BlackLine has a market cap of $5 billion. This year they'll do $700 million in revenue. Stock is really not expensive. Trades five times revenue, less than 20 times EV to free cash flow. Growth last quarter was 9%, down from 10%. 9% down from 10%. And operating margins were what, Patrick?
Operating margins were.
Q4 was 21%.
21?
Adjusted for FX, but yeah, 18.
There was definitely an FX headwind. Then you guys just announced some news, I'm told, which I didn't actually read myself, but I was told. You want to maybe we start with that.
Sure. So for those of you who haven't seen, this morning we announced a couple of things. One is one of our board members has accepted a CEO position, so we will not be able to stay on our board any longer, a gentleman named Bill Wagner. So that was the first thing. Then the second we did this morning was we announced a reduction in force of our team, about 7%. Plus we also offered a voluntary buyout for people if they didn't want to stay with the organization. Just from the questions we've had today, this morning people were thinking it had something to do with business. And the short answer is no, it didn't have anything to do with business.
Basically, in the time that Therese and I have been in the role, we've been talking to our people about, at BlackLine, if you want a job, you're in the wrong place. If you want a career, you're in the right place. And we have been driving a message that BlackLine is going to be a place that's hard to get into, hard to stay, and hard to get promoted. So over the last year, we've been pretty rigorous on who gets hired into the organization. And what you saw this morning were people being let go for performance that did not meet expectations. And we don't grade on a curve. We expect people to be able to deliver. And so those that didn't deliver, we asked to leave.
And then the other piece of that was we did offer a voluntary buyout for those that, even if you didn't get a poor evaluation, but if you don't have the stomach or heart or the fight for what we're trying to do, here's your chance to get off the ride and we'll make that work. And so that's what we've been doing. Part of this is we have a new leadership team, and we've been very clear about what is it going to take to get us to where we need to go, and making sure that we asked each of our leaders to truly assess that team and say, how do you get to a billion with the folks you have and make some adjustments? And so that was an important part of it.
Then the other thing, which we don't report but is very important, is we announced about 10% of our people were promoted, which, again, it's a hard thing to get promoted in BlackLine right now. We've got a higher standard. It's the lowest percentage that we've done, but for those people that got promoted, they really earned it and deserved it and are going to be well rewarded for that, and then the last piece, because people are, well, we're about to lay off, and the reality is it wasn't a layoff in our mind. It was just counseling out people who weren't performing, but very importantly, our attrition for our highest performers is minimal, so we really have a team now that we know want to be here, are ready for the fight. They want to build a dynasty.
That's been a really important part of the shift of how we move forward from a cultural perspective of what it takes to be at BlackLine.
Owen seems nice, but he's kind of a.
Yeah, I am.
Kind of a.
He can be kind.
I don't want to use the word, but that word, right?
Yeah.
So what's up with that? Where does that come from? I'm not saying it's good. Listen, investors like it, but.
No, it's when you listen, running a public company is interesting. When you're a CEO of a partnership and every one of your partners gives you feedback every day on how you're doing and what you're doing, it's pretty clear for what the expectation is. And so that's where it comes from. And we used to have sort of this mantra like, you need to evaluate what you're doing each and every day. And you better be putting more in than you're taking out. Because by definition, if you're taking more out than you're putting in, you're causing the value of the company to destruct. You're destroying value. And that was something that was drilled into me, and it's drilled into that organization. And it's something that we're just trying to do with BlackLine.
Yeah. How do you measure when people are not performing?
There's things that we can see. Some of it's more obvious. You can get into the sales organization. You can see who's producing.
Yeah, it's pretty clear in the sales organization.
You can see who's producing, not producing. We look at sort of the level of engagement that people have and how proactive they are in moving things forward. You can tell who is participating, showed up, prepared for meetings, knows what's going on and what's not going on. We can look at things like how people are accessing our various tools and systems in the organization. We're not running a surveillance state by any stretch of the imagination, but we can see, and so you engage those people about, are you trying to build a career here? Are you just interested in the lifestyle that you're comfortable in? Because that's not the place we want to have.
Yeah. Are you in the office five days a week?
No. We don't really need to be in the office five days a week. But what we do expect is accountability. So on Friday night, if we call you at 5 o'clock, we expect you to be available and engaged. And if we call you Monday morning at 8 o'clock, we expect you to be available and engaged. And I don't think that's unreasonable for what we're trying to do.
Owen also calls on Saturday and Sunday, just FYI.
Not everybody.
Not me. Do I ever call on Saturdays and Sundays?
All the time.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All the time.
Work doesn't know weekends.
Well, no. Guess what? Monday mornings are important. In our business, Monday mornings are really important. Right? So no, I hear you. Okay, Patrick, when do you become official? Or are you already?
Monday. Three days.
Monday.
Yesterday.
Yesterday. Okay. Congratulations on your new role.
Thank you.
Yeah. And so Notre Dame, right?
That is correct.
Notre Dame and then 16 years at PwC?
Yep.
Yeah. And then you joined BlackLine in 2015. And you've been the chief accounting officer for how long?
Since 2019.
Since 2019. All right. So what's really interesting when an internal candidate gets handed this role?
I don't know if I handed it.
Well, no. Because if you're joining externally, the question that someone like me should ask the new CFO four, six months later is, okay, what was better than you expected and what was worse? But if you're joining internally, you should have a pretty good idea of what you're getting yourself into. What are you getting yourself into? What are the hard parts and what are the good parts?
No, I know what I'm getting myself into. And I happily accepted this promotion. I've been thinking about it, working towards it for years. And this is obviously something that I really wanted. So I know exactly what we're doing here. I think versus an external candidate, context is important. My path was a little different. Yes, I was originally the controller and the chief accounting officer. But over the last nine, nine and a half years, I've been a user of our product. I've been a customer. And I've got the best pricing ever because I don't have to pay for it. But conversely with that, something that kind of emerged over the years had a lot of exposure to customers and prospects as well.
Talking to controllers, CAOs, CFOs, whoever it may be, the ultimate buyer to kind of understand what they're trying to achieve, what their transformation journey looks like, and helping map that out. Sometimes you get very detailed, which I don't typically always want to do. But then more or less, it's about articulating the strategy and helping them communicate that internally and develop consensus. So as I move into this role, I have a perspective of what our buyer looks like and what they need. I have a strong understanding of our product and our offering. And I'm excited about what's happening over the last year or two in innovation and that we, using Therese's words, got our mojo back there a little bit and where that could be going.
So, knowing what I got into there with all of our strategic initiatives, with our innovation, and then opportunities, whether it's with FedRAMP, with pricing, with partners, there's a clear path to our target model and something that I have a very high confidence interval in.
All right. Cool. So what do you think, as if putting on your user hat for a second, what are the things that you would want to see most from this product that it doesn't currently do? Right? Right here.
Yeah. There's several different paths you could go there, and this is true, at the end of the day, BlackLine is an upper mid-market customer. So our needs might be a little different than another company's needs. I would say ultimately, seeing something all the way beginning to end is important, and that's what we're on the path to do, if not already there, and what I mean by that is having a true platform out there like Studio 360 is what's generating, I think, a lot of enthusiasm out there that you have one connected platform for all of our solutions, one that enables you eventually to connect other products outside of the BlackLine suite within Studio 360, which is something we're working through, and as a user, data is everything.
You have to start with a singular data platform to see it flow beginning to end through all the solutions. By achieving that, you do many things. You mitigate risk. You generate more efficiency. Every accountant, every financial officer loves it because it drives more compliance, less risk, more efficiency. It's what we want to hear. Then ultimately, the next step to that is you can really create a platform, no pun intended, where AI can be utilized much, much more when you have a single source of data and truth throughout.
Yeah. It's not GA, right? When's it?
Studio platform?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Everything.
Studio 360 is GA right now.
Okay. And how's it selling?
We did nicely in January, February. There's still things. It's actually at our user conference. Our customers came up with some fabulous ways to extend it. So where it is GA, I'm still now thinking about all the other things that our customers would like to do to make it even more powerful.
How do you charge for it?
Right now, we're doing it by revenue band, size of company.
I mean, super rough ballpark, give us some idea of what it costs.
It's six figures.
Seven for the largest companies with. There's also a legal entity component to it that kind of is a rough indicator of complexity.
Okay, and that's on top of what you're paying for other BlackLine products?
Can be, depending on the pricing that they're doing.
Correct.
Is it complicated? Is the pricing complicated?
No, I think we're trying to simplify it, actually. Get away from user-based pricing. Give more of a holistic platform where, as the customer grows, we grow.
Yeah. So what can Studio 360, as an absolute smashing success, what can it do for your growth rate? If it's a total home run.
I think it can completely improve your margins.
Oh, really?
Because.
Why is that?
Because there's so much manual work still being done in finance and accounting, and the ability to orchestrate and automate a lot of those different processes is going to eliminate the need for a lot of extra people.
What can it do for BlackLine's growth rate?
Yeah.
Yeah.
But wait, there's one other thing.
But I like how customer-focused you are.
Yes, I am. But the other thing, too, is that one of the things our customers are most focused on is accurate information. So being able to have complete confidence in the accuracy of the information that we're feeding out and the ability to have that in real time is really important to them. Sorry, I wasn't thinking about BlackLine's growth rate.
No. So if it's a total home run, what can it do for the 9% growth rate we saw last quarter?
Yeah. So the way I'd articulate this is, as shown at the Investor Day, we have a path of several different investments that we're making as an organization. Some of that is innovation, which Studio 360 is a large subset of that, and then you have these other initiatives. All within our control and very achievable is a 13% revenue growth rate three to five years out in our target model. That, by nature, implies a bookings growth rate north of 13%, at least high teens, so that's what we believe very achievable and appropriate given where we are and given our level of innovation. Obviously, there's upside to that given the rate of adoption of Studio amongst other initiatives, but that's where we stand now in terms of our target model, and we feel confident in that.
Okay. So the target model is 13-16, and you're at nine. So it's.
Yep. We're at nine FX adjusted.
4%-10% growth, right?
Yep.
Yeah. Well, that's a lot.
That's a lot.
What's the go-to-market motion for it? How does it work?
So I think the way we've been trying to approach this is really talking about what the BlackLine universe is, what we can bring to a customer from all aspects, whether it's Studio 360 and all that it offers, all the way through everything we do from record to report, the very beginning to the end of that cycle, and then everything we do from invoice to cash, and so what we do is we go into our customers and talk about, here's the universe of how we can help you, but let's talk about what your particular pain points are, from a discovery perspective, and then we can sort of map a journey with the customers to what are they looking to solve for, because you can bring BlackLine to a customer, but most times, they want to go on a journey.
They're not trying to do everything all in one fell swoop. And so part of this then is sort of getting that agreement with the company, most of the times with a systems integrator, whoever that's going to be in BlackLine, about what are the key points that you're trying to tackle. And let's go through those one by one by one. What's been interesting for us is over this past year when we really started to increase our investment in industry, being able to bring those unique use cases, whether it's unique things you do in oil and gas or unique things you do in film and entertainment or the unique things you do in life sciences, bring those use cases to the customers and show them how they can accelerate that conversation, then connecting them with their peer set.
I think one of the things that was interesting at our breakout at InT heB lack this past year was we couldn't get the industry groups to break up. They wanted to keep going.
They kept learning from each other. Yeah.
Learning from each other was we knew that was going to be powerful, but it turned out to be more than we thought, and so it's really helped us to accelerate even more as we head into 2025 of what we're trying to do, so it's telling that whole story and then figuring out what are your pain points and how do we bring that together with you to solve those things that are most.
We hosted one of these private company CFO dinners, and I mean, we're part of a much bigger bank now, right, so there's a number of different people attended, but it's so funny how the private company CFOs immediately find a table, and they take all the seats, and they start talking about what their problems are. Wait, how do you do this? How do you do that? Yeah, and then they're like, that was a great dinner, Pat. Thank you. It was really helpful.
With Studio 360, the other tack that we've taken with it is to include a number of parts of it for free to get people interested in what it can do. So for example, we now have Power BI dashboards for all the products. If you want to have your own Power BI dashboards incorporated in, that's part of the platform. We've incorporated control where you can do things like your yearly review of your chart of accounts. We've incorporated the blueprints so that you can see the kind of process orchestrations that our partners offer. So we've put aspects of the Studio out there for free, thinking that allowing people to use bits and pieces of it will generate more interest.
Little product-led growth. Okay. Owen, how's business? And then we'll turn to questions.
Yeah. So business, January, February, we met our plans. So that was good. Obviously, March is the biggest month in the quarter, just like it is for everything else, and so it's only March 3rd, 4th, what the heck did I get?
4th, I think. Yeah.
Obviously, lots going on out of Washington and elsewhere around the world that always cause me to wonder where it's all going to play itself out at. But absent any instability there, we feel pretty good about what we're trying to do. The pipeline continues to build, which is positive. Things with SAP are moving in the right direction. We talked a little bit about industries. We're making progress in what we're trying to do in the federal government space and the state government space. So all the things that we committed to driving back in November, we're moving those along. Our Workday partnership is moving. But for us, we've got a plan that's sort of more back of the half, back year, back of the year heavy. And we've got to obviously execute against that. So if there's certainty and clarity, that plays better for us.
If there's a lot of uncertainty, lack of clarity, that always makes me just a little bit more anxious. But you know, Pat, I'm a worrier. I worry about.
No, it's not just you, Scarpelli. The CFO of ServiceNow, not of ServiceNow, of Snowflake was up here. He used to be ServiceNow. Of Snowflake was up here. And he said, "We haven't seen it actually show up in any of our metrics yet or any deals getting delayed. But you turn on CNBC, and it's all you see. And it wouldn't surprise me." Right? So hopefully, we get more certainty and clarity. All right. Questions from our audience? Yeah.
Could you explain a little more about things happening in the back half of this year?
Sure. So as we think about it, we've made some pretty significant changes. We've changed out our whole leadership team over the last 13 months, other than our Chief Legal Administrative Officer. Those people have all gotten their sea legs underneath them now, what they're trying to do. One of the key points was what we were trying to do around marketing and to drive more demand in pipeline. We really began to see growth in the pipeline starting in September. That's continued now year over year compared to where we were. I haven't seen the final February numbers, but I know January was a good month as well. And then when you start to see our typical sales cycle, probably 9- 12- 18 months.
And so if you think about what our historical win rates are and just sort of extrapolate, no changes really in win rate, but executing against what we think is a pretty good quality pipeline, that would sort of indicate that we should have a positive back half of the year. I think the other thing is that we haven't really touched on. Last year was a year of transition with us with SAP. There was a lot that went on in that relationship. We had to go through kind of a reset, at least from our vantage point. There's like five or six big things we got agreed to with SAP over the wintertime and early this year that we believe are going to have a very positive impact on our business as we head into the back half of the year as well.
So those are the things that give us the confidence. Again, I just bear a caution, which is you just don't know what's going to happen in some of the world capitals and how that impacts the broader economy. I can't predict that, and I wish I could, but I just don't have that ability.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Five minutes or a question?
Yeah. Do you have data on kind of competition? A few years ago this conference, FloQast made a pretty big splash. Is there maybe less relevant to you, but an update on competition?
Yeah. I think if you kind of go around the horn at different companies, so FloQast, we still compete against mostly in the lower end of the middle market, which is a place that we've sort of been de-emphasizing. So if you look in that $100 million-$300 million customer range, there's still a reasonable amount of competition there. But last week, they put out two press releases. One had theirs focused on bookkeepers, and another was sort of their list of partners that they work with. And I've grown up in this industry. I didn't recognize any of the names of their partners. So it's a big difference between who they're working with. By the way, that's a good market. I'm not suggesting anything otherwise, but that's where they seem to want to focus. And that's fine. We still see Trintech periodically.
Obviously, the stories are they had another busted auction. I don't really know what it means for them. But certainly, what we see is we try to compete on quality. There's some players that we seem like have to fight a bit more on price. And so we have to make that distinction about why BlackLine is worth the money. We see OneStream a little bit. Depending on where you're coming into the buying cycle, so if you're upstream where BlackLine is and working your way downstream, then that's a place where we're in a pretty good spot. But if it's somebody looking to buy FP&A and maybe do consolidation, then that's a place where OneStream has. And if it's in the consolidation space specifically, that's where we go head to head against them. I think Workday, we're trying to do more cooperation with. So there's not really competition there.
SAP, obviously, is a great partner. We do run up against Oracle when they offer their ERP solution. We know our solution is far superior. But if the CIO is the buyer versus the CFO, we're at a little bit more risk there because the CIO is looking for one-stop shopping, and they don't really know or appreciate what matters to a CFO in an accounting function. So that's sort of the biggest things that companies that we compete against in the marketplace. So hopefully, that answered your question.
Awesome. All right. We have two seconds. So I think we'll stop there.
You want to ask?
He works on LinkedIn for you. Let him ask a question.
He'll ask when we get off the stage for the next version.
All right. BlackLine, thank you so much for coming into.