Asure Software Inc

Good afternoon and welcome to Assure's fourth quarter 2021 earnings conference call. Joining us for today's call are Assure's Chairman and CEO, Pat Geppel, Assure's Chief Financial Officer, John Pence, and Head of Investor Relations, Randall Rudnitsky. Following their prepared remarks, there will be a question and answer session for the analysts and investors. I would now like to turn the call over to Randall Rudnitsky for introductory remarks. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, everyone. And thank you for joining us for Assure's fourth quarter 2021 earnings call. Following the close of markets, we released our financial results. The earnings release is available on the SEC's website and on our investor relations website at investor.assuresoftware.com, where you can also find the investor presentation. During our call today, we will reference non-GAAP financial measures, which we believe to be useful to investors and exclude the impact of certain items. A description and timing of these items along with a reconciliation of non-GAAP measures to their most comparable GAAP measures can be found in our earnings release. Today's call will also contain forward-looking statements that refer to future events and as such involve some risks. We use words such as expects, believes and may to indicate forward-looking statements and we encourage you to review our filings with the SEC for additional information on factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from our current expectations. Finally, I'd like to remind everyone that this call is being recorded and it will be made available for replay via a link available on the investor relations section of our website. With that, I would now like to turn the call over to Pat Geppel, Chairman and CEO. Pat.

Thank you, Randall, and welcome everyone to Assure Software's fourth quarter earnings call. We welcome all clients, partners, employees, and investors. I'll begin today's presentation with an update on our business performance of 2021 and specifically fourth quarter. Then I'll turn the call over to our CFO, John Pence, for a more detailed review of our financial results and financial outlook for all of 2022 and first quarter of 2022. I'll then offer comments as we look forward TO THE YEAR OF 2022 AND THEN CONCLUDE WITH A SESSION OF ANSWERING YOUR QUESTIONS OF OUR PERFORMANCE. WE REPORTED A VERY STRONG FOURTH QUARTER PERFORMANCE WITH REVENUES GROWING 29% TO 21.1 MILLION AND EBITDA MORE THAN DOUBLING TO 2.4 MILLION. WE GREW EBITDA MARGIN STRONGLY TO 11% IN THE FOURTH QUARTER from 7% the year earlier. Notable has been our strong gross margin improvement over the last two years. As you recall, we sold our workspace business in 2019, and this was our second year as a standalone human capital management business. We're very pleased with our gross margin improvement. For the full year, we grew revenues by 16% to $76 million, with about one quarter from organic revenue growth and the remainder from acquisitions. Our new sales bookings rose by 29% relative to 2020, and we are guiding for another positive year in 2022, with revenues expected to reach $85 to $90 million, approaching the important milestone of 100 million revenues where we gain critical scale benefits of our business. In order to get there, we're executing against our 2022 plan. The first initiative I want to talk about is the transformation of our sales organization to drive accelerated levels of organic growth via new client wins and cross-sells. We have significant expansion of our direct sales staff underway, and it's supported by the investments in partners and sales and marketing, including lead generation activity. Not only are we expanding our reach, but we're more effectively targeting clients and investing in sales automation tools and support. These efforts are expected to accelerate time to productivity, reduce customer acquisition costs, and enhance cross-selling activity. Underpinning our sales objectives, we're spending more on digitizing and activating new targeted campaigns to feed our sales engine. We're off to a great start in 2022 with new sales bookings in January rising by over 22% year over year, and we're just getting started. We have grown by a factor of three, the sales organization since we began as a pure play human capital management provider two years ago. We're continuously optimizing our sales and marketing tactics and putting our resources behind the market opportunities that we think will bear the most fruit. We're also leveraging key technologies within the Assure family that provide us with unique differentiation in the market that will enable us to expand our relationships and tap into larger client segments. A great example of a key asset that we're leveraging is our HR consulting business. We feel this business is a differentiator for us, and it offers several technology and service options to suit the needs of small and medium-sized businesses, ranging from self-service HR support all the way up the value chain fully outsourced HR solutions. Our solutions provide compliance with federal, state, and local employment laws, replace an internal HR manager for a fraction of the cost, and provide a team of certified HR professionals. We're really excited about the differentiation we have, and the early wins are really encouraging. Next, I'll turn over to our product strategy. There are two main objectives that drive our product strategy. One, the first is our focus on extending our platform. This is really all about moving from the legacy way of doing business in the human capital management world of providing transactional support to just businesses to reaching employee activities directly in ways that positively impact their lives. This is about moving from a fulfillment model to a future world where we deliver to electronic wallets, real-time pay, alternative currencies, and become a trusted financial partner for employees. The second is our focus on building platform connections. This is our drive to make connectivity of services, systems, and application much more seamless and robust, not only within the walls of the Assure ecosystem, but by expanding needs to our community of partners. This provides new value for our clients by increasing automation and making administrative business processes easier to use and more efficient. Long term, we see this as a big opportunity for Assure. Our product strategy is all about the future and positioning Assure with its unique collection of assets to deliver to businesses their employees' unique values. This is where we think the market is going, and we intend to be leaders in taking it there. So let's talk about some of the recent product developments in that light. In the fourth quarter, and with future announcements last week, we announced a new integration with Intuit QuickBooks. This enhancement allows Assure's clients to automatically sync their payroll data with with QuickBooks Online, eliminating the need to enter payroll manually or duplicate information between the general ledger and accounting software. This makes it easier for our customers to do business with us and saves them time, allowing them to focus on their core businesses. We recently announced a new treasury management system to bring world-class automation to our clients. This system allows customers to be more effectively manage their treasury functions, and provides instant visibility, thereby enabling them to operate more efficiently and reduce their risk. This solution is geared for human capital management providers and larger enterprises who need automation and is a compelling and innovative product in our view. In the fourth quarter, we build functionality to integrate with employee navigators. that employee navigator serves 60,000 companies and serves 10 million employees with benefit administration onboarding compliance and more this solution creates a seamless connection between employee navigator and assures payroll and HR solutions enabling benefit brokers to separate their offerings create new value for the brokers and their clients lastly I want to touch on on the unique value of our tax platform. Client interest continues to build, particularly among larger enterprises. Our solution has a distinctive position in the market and offers compelling value by enabling our customers to lower risk and seamlessly integrate with our accurate and trusted tax filing solutions. We're very excited about this business, and it really has the potential to significantly expand our addressable market and open up new client segments for us. We're experiencing strong demand for our tax solutions and have integrations underway with several new partners. We will keep you updated on our progress and successes. While some of our protocols are future-oriented and they represent a change from the way human capital management solutions been traditionally consumed in the market one thing is not changing and that's our commitment to be the most trusted partner for small businesses and to deliver them effective solutions that enable them to focus on their core businesses in the current environment which features an unprecedented level of compliance and regulatory change we are determined to be a valued partner with that I I'll turn it over to John Pence to talk about 2021 and his comments. John?