Good morning, everyone, and thank you for participating in today's conference call to discuss Wayside Technology Group's financial results for the first quarter ended March 31, 2022. Joining us today are Wayside CEO, Mr. Dale Foster, the company's CFO, Mr. Andrew Clark, and the company's investor relations advisor, Mr. Sean Mansouri, with Elevate IR. By now, everyone should have access to the first quarter 2022 earnings press release, which was issued yesterday afternoon at approximately 4:05 PM Eastern Time. The release is available in the investor relations section of Wayside Technology Group's website at waysidetechnology.com. This call will also be available for webcast replay on the company's website. Following management remarks, we will open the call for questions. I would now like to turn the call over to Mr. Mansouri for introductory comments.
Thank you. Before I introduce Dale, I'd like to remind listeners that certain comments made on this conference call and webcast are considered forward-looking statements under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements are subject to certain known and unknown risks and uncertainties, as well as assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially from those reflected in these forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are also subject to other risks and uncertainties that are described from time to time in the company's filings with the SEC. Do not place undue reliance on any forward-looking statements which are being made only as of the date of this call. Except as required by law, the company undertakes no obligation to revise or publicly release the results of any revision to any forward-looking statements.
Our presentation also includes certain non-GAAP financial measures, including adjusted gross billings and adjusted EBITDA, as supplemental measures of performance of our business. All non-GAAP measures have been reconciled to the most directly comparable GAAP measures in accordance with SEC rules. You'll find reconciliation charts and other important information in the earnings press release and Form 8-K we furnished to the SEC yesterday. I would now like to turn the call over to Wayside CEO, Dale Foster.
Thank you, Sean, and good morning, everyone. During the first quarter, we continued to build off our strong momentum from the end of last year. We grew our top line double digits in Q1, with our net income increasing to 79%, and our adjusted EBITDA was up over 60%, reflecting the inherent operating leverage in our business. These significant improvements are a testament to the execution of our core initiatives. More specifically, we are continuing to generate organic growth with our existing vendors and customers while adding new and disruptive vendors to our line card. This organic growth was most evident in our top 20 vendors as we grew gross billings with this group by nearly 20% during the quarter to $171 million.
This reflects the strength of our relationships with our most meaningful partners and showcases both the value we are offering as well as the ability to evaluate and partner with the right companies that are bringing innovative products to the market. We have seen a significant increase in the sheer number of brands looking to partner with Climb this past quarter. While we remain committed to a purposely limited line card, we did enter into a relatively high number of new partnership agreements in Q1. Climb evaluated over 50 new prospective brands and signed eight new agreements. One of the most notable partnerships we signed in Q1 was a partnership with Cato Networks. Cato Networks is a network security company that develops secure access service edge technology, which combines enterprise communication and security capabilities into a single cloud-based platform.
While Cato Networks is a relatively new company established in 2015, they pioneered the convergence of networking and security into the cloud and created a highly differentiated offering that we know will be well received by our VAR and MSP partners. On the topic of the right partner, I'd like to highlight our sponsorship of the world record-breaking mountaineer Nims Purja through our Climb subsidiary. Not only has Nims climbed all 14 of the world's death zone peaks over 8,000 m in just six months and six days, he was part of the first winter ascent of the Savage Mountain K2. His film Fourteen Peaks: Nothing Is Impossible is now out on Netflix, and he is the founder of the charitable Nimsdai Foundation.
Nims Purja embodies the characteristics that we hold true here at Wayside, that our employees, our partners, and our customers can not only achieve their goals, but they can push themselves to the next level of success. We thank Nims Purja for leading by example, reminding us to perform at our very highest level, ensuring the success and elevation of our partners. We can't wait for Nims Purja to carry our flag to the top of Denali's Peak. Subsequent to the quarter end, we kicked off a collaboration project with Seagate Technology, who is a world leader in mass data storage infrastructure solutions, to expand its data protection and storage portfolio to the channel community through Seagate's Lyve Mobile application
With simple deployment next to limitless data capture and low cost infrastructure investment, this combination will provide the channel community with a service-ready solution to enable the next generation of data movement, mobility and migration practices to the market. Touching on our M&A initiatives, we are continuing to evaluate opportunities in both the U.S. and abroad that will be accretive to our business and align with our strategic goals. We are in the discussions with multiple targets that can enhance specific categories of our business, including through geographic reach, vendor expansion, and service and solution offerings. Each potential target fits into one or more of these predefined buckets. With our strong and growing balance sheet, we have abundant room and financing capacity to execute on various forms and sizes of acquisitions in 2022. With that, I will turn the call over to Drew Clark, our CFO. Drew?
Thank you, Dale, and good morning, everyone. As we review our financial results, I want to remind everyone that all of our comparisons and variance commentary refer to the prior year quarter, unless otherwise specified. Well, some might consider our first quarter of 2022 as a bit boring because it was a continuation of our team successfully executing on our business strategy. As reported in our earnings press release, adjusted gross billings, which we all realize is a non-GAAP measure, increased 13% to $238.7 million, compared to $210.9 million in the year ago quarter. This increase reflects continued organic growth from new and existing vendors. In addition, net sales in the first quarter of 2022 increased 13% to $71.3 million, compared to $62.8 million in the prior year quarter.
Gross profit in the first quarter of 2022 increased 11% to $12 million, compared to $10.8 million for the three months ended March 31, 2021. As Dale mentioned earlier, the increase in GP was driven primarily by organic growth from our top 20 vendors in both the U.S. and Canada, in addition to the onboarding of new vendors. Our gross profit as a percentage of adjusted gross billings was 5% versus 5.1%, which represented 16.8% of net sales compared to 17.3% in the prior year quarter. Q1 of 2021 included a large sale in our solutions business that had a significant impact on our GP and was unusual in nature. Excluding that transaction, GP as a percentage of both AGB and net sales increased quarter-over-quarter.
SG&A expenses in the first quarter were $8.6 million compared to $8.8 million. SG&A, as a percentage of adjusted gross billings, improved to 3.6% compared to 4.2% as we continue to emphasize lean operations and scale our infrastructure. Net income in the first quarter of 2022 increased 79% to $2.7 million or $0.61 per diluted share, compared to $1.5 million or $0.35 per diluted share for the comparable period in 2021. Adjusted EBITDA in the first quarter increased 61% to $4.2 million compared to $2.6 million. Once again, this significant increase was entirely driven by organic growth from both new and existing vendors, demonstrating our ability to leverage, scale, and deliver a higher percentage of our incremental gross profit to net income and adjusted EBITDA.
Quickly turning to our balance sheet. Cash and cash equivalents increased to $37 million as of March 31, 2022, compared to $29.3 million as of December 31, 2021, while working capital increased by $2.2 million during this first quarter period. The growth was primarily attributable to the timing of our collection and payment activities and not indicative of any type of business trend at this point. We continue to remain debt-free as of March 31, 2022, with no borrowings outstanding under either our $20 million or GBP 8 million credit facilities. On May 3, 2022, our board of directors declared a quarterly dividend of $0.17 per share of common stock. The dividend is payable on May 20 to shareholders of record as of May 16.
As we look ahead to the remainder of the year, our strong foundation continues to allow us to drive organic growth and meaningful operating leverage, all while expanding our relationships with new vendor networks and customers across the globe. As Dale mentioned previously, we also remain diligent in our M&A strategy as we constantly evaluate targets that can enhance our geographic footprint in addition to our service and solution offerings. We look forward to delivering yet another year of strong organic and inorganic growth to our customers, partners, and shareholders alike. This now concludes our prepared remarks, and we'll open it up for questions from those participating in the call. Operator, I will turn the meeting back over to you. Thank you.
Thank you. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. To join the question queue, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. You will hear a tone acknowledging your request. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing any keys. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. We will pause for a moment as callers join the queue. Our first question comes from Bob Sales of LMK Capital Management. Please go ahead.
Hi. Good morning. Congratulations on the quarter. It was excellent and the progress with agreements in the M&A front. I did have a bookkeeping question. When you think about your receivables, and I'm gonna ask this simply 'cause it would jump out potentially to an analyst in terms of just pure DSOs. How do you think about your receivables relative to gross billings, revenue, and then the offset of payables so we can think better about your management of that particular figure?
You wanna take that, Drew?
Y eah. Bob, thanks for participating and thanks for the question. You know, our receivable portfolio tends to turn fairly quickly. Most of our customers are on a net 30 billing and payment cycle. We do have agings that will get into the 45- and 60-day bucket from time to time, based on the cyclicality of some of the treasury management functions of our customers, especially the larger DMRs. A t the end of the day, our DSOs are probably sub 45. On the payable side, we normally have opportunities where we can garner rebates or early payment discounts with our vendors, so we will take advantage of those.
There may be a slight mismatch between the receipt cycle and the payment cycle on the vendor side, but normally fairly closely aligned on any particular month or quarter end. I think a number of our large customers, you know, probably participated in a little bit of window dressing at the end of the year end. We did have, you know, an elongation, if you will, of some of those payment cycles, but normally fairly consistent month to month, quarter- to- quarter. The cash flow is, as you know, very strong in any particular quarter. Don't see any reason that those cycles will change dramatically in any particular direction.
As you know, if you sort of try and model a little bit of the cash flow and working capital requirements of the business, we do have that excess cash, and we are diligently looking to deploy that into some acquisition activity that hopefully we can be sharing with the market in the not too distant future. Nothing definitive at this point. I'll turn it back to you, Bob, if you have a follow-up question.
Real quick. Let me jump in also.
Yeah.
Real quick, on the vendor side of things, you know, we look at the you know the contracts that we have with each one of the vendors, and we follow those. Because of our relationships are so tight with these emerging vendors in getting to market that, you know, they are very flexible with their terms. There's contracts and then there's the terms per opportunity. You know, we're in lockstep with them as far as our receivables go. If there's extended terms, you know, if we pass them on. Yeah, it's important to us. It's each week as our executive team we meet to talk about receivables because it's a big part of the company.
Yeah. I only ask the question, I mean, your receivables were down sequentially, right? Also, you know, gross billings versus GAAP revenues sort of distorts the absolute metric. I ask it just to you're doing such a sensational job financially. I don't want to give you the ability to, in this conference call, sort of explain some perspective so someone can't, you know, nitpick that down the road because your cash flow looks great, right?
Yep.
The second thing I wanted to ask about was. I'm sorry, did you want to respond to that?
No, yeah. I agree. I mean it.
Okay. Help me out. What are your thoughts on the eight new agreements and look at 50? Is it more of a conscientious expansion of the number of names that you wanna deal with at this point? Or is it sort of casting a wider net to understand over the course of time those vendors that will become additional strong top 20 players?
Yeah. It's for this past quarter, it's really a bit about timing. W ith some of the new vendors hitting us at that period of time, and then we look at them pretty deeply, and we take our time vetting them. It just happened to be a timing thing where we were looking and seeing quite a few of them come at us. We've got a couple more in the pipe that are sizable, and we wouldn't even entertain them as we're trying to onboard these eight if it wasn't, you know, important to, you know, the management and also the sales teams. We get pretty much everybody involved when we look at a new vendor to say, "Hey, does this fit? Is this right in our portfolio?
Where does it fit into our six segments of, you know, technology?" We sign from there. You know, I'd like to think, and we haven't been able to verify it. I'd like to think that just because we're becoming more prevalent in the marketplace and a little disruptive to our competitors, that we're getting seen by, more vendors and emerging ones coming at us instead of us going after them. We'll vet that out over the next, you know, year and probably a continued process.
Okay. I'm gonna keep going. I got a feeling there might be not many callers since I was the first one with you. On the M&A front, should we expect sort of the continued nature of the size and you sort of mentioned the complementary aspects of it. Should we expect sort of the same size of ongoing acquisitions? Or do you think that you'll be looking at anything that will scale up bigger?
Well, I can tell you without disclosing too much that, you know, we've looked at very sizable transformative to the company. We still have some in the wings, you know, that are very small. I can't say too much, but as far as the size range from very small tuck-ins to transformative in certain regions, as I talked about, you know, what our three strategies are as far as acquisitions go. Some that are just by the actual vendors that they hold that would help, you know, take that vendor across all of our different regions. That's one of the things that, you know, we did with Interwork when we acquired them, and they had Trend Micro.
We haven't done a great job at getting them into the U.K. or the U.K. into the U.S. as much as we would like. You'll see that throughout the rest of this year. You'll start seeing just through the press releases that some of those vendors creep into other regions. We feel like we're successful in one region, why can't we be in the other? It's a frustration that we have that we'll focus on the remainder of this year as well.
Okay. Last question. What are you seeing with the you know some of the challenges in Europe that we're hearing about some of the supply chain issues and I guess at this point just the nervousness of the financial markets. Are you seeing any signs that buyers are getting a little bit slower in making decisions or more cautious in spending?
Two things. I was on a call yesterday with Supermicro. You know, Supermicro is a hardware supplier. They're like a tier two for anybody that wants to buy servers that aren't HP, IBM or Lenovo. You know, that's the issue, it's the hardware piece. We're 80% software as far as our portfolio. The only thing that slows down with us would be if there's a big implementation going on that has hardware that goes with it, you know, our software, they might, you know, delay the buying cycle until they get everything ready to go and ship. Other than that, you know, we are in the two hotter spaces, right? We are in security, which everybody needs, and everybody claims that they have a security product.
I don't care if you're data storage. You still say that, hey, you have security to watch to make sure you're not backing up ransomware. So that's the hotspot. Then the other one is data center. When I say data center, people are migrating, right? Whether they're migrating to the cloud, they're using a hybrid cloud setup or they're trying to, you know, do regress back off the cloud because of, you know, some of their workloads didn't work well enough in the cloud. We're in the two good spaces, so we haven't seen that, you know, concern with the interest rates in the market slowing down in some spaces. We're gonna watch our receivables and who we give credit to even more closely. We're used to this cyclical nature, you know, over the last, you know, 20-some years of our careers.
Got it. Okay, thanks. Congratulations on passing the time.
Thanks, bud.
Our next question comes from Howard Root, a private investor. Please go ahead.
Thanks, guys, and congratulations on another great quarter. I've got two questions, one for Drew and then one for Dale. For Drew, you know, I do everything based on adjusted gross billings, which I think you guys do too, because the determination, whether it's a sale or not, it's just an accounting decision. Based on that, you know, I look at the gross profit and then the SG&A. Your gross profit, you know, thanks for the comment on what happened there, you know, from last year being a little aberration at the high. Q4 to Q1, I think went from around 4.8%- 5% sequentially. Do you see that kind of being, you know, that 5% gross profit based on adjusted gross billings as being kind of your new normal?
Is it gonna creep up from that? On the SG&A side too, you know, the decrease of $200,000 from last year to this year surprised me. Great job on that. You always have been great on cost management. Do you see that $8.6 million going up? What do you see on trends on the SG&A line and on the gross profit line?
Yeah. Thanks, Howard, and good questions. On the gross profit line, you know, if I were to provide sort of directional guidance, if you will, I would say that that's a steady state for us, and we can move the needle slightly. As Dale referenced, when we bring on new vendors, they tend to, you know, build over a period of time. They may have a more attractive economic value to us in terms of the contract that we negotiate, and how we deliver and go to market on their behalf. I would say, you know, that 5% is a pretty good number. Our solutions business as that continues to grow with our Microsoft CSP relationship that we can incrementally move that, you know, in a correct ascending direction.
I don't know how much stronger we can get above 5%, to be honest, in the next year, but that's something we think about every day, and work on with our, you know, vendor relationships and, you know, how do we manage early pay discounts and rebates and all the things that go along with both on our customer side and our vendor side. So again, kind of directionally, I'd say that's a good trend for us, and we expect to kind of maintain that at least through the balance of this year.
On the SG&A side, you know, to Dale's credit and the sales and marketing team's credit, last year we really evaluated how do we compensate our sales folks, and we wanted to make sure that we are incentivizing them properly, but also ensuring that we can create, you know, the right metrics to drive the business. Dale's created, you know, a really good infrastructure and an organization with our sales teams that enable us to further leverage around either brand sales specialists and products, or territories. We're getting more efficient and therefore, you know, able to drive more adjusted gross billings with about the same type of headcount. I think we'll continue to see SG&A improve incrementally and not significantly, but that will continue to improve as well as we move forward into the balance of 2022. Dale, I don't know if you have any thoughts or comments.
Yeah, let me comment real quick. Thanks, Drew. You know, on the margin, we talk about it a lot, right? I mean, we're in a margin business as far as us doing margin expansion where we can do that. When we look to expand margins, we have to give more value, right? What that value is, you pay a certain amount of margin just to do pick, pack, and ship, and then what do you do on top of that? You know, what are you bringing it to the marketplace? You know, we've talked about before, you know, doing solutions, much more service and technical things. The issue is, you know, it's important to us internally, you know, how can we scale that to the rest of the business? That's the job that we need to do. You know, as we sign vendors, can we do more for them to garner higher margin? That's what we look at constantly. We do have some things in the works that we'll announce over the next six months easily.
Drew, when you say improve SG&A, I mean, you're not gonna drive SG&A down at an absolute number. I assume that's gonna tick up. It's just on a percentage number it's not gonna increase as high as your adjusted gross billings will up. Is that what you're saying?
Correct. Yes. Correct. Yes. Not
Okay.
On a gross basis, but on a directional basis as a percentage of AGB. Yes.
Okay, great. My question for Dale, you know, I just looking back, I think you've been there running the company for 3+ years, maybe four years now. You know, from when you started, you just had this focus on getting to your top 20 accounts, not taking every business that walked in the door and focusing, and you've done a great job doing that. The results speak for themselves. Now you're doing $1 billion in adjusted gross billings and growing double digits, 13% increase. As your CFO said, it's just another boring quarter, which kind of, you know, begs the question for the next level of your visibility and everything is giving guidance.
I think, you know, when I look at it, your company is now at a point where you can start talking more about, you know, the plan to get to $2 billion, $3 billion in adjusted gross billings or what the trend is for the next four quarters, and would give us investors an ability to really model this out and see what's happening. I'd encourage you to do that on the next call. You know, I'm not gonna ask you for all the specific numbers here, but maybe you could give, you know, some perspective now that you've gotten this thing really focused on your top 20 accounts and geographic expansion. Without accounting for acquisitions, do you see this, you know, double digit or AGB growth continuing? You know, is 15% your target? Is 20% your target?
Is this a billion-dollar adjusted gross billings year? $1.2 billion? Where do you see it? When can you start giving guidance, kind of looking forward now that the business really it seems to be, in a really solid position?
Yeah. On the guidance front, I'll talk about that. You know, we had our board of directors meeting earlier this week, and we talked about it because we have a good board that comes from a lot of different backgrounds. It gets discussed. It's becoming much more of a talking point. I think you'll see that in the next, two quarters. We'll talk more specifically about that. But to your question, as far as our growth and where we see it, right? We're trying to pick off.
I think I said on the last call, we're trying to pick off more of a tier two, tier three vendor approach because we have a good wide net of who we're calling on. I want to sell more products to that group of resellers. With that, you know, we need to have some vendors that are not just emerging, that can bring us $4 million or $5 million in gross sales per year, but we can move the needle to $10 million-$20 million. That is transformative to the company. That, that's what you're gonna see. I mean, you know, like I said, we don't give guidance, but, you know, that growth rate, you know, low double digits, I mean, that's what we focus on internally. But we have some things to fix.
I mean, we have a new ERP implementation that we're kicking off. Drew and his team have kicked it off a couple of months ago. That's gonna be transformative to the company to continue to make sure that you know, we keep our SG&A at the right level so we can actually scale. I don't believe we're at the scaling point yet in the company or that real inflection point. We can feel it coming, but we still have to get our systems in line to be able to onboard vendors, onboard customers, and transact more efficiently. Right now, great systems that we've built over the years, but not for the size that we are and we're going to.
Just to follow, what do you see as, you know, transformative growth size-wise? T his market's huge, but your segment is kind of the smaller end of that. Is this potentially a $5 billion adjusted gross billings company? You know, excluding acquisitions, do you see that in a five-year plan? Or is this getting up to a maximum where you got to acquire to get the business to continue to grow at this rate?
It's a combination. W e wanna acquire just because we think what we're doing is good in the States and we can acquire and move those into different geographies. The targets are all gone, like I said before, in the States, so we're going outside of there. Yeah, $5 billion in 5 years, I mean, I wouldn't say that's outside of the norm that we could do. There's not that many targets that are gonna do just by acquisitions, get us there, right? It's gonna be organic. It's going to be, you know, some other pockets or adjacent markets that we look into.
Yeah, if you look at the smallest of the big three IT distributors, which is Arrow at $30 billion, you know, there's a huge gap between us and Arrow, and then you have Ingram and Tech Data and SYNNEX on top of that in the 40s billion and $50 billion. There is a lot, but we just don't want to keep driving to adjusted gross billings. We do want to do both, right? We wanna increase our sales, and we wanna try to expand our margins in areas that we can. It won't show up overall, but it'll show up in certain pockets that we become that more entangled with our customers, because that's what we want. I want a customer for 10 years, not 10 orders. We're gonna keep that same mantra as we go, no matter what. Did I lose you, Howard?
Yeah, you cut out there. Sorry about that, but I think I caught most of it and, you know, I'll listen to the replay if there's anything I missed. You know, congratulations on a great quarter. I just encourage you, next call, you know, spend a couple of minutes talking about the long-term, you know, of the company and the guidance kind of going forward as much as you can.
You got it.
Yeah. Howard.
Thanks.
As Dale referenced, we did a deep dive with our board. It's sort of a strategic session. You must have had been a fly on the wall because we absolutely will be starting to share some I'd hate to say guidance, but sort of directional trends that we are looking forward to over the next 2-3 years. At least you all will have a sense of some guideposts, but, you know, we won't be uber specific, but we absolutely will provide some directional thoughts and guidance to the market after our Q2 earnings call.
Great. Thanks, guys. Great quarter.
Thank you.
Thanks.
Our next question comes from Bruce Lindeman, a private investor. Please go ahead.
Hi. Me and my wife are shareholders for over 20 years. We want to thank you for the great job you've done with this company over since you've taken over. Our question the liquidity is very problematic. Sometimes it could be $2 or $3 during the trading day. Even though it's not fashionable to split a stock at these levels, maybe it's possible that some sort of stock split could at least get more shares into the market and make it, you know, more. Because to attract investors, especially institutions, they've got to be able to get decent number of shares, and they also have to be able to get liquidity. That might give us some liquidity. What are your thoughts?
Yeah. Thanks, Bruce. We talk about it, you know, in the various meetings, you know, as far as the exact comment you made as far as liquidity goes. We haven't come up with exact plans that the company is gonna go forward. I can tell you it gets discussed. It's not like we're sitting and saying, "Hey, you know, it is what it is." We'll look at different levers that we can pull. We think that, you know, our stock, you know, the people look at it and say, "Hey, this is a good value and where the company is gonna go." We need to do more work on that side.
I can tell you, just personally, I mean, we're so focused on driving the business, and we need to look. That was part of our strategic meeting this week with the board as far as where we're gonna go, what's important to our shareholders, you know, and guidance came up and liquidity comes up in almost every meeting. We hear you. We don't have an answer for you today.
Listen, thank you guys for everything. You've done a very nice job. Thank you.
You got it. Thanks, Bruce.
This concludes the question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Mr. Foster for any closing remarks.
Thank you, operator. I'd like to close today's call, thanking all of our stakeholders and a special thank you to our growing global employee headcount. Just got a great team. Wherever we go, we are making a difference. You'll see more and more of our company's names out there. Climb is very prevalent, and our new Grey Matter transformation in the U.S. is getting more and more traction. You'll see that. Thank you to all of our stakeholders.
This concludes today's conference call. You may disconnect your lines. Thank you for participating and have a pleasant day.