RIWI Corp. (RIWI) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Listeners, it's Paul Andreola here. When I joined our community at Smallcap Discoveries, where we offer our members direct access to some of the best micro-cap investment opportunities available, our members are getting access to premium micro-cap financings, research reports and direct access to management. Sign up today at www.smallcapdiscoveries.com.

Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Smallcap Discoveries conference call. Today on our call, we have CEO, Greg Wong; and Chairman, Neil Seeman from RIWI Corp. RIWI trades on the TSX Venture Exchange under the symbol RIWI and on the OTC under the symbol RWCRF. The company is currently trading at $1.80 with roughly 18 million shares outstanding or about a $32 million market cap. I'd now like to hand it over to Paul Andreola.

Yes. Thank you so much, Trevor. Always good to have Neil Seeman with us. Extra pleasure today to also have Greg Wong, new CEO of RIWI. Gentlemen, thank you, and welcome. Neil, welcome back.

Thanks, Paul.

I'm losing track of how many times we've got you on here but always good to have you here. Why don't we just jump right into it? There's been some changes obviously with RIWI over the last little while, specifically Greg coming on board as CEO. Before we get into that, why don't we just refresh everybody's memory in terms of what RIWI is all about.

Thank you, Paul. So for those -- and I actually recognize the names -- a couple of names here, so thanks, and thanks, Trevor. RIWI is a global trend-tracking, prediction technology company. We conduct surveys in every country in the world and message tests in every country in the world. We make our money through long-term agreements and monthly subscriptions. And we stand for real-time interactive worldwide intelligence. And happy to speak to Greg's onboarding, if you'd like, Paul.

Perfect. Well, let's do that. Neil, you're the founder of the business. You've been running this for a number of years. What brought you to this point? And why Greg? We'll get into that a little bit, but why now? Why now a change like this?

Yes. Thanks. I mean, I've always been of the view that there are different leaders -- operational leaders for different stages of a company. I sort of learned that early on in my investment life sort of just as a mentee to different people and different leadership positions. My vision was always to get to a stage that we got to. Then COVID hit, right? So actually, this plan had been predated to COVID. The plan is to bring on a revenue-focused CEO, someone who had scaled the company internationally in what I call our scale-up phase, and Greg fits that description. There's a wide range of reasons I hired him. And Greg in particular has had the experience of taking a founder, operator-led company in the technology space and growing internationally. So I'm very happy to have this partnership with Greg. Thanks.

Maybe before we sort of speak to Greg, give us a little bit more background. What was the process like? What's it like as a founder and founder of a public company to go out and find somebody to sort of replace yourself? What's the process? And what were you really sort of hoping to gain by it from the public's perception?

So yes, from the public's perception, the idea is to showcase a partnership, right, and to go forward and bring forward someone who can take operational leadership while, at the same time, I can add value in a way I can add value most, right, which is a range of product development issues, innovation, R&D, a range of sales-related activity in the areas that I've helped grown out. So that's the idea. From an experience perspective, it exceeded my expectations, right? So I thought it would be a really transactional experience. You just get a flood of résumés and work with a firm like we did. And then it was kind of -- it would be mechanical. And in fact, it was not like that at all. The number and quality of candidates that we got was extraordinary. I worked, of course, with the Search Committee of the Board on this and with Korn Ferry. But really what happened was very early on, and I'll speak for myself here, Greg, is that I found myself just working with Greg naturally talking about strategy, talking about the kind of data we need to dig into. I think if there was -- I've never said this publicly, but I think if there was some one mistake that I've made that I've recently realized, and I think Greg has helped me observe this, is that I was thinking too small. And in the process of -- because I built this company to solve a problem, and we actually did solve that problem, okay? How do you collect diverse voices, people who are not traditionally included in survey responses, how do you do that in every country in the world, how do you do it on a random basis and how do you get some awesome clients and build that work. But the process of talking with experienced CEOs and who have had that leadership and revenue-driving experience sort of taught me that I was thinking too small. And so that idea of just thinking bigger, thinking tactically, thinking more strategically, that's where Greg and a number of the other candidates came in.

Fantastic. So Greg, who is Greg Wong? What can you tell us about yourself and give us your background?

First of all, Paul, thank you for having us. And I think we're thrilled to be here. And it's my first time. Neil has been here many times. But hopefully, it will be the first of many such occasions where I get to know both you and Trevor and the rest of the investment group that you represent. But who is Greg Wong is a great existential question. So I'm a revenue-focused individual, right? If you look at my background, you look at the things that I've done, I'm detail oriented. I love technology, right? So I think one of the things that surprised most of the people in the company is, in my first couple of days, I went deep into tech. I wanted to understand our tech. I wanted to understand how to scale our tech and then to understand how to grow this organization leveraging tech. So I'm a big believer in technology. I'm a big believer in growth. I'm a big believer in scaling organizations with technology and not with people. So early on in my first couple of days, again, I got to know -- understand the technology [ channels ] a lot as to how we do things and where we're doing things. But if you look at my background, it's all been about growth.

Fantastic. Maybe describe some of the past experiences or past businesses you've run. Give us a sort of a sense of what they do in size and just sort of a bit of your résumé right now.

Sure. So I mean, anybody can look at LinkedIn. But most recently, I was at an organization called Pivotree. And Pivotree, when I joined 4 years ago, a little over 4 years ago, it was a $20 million company based in Toronto, really in the hosting space. And I came on board really to help scale the organization and change what we did because, as a hosting company with our own data centers, that was a dying business model. With the advent of AWS and Azure and Google, hosting as a concept was being brought to the cloud, and so more traditional data centers were not going to do as well. So we reinvented our strategy. We looked at who our customers were and what can we really do to change the game. And through a combination of organic growth and some acquisitions, we redefined ourselves as the frictionless commerce company and, in that process, grew. So we grew from $20 million to $65 million in a 4-year period, again, both organically and inorganically but really focused on a strategy. And I think that was the key is. For a while, we didn't know who we wanted to be and where we were going. We were just doing. And so the key for me was figuring that out. Prior to that, I've had a couple of different places, but maybe my longest stint was an organization called Heiler Software. And I joined Heiler in North America originally. It was a German-based company, about EUR 5 million or so in revenue. And over a 10-year span, we grew that business from EUR 5 million to be a $60-plus million company sold into Informatica for over $150 million, somewhere in that range, and had a great run. But throughout that process, I started off really trying to grow North America and eventually took over responsibility for a lot of the European operations, Australian operations, sales strategies. So it was a great partnership. And very similar to RIWI, we were a small company, and I partnered with the founder. The founder was Rolf Heiler, right, and it was really a strong partnership. And I would never say I replaced someone. I would always say I partnered because Rolf, throughout that entire process, continued to be the thought leader around a lot of the technology, around the innovation. He was a brilliant individual in terms of understanding the space very much, and I see Neil very much the same way, right? I'm not replacing Neil as CEO. I'm partnering with him. And Neil is going to continue to have a stamp in our product development and where we go as an organization because he understands at an absolute detailed level what our customers are looking for, what is biased, what is the difference between panel surveys and our types of surveys, what other type of data collection technologies are out there, what is more effective and more efficient for the type of customers we're going after. That deep expertise and knowledge, you can't just replace, and so for me, it's more of a partnership than a replacement.

So from what I can tell, you had -- you could almost write your own ticket. There's a lot of different places you could have gone to. Why RIWI? What do you see at RIWI that excites you?

Yes. So it's a great question. And you're right. I mean, everybody in technology with experience these days are being recruited left, right and center. It is an absolute seller's market, right, and not a buyer's market when you're looking for talent. And we're experiencing that same issue as we're trying to recruit someone higher. So it's a problem for everybody in the industry. But I think specifically to RIWI, what I really like is there's a lot of jobs out there. If all you want to do is make money, there's tons of places you can make money. It's not hard to make money. What's hard to find is a company that is -- that has a mission and a value that goes beyond just making money. So what I love about RIWI is, when you talk to anybody in the company, they love what we do. They're on a mission to solve a problem and do good in the world while making profit, while growing. We are -- it's funny because we always talk about the quiet voices, which we want to bring the quiet voices. I think we're the quiet voice today, quite frankly, as an organization, right? And we need to get loud. But if you look at what we can do and the problems that we solved, if we can make sure that the types of customers that can benefit from it -- from that type of technology, hear about us, we will solve so many more problems. So I'm excited about what we can do with this tech. I'm excited about what we can do with our team. I'm excited about the market opportunity and just to be part of something that is more than just making money but, at the same time, has a massive profit potential.

Why don't we talk a little bit about the market opportunity the way you see it? Neil's really, in the past, described where he sees the opportunity. But tell us what you think the market opportunity looks like for the company.

Sure. So let me start off with we have just kicked off a strategy process internally. And so part of that strategy process is define your vision, your mission, your -- where you want to go, who you're going to be and all those type of stuff, so we can really understand our USPs and where we're going to focus. So we're going through that process. So some of what I'm going to say may change as we kind of go through that process. But the opportunity that I see is, when you think about data collection and data management and the market for alternative data, today, we're really focused in 3 individual markets, which is health care, financial services and we call humanitarian and global customer engagement, but it's essentially a sort of government type area. But the opportunity within each of those sectors is massive, and then there's several other sectors that our technology can solve problems for. So there's a huge set of customers that are untapped. There's -- today, our technology does one piece of a problem -- solves one piece of a larger problem, but there's many pieces to that problem. And so as we talk to our customers, the ability for us to expand our technology into more areas is significant. So we can continue to win new customers using our really patented technology. But existing customers we have, we can get a bigger piece of their wallet just by solving a bigger piece of their problem. That can include things like not just collecting the data but collecting other types of data, whether it be through social listening type technology, whether it be through other types of survey technology. It could also be helping our customers manage their data. It can be helping them more on the analytics side. So the opportunity both with existing customers and then we go into new verticals and expand within our existing verticals is massive. We're a subscale company today. We have subscale sales. we have subscale marketing. So with a little bit of focus and a little bit of elbow grease, I think we can grow just in our existing and then expand more broadly from there.

Now a couple of times you said you want to scale technology. Maybe give us more -- sort of explain that a little bit better. What do you mean by that?

Sure. So I mean, I think everyone knows the size of our company. We are fairly small. We have a small development and R&D team that really builds and has done incredible things for the size of team that's there. But there's a number of things that we do in our technology that still requires people. So -- and I would not go into all the individual details. If we were to win 20 more customers, we would probably today need to scale by a few more people. And I think the goal right now is how do we develop more and more within our technology space so that when we need to -- we've run 10 more surveys or 50 or 100 more surveys, we don't need to add another person. It's all the self-service capabilities are there, all the algorithms, a lot more machine learning to support a lot more of our surveys. So it's about looking at every step of the process that we go through when we deploy a customer and how do we automate maybe not 100% of it but 98% of it.

So I mean, it's early on. You've barely been there, but where do you see the current strengths and weaknesses of the business?

Well, today, we do something that nobody else can do, right? If you want to get data in China, you want to get data in hard-to-reach places, Afghanistan, Myanmar or other places, there's very few people that can do it or do it well, right? So I think that's absolutely a core strength of ours. We have people also that are absolute experts in understanding the data, understanding how to create surveys and questions so that you get the right type of answers. Often, customers come to us and say, oh, I'm looking to -- here's the question I want to ask. And then we start questioning them, talking to them, well, what are you trying to achieve with these questions? And our team was able to show them in many cases, the questions they're asking will not actually get the results that they want. So we have a team that really understands how do you need to formulate the questions and how do you sequence those questions to actually get the right type of information and to identify the problem that you're really trying to get at. So I think that's another core area. Those are 2 of the big things. I think we have a huge set of customers that really trust us, right? We have this asset of a huge amount of customers that we've done amazing work with. I think one of the assets of the company is now leveraging those customers to do more and getting a bigger piece of their wallet because they trust us already, so getting that next discussion is easier. And now it's about, again, how do we help solve more of the problem.

And you partly answered my next question, but what challenges does RIWI face right now in terms of moving to where you want to see it go? We talked a little bit about sort of talent and things like that. That's clearly almost every tech company is dealing with that sort of stuff. But is there other stuff that you think is a bit of a challenge, maybe getting the word out more or something? What can you tell us?

Yes. Brand recognition is clearly a big problem, right? I mean, and I'll use myself as an example, when a recruiter first reach out to me and they said, "Hey, we've got a great opportunity with this company called RIWI," I was like, "Who?" And they had to say it 3x, right, because I just didn't -- never heard of the company, right? So again, I think we need to get loud. We need to get -- but we need to get loud in the right places, right? We've done a little bit of marketing in the past, but we've really just been a spray and pray type process, get the same message out to everybody. And I think one of the things we're doing right now through our strategy sessions are really identifying who are our target customers, where can we add to the most value, and then how do we get loud in that subsegment of customers with what messages and how can we set multi-touch campaign so that we're in front of these people consistently. Not everybody has a project they need to do right away, but they will at some point, so how do we make sure that we have the mind share when they get there. The other thing that we're really trying to evolve some of these customers is how do we build long-term relationships with them. So we often will do a survey and do fantastic job where we get results for those customers. But part of the issue we need to do or part of the things we need to resolve and get to with these customers is how do we start selling them indexes, long-term recurring subscriptions. So we have this stigma index. And if you want to understand about opioid abuse and those type of things and how people feel about opioid users, right, we have a stigma index. Instead of buying something once it's done, we can build a relationship with, call it, the top 50 organizations that care about that. It's all about subscription. It might be a small amount of money every month, but now we've got a long-term recurring relationship with that customer. Now we have the right to go back and talk to that customer about everything else they want to do, what are they trying to accomplish. And we can start talking to them about more custom surveys or other types of work, leveraging both our current technology and also where else are they looking to go so that we can evolve our technology to meet their demands. So again, I think the recurring long-term index type revenue is going to be critical for us.

Fantastic. I want to remind everybody that's listening, if you got a question you'd like me to ask Neil or Greg, feel free use the chat function, and I'll do my best to ask the question. Greg, RIWI is a public company. Is this your first involvement in a public company?

No. So at Pivotree, my last company, we actually IPO-ed last year. So I had experience going through that process, both through the IPO process and all -- working with all the bankers to get through everything as well as the afterwards. And when I was at Heiler, we were a public company as well so -- for 10 years. So it's multiple experiences at different levels, one as a CEO, one as a CRO, and now, of course, with RIWI back as a CEO. So...

So you're not fearful of the public markets. You've been in the ring before.

Yes. No, I mean, the public markets are interesting. For a company our size, it's a bit of a double-edged sword, right? It's fantastic that it helps get us a lot of publicity, gives us access to liquidity and to funds potentially when we want to raise that are -- it's easier than when you're a private company. It also gives our customers a level of transparency and confidence. So when we say we have X amount of revenue and this is who we are and this is what we're doing, it's all public. You can see it, right? It also gives us the ability to say we can't share that. We're a public company, and it has to be. So there's a lot of positive that way. There's also some costs that come with being a public company and some additional scrutiny, which, again, is really positive but also adds some stress on a smaller organization. But overall, I think the benefits significantly outweigh the drawbacks.

If we take sort of a bit of a step back, let's talk a little bit more about the industry and where you see it going. Like what data collection, if you want to call it that or however you want to categorize it, what does that look to you in the future?

Well, so today, we've got one type of technology that captures amazing amounts data, and it's probably some of the most accurate data you'll find anywhere in the market. But it's one slice of data collection, right? I mean, and if you -- even within the survey market, it's only one slice. But should we be doing -- looking at adding panel surveys to our mix? Should we be looking at doing other types of social media listening, so Twitter, Facebook? Should we be pulling in that data and also appending it to our current data, so customers get a broader view of data, right? So I think there's a number of different areas. There's also all of our customers have data. And in many cases, they need the ability to not only take the data that we have, but they need to take their own data that they've collected, bring it together and then do analytics on it. So can we provide a great platform where we collect not only our data but their data and other third-party data, bring it together, provide them the ability to do analytics and manage and exchange it and find insights across a broader set? So I think there's a lot of areas of data and even potentially bringing in financial data, transactional data, depending on the use case, right? In humanitarian it may not be as important. But when you circle into financial services, there may be a ton of additional data that we can bring in from our partners and our customers to give our customers a more complete solution.

Greg or maybe Neil, maybe both of you guys can answer this question. But the company has been public for a little while now. What, if anything, do you think the market gets or investors get wrong, like they misunderstand about RIWI?

Neil, maybe I'll let you take -- make a first cut just because you've obviously got the history with the markets and our investors. So I can give a viewpoint from a newer perspective, but you'll probably have a longer-term view.

Thanks. Yes. No, thanks, Paul. It's a great question. I think we're a thinly traded company, right? So I think one, and the public capital markets are impatient, right? So there's kind of often times a sense you get a small retail investor or a small investor that can change the price or, let's just say, or any small little issue can have an overinflated impact on the valuation of the company in the eyes of the capital markets. And then that can have sort of a cascading impact, right? And so an investor of which I'm the largest one, right, sort of I don't get nervous, but others can. So there's that cascading effect. The -- so what some investors may not fully appreciate is that RIWI is a successful company, right? We were -- but we need to scale, right? So the value may not be fully captured in that momentary stock price. And it's a long-term play. And as I said earlier, going back, right, like I was thinking too small, and we really need to think bigger and longer term. So I think one thing that -- and message that I feel we need to convey beyond getting loud and showing our present value is also showing our future value, where we're going. So just to build on your question about the data marketplace, right, like one of the things that's changing is that the data value chain is expanding. So we're in the business right now partially on providing first-party data sources, certain elements, small elements of the analytics piece. And then if you go along the data value chain, right, there's companies now entirely specializing in data governance, in data ethics, data privacy. And those are -- all those companies that are part of the data value chain are also our customers. So we're really at just such an early stage of the data value chain growth. Greg, maybe you want to supplement.

I think the other thing for me when I look at our valuation, we are valued as a professional services company. We're kind of 1.5, 1.6, whatever, depending on what the stock price is that day, right, from a valuation to revenue, right? And if you look at technology platform, SaaS-based companies, they're typically 6, 10. If you're a Shopify, maybe even a much higher amount. But -- so as I look at us as a platform and we develop our platform, over time, we'll report out a lot more platform type revenue and those type of things so that we can start being seen more as a platform, as a destination platform for data collection, data analytics, data management, data syndication, right, all those type of things. But when that happens, I would expect our valuation to revenue to become more of a SaaS-based platform type thing. So I think what the -- where investors are wrong today is -- maybe wrong is not the right word, but what they're missing today is that we are a platform technology company. We're not a professional services company. We have professional services, as you can expect, that help optimize our surveys and help leverage our platform better. But our professional services are in service of our platform and not the other way around. And so as I think we get the message out more clearly to investors so that everyone understands we are a technology play, right, which was, to be honest, one of the big things that attracted me also to RIWI is that we are a technology play. That I think what you'll start to see or hopefully we'll start to see is investors start to value us that way. So that's, I think, where maybe the -- we could do a better job at communicating that.

And I think you nailed it. I think once the investor community realizes how scalable the platform is, I would think you get rerated pretty quickly and pretty aggressively.

Yes. And actually, part of that is also how we report, right? We reported revenue number today. We don't actually break down our services versus our platform revenue. So again, I don't know that we're ready to make those changes in the kind of a first step. Today's day 16 for me today. So -- but give us a couple of quarters, and let us get all of our financials reported the right way and everything else, and I think we'll start to be able to prove to analysts and to investors why we should be valued as a technology play.

I mean, you mentioned you guys are still just at the sort of early stages of building out your corporate strategy. But when do you think you'll be able to communicate sort of the new strategy to the investment community?

Yes. I think sometime in Q1 we'll be able to do it. So we plan to have -- strategy is never done. So let me start with that. It's always evolving, right? But we expect to have a working version done at the end of this quarter. So -- and that working version of the strategy impacts everything we do, right? It impacts our budgeting as we're going through it. I saw there was a question popped up on the chat about profitability versus SG&A investments and those type of things, right? But again, strategy is what should drive our budgets and our investments. Strategy should be what drives our very specific focus on what customers we're going to focus on and win. We're too small a company to go after everything and everybody, so we need to be focused. And we got to win, and we got to win at scale, and then we'll go into the next area, right? So it's strategies about choices. So as we get through this process this quarter, we'll communicate it next quarter. And then you should start to see results within 1 to 2 quarters from there. But we should not also expect results are going to start just changing automatically because we have now this strategy.

Yes. For sure. For sure. Let's talk to that question. Look, any -- it's almost a cultural decision how you sort of grow your business. Are you going to rely on sort of existing revenue and profitability to reinvest in the business? Or do you go bigger and decide, hey, we're going to raise a little much money and try growing faster? How can we sort of -- how can we think that through? What sort of message should we be getting?

I think we're a little early on to make a real decision on it. But what I'd say is, obviously, Neil said at the beginning, I was brought in for growth, right? 5%, 10% growth is just not interesting, right? It's just not the type of numbers that I was brought in to try and enable in the organization. So I don't know that we've made any decisions as to what we're going to do at this point, but we will be looking for growth. We will be making our decisions on investments based on the expectations of growth and where we believe we can win. So I think part of what we also need to be doing though is not just taking the money we have and kind of dumping in, hire 10 salespeople, right? It's got to be focused. It's got to be specific. But also we're, call it, by end of the year, somewhere between $4 million and $5 million U.S. company, right, depending on where we end up for the year and no guidance here. But it's pretty safe to say based on where we are. That means we're -- and we would not make a huge amount of profit, right, in any year, so we're investing a lot of our money back in the company. So we've got greater than USD 4 million every year that we're investing in the business, whether it's in our people, whether it's in tech, whether it's marketing, whatever it's in. We need to make really good use of that capital, right? The job -- Neil and my job, one of our main jobs has to be capital allocation. Every dollar we spend should be focused, should be specific. It should not be wasted, and we should have a clear expectation about what the return on that dollar is. So we will actually spend money, but we will take the current money we have first, make sure we're optimizing that and then go and make business cases to spend more. And it should always be based on expectations.

Yes, definitely. Again, you've barely been there, so it's hard to give you this question. Maybe we'll lean a little bit to Neil for this question. But where is RIWI going to look or where is RIWI going to be in 5 years? Now what's it going to look like as a company? What's your hopes that RIWI looks like in 5 years from now?

Yes. I mean, we're in the prediction business, but I'm loathed to make predictions more than 4 days out. So we're going to be a lot bigger. You're going to see a company, as Greg articulated, that is a louder, a technology play, a platform play. You're going to see a company that maintains its integrity and values in terms of impact while at the same time delivering value for shareholders. You're going to see a talent magnet of a company, people who just -- the brand is going to be a company where just people from all over the world want to work. I'm just always hungry to be surrounded with just some of the smartest people in the world. I'm very fortunate that through our customers and various of the folks that we interact with in the data community, we get to work with people like that. I think you're going to see us playing in a range of different markets, but I don't want to go further than that. Greg, do you want to maybe...

Yes. I think you'll see us be market leaders in the markets we choose to play in, right? I mean, we're not going to play in markets that we can't win. So we are going to be very focused. We'll be, as Neil said, a lot bigger, a lot louder. We will have absolute brand recognition. But it's not that my grandmother down the street will recognize the RIWI brand, but anybody in the spaces that we would choose to play will recognize RIWI. We will have mind share so that when people think what data collection, they think about surveys, they think about reaching data in hard-to-reach places, that we will be the company they think of first. We will be the premium player. We will never be the low-cost provider, right? That's not a place you want to be in. We will be a value-driven organization that delivers significant value. And we will make sure we are able to communicate the value that we deliver for our customers, right?

So I see an interesting question here that I always try to squeeze in to Neil one way or another. But what fun and interesting predictions is your software throwing out these days? Give us something, some sort of curveball. What are you guys looking at? What's surprising you? And any data you can sort of throw at us?

Yes. Sure. Well, the -- we're doing a lot of important work in the area of COVID-related work around the world, looking at both the resilience of the economy and different aspects of public health. There is a changing relationship between China and America. And we are studying that every single day. And that relationship is just super, super important. And in particular, one thing that is really interesting to me is that just in the last week, there has been an agreed understanding both within China, all parts of China and within all parts of America, there's just been a really fast-growing understanding that this is endemic. COVID or related issues around COVID are endemic. We're going to live with these kinds of conditions. We're going to live with these sorts of situations. And both from the economic and a public health perspective, this has sort of widespread implications for supply chain, for a range of trading implications, equities implications. So that's what we're seeing. Like I think there's a -- please don't take this as an investment advice, but there's -- people -- I think there's been certain industries that people have sort of thought will be -- will rebound really quickly, whereas just the nature of what public health folks call endemicity will mean that I think those industries will have to permanently change based on what we're seeing.

We actually just released a piece of research, if anyone who goes to our website takes a look, about -- on what's the changing phase of new investors and retail investors and have a huge amount of young investors right now investing. And their risk tolerance is significantly above, let's say, the more traditional investor, even the more traditional younger investors. So COVID has kept a lot of people at home. They've made a lot of money, and they have not necessarily been able to spend it. What are they doing with it, they're investing in it. And platforms like Robinhood, platforms like Questrade, like TD Ameritrade, these are all gaining a huge amount of traction because of it. And it's a great study. It's really interesting if you're an investor that are looking at or targeting younger retail investors. It's what motivates them, why are they doing it. And I think we're starting to see more and more of that type of stuff coming out as well.

Yes. It's a great little article that I saw, and I do recommend everybody to take a look at it just to get a better gauge of kind of market we're in, what's driving some of the volatility out there. The -- like so the next sort of, call it, next 6 to 12 months, you guys are going to be implementing some new ideas and some new strategy. What do you think -- apart from revenue, what do you think are the key metrics? Or what are the things that investors should really pay attention to, to sort of see that you guys are executing on your business plan?

So I think there's a couple of things that will be really interesting. One is we're going to build out an ecosystem. So today, we're a stand-alone company, right? We're a dot on the map. And RIWI does not exist on its own. We exist in an ecosystem of organizations, partners, customers, and we will build out an ecosystem that will help drive growth, help drive profitability, help drive revenue and help drive more value to our customers. So we'll have lots more partners, partners that are resellers, partners that are OEMs, partners that are VARs, partners that are just complementary partners that add additional types of data that maybe we don't offer that value to our customers or, again, partners in many different areas. So we will build out an ecosystem because we can't do it by ourselves, we're too small, and we're much stronger together. And we've already met many partners where a 1 plus 1 equals not even 3 but probably 4 or 5, right? So I think that will be one big metric to understand what partners are we starting to work with, what value are we starting to see out of those partners. And I think those will be some other things that we'll start to report on and start to understand over time. I think backlog is another one, right? It's -- right now, we don't report on backlog. I don't know that we'll put on it in the next 1 to 2 quarters. But over time, I think we will start to report on backlog because that's a significant portion of our business. And I think as an investor, when you look at and say, well, hey, 80% of RIWI's revenue in a future quarter could be already baked, the risk profile for that quarter or the upside quarter could be for that profile is great. And by the way, I'm not saying 80% of our revenue for the next quarter's already baked. I mean I just use it as an example. But those types of things, I think, are important. So those are 2 big ones. I think when you start looking at personnel, right now, we're a small organization. We're going to grow. To the question of SG&A versus profitability, I would expect some significant investments in both our R&D and our sales and marketing areas over the next -- I don't think it will be as much in Q4, but looking towards Q1 and Q2, I think you'll see some significant investments there. And so that will also -- there's a sales cycle and process. So it won't give us results in 30 days after, but we expect 4 to 6 months after that, you should see results from those things.

We're about to wrap up here. This is sort of my last share or stock-based question. But do you think you can do anything different to sort of get sort of the stock on more radar screens? Or is there something else you can do, PR, IR-wise to bring more attention to the company?

Yes. It's always interesting. When you're a micro-cap like we are and a lot of shares are held by insiders that are not selling, right, I mean, I do see the other question, there is some selling going on. But the large majority is not being sold by the key insiders that are in the organization. So liquidity will be a bit of a challenge, I think, for the foreseeable future. But if we do the right things, we grow the company organically first, identify acquisition targets and then look to grow through acquisition as well, we will then be able -- probably need to raise more funds. And that will then generate more liquidity in the market as well. If we do it through debt, it's fine. If we do it through an equity raise, we'll generate more liquidity in the market. And I think that will help the share price. But it's -- there's not a lot I think we can do on a very immediate basis. We will continue to do sessions like today where we share, we believe, our -- the good news of RIWI. As Neil said, we are a growth company. We are a successful company. And as we start to show more results to the market, hopefully, that will generate more liquidity. Although if we keep showing results and we don't raise more money, great shareholders won't want to sell because the stock price will be going up.

Exactly. Exactly. And I'll take one last question from the audience here, and then we'll sort of wrap up. But you just mentioned acquisitions. Like what kind of acquisitions do you think you'd go after? Is it more relationship style or technology bolt-on? Where would you look?

We're having a lot of discussions about that right now as part of our strategy, as you can imagine, but it will be in 1 or 2 areas. It will either be complementary technology that advances our platform, or there will be more of a customer acquisition where we win customers to scale either current vertical or bring us into a new vertical that we want to get into. So right now, we're subscale in everything we do, so we need to get to scale in everything we do. We then need to grow our technology, and then we need to go into new verticals. So if you think about it in those lanes, it will always satisfy one of those things.

Yes. Perfect. So we're nearing the end here. Last sort of question or what -- a key message or a key takeaway. What do you want to make sure that everybody here listening today walks away knowing about RIWI?

Neil, do you want to start? I can go after.

Let's start with the Chairman, then the CEO, yes.

Okay. So I mean, I think the key message is Greg and I have a partnership, and it's a super important partnership. And that's -- and we're working together very, very closely to make things drive and scale. I guess the other message I'd say is that, yes, this is a difficult stage of any business. It's critical and really hard, the scale-up phase, I'd call it Phase 4 of our company. But we've also -- to get here was really, really tough. So I know that having gone through those other milestones, we can do this really, really well. And I feel ever since Greg was hired, my confidence level has materially increased on that. Greg, do you want to...

Yes. So I think the important thing to understand is that we're putting together a detailed strategy, right? Hope is not a strategy. We're not going to hope that we grow. We are putting together a very focused strategy around growth with all the things that we need to do, and then we're going to execute. So I think we'll start communicating those things to the market next quarter, and then I'd say hold us accountable for it because you're going to see us actually delivering it. But we're focused. We know we need to -- we know we're a technology company. We're going to grow the tech side. We're going to scale the tech side and scale sales to go with it. It will be very deliberate. It will be very focused. And I think you'll see the results coming from it. It's -- I can tell you, I'm 16 days in, I'm loving every minute of it so far, working with an incredible team of professionals that are passionate about what they do, which is so fantastic to come to work every day when you get to talk to people that love what they do. I got to say it is incredible to be part of a company like this. And I'm very confident that we're going to do the right things to grow. And the good news is our market is so bloody big. It is so incredible in size. We are not even a rounding error today. I aspire to get to become a rounding error in that size of the market, and we will all be very wealthy. So it's -- yes, the future looks bright.

Awesome. Awesome. Well, listen, exciting times, certainly. We've come to know Neil very well, and we've been very appreciative of what he's done with the business, what he's done for our shareholders and the time he's graciously given us. Greg, it's great to meet you, and we wish you guys both all the success as possible. And we welcome you back. Hopefully, we can have you back with some exciting news in the near future. But in the meantime, good luck with everything. And again, thanks for everybody here.

Thank you, everyone. Take care. Thanks, Paul. Thanks, Trevor.

Thanks, everyone.

You got it. Thanks. Take it easy.

Bye.

Bye.