Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us this morning for our Q1 2023 conference call. Before we begin, I will read our cautionary note regarding forward-looking information. Certain information to be discussed during this call contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable securities laws, including, among others, statements concerning the company's 2023 objectives, the company's strategy to achieve those objectives, as well as statements with respect to management's beliefs, plans, estimates, and intentions, and similar statements concerning anticipated future events, results, circumstances, performance, or expectations that are not historical fact. Such forward-looking statements reflects management's current beliefs and are based on information currently available to management and is subject to a number of significant risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated. Our commentary today will include adjusted financial measures, which are non-GAAP measures.
These should be considered as a supplement to and not as a substitute for GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations between the two can be found in our MD&A, which is available on SEDAR.com and our website. With that, I will hand over the call to our CFO, Mr. Brian Goffenberg, to go over our financial highlights for the quarter. Please go ahead, Brian.
Good morning, everybody, thank you for taking the time to join us this morning. We continue to show momentum by consistently growing our client base, both organically and through M&A. This quarter, we've experienced growth in both revenue and gross profits as we focus on scaling our healthcare product offerings and integrate further into the healthcare networks, resulting in increased sticky recurring revenues. We are confident that our product solutions will continue to gain traction in our targeted healthcare sectors. On that note, I will share our financial highlights of the quarter. Total revenue for Q1 2023 totaled CAD 12.6 million, compared to CAD 9.4 million in Q1 2022, an increase of 34% year-over-year. Revenue from term licenses made since reporting Q1 2023 was CAD 10 million, compared to CAD 5.7 million in Q1 2022, an increase of 74%.
The increase reflects the impact of continued organic growth in the company's suite of products, coupled with uncertain derived from acquisitions. Revenue from perpetual licenses in Q1 2021 was CAD 310,000, compared to CAD 2.8 million in Q1 2022, a decrease of 89%. This decrease is due to the unusual volume of high-margin perpetual license sales in Q1 2022, which really skewed our Q1 2022 numbers. Revenue from professional services and hardware in Q1 2023 totaled CAD 2.3 million, compared to CAD 900,000 in Q1 2023. Sorry, in Q1 2022, an increase of 148%. The revenues from professional services and hardware can vary depending on the timing of hardware deliveries and the progression of customer projects.
Annual recurring revenue or ARR, of which we formerly referred to as annual contract value, totaled CAD 39.6 million as of March 31, 2023, compared to CAD 24 million as of March 31, 2022, an increase of 65%. The growth in ARR benefit from the organic growth, acquisitions, and a slight increase in foreign exchange revenue. Gross margin on total revenue in Q1 2023 was 80%, compared to 84% for the same period last year. The decrease in Q1 2023 was due to the unusual volume of high-margin perpetual license revenue in Q1 2022 compared to this year. Operating expenses in Q1 2023 totaled CAD 7.6 million, compared to CAD 5.3 million in Q1 2022, an increase of 45%.
The increases are due to costs from acquisitions completed during the year and the time it takes for synergies and cost savings from the integration of acquisitions to be realized. With the lifting of travel restrictions, marketing and travel expenses have also increased compared to the same period last year. Net income before income taxes in Q1 2023 was CAD 780,000, compared to CAD 1.6 million in Q1 2022, a decrease of CAD 783,000 or 50%. Net income in Q1 2023 was CAD 162,000, compared to CAD 1.4 million in Q1 2022, a change in 89%. This is versus a loss of CAD 338,000 in Q4 2022.
EBITDA in Q1 2023 was $2 million, compared to $2.3 million in 2022, a decrease of 60-16% . Versus an EBITDA of $470K in Q4 2022. Adjusted EBITDA in Q1 2023 was $2.9 million or 23% of revenue, compared to $3.1 million or 32% of revenue in Q1 2022, a decrease of 4%. Decrease in Adjusted EBITDA was primarily attributable to the high volume of high margin perpetual licenses in Q1 2022. Adjusted EBITDA in Q4 2022 was $2.4 million. Cash flow from operations was $1.5 million in March 2023 versus $2.5 million for the same period last year. Cash on hand at March 31, 2023 was $17.2 million, compared to $17.5 million at the end of 2022.
That's after spending CAD 1.8 million on acquisitions in the quarter. With that, I'd like to hand the call over to Dan for an update on the business.
Good morning, everybody. welcome to the conference call. you know, I was thinking of words that we could talk about. I think it seems like yesterday, but it was a year ago that we were sitting here after announcing a huge volume of perpetual licenses, mainly on the InTouch-
Software suite, you know, that we had record times. You know, this quarter the question was, "Can you sustain it?" I said, "I think that's gonna be a pretty difficult thing to do." The reality of it is, we came pretty close to the exact same Adjusted EBITDA, pretty well the exact same Adjusted EBITDA, a year ago when we did CAD 2.7 million in perpetual licenses compared to CAD 300,000 this year. This year's model reflects pretty accurately what our model is. We, you know, we think we're in a great spot. We don't think we've been in a better spot since we've started. We got 80% of our revenue is recurring in nature, and that's been that way for a long time, and we expect that to continue.
We're at the CAD 40 million mark, which gives us some great flexibility in terms of really trying to understand our business and being predictable, you know, for, in all those different areas. We've had contribution from all areas of the business. There hasn't been. I think all areas contributed to the increase in our organic ARR growth, which was still at about CAD 1.5 million, which we consistently have predicted that we believe we can do between CAD 800,000-CAD 1.5 million on a quarterly basis. I think we've done that, you know, consistently over the last, you know, 10 quarters, you know, we've been announcing these things. We've seen contribution ARR from all of our business sectors. The three main areas we're seeing it are from the Hicom business.
It's a business we bought last April. It has a product called Oriel, which is a national NHS service for the recruitment of clinical people, primarily physicians, into practices, and they use that system. It just keeps expanding with more skill sets and more areas, and just keeps adding recurring revenue on a quarterly basis from that business. The TREAT business in Canada, we've seen a really nice uplift, and we expect that to continue with RFPs that we've been seeing issued in the mental health area, primarily in the children's area, and we continue to win business in the Canadian marketplace. In the Transforming Systems business, the SHREWD product continues to expand across the NHS, and we are seeing traction in the Canadian market now.
There's lots of opportunity, we think, on that product expanding in many different jurisdictions. We still think we got more work to do on the cost side. We continue to work on that particular area. Our Colombo, Sri Lankan base is continues to build and mature. I think we're up to about 110 employees in that area across all the different skill sets, but we still got work to do in terms of our base, in terms of getting products over there and so forth, so we continue to work on that. We still live by our guidance on our organic growth stuff. We still expect that to continue. We see lots of opportunities, lots of RFPs, and we still work. You know, we still, we're still there. On the acquisition front, there's work in progress.
We're being careful, but we do believe that we are gonna get things across the finish line before the end of the calendar year. We continue to explore, and we continue to look at that areas, and that group is being very active. We're being very careful in our situation. We got lots of cash. You know, we're above CAD 17 million in cash for the quarter. We've still got our bank facilities that we can call on, and we're generating cash from operations. We are just inching into the true compounding nature, which we predicted what would happen in 2023. We're bullish, and I'll turn it over to anyone who has any questions.
Thanks, Dan. Should you have a question, please use the Zoom raise hand function on the bottom of your screen, and we will make sure to open your line. The first question comes from Gavin Fairweather of Cormark. Please go ahead, Gavin.
Hey, good morning. Congrats on all the progress. Dan, you talked about the breadth of the growth this quarter kind of across products and geographies. Curious if you think, you know, that should make your sales performance, maybe a little bit less seasonal, a little bit more smoothed out over the year, kinda over time.
Yeah. You know, I think, I do think that should be the case in terms of what we got going on, and we're not seeing it just being 1 product that's contributed, and it's not relying on government-funded envelopes, et cetera, et cetera, that's coming through. I think that's probably a good statement to do it. I've never felt like Q1 definitely has traditionally in our sector been a better quarter for everybody, but I've never felt that's a firm statement in looking at our business. We look at our pipeline, and we see things moving across. Obviously, theoretically, we should get more business, and often we do, but it doesn't mean that you can see a Q1 quarter in Q3. It just depends on how things happen.
You know, we had a fair amount of new deals on a regular basis, but we're not a huge amount of deals. There's still not enough there to really, you know, predict in terms of like, hey, you know, this quarter's just gonna be that much more than that quarter 'cause it could happen in any quarter.
Got it. Given all the acquisitions that you've done in the U.K. market, can you just touch on how kinda the nature of your sales is changing? Are you talking to different people? I think last quarter you talked about potential for a strategic deal for Transforming. Are you seeing more cross-selling come through? How with your expanded scale has your sales motions changed in the U.K. market?
You know, the U.K. market continues to do that. Definitely a little bit lighter on the Intouch product set, but we still see business in that area. We still continue to close deals when we do it. The Transforming Systems SHREWD product still sees a fair amount of opportunity to expand into that marketplace. We're adding deals. There's a lot of exposure on a national scale for what the type of products that Transforming Systems can do and in the visibility-based solution. There, we think there's opportunities there, and we're seeing a lot of conversations of being able to grow that product in a material way in the U.K. You know, time will tell if that comes to fruition. You just never know where that stuff goes.
The S12 product set has been pretty quiet over the last couple quarters, but we've been very busy in the development world to creating two add-on modules. We already have 80% of mental health, you know, practitioners that would do the S12 compliance-based world on that platform, and they've been asking for new modules and new opportunities. We finally finished those modules, so we think there's gonna be opportunity in the latter half of the year to be able to add more revenue into that product set as well. We're continuously working on that, and we expect that product to contribute a little bit more in the second half of the year. The ADI product set is being integrated into the Intouch set.
It's also being integrated into the Hicom diabetes module 'cause they're looking for a portal-based solution there. There's opportunities on there for cross-selling the products within the U.K. market as well. You know, we're seeing different pockets of things that we're working on and different ideas that we can keep creating and adding add-on products into our suite that we're trying to be opportunistic on.
How should we think about perpetual licenses going forward? Obviously, last year you had kinda like the gold rush of perpetual licenses there. More modest this year. Are you being much more selective in when you sell them? Should we expect those to kinda gradually decline over time as you're shifting to SaaS?
Yeah.
How, what do you think about that?
Well, that decline in perpetual license is two reasons. One is just didn't close as many Intouch deals as we did in the previous quarter, but more, it's that we introduced a recurring revenue model for that product set which we wanted to go into. We've never really wanna be a perpetual license-based company. We're still gonna do some. There's still some opportunistic side. There's a hardware component to that product which we always want to do as a one-time license, so it's a little bit challenging to do one element as one time and the other element as recurring. That's why we get those perpetual deals on the Intouch side that come out of there.
We do expect that not to, you know, be high as ever, you know, in that particular area. You never know what can happen, but we don't expect that.
Got it. Then just lastly before I pass the line, you touched on M&A integration and still having some work to do. Do you have a sense of kinda how much cost you'd like to reduce or how much work, further work, you can ship to Sri Lanka? How are you thinking about the timing of that taking place?
Yeah, I think it's an ongoing process. We're constantly a quarter-over-quarter making that way. you know, we, you know, we've done a fair amount of acquisitions over the last little while. It's a lot for Vitalhub to digest and, you know, some of the companies have been very technologically heavy. We got a queue of work to do there. We expect, you know, quarter-over-quarter just keep to, you know, either complement those existing groups to get more innovation or, you know, if necessary, try to reduce the cost on that perspective. I don't feel comfortable putting guidance or numbers on it. you know, we're constantly gonna chip away at it.
Thanks so much.
Thanks, Gavin. The next question is from Christian Sgro of Eight Capital. Christian, your line is open now.
Great. Thanks, Babak. Good morning, everyone.
No problem.
I'll follow on the cost side of the business, Gavin's last line of questioning. Only just to unpack some seasonal fluctuations in G&A and R&D that we saw in Q1. I know you didn't wanna give forward guidance, Dan, but maybe help us understand maybe some of the increases, decreases in Q1. Maybe some of it's due to FX or other reasons. Again, without giving guidance, where you think the off FX profile can trend through the year.
Yeah. We've been, you know, when you're doing acquisitions and so forth, trying to get proper allocation sometimes becomes a challenge. We've introduced in the latter half of last year an analytics team and platforms and so forth, right? Coming into this year, we did a lot of work on reallocation of costs into the particular buckets to get that. Part of it is that going on into the perspective. Part of it is the introduction of the acquisitions, where you get more different skill sets that lead to that particular areas of those G&As. You know, G&A is what it is, right? We, you know, it's a cost-based stuff. It usually gets flat. We don't expect that to grow.
We've invested a fair amount in the latter part of last year and then this year in terms of beefing up our processes and our procedures, we've introduced, you know, more of a corporate operations group, which is helping with some things. We've purchased a bunch more software to help us in our integration side. That's all, that's also part of it. R&D, we're constantly looking at that, right? We like to move as much offshore as we can to do that, which really just goes back to Gavin's old question. We're gonna constantly nip away at that.
Okay, perfect. Then on, back to revenue on the professional services, segment of the business. Probably a way we would think of the growth there is just stable growth as the company's busier and scales. Do you have visibility into services maybe increasing more than we would expect with deployments in Canada? Anything else going on in the U.K. or Australia? Where do you see-
Yeah.
That service trending?
Professional service is a direct correlation to the mixture of the product sets that we have. The increase in that is primarily attributable to the Hicom and the TREAT business, which have the ability to do custom development and get paid for it as part of their implementation cycles. Both those products have started to contribute, which you didn't really have a year ago in our mix, right? We're also really working hard with our subsidiaries to get paid for professional services, where in the past, they didn't get paid as much as they probably should have in the delivery of their product sets.
They sort of just rolled it in, as a lot of small companies do, is rolled in the installation and rolled in the work as part of the license fee. We're not firm believers of that particular model. We're just culturally changing our acquisitions to say, "Hey, we gotta get paid for this stuff." That's a direct correlation of where our services revenue is increasing as well. We've been working hard on just getting that cultural change within the organization to get paid for that and trying to get our services business as an accurate P&L for the business.
Got it. Thanks very much, Dan. Just those two from me this morning, and I'll pass the line. Thank you.
Thanks, Christian. The next question comes from Gabriel Leung of Beacon Securities. Go ahead, Gabriel.
Morning, thanks for taking my questions. Dan, can you talk a little bit about the breadth of assets you've got in your M&A pipeline right now? You know, as you, as you look towards closing some of these, what's the bottleneck that's preventing them near term? Is it more financial, or just trying to figure out if it's the right fit for you guys right now?
I don't think it's financial. We got the ability to execute, we will. You know, it's just trying to get the sellers to get an appetite to do something, right? This economy has put people in cocoons, even though the valuations might go down. It's, you know, it's the same. I talk in analogies way too much in what I do, but I think it's the same analogy of why aren't people selling their houses now when they were selling them two years ago, right? It's because they don't think they can get the price for their house, and the market's gone down. They take that off the market and say, "We'll just live here for another three or four years till the market increases." I think that's a part of what we're seeing in M&A.
I've been reading stats of private equity is down on, you know, on M&A in an extensive amount, and just volume overall is just down overall. I think that's attributable to it. With that being said, we're also being more careful in what we do in terms of where it goes. We know we're being measured on the bottom line, not on the top line, and we gotta feel really comfortable that we can get that bottom line. You know, it's a lot of the business that we have might be break-even businesses that we gotta bear some pain for a little while till we get them into our mixture of what we do. We need to really carefully look at that, and we wanna be careful with everything that we do from the acquisition side.
We do have things going on, and we expect still to do stuff on a basis. We want to do stuff, and it's not like we've put the brakes on at all. We're definitely looking.
For sure. In terms of the stuff that's in the pipe, are they more tuck-ins you think near term? Or is there stuff that could, I guess, more meaningfully move the needle on your ARR?
Yeah. I think the part that, I do think there are, you know, there are opportunities for, businesses that do have investors that are in them, that their valuations have decreased, and the investors are saying, "Hey, I want some liquidity options," and they're exploring liquidity options, or thinking of exploring liquidity options. There are scenarios like there that we're communicating with, and we would like to get involved with some of those, and those would be more on the larger scale type of stuff, 'cause that's got the investors and the ability to do that. With that being said, we're also doing the tuck-ins, which wouldn't necessarily have those characteristics at all. Those are, you know, those are the attributes that we're doing, and we continue to look at it.
Gotcha. Just one last thing for me. Any additional talking points around geographic expansion outside of your existing core areas?
Yeah. We're, you know, Australia is still an area that we've beefed up cost there on the sales and the marketing side. We're starting to see activity with the TREAT business in the Australian marketplace, which is really exciting for us as we haven't tried to move that out of Canada. Australia, we think, is really prime for that business. Early indications, at least the customers that we've spoken to, go, "Wow, this is something we don't have in this market," which has been really exciting for us. The Mid East with Hicom has given us the ability to look at, you know, has given us much more leverage with our U.K. products into the Mid East.
The sales group that has been responsible for Hicom in the Mid East has been really helpful for us. We got some things going on. On the acquisition side, we, you know, we've broadened our scope into more of the European marketplace. We got more activity cooking there. We would like to get into the European marketplace a little bit more. We think there's a lot of our products that those markets don't have yet. We don't wanna enter those markets really without a beachhead of an acquisition. It would be nice to get something there. Again, we'll be patient to make sure we do it in the right way.
Actually, as a follow-up that, you're calling on the interest in TREAT in Australia, do you think that would translate into a little bit more additional lumpiness on the licensed services side, or do you think you can get an arrangement whereby, you know, TREAT might be offered more on a subscription basis as opposed to a bigger license?
TREAT is on a subscription basis, although there's a services element, right? It's all recurring from that business. yeah, and the lumpiness comes on the services side of that particular area. It's the same business model there that it would be in the Canadian marketplace. The only difference is we got a team, we got a 20-person team with the CDS acquisition that actually understands the domain and understands the space and is getting trained on the TREAT product set to go out there and try to go sell it, right? They'll be the ones that need to do the implementations of it. We have seen RFPs in that marketplace. We're responding to those RFPs and they're pretty favorable.
Gotcha. Thanks for that and the progress on the progress.
Yeah.
Thanks, Gabe. The next question comes from Richard Baldry of ROTH. Please go ahead Richard. Richard, you need to unmute.
Hi. Can you hear me now?
Yes. Perfect.
Thanks. Can you talk about how much of the organic growth is cross-sell versus new clients? Maybe speak to the breadth of the sales, whether that's globally or across your product sets. Sort of trying to figure out if it's across the portfolio or if there's some hotspots and weaker areas. Thanks.
Yeah. I think the sales are done, you know, all of our products have been sold. You know, there's nothing that's really sticking out. Most of our business units that we expect to contribute. We have some business units that we don't expect to contribute to our sales, and they're just upsell opportunities for other products 'cause we've got duplicate products in that particular area, so we don't expect them to increase. Those areas that we expect to are primarily the, you know, the Hicom or AL products that the TREAT product, which is the HI Next acquisition, the Oriel product, the set that we have, the Transforming Systems product set. Transforming and Hicom are part of the U.K. base. Transforming is most of those sales are new entities.
They just keep expanding within it. Hicom is upsell within its existing set. It's just adding more users and more skill sets. It's just the one website implementation that just keeps growing that's there. TREAT is all new product sets as well. You know, if you look at the Transforming set, a lot of those customers are probably InTouch customers, so they are add-on. You know, what impact did InTouch have with that? Probably in some of the cases, yes. You know, we got product all over the NHS. I think we're installed everywhere, right? You know, every deal that we do probably has some impact from another person to do that, so it's hard to really qualify as either a new customer or an add-on.
You know, most of our, most of our contracts, is because our sales groups and our teams have those relationships. If they don't, you know, if one group's trying to get in somewhere, We see that we have another product set, we call that particular group and say, "Hey, can you get me in here?" That's what happens, right? We get access to decision-makers, we get access to buyers through our product sets, and a lot of our deals are sold that way, most of them.
Maybe to build on that, you talk about you've done a lot of acquisitions. How do you feel about the overall combined, you know, sales headcount you've got, the productivity levels you're at, the capacity to sort of keep up this organic growth rate? I don't know if you want to think about it in terms of how long a tenure they have with your company specifically, so you know, how good they're at selling the suite of products. Just sort of an overall thought there. Thanks.
You know, we got a sales force that's been doing this for a long time. There's not very, you know. We have increased our sales force in the Australia marketplace. Those are newer sales reps, we did hire people with experience that have sold into those marketplaces before. You know, the group that's been in the Middle East has been doing it for a long time. The Transforming team has been in the market for a long time. The Intouch suite we got sales reps that have been here for 15 years. We got some pretty mature sales reps. You know, do we have enough of them? I think in some areas we got too many of them other areas we don't have enough of.
Probably need to rebalance that to a degree on our TAM and which products we can sell more than other products. you know, that's one of the advantages of growing through M&A and adding new product sets. You just don't get the products, but you get the people. I mean, you know, keeping the people on our team at least the ones we want to. you know, preserving the brand and the integrity and what they've built up over the years and try to, you know, use that as a platform to grow it and not destroy it. We got lots of expertise there, Rich, to answer your question.
Great. Thanks, and congrats on a great quarter.
Yeah.
Thank you. Thanks Richard. If there are no further questions, I will hand over the call back to Dan for your closing remarks.
Yeah. Just, I guess the message is, you know, we got ourselves, I guess if you take our Adjusted EBITDA close to CAD 3 million at producing, you know, CAD 12 million of Adjusted EBITDA on a 50-ish, above 50, level of revenue which 80% of it's recurring. We expect to continue to grow off of that, expand off of it, and move ourselves forward. It would be nice to add some more M&A to that equation, and we will. We just keep on the business model. I think quarter over quarter it's just becoming, you know, it just keeps coming clearer and clearer, and we just keep growing that number.
You know, I think we got ourselves to, I don't know, on an enterprise level, if you use our cash, we've got no debt, maybe an 8x Adjusted EBITDA base world. It's just a question on, you know, what the investors wanna see, 'cause that will just keep going, and some point it'll be 7x, 6x, 5x EBITDA. I don't know what the valuation will be unless the stock goes up. We just keep looking at it and we keep going and we hope the investors can understand it. We're trying to be transparent with our business model, and we'll continue to do that. We're excited about what we did in Q1. As you can see, the foundation is there. We expect to continue just inching this forward.
Thanks Dan. Thanks everyone. Appreciate everyone joining the call this morning. You may disconnect now.
Bye-bye.
Have a great day.
Thanks. Bye.