Good morning, everyone. I'd like to introduce you to our next presenter, Richard Mills, from Creative Realities. Good morning, and welcome.
Thank you. Good morning, folks. Thanks for being here, early in the morning. So let's just get this going. Obviously, here's the slide that says, "Don't believe a word I say, and don't believe any of the math." So, investor highlights. Really just to talk about. We had our year-end and our Q4 release come out three-four weeks ago. Speaks for itself. All-time record revenue, all-time record gross profit, all-time record adjusted EBITDA. Annual recurring revenue, our guidance prior for 2024 had been $18 million. As we speak today, we're at $17.7 million, so we raised our guidance to $20 million for the year. And also, we continue to significantly deleverage and strengthening the balance sheet, and we'll show you that. Our business model is pretty simple. We sell screens, right? We sell screens to those customers.
They put them on a wall to make the customer journey, the experience, and that screen connects to our SaaS platform. We are a SaaS revenue company. It's very simple. We sell the hardware because our customers want us. We install it because it gets it on the wall the most efficiently, and we can display content anywhere in the world. And today, we do in about 12 countries. Okay? On the left here is an overview of the verticals that we are strong in. So, in retail, entertainment, sports venues, restaurant, QSR, convenience stores, those are some of our strongest verticals. In the middle are objectives that customers say, "Gee, I wanna increase brand awareness. I want better customer support. I want improved outcomes." What does that really mean? I wanna sell more stuff, right?
That's really what it's all about, and that's what customers wanna do. On the right side here is my four sources of revenue. We sell the hardware, and I install it. Why? Because our customers want us to, and again, it's the most efficient way to get the screen on the wall. We don't own the screens; customers own them. But that generates the SaaS, and occasionally, we will sell media content for the customer.
Sampling of our customers, we are built for enterprise. Anybody in this room been in a Best Buy? We do every Best Buy in America, 75,000 TVs. Anybody here been in a Macy's? We do every Macy's in America. Anybody here got a Verizon phone? We do every Verizon. The Verizon network's 55,000 screens in Verizon stores alone across America. That's just in our retail. Anybody here buy a Stellantis product?
Jeep, Alfa Romeo, Dodge, Fiat, Maserati, you name it, we're in every dealership in America. We're in every dealership in Canada. Anybody here ever shop in a 7-Eleven? Yep. Every business day in America, we install one-three new 7-Elevens every single day. Today, somewhere, I will be installing one-three new 7-Elevens today. Our network in 7-Eleven today is over 17,000 screens and growing at about 4,000 a year. Sports and entertainment, I'll talk about that on the next slide. Theme parks, we do two out of the four largest theme parks in America, Six Flags and Cedar Fair. Oh, by the way, they're in the middle of a merger, and so we do 100% of the screens at both those parks. Our largest network is PatientPoint, bottom right-hand logo. It's a point of care in doctor's offices.
Everybody here has been at a doctor's office and seen that screen. It's trying to sell you medicine, whatever the case may be. It's a 140,000-screen network. It runs on our equipment. Five out of the 10 largest networks in America run on our network and run on our cloud. Stadium and arena, okay, probably our most, our best-known use case here is that team in Texas called the Cowboys, AT&T Stadium. Our software controls all 3,800 screens. There are two screens in there that we do not do. We do not do center-hung scoreboards, and I don't do the jumbotron. Other than that, we control every screen. So today, at most of these, we do the menu boards, okay? Each stadium, we do about 65-70 stadiums today.
Each stadium has about 10 different food concepts, you know, the hot dog stand and then the burger stand and then the pizza place and, and whatnot. So among our stadium and arena and our QSR customers, we design and reconfigure about 1,000 different menus a year, okay? In the last 12 months, we've outfitted 6 stadiums, complete. Anybody in here from Minneapolis? We've done two of your stadiums in the last six months alone. QSR: Panera, Freddy's, Human Bean, Black Rifle Coffee, 7-Eleven, Speedway, Casey's, a bunch of Levy's accounts. So as you can see, these are really well-known brands
We are built for the enterprise customer. I always say, if, you know, there's somewhere, there's Sally Sue's Fish Shops, and she's got 16 locations in some city in America. We are not built to do Sally Sue's Fish Shops.
When Sally Sue gets to 500 locations, we're the best people to call. We're built for enterprise, period. Some pretty pictures. I'm just gonna leaf through these, right? So you get a chance to see pretty pictures. That's all our drive-through equipment. That's The Human Bean Coffee chain. They have 2,000 locations coming online in the next 18 months alone. 7-Eleven, this is a unique 7-Eleven. It's got two food concepts. You know, QSR or C-stores believe they can serve food just like QSRs. Within 7-Eleven, there are 16 different food brands.
This just happens to be one location that has both of them in the same location. Verizon, 55,000 stores, 55,000 screens, I'm sorry, all across America. That's an AT&T flagship, a very pretty store. That's on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. Macy's, that shows a picture of a video wall inside of Macy's.
Macy's has about 4,000 screens in all their stores across America. Last year, we installed. It's the largest LED rollout in retail history. We installed a six-foot by 10-foot LED in 500 Macy's in America. So when you go in and you go to the AYS or At Your Service desk, behind it is now a six by 10 LED. That's us, and we service, and we have a maintenance contract for all that throughout Macy's. Chanel, pretty, it just, there's a wonderful customer.
They've been a customer for 12 years. Last year, we just were doing the Dallas boutique now, I think, for the third time. Chanel's been a customer for 12 years. Last year, we installed one screen in Rodeo Drive. Store is $1.3 million. And this is our connected dealership, showroom, and Chrysler, Stellantis, whatever name they call themselves this year.
But again, we're in all the dealerships here and in Canada and looking to go global shortly with this customer. Our locations, we're up in Windsor, Ontario, so Canada. Louisville's headquarters, that's where I'm from. That's why I got a hillbilly accent. Dallas, Texas, our folks are there, and then Atlanta, that's most of our content team. But this slide really says, our scale aligns with our client footprint.
You know, you think about all these enterprise customers that have multiple locations that all gotta go digital. NAPA Auto Parts still hadn't gone digital—the whole auto parts sector, Pep Boys, you name it. The whole retail sector, there are thousands of these companies that have hundreds, if not thousands, of locations across the U.S., and every one of them is putting screens. 2 million screens a year join the inventory that is currently out there.
size of the market. It's about a $20 billion market. That's spread about 50/50. 50% of that is ad sales. For example, OUTFRONT, the media company with billboards, et cetera, they would be in that $10 billion ad sales sector. The other $10 billion is really what we do. We have a media sales component, so we really participate in both sides of the equation, but our revenue is predominantly in the SaaS business.
These are our platforms. The reason we're winning today. Clarity is purpose-built for food. That is a platform. It's purpose-built for QSR and food, so all of our QSR and food customers utilize that platform. ReflectView is our retail platform, so think Macy's, think Verizon. Those kind of customers are all on our retail platform. And then we have AdLogic, which is our ad-serving platform. So customers pay us to serve ads up.
Typical month, we'll serve about 50 million ads. I'm sorry, excuse me, it's 50 million ads a day. We serve over a billion a month. Okay? Where, where's our market position? Where are we relative to the rest of the world? This is a firm, invidis. They're out of Germany. They rank the world. They're kind of the becoming the leading authority on this niche market we're in, 'cause there is no other authority, so invidis has risen to the top. They've published this. This was last year's publication. We're ranked eighth in the world, number of licenses. They had us at 200,000 licenses. Today, we're managing close to 400,000 devices, so they got it wrong, but that's okay. We're in the top 10 and growing, taking market share every single day. What stage is the market today?
You know, 10 years ago, screens were kinda cool. You know, someday, some manager 15 years ago at Target got out of bed and said, "You know what? I think I'm gonna put screens up," and he went and he bought eight screens and put them up- put them above the checkout counter, right? And I don't know who that manager was at Target, but I guess it caught on, because today there are screens going in everywhere. So what we do today is considered mission-critical, right? It's business-critical.
Digital signage works. Somewhere in America today, at 9:20 A.M. or 9:18 A.M., somebody has already walked in and said, "Take down that poster and put up a screen." I tell you what didn't happen today. Nobody walked in today and said, "Take down the screen and put up a poster." That didn't happen, okay?
2 million screens a year are added to the inventory in this country alone. So digital's going everywhere, particularly if you want to interact with the young shoppers today who are going through your environment. You know, if you approach that shopper three times and ask, "Can I help you?" What does that shopper do? That shopper leaves the store. But if you leave them alone, and they go to digital screen, and they'll scan QR codes, and they'll look up and they'll self-serve themselves, okay? Screens are not going away, they're going everywhere. And the one thing I promise you today, when you all leave this, you'll suddenly notice a lot more screens as you walk around today. Annual Recurring Revenue, growth dynamics, we continue to grow our ARR. It's. We call it the long tail of hardware.
Every time we sell a screen, right, it creates SaaS or additional revenue. This continues to grow. This year, we'll be at 30%. We've projected to the market that we'll do about $60 million in revenue, and we also told the market that we raised our ARR guidance from $18 million to $20 million. We'll exit the year at $20 million in recurring revenue. We're already north of $17.8 million. I think we'll cross $18 million in the middle of this month or next month, so continues to grow. And those are the four sectors kind of where we generate the ARR. By the way, somebody asked a question earlier in another session I was in. They said, "Tell me about the lifespan of your customers.
How sticky are they?" Well, Best Buy, 15 years; Verizon, 12 years; PatientPoint, eight years; Chanel, 12 years; Macy's, 10 years; Cowboys, at least 14 years. We have people on site at every event at the Cowboys stadium, right? So they pay us to have people there to support every screen in the building. Our customer retention rate is 104%, okay? And so we just simply do not lose customers. Last but not least, I told you I'd talk about our leverage ratio. Back at year-end 2022, we were about five to one in terms of earnings to debt. You know, it's $21-$22 million in debt. EBITDA was $3.8 or $4.2, ballpark. That's not a leverage people are really comfortable with, us included as management. We have aggressively paid down debt.
We're servicing our note, currently servicing, just pure servicing the note's $400,000 a month, or excuse me, repayment of the note. So we think at year-end 2023, you can see about where we were at $5 million in EBITDA, and our debt was down at $15 million. Net debt was closer to $11 million when you take out cash on the balance sheet, but the debt was $15 million. At this year, will certainly be less than two to one, okay? And what does that give us? It gives us the ability to potentially look at accretive M&A in the future, and our goal would be to continue to use debt to do M&A because folks are not, and folks, including management, is not interested in dilution, right?
Sometimes dilution is the right thing when it's the right accretive transaction, but our goal will be to continue to use debt. So that's why we're working very hard at deleveraging this balance sheet. Last but not least, our six-point value creation plan. We talked about this. We published this about a year and a half ago, I think is when we kind of came out with it. Said, "Okay, this is what we were gonna do." So we talked about our revenue. By the way, our revenue last year was $46.7, but due to an accounting change, the auditors made us take some service contracts and media revenue and take off the top-line booking and book only the gross margin. That was a March fifth surprise, so it lowered our revenue for the entire year.
But we still think this year, even with that factored in, we published 60-80 million as a range for the market. We feel comfortable with a range, certainly north of 60, even with the accounting change. Our adjusted EBITDA target, we said we would exit 2023 at 10%. We achieved 11.2% for the whole year, okay? This year, we think we'll our adjusted EBITDA will exit at 12%-15% because every incremental dollar of revenue drops to the bottom line at a higher percentage. Our fixed costs are essentially covered, right? So every new dollar drops to the bottom line. We've talked about the 2024 exit run rate of $20 million in ARR, and I would tell you that this management team is a very disciplined approach to reducing debt and the financial leverage.
We want some dry powder, right? It's pretty simple. We talked about the ARR guidance. We raised it. It was $18 million for 2024, and we have raised that target to $20 million, and we're very comfortable. You see the net debt leverage ratio, which was 5x at year-end 2022 to 2.4 2023. Today, as we speak in April, I'm less than 2x. Okay? Analyst coverage, we got a couple analyst coverages today with a buy rating in the $5.50-$6.50 range. And last but not least, the value creation puts the company in a position for accretive M&A. And accretive M&A, why? When we buy people in the same verticals that we're in, we take out 70% of their SG&A. Simply do not need it. Don't need duplicate platforms, don't need duplicate people.
I just migrate the customers to our platform, and all that revenue and all that expense goes to the bottom line. With that, open it up for questions. Yes, sir. Hey, Brian.
How are you? So I think it'd be helpful for the investment community to understand your second half of the year will be much stronger than the first half of the year, I believe. And I think that leads into next year being much stronger in revenue and adjusted EBITDA. Maybe talk about the backlog and the challenges early in the year of converting that to revenue that will ease, so that you'll have a much stronger performance in the second half of the year leading into next year.
Okay. Great question, as always. Yeah, so Q1, just by nature, is always our slowest quarter, right? And, you know, budgets don't get approved till really the end of January, so then by the time you get going... And a lot of what we do involves around construction, different facilities getting built and construction. Has anybody ever had a construction project finish on time? Okay. So it all tends to get delayed and pushed out. We have a large project, we have referred to it in the past, called Bowling. Bowling was a, It was a $25 million project for one customer. It originally started out as $35 million. It has since come in at about $25 million. We've now put in 60, 70 bowling centers, where it's 1,000 bowling centers that go in at $25,000 a piece.
Each bowling center is 10 screens. So that project has been very slow to start. That project was supposed to deliver $ millions of revenue in 2023, and it didn't. It is now starting to deliver revenue in 2024, but in Q2, we originally anticipated 60 bowling centers. We'll certainly do less than 30. Why? The bowling proprietors, the owners of these buildings, are moving much slower than anybody anticipated, so that's causing a little bit of slowness. We do think that will pick up May-June timeframe.
Also May-June timeframe, it's the best quarter, two quarters of the year, Q2, Q3, for construction. Construction's rolling, and all those things that were behind schedule suddenly start to get on schedule in Q2 and Q3, and they get open. A lot of our QSR customers, particularly the coffee chains, are opening stores on a monthly basis.
So all of that's leading to a strong second half of the year, and as Brian alluded, 2025. Our backlog continues to remain north of $100 million, and we feel very comfortable we have three years' worth of deployment there. What else?
Well, I'll ask another question. The competitive landscape, and maybe talk about fast casual and drive-through. It seems to be one of the hotter sectors for your business. Who are the, who are the primary vendors you compete with for that business?
You know, there are really three competitors that kinda are the top three in the market today. One is a company called STRATACACHE, and they are truly the largest drive-through. They do currently supply some, if not all, of McDonald's in the U.S., although there's another competitor from Australia that has taken some of that McDonald's business, but STRATACACHE. There's another company called SYSCOM, which is really controls the Burger King rollout of all the Burger King locations in America. Next is us, where we typically today install one drive-through a day, every business day. By the way, we entered the drive-through market two years ago. Two years ago, in 2022, I installed one drive-through. 2023, I installed probably north of 100.
2024, we'll install at least 250, and we expect to triple that rate over the next twelve months because drive-through is hot. Okay? If you can improve your drive-through experience by 9 seconds a customer, that's it. I just need to pick up nine seconds a customer. It's $5,000 a month, okay? And profitability for that store. Or excuse me, revenue for that store. Not profitability, but revenue. Okay? Number two, digital at the drive-through, because you now have order confirmation. How many people have been through a drive-through and got home, and you open the bag and go, "This isn't my food?" Right? We've all had that experience. Well, but now, when you have order confirmation, you can see it on the screen. And how many have corrected an order? "No, I didn't order the triple burger.
It's the double with cheese." And you correct it right there at the window. Okay? So drive-through QSR is hot. C-store, same thing, another vertical, very, very hot. Why is C-store hot? Every C-store believes they can cook food just as good as the QSR. You know, the QSR industry had a, had one of these great ideas 20 years ago: "Let's co-brand with the gas station people. Let's put the Subway in.
Let's put the Burger King." What did they do? They trained all the C-store owners to focus on, "Hey, you can cook food just like we do." And that's literally what they've done. And so you see the decoupling of the, of the brands from the C-stores because the C-stores all got their own food, right? Typical C-store pizza sells for $16, $4 a slice. The cost in that's $1.22, $1.23.
We got about three, three minutes left for questions.
We actually got about one minute left. Our next presentation starts in three minutes.
Got it. one minute left. Testing one, two , three . Any questions? Thank you all very much. Have a great day.