ACCESS Newswire Inc.

Greetings and welcome to the Access Newswire first quarter 2025 earnings conference call. At this time all participants are on a listen only mode and a question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference please press star zero on your telephone keypad. Please note this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to your host, Mr. Sean Carlos. Sir, you may begin.

Welcome to Access Newswire's first quarter 2025 earnings conference call. My name is Sean Carlos, and I serve as the company's director of sales. I've been in the press release and communications industry for nearly 11 years, including the past seven here at Access Newswire. It's a pleasure to be your host today. In just a moment, you'll hear from our founder and chief executive officer, Brian Balberni, and our Chief Financial Officer, Steve Nur, 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. I'd like to remind you that statements made in this conference call concerning future revenues, results from operations, financial position, markets, economic conditions, product releases, partnerships, and any other statements that may be construed as a prediction of future performance or events are forward-looking statements, which may involve known and unknown risk. uncertainties, and other factors which may cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed and implied by such statements. Non-GAAP results will also be discussed on the call. The company believes that the presentation of non-GAAP information provides useful supplementary data concerning the company's ongoing operations and is provided for informational purposes only. With that said, I'd like to introduce the company's founder and chief executive officer, Brian Belverni, and our chief financial officer, Steve Nur. Brian?

Thank you, Sean. Your hosting today is a treat for us. I've enjoyed watching you progress over the last almost seven years. You've been a great mentor and knowledge tree for your team and our organization. I have no doubt you will continue to succeed, and we all look forward to seeing what the next seven years brings. It's exciting to go to market with you each and every day. 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 each and every call. Keep up your Jedi ability, sir. We love having a little fun here each quarter with our team. Having him host our company call also gives you a little bit of our human approach to how we work together. 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. 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. Revenues delivered from Q1 were $5,476,000 compared to $5,572,000 in first quarter last year. The 1.7% decrease in revenues were a result of less public company activity in the period. Market-driven volatility drives this customer profile to perform in this manner, something we believe will improve later this year. With that said, our core press release business grew 1% in revenues and 2% further in volumes. Strategically, becoming Access Newswire and not a compliance and communications company was and is the right decision, as we continue to believe in the addressable market for our public relations subscriptions and press release products. We are invigorated to see gross margin improvement, something we messaged last year that we believe would prove itself out this year. Seeing results deliver 78% gross margins, 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. In the prior quarters, as we've been transitioning to subscription-focused sales, we messaged that the average reoccurring revenue ARR would continue to increase with guidance that by the end of the year, new ARR would be 14,000. For Q1, new subscriptions signed were $14,059, moving our average from 9,300 in Q1 last year to just over 11,139 this year in Q1. That's a 20% increase. If we look at total subscriptions, they were up 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 of that compliance business. To reaffirm, we still believe that we can get to the 1,500 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. We recall from our prior year-end 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. We reduced the debt on the balance sheet by 78% as a result of the sale of the compliance business. 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. And we delivered gross margin messaging, ARR increases, and customer growth, speaking of which also increased over 12,000 of 1% from last year. 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 gross margins, expanded cash flows from operations, and EBITDA percentages 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 year-end highlights. Steve.