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spk07: Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Talkspace first quarter 2022 earnings conference call. At this time, all participant lines are in listen-only mode. After the presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you'll need to press star, then 1 on your telephone keypad. Please be advised today's conference may be recorded. If you require operator assistance during the call, please press star, then 0. I'd now like to turn the conference over to Mike Lovell, Investor Relations Director.
spk04: Good evening, everyone. Thanks for joining Talkspace's 2022 first quarter earnings call. I hope you've had the opportunity to access the press release. We have a presentation of our earnings materials that you should see on Talkspace's IR site We'll use the presentation to walk you through today's remarks. We will begin with comments from Chairman and Interim Chief Executive Officer Doug Braunstein, followed by Chief Financial Officer Jennifer Falk. Both are available for questions following the prepared remarks. Certain measures we'll discuss on this call are expressed on a non-GAAP basis and have been adjusted to exclude the impact of one-off items. Reconciliations of these non-GAAP measures are included in our earnings release and on our website, Talkspace.com. I also want to remind you that we'll be discussing forward-looking information today, which may include forecasts, targets, and other statements regarding our plans, goals, strategic priorities, and anticipated financial results. While these statements represent our best current judgment about future results and performance as of today, Our actual results are subject to many risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from what we expect. Important factors that may affect our future results are described in our most recent SEC reports and today's earnings press release. For more information, please review our safe harbor disclaimer on slide two. And now I'll turn the call over to Doug, who will begin on slide three.
spk05: Thanks, Mike. And thank you all for joining us today to discuss our first quarter 2022 results. I'm going to begin with a snapshot of the first quarter financial performance and then discuss the progress we're making towards the operational and executional priorities we outlined during our fourth quarter earnings call. So you can see on slide three that revenue grew 11% year over year, driven by an expansion of our B2B franchise, which demonstrated year-over-year and quarterly growth in revenues, in sessions, and covered lives. We added Beacon, a significant new national account, at the end of the quarter, and we expanded our relationship with Optum in Q1. We also added 31 new accounts in the quarter for our DTE, or direct-to-employer business. including large national accounts such as Kempton Hotels and Resorts and Restaurants, and two significant broker houses, Gallagher and Alliant. Our B2C business was down year over year, but was essentially flat quarter on quarter, despite another sequential reduction in our advertising spend. We implemented several changes to the funnel in March, that have begun to yield modest improvements in our conversion metrics and reduced our customer acquisition costs. So if you turn to slide four, you'll recall that in January we outlined six strategic priorities that the management team would be focused on to improve our performance. Page four highlights some of the items we introduced in Q1. that we believe represent progress towards these priorities and impacted the performance and the KPIs we track in the first quarter. So first, we began data tests in March, unifying our funnel, essentially making it easier for B2C and B2B customers to find a provider directly through our consumer website and apps. As a reminder, we have several million non-unique visitors to our site each quarter, and the early results from these tests are encouraging. We believe that this can drive both penetration and utilization in our B2B business over time. In addition, we made an important change to our matching process based on consumer research, and we made that change in March as well. This change, which uses our proprietary algorithm to deliver quick and appropriate matches, drove a higher conversion rate and a lower tech in March, which favorably impacted quarterly results. Second, we continue to make progress towards expanding capacity and increasing satisfaction of our clinical network. The marketplace for clinical talent, as you know, is undoubtedly competitive today, and we're taking steps to make Talkspace a platform of choice for providers. We've accelerated multistate licensing, we improved our provider dashboard, and we adjusted our clinical compensation policies, making it both more transparent as well as more responsive to the current market environment. As a result of these actions, we're seeing early signs of improving therapist satisfaction in our most recent surveys. We grew our average hourly engagement from our existing therapists during the quarter, and we had our strongest recruiting month in March for new contracted therapists over the past year. Third, we're continuing to add customers, resources, focus, and products to our B2B business. We introduced a bundled offering product late in the first quarter for our B2B partners. which now includes our new Talkspace self-guided product. And we grew our B2B sales team over 25% in the quarter. Improved targeting and focus in our DTE business introduced in Q1 is helping us to build a pipeline of larger DTE customers. Our average contract size was up in Q1, and we signed our first large million-dollar-plus account this year. While the cycle time for these larger clients is often longer and the revenue growth can be lumpier, we're targeting these opportunities today more directly with our sales force. Fourth, we continue to optimize our consumer businesses to deliver improved efficiencies. As I mentioned, we implemented a number of changes to the funnel in early March that we believe led to our modest improvements in conversion and customer acquisition metrics compared to last quarter. In fact, this is the first positive quarterly trend in our conversion data in the past four quarters for the company. So while media spend was reduced by 19% sequentially pursuant to our plans coming into the quarter, adjusted sequential revenues were flat as we saw increased traction for our highest service video products. We do expect to continue to reduce aggregate B2C media spend going forward as we better manage our cash flows, and that should result in a smaller revenue base for this business. But we believe management can implement changes to further improve our members' experience while also increasing efficiencies in both tech and unit economics. Our fifth strategic priority is continuing to innovate and enhance our product suite. Minor changes like simplifying our onboarding process for our MBH members in their initial evaluation sessions, as well as more significant product launches like PoxBase Self-Guided, do allow us to build towards a better member experience and offer a broader solution set for our B2B customers. And finally, as we continue to focus on optimizing cash flow across the business, as I mentioned on our last call, We believe we have ample cash resources to enhance and expand our capabilities in ways that both deliver operating leverage over time as well as value to our shareholders. But basic operating progress, like introducing KPIs, scorecards, real-time reporting, have been both adopted and embraced throughout the broader organization and it has allowed us to make timelier, data-driven adjustments to our business plan. As an example, actions taken this quarter generated efficiencies in our cash collections that positively reduced working capital. So while management clearly understands that we've got plenty of ongoing work ahead of us, we believe that the actions we've taken in the first quarter reflect the first important steps in our path towards building shareholder value and delivering on our mission. So with that, I'll turn the call over to Jennifer to provide details on our operating and financial performance. Jennifer, over to you.
spk08: Thanks, Doug, and good evening, everyone. I'll focus my comments on sequential results as we continue to believe this presentation is most useful to understand our performance beginning in November 2021 given the new management team, our evolving revenue mix, and the significant operational initiatives we identified at that time. Starting with slide five, first quarter revenue was $30.2 million, up 3% sequentially on a reported basis from the fourth quarter. First quarter B2C revenue was $17.3 million, up 5% from the fourth quarter with three percentage points of growth related to a $500,000 one-time non-cash reversal in deferred revenue associated with customers no longer active on the platform. The remaining two percentage points of sequential growth were driven by improved mix in consumer plans partially offset by a lower number of active users. B2B revenue was $12.9 million. up 1% on a reported basis from Q4. You will recall that Q4 2021 results included a favorable impact from revenue reserve on receivables of $800,000 from prior periods. Normalizing for that adjustment, sequential growth was 8%, driven primarily by growth in B2B sessions, and to a lesser extent, additional DTE customers. Our first quarter gross profit declined 6% sequentially to $15 million with a gross margin of 49.8%. Down compared to Q4 primarily due to higher clinician costs and a revenue mix shift within the B2B business. Turning to slide six. First quarter 2022 gap operating expenses were $36 million compared to $45 million in the fourth quarter. This reduction was due to lower stock-based compensation and the elimination of non-recurring severance costs booked in Q4. Excluding non-recurring items, first quarter operating expenses were down slightly from the fourth quarter as lower media spend and lower employee-related expenses were partially offset by higher professional services fees. Fourth quarter net loss was $20 million and adjusted EBITDA loss was $18 million. Our cash balance as of March 31st was $184 million, a reduction of $14 million from the year end. We benefited in this quarter from actions taken to reduce the DSO for our receivables, which generated a one-time benefit of approximately $4 million. We expect cash burn to generally match our EBITDA going forward. Turning to slide seven for a closer look at our B2B performance. As I mentioned earlier, B2B revenue for the quarter grew 8% on a normalized basis, reflecting an increase in covered lives and sessions, as well as growth in our DTE customer base. We ended the quarter with approximately 76 and a half million eligible lives, an increase of 11% versus the prior quarter. Number of sessions completed also increased 11% sequentially to almost 91,000. We believe we have significant opportunities to continue to grow our B2B business as we execute our operational agenda to drive penetration in our covered lives, expand our relationships with existing health plan partners, and launch coverage with new payers. Enterprise revenue was up 5% sequentially driven by the addition of 31 customers in the first quarter, partially offset by the loss of a large municipal customer that no longer had funding available for our program. We continue to see strong demand in our pipeline from employers seeking expanded mental health benefits for their employees. Turning to slide eight for a closer look at our B2C performance, revenue grew 5% sequentially, of which 3% is related to the deferred revenue adjustment mentioned earlier. The revenue increase was driven by higher ARPU as our members continued to migrate toward higher subscription tiers with a greater number of video sessions, partially offset by a 7% reduction in active members. Advertising spending was down 19% sequentially as we continued to optimize our marginal ROI. The combination of modestly improved conversion and reduced advertising spend led to a modest improvement in quarterly contribution. Turning to our conclusion on slide nine, as Doug mentioned in his remarks, we continue to believe that initiatives we are focused on as a management team will drive growth and profitability and deliver shareholder value over time. We look forward to keeping you updated on our progress. With that, we'll open the call to questions.
spk07: If you'd like to ask a question at this time, please press the star, then the number one key on your touchtone telephone. To withdraw your question, press the pound key. Our first question comes from Charles Rhee with Cowan.
spk02: Yeah, thanks for taking the questions, Doug and Jennifer. You know, if I could start with, on the BDC side, obviously results, you know, look much better than we were expecting. And just wanted to get your sense, you know, the performance is holding up here. You kind of mentioned more video visits. You know, maybe can you talk about some trends that you're seeing here? Obviously, you are reducing your marketing spend. Maybe your thoughts on the ad space. sort of the ad market and the pricing there. Obviously, your larger competitor highlighted that recently last week and just wanted to get your thoughts on what you're seeing right now in the market as it relates to that.
spk05: So, Charles, thanks for the question. Actually, it felt like quite a few questions, so let me try and step back and address it. You know, we have been speaking consistently – since I began making these calls about the pressures and challenges in the advertising market. We did not see anything unique or different in our business in the first quarter as it relates to that. What we did tell you, however, is that we believed we had a number of opportunities to address and improve our customer journey through our website and the conversion of those customers as they come through the process with us. And what you see in our results in the first quarter is we told you we would be reducing our advertising spend, and we did that. I did also reference we're going to continue to improve our efficiency in this business, so you can expect some further reduction in the second quarter. But importantly, we actually implemented a number of things we were working on through the beginning of the year in March that had a meaningful impact in increasing our conversion, and as a result of that, reducing our CAC. And we have a number of other adjustments and additions to how customers experience their journey through our website and then are connected with therapists and the retention associated with that that we're going to be introducing throughout the second quarter that we think will continue to make us a much more efficient platform. So I can't speak to what others may or may not be doing, but I think a lot of what we have in front of us on the B to C side to improve our economics is completely within our control.
spk02: Maybe just to expand a little bit, can you give an example or some examples of what's changed to make the experience, the conversion better?
spk05: Yes, so we changed our matching function. So we did a bunch of customer research And, you know, one of the things, Charles, we've said is we're going to try and we've now got a fully staffed team, a conversion pod that is literally focused on optimizing our conversion. So we've added engineering software talent and data scientists in addition to a marketing team. And we're basically looking at our analytics and saying, where can we improve conversions? So one of the big sets of feedback we got from our customers was they prefer for us to use our algorithm to match them to a therapist. And so we actually went from a broader matching process to what we call the queue. We effectively used the algorithm, picked a therapist for them, got them a match both quicker and we think actually a much more preferential way for the consumer to experience our process and it had a meaningful impact on our conversion. By the way, it also improved the speed of which we match and it actually increases the capacity in the system. So it had a couple of ancillary benefits for us but mostly it improves the customer experience.
spk02: That's helpful. And a question for you, Jennifer. You mentioned in the gross margins, the gross profit in the quarter impacted by higher costs for clinicians. Can you talk about sort of what should we expect going forward? Is this something that, you know, obviously wage inflation is a topic across, you know, all industries right now. Maybe give us a sense for how you're thinking about further increases in clinician payouts. Just maybe your thoughts there. That would be helpful. Thank you. As we think about the second quarter and going forward.
spk08: Yeah, sure, Charles. So, yeah, I mentioned that we, you know, Doug had mentioned on a previous call, we had a lot of needs as far as addressing the network and ensuring that we were optimizing the experience for our clinicians, and specifically in Q2, we increased wages.
spk06: Q1.
spk08: In Q1, we increased the wages for our 1099 therapist network, and that obviously had a negative impact on margins, but As Doug mentioned, it was effective in what we were after, which was improving the satisfaction scores, expanding the hours worked for the contract network, as well as improving our recruiting capabilities. Again, the Q1 efforts were effective at doing that. Without having specific numbers for you, I think we see opportunities to drive more optimal margin. That's specifically in our largest opportunity is with regard to our W-2 salaried network, where we've really just begun early in the second quarter to implement initiatives to drive better productivity with regard to that opportunity. the work that they do. So we see this as having a benefit as we look forward. And in addition, more broadly, as we look at margin, we also see the need to be able to leverage the quality of our services to help offset those higher wages that we're paying in the price of our services. So these are all parts of our agenda going forward.
spk02: So, Ned, as we think about the second quarter and maybe as we think about the year, is this sort of the right gross margin range you would expect, or would you expect it to trend back up a little bit? Any color there would be helpful. Thank you.
spk05: Yeah, Charles, I guess I would say we would – we think there are a number of additional self-help items here, much like I talked about in B2C. that we would hope to be in a position where this is the bottom of the cycle for us from a margin standpoint.
spk02: Great. I appreciate the comment. Thank you.
spk07: Our next question comes from Vikram Kisavabhotla with Baird.
spk06: Hi. Thanks for taking the question. I wanted to start on the consumer side. Can you just give us some more color on what you're seeing in the competitive landscape today? And in particular, I'm curious if you're noticing any change in the advertising behavior or the types of strategies being used in the environment today relative to the environment that you navigated throughout last year. And maybe from a higher level, we'd love to get your thoughts on how you're expecting the B2C competitive landscape to evolve going forward.
spk05: Yeah, so, Vikram, happy to do that. And, you know, Charles said, focused on that as well. So, let me say a couple things. We haven't experienced in the first quarter any meaningful increase in advertising cost. Now, we have experienced over the past several quarters increased pressure, largely driven through increased competition in the space. We, you know, we are certainly aware of what others are saying, but we're really focused on optimizing the spend that we participate in. And so you've seen us, our trending on spend come down now sequentially for three quarters. And our ARPU continues to rise sequentially for three quarters. And we've now begun to work on improving our conversion. So, as I mentioned in my opening remarks, we had the first positive trend in four quarters in an improvement in conversion and a reduction in CAC. And much of that was really driven by initiatives that weren't formally launched until March. So, our And we have other things that we believe we can do to continue to improve that performance. I would say that we're striving to have a very disciplined return on invested capital with our B2C business. And the other piece of the equation for us is the ability to use what we think we've maintained a leading brand in the space to really drive incremental conversion with our growing network of B2B customers. So you heard me talk about this, and I think this is unique for us, Unification of the funnel, we literally talked about that in the third quarter call. We talked again about it in the fourth quarter. We've just begun to implement some testing, quite extensive testing now, in our consumer-driven funnel that is demonstrating some really interesting and exciting results to increase our penetration and utilization of our B2B customers through that channel. So we think that for us is also a unique benefit from our consumer advertising spend converted into B2B. Okay.
spk06: Thank you. And then maybe a follow-up question on the B2B side. I'm just curious if you can talk about how the selling process has evolved there. You know, obviously there's a lot of moving pieces in the macro environment right now. You talked about the competitive landscape, you know, continues to evolve as well. I'm just wondering, you know, how are customers adjusting their buying processes and decision-making processes in this environment? And, you know, what types of adjustments are you making to your kind of marketing approach in that environment, if any, to kind of react to that? I would great to get your thoughts there as well. Thanks.
spk05: Yeah, so Vikram, actually, again, I'm going to tell you for us, the first quarter, we added covered lives. We added sessions. We added DTE customers. We signed our first million-dollar annual revenue account. We have, I would say, suggest a reasonably robust pipeline of potential customers to add to our DTE business coming into Q2. We're not really seeing a change in the pace of demand for B2B services for behavioral healthcare, quite the opposite. It continues to be, I think, top of mind for companies and for payers. And, you know, this is still, unfortunately in the U.S., a huge unmet medical need. And access still remains remarkably challenged. And we think our solution set, both for our DTE accounts and for our payers is actually quite powerful in addressing those needs. So we're not really seeing a change in buying patterns. I will say the one caveat is I mentioned in the introductory remarks, we are increasingly targeting larger accounts. And the general selling cycle of those accounts, as you might expect, are longer, They have RFPs. Those tend to go through a little bit more. Having worked at a very large company in my prior life, they're more process-driven, and they take time. So while we have a robust pipeline of those opportunities, they'll be lumpier in nature, and they can have a quarter-to-quarter swing on our trend line, but the trend is still up and to the right.
spk06: Okay, thank you.
spk07: Our next question comes from Ryan Daniels with William Blair.
spk01: Yeah, guys, thanks for taking the questions, and congrats on the progress, I guess really towards all the goals you laid out. Let me start with one. You mentioned ARPU is also increasing, which is a nice trend to see. What's driving the move to more video sessions? Is that something you're actively pushing or marketing differently, or is it just consumers adopting that more?
spk05: You know, it's a combination. Look, I think we're doing some smart things from a marketing standpoint because we like the higher ARPU, but honestly, it's a demand-driven functionality. We're seeing that, by the way, Ryan, we're seeing that in our B2B business as well. There is an increasing, as we're re-upping clients, they're moving from texting-only plans to texting plus video or moving completely to live video. It's for us. It is not only a positive from an ARPU standpoint, but Jennifer mentioned the opportunity for us to improve the productivity of our W-2 therapists, which is called our NPP, our National Provider Practice. One of the ways we intend to do that is to move that group more towards live video, which allows us to more effectively manage their schedules. It also allows us to do a better job with our members by actually doing some basic forward scheduling, regular scheduling, and so it not only has from a productivity standpoint, but we think it will increase utilization and retention because we're able to, you know, more actively manage the interaction with therapists and their members. Ultimately, you know, the best news in that is, you know, we think duration improves efficacy. In fact, we know that from our clinical work. And so we think this actually improves outcomes and makes our members healthier and, you know, more productive.
spk01: Yeah, that's helpful, Colin. You didn't mention this, but I assume the improvement in the matching algorithms is not only helping with conversion rates, but is that also driving longer lengths of treatments? because you're getting them to the right therapist, it's a better experience.
spk05: You know, it's an excellent question. Part of the reason I mentioned it is we implemented it in March, so I think it'd be misleading from a data standpoint. We think it will, but we don't have enough data to come back to you yet. We're clearly keeping an eye on that.
spk01: Okay, we'll stay tuned. And then, You know, good news on the strength of the pipeline to D2E customers in the first million-dollar sale. So congrats on that. I'm curious, with that change, though, does it require any changes in the size of your sales team, the way you are going to market there or pitching the product, whether it's an employee benefit or ROI-driven, just anything like that, sales force changes, product needs, et cetera?
spk05: Yes. So it's a really great question. As I mentioned, actually, again, in the introductory remarks, we added about 25% more individuals to our sales team across B2B in the first quarter. That was basically our target. We were very successful in hiring and adding folks because people are excited to come to us because they see the opportunity. The other big thing we're doing is we've gotten way more rigorous in targeting. And so that's really important. And then I'll tell you the third thing that we're doing, which is we are improving. Jennifer talked about our ability to respond to the increased cost of our therapists, which we thought was really important to do for a variety of reasons. But we've also got increased costs across the board. Obviously, everyone is dealing with, you know, increased costs. We're trying to drive much more effective relationships with our customers that reflect the quality and the efficacy of our services. And we're having, you know, I would say it's early days. We're having real success with that. In part, we're going to be adding, and I know this is maybe more than you asked for, but we're doing some research right now that we think will help continue to validate the fact that people who use us as a benefit for their employees get reduced turnover, increased satisfaction, increased morale, and reduced medical cost. And so as a result of we think a lot of that work that's been done, you know, we think there's a pretty high ROI for our employers in utilizing our services. and I know I'm going on on this, but I'll add one more thing, which is really exciting for us. We introduced a full suite of, and I haven't really, I didn't talk enough about this. We introduced Talkspace Self-Guided, which is a full suite of digital product that both has clinical efficacy as well as a broad set of of applicability directly to our B2B customers. And it has really been driven as a B2B product set. We just started introducing that as an offering for our both DTE and our payer customers. And the early reaction to that is really quite positive. And what it allows us to say is we've got a full suite from self-help to therapy to psychiatry, so we can be sort of a one-stop shop for behavioral needs for most of what employers are looking for.
spk01: Okay, perfect. That's very helpful, and I appreciate all the color. Thanks.
spk07: Our next question comes from Stephanie Davis with SBB Layering.
spk00: Hey, guys. Thank you for taking my question. I just have a quick question on the arc of the B2B business. As we think about growth and evolution, how should we think about the end market demand? Is there structurally enough wallet available for pure play employer wins? Or with the current backdrop with employer fatigue, we see greater focus on something else, such as EAP enablement or a continuation from your recent payer wins?
spk05: You know, Stephanie, again, I'm not exactly sure what you're looking at or referring to. On the payer side, as we mentioned, we signed up a big national account at the end of the first quarter. We added more lives with another large national player, and we've got a pretty robust pipeline of new payer relationships that we have not penetrated. And I would say a across the board on the payer side, everyone is facing significant challenges in meeting the demand of their members. So on that side, we think there's lots of opportunity, and we haven't even really scratched the surface of some of the things we've got planned to drive utilization and penetration of the lives we currently now cover. On the DTE side, again, I think our pipeline is pretty robust. While we're proud of all the accounts that we've added, it's an incredibly small number relative to the size of the opportunity set. And You know, we continue to experience inbound calls from individuals. We continue to see circumstances where we're pitching and there's very little competition. And we continue to win more of our fair share of things where there is competition because people really like our product. And I just have to say the strength of the brand is is really important. And I think we're making the product better every day. So, you know, I can't, I'm a little bit confused by the predicate of your question, but we remain reasonably optimistic about the opportunity set in B2B.
spk00: So let's put this another way for my follow-up then. We are seeing in our channel checks for employers that there's a lot of fatigue for all the different PMPM solutions that exist in the market and that they've been pitched over the past two years. A lot of the employer-facing solutions just aren't doing as well recently, candidly. So is there more creative pricing beyond a rope PM-PM where you're seeing a lot of traction, such as just offering as an insured benefit, or are there alternative ways you were selling in this market?
spk05: So there's no question for us. We've had a pretty – unilateral approach to our DTE business, I would say we think there's a lot of opportunity over time to drive the fact that we feel very strongly about our clinical efficacy and our outcomes data. And so are there going to be more opportunities for us to be creative? Absolutely. I think there are also more opportunities for us to become, because of that, closer, better partners with our employers. We're in active discussions with a number of them right now. Again, fatigue would not be the adjective that I would use to describe any of our B2B business, quite the opposite. I can't speak to competitors. I don't have a view. I can speak to what we are offering. And, you know, we, we have a, we have a pretty rigorously clinically demonstrably good product. And I would say this, this digital offering we just offered is differentiated from a lot of things out there, right? It didn't, it's, It's got some real clinical efficacy to it. It also incorporates workshops and sessions with live therapists. There's a lot. And then it has the natural extension for those individuals that need more to move right into our therapy product. So I remain pretty Look, it's a tough world out there, but I remain pretty optimistic. Jennifer, you want to add something?
spk08: I just wanted to add, you know, so there's the new business and expanding relationships with payers, but, you know, as Doug mentioned, a huge opportunity for us is with the 76 million covered lives that we have in hand. And I just want to write, we grew sessions 11% quarter over quarter. This is where we have, I think, the largest opportunity, and this is where... The efforts that we have, as we've described in the operational agenda, related to the product and ensuring we're optimizing that customer experience, unifying the funnel, making it easier for those covered patients to use Talkspace. These are all efforts that we see playing out and helping to drive growth in the future.
spk07: Helpful. Thank you. As a reminder, that is star then one to ask a question. Our next question comes from Glenn Santangelo with Jefferies.
spk03: Yeah, thanks for taking my question. Hey, Doug, I hate to do this, but I do want to follow up on this B2C side one more time because I think this is a good question for people. You know, I think if you listen to, you know, one of your competitors last week, they talk about, you know, a private player potentially doing some irrational things. And I think everyone, including yourself, is obviously aware of of some of the financing that's gone on on the private side, and in particular some more recent financings, and now you've seen some meaningful share shifts. And I guess that leaves people sort of wondering, you know, about the barriers to entry into this business. And you're at a time where Talkspace is trying to cut costs and become more, you know, financially efficient and lower the CAC at a period where others seem to be investing sort of very heavily in and seem to be taking some shares. So I was just wondering if you could maybe, you know, provide your thoughts on that dynamic on how that plays out on both not only the B2C side, but also, you know, if that ultimately spills into the B2B side.
spk05: So, yeah, I think – look, I can – Let me just reiterate and start off with the facts of where March was for us, which we made a number of changes that improved conversion and reduced CAC. And those two facts, I would not have been able to say that for the preceding four quarters. So I can't tell you what the world will look like going forward, but I can tell you that we believe there are still a number of things within our control to improve conversion and reduce CAC. We want our share to be focused on high return investments. That's where we are, and we're going to continue to drive towards, you know, it's going to take us, you know, we're We had a better quarter from a cash standpoint. We have our own set of expectations to continue to improve our cash efficiency, and we're going to be working on that every day. You know, we've got a unique, I will just say we have what I believe is a unique product And others that have generated, you know, raised a lot of capital have different approaches to the market. Some of those have attracted a fair amount of press coverage in the last few days. That's not a path that we've chosen to go on. We're really focused on, you know, these digital self-help capabilities, therapy, and an approach to psychiatry, which is different than others. So our objective is to spend our shareholder money wisely and generate a good return. Over time, for us, I think that means more of our business comes out of the B2B side, where You know, we've got a really good presence today, and we've got really good product, and we've got really solid momentum. And so, and the last piece I'm going to just say, which we have not begun to take advantage of at all, but I think it is clearly in our, you know, plans. We have great data and analytics. And eventually, you know, I think we are very well positioned to be a leader in value-based care for behavior. And I do not believe others are similarly situated.
spk03: Hey, Doug, maybe I can just follow up on the balance sheet, right? There's still no guidance. And so as you look forward, I mean, I'm guessing you don't want to give us too much of a clue, but You know, we're sitting with $184 million in cash. The company lost $20 million this quarter. It's unclear to us if it stabilizes from here or gets better from here and how we should think about, you know, that cash burn rate relative to the capital structure, you know, of the company today. Sorry, did I cut you off?
spk05: No, no, it's a really good question. So let me just make sure we're clear on the underlying for the quarter. Sure. So we actually, because we are focused on cash across the income statement and the balance sheet, we burned a little more than $13 million in cash this quarter because we actually drove some real efficiency in our working capital. And that was, again, part of a very proactive management team effort finding the ways to optimize use of cash. The second thing I think what Jennifer said was you should think that over time cash should better track EBITDA, and EBITDA for the quarter was a loss of about $18.5 million, if I'm remembering the number off the top of my head correct. And then the last thing I just said is we are going to continue to drive more efficiency out of the business in a variety of ways. So our expectation is that you will see cash burn coming down over time as we continue to implement a lot of these changes. They're both good for the customer, they're good for our members, They're good for our employees, and they ultimately have to be good for our balance sheet. So that's sort of what I'm going to say. We are really highly focused on cash and having all the resources we need to get to a place where the shareholders are seeing a lot of value.
spk03: Okay, thanks for the comments.
spk07: That concludes today's question and answer session. I'd like to turn the call back to Doug Bronstein for closing remarks.
spk05: I want to thank everybody for listening. We look forward to continuing to engage and make progress. I do want folks to remember we're on a journey together. I think we've made some really good steps forward. I hope you're starting to see that in The financials, we have more room to go, and your expectations should be consistent with mine, which the management team is really focused on creating value for the shareholders, and we hope to continue to demonstrate that progress in the quarters going forward. Thanks.
spk07: This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.
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