Okay. Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us. Welcome to the Needham Technology, Media, & Consumer Conference. My name is Mayank Tandon. I cover fintech at Needham. I'd like to welcome the CFO of EverQuote, Joseph Sanborn. Joseph, thank you for joining us.
Thank you. Great to be here.
Appreciate it.
Thanks for the invitation.
We're gonna talk some EverQuote today. It's been quite a wild ride in recent days. We were talking about that offline, but maybe to start, Joseph, I think it may be a good place to start would be just the backdrop in the insurance space. You know, what are you seeing in terms of the market? Seems like the carriers are very profitable, and that's obviously helping your business. Maybe we could step back and talk about the industry as a whole.
Sure. It'd be great. Maybe I'll start with a little EverQuote. Our mission is to help insurance carriers and agents in the Property and Casualty space, auto and home, help them acquire consumers in the digital age to grow their business. That's our mission. We've been doing this since we went public in 2018. You were a part of that story. We had a bit of a wild ride. I think when we look to where we are right now, you know, we're in a very good spot as a business, right? We are in an industry starting this year. We have a very healthy backdrop for our carrier environment. You know, our business is all about helping carriers grow their business.
When you think about what does it mean for the industry, you know, if you're a carrier CEO, you think about two things. First, you think about getting underwriting profitability. At first for the past couple years, you've had significant rate increases by carriers trying to get underwriting profitability after this unusual period of the coming out of COVID, where supply chains and everything was broken. They got rate adequacy. Now they have that. They're shifting to the second thing a CEO of a carrier worries about is, how do you grow your business? Which means growing policies in force. As you look about that backdrop, combined ratios, which is the measure of sort of carrier healthiness, quite low, meaning they're quite favorable.
They have a lot of room to grow to invest in digital channels, broadly invest in their business. They want to grow. They're starting the year saying, "We want to grow policies in force. We want to gain share." We see digital channels as a way to do it because it can be more specifically targeted, and they see us as a great partner to do it. We think it's a great backdrop. We said that in our February call. We continue to feel that as well now.
When you look at the carriers, is the growth coming broad-based or has it been more isolated to a few carriers that are driving the growth and there's still maybe a catch-up for some of the other carriers?
Sure. As you think about how this cycle has evolved, it was a view where carriers were more narrow and it's been broadening as we progress through 2025 into 2026. Even in Q1 going into Q2, we're seeing a further broadening of carriers. You know, a good example, we had a top five carrier prior to the downturn, so going back, you know, prior to the hard market of coming from COVID, you know, now coming back into the marketplace in Q1 and more meaningfully in Q2. That's a carrier who's really been out of digital channels entirely. It's not unique to EverQuote if they pulled back from the market. They're now engaging back in that because they have the right, the right underwriting profit. They also, in their case, they were also making changes in their technology stack.
That's a good example of a broadening out of a pretty significant carrier. You look at other carriers that we see out there, broadly the landscape is carriers want to grow their business and obviously they have different ways of doing that, different priorities, different customer segments. That's what makes our model work really well. We help carriers really target specifically what they're trying to do, but we have that broad base. The other question I'd say when I think about breadth of carriers, we often get this sort of concept of, you know, state footprint, which is one you and I talked about. I'd say broadly most states are pretty back to normal. You know, California's probably 90%, so there's a little bit of room to go.
The way I would think about that is less about It's been progressing back through the course of 2025 into 2026. What's interesting about that is it's less about them getting to a quote 100% per se. It's more I'd say carriers are saying relative opportunity if you're a national carrier. I may be leaning in more to these states now.
You know, we'll come back to those states as well. It's less about getting new rates per se. It's more about prioritizing where they're at. I think that's another healthy dynamic as well to be broad-based.
Joseph, I think you guys have talked about I think, 20 of your top 25 carriers not being at peak.
spending levels. Where is that number today?
So-
What does that mean for the future?
When you think about a broad base of carriers, you know, 75, our last stat we said is, you know, 80 of the top 25 or sorry, 80% of the top 25 are not back to peak spend. You know, we look at that, is that in any given quarter, I'd say first of all, not all carriers will be at peak spend in a given quarter. It's important to know about our model as you think about, you know this. For those who are new, carriers go in and out of our marketplace. It's an auction environment. Sometimes there's quarters where a carrier really wants to win, they lost out to another carrier who was more aggressive. This Q1, for example, was a quarter that was heavily driven by pricing.
When you think about a business like ours, it could be volume driven, more consumers, it could be price driven by more demand. Heavily driven by price. See, what you had interestingly in Q1 was more carriers participating broadly. You know, we had improvement in the breadth of carriers, actually winning in the auction. There were a number of carriers who weren't winning as much because some of their other competitors were being more aggressive. That speaks to the market cycle we're in. Carriers are shifting from rate adequacy to how do I maintain and grow policies in force? You're seeing some being more aggressive than others. That will go up and down as quarter -to -quarter. I think that speaks to us another way to think about breadth of the industry.
Then the other question we sort of get is, when we think about the top carriers broadly, how do we feel? I'd say they're all coming back, right? I would say they're all back in varying levels. The most notable one was the one I mentioned that was a top five prior to the downturn. They're involved now. They're all sort of back. In any given quarter, some may be more aggressive than others, generally they're all hungry to grow. It's just a question how aggressive they're being in a given period. What's interesting about this period is carriers are broadly healthy. They want to grow. The question is the landscape's changing quickly where their competitors are also wanting to grow, which is a great backdrop for us.
For an individual carrier who's trying to win share in a market that quarter, they go, "I didn't make my number. You know, what am I gonna have to do next quarter to solve it?
It sounds like market is very healthy right now.
It is.
It's obviously great to hear. What happens in a potential downturn if we?
Sure
these inflationary concerns, obviously a lot of geopolitical stuff going on, how do you view the risk on the downside if some of these conditions start to move the other way?
Sure. When you think about our business, you know, what are the dynamics for carriers to absorb increasing costs? When you think about inflationary prices, what that would mean in the context of our business would be underwriting costs rise, the cost of repair from an accident, cost of totaling a car rise. If you look at where their combined ratios are right now, they're very, very healthy. There's a lot of room to absorb increases in pricing. That's the first thing I'd say. They have quite a bit. This is very different than, say, fall of 2022. The carriers are much more teetering on underwriting profitability. When they had, in that case it was a large storm, it impacted them as a And they said, and that teetered over.
This is very different dynamic. Now they have wide range to absorb increasing costs. That's one piece. The other part which is interesting in our business is when you look at the dynamic around the macro environment, there's a piece around consumers, right? Consumers, one of the things that happens with consumers with gas price, which is one of the key things that's been happening right now is rising, consumers will drive less. There's a high correlation between gas prices and driving less miles, particularly when gases go over a certain threshold price, whether it's $4 in a market or $5. Different markets around the country have sort of like a line that sort of people say, "Once you cross that, wow, it's really gone up," right?
I spend so much to fill my tank, it's really gone up." What you see happen is actually consumers cut back on miles driven. They actually drive less. That is a benefit to carriers because there's a high correlation between miles driven and accident frequency. As you think about the landscape, if the world becomes, they get some inflationary pressure on one side, they have the ability to absorb. Flip side is you could have a environment where consumers actually drive less when inflation's being particularly driven by energy costs. The other piece that can happen too with consumers is in a belt-tightening environment, do they shop more, right? Consumer volumes were quite elevated, you know, 2023, 2024, and 2025. They've started to moderate a bit. It's been more pricing driven.
You certainly could see that consumer shopping dynamic kick in as well, depending on how severe belt tightening is. There's interesting balance in our business that's, you know, reflects the nature of insurance that a lot of, that in turn benefit us given their model.
That's a great answer. Very helpful. Joseph, maybe to back up even more-
Sure
on the TAM, I think we've talked about this before. I'm assuming there's been no change, but it might be helpful for investors who are newer to your story on how to think about the market as a whole.
Sure
What is sort of, the inherent growth rate of the market?
Sure. When you think about our business, right? We serve this massive industry called property and casualty insurance carriers, right? When they think about their spend, I'll sort of take it at the most narrow view, and then I'll expand from there. The most narrow view is sort of digital advertising spend. That's roughly an $8 billion market. If you look, you know, the studies on this are wide ranging, but $8 billion is sort of, you know, pretty conservative view of that market. That $8 billion market, you know, if you look at various views out there, how that's gonna grow over the next three-five years, it's somewhere between low double digits to mid-teens. This is a broad market.
What is driving that is that that $8 billion is in the context of sort of broader advertising, which is like $17 billion, $18 billion, something like that, which directionally means that digital advertising is well below 50% of total advertising. If you look at most industries out there, broader financial services, travel, they're much higher percentage. They're, you know, 60%, 70%+. That speaks to a tailwind that has existed since you covered us, which is insurance has been a laggard going online, and it's not like insurance is standing still. They're moving along, but the world is moving along, right? That's a tailwind that's quite strong for us. That's one piece.
The other piece that's interesting is we talk about not just the advertising component, but we talk about the broader distribution spend, which is really agent commissions, and that's like a $110 million roughly number. You think about that $110 billion as the amount that carriers currently spend giving to agents to acquire new consumers.
Your local agents, your captive agents, your independent agent. They give to those agents to acquire consumers and also service them. One thing that's been evolving in this industry over time is as you have carriers emerge who are direct to consumer carriers, they effectively are taking that agency, that 10%-15% of premium spend that equals $110 billion, bringing it in-house. They're doing more cost effectively the servicing and the sales, and so they have more money to spend of the pie on acquiring consumers. If you look at some of the leading digital direct to consumer carriers that are digital, they very much engage in digital. Their P&L is still very attractive, but they've figured out how to make efficiency in these other areas.
That's another tailwind to our business as well when you think of the market size. Those are the two I think about the TAM. When I think sort of more nearer term about growth dynamics, I'd probably highlight two for you. One is we're in this, what's referred to as a soft market cycle, right? In insurance, I don't know how they pick these terms, but soft market cycle is actually a positive thing. What it means is they have rate adequacy, and now they want to grow policies in force. It typically lasts, you know, four or five years. We're probably a year or so into it. There's no magic demarcation of when it begins and ends.
It's not like they all the carriers have a call and say, "We're in the soft market cycle." You sort of see this trend, and it's categorized by rate adequacy, and we've had that over a couple years of getting significant rate increases. That soft market cycle lends to an environment where carriers are focused on growth, and that's where we fit in really well. That's a benefit to us sort of in the nearer term, more narrower than the TAM, but I would say sort of a nearer -term driver. Then the last one I touched on was we have this large carrier that's come back, and we think they'll be a benefit to us, and then you overlay that against broadly health.
That's probably for the biggest view of the TAM down to sort of nearer -term drivers.
Does it matter if the growth comes from the carriers versus the agents in terms of the way it drives your business and also the profitability on that?
It's interesting, we get this question a lot, like, do you care about enterprise versus We call it the enterprise business, which is more the clicks business, online -to -online. Online -to -offline is more the, we call it, a lead to an agent. We're indifferent in the sense that we wanna help carriers grow successfully over time. Some carriers are actually in both channels. Now, it used to be a world where some carriers were direct, some were captive, some were in the regional carriers. They all were in their own bucket. These lines in insurance have blurred. You see some of the previously purely captive agents or captive carriers with captive agents saying, "How do I look at digital?" And some of them have really done that in a significant way.
In any given quarter, they may lean one way or the other. What drives it could be, "Hey, we are." Remember, this is 50 markets they run. They go, "This quarter, we really want to focus on this part of the country. In this part of the country, we have an amazing agent network, well-developed. Next, we want to grow in this area. Maybe it's not as well-developed. They may be, or we see it as based on our studies of the market, direct-to-consumer route, which would be more effective. Or we help them work on both. For us, one of the opportunities which is interesting to our model is because we have both, no one else out there has both of those. We've built that agent business over years.
It represents roughly a third of insurance distribution. Really hard to build, as you might imagine, because you have to get the Good Housekeeping seal of approval from the big carriers, then you got to sell to local agents, 6,000 local agents. Not many companies have a go-to-market muscle of enterprise consultative sales and small business sales. They're two different things. We've been successful in doing it because we've done it for a long time, and that's sort of the piece that helps us think it as well.
Got it. No. Great answer. Joseph, when I tie all this, that you talked about the growth, the industry backdrop, et cetera, how do we tie that back to your billion-dollar revenue target? I know you've said two to three years-
Sure
We can sort of handicap that in terms of.
Sure
the growth rate. would love to sort of.
Sure
you unpack that type of growth rate.
In November's earnings call, on the first week of November last year, we put out a goal, an intermediate goal, of being a billion-dollar business in two-three years. At the time we made that, we were tracking about, you know, $650, $675, depending on which models you looked at at the time, and we finished a little bit above that for 2025. What we said at the time is we're, in two-three years, we'll be a billion-dollar revenue business. If it takes three years, at the time we said it's like 14.5% growth. If it takes two years, it's like 21%-22% growth. Fast forward, we had good Q4, good Q1. We've given a guide for Q2. You know, we still feel we're in that two-three year dynamic.
You know, if it happens now, I think if it's two years, it's like, given what's in the rearview mirror, it's probably closer to 13% and 20%, and we still feel that's the right range for our business. You know, what I would say about our business is we are categorized by a very healthy backdrop. Carriers give us insight on the next quarter, but what they don't give us is the specificity for every quarter there. They give us a feel how they're thinking. The exact playbook of how they'll execute, they haven't told us because they themselves haven't decided. They generally set parameters upon how we feel about the year and the outlook, but their execution plan will vary.
What's interesting for us is it's varying now differently than it might have, say, four or five years ago, prior to the downturn. What is different about it is they seem to be thinking in a more durable way about spend. Just because we start the year and we have really strong combined ratios doesn't mean we go crazy and acquire consumers aggressively. You know, we'll sort of pull back. You think about how do we do this in a more measured, disciplined way. I remember when I said disciplined in our February call. "Wow, that's a terrible word." I'm like, "No, discipline is actually a good word to think about long-term sustainability." That's what we like to think about in our business. That's what they like to think about, that's what we're seeing.
What that means, though, is how exactly it'll play out, they're adjusting as they go, and as they see opportunities, they're leaning in. As they see it, they say, "Hey, geez, we could be going faster," The other thing with carriers is even though you could go faster, you think about durability. Durability means two things. One is being flexible for how you can acquire based on changes in the marketing environment. Second is your book, the quality of your underlying underwriting book. If you build your book of business too quickly.
You can have what's called adverse selection in the insurance industry, right? Carriers are very conscious. If you start the year, acquire a big book quickly, and turn it over, you are likely to have underwriting challenges and have adverse selection. They'd rather do it in a more disciplined way over time, and that's another piece about durability. We've looked at this as still the range. I'm not gonna break new news to you, I'm sorry, in terms of how we think about our outlook for the second half. We're not gonna give guidance. We still feel good about that range, but we feel like what we also can say about that top line is how will we manage the business, right? You will see us manage, we've said EBITDA margin improved roughly 100 basis points for this year.
Last year was 200%. Year before that, we went from 0%- 11.6%. We said we'd grow about 100% this year. Assume we'll be closer to 100% after so much growth. If we achieve that, it'll be like 14.6%, 14.7% EBITDA margins. Q1, we were higher. We were 15.3%. Q2 will, the guide implies is closer to 15%. The back half will probably be a little lower.
The year will average out $14.6. When people look at that, they go, "Well, what are you telling me?" I'm like, "I'm actually there's really no insights on this," which is our EBITDA, our business is not a locomotive that goes perfectly on time at every stop. What we know over the period of time is we know where we're headed. We know they wanna go there. How fast or measured they do it will remain varied by carrier, but we feel very good about the trajectory. We know as that revenue growth happens, we're also gonna be driving EBITDA margin and most importantly, strong year-over-year growth in EBITDA dollars. Like in Q1, we had 15% revenue growth. We had 30% growth in EBITDA dollars, and our business is really very capital efficient.
That, you know, is nicely converting to operating cash flow as well.
Thank you.
For later, but I've had a lot of one-on-ones. You set up a good schedule for me.
I have a few more.
Yeah.
So I think we'll get-
We're good though. We'll be good.
Through the time. Obviously, I have to ask you about AI.
Sure.
It'd be, you know, foolish for me not to ask you. Jayme and you shared some really valuable perspective on the earnings call, but maybe for the audience it might be helpful to talk about the AI initiatives that are underway at EverQuote, and how does that play into your both growth initiatives and also from a cost side, do you see any-
Sure
Efficiencies that could come through?
Yeah. AI, we're very excited by AI at EverQuote, partly it's because it's not new for us. Like we are. At our core, we have been a tech and data company since our inception. You knew our founders. Our founders knew nothing about auto insurance when they started. They knew nothing about insurance. They started the business 'cause one of them moved from New York and couldn't get insurance, right? That's how it started, right? We were all about how to use data and tech to acquire consumers online. If you look at what we did, the early days of AI and our heritage was machine learning. Look at our traffic bidding platform. You know, we've done that. You look at our Smart Campaigns program, which is a predictive AI tool, where carriers turn over their disposition data to us.
We automate all the bidding for them. Today, the majority of our carriers use that. We've been doing these things for a long time. When I think about you know, another example of efficiency, I said this with a group and I'll say it to you. I probably shouldn't, but I will, which is somebody said, "Well, how do you feel about these companies saying they're gonna, you know, keep head count flat or they're not gonna grow across?" I'm like, "We've done that for two years." In 2025, we more than doubled revenues and our OpEx stayed the same. Yes, we made lots of changes underneath the covers. The headline, number of employees, the composition change, et cetera. We brought in more data scientists, more analysts, et cetera.
We've been doing those things to drive efficiency. We will our ability to continue to drive improvements in the EBITDA margin is not because we're not investing. We are very committed to growing it, this business over the long term. We think there's a chance to create not just a billion-dollar company, a several billion dollar company over time, given the size of this space. To do that, you have to make the right investments, and we've been doing that. I'll talk maybe shifting a little bit to AI specifically, some of the things, given our heritage, where are we looking? I'll start first with some common misperceptions on the AI landscape, right? One of the views is that the insurance space is like the travel space, and that organic search has ended and we're in big trouble, right?
First thing is EverQuote had like 1% organic traffic, maybe 2% a good day. We really didn't lose much, right, of organic traffic. The other piece I would say is these large language models, as they're evolving, the question is. What is the nature of the industry, right? Travel, all the data, for example, on travel is available widely out there. You know, hotel information, you know, flights, all that's widely available on the internet today, and there's no discernment if it's sold to me, yourself, me, anyone else in this audience. Like Delta's happy to sell the shuttle ticket for us to go to Boston. Insurance, very different. Oh, I say also pricing information's widely available.
Yep.
Widely available. Insurance, very different. You have an opaqueness of the industry, meaning the carriers do not want to compete on price transparency directly. That dynamic has always been part of EverQuote's story. It's as true today though with these large language models because this dynamic of opaqueness means that the data's not available widely to do that. That's one, right? Second is you have a very regulated industry. When you think about insurance, it's actually not a nationally regulated business. It's unlike a, like financial service. It's regulated by all 50 states individually. Why is that? Insurance agents are part of the fabric of Main Street of America, those regulations are there to make sure the industry continues to exist 'cause it serves those communities. There's a dynamic around that as well on the regulated side, right?
The other piece of this as well is the carriers are very much into targeting, very precisely. To my example, if I was trying to find an auto insurance, we all have the exact same car. We lived in the same building, say in the same house. We may have all very different histories of driving. I learned to drive in Boston. I'm a little more aggressive. I may have a few more fender benders than you do. You're much more careful. All of those things factor into a very targeted view, and the last is it's very dynamic, right. The carriers change their preferences based on all 50 markets at any given time for underwriting reasons. Normal course of business. "Hey, we're heavy on this region. We want to go here. In this region, we get too many Mayanks .
We want more Joseph's profile." You know, you've got to bring those in because we pay a lot in premium. You add those all in the mix. Those are all the things that make the industry very different. What we think that means is that the idea that our industry is going to radically change with search with large language model is not happening, right? To be clear as time today. That being said, we're excited about where it's headed, right? We think in the mini- medium term, we've observed what's going on in other parts of other industries, how search is changing. We think there's probably three ways it'll change for us, right, over time. One is it could become another source of advertising, performance advertising. Large language models are going to monetize through advertising.
We're pretty good at performance marketing and adding new channels, so it could be that. The second is APIs. As you think about the large language models having subscribers, may try to give an experience that's, you know, through APIs. We think there's an opportunity there. We're in those discussions. The third is this idea of will some type of curated search exist for maybe subscribers of large language models that gives them a better shopping experience? It hasn't really come into insurance today, although people will try to Google it. Or try putting in your favorite large language model. It doesn't exist today, really, but will one day happen over time. We think it might. What we've noticed in other verticals, the thing that drives that behavior is content.
Different than the old days of content, which was self-generated by companies, the question might be. What is community expertise is the way they think about it? We have 6,000 local agents who are our customers. We have 6,000 local agents who we offer, started offering a digital marketing services program to 18 months ago. You can see how those two could come together over time. We're excited about all of those ways to emerge. We think it is limited how soon it will happen in the insurance part, but we're excited by it. If it happened faster, We'll be well prepared for it. The last thing I think it's important to note as insurance is the nature of the industry with the carriers themselves.
We had the same comment going back to our business when public, which say the carriers will just go directly to the sources, you, they won't need you, right? Why that has not evolved over time is that we're able to help those carriers be more precise in their targeting than they can do themselves. They're, if they're to use the analogy, they cast the net, pull in lots of fish, we're spearfishing 'cause we get more information to consumer. That dynamic will still exist in the large language models 'cause we'll overlay our knowledge with theirs. The other piece is probably even more important to the carriers is they're very careful with sharing disposition data, and the most sensitive disposition data is actually pricing data. You go all the way back and lifetime values.
They have worked with us, you know, for over a decade. Over time they'll say when we start like a new offering like Smart Campaigns, they have to give us their data. Launched that four or five years ago. People said, "Carriers will never trust you with that data," right? You know, they If you go four or five years before that was connections, workflows, data from our workflows pass through to carriers. Carriers will never trust information that doesn't come from their own people or their own agents. They're obviously 100% of carriers ultimately did that. In the Smart Campaigns, the majority of carriers are doing it. We think one of the large language models, what'll be needed is the carriers are gonna be very protective of this pricing information.
If I would say they've always kept that in the vault, they probably add an extra wall to that vault recently. If as they think about working with the large language models to acquire those consumers, it you could see an opportunity for an EverQuote to emerge to be that interface between the two. They trust us. We know how to work. We're a tech savvy company, how to work with these folks. We're sort of in the orbit, I think that's really an opportunity for us. We're really excited by it. Then in the efficiency side, I'll touch on the last thing in efficiency is we've done a lot. We sort of have it, let's say three parts of efficiencies. I'd say first we have this idea of how do we continue to help our employees, right?
You know, upskill our employees, you know, help them be really become AI fluent is the term we use internally. We're doing a lot of training there. I bounce it off other experts. They go, "You guys are way ahead in trying to get every employee to use this." The second piece is we're rolling out AI agents in every function of the company. I think with all the functions reports, I mean all the G&A functions, every single one is putting forward a program for how they want to do it. It's, and for us, it is driving efficiency. You know, people say, well, you're trying to, you know, cut employees. I said, "We're really trying to do is make our employees more efficient." Like we have an analogy for our employees, we call them GOATs.
There's a long history with our founders of that. We say what AI is doing is making them super GOATs. It's making them more effective. The more basic work is being automated so they can spend more time in the analysis and the value add. That's the next piece of it. The third piece is how when we think about efficiency is also how do we sort of step back and say all our processes, how do we continue to inject, whether it's our traffic bidding platform, our Smart Campaigns, all the things, how do we continue to drive efficiency in those operations? That's at least our thoughts on it. As you can tell, we're pretty passionate about this topic. Thank you for asking the question.
Very helpful. Great perspective. Joseph, the other thing I wanted to ask you about was just competition in general. Obviously, we watch some of your, you know, peers or competitors out in the market. Any changes that you've noticed from some of the other major players in the market when it comes to the insurance vertical?
Sure. I'd say we have a healthy respect for all our competitors. I would say, you know, when we look at how we're doing, I think we're doing well, right? If you look at, you know, people always ask this question, "Tell us about share. How are you gaining share?
Right.
The difficulty for investors, there's no one definitive source you can go to, and say, "This is share." It's not like the equivalent of league tables. You can't do that, but what you can have is the carriers give feedback to us. We've had examples of, we get these scorecards back from them, and they say, you know, we had one carrier tell us last quarter, we became a top performer for them of the largest budget we've got. We've had examples of some of our competitors announcing they've lost some carriers. You know, we think we've been a beneficiary of those. We get the scorecards back about performance, which is ultimately the thing that drives our success is as we think about the long term is how are we driving performance for our carriers and agents?
The choice we made back in the summer of 2023, we did this significant strategic realignment, as you know, and the choice we made is we're gonna as opposed to being an inch deep and a mile wide, trying to do several verticals, we're gonna focus. We picked the vertical, we have the most domain expertise in P&C. It also is a very large vertical and we said, "Let's go deeper." One of the things we've done over these past three years is really focus on how can we be our carriers and agents be more successful? How can we help them grow their business profitably? We've done lots of things.
That mindset though has really helped us, and that in turn has allowed us to do some things we weren't doing before that I think is deepening our relationships, driving us more share, but also like creating a more value-add relationship. Like our Smart Campaigns, half on carrier side, more than half of our carriers are now using it. We're rolling out Smart Campaigns for our agents. It's early days. Another example, we're trying to help them be more successful. Those are all the ways we think about share and we feel good about it, but more importantly, we're always hearing from like, "How can we help you be successful?" If we get the feedback we are, that's what we feel like we're doing better and better at that.
We're thinking how to do it in a differentiated way versus trying to do the same thing as the other guy. The other thing I'll say versus competitors, which we benefit from is the focus. I think other competitors have had different, other verticals which have had regulatory issues or have had broader challenges from a macro environment. We are fortunate we did not have those.
On the share issue, is it worth asking about the penetration of the marketing budget of some of your customers? Is that a good proxy for growth opportunities within that customer, in other words?
Within a given customer, they will give us a scorecard about how we're doing in a given quarter. It's interesting, they don't always give it the same time every quarter. I wish they all would agree to do this at the same time, so we could actually give a stat. I've tried. I'm not, I've not succeeded with our BD team. They certainly will say how we're doing in terms of share of wallet, and that's we feel quite good, that we're sort of, you know, making progress. Again, it's we don't think about it though in terms of a quarter. Some quarters will go up, some quarters will go down with a given carrier. Sometimes that's for perfectly valid reasons.
Their competitors were bidding more aggressively in our marketplace. Yes, the BD person who covers the carrier who bid down, who got lower budget, they may be saying, "Well, what am I doing to help them?" From a overall health of the marketplace, I'm like, We're agnostic who wins or loses, right? In a given quarter. You know, to actually see some going up and down actually is encouraging 'cause it shows the health of the marketplace and vitality. We're seeing more of that, right? Certainly over time, if you see a carrier pulling away over time, you ask why and you try to say, "What can we do to help them?" That's where we are fortunate. We have our enterprise account management team.
We have this, what I would say a very much a consultative sale process that's not that's led by a BD person, but it's a team coverage model. And it's quite sophisticated, all the way from, you know, Jayme, a CEO, having a relationship with a executive counterpart to our analytics team, and even some of our engineering team having counterparts with their. It's that kind of coverage model that has allowed us to help to go deeper with those carriers.
Got it. On the focus, 90% auto today.
10% home.
Yep
Renters.
Really home. Home.
Right.
Yep.
Home is the-
Renters is.
Portion. Right
Yeah, it's really a home business, yeah.
You obviously, I'm gonna use the word dabbled in healthcare.
Yep
You pulled out. Do you think over time you can see yourself extending into other P&C areas? Is that something that's on the agenda?
Maybe I'll start with home. Home I'd say our home vertical is roughly 10% of our revenues today, about $18.5 million business last quarter.
Yeah.
We've been very pleased with home. About a year ago, we put in place a new operating plan, we've been executing against that plan. It's been executing well. We had 30% growth in Q1. Year-on-year we had 30% growth, year-on-year in Q4. You know, I'm not necessarily saying we're gonna grow 30% year-on-year every quarter, I do think this is a market that'll grow at a higher rate than auto in the medium term. Why do we think that? Highest level, auto premiums roughly two- one. You know, auto to home for P&C premiums. If you look at our business, it's 90/10. Between 10% and 50% is a long way.
We don't think that everything will go through digital channels at home, but between 10% and 50%, you know, is it 30%, 25%, I think there's a lot of room to go. One of the things that helps us be successful there is our agent business. That's an area where the agent consultative sale process can be really valuable, and that's a key piece for us. We see we're bullish about that. As we look at other verticals. Excuse me. You line up such a meeting schedule, I can barely talk now, Mayank, at the end of the day. Looking at other verticals, we think there's other opportunities within P&C. Think there's like small business commercial. That really falls under personal lines.
You look at things like RV, boats, some of those areas could be interesting. We think there's these various areas we think they may be smaller markets, but the opportunity could be interesting to have a larger impact in the vertical, and also perhaps use get data insights that help us in other, help the carriers grow their business in other ways in some of the larger verticals. We're excited about those.
I think we have, yeah, a little bit of time left, Joseph. Let's talk about the balance sheet cash flow and the capital allocation priorities. You obviously have a buyback program. In terms of, you know, other uses of cash, M&A, is that something on the agenda or not something that's imminent?
Sure. Sure. About $180 million in cash at the end of.
Good place to be in?
Good place. Yeah, Very different than we talked three years ago.
Right.
We were worried, are you gonna have enough cash to survive? We've really changed the business, and I think it speaks to we have fundamentally changed this business to be a very clear cash generating business, and we feel very confident about generating year-on-year meaningful growth in adjusted EBITDA and high cash conversion. That's the backdrop. That means our cash position is building. Really, I love these questions, 'cause before people said, "You're not gonna have any cash." I think first as we think about capital allocation, there's three pieces. First and foremost is a fortress balance sheet. We think that is really important. The reason we think that's really important is a couple things.
First, I would say as you think about our business, you know, and the environment, we're in a fortunate spot relative to a lot of our competitors who don't have that position. As a public company, partners wanna work with people who are financially secure. You know, that's an important piece and we are gonna be there. We're trying to create a business that's here to be the winner in this space long term. We think that's a key part to it. The other part is just an orientation as a company. I think back to 2023 when our cash was missing a zero, decimal place was slightly over, was over one at least, is we had opportunities to make significant investments where the ROI was compelling, but the payback period was too long.
We have to be thinking as we're trying to build from a billion-dollar business, we're really thinking like, what's $2 billion business, what's $3 billion? What are the investments we have to make to build that? Those are multi-year bets, right? We have to have the confidence in our balance sheet to think about multi-year time horizon returns, and we can do that with a strong balance sheet. That's one. Second is buybacks. We did our first buyback program we announced last August. We did $23 million, a little over $20 million, Q3 of last year, and we bought some back from our largest shareholder, which was done very efficiently. We did it great price. We also didn't impact the flow to the stock.
Q1 of this year, we did open market purchases about another $20 million. We've, and we're continuing to buy into Q2. You know, if we look at all that, we'll probably have most of that plan will be done this quarter. You know, faster than we thought. We thought it'd be a one-year plan, it's happening a little faster. We took advantage of what we saw as very, very attractive prices. What's important to note about that addition to the confidence we have in our business and the ability to generate cash flow is the shares, how is it offsetting dilution? We're probably offsetting 8%, 8.5% dilution with the shares we bought back. That nicely offsets issuance last year and this year for employees, which I think is, you know, a healthy way to build a business.
You go from being an IPO-centric company, where dilution is a little more not as conscious a discipline, we've become more disciplined in all aspects of our business to make sure we're aligning with shareholders, and that's a key one is that. Buybacks will continue to be a tool in the toolbox for us to allocate capital back to shareholders. The third is M&A. We think about M&A, I wanna start with saying we don't need it to get to a billion. Feel very confident we'll get there from organic. We do see opportunities out there in the landscape, and if anything, those opportunities have increased over the past year. I think you know I've been was an M&A banker for here.
Yeah
for a couple decades. I look at the landscape, which is there are more private companies who are going to struggle to get opportunities. Some cases very good products, very good teams, capital structures, I dynamics for exit are not there. That I think the dynamic is improving. Those public company valuations are coming into private company. I think about where we could grow. It could be we get more products for agents and carriers help grow their business, right? We want to be the one-stop shop for agents, maybe products fit in there. I look at the verticals. We talked about other verticals. Maybe that's through M&A. Of course, there's also our core business, which is tech and data.
Maybe there's new source of data that can make us more robust, that help us think about helping carriers grow more profitably. Maybe that gets us deeper into the value chain. Of course, some of that is bringing in talent. Talent is, you know, we are very thoughtful how we recruit. We have a really strong recruiting effort. Sometimes M&A can be a way to bring in additional talent. Those are all the ways we think about it. Capital allocation will continue across those three. I look forward to sharing more as we progress.
Very thorough. I think we have a few minutes here. Any questions from the audience before we wrap up? I think we covered a lot of ground. Joseph, anything I missed that you wanna highlight at the tail end of our fireside?
Yeah, I guess what I'd say is we are feeling very good about the position we have. Like, you look at this backdrop. Healthy industry, they wanna grow. Digital channels are a way to do it, to be targeted. We're well-positioned to do that. When we think about our business from an investor viewpoint, today, we are woefully undervalued on I think, you know, I typically don't talk about valuation on these fireside chats, but multiple versus cash flow is pretty quite low. I think I can say it and not with a straight face. For us, I would say is what should investors take away? Which is we have a model that balances top line growth and expanding profitability. We think that is a winning combination. It's an evergreen demand for that.
We're doing it against a large TAM, which I think key. I think the other piece I'd say is, as a business, we have evolved over this past several quarters. Since our changes in the summer 2023, what have we done? We focused on how we're going to help our carriers and agents grow more successfully and do that in a different way from competitors. How do we build the competitive mo- but do things that add more value to help them be successful? We think that's working. Second piece is as we get paid for that, you know, how do we manage it? How do we drive return to the bottom line? How do we in turn make investments long term? I think we're doing that. While you're seeing it in the numbers, we're seeing it in the investments.
We talked about our AI efforts. That's working. How do we align interests with shareholders, right? You know, I think I told you a story when we first made changes to our plan, our outlook. We'd started talking about EBITDA in the summer of 2023. Most of the company didn't think that way. We were really smart folks who had grown up at EverQuote, the executive team, where people weren't thinking about. Everyone knows what cash flow is now 'cause, you know, our leadership team comp plans are tied to it. Again, we're aligning interest for sure. We look at this as a value creation cycle, which is big opportunity. You know, we're helping carriers and agents be successful. We do that well, we're gonna drive results, and we're in turn aligning interests with the shareholders.
I think that's an exciting time for us.
It's a great way to summarize it. On that positive note, Joseph, thank you so much.
Thank you.
Pleasure hosting you.
Thank you. Appreciate it. Pleasure. Thank you.