Forrester Research, Inc.

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Forrester Research First Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star then 1 on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star then 0. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Chris Finn.

Hi, everyone. Before we begin, I want to quickly introduce Tyson Seeley, our new Vice President of Investor Relations. Tyson joins us from Keurig Dr. Pepper, where he ran Investor Relations for the last three years, and prior to that, he was in IR and Financial Planning Analysis at Pinnacle Foods. We're very excited to have him on board and look forward to leveraging his expertise as we ramp up our Investor Relations function. Welcome, Tyson.

Thank you, Chris, and hello, everyone. Thanks for joining today's call. I'm very happy to be here with Forrester and look forward to making connections with all of you. Earlier this afternoon, we issued our press release for the first quarter of 2022. If you need a copy, you can find one on our website in the Investors section. I'm joined this afternoon by our Chairman of the Board and CEO, George Colony, and Forrester's Chief Financial Officer, Chris Fenn. George will open the call this afternoon, and Chris will follow with a financial update. We'll then go into Q&A. Kelly Hipler, Chief Sales Officer, and Kerry Johnson, Chief Product Officer, will also join us for the Q&A portion of the call. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that this call will contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Words such as expects, believes, anticipates, intends, plans, estimates, or similar expressions are intended to identify these forward-looking statements. These statements are based on the company's current plans and expectations and involve risks and uncertainties that could cause future activities and results of operations to be materially different from those set forth in the forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ are discussed in our reports and filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission and the company undertakes no obligation to publicly update any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. Lastly, consistent with our previous calls, today we will be discussing our performance on an adjusted basis, which excludes items affecting comparability. While reporting on an adjusted basis is not in accordance with GAAP, we believe that reporting numbers on this adjusted basis provides a meaningful comparison and an appropriate basis for our discussion. You can find a detailed list of items excluded from these adjusted numbers in our press release. And with that, I'll hand it over to George.

Thank you for joining Forrester's Q1 2022 investor call. We are very excited to have Tyson joining the Forrester team. Welcome, Tyson. Forrester came out of the gate strong in Q1. The momentum of 2021 continued as we delivered our third consecutive quarter of double-digit CV growth. In Q1, we produced double-digit revenue growth, headlined by a 14% increase in research revenue. Wallet retention improved to 103%. CV increased by 15%, helping us deliver adjusted EPS of 45 cents, exceeding our high-end guidance by 11 cents. And Chris will provide more color in a few minutes. Forrester's sustained CV growth is partially driven by the success of our recently launched flagship research product, Forrester Decisions. As a reminder, Forrester Decisions combines the best of Forrester and serious decisions research. It constitutes a unified portfolio of 15 different research services built around business and technology personas and their critical priorities. Since its launch in August 2021, the portfolio has become the fastest growing product in Forrester's history, winning new logos and migrating existing clients from the legacy Forrester and Sears decisions research products. The Salesforce has enthusiastically embraced Forrester decisions. The product is selling at list price and the vast majority of clients have opted into multi-year deals. Five to six priorities lay out the critical imperatives for each services persona. The priorities were constructed based on hundreds of customer interviews and they have made Forrester Decisions easier to sell and to buy. The priorities are a shortcut to value for clients. And in addition, they create a clear research agenda for the analysts that serve Forrester Decisions clients. To drive excellent customer experiences with our new portfolio, We made enhancements in Q1 to the Forrester Decisions user interface and search functionality, and we continue to streamline how our clients find relevant research. Between search, the priority architecture, and site organization, clients can get to value faster. Quarterly visits to the site are up 42%. In addition, Forrester Decisions inquiry and guidance sessions are enabling clients to directly apply our research. And here's a quote from the CMO of a large commercial bank. Forrester decision seats are a must-have for all of my direct reports during the bank's next budget cycle. I have already added two seats for team members who are involved in our analyst conversations. So as noted on previous calls, we will be continually improving the product and finding innovative ways of delivering our research. Benchmarks and forecasts have been added as content categories, and we expect to create additional features and value over time. Fortune decisions will become our power platform, the most important product in our CV growth engine. Before I move on, I would like to highlight some of the key research we published in Q1. In March, a research team analyzed the much-hyped Web3. The report concluded that many of the underlying Web3 technologies and premises will never be fully workable, and that CIOs and CMOs should adopt a posture of educated wariness. Forrester has been assembling a portfolio of research to prepare Forrester's clients for potential cybersecurity attacks that we expect to be launched in the West as a result of the Russia-Ukraine war. And finally, a group of analysts published an in-depth analysis of the metaverse, concluding that the technology is primordial at best. Now, that said, large company executives should engage in aggressive experimentation to prepare for possible internal and customer applications that could emerge in the next five years. As these examples demonstrate, Forrester is unafraid to make objective calls on emerging technology, running against the grain of media, venture capital, and vendor hype. And finally, I'm happy to report that the White House announced two weeks ago that the federal government will be using Forrester's CX Index to measure its department and overall citizen experience. Its goal is to move from the bottom of the CX Index to the top 10% over the next four years. Forrester has been working with the U.S. government for many years, and we are very happy that it has now decided to embed our methodologies to accurately measure and improve its digital and physical experiences. Turning now to our events business. Earlier this week at Austin, Texas, Forrester hosted its annual B2B North America Summit. And this was Forrester's first in-person event since November of 2019. Attendees were excited to be together and they were very highly engaged. All of our events for 2022 are planned to be hybrid, in-person, running concurrently with virtual. We had over 1,500 attendees at Summit with over 100 in-person sponsors. In addition to bringing back physical events, Forrester fully reopened 18 offices globally in Q1, after more than two years of being closed. Forrester rights around the globe are embracing the spirit of our new Anywhere Work policy, which empowers employees to decide when and how often to be in the office, depending on their needs. We believe this is not only the right approach for our people, but also for our business. Our research shows that companies embracing similar policies have happier, more engaged employees with attrition running lower than average rates. Now, it is a challenging hiring environment, and as you know, Forrester is looking to expand headcount by double digits in the year. After spiking in 2021, attrition across all departments is dropping, and we are expecting that in 2022, the company will return to our pre-pandemic levels. Anywhere Work is helping us with talent acquisition, and we've expanded our hiring staff to enable the company to extend its research and sales capacity. Overall, company headcount was up 7% in Q1 as compared to Q1 of 2021. I'm pleased to share two new additions to the Forrester team. First, Sarah Leroy has joined us as our new Chief People Officer. Sarah has had a very distinguished career, most recently as the Chief Human Resources Officer at RSA Security. She will play a key role in expanding our ability to attract and retain top talent, and her background extends to compensation, diversity and inclusion, and training and development. I would also like to welcome Warren Romine to Forrester's board. As we scale our company and continue to drive contract value growth, we look forward to benefiting from Warren's deep expertise in leading investment banking, finance, and M&A functions. Warren joins as the eighth independent board member out of a full board of nine members. And finally, in celebration of Earth Day, we announced our plan to reduce foresters' carbon emissions from 2019 to 2025 by 50%, and anywhere work will be a big part of that story. Before I turn the call over to Chris, I'd like to take a moment to discuss the Russia-Ukraine war. Four years ago, we made the decision to not expand our business into Russia, and we have no staff, offices, or significant business in that country. That said, we did have several clients controlled by Russian companies. In the quarter, we made the decision to sever those relationships. We have stated publicly that as a company, we stand with international sanctions levied against Russia in response to its invasion of Ukraine. Additionally, I'm very proud of Forresterites, who collectively raised a substantial sum for humanitarian relief in Ukraine, one of the largest fundraising efforts in our history. So to conclude, we are very pleased with our performance in the first quarter as we continue to increase contract value at double-digit rates. I'm especially proud of how the Forrester teams are staying focused on helping our clients navigate the challenges of pandemic, inflation, and the war in Europe. We continue to be on their side and by their side. And now I'd like to turn the call over to Chris Finn, Forrester's CFO.

Chris. Thanks, George, and thanks again to everyone for joining us. There is no question that the year is off to a great start. As George mentioned, we delivered strong CV growth of 15% in the quarter and overall revenue growth of 10%, driven by the strength in our research business. In the quarter, we exceeded our guidance for revenue, adjusted operating margin, and adjusted EPS. Specifically for the first quarter, our key metrics continued to be strong, with improvements in wallet and client retention compared to the prior year period. Sales productivity also continued to increase, and I am encouraged by our growth in sales headcount. Let me walk you through our results in more detail, starting with revenue. Total revenue increased 10% to $125 million compared to $113.8 million in the prior year period. As I indicated, this growth was largely driven by our research business. Specifically, research revenues increased 14% compared to the first quarter of 2021 as a result of the aforementioned double-digit growth in CV. Further, wallet retention increased 14 points compared to Q1 of last year, and was up one point over our previous quarter, representing our sixth sequential quarter of wallet retention growth. Client retention and client count were also both up from Q1 of last year, although they did decline slightly from Q4 due to elevated churn within our smaller vendor clients. To this end, and looking forward, we believe there may be continued noise around client count and retention as we migrate our legacy base to the Forrester Decisions platform. But with that said, our wallet retention metric continues to improve, showing that we are keeping and enriching our larger clients. Part of the enrichment story has been the success of our Forrester Decisions platform as clients that migrate to our new platform have shown strong enrichment. Let me provide a quick comment on our CV metric. We have calculated the current quarter CV at the 2022 foreign currency rates that we use internally. And for comparative purposes, we have recast our historical CV at these 2022 rates. We have publicly updated CV metric on a quarterly basis, going back to the first quarter of 2020 in the investor presentation on our website. Our consulting business posted revenues of $38.4 million, which were essentially flat compared to the prior year as our analysts continued to shift a portion of their focus to delivering on our fast-growing CV business. And finally, in terms of our events business, we had minimal revenue as we did not hold any events during the quarter. We look forward to talking to you more about this segment of our business as the year unfolds, and we are certainly encouraged by the prospect of holding hybrid events this year. As George mentioned, we just completed our first hybrid event, B2B Summit, this week in Austin. Continuing down our P&L, adjusted operating expenses for the first quarter increased by 12%, driven by higher headcount and increased compensation costs. To be more specific, for the first quarter, headcount was up 7% compared to the same period in 2021, which was in line with our projected headcount for the quarter. As a result of these increased expenses, adjusted operating income declined by 7% to $13.1 million, or 10.5% of revenue in the current quarter. compared to $14 million, or 12.3% of revenue, in the first quarter of 2021. Interest expense for the quarter was $0.6 million, as compared to $1.1 million in the first quarter of 2021. This reduction was driven by lower outstanding debt. Finally, adjusted net income of $8.6 million and adjusted earnings per share of 45 cents were flat compared to the same period last year. Turning now to our cash flow and our balance sheet, During the first quarter of 2022, cash flow from operating activities was $22.7 million and capital expenditures were $1.3 million. Given this strong performance, we ended the quarter with nearly $132 million of cash and investments. From a capital structure standpoint, we paid down $15 million of our revolver during the first quarter, leaving us with $60 million of outstanding debt. We also purchased $9.5 million of our common stock, leaving us with approximately $80 million of our stock repurchase authorization as of March 31st. We intend to remain opportunistic with our stock repurchase program during 2022. Given all of that, I'll now walk you through what we are expecting over the rest of the year and provide some additional commentary. We have good momentum coming out of the first quarter, although there are still many macroeconomic uncertainties in the balance of the year. We did a good job in the quarter navigating these challenges and hiring new talent in what remains a difficult environment for talent acquisition. Given the ongoing war in Europe, COVID-related challenges, and record inflation rates, which all lead to rising recession risk, we remain cautiously optimistic looking ahead to the rest of the year. As we have indicated previously, we do expect some lumpiness across the quarters on a top-line basis. Specifically, for the full year, we continue to expect FX hand winds to reduce revenue growth by approximately 1% to 2%, with an insignificant effect on adjusted operating margin. Also, as I mentioned on our last call, a portion of our research revenue is recognized as we deliver it, such as our reprint product and the advisory and event tickets, that are included in certain of our research subscriptions. This revenue can be uneven and was higher than expected in the first quarter. Due to the uneven nature of this revenue, along with current macroeconomic risks, we do not expect the revenue beat in the first quarter to carry over for the full year. I'll now provide commentary on our expectations for top line growth for our segments. In our research business, For the second quarter, we expect high single to low double-digit growth, and for the full year, we expect low double-digit growth on the strength of our CV growth in 2021 and our projected CV bookings for 2022. For our consulting business, we expect revenue to continue to be flat to down in the second quarter with double-digit growth in the second half as we ramp capacity and mid to high single-digit growth for the full year. Finally, for our events business, our revenue guidance includes a presumption that we will continue to be able to hold hybrid events during the year, which is highly dependent on local conditions in each of the jurisdictions where we hold events. As previously mentioned, we just wrapped up our first hybrid event and are planning for our second significant hybrid event later in June. Given all of this, we expect second quarter revenue to increase 160% to 170% compared to prior year, and we expect event revenue for the full year to approximately double compared to 2021. As we move through the year, we will revisit the events revenue outlook based on changing macro environment conditions. In the second quarter, given everything I just walked through, we expect total revenue of $144 million to $148 million, and for the full year, we continue to expect total revenue to be $550 to $560 million. In terms of other guidance, in the second quarter of 2022, we expect our adjusted operating margin to be 14% to 16%, and we continue to expect our full year adjusted operating margin to be 11.5% to 12.5%. given post-pandemic ramping of the business along with our ongoing investment initiatives to drive growth. We also continue to expect interest expense at $2.5 million for the year as our lower debt balance should offset expected increases in rates. In the second quarter and for the full year of 2022, we continue to expect an adjusted effective tax rate of 30%. Finally, for the second quarter, we expect our adjusted EPS to be in a range of $0.70 to $0.76, and we continue to hold our guidance for the full year in the range of $2.25 to $2.35. Given the strong performance that we posted today, we have the potential to raise this guidance later in the year, but given the macro environment that both George and I have spoken to, we are holding our original guidance for the full year at this point. In summary, Forrester is off to a great start to the year, with Forrester decisions performing well, our talent acquisition engine bringing new employees to drive our growth, and excellent CV and revenue growth. While there are still many macro headwinds, both geopolitical and economic, we are confident in the guidance we have put out today and our ability to navigate through these challenges to deliver on our commitments. Finally, I continue to be extremely thankful to all our employees for their work to drive these strong results. With that, let me hand it back over to the operator for any questions.

Ladies and gentlemen, if you have a question or comment at this time, please press star then 1 on your telephone keypad. If your question has been answered or you wish to remove yourself from the queue, simply press the pound key. Again, if you have a question or comment at this time, please press star then 1 on your telephone keypad. Our first question or comment comes from the line of Andrew Nicholas from William Blair. Your line is open.

Hi. Good afternoon. I wanted to start by touching on a few references in your prepared remarks and in the release about the macro headwinds. I understand that that would make sense, certainly in terms of conservatism, for the rest of the year. But I'm just curious, are you seeing anything – kind of with boots on the ground now in terms of those headwinds impacting your business? Obviously, it doesn't look like that in terms of the first quarter results, but thinking about maybe the first four or five weeks of the year that's leading you to mention that? Or, again, is it just tied to conservatism through year end?

Yeah, thanks. This is Chris. That's a good question. So, yeah, as we indicated at the call, I think, you know, there's still a lot of uncertainties in the current environment, as we mentioned. Ukraine, Russian war, COVID, driving continued lockdowns in Asia and elsewhere, heightened inflation, a tight labor market, the risk of recession. I think really, given that it's so early in the year, our view is that it's a prudent course to really just hold our guidance at this juncture. Given all the uncertainties, we do have full confidence that we can navigate all these challenges that we've done over the last three years and believe we can deliver on the guidance that we reiterated today. with the possibility of updating the guidance later in the year, as we noted. But at this point, we're just taking the stance that we're gonna wait and see how these uncertainties unfold. And I'd call out that a large part of our top and bottom line beat this quarter was also driven by the one-time revenues we noted. And those are not necessarily things that are gonna repeat, per se, and can cause some lumpiness in our results. And we were conservative in forecasting those items in the first quarter. We continue to be conservative as we forecast those items going forward.

Andrew, I think we believe there will be more clarity after Q2, so we'll give you better direction then.

All right, great. Thank you for that set color. And then I just wanted to spend a little bit of time for my follow-up question on Forrester decisions. I think, George, in your prepared remarks, you talked about it being a benefit to both upsells but also new logos. Is there – you know, a benefit that's disproportionate between the two that you're seeing from Forrester decisions, or it's a pretty broad base across all those different types of growth vectors? Thank you.

Hi, Andrew. This is Carrie Johnson. If we're talking about the sort of split between new business versus existing migration, the bulk of Forrester decisions, well, it's both, but we are seeing really healthy uptake from our existing client base, and that's where we're seeing a lot of the Booking benefits, too, a revenue benefit where those deals are mostly multi-year, selling at or above list price, and they also have a pretty healthy contract value increase as they migrate to the new portfolio.

Great. Thanks again.

Thank you.

Thank you. Our next question or comment comes from... Thank you. Our next question or comment... Our next question or comment comes from the line of Vincent Colicchio from Barrington Research. Your line is open.

Yes, good quarter, guys. Thanks, guys. Yeah, I'm curious. Your contract value, very, very strong year-over-year growth. Sequential growth slowed a little bit. I'm wondering if there's anything to look into that, or should it pick up again in the Q2? And... Yeah, that's my question.

Yeah, I mean, no, I think we did see good, strong growth in contract value, and our expectations as we move forward, you know, we'll see that pick up, obviously, in revenue as we move forward.

And then I'm curious, for forestry decisions, are you seeing the strength, is it broad across all the functional areas you're targeting, or are there some like many things in life, you know, some areas where you're seeing a lot more strength than others.

Hi Vince, this is Carrie. I'll take this one too. We're seeing, we're really pleased with the size of every single service right now and we're seeing some strength in some of our services that we've, like customer experience and B2B marketing executives in particular, but overall every service has cleared a threshold or sort of booking threshold that we were looking for. Very pleased with it across the board.

And then, Kelly, are you continuing to see a return of new clients that had left during the pandemic?

Thank you, Vincent, for the question. In terms of our win-backs, we do continue with that program, and we are continuing to win back clients not at the same rate as pre-pandemic because, thankfully, we've been retaining more of them. But our win-back efforts do continue, and that is contributing to the strength of our new business efforts.

Okay, I'll go into the queue.

Yeah, we're all just coming back from summit events, and there were a number of clients there who they were former Serious Decisions clients who dropped off. They've come back to us now. So I think, you know, as the events go back to being in person, that's helping us reconnect, and that's bringing those clients back into our fold, which is nice.

Okay, I'll go back into the queue. Nice quarter. Thanks.

Thanks, Vince. Appreciate it.

Thank you. Our next question or comment comes from the line of Anja Soderstorm from Sedoti. Your line is open.

Hi. Thank you for taking my questions, and congratulations on another great quarter. First, I'm just curious. The number of clients declined sequentially. Is there anything to call out there?

Yeah. Thanks, Anja. So, yeah, you know, as we move forward, I think as we – move through the transition of the base of legacy clients over as far as the decisions. You know, we do expect to see some lumpiness in number of clients and client retention. You know, I think, you know, we went down sequentially from 78% to 77% on retention and number of clients did dip slightly. But we do expect to be in the high 70s as we continue and go through that migration. You know, as we said before, you know, we're looking at, essentially, approximately one-third of CV to be in FD this year. We're still very much on track to get those targets. There was some seasonality in Europe.

Okay, thank you. And is there any sort of timeframe when you expect all the legacy to have transitioned onto the forester decision? Not really.

We're still – Anu, this is Carrie. We're still determining the total timeline for that. We're still selling some of our core legacy products. We have discontinued some, but our core research products actually are still available for purchase. So we'll probably have more information for you at the next call on that.

Okay, thank you. And then I'm just curious, you mentioned – the risks you are seeing, and you mentioned the recession. How did you fare in the last recession?

What was the last part of that? How did we fare in the last recession? Last recession, yeah. In 08, we float free cash right through that recession. Yes, revenue was down. Maybe someone in the room, if they help me with this, probably was down 3% or so, 3% to 4%. It wasn't down that much, and we float free cash throughout the 08 recession. Obviously, the OO, to go way back here, OO recession was much more difficult for us because that was a tech recession, essentially. But, you know, as I said, I think at the last call, Anya, our clients are looking to us to help them through higher inflation. There's a change in budgeting, which we help them with budgets during recessions. So, you know, we are affected. But in times of change and times of challenge, that tends to stimulate some, a good retention of research. So our FP&A guy's writing this down on the board right now. We were down 3% in revenue in 08, strong cash in that recession.

Yeah, it may have changed. Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah. It's early in the year, Anya. I think that's the point we're making at this juncture. So it's a little bit of a wait-and-see approach.

Yep.

And I understand. Thank you so much. That was all for me.

Thank you very much.

Thank you. I'm sure no additional questions in the queue at this time. I'd like to turn the conference back over to Mr. Tyson Seeley for any closing remarks.

Thank you, Howard, and thank you again, everyone, for joining us today. As I said up front, it really is a pleasure to be here at Forrester, and I'm excited about the opportunities ahead for all of us. I'll be around in a Thank you.

Thank you very much, everyone. Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for participating in today's conference. This concludes the program. You may now disconnect. Everyone, have a wonderful day.