Keith Burton and Brad Smith and we have our Co Founder, Scott Cook. Would you like me to use the mic? Is my this not working? Okay, great. I love using mics.
This morning's agenda is actually pretty straightforward. We'll start with the formal part of the presentation, and then I will give a brief update on the company's strategy and our performance. Let me also introduce that we have Kobi Lyons from Broadridge here, Inspector of Elections and our Corporate Secretary and General Counsel, Carrie MacLean, that will do the formal part of the presentation. Carrie?
Okay. Switching microphones here. Thanks, Hassan. For some formalities, I have an affidavit from Broadridge certifying notice of this that the stockholder meeting was properly mailed on or about November 21, 2018, to all stockholders of record as of November 19, 2018. I also have a list of the registered stockholders entitled to vote at the meeting, which is available for inspection, and the Inspector of Elections has executed his oath, which will be filed within the minutes of this meeting.
Broadridge has counted the votes cast on each proposal, and Mr. Lyons has informed me that we have a quorum. The polls are open. If you've already turned in your proxy, you shouldn't vote again unless you want to revoke your proxy or change your vote. If you'd like a ballot, please raise your hand.
Stockholders will vote on the 3 proposals described in the proxy statement. Following the vote, Mr. Lyons will tally the ballots and proxies determine which proposals have been approved, and I'll announce the preliminary results. Proposal number 1 is the election of 11 directors. Proposal number 2 is the advisory vote on executive compensation or the say on pay vote.
And proposal number 3 is the ratification of Ernst and Young as our independent registered public accounting firm for fiscal 2019. Management recommends that you vote for all 11 director nominees and for proposals 23. Please mark your ballots if you haven't already voted by proxy and give your ballot to Mr. Lyons. The polls are now officially closed.
We'll publish the final vote totals in a Form 8 ks that we expect to file within the next 4 business days. Based on the preliminary results of the vote, the stockholders have elected the 11 Board nominees named in our proxy statement, approved the advisory proposal on executive compensation and ratified the selection of Ernst and Young as our independent registered public accounting firm for fiscal 20 19. That concludes our formal business today, and the formal portion of the meeting is now adjourned. In just a moment, I'll turn the meeting over to Sasan Gadarzi to give his business update and answer any questions you might have. Sasan's remarks may contain forward looking statements, and there are a number of risks that may cause actual results to differ materially from our expectations.
For more information about those risks, please see the webcast version of this presentation and our SEC filings, which can be found on the Investor Relations page at intuit.com. Thanks for your time this morning. And now I'll turn things over to Sasan.
Great. Thank you, Carrie. All right. Well, let's get started. Let me first start by not rereading the forward looking statements.
So we are a company of re imagination and self disruption. You can see over our 35 year history, we have led through 4 chapters of technology shifts and competitive battles. And you can see by the gray surface area that our stock price has been up and to the right. And there are really two main reasons for that. The first one is we obsessively focus on our customers and what matters most to them, and we do not fall in love with our own solutions.
The second is that we are not afraid to disrupt ourselves, and that's really because everything starts and stops with our employees. When Scott founded the company 35 years ago, it was a small core group of entrepreneurs that focused on customers, and today we have 9,000 strong that every day show up to work to find ways to solve problems for our customers. And our goal is to create an environment where they can do the best work of their life. And this is why year in and year out, we've been on Fortune's top great place to work. And that has delivered solid customer growth.
Under Brad's leadership, we shifted the company from a desktop business unit oriented company to a cloud company, and we significantly accelerated our customer growth. And you can see over that same period, we doubled our revenue growth. We shifted to subscription, we shifted to the cloud, and now 75% of our revenue is actually reoccurring. And you can see that if you bet on the company that relative to other alternatives, you saw great benefits. And you know Brad has had a saying for many, many years, which is repair the roof while the sun is shining.
And boy, that makes a lot of sense in California these days with all the rain that we're getting. So although we were seeing great trajectory of the company several years ago, Brad actually before I go there, let me tell you about our results in FY 2018 and our Q1 of 2019. Sorry, I got a little bit ahead of my headlights because I'm so excited about our trajectory going ahead. But let me step back and talk about FY 2018 was a very strong year. In fact, it was the best year that we've had in 10 years.
Our revenue grew 15%. Our non GAAP earnings per share grew north of 25%, and that momentum actually carried into FY 'nineteen. You can see for the Q1 on all the key metrics, we exceeded our guidance. Now let me go back to referring the roof while the sun is shining. So 2 years ago, one of the things that Brad did was he took 150 of our top leaders.
We divided them into teams of 3, and he asked us to look into the future, to understand what's changing in the world, technology trends, what's changing for our customers, and develop a game plan looking ahead. And examples of things that we looked at, for instance, we tried to understand how is the world going to change with those that have been born after the smartphone era. Those that are used to downloading an app, instant benefits, talking to their phone, being able to swipe left and right and get the benefits that they need immediately. What will happen in an era with artificial intelligence? How will the world change when machines can do all the work?
What will happen as we're in the midst of this largest employment shift to self employed. So these teams, we went out, I was one of the team members, we ran lots of experiments, we spoke to lots of customers, we were all over the world, and we came back, and under Brad's leadership, we refined the entire company strategy. And it's all under, in one page, what we call the alignment triangle. Let me quickly walk you through our game plan, and I'll share some proof points that we're seeing after 1 year of this being in place. I'll start with our mission.
Our mission is grounded, empowering prosperity around the world. We are focused on helping our customers make ends meet. We are focused on helping small businesses improve their success rates. We want to make an impact in the world defined by each and individual customer. That's guided by our values that's been in place for years.
It's about integrity without compromise and giving back to the community, and it's got 6 pillars. The first one is being bold, and the last one is delivering awesome. And we have a compass which we call true north. And our compass is about delivering results today for our customers and for shareholders while we create a better future. And we're very deliberate about the goals that we set.
We show up to work every day to create an environment where our employees can do the best work of their life. And by doing that, we can deliver incredible benefits for our customers, for our partners, and at the end of the day, deliver for our shareholders. And we have metrics that we're not of course showing you today, but we set goals for ourselves both for the year that we're in and 3 years out. And in fact, that's what the Board holds me and the management team and the entire company accountable for. Now, we have a very clear game plan to actually achieve those goals, but everything in our strategy starts with our customers.
There are 3 core benefits that we are focused on delivering. The first one is more money. The second is eliminating work and drudgery, and the third is doing it in a way that delivers total confidence. And we believe 10 years from now when you look back, those three things will be most important to our customers: find ways to give me more money, find ways to eliminate work and drudgery, and do it in a way that gives me confidence. And the essence of our strategy to deliver those benefits is about unlocking the power of many for the prosperity of 1.
That's for us packed with meaning, and let me just share with you what that meaning is for us. 1st element is an open, trusted platform. This is about us and others outside of our 4 walls, solving the most important customer problems so we can help them benefit. The second is applying artificial intelligence that learns bless you learns from our large data sets and delivers benefits for our customers and delivers personalized experiences. And last but not least is connections.
It's connecting our customers to apps that will help solve the needs that they have. It's helping our customers connect to experts to deliver confidence. It's helping our customers connect to financial products that helps them make ends meet, all to create indispensable connections. We have 2 Uber priorities. 1 is about delivering the great experiences today with high velocity and doing what's right for customers.
The second is accelerating the benefits that our customers look for. And the essence of that is improving the experiences that we deliver, doing it in high velocity, and modernizing our technology and turning it into services so we can move fast for our customers. The second is about the benefits that our customers look for, and those benefits are improve my success rate as a small business and create financial freedom so I can spend time on the things that matter the most. And each of our benefits and priorities have a set of metrics where we hold ourselves accountable to these metrics, we measure how we're making progress, and we make adjustments as necessary. Now that's our game plan on a page.
We call it the alignment triangle. It's a way to galvanize 9,000 folks internally and our partners outside of our 4 walls in terms of what we are focused on to deliver for our customers. Now everything for us is about creating an environment where our employees can do great work and delivering for our customers. But we also focus on doing things in a way that over time will build advantage. And let me just share what that looks like for us.
The more we have a platform where us and others build on our platform and the more our customers use our platform, the more we deliver benefits, the more they're getting the benefits and it's becoming sticky. The more we build engines and algorithms that learn from our data sets, the more we can accelerate the benefits for our customers. And the more we can connect our customers to other apps, experts, financial products, we have an opportunity to create a network effect to build advantage and ultimately power prosperity around the world. Now, we're 1 year into this strategy, but we have very exciting proof points that we're proud of. Let me just walk you through a few of them.
The first one is small businesses go out of business after 5 years at a rate of 50%. And one of the largest levers that drives their success is connecting to an accountant. And accountants, the one thing they don't like to do is about hunting for business. So we, on our platform, have made a matchmaking app. And in essence, our focus is to connect small businesses to accountants so we can improve their success rate and improve the success of our accountants.
And you can see that in 1 year, we have increased the connection rate with small businesses and accountants. Our accountants are actually seeing the ability to grow and make more money. And when we make a connection, the retention on QBO increases. The second is 60% of consumers need assistance to get their taxes done. And as I said earlier, accountants look for ways to grow their business.
And so what we have done is on our TurboTax platform, we have brought experts right to you wherever you are, whenever you want it. And if you have any lingering question like you just bought a house, you just had a baby, you just got married or you got a divorce, you had a question of what does that mean, an expert can come to your screen, you see them, they don't see you or they can chat with you to help answer the most important questions. And when we do that, this past year, our product recommendation score was above 60, Their confidence increased. The 2,000 pros that were on our platform improved their livelihood, and it increases our retention and conversion. Let's talk about self employed, which is one of the largest global shifts that we are seeing.
Self employed mingle for personal and business expenses. When they go get gas, is that personal or is that business? The lunch that I just had, is that personal or business? The things that I just bought for my home or office, is that personal or business? Most of them do not actually record it at the time in which they do the transaction.
And then when it's tax time, it's a real mess. And so we've connected QuickBooks and TurboTax. So with QuickBooks, you can easily manage your personal and business expenses. And when it's tax time, you hit a click of a button and you can get your taxes done through TurboTax. And on average, our consumers have benefited with over $4,600 additional benefits.
And we've seen significant growth with QBSE Salves. This is our self employed app, and all around, it's a win win win. The 4th example, young businesses, 70% of them need access to money. And it's very hard for them to get the funding that they need because they're such a young business. And it's hard for lenders to actually find ways to lend them money they don't have enough data to see, is this a risky loan or not?
So again, we've made a match. We've connected small businesses to lenders. And when we've done that, 60% of those that have gotten a loan were un lendable by a bank. The financial institution benefits, the customer benefits, and ultimately, we benefit, and this is a great example of powering prosperity around the world. And then one of the last ones is about the fact that the median savings for a consumer is about $4,600 and it's actually lower than their expenses.
So if you think about that, consumers have a very hard time finding emergency cash. And there are those that are willing to help, and we made a match. So you can see in this example, 25,000,000 folks through TurboTax last year consented to use their data to get a better rate, a better loan. And when we did that, it increased the conversion rate of the lender, and we benefited from the opportunity. So these are just five examples of our strategy at work and the fact that we are delivering personalized experience through an open platform and creating indispensable connections, all in service of finding ways to deliver more money, eliminating work and increasing the confidence of our customers.
Now all of this puts us in service of growing the core. Our focus is finding ways to bring more customers into the franchise by focusing on the benefits that matter the most, solving additional problems across the ecosystem, whether it's helping them with capital, whether it's helping them get paid faster, whether it's connecting them to experts or connecting them to financial products, and taking our game globally, where now 25% of our QuickBooks customers are outside the U. S, where we're continuing to improve Net Promoter Scores. So let me end with where I started. What gets our heartbeat going is our customers.
We have 9,000 employees, many partners outside of our four walls, and what gets us excited is finding ways to help our customers thrive. And it all comes down to finding ways to power prosperity around the world. So thank you, and we'll open it up to any questions that you have. And I think mics will be coming around.
Hi, good morning. My name is Justin Danhof. I'm General Counsel with the National Center For Public Policy Research. I want to talk about some of the company's outside social activism. According to multiple news reports, Intuit is one of only 38 companies in America that contributes funds to Planned Parenthood.
Gallup polling indicates that when it comes to abortions, Americans are equally divided on the subject, half are pro choice, half are pro life. That means Intuit is purposefully alienating half of its potential customer base. Seems to us an odd choice for a business in such a competitive industries. And let's not forget the racial elements at play. Planned Parenthood was founded by noted racist Margaret Sanger, who wrote, we do not want the word to get out that we want to exterminate the N word population.
I'm not going to say what she said. How is your organization carrying out that mission today? According to one study, Planned Parenthood targets minority communities by placing 79% of its abortion clinics within walking distance of densely populated minority communities. This leads to the inevitable result that even though black Americans make up 13% of the U. S.
Population, 35% of babies killed in abortions are black, according to the CDC. The Black genocide of abortion is disturbingly evident in New York City, where state data shows that year after year, more Black babies are aborted than born in New York City. Think about that. Outside of abortion funding, the company has also contributed significant funds to an organization that works to undermine religious protections, which are supposed to be guaranteed by the U. S.
Constitution. According to Corporate Watchdog's 2nd vote, InduIt has donated funds to Out and Equal, an anti religious advocacy organization. Out and Equal helped to defeat a 2016 bill seeking to protect religious freedom in the state of Georgia. The group also worked to activate corporations to oppose North Carolina's decency law that came to be known as the bathroom bill that simply sought to prevent grown men from using the same facilities as young girls. I have a few brief questions.
What do you have to say to
the millions of pro life Americans who are deeply offended by your funding, many of whom are potential Intuit customers, employees and investors, especially in light of the fact that the March for Life is tomorrow and we're going to be bringing this message to tens of thousands of ardent pro life Americans. What do you have to say to the minority communities who have been insidiously targeted by Planned Parenthood? And can you tell me why the company funds groups that work to diminish religious liberty?
Well, thank you for your question. And I'll share our philosophy with you and perhaps we can have additional conversations offline and something that also Carrie MacLean can engage you on. I would tell you that we deeply believe in our mission of powering prosperity around the world, which means that we care deeply and measure deeply around how inclusive we are. We think about diversity, and we think about that not only because it's important internally, but those are the customers that we serve. And so every action that we take is really guided by our values, which I talked about a moment ago.
And we believe in doing what's right, and we always will adjust if we feel like we're not doing something right. So it's something we'd be happy to talk to you about offline. But at the end of the day, our mission of powering prosperity, making sure that we're inclusive and think about diversity, not only internally, but those that we serve is something that guides us every single day. Other questions?
I'd like to know when it comes to return to shareholders, how you decide between share buyback and dividend increases?
Yes, great question. Thank you for your question and very good to see you again. So we have a set of financial principles and our financial principles are growing our revenues double digits. The second is growing operating income faster than revenue. The third is applying our cash in areas where we can get a return on investment of greater than 15%.
Then when it comes to our excess cash, we look at both stock repurchase and we look at dividends. Our focus has been growing dividends at the same rate as our net income. And for our stock repurchase, we have a grid where that grid helps us make decisions in terms of the rate of the stock purchase plan. So that's the way we approach it. It's all in line with our financial principles.
Yes, please
go ahead. 2nd question is about as the stock price goes up, do you have a target at all where you might split the stock because the price is high?
It's something, of course, we think about, we talk about. It's all guided by our financial principles, and we don't have a target in which we say we'll split the stock, and it's something, of course we talk about with our audit committee, but it's all guided by our financial principles.
I'm a
little bit confused about the small loans that you were talking about. Now for instance, with this federal shutdown, would you be loaning money to federal employees who don't have a paycheck at the time being? Is that part of your business, Mark?
Well, first of all, we recognize that with the shutdown, a large number of the small business lending that comes from the government has been slowed and there's a lot of actually uncertainty. And we are actually looking at are there areas where we can accelerate helping those that may be in business for themselves that, in essence, use QuickBooks and where we have an opportunity to help them with potential loans. But that we don't target based on the government shutdown. Really, our focus is small businesses that are entrepreneurs, that are capacity is because we don't ever want them to be overdrawn. And then we help them find ways to accelerate capital.
But we recognize that there are some real constraints right now, which is sad to see given the government shutdown and the fact that the loans have really dried up. And we're actually looking to see if there are ways that we could help those QuickBooks customers in that situation. Thank you for your question. Well, thank you very much for attending our Annual Shareholders Meeting, and have a great week. And the rain is great, but hopefully it will calm down a little bit so we can all walk around dry.
Have a great rest of the week. Thank you.