2/27/2025

speaker
Jeannie
Conference Operator

Thank you for standing by. My name is Jeannie and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Thrive fourth quarter and full year 2024 earnings call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, Press star 1 again. We do ask that you limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. Thank you. I would now like to turn the call over to Cameron Lessard, head of IR. Please go ahead.

speaker
Cameron Lessard
Head of Investor Relations

Good morning, and thank you for joining us for Thrive's fourth quarter earnings conference call. With me today are Joe Walsh, chairman and chief executive officer, and Paul Rouse, chief financial officer. During this call, we will make forward-looking statements that are subject to various risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from these statements. A discussion of these risks and uncertainties are included in our earnings release and SEC filings. Today's presentation will also include non-GAAP financial measures, which should be considered in addition to, but not as a substitute for, our GAAP results. Reconciliation of these measures can be found in our earnings release. This quarter marks our first time reporting SAS results, inclusive of keep software. Following our acquisition on October 31st, 2024. With only 2 months of keeps revenue reflected, we are focused on executing our integration plan and realizing the synergies we outlined at analyst day. To note for 2025 total SAS revenue will reflect. the combined performance of Thrive and Keap. We will only specify Thrive SaaS when isolating Thrive's performance. This reporting approach aligns with our long-term vision of a unified SaaS platform and ensures investors have full visibility into our growth trajectory. For deeper insight into our future strategy, we encourage investors to review our December 3rd Analyst Day materials. The presentation details our roadmap, including the planned exit for marketing services in 2028. Keith's role in accelerating SaaS adoption, expected synergies with the acquisition, product innovation, and our updated medium-term outlook. With that, I'll turn the call over to Joe Walsh, Chairman and CEO. Joe?

speaker
Joe Walsh
Chairman and CEO

Thank you, Cameron, and good morning, everyone. On today's call, I will highlight our fourth quarter results, key trends, as well as progress in our SaaS transformation. I'll provide an update on our Keep acquisition, and then our CFO, Paul Rouse, will take you through some of the financial numbers. Rye finished the year with strong momentum, beating the top and bottom line guidance for our SaaS business. For the quarter, total SaaS reported year-over-year revenue growth was 41%, and normalizing for the effect of the Keep acquisition, Rye's SaaS revenue growth was 23%. For the full year 2024, Thrive SaaS year-over-year revenue growth was 25%. Total SaaS revenue is now officially well over 50%, a milestone for our transformative business. Subscribers in our Thrive SaaS business grew 50% year-over-year to 99,000, including keep in the subscriber base takes us to 114,000. SAS adjusted gross margin increased to 76% for the fourth quarter. Our quarterly SAS EBITDA of 17 million beat guidance by over $5 million, continuing to demonstrate our focus on building a profitable, growing SAS software company. SAS obtained Rule 40 milestones for the second quarter in a row. Net revenue retention was 98%. As we've said, our target is 100%, and we'll be a couple points plus or minus that. Sometimes it'll be 101 or 102, and sometimes it'll be 98 or 99. But we'll be right around 100% is what we expect going forward. The number of clients using two or more paid SaaS products increased by over 4,000 year over year, now representing 16% of our client base. This is a key metric as it demonstrates growing engagement and the increasing value clients are deriving from our platform. Now, we've broadened the definition beyond just paid centers, which is 12%, to include all paid SaaS products. This is underscoring the expanding adoption of our full suite of solutions. I think it shows we've been innovating and coming up with some interesting additional SaaS add-ons that fill in and around. The overall base increased tremendously, so the percentage of centers looks like 12, but when we look at number of staff products overall, 16% or 4,000 gains. So, pretty excited about what that shows in terms of the progress that we're making. One of our core strengths as a management team is integrating acquisitions with speed and efficiency. This KEEP acquisition is our first SaaS platform and something we've been working on for a while and planning for a while. So it won't come to you as a surprise that we've already crystallized 10 million of EBITDA synergies. We've done this primarily by eliminating redundancies between the two businesses, vendor consolidations, and some plans for cost reductions. From a cross-sell perspective, the big long-term opportunity is the revenue cross-sell back and forth. And we're working hard getting that set up now, and we expect very strong revenue potential to be unlocked over the next couple of years as we cross-sell between the two customer bases. We have some pretty exciting product updates in Q4 that I think strategically position us really well as we go into 2025. I'd like to highlight a couple of those for you now. Reporting Center launched with a PLG motion. This positions us to unlock revenue expansion opportunities, and it increases the client satisfaction, particularly of our larger accounts. Some of our larger accounts will say to us, you know, we want more powerful reporting. And so we're including Reporting Center on a kind of a PLG or a product-led growth basis, and we'll extract revenue down the road. But in the meantime, We've got an initiative to try to sell to a little bit bigger businesses to move ever so slightly upmarket with our VSB group, and Reporting Center will really assist with that. We also added AI review response to Business Center and Marketing Center. This feature has been really well received by clients and sales, paving the way for future innovations leveraging AI. The addition of social media to Marketing Center added enhanced communication tools for our clients. That's been really well received also. Within the Keap products, we've had some improvements there as well. Updated the automation builder, which decreased the time to publish an automation by two-thirds, meaning it takes about a third of the time now to get one set up. And so, that was an opportunity there, and the Keap team has leveraged that. Also, the visual sales pipelines have been streamlined for clients. There's a real product improvement there that I think customers within Keap will really appreciate. So with that, I'd like to turn it over to Paul Ralph, our CFO, to discuss our financial performance.

speaker
Paul Rouse
Chief Financial Officer

Thanks, Jeff. Let's begin with SAS. Total SAS reported revenue was $104.3 million in the fourth quarter and above guidance, representing an increase of 41% year-over-year and up 20% sequentially. Full-year SAS reported revenue grew 30% year-over-year to $343.5 million. Excluding Keith, Thrive SAS business grew 23% year-over-year in the fourth quarter and 25% year-over-year for the full year. Breaking this down, our Thrive SAS revenue was $90.9 million in the quarter. landing within our guidance range and growing 23% year over year. The KEEPS acquisition contributed $13.4 million in revenue in November and December 2024, surpassing our guidance range of $11 to $12 million. For the full year, our total SAS revenue grew 30% to reach $343.5 million, excluding KEEPS our Thrive SaaS business achieved 25% year-over-year growth. Our total SaaS adjusted gross margin has shown significant growth, increasing by 620 basis points year-over-year and 370 basis points sequentially, reaching 76%. Over the year, total SaaS adjusted gross margin expanded to 72%, up from 67% last year. a 540 basis point improvement. Importantly, our total FAS adjusted gross profits grew 53% year over year, outpacing our strong revenue growth. In the fourth quarter, total FAS adjusted EBITDA increased to 17.3 million, significantly exceeding our guidance range and resulting in an adjusted EBITDA margin of 16.6%. As Joe mentioned earlier, This marks the second consecutive quarter in which our SaaS business has achieved Rule of 40. In the fourth quarter, we delivered strong SaaS subscriber growth, reaching 114,000 subscribers, excluding key subscribers of 15,000. This represents a 73% year-over-year increase. Total SaaS marketing for the fourth quarter was $324, including key. drive SASR approved was $313, an increase from the previous quarter, while keeps RP was $424 for November and December. Net revenue retention with 98% demonstrates strong performance and is a significant improvement compared to prior years, underscoring the effectiveness of our land and expand strategy. This result is very close to our long-term goals of maintaining retention near 100%, which remains a key priority for the business. Additionally, centers per client grew to 12% at the end of the quarter compared to 6% in the prior year, further highlighting the traction we're seeing with existing clients. Moving over to marketing services, fourth quarter revenue was 82.3 million and within guidance. Full year marketing services revenue was $480.7 million. Fourth quarter marketing services adjusted EBITDA was $12.1 million, resulting in an adjusted EBITDA margin of 15%. Full year marketing services adjusted EBITDA was $121.2 million, resulting in an adjusted EBITDA margin of 25%. The variance in reporting marketing services adjusted EBITDA to guidance in the quarter was primarily due to legacy and operational costs which the company plans to streamline in 2025, including system-related expenses and support staff. As indicated at our 2024 Analyst Day, we are committed to decommissioning legacy systems through 2025 and converting many legacy digital marketing services customers onto our SaaS platform. Despite this, our overall EBITDA for the quarter was at the high end of our range of guidance. Fourth quarter marketing services billings were 92 million, reflecting a 40% year-over-year decline. This trend more closely aligns with our strategic direction for marketing services as we continue to convert many of our legacy marketing services clients to our SaaS offerings. The pace of this transition impacts the rate of decline in marketing services billings. As previously disclosed, we are exiting the marketing services business by 2028, with cash flows from the business extending into 2030. This will provide the company with ample liquidity to meet its obligations during the transition to a fully SaaS-focused model. Fourth quarter consolidated adjusted gross margin was 69%, and full year consolidated adjusted gross margin was 68%. Fourth quarter consolidated adjusted EBITDA was 29.4 million, representing an adjusted EBITDA margin of 16%. Full year consolidated adjusted EBITDA was 162.4 million, representing an adjusted EBITDA margin of 20%. Finally, our net debt position was $279 million at the end of the fourth quarter, a decrease of $61 million year over year. Our leverage ratio was 1.63 times net debt to EBITDA. As previously discussed, we made an additional prepayment of $26 million on the new term loan during the fourth quarter. bringing our total amortization paid for 2024 under the new credit facility to $78.8 million. This eliminates the need for an additional payment until December 2025. This proactive debt repayment underscores our commitment to financial discipline and maintaining our healthy balance sheet. We intend to continue prepaying debt this year, reinforcing our focus on strengthening our financial position. Finally, on leverage, we remain committed to further deleveraging of the business by the end of 2025. However, as we have outlined at our December Analyst Day, net leverage will temporarily increase in the first two quarters of 2025 due to the prepayment of key vendor contracts, decommissioning of legacy systems, corporate bonus payments, and the timing of directory publications, which follow a 24-month cycle as we position the marketing services for exit in late 2028. Since leverage is calculated on a trailing 12-month basis, it will be impacted by this publishing schedule. As a result, we expect significant deleveraging in the third and fourth quarters of 2025 and on a full-year basis. Turning to our outlook for 2025, for the first quarter, we expect total SAS revenue to be in a range of $107.5 million to $110 million. For the full year, we expect total SAS revenue in the range of $464.5 million to $474 million, which implies drive SAS revenue growth of 35% to 38%. We expect KEEP to contribute between 75 to 78 million for the full year, consistent with what we announced at our recent analyst days. For the first quarter, we expect SAS adjusted EBITDA in the range of 9 million to 9.5 million. For the full year, we expect SAS adjusted EBITDA to be in the range of 69.5 million. to $71 million, which implies staff suggested EBITDA margin of 15%. For the full year, we expect marketing services revenue to be in the range of $310 million to $314 million. Quarterly guidance ranges for marketing services are available in our investor presentation, which can be found on our investor site. For the full year, we expect marketing services adjusted EBITDA to be in the range of 77.5 million to 78.5 million. With that, I'll turn it back over to Joe.

speaker
Joe Walsh
Chairman and CEO

Thank you, Paul. As we look ahead to 2025, I'm happy to share that including Keap, our SaaS business will be 60% of total revenues. That's a big milestone for us. At our analyst day recently, We outline what some of the key inflection points coming up will be. One of them is that in 2026, the majority of our EBITDA will come from SAS. So that really kind of helps focus us on the fact that we're building a profitable SAS business. And then in 2027, we anticipate a return to overall top line revenue growth as we continue to build out our platform and gain more and more traction, deliver more and more value for clients. You know, we are proud of the fact that we were recently given an important award as best software by G2. This is a third party kind of validation of the progress that we're making. And it echoes what we hear from our customers all the time. And that's that our software is easy to use. It's helping them run their business more efficiently, helping them streamline operations and importantly, helping them grow. And so, we intend to continue to innovate and improve and expect to win more awards in the future, but that was really good external validation. So, as we look now and sort of finish up 2024 and look back on what happened, we're maturing as a software business. Our platform is getting built, not quite done yet, but it's getting built out, getting stronger, and our ability to sell to a little bit larger businesses is coming. That's been one of our goals. a little larger ACV. We think there's a little lower churn there. We've already got low churn, but we think we can do even better as we sell to a little bit larger businesses. We think that that's worth the investment. And as our platform is being more fully built out, we're really focusing on leaning into the growth side of business, helping small businesses grow, being an industry-leading marketing and sales platform, helping them to deepen their relationship with their customers. And so our dedicated team, I think, is delivering innovative technology, and I'm confident that we can continue to drive sustainable, profitable growth and maximize shareholder value. So we appreciate your ongoing support, and we look forward to the many opportunities that lie ahead in 2025. With that, operator, we can open the line for questions.

speaker
Jeannie
Conference Operator

At this time, I would like to remind everyone, in order to ask a question, press star, then the number one on your telephone keypad. And your first question comes from the line of Jason Cryer with Craig Hallam. Please go ahead.

speaker
Jason Cryer
Analyst at Craig-Hallum

Wonderful. Thank you, guys. So, look, I know it's early days on the keep side of things, but just wondering if you could give some early commentary on what the cross-sell process looks like and getting those customers into some of the Thrive Centers. Sure.

speaker
Joe Walsh
Chairman and CEO

The acquisition, as you know, was just Halloween, so we just had a couple of months to work on it. So everything is not fully complete, but we do have some cross-sells beginning. The process is underway. And it really goes two ways. It's some of the key customers that are coming in through their funnel, through their pipeline, that come in and learn about the automation, say to the representatives that are working with them, you know, I really want growth. I really want to generate leads. I really want to build my list. And that really is a natural conversation to talk to them about marketing center, our Thrive products, and so that works well. On the Thrive side, we have, I'd say one of our biggest problems is we generate huge numbers of leads for our small business customers. And some of them just sort of fall on the floor. They don't really get followed up on as well as they should or we'd like them to. And so putting in place a sales pipeline, a funnel, an automated process that continues to follow up with those customers, make sure none of them are lost or missed, I think will add tremendous value to our 100,000 Thrive customers on that side of the house. Our sales organization is excited about that. And, you know, the sort of the plumbing and the wiring for all that is being put together and the groups are being trained. And that will kick off and begin to happen as the year plays out. So we've had a couple of early sales already, just sort of with, you know, demand was strong. We figured out how to do it. But the broad process will be picking up very soon. And we expect about 5 million. of cross-sell back and forth between the customer bases this year. That would be a little bit back-weighted just because it takes a minute to get it all set up and going. But there's definitely, in terms of the depth of demand, our business advisors are really excited to get their hands on it to take the key automation into the big drive customer base.

speaker
Jason Cryer
Analyst at Craig-Hallum

Okay. Thanks, Joe. Maybe similar topic, you know, as you're targeting these larger businesses, just curious if there's anything different with that process, like if there's any changes in the selling cycles, and then do you have any tangible evidence yet of the ability to cross-sell into that group, or is that maybe, is it too early to tell there?

speaker
Joe Walsh
Chairman and CEO

Well, look, I want to be clear about this. We're not talking about going to really big companies, like 200, 500 employee companies. We're talking about going up from a three employee business to an eight employee business. So it's not that different. I would say the biggest difference that we hear when we get into a little bit larger, you know, we have a lot of service-based businesses in our customer base. So the difference here is between a guy with one truck on the road and a guy with five trucks on the road. That's sort of the difference here. And what we find when we get into the kind of 10, 15 employee businesses that we really target and really covet, is they're looking for more powerful reporting. You know, our Thrive software is, you know, on the continuum between complicated and really powerful and simple and easy to use. We are closer to simple and easy to use. And so one of the things up until now it has lacked is really powerful reporting. And I can say the same for Keap. Keap tools work really well, they don't have as powerful reporting as a lot of their customers would like. So the reporting center, which we rolled out recently, is a big answer to that and will meaningfully improve client satisfaction for the larger, more complex businesses that are in our current customer base. And as we talk to customers in the future that have 15 or 18 employees, they're a little bit bigger, they have a manager, they have some management people that aren't just out there putting the roofs on or whatever, they'll be able to look at reports and use reports to run their company, to run this software in a way that we think will make us much more attractive to those little bit bigger businesses. That was, I guess, a shortcoming up until now when we got into bigger businesses. They were giving us the feedback. Look, we're really looking for more reporting than this. So that's part of the reason that we prioritized building a reporting center and something that's to keep product development teams that are jumping up and down excited about getting reporting center for their offerings as well.

speaker
Jeannie
Conference Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Scott Berg with Needham. Please go ahead.

speaker
Scott Berg
Analyst at Needham

Hi, everyone. Nice quarter here. I guess a couple questions for me. Joe, let's talk, I guess, sales in the fourth quarter. You guys obviously had a lot going on with the acquisition and whatnot, but your customer ads, or I guess your net customer ads on the core SaaS business declined a little bit from what you saw in Q2 and Q3. And I know there's a little seasonality in the business there, but did you see anything different there around, I don't know, buying appetites from your customers or how you guys are going to market versus what was really a strong middle part of the year?

speaker
Joe Walsh
Chairman and CEO

Look, Scott, the holidays are always a little soft for us. Our small businesses, they almost are on the continuum between enterprise and consumer. They're almost closer to consumer. They literally go on vacation or have things going on in their lives where it's hard to even pin down. Thanksgiving through early January, it's just always a little harder for us to be as productive as we'd like with our sales force, to be honest with you. That kind of, that always happens. So, in terms of you trying to ask me kind of about the macro and get a read there, which is what I'm sort of hearing you ask, I think immediately following the election, I think that there was a sense of, a positive sense among small businesses that we were going to have a more business-friendly administration and that the climate would be better going forward. And I think that that's still there, but it, There's a layer now of concern about tariffs and about, you know, potentially inflation and things just feel a little softer to people out there. And I just think there's some, you know, there's some concern just because there's so much going on. It's not negativity, really, just a little bit more of a caution than just a pure positive feeling that was there in the immediate two months after you know, after the election. So I would say overall, and I've said this to you before, I don't really feel like our results ride on small business sentiment or consumer sentiment at all. It's really down to our own execution. But you guys often ask me about, you know, what's the macro, what's the climate? And I would say it's met. You know, it's not bad, but there is just a little bit of extra concern now out there in the environment, and it does not really impact on our results.

speaker
Scott Berg
Analyst at Needham

Certainly understand the seasonality in your fourth quarter. It's apparent in some of your historical metrics as well. From a follow-up, Paul, the keep acquisition outperformed your expectations in Q4 by, I'll call it $2 million round number, roughly, yet you maintain the fiscal 25 contribution from that business. I guess what drove the upside in the two months that you had it and then you know, is there any follow through on that and how we should think about maybe upside opportunity for that key segment here in fiscal 25?

speaker
Paul Rouse
Chief Financial Officer

Yeah, we were a bit conservative in estimate. We just got the business and we wanted to make sure we delivered. So it was conservatism that led to overperformance. I think what we're going to stay with are, you know, because integrating businesses are hard and, you know, for caution, You know, we're going to stick with our estimates that we gave in the analyst day between 75 to 78 foot a year from the key business. We think that's the right number to go with right now.

speaker
Scott Berg
Analyst at Needham

Excellent. Thanks for taking my questions.

speaker
Jeannie
Conference Operator

Thanks, Scott. Your next question comes from the line of Arjun Bhatia with William Blair. Please go ahead.

speaker
Alinda Lee
Analyst at William Blair

Hey, thanks for taking the question. This is Alinda Lee here for Arjun. First question is, what are the feedbacks from customers who have experienced a cross-sell between Thrive and Keap, and what are you learning from those customer conversations so far?

speaker
Joe Walsh
Chairman and CEO

So it's very early days. We were only really just getting that process started. I mentioned earlier, some of the Keap leads, if you will, people coming into Keap, you know, are trying to figure out how to grow their business. And Keep's offering is really kind of the second step in growth. You need to have a list. You need to have customers that you can then nurture and put through Keep's automation process. Keep doesn't, isn't really advertising or really won't kind of go generate that list or generate leads for you. And so, you know, Thrive's marketing center is actually designed to do that and is really helpful in doing that. So, That's been really cool for them. They've been able to capture some leads, which otherwise would have just been, you know, gone away before. And so that we've had great feedback there. And I think as they get some success with, you know, winning new business and building up their list, they will naturally be able to add the automation to nurture and manage their sales pipeline. So it's kind of a hand in glove, perfect scenario. On the Thrive side of the house, You know, we're already bringing them leads. We're already building their list and all that. And so, you know, we will soon begin to sell, you know, sell the automations to those customers. And another thing it's permitting us to do is customize and build some vertical automation so that we can, you know, have a very successful HVAC guy or a very successful roofer help us build automations for their industry. that we can then go to thousands of other HVAC or roofing guys and really say, look, this is being used by one of the leaders in your industry. And it's got all the automations designed just the way you would want them for your business. You can, of course, customize them. But this is turnkey and ready to go. And so that's a big piece of what we're doing going forward. Because while we are a horizontal software, we've had a tremendous amount of success in a lot of verticals. And further customizing for those verticals is something that we really were excited about doing. And Keap permits that and lets us do that in a really big hurry. So that's something that I can tell you our sales organization is really excited about getting those customized automations to take to their clients and feel like there'll be a very strong appetite for them.

speaker
Alinda Lee
Analyst at William Blair

Awesome. And kind of moving broadly, any changes to the go-to-market to achieve the goal of returning overall business growth by 2027?

speaker
Joe Walsh
Chairman and CEO

Yeah, I mean, the acquisition of Keep added a really significant partner channel. We have a thousand partners in that partner channel. And, you know, we had a small partner effort within Thrive, but we were honestly not that great at it. And buying a proven two-decade-old, really well-oiled, well-running partner channel is a meaningful adder for us to enhance our sales channel to the more sophisticated kind of businesses that acquire their software through partners. The other piece it does is it really amplifies our international efforts into markets that we don't currently have a footprint. And so, yes, I do think that That's a big amplifier of our sales efforts and will contribute mightily by 2027 to the overall top-line growth that we anticipate getting back to.

speaker
Alinda Lee
Analyst at William Blair

Awesome. Thanks, Gal.

speaker
Joe Walsh
Chairman and CEO

Thank you.

speaker
Jeannie
Conference Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Daniel Moore with CJS Securities. Please go ahead.

speaker
Daniel Moore
Analyst at CJS Securities

Good morning. I appreciate the color and thanks for taking the questions again. I guess two quick ones. One, You reiterated it in the slide deck. Great to see the lines, so to speak, cross on revenue and SaaS making up the majority of revenue now. Just update us on your confidence and maybe any greater specificity in terms of when you expect the lines to cross on EBITDA. Just wondering whether you still feel like fiscal 25 will mark roughly the bottom for EBITDA when we start to think about overall growth there.

speaker
Joe Walsh
Chairman and CEO

Sure. That, in our investor deck, there's that, I think, great slide that shows the sort of inflection point. We're anticipating that the majority of our EBITDA, source of EBITDA in 26 will be coming from the SaaS business. So, it will actually, you know, sort of take the baton, and it's not like marketing services still won't be making a whole lot of money. It will, but SaaS will actually eclipse it. And then the following year in 2027, we believe that now that much bigger SaaS business will be able to deliver overall top-line growth to the business, even as marketing services continues to decline rapidly. So that's sort of how we see it playing out. As far as trying to parse it all the way down to like what quarter that happens or whatever, I think that would be a little too clever for us to try to do right now. We do have models as we're looking at them and We think about it, but I'm not sure that would be appropriate for me to, you know, go there and take it down tighter than that.

speaker
Daniel Moore
Analyst at CJS Securities

Understood. And then maybe just speak to the cadence of the launch of additional centers over the next, you know, say one to two years, or is the focus more on, you know, integrating and capturing revenue synergies from KEEP? Thanks.

speaker
Joe Walsh
Chairman and CEO

Yeah, we have already, you know, sort of pre-announced at our analyst day what the next center is. It's Workforce Center. We've had a demand there for time tracking and paying of employees and contractors. And that's something that we've been building for a couple of years and actually have it in sort of alpha level now. And so we're confident that that will come out this year. You know, probably won't add any revenue this year. Probably the revenue adds come the year after. As far as additional centers going into 26 and 27, we've stopped short of promising any further centers. Now, that doesn't mean we won't add any, but what we are going to be really focused on is making it all really work well together, making sure the platform of tools that we have is interoperable with other things in the market, and in the case of Keep Coming In, that it uh silky smooth working between everything the uis are integrated everything you know just works well we're not looking for frankenstein here we want a really easy to use platform you know one of the things if you're dealing with very small businesses you have to make it kind of consumer grade it's got to be really simple and clear you can't challenge people with hard to use tools so that's that's going to be really important for us and we uh have not promised uh you know, more centers each year after that. You know, some of our innovations may come in the form of, you know, add-ons or, you know, other product offerings that maybe don't rise to the level of being a whole separate center. We had an initial vision for the platform we were trying to build, which Workforce Center, you know, puts the big legs on. And now we've got a lot of fill-ins to do. So I would not guide you that you'll see you know, another massive center coming out each of the next few years, just us continuing to innovate and make everything work better together.

speaker
Cameron Lessard
Head of Investor Relations

Understood. Appreciate it. Thanks, Dan.

speaker
Jeannie
Conference Operator

Your last question comes from the line of Zach Cummins with B Reilly Securities. Please go ahead. Hi, good morning.

speaker
Zach Cummins
Analyst at B. Riley Securities

Thanks for taking my questions. Joe, I wanted to ask about the ARPU and just the core Thrive SaaS business. It was nice to see that sequential uptick from Q3 to Q4. Are we approaching the trough in terms of where you think ARPU will be for that business? I know it can fluctuate just given adding new marketing legacy. marketing services customers versus layering in additional products. So just curious of how you're thinking about that progression of the ARPU for the core business.

speaker
Joe Walsh
Chairman and CEO

You're right. The number can be noisy and bounce around a little bit based on the conversion activity working with the marketing services folks. So that has been a bit noisy. But I do feel like if I look at the whole of 25, that one of the stories when we look back at the end of it will have been very strong progress on our food growth i think you know we spent the last couple of years really building a very big client base 114 000 whatever clients may include keep and i think what we want to do now and what we're what we're you know asking our sales organization and our marketing team to do is really spend time with that installed base and make sure that they are engage with the product, bed it down, using it, and that we're meeting more and more of their needs so they don't have to go elsewhere. We wanted to do it with us. And so not to be crap, but upselling them, basically working with them to get more products in place. I think that one of the slides in the deck talks about, you know, the significant progress that we've made so far on, you know, adding additional SaaS products to existing customers. I think this year, 25 will be a year where that's a beacon. That's like a big focus within marketing and sales of the company. And so I, you know, I do expect that'll be, you know, our food growth will be probably the big, the big thing for 25.

speaker
Zach Cummins
Analyst at B. Riley Securities

Got it. Got it. And I think you were, I'm already partially addressing my one follow-up question, but can you speak to just some of the other paid SaaS products that you've crafted and are selling within the base now, aside from just paying for additional centers and driving that percentage upward?

speaker
Joe Walsh
Chairman and CEO

Yeah, we are trying to kind of fill out the offering with an eye toward helping a small business grow. You know, our background, our legacy since 1886 is linking buyers and sellers together. And we still own and control some of the most, the biggest and most powerful directory sites around the world. And we have a very large network of directory partners for which we work and we sort of monetize their traffic. And so we're trying to bring all of that to bear to, you know, make the phone ring, bring inbound inquiries to our customers. And, you know, what we find is that customers will stop and really have a conversation with you if you can help them grow. If you can make their phone ring, if you can bring jobs in, if you can help them get new customers. And so we've been building products to help them do that and reaching back to some of our, you know, our legacy capabilities, if you will, to do that. You know, one of the things that we added last year was a product we call, you know, growth packages. And these growth packages You know, when they go with Marketing Center, so they're an add-on to Marketing Center, you know, just, you know, lights you up and help you bring in that inquiries in. And it's really working very, very well, both from a results for our customer standpoint, but also from a sales standpoint. I mean, our sales force gets it, and it's been really great at selling that. And so, that's part of why we broadened the definition instead of just additional centers, we made additional products because growth packages aren't a full new center. They're more of an add-on to marketing center, but they have made a big difference and I think are helping us really stake out ownership of that growth category. There's a lot of software out there to help you with CRM type stuff. Back office type stuff, tracking your trucks when they drive around and all this kind of stuff. And there's a lot of that out there. But something that a small business can embrace that will actually help them grow and then help them really track how that growth is working. There's the famous John Wanamaker quote from last century where he said, I know half of all my advertising is wasted. I just don't know which half. You know, Marketing Center addresses that. It allows you to instrument and know absolutely everything that you're doing and how it's working. That yard sign that you put in front of, you know, a house that you're putting siding on, is that actually working? Well, Marketing Center will tell you exactly how many calls it generated and then link that to your results, whether you sold them or not. The phone number that's on the side of your truck, you can figure out that's working. Everything that you're doing, you can track. Are people bouncing out of your website? You can heat map your website and figure out what's working and what isn't. Really, every piece of your marketing. And so to have that kind of absolute transparency with Marketing Center and then have tools that actually drive leads into it, we think is a really valuable place to sit within the market. And customers are really responding well to it. And then the coup de grace is you come along behind it and you add the key product where you put a sales pipeline and automations in that funnel to make sure that none of those leaves are spilled on the ground. And you really are starting to cook with gas here. You've got a really great growth-oriented package. And then for the businesses as they succeed and they grow and they get a little bit bigger, you know, we obviously have a CRM. estimates, invoices, billing, payments. We can help you manage social media. We now have got powerful reports that you can track how it's all working and have a daily report. You can run your business off almost like a small business version of Domo, like something really simple that helps you run your business. And soon you'll be able to also pay your employees and keep track of contractors and hours and so on. So we're really building almost like a complete platform to run a small business on. And it's really, and this is really important. This is where the market is now. If we look back five years, most small businesses were not in the cloud. And if they were, they were just using a little narrow point solution. They were maybe, you know, bringing in a loyalty tool or some little thing to help them with social media or maybe a payment tool. The question that's on their list now is rather than this piecemeal point solution thing, is there a more complete platform that I could sign up for, that I could have one login. I could show my employees how to use it. I could set permissions within this one thing. And I could have this more almost enterprise-wide for my 12 employees. This is a tool that I have access to on my mobile device. When I'm at the kids' soccer game or I'm away for the weekend, I can track everything. I know what's going on. I get rid of some of the paper in my life. And I'm actually able to run my business. And the whole thing is less than $1,000 a month to run my business on. And that's the spot we've been aiming at. And I'll admit, we might have been early. We were out there trying to sell a complete platform to people that were only ready for point solutions in the early stages of this. But now, the small businesses are moving toward this, wanting this more complete solution. And I think we have the right product for the right time. I think that second half of this decade will be a whoosh, big wave of demand for what we offer. And I think that we're really well positioned. We're working with great urgency to finish our platform, finish building it out and, you know, work out all the little, you know, kinks and burrs and problems. So it's super, super easy to use and very interoperable with everybody else's tools. But we think we will capture an enormous amount of demand as it comes. And we're super excited about it.

speaker
Zach Cummins
Analyst at B. Riley Securities

Got it. Appreciate all the color and congrats on the strong results. Thank you.

speaker
Jeannie
Conference Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes today's call. Thank you all for joining. You may now disconnect.

Disclaimer

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