We are good to go? All set? Okay. Thanks, everyone who is here joining the room in person, as well as those that are joining over the webcast. Before we start off, my name is Jacob Barrish. I'm the research analyst here at William Blair that covers Workiva. For a full list of our research disclosures, please visit our website at williamblair.com. With that, though, really excited to have Chief Financial Officer Jill Klindt and Chief Strategy Officer Mike Rost here for this presentation. Just before we kick off and before we go into the fireside chat, Jill is going to kick us off with a few slides just to level set with those in the room that might be newer to the story of where Workiva is, what its platform does, and kind of the market that it's addressing. Jill, I'll turn it over to you.
Thanks, Jake. Appreciate it. Thanks for having us. All right, we will get started with our safe harbor as well. You can take a look at these slides after the fact. We will have them available for you. Some lovely pictures the team put in of Mike and I. We can go past those and head straight to our first slide, helping to describe and give a little bit of context for our platform. We are a company that provides a platform for assured integrated reporting to our customers, meaning that we help our customers with financial and non-financial reporting, all with assurance wrapped around it, the ability to audit that report, whether it would be audit of their financial information or whether that is audit of, say, sustainability management information.
We're built to be able to help customers transparently report period over period, consistently over time, and be able to allow their auditors to easily audit those numbers. Our customers bring that information into the platform, connect that data throughout all of their different work products. Regardless of where you're using a bit of data, whether it's in external reporting, whether it's in management reporting, whether it's within your controls management, that same piece of data is consistently carried throughout the platform and consistently linked so that no matter when you change that information, it's changed everywhere throughout the product. We have financial reporting, sustainability management, governance, risk, and compliance, again, assured and integrated reporting.
Thinking about our TAM, the way that that mix of solutions comes across in our TAM is that we've got it split up here for our $35 billion TAM between the Americas, Europe, and APAC. 20% of the total TAM is coming from sustainability management, 20% comes from GRC, 10% comes from the industry verticals, and 50% comes from financial reporting. We have a good split of our TAM, large under-addressed TAM, across the portfolio of solutions, but very clearly laying out also the split between the Americas, Europe, and APAC. We're more heavily into the Americas right now. A certain area of growth that you've probably heard us talk about over the past few years, if you're familiar with the story, has been moving towards having 25%-30% of our total revenues coming from Europe over time.
We are definitely on a path towards that as we continue to grow outside of the U.S. in Europe. For the next slide here, we have Workiva's best position to capture the growing opportunity, meaning that the capabilities within our platform and our ecosystem are there for us to be able to execute against. The four components of our growth are our platform, the connected data that we were just talking about, as well as the large portfolio of solutions. It is our ability to grow and our opportunity to grow outside of the U.S., and also our partner network. All those things will help to drive our growth over the next few years.
Thinking of how you can expect us to perform as far as financials over the next few years, we have provided medium-term 2027 targets as well as long-term 2030 targets for both revenue and margins. We reiterated our guide about a month ago when we filed Q1 results around total subscription revenue guide and also our operating margin guide, the 5%-5.5%. The way that we are executing today in the company is not only with our 2025 margin goals and guidance in mind, but also specifically moving towards our 2027 goal of 16% operating margin for 2027. We are also pleased to be able to report that we expect to have 20% subscription revenue growth for 2025 as well. With that, we can—that was almost exactly five minutes. We can move into Q&A.
Perfect overview. Did exactly what you said you were going to do.
Yeah, there we go.
Thank you for that. I guess just to kind of think about where you began. You obviously began as a financial reporting platform, have expanded subsequently to GRC or ESG. What were customers using before Workiva? How did they get these workflows done, and what are you most commonly replacing?
I mean, if you, in the way back time machine and thinking back to SEC reporting, there would have been other solutions that customers were using that did not allow them to connect the data in the way that we do and did not allow them to do real-time reporting with the SEC. Building that report with no pencils down period, direct connection to the data so that if you are making changes, if there is a need to make a change to any data element within your report, you can very easily do that. It would have been some of the competitors that we see today, Defin, Topo Merrill, but it also would have been companies that no longer exist would have been competitors in those early markets.
For some of our other areas of focus, especially around sustainability management, many companies today are just using office tools type solutions, more manual processes to do some of the work that they're doing around this reporting. What they consider when they're looking at Workiva is a way to automate those reports and streamline their processes to be able to bring the data all together within the platform and not have to rely on those manual spreadsheets and charts and graphs that connected to those spreadsheets potentially. It brings them the ability to be more auditable because the auditors can look at and see exactly where that data is linked. They can see if there was any change to that data, whereas in Excel or Word, you can't necessarily do that.
It's a much more clear-cut way to become more efficient with their processes as well.
Yeah, that's helpful. You have done a lot of work to build out the GRC platform, the sustainability platform over the last few years. Could you talk about how those products have evolved over the past few years? How often are you landing broader platform deals that include financial reporting, GRC, and sustainability versus just maybe getting your foot in the door with one of those point products and then expanding over time?
I'll take the product side of here first. Yeah, if you go back 10 years when the company went public, right, in our S1, we highlighted five use cases beyond just the core SEC reporting solution. Yes, we got our start in this SEC area. In our most recent K, we highlighted that as still more than 40% of our business, but a lot of our growth now is coming from broader financial reporting solutions, governance, risk, and compliance, or GRC, as you said, and sustainability. We have been investing quite a bit on the solution area over the last five years and expanding out that footprint and expanding out where we get that revenue. When you think of our use cases, yes, SEC reporting for publicly traded companies, which is doing the Qs and Ks and the XBRL tagging and the filing parts of that.
We also support private companies with private company reporting. Many of the large privates have a lot of the same complexities as public companies, just do not have to file with the SEC. We help companies with global statutory reporting. It is multi-entity reporting for all their legal entities, reporting to their tax authorities, and internal reporting, and other use cases outside in Europe. For governance, risk, and compliance, we started off in helping companies with SOC or internal controls over financial reporting. That has now expanded into internal audit, policy management, and risk management. For sustainability, we actually were involved way back when, about 2012, in helping companies with their initial corporate sustainability reports. Back then, it was more of a marketing exercise than an investor-grade reporting exercise.
Really, over the last three years, we've invested significantly in that and have had really strong growth in that market. That is helping organizations with, one, their performance metrics that they've signed up for, their science-based targets. Yes, there are some regulatory parts of this, which could be the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive in Europe or the upcoming California Climate Disclosure Rules or maybe supporting one of the 20 countries that have aligned with the ISSB or International Sustainability Standards Board. Really, what we've seen over the last three years, the sustainability reporting has come now in line with some of the disciplines around financial reporting, which is investor-grade data, going through audit processes, and regular disclosure processes.
The other part of that question about how we're landing, we have talked at length about our focus on selling the platform. When we go to talk to our customer, whether it's an existing customer or a new logo, we really are focusing on what the platform brings to them, not necessarily an individual solution, although certainly you have a conversation around those individual ways that the platform supports their reporting. We do focus on the platform and sell across the platform. You've seen within our metrics that we provide the success that we've had there as we've had 32% growth in Q1 in customers spending more than $300,000 a year with us and spending more than $500,000 a year with us. Both of those groups grew 32% in Q1. That's not new. We've continued to grow those categories.
have continued to see expansion in the amount of our revenue coming from customers that have more than one solution with us as well. We have a lot of opportunity for the customers that are spending less than $100,000 with us to be able to continue to expand. That is an area that we will focus on. It is a mix between that expansion into our base and selling new logos that we are seeing success across the platform.
Okay, that's helpful. Then zooming out a little bit, obviously the macro is a big conversation topic these days, especially with the recent kind of tariff uncertainty out there. You all called out a little bit of macro sensitivity last quarter. Maybe talk about what you saw in the macro environment and just how demand has been trending over the course of the year.
We did call out some uncertainty, which I think you're hearing from a lot of companies. What we relayed was that we saw uncertainty. We took into account the risk that that had within our model for the year and called out that we reiterated guide for revenue and for op margin for the full year. Taking into account all the risk that we were seeing, it was really around more expansion or elongation of the deal cycles, not necessarily hearing a no, but more that companies were being very careful about how they were spending and not unlike what we ourselves are doing. It was more around that and a potential delay in when a customer might move forward with a project, as well as some of the sustainability conversation also came into play.
The clarity that we received around the CSRD in Europe was really helpful so that companies that were in wave one continued to report. There was a delay in the wave two and wave three, which were not necessarily where we were focusing in any case. Really, the wave one customers were where we were initially focusing our efforts there. It was all of these things, just the general macro, that was putting some pressure, we felt, on the financials and so did hold our guide on those two metrics.
Okay, that's helpful. Then just thinking about margins, how do you think about the balance between growth and profitability? You obviously had the slide up there about the 2027 and 2030 targets, which show a pretty steep expansion in margins. Just curious how you plan to drive that margin expansion over the next few years.
Absolutely. We think about it all the time at the company. The way that we are executing and operating today are with those margin goals in mind. As we are considering where we are investing, as we are considering the ways that we can be more efficient throughout the business, we are considering that 16% margin target for 2027 as being the first step towards the 2030 goals as well. Throughout the business, within our customer success teams, we are looking for ways to be more efficient in the way that we support our customers, whether that is with systems or external systems or whether that is within our platform building additional functionality to be more efficient. Absolutely. We have talked at length about moving our more high margin setup and consulting services over to our partners, and we have been executing on that now for a couple of years.
You have seen that reflected in our numbers, and we will continue to see leverage there from the resources in that team. It goes on down throughout the rest of the business, focusing on using systems to be more efficient throughout the business. If not even systems, also thinking of other ways to be more cost-effective in the way that we staff. There are a lot of different things that we are considering as we execute on and against those margin goals.
Okay, I was just going to pause on that. I mean, because it's a very important point, I think, for the dialogue that's going around on our stock today, right? Implied in our committed guide for 2025 is an acceleration of margins in the second half. If you look at history, you'll see that quarter over quarter we have some fluctuation, but typically the second half we have higher margin than we're doing that. Also implied in that, again, we reiterated this on our call in May, is that we are committed to those 27 targets, which also implies an acceleration of margin into 2026 and into 2027. This is an expanding margin story while still at the same time driving growth, which I think is kind of an exciting story to look at hopefully from an investor perspective.
I just want to reiterate, we have the plans to get there and are really excited about the growth and leverage we can drive in this business.
That's really helpful. Yeah. Switching over to sustainability, another big topic among investors. Mike, maybe I'll throw this one over to you, but can you talk about the demand drivers for sustainability between you have CSRD in Europe, you have state regulation in the U.S., internal SBTi initiatives? What drives the demand to your platform and what are you most excited about moving forward?
Yeah, so I'll maybe even just take a step back, right? There's been a lot of media coverage of the broader sustainability and derivatives of sustainability over the last 100 days and maybe even a little before that. There's been a lot of moving parts in this business. I'll just kind of net it out. First and foremost, when we talk about drivers, we've been selling well ahead of regulation for the last several years in sustainability, right? These are drivers of business performance, managing risk, organizations want to participate in global supply chain. There are a number of different business drivers out there for companies that are focused on sustainability. It's not just a regulatory thing. Second is one of the drivers is organizations just self-regulating. There's something out there called the Science Based Targets initiative, SBTi.
You can go Google it and they have a dashboard out there. In the dashboard, you'll see that as of last week at least, there's close to 8,000 companies that have now committed to science-based targets. And what that means is they've gone through a process to get their targets approved and they've also committed to meeting those and report against those. That's up from about 4,200 this time last year, right? So a significant increase. It's showing in spite of regulation, in spite of all the news and narrative, organizations, corporations are focused on addressing some of these sustainability needs. Then there's the regulatory piece, right? We break it down between Europe, North America, and the rest of the world. In Europe, there was a law passed going on two years now almost called the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive.
All the news that's happened here in the last 100 days has been they came out last fall and said, "Hey, you know what? We might modify this existing regulation and simplify it." Then there were all these stories about what's going to happen and it's going away and this, that, and the other. Clarity came out in February, end of February, this thing called the Omnibus. They even had a vote in April for part of this. To net it out is organizations, the threshold that used to be companies of employee size of 250 and more had to report. They changed that to now be companies over 1,000 employees in Europe that had to report. First change. Second change is, and Jill had mentioned, there's different waves. Larger companies are wave one.
The companies that are the next size down are wave two. The next size down are wave three. They said, "Hey, wave two and wave three companies, you get an extra two years to report." That was decided on. Now, what's interesting, the wave one companies, the large companies, which is our primary target market, not much has changed for them. These are companies that are actually reporting now in 2025 on 2024 results. You can go out and look at some of those disclosures. What you'll find is the 600 plus that have already been filed, on average, these are documents that are at least 300 pages long and have 100 pages of sustainability information in there. They talk about things like double materiality and all these different reporting standards. This is hard and complex work that's going on that has not changed, right?
We see that as a very interesting market out there of a complex requirement that's just coming into play. Oh, by the way, audit requirements are coming forward for these. It's just going to get harder for them. In Europe, things are moving along. Yes, there were a few delays for organizations in the wave two and wave three. It did not go away. The smaller companies who we did not target, yeah, some of those do not have to report anymore. In the U.S., yes, there's been maybe not an embracing in the new administration of sustainability. However, what does exist in the U.S. from the regulatory standpoint is the state of California has passed a law, climate disclosure rule.
Even as recent as last Thursday, the regulator CARB in California did a webinar of which the sponsoring center got on along with the regulator and said, "Hey, we do not have all the details of what is going to have to be disclosed, but be clear, you still need to report in 2026 on 2025 results." The core companies that have to report on this are companies over $1 billion that are doing business in California. That means companies that may have been paying state California sales taxes or have employees or paying payroll taxes in California, right? That is 5,000 plus companies that might be there. There are other states right now, even the state of Illinois here. There is a bill, a House bill sitting at a House committee right now.
There's a bill sitting in New York, a bill sitting in New Jersey that are all in process. Not saying they're going to pass, but there is activity in other states for similar climate disclosure rules. These rules would require organizations to report on their emissions, their scope 1, those emissions they do, and scope 2 and scope 3 emissions as part of this. Again, complex reporting requirements that are all new things for companies to go through. There is a bear case. Maybe Trump comes out and says he can't do any of that. There is a bull case. All this stuff rolls through and all these people have to go report additional information.
Yeah, yeah. A lot of different kind of irons in the fire on that front. Today, are you seeing more demand for sustainability in the U.S. or in Europe? And when we think about the European opportunity, that's obviously a much more greenfield market for you. You're very penetrated in the U.S. So when you land those new logos for sustainability in Europe, how often is it also pulling through kind of the ESEF or the financial reporting business that you can also sell to customers?
It is true that if we, as we're selling into Europe, it is more often a new logo because we are not as penetrated there in the market. We would not focus on selling sustainability. We would focus on the platform. Does it always pan out? Not always. Often we are able to sell not only sustainability, but potentially annual reporting, potentially some of the other solutions that are more common in Europe because a lot of companies, if they have multiple entities, there might be multiple entity reporting that they are doing. Certainly if a company is carefully considering the need for assurance around some of this data in the future, they might also be looking at building a controls environment around it. They might also be purchasing audit risk controls. We are always focusing on the upsell and multiple solution selling across the platform.
That is the conversation that we're going to have with that customer.
That makes sense. Then shifting gears to another catalyst for your business, the SAP migration, Oracle migration, all the ERP super cycles that we've been hearing out there. How often are you being pulled into deals as a part of a larger transformation around the ERP? How has that been trending over the course of this year?
Yeah, so I think the, don't give specific numbers on how many, but I will say the environment, the way I talk about this is when organizations go through a migration like this, this is typically a disruptive thing they're doing. They're moving from on-prem to cloud. What happens, similar to doing your own home remodel, right? You start looking at everything else that touches that core system of which Workiva would be one of those things. What we've seen and we've highlighted in earnings calls the last year every quarter is a deal example of how we get engaged with those. Sometimes we get involved upfront, which is organizations want to make sure that their final disclosures and their process for that doesn't get disrupted while they're changing all their backend transactional things out. Workiva can play a role there.
At times we're involved in the middle. For example, we highlighted a deal a couple of quarters ago where a large oil and gas company was going through a transformation and they discovered they had a 40-year-old mainframe system doing internal reporting. They said, "You know what? We're not going to go live on our new cloud system here and connect it to this really old thing," right? There it is the, "I started remodeling the kitchen. I got to remodel the room next door because I do not want to have those two things coexist." Finally, we highlighted one last quarter, which was a deal where they had gone live, in this case with S/4HANA. As part of the overall transformation, they were now looking at the other systems on the backend. We can get involved in all three parts of that.
To me, it's a trigger event for that. It's important for us, right? Where we are working with our partners, our trusted partners are typically involved in driving some of these transformations. For at least one of these big four firms, we are part of their S/4HANA playbook, right? It is even part of how those partners go and serve those clients as Workiva, if that requirement comes in, is part of that transformation.
Okay. That's helpful. I'm not going to ask you to predict when IPO markets return or anything like that, but just on the capital markets piece of your business, how has your traction been with getting into private companies earlier in their reporting process? Maybe take us back to a more normalized kind of IPO environment back in 2019 or 2020 and how capital markets activity kind of benefited your platform during those times.
Yeah. I'll start with the last question, which would have been 2021 when it was the largest year that we saw around capital markets. It was less than 5% of our total revenue. We've maintained a pretty steady state then as we moved into 2022, 2023, 2024 around capital markets. Thank you for not asking us to time that out. I would not do so because capital markets remains a potential tailwind for us if there is a true return to a lot of activity there. Thinking about how we market to private companies, I would say in the past that we really would have focused on a private-to-public pathway. Working with a private company and their annual interim reporting and building a control environment as they were considering an IPO. We've moved more towards there's a lot of really large private companies.
We were less focusing on that potential move to an IPO and more around just serving them for their needs as they have them as being a large private company, whether they're reporting to different investors or however they're funded. There's still a need for them to operate in that way. Honestly, they're probably expected to, especially at size, have a more quarterly, a more external financial reporting cadence where they're reporting quarterly to different stakeholders where they're expected to have a very strong control environment. We help those companies to maintain that within the platform similar to how we would for a public company, regardless of whether or not they're on a path to an IPO. Of course, if they do move towards an IPO, we expect to be able to help them.
It is more the focus on private companies as a whole as being a very valid market for us, the same way that a public company would be.
Okay. That's helpful. We're coming up on time here. I'll ask one last question, but per usual, I'll make it a two or three-parter to get in everything. The go-to-market motion has been, you've been making some changes to your go-to-market motion over the last year or so. Could you talk about, A, how those changes have been trending? B, what ending are we in? Where are we at in the process? The last part would be, where are we at in terms of getting the AEs to be able to sell the full platform versus being kind of supplemented by the more solution specialists for each of the product tiers?
I'm going to take the middle one first on the ending. Having been in software for a number of decades, right? I will say no company is ever done with their sales and marketing programs, right? You're evolving at different stages of company and different things. It's always a moving target. The way we talk about it, right? It's about the structure, it's about the staff, and it's about the strategy. Yes, we are making some structural changes. It's interesting when I bring that up. Half the investors I talk to say, "Make changes faster." The other half say, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, do not impact growth," right? It's finding that balance of how we go through that. We are methodically going through that and doing some structural things to make sure that we have a more effective, productive model in the future.
On the strategy side, it is really about where we're selling and where we allocate those resources. On the staff side, it's really about bringing in a different type of seller in. Jill highlighted some of the larger contract metrics that we have now. With that, right, it is finding reps that are truly scalers and evangelists and go out and close those large deals, right? Million-dollar deals don't happen in software, right? You have to go earn those. It's a different type of skill set to close a million-dollar deal versus a $50,000 deal. We're focused on that strategy. From that standpoint, Jill, I mean, where we're going with this, it's in the model a little bit and.
Absolutely. It's in the model and to continue to look for ways to more efficiently deliver on, have our sellers deliver more efficiently. A lot of them that we've hired more recently, getting them up to speed to be more productive. All those things are where we're focusing as we consider our margin goals over the next few years.
Okay. That's really helpful. Thanks, Jill. Thanks, Mike. Appreciate you all spending the time with us today. Thanks, everyone in the audience. If you are interested in digging deeper into the story, we'll be up in the breakout room, Jenny B, and that breakout session will start in about 10 minutes. Thanks, everyone.
Thanks, Jay.
Thank you.
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