years, so I learned a lot about efficiency and productivity, right, and about staying on it, being on time. So we're exactly on time. I am not going to talk about our corporate strategy around simplifying complexity. What I'll tell you is you're not going to see a lot of numbers in my slides right now, but I promise you you're going to see a lot of numbers when our CFO, James Lorimer, comes up and speaks, okay? So I'm going to talk more principally about where we're going from a strategic perspective. I think all of our investors have heard about our print-first to digital-first strategy, okay; how we're going to move from a company that not only does print, but we actually tech enable that marketing workflow, as you'll hear in a little bit, okay? So I can tell you the work, about 32%, 33%, in fact, I think last month we're north of 35%, of our workflow starts with digital and eventually flows into digital distribution or print distribution. That's a higher-retention business. And it's a higher-margin business, much higher loyalty, much what we call stickier with clients, right? So strategy, move from print first to digital first. We want to move from, and it's not necessarily we're on the left today, but a low-SKU high-volume business, okay, a low-SKU high-volume business, to a high-SKU low-volume business. So track with me for a second here, okay? Low SKU, high volume in the printing and workflow business, a lot of companies can do that, all right? I got one SKU and I need 1 million impressions of it. If I've got thousands of SKUs and I need 1 impression of each, there's few companies that can do that; and we're one of the few that can do it. And by the way, in this business, this marketing workflow business, whether it's print or digital distribution, the money is made on the right-hand side here, all right? The more complexity, the high SKU, low volume is where the margin is. And you look at our margin that we reported last quarter, north of 30%. And you compare that to a couple of key competitors in the marketplace. And we're 11 or -- 11%, 12% higher, I think, on average because we're doing a lot more on the right-hand side of this chart, the high SKU, low volume, okay? So we as a company -- and not to say that we've always been managing simplicity, but we want to manage simplicity, right? We want to manage simplicity, right, and manage -- sorry, manage complexity with simplicity. It's a bit of a tongue twister, right? So we want to help clients, and you heard Brad and Jim talk a lot about it today; simplify their complexity, right, highly complex world. And again where we're going to play is that high-SKU low-volume area. That's where there's a lot of complexity and that's where we can drive a lot of value. So when you think about where we are or where we've been as a brand. We're a well-trusted brand in the marketplace. We're working with 250 top organizations across Canada; 70 of the -- I think, 70 of the largest corporations; 3 of the 5 top government agencies. 250 clients represent 93% of our revenues, so we're a well-trusted brand. We have been the brand behind those big institutional brands. We've been the brand behind those institutional brands. And we've been helping those large companies simplify their complexity over time, but we're really going to lean into this. This is where we're going in the future. And you can see that here from even the way we're going to communicate our brand, right, our unique selling proposition in the marketplace. We're going to be a company that helps companies simplify complexity by being surprisingly simple. So this is the first time we're sharing this with investors, but we're going to be very clear in terms of what we stand for, what our unique selling proposition in that marketplace is. We're going to be a company that helps you simplify complexity. And I'm going to share with you -- this is some marketing speak, okay, so Brad, you may like this, all right? This is marketing speak. So it's our mission, okay? And our mission is to transform our clients' business by simplifying the way they communicate and operate so they can accomplish more with fewer steps and less effort. And I can tell you there isn't a single marketing workflow company in Canada today that has that mission statement. I can stand here and say that today, right? So again, that will be our unique selling proposition in the marketplace. We're going to help simplify complexity. There's our mission statement. Now I'm going to put it -- I'm going to take it out of marketing speak for a second, all right, if you don't mind. And I'll put it into my words of what we do. And maybe you might have heard of -- me say this on a couple of investor conferences. So this is really the value that we bring to clients. We eat complexity for breakfast at every day. We love complexity, and I can tell you that honestly. There are -- if we -- there's a simple client -- and I've been in -- and Phil knows this. We've had several conversations. If it's a client where there's a little complexity, there's little value we can add to that client, quite frankly. There's very little value we can add, right? And we know, if there's little complexity, there's likely little margin as well, right, Phil, right, or right, James? So the more complexity there is from a client standpoint in terms of managing that workflow, the more value we can add to that client, the more value we can create, right? There's mutual value creation. So pretty straightforward, pretty simple, if you think about it, but that's where we're going as a company. Not that we're not doing it today, but this is where we're going kind of full force from a branding standpoint. Now obviously, the more complex the workflow, the more digital capabilities are required to manage that workflow. And that's what you're going to hear about today from Shelly and from Karen, right? So the more complexity, the more digital capabilities you need to manage that complexity. And you're going to hear from the team we've been managing complexity for clients for over 40 years and we've actually built a fantastic digital platform. And I gave you a few examples of how we're delivering and simplifying complexity with these digital capabilities. And I can tell you right now it's changing very quickly, right, Phil and the rest of the team? There are still more clients that are unaware of our digital capabilities than are aware of them, okay, so we've got some work to do, but I can tell you that we're really accelerating our pace. So I'm going to give you 3 examples of what we do with clients. I'd love to have a couple of hours because I'd give you 40 or 50 examples. I've got 3 very diverse examples of how we're helping simplify complexity with technology using our DCMFlex platform, which you're going to hear a lot more about in a minute. And this is a cannabis label client. You've heard me tell this story before. I'm going to give you a little bit more detail today. So we have 85% market share of cannabis labels in Canada, 85% market share. And Christine, not because we're a great printer, we know we're a fantastic printers, right? But frankly, anybody can print cannabis labels. So why do we have 85% share? Because we basically took our DCMFlex platform, and we tuned it to meet the needs of that vertical, right, of that category. Because it is a super complex category from a labeling standpoint, we're managing -- you see the slide, 4,500 SKUs, but it's not 4,500 SKUs because every SKU has 8 different regulatory labeling requirements that need to be rotated. So it's actually 36,000 SKUs, 36,000 pieces, right, of packaging that we have to manage. And it's relatively low volume. No pun intended. It's a growing category, but it's relatively low volume per SKU. You cannot do that without automation, right, without digital automation. We -- every SKU has an individual identification code, right, bar code, automated workflows, managing regulatory compliance. Talk about regulatory compliance, right? Talk about a highly regulated industry. That needs to be right through to every individual word on that package, whether it's the principal panel or the technical panel. We have algorithms to manage to the federal legislation, governance and oversight, marketing communication and content, reporting and insights and a lot of third-party access we need to provide to this platform as well. And we're doing this in U.S. as well, right? Just literally started in the U.S. We've got a couple of clients there. I think we're over 500 SKUs, but it's 500 SKUs and 15 states. And every state has a different labeling requirement, right? That all needs to be tech-enabled with very little human intervention. And that's a great example of technology we've got that is secured, a very viable business. Our margin in this business is -- I don't want to -- I look for James, got to be careful what I say. But it's, let's just say, a nice premium to our average margin because we bring a lot of value to the industry in simplifying this workflow. Another example is commercial banking. This is a commercial banking wealth management client, okay? I can't tell you the client's name, but we work with many commercial banking clients here in Canada. We support several lines of business. We streamlined our on-demand content personalization for over 1,000 independent advisers across 80 locations. So you got 1,000 independent advisers who want to have highly customized, individualized communication. You can't do that without automation. You can't do that without a digital capability and managing that workflow. We have 1,100 branded assets that are officially managed for regulatory and brand compliance. And we've obviously helped this client accelerate quite significantly into not just printed output but digital output. In fact, a lot of those advisers, it's digital to digital, right, digital distribution, not just print distribution and massive reduction in internal resources. So as an example, and again, I can give you another -- many other examples of what we're doing in the FI space. And here's one for diversity, okay? We talk about diversity, diversity in clients. To show you a client that we are tech-enabling completely outside of FI and cannabis. This is a large pipeline client, Western Canada. You maybe guessed who it is. We actually produce 1,200 individual signs for this client. And it's not one sign 1,200 times. It's 1,200 individual signs, all of them with the geolocation-specific numbering on the sign. Because these signs need to be placed, right, in geolocations, don't dig here, right? They've got to be placed in locations where there is risk, right, or there needs to be awareness of a pipeline or something buried in the ground. And if they don't have that sign there, by the way, massive regulatory fines, massive regulatory fines. So we manage that entire workflow. And listen, we're shipping signs, geolocation signs across Canada and actually into the U.S. as well. So many of these signs are bilingual, English and Spanish. And we're doing the entire order flow, printing, billing, shipping. We're tied directly into the client's ERP system. We're tied directly into FedEx in production. And if you're in the field and you're ordering a sign, you use your P card, right, use your purchasing card and you're automatically billed -- directly billed, collated, distributed and make sure that we're -- you get that in the hand -- in the hands, rather, of that field operator on a timely basis, right? Otherwise, they face regulatory -- significant regulatory compliance. So I gave you 3 very different examples just to show you the diversity of what we do. Again, we could have talked about 40 or 50 different examples. All of this starts with helping clients simplify their complexity using digital technology. It happens to be our DCMFlex platform, okay? So now what we're going to do is I'm going to hand it over to Karen, who's going to take you through some details on our DCMFlex platform and how we manage workflow, that 35% of our revenue which is generated through that workflow, that digital workflow. Our plans, as you've probably heard in several meetings we've had, our plan is to take that up to 75% penetration, so from 35% to 75%. Again, higher margin, higher loyalty. And you'll also hear about our digital asset management strategy, standing up a platform we called ASMBL, okay? So Karen.

Thank you very much, Richard. So I'm first going to start off and run a nice, great summary video to give you an introduction to Flex. So please enjoy. [Presentation]

So really, what did we do? What did we develop? So as our customers have been changing, as things have become more complex and the needs of those customers have changed, for the last 20 years, we've been developing our technology of Flex. And we've been doing that through proprietary developments and as well through integrating to the best-in-class solutions along the way as well. And we've built out a tremendous platform in doing so in those past 20 years. But what have we not been doing? We have not been thinking like a workflow automation company. We've been going at this thinking like a printer. In doing that, we've really undervalued what DCM can offer to our customers. So really, that's where things are changing. We have the technology. We have the expertise to go into the conversations with our customers, to talk with them about the solutions that they're using, to talk with them about how those solutions can be simplified, integrated, to give them some optimizations that they're looking for, and we're steering our conversation away from the transaction. And we're really talking about what those problems are with the solutions they have and how we can help to simplify through automation with the technology that we have and build upon our tech with the solutions they already are using in-house. So really, no one solution fits all. It doesn't matter the vertical that we find a company in. It doesn't matter the size. It doesn't even matter if they're using similar platforms of technology inside. And quite frankly, we don't them to be the same. We don't expect them to be the same. Because of the proprietary nature of our Flex technology and because of our ability to integrate with anything, we can build out the solutions that meet those unique needs to those customers based on what their unique requirements might be. And when you look at what the customers are doing more than ever, and I know many have mentioned it already, but more than ever, there's a need to optimize and automate for speed to market, for accuracy, from everyone's dealing with regulation and compliance these days and what's -- how can they get through that with reduction of air and speed to market to get their message evident to the market as fast as possible. And when you do this and when we look at simplifying those solutions and offering a tech-enabled solution to the customer, quite often, we're also really looking at the change of the process to be a change of the user. We look back over the years, you might have needed a skill set of a user that's very different today than it would have been years ago. So perhaps someone needed to be a developer, programmer. With the simplified technologies that we can put in front of them now, we can change that skill set of that user and provide a different step along in the process to meet the needs of the solution they're looking for. So why? Why are we doing this? Why are we changing the conversation to be about automation and workflow optimization? For a number of reasons, really: higher value of partnership with our customers; higher retention of keeping those customers. And the more embedded we find ourselves with their people, their process and their technologies, the more sticky we really are. And that's a really great place to be. So as we go on this journey to lead our tech-enabled revenue to be -- to equate to 70% of our revenue, we will be doing that through a shift of conversation, not talking about a transaction, but really getting to know better with our customers, what solutions they have, where their chaos exists because we know it does and then better understand how we can position a solution for them. Now I'm going to pass it over to Shelly, who's going to talk more about ASMBL.

Great. Thank you, Karen. And as she mentioned, I'm going to take you through how we're going to drive digital asset management penetration with the platform that we are just launching that we branded ASMBL. So to set that up, I first want to talk about the market sizing. So analysts had projected that the global market size of digital asset management will be $5.2 billion and a 21% CAGR over the next 4 years. And if you consider that only 1 in 10 companies responded that they're using digital asset management solutions today, the opportunity is quite significant. And building on what Brad said earlier today, there's a real growth driving in an era of digital content management across all industries. I actually think he used the word and term explosion. So there's a lot going on in the marketplace. When we look about the geographical opportunity, North America will have a 40% market share. And then finally, enterprise size organizations will have a majority stake in the growth. And that's our DCM sweet spot. It matches perfectly to our ideal customer profile. We've talked a lot today about increasing complexity. And it's really a core theme that's going on, not just within the halls and walls today at DCM, but externally within the marketplace. And there's really 2 key factors both externally and internally that are going on. From an external standpoint, there's a heightened awareness around privacy, around privacy legislation, around privacy laws. And so the government is taking a real active role in setting up policy and legislation and passing bills on the importance of digital privacy protection. And coupled with that, and we heard Brad talk about this earlier, is that organizations are really challenged with compliance and risk. And adding on to that challenge is the ability to leverage integrated customer data in order to drive consumer engagement, in order to deliver personalized communication and then ultimately, to achieve organizational growth. So that really sets the stage for what we want to achieve with our ASMBL platform. So I'm going to flip the slide now and run you a short video to tell you a little bit more about what the platform can do. [Presentation]

So DCM is uniquely positioned in order to create a real competitive advantage in the market today. As you heard us talk about earlier, we are practitioners with more than 40 years of experience, expertise and skill in managing complex digital solutions, and automation has been foundational to DCM and our growth over time. We've invested significantly in web-to-print technology and automation through the transition of physical to digital. We work with 70 of the top 100 organizations across the financial sector, retail sector, health care, energy and cannabis. And it was just recently that there was a conversation with one of our enterprise customers who described as DCM sitting above the silos. And that really gives us the opportunity to take a look at these organizations and add value and design solutions specifically to meet their client needs. Karen and her team have been using digital asset management for years. And with that, they've been able to develop and build an extensive digital ecosystem. And now that helps us to provide integrations into several service channel partners. For those of you that read, we've recently released that we secured a large leading technology retailer. The situation that they were having is that they had technology that was coming end of life, and they were also being challenged with heightened regulatory and security requirements. So we developed a solution that really help them within the consumer electronics space. So if you think about consumer electronics, it's highly competitive. It's a huge market. There's so much segmentation in multiple channels and multiple communications and campaigns. There was a lot to unpack there. So we developed a solution that allows them to easily access, create, download, share all of their elements required for their promotional campaigns. We've centralized the workflows for their marketing automation and asset management. We've been able to provide them with reporting so they see how they're tracking. They get visibility across all lines of business. And we've already achieved and delivered ROI. We've helped them to reallocate resources. We've helped them to improve their speed to market. And we've also helped them to process millions of lines of data in a simple upload automation. Again, we heard from Brad the importance of pace, and pace is what we can give them in this highly competitive market. And when we look forward to the next few years, it's important that we've got a plan that builds out and expands on the profitability and the value our organization. So we've got projected revenues over the next few years that are going to reach between $10 million and $20 million, pretty aggressive. I feel a target on my back, but lots to do. And so when we look to the horizon, we've got a highly active pipeline. We've got over $5 million of opportunities in our pipeline. And 80% of those opportunities are coming from 4 core sectors: the financial, retail, health care and emerging markets. We've recently won, and I know there's been talk earlier about the cannabis industry, it's an area that I spend quite a bit of time in, and we're really proud that we've landed a large multistate operator. And so for those of you that may not be aware, the legislation is actually more complex in the U.S. and Canada because it's federally legalized. It's not as complex. And so what's happening in the U.S., as Richard was alluding to earlier, they need to automate their content and version control in order to be compliant across all the states. You can't transfer product across U.S. states. And so what we've done is help them and design the platform in order to accommodate for this and what's really accelerating their ability to scale and expand into the 9 states that they have facilities today. And then the last one that I'll talk about is our partnership that we've just recently agreed to with Ryerson University. We're really proud about this partnership because Ryerson is the only Canadian institution that has a dedicated digital asset management curriculum. They've got over 145 students enrolled in this program. And as a presenting sponsor, we're supporting the education, the learning and the opportunity to seed talent into our organization and our customers' organizations through that program. So with that, I will pass it over to Natalie.

Great. Thank you, Shelly. So we've heard a lot about ESG today. I'm really excited to be here representing our ESG Committee. This is a committee that's being pooled from experts across the company. And for us, ESG really truly is a reveal. We haven't had an ESG Committee. We haven't had a properly, formalized strategy at DCM before. So this is something that we're really excited to be moving forward with. So I'm going to go through, at a very high level, our commitments in each area. We'll talk about some of the targets that we're setting, some of the partners that we'll be working with to help us those to life and some of the programs and initiatives that we already have in place and are working on towards the future. So when we think about the environment, of course, environmental impact is at the forefront for us, particularly, we can -- when we consider that while we do put digital solutions into the market, we also still have quite a bit of commercial print. So environmental impact is definitely top of mind. So we break this down into 4 key areas of impact. Reducing our carbon footprint, so here, our goal is to have a 30% reduction in carbon footprint by 2030 and achieve net zero by 2050. When we think about the energy sources across our facilities across the country, we'd like to transition to more renewable energy sources. And in that area, our goal is a 30% reduction -- or sorry, transition to 100% renewable energy by 2050. Thinking about the solid waste that's produced in our facilities, we'd like to achieve a waste reduction annually of 10% when it comes to solid waste. And then going beyond what's happening within our facilities and also thinking about the resources that we use, we have a commitment towards sustainable forestry. So the number that you're seeing here, 144,000 trees planted annually is based on our consumption of paper within our facilities. And you'll hear a little bit more about how that will work on the next slide. So of course, the goals that I've just shared with you on the previous page are quite a big goals for us to achieve with long vision ahead of them. And we're going to be working with partners to help us get to these. And this is really just a starting point for us. There'll be different partnerships as we continue to move forward with these initiatives. So on the left, when we think about our facilities themselves, SGP is The Sustainable Green Printing Partnership. SGP is a not-for-profit. They really exist to introduce more sustainable practices into the entire printing process. They do that by helping set the criteria and the goals that company should be meeting to help with the progress tracking and making sure that there's transparent reporting happening. So of course, to do that, we need to implement a pretty sizable, sustainable printing management system into our operations. And we will be partnering with [ Canadian Consulting ], a third-party SGP auditor, who will help us along with that process. Looking in the middle, when we think about our forestry commitments. So PrintReleaf is a really interesting -- it's a company -- it's really a software solution. So what they do is they track in real time the amount of paper being used across our facilities. So they'll be live tracking our consumption. They then turn that into a reverse calculation of the amount of trees that would have been harvested in order to produce that paper. And then we have funds that are directed to our global reforestation projects as a result. So they'll figure out exactly where we need to put our funding, and they'll help us really put back our paper footprint into the world. And so that's where you saw that 144,000 number. That's a number that will change as our consumption changes. And then on the same note, FSE, I'm sure this is a logo that people are familiar with and have seen before, it really just means that any paper used in our facilities is procured from sustainably sourced wood fiber. And then finally on the right, you see Haneco. So this is an organization that produces LED lighting and other energy-efficient solutions. So with them, we will be working to retrofit our facilities across Canada to make sure we have more energy-efficient products and services driving the work that we do. And their whole goal is to achieve cost-neutral operations. And the way that they do that is by the cost savings that we'll achieve by having more energy-efficient solutions put in place and then also taking advantage of some government rebates that are available to us as we put in these more environmentally friendly solutions into our business. So that's a high level look at environmental impact. Of course, more of the story will come in the next year. When we think about our social commitments, this is certainly an area where we're not starting from scratch. We have a people and culture team that works on putting many of these initiatives into place. So what I'll take you through today is a high level on the areas where we think we can focus a bit more. So on the left, when we think about giving back to our community, we want to make sure that all associates feel that they have the opportunity to do so while working at DCM. We have lots of grassroots initiatives that happen at our facilities. But at a corporate level, we're partnering with Habitat for Humanity. And so for Habitat, we will be producing some commercial prints. But really, the focus is more on the brand strategy, marketing and communication services that we can offer them. And we're also in talks to them about implementing a digital asset management system for them. So we'll be providing all of those services in kind. Thinking about quality of life for our associates. Lots of programs are already put in place when we think about financial security for our associates. We have our employee share ownership plan. We have a pension plan. We have short-term disability. And then when we think about growth and development, we have lots of funding allocated to reimbursing fees for tuition, reimbursing fees for leadership courses. And we also have a competency model that we're putting into place to make sure that all of our leaders across the business are better trained as managers. The one area that we identified where we could do a little bit more was around physical health and mental health, so looking at ways to improve the well-being of our associates outside of their day-to-day life at work. And so to do that, we have a partner called Workplace Options. They're a provider of well-being solutions. And so through them, we'll be making more educational resources available to our associates, bringing in experts for guests lectures on topics ranging from nutritional health to mental health and so on. So that's something that we'll be offering more as we go -- proceed. And then finally, DE&I, of course, is a big topic within this space and, again, something that's relatively new for DCM, at least, in a more formal light. So we have a partner here called Global Learning. They'll be providing education support to our team as we work to develop a DE&I Council. And we start to bring some DE&I initiatives to life. Some of these include things like employment equity goals, making sure that our hiring practice line up with those employment equity goals, our supplier diversity program, our federal contractors program and so on. And then finally, governance. So I certainly won't take you through the 133 policies, plans and procedures that we have in place. But of course, as a company of our size, there's lots of different policies governing how we operate. But for us, the focus here is really thinking about what information do we need to make more readily available to the public, what policies and procedures do we need to distill and get on to our website to make sure that the market is aware of what we're doing. So this, again, breaks into 4 key areas. We have business ethics, so these will be things like our code of conduct, our pay equity policy. Safety and security, we have things like our privacy policy, workplace harassment and violence policy. Under regulatory compliance, there's AODA compliance, and our supplier diversity policy will come into play here as well. And then finally, Board management. So we already have a Board diversity policy in place. And this area will be one, again, for continued growth to make sure that we have a diverse representation on our Board. So a quick high-level update and definitely something that we invite you to think about in the future as we will be sharing more of our impact in this area in 2022. Thank you, and I'll pass it off to James.

Thanks, Natalie. I'm going to provide a bit of a financial update for everyone. I'm not going to give any forward-looking information here, but a lot of this information is historical. And I want to give a little bit of context to it. So typical kind of forward-looking statement disclosure here. I thought I'd start with our 5-year financial objectives. And we've been talking about these for a couple of months now, but I thought I'd lead with these. Really, from a revenue perspective, our plan is to grow the business by 5% a year over the next 5 years. And if you step back, and lots of finance people here, the easy math is just really to get the business back to $300 million in revenue. And we think that's achievable over the next 5 years. We're also putting in place plans to grow our gross margins with auspicious targets at the high end of 40% gross margin. We think 35% is certainly within reach over the next 5 years, and 40% will be a stretch target there. As you can see, and I've got a slide -- and a few slides here. You can see the progression in our gross margin. We've been consistently making some good progress there, and we think there's lots of opportunities on that. SG&A. Our target is to continue to work hard and grinding SG&A down. We set targets of 18% to 20% of revenue. And really, part of that is going to be keeping our SG&A fairly constant or 0 overhead growth as our revenue accelerates. And if those work, we should have adjusted EBITDA results in the 18% to 22% range. So really kind of top line here, the objective is to get the business back to $300 million in revenue. We've got a revenue chart here, which goes back a couple of years. And I think it's kind of useful to look at our revenue on a pre-COVID and then kind of a COVID period. And then what we think we're emerging from is kind of post-COVID environment. You can see in 2019, we really didn't impact or didn't really feel results from COVID until the end of the first quarter of 2020. And that's when we started to see some revenue declines. We certainly did benefit in 2020 from some kind of COVID-related product sales, probably in the $7.5 million range, and that would be everything from hand sanitizer and PPE and some other kind of signage and things that maybe unusual business that is not going to return again. But certainly, we're still seeing some things and some businesses shifted. Where we're now -- where we're looking at now, and I think if you look back over the past 5 or 6 quarters, you can see that revenue has kind of stabilized. And so we're kind of in that high $50 million, kind of low $60 million range per quarter. But I think what's also informative from this is you can see on kind of an annual basis that our revenue tends to be highest in the first quarter of the year. Second quarter is typically the slowest. Third quarter starts to rebound. Fourth quarter accelerates a bit, and then, again, into a stronger first quarter the next year. We talked about our gross margin aspirations. And this chart shows our gross margins over the past number of years. And as you've seen, if you've been following us, we've been putting a lot of effort into consolidating facilities, revenue management, really trying to drive efficiencies out of our business to make our business a better business at the end of the day. There's a bit of a blip in Q4 of 2020, where we only had sub-25% gross margin. But if you ignore that, we've been pretty consistently in the 29% to 30% gross margin range. And that's despite some revenue declines over that period. So our view is we're pretty consistently in that 30% range in the near term. Our plan is to grow that into the 35% range and ultimately strive for 40%. Here's a few initiatives that will help us get there in the near term. And we've talked about these before, but I wanted to highlight them. First one is digital inkjet capabilities. And we expect that we're going to save about $1 million from a couple of different initiatives related to this. One is putting in a new digital inkjet press, which we haven't had before. And this, we're, frankly, really excited about the revenue opportunities that this will provide us. We've got a number of jobs that have been -- and client work that we've just not been competitive with the prior technology that we had. So we think not only is this going to open up opportunities for new work, but it's also going to increase the margins on some of the historical work that we've been doing. We've also done a bit of a refresh of our digital equipment fleet. And so all-in, we expect that's going to save us about $1 million next year. The consolidation of our Mississauga and our Brampton facilities is on target. We've done, I guess, 2 waves of moves so far. Started 2 weekends ago when we have started moving equipment over, and it's starting to light up in our new site in Brampton. Rents and overheads and a little bit of consolidation, that's going to save us about $1 million next year going forward. We think there'll be significant other potential opportunities for margin enhancement as we get those 2 facilities really humming under 1 roof. We previously talked about our Calgary consolidation, where we moved our Edmonton site into Calgary. That was done -- I think it completed the end of June this year. So on an annualized basis, that's going to result in about $750,000 of savings. We already realized about half that in the current fiscal year in 2021. And then as Richard led off the conversation with our hybrid work model and consolidation of office facilities, we're going to save about $800,000 by consolidating some of our SG&A kind of facilities. Big focus for us is really driving cash flow from operations. And year-to-date, we've generated a little over $20 million in cash flow. The proceeds of this or the funding of this is allowing us to really accelerate our debt payment. Here's a chart that shows how we compare to last year. 2019 was obviously a year that we'd rather forget about. And 2020, we really benefited from significant improvements in working capital. So that $47 million in cash flow from operations that we generated, a good part of that was from just operating cash flow, but also, a good part of it was from working capital improvements. We've really kept the brakes on CapEx, particularly in 2019 with our ERP launch and then in 2020 with the COVID environment, really waiting to see how things are going to shake out. Year-to-date, our CapEx are about $600,000. We'll probably finish the year $1.25-ish million or so. And again, that investment is related to the consolidation of our Brampton and Mississauga sites, as we're building a clean room to operate the digital equipment that we're moving in there. Going forward, we expect CapEx to be in the $1.5 million to $2 million range. And so you can see that the business really generates a high level of free cash flow. Year-to-date, we're tracking around 90% free cash flow version. We think that's an objective that certainly bodes well for the future. I want to highlight some of the organizational effective initiatives because they certainly haven't come without a cost. But I think here's the benefits. We've taken out almost 500 employees since 2019 -- or sorry, 2018. And that's a 34% lower headcount than what we started the year with. I've shown severance payments here that have come as a result of those costs. In 2019, it was about $6.5 million; in 2020, a little lower at $5.6 million. Year-to-date, we're about $5.2 million, and that will certainly continue a little bit in the fourth quarter. These numbers are in our financial statements, so in the notes, if you can get that far into our detailed notes. But over the next 12 months, so this would be Q4 this year through Q3 next year, we've got another $3.5 million of provisions that are planned. And then there's about $300,000 of provisions that are kind of out another year. I want to give everyone guidance that with our optimism in terms of consumer movements turning and returning to more normal, which is going to impact our revenues. We're not forecasting any significant severance costs next year. So these numbers should hopefully stick. And we may see a little bit improve -- a little bit more, but we're really expecting severance next year to be very modest. We talked about repayment of debt being a significant priority for us. And you can see here that debt has come down over 54% since its peak in 2019. It's just about $12 million this year alone in debt repayment. So we're making some really good headway on that. Because of the improvements in cash flow and the repayment of debt, we're in a fortunate position that we've been able to refinance our more expensive Crown Capital financing, which was 12% coupon. We've been able to replace it with sub-6% coupon debt from a combination of our bank lender and Fiera Private Debt, which the bank facility closed just a couple of weeks ago. The Fiera Private Debt facility is scheduled to close on December 17. So all in, next year, we'll save $1.5 million in interest expense because of this initiative. So a big, big win for us. I think this is useful to show here kind of our current debt maturity profile. And fine print here, we'll make the slides available afterwards, but we're currently sitting about $36 million in fixed term debt. This shows -- based on our amortization schedules with our various credit facilities, our debt will be fully repaid by the end of 2026. And we think that will be a great initiative. This excludes our working capital line. With our new bank facility, we have a $15 million working capital line, and that will fluctuate. But currently, it's sitting a couple of million dollars drawn. It's been very consistently in kind of a cash balance to a couple of million drawn, depending on working capital and big payroll every couple of weeks and things like that. So we're certainly working to keep that modest and keep that low. This chart shows our principal payments that we'll be making over the next years and the next couple of years. So you can see the balance of this year, we've got just shy of $2 million of principal payments that we'll be making in the fourth quarter. Over the next 2 years, we're going to be paying down $26 million of fixed-term debt alone. So that's a big number. And you can see that principal payments as we get into '23, '24 and '25 are fairly modest. So big aggressive payments of debt in the next 2 years. Now we are starting to see some supply chain headwinds as many companies and anyone who's a market participant has seen. The operations team and the purchasing team, Asem is represented here today, and Christine. They're doing a phenomenal job of making sure that we have the supply for our customers. We're taking advantage of the opportunity to make sure that we're working very closely with our clients to make sure that we have raw material available for them when a job is coming in. In some cases, we've been able to advance some of those jobs just because we got to get paper product right now, and they might not be able to get it in a couple of months. So that is helping us. We think as we see price increases, we'll be able to pass those price increases along to our clients. And we'll also be able to improve our margins. One of the things that we're very proud about is almost 2/3 of our business is under contract. Now some of those contracts are different in terms of when they allow us to pass those increases on to our clients. A lot of the transactional work is very beneficial for us and that we can adjust prices right away and pass those on immediately. Some of the longer-term stuff is a little bit more limited. But back in 2018 when we had, I think, almost 20% increases in paper, we really -- increases in the price of paper, we were able to take that learning environment to really adapt a lot of our contracts to give us better ability to pass on increases at a better rate than we historically had. So that's an opportunity for us for the coming year. Really kind of the 3 key initiatives to our financial strategy, really focus on growing cash flow, not only as we increase our margins and generate free cash flow, but also continue to drive further improvements on working capital. And we still think there's some improvements that we can wring out of the business over the next year. We're certainly going to be spending our efforts on digital innovation. And you heard some of the things we're doing from Richard and from Shelly and Karen. Digital innovation is going to be a real focus for us over the coming year. We're going to be very, very selective in terms of some of our kind of more traditional CapEx for equipment. And it's really going to be focused on things that can help drive more revenue through our Flex platform and really more digital equipment. It's not -- we're not buying any more forms presses or any labels presses. So it's really, really a focused CapEx strategy. And we're also going to be looking at -- opportunistically at M&A. We don't have any particular big targets in our headlights at this point. We see lots of opportunities. We're not looking to put more iron on the floor. And so acquisitions would have to be either something that could help us advance our tech enablement of our business or something that might help us from a technology and marketing workflow. So maybe we can find a more traditional printer that has a business that put through our marketing and technology workflow capabilities. Or it might be a small team of professional services folks that could really help us lean in hard and make -- really accelerate our digital technology. So we're not looking to buy kind of a traditional print business. So very, very focused on M&A opportunities. Chart here just kind of show a little bit of relative valuation and just kind of a summarized model here. But we're currently trading at about 3.5x EBITDA on a trailing basis. If we look at our print comparables, they're trading around 7.5x. So we think there's an opportunity for us as we continue to do the things like paying down debt, growing our revenue, keeping our margin strength. We think there's an opportunity in the short term to grow into more of a kind of print market multiple. On the kind of the next couple of comparables, tech-enabled marketing workflow companies are trading about 12.5x EBITDA. That would be really exciting to get there. But they tend to trade more on a multiple of revenues, so almost 2x revenue. Pure digital asset management companies right now are trading broadly kind of 7 to 10x. So as that business develops and that market really turns out, we think there's opportunity to capture some more of that kind of market multiple. So kind of painting the picture for where things could go, certainly, in the short term, our focus is on just creating value and trying to grow into a decent print multiple, but there's certainly lots of upside here as some of our digital capabilities really accelerate. So in summary, why invest in DCM? Thanks, everyone, for coming here and having some confidence in us and seeing what we're up to. Really 3 things I want to leave you with. There's opportunities as consumer movements return to more normal levels for our revenue to continue to strengthen, for margins to continue to grow, and that should drive bottom line results. We think there's value creation opportunities as some of our tech projects really take hold. And that print-first to digital-first transaction -- or transition, I can tell you, is really happening. Listening into sales calls and listening into some of our operations calls, everyone is thinking about it, and the level of engagement is really high. So it's really exciting to see that. And then continuing to pay down debt. So we're going to keep focused on that. So those are some of the big opportunities we see ahead. In result, there's kind of 5 things that we've closed off a couple of our earnings calls with in terms of building both a better and a bigger business. And the 5 buckets are: talent; and we think we've got a great team; business intelligence, we're starting to use some of the tools we have in our new systems to really drive better insights into our business; we've got lots of operational excellence initiatives; our client engagement levels are really high; and tech-enabled services, I think a lot of this presentation today has been focused on profiling that. So hopefully, that's given you a bit of a flavor for some of the great things we're working on. Right. Now I'd like to let Richard close.

Okay. Thank you, James. Thank you, James. And thank you to Natalie, to Shelly and to Karen as well for great presentations today. And also thank you to the entire DCM leadership team and the DCM associates across the country as well as our associates in the U.S. The journey started about 8 months ago, right? And you can see it's been an accelerated journey. And I am super happy with the progress that we're making. And also thank you to all of our shareholders for the support you provide every day. So I'm just going to wrap it here and close with a couple of things. So hopefully, it's clear to everybody today that our strategy of moving from a print-first company to a digital-first company with workflow management and digital asset management, that's our strategy. Hopefully, that's clear, right? That was one of the expectations we -- I sort of started the meeting with. And secondly, and thank you, James, for going through the details of how we're going to build both a better and a bigger business. The 5% growth plan, getting us to north of $300 million, back north of $300 million. The 35% to 40% gross margin target, I think, it's well within hand. A lot of strategic revenue management opportunities and managing mix and more digital. We all know that the margin in digital is significantly higher than it is in paper. So lots of opportunities for value creation from a gross margin perspective. Our SG&A, as James said, we're operating at we call ZOG, right, zero overhead growth. And as revenue flows, we'll see that easily in target in that 18% to 20% range. And of course, our adjusted EBITDA in the 18% to 22%. So I want to thank everybody for being here today. I really appreciate all of our investors being here. Also thank everybody for joining us online. For those that are here, we're going to have a little reception and walk around and talk to our leadership team, have a look at our office. Thanks, as I said, to the prior tenants, for fitting this office out beautifully for us. We've got a great theater in here you got to see. Our leadership team is available, and we've got 3 rooms you can sort of wander through if you want to ask any questions about our tech capabilities. We've got Shelly, who's going to be talking about ASMBL in one of the rooms. We've got Karen, who's going to actually take you through more -- a few more details on DCMFlex, if you're interested. And we've got Barbara, who's going to talk about our marketing strategy and create our proven services. So thank you very much, and that closes the formal agenda for today. I appreciate it. Enjoy your time in the office. Cassandra?

Richard, sorry, we have a question online for James.

A question for James. Okay. Sure. You guys got one question before we close. You're the only thing standing between reception and -- go ahead.

So James, can you talk more about the negative FCF in 2019? What are -- what were the factors there? And how much was related to the ERP system issues?

Yes. The factors were ERP, and that was the factor. As anyone who's been following us over that period knew that things went -- well, it did not go well. But you know what, our working capital balloons in 2019 as we tidied up our billings and then we accelerated the collections in 2020. And so that was really the issue there. We had to put in some more of that high-priced debt. But fortunately, our partners at Crown Capital came and helped and as well as some insiders. And we've repaid or refinanced all that money now. So we're in a much better position.

Yes. I'll just build on that, and some have heard me say this before. I'm glad I wasn't here for the implementation of ERP, but I'm glad the team did it. So I'm glad I'm here after. Because the business intelligence we're now pulling from the data that we're collecting in our ERP system is outstanding. And we're using that to our advantage. In fact, many of the targets I put up here today are as a result of the knowledge we have. We say knowledge is power, right, the knowledge we now have as a result of this hard implementation of the ERP. So it is delivering a lot of value. So what do we say? You got to have pain to get gain. So the guys went through the pain, and we get to now deliver the gain. So it was -- I guess hoping that answers the question. Obviously, there was an impact in 2019, but we're getting the benefit from it now. Okay. So that's it, right? Enjoy, and we're around for any questions, guys. Thank you very much, guys. Appreciate it.