In progress from Beyond. From the company, we have Chairman of the Board, Marcus Lemonis, Dave Nielsen, Interim CEO and President, Adrianne Lee, the CFO, and Lavesh Hemnani, Investor Relations. For investors that are tuning in, first of all, thank you for the time. If you have any questions, feel free to enter those onto the screen, or feel free to also email me at a.andreeva@needhamco.com, and we will go through those. Before we start, I wanted to just kick this over to Lavesh for a safe harbor statement. Thanks, Lavesh.
Thank you, Anna. Thank you for hosting us. It's great to be here with everyone. So comments made during today's fireside chat may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of federal securities laws. Such forward-looking statements include all statements other than statements of historical fact. There can be no guarantee that any such forward-looking statement will ultimately prove to be accurate. Factors that could materially affect the accuracy of such forward-looking statements may be found in our annual report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2022, and in our subsequent filings with the SEC. With that, I hand it back over to you, Anna. Thank you.
Okay, great. Thank you so much. Perfect. And so, Marcus, I wanted to start with you. I know you wanted to make some opening remarks, so go ahead.
Well, it's been a pretty wild 60 days for those that have been following the stock. The journey and the privilege for me to be here has been clearly an interesting one. You know, the number one question that I've been getting is what has attracted me to this particular company? I like to keep things very real. If you know me, and if you don't, you'll as you get to know me, you'll find that I keep things very honest and transparent. I think first and foremost, you know, for most of us, the Bed Bath & Beyond brand has been part of our childhood and our adulthood and really been part of the American consumer fabric for many years, and have always been a super fan of that brand.
I think secondly, and maybe more importantly, is I have a bit of a no butthead policy. And as I studied the current management that was there in the past and the way the company was operating, including employee satisfaction, vendor satisfaction, and shareholder satisfaction, there looked to be a lot of opportunity to improve those three things, and that was really paramount to me. Last, I'm a big believer that the generational wealth for Americans is created in their home, and I think the company has done a nice job of establishing the commerce side of this business, the transactional nature of interacting with homeowners, but I think there's a lot more there that can be done to establish that.
Before we jump into the Q&A, though, we, as a management team, have 10 very simple actions that we, that are foundational for us, that we are gonna be spending the next several years hyper-focusing on. And while some people may think that 10 is a lot, I want to be clear, there is a lot of work here to do, but I'm gonna go very slowly and clearly so people understand them. Number one, from a practical standpoint, we need to improve our employee satisfaction. Our single greatest asset are the folks that work for us every day, and help our customers interact, so we need to improve that satisfaction. We are not getting very high marks now. We need to dramatically improve that. Two, we need to provide more value to customers.
Oftentimes, you hear words like enhance the customer experience and, and fancy words like that. Consumers come to us, and we want more to come to us because they believe that we provide value to them and their household. Delivering the right product in the right time, giving them new alternatives, finding ways to enhance the value of their home, those are important. Third, and most importantly for this call, we need to be better communicators and performers for our shareholders. Better communicators and performers. Recently, we declassified the board. I'm a firm believer that this is a performance-only business, and on an annual basis, whether it's Dave, Adrianne, myself, the rest of the management team or the rest of the board, we should be able to be removed if we're not meeting the standards of our owners.
If we do, then we're given another year to hit those goals, but I believe in a high level of accountability. So those are the first three. Fundamentally, our company needs to grow our active file. Those are the folks that transact with us in a short period of time. They give us currency. We need to grow that active file to 10 million. Today, we're north of 5.2. The company has had a history in the last 12-18 months of seeing that file decline. Number two, we need to increase the frequency of visits in which our customers come and transact with our company. Number three, we need to grow the average order size. So if you can grow the file, increase frequency, and increase average order, that holy triangle is essentially the path to success.
So those are the fundamental things that we want to do. Those are an additional 3, now up to 6. From an efficiency standpoint, we need to dramatically reduce the fixed expenses and overall SG&A while reducing the cost of customer acquisitions and retentions. We're gonna do that through improving our database and how we actually manage the customer journey process. I look at SG&A in two buckets. We have our labor, which is about half of our SG&A, and we've made some sudden moves to bring that down, and the rest of it is the operating expenses to run the business, which need to come down by at least 30%. So we are going to take a sledgehammer to the ideas from the past in understanding why an asset-light business needs the SG&A that the company has today. We can't afford it.
We need to divest or eliminate all non-performing assets that aren't either growing revenue, generating cash, or materially improving our share price. That's. I say that again, divest or eliminate all non-performing assets that aren't growing revenue, generating cash flow, or materially improving our share price. We wanna build cash, we wanna make acquisitions, we wanna have optionality to buy shares back. Those are all the things that are ROI priorities. We wanna grow margin performance. We know that margins are severely under pressure. We've put some of those under pressure ourselves by being more promotional, by trying to gain market share. The way that we need to grow our margins is to build stronger relationships with our vendors, to potentially minimize our dependency on distributors, and let volume justify our request for better pricing. But we know we have a mandate to expand the margin profile.
We need to grow. We also need to develop the creation of products and services by monetizing the database. If you know me in my other life, building the database is one thing, keeping it clean and monetizing is a more important thing. When you think about the American homeowner, rather than thinking about the things in their bedroom or their bathroom or their kitchen, we want you to think about the four walls of their property and the four corners of their house. That is our addressable market. That doesn't mean that we're selling cars because they're in the driveway. That doesn't mean that we're offering cable services.
So the idea isn't to get into all these random ancillary things, but if we believe that customers are transacting by buying things for their outdoor space or their indoor space, my primary focus with the management team is: how do we drive market share? How do we drive share of wallet? How do we improve retention? And how do we drive high-margin, recurring revenue that isn't something that shows up in a box on the front doorstep of your home? So those are our basic 10 things. We will post those 10 things here in the next couple of days so that people have an accounting of those, and those are the essential KPIs of how I'm gonna be managing, along with Dave and Adrianne, the business.
So thank you for that. That was a perfect intro, and I think makes a lot of sense. You mentioned the words efficiency and profitability, multiple times. The previous management team talked about net adds as the key KPI in determining success of the rebrand, of Overstock. So can you talk about how that has evolved? And as you look at the business in the next, let's call it 9-12 months, how do you think about balancing that top-line growth and market share gains, at the same time with profitability?
I think the management team historically made profitability a real regulator for growth. You can be profitable by cutting your way and limiting your opportunities and limiting your risk and limiting the chances that you take, and manage it like a bank. At the end of the day, I invested in this company for growth. But I invested in this company for not small growth, big growth, knowing that over time, the size of that database would allow us to lower our cost of acquisition, lower our cost of retention, provide more value for people so they become sticky to the business, and create partnerships with third parties, not taking on contingent liabilities, to provide potentially HELOC opportunities, mortgage opportunities, warranty opportunities, insurance opportunities, maintenance for your home opportunities. Dave will address some of those other things later.
But we wanna have a 360-degree suite of products and services, so that when people think about our company, they think beyond just the things that show up on the front doorstep in a box. So I would expect in the short term, profitability is going to be under material pressure. We made a commitment when we wrote the script for the last quarter, that we were going to invest some of the company's cash. And as a reminder, a bulk of that cash was generated through a secondary offering a few years ago. Those folks who bought into the company when that cash was generated, expect this company to deliver returns, and they expect this company to invest that capital in very thoughtful ways.
I will tell you that I am very disturbed and disappointed by some of the investments that the company has made in the previous decade that are in parts of the general economy, that have nothing to do with this particular consumer. Adrianne and Dave are leading the charge in researching and analyzing and understanding every transaction that was ever done, and then they, as our management team, will determine what is our exit strategy or maintenance strategy for those investments.
Okay. So, all of this would be impossible, of course, without the right talent in the organization. And at the moment, in addition to still searching for a permanent CEO to lead the business, there's some pretty key roles that you're looking to fill in, such as CMO and CTO. So can you talk about maybe some of the characteristics that you're looking for in those really critical hires and just anything on the timeline?
Well, let me be as clear as I can. I am a no-holds-barred. I just tell it like I see it, and I have been pretty satisfied with both the executive team and Dave and Adrianne, and that next rung of leadership. I think there's a strong foundation there, but it has become clear to me that there are some gaps in talent, and those gaps will be filled. But what we don't want to do is have a potential new CEO, whether it's internal or external, have to come into a business and clean up a bunch of garbage. So we are taking, as I mentioned earlier, a sledgehammer. We're gonna be putting the building up for sale in Salt Lake City. This company invested a lot of money. We don't need 220,000 sq ft to house people.
The bulk of our associates are remote or virtual, and that's where a lot of talent is today. Number 2, from a marketing standpoint, we have some work to do to really determine how many brands we're gonna operate, which Dave will address in a few minutes, and then what our ultimate go-to-market strategy is. The idea of just couponing our way through the rest of time isn't something that we're going to do. The idea of just chasing things down a black hole to just drive margins down to gain market share isn't a long-term strategy either. But we do need to reignite things, and so we are taking a very provincial approach. A silly example, okay? Historically, the company used outside firms to create their marketing strategy and to buy their media and to do the actual ads. All of that is gone.
We're gonna find the talent or utilize the talent inside, save that SG&A, and force the team inside to put their reputations and their ideas and their process to the test, as opposed to blaming it on a third party. So I have been pretty involved in the day-to-day operations, as Dave and Adrianne will chuckle and laugh. It's been painful for a lot of people, and we're just getting started.
Okay. I know it's early days. I was going to ask, so how do you assess the success so far? Last week, the Cyber 5 announcement, pretty strong results in obviously difficult tape and difficult category. Maybe talk about some of the surprises that you saw, whether positive or negative.
Look, Cyber 5 is a flashpoint. It, it's a flashpoint, and it shows that if we push really hard and we're super promotional, we can, we can grow the market. But what I wanna see on a go-forward basis, and Dave and Adrianne and the management team are committed to it, is I want sustainable growth.
Yeah.
Do I need to have 24% growth year over year, over year, over year? I'd like it, but I'm not going to buy it. Not gonna buy it. So as we think about the next 12 months, we have to dramatically take costs out of the SG&A so that we could take those dollars and redeploy them into growing the file size. The business has actually been pretty decent since Cyber 5, but we are very promotional, and our margins are under pressure to do so. Part of my strategy in pushing the team to do that is to regain the trust and the love from the vendors who also need to move product. Over time, as we gain our credibility and we build direct relationships, it is our expectation that our margin expansion will come from our continued performance.
As a vendor myself of other products, if you give me more business, over time, I will give you a better deal, but you have to re-earn my trust, and we have some work to do there on that front. As we head into 2024, and remember on the call last time, we talked about deploying up to, up to $175 million as the overall transaction. We spent some money with the acquisition. We spent some money in the third quarter. We're going to spend a meaningful amount of that in the fourth quarter, and I would expect that spend to continue through a good chunk of 2024. But if at any moment in time, we're not seeing retention of those customers, increased frequency of those customers or file size growth, we will not spend money just to say we spent it.
Money is too hard to come by. So we have a good strategy right now. We are grabbing market share. You could see it if you look at the web traffic that's out there and the transactions that are out there. But this company made one fatal flaw. Dave, what was it? What did we walk away from?
We walked away from Overstock.com in 22 years or 24 years of retail sales with those customers, and we're coming back. So as Marcus has just teed this up, we're coming back in a 3-phased approach, and the first phase starts next week... with a subdomain launch of our product categories in, in, patio furniture, furniture across the board, all of the RTA and area rugs. So customers in that cohort that we talked about on the last earnings call, having a little bit of a struggle transitioning over to Bed Bath & Beyond, they'll have an opportunity. As soon as next week, we'll be marketing to them to come over to that subdomain. That's phase one.
Phase two, we mentioned on the third quarter earnings call, and when Marcus says he's been involved and we've been involved in working in this business and working as a management team quickly, we committed third quarter, we would have Overstock.com up as a website.
Of next year.
Of next year.
Yeah.
We've moved that up to the first half of this year and have a plan that we're actively working on now to stand up in phase two. Overstock.com is its own website that we'll be marketing to, a true liquidation site. And phase three, we're bringing back jewelry and watches, apparel and footwear, health and beauty, all of those categories for those customers who loved Overstock for what it was. So you'll have Bed Bath & Beyond, and you'll have Overstock.com. And we have a team that can manage and market both of those.
I think the company, to be honest with you, Anna, I think the company, and previous leadership let their ego get in the way of thinking that we needed to not be Overstock, like there was some bad association with the name. There are consumers in the marketplace that need to be serviced, and there are value-oriented consumers. And when I look at the cradle-to-grave process of bringing somebody in the front door of our funnel, I want to make sure that every single price point, value buyers, mid buyers, luxury buyers, there is something for everyone. And when we shut down Overstock because we either didn't like the association of the name or it felt too something, it was a grave error. And in this economic environment, there are two parties that need to be satisfied.
Vendors who have excess inventory or samples or mistakes or whatever it may be, and consumers who are always looking for value. Our job is to deliver that. When you look at the categories that historically Overstock dominated in, and you contrast that to what historically Bed Bath & Beyond did, they were complementary. To shut one down is like walking away from, over time, what could be $500 million or more of incremental revenue for no reason other than we didn't want people to associate with a dis-- you know, like a discontinued product brand. I want to associate with whatever's going to drive shareholder value and generate cash.
So a lot to unpack there. Couldn't agree more on the consumer's ongoing emphasis on value, right? Like, value wins, as well as from the vendor's standpoint. Completely agree with that. But can you just provide a little bit more color on what that means? Are you essentially thinking off-price type of a entity online, across, you know, various categories, essentially TJ Maxx online, if you will, as an ultimate goal for the business? And it's not easy to navigate various sub-brands in a portfolio without potential cannibalization.
Yeah.
How do you-
Yeah. So first of all, they're not sub-brands. They're peers in terms of our importance of where we think they can drive revenue. And Dave has how many years of experience with Overstock?
12 years. 12 plus years of experience with Overstock.
I'm not walking away from that. You were the president for a number of those years.
Yep.
The first thing that Dave said to me when I met him, he pulled me off over by the water cooler and said to me, "Marcus, we got to get Overstock back up." I spent 12 years of my life building this brand with the rest of the team, and people in the building are sort of looking at me like I have three eyes. We need to develop those. As we do that, the one thing that this allows us to do with Overstock is it doesn't just have to be excess merchandise from third parties.
It can also be collaborative, using the IP that we acquired, both with Bed Bath & Beyond and some of the legacy private label brands that Overstock has, to go to some of our manufacturers, a rug manufacturer, a furniture manufacturer, to stand up what I would call margin expanders.
Mm-hmm.
If we believe that the Wamsutta brand, which is one of the many, many brands that we acquired, that sitting on the shelf has a legacy value, I'm fine taking that all the way into the mattress business. That's a determination that, that Dave and the team have to make. I should not be making that, but I am going to press them very hard on finding every single opportunity for margin expansion, which, by the way, as we develop some of those private labels, they also can be distributed through other channels other than our own. We're not going to discriminate on how we generate revenue. If we need to have an Amazon marketplace using our private label products, then we're going to have one. If we need to find other vendor partners, we're going to do that. Dave?
Absolutely. The licensing opportunities are endless, and I will also tell you with Overstock, there is a real need in the market. Today, when I go to the different conferences, just up at the CHESS Conference for all of the International Housewares Association, with the owners and founders and CEOs of these companies, and one of their biggest challenges is how do you liquidate product online without creating channel conflict?
Mm-hmm.
And Overstock is the perfect place to do that, where we won't be feeding those products over to, over to Google and spreading the word out and causing all kinds of channel conflicts. Overstock, in some of these liquidation categories, will be a place where the customers just know, you got to come to Overstock if you want to find a great deal and see price in cart, and they can buy that, and we can liquidate it, and it's a way to get rid of their merchandise. That's just one of the many things that made Overstock so successful through the years.
Um-
Dave and I had a meeting with, just as a side point, Dave and I had a meeting, a fantastic meeting with Newell, which is an unbelievable company in the space. And Newell did, I think, Dave, hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars with Bed Bath & Beyond. And we're going to reestablish that relationship with them in a very meaningful way. And the one thing we'd learned is that they have brands that we were unfamiliar with. They have brands that they may only distribute internationally. And so, as we look to grow those relationships, we want to be a throughput and a testing ground for a lot of those companies that may want to bring international brands domestically and may want to use that as a category leader or a category killer.
And so we know that there are certain companies that don't want their brands on Overstock, and we appreciate that. That doesn't mean that they don't want their products branded something different-
Yeah.
-sold there.
Right.
That, that makes sense. Remind us, historically, what was the size of the own brand or private label brands on Overstock?
The private label brands ended up, I think, 8%-10% of sales. But I would say we didn't have the expertise that we need and that we will have here with... Just, I, I will tell you, just in the amount of time I have spent with Marcus, referring to that Newell meeting and what he has done with some of his brands on his website and how he's thought about that, that I, I will tell you, that's an area that has not been something that we have focused on here at Overstock. That is an immense opportunity for us. So this private label branding and the way to position that, a real opportunity for us.
One thing that was shockingly disappointing is that 80,000 people a day type in on their computer, actually type in the word Overstock.com.
Mm.
the amount of cart abandonment-
Mm.
Not even in the cart, the amount of site abandonment. Because if you were a historical Overstock buyer and you came there 1.6-7 times a year, and it just so happens that this is the time you come back and you get onto a landing page that says Bed Bath & Beyond, you're like: Wait a minute.
Right.
What happened? So we spent all this time building this file of Overstock, and then we literally just told them: "Sorry, the party's over. Go somewhere else. Buy some towels." And we believe that there's a great market to sell towels and soft goods and small appliances and large appliances, but Bed Bath & Beyond didn't do large appliances and furniture and some of those other categories, and I don't want to spend the money to try to convince people that we can.
No, that makes sense. Just as a final thought on this, you mentioned bringing back jewelry, some apparel categories as well. Do you feel that you need additional people for that? It's not that easy, right, to merchandise that depth and breadth of the assortment online. Or do you have—I mean, it sounds like you think no, you have the talent in place.
I don't think we need maybe a handful of people to do this at the most. This is something that these partners already know. We've been in contact with a lot of them. They are thrilled at this opportunity to come back. It was a difficult decision over time to shut those product categories off. But to have somebody to oversee the management of all of the partners in jewelry, that this scales so nicely with the efficiencies that Marcus talked about in the-
Some of our current buyers used to do it.
Used to do some of this.
They're sort of scratching their head, wondering why they have to just do something else now. So this is more of a groundswell, Anna, where people in the building, the actual people that do the work, came and said, like: "Why are we doing this? Give it back to me. I could, I could generate $20 million, $50 million, $100 million." And we want this business to be run by the employees, not by, not by other people.
Great. So you mentioned you're pushing up the timeline for Overstock in the first half of the year, right? Talk about what you've seen from the core Bed Bath & Beyond consumer resurrection as she or he comes back.
Dave?
You know, just as you, as you go from what we talked about in the third quarter, those proportions between the cohorts we talked about, the legacy Overstock, the legacy Bed Bath & Beyond, and that TAM new customer, those have remained the same. What's been exciting is that all boats have lifted. All boats have lifted with Cyber 5, and as Marcus said, yes, we bought some of that, but we also tried to buy some of that early on, and it wasn't happening. And it is resonating now. The customers are getting this, and we are seeing improved repetition and repeating within that 28-day period. We're seeing that improve with each of these customer segments, and it's exciting to see.
Uh, where-
Just to put a finer point on that, we are spending and going to continue to spend the shareholders' cash to grow the file with a very intelligent process to focus on retention, frequency increase and a larger share of wallet. With that process, though, we will only make this work, in my opinion, as we roll out high-margin product and service items to help build that margin profile. If we have to build this business singularly, singularly on just selling goods, the business will never reach the level of profitability that I demand for it. It'll never get there. So we need to have those other enhancements to it. And even, Dave, you could talk a little bit about the services and contracts you're working on.
We've just completed two different RFPs, and we are in the decision-making process on one, and we're down the path on the other. But in the first half of this year, we'll be launching services that will help us with deliveries in the home, the ability to warranty our products, and a very, very creative and lucrative warranties capability that flows to the bottom line at a very nice margin. You know-
With big partners, with big, credible partners, like legit people.
Massive partners. Yep, massive partners who do this, and have done this and have shown proven success. Shipping insurance, you know, that makes a big difference. And, as we've looked at some of that and in the RFP process and gone through who we'll be selecting there, a real flow through to the bottom line, and also adding from an efficiency standpoint, an improvement in the cost of returns because of that shipping insurance. So there's some really good benefits that come from this, but it does help us across the board to improve our overall margins and maximize profitability.
How does the advertising business then tie into some of those plans over time?
You know, it's actually both parties that are advertising those programs and advertising those capabilities. There's a benefit for the third parties to put dollars in towards that advertising, as well as us. And we'll have those product pages as important product page advertisements and callouts and pop-ups that the customer will be able to select.
Anna, the way that I'd like everybody to think about it is total transaction margin-
Mm-hmm.
As opposed to just product margin. When you look at the layers to build total transaction margin, the product itself is the foundational piece, but we need to add other layers of profitability on top of that total transaction that enhance it for the customer, and whether that's providing a warranty or providing installation. So if you buy a bed from us, we don't need the bed to show up, and then you get, like, the IKEA feel, where I'm trying to, you know, glue it together, and you're sitting on the floor with your directions. We want to create a full 360-degree experience for people, because if they buy the bed from us, and if we provide the installer, even if it's at a fee, people will pay it.
That's why the Angie's List of the world exists. If you pay that fee, your likelihood of returning it goes down, your likelihood of customer satisfaction goes up, your likelihood of retention and a second purchase goes up. And now that I know you bought a bed, my offers to you for new pillows and all the soft goods that go around it go up. And if you do that, then I can start to create this predictor file. And so I'm a big believer in understanding the journey of the customer. Where do they come in, and where are we going to take them on the Venn diagram? How do we actually take them from cradle to grave? One of the categories that we haven't talked about that we are going to launch in a big way for the little ones in our house are, Dave?
Baby. Yep, this is—these are life moments, and we want to pick this customer up as she begins shopping for the nursery.
Mm-hmm.
For the car seat, for... You name it, in the product category. And again, back to some of these partners that have products in these categories, like Newell and others, real opportunities for us to build this out. We're going and getting talent that we know knows this business inside and out.
We're gonna go, we're gonna go hire people that used to be at Buy Buy Baby. Let's just call it like it is.
Call it like it is.
Because what nobody realizes is that the database that we bought has those customers inside of it. And so I don't really care what we call the category. We're going. We believe there's a tremendous amount of white space-
Mm-hmm.
Around one of the most important things that happen in your life in baby. And so when you start stacking baby on top of the existing SG&A model or a reduced one, and you start to bring people into that life cycle early, it's fine, but we need to add more value. And there were a couple of key individuals at Buy Buy Baby and some of the vendors that made a lot of money on Buy Buy Baby, that have come to us and said: Listen, yeah, we don't have the name, but, but we have the firepower and the database. And so you're gonna see us ramp that up here in very short order.
I think that's great. That makes a lot of sense, and it's a pretty white space in terms of opportunity for that category, for sure. But I think it would be helpful to just gauge what is the timeline that you guys think for all these exciting initiatives? When should we think the services component could become a more meaningful, you know, part of the P&L? Just any timeline on that, I think, would be super helpful.
Why don't we go through them one by one, Anna, where you ask a specific item, and we give you a very specific answer on a conservative basis, Dave?
Yep.
All right, so let's start with services.
So services, as Marcus mentioned, you don't want the IKEA experience, you want somebody to come in your home. That service and solution we expect to have up by the end of second quarter of this year.
You're in the final contract negotiations right now, correct?
Right in the, in the final stages of, of red lines. Yep.
Did the legacy Overstock do that type of a service historically?
On a very minuscule basis with certain partners.
Okay. Okay, what about some of the shipping insurance and warranty things like that?
That is, we just finished the RFP on those products with those companies this past week, and we'll be making a decision this week and moving forward. As we look at the options there, we think this is first quarter potentially, but conservatively by the second quarter, we'll have that up and running.
Okay.
Yeah.
Whatever number Dave gives you, Anna, back off 30 days, 'cause I'll just press the gas a little bit more.
Okay. Okay, that's, that comes in.
Anna, that is exactly how it works.
Some of the companies in my coverage talk about the advertising opportunity on the platform as low single digit percentage of either sales or GMV. How do you think about that? And again, the timeline potential.
We're looking at these from a take rate standpoint and the RFPs that we've been through. From our own history, we don't have that, but I would say in line with what we've heard the industry is getting and what you've been hearing, so not, not surprising to hear that.
Are we talking about, Dave, are we talking about attachment on things like warranty?
We're talking about attachment rates for warranties-
Yeah.
and those types of services. Yep.
Yeah. The attachment metric is gonna be a very important one for me because we know what the industry standards are, and we will be utilizing subject matter experts. One of the conditions of doing business with our company, if you are a vendor, is that you will train, integrate, implement, retrain, monitor, and train some more to make sure that everything we're doing through the process and the flow of the transaction is meeting all the best practices that you already know exist. We don't need to author something. We need to plagiarize what we know already works. And so if you were buying a couch from us, you could expect a PPP product. That is a product protection program, that's a warranty, to be integrated into that transaction.
In some categories, we may actually bolt it on to the product as a value add, as an incentive. We wanna take all the objections away from it, and we wanna put our competitors on their heels to understand that the consumer is going to drive this process, and they're going to get more value, period.
As we think about the margin profile of the business, and of course, these services are gonna be nicely gross margin additive over time. Marcus, you mentioned the word sledgehammer. Last week, $25 million in expense cutting opportunities is what Beyond talked about. And expenses of the business, just looking simplistically, have been managed very tightly, for a number of years now, you're shaking your head, but in a down sales environment. So I guess just, philosophically, how do you think about not cutting into the bone of the business? And maybe some of the examples of these, P&L opportunities that you guys see in the business would be very helpful.
I actually think the expenses were terribly mismanaged. Terribly mismanaged. The reason that I say that is that the definition of properly managing expenses isn't that there's just a small amount of profitability, because the expenses that should have been deployed would have driven revenue. Instead, there were expenses on an annual basis to keep a giant building, to keep people employed that didn't belong there, to spend money on silly things that the company didn't need. So you have to really think about rejiggering it. Adrianne is an absolute killer when it comes to understanding personnel as a percentage of gross profit, advertising as a percentage of gross profit. It's okay if expenses go up and down, but they need to move up and down in correlation with revenue.
We need to create a more variable expense model, which is why I was so clear in the beginning to say: We need to get rid of fixed expenses. If the expenses were historically $200 million and they go to $250 million, that would be because the revenue exploded at the same time and your acquisition and your fulfillment costs would go with it. Adrianne, you want to talk just for a minute on it?
Sure, Marcus, I think you, you, nailed it with the variable perspective. So I think, Anna, what we've talked about historically is kind of our tech and SG&A and have this run rate. And I think what we're really trying to create, as Marcus said, is a more variable cost structure, so that we can kind of weather ups and downs, and it will reflect, you know, that structure will reflect kind of the business needs. And I think we talked about in the press release that you mentioned a few areas. Marcus touched on our headquarters, which was built in 2016, and I think in today's day and age, it's something that we need to think differently about. We talk about kind of, you know, what people are prioritizing, what, and what they're working on, and that's kind of the talent piece.
Do we have the right people working on the right projects? And then I think there's areas of our business, and I'll use my, my side of the house. There's areas in even a finance function that, you know, should we think about variable labor or outsourcing opportunities so that we can rise and fall as sales come in and go? So I think, Marcus, that's probably what I'd share about those two lines.
Yeah, and Anna, just, just so we're clear, 'cause this has been a hot topic. It, it is my plan, unless the shareholders kick me out, that everybody, including the board, including the executive team, and including all the way down in the field, will have compensation plans that align with building shareholder value and driving certain KPIs. In the short term, right, we want the management team to continue to make a good living. We want to attract the best talent. So the short-term KPI could be file size, growth, and revenue. The midterm KPI could be margin improvement and profitability expansion. The third, long term, could be finding new strategies, making acquisitions, buying shares back, all the things that need to happen. But there will be a very, very strict discipline around having compensation line up.
For example, I receive no cash compensation from the company today. None. It is our plan over time that if, if I work here, as long as the shareholders allow me to be here, if I drive value, then I should have an opportunity, like the rest of the board members, like the rest of the executive team, to enjoy in the upside, but not until the upside happens. I shouldn't make money until you make money.
That makes a lot of sense. How does Medici, the government contract that I remember we used to talk about, haven't really talked about recently, as well as Canada, and Canada was earlier to the rebrand than the U.S., tie into this opportunity?
I'm gonna separate out the three things. I wanna do Canada by itself and address that, and then we'll do Medici. And what was the third one that you mentioned?
Government.
Government.
Government. Okay. So, Dave, if you'll take Canada and our superstar there, what we're doing there.
So we have a superstar in managing and overseeing our Canada business. It is actually a business that is going to achieve what we had set out this year to be our planned performance on the top line. It has been incredible for us. Different than in the U.S., the Canadian business is... There's a good competitive set, but it's not as challenging of a competitive market as the U.S. is for-
Not as cutthroat. Not as cutthroat.
It's not as cutthroat. And, and the customers in Canada love the Bed Bath & Beyond. They trust that brand. They know that brand. It's been around. That business has been incredibly successful for us, and we're continuing to, to push on the gas there and grow that file, that customer file base. It's, it's, it's been very good. We'll be launching in 2024, first half of the year, we'll be launching the mobile app for Canada, which is a great way to then drive, repeat, and loyalty purchases. A great way to communicate with that customer through push notifications without having to spend so much on Google, through paid advertising. So Canada is in a good place and growing and becoming a more and more meaningful piece of our business.
I can't say enough about the management team there that is driving that business. They are all over it.
That's great.
As part of that, Dave, right, the management team there will also be launching-
Yeah, there's several other-
A robust new.
So that management team is also launching for us our trade business.
Mm-hmm.
In a more meaningful and bigger way, where we'll be focusing, as Marcus mentioned, earlier and on other conversations. This business is about... It's about designers throughout the U.S., small business owners, and us taking the approach with this trade business and using Marcus's expertise, which I'm gonna take all I can get out of it, because he's got the ability and the connection into so many different areas with these, these different small business owners all over the U.S. We're gonna go grab those customers, and we're gonna provide them resources, seminars, usage to, to access to, to a trade platform where they can grow their businesses, build their businesses, while building our business. Almost a, a, a guerrilla approach, a marketing approach to building out that trade business. And this same management team who's launched so successfully Canada, is going to be doing that for trade.
Okay, that makes sense. That's okay.
As disclosed with the trade, you know, one of our peers does a really nice job in the trade business. You know, we think there's two specific strategies to grab some market share from that. It's not much for us today, so we can be very aggressive on it. One is providing value through better pricing. Two is an annual rebate program through volume buying. And third, and most importantly, is our expectation that we will create a small business designer, trade-type educational platform.
At the end of the day, people have affinity towards us because we're experts in certain things, and when I look at the tens of thousands of designers and trades folks that make up that category, they need help with their P&Ls, how to improve their profitability, and so we'll be using resources that I have available to me to make them available to those folks to create the stickiness. With all of that being said, we will be exiting. Adrianne?
Thanks, Marcus. And I think the third part of your question, if I'm picking this up, is to talk about kind of the Medici and blockchain portfolio.
No, the government, the government piece first.
Oh, thank you, Marcus. Yes, I apologize. The government piece. So, Anna, I do think, as we were talking about talent earlier and talking about deploying kind of our most important capital, which is human capital, deploying those to the most ROI-intensive projects, I think you can just expect that we will kind of look at those bodies of work and make sure that the capital we have is deployed at what kind of Dave mentioned, which is more of our Canada business, where we see great opportunity, and clearly the trade business, which is a place where I think we have every right to win. ... So I think you'll see-
We're not wasting time on stuff. We're not gonna waste time on nonsense.
Yeah.
It's silly. The most controversial question that you asked was the Medici Pelion.
Mm-hmm.
I don't know how to describe it. As I mentioned, I'm very disappointed over the last 10 years with what the company has deployed their capital into. That doesn't, however, mean that there isn't significant value in some of those things. I look at the GrainChain asset. I've had a chance to talk to the founder there, and the work that he is doing to not only solve things for the American and foreign farmer to provide great intelligence on how to imply and increase food supply and, and yields is, quite frankly, unbelievable. We see a tremendous amount of value. We are asking a lot of questions. Adrianne, Dave, and I had a call with David Goone from tZERO.
We have a lot of questions around the profitability of that business and what the path is, and we're gonna be holding everybody to a very high standard. With all of that being said, we are looking at what is the relationship with Pelion and how do these assets work, and what is the right use of the company's cash? I think as we assess those things, we're going to overcommunicate with the marketplace in terms of what our plans are, how we believe we can unlock value, how we believe we may have to divest some of those things. I don't expect us-
Mm-hmm.
to consider, contemplate any additional investments out of our cash into those existing portfolio companies, regardless of how spectacular the terms may be. I do expect, however, that if we choose to continue to be in that kind of space, that if we do make any investments, it will be with partners who provide products or adjacencies to our business.
Mm.
I'm not opposed to making acquisitions for bolt-on, not opposed to investing in things with partners that we have that can drive our revenue. Those current assets, while they may be powerful and valuable on their own, and we may separate them out on their own, if need be-
Yeah.
We're not gonna be spending any more of the shareholders' money on those things.
As you're saying this, we just had three questions come in, specifically on tZERO-
Of course.
In the last five minutes.
Of course.
So, um-
Yeah, I would expect that.
Very much on the investors' minds. Okay, in these final few minutes that we have together, and thank you, this has been extremely educational and very helpful, and great to see you all. The one burning question I've had observing this turnaround and this rebrand is around Bed Bath & Beyond. And very curious to hear some of your comments on why you think there was this eventual demise of the brand, either from a merchandising standpoint or operational standpoint. What are some of the mistakes, in other words, you've seen that management team make, that you are certainly focused on not repeating in any shape or form here?
I, I'm a big believer that any really good retailer, online or in brick-and-mortar, has to have a good, better, best stratified price strategy. And in that, the top category are romanticizing and loving on and promoting and embracing what I would call legacy... powerful legacy brands. And whether that's the Cuisinart or the Conair or the Oster or whatever those things are, those brands that our families, our mothers, us, are all familiar with. And when you depart from that, for the single purpose of expanding margin, you lose credibility in the marketplace. So you have to really reestablish and maintain the importance of those legacy brands as the preeminent brands in the home space. I think secondarily, you have to establish and understand what are the value brands that can lay underneath it as a complement?
This is gonna sound like a really silly thing, but anybody that gets dressed up to go out to an event finds a combination of a very expensive shirt and a very affordable pair of shoes. And women can kind of correlate to that a little bit more. You mix and match. And when people are doing their home, whether they're decorating it, renovating it, moving it, putting their kids into college, they really think about, "How do I get the overall assortment to still fit in with my budget? I'll splurge on my blender, but I need to be a little more conservative on my towels." And so we need to find those category segments where we can play in the high-margin business as a complement, without compromising the quality of the product, and you have to have it in stock.
I think lastly, and most importantly, is really understanding that discounting and value and closeout and clearance are part of every retailer's strategy. And whether it's online or in store, I think Bed Bath & Beyond got away from that, and it turned into one giant private label box with brands that had no story behind them. I'm a big believer in licensing, big, big believer in licensing, and whether that's taking our assets and putting it on products or licensed them to third parties or licensing things from the outside to put onto our products, brand familiarity matters to consumers a lot. And while people want value, they want familiarity and value.... That's why generic cereal does as well as it should. It's the same cereal inside the same box, made at the same General Mills facility.
Yep.
But people know Kellogg's, and they know General Mills, and they know Froot Loops, and they know Conair, and they know Cuisinart, and they know Coleman, and they know Rubbermaid, and all these brands that are out there. I think they got away from it. I think last, and most importantly, we have to find the balance between being asset-light and opportunistic. And we do have a couple of warehouses. This idea that the company has no warehouses is a fallacy. Dave, you want to maybe dive into that just a little on what the opportunities are there for margin expansion?
Yeah. We just shut down one of our warehouses in Kansas City and moved it to the asset-light model, where we're leasing month-to-month space, and partners can put their product in there, but we're not tied into some 500,000 sq ft facility. We still have one of those facilities in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, that's nearly 500,000 sq ft, that we are using for Canada fulfillment and other things. We're looking at that as well. We're looking at every opportunity we have to truly get asset light and improve the margins there.
Okay. Okay, I think,
Can I add one more? Can I add one more, one more thing?
Go ahead.
One of the challenges that I've put on Dave and the team's plates are two things, and these are super bold, and they're not gonna happen in three months, even though I'd like them to happen tomorrow. One is creating an environment that has an Etsy-like environment inside of it, where people can actually sell things for homes in small batches and crafty batches. And I think there's a way to get it done. We have a lot of work to do on the technology connectivity and how that process would happen, but we think there's market share to be taken in that space from customers that may want to add things to their cart, things they know, like a blender, and things they may want, like a beautiful doily around their, their...
A beautiful skirt around their Christmas tree made by Susie in Kansas City. So we think that we have to find that blend, particularly since a lot of our trade business may come from some of those folks. So you could expect us to dig deep and dig hard in looking for that small business opportunity to be vendor possibilities because of our asset-light model. We believe that every vendor in America, no matter how big or how small, if they have a good product, we want to help them get it in front of consumers if they meet our standards, and there's going to be many standards. Amazon did a great job of doing that. We obviously don't feel like we're competing with Amazon.
We feel like there's market share to be taken away from Etsy, and as they just announced some downsizing today, there may be some interesting talent there that can be recruited, particularly in certain small spaces, to bolt onto that a little bit.
Okay. All right. Well, terrific. This is a perfect note to end this on. Thank you, everybody from the Beyond team. Thank you, everybody, for tuning in, and happy holidays, everyone.
You too. Thank you.
Thanks, Anna.