Q1 2025 ACCESS Newswire Inc Earnings Call
Speaker Change: Greetings and welcome to the Access News Live, 1st quarter 2025 Arning's Comforts Call.
Speaker Change: At this time, all participants are on the synony mode, and a question and answer session will follow the formal presentation.
Speaker Change: If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star-zero on your telephone keypad.
Please note, this conference is being recorded.
Speaker Change: I will now turn the conference over to your host, Mr. Sean Cardiff.
Sir, you may begin
Sean Carliss: Welcome to Access Newswires' first quarter 2025 earnings conference call. My name is Sean Carles and I serve as the company's director of sales. I've been in the press releasing communications industry for nearly 11 years, including the past seven here at Access Newswires.
Sean Carliss: It's a pleasure to be your host today, and just a moment you'll hear from our Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Brian Balbirnie, and our Chief Financial Officer, Steve Knerr, who will walk you through the company's performance for the quarter. Before we begin, I'd like to read a brief version of our Safe Harbor statement.
Speaker Change: I'd like to remind you that statements made in this conference called concerning future revenues, results from operations, financial position, markets,
Brian Balbirnie: Relations, and is provided for informational purposes only. With that said, I'd like to introduce the company's founder and chief executive officer Brian Balbirnie and our chief financial officer, Steve Knerr. Brian ? Thank you, Sean.
Speaker Change: You're hosting today the treat for us. I've enjoyed watching your progress over the last almost seven years. You've been a great mentor and now it is treat for your team and our organization. I have no doubt you will continue to succeed and we all look forward to seeing with the next seven years' brains. It's exciting to go to market with you each and every day.
Brian Balbirnie: Most of you don't know this, but Sean purchased his very own Jedi fighter helmet a while back and he puts it on each day and now serves as his internal organization's headshot. I love seeing this, Sean. But our customers can rest assured that Sean surely takes it off before reaching every call. Keep up your Jedi ability, sir.
Speaker Change: We love having a little fun here each quarter with our team, have a mem host our company call, also gives you a little bit of our human approach to how we work together.
Speaker Change: With that, good morning everyone, welcome and thank you for taking the time to speak with Steve and I today on our first quarter 2025 performance.
Speaker Change: Our press release, which is accessible in our newsroom, was released pre-market this morning and provides key takeaways on our performance for the quarter.
Speaker Change: Revenue is delivered from Q1. We're 5,476,000 compared to 5,572,000 and first quarter last year. The 1.7% decrease in revenues were a result of less public activity in the period.
Speaker Change: Market-driven volatility drives and is customer profile to perform in this manner, something we believe will improve later this year.
Speaker Change: With that said, our core press release business grew 1% in revenues and 2% further in volume. Strategically, becoming access newsletter and not a compliance and communications company was and is the right decision, as we continue to believe in the address world market for our public relations subscriptions and press release products.
Speaker Change: We are invigorated to see gross margin improvement, something we messaged last year that we believe would prove itself out this year.
Speaker Change: Seeing results deliver 78% gross margins to 3% higher than Q1 last year at the 75% number is something to build on. I think we're slightly ahead of pace, and we will continue to be mindful of further efficiencies to deliver at these levels without sacrificing our customer satisfaction.
Moving along to KPIs on customer counts and subscriptions.
Speaker Change: In the prior quarters, as we've been transitioning to subscription focus sales, we methods of the average reoccurring revenue AR would continue to increase with guidance that by the end of the year, new AR would be 14,000.
Speaker Change: For Q1, Lucis Griffin signed with $14,059, moving our average from 9,300 and Q1 last year to just over 11,139 this year in Q1.
Speaker Change: That's a 20% increase. If we look at total subscriptions, they rub 9% for the quarter compared to last year up to 955. Keep in mind, these are communication subscriptions only as we have removed all compliance related metrics as a result of the sale on that compliance business.
Speaker Change: To be a firm, we still believe that we can get to the 1500 subscriptions by the end of this fiscal year something I will talk a good bit about later in the call. Before I turn the call over to Steve, though to discuss results in more detail, I want to be sure that we intimate to our stakeholders a few obvious points.
Speaker Change: We've been called from our prior year and call. Last Q4, at the end of Q1 this year, the financials would be a little bit messy with discontinued operations of our compliance business.
Speaker Change: We reduced the debt in the balance sheet by 78% as a result of the self compliance business.
Speaker Change: We completely rebranded our business, the product offerings, pricing strategy, and internal systems to drive this long-term growth that we're talking about today. We reduced headcount to realign with our go-forward business.
Speaker Change: and we deliver goes from our messaging ARR increases and customer growth, speaking on which also increased over 12,000 at 1% from last year.
Speaker Change: We are pleased on where we are and we have a clear focus strategy on where we are headed. We know that Revenue Growth is the ultimate goal and getting the business to scale is needing as paramount as we deliver this. We will continue to see these levels of growth margins, expand attached with some operations and we put up percentages.
Steve Knerr: Back to where we've seen them several quarters ago. There's a lot more to talk about today so I'll turn the call over to Steve to cover the quarter and urine highlights. Steve.
Steve Knerr: Thank you, Brian , and good morning everyone. As Brian mentioned, a lot was accomplished during the first quarter of 2025, that we believe will put us on the right path for growth in the quarters ahead. But for now, I will highlight some of the results we achieved during the first quarter of 2025.
Steve Knerr: Total revenue was $5.5 million, a decrease of $96,000 or 2% compared to $5.6 million for the same period of 2024.
Steve Knerr: The decrease was due to a slight decreases across our various product lines. However, Revenue from our core press release business increased 1% due to an increase in volume during the quarter.
Steve Knerr: During the quarter, we experienced an increase in our Gross Margin percentage, which increased to 78% during the first quarter of 2025, from 75% during the first quarter of 2024. Gross Margin also increased to $4.3 million from $4.2 million.
Steve Knerr: The increased and gross margin percentage was due to optimization of our operational teams in lower head count.
Steve Knerr: Moving to operating loss, we posted an operating loss of $677,000 for the first quarter of 2025, compared to an operating loss of $862,000 during the first quarter of 2024.
Steve Knerr: In addition to higher gross margin, operating expenses decreased $96,000 to $4.95 million.
Steve Knerr: The decrease was primarily due to a reduction in sales and marketing expenses as a result of lower headcount and advertising costs, partially offset by an increase in general and administrative expenses due to a one-time stock compensation benefit recorded in the first quarter of 2024 of approximately four hundred and thirty thousand dollars.
Steve Knerr: On a GAAP basis, we reported a loss from continuing operations of $765000 or <unk> 20 per diluted share during the first quarter of 2025 compared to a net loss of $783000 or 21 per diluted share during the first quarter of 2024.
Steve Knerr: Income from discontinued operations net of tax increased to $6 $2 million during the first quarter of 2025 compared to $644000 in the first quarter of 2020 for.
Steve Knerr: This increase is primarily the result of the gain on the sale of the compliance business Brian discussed earlier.
Steve Knerr: Looking to some non-GAAP metrics EBITDA was negative $4000 for the first quarter of 2025 compared to $245000 or 4% of revenue for the first quarter of 2024. However.
Steve Knerr: However, adjusted EBITDA for the first quarter of 2025 increased $503000 to $564000 or 10% of revenue to $61000 or 1% of revenue for the first quarter of 2024.
Steve Knerr: This increase is primarily due to adding back more stock compensation expense because of the benefit recorded in the first quarter of 2024, I noted earlier as well as adding back the loss recorded on our interest rate swap in the first quarter of 2025 compared to subtracting the gain we recorded in the first quarter of 2024.
Steve Knerr: non-GAAP net income for the first quarter of 2025 increased $571000 to $206000 or <unk> <unk> per diluted share compared to a non-GAAP net loss of $365000 or <unk> 10 cents per diluted share in the first quarter of 2024.
Switching over to the balance sheet and cash flow statement, our deferred revenue balance which is revenue we expect to recognize primarily over the next 12 months increased 6% to $5 million as of March 31, 2025, compared to $4 7 million as of December 31, 2024, We also increased our cash generation from continuing operations, which amounts are.
Steve Knerr: Two $809000 during the first quarter of 2025 compared to $77000 during the first quarter of 2024.
Steve Knerr: Adjusted free cash flow was $1 $29000 for the first quarter of 2025 compared to negative $126000 for the first quarter of 2024.
I will now turn it back over to Brian who will provide some updates on the business customers subscriptions and volumes, while with everything else. We have planned for the remainder of the year.
Steve Knerr: Brian.
Speaker Change: Thank you, Steve, but the remaining time today I'd like to speak about there and articulate our go forward products, where we see growth coming from recent wins, our product innovations as well as further efficiencies that we can see in the business.
Speaker Change: I wanted to go back to this last quarter I do not think I did an adequate job putting the products together for you in each of their respective subscriptions as well as what we keep as a result of the compliance business sale.
Speaker Change: 10 individual products I highlighted last quarter and the three different subscriptions here is how they are sold exercise our includes our investor Relations website, corporate newsrooms and our quarterly earnings calls.
Speaker Change: Access PR.
Speaker Change: Our news distribution, our media monitoring media database pitching in corporate newsroom.
Speaker Change: Additionally, we have standalone product subscriptions that are sometimes sold as add ons to <unk> and access PR subscriptions. Those are our PR optimizer, our events platform for investor meetings in annual meetings and then the two compliance products that we kept as a result of the sale was our SEDAR filings, which directly tied to our <unk>.
Speaker Change: Public companies for press release distribution, two filed with SEDAR in Canada as well as our incident management wastewater services, which is a new York stock exchange subsidy product at <unk>.
Speaker Change: Wanted to continue on our platform.
Speaker Change: All access subscription is essentially a combination of both our IR and PR subscriptions that I just mentioned about the market is telling us and by pipeline insights at all signs for the remaining part of the year and into next year will be the majority of our growth will come from our access PR subscriptions and offering that typically starts at around nine.
Speaker Change: <unk> and tiers, all the way up to 17000 plus.
Speaker Change: Breaking it down a bit more since approximately half of our revenues that come from subscriptions today and approximately $12 million annually about 75% of it is access PR and growing.
Speaker Change: To get to our 2500 target number is going to be heavily driven by the <unk> platform and its new innovations slated for this year some of which we have talked about in the past.
Speaker Change: We will see platform add ons through the remaining part of the year some of which are internal efficiencies to help drive margin and prepare us for scale and volumes that innovation was released you are just a few weeks ago internally is referenced as our press release content validated we believe an industry first enhancement to our editorial process whereby editors IR team can utilize our proprietary.
Our language model to detect keywords phrases and are acronyms, we know our content guidelines partner networks and prohibited contents policies will share.
Speaker Change: It will not accept automatically this information and flag it for referenced by the customer and our internal teams, we expect to see up to a 10% efficiency gain by utilizing this tool and as we learned that allow our agents to get smarter. We expect to make this feature available to our customers in the back half of the year, whereby they can pre validate their voice in the press release, but also <unk>.
Speaker Change: Lines are enhanced version of our.
Speaker Change: Our AI writer to help tenacity project engagements across audiences with some very innovative customer suggested the internally developed processes.
Speaker Change: These are two of the areas that we see product innovation coming from this year and are also going to be impactful to our customer, helping solidify gross channels and differentiating our product offering in the market.
Speaker Change: We see comprehensive social interactions and messaging tonality as being the two intersections of convergence whereby our platform can become a centralized communications ecosystem for our company's message that is distributed beyond just the press release and into more of a focused medium selection of story of our storytelling platform.
Speaker Change: IR PR and Qualcomm are all utilizing social mediums content scheduling platforms AI engines, hopefully secure closed platforms are not open LLS unsecured data systems and press release services like ours to tell their story, we envision the storytelling platform, whereby our customer can create a message and enrich it with our system post <unk>.
Speaker Change: Target and monitor each medium performance and outcomes using our all access platform.
Speaker Change: We are excited about these back half of the year developments and what they will mean for our customers and our ability to gain further market share.
Speaker Change: Customers recognize this product roadmap are buying into our subscription vision. These recent wins during the first quarter continued the momentum with customer growth further securing large brands and cross selling current brands are access IR offerings saw big brand wins like EPS for the quarter. Our all access platform saw upsell value driven deals from companies like Blackberry.
Speaker Change: And our access PR not only saw growth. It also saw big Brian wins from Konica, Minolta, and even the Chicago White Sox something that we touched on earlier in the call. Our PR volumes any revenues continued to grow for the quarter a trend that will continue and further expand as we move through the market as the number three volume player.
Speaker Change: Saying that we want to be sure that as no. Although we are continuing to grow volumes and revenues in our business. The industry is retracting bolting revenues and volumes, whereas our growth we are seeing pipeline pricing improvements in the number of inbound customers interested almost at an all time high not to mention we have fielded a good bit of interest in the market with very acquisitive tones.
Speaker Change: That will likely bode well for us as we continue to execute on our growth strategy.
Speaker Change: Lastly, and something else I am personally excited about our product and Dev teams are spending some time with the business initiatives. We have that is to Narita story and editorial format that brings to life one's views missions and storytelling into a near real time spokesperson ish kind of what this.
Speaker Change: This incorporated technology advancement will be industry first advancement and for the reasons I won't be a little brief here today, and P&L lines, but I'm Super Crazy about the possibilities and look forward to showing you a demo on our next call.
Speaker Change: We continue to move forward, we are emerging as very focused communications business led by our subscription platform and our first cross market news distribution brand, our new name, our new strategy and compelling go to market plans is setting us up to emerge in 2025 as the leader in this space illustrating growth in our customer accounts revenues gross margins and earnings power as well as.
Speaker Change: Continued cash flow from operations.
Speaker Change: In closing last quarter I said, we anticipate over the next couple of years, we will derive the majority of our revenues from reoccurring subscriptions. Our goal was to reach 75% by the end of 2026.
Speaker Change: We believe that we are far ahead of that so it will be very close by the end of this year far ahead of our initial projections slight gross margin improvement in customer accounts and we.
Speaker Change: We are built to deliver on our guidance and now we need to show the top line that can also continued to similar advancement.
Speaker Change: As always it's nice spending time with you today to talk and discuss our results for the quarter. Operator can we please go ahead with the Q&A portion of the call.
Speaker Change: Yes, Sir.
Speaker Change: This time, we will be conducting our question and answer session.
Speaker Change: We'd like to ask a question. Please press star one on your telephone keypad.
Speaker Change: A confirmation tone will indicate your line isn't the question Keith.
Speaker Change: You May press Star two if you would like to remove your question from the queue.
Speaker Change: And for participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star Keith.
Speaker Change: One moment, please while we poll for questions.
Speaker Change: Thank you.
Speaker Change: Our first question is coming from Jacobs Stefan with Lake Street. Your line is life.
Speaker Change: Hey, guys I appreciate you taking the questions and congrats on all the progress here.
Speaker Change: On the gross margin can you just give us a little bit better sense on maybe some of these efficiencies you're seeing obviously nice outperformance in the quarter, but how do you expect the gross margins are kind of trend throughout the year.
Speaker Change: Hey, Jacob Nice, it's nice to talk to you again.
Speaker Change: Great question as Steve highlighted in some of his prepared remarks, a little bit of the gross margin improvement came from staff realignments.
Speaker Change: Top line of the business as we prepare to exit the compliance business.
Speaker Change: And really hone in on what scale could look like for a communications focused go forward platform.
Speaker Change: But the second component is what I touched on is this PRA analyzer products internally that we're using as a compliance check it gives our editors more time to focus on articles handle volumes greater than what they had in the past and so we're able to see some efficiency gains there as we continue to approve it I think I used the word agent that really meant.
Speaker Change: Hey agents in AI bots that are running in the background to continually find new things and can aid band. So we expect that even to continue we don't see pricing pressures in the market if anything we see less in price.
Speaker Change: On a pay as you go basis as well as bundled subscriptions moving upmarket. So we've got some installation on topline. That's just now becomes a scale game. So we really do believe between 75 and 78% is where we'll see the remaining quarters.
Speaker Change: Okay very helpful. And then next one maybe.
Speaker Change: Dissect a little bit on the new subscribers and being on boarded at 14000 plus.
Speaker Change: Our or is that more of a function of.
Speaker Change: A change in pricing or is it more product uptake.
Speaker Change: It's a combination of both really we've done well.
Speaker Change: Groups like Blackberry coming back into the platform to two.
Speaker Change: Trade up I've been using this.
Speaker Change: Theres nomenclature inside the organization excuse me about trade up and trade in.
We're doing a really good job of customers trading up right meeting, they're buying a introductory or a small platform and theyre coming back within the year to upgrade with Blackberry is a great example of that there's many others that are causing less generic.
Speaker Change: And then secondarily, we see.
Speaker Change: The trade in how do we get customers to come into our product platform from the competitive landscape that's out there, meaning they buy three or four or five vendors consolidate to one we're seeing those prices start to come in at a higher wage as well.
Speaker Change: It also does impact having large accounts with.
Speaker Change: With a much kind of disproportionately they are in the top line.
Speaker Change: But we're seeing it across all areas, which is a good indicator to us.
The stickiness of the product platform is starting to happen within the customer base, we've invested heavily in our customer experience teams.
Speaker Change: Love, our customer more as we say to get in and show them. The demonstrated values of each of the components and how they use them across all the mediums and we think that's starting to progress for us, which will ultimately help on retention and fishing and everything else.
Speaker Change: Okay. Thanks, maybe just one more.
Speaker Change: Yeah.
Speaker Change: Blackberry White Sox, obviously, some some big brand name wins here, but you know what's the sales cycle like how different is it from.
Speaker Change: Maybe onboarding a smaller public company.
Speaker Change: Or are these customers finding out about access.
Speaker Change: Yeah.
Speaker Change: The rebrand of our business is really driven home traffic and volume inbound interest we just from a.
Speaker Change: Purchased in a couple of different ways from a traffic perspective, we're driving about two and a half to three times more traffic to our platform, which means both customer log in traffic as well as eyeballs.
Speaker Change: Eyeballs people like even I reading news articles every day, which means increased engagement for our customers, which is good stickiness for them.
Speaker Change: Educated customers, where this market is really over the past couple of years changed significantly I think like many other industries and verticals is that our customers educated they're doing their research before they come inbound.
Speaker Change: Make the car before we even contact them. They know what they want they know how they want it and they know what price point they need to be at.
Speaker Change: The large accounts are actually from initial touch to close are.
Speaker Change: Sometimes just as quick as the small and the only difference is once you get past the you know.
Speaker Change: The decision maker you then have the back office compliance of suck too and security concerns and everything else that you've got to go through a preventive management, which takes a little longer.
Speaker Change: D contact the demo to proposal to close.
Speaker Change: In many cases is very similar.
Speaker Change: A lot of them are one call closes on the small side and the larger cap Mega cap companies tend to be you know three to four call closes with a couple of meetings in between and so we're seeing the sales cycle shorten.
Speaker Change: Part of your point, whereas we could then start to see some velocity in this and we continue our marketing and branding and our sales teams continue to work those accounts, we should begin to see a lot more of those large numbers happened for us in the back half of this year.
Speaker Change: Got it very helpful. I appreciate it guys.
Jacob Nice: Thank you Jacob.
Speaker Change: Thank you as a reminder, ladies and gentlemen, if you have any questions or comments. Please press star one on your telephone keypad.
Speaker Change: Our next question is coming from Mike Grondahl with Northland Securities Your line of sight.
Speaker Change: Hey, Brian.
Speaker Change: A question about you said in the.
Speaker Change: Quarter.
Speaker Change: The the subscriptions you signed.
Speaker Change: Averaged $14000 and prior to the quarter.
Speaker Change: Average 9000.
Speaker Change: Is there a.
Speaker Change: Typical what is it 14000 dollar customer look like versus the 9000 dollar customer is there.
Speaker Change: A common path.
Speaker Change: Package they purchased.
Speaker Change: Is it a longer term.
Speaker Change: Just help us understand the difference if you will.
Speaker Change: Yeah, absolutely and I think it's important, particularly I think thanks to talk to you Mike. Thank you I. Appreciate the question Q1 last year was 9000 and change in that number. If you guys go back in history and I can put an update to the slide deck on our investor presentation to kind of show the progression of this every quarter. It's continued to increase.
Speaker Change: We messaged two quarters ago, or 14000 would be our aggregate RVP pantry.
Speaker Change: 2025, and a lot of folks are questioning whether or not we can deliver that and to your point. We've done it by targeted distribution that drives value. So the access P. Our subscription product platform, which is a leading subscription product is made up of media database pitching analytics.
Speaker Change: And news distribution.
Speaker Change: Early on when we started selling that product before we rebranded we were selling it to much more of a smaller business that was buying a budget classic and budget was budgeted distribution. So it didn't really go everywhere that you'd expect like a national or a premier more north American press release that the early or the not the early adopters, but now.
Speaker Change: The adopters of buying a subscription today are buying into.
Speaker Change: More of a north American premium or a U S premium product that rises the price and limits the number of releases they can do so.
Speaker Change: So we're seeing that they are all linked and so.
Speaker Change: I think at the end and Steve keep me honest here at the end of Q3 last year. We were about 11000 vein. We ended Q4 about 12000 and change meaning the deal signed in the quarter.
Speaker Change: Average that and in Q1, they're already at <unk>.
Speaker Change: And so to be fair to that nimble. We believe we can continue to drive a R. R pile.
Speaker Change: On product expansion Adjacencies things like we talked about social integration.
Speaker Change: Things that we talked about what tonality checking and optimization and then the third item that I briefly touched on which is a very audit auditoriums kind of product that will be added to this in the back half of this year. However, we do also think about having a low range.
Speaker Change: Components that could drive significant volume of subscribers and so we want a balanced this we're not going to come off of our 14000 number. This your guidance and go beyond what we May think about next year, having a more entry level product like many other subscription based businesses do you've got an entry point if you can.
Speaker Change: Tens of thousands of customers to come in for a very small amount. So we're keeping our eye focused but for today. We believe we're going to continue this progression and continue to add on which could further drive those 14000 Linda.
Speaker Change: Got it so it's kind of been.
Speaker Change: Add ons have driven it but also some <unk>.
Speaker Change: Repackaged a little bit is a premium product are those the two biggest drivers.
Speaker Change: If I heard you right you're correct.
Correct, yes.
Speaker Change: And then.
Speaker Change: How do you how should we think about.
You have 955.
Speaker Change: Subscribers.
Speaker Change: 12000 customers, if I read it right.
Speaker Change: Where are you targeting those 11000 debt.
Speaker Change: That aren't on a subscription.
Speaker Change: Yeah, there is targeted messaging that goes to those back.
Speaker Change: That group and so we examined the group for kind of a cohort of what what do they offer in the opportunity for us to convert them.
What do they have <unk> as a as a package price today. So here's an example, we have.
Speaker Change: Hundreds and hundreds of customers likely thousands that are by what we have called in the past they value pack or a bundle of press releases. This is the good and the bad about the press release industry and that you can get a lot of companies to purchase at a discount a committed number of press releases and you take the money upfront or.
Speaker Change: You get to recognize the revenue as they use the press release, which then causes it to be a little seasonal a lumpy.
Speaker Change: And not consistent like an air our product we're focused in on those customers spending kind of three to $6000.
Speaker Change: And moving them to a subscription product we've talked about this a couple quarters ago that was where our initial access P or what we call media suite at the beginning.
Speaker Change: Excuse me was really found.
Speaker Change: You know kind of success, 70% of the subscriptions. We sold in Q3 last year came from existing customers and we used a kind of a five to 9000 rate dollar value to convert those customers and so now we're gonna come down market a little bit.
Speaker Change: And saturate those customers and so we believe that there is another kind of 600 plus potential customers that we can get to convert based on their current spend and based on the add on and they'll get to drive to one 1500 number and beyond.
Speaker Change: And that you know that I think answers your questions into your prior question is how do we drive volume. So we think about a lower end subscription because there are thousands of customers that come in and buy a press release right and so they may spend five or $600 once and they have nothing else to talk about and so we want to figure out how ways to drive those customers because that is <unk>.
Speaker Change: To be the key here next year as we can continue to brand and market. We get five to 10 additional every single day coming in and buying press release, what can we do to convert them into something that's more of a recurring model.
Speaker Change: Sure and then just lastly, where is headcount today versus say, maybe I don't know a year and 'twenty three.
Speaker Change: Yeah.
Speaker Change: I would estimate number I'd give you of where we're likely about 100 today.
Speaker Change: We're probably down from 121 25.
Speaker Change: From the prior reference period some of the reduction obviously as members of the compliance division when should the business.
Speaker Change: And then others were just areas of the organization because of.
Speaker Change: The transaction, we were able to lean up and become more can sheet I T HR back office kinds of things.
Speaker Change: No. We we believe we're at a good.
Speaker Change: Head count.
Speaker Change: Kind of G&A Wyatt.
Speaker Change: We do want to spend and invest in sales and marketing.
Speaker Change: We won't read our 10-K here shortly like we can pick it up from the 8-K filed with the earnings press release already this morning.
Speaker Change: We had a reduction in sales and marketing as we approached the rebrand.
Speaker Change: We really wanted to be careful of how much we're investing in sales as we were changing a bunch of brand names and product offerings and now that we've gotten that behind us we've got a likely two to three new salespeople to be added this quarter.
Speaker Change: Rounding out interviews now you've got additional marketing head count coming in as well. So we want to invest in those areas that's going to help accelerate this business even more but.
Speaker Change: Call it around 100 today compared to the 195.
Mike Grondahl: Hey, Thanks, a lot. Good luck. This thank you Mike.
Speaker Change: Thank you Sir.
Speaker Change: Thank you.
Speaker Change: Once again, ladies and gentlemen, if there'd be any final questions or comments. Please indicate so by pressing star one on your telephone keypad.
Bernie Ball: Okay. As we have no further questions on the lines at this time I'd like to turn the call back over to Mr Ball Bernie for any closing comments.
Speaker Change: Ali Thank you Sean Thank you, Steve and I also appreciate.
Bernie Ball: Everyone spending time with US this morning to talk about the Q1 results.
Bernie Ball: A copy of this transcript in the presentation that we shared with you today will be available at <unk> Investor Relations website.
Bernie Ball: Here shortly for reference it's investor thought access newswire dotcom.
Speaker Change: Stephen I as always are available for follow up calls we look forward to talking to you again as always in the future. Thank you have a great day.
Speaker Change: Thank you ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today's call and you may disconnect. Your lines at this time and we thank you for your participation.