SpringBig Holdings, Inc.

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Spring Big's fourth quarter and fiscal year 2023 earnings conference call. I will now turn the call over to Spring Big's investor relations, Claire Bolteri.

Thank you. Hi, everyone, and thanks for joining our Q4 earnings conference call. Joining me on the call today are Jeff Harris, our CEO, founder, and chairman, and Paul Sykes, our CFO. Hello. By now, everyone should have access to our earnings announcement. This announcement is also on our investor relations website. During this call, we'll make forward-looking statements, including statements about our business outlook, strategies, and long-term goals. These comments are based on our plans, predictions, and expectations as of today, which may change over time. Our actual results could differ materially due to a number of risks and uncertainties, including the risk factors outlined in our 10-K that will be filed with the SEC. Also during this call, we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. These non-GAAP measures are not intended to be a substitute for our GAAP results. Please refer to our earnings release on our Investor Relations website for a reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP financial measures, as well as additional context on our key operating metrics. And finally, this call in its entirety is being webcast from our investor relations website at www.investors.springbig.com, and an audio replay will be available on our website in a few hours. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Jeff.

Thanks, Claire, and thanks, everyone, for joining this afternoon's call. During today's call, Paula and I will provide you details on our fourth quarter and full year results, update you on our key business initiatives, and provide guidance for the first quarter of 2024. I am happy to report that Spring Big is in an excellent position. We continue to execute on a sound strategy, and I am confident that we are making the right investments to both add value to our clients and at the same time capturing the long-term opportunity in front of us. While throughout the year we have experienced some end-market challenges, we grew revenues by 5% year-on-year, and we have diligently reduced our operating expenses by 17% and 31% year-on-year for the full year and fourth quarter, respectively. We achieved our target of delivering positive adjusted EBITDA before the end of the fiscal year, with December being our first profitable month. And in Q4, our adjusted EBITDA loss was a modest $200,000 compared to $3.2 million in the same quarter last year. Shortly after the end of the year, we secured $8 million in debt financing with a syndicate of lenders, which allows us to move forward with a much stronger and cleaner balance sheet as we look to continue to expand and deliver shareholder value. Paul will discuss our financial results and the recent debt financing in a moment, but first I would like to highlight some of our accomplishments over the past year. As a reminder, our retail and brands platform provide merchants and brands with the tool set that they need to create and manage a successful loyalty and digital marketing program along with instituting a data-driven approach to how they connect and engage with their customers. Throughout 2023, we have been operating in a challenging end-market environment with broader macroeconomic concerns weighing on marketing budgets and digital spend and compression of margins in the cannabis industry, increasing the financial stress on our clients, and we have worked diligently to support them. In such an environment, it is pleasing that we have continued to grow revenue with full-year growth of 5% year-on-year and with our subscription revenues underpinning this growth and increasing by 14% year-on-year. As the cannabis market benefits from an improving macroeconomic environment and potentially rescheduling from Schedule 1 to Schedule 3, we anticipate an acceleration in growth. We have also focused our attention on a small number of high potential growth initiatives, and while we continue to develop and launch innovative product offerings to enable our clients to retain and grow their customer bases within our core platform, these new initiatives both complement our core and provide discreet new offerings. We have talked on prior quarterly calls about the launch of subscriptions by Spring Big, which enables our retail clients to offer consumers in return for a monthly or annual subscription fee the opportunity to earn additional loyalty rewards, access to special promotions, and other perks as VIP subscribers. Progress has been at a pace we expected given this is truly an innovative offering in the market. We have 13 clients that have expanded their contracts to incorporate this offering, and six have already launched their VIP subscriber programs with more than 1,800 consumers already subscribing to these programs. We see meaningful potential from both the revenue growth and profitability perspective for both our retail partners and Springpig as these VIP subscription programs are launched and mature over time. Our second key initiative was launched in Q4 is our offering of the unique gift card payment option that can be used by consumers as a method of payment in-store directly from their existing loyalty wallet and will also enable the consumer to uniquely combine the use of loyalty points and the prepaid gift cards. We expect meaningful revenue from these two initiatives to start accruing in the second half of 2024. Finally, we continue to expand beyond the Canada's vertical with our loyalty and messaging communications platform servicing other regulated industries such as alcohol, vape, smoke, and CBD. While these newer initiatives are going to take time to evolve, we are confident that in time, they will fuel significant growth to complement the potential we believe is present to further expand our existing offerings. Before I hand over to Paul, who will walk through our financial results in detail, I want to conclude with my assessment of the current state of SpringVic. SpringVic is in an excellent position. Our technology platform is operational in more than 2,900 retail locations across the United States and Canada and present in the smartphones of over 35 million marketable consumers. We have a significant opportunity in front of us to continue to offer and develop innovative technology solutions that enable our clients to retain and grow their customer bases. Our financial position has improved both from the perspective of having cash in our balance sheet and having optimized our operating expenses to a level that enables us to generate meaningful and sustainable earnings in the future without being reliant on revenue growth. For 2024, our focus is on ensuring successful execution of our key initiatives so we start realizing some of the significant potential, further expanding our subscription revenue generating loyalty and digital messaging platforms, and continuing to be highly disciplined in our expense management to deliver meaningful adjusted EBITDA. With that, I'd like to turn things over to Paul.