Pivotree Inc. (PVT) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

[Call starts abruptly] future events. Any such information is subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements. For more information on the risks, uncertainties and assumptions relating to the forward-looking statements; please refer to Pivotree's public filings, which are available on SEDAR. During the call, we will reference certain non-IFRS financial measures. Although we believe these measures provide useful supplemental information about our financial performance, they're not recognized measures and do not have standardized meanings under IFRS. Please see our MD&A for additional information regarding our non-IFRS financial measures, including for reconciliations to the nearest IFRS measures. Now I'd like to turn the call over to Pivotree's CEO, Bill Di Nardo.

Thank you, Dennis. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us for our fourth quarter 2024 conference call. With me today is Mo Ashoor, our Chief Financial Officer. As we normally do every quarter, we published a CEO letter in conjunction with our earnings results; that is available on our website. It's filed on SEDAR and I'll be covering a lot of that material here today. I'm going to start just with a quick year-end review since this was the end of our fiscal year and then slide into the fourth quarter results. So as everybody knows by now, 2024 was a year full of change, but we did set ourselves up for success in '25 following some of those key changes. As we noted in our last earnings call, we executed changes that amounted to an annualized reduction of about $8.5 million in costs. And then what shouldn't be a surprise, we delivered $1.7 million of adjusted EBITDA in Q4. And that's a record high since going public in 2020. Again, I'll also point out too that the only adjustments are non-cash-based compensation, so adjusted EBITDA is a really good indicator. I'm happy to say that we delivered these results while continuing to invest in product and go-to-market initiatives. So let's talk about product for a second, SKU build, in particular. This year, we added 1.4 million SKUs to our SKU Build repository, bringing the total up to around 2 million total SKUs. And these additions were all done using our automation tools at a very low cost. Additionally, we've seen some great progress on the SKU building go-to-market. You'll see some of that reflected in our bookings for the quarter and the kind of conversations we're having with customers now and that library is factoring into those conversations. Control Tower, and just as a quick reminder of Control Tower, it offers real-time observability to dashboard across technologies and platforms. It's really a combination of monitoring and real-time reporting. Last year, we kind of reset that platform by adding new applications that we integrate to. So we completed integrations to VTEX, Fluent Commerce and Precisely, which is formerly EnterWorks, in addition to the original dashboard, which was Fluent. So now we have active dashboards across a number of the key elements in the commerce ecosystem, so your data systems, your commerce systems and your order management systems. And we actually now have customers that straddle multiple dashboards. Our legacy managed services, and yes, we're going to keep talking about this for a while. We've been talking about the decline in this category since 2020 and they continued today. In '24, we started exposing that the revenue and bookings metrics just to shed more light on the segmentation of that business. So this segment continues to decline. It did so by about 30% this year. And again, we see further declines as customers migrate to new technologies. We did move more customers last year and on to platforms that we manage. And so we will see that revenue change from legacy to our more growth segments. By the end of this year, we will be down to our last few customers in the at least Oracle ATG segment. And finally, it was a big year fulfilling some key roles in '24. Kyle joined us as our Chief Revenue Officer in Q2 and that was a role that had been vacant for some time. And we did feel the pain point of not having an expert in the revenue side. He's brought new focus to the revenue ownership. And he's doing so with more capital-efficient efforts in that area. Our TCV bookings in 2024 were up 8% compared to '23. And TCV bookings for our managed and IP solutions was up 14% over that same previous period. Cliff joined as our CPO in Q1 to take direction of our core products. Cliff has played a key role in creating a more agile engineering process for all of our products. And he's really improved on the process for capturing customer insights and converting them into delivery work. And as I said, he's really led the capabilities of building product in the way that the engineering teams are assembled and working now. So a big year of change for us, a lot of foundations being set. And I think you're seeing the first set of results, which are step number one, let's see the bottom line improve. So across the business, we had a decent quarter of TCV bookings. It's up 8% compared to Q4 2023. I will detail some of the highlights from this quarter's bookings around mix in the next slide. We've seen positive indications in our MIPS category and that success really driven mostly by SKU build. We had a record quarter of $6.8 million in TCV bookings in this bucket. I've been consistent though and I just again want to reiterate about the nature of this category right now is it's lumpy. These are some fairly large contracts. They're not small ones when they finally close. And the good news, though, for us, at least is these contracts are now looking like multiyear, so they're creating more visibility. It doesn't mean it will flatten that revenue curve. So don't expect we have a huge lift next quarter because we've got big bookings. What we're really starting to get is longer term visibility into this segment. And so that makes us happy because it also is easier to manage from a profitability perspective. And I just walked you through, but 2024 was that significant transformation around EBITDA and all of those efforts. And again, this was a large effort by a great team to shift a lot of management layers out of the business and drove $1.7 million of adjusted EBITDA. So it's a 9% margin on adjusted EBITDA and its 8-point-something on an EBITDA basis. So again, you can see good growth in the bottom line. And I think what you're also going to see is consistency there. MIPS, is again, an important part of how these bookings are working. So TCV bookings in Q4 were down from our recent trend. I think I've articulated in the past. We've been averaging 19% to 20%. But I think what's really important to note is to see that progress in MIPS. That's one of our growth segments. And it's also important to note that the LMS is making up less of the bookings. So MIPS matters when you're looking at how the TCV bookings or total contract value is going, so again really strong quarter of MIPS, $6.8 million, nearly doubling quarter-over-quarter and up 77% compared to Q4 '23. For the full year, MIPS TCV bookings totaled $16.2 million and that was up 14% versus last year. Again, really, the key driver here was substantial long-term bookings and SKU build. And these large deals reinforce the strength of the offering. This is really a category that I would suggest. There are people that are doing manual solutions out there. The industry has existed for a long, long time. We're trying to disrupt it. And the key is proving our capabilities. And then what we're finding is once customers believe we can deliver, they want to start accelerating. So there's a little bit of a burn-in upfront for proving credibility, and then there's the ability to accelerate on the back. Q4 did mark a bit of a pullback in PS TCV bookings compared to our recent trending. We recorded $9.8 million of bookings in Q4. This is down quarter-over-quarter and versus 2023. But the full year PS bookings are only down about 3%. Again, we find PS is a bit lumpy and it goes in cycles. So it is down modestly. We are seeing some upside on the move forward. The LMS averaged 5.9 million in bookings through the first 3 quarters, but it was down to 1.6 million. And again, I think this is exactly indicative of what you would expect in a business that is declining. And we've been talking about it for years. You are going to see the tailing off now. And this is, again, I think, a good first signal that at 1.6 million, the folks that were going to re-sign, they've re-signed in that 6.5 million, 7.1 million and 4 million and now we're down to the final small deals. And this will persist, I think, until we're completely finished. As Mo is going to share in more detail in a minute, we have sized our operations to manage within the revenue range of $17 million to $19 million. And again, this is really looking forward into LMS declines, making sure with the changes we made that we run a positive EBITDA business in the $17 million to $19 million. Now we have the ability to produce the kind of EBITDA that we're showing you. There's upside on that at the higher end of the range. And we expect that higher end to come from our investment in sales and marketing, but not until really Q3 or Q4. So overall, we've set great foundations for '25. I think the first number you're seeing evidence of that is EBITDA. And as we've maintained for quite some time, keep an eye on the bookings. Bookings are going to tell you when and how revenue is rebounding and starting to get back on a growth path. So again, I think you've got all the metrics you need to know where we're headed. Pass it over to you, Mo.

All right. Thanks, Bill. So revenue was $18.2 million in Q4. It was down $2.8 million or 13% year-over-year. As Bill has been mentioning, the primary driver of the year-over-year change is the expected decline from our legacy managed services, which was down 27% year-over-year and 30% on a full year perspective. We expect to see this trend to continue with the LMS category being a smaller portion of our total revenue over time, as we've mentioned in the past. MIPS revenue was $3.4 million in Q4. It's an 11% sequential decline, a very modest increase on a full year perspective to 2023. With the record total contract value bookings in this category, we are seeing positive indication of future revenue growth. And it should support our expectation of growth in the coming quarters. During the second half of 2023, I don't want to mention last year 2023. Second half, we saw mix. And we've mentioned this on prior results. We had a ramp-up in SKU transaction volume and backlog that SKU volumes the customers wanted us to work through and clear, which we have, and now we're seeing that stabilized in Q4. So that's really part of the ramp-up that we saw in the early part in what we're seeing is kind of contributing to the sequential decline for MIPS. Professional services revenues were $10.4 million. It's up 2% sequential and flat year-on-year. We expect to continue to see -- we do see new demand in this segment to support new phases of work and in some cases, completely new projects. So we're optimistic even with all the uncertainty that's out there. We're optimistic we're still seeing demand to support our PS services. Our Q4 gross margin was 44%, down from 46.7% last year. Its normalizing back in line with our results through 2024 with the exclusion of Q3, which we had numbers which contained and we reported last quarter contained onetime items that were now passed and Q4 again back to normal levels. Looking at the chart on the right, we represent the adjusted EBITDA OpEx, which reconciles to the reported adjusted EBITDA. Adjusted operating expense in Q4 was $6.3 million. It was down nearly $3 million from the prior year Q4 2023 and down versus the recent $8.1 million in Q3 of 2024. These results were largely driven by the restructure. With the restructure efforts from last quarter, this Q4 contributed to delivering $1.7 million of the adjusted EBITDA, representing 9% of our revenues. Included in the $1.7 million was an FX benefit of $0.5 million. During Q4, there was no restructuring-related add-back to EBITDA. The EBITDA is closely aligned to adjusted EBITDA, as Bill had mentioned, with the adjustment for noncash compensation. As Bill has noted, we have rightsized the business to deliver healthy single-digit adjusted EBITDA with a $17 million to $19 million, revenue business. Moving on to the balance sheet. We ended the quarter with cash of about $3.9 million that consumed about $1.6 million in cash from the previous quarter. The consumption is due to timing of working capital and the restructure payments. When you isolate those out, we are showing a trend towards generating cash. We generated $1.7 million in the green bar from core operations, which aligns closely to our adjusted EBITDA. We consumed $1.2 million of cash related to the accrued restructuring, which will be declining over the coming quarters. And there was $1.6 million tied up in working capital, which we have a clear path to recover on. As mentioned, the business is managing towards operating cash flow positive. And we believe this will be accomplished for the reasons I mentioned above. We expect to deliver this while continuing to make the necessary investments to grow our business. So as a reminder, in addition to the $3.9 million of cash, we have access to our credit facility with National Bank of Canada. We have recently decreased that line from $12 million to $8 million, plus we have access to an additional $15 million accordion. The decrease in the line was to align the credit facility to the current size of our business and not oversubscribed for a line of credit that we wouldn't be able to access and what the business requires. And it also reduces our overall standby fees. I'll turn it back to Bill now for a closing summary.

Thanks, Mo. The team continues to find ways to operate more efficiently. We're seeing good leading indicators with our new solutions. Again, we've got really 3 areas of focus for next -- for this coming year, right? Continue to execute on, close our new logo pipeline initiatives, again, we're seeing green shoots. And we're really happy with the work that both Cliff and Kyle are doing. We continue to invest in growth of our MIPS solutions and revenue. So again, we're more efficient. You'll notice from my letter that we are reducing the R&D spend, but not eliminating it. We're being more capital efficient again in how we're bringing these things to market and then number 1 top priority this year to generate EBITDA and cash flow. And again, just based on where we are today, what we can see coming forward, we're very confident we'll meet the commitments we're making. So thank you for taking the time to attend the call. I look forward to updating you on our progress on the next call, which, if I remember correctly, is only 45 days away. So we'll be doing this all over again soon. Over to you, Dennis, to take questions from our analysts.

Yes. Thank you, Bill. We'll now take questions from the analysts. [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Max Ingram with Canaccord Genuity.

Bill, in your CEO letter, you mentioned the planned reductions. And you just touched on it now in areas of product investment that could provide additional EBITDA upside in the future. Can you just dig a little -- dig into that a little bit more? Help me understand, are there specific areas or specific products that you're referencing?

Yes. I think you can probably not so subtly read between the lines of the products I've talked about are the ones we're going to focus on. And some of the things we've maybe done in the past, we're deemphasizing. So certainly, Control Tower and SKU Build continue to be the focus of our attention.

Okay. That makes sense. And then my second question is on -- good to see the cost savings are evident in COGS and OpEx this quarter. How should we think about gross margins moving forward just in terms of any future benefit that you expect to come?

Yes. What I can tell you, observing some of the operational changes we made. There's, more controls in place now. There's better visibility. The operating team runs the -- particularly the services parts of our business with a level of discipline that gives me confidence they'll squeeze some additional gross margin out of the business. Until the mix really takes over, and again, there's some opportunities in there with some very high-margin solutions. Until that really starts to kick into gear, I think you're kind of seeing between that 44% and 46% gross margin is probably not a bad place to think about the business on a go forward. And again, I think there could be some modest upside with the way the team is operating and being a little bit tighter about how we control the bench. So I think we're in the right range.

Okay. That's helpful. And then my last one was on the trade dispute. I realized it's nearly impossible to put a really fine point on this, but just wondering how that's impacted conversations with clients so far.

So far, it hasn't. So far, these are not as evident as the conversations in the media seem to be. But we've been talking about it extensively at Board as well to get a broader sample of where is it impacting the economy and what businesses are being impacted. Look, I think more than anything, it's just creating uncertainty. Until tariffs are firm and who's going to be affected and how, I think everybody is responding to uncertainty with conservatism. But I don't think it's explicit. I don't think people are saying, hey, we're tightening our budget because of. I think people are just continuing to maintain tight budgets and being cautious. But I can't honestly tell you that any of the conversations I've been in have been, hey, are the borders affecting us and we're making some changes.

Our next question comes from John Shao at National Bank.

Congrats on the record EBITDA this quarter. Just want to ask about the comment in your letter, you mentioned like the management will start shifting your attention to growth. So could you maybe talk about the time line and whether this plan is kind of dependent on the macro environment?

Yes. Look, I'm not an economist. And so what I say in the following sentence is bordering on being a hack. But obviously, macroeconomics had to have an impact on every business. I don't think we know exactly what they're going to be as it relates to our business. We're controlling the things we can. Again, that comes back to knowing and understanding our levers around managing the bench. I think we're looking for ways of taking advantage of the current economic sentiment to make sure our solutions represent potential cost savings or as our product leader says, all of our customers are scraping every dollar of revenue they can. And so again, anything we can do to help customers find revenue, keep revenue and reduce costs, I think, will play well in this climate. So that's factoring into our messaging. And certainly a focus when we talk about our product capabilities, how does it contribute to either of those. So we don't anticipate a large uptick nor do we anticipate a large downtick from where we are. I think we've taken a conservative view to model the year and managed costs. But I think we would all recognize we're not in a bull market. So we're managing cautiously.

Okay, got it. And maybe just a related question. It seems that you're comfortable with $17 million to $19 million revenue run rate per quarter in current team size. Just curious about your staff utilization at this level and how much an additional capacity you're going to have to support your future upside in revenue growth?

Yes. Again, I think we -- I want to be careful about forward-looking statements here. But obviously, we're in Q1. We know what we're delivering to. We know what we're capable of delivering to. And it's well within that range and probably a little above that range before we have to add additional staff. But again, I want to be really clear when we talk about capacity. We don't see a need to add management layers above $19 million. When we talk about having to add, it would be the production engine, if you will, may need additional resources if we grow beyond $19 million, again, particularly on the PS side. If the things we're seeing on our MIPS as an example, highly automated category. That's not something that would need excessive additional human resources to be able to drive more growth. So it really depends on mix, John. Like is it PS that starts to accelerate or MIPS that starts to accelerate, that could affect, again, what kind of additional resources we require, but we expect to maintain the margins all the way along.

Okay. And maybe last one question for me. I know it's still a bit early. But with the stabilization of EBITDA and the company appears to be in a position to accumulate cash, I just curious about your capital allocation going forward. Is it going to be around sales and marketing?

So one of the things we articulated last year was when we went through the OpEx budgeting exercise to figure out where we should be on key lines. We concluded that the percentage of spend on sales and marketing was over-indexing versus our peer group and a percentage of revenue. And so while we've cut back on sales and marketing relative to our previous spend. We've maintained an over-index level compared to our peer group. Now, obviously, a much larger peer group in general. So what I would say is, yes, we expect to continue over-indexing versus peer group for a period of time. And that period of time really is this year to see how Kyle invests that capital to drive pipeline additions and conversions. So early indications are where Kyle is sourcing deals for us now is transforming in a very healthy way where we control more of our own destiny. And those kinds of dollars are required to do that kind of transformation. So we have good partnerships. But we're relying less on partners to bring us things and take more control over going direct into the market. That's a little bit more expensive way of attracting revenue. So yes, we plan to continue over-indexing.

Our next question comes from Jesse Pytlak at Cormark Securities.

Bill, just kind of thinking about your B2C exposure, given that you work with a lot of retailers and given all the pressures on consumers right now and kind of what we're seeing in terms of consumer sentiment range. Can you maybe just talk to maybe the health of some of your retail customers?

Sure. I'll tell you, having spent many years in this particular space. When you start seeing insolvencies and bankruptcies, you're always looking for any of your customers on the list. So we certainly had former customers show up on the list over the last couple of years. But thankfully, most of the customers we work with today in at least retail and B2C, to the best of our knowledge, have already gone through their restructuring sometime in the last call it, 24 to 60 months. They all seem to be in healthier positions. They're all -- even some of the most profitable brands that you could be familiar with. They're all being very, very conservative on their budgets and spend. So what I can tell you is the smart ones have been tight. And they seem to be managing their cash effectively and they're good customers. We haven't seen any real evidence right now of risks. Mo monitors that with all new deals. We've got a couple of new brands that have -- are in the middle of onboarding and contracting. And the first thing we do is check on their long-term financial viability and make sure we're not going to be holding a big receivable with them. So we're monitoring it carefully. It's a portion of our business. And I think this is important, something that you're raising, Jesse, is we're far more diversified now than we were call it, 5 years ago. We very much today are playing in the B2B space and particularly industrial goods and heavy-duty equipment and manufacturing, all of whom are spending money to transform their commercial supply chains. Again, how they transact, how they manage their data. In fact, it really is B2B that's driving our SKU Build and our MIPS business. And so, I think that diversification is helpful when you start seeing some of the retail challenges that you're all reading about in the paper today. Our exposure to the segment is not nearly as large as it once was.

Okay. That's helpful. Appreciate that. Maybe just more of a housekeeping question for Mo. Just with respect to the cash collections. Can you just give an idea of what they were in Q1 and maybe where the cash balance sits at today?

Yes, I'm not sure if I can release actual cash today. But I'll tell you that we've materially kind of recovered the working capital number that you've seen there. So we are expecting that timing impact to go the other direction in Q1 and to shift us to positive.

Okay. And then maybe just one final question. Just kind of any commentary you can maybe provide on how bookings have trended through the first quarter here now that we're pretty much at the end of March?

As I reminded my Board, we're not done until Monday. So we have a number of contracts that are out for signature that will tell us exactly how good Q1 is going to be when we come and talk to you in 45 days. So all I can tell you is right now, it looks like it's right within the range that we've been reporting against for some time. So there's some upside potential in it. There's, some great new logos that have closed, which has been a key part of the conversation we've been having. We need to augment our bookings with new logos because they drive longer term customer growth. Once they land, they tend to spend more, so new logos are a positive in the quarter. So lots of positives in the bookings that we're excited about, but we're not done. We're not done until Monday, Jesse. So I'm going to hesitate to comment further on that one.

Our next question comes from Daniel Rosenberg from Paradigm Capital.

My first question was around the SKU Build product. It seems like you're seeing some traction, making some progress and obviously a focus for you guys. I was wondering if you could speak to just kind of the economic profile that it gives you. So kind of what does the revenue look like in kind of the initial engagement with the customer? And how does that recurring component continue in the future, just any idea of kind of the size of that rollout with clients?

Yes. So let me try and break down a little bit of the customer journey. We're having more and more customers just because of the way we're marketing it and communicating. It coming to us with -- we have a data problem. They also come with a lot of cynicism having dealt with other people in the industry, other methods of solving it that were unsuccessful. So generally, step number one is, do a POC. They want to actually supply us with SKUs. They want to see the quality first. And so we end up doing -- sometimes it's a paid POC. We'll deliver 50,000 SKUs. And they'll pay us something to clean it for them. So we'll get a small contract initially. And then with evidence that we can actually deliver the quality and the fill rates, then they'll expand the contract. We've increasingly been trying to convert right at the start, a POC that goes immediately into a paid longer term contract. But sometimes you have to actually deliver and then go negotiate the ongoing deal. We've talked about this in the past, a cost per SKU that customers are willing to pay ranges between, call it, CAD 1.50 and CAD 3.50 depending on what process the customer wants to follow. And the kind of customers we're talking to mostly today run anywhere from 1 million to 10 million SKUs. So we've got a couple of very large folks working through POCs. If they convert, they're going to drive very large contracts. There's an interesting dynamic going on right now. If we don't have the SKU in the library, it's a process even when automated it takes a little bit of time. We are hearing from customers who land that they want to accelerate. They want us to go faster. So there's -- again, there's going to be some timing questions. We've forecasted a lot of these contracts to run over multiple years. If we do accelerate these things to all in year, we'll see an accelerated revenue lift. Otherwise, we're going to see this very nice gradual incline on multiyear, multimillion SKU contracts. Does that help, Daniel?

Yes. No, that's great. And just -- I know you have some success in the industrial market. And you've spoken to some initiatives and trying to engage further with a landed customer and trying to take that workload and knowledge and apply it to a new logo in the same category. I'm just wondering how -- is that progressing and then any new verticals that you guys are targeting?

Yes. In terms of industry verticals, we're really hyper focused on 3 right now. The industrial goods and even a subset in that electronic component parts, we've gone really hard after. Again, as you can imagine, one of the benefits of being super focused, you build the SKU once -- there's, multiple distributors inside that category that need that SKU. And this is what I was talking about earlier. If you buy it from the library, you get it a lot faster and we get great margin. If you buy the process, it takes a little bit longer. It's a bit more expensive, so for us, hyper focus, where the ability to find sort of a concentration of customers that have the need for the same SKU has been important. One of the POCs we just did recently and completed a large part of the POC was proven out from the library. So that's step number 1 for us, concentrate in there. But what we are finding, Daniel, is the electronic component parts is strong, automotive. And of course, retail is still a segment for us. Control Tower is having a bigger impact inside retail. That's one that is helping our managed services business. And the kind of things we're discovering for clients going back to what our product manager or product owner said. Anybody looking to scrape revenue, Control Tower is helping customers find stock orders, fraud orders and it's really resonating with the retail customers. So 3 segments, a range of offerings that are appealing to each of them and hyper focus even within segments to have something really compelling. If we can do better, cheaper, faster, I think we're going to take the lion's share of that market.

My last question was just around EBITDA and cash conversion. So you went through the restructuring and cost controls over the past few quarters. So I'm wondering how we should think about conversion of EBITDA into cash? Is there a percentage you're targeting for the coming year or are there any onetime things that you expect to kind of hit you in the coming year that may impact cash conversion? Just how should we be modeling that?

Yes. I think the only cash conversion should wind down. There still be some remaining in Q1 and lesser amount in Q2 and I think marginal after that or rounding down not material will be the restructuring, so most of that will start to come off by Q1 and there's a bit less in Q2. And then it shouldn't be a material impact to our cash flow. So we do expect our EBITDA to be more reflective and closer to cash from operations. We did have a negative working capital in Q4, which I feel confident that we should be able to recover and be able to recover the cash consumption that we had in Q4. So that is more of a timing factor, but restructure is really the one that should reduce over time and EBITDA should be a closer reflection of cash flow.

Daniel, yes, just again, to put a fine point on what Mo just said, the 1.6 red change in working capital, expect that to not be red in Q1 and very likely green. And so we're very confident when we say to you, we'll return to normal in cash in Q1 because as we pointed out, we're near the end of the quarter. And going forward, again, we expect more of that cash flow from normal course operating activities to continue building our cash position. So we'll be -- hopefully, you'll see in the next quarter. We're not telling the stories. You'll see the actual results. And again, with very few changes like the restructurings, it should be consistent and tied to EBITDA.

It looks like we have no further questions. So I'll turn it back to you, Bill.

Okay. Thanks, everyone. Again, we're very pleased with the step number 1 EBITDA. We're excited about what's coming in Q1. And we're looking forward to speaking to you and sharing with you all again in 45 days, how our results are progressing. So thanks for attending. Thanks for continuing to show an interest in the business and the brand. And we'll see you in 45 days.