Workiva Inc.
Q1 2021 Earnings Call Transcript

Published: 4 May 2021

[Operator:]

Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. My name is Kavita and I'll be your host operator on this call. After the prepared comment, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. Instructions will be provided at that time. Please note this call is being recorded on May 4th, 2021 at 5 P.M. Eastern Time. I will now turn the meeting over to your host for today's call Mike Rost Vice President of Corporate Development and Investor Relations at Workiva. Please go ahead.

[Mike Rost:]

Good afternoon and thank you for joining us for Workiva's first quarter 2021 conference call. Today's call has been prerecorded and will include comments from our Chief Executive Officer, Marty Vanderploeg; followed by our Chief Financial Officer, Jill Klindt. We will then open the call up for a live Q&A session. Julie Iskow, our Chief Operating Officer is also on the call.

[Marty Vanderploeg:]

Hello and thank you for joining today's call. Workiva is off to a strong start in 2021, beating first quarter guidance for revenue and operating income. We exceeded 24% growth in subscription and support revenue, driven by broad-based demand for our platform and fit-for-purpose solutions. Macro business trends such as digital transformation, changes in the regulatory landscape and remote workplaces continue to create favorable conditions for the adoption of our platform. Due to improved market demand and an expanding addressable market we are raising our guidance. Jill will provide further details about our financial results and future outlook later in the call. Our team is executing. We are maintaining an aggressive pace on our 2021 growth priorities which include expanding globally, ramping our partner ecosystem, and launching new platform based fit-for-purpose solutions. Starting with global expansion, we continue to expand outside of North America. EMEA continues to show accelerated year-over-year growth as we continue to focus on ESEF and other use cases that we expect will drive logo expansion. Strong momentum continues with our partner ecosystem. Our partners continue to play a key role in extending the value of our platform and accelerating its adoption. They are also strategically involved in the go-to-market for our new fit-for-purpose solutions.

[Jill Klindt:]

Thank you, Marty and good afternoon, everyone. I would like to start by echoing Marty's positive sentiment on this quarter's results, and also express my appreciation to the amazing Workiva team for their continued dedication and execution. It's been a pleasure working alongside you the last 13 years and I'm excited to contribute to scaling the company in the CFO role. Turning to our results. I will talk about our results and guidance on a non-GAAP basis. Refer to our press release, for a reconciliation of our non-GAAP and GAAP results and guidance. We continued to see broad-based demand for our solutions in Q1. As a result, we are raising guidance for 2021 revenue and operating income, which I will discuss later. I'll address our performance against Q1 guidance first. We beat Q1, 2021 revenue guidance at the mid-point by $3.7 million. Higher subscription revenue accounted for the majority of the beat. We beat guidance on Q1 operating income at the midpoint by $3 million. The revenue beat mentioned was partially offset by increased compensation-related expenses. Turning to Q1 2021 results versus Q1 the year before. We generated total revenue in the first quarter of $104.2 million, showing growth of 21.5% from Q1 2020. Breaking out revenue by reporting line item. Subscription and support revenue was $84.9 million, up 24.2% from Q1 2020. New logos and new solutions helped drive strong revenue growth in Q1 2021. 61% of the increase in S&S revenue in Q1 came from new customers added in the last 12 months.

[Operator:]

And our first question comes from Matt Stotler with William Blair.

[Matt Stotler:]

Everybody. Thank you for taking my question. I think first we'll start with one on ESEF reporting and then I've got a follow-up. Would love to just, kind of, get an update on your expectations regarding the pace of adoption or kind of timing in terms of ESEF adoption over the coming years, kind of, balancing the timing of the mandate with obviously the mandatory compliance for financial statements layering in through 2022 and then expanding to non-financial data the following year balancing that with kind of your observations in terms of customer behavior. Would love to kind of get your sense of what a realistic adoption that might look like.

[Marty Vanderploeg:]

Hi, Matt thanks for the question. Good question. Just to, sort of, give you a state of where we're at now. We continue to close ESEF accounts and we're seeing a lot of interest there. There's no doubt. I would say it's progressing very much like the SEC did here in the early days of SEC XBRL tagging and reporting. And so I think that's very similar.

[Matt Stotler:]

Got it. Got it. That's helpful. And then just one follow-up on ESG. Obviously, really exciting to see the solution there launched last week. Still pretty new in developing in terms of landscape which I think your platform is very well-suited to handle. But would love anything you can, kind of, give some numbers around, kind of, potential companies and whatnot in terms of where this might be applicable in the EU. Any broader thoughts about the ESG opportunity globally? And kind of, again, looking at how that might kind of roll out in terms of pace of adoption any initial or early thoughts there would be helpful as well?

[Marty Vanderploeg:]

Well, there's been quite a bit of obviously from every corner in discussion about ESG. It's coming from the investment organization. It's coming from individuals. It's coming from governments. We're seeing pressure coming from all directions so I think it's a foregone conclusion that we'll see reporting requirements in a lot of jurisdictions. EMEA is, sort of, leading -- or the EU I'm sorry is sort of leading that charge. And as we talked about in our prepared comments that will potentially be 50,000 companies just in the European Union. We're seeing a lot of excitement from our partners. The large advisory firms are reaching out to us and we're putting together plans on how they're going to market. So we're just seeing broad excitement and execution starting there. Certainly, the TAM expansion is in the billions and some other companies have put out approximate numbers that you can find. But it's so early. We're just not going to put out some of our estimates until we get a little more visibility on what's happening. It's just such early days, but we feel so blessed in terms of having good fortune. This acceleration of ESG reporting couldn't have happened for a better time for us. Our platform is really maturing. We just finished our upgrade and we have people calling us. And we have customers for ESG already so we're learning very fast. So this TAM increase is just very well-timed for where we were at.

[Matt Stotler:]

Got it. Yeah, very exciting. Thank you very much for taking the questions.

[Marty Vanderploeg:]

Thank you Matt.

[Operator:]

And our next question comes from Tom Roderick with Stifel.

[Tom Roderick:]

Hi, everybody. Thank you for taking my questions. Great to hear from you. It's too big a topic. I'm going to piggyback on that question there on ESG. And Marty you laid out, I think you said 50,000 potential companies and going after this market. And if I lay that up against ESEF itself in Europe, I mean you're talking about a 10x opportunity, which is tremendous from a TAM standpoint and also begs the question, how do you best go to market. You mentioned partnering up with advisory services and businesses on that front. Tell me a little bit more about how you need to invest to tackle this opportunity particularly as some of these regulations rollout and perhaps accelerate the demand for this. Do you really have to get ahead of the curve? And then Jill I'm going to have a follow-on for you with -- in relation to that. So I'll come back to you in just a second. But would love to get the go-to-market here Marty and Julie.

[Marty Vanderploeg:]

Well, thanks for the question Tom. I would say first off that it's -- we're going to have to go at the go-to-market from several different approaches. We will definitely have a direct sales team that's working on this. We have account owners for a lot of accounts globally right now and we're well-positioned to take any type of specialists in there and attack those accounts. The relationships with partners is also going to be really beneficial. Again that was fortuitous. We've scaled those relationships and we see partners investing in practices around our platform, which has been very encouraging. And so I'm sure that a big segment of our go-to-market will be through partners. And then when you get to 50,000 customers there's a big scale in the size of those customers. So we'll definitely bifurcate the market from largest where it will be either us, direct or with partners, down to very smaller firms where I imagine we'll use primarily an inside sales team or we may even get into other forms of distribution. But it's going to take a lot of different means to get to the market that big, but we're just so well-positioned to do that. We have a reputation. We have a very substantial footprint already doing reporting and XBRL tagging and this is just going to dovetail nicely with our existing customer base as well. So we're -- like I said, we're very blessed. We understand that it's going to take some investment and it's going to take some time to watch how this market develops, but we're just extremely excited about it, so.

[Tom Roderick:]

Yeah. That's great. And Jill the follow-on question I'd have for you is thinking about the impact of this. I think you all had laid out the opportunity to get your up to 25% of revenues within I think perhaps five years if you can remind me what the timeline was. How much does this accelerate that? And then just as we think about on the -- building this into the cost structure. It's pretty obvious just given the implied guidance for the back half of the year, the cost structure ramps pretty meaningfully. So should we front-end load that into Q3? Do those costs get back-end loaded? Are they smooth pretty evenly? Just thinking about how to get from what's profitable here to a negative $3 million. $5 million up income number for the year would be helpful on the cost side?

[Jill Klindt:]

Okay. So -- sure. So we had put out and talked about the fact that in the long-term, we would expect to have EMEA contribute 25% to 30% to total revenue. We have not put out a time line around that. There's certainly something that we're aspiring to so there isn't a specific time line around that. But we think that this ESG opportunity you had mentioned whether or not this would accelerate the timing to that, I think that we've always known that there would be additional fit-for-purpose solutions that would help us towards that goal. And this is just one of those and so this is a part of the total execution on that plan and how we'll continue to consider other fit-for-purpose solutions that will also contribute to the EMEA market and globally. So we'll continue to focus on that as a goal and as part of our growth -- overall growth goals. And thinking about the guidance overall, you are correct that we are definitely ramping up now on hiring and investments in the business. We are focusing on growth and we believe that those investments will bring us to that growth. The hiring will be ramped through the end of the year. We are also ramping up and continuing to – will continue to ramp up travel through the end of the year. That has been still mostly on hold. We haven't really seen that through Q1, and you'll largely see that into Q3 and Q4, with Q4 probably being the heaviest. We do not expect that we'll get back to pre-pandemic levels on travel per head though. So while it will increase we will not be back to what would have been 2019 levels of travel, we don't believe through the end of the year.

[Tom Roderick:]

Wonderful. Thank you for the detail. Congratulations. Thank you.

[Jill Klindt:]

Thank you, Tom.

[Operator:]

And our next question comes from Alex Sklar from Raymond James.

[Alex Sklar:]

Okay. Thank you. Marty, one more on ESG for me. You talked about all the different sources of data customers need to pull from in order to do the reporting. I'm curious, if in your early customer lands, if you're finding the data needed for ESG reporting in general is already in your customer's Workiva platform and so the value prop for an existing customer is even greater?

[Marty Vanderploeg:]

Well, in some instances that is the case. We've seen some customers just go off and start doing ESG reporting with the platform as it existed and we had a group of customers, who are doing sustainability reporting for a lot of years. So yes, some of that is already in there. I would not say it's widespread. But the other thing is the customers know how to use our platform already. Collection of financial data and collection of non-financial data is not substantially different. We will have to make investments. Our platform like I said is ideally suited but we're going to have to integrate with all sorts of different systems. That's where some of the investments will take place and then just making it more fit-for-purpose, putting in a lot more of the framework. So those are all types of things we'll be investing in but I think that just the fact that they use it and are familiar with it is going to drive a lot of adoption in our customer base.

[Alex Sklar:]

Okay. Got it. Very helpful. And then Jill the XBRL services growth is a really impressive business in what I think is always a seasonally stronger quarter. But is there anything we can read into on the services that you're – in terms of the desk representative of the FERC or some of the European ESEF success? Thanks.

[Jill Klindt:]

Thanks for the question, Alex. It really is just related to continued growth in the SEC market and that Q1 is a – as you mentioned a seasonal high point for that revenue. We do continue to expand SEC customers and so that will be up – continues to be up year-over-year.

[Alex Sklar:]

Okay. Great. Thank you.

[Operator:]

And our next question comes from Andrew DeGasperi with Berenberg.

[Andrew DeGasperi:]

Yes, thanks for taking my question. I wanted to ask one more on ESG just in terms of the pricing for this module. Just wondering is this going to be in line with how you price your other products? If you can give us directionally how much they can be generally. And then secondly, just in terms of your long-term targets. Just wondering as you roll out these fit-for-purpose solutions, what could – would that delay achieving your long-term margins?

[Marty Vanderploeg:]

Thanks for the question. In the pricing just to first touch on that, it's very early days for us and we're still trying to figure out pricing. One thing I can say is I think that we'll see a wide range of pricing based on size of the organization and the amount of usage. So we're trying to figure out the metrics still on how we're going to structure the pricing. But obviously, this is a much bigger problem for large companies than it is for smaller companies, so we're going to figure that out. And I don't think it's going to be radically different from the price range we have now but we have a pretty large price range right now as it is. So – but it's going to be in the same ballpark I think, but it's way too early to even make definitive comments. And then the long-term financial targets, we've always said that, if we see growth opportunities we're going to invest and the market rewards growth. And obviously, the bigger we get the more scale we have, the better it is for us in terms of all the cost structure. So, I'm not -- I can't really even ponder a guess, if that's going to extend how long it takes to get there. But I do know that as we grow, we get more and more efficiency from scale, so I'm just -- again, we're just focused on growing. The faster we grow the better. The more these markets, we grab the better. And this is just an opportunity to do that. And I think that on how the market rewards growth, I think most of our investors would agree with that.

[Andrew DeGasperi:]

Just on -- one on potential -- the competitive landscape for ESG, is that significantly different than what you have in the other financial reporting tools?

[Marty Vanderploeg:]

Well, I would say that there's a lot of excitement obviously around ESG and there's a lot of start-ups and some that are even sort of past the start-up stage. But there's no company that has a comprehensive platform that can handle both the financial and the non-financial data, not like the platform, we've built in terms of dealing with all different types of reporting with XBRL integrated and all that. So, we see a lot of competition up and coming. That's okay. That definitely signals that it's a big TAM and we see investment in different startups all over. So, I anticipate, we'll have some competition here, but we're just very well positioned and just have a -- such a big head start in terms of having the tools already built and having our foot in all those accounts already. So, we're just very optimistic.

[Andrew DeGasperi:]

Thanks, Marty.

[Operator:]

And there are no further questions at this time and that does conclude today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.