Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us on our second quarter 2022 conference call. With me today is Mo Ashoor, our Chief Financial Officer. I wanna start today by thanking and acknowledging the Pivotree team on delivering our third consecutive record quarter in what's been an increasingly volatile macroeconomic backdrop, where we beat consensus on virtually every measure. We've made significant progress over the past nine months to drive broader frictionless commerce strategy. The hard organizational work we've done to integrate the acquisitions we've made last year has been completed in lockstep with this tremendous execution. And particularly, you know, when I look at the organic growth that occurred on top of everything else that went on, I think this was a terrific quarter. Let's jump right into some of these results.
In the second quarter, we reported record revenue, CAD 26 million, representing 8% sequential growth from Q1 and growth of 84% year-over-year. We're very pleased with the revenue synergies across all three of our main business units, and that's what we talk about regularly, commerce, data management, supply chain. Organic growth was 29% over the prior year, and this builds on solid organic growth in the last quarter of 12%. I think it's going from strength to strength. The record bookings activity we had over the past few quarters has really translated into this strong growth and higher mix of projected base revenue or project-based revenue. The recurring revenue made a significant part of our base at 40% of total revenue.
We were really pleased to see our recurring revenue grow again 6% year-over-year. Now, even though project revenue has become a larger percent of our revenue mix, and this is not something that, you know, we weren't consciously doing. We know during the pandemic, our PS revenues dropped off, and so the first thing that was gonna come back was our project revenue. That has obviously come back significantly. Our gross margin profile continues to differentiate us. As you can tell from the latest results, again, we hit about 45% in this quarter.
It really does differentiate us from the pure play IT service providers and peers, and it reflects that blend that makes us comparable to some other application service providers, a blend of the types of projects, the types of work, and the type of managed services we do for our customers. To be honest, one of the things I'm most impressed with our team is their ability to adapt. Now, having delivered an aggressive growth quarter, a couple of these significant aggressive growth quarters, and on top of doing the integration work and really driving our one Pivotree message, we asked the teams last quarter to start shifting gears towards a more profit-oriented posture for the second half of the year. I wanna be really clear because this question has come back to me already from a number of folks.
Now, does that mean we're gonna stop growing? The answer is no. This is about balanced growth. Really, it's time to take control of our destiny, and that means control of our bottom line and not rely on the capital markets for future sources of cash. We ask the team to start really looking at how we drive that aggressive bottom line, the way we've been driving the aggressive top line. And that's a lot for, you know, a group of folks who've been spending all this time growing, focused on growth. But again, the team impresses me in their ability to adapt to change, and, you know, that's even within the year.
It's not easy to shift from celebrating significant revenue growth every quarter to talking about that bottom line and focusing on it and making tough decisions around how to achieve higher levels of EBITDA. You know, at the same time, in the face of some of the economic challenges we keep hearing about, and one of the things we're very thankful for, so far our business hasn't seen the effects. That doesn't mean we're not going to like everybody else. You know, if we do, in fact, hit the recession folks are predicting. More importantly, it's gonna affect some of our customers. One of the questions that we've been asking ourselves and the team has been asking, what can Pivotree do in our environment, in this environment to help our customers?
Again, we don't know the length or the depth of some of these changes that may occur, but we know there's gonna be some challenges in the near term. If everyone is expecting price increases, and I see it written everywhere, you know, it's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Prices are gonna go up, and that means inflation is gonna go up. But how do we deliver more value to our customers? If high interest rates are gonna make capital projects more challenging, how do we help our customers continue to drive their digital transformation with capital efficiency? Again, the teams are coming up with innovative pricing models, innovative products and services in anticipation of some of these changes. I'm really proud of this team and the tireless work they're doing on behalf of our customers.
We're also really delivering on behalf of our shareholders as well. I think it's been a great quarter. Look, I think bookings have been a great leading indicator of how things are gonna go. As you know, everybody's well aware, we had a record quarter. The way I've articulated kind of our average billing pace and booking pace, last year or last quarter was an outstanding quarter. It was well above the quarterly average that we're expecting and banking on. As a result, again, you know, you saw the kind of revenue quarter we had. There is definitely some strong connections between those two. Now, I do see us being able to maintain our current bookings rate near our average. It's important, again, to point out.
I've been reasonably open about what I think our average is directionally, and I think we're gonna stay on pace for that. Now, Q2 looks like it came in at CAD 4.2 million. The only thing I'm gonna qualify with that is twelve hours after we closed, the other CAD 1.6 million we were expecting to close in the quarter came in. Again, we're gonna be very, very factually correct in the way we report it for Q2, but I do want everyone to understand we're starting the quarter of Q3 with CAD 15.8 million contracted, which again, is right around the expected run rate per quarter. We also continue to book new ARR contracts, and we had success in extending and renewing MRR contracts. Now, those extensions and renewals don't show up in our bookings.
We only talk, and it's particularly around ARR and MRR, if it's an existing contract and/or a renewal about the incremental. If we're just renewing, it doesn't count in our bookings. Again, to some degree, it's not easy to do the math on bookings to billings, particularly when it comes to ARR. Again, we had a good quarter. We've extended two contracts. This is also some of what we've been talking about around expectations this year. We know there's gonna be a continued decline in some of our MRR around, particularly our Oracle business. Despite those headwinds, we're still growing in this area. Again, on the project side of the business, the pipeline is extremely healthy. Our recurring non-recurring book-to-bill is over 100%.
It is looking like, again, a really strong Q3 bookings based on pipeline. The only challenge, again, I'm gonna flag for folks, there's every possibility it becomes another record quarter, but there's also a possibility, seeing the way signatures are taking a little longer, going through tougher processes internally with business cases, you could start to see some shifting. You know, what I will tell you is the backlog of opportunity, the stuff that's in contract negotiations, the signals we're getting for our customers, we're gonna finish the year fairly strong with contracts moving into 2023. You know, obviously, we're being very cautious about giving any sort of guidance. All I can tell you is we're pacing exactly the way we've been articulating, and we've got some potential for upside.
You know, one of the things we've been talking about, certainly with our analysts, we've been increasing the narrative around the different business units. One of the commitments we're making is in fiscal 2023, we will be starting to talk, even in our MD&A, more specifically about business unit performance. For right now, you know, we're gonna give you color on some of the things that are happening in here. By this time next year, we expect to be talking more specifically with the numbers about how the business units are performing. You know, let me start with the piece that we've been very excited about over the last five six months, is our data business. It's tracking ahead of the plans that we had, and it's having a great year.
It's clear more of our clients are understanding the importance of solid data necessary to drive any effective digital transformation. We're seeing more dollars being allocated to this category, even from our existing customer base, which is why data is really leading our revenue growth success. During the second quarter, we had a number of new logos, some great new logos in the mix. Our customer expansion and renewal wins, both B2C and with branded manufacturers, is really, again, driving this buoyant performance. Our commerce business continues to bring in renewal and extension MRR contracts. This would have been the category that would have had some of the headwinds, particularly around Oracle Commerce. There's been some positive surprises this year around, you know, what we thought were gonna be planned departures that have extended and stayed with us.
That's also led to, I think that's, you know, beating some of the forecasts, the analyst forecasts so far, is just some of those changes haven't occurred as quickly as we originally expected. We also are seeing evidence that, you know, folks are streamlining some of the costs in their current environment. They don't wanna disrupt operations of their revenue-generating assets, but we're also seeing, you know, the move or the shift not happening as fast as we would like to see. On the new logo front, we've seen some delays and shifts in spending by some of our clients, and as a result of it, slower growth. Now, the pipeline remains strong, and again, what I'll call out is the work that Joseph and his team have been doing, particularly on the new destination technologies.
You've heard us talk about Spryker, you've heard us talk about commercetools, and we're continuing to double down on DTX. A lot of those investments you're seeing, again, in a bench building. It's a little bit of a drag on our margins in the commerce business unit as we get ahead. The evidence really is in the pipeline, that we've got the strongest commerce pipeline we've had in years. Again, we expect to see the benefits of that into Q4 and into 2023. We look at kinda commerce as it's just in a bit of a pivot right now, and we're confident in the leading indicators that we're seeing.
Really the evidence, again, of transformation for our customers, the digital or the data is driving the start, and we expect to start seeing the renewal around commerce in the new year. Supply chain is a business that's tracking to target. It's gonna continue to grow. It's contributed solid growth as expected, albeit on a smaller scale. It's the smaller of the three categories and three business units. It really is the platform that we were building. It's got good organic growth, and we expect this to really be this growth platform next year, and we're continuing to look for acquisitions to help accelerate the scale in that category.
A great year in supply chain, great year in data, and a bit of a turnaround in commerce that is really starting to get some traction. The last group that we've been talking about is our digital solutions. Again, a number of products that have been getting built in here over time. We've shared a number of them with our analysts recently. You know, the good news is many of them are generating revenue. We're gonna start to see that next year as we break things out. Our software and our embedded software and tools that are driving efficiencies inside our project work are all starting to bear fruit now. On the back of our strong Q2 performance, you know, you can see all of our metrics really improved.
I'm actually not gonna spend a lot of time. I think this is probably one of the most compelling numerical results that we've brought to the market, and I think folks can read my letter, read the MD&A, but the metrics are really solid. Again, a couple of things that I would point out. You know, we've seen that great consistent growth on annualized revenue per share. Yes, some of that has been driven by acquisition, but I think what's important to note, you know, to go from 268 in Q4 of 2020 to almost doubling that, again, post IPO, I think we've demonstrated we're doing what we said we were gonna do. We haven't taken on a lot of additional dilution to get that growth.
Again, I think this is really demonstrating good capital allocation on some great deals. A couple of things that I don't generally record, but we're gonna start looking at for 2023. One of the key metrics we talk about internally, we've shared it with you guys as leading indicators, is our revenue per employee. We were a little over CAD 135,000 of revenue per employee at the end of 2021. We've climbed that number just above 155 now, CAD 155,000 per year per employee. To me, this is a leading indicator of efficiencies. Yes, and you're gonna hear more about that, you'll read more about it in some of my letter. We can improve margins with increasing amounts of offshore. We've got some very talented people around the world.
They do help blend our costs. That's a benefit to our customer, obviously, if we can get a blended rate, improve our margins, and maintain costs for them. But for me, the key leading indicator of are we being efficient, are we using our smart, skilled people in the most intelligent way possible, removing them from the commodity, mundane, and tasks that can be automated, that really is gonna get reflected in that revenue per employee number. You know, we see the evidence of it. In our managed services business when we went public, we did show you that number was well over CAD 300 thousand of revenue per employee. Our operational specific numbers, even in our project-based work, is upwards of CAD 170 thousand.
You know, we're gonna get above that 200, I think, in the mid to the next year term. Our goal really is obviously to drive that up. The only thing that could get in the way of that, again, with full disclosure, is we're looking at some acquisitions that have great margins, have great skills, great value, but they are in geographies where labor rates are lower. As we add more folks around the world, you know, there is some of that drag on that number. We are really pushing the team to look carefully and closely at how those acquisitions will affect that number. We're looking for companies who run their businesses efficiently as well. In terms of M&A, just again to hit on that, nothing's changed in the way that we think.
We continue to look for growth companies, you know, companies that our customers are saying we value services. They've got to have good margins, north of 40%, and positive EBITDA. We have looked at a couple of software businesses because one of the things we are noticing now, private valuations are starting to come more in line with the re-ratings that have gone on in the publics. We have a really deep, healthy pipeline. We've started to see more of the software that could enable our frictionless future. They're coming down into more realistic price levels. But the caveat is many of them are still subscale. When you're sub CAD 10 million software businesses, you don't find a lot of profitable ones that size. Even though they're generating sometimes 70, 80% gross margins, they're burning cash.
Right now, the mandate to the M&A corp dev team is let's be very, very careful about acquiring anything that's burning cash. I would say the order of priority is going to be acquiring the EBITDA positive and profitable businesses first. I think there's gonna be a little bit more time to continue to look at some of these software businesses. Based on our ambitious vision and mission, we'll continue to leverage acquisitions as a key part of achieving that vision. As a result, we'll continue to balance the various sources of capital to help support that. Under current conditions, our stock price, we believe, is undervalued.
As a result, I don't expect us to go and raise a lot of money at these prices, which means we're gonna have to rely on our ability to generate cash if we want to stay aggressive on our acquisitions. What's important to note, I think, in combination with this message, based on the way we feel about our stock price, we also recently announced the initiation of an NCIB. Now we're gonna carefully monitor the situation. I don't expect us to be out aggressively acquiring our own stock.
You know, when we sit down and run the math on the rates of return, when we compare, you know, the price of acquiring our own stock with what we believe it's gonna do over the next few years versus acquiring another company and their stock, it's become a new benchmark for us. If we can't beat the expected IRR we would get on buying our own stock, we really have to question why we would buy another company's stock. That has caused us to pause in a couple of instances on some deals, where they looked good, but they weren't better than our stock. Really this is setting a benchmark for us.
It'll be a tool, and frankly, again, if there's folks out there that are really happy to sell our stock at CAD 3, I think most of our long-term shareholders would have to be happy for us to buy that stock back. It'll be a balance, a careful balance. We don't take lightly the amount of capital we've got available, and to drive our strategy. Admittedly, again, our NCIB is not gonna accelerate the frictionless. What it will over time is help accelerate our earnings per share and will benefit long-term shareholders, which is really the path we wanna be on. With that, I'm gonna turn it over to Mo to talk more about the financials. Obviously, we'll be on after for questions.
Great. Thanks, Bill. As Bill noted, we saw a strong year-over-year growth in Q2, and it included significant organic growth components that increased 29% over the prior year period. Within this, our professional services grew 66% organically. Managed services grew 6% organically. Each of our three business units contributed positively to this growth in Q2. With the strong bookings that Bill was highlighting leading into Q2, we saw that convert to revenues and leading to the revenue growth that we reported, a strong contribution within the data management business. We've also been able to expand some of our professional services wins into managed services recurring revenue.
On a sequential basis, you do see recurring revenue decline by approximately CAD 270 thousand from the first quarter of this year of 2022, and it was really primarily due to some of our committed recurring professional services contracts that came off in the second quarter. On the other hand, managed services revenue, our largest portion of our recurring, mostly recurring, which is not reflected on this chart, increased by approximately CAD 120 thousand from the first quarter of this year. Can we go to the next slide, Bill? Moving down the financial statement, our growth margins improved both year-over-year and also sequentially to 45%. There were some timing issues that we highlighted last quarter, and it resulted in costs that landed in Q1 where the revenues could only be booked in Q2.
In other words, Q2 was a good quarter, you know, partly also contributed by some of the timing benefits and that will normalize in Q3. Overall, you'd look at our normalized margin with that benefit, it's closer to 44% and more aligned with some of the recent averages we've been recording. Costs associated with the Oracle business and some of the MRR growth and the heavier reliance on our cloud infrastructure, it's constrained our managed services margins, and we've seen that continue and part of what we've reported in prior quarters as well. Our G&A increased as a percentage of revenue to 16.3% versus 13.5% for the prior year.
Increases primarily from obviously the addition of the acquired companies, Bridge and Codifyd, and also the inclusion of a quarterly bonus that we brought into Q2, where we didn't have an accrual last year. Sales and marketing also increased to 10% of sales, of revenues from 9.5% from the prior year, driven by the investment in sales and marketing and obviously the growth in dollars is from the acquisitions as well. Adjusted EBITDA was slightly negative. Although included in this, I'll highlight, there's CAD 287,000 of benefits from foreign exchange that you see there in the financials. Adjusted free cash flow was CAD -627,000. Both EBITDA and adjusted free cash flow improved by just about CAD 1.5 million from the prior year period.
As Bill said earlier, we've asked the team to shift gears to a more profit-oriented posture for second half of the year, and we still intend to exit the year with Q4 delivering positive EBITDA. The last two quarters showed evidence of why that is possible, but it is important to put our current EBITDA and run rate in context, and set appropriate expectations for Q3. We brought on more operating expenses at the end of Q1. You could see that if you look at the Q1 to Q2 sequential increase there. What isn't obvious in these expenses was offset by the Q2 timing benefit on gross profits and the foreign exchange benefit that we've just mentioned and highlighted in the financial statements.
Combined with the timing and the foreign exchange, the benefit added up to about CAD 900,000 to the positive EBITDA impact seen in Q2. This quarter, I look at this quarter on a normalized basis really being between -CAD 800,000 to -CAD 1 million when you normalize it just for the quarter's performance. We still have to do some key work in some key areas of the business to create what we have confidence will be sustainable, positive EBITDA run rate, and we have active programs in place to refine and optimize our profit through pricing programs and third-party spend. This will take a bit of time, but we expect we are confident, and we will find the right balance for profitable growth as we head into Q4 and into 2023.
Can we go to the next slide? Thanks. Turning to the balance sheet. You'll see the primary use of cash in the quarter was really driven by the earn-outs that were related to the Codifyd and Bridge acquisitions. We have an estimated 1.6 million in earn-out payable on the balance sheet that will likely be in 2023, that's next year, in either Q1 or Q2, and 50% of that would be in cash. Aside from these payouts, our cash use is tracking close to the EBITDA performance in Q2. Cash at the end of the second quarter was CAD 16.5 million, and we still have a CAD 25 million undrawn credit facility from BMO, from Bank of Montreal.
Managing our growth investments and producing positive cash flow is our priority, and we have sufficient capital to take advantage of investment opportunities that we see in the market. I'll turn it back to Bill for a closing summary. You're on mute, Bill.
Thanks, Mo. Overall, Q2 was a great quarter. We're a better company now than we were 24 months ago, and we'll be even better next year. We have used the benefits of that IPO to acquire some great businesses with great leadership teams. We've built organic growth on the back of them. Again, the thing that inspires me most for our go forward is just the quality of team. The business units are running their businesses, serving their customers well, and that's being reflected in the pace and rate of growing our pipeline and the bookings. We have three strong business units that help balance risk as clients' spending shifts between these different categories.
We're doing many of the right things with people, products and services, and our digital team is really helping build those tools and those products that differentiate us in the market. Now we're gonna shift our focus to the bottom line. When you look at what this team has been capable of doing, when provided the direction, they've delivered and in a lot of cases over-delivered. That's one of the reasons Mo and I are extremely confident as we ask them now to balance that phenomenal growth, that great client servicing, to shift a bit more of that attention to the bottom line.
This team's very capable of doing that. All of that combined with our strong balance sheet, some great deals in the pipeline, it leaves us in control of our destiny to continue pursuing that ambitious vision and mission, which ultimately, I think is our greatest differentiator. We are inspired by doing something bigger and changing the way people shop in the world, and I think we're continuing on that trajectory. Very excited about the quarter, very excited about this year and next year. At this point, I'm gonna leave it at that. Hope you enjoy reading all the wonderful volumes of work we've written on the results, and I'll open it up to the analysts for questions.
Thank you, Bill. We'll now take questions from the analysts. As a reminder, to ask a question, please click on the icon to raise your hand. Our first question comes from Daniel Rosenberg at Paradigm Capital.
Hi. Good morning, Bill and Mo. Thanks for taking my question, and congrats on another positive step here with the results.
Thank you.
My first question was just around the current macro environment. You spoke to you know, you're still winning new logos, but you know, the customer dialogue might be shifting a bit, you know, given concerns around recessionary fears and whatnot. My question to you is just you know, what are the risks that you see around you know, bookings? Are there any or are the growth engines really overshadowing any slowdowns that you're seeing on the periphery?
Yeah, I think it's a great question, Daniel. Look, I think it's always difficult to be counter to prevailing trends, right? I think we're hearing about the risks. I think we're, you know, logical human beings have to believe there's gotta be some impact for our clients on higher interest rates, capital constraints. We haven't seen it yet. It doesn't mean we're not preparing internally for that possible eventuality. So far, the only thing I think we can say we've seen, and you saw evidence in the bookings, what should have been a CAD 15.8 reported was reported a CAD 14.2 because it was getting harder to get the signatures on time. I think people are taking an extra 24 hours, an extra week. They're passing it through another layer.
In a couple of instances, and again, some of this affected our commerce results, you know, some folks had their projects pulled until their business case was completed and approved. It wasn't that, you know, companies are saying, "Hey, we don't need to digitally transform." It's just the care and thought that's going into spend, and the scrutiny, I think is going up. I don't think, you know, the macro trend on digital transformation isn't changing. Frankly, when you really kind of think through logically, again, most of our customers, when you look at the revenue they generate through their digital systems, it's probably their single biggest source of revenue and potential margin and opportunity to improve. You're gonna continue to see the shift in spend.
You're gonna continue to see dollars going into digitization and automation because ultimately it'll be the most profitable for them. I'm not worried about long term, but I do. That's why I think we've been cautious about, you know, it could be a record quarter, it could be a little light. Based on pipeline, it looks strong, but it's the signing I think right now that's becoming the question mark, the timing of getting.
Just to help us understand, you know, some of the potential impacts, you know, your flagship products seem kind of like core operations and not necessarily, you know, discretionary spending. These are kind of must-haves, not nice-to-haves. Could you help us, you know, how would you characterize the overall business in terms of your service offering towards like core systems versus kind of discretionary, maybe front-end systems that, you know, spending budgets might be delayed or will or something to that extent?
Yeah. Look, I think it's again, a great question, right? How essential are we to our customers? I think one of the easiest things we can point to is how long the tail has extended on the Oracle services. It's essential to some of our customers, in fact, all of our customers who run it with us. It's generally big dollars. It's probably the largest amount of revenue into how they think of stores in their environment. It's in this environment where a big capital project would be required to move it. Those delays are also happening, which means they're extending the life. We're seeing some renewals and extensions that we thought might otherwise be migrations. Again, on the MRR front, we might have expected, in fact, we planned on a faster decline in it, and it hasn't happened for those reasons.
I think equally, if you look at the stuff that's growing in particular, data and supply chain, anything that touches revenue or the cost of delivering that revenue will be critical to business. Most of the services that we deliver and work on are about getting products to market, time to market, time to margin. A lot of our data business, the reason we're winning is those tools we're bringing to bear around, again, the automated process of productization. That stuff accelerates revenue for client, that stuff becomes core. We don't do a lot of discretionary spend type work. I think again, that's one of the reasons why our pipeline is strong. If folks are investing in our data services, it's likely to again, to drive faster revenue at a lower cost.
Again, I think that's why we're seeing the kind of pipeline and bookings that we're getting.
Thanks for that. Lastly for me, on the M&A program, you mentioned wanting to prioritize based on, you know, kind of the current environment and financial constraints that you or financial objectives you're committed to. I was curious to hear. You know, if you could provide some color on the size of things you're looking at or the categories that you're looking at. Just any details on that only the pipeline. Thank you.
Yeah. I mean, look, it hasn't changed materially from what we've shared with you guys in the past. You've seen kind of the biggest deal we do around CAD 50 million revenue impact. I would say there's probably a number of things that, you know, are bumping up against that at the upper end. We've seen some things at the lower end, you know, towards CAD 1 million, CAD 2 million of revenue, but good growth trajectory and good gross margins. The themes remain the same. We need evidence of path to recurring and path to profit. Path to profit starts with great gross margin. We won't look at anything under 40% gross margins. And you know, frankly, most of what we're looking at would be generating positive EBITDA.
Now, there's a certain amount of normalization anytime you're dealing with smaller businesses. You know, entrepreneurs don't take full salaries, but as soon as they're acquired, they expect full salary. Again, you've got to normalize some of the numbers we're looking at today. That takes some of the time, as we do that thorough diligence around what is the business gonna look like after we acquire it. Again, I wouldn't suggest that it's gonna look much different than what you've seen us do. We're trying to put more emphasis on the recurring part of what we're buying, and we're probably putting far more emphasis now on is it positive cash flow contributing, after we've closed. You know, up to CAD 50 million, all above 40% gross margins, and we're seeing some that are even generating upwards of 20% EBITDA.
I think the ones that are more interesting, Daniel, and the more challenging to quantify value are the software businesses. You know, we're constantly evaluating, do we build it ourself? We had a healthy discussion with the board, the other day about how much do we build our way to frictionless and how much do we buy. I can tell you there probably hasn't been a better time in 20 years to be able to buy if you've got a strong balance sheet, or a strong stock price to do accretive deals. That's the only thing I think that's getting in the way of us really accelerating our vision. The software cash burning companies that we've observed, really interesting products, are now starting to hit inflection points where they have to do a financing or they need to be acquired.
I think we're starting to see a buyer's market emerge. I'd like to be in a position to take a few more of those seriously, but I think we have to get our own house cash flow in order, before we take some of those leaps of the buy versus build on the IT. We can build cheaper ourselves, it just takes longer.
Okay. Good to hear. Thanks for taking my questions, and congrats on the progress.
Thanks very much.
Thank you. Our next question is from John Shao at National Bank. Please go ahead.
Hey, good morning, Bill and Mo, and congratulations on a strong organic growth this quarter. My first question is, could you give us some additional colors on your roadmap to drive a positive EBITDA by the end of the year? I know Mo mentioned something like a pricing program and third-party spending, and any other consideration that we should be aware of.
I'm gonna let Mo take most of this, but the only thing again I'm gonna flag for everyone is our plan was always to get there. That was in the budgets. It was in the, you know, forecasts. I think we've been tracking to it. I think we over-delivered in the first two quarters, which should be pretty solid evidence we're capable of getting there. I think the only difference between the first two quarters is it was a bunch of positive effects having an impact ahead of plan. I think you know, the right question that's being asked is how do we get to sustainable positive EBITDA. We're flirting with it right now, which should give everybody confidence it's achievable.
It's now the concerted effort to get it there, and I think Mo can give you a bit more color on how we do that. You're on mute, Mo.
There for each other on this one. John, the question, I think we can repeat. If you're gonna go look at the pricing side of things, we're always looking at pricing inflation and some of the natural things we could pull from our contractual relationships and our customers, especially on those recurring and continuing type revenues. It's a clear area and a starting point of every deal, and I'd say natural course of business that we'll be expected to generate some positive. We've also got a pipeline of opportunities in our cost of goods sold and specifically within our managed services, where we can bring down our cost base in terms of the infrastructure and the support and the license that are actually there to support our managed services business.
Through our obviously our professional services business, we've made investments. We have talent and skills that support some of the new areas of technology, and we expect utilization rates in professional services to also improve. Those three risk factors looking for that to drive the gross margin improvement. Within our OpEx, we had some shorter-term contracts. We had some third-party spend to drive some of our priorities that we were able to ratchet back. We'll be looking at those. Some of them we've already ratcheted back, and they were intended short-term projects to help drive some of our corporate priorities and expect some of that spend to slow down and some of those projects have ended as well.
Those are probably some of the big levers that we would look at. Obviously, we look across our business. Obviously, whenever there's an opportunity of natural attrition, how do we look at kind of the immediate, the business priority at that point in time in a fast-changing market, and confirm kinda what we need to do at every opportunity we see natural attrition in the business.
Okay. Thanks, Mo. That's a great color. The other question from me is more on the relationship with the Spryker and commercetools. Bill, what opportunity do you see is gonna arise from those new partners? A separate one on this topic is looking out what are some of the areas that you're gonna see, like, Pivotree's to form the new partnership relationship?
I'm gonna answer the first question, and I'm gonna ask you to repeat the second. In response to the first question, first and foremost, they're great technology platforms. They are truly headless and microservices-oriented in their architecture. One much more focused on B2C, the other much more focused on B2B. Those do have very different requirements. They are different sets of capabilities. Having both of those in our toolkit, particularly given the number of strong B2B relationships we've been building, particularly on our data side, having an effective front end to serve those clients, we think is really important. Again, starting just with the technology, it enables the conversation that we've been highlighting for a while. The drive to frictionless, we think, is gonna be architected on a microservices architecture, headless, connecting to many different endpoints.
These two platforms really help enable that. A number of our customers, we've talked about this actually for years, are moving from the old monoliths. Some of the ones that have been winning even in the last half decade have become monoliths themselves. We're gonna start to see this pattern now of migrating to this leaner microservices architecture. We now have the pathway to move those customers onto the right platforms, and that is really the three that we've been investing in: VTEX, commercetools, and Spryker. Two of those really are a result of Joseph joining, bringing relationships there, building the team out to support it, and also seeking some of the potential acquisitions to help accelerate those. It's a foundational technology for us, right?
It's the capability of moving our customers to something that has a much more modular approach and will allow a more elegant migration path from some of the bigger, more complex systems they're on today. It really is promising given that a number of our customers, existing customers, have in fact selected these platforms. We're looking at some acquisitions in these categories of folks that are actually already working with some of our customers. I think we're on the right technologies for the destination for many of our big clients, and we've got good relationships with both those partners that run deep. Again, thanks to our GM in Joseph that has really initiated that. Does that answer your question around Spryker and commercetools, John?
Yeah, definitely. I just want to repeat my second question on the same topic.
Yeah.
It's just like, understand the VTEX, Spryker, commercetools, all kind of like some sort of like filling the blind spot of the business. Looking out, like do you see any other like, opportunities or any other areas or trend that you see Pivotree to have like new relationship with some new partners just to fill in, you know, more of the blind spots?
Yeah. Look, I think it's an insightful question you're asking, John, and I think it's a great leading question for me around the future, which is, given the state of perpetual change in tech, there are always going to be new technology providers coming out that maybe it wasn't a blind spot at the time, but by them arriving on the scene and solving problems in a new or different way, they create a new opportunity or a new gap. Our theme has always been like, we don't have to own everything. We don't have to build everything ourselves. We have to have a very adaptable, agile methodology with our customers. That framework of how all these interrelated applications will operate, and our ability to bring them together, operate them efficiently, reduce the drag on making changes when change is good.
When the next great technology presents itself, our ability to help our customers adopt it, that's again, a big part of our function. I can guarantee you there will be more in the future. I can't tell you today what they might be 12 months from now or 24 months from now, but our model and our thesis is there will be perpetual change, and how we manage that change is where we're gonna create value for our customer. I would say today, John, quite often if we are leading with customers picked a technology, they've made a decision around the technology they want to use, and we help them. Increasingly, we want to help them make the decision, and then over time, that should become opaque.
As they start to buy a more complete solution from us, that solution will be compiled in many cases, and we hope our customers rely more on our choices of the technology rather than what they've picked today. This is a transformation. Today, it's very out in the open. We co-sell and co-market with our partners. Our partners bring us in when they've been selected. You know, my genuine goal and hope over the next five to seven years is we're bringing the partners in underneath our platform, and to some degree, the customer cares less what the brand name is on that software and more about how we've already integrated it with our other capabilities. We're always gonna be relying on the development and innovation that goes on out in the market, which means we'll always be relying on partners to contribute to that.
Okay. Thanks, Bill. I'll pass the line.
Yeah.
Thank you. Our next question is from Robert Young at Canaccord Genuity. Please go ahead, Rob.
Good morning. First place I'd like to start just to get a better understanding of the seasonality here in Q3 and Q4. Last year, it's stepwise better in Q3 and then Q4, but it sounds like this year, Q3 might be a little bit of a, I don't want to use the word pause, but maybe more of the benefit you're seeing in Q4. If I understand what Mo said, it feels like there's gross margin expansion in Q3 and Q4, but then, you know, EBITDA break-even or positive you don't really see until Q4 or maybe not confident until Q4. You know, the revenue seasonality, should we expect it to grow in Q3 and Q4 stepwise like last year, or should we expect a little bit weaker in Q3 because maybe a little slower bookings?
Yeah, maybe I'll start with the growth over this year, Rob. I think we had a record bookings of CAD 19 million in Q1 that kind of got us to the reported revenues that we've had here in CAD 26.4 million. That is really kind of stemming from those bookings. That was an above expectation, above normal booking levels. Yeah, the CAD 26.4 million is on the high end, also kind of supplemented by about half a million dollars from the one-time benefit. You could normalize the Q2 revenues there. Q3, yeah, we're coming off of what kind of Bill highlighted, CAD 14.2 million or CAD 15.8 million, depending on that last-minute booking that came in.
There's gonna be the expected trend when booking goes from CAD 19.6 million to, you know, CAD 16 million range. There's gonna be that impact as well. We do expect to see the benefit, seasonality benefit from Q3 to Q4. That is expected to provide some upside for us that will help on the revenue and the margins as well. That will continue, not expecting the season to be materially different from what we've seen in the past.
Yeah, let me just add to that too a bit, Robert. I think one of the challenges is prior to the pandemic, you could better and more easily and confidently predict the seasonality effect. When the pandemic hit and it was like the seasonality shifted, right? It was like we were having online Christmas sales in the middle of summer 'cause all their stores were closed. It's been a little while since we've had any sort of normal pattern to the seasonality. And I would say this one's no different. You know, last year, same thing. I think we saw some early positive hits come into Q3. But normally, I would say like all things being equal, if we weren't dealing with a pandemic, if there wasn't some other news coming up, Q4 would normally be quite strong.
I think we're starting to move back into, you know, Q4 is gonna be the seasonal. But again, the challenges with macro recessions and other things, it's been a little harder to predict when the seasonality is gonna have its biggest impact. I think we're starting to get back to more normal.
Just to maybe capture the EBITDA question, I think we gave you a normalized kind of standalone Q2 view, and you'll see that normalize in Q3. I think what you kind of summarized is probably the right trajectory. I think we gave you a normalized Q2. Expect some of that to continue to Q3, and then a positive to EBITDA in Q4.
Okay. That's all super helpful. Second question. This longer tail that you're seeing with the legacy and I guess the churn is dragging out longer than you'd expected. I'm curious, is there a pricing opportunity there for you or a way to walk those customers into, you know, next step contracts or. I'm just trying to understand if this is dragging out longer than you expected, is there a way to benefit from that?
It's a loaded question.
Okay.
The right clients are on this call.
Yeah. Probably good comment. Do you wanna take that, Bill? You want me to kind of talk about what we're doing right now?
Yeah, go ahead.
It's always an opportunity. I think as contracts come up, we did see some, Robert, not too long ago, we had customers extend for three years on Oracle, right? It definitely opens up a discussion every time we come to a renewal and some of these slowdowns as well. Joseph coming in as our kind of head lead on and GM on commerce has been active with all those kind of large enterprise customers that will definitely need a plan and a roadmap, and it's opportunity to discuss. The pricing opportunity is there. It's always there as kind of contracts renew.
I think it's also time to kind of also open up the discussion around kind of what their, where their destination is and how through kind of beginning to expand the technologies that we play in, the categories that we play in, how we can support them in that transition. I think we're very active. Joseph is out there meeting face to face with the customers to have these, either pricing discussions or just, strategy discussion around where we could help progress their digital transformation, commerce transformation.
Okay.
Partly with JD and partly Rob is anytime you're in a long tail category like Oracle, the number of available resources globally continues to shrink. In theory, to your point, you should be able to start charging a premium and extracting, you know, incremental value. The risk of that, of course, is every single one of our customers that is buying that from us would be one of our target customers on all of our new services. Many of them are buying multiple categories and multiple services. You know, one of the very cautious steps one needs to take is we have to keep up with the incremental cost of running the business. Passing on reasonable increases is really part and parcel with maintaining a strong relationship with that customer going forward.
I suspect if we wanted to be, you know, significantly more profitable, we could take dramatic price increases because we've got a captive audience, but it would probably impact and impair the long-term relationship that we wanna have with all of these customers on the additional services that we do with them. I think it's about being a good partner and a good vendor and building long-term relationships, but also maintaining profitability all the way through the long tail.
Okay. Last question, just on some of your comments around M&A. I think you said that you'd prefer to limit it to cash on the balance sheet. I mean, realistically, how much of that cash is available for M&A? You know, how much do you need to run the business? Then maybe a second question around, you know, how you're thinking of, you know, buyback versus buying outside third-party companies doing M&A. Like what are you looking at as the decision? Are you looking at your revenue multiple or are you looking at a more normalized EBITDA multiple? Or maybe if you just give it a little bit of thought of how you think of NCIB versus acquisition, then I'll pass the line.
Let me start with. We won't touch the credit while we're burning cash. It's not that we won't use the line. Mo's gone back and had good conversations with our provider. They're motivated, they're obviously pleased with the results and how we're running the business and they're motivated to work with us and have talked about various different products that could be available, particularly as it relates to M&A. What we won't do is draw down a line of credit that we then have to service with the line of credit. It's more around timing. It's another reason why the push to profitability matters is because we won't tap the line until we are generating positive cash flow.
Again, if I thought that was gonna take 24 months to get there, I probably would have a little bit more heartburn because I do see great M&A opportunities that I wanna be able to action. The timing, I think, is such that we will have access to it and we will be able to tap it in the new year confidently. It's not that we can't tap it now. Again, this is more self-imposed constraint, Rob, of I fundamentally don't agree with servicing debt with debt. That's just again a timing issue that is fully within our control to manage. What was the second part of that question?
I'm just trying to get a better understanding of how you think of buyback versus M&A. Like, what's the, you know, what are the metrics you look at? Trying to push you a little bit to give me a little more information there.
Yeah, look, I think the challenge in an environment like this is it's actually a pretty complex model that we run internally when we do our DCF on acquisitions, when we look at IRRs terminal values, when we look at our own expectations around what our business is gonna do over the next three to five y ears, and what kind of return one could get for dollars invested. You know, we could probably show you the model and give you some comfort on how we do the calculation. And absolutely, of course, you know, the EBITDA is ultimately a reflection of future cash flows, right? You could say part of this is looking at positive EBITDA multiples accretion on an EBITDA basis.
I guess one could argue we've got an infinite valuation based on an infinite multiple of EBITDA 'cause we haven't been producing it so far. I think that would be an oversimplification. Arguably, that would mean any EBITDA positive business we're going to acquire should be accretive, so why wouldn't we do that over NCIB? I think it is a you know, a more complex model than that. It is 'cause it's the model we've created and it. I don't want anyone to think that we're gonna run around and, you know, spend CAD 1.6 million buying our shares back.
I'll be honest with you, if folks are crazy enough out there to wanna sell our stock at, you know, CAD 3, I think it would be irresponsible of us to not acquire that stock on behalf of all of our shareholders. I think the return we would get on that kind of investment is sizable. It's a balancing act. It's complicated. It's thoughtful. Trust me when I say, like, we don't treat lightly using cash to buy back stock, especially as a recently IPO'd company. This is not a flippant discussion inside.
Okay. Thanks for all the color.
Any other questions?
Bill, I don't think I see any further questions, so I'll turn it back to you to close.
Listen, again, we're really pleased with the results. I think we've had just now a consistent set of quarters, year-over-year growth, on virtually every metric. We've been doing what we said we were gonna do from the start. I think we're giving more visibility into the products that we're building and the tools and how they're gonna enable us to be successful. I think folks are getting more color, in that understanding of the kind of product company we wanna be. They currently are already starting to extend our managed services, and our professional services. Our corporate development team is finding new and greater opportunities. My job now is just to try and facilitate, along with Mo, our capacity to act on many of these really interesting and exciting acquisitions.
Lastly, you know, we said last quarter and the quarter before, it's time. The market has said it's time, but we know it's time. A CAD 100 million business needs more evidence of profitability, and I can tell you it's Mo's daily conversation with the team. There's focus on it. It will happen. I'm confident in this team's ability. We're gonna exit 2022 as we described, with positive EBITDA. Again, I wanna reinforce, despite the fact we've been showing it, I'm gonna call that positive, sustainable, recurring, high confidence it's gonna happen every quarter EBITDA. That's what we're driving towards. Thanks everybody for attending this morning. For those from the team, just again, a big shout-out and thank you for all your hard work this last quarter. You did an amazing job and it's showing in the results.
Have a great week, everyone.