Good day. And welcome to IZEA Worldwide Incorporated Third Quarter 2021 Earnings Conference Call. During the presentation, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. Afterwards, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, today’s conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Ryan Schram. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to IZEA’s Q3 2021 earnings call. I’m Ryan Schram, President and Chief Operating Officer at IZEA. And with me on today’s call is IZEA’s Chief Financial Officer, Peter Biere; and IZEA’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Ted Murphy. Thanks for joining us. Earlier this afternoon, the Company issued a press release with details pertaining to our third quarter performance for 2021. If you’d like to review those details, all of our investor information can be found on our Investor Relations website at izea.com/investors. Before we begin, please take note of the Safe Harbor paragraph included in today’s press release, covering the Company’s financial results. And be advised that during today’s earnings call, our management team will discuss IZEA’s business outlook and make forward-looking statements. These statements are predictions, based on our team’s expectations as of today that are subject to inherent risks and uncertainties and should not be unduly relied upon. Actual events, results or trends could differ materially from our forecast due to a number of factors, including those mentioned in our most recently filed periodic reports with the SEC. The Company and our management team assume no obligations to update any forward-looking statements made in today’s call. In addition, our update today will also refer to a non-GAAP financial measure, adjusted EBITDA, and other business metrics such as gross billings and bookings. A detailed explanation of these measures is disclosed in our earnings release and in our most recent Form 10-Q. With the appropriate disclosures taken care of, I’d now like to turn the call over to my colleague and IZEA’s Chief Financial Officer, Peter Biere. Peter?

Thank you, Ryan, and good afternoon, everyone. I’d like to highlight our results for the quarter ended September 30, 2021. Total revenue for the third quarter of 2021 was $7.6 million or 88% higher, when compared to Q3 of 2020, with $7.2 million coming from our Managed Services business and $454,000 coming from our SaaS offerings. Managed Services revenue increased by $3.7 million or 104%, while SaaS revenue declined by $68,000 or 13%, both compared to the prior year quarter. As we’ve previously announced, Managed Services bookings, a key metric which measures sales orders received less any cancellations or refunds given during a period, topped $11 million for the third quarter of 2021. This all-time record represents an increase of 181%, compared to Q3 of 2020, and continues the growth trend that we’ve seen since late last year. The trend towards larger brands increasing their marketing spend with IZEA also continued during the quarter, as we added several new Fortune 500 customers and repeat business from three Fortune 10 partners. These factors taken together with efforts, put forth by our team to fulfill campaigns, resulted in the increase in Managed Services revenue. As a reminder, we recognize revenue on our Managed Services contracts over time, based on the percentage of completion, and delivery timing can vary greatly. Historically, bookings have converted to revenue over a six- to seven-month period on average. However, since late last year, we’ve been receiving increasingly larger and more complex sales orders, which in turn has lengthened the average period for revenue recognition to approximately nine months with the largest contracts taking even longer to complete. Planning for larger contracts takes more time upfront, which can also cause further delays. For these reasons, Managed Services bookings, while an overall indicator of the health of our business,…

Thanks Peter. It’s wonderful to be delivering continued strong results for our shareholders and clients alike. While 2021 has been a record setting year for IZEA on several fronts, one of the shining examples comes from our Managed Service work group. For those of you not familiar, this unit of integrated marketing professionals, works on behalf of brands and their agencies to concept, strategize and execute world-class influencer marketing programs. By leveraging IZEA’s technology platforms, it allows our team members to have a unique advantage in delivering both, highly innovative and highly effective work with unparalleled efficiencies. Such an offering is a key element in our strategy to unlock incremental value for our clients, resulting in larger dollar size commitments, broader geographic access, and more substantive relationships overall. And it’s working. Since 2019, we’ve more than tripled the number of clients who are trusting IZEA with $1 million-plus budgets, while at the same time increasing the absolute number of new Managed Service clients by more than 2x over the last year. Obviously, these are terrific numbers that our team is proud of, and they should be, but for our shareholders, it also underscores the continuing shift within the broader advertising and marketing investment trends that were exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Compared to old established bastions of media, such as television, radio and print, influencer marketing not only is more cost-effective, but it delivers a longer lifetime value through highly measurable results. As we look toward 2022 and beyond, there’s even more opportunity ahead of us, from new types of client engagement to provide strategic planning pre-campaign to offering best-in-class data science personnel to provide insight and analytics on campaign performance in new and exciting ways. We see IZEA’s future thriving at the intersection of our talented team members, our passionate creators and our proprietary technology. When paired with a healthy growth mindset entrenched across the Company’s personnel, by having the advantage of technology backed solutions, adding more clients doesn’t necessarily mean having to add proportionately more costs. While we remain steadfastly committed to securing and consolidating the very best talent across the influencer marketing industry in both, our sales and service organizations, we believe that IZEA will continue to enjoy an increase in revenue per full-time employee over time as we seek to enhance and automate lower value aspects of the campaign fulfillment process. That way, our valued team members can spend more time surprising and delighting our clients, driving increased retention and larger investments in return. Doing so also unlocks greater opportunities for the broader creator economy as well with increased deal flow and higher diversity of brand collaboration opportunities to engage against. Now, for some additional perspective on IZEA’s performance year-to-date as well as commentary on the road ahead for the Company, I’d like to turn the call over to my colleague, and IZEA’s Founder, Chairman and CEO, Ted Murphy. Ted?

Thank you, Ryan. At the end of 2020, our team set forth a goal to deliver at least 30% annual revenue growth per year for each of the next three years or a 30% compound annual growth rate. Revenues in 2020 were $18.3 million. Based on that rate of 30% growth per year, our goal is to achieve revenues of approximately $23.8 million in 2021 and $31 million in 2022. We are on pace to significantly beat our revenue goal in 2021. Our Managed Services bookings in 2021 have far exceeded our initial targets. Q3-to-date is $28.8 million in bookings, versus $10.7 million for the same period last year, a 170% increase. As a result of strong bookings this year, we are going to materially exceed our 30% revenue growth target in 2021. Year-to-date revenue through Q3 of this year already totals $19.5 million, and we are heading into a historically strong quarter for IZEA bookings and revenue recognition. We saw a large year-over-year spike in bookings in Q1, Q2, and Q3, which can make it difficult for investors to anticipate what Q4 may look like from a revenue perspective. To assist investors, we have included a chart in our latest earnings press release that illustrates the historical correlation between Managed Services bookings, and revenue. If you refer to the chart, you will see that there has been a divergence from the bookings and revenue trend lines over the past few quarters. The bookings trend line has far outpaced the revenue trend line for the past three quarters, as IZEA has been awarded larger contracts that span greater periods. That gap is best reflected in our unearned revenue backlog, which grew to $22 million in this quarter. We expect the revenue line to catch up to bookings over time and…

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] All right. Our first question is coming from the line of Jon Hickman from Ladenburg. You may now proceed.

Hello? Can you hear me?

Yes.

Okay. Hey. So, it appears from my look at your P&L for the last couple of quarters that you’re not spending money on marketing and stuff quite as fast as you had anticipated. Can you talk about that?

Yes. That is really a result of onboarding the team to effectively manage that spend. We hadn’t anticipated being more aggressive with that marketing spend, but it’s just taking a longer time to actually get the right people in place. And many of those people have joined us honestly in the past two to three months. And we are still building out that team. So, I think that you’re going to see that spend accelerate next year. And you’re definitely going to see that spend accelerate next year, now that we have the people on board to effectively manage it and make sure that we’re properly spending those dollars.

Okay. Thanks. That’s it for me.

Thank you.

[Operator Instructions] Okay. Our next question is coming from the line of Elliot Shaw from Shaw. You may now proceed.

Got a question for you on the share count. It shows that under the internet as 61 point something million shares. What is the actual share count as of today?

I will hand that over to Peter to answer that.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the number at my fingertips, but I’ll have it in 30 seconds, if you want to continue?

Yes. That’s my question. I’d like to know the number.

Okay. One moment. Okay. 61,989, 866.

Okay. And I got a question for Mr. Murphy, are you guys trying to glean any employees from the Fiverr company? They seem to be doing an outstanding job over there. Are you guys trying to recruit anybody?

You’re referring to Fiverr?

Yes.

Yes. We are openly looking at all applicants. We’re not targeting any particular company, but certainly looking for people that have background and experience in our space.

Okay. And then, do you plan any more of the pots and pans?

I can’t really comment on what type of events we’re going to have moving forward. But, we are certainly -- continue to have a high level of excitement here.

Okay. Yes. And then, maybe like state of the Purple Pumas or something, maybe a pair of Nike’s, and they’ll kind of put a little bit of a better foot forward, put a pair of Nike’s on maybe.

Yes. I run in Nike’s. I like Nike’s too.

Okay. Thank you.

All right, everybody. We have a question coming from the line of Bill Musser from New Frontier Capital. You may now proceed.

So, I have a question. Can we expect you to grow 30% a year for the next three years from the base of earnings in revenues -- or the base of revenues this year?

We are not giving any to next year quite yet and updating those numbers. We want to finish out 2021, and we will be revisiting that come next year.

But you will be providing some guidance?

Yes. We’ll be updating those goals, and that will be reflective of our budgeting process as we finish it this year.

And then, my second question is sort of my observation is that something is sort of really changed in the influencer marketing business, as it relates to brands’ willingness to do this kind of advertising relative to where their heads were at prior to the pandemic. And in other words, the growth you’re seeing, I know you improved the product, but the growth you’re seeing is so extraordinary that it seems to me that really for the first time influencer marketing is really taking off in a major way. Could you just sort of comment on, give some color on that observation?

Yes. I think that you’re right. We’re just seeing increased investment from the customers that we have across the board. And we are certainly seeing customers that have not previously invested heavily in influencer marketing, jump on board with larger allocations than we’ve historically seen. So, we’re seeing those initial investments, materially larger than a couple of years ago in 2019 pre-pandemic. And on the higher end, we are seeing more customers that are spending large sums with us. And Brian spoke to that a little bit with our count of customers that are now million-dollar customers of ours.

And would you attribute that to sort of environmental shift or to the fact you’ve improved the product a lot?

I think, it’s a combination of those things. I don’t think that we can ignore the fact that influencer marketing itself has really started to hit its stride and is becoming a line item in our client’s budgets and something that is being taken very seriously. At the same time, I give credit to our team who’s been working for the past 15 years to not only create this space, but really established us as leaders, both on technology and in strategy. So, it feels like all of this is happening very quickly, but it’s the result of a decade and a half of hard work on behalf of team IZEA.

Do you have a sense that the competition is growing as fast as we are, or are we gaining share of market in a general sense?

I believe we’re gaining share market in the general sense. I think that you’re seeing some companies in this space that are also growing and we’ve seen a lot that had fizzled out and are on life support. I would say that we are seeing more inbound deal flow and people looking to sell than we have in the past. And frankly, a lot of that is because they don’t have the ability to compete moving forward in terms of capital resources.

And just finally, in terms of hiring people, salespeople are available or not? How about technical people?

I mean, it is definitely a tight labor market, and there’s two parts of that. One is that we are now able to look outward, outside of Orlando in a way that we never had pre-pandemic, and we are now truly a global workforce. But, at the same time, so is everybody else. And so, it’s kind of blurred the lines for us as an employer as well as people that are job seekers. It’s opened up a lot of opportunities for them as well. I will say that it’s taken us a lot longer to get our engineering team and our product team to a point where we’re happy, we’re still hiring on both of those teams. And realistically, it’s probably going to continue to be tough for the foreseeable future in terms of onboarding new talent.

Just another final question, in terms of getting shaped up to the level of performance that you want, how long do you think that’s going to take?

Yes. Part of that actually dovetails into what we are just talking about is, getting the team members on board to really get that moving as fast as we would like. That is still a very small team of people. And that impacts our ability to move at a clip that we would want to. That is getting better. But, it’s certainly going to be into next year before we get some of the major things done that we would like to get accomplished.

Got you. Thank you.

Thank you.

All right. There are no further questions in queue. I’ll turn the call back over to a Ryan Schram for closing remarks.

Thanks Dave. And thank you everyone for joining us this afternoon for our Q3 earnings call. As a reminder, all of IZEA’s investor information can be found online on our Investor Relations website, and that’s at izea.com/investors. Thank you for joining us. Have a safe evening, and we’ll talk to you again soon.

And ladies and gentlemen, that will conclude the conference call for today. Thank you very much for your participation. You may now disconnect your lines.