Goosehead Insurance, Inc.

Hello, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Goosehead Insurance Second Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask the question during this session, you will need to press star 1-1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 1-1 again. I would now like to turn the call over to Dan Farrell, VP of Capital Markets. Sir, you may begin.

Thank you, and good afternoon. Before we begin our formal remarks, I need to remind everyone that part of our discussion today may include forward-looking statements, which are based on the expectations, estimates, and projections of management as of today. Forward-looking statements in our discussion are subject to various assumptions, risks, uncertainties, and other factors that are difficult to predict and which could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in the forward-looking statements. These statements are not guarantees of future performance and, therefore, undue reliance should not be placed upon them. We refer all of you to our recent SEC filings for more detailed discussion of the risks and uncertainties that could impact future operating results and financial condition of Goosehead Insurance. We disclaim any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements except to the extent required by applicable law. I would also like to point out that during the call, we will discuss certain financial measures that are not prepared in accordance with GAAP. Management uses these non-GAAP financial measures when planning, monitoring, and evaluating our performance. We consider these non-GAAP financial measures to be useful metrics for management and investors to facilitate operating performance comparisons from period to period. by excluding potential differences caused by variations in capital structure, tax position, depreciation, and amortization, and certain other items that we believe are not representative of our core business. For more information regarding the use of non-GAAP financial measures, including reconciliations of these measures to the most recent comparable GAAP financial measures, we refer you to today's earnings release. In addition, this call is being webcast. An archived version will be available shortly after the call ends on the investor relations portion of the company's website at goosehead.com. Now I'd like to turn the call over to our chairman and CEO, Mark Jones.

Thanks, Dan, and welcome everyone to our Q2 2023 results call. I'm very pleased to report that we continue to successfully navigate challenging industry conditions with a sluggish housing market and an extraordinarily hard insurance market. meaning we've been working both smarter and harder, but have delivered strong profitable growth. I'm also happy to say that the decisions we've made and actions taken over the last year to restructure our business are helping drive strong top-line growth, producing the planned, strong, and we believe sustainable improvements in profitability. Summary results for Q2 include 31% revenue growth, 27% core revenue growth, 36% growth in premium, and adjusted EBITDA margin expansion of 900 basis points to 33%. These results underscore the strength of our strategy and quality of our execution, focused tightly on the distribution link in the value chain with a powerful choice model. Our 20 years in business, we've seen many challenging circumstances, but each time we've applied the same maniacal external focus on our clients and the market. While our competitors circle the wagons, wring their hands with worry and focus internally, we've been aggressive and externally focused on capturing share. One example of our proactive approach to industry turbulence is broadening our product portfolio. While reduced product access is a headwind in some regions, our choice model allows us to seek out carriers that are looking to gain share and distribute through us at scale. So far this year, we've onboarded 24 new carriers to our platform. Our technology, scale, quality control, and unique human capital make us an attractive partner for any carrier looking to grow. Our agents remain completely engaged in acquiring new referral partners and penetrating deeper with their existing relationships to bolster lead flow. Because of this laser focus, we have agents today hitting all-time new business production highs, notwithstanding external challenges. While we're not unaffected, we are significantly insulated from market volatility that an underwriter or a single carrier product platform is experiencing today. When a single product platform decides to pull out of a market, their agents are left with nothing to sell. Most carriers continue to struggle with the impacts of the COVID Black Swan event and the plague of inflation driving higher claims costs. We are hopeful that the Fed can soon complete its job of taming inflation. The decision we made long ago to avoid entering the business of holding risk is paying off powerfully now. While we acknowledge the challenges we're facing, we don't allow them to become an excuse for weak performance. Market turbulence only serves to magnify our competitive advantages. The restructuring of our corporate sales team has yielded extraordinary results. Productivity is up 57% in the quarter compared to Q2 2022. This growth is despite the fact that we launched seven new franchises in the quarter from among our most productive corporate agents. In June, we began onboarding new agents primarily from college campuses, restarting capacity growth again. Feedback from the corporate sales management team has been that this group of new agents may be the strongest in corporate history. The class that completed training in June this year is outpacing the results of their counterparts from 2022 by more than 65%. We're moving into the later innings of the restructuring work of our franchise business. Our focus has been to move unproductive franchises out of the system so we can devote our finite resources to those that are likely to produce the best yield. We still have some more work to do in this regard through the remainder of the year. We also want to be fair to people and that process takes some time. That being the case, I think we can safely say that the heaviest lifting is now done and we'll continue the cleanup work over the next few quarters. There are three key levers that drive future franchise capacity growth. Adding new franchises, recruiting producers into strongly performing agencies, and converting corporate agents into franchisees. Franchise development's team's priority is the first lever, adding new franchises. And they've been focusing on specific high-priority geographic areas where we believe new franchises could be the most successful and help our carriers gain share in markets they want to grow. With each passing quarter, we become more effective and efficient in developing strategies to attract the right candidates. That, coupled with our improved digital marketing strategy, has generated a much more cost-effective go-to-market strategy. This strategy is resulting in fewer but higher quality new agencies launched that we believe will be significantly more productive and onboard producers more quickly. Lever number two, adding producers to successful franchises that are ready to scale, is proceeding nicely and according to plan. While the removal of underperforming agencies has had a muting effect on the growth of total producer count, the average producer for agency is climbing. And as a reminder to what we've said in the past, these producers have tended to be almost twice as productive as an average new franchise. Level three, conversion of corporate agents to franchises, is also going according to plan, and we intend to launch about 30 franchisees this year from corporate. It is important to remember that these have performed like new agencies on steroids and continue to produce at much higher levels than an externally recruited franchise. This source of the most capable franchise candidates is an example of a very deep competitive mode that is exceptionally difficult for competitors to mimic because nobody has a large super productive corporate agency like ours. Momentum for the longer term is very strong in this channel of candidates. Our recruiting pitch on campus is powerful as we describe the account executive job as essentially a paid apprenticeship that can lead to a candidate opening their own Goosehead franchise just a few years out of college. We expect this to become a very long lever over time. While we're pleased with the progress we've made on average franchise productivity, the gap between a corporate producer and a franchise producer would indicate there's still significant upside in franchise productivity. We will continue to attack this with more robust training programs, investment in client and agent-facing technologies, launching more agencies out of our highly productive corporate agents and managers, and hands-on culture building activities in the field. With our emerging quote-to-issue technology becoming a reality, we anticipate that corporate partnerships will become another channel with extraordinary growth potential over time and be highly scalable. Mark Miller will talk more about this opportunity in a minute. We've made significant progress with our QTI efforts through the second quarter and expect to launch travelers, nationwide, and clear cover auto products during the third quarter. As we launch additional carriers, our agents are able to be more efficient as QTI significantly reduces the time it takes to bind a policy. During the second quarter, we announced our partnership with Vivint Smart Homes as a new lead source to supplement our existing go-to-market strategy and to leverage QTI over time. Mark Miller will also provide more details on this exciting opportunity. Our business continues to generate significant cash flow, and we paid down an additional $10 million of our term loan during the quarter with cash flow from operations. Mark Jones, Jr. will address some of our balance sheet management opportunities in his section of this call. We are incredibly pleased with the results our team's been able to deliver in both a slow housing market and a challenging product environment. We believe that both of these headwinds are temporary, and when we come out the other side, we expect to be a tightly coiled spring with significant future revenue and earnings growth embedded. With that, I'll turn the time over to President and Chief Operating Officer Mark Miller.

Thanks, Mark, and good afternoon, everyone. As I look back on the past year, I'm proud of the business decisions we made and the speed with which our team has executed. Maximizing revenue and profitability has required us to focus intensely on the productivity of our corporate and franchise agents. The core of our strategy was simply to drive quality across the organization. I believe we have made meaningful progress in driving quality in almost every aspect of the business, but there is no area more apparent of this progress than in corporate sales. Last fall, we raised productivity expectations across the corporate sales team. As a result, many agents significantly increased their productivity levels. Agents that could not meet these expectations exited the company. These were not easy decisions, but they allowed us to focus on sharpening the skills of our best team members and driving material productivity improvement. Net-net would dramatically increase productivity per agent and maintain overall production levels with much less cost. From a productivity perspective, these efforts are already starting to yield significant dividends. Productivity per corporate agent has increased by 57% since this time last year. These record levels of productivity were achieved while transferring approximately 25 of our highest producing corporate agents to franchise ownership. While we're optimizing corporate sales productivity, we're also preparing for growth by strengthening and refocusing our recruiting function and reestablishing the hiring standards that historically set Goosehead apart. Now that we've built a healthy and thriving corporate sales organization, we're once again geared to hire agents rapidly over the next several years. This summer, we are quickly adding back top-tier college recruits to the corporate sales team. These hires all met our new rigorous hiring standards. This fall, we are now planning to accelerate our recruiting efforts on 12 college campuses to bring in even more high caliber talent. We anticipate ending the year at approximately 320 corporate sales agents. It's an exciting time to be part of this refreshed, high octane corporate sales environment. which gives us confidence in our ability to successfully absorb and ramp these agents. I could not be more pleased with the progress that Brian Petillo and his team of talented leaders have driven in a very short period of time. On the franchise side of the business, we're also making great progress. Overall, we're pleased with the health of our franchise community, but there are a few areas we would like to focus on and strengthen. Much like we did on the corporate side of the business, we're positioning the company for long-term sustainable growth. To achieve this, we're being much more selective in the franchise recruiting process and targeting particular geographies with low penetration and favorable market opportunity. We're removing existing franchise owners that fail to follow the model and put in full-time efforts. We're also helping existing successful owners with hiring and scaling their businesses. and converting some of our best corporate agents to franchise ownership. We made strong progress in removing underperforming agents from our system, but there is still more work to be done over the next several quarters. Our new initiative recruiting producers for franchises is evolving quickly and starting to take shape. We ended the quarter with eight recruiters and one manager fully dedicated to this effort. and we will expand this team as demand continues to grow. During the quarter, 119 agents were added to the existing franchise network through a combination of in-house recruiting efforts and franchise direct hires. We have the demand. Now we're focused on hiring velocity. Additionally, we remain very excited about our efforts to convert highly productive agents to franchises. We converted seven agents to franchises in the quarter and they continue to launch at much higher productivity levels than traditional franchises. To give an example, I'd like to highlight Colby Seamster, a high caliber corporate agent who is based in our Columbus office. Colby has been with Goosehead for 17 months and averages around 100 new policies per month. He has mastered our model by having 25 active referral partners that send him over 50 leads a month. Paired with a high close rate, Colby consistently delivers new business revenue results of over $30,000 per month. Colby has been approved to launch a franchise in September. Releasing Colby from corporate to launch a franchise is not only good for him, it is also good for us. For Colby, He will generate higher commission splits and have tremendous career opportunity being a business owner and having a clear runway to a seven-figure income. For us, it will extend the life of Colby's career with Goosehead, and it will also highly incentivize him to replicate himself many times over by hiring his own producers, which we believe will yield significant and accelerated growth. We look forward to seeing what Colby accomplishes over the next several years. Now turning to technology for just a moment. Auto policies for three major carriers will be QTI-enabled for all states in the third quarter. We expect this momentum to continue into the fourth quarter with additional carrier implementations for both home and auto lines of business. As a reminder, QTI drastically reduces the time required to quote and bind policies, which will enhance the productivity of our agents while significantly improving the purchasing experience for our clients. Additionally, we integrated CHAT-GBT into Aviator, our internal rater, to assist agents with general insurance questions and state-specific guidelines. As we continue to observe the outcomes of our sales and service agents, we may expand this functionality toward the client to help them navigate the complexities of the insurance market. In the second quarter, we also initiated the Vivint Partnership and completed the purchase and integration of their existing book of business. Converting high volume enterprise leads is a new and exciting sales motion for Goosehead. To fully capitalize on this opportunity, we're building new technological capabilities that allow us to manage and convert leads at much higher levels than we have historically experienced. We're continuing to operationalize the Vivint Partnership nationally, and we will expect to have lead flow and conversion rates optimized later this year and into 2024. I'm also excited about the existing pipeline of potential partnerships we are currently working and look forward to providing you more information on future projects. I'm confident the changes we're implementing will lead to stronger, more sustainable revenue growth and increasing levels of profitability in 2024 and beyond. I want to thank our entire team for their tireless efforts as we continue to harden our processes and operating platform for the future. Now I'll turn the call over to Mark Jones, Jr., our Chief Financial Officer.

Thanks, Mark. We are very pleased to be delivering exceptional top and bottom line results in an increasingly challenging operating environment. I'm incredibly proud of the discipline and grit of our team as they navigate through the unprecedented PNC product challenges. We have continued to gain share, but our runway remains massive. We will still be under 1% market share of this $390 billion industry by year end. We've done a great job expanding our lead flow and gaining market share in this tough environment, The current state of the P&C product market is more than offsetting the benefits we're getting from higher rates as carriers intentionally slow new business in favor of profitability. Importantly, we believe all the actions we have taken to address the product availability and continued real estate headwinds are making us a significantly stronger company that will be a tightly coiled spring for growth as macro factors improve. Just to highlight a few of our operating improvements that will provide ongoing benefits. Our agents have improved sales processes and activated new referral partners at an unprecedented rate. We expect to see tremendous benefit when the real estate market volume re-accelerates and product options expand. We currently account for about 4.4% of new mortgage real estate transactions in the U.S., up from 3.7% a year ago. While premium increases will likely level off as market conditions improve, we should be writing a higher volume of business at increased premium levels further enhancing productivity and profitability. We proactively slowed talent addition in select states, such as California and Florida, to align productivity and opportunity for producer growth once more product is reopened in those locations. We've worked diligently to add new viable carriers that help offset the pullback and underwriting appetite from some of our larger existing carriers. This increased product will further enhance our ability to serve clients as the market improves. Our agents are using the current marketing conditions to generate new lead flow and gain access to their clients earlier in the home closing process. The value proposition of our choice platform has never been stronger versus our competitors. Moving to our results, we've been delivering exactly what we set out to do a year ago. We have significantly improved our profitability and agent productivity. While there's more work to be done, particularly on franchise productivity, We're now in a position to add producer capacity, as evidenced by our strong recruiting class in June and expected hires through the balance of the year. Our deliberate actions over the past year, along with the current product environment, will, as expected, result in a temporary slowdown in our premium and revenue growth numbers through the third and fourth quarters. But we should continue to see very strong earnings and cash generation as a result of our expense discipline and focus on quality. As we add back to our producer count and continue to drive productivity improvement, we expect to see a re-acceleration of revenue and premium growth throughout 2024. We expect to be achieving these top line results on a much higher and still improving profitability base. We remain confident in our ability to deliver roughly 30% premium CAGR through 2027 and EBITDA margin in the range of 30% between 2025 and 2027. Over the longer term, we maintain the belief that our margins can be in the range of 40% as the business matures and the renewal book becomes a larger portion of total premium. Our premium in the second quarter, the leading indicator of our future revenue, increased 36% to $767 million over the prior year period. This includes franchise premium of $588 million, up 40%, and corporate premiums of $180 million, up 22% from a year ago. Our policies enforced at quarter end were $1.4 million, up 21% from a year ago. Total revenue for the quarter was $69.3 million, an increase of 31% from the year-ago period. This includes core revenue of $61 million, up 27%, driven by continued high client retention, improved productivity per agent, and pricing tailwinds. As we continue to launch more corporate agents into franchises, this creates a near-term trade-off on revenue growth because of the differences in revenue recognition, but significantly benefits longer-term revenue and profitability as the productive life of the agent increases and they duplicate themselves through producer hiring. Contingent commissions in the quarter were 4 million compared to 1.9 million a year ago, as the timing of growth-based contingencies are typically more uniform as compared to underwriting profitability contingencies. We continue to expect full-year contingencies to be around 40 basis points of premium for the full year. In the franchise network, operating franchises were steady in the quarter as we continued to average up the gene pool by removing underperforming franchises and replacing them with those of significantly higher quality. Our best franchise agents have similar productivity to our top corporate agents, and the agencies we are removing from the system contribute almost nothing to new business productions. Total franchise producers at the end of the quarter was at 2,069, up 3%. We expect both operating franchise and producer count to trend flat to moderately down year over year through the balance of 2023 and then accelerate in 2024 as we finish our restructuring work in the franchise business and focus on greater franchise productivity gains. Importantly, the productive capacity of our agent workforce should increase at a rate faster than the total producer count as we are adding back higher quality producers to the system versus those that are being removed. We fully expect the combination of producer growth, productivity improvement, and retention will support the longer-term premium growth objectives. Shifting to expenses, we continue to perform well as we focus on expense discipline and reinvestments for growth. Total operating expenses, excluding equity-based compensation and depreciation and amortization, were $46.2 million, an increase of 14% compared to the year-ago quarter. Compensation and benefits, excluding equity-based compensation, increased 19%, driven by our investments in partnerships, technology, marketing, and service functions, partially offset by right-sizing our producer count versus a year ago. Other G&A expense, excluding one-time impairment charges, was $13.7 million, up 11% from a year ago. BAD debts improved to $900,000 from $1.7 million, as we have substantially improved the quality of our signed but not yet launched pool of franchises. During the quarter, we consolidated some of our existing office space, resulting in a one-time non-cash impairment charge of $3.6 million. We have continued to improve the margin profile of the company. generating five consecutive quarters of EBITDA margin expansion and seven consecutive quarters of EBITDA margin expansion, excluding contingent commissions, a fantastic accomplishment for the whole team. Adjusted EBITDA in the quarter was $23.1 million, up 85% from the year-ago quarter, while adjusted EBITDA margin increased to 33% from 24% in the year-ago period. For the remainder of the year, we expect more modest margin improvement as we ramp investments for growth in a number of areas, including corporate agent headcount, marketing, and technology. As of June 30th, 2023, we had cash and cash equivalents of $19.1 million. Our unused line of credit was $49.8 million, and total outstanding term notes payables balance was $81.3 million at quarter end as we paid down an additional $10 million in principal. We are managing our balance sheet very conservatively given the insurance market conditions. As the market renormalizes over what we expect will be the next 12 to 18 months, we will be evaluating options to make our balance sheet more efficient by increasing our debt to a reasonable but conservative level. Our guidance for the full year 2023 is as follows. Total written premiums placed for 2023 are expected to be between $2.89 billion and $2.98 billion, representing organic growth of 30% at the low end of the range and 35% at the high end of the range. Total revenues for 2023 are expected to be between $260 million and $267 million, representing organic growth of 24% on the low end of the range and 28% on the high end of the range. We expect full-year adjusted EBITDA margin to expand over the full year of 2022. Again, thanks to our team for their hard work and focus in delivering such strong financial results as we continue our journey to industry leadership. With that, let's open the line up for questions. Operator?

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, as a reminder to ask the question, please press star 11 on your telephone and wait to hear your name announced. To withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Our first question comes from the line of Matt Carletti with JMP. Your line is open.

Hey, good afternoon. Hey, Matt. Just have a quick one. You guys covered a lot of what I had on my mind. It was very thorough commentary. But I guess what I want to ask is a little longer term. You touched on the digital agent and some of the quote to issue progression that's being made. As you look forward, kind of how do you see the digital agent evolving? I mean, I know we're not expecting Superbowl commercials and things like that, but as we, as we think forward as a tool for you guys to use, you know, how do you, how do you envision it as more kind of large national carriers get on quote to issue? You know, it's a, it's a, you know, 24 to 36 month sort of question, not a, not a next quarter question.

Let's start all that on there.

Yeah, so I think there's a lot of ways that that can evolve over time. Right now, it's a fantastic marketing resource for our existing agents to hand out to RPs to generate new lead flow. And we're getting a substantial amount of leads through the digital agents. It's about optimizing that process and creating an inbound sales motion. Our team right now is very, very good at hunting and generating new lead flow, which means that they're not as good at handling an inbound lead as they could be in the future. So there's plenty of room for us to go with that respect. The carrier product environment right now, as well as carriers, are not necessarily looking to make investments in generating new leads and new distribution networks. They're focused all on underwriting profitability. As that changes over time, we should see significantly more speed and ramp in the QTI projects as well. I'm very pleased with the way our technology team has been able to add carriers onto the platform, even in today's market, really is a good tool for agent productivity. Over time, that could develop to be a very profitable distribution network.

Yeah, great, great answer, Mark. This is Mark Miller. I would just say along the same lines, right now we're trying to work the technology aspects of it out. We had to back off of it a little bit, kind of rebuild the foundation that QTI runs on. We're really proud of the team for being able to put three new carriers on this quarter, and we'll kind of see where it goes from there. But I think about it in the short term as really being an automation tool for our agents and moving its way into service and other areas. We'll see where it goes longer term. I want to see how many carriers we can get on it. But the carriers, what I'm really happy about is the carriers are really leaning in and helping right now.

That's great. Super helpful caller. Thank you very much, and congrats on a nice quarter. Thanks, Matt.

Thank you. Will you stand by for our next question? Our next question comes from the line of Michael Zarimski with BMO. Your line is open.

Hey, great. Good afternoon. I guess just stepping back, I took a lot of notes on all, you know, gave a lot of great color and a lot of positive momentum, which we can clearly see in most of your KPIs. and you did use the term in the prepared remarks towards the end, I think ramp growth. So just curious, you know, cognizant that growth was a little slower than maybe some expected this quarter, but why wouldn't you guys take up kind of your growth rate into the back half of the year if it feels like there's just a lot of momentum, including, you said, spending a bit more money to grow as well. Is this a naive question or do you feel like you're embedding some conservatism?

I think we're doing exactly what we set out to do for 2023, which was get our corporate team as productive and profitable as possible and make it incredibly healthy. so that when we add new agents into the system, they're set up for much, much more success. So we've increased the recruiting standards, increased the accountability on the team. Brian Petillo, who leads that organization, is doing a phenomenal job maximizing every single ounce of productivity. So we're generating a lot of profitability on new business. We're in the point now where we're adding agents back into that system who are significantly more productive than agents we've ever added into the system before. So we feel very good about the long-term growth of the corporate channel. On the franchise side, as we talked about, we're still working through some of the agencies that are underperforming, but we feel great about the progress that we've made there. We're seeing more agencies hire, and the people that they're hiring are continuing to deliver very good profitability and productivity. We just need to let that burn in for the rest of 2023, and we should see growth reaccelerate in 2024. Okay. And if we...

You said to invest a little bit more in your term, which could kind of cause less of an uplift in the year-over-year margin. You can correct me if I'm wrong. But can you just – I know there's lots of investments, but are there a couple you'd like to highlight, or is it mostly just one of the big ones, hiring folks out of college that are just inherently going to be way less productive, or anything you'd like to call out there?

Yeah, I mean, we'll be onboarding a significant amount of individuals over the next, we started that in June and over the next several months. But as well, investments in the marketing function to drive inbound lead flow for new franchises, as well as new policies, it's significantly more efficient than having an outbound motion with hundreds of people pounding the phones. So that takes a little bit of setup on the front end, but pays off very nicely on the back end. You also get a more a highly qualified candidate who understands the opportunity a little bit better, and you can pre-qualify them with some of the information that they'll submit. That takes some infrastructure build-out, some technology build-out to continue to operationalize the Vivid partnership so we can maximize and get as much out of that as possible, as well as just continuing to grow the rest of the back office to scale the entire organization. Now, we saw very substantial margin improvements over the last six months. We continue to expect to see margin improvement over the next six months, but probably just not at the same rate as the first half of the year.

Okay, that's helpful. And maybe lastly, just, you know, also kind of on the macro level, you know, there's very hard kind of market pricing on the personal line side, clearly, and that's probably going to persist, but those are my words. But just curious, so when we're asked, you know, to think about that dynamic versus, you know, you talked a lot about the challenging real estate market and also just some less capacity. Do those three macro elements kind of net out to be a wash, ultimately, currently? Because it sounds like, you know, eventually you're talking about, you know, eventually if the real estate market opens up more, it sounds like you're saying there could be, even if hard market pricing opens, falls a bit, there's still going to be some positives in the outer years.

No, I would say that the product challenges in the PNC environment today are more of a drag than any of the tailwinds we're seeing from pricing. Housing, certainly we would prefer it to be running super hot, but our agents do a really good job of just taking share when the housing market contracts like it is today. We don't expect it to continue forever, so that will be a tailwind eventually again in the future. Product is the thing that we're dealing with the most right now, and a significant amount of our agents are in areas where there's very real product challenges. That will alleviate. Our expectation is sometime over the next 12 to 18 months. It's not necessarily up to us, but we're doing a really good job of pivoting and finding new partners to distribute with as well. We mentioned in our prepared remarks we added 24 carriers onto the platform so far this year. I really think our choice platform shines in this environment better than anywhere else. But ultimately, I wouldn't say it's a net wash or even a positive. I'd say we're doing a good job of fighting through an incredibly challenging environment today.

And I promise as a last follow-up, you've talked about a lack of capacity a number of times. Can we see any of that showing up in any of the KPIs? Or is it more of a soft, like you just know that your producers could – produce even more if they had more options?

We have a bunch of KPIs that we look at internally that can point to product challenges are hamstringing productivity a little bit, which makes the productivity gains we're making today all that more impressive. We're trying to be cognizant and not measure productivity on a dollars basis, but on a unit basis. Are we selling more policies today than we were previously per agent. And the answer is yes, our agents are becoming even more productive in an environment where they have less products to sell. So that will eventually switch from being a headwind to a tailwind. The carriers just need some more rate to take hold.

Thank you.

Thank you. Please stand by for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Maya Shields with Keith, Briette, and Woods. Your line is open.

Hey, guys. Good afternoon. This is Tommy McJoy on for mayor. My question is on contingent commissions. Obviously, we saw some good growth there in the quarter. And you mentioned that there's contribution from both the growth side and the underwriting profitability side. Could you just put a finer point on how much of that contingent commission growth was driven by the growth side versus the profitability side?

Yeah, it's really a de minimis amount related to profitability-based contingencies. The reason why it looks more in this quarter comparatively is the ones that are mainly volume-based are more uniform throughout the year, just logistically the way the revenue recognition works per gap. So we don't expect to have a gangbusters contingency year. We mentioned again in the prepared remarks you should expect somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 basis points of total written premium, which that is around all-time lows. So I wouldn't look at the second quarter contingencies and think, yeah, we should continue to model that level of growth going forward.

Got it. Thanks. And then my second question is just thinking out about this hard market cycle in PNC. To the extent that rate adequacy from the personalized carriers takes longer to than some expect. Would that in any way temper your growth expectations, or are you guys pretty committed at this point with your recruiting and new franchise initiatives that you have for the rest of the year?

I'd say we're pretty committed. I certainly wouldn't say I'm satisfied with the levels of productivity that we're seeing, but I'm incredibly pleased with our agents' ability to continue to make productivity gains even in this challenging market. If it continues to persist for a while, okay, our agents will get you know, the increased paycheck on renewals. They'll continue to have to fight through this environment from a new business perspective, but it will eventually come back the other way. So it's about patience. It's about being long-term greedy and not short-term greedy.

Makes sense. Thanks.

Thank you. Please stand by for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Mark Hughes with Truist Securities. Your line is open.

Yeah, thank you very much. You suggest that the margin improvement ought to be more modest through the balance of the year, but coming off of a 10-point gain, more modest could be two points or it could be eight points or something else. I wonder if you could maybe provide just a little more clarity on that.

Yeah, so historically, we haven't been incredibly specific on margin guidance, really to give us the freedom to make decisions that may impact timing of when some expenses may flow through. And so we'll continue to keep that level of, I would say, specificity on margin guidance. We've got some projects that we need to do to secure future growth as well, and those require investment. And whether that falls in Q3 or Q4, I wouldn't want to get too specific on that.

Okay. And then could you give the number for how many franchises you onboarded in the quarter?

Yes, yeah.

So we onboarded 72 agencies in the quarter.

And then when some of the corporate agents switch over to franchises, do they – take some of the renewal economics with them? Do they go from a flat start or is there some amount of commission volume that they take that might switch from the corporate channel to the franchise channel?

No, they're starting over.

Okay. Great. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Please stand by for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Paul Newsome with Piper Sandler. Your line is open.

Good afternoon. Thanks for the call. I'm sorry if I'm just confused here, but I was hoping you could help me understand a little bit. about the timing of both the of the corporate agent ads with you recruitment is all the folks that you hired through the summer essentially showing up in June number or did that do they get added on in July and August as well and so I'm just trying to think about the timing of what you've been talking about onboarding people compared with what the numbers we see on a quarterly basis. I apologize if I'm not clear here.

No, that's very clear. This is Mark Miller. They will continue to onboard throughout the summer, and we will continue to recruit all the way into the fall. So we have expectations of a certain amount of recruits. I won't get into that, but I will say that my prepared remarks, we said that we wanted to be at about 320 by the end of the year. That's what we're targeting. It depends somewhat on what attrition levels are. Our attrition levels are very low right now, so it's easier to hit the number based on where we are, but I can't control where attrition goes from here. But that's about what we expect it to be.

Interesting. Any thoughts on impact of distribution outside of your company specific? I imagine a lot of the franchise recruitment is quite a bit depending upon what's been happening with other agency systems. Last year we had nationwide getting to the independent agents. Just like your broader thoughts on what you think is happening with distribution in general.

Yeah, I would say we probably have the best carrier portfolio out there of any independent agency, and I don't know that for 100% fact, but I don't imagine there's anybody with a team as strong as ours out there acquiring new product as aggressively as we are. So I don't like it when a carrier shuts down, state farms shutting down in the state of California. Hopefully that helps California and their DOI understand some of the challenges that they're imposing on the consumer. But it is one less competitor for us out there to work against. But it is an incredibly challenging market out there for anybody trying to distribute personal lines insurance. I think we have the best offering. So it does help us from a recruiting standpoint. We can say, look at the number of carriers we've onboarded in your specific region that can help you out-compete anybody else that would be trying to operate an independent agency or be a single product platform out there. So it's definitely not necessarily a net positive, but I think we're doing it better than anybody else.

Thanks. We appreciate the help.

Thank you. Please stand by for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Katie Sakis with Autonomous Research. Your line is open.

Hi, good afternoon. I wanted to dig a little bit deeper on some of the questions about producer economics. So I guess first, it looks like the producer count is only up about 3% year over year. I was curious if you guys have a, you know, bogey as to where that might end the year and, you know, what are some potential opportunities to exceed that mark?

Yeah, so we said in our prepared remarks that it would be flat to moderately down. And, you know, importantly, the follow-up to that is the agents that are exiting the system are doing close to, if not zero, and the agents we're adding back into the system are much more productive than anybody we've added in before. So while the agent count may be going in the direction that is inconsistent with the actual revenue generation. So the productive capacity of that workforce is continuing to increase, even if the total number doesn't look that way.

I think it's also important to remember that we have just gone through a major restructuring exercise with our corporate sales force. And you would expect that to be down in conjunction with that effort. As we said on the call earlier, that restructuring is now complete. And we're seeing extraordinary productivity for the new people. I said in my remarks, it's over 65%. It's actually about 70% that are June. The class that went through in June training is producing 70% more than their counterparts were a year ago. So we're adding back real high-quality people. So I think that's important context on the actual number of butts in seats.

Yeah, just to be clear as a follow-up to that to make sure there's no confusion. Corporate sales ended the quarter at 280, which was up from Q1, down significantly from last year. We expect corporate sales to be ending the year around 320. Total franchise producers, we are expecting to trend flat to moderately down in the second half of the year.

That restructuring process is still ongoing.

But the ones we're taking out are not very productive. The ones we're adding in are much more productive. So you can average up the productivity level per agent.

That makes perfect sense. Thank you so much for the clarification there. And as a quick follow-up, it looks like you guys are still growing your tenured agents in Texas a little bit faster than those that are outside of Texas geography. I'm kind of curious, do you anticipate that to continue to be a trend going forward? Or do you anticipate having a bit more growth outside of Texas as you guys continue to look at hiring and transitioning agents from the corporate channel into the franchise segment?

That's a great question. It is exactly what we're trying to do, which is spread the franchise agents out more geographically across the United States. It doesn't mean that we wouldn't support our franchises in Texas if they want to grow. We help them hire on their behalf. We bring candidates to them. However, when we're looking for new franchises, or candidates to be franchise owners, we're paying particular attention right now to GOs where we have, where we're under-penetrated. So yeah, I would think if you look at the map of where our franchises are, you'd see more growth outside of Texas in a year from now than you do today.

Thank you. I'm sorry, just one quick follow-up to that. I mean, we've heard quite a bit about particular states where personal lines underwriters are no longer writing new business. I'm kind of curious of those underpenetrated states that you guys can see on your own maps. Are there any particular states that you guys would call out as growth opportunities for Goosehead, keeping in mind that these are also markets maybe where underwriters are no longer open for new business?

We're specifically prioritizing away from markets where the underwriters are risk off. So, like, for example, Florida, California, we're only responding to inbound calls out of Florida, and I don't think we're – I think we're completely – shut off all of our recruiting activity in the state of California. So what we're trying to do is focus our franchise development efforts on the most attractive markets for our carriers and the most attractive markets for us. And because we've been in Texas for 20 years, we have a big business in Texas, and all the carriers want us to give them not Texas. Awesome.

Thanks so much. Thank you. Please stand by for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Scott Helleneck with RBC Capital Markets. Your line is open.

Yes, hello. I had a question on cross-selling. I'm just wondering what kind of traction you're getting there in terms of customers that have multiple products, and this includes some of your ancillary products, the RV and flood and renters, condo. I know those are smaller, but just any kind of update in terms of what you're seeing on the cross-selling part and customers buying multiple products from you versus where it had been trending?

That's a best practice that we preach with our agent workforce is you want to try and capture a full share of wallet, get as many lines of business as you can with a client as possible. I think our agents do that best in class, probably better than any of the other insurance agents out there. I would say it remains high. We haven't seen a material change, I think, in any direction on that. It's a good retention lever. Having another line of business adds multiple years to the client's life. So not a lot of news to report on that, but I believe our agents do it better than anybody else.

Okay. And then... This is sort of along the lines, but just curious, too, how much increase in shopping activity that you're seeing just because of where rates are in auto and home, and I imagine a lot of people or more people are coming your way. If you can comment on that, and I'm also just curious how many people that you're seeing are actually switching to come across the goosehead agent, the typical person, just any kind of trends there.

Yeah, we are seeing a significant increase in shopping behavior from clients, which if you look at our client retention numbers remaining at 88%, strong credit to our service team for being able to deliver a phenomenal client experience in an environment where some people have premiums going up 20%, 30%. So I'm very proud of our team and the way they've been able to deliver incredible service throughout this. it's certainly not a tailwind for us or shopping behavior. You would expect potentially, you know, more clients are leaving their existing insurance agent, but it also means that our entire book is continuing to ask for a reshop as well.

Okay. That's helpful. And just the last one too, I was just curious if you had anything or you could comment on in terms of the franchisee restructuring, are we, Are we kind of 80% to 90% done, or is there any more context you can offer on that?

We talked about the majority of it is done. We're over the 50% line. It does just take a little bit longer for that to work through the system, given the way that the franchise law works. We need to give those agents a little bit more time to cure than you would a W-2 employee. So the second half of the year, there's still going to be a significant number of terminations, but we do believe we're nearing the finish line. Okay. That's helpful. Thanks.

Thank you. Please stand by for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Pablo things on with JP Morgan. Your line is open.

Um, hi, thank you. Um, my first question was a numbers question. Are you able to share written premiums for the corporate and the franchise channels? Sorry, what was that public share? What for written premiums? Sorry. Just to break down between corporate and franchise.

Yeah, that was included in the prepared remarks. Okay.

Sorry. Sorry. All right. Next question, as I look at policy in force or new business revenue growth, those metrics are filtering down, but it seems like you're well into your fine distribution, you're ramping up recruitment on the corporate side. Would it be reasonable to expect those metrics to start picking up second half of this year, maybe, and certainly in 2024?

Yeah, we certainly are expecting policies and force growth to re-accelerate in the direction of 30%. I would not expect that number to have a three handle in front of it in 2024. But we are gearing the organization around achieving a 30% policy and force growth rate.

We've managed extraordinary high levels of growth in the past. I mean, this is something that is not theoretical to us. This is something we've demonstrated previously. a very high degree of proficiency. And as we complete our restructuring efforts, we'll be sort of turning on the gas all the way.

Yep, understood. And that's actually a good segue into my next question. So as we think about your long-term premium growth target of, I think you said, 30% CAGR, can you walk through the different components that build up to that growth rate? And I'm thinking of number of agents, productivity, and the natural benefit from yearly premium increases. I think if you look at your premium growth pre-COVID, the number of agents has always grown faster than premiums, and it sort of makes sense if you think about the ramp up and those sorts of things. But I guess with this new model now, how will those different components build up to the 30% CAGR premium growth?

It's a combination of productivity improvements as well as increases in the number of sellers in the field. I don't believe the number of sellers in the field needs to increase at a 30% rate. As we generate more accumulated experience, we will be getting more productive over time. We're continuing to invest in technology and tools that make our agents more productive. And again, that's not theoretical either. We're really seeing that in real time. Agents are getting better every single month. It is incredibly impressive. To generate a 30% premium CAGR over the next five years, you don't need 30% producer growth. You need some producer growth, but really you need productivity gains. You need the productive capacity to continue to increase. That's how we're structuring the business.

Also, there's three elements of producer growth. Some are more productive than others. The traditional... agency. We know historically how productive they are. We should expect that to increase because we're just bringing on better people now. But secondly, this whole motion of adding producers to successful franchisees is relatively new. But those people, for every producer we add into a successful franchise, they produce 1.6 or 1.7 times the new business that an entire new average franchise would produce. So that channel is super leveraged. And then the one that is just the channel on nuclear steroids is converting corporate agents into franchisees. Those guys crank it out. And they're much more productive. They're as productive as many traditional franchises. So we're working, part of the restructuring that we did in our corporate channel was to make sure that we could provide sort of volume inputs to seed the franchise channel with new high quality franchisees. So it's different than kind of the arithmetic you would have seen in the past just because we have these other new channels that are either very productive on the case of adding a producer to an existing franchise or unbelievably productive if you're converting a corporate agent into a franchise.

That's clear. Thank you. And then the last one for me, maybe for Mark Jones Jr., I think in the past, when we talked about margins, you had sort of referenced that you think the improvement will be rateable over your long-term target, right? And I think you had said 3%. So I suppose in the context of a really good margin quarter, right, I think ex contingency, your margin is at 29%, right? Pretty good. And at your target already, is it still reasonable to assume that from here, you know, over the next couple of years, we should sort of have a steady upward march towards your long-term target. And clearly you're saying that 29% is not sustainable, but just thinking about the cadence from here and how you get to that long-term target.

Yeah, we continue to expect to see margin expansion and improvement year over year, quarter over quarter. We don't believe that 29% is an unsustainable level. Now, that may not happen every single quarter. Some quarters have better margin profiles than others, given the way that seasonality works and when hiring works and when raises work. But I certainly don't believe that 29% is a cap for us. We continue to expect strong margin expansion every year.

All right. Thank you.

Thank you. I would now like to turn the call back to CEO Mark Jones for closing remarks.

Thanks, everyone, for your questions on the call. We appreciate your attention and have a good day.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.