SelectQuote, Inc.

Welcome to SelectQuote second quarter earnings conference 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 the star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press the pound key. It is now a pleasure to introduce Mr. Matt Gunter, SelectQuote Investor Relations. Mr. Gunter, you may begin the conference.

Thank you, and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to SelectQuotes Fiscal Second Quarter Earnings Call. Before we begin our call, I would like to mention that on our website, we have provided a slide presentation to help guide our discussion this afternoon. After today's call, a replay will also be available on our website. Joining me from the company, I have our Chief Executive Officer, Tim Danker, and Chief Financial Officer, Raf Sadun. Following Tim and Raf's comments today, we will have a question and answer session. In order to allow everyone the opportunity to participate, we do ask that you limit yourself to one question and one follow-up at a time, and then fall back into the queue for any additional questions. As referenced on slide two, during this call, we will be discussing some non-GAAP financial measures. The most directly comparable GAAP financial measures and a reconciliation of the differences between the GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures are available in our earnings release and investor presentation on our website. And finally, a reminder that certain statements made today may be forward-looking statements. These statements are made based upon management's current expectations and beliefs concerning future events impacting the company and therefore involve a number of uncertainties and risks. including but not limited to those described in our earnings release, annual report on Form 10-K, and other filings with the SEC. Therefore, the actual results of operations or financial condition of the company could differ materially from those expressed or implied in our forward-looking statements. And with that, I'd like to turn the call over to our Chief Executive Officer, Tim Danker. Tim?

Thanks, Matt, and thank you to everyone joining on the call. As you saw in our press release, SelectWode had a disappointing quarter compared to our expectations. We will use the beginning of this call to discuss the challenges we face this AEP and how we are evolving our strategy going forward. Before we begin, though, I'd like to be clear to shareholders that we view these results as unacceptable. Unacceptable to you, certainly, but also unacceptable compared to what we know is achievable within the SLECWD organization and our differentiated position within the shifting healthcare system. With that, let's begin on slide three. SLECWD's consolidated revenue for the quarter totaled 195 million, and adjusted EBITDA finished at negative 163 million. Revenues decreased 45% compared to a year ago, and adjusted EBITDA declined significantly, driven by a number of unexpected factors this AEP season, which we will detail in a minute. Beyond the challenges with an AEP in the quarter, we also recognized a cohort tail adjustment of $145 million in the quarter, which includes the potential risk previously disclosed. This earlier and larger adjustment reflects lower persistency, primarily from higher entry-year lapse rates we experienced during the calendar year 2021. Bottom line, these results were materially below our expectations, and given the significant weighting and importance of the second quarter, Our full year results will come in below our outlook range as well. As you saw in our press release, our new outlook range for revenue is $810 million to $850 million, and the range of adjusted EBITDA is negative $235 million to negative $260 million, given the headwinds we've realized to date. Raph will give more details on our outlook for 2022, but clearly this will be a transitional year for our company. To that point, the SelectQuote management team and our board of directors are actively reviewing business strategy, especially within our senior Medicare Advantage distribution business. We will share our initial action plan on this call, but it's important to understand that this review will run through the remainder of the fiscal year and likely into next fiscal year as well. We are committed to getting this right, not just for our Medicare Advantage business, but because of the value we know SelectQuote provides as a unique connector between policyholders and patients, and the healthcare insurers and providers that pay for and provide their care. To that point, our population health initiative and SelectRx in particular have been a bright spot for us. We continue to see strong consumer need and demand for the growing array of healthcare services we coordinate with the population health platform. Consumer interest in our SelectRx pharmacy solution in particular continues to ramp up. To date, we have completed over 40,000 gross customer enrollments, and we are beginning to hit our stride in terms of shipments and recently eclipsed 10,000 active members receiving prescriptions. We know we can address the challenges impacting our senior distribution business and grow our population health business simultaneously, but our highest priority is to deliver value to shareholders based on the meaningful synergy between these businesses and the thousands of senior Americans that our services touch every day. Let's turn to slide four and discuss what happened this season and our senior Medicare distribution business. If we work from left to right, the first headwind began during our preparation for AEP, where we faced a very challenging labor market, as we discussed last quarter. In hiring for AEP, many prospective sales agents verbally accepted our offers that failed to complete the licensing process or took other employment. Filling these positions caused a delay to our hiring goals for the season, which we discussed during our last earnings call. We also indicated our expectation that those delays would impact effectiveness early in AEP, but we expected those agents would eventually achieve close rates more in line with historical flex agent classes. Although close rates did improve over the course of AEP, they did not improve as much as anticipated. Additionally, CMS mandated an industry-wide review of marketing materials immediately prior to the start of AEP, which added delays to some of our marketing programs, and more critically, masked the number of close rate pressures that we experienced early on in the season. We believed at the time that the FlexAgent onboarding delays and the CMS marketing review process were the underlying reasons for our depressed close rates and that both dynamics would ultimately prove temporary in nature. On the right side of the page, this Medicare Advantage season was also unique because of the seeming parity in Medicare Advantage plan features. In prior years, several large carrier partners underwent a multi-year process of building new and richer benefits such as more expansive dental, prescription drug, healthy meal, and wellness programs into their MA plans. These new and exciting plan features created compelling reasons for customers to move into a new MA plan. This year's greater level of parity in plan features across our carrier partners negatively impacted our sales process, which slowed throughput and significantly lowered close rates. In hindsight, the greater parity in plan design ultimately proved to be a larger headwind to close rates and policy production than we initially believed early in AEP. Lastly, we experienced a higher than usual fall off in submitted to approved policies driven by increased shopping behavior among Medicare consumers. Put plainly, in many cases we saw consumers consider a new plan only to remain with their existing plan given the lack of disparity in new features. In sum, The impact was a significant decline in our close rates compared to past seasons. During this AEP season, our average close rate was down more than 20% from last season, which had an even greater detrimental impact on agent productivity. Taking a step back, these headwinds clearly impacted volume, but what might be less apparent is the pressure our model faces on unit profitability with the type of unexpected slowdown we've experienced this season. Put simply, our operating leverage was too high for this unique environment and I'll touch on that as it relates to our strategy in a minute. Before I do, let's turn to slide five and I'll get some context on how each headwind impacted our profitability relative to plan. On the left side of the bridge, we begin with our outlook for consolidated EBITDA and the implied 2Q forecast of approximately 150 million. If we work from left to right again, first you can see the impact of the 145 million cohort tail adjustment recognized this quarter. To be clear, this includes the potential risk of $65 million for a cohort tail adjustment that was included in our previous full year 2022 outlook as part of our fourth quarter estimates. Raph will provide more detail in a minute on the makeup of that adjustment as well as actions we are taking to change our LTV methodology given the shift in environment. Next, as I mentioned, you can see the 20% plus decline in year-over-year AEP close rates accounted for the lion's share of our EBITDA shortfall outside of the tail adjustment. This EBITDA shortfall is a function of two things. First is the unexpected general parity in carrier plan design, which drove lower volumes and limited our throughput, which negatively impacted our top line. The second relates to the significant amount of operating leverage in our Medicare Advantage business. As you know, the AEP and OEP season for Medicare Advantage distribution is a compressed timeline that includes a number of fixed costs for the season. including recruiting, training, agents, and marketing. When the season performs within a normal range, the results and profitability are more than attractive, as we've exhibited over the past few years. The flip side is clearly true, and as a result of this season, we are reviewing what the appropriate balance is between growth and risk, as defined by operating leverage. If we move to the next section of the bridge, you can see the additional impact that we've experienced from senior LTV, primarily driven by lower persistency as well as the impact we've imposed with wider assumptions on our constraint, as well as our first year in renewal provisions. Raf will speak at length to those assumption changes in a minute. And lastly, we encountered some headwinds to other revenue, primarily made up of our auto and home and life divisions. While we were able to save $43 million in expenses, that was not nearly enough to offset the revenue declines and therefore adjusted EBITDA came in significantly below our expectations. Again, clearly not what we expected when we prepared for this season, but we're using this experience in real time to realign our strategy. To that point, please turn to slide six and let me offer our initial high-level assessment of SelectQuote Senior's business model and the direction we need to take it given the shift in environment. At the left, it is clear that many participants in the MA space, including SelectQuote, were organized for rapid growth against an addressable market that remains very large. It remains our view that SLECWT has significant competitive advantages given our data-driven technology and agent-led model. That said, our historical philosophy for growth and operating leverage is not aligned with today's market. To be clear, we believe the market for Medicare Advantage policies is very large and will continue to grow with the aging of America. We plan to benefit from and execute against this strong demographic backdrop for years to come, but we also owe it to our shareholders to mitigate volatility in our results. As I mentioned, we are working hard with our board to review our approach, and we believe our ultimate strategy for the Medicare Advantage business will be to reset our growth philosophy with a stronger focus on repeatable unit operating margins and predictable cash flows within a wide range of market scenarios. Next year, we will likely build a plan that pulls back on submissions year over year to reset the baseline with the intention of growing modestly from there. This will allow us to operate more efficiently with a higher mix of tenured agents and lower flex agent hiring needs, which reduces volatility and lowers cost. It also improves cash flow significantly. While this year's AEP included a number of unexpected headwinds, we need to better plan for risk, and we believe Selectwood has the ability to still grow at an attractive rate while also significantly reducing our operating leverage and downside risk. Moving down the page, as we have discussed in previous quarters, policyholder lapse rates from season to season have also driven volatility in our results. Rafa will discuss the changes we are making to our LTB assumptions to reset expectations here as well. Lastly, SelectQuotes' real value and potential exist beyond just Medicare Advantage. SelectQuotes' value as a connector, facilitator, and intermediary within the shifting healthcare landscape is core to our strategy. If we flip to slide seven, let me provide some initial thoughts on how we expect SelectQuote to shift strategically with the ultimate goal of driving shareholder value through improved margin predictability and cash flow. Beginning at the top of the diagram, as mentioned, we believe SelectQuote can continue to grow the Medicare distribution business in the future, but do so at slower rates after resetting the baseline next year. Most importantly, we believe we can ultimately achieve growth with better cash flow dynamics and less volatility of results. As mentioned, unexpected factors like we saw this season and increasing competition has clearly impacted the risk-reward balance at the very high level of growth the industry has sought in the past year or two. We maintain our conviction that Selectwood has built the industry's best platform to capitalize on this large opportunity, and we are taking appropriate action to ensure that we deliver attractive returns to shareholders in a wide range of market conditions. Moving clockwise down to the right, We believe slower growth will also allow us to reduce the operating leverage and risk in the Medicare Advantage business. Beyond operating leverage, we have identified a number of opportunities to reduce operational risk factors and will continue to do so to improve overall efficiency. At the bottom of the diagram, as I alluded to, the shifting market dynamics and policyholder behavior require us to review our LTV forecasting and moderate appropriately. Raf will give more detail on the changes and drivers here, but as I noted, it is our responsibility to shareholders to mitigate the backward-looking volatility we have experienced in certain cohorts as reflected through tail adjustments. Lastly, Selectwood has the unique opportunity and capability to be much more than a Medicare Advantage distribution platform. To be clear, there is a significant value in the MA business, including as an on-ramp to additional population health services like SelectRx. That said, our ability to capitalize on synergies and the broader healthcare landscape will be at the forefront of our ongoing strategy review. Now, I want to give some brief context about SelectQuote's history on slide eight. First of all, we're clearly shifting our strategy as it relates to our Medicare Advantage business. But I want to be clear that what we are talking about with population health and leveraging our platform to pursue new revenue streams is not new to SelectQuote. Over the past three decades, Selectwood has continually evolved across end markets, but with a common strategy. At our core, Selectwood is strategically built to leverage customer leads and the unique information we capture to offer value-added services while also optimizing revenue per marketing dollar invested. In the company's early days, we successfully leveraged our term life business to add auto and home insurance. More recently, the scale of our Medicare Advantage distribution business allowed for the expansion into our growing final expense product. And now we believe population health is the natural progression of how SelectWord can best leverage our unique assets and customer base to add value. On that concept, let's turn to slide nine and briefly discuss what we believe SelectWord can achieve with our unique set of assets, data, technology, agents, and partners. As we've discussed, we believe our population health initiatives position SelectWord as a critical value creator across each of the important constituents and the healthcare spectrum. As you know, our Medicare Advantage business makes SelectQuote a first point of contact with a growing number of senior Americans each year. From this point of entry, our data-intensive and agent-led model can connect policyholders, patients, healthcare providers, and payers across a wide array of healthcare services. SelectRx and a number of our value-based care initiatives are just the beginning of the broader population health strategy, and we believe SelectQuote has a number of strategic advantages to capitalize on this very large market. And I'd like to be very candid in saying that we provide this longer-term vision to give you a sense of our strategic direction. Based on our recent results, we and the board completely accept that it is our responsibility to shareholders to earn credibility for the strategy through tangible results. To that point, let me conclude my comments on slide 10 and give investors and analysts some insight to what to expect from us in the coming quarters. As I mentioned, our strategic review will continue beyond this fiscal year. What I can tell you today is that SelectQuote currently plans to take the following actions. First, looking ahead to next year's AEP season and in line with our objective to reduce operating risk, we plan to hire the majority of our agent class for next AEP much earlier. Similarly, we expect a reduction in overall agent headcount, including a lower mix of flex agents by next year. Next, we plan to provide regular updates on our SelectRx membership and revenues. As I mentioned earlier, we remain well on pace with our original expectations of 25,000 members by the end of this fiscal year and plan to share more detail on our expectations for the business later in our fiscal year. Third, you can expect to see additional detail from us regarding how we intend to increase visibility to our cash flow and earnings, beginning with the changes we are making to our LTV assumptions. Additionally, we plan to scrutinize our corporate expense structure with an eye to bringing costs in line with our forecasted policy production and revenue in light of our expected reset and the size of our Medicare distribution business. Lastly, as I mentioned on the previous slide, the growth of population health initiatives is a key focus, and we expect we'll be a growing contributor to our revenues and value over time. With that, Raph will now provide more detail on our financial and operational results for the quarter. Raph?

Thanks, Tim. Turning to slide 11 and our consolidated results. As Tim already said, this was an extremely difficult quarter. We had multiple operational issues we had to deal with, and despite pulling many levers, we could not offset all the headwinds that we faced. In addition, we took certain proactive measures to address persistency, like assessing the cohort tail adjustment and increasing the constraint and provision which impacted the quarter. Consolidated revenue for the quarter came in at $195 million. This included a $145 million negative adjustment for the senior MA cohort tail adjustment. Given the visibility into the January renewal event and the lapse rates experienced during calendar year 2021, we determined an adjustment was probable and reduced our commission's revenue in the second quarter. Excluding this cohort tail adjustment, Revenue was $340 million, which was down about 5% year over year. Despite growing MA approved policies 27%, lower LTV per policy drove lower revenue in our senior business year over year. As stated earlier, we incurred incremental costs associated with trying to produce more policies, but lower revenue associated with lower than expected policy production and the cohort tail adjustment. This drove adjusted EBITDA to negative $163 million for the quarter. Excluding the cohort tail adjustment, the adjusted EBITDA would have been negative $18 million. Needless to say, this has been a humbling quarter for all of us and has forced us not only to re-examine the current environment we find ourselves in, but also how we want to run the business going forward. While the margins of the business have certainly been compressed, we believe there are meaningful changes that we can make that will have a positive impact on the senior distribution business going forward. These include resetting the baseline of policy production. While we're not providing guidance for Fiscal 23 yet, we anticipate creating a plan that will produce fewer policies year over year before getting back to modest growth in Fiscal 24 and beyond. We anticipate this will have multiple immediate benefits, including... Reducing the number of flex agents we need to hire, which will lower our overall onboarding and recruiting costs. Hiring those flex agents by midsummer, which we believe will take the variability out of hiring plans and allow for more consistent training and onboarding. This will also allow us to operate with a more tenured workforce, especially during AEP and OEP, which should positively impact average close rates and agent productivity. cutting back on policy production in the seasonally low periods of the first quarter and fourth quarter, which will preserve cash and lower overall operating costs. And finally, we continue to invest in our healthcare services business with additional products and services that fit the unique needs of our customers and leverage the marketing spend we're already incurring on the distribution side to add additional revenue, most of which should come from products and services that are cash efficient, have quicker break-even points, and add value to the entire healthcare ecosystem, including our insurance carrier partners, healthcare providers, and more importantly, our customers. All of the changes I've discussed above should have a positive impact on cash flow and accelerate the timing of getting the cash flow breakeven relative to our expectations six months ago, albeit off of a lower adjusted EBITDA base to start with. And with that, let me now get into our operating results for the quarter. Moving on to our senior results on slide 12. We grew our total approved policies 22% and our MA approved policies 27%. The MA approved policy growth was lower than our submitted policy growth as we saw significantly higher switching activity after we submitted a policy on a customer's behalf. This impacted submitted to approved conversion rates. As Tim alluded to, this year agent productivity was negatively impacted by multiple factors, including higher flex versus core agent mix, a more competitive marketplace, and lower close rates associated with planned design parity. Over the past couple of years, we achieved steadily increasing agent productivity, but unfortunately, that trend reversed abruptly with the start of this AEP, indicating that something was fundamentally different in the market. We saw average agent productivity decline 45%, with 20-plus percent close rate declines for both core and flex agents. When we last spoke to you in early November, we thought that the softness in the first few weeks of AAP was driven by some CMS marketing changes that were made at the last minute and by the high number of less tenured flex agents that we had hired. We felt like the CMS marketing issue had mostly resolved itself, and as those less tenured agents gained more experience, we would see close rates tick up from there. We do normally see close rates increase during the course of AAP. Unfortunately, while close rates did improve, they did not improve nearly enough. We saw lower close rates across every marketing channel and every agent type, which points towards a general marketplace dynamic, mostly driven by plan design this year. We've evaluated several years' worth of data, and in years where there is a greater plan parity, close rates are lower. When there are greater differences between plans, close rates are higher. This is difficult to anticipate as we only find out plan design very close to the beginning of AAP. As we think about how we want to run the business going forward, there are numerous operational changes that we are making that should help boost volatility and improve profitability. With respect to MALTVs, while we anticipated MALTVs to be down 10%, they ended up being down about 27%. This incremental decline was driven by three factors, lower persistency, higher constraint, and higher provision for intra-year lapses. For the lower persistency, which represented around 60% of the incremental decline, we actually updated our 36-month weighted average to include the preliminary lower overall persistency we've experienced this year. Normally, that wouldn't impact LTVs until the fourth quarter. However, to be conservative, we chose to use our preliminary view of persistency for the second quarter, given the decline we're seeing, to start feeding that lower expectation into our results as soon as possible. On the constraint, we have increased our constraint from 6% to 15%, a significant increase and one designed to try to reduce the likelihood and magnitude of future cohort tail adjustments for new policies written. The increase in constraint represented around 25% of the incremental decline. Lastly, we reflected higher lapse rates for both first year and renewal year lapses based on what we experienced this year. Now, if we move to slide 13, let me provide more detail on the $145 million cohort tail adjustment we took in the quarter. As a reminder, we had a potential risk of a fourth quarter $65 million cohort tail adjustment This risk was based on an assumption that persistency would be flat to last year, but lower than what was originally projected when some of our cohorts were written. As a reminder, we had previously disclosed that we were seeing higher intra-year lapse rates during the course of the year. However, we did not know if that lapse rate pressure that we were experiencing could just be timing of when people lapsed their policy versus truly a reduction in overall persistency. Lapse rates from October through the end of the year continued to increase year over year. The preliminary end of year aggregate renewal event seems to have come in better year over year, but not enough to offset the lapses that had already happened throughout the year, especially for certain first year carrier cohort combinations that used up all of their constraints. Now that we are several weeks past the renewal event, we know enough at a cohort level to project with a high degree of confidence the impact of this lower overall persistency on our cohort tail adjustment. While it will take several months to have final persistency rates, we felt that given the known trends, it was prudent to recognize the cohort tail adjustment in the second quarter. As you can see, the vast majority, over 80% of the increase in the estimate in the cohort tail adjustment is driven by fiscal 21 policies. This was driven predominantly by three specific cohorts that used all their constraints and triggered a cohort and tail adjustment. These are large adjustments and reflect a pretty significant decline in persistency over the last three years, mostly concentrated in the first several renewal years of a policy. We are surprised at how quickly things have changed and the impact this has had over the last 18 months. As we have previously stated, we utilized 36 months of actual historical persistency results to determine the rates baked into our LTV calculations. We adopted this approach years ago to eliminate management discretion inherent in forecasting future persistency performance. Historically, persistency rates have been very stable and predictable, but clearly the market has changed. While we are currently booking lower and lower persistency as we update our assumptions, based on actual experience, we also made the decision to significantly increase the constraint from 6% to 15%. All these changes weigh on LTVs and margins and impact how we make investment decisions going forward, as both Tim and I have referenced earlier. Now, if we turn to slide 14, let me provide an update on the significant progress we have made growing our SelectRx pharmacy business. Since we entered the space last May, We've invested in the business and have significantly increased our organizational and operational capacity to serve more customers with chronic conditions and polypharmacy needs. Most importantly, we are more excited than ever about the high level of consumer interest in and demand for the pharmacy services we offer. As the chart on the left demonstrates, as of January 31st, we have already enrolled over 40,000 new members into our SelectRx offerings. That demand was generated almost entirely from enrollments of new and existing select quote Medicare Advantage customers at very low incremental acquisition costs to the company. There's typically a several month lag between initial enrollment and enrollees receiving their first shipment and member fall off will occur during that timeframe. However, the left hand chart clearly shows there is significant demand for the service. As we have scaled the business over the last six months, We've learned the nuances of this business and made many operational improvements to lower fall-off and speed up the onboarding process. You can see those efforts starting to take shape on the right-hand chart, which shows the growth in our paying membership. As of January 31st, we now have over 10,000 active paying customers on the SelectRx platform. Importantly, we exited the month of January with over 75% more active paying members than than we had at the end of November, demonstrating that our process enhancements are really starting to pay off. We remain excited about the positive and predictable cash flow impact this business can have on our overall results, and we remain confident with our forecast to exit this fiscal year with around 25,000 active paying SelectRS members, over 10 times what we started the year with. Now, if we move to slide 15, let me provide an update on our capital positions. The second quarter is always our biggest quarter for use of cash, as we have all the expenses of operating during AEP, marketing costs and sales agent commissions. However, we don't start getting paid for the policies we sell until January. For the quarter, we used approximately $219 million of cash from operations and $12 million of CapEx. During the quarter, we did draw down $245 million from our delayed draw term line. We brought on several new lenders into our revolver and increased our committed revolver capacity to $135 million. There's currently nothing drawn on that revolver facility. We also still have $100 million undrawn on our delayed draw term line. As of December 31st, 2021, we ended the quarter with $193 million of cash and $717 million of debt. We also ended the quarter with $1 billion of accounts receivable and short and long-term commissions receivable balances. Finally, on slide 16, based on the performance in the second quarter and our new expectations for the rest of the year, we are adjusting our guidance for fiscal year 2022. We currently project revenue in the range of $810 million to $850 million, net loss in the range of $236 million to $255 million. and adjusted EBITDA in the range of negative $235 million to negative $260 million. As a reminder, we assessed the cohort tail adjustment in the second quarter, and we'll true up that calculation if required in the fourth quarter. As Tim noted, the coming year will be one of transition for SelectQuote, but I'll echo his confidence in the value we can create with our population health initiative on top of the reset we are undergoing in the Medicare Advantage business. The healthcare market is very large, and SelectQuote continues to be an important hub for policyholders, patients, providers, and payers. We look forward to proving our value to those constituents and our shareholders in the quarters and years ahead. And with that, let me turn it back to the operator for your questions.

Thank you. At this time, I would like to remind everyone in order to ask a question, press star 1 on your telephone keypad. Please limit your questions to one and one follow-up. Thank you. We have your first question from Jayalendra Singh with Credit Suisse. Your line is open.

Jayalendra Singh Yeah, thank you and hello everyone. I want to better understand this comment around greater parity in plan benefits for the 2022 benefit year suppressing close rates. How do we reconcile that with the comment from some of the insurance companies as well as your peers that MA plans are getting more competitive, driving market share shift for insurers. We should have driven more shopping behavior among seniors. Just help us reconcile that commentary.

Yeah, Jalinder, this is Tim. I'll make some comments and have maybe Bob double-click on your specific question. I mean, clearly this AEP was very different than anything we've ever experienced in our decade-plus of experience online. And at the Medicare space, obviously, we had a confluence of events around the industry-wide CMS issue that masked some of the underlying issues. We also talked about the tight labor market and our need to bring on some of our agents later than we expected. And I think that those things, you know, at the time, the last time that we talked, that was what we really thought were the issues, only to really, as we kind of peeled it back and uncovered throughout the course of AEP that plan parity was more of the underlying issue that caused the significant compression in close rates that we mentioned on the call here. Bob, do you want to talk a little bit from a sales perspective and carrier perspective?

Yeah, it's a really good question, Jalendra. And again, you know, we've never really seen anything like this during AEP. And what we are describing as far as plan parity is, I guess, just less compelling reasons to buy a plan on each individual call. However, we are seeing a big increase in shopping behavior, which I know that sounds counterintuitive, but it's driving less close rate on each call that we have, while still seeing people switch at a high level, which is really different than any environment we've really seen, Jalimera.

Okay, and then my follow-up, I would like to understand your comment about modest top-line long-term growth you referred. Can you be a little bit more specific? Are you talking about like going in line with the MA market growth? And maybe I'd love to get any thoughts on your LTV longer term. And more importantly, with the increased scrutiny on the distribution channel, pressure on LTV, cost pressure on marketing and CCD costs, can the unit economics even work in this business, especially if there's no operating leverage?

Yeah, I guess I'll address that. I think... we're making lots of changes to the business going forward. I think this year is obviously going to be a challenging year, but it's not reflective of what we think the business can do in the future. Clearly the margins have been compressed and we are going to be making changes to be able to operate in an environment that has lower close rates to the extent that that continues and lower margins. But it will look very different than it did this year. That's on the distribution side. Obviously, it's important to have a healthy distribution business as an on-ramp for our growing healthcare services business. And so that is the plan going forward. Relative to growth rates and how we think about that, while we're not providing guidance with respect to fiscal 23, we are going to build a plan next year that has less policy production than we will produce this year, and basically resetting the baseline there. And that has lots of immediate benefits that I think we talked about on the call. After that, we'll return to some level of growth, but it will be modest and certainly modest relative to, you know, relative to the growth rates that we've seen before. Exactly what that growth rate looks like, We'll have more to share on that over the next couple quarters as we work through our strategic plans.

I mean, Jalinder, just to double-click on Raf's comments, I mean, an understatement. It's an extremely challenging year for us, a transitional year for the company, but I don't think the return characteristics that we're seeing today is what they'll be moving forward. We alluded to, you know, changes that we're going to make and refinements to our strategy to take out some of the operating leverage that things that we're doing with respect to a higher percentage of core agents, marketing optimization, a focus on unit profitability, and a goal to accelerate our cash flow, break even. We think, as we're highlighting through some of the good early progress on SelectRx, population health can be an extension of the services that we provide, ultimately to drive additional underlying value to consumers, but financially, a way for us to leverage the investment that we have in play. And we think that moving forward, we will still have a strong and robust MA platform. But strategically, we want to use that as the on-ramp into a broader healthcare services ecosystem.

We have your next question from Steven Valliquette with Barclays. Your line is open.

Great. Thanks. Good afternoon, everybody. A couple questions here. I guess I'm sure there's a bias to not want to talk too much about individual carriers, but just given the high visibility on Humana's AEP results, it seems the issues that you guys are facing are almost the opposite of what was happening from their point of view, which I think Jalendra kind of touched on a little bit just at a high level. But I guess two questions I have would just be, at a high level, can we say yes or no that some of your issues are related to humana's result, and you're correlated with that, or is it almost the opposite? I'm just trying to get to the bottom of that. And then number two would just be, is there any sense that major carriers are just taking matters into their own hands, and maybe this year and going forward, they may rely more on internal channels and sales efforts to drive growth for themselves instead of external telesales channel that includes a select quote in your peers? Thanks.

Yeah. Steve, this is Tim. Good question. And I'll address your second question first in terms of any type of pullback from the carriers. I think there could be pullback with respect to some direct-to-consumer brokers with various carriers. We certainly wouldn't expect to be part of that pullback. I think we have a very long and steady path with respect to our carriers. It continues to grow and expand. And I think as there's been you know, more evaluation, if you will, of brokers as to who's doing a better or worse job. We've actually seen, you know, more engagement and more investment from our carrier partners. I think ultimately there could be a flight to quality. I think that certainly benefits us. Bob?

Yeah, I agree. And I think one thing that's interesting is the carriers are talking about a competitive landscape a lot where they're kind of targeting certain benefits. But parity and competitiveness, I know, are a little bit different in our mind. The market is extremely competitive from a marketing standpoint, things like that. However, parity is driving lower close rates. So I do want to comment on that first. And yes, we are seeing some of the same pressures that the carriers are seeing in the fact that that competitiveness at times with specific carriers is causing some pressure on term rates to where Raf talked about earlier.

Okay. All right. Great. Thanks.

We have your next question from Jeff Garrow with Piper Sandler. Your line's open.

Yeah. Good afternoon. And thanks for taking the question. You clearly stated how you've been running the business for growth and EBITDA margin and sounds now like the focus is going to be shifting more to cash flow. So how should we think about the timeline? with which you could reach cash flow and break even?

Yeah, I'll take that. I guess, look, this quarter, obviously, very challenging. We are going to make and are making multiple changes to the business, as we discussed. I think the biggest driver of that is really going to be resetting the baseline, which we will do next fiscal year. And as we've talked about, you know, to some extent, you know, achieving cash flow, break even and timing all of that is relative to the growth that we choose and growth is a choice that we make. Obviously, the last couple of years, we've been growing at, you know, very fast growth rates. By pulling back next year, that will have an immediate benefit as, you know, the overall cost to write new business will be, lower than it was this year, but you'll get the renewal dollars associated with policies that you sold this year, you know, coming into the business next year. So I think you'll start seeing that next year. There is obviously a working capital dynamic that I think we talked about on our last earnings call that sort of takes 12 to 18 months to play itself out. But some of the benefits you shall see as early as next year.

Got it. That helps. And maybe follow up on the unit economics side of things. We've talked a little bit about the hiring and you guys have a lot of control over that. So maybe I'll ask about the customer acquisition side of things. I was hoping you could comment on what you saw in terms of lead quality and lead costs in the quarter and how your approach lead acquisition going forward. And maybe just throw out, could you shift to owning significantly more of the lead generation or generating more of the lead internally? Thanks.

Yeah, I'll take that. We are certainly in the process of kind of scrubbing all of our channels and layering in all the data that we're seeing in terms of all of the current kind of persistency rates and everything that we've seen, because the market has changed incredibly quickly, right? So it's fairly, as Raf mentioned earlier, very consistent for years, and now we've seen rapid change. What we're seeing as we layer in a lot of that and we really look at our marketing channels and dive into great detail is one, we see pressure across the board. So there's no one channel that is really working and one that's just really awful. What we see within that is there's kind of good and bad within each of those channels. And what we really need is to kind of dive in with each of those and figure out how to optimize within those channels. how to eliminate some of the things we're seeing with this growing population of what we call super switchers, so folks that are shopping more and more are more comfortable with shopping. We're not really seeing an issue with kind of raw lead costs in terms of like a huge increase in overall lead costs when you compare year over year on an apples-to-apples basis. What we really saw this year was just that customer acquisition cost relative to close rate, not relative to the actual cost. The actual cost came in pretty much in line and really stayed within where we would expect them to see. I don't think, when we look at a quality issue, I mean, A lot of those channels are the same. A lot of those channels are things that we generate ourselves. So I really think that it comes down to more of a compelling reason of why that consumer would switch in terms of, you know, when we talked about plan parity to say, look, those plans were still good, still loaded with benefits. There just wasn't that one single, you know, flashing green light reason why somebody should change and we saw close rates depressed. I think one thing I want to comment with when we slow down a bit, I do think that it'll give us the ability to really optimize our lead channels in terms of kind of figuring out, okay, where are we seeing the most goodness within each of those channels and give us ability to optimize their uh, uh, better, uh, you know, as we move forward.

We had your next question from your own Kinnar with Jeffrey, your lines open.

Hi, good afternoon. Um, my, my, my first question probably goes to Bob. Um, you correctly noted that the higher shopping activity in the face of greater plan parity is a counterintuitive and admittedly, I still don't really understand, the relationship. Could you maybe try explaining that again?

Yeah, to Bill's point, you know, it's usually we, there's carriers that win on core benefits, like maximum out of pocket, prescription drug savings, things like that. What we're starting to find is there's way more nuanced plan changes and things like that, a lot of things to market towards. So there's a ton of activity and a ton of people actually calling in and a lot of increased demand. However, it's harder on a single conversation to find the exact reason or the silver bullet like Bill talked about to get somebody to switch. So you see lower close rates on those single calls that have increased the overall kind of shopping, you know, throughout AEP. So it just creates a more difficult sales environment while there's still a really strong kind of demand for change from consumers. So we're seeing kind of pressure on lapses because of the demand that for consumers, but at the same time, it's much more difficult to find the exact reason why somebody should switch. You know, we sell towards benefits a lot, which would be more towards core benefits in the past. Again, prescription drug savings, making sure that your maximum out of pocket is properly aligned, those types of things. We switched a lot of things up to try to address this and have seen some progress there, but it's still much more complicated.

Got it. And then on the idea or the strategy of pulling back growth to some extent, is that as simple as just trying to weed out some of the serial shoppers that are out there, or are there other key differences or changes that you're contemplating?

Grant, I'll hit that at a high level, and Bob, maybe you can walk through it. I think there's a series of things that we think that we can do to optimize the our business and our engine as we kind of pull back on growth. I think we talked a little bit about a much higher percentage of core agents versus flex agents. That is one thing that we have learned over time that can help kind of moderate the volatility. I think Bill spoke about some of the marketing optimizations. I think we're taking a very hard look at our kind of unit costs and unit margins and And so, you know, there's multiple things we can do there. I'd also kind of highlight, and it's up to us to prove it to shareholders and to the market, but our move into population health, RX, and other ways that we can solve consumer needs and, you know, more effectively monetize the marketing spend that's in play. I think that's another important consideration. Bob, anything that you'd add?

Yeah, I'd just say, you know, I want to reiterate Bill's point that pulling back does allow you to kind of pinpoint what's working from a marketing standpoint and really optimize better. I would say, though, the other thing that allows you to optimize more successfully is having more tenured agents. You know, we always did have a lot of operating leverage, but the later classes this year really hurt us because they're always lower close rates than tenured classes and earlier in the summer hires. However, we've always done quite well with those classes this year, you know, with the, with the adjustments on close rates, we didn't see very good results out of those later classes. And by having more stability, it allows us, you know, to make adjustments much faster, be a significantly more cashflow efficient and really hone into what exactly is working. And, you know, hindsight being 2020, it's what we should have done this year. because we didn't get the normal operating leverage we do, and we would have been more successful with earlier hires and more core agents.

We have your next question from Daniel Crosslight with Citi. Your line is open.

Hi, guys. Thanks for taking the question. Your commentary on higher lapse rates and lower persistency, suggests that while parity is making it harder to sell new policies, someone's doing it, someone's closing on these seniors, or else we wouldn't have this increase in churn. So I'm curious, where are they going? Who's closing them? Because they're obviously buying their plans from somewhere. Have you been able to track where these folks are going when they lapse from a policy that was previously sold by select quotes?

I think we, yeah, there's a couple of things here, and I'll turn it over to Bob. I mean, two separate concepts with respect to what we saw on inter-year lapse rates that continued to mount throughout the year, and then the specific kind of convergence of plans that we saw during the AEP period. I think those are, you know, two different concepts that we just need to kind of get clarity on. Bob?

Yeah, I think also, you know, plans really align with consumers' kind of healthcare needs and things like that. So you still see quite a bit of switching, especially amongst, you know, as Bill talked about, kind of super shoppers, super switchers, you know, and those types of cohorts. But we are seeing, you know, quite a bit of stability on our other cohorts. It's just we couldn't really deal with the pressure of our newer or our older policies switching and kind of those super shoppers and super switchers just increasing their switching behavior?

Yeah, I think as Bob said before, there are sort of two concepts here. Relative to the persistency and lapse rate issues that impacted the cohort tail adjustment, that's really associated with plans that were sold in prior years, not this AAP season. And the biggest driver of that adjustment is obviously lower persistency over a couple years, but much higher intra-year fall-off that impacted persistency this year. So going into AEP, we'd already had, you know, so many policies that had already fallen off, you know, relative to people switching early on in the year. The planned parity, which impacted the close rates relative to AEP, you know, didn't really impact – you know, didn't really impact those prior cohorts, at least not yet. And while the entry year lapse rates were higher year over year, which impacted overall persistency, the actual renewal event that happens at the end of the year was actually slightly better than last year, which certainly from a trend perspective was very different than the entry year lapses. And we think was a function of the plan parity this year is that people sticking with plans that they had is just you know, so many policies that lapsed throughout the year by AP that, you know, that renewal event at the end of the year wasn't enough to offset those lapses.

Okay. Yeah, that's helpful. And then on LTVs, it seems like you're taking the bulk of LTV degradation this quarter. On a sequential basis, for the rest of the year, would you expect LTVs to further degrade? Or have you kind of set a floor with the increase in the constraint and the pull forward of the 36-month average?

Yeah, I think relative to the LTVs, obviously we've tried to be as proactive as possible in terms of feeding in the lower persistency that we're experiencing from this renewal event here in January that normally wouldn't feed in until sort of the fourth quarter. So we are taking that earlier to try and reflect that earlier. And as you noted, we significantly increased the constraint almost three times from 6% to 15%. So that's the biggest drop I would imagine in terms of LPV certainly this year. You know, and then for the next couple of quarters, it'll sort of be in line with kind of what we've, yeah, what we are, where we're at now outside of just general seasonality. There are certain times of the year where, The LTV is higher or lower, but the biggest drop would have been relative to what we did here in the second quarter.

We have your next question from Lauren Schrenk with Morgan Stanley. Your line is open.

Great. I guess just following up on that last question, understand that –

the churn in the older cohorts is the main issue, but it does look like churn is up in all the cohorts. So just kind of trying to square those comments away. And then just one modeling question. What is the tail revenue that you assume in the full year guide? Thanks.

Yeah. So I guess relative to the experience that we've had with persistency, as we've said in the past, it really seems to be concentrated in the first, you know, two or three renewal periods of a policy. Once you get beyond that, you know, it's much, much lower variability in each of those renewal years. And, you know, it's just, you know, the persistence rates are higher. There's less variability. That's been pretty consistent. And there's, quite frankly, also less dollars to collect once you get past the first couple years of renewal. So those are the trends that we've seen. Relative to the cohort tail adjustment, we'd originally anticipated the potential for a $65 million cohort tail adjustment the fourth quarter. we have accelerated that, and we've increased it to $145 million that we took this quarter. So outside of any adjustments that will be required in the fourth quarter when we actually do the calculation, that's the implied pieces in the guide, what we took this second quarter.

Okay, thanks. We have your next question from Mayor Shields with KBW. Your line's open.

Thanks. Two, I guess, background questions, if I can. One, can you comment on agent retention, particularly core agents, not just the new ones that didn't show up, but we keep on hearing about the great resignation and wondering how you're seeing that with your experienced agent group?

Bob, you want to take the lead on that? Yeah, absolutely.

So we have seen a mild increase in um, agent accretion or, or retention issues, but nothing alarming or, or not what we're hearing on credit is a great, uh, resignation to your point. You know, our level one agents, uh, were in the high eighties and low nineties before now our level one agents are at 83% for the last six months. So, um, we are still retaining our good agents at a high level, little bit of pressure. Uh, but that's just cause it's a really competitive job environment and different than kind of what we've experienced before. but not to the tune of what others, you know, we think are experiencing or what we're seeing elsewhere.

Okay. No, that's very helpful. The second question, I don't know how to even ask this specifically, but as you talk about a slower growth rate anticipated for next year, what is the implication of that? If we're talking about fewer MA policies, what does that mean for population health and select RX over the next two or three years?

I'll address that first, Mayor. Good question. I mean, you know, as we've highlighted, I think we will have a very, very meaningful MA platform as we go and optimize and really focus on accelerating cash flow break-even. We're having – there's a ton of demand out there with respect to population health. Our opt-in rates are very, very high, and as you've seen, one of the bright spots – for the quarter really is the progress we're making on SelectRx. So that is something that we'll continue to push on. We continue to build out, I would say, other highly relevant services for our population health engagement platform. The good thing is we will still have a very meaningful MA platform. I want to make that extremely clear. But there's opportunities for those that we may not convert into an MA policy that can still be – candidates for help through Population Health, Rx, or otherwise. So, we don't think that that necessarily slows down really the ramp up of our healthcare services business.

I'm showing no further questions at this time. I would now like to turn the conference back to Mr. Tim Danker, CEO, for any closing remarks.

Yes, thanks again for joining us today. As I mentioned, the entire Slickwood organization is committed to realizing our potential that we know that our unique business is capable in today's healthcare ecosystem. We certainly believe we can improve the predictability of our core senior business, but more importantly, really leverage our position as a critical connector and provider across healthcare services beyond Medicare Advantage. We look forward to proving that potential to you, and we'll take the significant challenges of this year to make our company stronger. Thank you again for your time, and we'll talk soon.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.