Dustin Wunderlich
Analyst · Maxim Group
Thank you, Will, and good morning, everyone. I want to use my time this morning a little differently. Krista and Mike will walk you through the quarter. I want to take you through the last 3 quarters because the third quarter only makes sense as part of that story. Where we started. Go back to the plan this company went public on, a value-based shopping marketplace and later a family of consumer brands. In 2024, that plan used $34 million of cash in operations and lost $58 million. In 2025, it used another $20 million. The marketplace, the company was named for never covered its costs. Neither did the brands. The one business with a real reason to exist was Credova, the smallest of the 3 when the company bought it. It was carrying the overhead of a company built for something else. A year ago, we had 72 employees, and we're using about $6 million a quarter in operations. In January, the team that built Credova took over running the whole company. Mike, Jim and I built Credova as a private company that paved its own way. We never had a capital market to cover a loss, so every product had to earn its keep. And that is how we have run this company since. We told you we would do 4 things: get out of consumer brands; cut the cost structure down to the business we actually have; grow payments and credit without growing headcount; and get this company to the point where it funds itself. We put numbers on each of those and ask you to hold us to them. Doing those 4 things meant ending the strategy this company went public on. What we have done? Three quarters later, here's where that stands. In that time, we shut down the marketplace, sold the brands business, cut the workforce in half, completed a reverse split, took our payment stack in the consumer lending with 3 new integrations to more than double revenue. We did all of it at once while running the business day-to-day. Any one of those is a year's work in most companies. The marketplace is gone. It was fully wound down by the end of June. EveryLife was sold this week to Freehold Brands for $5.5 million before fees and customary adjustments. The exit from consumer brands is complete. Those were hard calls and the numbers show they were the right ones. In the first 9 months of last year, the Marketplace and Brands business lost $7.2 million between them. In the first 9 months of this year, they lost $0.5 million. That is a $6.7 million improvement from 2 decisions, brought their operating costs down from $10.5 million to $3.7 million. We didn't sell EveryLife as the broken business. We cut its operating costs by 43%, while its revenue grew 8% and was close to breakeven in the third quarter when we sold it. For the first time since the company went public, every dollar of revenue report comes from moving money. The cost structure has been reset. We committed to roughly $8 million of annualized savings and delivered closer to $10 million. We have 35 people today, half the team of a year ago. And the bar for adding $1 of cost back is that has already earned its way in. The business grew through it all. Third quarter revenue was $7.3 million, up 67% from a year ago. For 9 months, revenue has more than doubled. Payments volume was $197.3 million in the quarter, up 121% year-over-year. Credova grew originations 23%. In the firearms market, it grew about 2.5% in the quarter. That growth came from a team half the size. That is the whole turnaround in one sentence, revenue up 2/3, headcount down half and nothing broke. The consumer side is changing and explains the shape of our credit growth. This year, applications from consumers with credit scores below 640 are down about 7%. Applications from 640 and up are higher and the 720-plus band grew the most. We didn't decline more of the lower score customers. They stopped applying. That's the K-shaped economy people talk about. Higher income households are still spending and a lot of them pay with a card. Lower income households are pulling back on the purchases they used to finance. Against that, we converted better. The share of approved customers who went on to complete a finance purchase rose in every credit band. Our primary installment product more than doubled and drove nearly 3/4 of our contract growth, while higher APR volumes shrank. So this year's credit growth came from closing more of the customers already in front of us. There's a limit to how that far that grows, and that's why the next leg of growth is putting the monthly payment in front of customers before they decide how to pay. And the losses are closing. Operating loss went from $9.7 million a year ago to $3.3 million. But the number I care about most is cash, and I want to be plain about why. A business that burns cash runs on other people's money and sooner or later, that market sets the terms. A business that pays for itself sets its own. For its first 2 years as a public company, this one burned cash. This year, we've cut it every quarter. In the first quarter, operations used $4.1 million; in the second quarter, $2.3 million, down 44%. In the third quarter, $1.7 million, down another 26%, and that included about $600,000 of onetime costs Mike will walk you through. In 2024, this company burned more than $8 million a quarter. We are now at 1/5 of that. Next year, the business pays for itself. Our target is positive monthly operating cash flow in 2027. On a non-GAAP basis, we've already earned an operating profit 2 quarters in a row. I'll give you one more number, and then I'll stop reciting them. In the third quarter of last year, each employee at this company supported about $61,000 of quarterly revenue. This quarter it was $210,000, 3.5x in 12 months. AI is a large part of how we did that in underwriting and engineering and finance and risk monitoring. And it is why we report revenue per employee every quarter and expect it to keep improving. From here, that metric only moves if revenue moves, which is exactly how we want to be measured. Why this is all worth doing? None of this would matter if the business we kept was not worth keeping. So let me spend a minute on why it is. Credova serves markets the banks and large processors walked away from: firearms and outdoor retailers, consumer lenders, campaigns and nonprofits. These are lawful businesses that get declined or priced as high risk on a basis of the category code rather than on how they actually perform. We underwrite the category ourselves and we price to the defaults and chargebacks we actually measure. Years of that performance data in categories most lenders will not touch is the asset. Every merchant we add makes the pricing more accurate. And because most of our merchants run both payments and credit through us, each one adds data on both sides of the transaction. That position is hard to copy. We hold state lending licenses. We've run machine learning underwriting on our own data since 2021, and we're the exclusive payments and credit provider inside Rayon AI's firearm software. A competitor would need all 3 and years to build them. That is why our demand does not depend on outspending anyone. Merchants come to us because the alternative is being shut off, and we continue to see businesses outside our core outdoor category seek us out for the same reason. We get asked what if a friendlier regulatory climate brings the banks back? The new federal rule on reputation risk, which took effect in June, changes how examiners supervise things, doesn't change the published policies of large processors and pay later lenders and it gives no bank the data to underwrite a firearm dealer. A returning competitor still has to win in the category, we already have. We also give merchants a reason to stay and they do have choices. We bring them customers. We reach out about 4 million e-mail subscribers in an audience mainstream advertisers largely ignored. In one recent manufacturer-funded 0% promotion, units sold rose 43%. Processors compete on rate, we compete on rate and on sales. It is also why the loan payments vertical matters so much. Consumer lenders face the same exclusion our firearms merchants do, the difference is scale and frequency, and a lender processes a repayment every month on every loan for the life of loan. In August, we announced LendSuite, Dealer Cash and Roja. Those integrations take our payment stack into loan repayment processing. And together, they put us in front of roughly 150 lenders on 3 loan platforms and more than 100 auto dealers in Texas. We expect these relationships to be contributing in the fourth quarter of 2026 and first quarter of 2027 and to build through 2027. Credit quality remains strong and losses and delinquencies are inside our expectations. So what comes next? Our priorities for the rest of the year have not changed. We are reaffirming our 2026 outlook, $32 million of revenue and positive non-GAAP operating income for the full year. Mike will walk through what the fourth quarter has to deliver and why we believe it will. Beyond that, the target is positive for monthly operating cash flow in 2027. We said that in July, and we are saying it again today. I want to be clear about the standard we hold ourselves to. We are not declaring victory on 3 quarters and turnaround is not finished until the business funds itself. What 3 quarters have shown is that this team does what it says it will do, and that business underneath it is a real one with a real reason to exist. Krista will show you that the financial statements now tell the same story I just did. Mike will take you through cash and the outlook. Krista, handing it to you.