Park City Group, Inc.
Q1 2021 Earnings Call Transcript

Published: 16 Nov 2020

[Operator:]

Greetings and welcome to the Park City Group's Fiscal First Quarter 2021 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Our question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Rob Fink with FNK IR. Mr. Fink, please go ahead.

[Rob Fink:]

Thank you, Operator, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for Park City Group's Fiscal First Quarter Earnings Call. Hosting the call today are Randy Fields, Park City Group's CEO and Chairman; and John Merrill, Park City Group's CFO. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that this call could contain forward-looking statements about Park City Group within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements are statements that are not subject to historical facts. Such forward-looking statements are based upon current beliefs and expectations. Park City Group management are subject to risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results to differ materially from those forward-looking statements. Such risks are fully discussed in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The information set forth herein should be considered in light of such risks. Park Study Group does not assume any obligation to update information contained in this conference call. Today, the company issued a press release overview on the financial results that they will discuss on today's call. Investors can visit the Investor Relations section of the company's website at parkcitygroup.com to access this press release.

[John Merrill:]

Thanks, Rob, and good afternoon, everyone. Today we report financial results for the first quarter of fiscal 2021 ending on September 30. Highlights of the quarter are as follows. Recurring revenue growth for our SaaS business which includes compliance and supply chain was up 6%. Marketplace revenue grew 15%. With growth in all three product lines our consolidated revenue grew 9%. SG&A expenses decreased 10%, net income more than tripled, cash from operations was $1.22 million and our balance sheet remains strong. The bottom line is that over the last year, we have built a profitable diversified growing business with a strong recurring SaaS component and a modest cost structure. Considering the significant challenges related to the pandemic and ongoing uncertainty, I am encouraged with our results. As we've communicated before, our software business comprised of compliance and supply chain services is now effectively all recurring in nature. Eliminating a significant amount of one-time license revenue and shifting to recurring revenue while maintaining profitability was a significant challenge to say the least. To be sure, the pandemic has elongated sales cycles for our software solution and created near-term challenges. But in the first quarter, we grew our software business and we have proven the value we bring our grocery customers by helping them navigate this environment. We still have just 10% penetration with our existing customers. So farming our own customer network remains a top priority for opportunity. We could significantly grow our software business just by farming our existing network. The second revenue stream in our business is marketplace, which allows buyers and sellers to source hard to find things within our network of 20,000 plus vetted retailers and their suppliers. As I have said before, marketplace is largely transactional and inherently unpredictable. The size and scope of transactions can vary from quarter-to-quarter based on seasonality, buyer preferences, pricing and the latest demand for those hard to find things. Because we sit between buyer and seller, our margin whether as a markup of goods or commission is substantially less than we get in the software side of the business. Gross Margin on incremental revenue of our software business base is approximately 80% to 85%. Conversely, marketplace is on average roughly 5%. We are focused on expanding that margin both within and outside the traditional grocery segment. Randy will speak more on that topic during his remarks.

[Randy Fields:]

Thanks, John. For the past two years, we've been focused on building out the three legs of our stool

[Operator:]

Thank you. We will now be conducting a question-answer-session. Our first question comes from line of Thomas Forte with D.A. Davidson. Please proceed with your question.

[Thomas Forte:]

Great. So Randy, and John, hope you're staying well. The first question I had was, can you talk about the financial health of your core customer and can you talk about the financial health of your competition?

[Randy Fields:]

Great question. Thanks, Tom. As I guess more indirectly said should have been more straightforward. Retailers at this moment in time are doing extremely well financially. They have as much business as they can handle, they've gotten past their breakeven. They're all from what we can tell, in good financial shape. Their suppliers and if you remember, our Tier 2 initiative and whatnot tends to focus on the suppliers, are not in as good or shape, but it's not that they're in bad shape. It's that they tend to be paid a little bit slower by retailers than was the case before. In some cases, some of their products are selling a little bit more slowly because not as many people are coming into the stores. So if you're a traffic dependent vendor, you have not prospered as much during COVID. Having said that, everything that we're doing -- our receivables are in good shape, obviously cash is in good shape. A couple of the people that we see competitively are not doing very well. We have one company that we compete with -- I obviously don't want to either gloat or even talk about it in depth -- is experiencing some financial difficulty. That's helpful to us. Our balance sheet is our calling card. We want our customers to be confident. The deeper they get with us, the more they depend on us; the more they depend on us, potentially the more nervous they would become if we were not financially strong. So it's a virtuous circle. Good question. Thank you.

[Thomas Forte:]

Thank you, Randy. All right. So then as a follow-up question, it seems that while people are not saying that we're going into the shelter in place, lockdowns, we were in earlier this year, there seemed to be some element of lockdown. And when I think about food retailers, they may start limiting the number of products consumers can buy. So to the extent you talked beautifully about how you've helped with the marketplace get anything from PPE to other products. Now that I guess this is kind of our second cycle of just occurring, do you feel like you have more visibility and is it possible you'll get more mandate for marketplace as a result?

[Randy Fields:]

Yes. Right now, we're carefully managing the use of marketplace. And what I mean by that is the desire for us to act on behalf of a retailer to help is greater than we are willing to fulfill. So we are cautiously expanding marketplace. We indicated that this summer would involve a great deal of introspection around marketplace and its future. Obviously, we believe that it has substantial upside and opportunity. We recently added to the staff -- senior staff of marketplace, which means we're making commitments. I think we now know enough about it and its processes that we're very confident that it has the kind of legs that we had hoped for. It's important to remember that we are simultaneously trying to expand the recurring revenue use of marketplace and we think that clearly has legs also. So we're pretty excited about how we stand currently. I'm not sure we have a long term view as to whether the products that are being sourced today are the products that would be sourced a year from now, but our business experience is because of our operational excellence focus is that when someone tries us for something, they know that we do a good job, we don't even have to convince them of that. So it's not too hard to go from, let's say, PPE, we helped you with your gloves, now, shouldn't we be talking about some other things that you're having difficulty sourcing. We really believe that's the path forward. I'm hoping that by the end of the year, our fiscal year, that we will have moved past the short term stuff in terms of COVID and people will begin to try us to find things other than what today in an emergency they need. So even as supermarkets begin to restrict how purchasing is done, the merchants inside of supermarkets need for us is growing, we are limiting what we're willing to do at the moment to make sure that were successful, but so far, I could not be more proud of the team and how they've executed this. It's really -- it's a beautiful thing to watch. So we're in a fascinating position where on the basis of our existing business, we're very profitable, very positive cash flow, and able to do a little bit of experimentation that I think opened some doors to significant growth for us in marketplace, we feel really good about how the world is looking at COVID, what the potential reductions in consumer behavior through limitations are likely to be. And there's clearly now light at the end of the tunnel. So I think everybody's beginning to plan and behave that way. And that's certainly good for us. That's very good for us.

[Thomas Forte:]

Excellent. All right, two more questions. If you'll indulge me, the first is online grocery, you hear every day hear about the growth of online grocery. Now, online grocery in many instances is just buy online, pick up in store, or buy online, pick up in store parking lot. So what does online grocery mean for your company as far as an opportunity?

[Randy Fields:]

Okay, another good question. Thank you. We play an interesting role, one that we're experimenting with now and we also think this has legs. Supermarkets have a great deal -- grocery has a great deal of difficulty maintaining perpetual inventories on fast-turn direct-store delivery kinds of items, like milk and eggs and things like that. They just have a lot of difficulty with it, which means that if you're a consumer and you go online to try and buy one of these items, and for those of you who've done it, you get a text message from Instacart or whoever the picker is in the store, saying dude, they don't have that, how do you feel about this? In other words, the substitution rate is painfully high. I've seen numbers as high as 30% and 40%. It slows down the pickers, reduces productivity for the supermarket, and frankly, becomes a pain in the neck for the person doing the ordering. It's never a clean order. So by maintaining a better level of perpetual inventories, we think we can be of help. We are currently doing a pilot with a major mass merchant chain in the US, one of the largest, where we are maintaining those inventories for them, and then passing them to their online systems. So that when someone goes to order, the odds of knowing it's really on the shelf goes up significantly. So far, the customer doing this has seen sales increases of 30% to 50% on the items that we track for them, could be a fluke, we don't think so. So as time goes on, we expect that that part of our business in online grocery has a really interesting opportunity. But it's in our wheelhouse, it's something that we can help with. Because an out of stock, if you don't go in the store, is really much worse. In other words, as a human being, you can go into a store and you take a look and -- I want 2% milk half gallon, they don't have any. But because you're a human being and your mind goes really fast, you can see that they have quarts of 2% or a different brand, and you're going to say -- I'll take this. The problem is if you specify it in an order, and the picker is in the store picking it, not you, you're going to have a whole different interaction with that human being over the product that you wanted. So substitutions are really terrible for the supermarket and the customer experience, terrible for the consumer, period. And we think we can help with that. So that's one area where we can play a role in that whole online grocery business.

[Thomas Forte:]

Great. So my last question for John. So John, you've done an excellent job managing expenses during COVID. Can you explain on the other side of COVID, when that is, how much of the cost savings are sustainable? And how much of it is returns, as far as we talked about traveling to conferences and things of that nature?

[John Merrill:]

Sure, I don't know when the new normal will be. But currently, for the foreseeable future, we're not doing the travel that we're doing. But Randy and I had gone line item by line item, and looked at it less about the COVID, but more about ROI, what are we spending. So there's two buckets, there's COVID-related, and then there's also what makes the most sense for the company, as far as expanding our business. And so, will travel come back at some point? Of course, but I do believe we'll exceed the hundred thousand dollars a month. As far as what our expenses are, what travel will be, we've planned for that. But we're still committed to that $100,000 per month, if you look back at June 30, 2021.

[Randy Fields:]

Let me give you one other insight. In percentage terms, more than 90% of the cost reductions that we've done, our cost reductions have nothing to do with COVID. If COVID comes, it goes away or comes back, it doesn't make any difference. The only one that really is stuck in there is travel. So with that, at this moment in time, we've made structural changes to the business consistent with technology investments that we've made over the previous few years. In the next few quarters, you're going to hear us talk more about that, because there's some exciting things coming on the internal technology front also.

[Thomas Forte:]

Wonderful, I look forward to hearing that. Well, thanks for taking all my questions. I appreciate it. Thank you.

[Operator:]

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. This concludes our question-and-answer session. I'll turn the floor back to Mr. Fields for any final comments.

[Randy Fields:]

Operator, thank you. We appreciate everybody spending time with us this afternoon. As I mentioned in my part of the presentation, we feel really good about where we are. And I suspect all of you as shareholders are going to enjoy the company's performances here. So relax, stay out of trouble with COVID, be safe and we'll talk to you all soon. Thank you.

[Operator:]

Thank you. This concludes today's conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation