Welcome to this quarterly update for the third quarter of 2024 for Exsitec. Presenting will be the CEO, Johan Kallblad, and without further ado, I will leave the word to Johan.
Thank you, Hampus, and thank you for joining. Talking now is me, Johan Kallblad. I've served as the CEO of Exsitec since 2010. I expect this presentation to be around 15 minutes, and it is possible to ask questions via the chat or the hand-raise function in Zoom. So as I usually do, I will start off by making a short recap about the business, and after that, we'll cover Q3 financials and talk a little bit about our priorities going forward. Exsitec, we exist to help medium-sized businesses in the Nordics use digital tools to improve their operations, and we are a one-stop shop, so the customer can focus on their core business and leave IT to us. Digital tools is an important part of almost every business wanting to stay competitive in a mature market like the Nordics.
So our offering can address areas like reducing financial administration through automation or use data for decision-making, and it can also be creating integrations and information flow between business applications that are used, in an organization. Like I said, I've been overseeing this operation as CEO since 2010. It took us a few years to set up this current business model and to reach scale. But since we did that in 2012 or 2013, we've had 10-plus years of good, solid growth and in both top line and bottom line. Market conditions have made growth challenging for the last 18 months or so, and we are working ourselves back into a growth mindset.
We have increased headcount quite a lot this quarter, and going after the quarter, we're around 625 employees in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and three colleagues in Finland. Target market is medium-sized companies, typically at least SEK 50 million in revenue. There is no size limit upwards on where the model works, but we don't actually actively target the enterprise segment in our sales and marketing. And since we don't have the largest companies in our target market, we have quite a large customer base. Typically in a year, no one single customer is more than 1-2% of revenue. And we combine the software components that we work with in a modular way, and we created bundles of software to fit different industries. They're often made up of the same foundational components with some industry-specific add-ons.
All in all, we sell and implement around 20 software packages that we combine in this way, and these are the primary software providers at this time. We have revenue share partnerships with the software providers, where we market and sell their software to new accounts, and we make customers successful in using the software over time. We also add our own in-house developed integrations to this. Dream customer can use up to perhaps 5 or 6 different components from us. The business model built on 3 revenue streams. Sales and marketing is focused on selling software and integrations. This is sold on a subscription model, where you pay as you use, and this revenue stream is around 20% of our net revenue.
Two-thirds of the revenue is from professional services, where we implement the software and make the customer successful in using it over time. We can also build, do custom development and custom integrations where needed. The third part of the business model is that we offer the customers a single point of contact support on a recurring fixed-price model, and in this engagement, we also take... can take care of infrastructure, internet access, and IT security, and we try to give the customers a predictable cost structure with much of the running costs on a subscription model. Going into specifics for Q3, on a high level, this is what defined the quarter for us. As always, a reminder, Q3 is seasonally very weak, given the vacation period, for us and our customer.
But this year was extra internally intense for us by design, as we took on around a hundred and fifteen new colleagues. About eighty people went into our trainee program for consultants, and 20 people went into a new sales talent program, and the rest of the people were already experienced in our offering, including a number of rehires of people that had worked with us previously. On the customer side, unfortunately, we had a really slow start of the quarter. We did see improving utilization and pretty good sales numbers towards the end of the quarter. Still a long lead time in closing deals, but as long as the market sentiment is not getting worse, we should be able to get back into organic growth over the coming quarters.
And lastly, even when we struggle with overall revenue, we do see good growth in recurring revenue, and this is because our customers continue using the software and integrations. And new implementations sold in prior quarters are going live, even if the general consulting market was weak. So, looking at the numbers here, total revenue for the quarter was SEK 161 million, an overall growth of 5%. However, with a negative organic growth of almost -5%, most of the negative growth came from Norway, where it's been one step forward and one step back for the entire year. We do see really strong sales numbers in Norway towards the end of the quarter, actually up about 100% from last year, but we've continued struggling with some quality issues and an uneven resource utilization.
The biggest segment, Sweden organic growth, was flat with a slow start and a stronger ending of the quarter, and we did have definitely the capacity to take on more work, but we've also been very occupied with training new employees here, so this is where most of the new people are. Adjusted EBITDA is where we really see the cost of the new employees. Margins of around 4% compared with 8%, almost 8% last year. Obviously not great, even if it's not that big of an outlier compared to historic Q3s. Time will tell if we're making the investment in new staff too early.
Given the market conditions, these things are hard to predict, but we do feel the combination of some easing in the macro environment, along with strong underlying finances for Exsitec and a pretty good order intake, should make this a long-term good choice for us. We have ten years of track record in running trainee programs, and we expect to recoup the costs, the investment sometime in Q2 of 2024. Year-to-date earnings up 2% from the year before. Looking at the segments, Sweden has been performing on exceptional margins for a long period. In Q3, of course, adding a lot of staff is costing us a lot of money.
We have been running at profitability levels that are over our long-term goals in Sweden, so we do feel creating conditions for long-term growth is more important than optimizing for short-term profitability here. Norway, again, had good overall growth due to the acquisition of Integrasjonspartner, but organic growth has been very weak in the quarter, which is a disappointment. I realize I've been saying that the performance in terms of growth should be better and more predictable for a couple of quarters now, and still we are not there. We do see really strong sales numbers in the quarter, and I must believe that this will turn into better growth numbers.
Denmark, again, is underwhelming in a slow market, and again, the key thing for us is reaching scale in new offerings where there's been one step forward and one step back, also here. For practical reasons, we packaged Denmark and Finland here. Finland is small, with only three employees at the time. So, after these numbers, I need some financial strong points, and I do want to remind the audience that we do see good growth in our recurring software revenue from software. This is the in-house developed integrations, along with recurring margins from resold software. We see a growth of 32% here year over year, and the growth comes partly from M&A, where we have a larger customer base and a broader offering. To some extent, it still comes from price increases.
These have been slowing the last year but were strong primarily during 2023 , leading into 2024 and it is growth from customers deploying new software. This is an important contributor to our earnings, and it's also a good proxy to see that we have a strong offering and customers continue using and deploying software from our offering, so I wanna finish up with a short update on the market conditions and our priorities. Some comments on the people here. There was a massive undertaking for us in hiring more than 110 people in the quarter. Average full-time equivalents, FTEs, was 33 people added from Q2 to Q3, compared to 14 last year. But since most hires started in the second half of the quarter, outgoing numbers is actually a lot more.
It's around 80 people more on staff after this quarter compared to what we had going out of Q2. Direct additional costs compared with last year in the quarter was, if we look at the sizing of the trainee program, around SEK 4 million-SEK 4.5 million in direct salary costs and, of course, a lot of overhead in terms of training and mentorship also. The SEK 4.5 million was the additional cost compared to last year, so probably SEK 14 million-SEK 15 million for running the trainee program in the quarter. With 10 years of track record here, we expect a positive contribution from Q2 of 2025 going forward from this initiative. The market, it's not a single answer. Overall, we see sales growth of 5% in the quarter.
We started slow, but in September, we saw a really strong end to the Q3 sales. We also see that sales cycles are still longer than historical mean. No real improvement, but not really getting worse either. On a really positive note, existing customers are starting to scale up. We see a big increase in existing customers ordering extra licenses and services, especially towards the end of the quarter. October has also started on a good note, so we do actually feel pretty good about this. Looking at M&A activities, we see an increased level of M&A activity, especially driven by ourselves, I suppose. Valuations are feeling that they are on historically average levels, about the levels that we paid before. We're not looking for massive acquisitions at this time.
We want to use the existing debt structure, so we do expect free cash flow and debt to be primary sources of financing going forward. We did close two deals early in Q3. These were very small in terms of the revenue implications, but we have a strong M&A funnel and reasonable competition, meaning that we can take the time we need to make a solid due diligence. So we do have a pretty positive outlook on opportunities for M&A going forward. So, as for business priorities going forward, three priorities.
The first one is the operational excellence, where we are typically running at around twice the margin of our peer group of publicly traded IT services companies, due to a higher level of reuse and a higher level of recurring revenues, and obsession of taking good care of customers over time. And this is always something that should be expected of Exsitec. And the second priority is talent development. We're doing a huge investment this fall in training both new consultants and salespeople, and we want to be a great place to start a career or develop leadership skills or sales skills, so obviously now, huge priority for us. Lastly, we are investing for growth in terms of capacity, which means we need to acquire more customers through organic sales and through M&A.
We think that we are early compared to competitors in scaling on for growth, and time will tell if we are too early, but we are switching more to growth, a growth mindset after a year and a half of consolidation. So last slide here, what's up with me? So after... This is a news report that came out about two weeks ago, after 14 years as a CEO. It's, I feel it's time for a change. So I've asked the board to start looking at replacements for me.
The timeline is open, no rush really, but then there's no reason to have it take more time than it has to, and I'm really looking forward to continuing working with Exsitec from a board level, so I'm not leaving the company per se. So, this concludes my presentation, and if there are any questions, please feel free to ask.
Yes. So, we have a question, and Jacob Vennon, you can activate your microphone. Please do.
Yes, thank you. Hello, can you hear me?
Yes, please go ahead.
Perfect. So I just wanted to start with some questions on the acquisition of mFlow.
Yes.
Can you start by just telling us your reasoning behind this acquisition?
Yeah. Yeah, so this is a bit of an unusual acquisition for us. It's actually the master reseller of Medius Software in Finland. So we have Medius is a software for automating accounts payables and to some extent purchasing that we've been very successful with in Sweden. It's actually really large. It's actually probably our largest recurring revenue contributor in Sweden today, even bigger than Visma Software. We've been very successful in Sweden, and we want to see if we can do the same thing for other markets. mFlow is the master reseller of Medius in Finland, meaning that they have the complete market.
Any Medius deployment that's done in Finland is sold through mFlow. It's a really small company, but it provides a good opportunity because what they have done actually is... It's only three employees, but they've been selling to large accounts in Finland, and they've handled all the deliveries through subcontractors. We're moving, so the thinking is moving forward, we continue to selling the software using our agreements with the Medius, and then we do the services ourselves rather than having subcontractors. The company should in 12 months from now, in terms of revenue, be a lot larger than what it is.
Then on a high level, the company looks expensive, but it's what we're buying is 100% recurring revenue with a very high margin. So now again, you know, we will have to prove over time that we can continue growing this, but it's a really interesting thing to do something that we've done really successfully in Sweden that has a good traction in Finland as well, and to become the go-to-market partner of Medius in that market, so yeah.
Okay. I see.
So that's maybe, Jacob, that's maybe a longer reasoning than you expected, not so much going into financials, but also talking about the logic. The other logic, I would say, obviously, we are interested in building a consulting operation in Finland, as well, and expanding our entire offering into the Finnish market. We don't feel that. We feel that it's a lot of growth opportunities in the other countries where we are already present, so we don't feel that it has to happen now, but looking long term, we do expect Finland to be in our scope for other services also, not only Medius software.
Okay, I see. Because, like, looking at the acquisition from the outside, it raises at least some eyebrows on my end, that you paid SEK 57 million excluding earn-outs, for this rather small company with three employees and a year-to-date sales of, like, SEK 5 million . And I did some calculations, and if your levels of salaries would be applicable to Finland as well, you would be able to hire, like, 15-something salespeople in Finland and run the business trying to sell Medius software for five years for that same amount of money that you spent on the acquisition. So can you tell us a bit more about your reasoning with acquiring a foothold here in Finland versus establishing yourself there organically?
Yeah, these are reasonable questions. But what we have here is it's something that you cannot see in the numbers is that we have customer commitments and deals. Actually, we have a master reseller agreement with Medius showing that we are the sole seller now, and with also support from Medius. So it's an agreement with Medius, a go-to-market agreement that we could not create. Well, maybe we could over time, but there is an existing agreement with Medius on being their go-to-market partner on the local market. And we have customer engagements on a lot higher levels than the historical revenue.
So over the last two years, they've been really successful in selling into new engagements, including some of the largest customers in Finland, like KONE, for instance, is a big one. The run rate of revenue, we do expect them to have an EBITDA of around. Looking from the date when we closed the acquisition and one year forward, we do expect it to be an EBITDA of around SEK 5 million-SEK 6 million SEK. Still not that cheap, I do agree, but it's rec- we have recurring revenues of. On customer commitments, on yearly revenues of somewhere around, I think SEK 11 million-SEK 12 million with 100% margin, and only the cost of three salaries to run it.
The forward-looking calculation is actually relatively reasonable here, even though I feel the same thing that you do. It's a lot of money for a very small operation, but I can see the customer commitments with around four, somewhere 40-plus customers and recurring revenue commitments under those contracts for using the software of SEK 11 million -SEK 12 million per year with-
Okay.
And that's the contribution. So it should be financially sound over time, but it's a steep price, considering the number of employees. Then also the revenues from consulting services, this is something that's not seen. That has not been funneled through the company. So there is no. The revenue that we see in this company is only the margin from software commitments. And we do expect to add our own consulting services to this, and you cannot see that in the historical numbers. But still, a really good question.
Yeah. Okay, makes a lot more sense now.
It makes a little bit more sense. But, yeah, I mean, you should continue asking this over, maybe not a quarter from now, but probably a year from now.
Yeah
... so, 'cause we do have some. We do have some, you know, follow-up to do to make sure that this was, 'cause it's an unusual special situation here.
Yeah.
I do agree that you raise eyebrows. Yeah.
Yeah. I think it makes a lot more sense now. I choked a little bit on my coffee this morning when I saw the consideration, but
Jacob, my board did the same when we came up with the idea to start with, so you're not alone.
Yeah.
But it does look. Actually, they've had a good start, too, even though a slow period there, but we closed one or two additional deals in this quarter. No revenue at all. The revenue doesn't start until it's deployed and the customer is successful using the software, but we do see the contractual commitments, and this should be a good growth, one of several good growth opportunities for us going forward. Okay?
Yeah, I understand. And can we talk a little bit about, like, the customer list that mFlow has? I'm interested in, like... Because when you look at Exsitec, now, and-
Yeah
... if we take your recurring revenue from software and divide it by your, let's say, 4,000, roughly, customers, I get, like, that each customer brings in a total of some SEK 40,000 per year in revenue from software. And mFlow had about 30 customers in the press release, and you said something like 40 now. So meaning that if each customer were to generate the same revenue per customer that Exsitec does, mFlow would only generate, like, slightly above SEK 1 million in sales, which is obviously not the case. So can you tell us a bit more about-
Yeah
... that customer base and what kind of revenue potential you see there per customer?
First, there's a historical thing that you have to be aware. Exsitec existed before we all did the cloud software transition in this space. So some vendors were early and did it 10 years ago. Some have done the transition a couple of years ago. So just there's a historical in our customer numbers. There's a legacy base of customers that are not actually SaaS software customers that are on-prem and that are legacy customers. So the average customer... Whereas mFlow, which has existed only for a couple of years, and they've only been successful maybe for the last year, and they've sold entirely a subscription-based transaction-priced software. They're at a lot higher software revenues.
But if I take out my Medius software, which is the same in Sweden as in Finland, if I take out that offering from my entire numbers, it's not that big of a difference between my Medius's customers in Sweden and the Medius's customers that we have in Finland. So it's. This offering is one, it's the most recurring revenue driving and also transaction-based pricing. It's the most modern pricing that we have of any software in our assortment of software that we sell. So we can actually compare these 40 customers to 150 customers or so that we have in Sweden on the same offering. But still, even while doing this, I would say that the average price, they're around maybe twice the size that we have.
There are larger customers. And the reason for that is in Sweden, we. This moving a little bit up in segment and realizing that our offering actually fits a little bit higher in segment, is something that's fairly new to us in Sweden. Historically, we've been only focusing mid-market. But even looking in Sweden on this offering, the Medius offering, we do have customers like Polestar, which is obviously a larger company than our average company. We do have an Ahlsell that we're working with. We do have multiple large-scale companies that we are working with, with this offering. So this is one of the offerings in our assortment that fits a larger customer scale.
I would also add that mFlow acts as the sole reseller of Medius in Finland, whereas Medius in Sweden historically have direct sales in the enterprise segment. You know, the average customer here is larger in terms of license usage than our average customer in Sweden. But when you look into detail, it's not that big of a difference, actually, 'cause this portion of the business doesn't look exactly as our historical legacy software base, if that makes sense.
That makes sense. And, with the acquisition of mFlow, does their key percentage kickback level from Medius change anything with you acquiring the company?
That's a good question. We've seen that in some areas where we have acquired a smaller vendor moving into our systems, and then we've been able to increase the margins. Unfortunately, in this case, they were already on the highest level. No, there is no opportunity like bundling volume, 'cause we were both at the highest level in terms of margin. We do, you know, possibly become a more important partner of Medius, but it's not actually... We don't expect any margin improvements due to that, actually, no.
Okay, thank you, and I think you have covered all the question marks I had regarding the acquisition, so another question from my end is, you mentioned that you have some quality issues in Norway related to a few projects.
Yes.
Just wondering if these are the same kind of issues that you talked about in the Q2 report?
Yeah
... as well, or if there's anything new?
Yeah. One of them is the same issues, and it's you know, a new product offering that we do feel really good about and that we're selling a lot of actually from Visma. But it has taken us time, and we've underestimated how much time it would take us to learn the software. And also, maybe we've been overselling to some customers, or not maybe, we have been overselling how easy the conversion should be, and we've been having to work a lot of hours for free in order to cover for this, and that's the same quality issue. We also have another one that's getting a little bit better over time.
We have another one, because we audited a lot of our project engagements, and we realized that we had software components that was only local for us in the Norwegian market that we don't intend to continue working on. So we're removing one product from our offering, and we only had three customers on that. But we need to scale back on that offering. But I guess two of the three were able to find other solutions, and one of them we will not be able to support. So it's been a one-off cost of rolling back a delivery that we are not able to complete.
It's one portion is the same and one portion is new, but that should be a one-off that only should be this quarter.
Okay, great. And you talked a little bit about organic growth in software subscriptions. But-
Yes
... I'm just wondering if you could explain a bit more how investors should view this. Like, for example, this quarter, you state that your software subscriptions are growing, like, roughly 15% organically LTM. But your organic growth for the entire group year to date is growing, like, 0% organically. And so what is driving the organic growth in software subscription to almost 15%-
Yeah
...% while your consulting organization is experiencing negative growth? Is this to be seen as some sort of backlog that you are now filling and that we should expect, like, more modest organic growth in software going forward, or?
These are hard questions, Jacob, good questions.
Sorry.
But you are correct in that we have negative. So first one, so let me first, reconfirm your analysis that we do have negative organic growth in the consulting operation. That's. That is, correct. Okay, so why is software subscriptions growing? Well, actually, one of the strange things is that new sales has actually been pretty good, even for the last 18 months. Not every month, not every quarter, but overall, we have not seen a large slowdown in organics in new sales, which is a little bit surprising con- But what we've seen really weakening, a really weak structure, is that existing customer base. The revenues that you get from just customers doing...
The customer that you already sold to many years ago doing some small changes that they just do. We've seen a lot of, like, the average customer has been cutting down on spend. So even though 'cause a new implementation is often driven by change, so something changes. You can't use your old systems, or you've grown too much, or the old systems became outdated. You need to do a change, and that's what drives the new implementations. And the old customer base can perhaps choose to not consume as much IT services for a year or two years if their finances are stressed, right? So we've seen less growth, and this is a bit unfortunate because the existing customer base used to just...
I mean, we have a, we have a lot of money coming in there that we don't actually have to work that hard for. 'Cause it starts usually with a customer calling support and asking for help, and then we realize this is not actually support. It's, it's, you're asking us to change something. And with the slow growth in the organic, like the consumption that happens by itself without salespeople being involved, that has been really negative growth, and that's hitting our consulting services the most. Because there were. This is where, like, it's just many small streams. It's an hour here and an hour there, and when you sum it all together, it affects our consulting service operation, whereas new sales has worked reasonably successfully.
So the reason for the organic growth is that we do deploy gradually. When we do sell new commitments and we deploy gradually, we do get an increasing software revenue, as long as the existing customers aren't doing so bad that they actually cancel the usage of the software. 'Cause there could be, like, an existing customer that does really bad, he may cancel it. He says, "I don't need this software anymore." We haven't seen that happen to a large extent, so it seems that the customers that are trying to cut down on spending, they cut down on professional services. They keep using the software, and new customers that come in, they add software.
Plus that, and we see on the newer, like a little bit what we talked about with mFlow, newer softwares typically have a higher, a higher software subscription component than older software. We have a legacy customer base, where the customer perhaps bought the software on a, on a perpetual license. So you paid SEK 500,000, and you got the perpetual right to use the software, and now everything is on subscription. So that means, churning out old customers and adding new customers, maybe a net zero in consulting services, but it will be really positive on, on software subscription growth. So, to get to the core of your question, I don't really expect software subscription to slow.
There is one effect that will be entirely removed, and it's that we've seen, you know, maybe last year, more than 10% price increases on the average software component. It's not like that software isn't. Prices aren't increasing that much this year, but there is still some lag. So some of the old price increases are hitting our numbers now and the last quarter and so on. So the money driven by price increases, of course, will dry up, and they're probably already, to a relatively large extent, drying up. But I don't expect a lower growth in terms of actual deployments and so we do feel pretty good about this one here.
Okay, thank you, and, sorry for asking the hard questions.
Yeah. No, these are good questions. These are the types of questions that we are asking ourselves internally-
Ah
... for our prediction. I mean, again, so coming back, so I don't mean to sound. I first, I don't want to dismiss. We were not happy with the start of this quarter, and I don't want to dismiss that. I do have some excuses, and I do have some. And I do around that, and, but we- there is also some logic as to why we are choosing this time to add a lot of staff, and it's because, in general, we are feeling pretty good about about things going forward. But you know, these are the types of questions that we're asking ourselves, of course.
Yeah, I understand. And my final question is about you stepping down as the CEO. Can you, like, firstly, comment a bit more on your decision? And secondly, I'm wondering what you think will be the main challenge for the company going forward without you and what you're doing to mitigate this.
Yeah. Continuing asking the difficult questions. Well, I felt. You know, on a personal level, I've been the CEO here for 14 years. It's more than twice as long as the second longest job I had in my life. And the second longest job I moved between four cities during the seven or eight years I was there, and now I've been doing the same thing for a long time because it was a good fit in my life, and it's a wonderful company to work for and to grow with.
But after 14 years, I also must say that oftentimes I ask the same people the same questions about the same things, and to some extent, I'm nervous about being, you know, about not thinking the new thoughts that I should think about. So I raised this question, and also it's a matter of inspiration, and I'm more of a growth person than I am a consolidation person, to be honest, and we've had a year and a half of consolidation perhaps, and maybe my own personal inspiration comes more from growth than from consolidation.
So I, I've had this discussion with the chairman, Peter, and we talked about, you know, there will be some point where maybe he won't be chairman and I won't be CEO, and then when we figured, maybe we should, yeah, maybe we could do a shift here. Maybe there's a way for me to be the chairman of the company, and maybe there's a way for somebody else to take over. So that, that's really the logic, and then we felt this became very much a, like, one of those more insider trading things. So we felt that if we have this plan, we need to go out and talk about it and inform about it immediately, even if we don't know who takes over, and so on.
But that's some level of... I really love this company, so I do intend to be involved in it going forward, as well. So that's... Then the other part of your question was, how do we mitigate risk? Well, I think we're divided right now into six business units, and the business units are performing on various levels. Some is underperforming, some are performing really, really well. But, I mean, it's around when someone... If someone else comes in, you know, lifting the business unit managers. I actually brought to the ones that I have physical meetings with me, I brought two business unit managers today.
They've been very quiet here, but they're with me here, so I wanna have some other people to get acquainted with some of the things that I do that nobody else does. The organization is actually built for not needing a CEO to be a part of day-to-day operations. The organization that we created over the last three years, four years, is built around relatively independent business units with their own that work a lot together in terms of recruiting and in terms of talent management, and so on. But they have their own separate sales forces and work relatively independently. So it's not a company where the CEO needs to be involved in all the day-to-day operations.
It's more about how do we measure, how do we, you know, how do we determine what is good and what is bad, and what's the general direction, and those things that's important? So, you know, I hope that we have six business units managers. I hope that we have six prospective new CEOs in the company from that level, so I'm trying to work on that.
Okay, great. Thanks for answering my questions, and if we don't speak to each other next quarter, I wish you the very best, and good luck on your next adventure.
Oh, I'm quite sure you'll be speaking to me in the next quarter.
Okay, thanks.
Thanks.
Yeah, so we have a question from Tom.
Hello, Tom.
Hey, guys.
Yes.
First of all, the run rate on consultancy services in Sweden, you've been relatively flat Q1, Q2 is down SEK 3 million in Q3. Should we expect it to remain on a flat level year on year in Q4 and Q1, and then accelerate in Q2 again?
Is that your question? Well, you know, we don't give forecasts, but we don't see a more... Like, we think that we're first, from a capacity level, we definitely have the capacity to increase our consulting services, and that's not actually driven by the trainee program, 'cause that takes longer time. That's in Q2 of 2025. But we also see much lower employee churn, so we actually have the capacity to deliver more than what we have. So we should have good opportunities for growth in that sense. So it's all about our ability to engage with our clients and make sure that we have the right demand.
The projection that you said would make me a little bit disappointed without doing any forecasts, but I would be disappointed if we don't have growth in also in consulting services over the next six months. That would disappoint me.
on the run-
On the run, or how we manage to engage with our clients. I mean, it's not a great market out there, but there are deals to be had, and we are. When we are engaging with clients, we do get work, and there's a lot of companies that really should invest in digital automation. So we do feel actually long term, pretty good about our prospects for growth.
All right, thanks, and just on the run rate on the kickbacks you received last year in Q4, do you have a status update for us on 2024?
On, you know, the, is it the software revenue?
Yeah, the extra software kickback, where you reached the Diamond level for Visma last year.
Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that was... We had a one-off in one. I think it looks pretty good.
Yep. All right. Perfect. That's all from me.
And then we have a question from Raymond.
Hi, can you hear me?
Yep.
Perfect, uh-
So yeah, go ahead. Now we don't hear you anymore.
Hello, hello?
Oh, hi.
Yeah.
Hi. Yeah, we hear you now. Yeah.
Okay, so in terms of CEO replacement for yourself, could you maybe provide some color on whether you think there are suitable candidates internally, or is there any reason to look externally?
Raymond, as you know, it's not the role of a CEO to name his successor. If I didn't think that there were people of the right integrity and quality internally, then I wouldn't have done my job, so obviously I think that there are candidates internally, but it's not really up to me, it's really up to the board, and I guess it's... but for sure, there are also very, very talented people outside of Exsitec. We decided with the board that we're gonna take this week this quarterly report, and then we'll start looking at that, probably next week, with the board.
But you know, from my end, obviously, if I didn't think there were people of the right qualities internally, then I would, I wouldn't have done my job. But it's really, again, up to the board. There's no one else who's been the CEO of SEK 1 billion company, turnover of a company internally, that's. And there are people like that externally. So is there a reason to look externally? Of course. The reason would be that you want someone who's already run a company with SEK 1 billion revenue, and there's no one like that internally, including myself. So that would be the reason to look externally.
But we have, you know, we have some of the best people in the business is already working as leaders in our organization. So, I mean, there should definitely be the talent. The question is, do they have the experience to make the board comfortable?
Got it. And you've said before that Denmark needs to reach a critical mass. What progress are you seeing there, and what should we think about in terms of-
Yeah
... timeline and any margin improvement?
Yes. Sorry, maybe you had something. I was gonna shed some light there. We've been, it's... I said one step forward, one step back. Last year, we finally got some traction on the Visma.net, which is the cloud offering from Visma, that we've been very late on releasing. Visma has been late on releasing in Denmark. We finally got some traction. I think we closed 11 deals on that software, which is actually not bad. We only do maybe 30-40 deals even in Sweden in a year, so that was actually pretty good. But just as we got that started, Visma decided to instead focus on Business Next, which is the cloud version of their old on-premise software, and they made that a priority.
Just when we were getting started with one set of new software, the focus from our main software provider lacked a little bit. We're not actually, at this moment, sure on how much growth to expect from Visma.net. We've seen negative growth this year from that new offering, which was unexpected for me. I really thought that it finally took off. We're instead moving into, following Visma, more of a focus of Business Next, already in Denmark. It released formally right around summertime. We closed our first two deals on that software. To be honest, I felt that we were a bit unlucky, and the team was a little bit unlucky because they...
It's a lot of effort in getting somewhere on a new software, and just as we started hitting traction, we got some changes in the product offering, and that was not by our design or by our choice, but sometimes you have to roll with the punches and you know just see things for what they are and change your plans, so yeah.
Yeah.
What type of progress am I seeing? Not enough, obviously.
Got it. Another question. So in the report, you write that customers have been slow to start a project after the summer. Is that a sign that customers are sort of more hesitant to make purchases? Or are these already-
Yeah
... won projects, that are seeing delays in their implementation after summer?
Yeah, we, we saw that. I talked to, actually, one of my business units managers, who's sitting in here with me. He just said that he was very disappointed because he had. We know that Q3 is slow, so we felt he had a detailed plan on what everybody was gonna work on once we came back from vacations. And then after vacations, around five projects were stalled, but it was actually mostly because of customers not having the staff available to run the projects. 'Cause we're not resource consultants. I would probably expect, without me knowing, that the more the resource providers, like the people where you buy a full-time consultant, that they will maybe do better this quarter than I did.
'Cause we're delivering the entire solutions, and it's not enough to have... We need to work in a team with the customer, and when the customer is not ready to initiate work with us, then we can't deliver, even if we have a contractual agreement that says that we were supposed to. So we don't know why it was very slow. Is it... We don't feel, I mean, if it was the overall market conditions, it doesn't make sense why it got started in September, then we would've seen the trend continue slowing in September, right? If it was the overall market.
So, but it did these projects, these five projects that we knew that were held up, that we thought we were gonna start on in August. They actually started in September. And maybe all of them. Let's ask... Yeah, all of them, yeah. So, it's a delay, not necessarily a stop. So yeah. I think I do not know, but I do think that there's been more talks in September around maybe now the interest rate is going down, maybe now it's time to consider investments. And there are some people that, like myself, are seeing that maybe we should not be the last ones to grow into a better economy. You know, maybe we should try and be a little bit early here.
Maybe this is a time for us to add to our... It's not like it's the general consensus in the market, but that there are more people than me that are thinking that maybe now is a good time to prepare for a better market in 2025. Yeah, that's my take.
Great.
Well, you-
Then comparing. Yeah. If you then compare organic growth, Q3 might not be so telling as maybe comparing September's growth year on year.
Yeah.
Could you give us any flavor on September growth?
Yeah, September was better. Still, all the issues around getting new people in there, but especially for me, the last weeks of September looked better, so September, even when August is slow, start of September is typically slow as well, but it's been improving, and that's really all I can look for right now. It's improvement week over week, and that's very simple, it's resource utilization, actually. It's not so much sales numbers, it's resource utilization at this time of year, and we're seeing improvements week over week, but not from a starting point that we loved.
Okay. All from me. Thank you so much.
Thank you.
That will conclude all the questions we've got.
Thank you so much for listening in, and we'll talk to you in a quarter. Bye.