IZEA Worldwide, Inc.

Greetings and welcome to the IZEA Worldwide fourth quarter and full year 2025 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during this conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, John Francis, Vice President, Sales and Marketing Operations. Thank you. You may begin.

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to IZEA's earnings call covering the fourth quarter of 2025. I'm John Francis, VP Sales and Marketing Operations at IZEA. And joining me on the call are IZEA's Chief Executive Officer, Patrick Venitucci, and IZEA's Chief Financial Officer, Peter Bieri. Thank you for being with us today. Earlier this afternoon, the company issued a press release detailing IZEA's performance during Q4 2025. If you would like to review those details, please visit our investor relations website at IZEA.com slash investors. Before we begin, please take note of the safe harbor paragraph included in today's press release covering IZEA's financial results and be advised that some of the statements we make today regarding our business, operations, and financial performance may be considered forward-looking and such statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. We encourage you to consider the disclosures contained in our SEC filings for a detailed discussion of these factors. Our commentary today will also include the non-GAAP financial measures of adjusted EBITDA and revenues excluding divested operations. Reconciliations between GAAP and non-GAAP metrics for our reported results can also be found in our earnings release issued earlier today and in our publicly available filings. And with that, I would now like to introduce and turn the call over to IZEA's Chief Executive Officer, Patrick Venitucci. Patrick?

Thank you, John, and good afternoon, everyone. At the end of 2024, the leadership team and I made a commitment to accelerate our path to profitability. I'm pleased to announce that at the end of 2025, we delivered on that commitment. Year on year, we broke even, increased cash, held managed services revenue relatively flat, excluding Whozoo, and grew our enterprise accounts faster than the market. We achieved a net profit swing of $18.9 million, which is not only a first for this company, but is a notable event in the context of micro-cap public company turnarounds. Annual revenue was $31.2 million, a 13% decrease that reflects a deliberate strategic pivot toward long-term profitability compounded by broader macroeconomic headwinds. During the year, we successfully exited international markets and off-boarded lower-margin SMB accounts to prioritize a high-potential enterprise portfolio. These internal shifts coincided with government-induced disruptions as DOGE and trade policies negatively impacted our government and retail accounts. Looking at the fourth quarter, revenue was $6.1 million, down 45% year-over-year. More than half of this variance was a direct result of our strategic client rationalization. While the balance can be attributed to delayed bookings in the second half, of the year on a few key enterprise accounts in a conservative holiday marketing environment. Despite these strategic shifts and external headwinds, managed services revenue, excluding HUSU, remained resilient, finishing the year down a modest 2%. This relative stability masks significant underlying growth, considering our enterprise accounts expanded well above industry growth rates. As we've strengthened and expanded our relationships with enterprise clients, we've been rewarded with more business. We have successfully scaled five enterprise accounts beyond the million-dollar threshold, each delivering double or triple-digit growth. Having largely worked through the attrition of our legacy S&B accounts, we believe the client portfolio is close to being stabilized, allowing the higher growth potential of our enterprise business to take center stage. Our sales and marketing efforts are attracting new clients, and our pipeline reached a new high for the year, with invitations to larger pitches growing. Lastly, we produced new work for Stellantis, Warner Brothers, Georgia Pacific, Danone, and many other leading brands, consistently delighting our clients. Our restructured cost base was instrumental in our return to profitability this year. We achieved a 40% reduction in total operating expenses, driving a significant turnaround in cash operating profit to $0.7 million, a substantial recovery from last year's $11.1 million cash operating loss. This disciplined approach further strengthened our balance sheet, putting an end to the cash burn. By implementing advanced human capital management systems We have institutionalized this class discipline to ensure our profitability is both sustainable and scalable. Looking ahead, our strategy is centered on a few core pillars. We are building deeper vertical expertise and executing key account plans on our enterprise accounts to maximize value for these high potential clients. We are refocusing our SMB efforts on boutique accounts, clients with franchise business models, so that our solution frameworks are highly repeatable. We are investing in high-tier talents who can level up our capabilities in creator strategy, media, and commerce, which our enterprise clients are demanding. At the same time, we are extremely active in M&A discussion, searching for companies that can build these capabilities faster and accelerate the growth of our enterprise client portfolio. It's important to note that given our low operating margin, an acquisition could be instantly accretive. Operationally, we are preparing to launch a proprietary technology platform which will enable our account managers to manage integrated creator campaigns at enterprise scale efficiently and effectively. This platform is infused with AI and tightly integrated with our unified operating model. In summary, we've reset the company's economic model in 2025 by creating operating leverage beyond cost reduction, establishing durable break-even economics where future revenue growth is expected to translate directly into profitability. This work has positioned the company for long-term success with a more focused client portfolio, a stronger leadership team, an engaging culture, significant client opportunity, and incredible possibilities with IZEA's technology platform. With all of this momentum and opportunity ahead of us, I am optimistic about the future of this company and our ability to deliver additional value to all of our stakeholders, shareholders, clients, and employees alike. With that, I'll turn the call over to Peter Beery, our Chief Financial Officer, for a closer look at the financial results.

Thank you, Patrick, and good afternoon, everyone. This afternoon, we reported our fourth quarter and full year 2025 results and filed our Form 10-K with the SEC. I'll focus today on the key drivers behind our operating performance, add more color regarding our strategic repositioning and the resulting profitability improvement, and provide an update on our cash position. All of today's comments exclude WHZU, which we divested in December 2024. As Patrick described, We repositioned our business in early 2025 to prioritize larger, recurring core enterprise accounts and reduce our exposure to lower-margin, project-based, or high-turnover client relationships. We refer to these collectively as non-core customers. Additionally, we reduced our annual cash operating costs in 2025 by over 40% or $10 million, while increasing our investment in enterprise account management personnel where we're seeing growth. Overall, results show that we're on track, posting positive cash from operations and breakeven net income for the year, both of which show significant improvement over 2024 results. Our strategic reset had a significant impact on 2025 contract bookings, which declined by 10.3 million, or 27% year over year. This decline reflects our intentional reduction in non-core customer activity which accounted for the majority of the decline, rather than weakness in our enterprise business. We ended 2025 with a $10.1 million contract backlog. Based on current pipeline opportunities and first quarter progress to date, we believe our bookings reset is largely behind us and expect to return to year-over-year bookings growth in early 2026. Given that revenue recognition for our managed services typically trails contract bookings by roughly seven months, 2025 revenue still reflected the runoff from non-core contracts booked prior to our repositioning, the majority of which concluded by the end of the second quarter of 2025. So we expect year-over-year revenue comparisons in the first half of 2026 to be lower, reflecting the absence of this non-core activity. We anticipate a return to year-over-year revenue growth in the second half of 2026, as revenue increasingly reflects our current mix of core enterprise engagements. Turning to results for the fourth quarter, managed services revenue was $6 million, down from $9.8 million in the prior year quarter, reflecting our deliberate shift away from non-core accounts toward enterprise relationships. About half of the year-over-year decline relates to the expected runoff from non-core customers as a part of this strategic client rationalization, while the remainder primarily reflects the timing of bookings from several enterprise accounts and a more cautious holiday marketing environment. Operating expenses declined meaningfully to $4.4 million, down 40% year-over-year, driven primarily by lower sales and marketing spend and reduced employee and contractor costs, which reflect our structural cost reset. For the quarter, we reported a net loss of $1.2 million, or $0.07 per share, on 17.1 million shares outstanding, compared to a net loss of $4.6 million in the prior year period, or $0.27 per share, on 17 million shares. This significant year-over-year improvement reflects the impact of our operating reset, improved cost structure, and a higher quality customer mix. Adjusted EBITDA for the fourth quarter was negative $0.9 million compared to negative $2 million in the prior year quarter. As a reminder, in late 2024, we refined our non-GAAP definition of adjusted EBITDA to exclude non-operating items, primarily interest income from our investment portfolio, and we restated the prior year amounts for comparability. A reconciliation of adjusted EBITDA to net income is included in the earnings release. We earned 0.4 million of interest income during the quarter, primarily from cash balances held in a money market account following the maturity of all investment securities. And finally, we continue to operate with no debt on our balance sheet. In September of 2024, we announced a commitment to repurchase up to $10 million of our common stock in the open market, subject to customary restrictions, which include regulatory limits on daily trading volume, and company-imposed share price thresholds. Through December 31, 2025, cumulative repurchases totaled 561,950 shares for an aggregate investment of $1.4 million under the program. No shares were repurchased during the fourth quarter. We remain committed to a disciplined capital allocation approach and will continue to evaluate repurchase activity in light of market conditions liquidity needs, and alternative uses of capital. As of December 31, 2025, we had $50.9 million in cash and cash equivalents, a decrease of just $0.2 million from the beginning of the year. This compares favorably to the $13.1 million reduction in cash during 2024 and reflects improved operating performance and disciplined cost management. With $50.9 million in cash and investments at year end, We believe we're well positioned to support organic business growth initiatives and pursue our strategic acquisition plans. Thank you for your time today. At this time, we invite our investors and analysts to share their questions so that we may provide clarity and insights.

Thank you. And if you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate that your line is in the question queue. You may press star 2 if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. And one moment, please, while we poll for questions.

Please stand by. Thank you. Thank you.

And we'll go ahead and take our first question. And our first question today comes from John Hickman with Leidenberg Thalmann. Please state your question.

Hi. Can you hear me okay? Yeah. Hi, John. This is Patrick.

So could you give us a little clarity on gross margins going forward?

Kind of... We don't give specific guidance, but I think we're on the right track. There's been an increase relative to the last couple of years. But more importantly, we really have our eye on net revenue. The real goal is to focus on growing the net revenue and keeping our cost structure aligned with that.

Okay, and then kind of in line with Peter's comments about the first half of the year being lower than last year, but the second half being higher. In total, do you expect year-over-year growth in revenues?

Yes, we're aiming for growth. I mean, This is a growth market, and so we're absolutely aiming for growth.

Okay, and then one last question. You mentioned several times an acquisition strategy. So do you see lots of targets out there? Is it lots of sellers, or are things tight?

Can you maybe elaborate on that? Yes. Sure. It's a very high priority. I'm spending a lot of time speaking with M&A targets. We're very active in the marketplace. As some of you know, this is my background. I've come from a space where I successfully was able to close quite a few deals in a short period of time. We're both tapping into my personal network of potential acquisition targets as well as working with quite a few investment bankers that specialize in this space. We're seeing good deal flow, and we're actively engaged at different stages of M&A.

So to follow up, in the past, there's been kind of a big – difference between private market values and public market values? Are valuations an issue for you?

I agree. There definitely is a difference in valuation. It's not an issue for us. I think it points out an opportunity for investors in terms of investing in IZEA because the equity value is not exactly what we're seeing in the private markets for IZEA. However, from our perspective, I mean, we have enough cash to be able to buy at a fair market value. We're going to be disciplined. We're doing our homework and using various valuation methodologies and so forth and making sure that any investment that we make, we're modeling out what our return on capital would be and we have certain hurdle rates that we're striving to achieve.

So are you interested in customers or technology?

Well, more customers. I mean, we've got ample technology. As you know, we shifted our strategy to be services first, supported by technology. And so our acquisition strategy really reinforces some of the things we've been outlining throughout the year. Number one, you know, the verticalization and enterprise accounts. So If there's an ability to add to our depth of certain verticals to add enterprise-grade clients with recurring revenue and strong relationships, that's one area. The second area is capabilities. As I've also stated throughout the year, we're trying to increase our service offerings that we're able to sell to our enterprise client base. having an integrated service offering is certainly part of our future.

Okay. I'll let someone else ask questions. Thanks. Thanks, John.

Thank you. And your next question comes from Chris Tuttle with Blue Caterpillar. Please state your question.

Hi. I think one of the things that would be really helpful right now is you guys are obviously having a lot of terrific discussions with your clients and potential clients the last couple months. I'd love an update on, you know, how are they thinking about IZEA in terms of their overall context? And not strictly speaking competition, but, you know, going to creators directly or, you know, different strategies they might employ. I'd just love an update on how they're seeing you positioned in relative to all the other things they have to consider and just some of your observations around that for this year.

Yeah. Hi, Chris. Good to hear from you. There's a massive shift happening in marketing right now that we're catching the tailwind on, and that is as television audiences have been declining and social media audiences have have been increasing. We're at what I've coined the social singularity, meaning that the audiences have flipped. So social audiences are now larger than television audiences. And a lot of marketers are still structured to service the old system, the old way, which was it was television first. And they're struggling to be social first, And the way to reach social audiences is through creators. Creators are essentially modern-day channels. And that's where IZEA comes in. I mean, we provide those kinds of solutions to marketers. We help connect the brands with the creators. But we look at it more as a marketing partnership where we We help them select and curate the right combination of creators. We cut the deals with them, and that helps them reach the right audiences and connect with their consumers.

Okay. All right. I get it a little bit. And then one last point on just, you know, when I looked at the enterprise value today relative to the cash, it was quite low. And I'm wondering, like, you know, is that where you look in terms of deciding when to deploy some of that buyback, given the fact that you have M&A opportunities? But, you know, it wouldn't take a lot for the enterprise value to get close to zero again.

Yeah. In the past, you know, we've been proponents of buybacks. Again, we believe that there's a lot of upside to this, and that's why we've done it in the past and can continue to have a philosophy of doing buybacks at the right price. We're not coming out and stating the specific price, but as I said before, I mean... We're looking at the market holistically, and as John pointed out, there is a gap between what the private markets are valuing companies like ours and what the public markets are. And so I think this is a great opportunity for investors. And with our capital, that's certainly one of our choices is to be an investor. And in the past, we've bought back, and if it continues to be that way, we'll continue to buy back.

Okay, terrific. Look forward to catching up with you soon.

Thanks again. Thanks, Chris.

Thank you. And a reminder to the audience, to ask a question at this time, press star 1 on your phone. We'll pause for a few moments to see if there are any last questions. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, there are no further questions at this time, so I'll hand the floor back to John Francis for closing remarks. Thank you.

Thank you, Diego, and thank you, everyone, for joining us this afternoon. As a reminder, a replay of today's call will be available shortly on our website, isea.com slash investors. We appreciate your continued interest and support and hope you'll join us for our next conference call to discuss our first quarter 2026 results. Thank you so much.

Thank you, and this concludes today's call. I hope parties may disconnect.