Shift4 Payments, Inc. (FOUR) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

November 20, 2024

New York Stock Exchange US Financials Financial Services conference_presentation 31 min

Earnings Call Speaker Segments

Daniel Perlin

analyst
#1

Thanks for joining. Welcome back. My name is Dan Perlin. I head up the payments processing and IT services practice here at RBC. And I'm delighted to have the team from Shift4 for joining us today. We have Jared Isaacman, who is obviously the Founder and CEO; and Nancy Disman, who is the Chief -- Chief Financial Officer, excuse me. So thank you both for being here.

Daniel Perlin

analyst
#2

I am going to get into the business questions in a second, but since I have Jared here. I thought it would just be interesting to hear, and I can say this is probably the most certainty of anything, that no one else has really walked in space, I think, at this conference. So I don't know if you want to say a couple of minutes. I'm fascinated by it. I think the audience would probably be fascinated to hear maybe 2 seconds to that and if you're willing to share, have added, and if not, we'll go into Shift4 business.

Jared Isaacman

executive
#3

I want to talk about like margins -- margin trajectory?

Daniel Perlin

analyst
#4

Well, if we want to pull that into the space concept, that would be fine.

Jared Isaacman

executive
#5

I can do all sorts of funds on like ups and downs in the parallel to the market exactly. I like it was -- I think like maybe what answers that question and also like has the direct tieback to what we do at Shift4 for is just the -- it's now been more than 4 years now since I've had like an opportunity to spend time with what I think is like the greatest company ever, like with the best talent working on the most awesome mission and vision, and they have very interesting philosophies around innovation, execution process. And they -- for all the ones that are even remotely applicable to what we could do in our day job, I've pulled it over and we call it the Shift4 Way. And it is fastening. I think like for those -- we're in business. Any major technological breakthrough there is somebody that shows up not that long after with something else. iPhone comes out, there's an Android 6 months later or something like that. They started landing rockets on ships almost 10 years ago, no one's done it once, and it's now moved on to catching skyscrapers with chopsticks, pretty awesome. They built new spaceships that we've obviously purchased in development and testing space over 2.5 years. U.S. government has been trying to replace the ones in the International Space Station for 40 years. They literally have cost and they've invested in billions to upkeep those things. So it's an incredible organization. I feel lucky to be able to spend some time with it, learn from as much as I can and apply it back to what we do at Shift4. So I've definitely got the -- hey, when everyone is tired of like changing the world in space and you're looking for something else to do or you fail a drug test, please apply it Shift4 and join this. Come on over and help make Shift4 the SpaceX's fintech.

Daniel Perlin

analyst
#6

That's awesome. Well, congratulations on that amazing achievement and that was hell of a thing. All right. So let's bring it back down. We'll come back to reality. So for a -- so let's just talk about the near-term priority. So just as a reminder, kind of where we are heading into the end of the year, kind of near-term priorities. And as you're setting yourself up, I know we're going to have an Investor Day here not too distant, but like thinking about the priorities that you're setting for 2025.

Jared Isaacman

executive
#7

Yes. I mean I -- sorry for those, I know a lot of familiar faces in prior meetings. I think going into the Investor Day, we have a couple of objectives try and take some of the complexity out of what we do. I know it -- I don't know, we don't feel it's that hard. It's kind of the same verticals running the same playbook, kind of playing to your advantages where you do have a unique right to win and then pulling growth forward where applicable. We don't think that story has changed a whole lot since our first Investor Day. So trying to bring that down to a simpler story, help our investors be able to kind of forecast what the next 3 years look like after we surpassed the previous 3 years' guidance and give you the picture of what the base business should look like which is a great business. And then what you should expect us to do to kind of accelerate when right opportunities appear because we won't just ever kind of fit on our hands. I think that, that's like -- what should you not expect? You should not expect us to enter into like, oh, we have these all new verticals that we're getting into, like we started essentially 3 years ago, in a lot of lanes that we weren't in previously. So we were entirely within the U.S. for 22 years of our existence. It's all our volume and revenue. We were almost entirely in restaurants. We were just starting to get good at hotels. We have like 1 or 2 stadiums, and we said, we're going to get into e-com. We're going to follow an important customer all over the world. And when we do, we're going to bring our restaurants product and hotel capabilities into those markets. We're going to do some gaming, some travel in e-commerce world that we have 0 at. We're going to do some nonprofits, which we had 0 at up until that point. And now we'll be able to go into this Investor Day and say like, all those things that we were at 0 at are doing really awesome. I mean, just to give you some sense of it, If you were to cut up our volume into basically 1/3, a little greater than a 1/3 is hotel and hospitality. So that's like we are #1 in and we are growing very quickly now across the world. And #2 is slightly under 1/3 would be restaurants, which fine, we're #2 in. We'll take that and we're bringing that product all over the world. And then the last portion of it would be new verticals, which almost all of it did not exist. 3 years ago at the time of the last Investor Day. So it's like it all works the table set really well. Now here's what you should expect within these lanes that we're advantaged in for the next 3 years.

Daniel Perlin

analyst
#8

Yes. So diversification and the structure of the business actually is the next little topic I really want to hit on because as all of those -- I mean, it's massively changed since the IPO worked on, right, it's massively changed...

Jared Isaacman

executive
#9

All restaurants.

Daniel Perlin

analyst
#10

Yes. 100%, and now you've got direct distribution guys. Internationally, just rattle off a bunch of them. I guess maybe a question for Nancy here is as you start to pull all these various pieces together, this diversification of the business, has it become harder to forecast or easier to forecast in your opinion.

Nancy Disman

executive
#11

It's a great question. I think the forecast process has significantly gotten easier because we have a volume metric, right? So -- and we've spent a lot of time today talking about volumes already. And so our model is based on credit card first, right? We want end-to-end processing. And obviously, we have these software components and these acquisitions coming in. What makes the forecasting process, I guess, not difficult, is the diligence we do on every one of these deals that may be for the external community is causing complexity. But for us, we have a very incredible deal process, where the finance team is at the head creating those models at the time of the deal. And we -- I think what Jared does a great job with the team is we know what our objectives are. So even though they're different verticals, and our model is very simplistic and we follow it like kind of the key. We know what's going to happen day 1. We know what our assumptions are. Now sometimes there's blowup of the revenue happen faster. The conversions happen slower, of course, -- but I think the tenants of each deal and even within each vertical are the same. And so I think as long as we continue to stay within our lane forecasting isn't difficult.

Daniel Perlin

analyst
#12

Can you also -- and this is for both of you, but I mean can you also speak to the durability that the kind of transition has obviously made? Like when people think about your company and obviously, the way you think about it and describe it, its underwriting these multiyear growth trajectories and you put so many points on the board, I think we all agree that it's going to be a multipoint journey. We kind of have to figure out like how durable that is over that, let's say, 3-plus year time horizon.

Jared Isaacman

executive
#13

Well, I think there's a couple of things I would say, would go to that. So we have an advantage that maybe isn't that appreciated, which is all of our customers are integrated, like 99.999%. So what does that mean? It means our payment platform is connecting into software to deliver a better commerce experience. So it can either be our products, in restaurants or stadiums or it could be the hundreds of software integrations that we have to go after hotels. And that is very important because you take like what has become like a fortress of a payments company in Fiserv and always felt like they were -- the ones that have been around for half century, they are certainly the best. At one point, they process like half the world's transactions through all the various alliances and partnerships. Now inevitably, when you touch that new transactions, you're going to have customers that are going to need Shopify or they're going to need to go to Square or they're going to go to Stripe or Adyen. I mean you got Stripe or Adyen that are both like $1 trillion payment companies, there's nothing that Fiserv can do to stop that. So like for as much of a gem of a product that Clover is plus the distribution firepower they have, there is inevitably portions of their business that are nonintegrated, that will have to gravitate to some of the other winners. So when people like talk about like the durability of our growth, every one of our restaurant customers on an integrated solution, every one of our hotel customers on, our e-com or gaming or whatnot. So like the -- I need to get away and go to Shopify dynamic does not exist within our business. Same for like -- like I need to get away and go to Stripe or Adyen. So I think like the existing base is far more durable than people can appreciate. And then it's just like, well, okay, so what about like the inherent growth without them having to do M&A. There are only 2 restaurant products for table service that are actively being invested into and being distributed at scale, [indiscernible] with it. Everybody else is more or less like capitulated or trying to extract what they can out of what they have. In hotels, like we're #1 in North America where there is a competitive environment for integrated payments, and we have a library of integrations to serve the hospitality industry that you can't replicate. In the rest of the world, no one has it at all. They're using nonintegrated terminals. Sports and entertainment is like should be a pretty competitive market in the U.S., like we really took that one by storm and added ticketing. And so I think like -- we obviously owe people some numbers they can put against this. That's the point of using an Investor Day to do that, so you can kind of forecast it out a little bit. But the base is super strong because it's all integrated, and you clearly have a right to win in these handful of verticals. And then you have another vertical that we've been investing in. Like the other thing, too, like for the financial performance of the business, we've been investing in products that are subscale. Our whole global e-commerce strategy is to support one unbelievable customer, which is, by the way, exactly how Adyen and dLocal were formed following Facebook all over the world. We have our version of that customer doing it. We're not doing that just for that one customer. There will be others that will follow into that vertical, which is -- it's not -- again, I wouldn't say it's underappreciated. It's overlooked right now because we haven't given you a reason why -- but at some point, you can bet there will be other monsters to follow and you take advantage of those rails, which has like what has become a very interesting geographic coverage to it. And there's like a lot of investments also in internal systems and such that have been just flowing through the last few years that haven't had a chance to really reveal themselves yet, but we talk about it like Phoenix and Mission Control. A lot of good going on.

Daniel Perlin

analyst
#14

Yes. No doubt. So let's talk about the international expansion for a second because I think that there -- here again, lots going on. But I'm kind of -- I'm trying to break it down into, I would almost call it like distribution models. And you kind of talked about one. So the first one is following your strategic partner into all these new geographies. The other one I would say is you got SkyTab into U.K. and Ireland. So that feels more card present restaurant pubs. Then you've got the Vectron acquisition in Germany, at 65,000. And then you had Canada and rest of Europe, which sounded like that was slower. So I do a lot [ action ] there, but that's kind of how we're trying to just dissect all of these opportunities that you have in the international market. How should we be prioritizing those? Which ones are more meaningful? I know they're all important, but...

Jared Isaacman

executive
#15

I mean the look, I mean, our 2025 playbook is just to realize the results of the -- those opportunities that we created in 2024. So cross-selling your 65,000 Vectron customers, Look, it's -- that's a gift that we'll have to give over 10 years because honestly, even if you converted 65,000 in like one shot, your average volume per customer, for example, in Germany, which 85% debit is like -- it might be the equivalency of adding 10,000 restaurant customers in the U.S. The idea is like they're very early in their cash to credit conversion and there's all those 300 dealers that you'll now bundle -- you've already told them, you can't sell hardware and software anymore. You have to bundle software with payments and use that to differentiate to win lots of new customers. Like that gift will give for a very long time, gives us the $300 billion cross-sell payment opportunity. It's almost exactly the same as a gateway conversion running the exact same playbook on. That will be a gift that we'll give for many, many years, but like 2025. So like I think it's a long way of saying like all these things you're referencing, the ramping of production across U.K. and Ireland for SkyTab is awesome. We get these into a good enough place so we can feel confident that 2025, to some extent, will take care of itself so that you can spend the first half of '25, like I talked about in my prepared remarks, turning on Australia, New Zealand and LatAm. We do have a big customer that intends to process payments all over the world, and they give us a road map and we meet that road map. And then again, we bring in other products and services. So probably a year from now, when we're sitting here, I'll say like everything we set up in '24 did exactly as we thought. There's a long runway. If we converted 2% of Givex in 2025 would be awesome. And now we -- it's the results of our 2025 efforts that make us feel very good about what's going to happen in LatAm, New Zealand, Australia in 2026 because we set the table very well for it. So I think that's generally how we're thinking about it.

Darren Baker

analyst
#16

Okay. Okay. I want to touch on kind of the contracted volume backlog a little bit, and there's so many questions I could go into here, but this one seems to be like top of mind for a lot of people. So you gave the number, which was fantastic, $25 billion and grew to $33 billion. You converted the $5 billion, then you added $13 billion, right? So like there is this constant motion that's going on. Can you just remind us how you think about that conversion pace? What are the things we as outsiders need to be paying attention to? And then how does that kind of roll into like another year, so to speak, either...

Nancy Disman

executive
#17

Sure. I think right off the that, it's just -- it's a component builder. Like we shared that information to really explain it goes back to your question about forecasting. Our line of sight into 2025, we already have. Like we have the road map a year ahead, and it's because of the backlog of volumes where we've signed customers that are implemented or we have customers that aren't at their run rate, could be a stadium where we haven't gotten ticketing, but we have -- where we haven't gotten the student tickets. It can be a hotel where we've installed 2, but we know there's 20. So sharing the backlog, and it's always -- as a CFO, I hate every time we add another indicator every single quarter. And we even had some people surprised that we gave it 2 quarters in a row, but it was really to build confidence of our visibility because we know people think there's a lot of complexity in the story. So I think that's what's most important is if it was $33 billion, it was $28 billion or if it was $40 billion, it's a big number. And it's all stuff that we have...

Daniel Perlin

analyst
#18

Okay. How do you respond to the question? You probably got this 15 times in other meetings, but we hear it all the time right now. It's like when you think about the fourth quarter, the end-to-end volume implicit, can we extrapolate that on an annualized basis going into next year? And do we kind of roll this into it? Or like what would be the guardrail, so to speak, that you want us to have as we think about pushing those numbers forward a little bit?

Jared Isaacman

executive
#19

Yes. I don't -- it is interesting because like we did get this bunch, and I know Tom's e-mail box blew up from a bunch of people. So somebody is like, I don't know, getting like or -- e-mail or something on the numbers, like I don't get the complexity of the whole thing. Like it's -- there's no mysteries on who these customers are. They're really big hotels, resorts, stadiums, ticketing customers, and they signed an agreement and said, I'm in. Now we don't get to necessarily control the timing of flipping the switch on it. But like if it's like unpacking the mysteries on it, they either haven't been installed at all or maybe the stadiums installed, but the ticketing won't go live for 6 months or something like that. Or maybe it's a hotel operator where you have like 2 locations that are up and running, but you don't have the rest of it, it hasn't like reached its full potential. Now like I don't know if like somebody is like we got them because if you annualize Q4, isn't some of the 30-some-odd going to roll into Q4, so it's like it will be double count. Do whatever math you want on the whole thing. If you're going to get to a place that will make you feel good on 2025 volume on the whole thing, you're going to heard like an evolution of that, which is like volume is no longer even a relevant KPI for Shift4, like [indiscernible] that one, right?

Daniel Perlin

analyst
#20

Okay. Yes. No, we get plenty of the questions and all different kind of derivations. So I just wanted to kind of put out there and see what the stake in the ground is going to be. I want to touch on Revel and the Givex acquisitions here. Revel in particular, you've had it now for a little bit. And so I'm wondering kind of -- you kind of laid out some plans to how you're going to go about converting into other things. But now you've owned a little bit, what are you thinking in terms of timelines there? Do you feel like you probably be blowing it up quicker, not so much? Are there some things that were stickier than we thought or maybe not as sticky?

Jared Isaacman

executive
#21

No, I think that one went I mean the only reason we could convince ourselves that we should do Revel was the experience off of Appetize, which was -- look, we've always underwrote any deal we've ever done on the cross-sell, right? You have a sticky customer, a foot in the door, you're going to get lots of shots on goal, better value properly prevail, one throat to choke, you're going to win payment volume. With Appetize, like -- so when you run into these scenarios of these companies that were historic cash burners, it is not in our profile to take on something that's going to be that much of a drag and bet only on a cross-sell. So you had to bet on -- you could delete the part. You had to take out a lot of expense to make Appetize work. Appetize for its like 15 years, only [indiscernible] Revel, same thing. So like in Appetize, we were like, we'll burn the ships. We're only taking the commercial people and the account managers and those that can help with VenueNext. We're not taking anyone to keep that product going. We're telling every customer, the product goes away, you got to move to VenueNext. We'll make -- we'll give you some great deals, but you're coming on over. It worked incredibly well. Totally turned around historic cash burner to that is like, I would say, like by now, Appetize -- it's been 1 year approximately is probably like synergized down into like, I don't know -- it's definitely deleveraging. It's like 2.5x probably -- maybe it's like. But that was a good deal. We applied the same logic to Revel, and that's another one where it was like we have to burn the ships. The product goes away. We move people over to SkyTab. And unlike the -- like we're not going to cross-sell them payments because we can't prolong them staying on the product. So it's basically burn the ships, get rid of the cost, maintain the customer base that start signing agreements to convert them over to SkyTab at a future date. And we want to work within like a 2-year time frame. I'd say that's going totally fine. If anything, like there was something that we had to bet on, which was the same as Appetize, which is -- they're not going to like their current product. We knew they weren't going to like Appetize because they were moving to VenueNext anyway. And the belief that like iOS for as great as it is as a consumer is probably a bad commercial product since Revel is an entirely iOS platform. That was very true. Like they want to move very quickly away from iOS.

Daniel Perlin

analyst
#22

Got it. Got it. And Nancy, in terms of like the subscription revenue number, that one gets a lot of questions as well, incredibly strong this last quarter. And I think even the forward look was a lot better than a lot of people expected. So I guess any kind of context to put around that -- as it certainly pertains to the deals.

Nancy Disman

executive
#23

Yes. And I definitely tried [indiscernible] guide in last quarter's discussions what to expect for this quarter. I know people were surprised by the 90%[indiscernible]. I kind of knew where it was going to this quarter. It's difficult, so this is definitely one for Investor Day, we're going to do our best to unpack when you talk about forecasting not difficult for me, but not wanting to really give everybody every last piece of information. It's you've got 3 underlying things going on that are just incredible, right? Pace of SkyTab has accelerations, pace of [indiscernible] acceleration with software SaaS component and just overall growth in SMB. We've got our not-for-profit [indiscernible] getting some growth, there's a SaaS component there. So the underlying SaaS growth, quite honestly, is actually better than where the total growth of subscription and other is right now. Going the other way, though, is we have the puts and takes of we bring in an acquisition, we have others that are being blown up. So I can't really unpack that better except to say those -- that dynamic is going to be there. It's something we're talking about for Investor Day of like how -- what more can we give you to help you remodel that. But software only is the new gateway, right? That's where the funnel software is sitting. So we are thinking about like we need to reposition what's left of gateway with software only and maybe there's a better way to package it. TBD still, we've got to spend some time on that and make sure that it provides greater clarity. But that's really what's going on. You've got this underlying incredible growth that's truly tied to our end-to-end volume growth, right? They're connected. And then you've got some of the money from the acquisition. But all of this goes back to your forecast question where one thing I just want to add to everything Jared said is we underwrite a base case. We go to our Board with base cases for all these deals, but we always have a mid and then a [indiscernible], right? So the complexity of how fast we execute on the Jared case is changing. People ask us all the time, what have we learned? Maybe our carrot and stick was too slow with gateways. We test that out now with some of the deals, like we get to a stick maybe faster. And so that push and pull will impact that category.

Daniel Perlin

analyst
#24

That's interesting. One of the questions I always ask and I'm asking again just because you have so much like such a bolus of growth is just the sheer ability to have an implementation staff, team, organization to kind of facilitate all of these opportunities, which are pretty significant. So in the past, you've said not a problem. I suspect you'll say the same again, but maybe if you could elaborate on why it's not problem.

Jared Isaacman

executive
#25

I think that if you cut up the deal and if you cut up any of these deals into like 2 parts. And so Look, there's absolutely kind of real -- we have one of our -- I mean, the best talent in the organization are those that generally are working on this. So our PMO office, our strategy team, finance, legal, like we have a lot of people that work really hard. And these are generally teams that, as [ Taylor ] has described, like in a culture of trying to maintain a flat headcount do get some latitude when they try out and pay a new help on some of these things. I will say, though, that a lot of it is about integrating the personnel. It's more of the admin type of things, the pain of like switching e-mail servers over and signature lines and benefits and all that. And I'm trying not to understate any of this because it is pain, importing, billing systems, things of that nature. That's a lot of the -- first 90 days of like hard part. The revenue synergy side is not the hard part. You're doing this already. That's the thing. Like there's nothing -- there's no like we have a new story now. You're taking all of the customers -- so give back. We're just cutting that up, who are the hospitality customers, drop down on the hospitality cross-sell team from the gateway side. Who are the restaurant customers, drop down on the restaurant software cross-sell team. They're going to the same people. And then you're always getting some headcount along with these deals, which is, hey, we will never -- it's -- we set expectations really well in the town hall, by the way. We're very transparent. We're never going to sell another gift card-only deal or loyalty-only deal. Like we do integrated payments. This is a feature as part of a company. It does not belong as its own separate company. So now you're on the team that's cross-selling restaurants and hotels and you absorb them into those teams. So the actual revenue synergy component of these transactions is just topping off the funnel of the machine that works pretty well and you try and make it better. There's the hard part of the other side of like the leading part -- every expense gets a defense spend component to it, personnel got to get absorbed. There's all sorts of things like that, that I'm not trying to undersell, but it's a lot different than I think other deals where you're like there's a lot of new here and we have to figure it out, and that's where people I think get in trouble.

Nancy Disman

executive
#26

Right. And I think the evolution that's happened with the company that's allowed us to get to the margin level that we're at and free cash flow conversion is we're investing on the needle movers. So we literally had a leadership meeting last year that said we're going to take people from these 3 things that are where we've been, and we're going to put them towards where we're going. And everybody kind of had a rally cry around that. And so I think everything is very focused and standing operating procedures have to be put in place. So Givex like -- I mean, it's been incredible, like watching my own team, right, just like execute on a playbook. And everything just -- things that didn't exist 2 years ago that exist today. And I just think we wouldn't be able to do this if we didn't completely change that culturally for the company.

Jared Isaacman

executive
#27

Yes. I think just on that cultural point, like the Shift4 Way philosophy, what I opened by saying like [ Rob ] SpaceX, like that -- we drill that so much. And it goes very much to like how we execute, especially on M&A, like keeping things flat, communicating radical ownership, which is lots of small scrappy empowered teams incentivized to build up to bigger objectives, deleting parts don't try and make it work. Like if there's a [indiscernible] weird -- oh, they did something funky with like a grocery, delete it. It doesn't matter what the revenue is associated with it. It's not -- if I don't know about it wasn't a needle mover anyway, get rid of it, repurpose people on things that matter, like burn the ships very quickly, proceduralize everything, like process and then be able to execute urgently. It sounds like a lot of words, but if you can get an organization that actually buys into the philosophy and applies it to the problems they encounter every day, you can do really good things with it, very much part of our -- how we approach M&A.

Daniel Perlin

analyst
#28

Yes. Just one more thing on Givex, you brought that up a couple of times. I mean one of the things you said was that the attrition rate on those clients was like less than 1%, which is an astoundingly low number. And I also had heard like in the market that they were not -- they had not been big in terms of pricing. And so I know you're dropping it into these various verticals. So I'm just wondering, usually, when you map 1% attrition rates and very low pricing opportunities, you can either blow up your attrition rates or you just generate a lot more profit. So...

Jared Isaacman

executive
#29

Yes. I mean I think there's a couple of things. This is another one like building out like our checklist for Investor Day, because somebody, I think it was at our -- after earnings dinner that questions came up. I would guarantee like we have triple-digit net revenue retention rates in every vertical other than restaurants. And that is just simply based on the fact that you can't -- you can't fix bad pizza. It will just go out of business. But like within the hotel, like we don't have -- we never lost a major like hotel customer under our [indiscernible] since we've grown those gateways. We've never -- I'm not aware of a single stadium that said I'm going back to the old ways. So of course, you have like -- whether it's like as simple as like your CPI increase clause in your SaaS agreements or something like you're always growing like your revenue with these customers, and they're -- we're not losing. I think again, the only one that wins with triple digit your restaurant base. When it comes to Givex, I think that the previous CEO had an interesting philosophy on how we manage cost to customers on that one. I think that like when we look at our playbook of a combination of carrots and sticks, they will all get a notice that your gift and loyalty fees can go to 0, your gateway fees can go to 0 for whoever you're using. You can get a free EMV upgrade device and some handhelds, but they'll probably get like if you choose not to, at some point, costs are going to [indiscernible]. And we do that same [indiscernible] for cross-sell opportunity.

Daniel Perlin

analyst
#30

Yes. Okay. I wanted to ask Nancy about just the margin trajectory. I mean the organization remains flat. You talked a lot about taking out parts in these acquisitions. You still had an opportunity to actually increase EBITDA margins despite this huge drag that you had. So maybe can you just level set for us kind of the expectation, not maybe obviously, in the fourth quarter, that's important, but just underlying again, the forecastability, durability as we think about going...

Nancy Disman

executive
#31

Yes. I think there's 2 things that are most important to remember about everything we've done over the last few years. We've improved the unit economics on every deal. So the flow-through just from gross margin to EBITDA is increasing. Stadiums and ticketing easiest comparison, but our enterprise customers generally require the least support. I mean the way they're operating on a cloud-based model, SkyTab, cloud-based products. But the counter to that and where the opportunity is, is not only continuing that flow-through, it's this operational efficiency that we still have more than half of our infrastructure in the company supporting that legacy SMB non-SkyTab business, right? So as that business either converts, as we implement our cloud-based infrastructure with Salesforce and Palantir, Mission Control, everything we're doing inside the company is to optimize that base. So that's the runway that we see, and it's all within our control. So it's the -- when we talk about on this last quarter about a 51% that could have been 54% without the acquisition drag, that's just executing on the synergies that are completely within our control. So that's where we feel really comfortable and why we talk about the drag because that's written. The other piece that we've been talking a lot about is this investment that's kind of going on while we are growing so fast. And 2025 will be the first time that pieces of that start going live. So that was always a 2025 into 2026 and probably '27, where we're going to get the rest of that kind of the synergized opportunity from the infrastructure. And again, as that legacy base, we never had a cloud-based product like SkyTab, right? So that's all new. And we haven't attacked our base, right? That's going to be something strategically that we do, certainly something that I'm sure we'll talk about at Investor Day. But it's right within our reach. I mean I know I get asked a lot, well, where do you think it could go? We've used the Adyen example at the 60s of like a guardrail, mainly because their mix of business doesn't have that large SMB legacy component. And I know Jared probably thought I was being conservative in an earlier conversation saying mid-60s, but I mean that feels certainly really like right within our reach.

Daniel Perlin

analyst
#32

Got it. We're out of time, and there's still so many questions that we have. But thank you both so much for being here. Really appreciate it. Congratulations on amazing achievement.

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