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spk01: Good day and welcome to the Transact Technologies third quarter 2021 conference call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I'd like to turn the conference over to Mr. Ryan Gardella. Please go ahead, sir.
spk05: Thank you. Good afternoon and welcome to Transact Technologies third quarter 2021 earnings call. Today, we'll be discussing the results announced in our press release issued after market close. Joining us today from the company are Chairman and CEO Bart Shulman and President and CFO Steve DiMartino. Today's call will include discussion of the company's key operating strategies, progress on these initiatives, and details on the third quarter financial results. We will then open the call to participants for questions. As a reminder, this conference call contains statements about future events and expectations which are forward-looking in nature. Statements on this call may be deemed as forward-looking, and actual results may differ materially. For a full list of risks inherent to the business and the company, please refer to the company's SEC filings, including its reports on Form 10-K and 10-Q. Transact undertakes no obligation to revise or update any forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances that occur after this call. Today's call and webcast will include non-GAAP financial measures within the meaning of SEC Regulation G. One required reconciliation of all non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable financial measure calculated and presented in accordance with GAAP can be found in today's press release as well as on the company website. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Bart.
spk00: Thank you, Ryan, and that was very quick. Thank you, Ryan, and thank you to everyone joining us on the call today. Our third quarter results marked an important point in our business as we posted our highest net sales number since the fourth quarter of 2019. This was accomplished through a combination of sustained momentum in BOHA and our food service technology market as a whole, as well as a major rebound in our casino and gaming market, which I will elaborate on shortly. As Steve will discuss in detail later, our preliminary third quarter total net revenue was $10.6 million, representing a 46% gain year-over-year, and as just mentioned, our highest number since the fourth quarter of 2019. We also recorded net income of $910,000 and an adjusted EBITDA loss of $1.2 million. Well, now let's discuss some of the results in our key markets. First up is our food service technology, or FST, market. Our total FST revenue hit another all-time high in the quarter, up 40% year-over-year to $3.3 million. Our FST recurring revenue, which includes software subscriptions, labels, and service, also showed strength with our second consecutive quarter of at least $2 million in recurring revenue and represents a 28% increase from the year prior period. As an important note, in September, we recorded our highest revenue month for FST software and label sales as the Delta variant started to subside. Those sales started to accelerate in September, and both software and label sales have continued to expand in October. Year to date, we have now generated $5.3 million in FST recurring revenue versus our guidance of at least $7 million for the full year of 2021. Barring anything outside our control, we should easily achieve the $7 million number that we provided. As our terminal base expands, this leads to higher FST recurring revenue, which we expect to be accretive to our gross margin in 2022 and beyond. Moving on to our terminal base, we added an additional 807 paid terminals in the third quarter for a total of 8,749 in the market. That represents an additional 3,061 paid terminals in the marketplace so far in 2021. As I have mentioned on previous calls, hardware sales and the number of paid terminals in the market are the lifeblood of our recurring revenue stream As we increase the number of terminals in the marketplace, our recurring revenue will grow exponentially, fueling a predictable stream of FST revenue. While we have many existing projects and new opportunities underway, we are unfortunately encountering some unforeseen headwinds in our new terminal installations due to the dire labor situation in the hospitality market and product shortages, especially with restaurants and convenience stores. We're hearing from several prospective and existing BOHA customers that they simply do not have personnel available right now to work on new technology installations as they work to improve their supply chain situation and their labor shortage issues. I'd like to emphasize that this does not mean these opportunities are disappearing, but the timing of these potential deals has simply been pushed out. As a result, this labor and food shortage issue has created a modest headwind in the timing of adoption of our technology, and we are now expecting our installed terminal base for 2021 to be at the low end of our previous guidance of 10,000 to 11,000. However, we believe these issues and challenges provide a huge opportunity for the recognition of the importance of our BOHA system and its ability to provide labor hour savings and efficiencies in the back of house of restaurants and with convenience stores fresh food programs. So when the labor and food shortage situations begin to improve, we're well positioned to capitalize on this opportunity as our technology is already being evaluated with BOHA workstations and terminals underway or about to begin. Let me tell you, our phones continue to ring and we continue to add new prospects for future potential business. Next, I wanted to provide you with an update on our ARPU. For the third quarter of 2021, our ARPU fell slightly sequentially to $1,016 per terminal versus $1,179 in the second quarter of 2021. Well, part of the reason for the decline was due to the impact of the Delta variant early in the quarter. As I previously said, we had our best month ever in September for FST recurring revenue, and it has continued into October. As I have mentioned previously during our investor calls, we have a strong relationship with the convenience store chain 7-Eleven, and they continue to order more terminals to be installed in their stores as they focus on expanding their fresh food initiatives. Each store requires some construction changes to add fresh food capabilities and includes the installation of the BOHA terminal. While we will not be providing a quarterly update on the penetration of the 7-11 stores, we will remind you that the terminal install opportunity for this year is about 2,000 total terminals, and the remaining amount of terminals for us to ship is about 7,000. I'm very encouraged by the many opportunities in our FST pipeline, despite the labor and food shortage issues in the market, and continue to be impressed with our relationship with Apple as we both work to win in the restaurant market. Now let's move on to our casino and gaming business. Revenue in the quarter was $4 million, up a fully 100% year-over-year and 16% sequentially. The continued strength in our casino business has been fueled largely by momentum in the domestic casino floor spending. We're seeing a very solid return to slot machine and EGT's growth onto the casino floors across the country as pent-up demand finally has an outlet to be realized. We expect the casino and gaming industry to continue to ramp up spending through the remainder of 2021 and well into 2022. Finally, I wanted to talk specifically about some of the challenges almost every business faces today. First, I'm sure everyone is aware that we have a major shortage of workers that is affecting a number of industries, but perhaps none as badly as the service industry and especially restaurants and convenience stores. As I said, this is creating a headwind to the timing of some BOHA deals due to the inability to assign resources to train and assess the capability on our platform, as I mentioned earlier. Second, we have seen widespread supply chain issues affecting primarily technology manufacturing, and unfortunately, we have not been immune to these. While our BOHA terminals and workstations have not been affected by these problems, our 9700 food service terminal, primarily for McDonald's, which falls under FST revenue, and our Epic 950 and Epic Edge gaming printers, as well as our Ithaca 9000 POS printers, have. We are working diligently to ensure the impact of these delays is minimized by every method possible, including buying parts on the spot market, which usually means paying more for these parts. These higher material costs combined with the current elevated shipping prices could have a short-term downward effect on the margin of our hardware sales. However, we have taken steps to mitigate these cost increases, including raising our prices. We are working hard to be able to ship every order we receive, but we could run out of product, especially if the market continues to rapidly expand for our technology and products. I would like to end this discussion by saying if we must push any order into 2022, we do not believe we will lose any of these sales. Remember, any competitor of ours is facing the same issues, and we believe we entered this new part shortage phase with much more inventory than most of our competitors. Before I turn the call to Steve to give you details about our financial performance, I'd like to take the time to thank the employees at Transact for all they did during one of the most difficult times in the country's history, but also in their lives also. Two industries devastated by COVID-19 pandemic were restaurants and casinos. So much went on inside of Transact. And just want to thank every employee for all you did to get us through these difficulties. Not only did these wonderful employees stay dedicated to Transact, but we also worked together to get our offices open so we could get back to meetings and discussions in the office and off the video. Our offices are now open. 100% of our employees are vaccinated, and it's great to see the interaction between the teams once again. I cannot thank the Transact employees more. You are wonderful. And with that, I'd like to turn the call over to Steve to go over our results in detail. Steve?
spk03: Thanks, Bart. Let's turn to our third quarter results in detail now. Total net sales were 10.6 million, which was up 46% from 7.3 million in the third quarter of 2020. Sales from our food service technology market, or FST, were up to 3.3 million, a 40% increase from 2.3 million in the third quarter of 2020. FST hardware sales increased 64% to 1.3 million from 771,000 a year ago. We added 807 paid terminals during the quarter, and we finished with a total of 8,749 in the market. Our recurring FST sales, which include software and service subscriptions, as well as consumable label sales, were 2 million, which was up 28% from the 1.6 million reported in the prior year period. As Bart mentioned, our recurring revenue is a function of how many paid terminals we have in service, and as those numbers continue to climb, so too will our label sales and other recurring revenue. As we mentioned last quarter, given that we're in the early stages of building our installed base of terminals, our ARPU will likely fluctuate quarter to quarter based on the size of individual software, label, and service orders and the timing of terminals shipped. As a reminder, we changed how we calculate ARPU to reduce the noise around the number. We now calculate ARPU by annualizing the quarter's recurring revenue and then dividing that number by the number of paid terminals and service at the end of the prior quarter. Using this method, our ARPU for the third quarter of 21 was $1,016, which was down from $1,179 in the second quarter of 21. Our casino and gaming sales were $4 million, up 100% from the third quarter of 2020 and up 16% sequentially. We're continuing to see improvement towards our pre-pandemic level of quarterly sales for the casino and gaming market, with particular strength in the domestic market that was up 71% from the third quarter last year. Our international casino and gaming sales also improved to 1.4 million, which was more than tripling the sales compared to the COVID-affected third quarter of 2020. We expect this recovery to continue as the pandemic-related slowdown begins to subside. POS automation sales were up 60% to 1.2 million from the prior year period. The increase is mainly attributable to higher sales of our Ithaca 9000 printer to McDonald's as sales recover from pandemic-depressed levels. Turning to print track sales, revenues were $160,000, which was up 50% from the third quarter of last year. Though we continue to de-emphasize print track sales, we still continue to fulfill orders from our legacy customers as the industry recovers from the impact of COVID-19. On to Transact Services Group, or TSG. Overall, TSG sales were down $122,000, or 6% to $2 million. This was due mostly to lower sales of legacy POS paper and service contracts on our legacy banking printers. Keep in mind, we're no longer focusing on the products in this market and expect our TSG revenue to decline over time. Turning to our gross margin, our third quarter gross margin was 40.6% as compared to 45.9% in the prior year period. Gross margin this quarter was impacted by lower margin on sales of BOHA terminals as well as higher material and shipping costs resulting from the worldwide supply disruptions and shortages caused by the pandemic. This was partially offset by 46% higher overall sales volume, including significantly higher casino and gaming printer sales, which are higher margin products, as well as higher FST recurring revenue. As a reminder, we decided to reduce our margin on BOHA hardware products to accelerate the growth of our installed base of terminals to drive more lucrative FST recurring revenue such as software subscriptions, service and labels. We should see a favorable impact on gross margin over the longer term as recurring revenue grows to become a larger percentage of our overall sales. As we move down the income statement, operating expenses for the third quarter increased 1.1 million or 23% to 5.9 million when compared to the third quarter of last year. Our engineering expenses were up due to the hiring of additional software developers and expenses incurred for continued BOHA software development projects paid to our third-party development firm. Our selling and marketing expenses also rose as we hired new sales and marketing staff, increased marketing programs to promote and support BOHA, and incurred higher sales commissions and travel expenses as sales and travel both began to return to more normalized levels. As a reminder, Q3 last year reflected lower COVID-impacted levels of spending And 2021 marks a spending ramp that began in the third quarter and will continue into Q4 and into next year. To further break down our operating expenses for the third quarter, our engineering expenses were up 30% to $1.9 million. Our selling and marketing expenses were up 51% to $1.9 million. And our G&A expenses were essentially flat, up less than 1% to $2.1 million. We incurred an operating loss of $1.6 million, or 15.1% of net sales in the third quarter of 21, which compares to an operating loss of $1.5 million, or 20.3% of net sales in the third quarter of 2020. Though I don't normally speak about our other income line item, during the third quarter of 21, our $2.2 million PPP loan from the SBA under the CARES Act was formally forgiven. As a result, we eliminated this outstanding debt from our balance sheet and recognized the $2.2 million gain as other income in the quarter. On the bottom line, we recorded net income of $910,000, or 9 cents per diluted share, in the third quarter of 21, compared to a net loss of $867,000, or 11 cents, in the year-ago period. After removing the $2.2 million gain from the forgiveness of the PPP loan, we incurred an adjusted net loss during the third quarter of 21 of $1.3 million, or 13 cents per diluted share. Adjusted EBITDA after the third quarter of 21, after removing the effect of the PPP loan forgiveness, was a negative $1.2 million, which compares to negative $869,000 in the year-ago period. And one final item I'd like to mention, we enhanced our liquidity position during the third quarter by completing our second capital raise in August. Through an underwritten public offering, we sold approximately 842,000 shares of our common stock, generating net proceeds of approximately $11.3 million after deducting all underwriting and other related expenses. As a result, we ended the third quarter of 21 with a solid balance sheet, including $18.7 million in cash and no debt outstanding. At this point, I'd like to turn the call back over to Bart for closing remarks. Bart?
spk00: Yeah. Thanks, Steve. Nicely done. Operator, at this time, we'll open up the call to questions.
spk01: Thank you. If you'd like to ask a question, please signal by pressing star 1 on your telephone keypad. If you're using a speakerphone, please make sure that your mute function is turned off to allow your signal to reach our equipment. I'll take that as star 1 if you'd like to ask a question. We'll take our first question from George Sutton with Craig Hallam. Please go ahead.
spk06: Thank you. Bart, I wondered if you could... quantify the labor issues relative to the install side. And then on the other side of that, talk about the impact and demand that you're seeing because of those supply issues from your customers.
spk00: So on the installation side, I'm clearly, you know, we have one night, you know, we have one big customer that's installing terminals every quarter and, you know, they face the issue of part shortages and, and, uh, oven shortages and construction delays and all that. So we're all just working through that. We still think we'll ship 2,000 terminals this year to them. I think the biggest thing, George, is we're hearing from two groups of customers. The convenience store customers, market is hot right now because the fresh food program seems to be taking hold. And when I look at the opportunities that we're working on right now, we've got a lot of big opportunities in the convenience store market. If they haven't got into fresh food yet, they're playing catch up and they need a labeling solution. But the interesting thing is they're also looking at other software to help them as they roll out a labeling solution. So that market has become ripe for new orders for us. So it's been quite exciting in that side of the business. And I think what really helped us, George, was being at NAC, the North American Convenience Store Show, because potential customers could go look at our product and our customers' products. And there's a clear difference between us and the competitors. So it really helped to solidify in our potential new customers' minds that we've got the best technology out there. What's very encouraging also is the calls that we are receiving from restaurant companies. You know, they start the conversation off by saying, look, we're on hold for the next 90 days. We're working through labor issues. We're working through, you know, I mean, I don't know if you've heard some restaurants have run out of straws and restaurants have run out of coffee cup covers. It's just amazing stories. But they've been told to get help for the back of the house. And one CEO I talked to, he said that's the most difficult part to hire is the back of the house. So you think about it, the waiters and waitresses are all making tips and all that, and the back of the house is not. In fact, one restaurant company is adding a line on their check for a tip for the back of the house. And the restaurant company is going to match that tip dollar for dollar because of trying to recruit people for the back of the house. So the calls that we are getting is almost a panic in a panic way, which is help. How can you help us? You know, we're now looking at the back of the house. We now need to drive labor out. We now need to get more efficient. And in fact, we have one customer that's given us an idea of a new product that we're starting to work on right now. And one we just never thought of because it's time consuming for this one kind of restaurant. And it's a certain segment of the of the market. So we're really encouraged, George. You know, we came out of the pandemic with some very stiff headwinds because everybody was closed. Now we're coming out of it. The casino market's taken off on us, and it's great. I just hope we can get all the printers we can because the orders are just flowing in. But we do feel the tailwind. from both the convenience store market and the restaurant market because one is trying to get into fresh food and moving trying to get it very quickly, and the other is in dire need for help on their labor issues. I don't think it's unknown to everybody that $15 an hour now is the average, if not the low end, of the wage scale. And so I'm very encouraged. And I think it's given us a lot of momentum. Now, it might take a little longer to close these deals. And that, okay, you know what? There's not much we can do about that. But the amount of deals that we're working on, the amount of excitement inside the business is pretty exciting.
spk06: One other question, if I could. I know you have been going to market with Apple now, and I wondered if you could just – either quantify the pipeline or just give us some perspective of what kind of success you expect, particularly on the restaurant side with Apple?
spk00: You know, the good thing about Apple is if you look at our solution, right, if you look at our workstation, we have to have a tablet, right? So if you look at the total cost of our hardware solution, it's the workstation itself, which is You know, this device that has two printers in it to go to all this communication. You know, we got Boho Link in it where we communicate to the printers wirelessly and all that. We don't use Bluetooth. But then you need a tablet. And with Apple going out and convincing restaurant companies across the board to start using the iPad... What happens to our solution, George, is we become cheap in a way because now the restaurant company has made a decision, not because of our technology, but because they want an iPad in every restaurant or two or three. Now that part of the cost side of the conversation with the customer goes away. Oh, you already have an iPad. Well, now all you need is the workstation. So it's actually been extremely helpful for us. And, of course... where they have gone into restaurants and sold, of course they're sharing that information with us. I will say that I am finding them to be very attentive and very interested in our success. I now have a weekly call with them personally, and we are really trying to align our efforts together. You know, their vision of the marketplace is the iPad becomes the device for the front, middle, and back of the house. And their partners, let's call it partners or their friends, whatever they want to call us, will be the ones that benefit. So what their big goal is, is that that iPad controls everything within the restaurant. And then all of us that are providing the technology to go on that iPad win. So it's very encouraging. And it does help us on the price of our technology. Because, you know, we don't have to include that anymore. They've gone and sold it.
spk06: Gotcha. Okay, great. Thanks for your help. Congrats on the results.
spk01: Yeah, thanks, George. Yep. Thank you. We'll take our next question from Jeff Martin with Roth Capital Partners.
spk02: Thanks. Good afternoon, Steve. How are you? Good, Jeff. How are you doing? Doing well, thanks. I was wondering if you could quantify or give a relative comparison the uplift in FST ARR that you saw or experienced in September and are seeing so far in October. How does that compare relative to, say, second quarter average? Anything you can do to help either give perspective or quantify, that would be helpful.
spk00: Yeah, so let's talk about the third quarter. So clearly we saw an uptick in our software sales. So if you look at Q3 versus Q2, we have more software sales, and that's because we're penetrating the restaurant market. Remember, we haven't announced a big deal, but we're closing little deals every day. You know, 40 restaurants, 30 restaurants, 20 restaurants. And there's a bigger amount of software in those deals than what we have in the convenience store market. So our software sales are rising. And one thing we've got to remember, the third quarter of this year versus the third quarter of last year, we had that large one order that came through from one of our customers that was an overkill. So even when we compare third quarter of this year to third quarter of last year, The third quarter last year had some extra label sales that should have never happened. And so our sales actually this quarter, this third quarter, was much higher than last year. But what we are seeing is that what happened in July and August was what I think the country saw, right? You had a Delta variant. Things started to slow down again as transactions slow down, label sales slow down because the amount of goods or the amount of grab-and-go or the amount of what they're, you know, making goes down. In September, as we kind of saw the Delta variant kind of slow down, things really started opening again. We saw our label sales grow and grow a lot, and we saw that continue into October. So we're encouraged by that. But I would say, Steve, I think you would agree with me, it was the software sales that really was the difference between Q2 and Q3 in regards to increase.
spk03: I think labels were up nicely, too, though. They were both up.
spk00: Yes. Okay, great. We had our best software quarter ever in the third quarter.
spk02: Okay. Okay. And then relative to your commentary around component and supply chain challenges, did you feel any impact from that in Q3, or is this a discussion that's more relevant to Q4 and maybe the first part of next year?
spk00: I'll take it from the sales side. We ran out of product in Q3. Okay. So in the gaming side, the gaming side just kind of exploded on us and we couldn't take any more orders. You know, I've never seen anything like it. And if you think it's just electronics, it's not. Let me give you an example. I mean, we use light emitting sensors to watch paper move within our technology. And our manufacturers, one of the largest manufacturers of sensors, couldn't get the epoxy to glue the glass housing over the sensor. So it's not just electronic components. Steve, you want to talk about the shortages?
spk03: Yeah, I mean, from the supply side, Jeff, like Bart said, we had them during the quarter. In some products, we completely depleted. Like the gaming product, we actually completely depleted down to nothing. And we're continuing to having what I'm calling like rolling stock outs where we might stock out of a product for a couple of weeks while we wait for a part to come in, and then we catch it back up. So I guess the way to look at it is we're hand-to-mouth. I mean, I think our operations group is doing a really good job getting the parts in any way that we possibly can. It's costing us a little bit more, and we have to sometimes pay more for the parts, and then typically we have to fly the parts in, which costs more. But we're doing okay. I mean, so far so good, but it definitely is going to impact us in Q4. Okay, great.
spk00: There's this new word called decommit, and it's not like we didn't prepare for – you know, to place orders on our vendors. So, you know, because we entered the year with a lot of inventory. But we, you know, everybody was talking about part shortages, so we placed our orders. And you could be expecting a shipment on October 10th. I'm going to make this up. But on October 9th, the vendor calls and says, I'm decommitting. We're going to be a month late. So this is a new word that none of us have ever experienced before. So where we really thought we weren't going to experience it that much this year, It's this thing called decommit where we're now getting calls from vendors saying we're going to be a month later, we're going to be two weeks later. And they don't tell you until the day you're expecting it to ship. So, you know, it's a phenomenon that we're living with. In the gaming side, the good news is we came out with a new Epic Edge printer for the casino market, and not all the slot manufacturers had moved over to it, and we were trying to end the life of the 950. The good news is we had Epic Edges in stock because we had gone into production of the product. So it really helped to motivate our slot machine manufacturers around the world to move over to the Edge. So our goal is to end the life now of the 950. You know, at the G2E gaming show, we actually had a sign up that said Epic Edge in stock to kind of force the casinos to talk to the slot manufacturers to get them to integrate the Epic Edge product.
spk03: Yeah, but another thing that's kind of – it's actually kind of funny. It's kind of good and bad is our competitors stocked out before we did because we had such a large inventory position. So we got – I think we stole a bunch of market share probably in POS and in gaming just because we had product in stock. So that also kind of exacerbated our shortage issue because we were selling more than we normally would because of that too.
spk02: Okay, great. And then Bart, care to take a stab at a range of BOHA terminal installs that you could foresee for 2022? Great.
spk00: You know, it's funny, Jeff. I've been working on that for the last couple hours. I figured you'd ask that question. And so I was adding up all the opportunities. And, you know, it's in five digits, right? I won't give you a number, but it's over 10,000 terminals that we're working on. And, you know, it's just the thing I can't, you know, it's what we can commit to is when will the customer be ready? They're very motivated. They've got this labor issue. They want to work on the back of the house. We've got new convenience stores that want to do fresh food. I think those will close. I think there we've got a better shot because that's a revenue. That can drive more revenue for the convenience stores. It's the restaurants that's hard to quantify when they will close. We're working on some big deals. And, you know, the rollout is what they're looking at and saying, okay, how can we do the rollout when we don't even have enough? You know, we have some restaurants that are closing, you know, at 5 o'clock because they have nobody to work at night. So it's hard to handicap that, Jeff. But I can tell you that our opportunities is in the five digits for next year.
spk02: Okay. Look forward to getting more of an update as we get into 2022. Thanks for your time.
spk01: Thank you. Once again, that's Star 1. If you'd like to ask a question, we'll hear next from Chris Howey with Barrington Research.
spk04: Hi, Bart. Hi, Steve. Good afternoon.
spk05: Hey, Chris.
spk04: Hey, Chris. Hey. You've talked about it a little bit, but I wanted to ask the question perhaps in a different way. What are the challenges that essentially everyone is seeing at different ends of the supply chain causing things to get pushed out. Can you maybe talk about how this environment has made the sales process simpler in that it's highlighted the need in the back of the house more so than ever and perhaps your pipeline of opportunities is accelerating faster than you had perhaps ever anticipated. As we go into the later part of this recovery.
spk00: There's no doubt, Chris. You know, I think in the restaurants that I've personally talked to, and now I talk to our salespeople almost every day, and, you know, we're just chatting about what we're hearing. In the old days, you just hired another body, right? Okay, I need to take temperature of this new food that we're making. $8 an hour, just put a body there. And now it's $15 an hour. They're now offering college education and full medical and all that. So now a body is expensive. I think it's, look, I think the last two years through the pandemic, the talk was the front of the house, right? It was online ordering. It was delivery. It was the only way for restaurants to stay open. And companies like Olo did great, you know, with, you know, working with restaurants. If they didn't have delivery or online ordering, they were closed. I think the next two or three years, the story is going to be technology and the technology for the back of the house. I think the only way to get out of this labor issue, especially the back of the house, where you've got a lot of labor, it's very difficult to hire. Talk to any CEO of a restaurant company. They'll tell you the back of the restaurant is the challenge. It's just hard to hire. Literally, there's somebody putting a new line on a bill for the back of the house staff to tip them so they can try and drive more customers. um you know income to the back of the house people i think the next two three years is easily the story of technology for the back of the house and this is and and you know it's it's driven the market to open up now we've just got to get through you know the next couple of months or a month or two you know today you know you heard some good news i some government person i think came out and said i i think you know the supply chain is getting better i think fedex and ups said that there's going to be stuff on the shelves for christmas and all that I think we're all waiting to see it. But I think once we get through that, I think it's just going to be a great time for our company and anybody else that's trying to get technology into the restaurants. I think that's what the story is going to be.
spk04: Yeah, and that kind of leads me to my follow-up question. That's very helpful, by the way. As we move from these larger opportunities to to the SMB market. Can you talk about the SMB market, how that performed in the quarter? And as we think about the SMB market in the context of the overall business, given the shorter cycle of this business, could it in the long run be a more reliable, predictable stream of revenue for Transact?
spk00: Yeah, great question, Chris. Well, we had to hire. We had to add another salesperson. We are seeing that market pick up. We're doing a fair amount of marketing, as Steve talked to everybody about, the spending that we're doing. We're about to kick off another major marketing program. And what happens is you get somebody that's got 20 restaurants in. that's facing the same issue that a larger corporation is facing, but they can move a lot quicker. And that's what we're seeing. So we're seeing the SMB business move a lot quicker. And that's what's picked up. You look at how many terminals we installed and all that. Outside of our existing customers that are adding, a lot of that new business was all SMB. So we have added. We'll probably add another person We're about to kick off a major marketing program again. Just yesterday, my marketing manager called. We've got two new leads just from some marketing that we're doing and how we're positioning our marketing. And some of our investors are seeing it because you sent me an email saying, I saw this in a convenience store. I saw this on National Restaurant News. our ads and all that, and it's resonating. We're trying to really focus in on the issue of labor, on food safety, which is a major issue, and it's resonating. But clearly, the smaller people can act and react a lot quicker, and we're seeing that. That's great. Thanks for taking my questions.
spk04: Appreciate the time. You got it. Yeah, thank you.
spk01: Thank you. And once again, that's Star 1 if you'd like to ask a question. It appears that we have no further questions in the queue. I'd like to turn the conference back over to management for any additional closing remarks.
spk00: Well, fantastic. Well, we thank you for your support. We thank our shareholders for your support. We're working hard. You know, I've got to be honest. I've never seen business like this where part shortages and labor shortages all hit at the same time. Inflation. Like I said, we are dealing with some of this by raising prices, so we are not absorbing all the cost increases, and I think that'll hold. But I've never seen a world like this, and I look forward to getting to the end of this. I thought we saw enough when the pandemic hit, and now we're coming out of it and seeing it on this side. But as Chris just talked about, I think it's an exciting time for the company because all of these issues is highlighting to restaurants, convenience stores, food service providers, kiosk companies that are selling food in grocery stores and all that, that driving cost savings, labor efficiency, productivity is going to be the way of the future, and that's what we do for a living. So I do think that the next couple of years will be pretty exciting for us. I do thank our employees, what they had to go through, and I'm sure everybody's firms had to go through this, but I do thank the Transact employees. They just did a fantastic job. We're all back together. I'm in our Las Vegas office. It's a very exciting time here. It's great to see everybody working together again. We are 100% vaccinated, so we're able to open up 100%. So look, I thank our shareholders for your support. I look forward to continuing our conversation with you and look forward looking out a couple of years and seeing the success of what we've been able to create. So look forward to talking to you after we get to the new year. Happy Thanksgiving, and if I don't talk to you, have a happy new year. Thanks.
spk01: Thank you. That does conclude today's conference. We thank you all for your participation.
spk00: You may now disconnect.
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