Earnings Labs

Consensus Cloud Solutions, Inc. (CCSI)

Q3 2024 Earnings Call· Sat, Nov 9, 2024

$25.69

-4.25%

Key Takeaways · AI generated
AI summary not yet generated for this transcript. Generation in progress for older transcripts; check back soon, or browse the full transcript below.
Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Consensus Q3 2024 Earnings Call. My name is Paul, and I will be the operator assisting you today. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. [Operator Instructions] On this call from Consensus will be Scott Turicchi, CEO; Jim Malone, CFO; Johnny Hecker, CRO and Executive Vice President of Operations; and Adam Varon, Senior Vice President of Finance. I will now turn the call over to Adam Varon, Senior Vice President of Finance at Consensus. Thank you. You may begin.

Adam Varon

Analyst

Good afternoon, and welcome to the Consensus investor call to discuss our Q3 2024 financial results, other key information, and our Q4 and full year 2024 guidance. Joining me today are Scott Turicchi, CEO; Johnny Hecker, CRO and EVP of Operations; and Jim Malone, CFO. The earnings call will begin with Scott providing opening remarks. Johnny will give an update on operational progress since our Q2 2024 investor call. And then Jim will discuss Q3 2024 financial results and Q4 quarterly and full year 2024 guidance. After we finish our prepared remarks, we will conduct a Q&A session. At that time, the operator will instruct you on the procedures for asking a question. Before we begin our prepared remarks, allow me to direct you to our forward-looking statements and risk factors on Slide 2. As you know, this call and the webcast will include forward-looking statements. Such statements may involve risks and uncertainties that would cause actual results to differ materially from the anticipated results. Some of those risk factors and uncertainties include, but are not limited to the risk factors that we have disclosed in our 10-K SEC filing. Now let me turn the call over to Scott.

Scott Turicchi

Analyst

Thank you, Adam. We had another strong quarter in Q3, meeting our expectations for revenue, adjusted EBITDA and adjusted non-GAAP net income per share. The outperformance occurred in both channels of revenue. This combined with our disciplined approach to cost resulted in another quarter of excellent EBITDA performance and an EBITDA margin above the midpoint of our range of 50% to 55%. As we laid out in our Q4 2023 earnings call, our goals for this year include: first, eliminating certain costs of the SoHo channel, especially in the area of marketing, to provide for stabilization of the base of revenue over time, which Johnny will address in his remarks; two, continuing to pursue the acquisition of customers primarily in the healthcare space for our corporate channel; three, reviewing our overall cost structure with the goal of driving adjusted EBITDA margins north of 54%. I would note it's 54.7% for the 9 months; and four, continuing the repurchase of our debt to further reduce our total debt to adjusted EBITDA ratio in anticipation of the first tranche maturing in October of 2026. Our corporate channel had the best revenue growth in 6 quarters. The 5.3% growth was driven by new customer additions and record usage for a quarter. The new adds came primarily through our e-commerce efforts of eFax Protect, supplemented by upgrades from our SoHo base, as well as several key enterprise wins. Notwithstanding the lower ARPA of eFax Protect customers than our current average, we were still able to maintain a $310 ARPA per customer and a tight range over the past several quarters. As predicted, we continue to see additional sites from the VA rollout, driving new levels of usage and revenue. In addition, we saw a return to 100% LTM revenue retention in our corporate channel.…

Johnny Hecker

Analyst

Thank you, Scott, and hello, everyone. I will provide an update on operations and go-to-market for the Corporate and SoHo businesses, respectively, including details on revenue, customer accounts and go-to-market strategy. Q3 was another record revenue quarter for our Corporate business. I'm very pleased with our growth and the increased momentum resulting in another solid performance in Q3. Our revenue for the third quarter increased by approximately 5.3% compared to the same period last year, the highest rate in the last six quarters. We have reached a total of $53.1 million up from $50.4 million in Q3 of the previous year. Particularly cloud fax, especially in healthcare, showed solid consumption growth within our existing customer base, while we were able to implement and ramp recently one new customers across the board. Our Corporate customer account has reached roughly 58,000, the highest ever for Consensus. And I am pleased to report that Corporate ARPA has maintained flat quarter-over-quarter at $310 and well within the stable $305 to $320 range for 8 quarters now. Driven by automation, e-commerce and SoHo upsell to Corporate added over 3,000 customers to the overall Corporate account base in Q3, another significant increase since last quarter. Our eFax Protect service is experiencing sustained growth. To further capitalize on this momentum, we're investing in its expansion, as outlined in the go-to-market strategy represented last year. While the recently introduced in-product upsell options from SoHo to Corporate have been successful in reducing the need for direct customer interaction and driving growth, we're seeing this upsell strategy plateau after many successful quarters. Moving forward, we'll maintain this profitable program, but continue to shift our focus towards e-commerce as the primary driver for acquiring small Corporate accounts. The success and growth of Corporate accounts on the lower end of the ARPA…

Jim Malone

Analyst

Thank you, Johnny, and good afternoon, everyone. In our press release and on this earnings call today, we are disclosing Q3 2024 results plus Q4 2024 and 2024 full year guidance. We expect to file our Q3 10-Q today. Let's start with our Corporate business results. Q3 2024 revenue was a record $53.1 million, up $2.7 million or 5.3% versus prior year and performing better than expectations. Corporate ARPA of $310 was essentially flat with the prior quarter and in line with the last several quarters, ranging from $305 to $320. Q3 2024 customer churn of 2.61% increased a 112 basis points year-over-year and 32 basis points sequentially, primarily driven by customer churn at the lower end of the customer continuum. Normalized for eFax Protect to cancel rate we've been approximately 2%. Notwithstanding this, these customers are net economically beneficial. I would also like to repeat Johnny's comment that our cancel rate is calculated on a per account basis. A better measure is revenue retention, which came in at a 100% over the trailing 12 months and 1% improvement sequentially. SoHo results. Q3 2024 revenue of $34.7 million is a decrease of $5.5 million or 13.6% over the prior year and in line with expectations. As mentioned previously, this decrease is driven by our plan reduction in advertising spend and the corresponding year-over-year base reduction due to lower paid adds. ARPA of $14.88 decreased 2.8% year-over-year as a result of the shifting to price plans with a discounted first month versus a free trial. These plans are net economically benefit. It should be noted that year-over-year paid adds were flat amid at approximate 40% lower spend as we continue to optimize our advertising campaigns. Churn declined 11 basis points to 3.38% year-over-year, and 2 basis points sequentially, in line with…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] First question today is coming from David Larsen from BTIG.

Jenny Shen

Analyst

This is Jenny Shen on for Dave. Congrats on the quarter. Just doubling down on the hospital environment right now. I know the general consensus has been that it's kind of a 2-sided coin with some hospitals doing better than others. Just broadly speaking, where are you guys seeing in terms of the labor and inflation trends for hospitals? And also whether you think the recent election or even CMS's recent physician fee schedule will have any impact on your hospital customers if they've said anything yet so far?

Johnny Hecker

Analyst

Yes. Jenny, thank you for the question. This is Johnny. I think it's a really good question, and you partially answered it already, right? Some hospitals are doing well. Others are struggling. I think we -- I mentioned it in the call, right? We see the green shoots actually growing and converting. So I think we found a way, especially in the specialty healthcare space, in the multi-location healthcare providers, where we can find customers with, let me call it, accelerated interest and conversion. So while we still have some very large clients that take their time, and we still see continued headwinds in that area, we have found ways to convert and actually ramp new customers. So like you said, it's a diverse environment out there and some customers are really accelerating, which is encouraging, even more encouraging that we find them and can engage with them and others continue to be slow. From the question about the administrative change and the new rules that we -- from the CMS, we don't see any particular impact on our business at this point. I don't know, Scott, if you want to...?

Scott Turicchi

Analyst

No, I think you had a third question which is about the election and any impact it might have, specifically on customer acquisition. My guess is, generally the answer is going to be no. Obviously, there's a lot of unknowns at this point. There's still an undecided house race. And so, I think if you listen to even Chairman Powell today on the interest rate cut and his commentary going forward, 2 things: one, there's a lot of unknowns because we don't have a settled Congress; and two, a lot of the policies that have been talked about and may be implemented are probably still months in the future in terms of getting through even a unified Congress and then actually getting implemented. So it's obviously something we will watch. There's all kinds of different pieces to it. Obviously, what -- how does it affect the economy generally. Interest rates, you see already moving around, tax implications. There's a whole myriad of things, but I think it's too early to call. But in general, I would say that elections and the different parties that can be in control or divided government, doesn't have a huge impact on our customer acquisition, go-to-market strategy. Clearly, if things either give an accelerant to the economy or a headwind, that could have an impact. But in terms of the direct correlation, I'd say it's generally weak.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] And there were no other questions from the lines at this time. I will now hand the call back to Scott Turicchi for closing remarks.

Scott Turicchi

Analyst

Great. Well, thank you very much for joining us today. It was obviously a very busy day to report earnings. So if any of you in listening to the replay or reading the transcript have questions, please feel free to reach out to us. We will have probably one or two conferences between now and our next reporting period, which will target for the third week of February. Of course, on that call, we will discuss not only the Q4 results, but we'll release 2025 guidance on revenues, adjusted EBITDA and non-GAAP earnings per share, much as we've done this year. So we look forward to talking to you in the interim and then giving you that update in about 3 months. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. This does conclude today's conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time, and have a wonderful day. Thank you for your participation.