Okay, up next, I will sit down with VitalHub CEO, Dan Matlow and Chief Financial Officer, Brian Goffenberg for a fireside chat. Please stick around. All right, hello everyone, and welcome to the VitalHub fireside chat. My name is Robert Blum, Managing Partner at Lytham Partners, and today I'll be moderating a Q&A discussion with Dan Matlow, Chief Executive Officer, and Brian Goffenberg, the Chief Financial Officer of VitalHub. The company trades under the ticker symbol VHIBF, and that's on the OTCQX in the U.S. and under the ticker VHI in Canada on the TSX Big Board. Gentlemen, welcome.
Welcome. Thank you.
Thanks so much for your participation here. You know, for those new to the story, let's start off high level. Provide us an overview, the problems you solve, customers you serve, and where sort of your focus is within the healthcare software space today.
Yeah, Rob, thanks for having us today, and we're excited to tell our story and the updates that we have in respect to our story. VitalHub is a healthcare IT software vendor. We work on an international basis for government-funded-based healthcare. Those are more dealing with the Canadian, UK, Australia, you know, European marketplace, as well as we do some work in the Middle East-based marketplaces. We've grown both through organic growth, which we've done extremely well at, and as a consolidator. We've completed about 23 acquisitions to date, and we continue to focus on consolidation as a big part of what our process is. We are primarily focused on enterprise type of solutions.
So, those would be government entities such as hospitals or government organizations that would oversee entire healthcare networks or integration systems that would integrate different areas of the healthcare, you know, roadmaps or pathways as patients would move between those different facilities. So, we're focused on really aggregating a comprehensive suite of solutions and going to market with those comprehensive suites of solutions that are both built organically and are acquired through a pretty strategic acquisition model that we have.
All right. When you sort of think about the differentiation of yourself versus some of the others that are within the sort of these verticals that you're operating in, you know, how is it that you look to differentiate yourself against them?
You know, in a competitive landscape, we really have accumulated a very comprehensive suite of solutions that can solve a lot of different issues. Our primary focus has been on what we would call patient flow-based solutions, and we really look at the entire pathways that a patient would move through the ecosystem of health, be it coming in from a physician's office into a specialist or coming in through the emergency department or coming in through elective operational-based perspectives or sitting within the hospital itself or moving outside of the hospital, either into long-term care or home-care settings, and really a comprehensive suite of solutions that help us navigate that entire process as we move through those institutions, and we think we've accumulated a very extensive suite of solutions, and we're building AI on top of those solutions, and we feel really proud of what we've accomplished today.
So, when you think about your customer base, you've talked about government vendors, you know, hospitals, so on and so forth, you know, help us understand exactly who the customers are, who you're selling to, you know, maybe the setting in which they operate in, and maybe if the mix has evolved over time, has there been any sort of a change here over the last number of years in sort of customer mix?
Yeah, as I said, we're a government-funded-based hospital. Government-funded-based healthcare is what we're focused. Of course, we're based in Canada, so about 35% of our revenue comes from the Canadian operations, and we do a lot of work in the U.K., but another 33%, and then the rest would be spread across Australia, the Middle East, and a little bit in the European-based markets that we would have. Each market would, you know, it's a little bit different in terms of who our buying influences are, but in general, a lot of the same concepts would be there. So, we sell to hospitals themselves. Hospitals are a big part of what our business is.
But you're seeing over the years that the hospital is a focus of it, but we do a lot of healthcare outside of a hospital, and we need to be able to communicate to get into those hospitals. So, we've seen an increase of government's involvement in how do we integrate our healthcare systems together and have our patients move more effectively to that. So, government itself has set up agencies where they're looking at the navigation of the patient through that, and we, so in those cases, we would sell to government itself as the actual buyer that is helping facilitate the integration of those systems altogether.
Are most of these sales done directly to, or are you working with channel partners? What sort of a mix of, and how does a typical sales cycle look like?
We work off of a direct sales model. We've got, you know, sales and marketing in a team. We do work with partners in a knowledge perspective, so we would work a lot with, like, professional services organizations and advisory firms that are working with those organizations on how to effectively set up those systems, and we would, you know, we would partner with those organizations when it would make sense for them to handle more of the governance and the change management processes and so forth that go in, and we would be a trusted advisor that would provide those technological solutions into those organizations, so in the most part, the actual contracts would be with us by itself, but we do work with consortiums when it's applicable to sell our solutions.
Yeah. When you think about sort of how mission-critical your solutions are to your customers and sort of their day-to-day operations, you know, how does that influence, you know, retention, long-term relationships? Talk about sort of the length of time you have with these relationships as it relates to your solutions.
You know, we, you know, through our acquisition model, we've inherited contracts that are over 20 years old in those scenarios, and probably most of our contracts are between, you know, the 10-year mark or, you know, even less, five to seven-year mark of where they're at in new systems that are coming in place. They tend to go for long-term. It is government healthcare. You know, change management is a large part of what we do. We do find our contracts are pretty sticky. Relevance to what it is and our retention levels have been extremely high relative to our base. So, you know, they are mission-critical-based applications for the most part. We would feel on the thing we do, and they do, you know, they do produce great value for our customers.
All right, excellent. You've really built the business, you've indicated this a couple of times, through both organic growth and then acquisitions. You know, how do these two levers fit together from a strategic standpoint today?
Yeah, you know, a lot of this is derived through some of the history that I've had in government healthcare. I go back into the mid-90s where I started working in healthcare IT software. The biggest part was in the U.S., and then we moved to Canadian-based and government-funded-based healthcare. And we found that there's just a lot of different smaller-based organizations that may have, you know, started within a hospital or started within a consulting group, or a physician had an idea or a clinical person had a great idea for an application, and they move into those markets and, you know, with some success. And then I always felt that we would get better success by combining these entities as others and going to market in a more comprehensive fashion.
And that really was the business thesis from the very beginning, and it's proven to be the correct one. We've been pretty successful in putting these things together and going to market in that way. So, you know, sort of how we drive how that business is going.
You know, I'll come back to the M&A side of this in a moment. When you think about the organic side of the business, the growth on the organic side, you know, talk about the key levers to growth, right? Is this just sort of expansion of customers, you know, pricing opportunities, innovative new products? You know, what sort of becomes the organic growth?
You know, all the above. You know, all of our products have additional modules, and we're always producing new modules. And as we keep building into integrated products and, you know, products that may have been a different product before become modules of one particular product, and it allows that upsell thesis to go a lot further in terms of what we do. So, we do a lot of cross-pollination between our customer bases and trying to get ourselves into preferred vendor status by providing good service and good solutions to our customer set. So, we've been very successful with that, and it does represent a big majority of our ARR growth, you know, that we've had to date.
All right, and then, you know, let's transition then to the M&A side. What are the characteristics that make a good fit here for the company? You know, how do you ensure that these acquisitions, you know, can be integrated successfully and add value?
We're, you know, we're looking for structurally financially healthy companies that we view that under our umbrella could be successful that we can change. A lot of times they're, you know, break even, maybe even losing a little bit of money, but, you know, through our coaching and through our processes that we can get these companies into a different stream. We have our own offshore development group in Colombo, Sri Lanka with 220 employees of our 700-plus employee set, and they represent an opportunity to bring innovation to our solutions in a cost-effective fashion, and we've been very successful in terms of driving that lever to get more products out the door at a pretty cost-effective place and get a lot of these organizations into a lot more of a profitable profile.
We really look at that as the core of what we do and what we can do with the company and how we can grow it or sustain it to get it into the financial metrics that we as a publicly traded company need to get ourselves into. Of course, we're looking for those products that would make sense in our offering. We look for technology sets that we understand or could quickly understand. We look at hosting profiles. We look at opportunities to add AI to products, a bunch of different things that we would put into our host of questions that we do. But the financial profile is really the most important of what we can do with that company once we get it into our family.
All right, excellent. Maybe we can bring Brian in here for a couple of questions on the financial side. For those, you know, maybe not familiar with the, you know, just sort of the general makeup of the company, you know, give us a high-level overview, you know, revenues, ARR, some of the key levers that are most important in sort of looking at the value of the company here.
Yeah, we look at, you know, obviously ARR is probably our biggest metric. We look for organic growth in ARR. I think we finished last quarter about CAD 94 million of ARR. We've got no debt on the balance sheet. We've got about CAD 120 million in cash. We're sitting with about 80% of our business is recurring in nature. We have some perpetual business and a small amount of hardware sales, but the majority is recurring in nature. And then we also have some services revenue. We do most of the implementations ourselves, so that gives us some services revenue. Our margin is typically GP, about 80%-81%. And we've been trying to follow the Rule of 40, so we've been looking for, if we've got organic growth of between 10%-15%, we want adjusted EBITDA between 25%-30%.
You know, for the last couple of years, we've been probably at about 14-27 with the last couple of quarters. There were the two big acquisitions we did Novari and Induction. Both give us about 30% of our revenues. They were break- even, so that brings the adjusted EBITDA down for a couple of quarters, but as soon as we get the synergies, we'll get those back to the higher levels that we expect.
All right, excellent. You know, we're sort of here at the beginning of the year, right? We're sort of kicking off a new year. I always like to ask, you know, if we're sitting here a year from now, what are some of the key activities, actions that you want to look to accomplish here over 2026?
You know, we're an M&A company, right? So, we're looking to complete acquisitions, although we're pretty selective in what we do, and today we've done like three, four a year, and we do about, you know, scenarios in the works. So, we expect to do those if they do come to fruition, and we're always looking for that. We completed a few bigger acquisitions towards the latter part of last year. Both of those organizations were breakeven and not making some money, so it did depress our, you know, our metrics a little bit in terms of what we traditionally do on the bottom line, so we're actively working to get us back into those levels, into the Rule of 40, and we're on target to continue to do that.
The early part of 2026 is going to be getting into those metrics and getting back into those, you know, 25%-ish to 27%-ish percentage of an adjusted EBITDA basis. Hopefully we get there as the year continues to roll on and we continue to make the changes and integrate those bigger, larger businesses into our organizations. We got a healthy pipeline of activity, and, you know, we hope to add a significant amount of a new ARR into the company, and we continually are working with that and continuously continue trying to build that and work with that and really just keep focusing on our operational, you know, structures and continuously trying to improve that. Really, yeah, business as usual for us.
I think our model has really been out there for the public to see, and to date we've executed, and I think, you know, they're looking for us to see if we're going to execute on those last couple of acquisitions, which we're well on our way to do.
All right, very good. Maybe any final takeaways for investors here as we wrap things up?
Yeah, we think, you know, we think we're a pretty secure-based investment with 80% of our revenue recurring and a really great consolidation model. We're sitting on a significant amount of cash that we can put to work, and we're producing cash, so we're excited of where our position is. We view AI as a really good opportunity for us to add more modules to our, you know, pretty large customer base that we've established and really, you know, add to that ARR value, and we expect to see that towards, you know, the end of 2026 and into 2027 as our customers start looking towards a little bit more AI in those solutions, and we believe that we're ready for them.
So, that's a big part of what we're looking at to do, and we're excited about where we are as a company and where 2026 is going to take us.
All right, fantastic. Well, Dan, Brian, thank you very much for your time here today, and thank you to everybody watching. If you have any questions, I would like to maybe schedule a meeting with the company here. I'm sure you can reach out to the company's investor relations team there, or feel free to send me an email as well. That's blum@lythampartners.com. We have additional presentations and fireside chats coming up here throughout the day, so please stick around for more. Again, Dan, Brian, thank you so much for your time here, and hope you have a great rest of the day.
Thanks for having us, as always.
Thanks, guys.