Session. Thanks, everybody, for joining us. I always say, if there's a question, get it ready right now, because we'll certainly leave a little bit of time at the end for some questions. And we've had some pretty good participation so far, so get your EverCommerce questions ready to go, and I won't ask them, and you can fire away. So thanks for joining us. Lauren, good to see you. With us today, Eric Remer, CEO, and Ryan Siurek, CFO. And how long have you been in the CFO seat for?
Probably about three months.
Three months, so we're going to be growing.
But with EverCommerce before that for a little over a year.
Okay. Okay, so thanks, Brad, for bringing the guys here. Eric, we'll start with you. 2024 has been a bit. There's been a lot of change since when you guys IPO'd in terms of businesses, both coming in and out of EverCommerce. You talked about 2024 being a bit of a transitional year. Maybe for those who follow the story, level set us on some of these big transformational changes. And really, what I want to get to is, what are the ingredients that could lead to mid-teens growth? Because I think we all think that your end markets are desirable, and they can get back to that level.
It's a good way to start. If you think about the end markets we're going after, they're massive. They're massive markets. The two biggest markets are home services and health services. From the SMBs perspective, just really large marketplaces to go after. As we looked at our organization, as you know, we acquired quite a few companies in the first seven years of our existence. As that came together, and we looked at not where we are today at $700 million, how do we get to $1 billion, $2 billion, and beyond? We realized we had to get the talent internally closer to the customer. There's really two main things. Number one, if we get the talent closer to the customer, it allows them to work faster, more efficiently, less obstacles.
And if we do that really well, then we can create more products, more solutions, and bring those products to market even faster so our customers can be more successful. So those are really the two main tenets of our transformation process. And then within that, we really focused on our two largest verticals, which was our EverPro home services and EverHealth, our health services. Those are both integrated SaaS platforms, independent of everything else. And so the thought process now is put leadership in charge, which we announced in our last call. Josh McCarter, who used to be the CEO of Mindbody, is actually going to be running EverPro. Think of it almost as in the first of the year we'll be announcing our next CEO of EverHealth as well.
Do you think that will have been internal?
It could be. It could be, potentially, and so when we think about the business going forward, now that we have our talent, our sales, marketing operations, and the feet, it allows us to just act faster, move quicker, provide more value to our customers, and we talked about it just a couple of weeks ago. We do believe this organization is a 15-plus % grower with 30% EBITDA margins at scale, but what's interesting in this transformation here, what we've done is we knew 100%. I mean, when you think about the organization, how it was built, we had a centralized platform, which made a lot of sense across the organization, providing value for all of our solutions out there. What ends up happening is you kind of peanut butter spread that talent across the organization.
As you bring it in and allow it to kind of grow, we knew that transition, taking people from A to B, would hurt growth. We got 100%, but if you think about it in the last two years, while we've done that, we increased our EBITDA margins over 600 basis points, and the reason for that was we're like, "Great.
If we're going to be pulling back some of our growth as we're putting the people in place, let's get our margins higher so we can then reinvest, and that's what we're doing now. That's where at the point now is 2025. We have solid EBITDA margins, which can expand beyond that, but we're at the point now that we can, because we've been so conservative, because we've increased our margins so much, we have the ability to start reinvesting in growth.
And then just not having the, maybe just for those that weren't familiar, the rationale behind divesting the fitness business, because I imagine it's going to provide you more focus, but just maybe a little bit of thoughts on that piece.
So, two pieces. You brought up the first one.
When we think about where is the value in EverCommerce, where can we generate the most value for the business and ultimately our shareholders, it's getting more focused. It's getting more focused on those categories that we think have the longest sustainable runways, really great businesses. And then by themselves, the value of those businesses is much greater. We think that the parts are much greater than the whole even at this point. So we looked at fitness. Fitness was a good category pre-COVID.
Never got to the point where recovery would be back where it was.
So as we looked at the long-term value, and it was a smaller part of our ecosystem, it was like 5% of our overall business. If we weren't going to double, triple down and invest in that category, we were never going to catch up with everyone else. So we felt those assets were better under a platform that was fully focused on it. And that's what we sold it to.
Because around IPO, you had really kind of three pillars. I think the questions were like, "What's the fourth pillar?" Now we're sort of at two pillars. Is that sort of, I mean, do you still, is that sort of what we should think of? There's not going to be a third at some point, or is it now just this focus around the two is sort of the main priority?
Yeah. For the near term, I think we're really double tripling down on those two pillars. And the reason for that is there was an opportunity, I think, in different marketplaces that we could have kept going like this. As the business has evolved and just as the market evolved, we realized we have two really scaled, really good businesses. And these are big businesses with very high profit margins and good solid growth rates. And as we invest in them over the next 12 months, and we'll probably potentially segment them out so people can see what these are, I think those two businesses by themselves are going to be.
Lots of opportunity.
Plenty of opportunity. Now, in the future, could we complement those with additional M&A and make those either grow or do tangential stuff? 100%. But as we've done a bunch of M&A, the focus has been, "Let's nail the operational execution of the businesses we have that have the longest runway in front of us.
And now you mentioned Josh a minute or two ago. What should we expect? What's the advantage of having somebody solely focused on that? And could that provide a bit of a boost to EverPro?
I kind of use an example. Within EverPro, we have a couple of mobile solutions that we have kind of remodeling solutions. We have break-fix solutions, and think of the gentleman who was running our mobile solutions, which is a relatively large business, really solid leader, and he now reports up to an SVP and GM and manages. He's got like 15 guys, right? The guy's kind of on an island, doing his thing, doing a good job, but now you put someone like Josh in place, who's going to have a dedicated CMO, a dedicated CRO, focused on helping this gentleman who was running the mobile solution fully focused on a day-to-day basis to improve the business, so when you think about the focus, the talent, and the ability to execute at a much faster pace.
We think it's actually a game changer. Josh is great, but the structure itself could be part of the game changer.
And even like the cross-sell, it always struck me that there's so many opportunities to cross-sell within these various businesses, in this case, EverPro. I mean, I have to imagine that's, and some of it's probably the underlying architecture as well and marketing to kind of drive better brand awareness within EverPro. I have to imagine that's a focus of Josh as well.
It's huge. And you think about just little changes they've made. They sound subtle externally. Internally, they're huge. And so to give an example with payments, which I don't talk about in a second, so I'll hold back on some of my stats here. But you think about a new customer signing up for an EverCommerce software solution, which our System of Action software is the core of what we do. Historically, they bought that software. Then we pass it over to the payment team, and it's literally a secondary sales process. In the last 30 - 60 days, that has changed where our payment sales process is integrated into the sale of the software. Our uptick from that has been almost 25, 30% uptick in terms of our ability to sell multiple products at time of sale.
It's much easier to sell that customer upfront than it is to go after the backbook. And so as we're looking to continue to kind of grow that upsell cross-sell, it's how do we integrate those sales teams within the specific vertical, make sure we can provide the right sales solutions to our customers at time of the purchase.
Yeah. Okay. Yeah. We'll get to payments in a second. Ryan, I'll bring you in now. When you think about the two core businesses now, just from a planning and even a profitability standpoint, what do you see as the, from a financial perspective, the benefits of kind of having two core dominant businesses and sort of removing the smaller fragmented business?
I mean, in terms of the things that Eric also talked about, just actually starting to operate those really as kind of standalone businesses and driving profitability at that level, having someone like Josh come in, a leader from the EverHealth perspective come in, focusing on it not just from a product perspective, but also the full P&L to actually get the margin improvement that we're looking for from an EBITDA growth perspective, it's significant. I know we're not talking about payments yet, but the payments piece is actually one of the most exciting pieces for one of the core areas, which is EverPro.
Also beneficial for EverHealth as well, but we're focused entirely on trying to make sure that we can penetrate into that segmentation, not from the cross-sell perspective, but actually from an embedded base point of view, and actually having that just part of the systems of action, and then with the 95% plus margin that's associated with that activity, really growing that business and focusing kind of all of our strategic effort on that.
Well, let's talk about payments right now. We'll get there right now because I think it grew about 7% last quarter. And you're seeing really strong attached. Maybe just an open-ended question. Why should we be excited about payments? And what is with this new kind of two-business structure, we see even higher attach of payments?
Yeah. What we're seeing, but if you think about it, it's a step back forward. We have over 700,000 customers. Right now, we've generated about $12 billion of TPV going through our platform, which represents about 12% of the actual GPV that we see in our invoices that go through us every day. So when we look at the opportunity, we haven't scratched the surface, and that's on us. We have to go do that, and that's execution. A lot of that execution is doing the things that I just talked about. It's integrating our sales teams on an upfront basis, providing more incentives, creating better products and services so it's a more seamless experience. Because when you think about that customer that doesn't take us for payment, it actually makes no sense.
We are failing that customer by not giving them the products and the solutions they need to take us to make a seamless experience. They literally will go and do a project, leave our system, which they're using every day, take a payment.
Square or something like that?
It depends on the organization. It could be a Square reader. It could be some guy who generally undercuts our process. Literally, it's not an integrated solution. So part of it is our sales methodologies and how we go to market. But the other part, which we've seen in a couple of other verticals, is if you create the right product offering. In a similar one, in our primary solution, which is the Salon Spa solution, we had the ability for people to take payments at time of sign-up. They can make a deposit. They had no POS on site to actually take the other 90% once they were done. We got a lot of traction for it. We finally launched it. That payments year-over-year growth is over 85%.
And so part of it is just creating the right products so that the customer has the right experience and makes it a no-brainer for the customer. All that stuff's happening. So I think when you think of the.
We talked about the 95% gross margin. It's plus 95%. It's incredibly high. It helps every aspect of the business. Not only does it increase growth, it increases EBITDA margins, and it actually significantly increases retention as well with customers utilizing more than one solution. Today, we're not where we want to be, but we have just under 90,000 customers that are proactively utilizing more than one solution. And most of that is payments. We have over 220,000 customers that have been enabled for more than one solution, meaning they've signed up for it. They're just not utilizing it.
Okay. That's low-hanging fruit.
It is very low-hanging fruit,
but that's growing about 25% a year right now, year over year. So.
Though that cohort of customers.
That is that enabled cohort of customers.
But not utilizing.
Not utilizing. So the next level is, if we look at the funnel, if we want to get 500,000 enabled, 2,300,000 utilizing, and then it starts dripping down. And when you start penetrating, you go from $12 billion, $20 billion, $25-$30 billion, which is still going to be 25%-30% of your growth and debt. It's exponentially different economics.
So, I mean, that's got to be some of the lowest. I mean, just to increase off of the 700,000 customers to take that number higher, that's got to be something just like across both businesses, just like a huge focus for Josh on the whole management.
That's a 12%.
Higher.
Had a payment. So we have some great talent currently there that'll still be with us. But Josh brought in somebody who's focused a little bit less than two years and better payments in vertical SaaS. That was literally his first hire because they said the biggest opportunity and the lowest income.
You were going to say something, Ryan?
Well, no, I was just saying that is the opportunity in front of us because the 88,000 or the 90,000 customers that are activated on payments, that's only 12% penetration with regard to the entire base that we have. So we have an embedded base of backbook, not to mention the frontbook opportunities that we have to really attack that.
I have to mention, it's not just the resistance, "I don't like the EverCommerce payment option." It's probably just lack of awareness.
Yeah, lack of awareness. Smaller solutions are smaller solutions. We have a big people who buy without touch. So it's a no-touch buy, which is great. It allows us to keep our customer when a merchant dies, but it also doesn't give us sometimes the opportunity to sell them. So how do you better just better product marketing, more seamless opportunities, more experience in it, and so those are not necessarily selling motions. Those are product investments. Those are investments in making them seamless, so those two things come together. Awareness ties into product offering. So you need to have the right product offering so they can switch over to you, but you also have the right product offerings in this experience.
Yeah. Well, if payments were to ramp more substantially, Ryan, what would it mean from both a revenue and a profitability perspective?
Well, I mean, if we're making somewhere in the range of 90 basis points TPV perspective, that 95% gross margin, that's falling directly down to the bottom line. So it's substantial in terms of our ability to penetrate the base. And so that is why we have focused so much in terms of our transformation optimization on that segmentation in terms of what we're doing within both EverHealth.
Okay. And there's nothing from a functionality perspective you're lacking from a payments perspective. It's there. It's just.
Let me answer. Like I said, you always have to create more and more product offerings to fulfill some of the things that customers want, so there's a full development team in the management group that are developing more solutions, and some of that development, like I talked about in the salon spa, will spur additional growth because you have really three aspects, right? You have to get enabled. You got to get utilized, and then the opportunity to get all market share, so somebody can be utilized, and then we may only get 30% market share, so as an example, up until about 90 days ago, really launching it all, we didn't actually have an integrated ACH solution with our Stripe partnership, and so we have some customers that are using large volumes. They want to utilize their payments, but they need to use ACH.
If we couldn't provide that as a seamless experience, they had to go somewhere else. That's an example of a product we didn't have that we now do have. We're starting to see the benefit of that. We talked about our growth in 80%. The actual TPP growth.
It's 8% a little bit, yeah.
It was brought down a little bit by basis points, but not in a bad way. So our ACH is actually growing, which is a lower kind of you just get lower basis points on ACH. But that's actually a really good thing because now, in a very short period of time, single launch additional capabilities in a product offering. We're seeing that uptick on ACH.
Okay. Maybe just going back to the macro, you talked about some of the pressures post-COVID on the fitness business. SMB overall has been a tough place over the last couple of years from a macro perspective. Can you talk about just the underlying demand trends from both the pro side, well, start with the pro side, I guess, and then.
Yeah. I mean, the home service market is an incredibly resilient market. I will say April of 2022, it shut down with the rest of the world. By May of 2022, it was acting like business as usual. The vast majority of our EverPro business is break fix. We're not doing construction. We're not doing starts. So we're primarily plumbers, HVAC, electricians, landscapers. It's really the monthly break fix type of marketplace, essentially. So the core demand for that business has really been solid.
It's been solid.
If we look at our pipeline, it's been really, we haven't seen much aggregation out there. I think a cooldown in the overall market will be helpful. Yeah, we have a little bit of money, right?
Yeah. So have we been economically hindered just strictly at a lower?
Yeah.
Sure, but the core solutions and the core demand really has shifted, and very similar with EverHealth. I think if you think about our EverHealth business, the transformation process actually happened to even start a little bit earlier as we've been consolidating platform within EverHealth to really create one end-to-end go-to-market, really unmatched SMB space. We are the only platform, as we launched this summer, with a fully integrated EverHealth solution with EMR, practice management, patient pay, claims processing, all under one integrated solution, so that has been a huge process for us to kind of combine those. What happens when you combine a bunch of stuff? You start sunsetting some legacy suite brand, which is 100% the right thing, but we don't talk about it. We don't break those out. That weighs on growth in the short term, right?
Because as you let things go, you're going to lose some customers, which is the right thing to do for the long-term growth. So we feel really good about where EverHealth is as well as we're coming out of that consolidation and really beginning to reinvest and grow there as well.
I wanted to ask an election question. It's obviously too soon to see any sort of change in the demand environment from that. But if you remember back from 2016 - 2020 and maybe think about what the next four years under a Trump administration could mean, does that mean tax cuts? I mean, do you think that could help the underlying?
I don't think it can hurt. I mean, we don't expect overall, we're not going to stick a claim on politics, but we actually expect the administration to be quite pro-business. And for us, if people were on the sidelines, even though we've seen resiliency in the customer base, we saw an opportunity where they had more confidence in the economy and what that looks like in the future. And we think that that would bode well from a business perspective as well. We view that all as a tailwind at this point in time. And we are continuing to just evaluate that as we kind of move into the future of the inauguration and going forward.
Our businesses, our small businesses, they act more like consumers than they do. So consumer confidence is really important, right? So.
Inflation is, yeah.
Well, look at the world. Look at all over the world in different ways. I mean, you have a huge portion of the population thinks we're in a massive recession. The stock market is at 20%. The economy exists, but I think new administration comes in, consumer confidence is higher. What does that mean for the plumber? Maybe they'll invest in that extra truck, which I haven't had yet. Maybe I will bring on a couple of other employees because I think things are going to be good. So a lot of it is still emotional. Right or wrong, I think that's where we've been stuck in a place where people have been scared to make investments, not knowing what's going forward. If we start getting some positive momentum, again, we all win. All boats will rise if that happens. And we're hopeful that will be the case.
How does your business, I don't recall, back in 2016- 2020? I mean, it was a totally different economic cycle and there were a lot of variables that wouldn't be applicable now. But do you recall how that cycle was?
I mean, look, this business was 20% north grower forever. We never dropped below 50% until COVID was our 150% until we started the transformation process. So we believe underpinnings of this business have mid-19% growth opportunities. And we've proven that we can do that in a very profitable way as well. So again, good markets help everybody. I kind of said, I think you and I talked a couple of years ago, I said, "Well, how's the economy?" In fact, I said, "Look, our pipelines aren't changing. We've seen that. But everybody's getting hit two, three basis points of growth just because." Just on the fringes of what is happening in the general economy, it just brings down everyone's growth rate, several hundred basis points just because.
Ryan, when we think about building blocks for 2025, realizing that this has been a transition year that we started the conversation with, how do you think about the path back to mid-teens growth? What are the major drivers from your perspective?
Well, I mean, one of the major drivers of the thing that we just talked about, which is payments and the payments acceleration tapping into the embedded base, backbook, also focused in on the frontbook. We haven't talked about it a lot, but we're not just focused on payments from a cross-sell perspective. We actually have organic opportunities that we've developed internally. Joist Rewards is a great one where we are actually helping our base of business. It's almost like a rewards program, but it's like a group purchasing organization where our vendors are actually our contractors are able to benefit from group discounts at various other vendors. It's another cross-sell opportunity for us. It's another one that we would use in order to tap into the embedded base because we have such a large base with home and field services.
So I think it's the things like that that are extraordinarily high margin for us. While we have a cross-sell motion, we want to actually make that simpler in our systems of action. And we're going to do that both with payments and with other embedded opportunities. We developed that business basically from scratch. It went from zero customers essentially on taking that to over 11,000 in just a few quarters. So that's also a significant opportunity for us. And it's also a high-margin business.
Well, yeah. So it's more than just payments. I imagine we're still sort of bringing on new leaders. And I guess I'm wondering, are there any guardrails that you could share?
From a 2025 perspective for growth or profitability, just should we think about an exit rate for this year as a reasonable proxy?
I mean, I think it's probably too early for us to give any formal guidance with regard to that. And for 2025, we're in the midst of building that. I think we feel good about what we set guidance on from a Q4 perspective. Going into 2025, it's going to be a mix of things. Yes, we're going to continue to focus in on sustaining really solid financial structure and governance. The EBITDA margins that we've generated so far, 25.3% for Q3. We would like to continue to maintain that and grow, but we also want to make sure that we're reinvesting in the business and reinvesting in the transformation.
So while we are focused in on triggering that top-line growth and focusing in on the opportunities that will actually do that for us, we also want to make sure that we're actually making strategic investments for future growth for 2026 and 2027 as well. We feel very good about the business, the SMB market itself. But we've got to make sure that we're actually investing now for the things that are going to generate real value in the future and get us back to essentially what Eric was talking about. We think Rule of 40 is not something that is impossible for us, and it's a target.
If you look at the business, we didn't talk about it, but our marketing business, which is honestly an anchor in the business, and it was a really solid rationale why we bought those assets. It actually is making a lot less sense today than it was when we bought them.
But that business, which is fairly large, is growing at negative 6%, which will bring down all of our growth rate. When you look at the core vertical SaaS businesses that we have, it's just under double digits right now with very, very high EBITDA margins. And so that business alone is relatively close to Rule of 40 as we sit here today. And so as we reallocate resources and make investments, our ability to get to mid-40, potentially Rule of 50, is attainable.
Yeah. That's great. I'm going to pause here for a second. I've got a couple more questions, but yeah, over here.
Quick housekeeping question.
I can just say if you guys compare after you've added your Pro business to what they do.
So great business. We know the guys. They're doing a great job. Just as a high-level comparison, came out yesterday. We have 8,000 customers. We have 700, well, in contract, we have 350,000 contractors. So it's not better or worse. It kind of shows you where we play versus where they play. They're much more enterprise-level customers. We are definitely in the SMB low-market space. So there's very little overlap in terms of what we're doing. I think in the enterprise space, I think ServiceTitan is a great platform. They are the clear leader in that space. Down market, where we play, they just don't play. We just don't run into them. So from a cursory perspective, they're providing similar solutions to that marketplace just at a much more enterprise level.
So it's kind of like being two ways to move up from SMB to EverPro times.
Something like that, yes, and you think about they've done a good job of kind of building a great brand in the marketplace. They have done a good job of creating or actually acquiring some of those entertainment assets. I think their challenge is going to be how do you do that and maintain that growth rate while you hit the profitability as well, but I think the core software is a really solid software, and in the markets they play, they're a really solid company.
They disclosed of the 8,000 customers that they have, they disclosed like 1,000 of those customers are in excess of $100,000 a year on our basis, so it's just a different customer demographic than ours.
Ours is running $2,000 or under $2,000, so it's much finer.
Thanks, Rob. Yeah. Quick one up here in the back.
Yeah. No, right here. Yeah. And we'll go back there.
Yeah. Just to clarify, the 15% target, is that total revenues or is that subscription?
We think, again, it's not going to happen in 2025, but we think within the next several years, our goal is to get to mid-double digit growth, yes, revenue.
Total revenue. Thanks for the question.
They're just following up on.
Just following up on that question. So for 15% growth, you're growing 3% now, and then EBITDA is like 25% EBITDA margin. As you invest, the margin probably comes down, but then you're investing in growth. So I guess how does that kind of look in terms of where margins kind of come out and then also getting that 15% revenue growth?
So again, part of that growth rate is tied to what the perimeter of assets we're working with. And if you think about where we are today with our core software solutions, so I should clarify. Our focus is that 50-plus% with our software solutions. It excludes our marketing solutions at this point because that anchor will make it very much more difficult for us to get there. So when we look at business, we think in the near term, our goal is to maintain with the margins similar as we get growth rates up. But as we continue to kind of scale the business, especially through payments, which is so scalable, we think EBITDA margins should be close to, if not crossing 30% at that scale.
We didn't talk a lot about our transformation optimization program, but the reason that we want to continue to focus in on maintaining EBITDA margins is, while there will be investment on the transformation piece, we think the optimization parts of the work that we're doing will help to cost offset those investments, and that's where we're actually trying to spend most of our time to see that we can balance those two things.
Essentially, simply speaking, what's going to drive that growth? Still not deployed.
Yeah. I mean, like I said, right now, our software solutions are just under 10% right now. So it's not going from 3% - 15%. We're really going from 9% in where we ultimately want to be in that 15% range. And so that growth is a combination of just better execution and better focus on our upsell and cross-sell and then creating better products for our new customers to come in. When you think about you ask the question, what does it mean when you penetrate payments? We're at $12 billion right now at 12% penetration. If you went up to a 20% penetration, you had almost $10 billion of payment revenue. And as Ryan talked about, that's about 92 basis points. We're booking everything, that's a $90 million increase in growth rate. And about 6% of that hits the bottom line, right?
5% of that hits the bottom line. So as we look at growing the business, part of the reason we think we can grow not only from a top-line perspective while maintaining and potentially growing our bottom line is the biggest growth vehicles are incredibly high margin. So as you're growing the top, you're actually growing the bottom at the time.
What percentage of the business is MarTech again?
20.
Just under 20%.
Just under 20. Okay. And maybe just one last question. Could you remind us again of what percentage of ownership the sponsor has and how we should think about liquidity?
Yeah, so the sponsors today own approximately about 80% of the float, and they're great partners. They're focused just like we are on just building to execute on building a great company, and they're very confident in us that if you build a great company, you can grow the rates to that number that you need. I think that float takes care of itself.
We're out of time. We've seen zero here. But listen, guys, thanks. Great conversation. And best of luck. Thanks for coming again.