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spk00: Good morning. My name is Michelle, and I'll be your conference operator this morning. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Soft Choice Q4 and Fiscal 2021 Earnings Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise, and after the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session for analysts. If you would like to ask a question during that time, simply press the star, then the number 1 on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, please press the star followed by the number two. As a reminder, today's call is being recorded, and I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Tim Foran from Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.
spk11: Thank you, Michelle. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to SoftChoice's Q4 and Fiscal 2021 conference call for the period ended December 31st, 2021. A reminder that for purpose of the recording, today is Friday, March 4th, 2022. Joining us today are Vince DePalma, SoftChoice's President and CEO, Brian Rocco, CFO, and Andrew Caprera, COO. After prepared remarks, we will open it up for analyst questions. The company will make forward-looking statements on our call today that are based on assumptions and therefore subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause the actual results to differ materially from those projected. The company undertakes no obligation to update these statements except as required by law. You can read about these risks and uncertainties in our earnings press release today, as well as in our filings with Canadian securities and regulatory authorities. Also, our commentary today will include adjusted financial measures, which are non-IFRS measures. These should be considered as a supplement to, and not a substitute for, IFRS financial measures. Reconciliations between the two and relevant disclaimers can be found on the company's MD&A, which is available on our website. Finally, please note that because the company reports in U.S. dollars, all amounts discussed today are in U.S. dollars unless otherwise indicated. With that, I will now turn the call over to Vince.
spk12: Thanks, Tim, and welcome, everybody. Thank you for joining us today. I will start on slide four for those following our webcast presentation. In terms of an agenda for this call, I'll first go over some 2021 highlights. And then I'll discuss in more detail some of our growth drivers and execution on our strategy before turning it over to Brian to provide a deeper dive on our financial results and financial outlook. So I'm very pleased to report on an exceptional period of growth and progress for SoftChoice, driven by the successful execution of our strategy and continued strong demand from our customers on their digital transformation journey. During a year, we recorded double-digit growth in gross profit across all of our IT solutions and across our three sales channels in North America, SMB, commercial, and enterprise. Our unique go-to-market approach and the significant investments we have made in our technical and sales capabilities has continued to drive our transformation into a trusted IT solutions advisor to our customers. 2021, we achieved record gross profit per customer and a record revenue retention rate through deeper engagements and the delivery of advanced multi-vendor software and cloud-focused IT solutions that enable superior business outcomes and success for our customers. During the year, we also continued to invest in our team members and achieved strong Team member retention, and we refer to team members, those are our employees. And that was particularly strong, our team member retention in our sales, services, and go-to-market organizations. Our core values and people-first approach have positioned SoftChoice as one of the best employers in the industry. In 2021, we were named a great place to work. for the 16th consecutive year. We are only one of two companies in Canada to have achieved this distinction that many years in a row. Proudly, we also received multiple awards for our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, including for women and LGBTQ equality, as well as our commitment to give back to our communities. I won't go into all the workplace awards we have won, but we have included them in a slide in the appendix of today's presentation. In terms of financial highlights, we generated record gross profit, adjusted EBITDA, and adjusted free cash flow in 2021, which Brian will cover later. The beauty of our asset-light software-focused business model is it drives highly attractive profitability and free cash flow. In 2021, we used our with treasury proceeds from our IPO in June to repay $97 million of loans and borrowings and delevered to 1.2 times 2021 adjusted EBITDA as of December 31st, 2021. And that's compared to 2.9 times at December 31st, 2020. Following our IPO in June, we also initiated a quarterly dividend. We are entering 2022 with significant momentum and in a sound financial position. Given the visibility in our business model and our continued strong performance, we have increased our growth outlook for 2022. Reflecting this anticipated significant increase in profits and cash flow in 2022, we announced today a 29% increase in our quarterly dividend to $0.09 Canadian per common share. We will also commence a buyback program for our common shares under a TSX normal course issuer bid. Turning to slide five, I'll provide a bit more color on the drivers of our gross profit, which is how we and others in our industry measure our top line. For the full year, gross profit increased 20% to a record of $287 million. Software and cloud was again the primary driver of our growth, as can be seen on the chart on the right-hand side of the slide. Our growth in software and cloud was driven largely as a result of strong demand in three solution areas. Our workplace software solutions, including those that power collaboration, our security software solutions, and thirdly, our hybrid cloud software driven by increased public cloud consumption. As it relates to public clouds consumption on slide six, we provide a snapshot of our recent progress in multi-cloud. In 2021, we continued to record very high growth of 86% in combined public cloud growth sales volumes from our three core partners. These include Azure, reflecting our top tier status with Microsoft, and GCP and AWS, where we have been increasing our capabilities significantly over the past few years. These trends evidence the value we provide to these technology partners. These technology vendors are increasingly seeking to partner with SoftChoice as we have strong customer relationships, we have the capabilities to ensure technical integration across multi-vendor solutions, and we have an ability to improve the customer experience and drive enterprise-wide adoption of these technology partners' products. This is one of the reasons why our partners are an important source of customer referrals and leads for us and why they have been co-investing with us to increase our capabilities. For example, in 2021, we secured a multi-year strategic collaboration agreement with AWS to strengthen cloud migration and modernization service offerings which will enable customers to transform and innovate in the cloud with agility. We also recommitted to our joint investment program with Microsoft to further deepen our ability to deliver advanced Azure application and data services and to help customers leverage the advanced security and operational features in Office 365. And subsequent to year-end, we achieved the elite managed services provider designation in the Google Cloud Advantage Program, demonstrating our continued success in enabling cloud transformation at scale with technical expertise in GCP, with whom we were already a premier partner. On top of the progress we made with Microsoft, Google, and AWS, we also received multiple awards from other technology partners as seen on slide seven. These include Cisco's Global Awards for Social Impact and Cisco's America's Security Partner of the Year. We also received Red Hat Solution Provider of the Year and we were also named VMware's Lifecycle Services Partner of the Year. These awards reflect how we have broadened our technology partner relationships in recent years. It also reflects the fact that the market has migrated over time to the areas where soft choice is strongest, that being software-focused IT solutions, including subscription-based services such as public cloud offerings. And the increasingly strategic role of IT within organizations coupled with growing complexity has created significant demand for our holistic IT solutions. To make this real, on slide eight, we provide a couple of soft choice customer examples. Our first customer example on the left-hand side of the slide is a financial services company in New York with global offices. With the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, as with many businesses, they found themselves shifting to online workloads as the world adapted to a digital landscape. And that created an opportunity to move away from a physical on-premises data center and optimize their workloads with the move to the cloud. After working alongside the customer and determining their specific needs, SoftChoice recommended our proprietary assessment, the Cloud Readiness Review. Our team conducted initial discovery in their environment to analyze results and build recommendations for rationalizing and optimizing a move to VMware Cloud on AWS. This allowed the customer to move much more quickly since they were able to leverage existing VMware skills to rapidly migrate these workloads to achieve exiting their data center on time and on budget. As a result, the customer saw a 40% decrease in cost equating to hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings versus their on-premises environment, while also enjoying the agility of running these applications in the public cloud. They were also able to benefit from funding from our partner, AWS, which helped offset migration costs and allowed them to realize their return on investment from day one. I won't cover the second example on the right-hand side simply for time considerations, but it is a very similar story with an Azure VMware solution. These case examples illustrate the value that our customers get from having one partner who first of all understands the software and licensing opportunity for savings, can consult and design the roadmap across an on-premise and cloud solution, and then can implement that solution with end-to-end ownership. That is the unique ability that we bring to the market. Slide nine provides some detail on the nature of our growth investments in 2021. We expanded our roster of technical experts from 650 to 720. Namely, we increased our cloud specialty sales executives or SSEs and our journey architects that support our account executives. We accelerated investments in certain strategic technology partner relationships and capabilities. And we also implemented a new digital workflow platform for our managed services business, which went live in Q4 of 2021, which improves both the customer and employee experience associated with our managed services offerings. These investments, as you can see, drove a 27% increase in our Salesforce productivity in 2021 to $751,000 of gross profit per account executive. They also allowed us to go far deeper with our customers than ever before. And as you can see on slide 10, that helped us achieve 113% revenue retention and a 27% increase in gross profit per customer. Turning to slide 11, as Gartner notes, staff skills gaps, wage inflation, and the war for talent are pushing CIOs to rely more on third-party firms to pursue their digital strategies. In order to capitalize on the strong market backdrop, we began ramping of our sales force near the end of 2021, as I outlined on our Q3 earnings call in November. As seen on the slide depicted by the black line, we ended 2021 with just under 400 account executives, or AEs, and that was an increase from the end of 2020. We are on track to achieve our stated target of ending 2022 with 423 to 433 account executives. The addition of new AEs represents a highly compelling and accretive investment given the attractive gross profit potential for each new AE based on our historical track record. And so we are hiring AEs for all of our sales channels. Prior to the pandemic, we were growing both our sales force and our customer base in the mid single digit percentages annually. As you can see on the right-hand side of this chart, in 2021, we saw a 4% dip in our customer base stemming from declines driven during the pandemic. The primary reason for that dip, as we discussed on prior earnings calls, is that we paused the ramp in our sales force during the pandemic. But now that we are adding more sales capacity into our system to prospect and win new accounts, We will get back to driving an increase in our customer base, and we see significant opportunities for new customer acquisitions, given the fragmented nature of the market. Q4 and fiscal 2021 gross profit growth included net benefits from Project Monarch, an initiative in which we reengineered our business processes and redesigned our technology architecture, as outlined on slide 12. The project remains on track, and we remain confident in our ability to realize the total anticipated net benefits of Project Monarch in 2022, equating to $25 million of EBITDA uplift, primarily related to top-line gross profit uplift, but also from some OPEX savings and cost avoidance. At this point, let me turn it over to Brian to take a deeper dive through our financial results and our outlook. Great. Thank you, Vince.
spk16: So starting with slide 13, and as Vince noted, we generated record gross profit, which is our top line measurement. Q4 gross profit increased 31% over Q4 2020. By IT solution type, the increase in gross profit was led by software and cloud, which increased by 42%, driven by the factors Vince outlined. Additionally, margins on software and cloud growth sales improved year over year, partially a result of Q4 2020 margins being unusually low. Gross profit from our managed and professional services grew 70%, driven by increased project activity and margins related to a rebound in customer spending. Finally, gross profit from hardware increased 7%, primarily a result of an increase in average margins offsetting supply chain constraints. Global supply chain shortages for hardware continue to persist, and as demand continues to outweigh supply, it is expected that these constraints will continue in the near term. But this has not really stopped our customers from booking orders with us for hardware or postpone larger projects that involve our broader IT solutions offerings. We have built up our backlog in hardware to an extent, which should provide a modest tailwind in 2023 or possibly late 2022. For the full year of 2021, our growth profit increased 20%. On an absolute dollar basis, this growth was driven by software and cloud. Buy-sale channel gross profit growth was primarily driven by commercial channel in both reporting periods, which increased by 34% in Q4 2021 and by 24% in fiscal 2021. Gross profit in SMB channel increased by 40% in Q4 of 2021 and 20% in fiscal 2021. And gross profit in our enterprise segment increased by 20% in Q4 of 2021 and 14% in fiscal 2021. As a result of the commercial channel's strong growth, it represented just under 56% of total company gross profit in 2021 versus 54% in 2020. The SMB channel comprised approximately 20% and enterprise 25% of 2021 gross profit. Currency fluctuations primarily related to a strengthened Canadian dollar also had a positive impact on our gross profit, though this was offset by its contribution to higher operating expenses. Now turning to our growth sales on slide 14, growth sales increased 20% in Q4 2021 and 15% in fiscal 2021, driving the growth profit increase in these periods. On an absolute dollar basis, this increase was primarily due to software and cloud sales, which grew 32% in Q4 and 24% in fiscal 2021. Software and cloud comprise 68% of our total company gross sales in 2021, which is an increase from 63% in 2020. And this reflects the continuing increase of software and cloud solutions within our midst of business that has occurred over the past few years, but also from a weaker than normal year for hardware sales due in part to the global supply chain constraints. Services gross sales increased 21% in Q4 and 12% in fiscal 2021, and it comprised approximately 5% of total company gross sales. Hardware gross sales decreased by 4% in Q4 and 2% in fiscal 2021, with sales continuing to be negatively impacted by global supply chain shortages that I described earlier. Hardware was approximately 27% of our total company gross sales in 2021 versus 32% in 2020. Now shifting gears to our operating profitability on slide 15, we also achieved record adjusted EBITDA of $69 million in 2021. This was led by $26 million of adjusted EBITDA in Q4. On a year-over-year basis, adjusted EBITDA increased 2% in Q4 2021, which is in line with our expectations driven by the $20.4 million increase in our gross profit. This gross profit growth was partially offset by an increase in our adjusted cash operating expenses, reflecting growth investments, higher variable compensation related to our gross profit growth, FX and some wage inflation. Operating expenses also showed an increase due to $10.3 million in Canadian emergency wage subsidy payments received in Q4 of 2020, which lowered our operating costs in that period. Through 2021, we increased our investments as confidence and conditions improved during the year, which not only helped drive strong top line growth in Q4 and fiscal 2021, but is also anticipated to help drive growth and margin expansion in 2022 and beyond. On a full year basis, adjusted EBITDA was $69 million, a 6% increase over 2020. The $49 million increase in our gross profit in 2021 significantly outweighs both a $32 million increase in adjusted cash operating expenses, driven by the same factors impacting Q4 operating costs, as well as a $13 million reduction in SUEs received in 2020. As for our cash flows, we review adjusted free cash flow on an LTM basis, and it's measured as adjusted EBITDA, less maintenance capex, and least payments. In 2021, adjusted free cash flow increased by 4% over 2020 to approximately $60 million, which equates to an 87% free cash flow conversion ratio. Now turning to our outlook on slide 16. So given our strong momentum and the visibility within our business model, today we revise upwards our 2022 outlook as outlined on this slide 16. We are now forecasting fiscal 2022 gross profit to be over $320 million, representing greater than 11.5% growth in 2022. And this is an increase from the over $300 million in gross profit that was in our original outlook provided during our IPO. Key underlying drivers include, one, the expected growth of our addressable market, two, the expected growth of our sales force and improvements of our sales force productivity, and three, the expected growth of our customer base and wallet share among existing customers. And it also includes the ramping benefits from our growth investments that we made in 2021. Our adjusted EBITDA outlook for fiscal 2022 is an increase in adjusted EBITDA to gross profit margin from 24% in 2021 to around 30% in 2022. This expansion resumed the progression upwards that we had pre-pandemic. And for context, our margin was around 20% in 2017 when we began the strategic transformation of our business. We changed our adjusted EBITDA outlook from an absolute dollars to a margin basis for a few reasons. So firstly, it raises the low end of our adjusted EBITDA guidance consistent with our increased gross profit outlook. Our updated guidance implies approximately $96 million of adjusted EBITDA in 2022, which is $6 million above the original outlook's low end of $90 million. Secondly, to be consistent with gross profit, we are no longer setting an upper limit to our outlook, which was originally $100 million. And thirdly, so while our natural adjusted EBITDA margin on an incremental dollar of gross profit is higher than 30%, our intention is to reinvest incremental gross profit growth into growth investments in 2022, which is anticipated to keep our margin at approximately 30%. Our outlook also reflects net benefits of $25 million from Project Honour that we will achieve in 2022. And our outlook assumes an average US dollar to dollar exchange rate of 0.79 in fiscal 2022. As for our adjusted free cash flow outlook, we have reiterated that we expect to achieve a very high adjusted free cash flow converting rate of approximately 90% of adjusted EBITDA. This is based on the adjusted EBITDA assumptions outlined above and assumes Maintenance Cap Act and IFRS lease payments are relatively in line with historical levels. In terms of the cadence through 2022, we expect that growth rates will be increasing through the year as a result of our investments taking hold. Additionally, we expect gross profit and adjusted EBITDA seasonality to be relatively consistent with 2021, with Q1 being our lowest quarter at just under 22% of full-year gross profit and 15% in adjusted EBITDA. And this would be followed by Q3, Q2, and then Q4. Finally, before I leave this page, I just want to stress that we do have a high degree of confidence in the outlook outlined on this slide. So moving to slide 17, we are entering 2022 in a strong financial position with low net leverage of 1.2 times 2021 adjusted EBITDA compared to 2.9 times at December 31, 2020. This deleveraging was a result of our impressive free cash flow generation in 2021 and to a lesser extent from applying the IPO treasury proceeds to debt repayment. We have significant financial flexibility, including more than $200 million available under our revolver, as well as anticipated strong free cash flow. In terms of capital allocation priorities, first and foremost, we intend to make off-back investments in our sales force and in the sales specialists and technical experts that support our sellers, as we have outlined today, to drive long-term profitable growth. Secondly, to enhance shareholder returns while maintaining balance sheet strength and flexibility, we are increasing our quarterly dividend by 29% to $0.09 Canadian per common share. And thirdly, we will commence a buyback program for our common shares under a normal course issuer bid, the details of which are set out in a separate press release from our earnings release today. And I also want to point out that our outlook and growth strategy are entirely organic. However, we are opportunistic as it relates to M&A and will consider bolt-on acquisitions that could enhance our advanced IT solution capabilities, thereby accelerating our growth. With that, I will now turn it back over to Ken.
spk12: Okay, thanks, Brian. I'll end our presentation on slide 18 today with a brief recap of our focus going forward. We have driven a transformation in our business over the last five years, focusing on the fastest-growing subsectors of the IT industry, which you can see highlighted in orange in the second column from the left, and executing against four major strategic initiatives, which you can see in the middle column. The good news is that a lot of the heavy lifting is behind us, and we are now positioned better than ever to capitalize on the exciting market opportunity based on our strategic changes. Our focus going forward is on executing and continuing to drive double-digit organic growth by helping our customers fully realize the value of cloud and workplace through data and customer success. As you can see in the far right column, to achieve this, we will, first of all, expand our sales force and continue to make sales productivity investments. Secondly, capture the remaining Project Monarch benefits. Third, continue to attract and retain top talent by strengthening our highly engaged culture. Fourth, employ a modern customer engagement model with a multi-channel approach to to facilitate easier communications and transactions, grow our customer base, and deliver world-class customer satisfaction. And finally, we will deepen our IT solutions in our three strategic focus areas, hybrid multi-cloud, collaboration and digital workplaces, and software asset management. In closing,
spk00: we are quite pleased with our performance in 2021 and we are incredibly excited about our future and with that i will turn it back over to michelle for q a thank you sir ladies and gentlemen we will now begin the question and answer session if you would like to ask a question please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad and to withdraw your question please press star 2. As a reminder, if you are using a speakerphone, please lift the handset before pressing any of the keys. One moment, please, for your first question. Your first question comes from David Kwan of TD. Please go ahead.
spk15: Good morning, guys. Congrats on the great quarter. Nice to see the increase in guidance and the dividend. I wanted to ask you about the guidance. As you mentioned, I guess the EBITDA margin guidance implies about $96 million for this year, which is above the midpoint, but also brings up a low end of guidance. Given your commentary, it seems like we should be comparing that $96 million to the low end of your prior guidance or $90 million versus the midpoint at $95 million.
spk16: Hey, David. It's Brian Ronco here. That's right. So what we've done here, so we're no longer providing a range. Instead, we're saying GP will be over $320 million at a 30% margin. That would imply EBITDA of over $96 million. And so we're no longer setting a high end or an upper limit of our outlook. We're providing kind of an updated lower. So that's why we compared the 96 to the 90.
spk15: Okay, perfect. That's helpful. And when you talked about the EBITDA margin guidance of 30% and kind of reinvesting additional gross profit growth such that it sounds like the margin should be around 30% for the year. But looking out maybe beyond this year, should we expect that your margin should expand or you can kind of continually reinvest in the business to keep the margins in around the 30% level?
spk16: Yeah, we will continue to reinvest beyond 2022. And so, you know, we've got a large growing TAM and we've got a lot of confidence in our commercial model that we're able to add both sellers as well as, you know, technical and specialty sellers as well. You know, beyond 2022, we're obviously not giving any guidance today for 2023. But, you know, if you look at our historical track record pre-pandemic, Um, we grew, you know, from 2017 to 2019, we grew gross profit at a 10% CAGR. We grew EBITDA at a 20% CAGR. That resulted in our EBITDA margins going from 20% to 27%. And I consider that, you know, um, representative of the operating leverage within our business. And we were investing from 2017 to 2019. And so we're getting back to our normal cadence, but 2020, 2021, and even 2022 are a bit unusual on the operating leverage front. Just given the impact of the pandemic, the pause that we made on investments in 2021, or sorry, in 2020, when we reignited them in 2021. And then Monarch, of course, has a big impact on the operating leverage and margin increase we're seeing in 2022.
spk15: Perfect. And I'll ask one more question here. Just as we're seeing more employers bringing employees back into the office here, are you seeing any changes in customer buying patterns?
spk12: No. Hey, David, it's Vince. Customer demand is robust. We've seen that through the course of 2021 and into 2022. And it's robust in our three major focus solution areas of hybrid multi-cloud, digital workplaces and collaboration, and software asset management. So customer, like the case example I took you through on this call, and those were cloud-based examples, we could have given you examples of how companies are leveraging technology in the digital workplace and collaboration front and so forth, but demand remains very robust for these IT solutions as companies are continuing to drive their digital transformation to be able to compete in their respective industries.
spk07: That's helpful. Thanks, guys.
spk06: Your next question comes from Brian Ethic.
spk02: of goldman sachs please go ahead hi good morning and congrats for me as well on the results it's nice to see the uh you know account executive growth and better productivity um i guess on that front um could you maybe give us a sense of you know where you are in your in your plans for hiring you know into 2022 um are i think previously you noted adding maybe 40 to 50 account execs How are you finding sourcing the talent? How are you envisioning your ability to ramp on that front? And what might potential tight labor markets, if that's the case, be a headwind to that? Or are you actually finding it a bit easier to hire in this environment?
spk12: Yeah, thanks, Brian. It's Vince. So I'm just going to reiterate, we did end 2021 at just under 400 AEs versus 2020, where we had end of the year at about 383. And we absolutely fully expect to get to our targeted AE headcount of between 423 and 433 AEs by the end of 2022. So there's two aspects to, well, how do you do that, right? And I'll tell you, aspect number one is focusing on our team members, on our culture, on helping our employees with their career growth, their career development, ensuring we have an incredible focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion, and investing in our people leaders to be human and inspiring to their people. All our frontline people leaders who lead all our various team members are critical to the success of our team members. And so all of what I just said results in very strong team member retention. It's because you've got to retain your existing employees to be able to grow your existing employees, just like you have to retain existing customers to grow your customer base. So we really do focus a lot on our culture, our people-first approach to drive success very strong top quartile type retention in our sales force and our technical experts, as well as within the corporate functions that support all of those people. The second aspect, of course, is talent acquisition. And we do not struggle to attract salespeople and technical people to soft choice. And I say that for two primary reasons. Number one is we have a phenomenal reputation in the marketplace, as can be illustrated by all the awards we get for being a great place to work, for being a great place to work for women, for LGBTQ+, for today's youth, for technology, for hybrid work, et cetera, et cetera. And so we have a great reputation, and we have an amazing talent acquisition team that is constantly sourcing new candidates. And guess what? Our frontline... Managers do the same thing. They are always networking and sourcing talent along with our talent acquisition team. I will tell you for the hiring of technical talent, lead times have increased a bit because it is competitive. And so we are still sourcing that talent quite successfully. But we have seen a slight increase in the lead times it takes to source a candidate when we open up a position to be filled. But we have very high confidence in our ability to ramp both our sales force and the technical talent and sales specialists that support our sellers.
spk02: That's helpful. And maybe if I could follow up. So a good number of net new ads in the quarter, but you still had some pretty strong productivity improvements. So how do we think about the maturity of those AEs and how to frame out expectations for productivity improvement in 2022?
spk12: Yeah, so the way we drove the productivity improvements that you saw in 2021 was because of the investments we made both in 2020 and 2021. in those technical resources, sales specialists that support our sellers, as well as the co-investments we made with some of our technology partners to enhance our capabilities. So those sales specialists and technical people who are right in there with our sellers, with customers, are helping drive more advanced solution with our customers, which is improving Salesforce productivity. And we're going to continue to do that. We're going to continue to ramp our SSEs, the sales specialists, our journey architects, our principal architects, our consultants, our engineers to support ourselves in having these very advanced conversations with customers to drive these advanced solutions. And we will continue to invest alongside our technology partners like we've discussed in the public cloud areas with Microsoft, AWS, and GCP to advance our capabilities there. And we believe that we will be able to drive double-digit organic growth like we have done historically in getting half of that through growing our sales force and the other half of that by continuing to improve Salesforce productivity. And our Salesforce productivity, to your point, Brian, excuse me, our Salesforce tenure has increased through the course of the year, and that's a result of our very strong team member retention.
spk07: Super helpful color. Thank you.
spk00: Your next question comes from John Shoke of National Bank. Please go ahead.
spk04: Hey, good morning, guys. Congrats on a strong quarter. I just have a quick question on the managed services because, Vince, you mentioned the managed services in your prepared remarks. Maybe just elaborate the opportunity in that market. Did you already see the strong customer inbound for that service?
spk12: Yeah, you were breaking up a little bit on me, John, but I think I got the essence of your question. If I didn't, I might ask you to repeat it, or maybe one of my colleagues here, Andrew or Brian, caught it better than me. But when we go into a customer situation, take the example I gave you of the New York-based financial institution that was moving out of their proprietary data center into the cloud, and we go in and we figure out Well, which cloud and depending on which applications and what data we're looking to move to the cloud and maybe what cloud they're already using. We're also right at the beginning of that conversation, making sure they understand the full breadth of our solution, including managed services, right? So, you know, we can do the design work up front to figure out which applications need to be moved to the cloud. which cloud would make the most sense depending on those applications and the underlying data. We can then do the implementation of actually moving those applications and workloads to the cloud, and then we can manage that environment for them. And there's a lot of different aspects to the management. It can be cost optimization. It can be overall governance of the cloud. And it could be how they actually operate day-to-day with their cloud services. So there's different degrees of management. So our salespeople, our specialty sellers, and our technical people are having conversations early on in the sales cycle about our professional and managed services capabilities so that we can do an end-to-end solution with our customer. And that is helping us to grow both our professional services business and our managed services business.
spk04: Makes sense. And so, Ben, in terms of the infrastructure for the managed services, do you think the company is ready to scale that by now? Or what is the timing I should be thinking about in terms of the scaling for managed services?
spk12: Yeah, so we just implemented the new technology architecture in our managed services business, and it went live in early November, and it went without a hitch. And I will tell you that the customer experience and our own team member experience with our managed services engineers have been greatly improved. We actually reviewed that with our board of directors in a recent board meeting. Sean Denemy, our SVP of services and customer success, reviewed that with our board. And we will continue to make enhancements to those systems we just installed. And really, there's a phase two to it this year. It's very minor investment. It's embedded in our and it will allow us to reap the benefits and do exactly what you said and have a better ability to scale our managed services business.
spk04: Okay, and last one for me regarding the Project Monarch. When I look at the $25 million uplift EBITDA for 2022, is that going to be evenly distributed throughout the quarters or is it going to be more close to the second half of the year? Hey John, it's Brian here.
spk16: So we did give a bit of guidance around the cadence of both gross profit and EBITDA and Project Monarch goes through both of those, right? It is primarily benefiting our gross profit and then there is some off-bag savings and avoidance as well that would impact EBITDA. And so the normal cadence of our business and how I would look at it, including Project Monarch, is Q1 is our smallest quarter. It's around or a little less than 22% of full-year growth profit. EBITDA is around 15% of full-year EBITDA in Q1. And then Q3 is, you know, the next largest quarter, and then Q2 and then Q4. Thank you.
spk04: I'll pass the line.
spk00: Your next question comes from John Shooter of RBC. Please go ahead.
spk13: Hi, this is John calling on behalf of Paul Treiber. Just a question first on the new Microsoft commerce experience and the shift there from monthly to annual. What has the impact been on your business there maybe from a revenue growth perspective and any other impact you're seeing maybe to cash? Thanks.
spk09: Sure, John. I'll take that. This is Andrew speaking. In all honesty, I don't think there's been a material impact from that. I think the impact is more on the customer side of things and the experience they get on the new platform. And honestly, on our ability to serve customers, it's been advantageous for us to be able to offer this. And I think as Microsoft has come out with some of these new features. They've also come out with new options for us as partners to be able to take the modern commerce experience to the customers. So I don't think you should think about that as having a material impact on changing the trajectory or the dynamics of our performance. I think for us it really is just an opportunity to take our ability to serve customers through our CSP offering and our managed services on both Microsoft Azure and their modern workplace solutions to our customers in a sort of new and exciting way.
spk13: That's helpful. Thank you. And maybe just on the demand environment that you're discussing, are you seeing perhaps a pull forward in demand or is it the momentum more structural?
spk12: John, can you repeat that? You broke up on me.
spk13: Yeah, so just related to the current environment, demand environment, are you seeing this as to some extent a pull forward in demand or is it structural?
spk12: It's not a pull forward in demand. It's been, you know, we started seeing, you know, there was in 2020, you know, when the world went crazy with COVID, we saw a lot of pause in projects. But demand came back, I'll say in Q4 of 2020. And it just continued throughout each quarter of 2021, and it appears to be continuing this year. So I would say that it's structural. Companies are realizing that to be competitive, to drive success with their own customers, to drive success with their people, and to drive success with their organizations, they have got to digitally transform the way they run their businesses. And that is driving the demand in these solutions, which we have been hyper-focused on for the last five years, as I reviewed on that very last slide, when we made a strategic shift in our strategy to focus on hybrid multi-cloud, digital workplace and collaboration, and leveraging our strength from our legacy focus on software asset management. And so those are the things that CIOs and business leaders care about, how to leverage technology and unleash the potential of their people through technology and drive their business. And that demand is, I would tell you, structural. And you could read all the reports from Gartner and IDC and Forrester and others, and they will tell you largely the same thing. And they're projecting the overall IT industry to grow at about a 7% CAGR over the next couple of years. When you look at The focus areas, we're focused on cloud, workplace, software asset management. Those tend to grow faster than the overall IT industry. And so we are focused on those subsectors that have the greatest demand and the largest growth prospects going forward, as outlined by some of the industry pundits like Gartner and IGC and Forrester.
spk13: Great, thanks. And maybe just one more from me with respect to the changes you've made on the NCIB and the dividend. How are you thinking about allocating capital between returning to shareholders and possibly repaying the debt or making potential acquisitions?
spk16: Yeah, so we do have a slide in the deck that I walked through today. And on the left-hand side is kind of our sources of funds. So we generate a lot of free cash flow. And we have what I think is a great all revolver facility on the sources side. And then on the uses side, our priorities are, and it's, you know, starting first and foremost is we're investing in our business. And those are our OpEx investments and they're funded within EBITDA, but we're making sure we're making investments to take advantage of the large TAM that we operate in that's growing. And we've got, like I said, the commercial model to grow faster than the market. and so making sure we're capturing that to drive long-term profitable growth and then beyond that you know the next priority for us are we did increase our dividend today by the 29 and that's a reflection of you know the um updated outlook that we provided today and the increased profitability that you see in 20 that you would see in 2022 as a result of that versus 2021. And then instituting the NCIP as well. And so it will be a balanced approach of investing in our business and returning capital to shareholders. Our leverage, we're at 1.2 times at the end of 2021. We are a cash flow machine. We can support 1.2 times leverage or higher than that to be totally frank. So it's not a priority of ours to repay debt aggressively. in 2022. Given everything I just said there, we are a cash flow machine. We do have access to capital. We are in a strong position to be able to act on M&A as well. We talked about being more opportunistic there, looking at capabilities if they fit within criteria that we're looking for in terms of advancing our capabilities. We're able to bounce there as well.
spk07: Okay, great. Thanks for taking my questions. I'll pass the line.
spk06: Your next question comes from Stephanie Price of CIBC.
spk00: Please go ahead.
spk05: Good morning. I've tried to see some impressive growth from the public cloud vendors recently. Can you talk a bit about what you're seeing from each of these partners as you think about 2022?
spk09: Hey Stephanie, this is Andrew. It certainly has been a core part of our strategy. And as you saw, as Vince went through, we've seen good growth in 2021. And we saw that accelerate really because we've started to invest in getting much deeper in our Google and AWS capabilities over the last couple of years. And so we've had that really strong Azure presence for years. quite a few years now, but we're getting to a really exciting point, I think, now where we've got the opportunity to really go into a customer and say, you know, no matter which of the three major public clouds you want or need to use, and if you're not sure, we'll help you figure it out, but no matter which one, we can help you with that. And we can help you all the way from the initial design of the environment through the professional and managed services to implement and then govern and operate and secure that cloud environment. So, We think we're just on the cusp of something really great as we build out that Google and AWS side of that multi-cloud solution business. And so we're really excited about what potential we have in that cloud business going forward.
spk05: Great color. Thanks. And then just in the M&A markets, you know, you've got pretty low leverage, as you just mentioned. Can you talk a little bit about how you're thinking about M&A here and maybe a bit on valuations as well, just given the public markets?
spk12: Yeah, so as Brian outlined, we'll be opportunistic there. So let me tell you, and I think we talked about this maybe in some past calls, but let me tell you what the focus of any M&A activity might be. And let me reiterate first that, look, everything we talked about on this call and all the results and all the forward-looking outlook is all entirely organic. However, we have been investing in ourselves these last few years, as Andrew just outlined, to build our capabilities, notably with AWS GCP, as well as with Microsoft Azure. And we do use partners where we don't have capabilities today, but where we continue to look to either build or acquire those more advanced capabilities over time. What we won't do is we would not simply buy competitors that would take us off strategy, such as acquiring a local regional bar with a legacy hardware business. What we would do is be opportunistic on M&A where we would see an opportunity to acquire advanced capabilities that strengthen our internal capabilities and therefore our market position. So that would be things in the areas of application development, DevOps, machine learning, AI. So those would be potential acquisitions we would look to make. And we will do our work to scan the marketplace to see what opportunities may be out there that would be a way to advance our capabilities more quickly than building them on our own through OpEx investments.
spk05: Great. Thank you. And just finally, Brian, you mentioned some inflation in the quarter. I assume it's in the guide, but maybe you can expand a little bit on what you're seeing there.
spk16: Okay. You got a bit there, Stephanie. I think the question was around wage inflation. Is that right?
spk05: Yeah. You mentioned some inflation in OPEX. Just curious about what you're seeing there.
spk16: Yeah, so wage inflation is a part of our business. It always has been. We've been reading about the war for talent, especially in tech, and it's not something that's new in our business. So it's part of our business. As Vince outlined, we take a lot of measures to make sure we are a great place to work and Compensation is a part of that, but not everything. And so what we've been seeing is there has been wage inflation in our business, but we think about it as actually being a positive for us long term. And so if we're going through this, you look at our customers as well, and some of the challenges they're seeing, and Vince alluded to this, some of the top priorities for CIOs and the challenges they're seeing, and this is one area. And so where we can really step in is with our managed service business, with our professional service offerings, as well as being the trusted advisor to our customers. It's an opportunity for us overall. But in terms of our outlook for 2022, we have modeled in kind of wage inflation. A normal part of our business is we do merit, we do market adjustments, and we'll continue to do that.
spk05: Great. Thank you very much.
spk00: Your next question comes from Gavin Fairweather of Cormark. Please go ahead.
spk03: Oh, hi there. Good morning. I thought I'd just touch on a tidbit I saw on the deck, and that was related to Project Monarch and specifically the pricing lift is coming in maybe a bit better than expected. Can you just elaborate on why you think that is? Is that tied to the stronger demand environment or maybe just perhaps greater fruits from your new CPQ tool?
spk12: I'm terribly sorry, Gavin. It must be a problem on our end with the volume, but I'm going to have to ask you to repeat it. You were very low. Could you maybe repeat it?
spk03: Is this better?
spk12: Yeah, that's much better.
spk03: I was just looking for some color on the pricing list that you've seen after Project Monarch and specifically what the drivers were. It seems like pricing has been a bit more of a driver than you'd initially expected.
spk12: yeah thank you and then an apologies for that um uh making you repeat that but so we we've seen uh you know as as we outlined on when we talked about project monarch in the past the big bulk of the ebitda uplift in 2022 comes from gross profit uplift the two primary drivers of that is both in pricing in other words getting better margins and in procurement savings which improves our cost of goods sold which allows us to drive better gross profit on the same sale that we would have made previously. There are other things that are also improving the GP uplift around how we do renewals, how we manage our business for rebates and other things. But the two primary drivers are pricing and procurement. Where Monarch is amazing is the data analytics and the data governance we've put in place where we now are able to do heavy data analytics behind the scene on every opportunity that our sellers are going for and give them data-driven advice on how to price an opportunity based on where the pricing has been with other customers, where they've priced it before, and a whole bunch of other factors behind the scenes that says, hey, given this opportunity for this particular customer, skew, here's what we would suggest as a target price, here's what we suggest as your floor, as you're into negotiating. That's information that our sellers never had before. And they would be pricing their deals based on their best guesstimate in a pre-monarch world and talking to their boss and talking to their peers. And now we're doing that through very strong data analytics. And tools. We introduced a configure price quoting tool, CPQ, which is allowing us to arm our sellers with that information to drive improvements in pricing systemically across our 400 AEs. And we've been seeing better than planned performance on the pricing front, as we outlined on the last earnings call. And we continue to remain optimistic that we'll continue to overperform.
spk07: Great. Thank you so much.
spk00: Your next question comes from Divya Goyal of Scotiabank. Please go ahead.
spk01: Good morning, guys. Wonderful quarter. Vince, can you hear me properly?
spk12: Yeah, you're coming across great, Divya. Thank you.
spk01: Awesome. So just elaborating quickly on the last question here, on Project Monarch, can you just confirm whether was that tool internally developed or was that outsourced from the vendor partners? And if it was internally developed, can we consider that as one of the SaaS-based tools that Softchoice has?
spk12: And you're asking that specifically about Project Monarch, is that correct?
spk01: Yeah, like the ERP and the pricing tools that you just talked about in the CPQ, is that something that you could potentially in future start to market to your clients as well? given the benefits?
spk12: Yeah, so, you know, that's a great question. So the biggest, there were three biggest parts of the technology backbone that we replaced, which was we replaced a proprietary homegrown ERP with SAP S4 HANA. We replaced our CRM. We actually did that pre-Monarch with Salesforce.com. We upgraded to a more advanced Salesforce.com, including Einstein, and that's also where the CPQ module sits. And we upgraded our HRIS systems, going from eight or ten disparate HRIS systems that didn't really talk to each other very well to one system that allows us to manage our talent from hiring all the way through to, let's just say, retirement and everything in between. Those are the three major systems we implemented. We don't do ERP work with our existing clients, and we quite honestly don't do a lot of CRM work with our existing clients. So those are not really focus areas for us. Those are things that require a different set of skills than we typically have, and so those probably wouldn't be something we would be specifically marketing for. But what I would say is going through this transformation, it is an amazing case study and arming our people with how we did this to ourselves, how we did this for ourselves and the benefits we're getting is a great example of how you deploy technology to unleash the potential of people. And that's what we're doing here at SoftTrace with this technology, and that's what we do with our customers in the areas we focus on, which of course is how do you best leverage the cloud to improve your agility, to improve your employee's experience, to improve the customer's experience of our customers. How do you put in place the right digital workplace and collaboration technology, once again, to improve the employee experience, to improve collaboration, to improve employee productivity. You know, while Monarch may not be directly applicable because we don't do ERP and CRMs for the most part, it's applicable in the sense of how you deploy technology to drive a transformation of a business and improve a company's ability to drive success with their own people and with their end customers.
spk01: Yeah, no, it's a phenomenal case study, as you said, and obviously it's a true example of technology promoting technology here, right? So, thanks a lot for that response. Just the second question here, and I'll keep it quick. With respect to your growth, obviously, wonderful plans here with respect to the capital allocation, are you considering any global growth beyond North America, be it on a clientele side or from an acquisition side? And I know the latter is not the priority, but just from an expansion side beyond North America.
spk12: Yeah, great question, Debbie. And we've talked about that and we've discussed it with our board. And, you know, fundamentally where we land every time is we're going to stay focused on North America because we have a huge TAM. Last call, I think we showed it on a slide of $298 billion. And so with our $2 billion of Gross sales, we have slightly less than a 1% market share. There's so much opportunity to grow right here at home in Canada and the U.S. We're going to stay focused on North America and not look to expand internationally. That said, hey, think about the case example I took you through in this call. That was a firm that has global presence, a New York-based financial institution that has offices around the world, and we're able to serve them. They're headquartered in New York. but they have operations throughout North America and outside North America. And what we're doing in helping them with the move to the cloud, in that case a VMware on AWS solution, helps them with their entire business globally. So our clientele is headquartered in North America, but some, many of our clients have operations outside North America that we're able to assist with.
spk01: That's wonderful, Vince. That's all for me.
spk06: Thanks, guys. Your next question comes from Nick Agostino of Laurentian Bank Securities.
spk00: Please go ahead.
spk14: Yes, good morning. Can you guys hear me? Yep, you're good, Nick. Perfect, thanks. First, congrats on the quarter. I guess two quick questions. We spoke earlier about adding new AEs for 2022. And obviously, the timing as to when they come on stream and then the training to get them up to speed and all that. My question is, how much of your 2022 gross profit guidance or how much contribution is in those numbers from those new AEs?
spk16: Hey Nick, it's Brian here. Good question. So we don't provide specific guidance around how much productivity will be versus kind of capacity or adding kind of more AEs. What I will say though is You know, from 2017 to 2019, we've talked about it being kind of a balanced approach where it was two prongs and each of those prongs was driving the double-digit growth. And 2020 and 2021 were unusual for all the reasons we talked about earlier today. But what we'd like to see going forward is getting back to kind of the more normal approach where both AD capacity and productivity are driving growth. Double-digit organic.
spk14: Okay, thank you. And then my second question earlier, I think in the presentations, you guys spoke about just strong demand for security software. Obviously, in the current environment, cybersecurity specifically is starting to get more and more attention. Just maybe speak to how much of your sales is coming from or exposure you have to the overall security software market. And just based on where that number is today, how much more focused maybe where you think you can take that number, maybe where you want to take that number going forward and leave there. Thank you.
spk09: Yeah, thanks, Nick. This is Andrew. You know, as you know, we don't break out the specifics beyond software and cloud. And what I will tell you is that security and security software is just such a core part of all of our solutions. And it's an important part of our business. And What I can tell you about what we do is we actually go in and help hundreds or thousands of customers with their security posture. We often find that they're actually oversubscribed and underprotected, meaning that they've got too many soft security licenses and too many security vendors in their environment, which actually creates additional risk for them. So we've got a lot of effort right now into helping customers actually go in and assess their security environment to find ways to consolidate and standardize their security approach to fewer vendors, essentially. And that way it's easier for them to manage. They need fewer skills and capabilities. And we help them get that environment set up. And so where we're going with security, certainly security software has been a big part of our business, but as we've grown our cloud business, the ability to govern and secure a multi-cloud environment has grown in importance in our business. And we've even recently started to get into more advanced security services offerings. So for example, one of the largest financial institutions in North America, we have an active security project right now to help them implement a zero trust security posture. And so we are getting deeper into this. It's not just a licensed resale business anymore as we continue to add services capabilities around both our cloud and workplace solution areas.
spk13: Okay, great. Thank you for that.
spk00: Your next question comes from Martin Toner, ATB Capital Markets. Please go ahead.
spk10: Hi. Thank you, guys. We've covered a lot here, so I'll be quick. Two quick ones. Number one, is it fair to assume that at the moment you have a preference for buyback over debt repayment? And number two, it sounds like you're saying that wage inflation is sort of a short-term headwind, but long-term you guys will be able to price through it. Can you answer those two questions for me?
spk16: Hey, Marvin, it's Brian here. So, good question. So, the first one on buyback versus debt repayment. So, yeah, you got it right. Our capital allocation priorities for 2022 do consider, you know, dividends and buybacks as our first, you know, use of capital. What you may see with debt, though, is it is an all revolver facility. So, it could swing around. So, you could see One quarter where there could be a working capital swing, for example, you normally have a working capital outflow in Q1 where debt could go up, and then we could pay it down when we see that reverse. So you will see that over the normal course of the year, but our priorities, again, for capital allocation are continue making growth investments in our OPEX. We've increased our dividend, and we've instituted the NCIB fund.
spk12: On the wage inflation part of your question, Martin, you know, the way we do merit increases every year, people get promoted, usually with a promotion that would result in a wage increase. And so that's a normal part of our business. We've been doing that for five years that I've been here and even before me. So that's just a normal course of our business. And You know, our outlook includes what we believe will be our merit increase this year and promotions that occur and any off-cycle adjustments we need to make to people's compensation in specific cases. So our outlook includes what we believe will be the normal course of growth. wage inflation, which is, like I said, typically merit increases and promotional increases, and we're not seeing anything out of the ordinary, if you will, in terms of our ability to retain our people and pay them appropriately, but what really attracts our people to soft choice besides compensation is everything we talked about earlier, which is our culture, our people-first approach, our focus on their career growth and development, our focus on diversity, equity, inclusion, and having great leaders who inspire their people. And when you put that all together, we're not overly concerned about wage inflation in terms of the impact on our operating expenses.
spk10: Super. Thanks so much.
spk00: Ladies and gentlemen, there are no further questions on the phone lines. I will turn the conference back over to Mr. Vince DePalma for closing remarks.
spk12: Great. Thank you, Michelle, and thank you to all our listeners and viewers who joined us today. Thank you to all of you who asked those fabulous questions. We look forward to updating you on our continued progress on our Q1 call in May. Have a great rest of your day and a great weekend, everybody.
spk00: Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes the conference call for this morning. We would like to thank you for participating and ask that you please disconnect your lines.
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