IZEA Worldwide, Inc. ($IZEA)

Ladies and gentlemen, greetings, and welcome to the IZEA First Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Sandra Carbone, SVP, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary of IZEA, Inc. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to IZEA's earnings call covering the first quarter of 2026. I'm Sandra Carbone, SVP, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary at IZEA and joining me on the call are IZEA's Chief Executive Officer, Patrick Venetucci; and IZEA's Chief Financial Officer, Peter Biere. Thank you for being with us today. Earlier this afternoon, the company issued a press release detailing IZEA's performance during Q1 2026. If you would like to review those details, please visit our Investor Relations website at izea.com/investors. Before we begin, please take note of the safe harbor paragraph included in today's press release covering IZEA's financial results and be advised that some of the statements that we make today regarding our business, operations and financial performance, may be considered forward-looking, and such statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. We encourage you to consider the disclosures contained in our SEC filings for a detailed discussion of these factors. Our commentary today will also include the non-GAAP financial measures of adjusted EBITDA and revenues excluding divested operations. Reconciliations between GAAP and non-GAAP metrics to our reported results can also be found in our earnings release issued earlier today and in our publicly available filings. And with that, I would now like to introduce and turn the call over to IZEA's Chief Executive Officer, Patrick Venetucci. Patrick?

Thank you, Sandra, and good afternoon, everyone. In 2025, we made a deliberate strategic shift away from SMB accounts toward enterprise clients. Over the past 12 months, we intentionally exited a significant portion of our SMB business, which was characterized by smaller nonrecurring and often unprofitable project work. This disciplined action reset our economic model, resulting in a net profit swing of $18.9 million during 2025. As expected, revenue in Q1 2026 declined year-over-year, primarily reflecting the impact of this transition. However, this quarter represents an important milestone marking the completion of our exit from the SMB model and the full transition to an enterprise-focused business. Today, our client portfolio is predominantly composed of large enterprise brands, including Warner Bros., Casera, Nestle, Danone, Georgia Pacific and Stellantis. We have meaningfully reduced our total number of accounts by more than 1/3 while increasing the quality and scale of our relationships. Many of our largest clients are now recurring revenue streams that are more predictable and durable than our prior SMB mix. While we did experience a temporary slowdown across our top 3 accounts in the quarter, this was more than offset by rapid growth across newer enterprise clients and contributions from new business wins. We added clients such as Hulu, ASUS, Garanimals and my Roth, and our pipeline remains healthy, giving us confidence about achieving growth for the year. Importantly, over the past 12 months, our enterprise portfolio has grown at a healthy double-digit rate, outpacing overall industry growth. By streamlining our client base, we have increased average revenue per account by more than 33% and established a more consistent and scalable profitability profile at the account level. To support this trajectory, we've added a dozen new team members to our growth organization lending deep, influencer marketing expertise with broader enterprise marketing experience. We continue to build momentum creatively and operationally. During the quarter, we delivered standout work for brands, including Jeep, Warner Bros. and Netflix. We also launched Z, our proprietary creator economy marketing operations platform infused with AI, which we believe will further differentiate our capabilities and drive efficiency at scale. In parallel, we have been highly active in the M&A market, engaging with a number of potential acquisition targets that would expand our capabilities and accelerate our growth strategy. As we deepen and expand our presence within these enterprise client organization, our role continues to evolve from vendor to strategic partner. We believe this positions IZEA to become an increasingly indispensable marketing partner to some of the world's leading brands. With that, I'll turn the call over to Peter Biere, our Chief Financial Officer, for a closer look at the financial results.

Thank you, Patrick, and good afternoon, everyone. Earlier today, we reported our first quarter 2026 results and filed our Form 10-Q with the SEC. I'll focus on the key drivers of our first quarter performance, frame our results in the context of our strategic repositioning and path to profitability and close with an update on liquidity. As Patrick outlined, 2025 marked the deliberate reset of the business, -- we exited a substantial portion of lower-margin nonrecurring SMB activity and reoriented towards larger enterprise relationships while materially reducing our cost structure. This transition is nearly complete. Both contract bookings and revenues associated with noncore SMB customers will be substantially behind us after the second quarter reducing their impact on year-over-year comparisons. While most of our cost actions are in place, we will continue to optimize our structure and capital allocation. Overall, we believe the business is on a much stronger footing positioning us for more consistent profitable growth in the second half of 2026. With that context in mind, I'll turn to our first quarter results. Managed Services bookings were down $1.2 million year-over-year with roughly $1 million related to timing across several enterprise accounts and the remainder from noncore runoff. We expect these accounts to normalize with a more pronounced impact in the second half of 2026. As a reminder, revenue from managed service bookings is recognized over the life of the underlying contract with the period from contract signing to final revenue recognition averaging approximately 7 months. Revenue was $6.6 million, down from $8 million in the prior year quarter. The net decline is entirely due to our shift away from noncore customers. Our enterprise accounts continue to grow. And based on customer engagement, we expect meaningful growth in the second half of this year. Cost of revenue, which includes direct production costs, direct internal labor and certain overheads reflect stable gross margins in both comparative periods. Operating expenses were $4.1 million for the quarter, down 3% year-over-year. Sales and marketing costs decreased by $0.2 million, primarily due to lower commission and headcount costs. G&A increased about 3% over the prior year period, driven by modestly higher payroll-related costs, partially offset by reductions in other areas. Overall, our cost structure is largely aligned with our current operating model, and we expect expenses to remain relatively stable through the balance of this year. For the quarter, we reported a net loss of $0.8 million or minus $0.04 per share on 17.3 million shares outstanding compared to a net loss of $0.1 million in the prior year period, or minus $0.01 per share on 17 million shares outstanding. The year-over-year change primarily reflects lower revenue in the quarter, partially offset by the benefits of our reduced cost structure. Adjusted EBITDA for the first quarter was minus $0.5 million compared to minus $0.1 million in the prior year quarter. A reconciliation of adjusted EBITDA to net income is included in the earnings release. As of March 31, 2026, we had $46.5 million in cash and cash equivalents and no debt, a decrease of $4.4 million from the beginning of the year. The change was primarily driven by working capital timing, including higher accounts receivable at the end of the quarter that were collected in early April and the payout of prior year incentive compensation along with normal fluctuations in other working capital accounts. Turning to capital allocation. The Board authorized a $10 million share repurchase program in the fall of 2024. To date, we have repurchased 523,268 shares for approximately $1.3 million primarily under our initial Rural 10b5-1 trading plan. Our current trading plan is scheduled to expire on May 15, 2026, and we expect to adopt a new plan with updated purchase parameters based on market conditions. We continue to view share repurchases as an attractive use of capital when our stock trades below the board's view of our intrinsic value and believe our balance sheet positions us well to support both organic growth initiatives and to pursue strategic acquisition opportunities. Thank you for your time today. We'll now open the call for questions.

[Operator Instructions] We take the first question from the line of Chris Tuttle from Rue Caterpillar.

Thanks I've got 2 really. And 1 of them is now that you guys are on this solid footing, you've gotten exited that SMB business. What's -- what would you put as kind of a top governor on your ability to grow sequentially over the course of the next year or 2. What are sort of the gating factors right now?

Chris, it's Patrick. Yes, I wouldn't say there's any meaningful gating issues. I mean, as we've said before, we're reaching higher and wider with our clients, and we're getting more assignments given us by many of our enterprise clients. So I wouldn't call it a gating factor, but just kind of an issue of how fast we're getting traction, how fast can we activate the different opportunities that we have with our clients.

Okay. And just the relief of Z, help you with that? Or maybe provide a little context for.

Yes. No, Z is definitely opening more doors Z is certainly, as the demand for greater economy campaigns, not just goes up, but is going up in terms of scale, right? So we have many, many clients who are coming to us saying that the days of testing this with 5 and 10 clients are over, and now they're trying to scale it up. In fact, in the past couple of weeks, I met with a CMO of a major global brand who is working with 1,000 influencers at a time. And his quote to me was that he wants a 10x that and was very interested in Z. So Z is certainly -- it's certainly going to be something that's going to enable us to scale this and operate more efficiently.

Okay. And my other question was just regarding how you guys are thinking about M&A opportunities in your sector, either adjacencies vertically or horizontally. Just curious if you think it's a target-rich environment, you think there's some things that you can do this year that may accelerate your path? I'm just curious to know how you're kind of thinking about it right now.

So the way we're thinking about it is we're looking -- we prioritized a number of different capabilities that we would like to get, but we're also trying to stay flexible enough knowing that you can always -- can always find exactly what you want. So we have a well-defined M&A strategy. The priorities are to add new capabilities, not necessarily just to add look alike to get scale -- the new capabilities are capabilities that would allow us to cross-sell into these enterprise clients, where we see it going is that right now, it's very much kind of a narrow pure-play offering of creator partnerships across the industry. But in the future, what we're seeing is that enterprise clients in particular, are looking to have a more integrated offering, integrated across content, across media, across commerce, like social commerce, for example. And so we're actively out there having discussions. I would characterize it as you say it as a target-rich environment. However, with that said, there's a lot of deals according to the investment banking community that there's a bid price ask spread that sometimes is insurmountable. We're being very disciplined. We want to pay fair prices, but also don't want to overpay. Planning and using the capital efficiently and responsibly. But we're very encouraged based on the number of active conversations that we have and relationships that we're building.

Okay. And is there any way to talk about your current numbers like apples-to-apples or same-store sales where we factor out the SMB business and the project work that you didn't want to continue on with in 2026 to kind of consider like what is the core revenue and/or bookings growth look like if you strip out some of the business that you've intentionally tried to avoid.

Yes. We're not reporting to that level of detail, but as I said in my comments, over the past 12 months, our enterprise portfolio has grown at a double-digit rate. So that's our attempt at sharing with you exactly what you're asking for. And we really believe that the underlying base as fast as we can -- as soon as we can melt away this project work and client base that the underlying health of the enterprise accounts as a group is really encouraging. And as I've said in the past, too, it's growing faster than the market. So that's what we're trying to get to as fast as we can.

Okay. And last thing for your consideration is should investors think that at this point, we would -- it would be -- like we'll see bookings begin to trend upwards with Q2 at this point in the trajectory?

Yes. I mean obviously, we're not giving specific guidance, but that we are focused on increasing bookings. And as Peter said, there has been some timing issues that we ran into this quarter with some of our larger clients, whic already, good things are happening with some of these clients. So stay tuned for Q2.

[Operator Instructions] We take the next question from the line of Bill Church from TG AR Capital.

We're seeing many consumer discretionary companies stumbling and missing numbers and talking about a slower economy and that sort of thing. And I wonder if that -- to the extent you're seeing that, does that increase a higher angst on their part to hire somewhere like you to help them sort of double down on their message. And at the same time, I'm sure they're also looking at what the cost or expenses are and maybe kicking out some that haven't been as effective. Just trying to get a sense.

Thanks for the question, Bill. Yes, I would say it varies sector by sector in the CPG industry, we have seen tariffs and inflation, in particular, impact their business. And so some of that -- some of the slowdown we referred to was a result of that. But what we're also seeing too is that it can't last forever, right? These are very large enterprise serious professional marketers, and they are already we're seeing that they're releasing some of those. So that's why we characterized it as a slowdown. And it's not the case that we've lost any of these enterprise clients. But clearly, there are some macroeconomic environment factors at play here.

[Operator Instructions] As there are no further questions from the participants, I would now hand the conference over to Sandra Carbone for her closing comments.

Thank you, Ryan, and thank you, everyone, for joining us this afternoon. As a reminder, a replay of today's call will be available shortly on our website, izea.com/investors. We appreciate your continued interest and support, and hope you'll join us for our next conference call to discuss our second quarter 2026 results.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, the conference of IZEA, Inc. has now concluded. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your lines.