SurgePays, Inc.

Good day and welcome to the Search Base Q3 2023 earnings conference call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing star, then zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star, then one on a touch-tone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star, then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Brian Pernavo, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator, and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the SurgePays Third Quarter 2023 Earnings Webcast and Conference Call. Today's date is November 14, 2023, and on the call today from SurgePays, Brian Cox, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Tony Evers, Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that this call may contain forward-looking statements as they are defined under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed in the forward-looking statements. For a discussion of such risks and uncertainties, please see SurgePay's most recent filings with the SEC. All forward-looking statements made today reflect our current expectations only, and we undertake no obligation to update any statement to reflect the events that occur after this call. Also, during the course of today's call, the company will be discussing one or more non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures are included in the press release we issued this afternoon. Copies of today's press release are accessible on SurgePay's Investor Relations website In addition, SurgePays Form 10-Q for the quarter ended September 30th, 2023 will also be available on SurgePays Investor Relations website. Now, I'd like to turn the call over to President and Chief Executive Officer, Brian Cox.

Thanks, Brian. First, I'd like to thank our shareholders and those interested in SurgePays for joining the call. As we have expanded and continue expanding our audience, I'd like to give a brief overview of who we are, what we do, and our target market. Surge Pays brings financial and telecom products to the underbanked and underserved populations at a grassroots level where they live and shop. The underbanked do most of their financial transactions at their trusted local convenience store closest to their home. Surge Pays utilizes these stores as the point of distribution into these communities. Our technology-layered platform empowers clerks at thousands of convenience stores to provide prepaid wireless and financial products to lower-income and underbanked consumers without access to traditional credit cards or checking accounts. The FCC licenses us to provide subsidized wireless service to qualifying subscribers through the Affordable Connectivity Program, more commonly referred to as ACP. Our ACP prepaid wireless companies provide service to hundreds of thousands of subscribers nationwide. This enticing and beneficial program is the lead product to get our platform into stores nationwide. These store owners are quick to realize that in lower-income areas, usually over 20% of the transactions in the store are done through government-supported programs, and those customers are all eligible for ACP. In a high interest rate environment where store owners are looking for more transactional revenue without hitting their credit line for store inventory, SurgePays presents a compelling offering for those owners who want their store to be the transactional tech hub for the underbank community. With this go-to-market approach and a profitable suite of underbank products and services, we are well positioned to significantly grow our footprint and owner operated convenience stores nationwide. Our strategy is to continue evolving into a multi-product company with an ecosystem around us, enabling us to build the largest distribution of products and services sold to the underbanked population. I'm pleased to announce that the third quarter of 2023 continues the profitability trend that we saw at the end of 2022. delivering our highest ever net income of $7.1 million and EBITDA of $7.5 million. This year has indeed demonstrated the long-term profitability potential of the business, and we are just getting started. We have achieved over $17 million of net income year-to-date, and our profitability margins have continued to expand. Our cash balance improved to over $12 million and minimal debt. This year compares well to September 30th of last year when we lost approximately 3.7 million on the bottom line. The tremendous profitability level SurgePays has achieved have afforded the company some opportunities that would have not have been possible in the past, especially in this economic environment. SurgePays can now focus on playing offense aggressively and make strategic decisions on our terms at our timing that will produce both short and long-term growth and profitability. In over 20 years of successful business, I have never been shy of stating my goals and willing to make tough decisions to accomplish them, whether through delayed gratification or some actions that might be confusing or unpopular to casual onlookers. Achieving the listing on NASDAQ was just the first of several accomplishments we fully expected to perform. The next goal is to move from micro cap to small cap. After months of discussion and well over a year of speaking to analysts, consultants, portfolio and fund managers on this subject, it became apparent in order for us to accomplish this next move, we need to gain institutional stakeholders at an impactful level. One of the checks against us was our potentially confusing businesses outside of our core model. It was clear we needed to shelf the legacy mass tort lead gen company, Logix IQ, and streamline the company messaging along with our financials. Our company, story, focus, and market strategy must be defined with an understandable vision of a significant attainable future value. Even though Logix IQ contributed 4.1 million to the top line sales last year in Q3, We chose to wind down operations because we felt it was the right thing to do to ultimately accomplish our goals. Another example of our strategic long-term profit approach is our ACP signup transition focus to convenience stores. Yes, it slowed down subscriber growth in the short term compared to outdoor pop-up tent sales, but considering the economics of a store-based versus tent sales model, It was 100% the right call. Scaling the national footprint of stores transacting on our network while growing actual routes into these communities creates a tremendous revenue opportunity, not only organically, but by controlling the distribution platform, we are creating an M&A machine whereby we can acquire companies with existing relationships or networks of stores and also acquire companies with products we can add to our platforms. Revenue was down 2.1 million for Q3 year over year. But as discussed, this is due to the winding down of LogixIQ, which contributed 4.1 million last year. For those of you doing the simple math, yes, that means the core business of wireless and FinTech was up over 2 million in Q3. And this focus contributed to the record-breaking 7.1 million in net income. As a moment of reflection, in 2021, when we uplisted to NASDAQ, we had a net loss of 13.5 million for the year. It's pretty amazing what our team is accomplishing and we are adding like-minded folks to the team each quarter. From our leaders spread out coast to coast to my favorite team working at our bilingual operations center in El Salvador. Chris and Franklin are among several great managers leading a fantastic group of over 150 hardworking folks at every level of operations, ready to immediately scale our store and subscriber growth. As I mentioned in last quarter's call, the key metric in the future is new stores on our platform. More stores on the platform mean more ACP signups, more products and services, more transactions over the platform, and more sales for individual stores, equaling more revenue for surge payers. Our model to acquire ACP subscribers at stores worked fantastically. However, converting leads to customers directly using text messages were not performing at the success rate I expected. After a couple of months of analysis, we determined the challenge was relying on customer follow-up to give consent to check their eligibility. We concluded we needed equipment on the countertop next to the register that was customer facing and allowed the customer to perform the necessary compliance components of the ACP enrollment at the moment of impact before they walked away. This short-term process failure was the seed of a tremendous success that has opened opportunities for a much better approach to the market with our own customer facing point of sale equipment. We can now promote our other products through 24-7 marketing on the LCD screen at the register. This includes creating awareness of the prepaid top-ups potential for customers, awareness of the upcoming launch of our prepaid wireless brand, LinkUp Mobile, and other products on our platform. Historically, we relied exclusively on posters and other promotional materials in the store to create awareness of our products since we don't have actual facings on the shelf. Now we will have our products in lights on the screen right in the middle of the most prized real estate in the convenience store, the counter by the register. In other words, this solution launched our point of sale equipment channel. We partnered with Clearline Mobile to test customer facing LCD screens at the register to promote our products activate wireless subscribers and create customer engagement. This next step in point of sale advancement will solidify surge pays as an innovative market leader in providing wireless telecom and FinTech products to the underbanked and underserved where they live and shop. This will also assist in connecting dots for potential investors by quickly seeing visuals of our equipment at the register, and understanding the impact we can have in the stores on our network. We have placed over 100 LCD screens at this time and are pleased with the response. An additional 1,000 units just arrived this month and we will be immediately deploying those while continuously reordering more units in bigger batches. At this point, we've just begun to scratch the surface of the potential means SurgePace has to drive additional revenue through our store relationships. As always, we're focused on managing our cash and cash flow and deploying that cash to maximize growth. Now that we have integrated our equipment and software platform and our sales leadership team has been built out, we can focus more heavily on driving revenue organically and through acquisition while working through relationships that position us to accomplish our revenue goals. We expected third quarter revenues to align with second quarter revenues and precisely what happened, but with even stronger cash flow. Now, I'll turn the call over to Tony to review our financial results before summarizing today's call. Tony?