Ladies and gentlemen, welcome everyone and thank you for joining Xref's Investor Update Conference Call.
Update. I would now like to
hand the call over to your speaker, Mr. Lee Martin Seymour, Chief Executive Officer. Please go ahead, sir, and thank you. Thanks, Eddie. Good morning, everybody, and thanks for joining us.
My name is Lee Marc Yitsima. I'm the Director, Co Founder and CEO of Strip. We also have James Solomon, our CFO, on the line today. Thanks ever so much. Always good to have Some familiar names joined us this morning, but also an awful lot of new people to the story.
So I'll add some color to this morning's update that hopefully all of you have had a chance to read already. So I'll be doing that over the next sort of 10 or 15 minutes. If people are genuinely new to the story and I haven't been involved in the recent Zoom roadshow that James and I conducted a couple of weeks ago. Then please get in touch, and we're happy to provide you with the 101. Sorry.
If you we will also be opening the floor to questions at the end of this session, so please get ready for those. If you have been following us since lifting in 2016, you'll understand that Q1, The Q1 of the year tends to be our lowest quarter, and this is due to seasonality across the Southern and Northern Hemispheres. However, this year, we've seen the smallest impact. And our sales have grown in Q1, As you would have seen by this morning's release by 126%, up on last year, but also up 113% based on the pre pandemic Q1 of 2020. So in a nutshell, We're experiencing high demand across all of our regions.
Our incoming leads from Our digital and channel marketing are currently at record levels. Our initial deal size to 45% bigger than we've seen prior. And our conversion rates are higher. This has helped along this has been helped along by our self-service platform and other platform enhancements as well as our global credibility. The sector at the moment is seeking an all time high automated employment verification as recruiters work from home and people start to companies start to right size across the globe as we come out of a pandemic.
Up. So they are finding us via channel partners such as Workday, Oracle, PageUp, Smart Recruiters. They're finding us via our online content, free tools or via our rating sites that we lead such as G2, Capterra or our Google ratings around the world. They're finding it easy to sign up and begin their journey with us. And these are all things that have built that we built over the last few years, and they are certainly paying dividends whilst the sector demand grows.
Update. Notable clients that we listed in the release this morning include Arnott's, Fortescue, of Kiwi Bank H&N Group UEFA that we're pretty proud of and the University of Pittsburgh in the U. S. 78 new clients contributed 19% of our $5,400,000 sales in Q1, But our cohorts were just as busy. So 17% came from clients that have been with us for more than 4 years and a similar story for clients that joined us in 2018, 2019 2020.
So the compound growth coming from the legacy clients, providing us with a very strong platform, a very strong foundation for growth leading into this financial year. So rather than look at our sales run rate, If you do the run rate, you're going to get to $20,000,000 However, consider that every year for the last 5 years of us being around, I know us being listed. Our Q4 sales tends to be higher than the preceding H1 results. So I'll let the analysts model that one out, but I'll reiterate that. Our Q4 results, if you had a look at our Q4 from FY 2021, it is bigger update in the preceding H1.
So realistically, our sales are our crystal ball update. And they determine what our revenue will look like in the future. But having now seen what Q1 looks like, forecast Q2. Add the 2 together, that would, in a traditional sense, give you what Q4 looks like and then all you're left with U. S.
Q3. So I'll let you get your calculators out and work that one out for the year. In terms of revenue. We recognize revenue once the prepaid credits have been used on our platform. Dollars 3,900,000 was up 70 7% on last year.
Our sales, as I said, is our crystal ball. So we are expecting A nice step change in our revenue across the year, considering the sales results, update, especially with the growing demand for additional checking, including services offered by RapidID. Update. Following a strong Q4 in sales, our cash risk beat hit $5,800,000 providing a nice cash to $1,200,000 in the quarter. This has pushed our cash at bank up to $9,400,000 as at the end of September.
Expenses will remain relatively flat throughout the year and only increase as a result of sales commissions from record results as they tend to push this forward. Update. Next week, we're very excited. We released the new platform, the exit survey platform. We've been developing Xref exit surveys for now just for the last year.
I've had the joy of personally demoing the platform to some of our clients around the world over the last few weeks. Once we launch those Appliance. We'll be the 1st to use the platform. We've had an overwhelming response as a result of the demos, and I've enjoyed buddying up with some of our sales and account managers around our global offices to bring the news to the market. The platform extends our addressable market tenfold and allows us to offer more traditional subscription services to our pump extensive client base.
We're already seeing strong demand from our North American market, especially prizes that have endured large global attrition during the pandemic. So more detail will follow in the coming weeks as to how that platform looks, how it works. And we're hoping to share with you some early wins as some of our largest clients start to use the platform. So a very exciting space for us right now. So please make sure you follow us via our Twitter handle or our website, xfone.com, for upcoming news over the next few weeks in terms of the platform and other things.
And to round out a nice quick update for you all this morning. I'd like to spend some time opening the floor to some questions. So Eddie, I'll hand it over to you.
Operator. Your first question is from the line of Luke Tai. Please go ahead with your question. Thank you. Thank you.
Can you hear me?
Yes, I can, Luke.
Okay. Thanks, Lee. Lee, look, just a question on I noticed that you and I sort of spoken about it, I think, in the past. I saw About a year ago that you the company borrowed $5,000,000 and it would appear that, that money is still sitting in the bank update. And yet it's sort of the interest on it's taking up about 10% of the net cash flow at the moment.
Can you sort of explain to us, Are
there any plans for this money? And also, why was Golinda providing And equity stake in the business ahead of the other shareholders in the company.
Sure. It's a great question, Luke, and thanks for asking update. Let's cast our mind backs to our minds back to March 2020, when The world was starting to wind back headcount, and most of our clients were reporting that They were ceasing recruitment, etcetera. So at that time, we were pretty prudent With the share price down to $0.09 it wasn't a very good decision to perform a capital raise at that time as it would have been very dilutive to our shareholders. So we started to explore some equity debt.
We knew what opportunity we had ahead. We knew where We had repositioned our costs. And so equity debt was something that we needed to explore. We'd actually spent some time with 3 or 4 vendors of debt in the market and we're not happy with the way those businesses structure the debt. However, having chatted to having spent an awful lot of time with Pure and the team over at Pure, we were very happy to onboard at the end of that financial year in June FY 'twenty sorry, FY 'twenty one.
We were very happy to onboard the debt at a premium to the market at $0.35 providing those $0.35 warrants to Pure. We provided we took on that debt premium. It was very it was highly serviceable by us. Update. It formed no risk.
And so we did it at a time where in June 2020 when, On one hand, we knew our opportunity coming out of the pandemic was fantastic, But our bank balance was just over $2,000,000 So it was one of the best insurance policies that we have ever performed. And with hindsight, we do exactly the same again. It was a very bleak period for any business globally. So it was a really good position. Pure have partnered us since then in a fantastic way, and they continue to be a really big supporter of the business.
So much so that when we released our performance for FY 21. We actually worked with Pure to reset the interest rate back from 9.95 down to 8.5. And that was really in lieu of their confidence around our business. And so our interest rate has been pulled back. Yes, our cash balance has gone up, and we have never actually up.
We have a full focus on at some time in the future removing that debt. But I think this financial year is a year to be prudent, to focus on land grab and growth, to remain profitable and to exercise in the future a way of paying debt down. But today, it's a lesser interest rate, entirely serviceable and Pure continue to be a fantastic partner. Hopefully, that answered your question, Luke.
Yes. Thank you.
Thank you very much sir. Your next question is from the line of Johnny San. Please go ahead with your questions. Thank you.
Firstly, congratulations on an amazing result. I think we've been sitting here a year ago talking about this, the outcome. I think you would
have been pretty happy. So congratulations. It really has been a terrific performance.
I suppose what pleases me most is your growth in international business despite and the inability to travel and the inability to actually get out in front of large corporates as a CEO and talk about the potential opportunity of Xref. So my view is not dissimilar to say someone like Nearmap up. You've done unbelievably well in Australia and continue to do so. And I think I see that happening with Xref over the next 2 or 3 years where you've kept building. But When do you see international business exceeding Australian business because that truly changes the whole
up for ExtraF. Brilliant question. Slightly loaded as normal, but brilliant. Okay. So our new platform has been built for the North American market.
Obviously, it takes into account all of our other regions. But it has a level of self-service and self branding and things like SMS Ups built in because North American market works slightly different to the rest of the world. So we have built to the North American market. Why have we done that? Because we want to leverage the opportunity that exists with huge businesses, and we don't get in front of businesses as large as some in North America down here in APAC.
So We have seen strong growth and strong demand for the new platform from clients we're speaking to. In terms of getting in front of those clients, the world has just given us the gift of remote meetings. So funnily enough, I'm actually spending more time with clients around the world now than I ever have because we were always restricted with face to face meetings and the cost of travel. So in fact, all of the demos that Myself and the team have conducted over the last few weeks on the new platform have been on Zoom, and we'll continue to work that way. The two goals that will probably showcase where we are as a business today exactly as you detailed.
We I think everybody would agree once the North American revenue eclipses that on the rest of the business. We're in a very good space. And I think the second goal is a complement to that. Update. As soon as our subscription revenue eclipses our traditional credit model revenue.
We are also in a good space. So these are the things that we're focused on. How are we going to do it? Well, Our step change comes from not just our preexisting client cohort, it comes from our digital marketing and the demand that we're seeing through leads for client acquisition. So client development and client position are our 2 key secret weapons in our business today, but also the ability to move our platform to a wider addressable market.
The current addressable market within the regions we're working in It's about $19,000,000 permanent employment job moves per year. Our platform extends now across the hire to retire spectrum. So it doesn't just include pre employment. It includes pulse checks for employers sorry, employees and exit surveys for exiting staff. So our addressable market goes up from $90,000,000 to $900,000,000 across the regions we're in.
We now can speak not only to the recruitment side of HR, but HR itself and including payroll. Wouldn't it be nice to integrate our exit survey platform into ADP or Kronos, some of the biggest payroll vendors across the world? So this is a big step change for us. It's an inception point. What we're seeing today is a mix of the hard work that the team have performed over the last 11 years to position us as the best platform on the planet in terms of automated referencing, but also mix that in with the demand in the market for automated remote referencing for pre employment and analytics surveys.
Update. I got a really lovely message from one of our investors this morning and my response was up. We are enjoying every minute because we've worked very hard for 11 years to see the market finally Google us, find us, up to set up an account and get their credit card out of their back pocket because what they're getting in return is huge return on investment. Hopefully that answers your question.
It does and thanks for the detailed response. Just one little short question. Show. Very impressive range of new accounts that you signed, which is always critical and also critical that you've retained customers from as far back as 2017, which tells me about your annuity capability. Can you possibly tell me how you signed up.
How did you bring you guys there in Switzerland on as an account, if it's possible to talk about an experience like that? Appearance like that. That's a pretty impressive achievement. And that's not as a much football fan.
Well, I'm really glad you spotted that because if you look at our releases across the last 5 years, Irrelevant of all the news that we shared with the industry, with the market, The biggest rise in share price as a result of a release was when we signed Chelsea Football Club. So I'm not sure what it is about football clubs or football related clients, but UEFA was sold out of our European business and as a result of just the network between clubs, because we do have an array of soccer clubs around the world. And so that network talks, and that's how we brought UEFA in. It's a really nice deal to do, and they're using us on a global basis. So for them, up.
Our language capability was very important and so was our ability to integrate as well as those additional checks like RapidID. So It was a really nice deal because it used the full suite of our services and it came from a network of pre existing clients within that space.
Well, Dan, as long as it was an arsenal you were signed, congratulations.
No problem.
Thanks a lot, Martin.
No problem. Thank you.
Thank you, sir. Your next question is from the line of Yuri Seltz. Please go ahead with your question. Thank you.
Your results from JSF. Good morning, everybody, and strong congratulations, of course, as well. I have two questions. The first one is on your cash flow report. Seems that you had spent something like €500,000 on the website, at least it reads like that.
Can you comment a bit more on what you have been doing? Where did the cash up. What would you spend there? And in particular, what's the nature of that cash out? Was that fixed?
Was it a one off? Or was that ongoing? Maybe you can start with that question.
Sure. So during COVID, we spoke to many of our clients that were letting people go or seeing a huge attrition rate within their business, companies like Qantas and Crown Casino and lots of nonessential clients within the market. So I actually called around on all fours with big A3 sheets of paper and a marker and started to design our exit survey platform. And so for the last year, we have been in full development. And it's not developing a feature, it's developing the whole platform.
In fact, Our new platform is released with the exit survey tool. However, In January, February, we'll be releasing our automated references on that new platform as well. So brand new look and feel and a lot more features as well as our pulse surveys will be released as well. So we've not only built a new platform for exit surveys. We've built a new platform to house all of our products and features.
So that's been a year long build. We've only capitalized the build of that platform. There's no other dev business as usual or integration development that has been included. It's pretty much put brackets around of that new platform development. And we can see that extending throughout this year.
We go into building our of new billing engine in the New Year, which will house our self-service subscription pricing table. So you'll see development run through most part of this year, but certainly waning as we get to the end of the development. We're aiming by the start of Q4 to be fully ready with a fully new platform, including all of our products and services and the new billing engine because as you know, Q4 is a huge quarter for us. But I can tell you this, where we are today, where the platform is. We'll easily get us to $100,000,000 revenue without any further development.
We have what we need, and now it's just about growth in scale. And any capitalization has just been purely based around that new platform. Hopefully, that answers your question.
Okay. That's fair enough. 2nd and last question is on your cash surplus reported at €1,200,000 I mean, given up. The type of business you're in with quite a lot of cash coming in upfront and also the clear growth trajectory you are now in, Would it be a reasonable assumption that in the next 2 or 3 quarters, you will also up to $2,000,000,000 or are there for the near term, again, the next 2 or 3 quarters, Apparel. Are you aware of some costs, maybe some necessities, some one offs that will occur that will still lead to a cash loss somehow.
A few comments on this one. Great question. I think when you first land profitability, It's a bit like landing a big jumbo. You might bounce around the runway until you get comfortable. So there might be the odd quarter this year that we are not, in fact, cash flow breakeven.
But the year will be up. We will be bringing the year in cash flow back even. Now let me make this comment. We are on a global land grant. We're doing everything we can to grow as fast as we can to find the scale and make a considerable step change in our business.
So our focus is not necessarily profit. Our focus is to not to have cash reserves and to not burn cash. At the same time as growing as fast as we can. And this is a balancing act that we've performed quite nicely over the last few years. So I think what's important for us is to make sure that any additional cash, we make decisions on that.
And those decisions will probably be around pushing it more into the digital marketing space. We're in a position right now where if we spent additional money within our digital marketing. We know that, that has a huge knock on effect to the pipeline that's coming in for the following quarter. So we're playing that balancing act at the moment. We're focused on bringing the year in profitable, up.
But any extra resources will be focused on marketing that brings in more leads, therefore, more pipeline. This quarter, we actually saw more than $3,600,000 worth of pipeline up to date created out of the converted leads that came in, a huge record and a massive signpost to a successful Q2.
It all makes sense with you, so I 100% agree. Thank you very much.
Update. Thank you.
Thank you very much. Your next question is from the line of Angie Ellis.
Please go
ahead with your questions. Thank you.
Hi, Lee. How are you going?
Yes. Good, Angie. Nice to hear from you.
Yes. Sorry, congratulations on a great result. I probably have too many questions. It must have been at the time to catch up. Update.
I was just wondering, in terms of the demo to sign up time, are you finding someone to do these demos? Is the sign up time. And getting shorter or longer these days?
Up. Definitely shorter. So to sort of put that into context, when we listed in 2016, our Sales cycle was 95 days long on average because we had to meet the client. They wanted a free trial, Then they wanted a pack of credits to last in the 1st 30 days, and then they want 30 day payment terms. So we'd spend 95 days and turning them around to a proper client.
In 2018, I made the promise that we were going to find or acquire clients within one day. And it was called at the time the one day promise. And we did it by launching Xref Lite, upsellers self-service sign up tool. And we've seen the growth of that since the end of 'nineteen. So today, we don't actually sign up clients in a day.
We see clients sign up in an hour within minutes. So when we report our client numbers, we don't actually report the Xrefs lite clients because we do have A lot of clients that find us through content, check us out on G2, figure out that we are actually market leading, open up an account, spinning the wheels without talking to us. Get their credit card out and buy a few credits. And then they work out, hang on a minute, We need to use this across the enterprise. Let's contact 1 of their enterprise salespeople.
So to be honest with you, not only do we sign up clients an awful lot faster than we used to. Xref Lite helps with that. Our digital marketing helps with that. Our Our credibility globally helps with that. But also, when we see them sign up, they sign up with vigor.
Up. And the initial sale is much larger than it's ever been. So up. They had a look at Xref Lite because of the size of the business. They I spoke to one of our account execs here in Australia.
And their first purchase was 120 $1,000 So a really big move forward in the strength of conviction that we are seeing from clients around the world. So hopefully, that puts into perspective where we are with our digital marketing.
Fantastic. That's great. Well, I'll let other people ask questions and stick out, but thanks for that, Lee.
Just get a hold of me, Angie, and we'll I can answer any more questions.
Well done. Thank you.
Update.
Up. Your next question is from the line of Stella Wang. Please go ahead with your question. Thank you.
Good morning, how are you? Good morning, Stella. Thank you. Just two follow on questions from previous really good questions. The first one is with the strong expectation on the new platform to be released, What should we expect in terms of financial should we expect strong SaaS type subscription to become a more noticeable part of the pie, for example, in your next quarterly reporting?
Or is it initially still reflected in credit sales?
All of the above, Stella, as normal. Update. If you were a client of Xref today, you would be paying us for your next year's hires. So if you were going to make 1,000 hires next year, you would prepay your credits for those hires, and then we would recognize those that revenue when you take those checks over the next 12 months. So we have a big client base across the globe.
However, We have now the ability to revisit all of those clients. And our conversation would be, For years that you've used us, you've paid us prepaid credits for references that you're going to collect. However, update. If you move to the new platform, you're going to be able to not only have the new UI, you're going to have more features like SMS or a brand full branding, advanced security, but you're going to have unlimited post checks for your internal staff and you're going to have unlimited exit surveys that you can perform on not only the person that leaves today, but everybody that's left the last few years. Update.
So there is a huge amount of value that you as a customer in Ghana by moving to the new platform. But what we're able to do is revisit our whole client base, Bring a new platform to the fray. So those people that love using Xref today offer more value and obviously move them from a prepaid credit situation into a subscription model. In doing that, we can then charge effectively charge more for providing more to a client that's been with us for a long time. So it's a way that we can revisit our whole client set, bring them onto the new platform and effectively up the amount of money that, that business is paying for ExtraF Services across their business, not just employment.
The other thing is, obviously, with a subscription, we're able to recognize revenue faster. There are clients that pay us prepaid credits and then they go on to a recruitment freeze or they don't use those credits for 18 months because for some reason there's been a change in their business. No longer do we want to, as a business, be tied to someone's recruitment so that we can recognize our revenue. We want to recognize revenue faster. So with a subscription, irrelevant if you are hiring, if you are checking up on your current employees Or if you are surveying your exits, irrelevant of what you're doing on our platform, we will recognize a 12th of your subscription every month and therefore have a far more consistent revenue recognition model.
We haven't we don't then have any credits hanging over, and we're not tied as we were within COVID to companies not hiring. So larger sales to our cohorts, up to a bigger addressable market to not only the recruiters, but to the HR and payroll contacts within that organization and a much faster revenue recognition model. So those 3 components sort of lead to your question to yes to all of those things.
Update. That all makes sense. The second one is, I really appreciate you balancing the growth and keeping a strong cash balance. And in light of the debt facility that's still in place, I'm just wondering, in addition to the digital marketing expenditure that growth might require in land grabbing, Would you also consider acquiring in order to grab more client base that would be otherwise hard to grab. And even if the acquiree could be loss making, update.
If that makes sense in terms of customer acquisition cost, would you contact us like doing that?
Update. So not all acquisitions are the same, obviously. We've courted 11 businesses over our 11 years and explored acquiring them. And have said no to 10, One, we did acquire RapidID. We've grown 2,200% since the acquisition mid-twenty 19.
If we were to make any acquisitions, it would update to be focused on our growth. So could we make a step change up in technology or our client set. Unfortunately, a lot of acquisitions that we look at, possible acquisitions. The technology is simply not as good as what we could develop or what we have at the moment. The people aren't as good as our people because the Xref team is just exemplary or their client set, most of which we already have.
So a possible acquisition has to look very much like RapidID, up to $0.01,000,000 Strong early signs of an additional market that we can leverage and technology that provides us a time hack. Let's not spend 18 months developing something if we can get it off the shelf and get it into our client set immediately, which is what we've done with RapidID. So the word is prudent. We would be very prudent, but we are very well connected to the market that we work within, and we tend to explore any opportunity.
Sounds very sensible. If I could just squeeze in a general question, only because you got your fingers on the pulse of the world's employment trend. Is there during the last quarter out of up and down to COVID. Is there anything interesting you noticed in terms of what segments are doing better among your customers and segments are not recovering as fast as you would expect. Any interesting trend you see there?
That will be last of my questions.
Update. Sure. During COVID, we split our client set into essential and nonessential businesses. We wanted to do that or we did do that because we saw growth within our essential businesses such as aged care, not for profit education government. And I think internally, it was good for at the time, it was good for our team to see that Despite the pandemic, an area of our business was performing really, really well, and we were adding value to essential services in the regions that we're in.
So it's a very good space to polarize. Our nonessential clients are starting to right size. This lockdown in Australia hasn't been like the last one. What we have seen is clients start to mobilize their recruitment because they know that we are going to have that Freedom Day and we are going to get back to business. So There's a big strength of conviction from nonessential clients rightsizing.
However, finding talent is really, really difficult at the moment and on a global scale. So if you have a think about talent that's on the move right now, We have candidates that are calling time on their employers, so they're wanting to move. They've been there for 18 months, and they want pastures new. So we have a big migration of talent that has been in work, people trying to get back to work, people trying to move sector. So there There's an awful lot of people that have worked within the airline industry that are now moving into health because they can offer customer service within triaging hospitals instead of in pushing a trolley in the middle of a plane.
So big sector moves, but also There's a huge amount of salary pressure that's emanating from borders being closed and no migratory talent coming in. App. So we have many businesses that hire nurses within Australia and health workers. 30% of all health workers tend to Arrive in Australia every year, but we're not seeing that. The government are consuming an awful lot of health workers to put jabs in people's arms.
So our aged care centers and hospitals can't find the talent they're looking for. Search or talent search, but Canada search is an all time high in terms of and the HR agenda point. So for us to bring exit surveys to the fray, that Uptown, where an employer is able to up relative 5,000 people that have left your business over the last 3 or 4 years and ask them whether What they thought about the business, whether they would ever like to return to your business and what kind of role and skills and competencies at what they like to be remembered for. We are in the next couple of weeks going to be able to create immediate groups of alumni candidates that are willing to get back to those companies. Thousands of Quanta staff are going to be asked the question, Would you like to come back?
We're helping our clients find a new way to source talent that they never They've never thought of or acted in for before. So it's an exciting space, and we're responding well to the market trends. And I think many of our clients suggest that they're going to continue to be remote. Therefore, their recruitment is remote, and therefore, automated Checks are very much in demand. So as I said before, I think We've worked very hard to position ourselves for the market as we climb out of the pandemic.
And we're just about to enter one of the biggest migrations of talent we've ever seen. And internally in Xref, we're certainly very excited about the roaring 20s.
Update. Thank you very much. There are no further questions at this point. Mr. Seamarc, please continue.
Thank you.
Update. Thank you. Well, some absolutely fantastic questions this morning. Please reach out if you'd like a discussion with myself, Sharon or James. And please follow us.
We have got some news flow due out as we launch the platform and a few other things. So thanks ever so much for your time this morning. It's been excellent and look forward to catching up soon.
Thank you, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes our teleconference