Dayforce, Inc. (DAY) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. Well, good afternoon, everybody. Dan Jester, BMO software research here. We've got another great session this afternoon with Dayforce. So we have David Ossip, Chairman and CEO; as well as Jeremy Johnson, CFO. And we really appreciate both of you taking the time to chat with us today. In terms of logistics, please, let's keep this interactive. Shoot me an e-mail with your questions. There's a Q&A feature in the webcast, where you can also drop a question and send it to me. And I'll get those incorporated in the conversation as soon as you send them. So thank you, everybody, for your time.

So David, everyone on this line knows about Dayforce. And so I think instead of sort of going into the company background, I think we should just kind of jump right into it. And I think the #1 question we're getting, sort of big picture, high level, is how are you seeing sort of the buying environment evolve as the year has progressed? We've heard sort of a variety of data points from sort of B2B enterprise software. And I'd love to start the conversation with what you're seeing on the ground today.

Thanks, Daniel. We're still seeing a healthy buying environment this year, which I've commented, I believe, throughout. A part of it is that the way that we typically approach customers is with the overall message of more automation, less integration, less manual workarounds, less manual errors, less FTEs, higher efficiencies, better experience obviously, better reporting. And what that means in practical terms is that our sales team goes into a prospect, and we workflow out for them their HR stack. And typically, we find that they are using 12 different products. And for each of those 12 different products, they're paying either a licensing or subscription fee. They generally have a few FTEs that are administrating each of those 12 different systems. There's usually a separate integration platform that they're paying for and as well as additional FTEs. And finally, they're trying to aggregate the data using another piece of software for reporting and another few FTEs maintaining reporting. And when they move to Dayforce, you get that 12:1 simplification. And then we quantify for them. We effectively go in and we say, this is your investment cost of implementation. And once you go live, this will be your software subscription reduction because you're going from 12 different subscriptions just to Dayforce. And here's the FTE savings that you'll have from an administrative perspective and as well, we'll increase your compliance. And you will probably get more accurate overtime type of spending. And this is your cash flow IRR you'll get on the system, which typically is in the 200 to 500% range over the life of a contract, 3 to 5 years. That messaging resonates very well in today's environment. In today's environment are 3 central themes. The first is people are being mindful about their investments. The second part about it is that they're looking for simplification. So no one wants to have 12 different vendors in order to negotiate and to manage with. A singular vendor that they can manage obviously gives a lot of benefit. And the third one has to do with AI that they want to make sure that the investments that they're making are going to move into AI. And of course, in order to deliver any form of AI, it starts with the data. And if your data is spread from 12 systems, you can't do anything. Whereas if you have all the data nicely formatted into a single database, all of a sudden, the possibilities of gen AI and other forms of machine learning become very real today.

That's a great overview. And so it sounds like that the ROI theme in the totality, no matter kind of how you get there, is really resonating in the environment. Has your pitch around this, from a sales motion, changed though? Because if I go back and I listen to you from a year ago, there's definitely focus on ROI. But maybe it didn't sound like it was the #1 sort of leading point to unlock that customer engagement. Has that sort of messaging evolved?

We've always had the messaging around quantifiable value. And that goes back to the founding of Dayforce, where at the time, we spoke about making our managers think like a CFO. We've spoken about it in the way that we develop products, which is we identify that measure that's going to be impacted by the feature that we're building. And we have to be able to quantify the benefit and convert it into a money benefit for the customer. So it is -- what has changed is over the last 4 years, we have built a very deep system of record, which is core HR, and very deep and very wide talent capabilities. And so now when we approach a customer, there are 2 ways that we simplify. The first is, if you're a major market enterprise account, which for us would go to about 12,000 employees, so about 700 to 12,000, we're looking at 12:1, which is we're going to simplify all the talent component, system of record, time and pay and benefits into one system. The other area that we find that we have the right to and that we do win is when you are a very large organization, which for us begins at 12,000 and goes into many hundreds of thousands of employees, and those organizations typically are global. And when you look at the simplification for these large global companies, you will see simplification of 90 different systems to one. And of course, in those cases, each of different geos would have a different system of record, different paces and different time system. So you don't need to have the module density. But rather, if you have the geo span, the simplification message in a quantifiable value is equally strong.

That's fantastic. And so maybe we can spend a few moments on, David, what you're working on these days. Obviously, I know you travel a lot. You spend a lot of time with customers, a lot of time on the product. But I'd love to get a sense of where your incremental priorities have -- are shifting you today.

So when we look at the overall company, I believe we've executed fantastically well. If I go back to the time of the IPO today, we've done everything that we actually set out to do. And so our focus, as you know, is planning out the next 5 or 6 years, which is a blend between 2 different areas. One is growth and one is free cash flow. And that's a bit of a pivot for the organization. And so a lot of what we're doing now at the Executive Operating Committee, which is where we run the company, is really building out what is the actual focus areas for the organization, so that we are really allocating resources where we have that right to win and where we can do that in a very profitable manner. So if we look at our native payroll and our unified payroll strategy, the focus over there is can we cover the majority of the market with a set of native payroll or payroll engine capabilities? And I think we're doing very, very nicely on that. And even from a go-to-market perspective, making sure that we are focusing on prospects where we know we have the right to win, which are the 2 kind of scenarios that I spoke about.

Got you. Maybe this is a helpful point to actually talk about native payroll because I think you just launched Singapore recently, and you've been adding a bunch of capabilities there over the globe over the last year. Maybe just take a snapshot like where we are in terms of that rollout and where you would expect us to be over the next year or 2 as we progress further along the countries that matter.

So currently, we own payrolls in 22 different countries. They're broken down between 10 native engines and 12 unified engines. Regardless if it is a native engine or a unified engine, the user experience for the customer is the same, that you have the Dayforce payroll screen that you use to manage your pay groups, view the pay slips and the registries and such of the actual payroll data. Next year, we'll be adding Mexico, which is actually one of the unified engines that we acquired from ADAM. We're now doing the build-out of Mexico natively. And as we go forward, we'll look at doing a few more of the unified to Dayforce. Across those 22 different countries, we cover about 65% of the global TAM, which for us is a lot of market. And when I look at our actual business today, we've got just less than a 3% market share of what are all our right-to-win markets. If we can take that to a little bit above 6%, we can hit the $5 billion growth revenue number that we're looking for by 2031. And obviously, by focusing again on these 22 different tiers where we own the actual payroll engine, it does allow us to reach that. And the other point that I would make is that we are much more than a payroll company. When we talk about the 12:1 simplification, payroll is one module. So we have a very, very wide SKU and a list of SKUs that we're able to go to market with. And depending on the actual customer, the quantifiable value comes from the simplification of the module that make the most sense for them at the time.

Okay. So maybe moving on to another sort of product set of questions around Dayforce Flex, interesting announcement there recently. Can you just sort of help the folks on the line understand kind of what is the pain point that that's solving for your customers that have contingent workers? And just sort of how that fits into the broader talent focus that you've been describing, David?

So firstly, we focus on customers that have a high degree of frontline workers. That's where we are, by far, the strongest in the markets. And whether we're selling our SaaS product, whether we're selling our Dayforce Flex, the focus are organizations that typically have a large degree of hourly and part-time workers. Alongside those hourly -- those full-time and part-time workers, there's an entire new economy of contingent workers, gig workers, contractors and the like. What Dayforce Flex allows an organization to do is as the managers are building out their schedules, if they have a shift that they're unable to fill because they don't have a full-time or part-time worker, it allows them to post it to the Talent Cloud. We then look at the shift and we break it down based on the skill requirements, and we match it with people in our Talent Cloud. Those people are then notified through the Dayforce Flex about the availability of the shift, and they could then say, yes, I would like to work it. When they do that, they then show up on the schedule with the other full and part-time employees. When the time is approved alongside everyone else, at that point in time, we pay the worker through the Dayforce Wallet. And we act as the system, the employer of record for the actual worker. In other words, we're responsible in Canada for the T4, on the U.S. for the W-2. We handle the background screen of the individual. We do the right-to-work validation. Where we see the Talent Cloud, it's largely from the alumni of our customers. And if you look at a typical customer, the ratio between employed people and part time -- sorry, and retired individuals is about a 1:3 ratios, between 1:2.5 to 1:3.

Okay. So I suspect though, you need to build a bigger pipeline though if this is going to scale. So do you have a process thinking in mind about how to expand the number of potential candidates? And maybe talk about sort of staffing agencies and any role they could play in this?

So first, we've obviously got a very large customer base. Remember, we have over 6,500 customers. And when we look at the alumni of their organizations, we're talking tens of millions of people. So the first place of really building out the Talent Cloud is through the activation of the customers' alumni. And obviously, as someone who's been offboarded today, you can now onboard them into the Talent Cloud. And that is a very, very large market. It also allows us to leverage our back-to-the-base sellers to now approach those customers to build out a pipeline for those types of opportunities as well. Now that being said, the way that we've built out Dayforce Flex is really a platform that if we chose, we could approach the contingent workplace vendors, the staffing agencies, and make the product available to them as well on a white-label perspective. So from a technology perspective, you have a Dayforce instance that you set up. In our case, we set it up for ourselves. And that houses all of the employees and does all of the compliance calculations, the validations. It pays them through the Dayforce Wallet using the Dayforce mobile apps and such. And then we have a new app, which is available, that communicates via the Dayforce API framework to do the onboarding of the employee, the payment of the employee, et cetera. And so we could make that available from a white-label perspective. Again, remember that this is a new product that we are testing in market. So it's not included in the Dayforce revenue guide or profitability metrics. Rather, for us, it's an opportunity over the next 2 quarters to prove out that it is a valid market or not. And at that point in time, we'll look at really how we would like to monetize or commercialize the offering. The conversations that we've had to date seem to be very promising, but we do need a few quarters to test this out.

Okay. That is a great update there. Maybe we could shift gears and talk a little bit more about the sort of other angle that you talked about, David. So on one hand, the growth algorithm and how you drive growth over the next few years. The other side of that is free cash flow. In that, maybe Jeremy, I can bring you in for a moment here to talk about free cash flow generation because it's actually a topic near and dear to many people on this line's hearts. And so maybe we can spend a moment today talking about sort of where we are today. And then maybe spend a moment like what are the things that we can drive in that future state to drive a better conversion.

Yes. Thanks, Dan. Look, I think one of the things I was actually really impressed with when I came back is the progress we've made on free cash flow to get the ball rolling. And now I think it's my and my team's job to push the organization to continue to expand free cash flow margin. So last year, I think, overall, we were around 7.5% overall free cash flow margins. That came down from about $410 million in adjusted EBITDA and had a conversion down to free cash flow in the kind of 30% range, and we can improve upon that. You improve upon that -- overall free cash flow is improving. I think we'll look to expand it a couple of percentage points this year and continue that expansion, as David mentioned, as we move towards this kind of $5 billion target trying to kind of, at that point, get towards $1 billion or $1 billion plus in free cash flow. We ultimately improve it a number of ways. One is we still got room to go in our recurring gross margins. You've heard us talk about a midrange target of around 80%. We're largely there today. We haven't seen that as a ceiling for us. I think we still have room to go there. One of the things that supports that is our ability to go back to the base and sell into our existing customer base where last year, it was around 30% of our total sales were back to the base sales. I think over the long term, we want to move that more towards a 50-50 mix. And we think we have an opportunity to do that. Back to the base sales are much more profitable and have a higher recurring gross margin than kind of a new business sale. We also have some room on professional services and other, as we talked about, continuing our move into the SI model, where we can improve the profitability on professional services. And I think last, we've got a lot of room to go in scaling G&A. So I think those are the kind of areas we talk about from a profitability improvement, and then that conversion really comes from balance sheet optimization. And that's what you're seeing me start to focus on. And when David mentioned at the beginning of the call that this is something that we're kind of training the organization on because this is -- it's a new muscle that we've got to build here, and we're working on building that.

Okay. And I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you then about float and how that affects the ability to drive free cash flow improvement. So maybe first point, like remind folks about the flow dynamics and how Dayforce is going to be affected by float in the future. And then secondly, like what does that mean for how you think about free cash flow conversion of the business?

Yes, that's great. We -- so as everyone knows, we've got around $4.5 billion of average float on an annual basis, a little higher in Q1 kind of with the tax and bonus runs and comes down in the remaining quarters. Last year, we were able to yield around [ 3.774 ] basis -- percentage points on that to get to close to about $170 million of float. This year, our current guidance has us at around $183 million. It will likely, with some of the rate cut discussions, be a little bit higher than that as we move forward. But I think a common misconception here is that we're going to have yields fall off a cliff as rates start to come down here in the coming quarters whenever it does. And our investment strategy is that we actually -- we put half of our funds, and we've done this for some period of time, about half of our funds go into a liquidity portfolio, which does have an immediate impact on our float income and our yield as rates come down. The other half goes into a core portfolio. And the core portfolio is laddered out from a few months to a number of years with an average duration of around 2 to 3 years. And we're actually still working our way up the yield curve on that core portfolio. So we believe that even with rate cuts anticipated in the coming years, the quarters and years, that our average yield will stay somewhere around this kind of 4% range and stay there through 2026, 2027 time frame. So I don't look at float as being a massive headwind that I think everybody else is expecting it to kind of drop and fall off a cliff. Certainly, it's not going to be a tailwind like it has been in the past, but I don't see it being a huge issue for us in the coming years. I don't know, David, if you have anything else to add?

Yes. When we look at float, the reality is that I think that you will see that the float -- the average yield we get on the float balances will actually increase next year and the year beyond and probably into 2027 as well. So it won't be a headwind at all during that period of time. It's obviously not going to be a massive tailwind like we saw last year and the year before, but it will continue benefiting us for quite some time.

Okay. And so maybe if I step back from that and think about some of the things that you just reflected on, Jeremy, right, if you want to change the mix of growth or if the mix is going to change to more back to the base sales, as a percentage of new business relative to where it has been, I guess, how should then I think about the big moving pieces around the growth algorithm? Because obviously, that's not adding a new client. Maybe that isn't adding even a new employee necessarily. So maybe there's a lot more PEPM associated with the growth model and maybe some other things that are affecting the growth model. So kind of how do I sort of stack order those big moving pieces in thinking about the growth algorithm? No, not this year, but like in the future state.

So first of all, our market share, as I mentioned, is less than 3%. So there is still a ton of white space for us to acquire new customers, and that remains a central part of our growth strategy. The second part about it is that we continue to expand the actual platform. We're doing that for the last, I don't know, 5, 6 years. And that gives us the ability to go back to the base and to drive additional recurring revenue from the client base. We also are continuing to go up market and to go into large enterprise and integrate into the public sector. And then we have the adjacency products such as Dayforce Flex, the Wallet and the actual like. The -- going back to the base is also tied to the overall profitability of the business. That when we go back to the base and we sell an additional module, generally, it doesn't change the cost of servicing the customer. So the additional PEPM flows directly down to the bottom line. So it's very, very important for us that we build out the back to base client motion, and we've made some nice investments in people this year, where we actually brought on the person who had run the client-based sales for Workday for the last 8 years. And he's continued to build out his team with familiar people as well. We saw that already in Q1, in terms of the results that we saw coming out of the business from that perspective. We also, obviously, as we do sell customers -- new customers, we are selling the full suite in the majority of the actual cases. And the cases where we aren't there typically are large global accounts, where we're selling multiple geos at the same time.

But even just to be clear, and I think you've said this in the past, but I just want to hammer it home. When you sell a platform deal, it doesn't mean you're selling the entire Dayforce everything. It means you're selling the core platform and you still have the ability to go and sell more to that customer in the future. Is that correct?

That's correct. And Daniel, it comes back to when we start off, we workflow out for the customer, as I said, the different modules in their HR stack. And when we're working out the IRR for the customer, we take into account how long is the subscription agreement that they have with the individual modules. So we'll say, okay, in year one, you have these 4 modules that are coming due with the other vendors. So at that point in time, we can replace those 4. And then a year out from now, you have another 4 that are coming, and a year out, you have another 4. And for us, what we'll try to do to deliver the value is we'll sell the modules that they'll be using and drive the IRR based on that, knowing -- and the customer knowing that when the next modules come due, we can replace those and deliver to them an additional subscription saving and FTE saving. And that today, in today's environment, works very well, especially when you have some of the ERP vendors that are really battling with having sold too much to the customers upfront. The customer is not using the software. And then upon renewal, they're getting very high client retention rates, but they're seeing revenue come down per customer on renewal.

Got you. Okay. So maybe to shift gears and talk about partners. You made a lot of investments here over the years. But it sounds like from the conversation we've had so far today, there's still more that can be done from a partner perspective. And so maybe just give us an update in terms of how you're seeing that evolution take place. And kind of where are we in that journey of building out sort of a true, deep, wide, global partner network?

I would argue today, we have a well-established GSI strategy in market. We have very strong partnerships with some of the largest brands out there, a lot of very large projects with groups like E&Y and Accenture. Very ingrained in some very nice global agreements as well with the guys at Deloitte. We have deep relationship with the BDO types as well, and you've seen those. Our partnerships expands, that will be BDO and [ Fink ] best practice. And then we also have kind of deep partnership with a lot of the more specialty providers, groups like HRchitect and AXL and the like. Some of them are specific to geo. Others are kind of more global in nature. Some of them are tied to specific industries and such. And so I think that's actually going very, very nicely. I would argue today that most of the large deals, we're doing. So once we're into the enterprise and large enterprise space, those deals are highly influenced by the partners. And when we look at the implementation work, the majority of them are actually being primed now by the SIs. The next step will basically be looking at ways that we can allow the partners to sell the Dayforce system on their paper. And we're beginning to talk through a number of the big SIs about that as a possibility.

Great. Maybe we can spend a moment then on your own sales force. There's -- you made some sort of very strong hires over the years and Sam Alkharrat, the most sort of recent one at the top end of the organization. How is sort of seller productivity trending? Maybe talk about retention levels. How is the sales organization sort of navigating this period of time?

I think Sam's done a fantastic job. So when we look at the quality of the pipeline, when we look at the predictability of his forecast, I think he's done tremendous things. Sam's also continued to be a talent magnet. So as you would expect, we continue to bring in very good talent into the sales organization. The individual I spoke about from the back to the client-based sales market is an example. More recently, we brought in a stellar person on the partnership side as well. So it's been very, very positive. And obviously, I speak to Sam probably more than I speak to my wife. So I have a very good working relationship with him. And I'm very optimistic and very encouraged by the results that he is -- or he kind of already delivered.

That's great. And then sort of working down through the organization, anything you'd call out in terms of either seller retention or churn or anything else that has -- that you'd call out there sort of down -- in the downmarket in the business?

Across the entire organization, not just limited to sale, we've seen a very low voluntary attrition rate. Obviously, in sales, you always will performance manage that organization, like with many with other aspects. But the retention rate has been very strong.

Okay. So I'm just going through, I got e-mailed a couple of questions, so I'm going to try to squeeze them in here. So one of the questions was around -- let me make sure I read this right. So this is about Europe, in particular, it seems. And I guess, the question was one of your competitors suggested that European enterprise markets have slowed, and you've had a really strong presence in Europe for a while. Anything in particular that you're noticing around sales cycles in Europe?

So remember that we play in markets where we have the right to win. So for us, Europe largely would be the UKI, so the U.K. and Ireland, and it would be Germany. And both of those markets seem to be quite robust. But we don't play broader than that because we're very focused on really playing where we actually can win the deals.

Okay. Do you think in the future, the European opportunity will expand beyond those core markets? Or in the near term, it's not going to be those?

Yes. We think regionally from a business perspective. So the U.S., we look at U.S., Canada, Mexico as kind of a region. We then would look at Australia and New Zealand as a region. We look at Singapore and kind of APJ as a region. And when we go into EU, we think really around Germany and then we think around the DACH countries. So the first step is obviously Germany, making sure we get good traction and good momentum and then expanding out to the other DACH countries. There's also the Nordics that we'll be looking at. Eastern Europe, possibly at some point in time, but it still remains highly, highly fragmented in kind of Eastern Europe. But there's -- if I look at the German market, it's massive.

Yes. So another question about AI and the ability to drive pricing from AI. I guess, the specifics of the question is as you release new AI-centric features, how much of a pricing opportunity is this going to be for you in the future? And is it going to affect numbers this year? Or is this not a 2024 story?

So the first part about it, our type of application actually lends very well to gen AI. The way it works in our application is that the landing page is something we call the Hub Experience, which is a content management system. And from a Hub perspective, you can have multiple pages. And for each page, you specify the audience or the content on that page. All of the content that a customer now loads up into the Hub, and it's a beautiful tool that they can create these wonderful experiences on both web and mobile, gets indexed from an AI perspective. So a customer today could load up a paternity policy or a job share policy. And once they've done that, for the audiences of that content, the users can now ask questions. I'm having a baby. When can I take [ home ]? How much will I get paid? What's the job share program? What are the company values? How do I do this and that? And it answers it back very, very, very nicely. We also have loaded the system with all the implementation and the knowledge bases, so you can now ask questions about how do I do this. And the system comes back very, very precise with the underlying link where to go to and the knowledge content of how to actually do it. And you'll find that everywhere in our app, you'll see the Copilots throughout the application. The way that we're monetizing is tied to what we're doing on the pricing side. So we're moving now to more of a bundling type of strategy, where you have a good-better-best type of approach. And the AI features are typically in the best package, and it's a way of having more of the customer population move into a higher bundling in order to actually leverage the AI capability.

Okay. All right. One last one that we got e-mailed in. How important is it for you to maintain Dayforce recurring growth above 20%?

Look, we look at it from a 2031 perspective. And at that time, we want to get a balance between what I'd call durable growth for the business and free cash flow. The growth rate of the business is largely determined by the amount that we invest in pipeline. So currently, we run the business at about a 4 to 5x pipeline, which means if we're trying to get $1 of sale, we need to get $5 of pipeline. There's a cost of building our pipeline. If we build out more pipeline than we have the ability to service, well, then that's a wasted investment. And so the balance for us, which is, hey, we would like to get to that 20% free cash flow conversion, that determines really what the upper bound of pipeline development and pipeline servicing, sales and marketing expense can be. And so our target at the moment is hitting the 2031 numbers. And at that point in time, we can reevaluate based on where the markets are. Do we take the growth rate back up to a 30% level? Or do we maintain it more at that 15% to 20% type of level?

Okay. Well, great conversation. Unfortunately, we're out of time. So David, Jeremy, really appreciate you spending some time with us today. So thank you very much.

I appreciate it, Daniel. Pleasure to be here. Thank you.

Thanks for having us.