Randy Fields
Analyst · ATW
Normally, I am the person who speaks rapidly. You have set a whole new standard. And normally I don’t read this, but today I am going to read my remarks and that will force me to slow it down, so we will have a nice distinction between Todd and Randy in terms of speaking to speed. It was a very, very interesting quarter. We would love where we are headed. We like what we have accomplished, but I think I need to peel back just a little bit so that as investors, you can see all other things that were going on. It’s a little bit I would guess like a duck going across the pond might appear on top to become cool and collected but underneath, oh my god, are those feet moving. And this was an, oh my god, are those feet moving quarter. And then there is a couple of things I think a very important note from an investor perspective and certainly, things that have mattered to the management team. Then we talk about three things in terms of focus for the quarter. First, ReposiTrak obviously connections are accelerating, our pipeline is expanding significantly and we are implementing on a continuous basis how we do automation, what we can automate and how do we make the process of bringing – we call them connections to fruition. So our scalability continues to improve and we will see that in the subsequent quarters as well. Secondly, we are going to talk about something that we, for now call the portal. Trust me, the name is going to change, but for the moment, we call it a portal. And we are moving very aggressively to deploy this portal and the application strategy that’s inherent in it. There would be a lot of conversation today and going forward because this is a game changer. I know I often say that there is something important, this is very important. Note well, it’s going to permeate our entire business over the course of the next year or 2 years. And I will go into it in detail. And thirdly, what’s happening in our supply chain business, it turns out really this portal is transforming our supply chain business. It’s creating an infrastructure that will take our supply chain solution to we would think of compared to where we have been, truly a mass market. In short, these two businesses are very rapidly converging into a single modular offering, that’s victim, by the way. As a result, we now have multiple proposals in front of existing and new customers. I will speak to it in a minute. Both large CPG companies and retailers and frankly they are larger than anything we have done in the past. So before I get into more detail, let me spend a moment on food safety and give you an update. FSMA, since the last time we talked to you really has begun to roll out. So the implications of the Food Safety Modernization Act actually being a set of regulations that are finalized is critical for us, frankly there is more and more talk amongst industry leaders. In fact recently, the CEO of the largest trade association for food retailers gave a presentation and said yes, food safety is the second most important thing on her list of issues for the industry as a whole. So we are moving up the list. The more we move up on the list, frankly the more important it is to us, the more important it is to us, the better it become to investors. We are actually – and this is interesting, we are beginning to get inbound calls and inquiries. And I suspect it has something to do with the fact that CEOs now are realizing they are personally on the hook. We keep seeing it, but remember to us, its Sarbanes-Oxley comes to the FDA, it is what do they say, there is nothing like an execution to focus the mind and the reality here is that more and more executives realize that food safety is not something that’s delegated. They own the risk. They own the consequence. And it’s certainly helping us to get more inbound calls that we have ever had before. Remember that the Food Safety Modernization Act and we have said this thousand times, is the most significant change to food safety regulation in 70 years. It creates civil liabilities and criminal liabilities, up and down the food chain. And as if it needed any explanation, the Justice Department not too long ago noted the fact that they believe criminal prosecution is increasingly important as a tool to bring food safety to an acceptable level for our society. I don’t know if you saw this, but recently the executives at Peanut Corp. of America, in particular the CEO was sentenced to a 28-year term. That means he gets out of jail when he is 91, which I guess, is not quite a life sentence, but pretty damn close. So the justice system is now gradually milling the reality of food safety into a very fine powder that all of us will experience. Historically as you know, our focus has been on bringing wholesalers into our network, into our ecosystem. But now that the Food Safety Modernization Act has taken hold, we are beginning to see retailers waking up and becoming interested in the fact that they too certainly have increased risk reliability, etcetera associated with the changes in law. Now, if you remember in our core supply chain business, for those of you who have been around a while, we said our way of approaching this will be small first, then medium and then large. We are applying that same strategy to retail. So we are starting with the smaller retailers, as we get more experience and understand what particular demands they may have, we will move up to medium retailers and ultimately to the larger ones. So we feel as that we have a plan of action and we are mobilizing our partners to help direct us to prospective customers and you will see more about that in just a few minutes. I think we are gaining traction. I mean, it’s important always to ask the question, why is it gaining traction. And we are not just gaining traction from a connections perspective, we are gaining traction from a buzz perspective. And as you – if you have ever listened to these calls, buzz is not a word that Randy uses, something different is happening. People are talking about us. People are hearing about us. People are recommending us. Recently, I had what’s called a public warehouse, meaning a place where people store warehouse food and then – because they don’t have warehousing capacity, so it’s manufacturer, they put in what’s called a public warehousing business and then that public warehousing business provides the dray edge to get the product to the customer. This guy called, it was the owner of the business that said wow, I got a letter from one of your customers and told me that I better do this or else. So I think I need to learn about you. So there is a buzz, and people are beginning to talk. But a big piece of why, again for those of you who have been around, the number we talk about the efficacy of what we do. If we can’t actually improve the problem that a customer brings to us, if we can’t make it better, well, shame on us. I mean, absolutely shame on us. We frequently publish our case studies around our supply chain business. I am hopeful that all of you have seen those, really directed to the food industry, not to Wall Street. But hopefully, you still see them. We are really, really, really good at the execution of our supply chain business. In ReposiTrak, although remember, all of us want to get thousands and then tens of thousands and then someday, hundreds of thousands of connections, the reality is in the long run, the value that we offer is to improve people’s compliance and enable them to quickly track and trace products to in fact, ensure that the supply chain is now a global food supply chain, is safer than it otherwise would be. That’s our mission. It’s not just to get connections. So we are very proud of the fact that we can now demonstrate over and over and over again that when we call it a hub and let me describe a hub quickly. To us a hub is someone who comes to us and says, I want my supply chain, my suppliers to be on the system and I am going to push them towards you. So we can have wholesaler hub, who push their suppliers in. We can have retailer hubs, who push their suppliers in. And we can even have suppliers think of them as food manufacturers or processors who push their suppliers, so they are all hubs to us. And they have varying sizes. A manufacturing hub might have from a few dozen to a few hundred suppliers. A retailer hub might have 800 to 1,000 suppliers and a wholesaler might have 1,000 suppliers. So the hubs vary in size, but they all have the same nature, meaning they made the decision that their supply chain needs to be improved in it’s risk and they are looking for us to do it. So here is the result. When a hub uses us to improve the compliance of their supply chain, we move the compliance needle from starting point, which is negative 75%, meaning noncompliant is 75% – oh my god, down to less than 25% over about six months. In other words, it works. And that, in the long run, is the most important thing we are doing, because if it didn’t work, in the long run, our customers shouldn’t be signing up. But the efficacy and our cost is really why the industry endorsed us. So, we are proud of the fact that we have the endorsement of several organizations, one and think of them as supplement, one from wholesalers and one from retailers and manufacturers that we are the industry’s standard platform. So, we continue to deepen our relationship with our industry sponsors. I think we have treated them well. I think they respect us and they continue to take us and put us in front of more and more people. Let me give you an example. One of our trade association partners has groups of only senior executives from retailers that they put together regionally throughout the year. And we have just finished with the fall group and we got in front of two of their groups of retailers. And then this spring, they start up again, but it really means over the course of the next year, several dozen retailers will hear us upfront in person, very close talking about ReposiTrak with a full-throated endorsement of one of the industry leading trade associations. It helps. And in many cases, there will already be a member we are hoping that can speak to use these guys they are really good, they get it done, they are fun to work with, they are great to work with, and that’s really the objective with that. I have a team that I am proud of in terms of how they put this together. It’s far more complex that we can go into on this call. We have to help people as a hub identify who their suppliers are. Yes, I really mean that. It’s that difficult. We have to help them get the contacts. We call it scrubbing the list that we have to reach out and so on and so forth. So, there is lots of complexity, but that gives us lots of room for automation and continuing to improve the productivity of our processes and our people. So, how did we do? 940 new connections during the quarter, again, another record high leaves us with about 3,500-ish connections as we would measure them and our subscription revenue grew by about 300% during that quarter. We are now working with 15 hubs, meaning either manufacturing hubs, retailer hubs or wholesaler clubs and that’s up from 5 a year ago. So, it means that people like what we are doing. The word is spreading and it’s getting – we never say business is easy, but it’s getting easier and easier to bring the hubs on. We have agreements right now in front of several retailers and I would be surprised that several of those don’t get signed up as new hub probably right after the first of the year, possibly sooner, the number will come in into the holiday. We are seeing a pattern. If you remember I said that we wanted to do crawl, walk, run meaning small retailers first, then medium, then large. The smaller retailers, frankly, we are concerned about them, because they have a high degree of risk in their supply chain. They tend to be thin on staff. So, there is a lot we can do and I think it’s a feather in our cap that from an industry perspective, we are helping the most – the retailers who need it the most. And then the way we onboard as we call it, their suppliers were spokes, so think of it as hubs and spokes again. The way we on-board their spokes or suppliers as we start with the riskiest first, which again are often the smallest suppliers and then we move up the, no pun intended, food chain to the largest company that they do business with. This execution is important, because we see our job is protecting our customers from a risk perspective. Again, automation will play a very important role. We are always, always, always – including yours truly – focusing on how can we take time, cost, and friction, if you will out of process of bringing people into the business. Well, it turns out we made an announcement earlier this year about this new vendor portal that we were bringing out and strangely enough, it was one of our more benign press releases. And it turns out, I am going to put that one in a frame and put it on their wall, because I happen to think that the portal strategy that we announced earlier this year will be transformative to the entire business and critically important to both our scaling and our future revenue profitability. That means watch this space. So, what do we mean by the portal spend? First thing we mean is we are going to change the name of it before too long, so don’t get too used to portal. We will find a better word. But the concept is we really now have an ecosystem of applications and we want to be able to offer our hubs, our retailers, wholesalers and their suppliers, a whole host of applications extending well beyond simply this Compliance Management, Track & Trace, etcetera. And what we are really doing is breaking our supply chain applications down into very discrete self-implemented modules that will enable our suppliers on the system and hubs to increment what they do with us, each of which will have we believe incredible value and we really believe in our value proposition, we have to have improve somebody’s business. In the long run, sell more, stock less, see everything. That’s our goal. But each of these applications will be separately purchasable for a small monthly fee and we think that this will introduce us to a much larger and growing marketplace, if you will, not to be confused with stuff that we say in a few minutes, but a much larger market to be addressed by what we are doing that we do today. We call it internally the portalization of our product. It’s gone far faster than I would have imagined. I am going to come back to it in a minute. So, it allows both our food safety customers and our supply chain customers to see us in a whole new fashion and increase the type and nature of business that they do with us with less difficulty and more broadly than they ever have before. If you remember – for those of you who listened a year ago, what we said was we couldn’t figure out what the bridge was between the ReposiTrak customers and the supply chain customers and that was one of the impediment to pulling the trigger and buying ReposiTrak. It looked like two entirely separate businesses, one with a light touch, one with a heavy touch, but very difficult to figure out how you move one to the either. Well, this is it. The portal is the mechanism. It is now the center of our strategy. And the market reaction to it has been, in my mind, amazing, absolutely amazing. Let me give you an example. One of the first applications in our portal strategy is what we call the new vendor application. And what that does is it screens vendors for one of our hubs to make sure that from the very beginning, that vendors is in fact compliant with all of the standards that the retailer, manufacturer or wholesaler might have. So, they don’t waste their time trying to do business with a vendor who can’t be compliant. They start out with a list of compliant vendors, if you will. So, we then link them to all of their internal systems, so it becomes faster for someone to become a new vendor. At the same time, it becomes a better screening process for the hubs to get these new vendors in place. The new vendor portal has been live at one of our primary hubs, one of our largest hubs for some time. And to say they are thrilled with it is an understatement. They are thrilled with it enough. They have actually come to us and said we think you are showing us everything. We want to see the whole deal. So, we recently presented everything that we can think of doing within the portal and they all nodded their heads. So, I would be surprised if we don’t end up deploying our entire portal strategy against this customer quickly. They are a thought leader in the industry and we believe as they do that, others will come to the table. But beyond that, that’s the whole portal, the new vendor application within the portal looks as if it’s about to be taken up by virtually all of our existing hubs. So, that means the stepwise way in which we sell this start with a new vendor, move into the fully deployed hub, is gaining traction. I think none of us internally could have expected this and it’s a really big deal. But if you think about also what that means – I mean as investors always want to know what that means. Well, here is what it means. If you imagine this new vendor portal means that every time a new vendor comes to one of our hubs, they automatically have to sign up for ReposiTrak before they can be approved as a vendor for any of these people to assume that they don’t have high risk that they are a safe company, if you will. It means that they are automatically enrolling in ReposiTrak. So when you talk about how do we leverage our inside sales organization, they are coming on automatically. In fact, a goal of ours and I think it’s realistic is that 12 months from now, we will get as many new vendors and as many new users of ReposiTrak signed up, as many new connections from the portal as we get today from our entire inside sales organization of course in a month. So we can effectively double or triple the ability of our inside sales people to bring new people on. It’s a very important step and I can’t tell you – can you tell how I am excited about it because it makes us [indiscernible]. Okay. So what’s the second application, you might ask and if you didn’t think of asking, I will ask it for you. The next application to be brought forward into ReposiTrak will be what we call the ReposiTrak Marketplace and what’s that, if you are one of our hubs, you might very well want to say, I need vendors who are compliant, I have got to find the good guys and sort them out. So the marketplace is where our hubs will be able to find good compliant vendors and conversely our good citizen vendors will find new markets. So we think that’s a terrific adjunct of what we are doing and that will come into existent in place shortly after the first half of the year. So the reality is our marketplace is a very important adjunct as I say you will begin to see applications coming quickly starting right after the first of the year. This is a big transition for us. Now if you think of what we call our core supply chain management business, what we have really done now with the idea of the portalization, that is the word, by the way. The portalization enables us to break down our very large supply chain offering into discrete modules and those discrete modules will now also appear in the portal. And in fact when we ran this idea out by some of our largest customers and our largest prospects, they all said, this is a really important idea and give us the proposal. So we actually I think have six proposals now, all larger than things we have done before, very large proposals to test and use this portal with our supply chain application just as we are talking about using it for ReposiTrak. But what this mean, these two businesses are about to converge to become a single broad-based offering, that’s big news. It changes lots for us. It’s enabling us, as you have seen on the cost side of our business, to consolidate some of our cost at the same thing that we enable people to buy our applications more easily, more quickly and deploy it far more widely than we otherwise would have done. So as the portal evolved, it will be very quickly one of numerous applications for both hubs and for their suppliers. In a sense, we are realizing today and it impact us a little bit now and it will continue for a short period of time. We don’t want to go deploy big supply chain offerings and then redeploy them through the portal. So it slows us down a little bit now and speeds us a lot later, so we are really focused on bringing this activity to our customers as quickly as we can. So just watch this space, you will see a convergence of these two businesses. If you remember, first I thought we could kind of join them with a bridge. And now suddenly, I have seen some actually converging into a single offering. Okay. Next, don’t worry we are almost done. We talk a lot about insurance, we think we have now formulated the strategy and the partner, and we anticipate in the not too distant future, how that translates, but certainly within this fiscal year, we will announce a venture between us and a notable insurance player for a go to market strategy. So the insurance objective that we have will get better shortly. Please remember, it is not an inducement to do ReposiTrak, it is a reward for being a good citizen. But we think this will be a very interesting venture and opportunity. And that along with the marketplace enhances the attractiveness of what ReposiTrak would mean to people who subscribe to us. We are chugging along – if you can call the speed at which the pharma industry moves chugging – we are chugging along with our pilot in pharma. We are actually having a couple of other conversations, three actually. We are talking with this pharma company about deepening what we are doing and we are talking with a couple of others about initiating some kind of test and activity. So that continued to go along. The truth is we have got a lot of opportunities that are in play. We got to be judicious and looking at them, but as you know kind of I see the role of the business to keep extending what we can do to drive what I call the four corners of the tablecloth to ensure that the table is set for it. That’s it aside from that, not much. But we are feeling very, very good about where we are. Obviously, we anticipate an excellent year barring any unforeseen things at this point. But this is going to be a great year, highest growth rate ever for us. And I think people will be very impressed with how the pipeline grows throughout the year and how it closes throughout the year. So that’s it.