Earnings Call: Q3 2019

Nov 6, 2019

Good afternoon. My name is Detamara, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Workiva Incorporated Third Quarter 2019 Earnings Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute Thank you. I'll turn the call over to Adam Therese, Director of Investor Relations. Please go ahead. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us for Warkiva's third quarter 2019 earnings conference call. This afternoon, we'll begin with comments from our Chief Executive Officer, Marty Vanderplow followed by our Chief Financial Officer, Stuart Miller. And then we will turn the call over to questions. Also on the line today is Joe Clint, Chief Accounting Officer. A replay of this call will be available until November 13th. Information to access the replay is posted in today's press release, which is available on our website under the Investor Relations section. As a reminder, today's conference call is also being broadcast live via webcast. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that during today's call, we'll be making forward looking statements regarding future events and financial performance, including guidance for our fourth quarter full fiscal year 2019. These forward looking statements are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties. Warkiva cautions that these statements are not guarantees of future performance. All forward looking statements made today reflect our current expectations only, and we undertake no obligation to update any statement to reflect the events that occur after this call. Please refer to the company's annual report on Form 10 K and quarterly report on Form 10 Q for factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially from any forward looking statements. Also during the course of today's call, we will refer to certain non GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations of non GAAP to GAAP measures and certain additional information are also included in today's earnings press release. With that, we'll begin by turning the call over to our CEO, Marty Vanderpla. Thank you, Adam, and thanks to everyone for joining the Warkiva third quarter 2019 conference call, which is our 20th quarterly financial release as a public company. We are proud of our third quarter, which exceeded guidance for revenue and operating results. In our last call, we discussed our 4 growth factors: W Data, EMEA, Integrated Risk And Global Statutory Reporting. We are pleased with our many of our solutions because it enables with new capabilities including automatic data updates, workflows, improved connectivity and risk and controls integration, W Data is changing the way people work. The city of Mazua's financial reporting supervisor spoke at our user conference in September about how he previously copied and pasted up to 60,006 1000 lines of data and then hand check the resulting reports. Now, the city uses W data to automatically update their reports their source systems daily, saving time and reducing errors. Demand for our current solutions is driving strong and prospects as they prepare for their first ESF filings in 2021. Therefore, we continue to ramp up sales and support in EMEA. We also continued to In addition, we are expanding our integrated risk solutions into EMEA and the U. S. Federal Government. We are very pleased this quarter by our go to market results in global statutory reporting. We continue to validate demand for our platform to streamline multi entity reporting in numerous jurisdictions. We are aggressively pursuing this large underserved market. We continue to augment our sales and delivery channels with advisory and service partners. We recently announced a strategic alliance with Deloitte which adds tember user conference, we named KPMG, our global partner of the year. Last month, we received FedRAMP Moderate authorization, which recognizes our work to further strengthen the security of our platform benefiting all of our customers. This higher level of authorization enables us to help federal agencies connect, control and report up to 80% of their information types. In addition, many commercial enterprises consider FedRAMP the highest standard of security assessment authorization and continuous monitoring for cloud software. We are thrilled with our largest ever September, where more than 1800 customers and industry leaders spent 3 days with our R and D and customer teams. As I visit with customers and prospects, I am more confident than ever that Warkiva will continue to be a driving force in data transparency and connected reporting throughout the world. With that, let me turn it over to Stuart Miller, our CFO. Thank you. As Marty discussed, we've been investing in EMEA W Data Integrated Risk And Global Statutory Reporting to drive revenue growth. That we are accelerating our revenue. I'll cover the specifics on guidance later in the call. Also, as you know, we successfully recapitalized our balance seat in Q3 with a convertible note offering significantly improving our financial flexibility. We intend to be patient and thorough in evaluating opportunities for investment. Turning to our third quarter results and financial outlook. For the rest of 2019. I'll talk about our results and guidance on a non GAAP basis. That is before stock based compensation and non cash interest expense related to our convertible notes. Please refer to our press release for a reconciliation of our non GAAP We outperformed our revenue guidance for the quarter. We generated total revenue in the third quarter of $74,200,000 an increase of 21.9 percent from Q3 2018. Breaking out revenue by reporting line item, Subscription and support revenue was $63,000,000, up 22.8% from Q3 2018. New logos, new solutions and conversions to solution based licensing helps drive strong revenue growth in Q3 2019. Professional services revenue was $11,200,000 in Q3 2019, an increase of 16.6% from the same quarter last year. XBRL services accounted for nearly all of the growth in professional services revenue, in Q3. We expect revenue from professional services to return to single digit growth Turning to our supplemental metrics. A net increase of 165 customers from Q3 2018 and a net increase of 33 customers from Q2 2019. The gross number of new logos was strong. Churn in Q3 was higher among smaller companies which tend to be more price sensitive. Our revenue retention rates remained resilient. Our subscription and support revenue retention rate was 94.5% for the third quarter of 2019 compared to 95.9% for the same period last year. Nearly half of our revenue churn in the quarter came from M and A de listings and bankruptcies. With add ons, our subscription and support revenue retention rate improved to 112.8%, for the third quarter of 2019 compared to 104.7% in Q3 2018. Our progress with larger subscription contracts is encouraging. The number of contracts valued at over $100,000 per year totaled 611 in third quarter of 2019, up 54% from Q3 last year. For annual contract value at $150,000 plus, we had 2.61 customers in the 3rd quarter, up 51% from Q3 twenty eighteen results. Moving down to P and L. Gross profit was $53,300,000 in Q3 up 17% from the same quarter a year ago. Consolidated gross margin was 71.8% in the latest quarter versus 74.8% in Q3, 2018. Breaking out gross profit. Subscription and support gross profit was $52,500,000, equating to a gross margin of 83.3 percent on S and S revenue, a contraction of 120 basis points compared to Q3 2018. Additional headcount to help upgrade customers to our next generation platform and higher server costs accounted for the decline. Professional services gross profit in the third quarter was $800,000, equating to a 7% gross margin, down $1,400,000 from the same period last year due to investments in additional talent to enhance services and address new markets. Research and development expense in Q3 was $20,600,000 up 12.4% from Q3 last year due to higher compensation and server expense. R and D expense as a percentage of revenue improved 240 basis points this quarter to 27.8% compared to Q3 last year. Sales and marketing expense for the quarter increased 35.8 percent from Q3 last year to $30,800,000, reflecting investment to drive bookings growth. General and administrative expenses totaled $8,100,000 in Q3 down $100,000 compared to Q3 2018. G and A expenses as a percentage of revenue improved 270 basis points to point $3,000,000 in Q3 2019 compared to an operating loss of $3,800,000 in Q3 2018. Warkiva's operating margin contract contracted 220 basis points in the latest quarter, but was about 30 basis points better than our guidance. Turning to our balance sheet and cash flow statement. At September 30, 2019, cash, cash equivalents in marketable securities totaled $485,000,000 an increase of $347,000,000 compared with the balance at June 30, 2019, driven mainly by our issuance of convertible notes in August. In Q3 2019, net cash provided from operating activities totaled $4,700,000 compared with cash provided of $7,600,000 in the same quarter a year ago Remaining performance obligations continue to differ from deferred revenue as we implement multi year contracts with annual billing terms. Turning to our guidance for the fourth quarter of 2019, we expect total revenue to range $75,300,000 to $75,800,000. At the midpoint, we are guiding to a growth rate of 17 point 2% for total revenue in to return to single digit growth in Q4. We expect non GAAP operating loss to range from reflecting investment in the growth for total revenue to a range of $292,900,000 to $293,400,000. At the midpoint of this updated guidance, we Revenue growth for the year is 20%. We expect non GAAP operating loss to range from 13.6to14.1 $1,000,000. We continue to believe operating cash flow for full year 2019 will be in the low 30,000,000. Turning to 2020. So on a preliminary basis, we expect total revenue in 2020 to exceed $340,000,000. Our preliminary guidance reflects that a substantial majority of our subscription revenue We expect the growth rate of subscription and support revenue to continue to outpace the growth rate of professional services revenue. We expect our margin on non GAAP operating loss to decline consistent with our planned investments and our growth factors. We plan to offer detailed guidance on our outlook for 2020 on our next call. I think we're now ready to take your questions and operator, we're ready to begin the Q And A session. Thank you. Your first response is from Terry Tillman of SunTrust Robinson. Please go ahead. Hey, gentlemen. Can you hear me okay? Yep. Solid job on the quarter. I guess the first question, Stuart, that was nice to hear about a little bit on the guidance for next year. I don't actually haven't done the calculations, but could you give us some sort of kind of directional commentary on the subscription revenue, you know, kind of breaking that apart versus the the total of 350,000,000 just trying to gauge kind of the vitality of that growth versus total revenue? Thanks, Harry. We have historically not done that. As you know, services revenue is is, pretty or can be volatile. And it's pretty hard for us to predict. Some of it gets sold and delivered within the same quarter. Our long term guidance on, the mix of revenue, as you know, over time, we're expecting to be sort of 85% subscription and 15% services. So we're still, we're still heading in that direction on an annual basis. And we did say, of course, that we expect subscription revenue growth rate to exceed the growth rate in professional services. It's also very early to be talking too much about 2020. But we wanted to give, you know, the street some idea of what we were thinking. No. No. Understood. Understood. Well, maybe a follow-up question. And I know it's going to have potential material implications for 'twenty, and it is still early. But we get lots of questions about Europe. It seems like you have an event driven catalyst there, with the, the regulatory mandate. So I would just love some perspective from you or Marty in terms of what are you seeing and how does it look like it's going to shake out in terms of the buying pattern as we move through 2020 and even into 2021? Around trying to get one's health in order around the new mandate? Thank you. Well, you're right. You're right about one thing. It's really early. But we definitely have seen an influx of customers and prospects, why to discuss it with us. That's been very promising. And we've also seen, larger customers that are already engaging with us in terms of putting together plans and actually buying. So We're still very optimistic on the high end. I think we have good visibility to maybe the 500 largest or 1000 largest ESUP customers. On the low end, we're very optimistic too, although they're slower. They don't get going as quickly. And, And it's just hard to say, but we are getting great response. We're having lunches and breakfast that are around ESF, and, we've had great luck getting people to come to those. So we're quite optimistic. Yes, maybe Marty, since you're on a roll there, you do have 4 key kind of growth vectors here. Of the 4. And and I'm sure you're proud of them. I'm all excited about all of them. But given just 3 months removed from the last time we got together in terms of the earnings call, what is the 4 kind of surprising you the most in terms of just kind of where you are versus maybe the expectation on the positive side? Thank you. Well, I know you guys want me to say these 2 are doing great, but it's really interesting. They're all quite different. And, with W. Data, it's, it's been really encouraging the last quarter. We've seen a substantial growth in pipe and book albeit off a fairly small number, but it's really starting to pick up. And the customers love it. We get so much Pluto from customers. So we're very optimistic about that. The global statutory reporting, really had a great quarter and, so did EMEA. So it's real and and then, you know, the the thing about, integrated risk is that it's the largest, right now in terms of building off, a base for growth and they showed solid growth as well. So I can't pick my favorite child, but I really, feel pretty strongly about all four of them. Alright. Well, thank you. Your next response is from Rob Oliver of Baird. Please go ahead. Great. Thanks. It's Matt Lemenager on for Rob this afternoon. Thanks for taking the question. I have one on the larger customer deals, the customer is greater than $100,000 and greater than $150,000, continued to accelerate again this quarter. And I assume solution based licensing helping drive that. Do we kind of reach a point in the fourth quarter or perhaps the first quarter, I guess, either Marty or Stuart, where you think that levels off? I know that Europe you've talked about those being larger platform sales and maybe some of those will be net new customers that come in greater than 100,000 initially, but just trying to think about how should people think about that expectation for the growth in customers on 100 over 100,000 as we start to kind of anniversary the solution based licensing? Well, the when we really look at it, I really don't expect that to slow down W data by enough in and of itself is, you know, something that a lot of our customers add on. It it not only increases our ADS on new customers, but it also augments the ADS on the existing customers. Global statutory reporting, another one of our growth deck is typically a much larger deal as well. So, you know, we're we're feeling really good about that in terms of keeping those, those numbers growing on the large customer side. Stuart, do you want to add anything? Yes. So I'd just say, I mean, echo at Marty saying, if you think about the 4 vectors, EMEA is largely about new logos. Stat global stat reporting is largely about add on sales. W Data is largely about add on sales to existing customers. An integrated risk is a little bit of both. It maybe leans a little bit towards, add on sales to and customers. So 3 of the vectors are sort of are either heavily or entirely focused on add on sales to addition to existing customers. So that's why we're confident about the growth in the larger deals, larger contract size. Okay. Got it. And then one other one I have is on the operating income guidance for the fourth quarter. And just curious kind of what the I know we're ramping in your we're hiring salespeople and all that. We're doing a lot of breakfast and lunches. That's a lot of breakfast and lunches. But, the question, I guess, is what goes into? I think it's kind of a bit lower than what the Street has. So just kind of see the what goes into that for the fourth quarter? Sure. So it's not a lot different, but it is it does reflect the acceleration of the growth that I mentioned in in my, talk earlier. You know, it's also, you know, we've hired a new COO and We're investing in, and marketing as well as in sales in Europe and in global stat. In an integrated risk and in W data. So it really reflects the acceleration that I mentioned in my comments earlier. Okay. Thanks, Stuart. Thank you, Matt. Thank you. Your next response is from Stan Schlotzke of Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead. Daniel line is open, please. Hey guys, this is, this is Hamza Fodderwala in for Stan Zlotsky. I just had a question on the increase in investment. How much of it, was a sort of a catch up on hiring at all? I mean, I noticed The headcount growth did pick up a little bit. Again, in Q3, I think it was up 17%. It was up from sort of single digit growth in the first half. So was it at all, related to maybe a bit of an under investment earlier in the year? So Hamzah, thanks for the question. You know, we were headcount was relatively flat in 2018. And, we, when we were doing the analysis on the new growth vectors, we, pulled the trigger on that earlier this year and we made comments to that effect on our conference call. And it just it just that the headcount starts to build as, you know, takes a while to hire people. And so that's really what you're seeing from flat to single digit to to faster growth in the third quarter. This is Marty. I just want to comment on that as well. I we really don't view it as under investment. I mean, I think I was pretty clear, when I took the helm that we're gonna we kept the headcount flat in 2018 and we wanted to figure out what to invest in. And so we were very thoughtful. We tested all that stuff And we didn't want to jump into these things unless we had a high level of confidence. So really that was the period of time that we were we're doing that due diligence on those different growth factors. And so now, we feel very confident in all four of them and now we're going to start to invest. And as we've always said, growth is our primary focus. Got it. Okay. That's it for me. Thank you. Thanks, Hassan. Your next response is from Tom Roderick of Stifel. Please go ahead. Hey, good afternoon. Thanks for taking my questions. So, Marty, maybe I'll throw this first one at you, Stewart. Feel free to chime in. You've had the benefits now of a full year of sort of testing the solution based licensing. You've seen, I think, pretty darn good traction from that. It looks like that approach is wrapping up earlier than expected. So you'll get through the customer base by the end of this year. Can you just talk a little bit about the success level you saw in that in terms of lift in average price or the benefit to that Marty, you mentioned a little bit of churn at the lower end, for some price sensitive customers. So perhaps that was a little byproduct that will get through And then perhaps the 3rd part of that question is just as we look at the acceleration in growth over the last several quarters, how much should we attribute to the solution based pricing as opposed to just general better execution and newer markets and things of that nature? Well, most of those questions were, most of those questions were Stewart. So I'll turn it to him and then I'll chime in on any things that I want to add. So go ahead, Stewart. Yeah. So, So, Tom, I'll take the last one first, which, you know, as we've mentioned, the last call, it's hard to isolate, SBL because of, it's it's a matter of determining what time the salespeople would have spent, how they would have spent their time if they were not talking to the customers about SBL. But I think as I mentioned in the last call, we, we think it affected as Bailey, you know, benefit of a couple of 100 basis points. But beyond that sort of level of estimate, it would be sort of misleading to try to be more specific than that. So, you know, the the benefit of SBL, there are there are a couple of longer term benefits. One of it, one is it it it increases, the price for the platform on new logos going forward. That's number 1. Number 2, it increases the number of users at each of our customers who get experience with Wdesk and then become better prospects for calling on for their specific use case that they might use every day. And, you know, we're seeing that, with our, within sales. So that's all that's all been to the good. I don't know if, Martin, if you want to have anything else to comment on. Yeah, I'll just address the churn issue real quick. Churn has been a really, pleasant surprise for us in terms of the lack of churn we've actually experienced as a as a result of SBL, some of the customers on the lower end of the market, you know, didn't see the value they would only add maybe 1 or 2 because they're quite small organizations. We actually modeled a higher churn rate. So we've been very pleased with that. And, having gotten through a lot of those already, I think that that is we've pretty much seen the effect of SBL on churn rate. Good. Very helpful. Great. Okay. And then my follow-up, Stuart, I'll just aim this one directly at you. This is an RPO question, so one of your favorites, I'm sure. When I look at that RPO number, so total is accelerating. It's growing a little faster than even it was. And you're in the low to mid-40s there on total RPO growth. So that's really interesting and good. And if I look at current, it's growing a bit slower than that in the high 20s. Can you talk through the dynamic of that, we saw also in the long term deferred this picked up a little bit more than we are modeling for. So it just strikes me that perhaps you're seeing some customers willing to make longer term commitments to the platform, perhaps that's a function of who you're selling to or what you're selling to or how you're selling to them. But we'd love to hear more about that. Yes. So I think that the main difference there, and I mentioned this in the script is, remaining performance obligations differ from deferred revenue, mainly because we have been implementing some multi year contracts, typically 3 year contracts, but have annual billing terms. So that would explain, the main difference there. It's a three-three-1 contracts are absolutely standard, for example, in the GRC space. And so we're just we're seeing more demand for customers for multi year contracts. Okay, excellent. So that's GRC driven. And just to be clear, even on 606, those are all still recognized ratably on a daily basis So no revenue 606 pull forward associated with that, right? That is correct. Excellent. Okay. That's it for me. I'll jump back in queue. Thank you, guys. Nice job. Thank you. Your next response is from Mike Grondahl from Northland Securities. Please go ahead. Could you rank your 4 growth vectors kind of in terms of their margin profile? Oh, no. I mean, I, Mike, I would say since we're, our view, I mean, on a subscription basis, they're all subscribing to the same platform. And so our costs, at least at the, you know, customers, the price a subscription price minus customer success is pretty close to the same margin for all of them. Now, there, there's, when we're in a new market, we definitely will have higher client services costs as that product matures. And so you'll see, that on the PS line. But on the pure software side, not the services side, you'll see a fairly consistent, gross margin. Got it. And I guess I was thinking more operating margin, but that's okay. I understand. And then can you comment at all just on the acquisition pipeline? Have you leaned into that since the converter? Just kind of what's the current thinking? Yes, thanks. Well, so, you know, we have been certainly looking at acquisitions for 3 years and And, by, you know, we raised the money in part to fund acquisitions We certainly have, increased our activity in that space and looking at investment opportunities. No acquisitions imminent. And we plan to be patient and we plan to execute according to to our strategy, which is one that will have a, you know, a clear commercial objective and will accelerate our existing strategy. Thank you. Your next response is from Brian Peterson from Raymond James. Please go ahead. Hi guys. Kevin here on for Brian. Thanks for taking my call. I wanted to ask a little bit more about your partner strategy. There were a lot of new partners that amplify, that are starting implementations and provide ongoing service around the product. So I guess how was the partner ecosystem and that mix been contributing with some of your recent deals? And maybe related to that, outside of some of the sales and marketing investments in Europe, how do you think about partners as a potential point of leverage going forward? Well, this is Marty. I'll take the first crack at that. What we're seeing in the U. S. Is, a lot of interest from the partners. They've definitely realized that there's demand for the product, they definitely believe they can make money actually implementing the product. And so that has really driven a lot of incoming activity, actually. And, as resulted in us getting some really nice relationships put together. In terms of bookings, we're starting to see that tick up. I'm not going to put a number on it, but we're definitely seeing acceleration in bookings coming from partners, again, off a small number. But I'll tell you the thing about partners is that partners is a 2 or 3 year investment that they take a while to get up to speed to where they can deliver and they know how to sell it and all those types of things. So I'm very pleased with the rate we're adding partners, very pleased with the rate that partners are bringing us leads and actual deals. And, overall, I think the growth rate we have there been very promising. It's going to be a big part of next year, frankly. In Europe, we're obviously starting to scale partners there as well. We're not as well established there. So it's a little bit behind, but it's going to be a big part of the strategy there as well. Partners, I think, play in a more important role when all those countries have different cultural aspects. And So we're definitely going to connect with some of the same partners, just their local offices in Europe, and that's already underway, but behind where we're at North America. Got it. That's helpful. Maybe one more. Can you talk about the near term implications of getting the FedRAMP moderate authorization? I know it's only been a few weeks but what's been some of the early feedback I guess from your government vertical sales team just in terms of that potentially opening some more doors for you guys? Yeah, I think that, we're going to, again, it's off a small number, but we're going to see some nice growth out of the federal government over few years. There's been a lot of interest in the GRC, our, I shouldn't say GRC, but our controls and audit and solutions. We've already had some sales there and the financial reporting is also starting to pick So I think that's going to grow nicely over the next few years. I also want to say that All of our commercial customers are getting much more sophisticated in their ability to assess security of SaaS solutions. When we first started back in 2008 2010 when we launched the product, we were oftentimes maybe the first 2nd or third SaaS app these companies had ever utilized. And so we were an early pioneer there and the of our commercial customers has just followed has gone up a really steep learning curve. And so There's a lot of things we have to continually invest in to get our security to the point where our customers have confidence. It's just an ongoing investment. And, so FedRAMP was a big part of that. Big step forward. We tell every commercial customer, when we have our security reviews with customers or we discuss security with prospects, that were FedRAMP authorized. And that covers a lot of the questions. You just say that and it covers a big percentage of the questions they have because they know what that implies in terms of internal controls and monitoring, continuous monitoring. So it's going to be a big deal for us across all of our customers and it will start to grow the federal government. We tend to going to these things when the time is right. Maybe just a little conservatively at times, but we really think that we're ready to step into now that we have FedRAT moderate and we have a good gauge on the solutions we can sell to federal government. And I think it'll be a nice growth, another nice growth factor for us. So FedRAMP moderate, as Marty mentioned in his original talk here, broadens are reached 80% of the information types that the federal government uses. So it was a significant expansion for us. Understood. Thanks guys. Thank you. Thank you. You have a response from the line of Tom Roderick of Stifel. Please go ahead. Alright, gentlemen. This falls under the yep. It can't get rid of me. This falls under the category of don't feed the bears. So, Stewart I appreciate the top line look at 2020. And as I sort of sort of running through the numbers just for the fourth quarter and thinking about what it means for OpEx it strikes me that we'll probably be somewhere in the ballpark of 6263, maybe a little bit above that and non GAAP operating expense. Without, I'm gathering you probably didn't want to give a full year look on profitability. Otherwise, you probably would have done that, but would love to know your thinking as to the run rate we would build into our models here for 4Q. Are there any sort of one time marketing push benefits or pull ins to that number? Or would you sort of encourage us to think about the run rate on OpEx that we'd model here for 4Q? As a nice starting point going into 2020. In other words, kind of keep building off that forward as opposed to a pullback in Q1. Any thoughts on how we kind of consider OpEx modeling for next year? For next year for 2020. I thought you're talking about 2019, which we gave specific guidance on. No, just thinking about how it plays forward after Q4. Yeah. So what I said, Tom, just to recap, I said that we expect our margin on non GAAP operating loss to decline in 2020 relative to 2019. Consistent with our planned investments and growth factors and that we'd give more, specific guidance on our next call. But you're right, it's too early for us to be much more specific than that. There are no further responses in the queue at this time. Do you have any closing remarks? Thank you very much. Thank you for joining us today. This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect. Everyone else has left the call.