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spk01: Good morning. My name is Kelsey and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I'd like to welcome everyone to the soft choice Q1 2022 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 the analysts. If you'd like to ask a question during this time, simply press star then the number one on your telephone keypad. If you'd like to withdraw your question, please press the star followed by the two. Thank you. Brian Rocco, SoftChoices CFO, you may begin your conference.
spk03: Great. Thank you, operator, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to SoftChoices Q1 2022 conference call for the period ended March 31st, 2022. A reminder that for the purpose of today's recording, today is Thursday, March 12th, 2022. I'm joined today by Vince De Palma, SoftChoice's president and CEO, and Andrew Caprera, our COO. After prepared remarks, we'll 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 filing with Canadian security 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 in the company's MD&A, which is available on our website. And 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.
spk05: Thanks, Brian, and welcome, everybody. I look forward to speaking with you today about our financial performance and operational highlights and to answer your questions. I'll start on slide four. I want to start by summarizing our Q1 performance and our full-year outlook. Our Q1 billings growth of 11% is in line with our GP outlook of over 11.5% for the full year 2022. demonstrating the underlying strength in the business. We will explain in a minute why that did not translate into double-digit gross profit growth. We are ahead of schedule in our investment in sales and technical sales talent that fuel our organic growth strategy, showing the robustness of our ability to attract and retain talent, and setting us up for strong performance in the remainder of the year. though resulting in a short-term negative impact to our EBITDA as these resources get onboarded and move towards productivity. And we have a robust sales pipeline as we enter Q2. Due to these factors and the fact that we remain on track in realizing the full $25 million of net benefits from Project Monarch, we are therefore reaffirming our 2022 outlook and restating our expectation noted on our last call that our growth rates will progress through the year as we realize the benefit of our investments. So now let's dive a little bit deeper into the Q1 results. In terms of our top line gross profit, although software and cloud grew 11%, our gains here were partially offset by lower growth in hardware due to global supply chain constraints as well as a decline in services gross margin, resulting in an overall 6% gross profit growth in Q1. Additionally, I want to share two specific factors that impacted gross profit by approximately $3 million in the quarter. We do not anticipate these to reoccur, and they do not impact our full-year growth outlook. First, volumes were impacted by slowing provincial public sector spending in Canada. along with volume declines with a small number of customers in our enterprise channel. The latter impacted by timing of certain multi-year software renewals. Second, services gross profit declined due to accelerated additions to areas of our services engineering team. As I stated earlier, we are ahead of schedule in our talent investments that fuel our organic growth strategy. Following multiple quarters of solid growth in services billings, we needed to hire more people to staff the projects we have won, as well as part of our strategy to increase our advanced services delivery capabilities. The flip side of that success is a short-term drag on our gross profit, since these resources are accounted for in our cost of sales. However, due to the backlog of projects already booked, and in progress, along with strong double-digit growth in services billings in Q1, as well as a healthy pipeline, we expect to see these investments accelerate gross profit growth in the back half of 2022. Below gross profit, Q1 was impacted by higher cash operating expenses of just under $4 million, but these are investments that are anticipated to pay off in the back half of 2022. First, we were incredibly successful in ramping our sales and technical sales team members in Q1 at a faster pace than anticipated, including making fantastic progress on hitting our target recruitment of account executives, which I will describe in detail in a couple of slides. Second, we incurred certain personnel costs that were accelerated into Q1, including commissions related to elevated billings in strategic focus areas that yield higher commission rates. And lastly, there were some timing issues with certain operating expenses that should reverse in the remainder of the year. The combination of the above impacts to our gross profit and increased op-ex resulted in adjusted EBITDA being flat year over year, excluding wage subsidies received in 2021. However, we remain confident in our full-year outlook as Q1 is a very small seasonal quarter from an EBITDA perspective, and the underlying drivers of our Q1 performance that I just described do not lower our expectations for the remainder of the year. In terms of operational highlights, over the past year, the increase in our sales support and technical sales resources has driven record customer engagement, with our gross profit per customer increasing 21% over the prior LTM period. Continued high customer retention and increased engagement drove a 112% revenue retention rate, which we are very pleased with. and our gross profit per account executive increased 25% over the prior LTM period, which is the highest in the company history. In terms of capital allocation, along with our growth investments, we have been active in our share buyback program since its launch in March. Additionally, in Q1, we announced a 29% increase in our quarterly dividend, to nine cents Canadian, which was paid in April. And today we declared the same dividend for the Q2 period to be paid in July. The increased return of capital to shareholders reflects the expected significant increase in our cash flows in 2022 included in our outlook. In 2022, we continue to generate recognition within our industry and beyond, as noted on slide five. This is a credit to the depth and breadth of our capabilities and our culture of excellence, which enables the success of our customers' organizations, their IT teams, and our people. For example, we have been working with a large financial institution to help them solve for a matrix and siloed cloud spend across their divisions, each with competing priorities and programs exacerbated by misalignment between the business, operations, and IT. Our solution, designed by our FinOps practice within our digital acceleration business unit, included a better operating model and optimized workflows, which helped our customer avoid $5 million in cloud costs. Outcomes like this exemplify our purpose for unleashing the potential of people and technology. When it comes to the latter, in Q1, we built on our Google Premier Partner status by earning the Elite Managed Services Provider, or MSP, designation in the Google Cloud Partner Advantage Program, which recognizes our success in enabling cloud transformation at scale with technical expertise in Google Cloud Platform and is validated by real-life customer engagements. We continue to grow our technical expertise and partner certifications, including across the three major hyperscalers. We're already a top-tier partner for Microsoft Azure and an Azure Expert MSP. And through our strategic collaboration agreement with AWS, we expect to achieve a similar MSP designation with them in the future. Subsequent to quarter end, we were also named VMware's Global Partner of the Year, which is an incredible distinction we achieved for delivering the most value and impact to our customers by utilizing VMware to deliver on-prem to cloud migrations. As you may recall, on our last earnings webcast, we provided some case studies of how we help customers move to the cloud using VMware solutions. When it comes to our people, so far in 2022, we have received two prestigious workplace recognitions. We were named a Best Workplace in Canada by the Great Place to Work Institute for the 17th consecutive year based on feedback from our people and an in-depth review of our culture and employment practices. And we once again received the perfect score on the Human Rights Campaign's Corporate Equality Index and were named the best place to work for LGBTQ equality. SoftChoice's recognized brand and culture combined with our strategic focus on advanced IT solutions have allowed us to stand out in a competitive labor market as evidenced by our successful recruiting. To provide some detail on our recruiting success, on slide six, we outline where we have been making growth investments in our team members. As you can see on the left-hand side of this slide, since the end of 2020, when we saw customer spending rebound, we have ramped investment in our technical capabilities, including adding almost 100 technical experts that support our account executives. You can also see that we have added almost 15 members to our sales team, including 20 additional sales support and 28 more account executives, more on the latter in a bit. These additional sales and technical sales resources continue to drive record Salesforce productivity, with our gross profit per account executive reaching $761,000 over the last 12 months, a 25% increase over the prior LTM period, which you can see on the right-hand side of the slide. The increase in resources has also continued to drive record customer engagement by providing our sales team with the capabilities to go deeper with our customer base. As outlined on slide seven, our LTM gross profit per customer reached a record $63,000. And our revenue retention rate on an LTM basis was 112%, reflecting both high customer retention and increasing sales to existing customers. Beginning in the second half of 2021, we began to ramp our account executives, the sales team members who quarterback relationships with our customers. And we made 13 net additions in 2021, as can be seen on slide 8. In Q1 of this year, we accelerated this ramp and added another net 15 AEs in the first quarter alone. We ended the quarter with 411 account executives and are therefore ahead of plan on achieving our target of reaching 423 to 433 AEs by the end of 2022. These new account executives are still ramping up their books of business, and so their contribution is negative to EBITDA in the beginning months. But this will be an exciting accelerant to the growth in our customer base and correspondingly gross profit as they become productive later in 2022. I'll now turn it over to Brian for a deeper look at our financial results and our outlook. Brian?
spk03: Great. Thanks, Vince. I'll start on slide 9 with a look at our top line gross profit. Overall gross profit increased 6% driven by 11% growth in our software and cloud solutions. The increase in software and cloud was driven by high growth in our public cloud and security solutions. Hardware also contributed to gross profit growth despite ongoing supply chain constraints that continue to impact hardware sales. We don't foresee our supply constraint backlog in hardware reversing in 2022, though it would provide a modest upside if conditions do improve. Services gross margin or gross profit declined in Q1 for the reasons that Vince outlined at the top of the call. By sales channel, Q1 growth was driven by the SMB channel, while commercial and enterprise channels were stable year over year for the reasons that Vince outlined. We continue to expect growth across all channels on a full year basis, driven in part by our continued investment and growth of our AEs and technical capabilities in all three channels. As seen on slide 10, our growth and gross profit was driven by a similar 7% increase in our growth sales, which is how we measure customer volumes. Similar to prior periods, growth was driven by our software and cloud solutions, which increased 10%. Now turning to slide 11, adjusted EBITDA decreased by 5% to $10.0 million from $10.5 million in Q1 of 2021, but was essentially flat year over year, excluding the $500,000 of SUE subsidies received in Q1 of 2021. Our $4 million growth and gross profit was offset by an approximate $4 million increase in adjusted cash operating expenses. This increase was in higher personnel costs driven by the higher headcount related to the company's growth investments. Adjusted free cash flow was 87% of adjusted EBITDA over the LTN period, or approximately $60 million, as noted on slide number 12. Over the past year, after interest and taxes and some non-recurring costs, free cash flow was used to significantly reduce debt, initiate our quarterly dividend to shareholders, which was increased in Q1, and undertake our ongoing share buyback program. We ended Q1 in strong financial condition with approximately $189 million. in available funds from cash on hand and through our $275 million revolving credit facility. Including internally generated cash flows, we anticipate having significant resources with which to pursue growth opportunities and enhance shareholder returns. And as noted on our last call, our capital allocation priorities in 2022 will be focused on our growth investments, including ramping of our sales force, as well as paying our dividend and continuing our share buyback program. We will also review potential bolt-on acquisitions that would enhance our advanced IT solutions capabilities and accelerate growth. Now turning to our outlook on slide 13, So given Q1 performance and continued strong billings activity, today we reiterated our 2022 outlook. As noted on our last call, we expect Q1 to be our lowest quarter due to seasonality in our business. And we restated that our top line gross profit growth rates are anticipated to increase through the year as a result of our investments taking hold. Therefore, we anticipate slightly higher growth in gross profit in Q2 than in Q1, before moving into low to mid-teens in Q3 and Q4, respectively. As cash OPEX has less seasonality, we therefore anticipate H1 adjusted EBITDA will be just over a third of the full year EBITDA, with H2 being around two-thirds of the full year. So, in closing, we remain confident in our 2022 outlook and are incredibly excited about the future. And with that, I will turn it over to the operator for Q&A. Operator?
spk01: Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question and answer session. If you have a question, please press the star followed by the one on your touchtone phone. You will then hear a three-tone prompt acknowledging your request and your questions will be pulled in the order that they are received. If you wish to decline from the polling process, please press the star followed by the two. And if you are using a speakerphone, please lift the handset before pressing any keys. One moment, please, for your first question. And your first question comes from David Wan from TD Securities. Please go ahead.
spk02: Good morning, guys. I appreciate the color just on the impacts that you saw that hit the Q1 results here. But I was curious to get your commentary on the software and cloud net sales as part of the decline. How much of that was kind of mixed that could possibly, I guess, been impacted by the netting down impact versus anything else?
spk03: Can you repeat the last part of the question, David? We couldn't hear you clearly.
spk02: Yeah, I'll repeat the entire one. It's just related to... the software and cloud net sales, the score and the decline that you saw year-over-year. I'm just curious to what extent that might have been impacted by any netting down activity versus something else.
spk03: Yeah, so in Q1, we saw the continued theme of more netting down within our software and cloud business that has a dragging impact on net sales. you know how we look at and analyze our businesses gross profit and and our gp for software and cloud grew 11 if you want to look at you know the more relevant um indicator of volume growth for software and cloud and sales i'd look at gross sales which is where we saw around 10 growth and so the decline in software and cloud net sales is attributed to an increased mix of netting down which is like i said consistent with what we've you know reported you know the past few quarters And it's expected to continue to be honest.
spk02: Okay, thanks. And maybe looking out beyond the challenges that you saw in Q1 and maybe even looking at this, looking at, I guess, beyond this year, given the reaffirmed guidance, I was wondering how sustainable do you think double-digit organic growth and your gross profits are looking at to say 2023 and beyond?
spk03: Yeah, so we've got various slides in our earnings decks around, you know, our growth engine and the levers that we intend to pull. And so we obviously we have outlook or guidance for 2022 that's over 11.5% growth, but we're focused on driving long term sustainable growth. We've got a huge TAM where we've got a small market share, and we think we've got an opportunity to continue to grow our market share. And we've invested in the fastest growing subsegments of the industry. And so when you combine that with the growth investments that we've been making, especially, you know, for the last year, and we doubled down, as you heard in kind of Q1 here, we think we're well positioned to drive sustainable long-term growth.
spk02: Thanks, Brian. And two more questions. Just as more and more employees kind of head back to the office, have you seen any material changes in your business or customer behavior?
spk08: Yeah. Hey, David. It's Andrew for our calling. I would say one of the things that we're starting to see is that organizations are having to adapt to a true hybrid collaboration experience. The reality in the past two years almost is that most organizations had almost an exclusively remote experience, which was actually a lot easier to operate in because everybody was you know equal on the on the screen here and now organizations are trying to figure out how do they create the environment for folks to really do collaboration well remotely and so that's an exciting place for us because implementing you know something like teams or or webex or zoom was actually probably the easier part during the pandemic and now we're moving towards how do we do the optimization And how do we help customers adopt and get the most out of the features that they're not using to properly do that kind of collaboration? And so I think there's an exciting opportunity for us, given our huge base of customers using these kinds of technologies like Microsoft Teams to go in there and help with that optimization, which then leads to other conversations about security, data access and availability and potentially other application work.
spk02: No, that's helpful. Thanks. Thanks, Andrew. Just the last question here. Can you talk about how you decide to allocate capital between, say, buying back shares versus increasing the dividend? I know your leverage levels continue to trend downward here and should have a lot more free capital to redeploy as you head into the second half of this year and into 2020-2030.
spk03: Yeah, so we've got a slide in there, and we did speak about it on our kind of Q4 earnings call, but we've got our capital allocation priorities, and first and foremost is, you know, making sure we're making growth investments to, again, drive, you know, sustainable, profitable growth in our business, so that includes, you know, adding AEs and technical resources. And then beyond that, you know, we do pay our quarterly dividend, which we did increase in our That was a reflection of, you know, increased profitability and expectations that we had for free cash flow and growth in our free cash flow in 2022. And then beyond that, you know, we have been active in the market with our share buyback program. So we announced it in March. We can buy back up to 3 million shares. You know, through the last two months, we've repurchased around 300,000 shares, around 10% of the buyback program. And and we expect to continue to be active on that program for 2022. Our leverage, you're right, you know, there is some seasonality with our working capital where leverage can move around and where we have, you know, we have working capital outflow in Q1, which is normal, but it increased our leverage slightly, but we're still conservatively leveraged, and we think, you know, we're well capitalized to be able to take advantage of opportunistic M&A opportunities that may arise as well.
spk02: I appreciate the color. Thanks, guys.
spk01: Thank you. And your next question comes from Brian Essex from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
spk04: Hi. Good morning, and thank you for taking the question. I apologize that this has been asked before. I've been jumping around on a few calls. But maybe if you could get us a little bit of color on the hardware line and, you know, maybe to get a sense of where you're seeing the pressure in that market, confidence in the durability of that line for the rest of the year, just to maybe get a sense of what's in the pipeline so we can kind of monitor any pressure in the market going forward. Hey, Brian.
spk08: It's Andrew. I would say at this point, we've not seen any material change to the trends that we've seen around supply chain constraints in our business over the last several quarters. So, at this point, we continue to flush through backlog from previous periods but create sort of that equivalent backlog going forward. I don't think any of us have a great sense on when we think this will change. I was on calls with some of our top hardware partners actually just yesterday, and even they're saying they're struggling with their own business and their own production to predict when exactly it's going to turn around. So, you know, we think of this as a potential tailwind at some point as this starts to catch up. We just can't predict when that's going to be at this point.
spk04: That's helpful. Any kind of color you can provide on what segments of hardware that you're exposed to that are seeing the pressure? Is it more kind of on the storage side or network infrastructure side, just to get a sense of where that's coming from?
spk03: Yeah, so this is Brian here. I could jump in. So we still see pressures in kind of both those areas, so devices and kind of networking infrastructure. It did alleviate slightly on the devices side, but we do continue to see kind of pressures and longer lead times across the board. And so we didn't see a pickup from even on the devices side in Q1. And overall, as Andrew noted, like, conditions remain stable. Our, you know, what we call our constrained hardware backlog increased slightly in Q1 and, you know, we're probably seeing a little more pressure on the networking side than the devices, but things can change pretty quickly and that's where we're at now.
spk04: Got it. That's helpful. And maybe to follow up on In terms of the deals that you're seeing overall as we kind of go into 2Q and the backlog that you're building on the software side, were there any kind of push deals in a 2Q and maybe a little color on the visibility into the backlog that gives you more confidence in a 2Q reacceleration?
spk05: Hey, Brian, it's Vince. So, you know, we always have a robust pipeline, and you always get into those interesting situations where a deal could close late in a quarter, and you book it. You may even bill it, but you can't recognize the revenue necessarily because you haven't actually performed the service. So, We had some of that, but also we have what I would call a very robust pipeline of some large transformational projects with customers. So I mentioned that when I talked about The services business and how we have staffed up in Q1, our engineering talent, particularly in our professional services organization, because of the amount of deals we booked and billed in the last couple of quarters, as well as we look at our pipeline and seeing the potential work ahead of us. So I would say we have a very good pipeline of very good opportunities for us to continue to pursue in Q2 and beyond.
spk04: Got it. So it sounds like maybe normal amount of deal fluctuation between quarters, but mostly transformational pipeline. Is that fair?
spk05: Yeah, I'd say it's a normal phenomenon. You have that every quarter. So there's nothing unusual about Q1 in terms of deals that may have – you also have deals that you were hoping to close in Q1 that slipped to Q2, but that happens every quarter. So there's nothing unusual in Q1 with regards to that.
spk08: I'll just quickly add, as Vince said on the call, we invested heavily in some of our advanced services personnel on our team to really do the kinds of transformational projects that we want to do with our customers going forward. These are much larger than we've done in the past with customers and much more transformational. And so as we staff that team up, we expect that business to grow as the year goes on. And that's why it's a bit of a drag in Q1 as we hired all these folks. But we're really, really excited about the kinds of work that we're going to be doing for customers going forward at an even greater pace.
spk06: That's really helpful. Thank you.
spk01: Thank you. And your next question comes from Gavin Fairweather from Cormark. Please go ahead.
spk09: Oh, hey, good morning. I thought I'd just start on the macro environment, which continues to be pretty dynamic here. I mean, it seems like demand for IT broadly remains pretty strong, but I'm curious if you've noted any changes in market demand kind of across regions or customer segments that you'd call out.
spk05: Hey, Gavin, it's Vince. The short answer is no. The customer demand is strong. Andrew highlighted what's going on with digital workplace and collaboration and the conversations we're having with customers about how to create a true Truly great experience for their employees that are working in a hybrid environment with some people in the office and some people still remote. We're seeing continued interest amongst our customer base in migration to the cloud, particularly when you think about some of the hardware constraints, especially on servers and storage, people are more and more and more interested in moving applications to work with. So that is very robust, and as Andrew also pointed out, some of these more advanced projects are working on their customers. So the short answer is customer demand remains strong, and it's up to us to capture those opportunities with our customers. We're very excited about what we're seeing in the marketplace.
spk09: That's helpful. And then just a quick one on that renewal in the enterprise segment that seemed to, I guess, not renew. Were they just switching to another software platform? Can you provide some color there on a few of those enterprise customers?
spk08: Yeah. Hey, Gavin. No, the reality is those are multi-year commitments. They're three- or five-year contracts. And so this is really, you know, essentially most of them are three-year contracts. So Three years ago, we signed fewer than we did four years ago, but that creates a year-over-year compare for this year versus last year's renewals that had far fewer falling into this calendar year. So they're still with us. They're still great customers. We still own those contracts. We just had fewer of them renewing. And the way that these work, obviously, is that you've got much more of a, you know, a financial incentive at time of renewal as the partner on those agreements. And we just have fewer in Q1. So it really is a timing thing. We don't expect, it's not like 2022 in the year for the rest of the year is depressed every quarter. That was really just a phenomenon in Q1.
spk09: Okay, that's helpful. And then just on the Microsoft repricing, obviously the 365 licenses per seat are going up. How will that kind of flow through to your businesses, given your base of licenses kind of under management? And secondly, I know that you're a strong leader in kind of the E5 class, and it seems like the pricing is designed to push more people into that class. Will that create opportunities for you as these pricing changes are rolled out?
spk08: Yeah, hey Gavin, I would say on the latter, let me start back. The first question, the answer is it kind of depends. As you know, some of the Microsoft business, we transact directly with customers where we have pricing control and other parts of it, if it's an enterprise agreement style. Microsoft controls the pricing and we earn the referral fee on that. And so, you know, sometimes that essentially means, well, if it's a percentage, then technically, yes, as you know, if the price goes up, we still earn the same percentage. And so marginally, that would be beneficial for us. So overall, I would say I wouldn't use it as a massive driver that's going to make a huge change in our financial position, but could be potentially slightly positive. But the second part of your question is what I'm really excited about, because we've spent the last three years building deep capabilities and helping customers envision and implement changes to their environment to drive the solutions in Microsoft E5. And so by creating this tighter gap between the E3 and the E5 license, the incentive is absolutely there for the customer to take a look at this. And we've built a whole bunch of services and assessments to scan a customer's software environment to understand what they're using and to look for opportunities to consolidate that down to fewer providers and save them money overall. And often what we find actually is that The gap for them to upgrade from E3 to E5 can be offset by cost savings with other software titles already in their environment. And then we've got the capabilities to show them that and then to do the implementation and migration work and implement this properly. We think we're, as you said, one of the leaders in helping customers across North America get the most out of these E5 and security features in the office suite. And so this is a really exciting opportunity for us that we're actively pursuing right now.
spk09: Okay, awesome. And then just a quick last one for me. Just the commissions and strategic areas. Not sure if you can share kind of which areas you're trying to drive revenue in. Not sure if it would be maybe GCP or AWS and so we think about those kind of commissions in the strategic areas Recurring here going forward and that's it for me.
spk05: Thank you Yes, it's basically in two or three three areas Gavin. It's in the cloud. So all all of our cloud business whether it be with Microsoft Azure GCP or AWS, so Those are more heavily emphasized in our commission plans, and services, both professional services and managed services, because particularly on the managed service side, as well as the cloud side, they tend to be multi-year agreements, which are recurring revenue streams, so we place greater emphasis in our commission plans on those type of arrangements with customers where we can get a multi-year contract that gives us that recurring revenue.
spk06: So those would be the three primary that have the emphasis in our commission plans.
spk01: Thank you. And your next question comes from John Sheho from National Bank. Please go ahead.
spk10: Good morning, guys, and thanks for taking my question. So the first one is, would you be able to provide an update on the breakeven trajectory of the newly hired AE? I remember back in the IPO, it was around 14 months to breakeven. So any update on this number this quarter? And also, is there any chance to potentially accelerate its trajectory?
spk05: Hey, John, it's Ben. So no real update on the breakeven on timeframe for when we start new AEs. And that breakeven might vary depending on the sales channel we're talking about. But in general, it's sort of a year in terms of breakeven. Now, they get productive well before that, but they don't breakeven until sort of that one year mark, 12 to 14 months. But we are constantly... working to say how do we do a better job of sales enablement how do we do a better job of onboarding our our account executives as well as the technical sales resources we have that support them so you know that's a collaboration between our sales team andrew's organization where he has a lot of resources to help with sales enablement as well as our human resource function which we call people in growth that helps with sales enablement. So we're always trying to figure out how do you get these people to be more productive quicker and how do you enable them to have these very complicated conversations with customers early on in their tenure. So, but there's no real change to that break even mark at this point in time. So it's still in that 12 to 14 month mark.
spk10: Okay, thanks. Just a modeling question from me. You mentioned accelerated commission this quarter. So is there a way we can quantify the impact so we can better tweak our model for Q2?
spk03: Yeah, so for Q2, it will depend on the mix of business. So Vince noted, you know, the areas where we saw those accelerated commissions. And even during the call, at the top of the call, he noted kind of the strong billing performance in our services business. And then you would have seen kind of the rep-reg gross profit performance, you know, lag that, right? And so if we continue to see that, we could continue to see kind of, you know, elevated commission again. in Q2, but we're not providing kind of guidance by quarter by solution type. In Q1, it was roughly around over a million bucks or so on the commission, so that's one piece of information you may be able to use for your model.
spk10: Okay, thanks. I'll pop the line.
spk01: Thank you. And your last question comes from Martin Toner from ATB Capital. Please go ahead.
spk07: Thank you very much, everyone. Can you talk a little bit about if the inflationary environment or the softening in your customers' businesses had any impact on the rate of gross profit growth for you guys in the quarter?
spk05: Hey, Martin, it's Ben. So I'd say the short answer is no. And as I mentioned at the top of the call, our billings growth was 11%, right? And for the reasons I cited at the top of the call, that didn't translate into double-digit GB growth. So we saw robust growth. Walk-ins activity, robust billings activity, and 6% GP growth. So the inflationary environment, if anything, is probably a help in many ways. I think Gartner has pointed out that many CIOs are struggling with hiring talent in their organizations, and more and more they're looking to other parties like ourselves to help them with their digital transformation agenda, whether that be on the digital workplace and collaboration side or on the overall hybrid multi-cloud environment. So I think that's actually a help to our business, and I think there's other other industry pundits that argue the same. So we view that as probably a positive in our business dynamics, not a negative.
spk07: Got you. Can you comment on your ability? I mean, you guys have talked a lot about how Monarch improves ability to take price in certain areas. Can you comment on your ability to take price in this environment?
spk05: Yeah, so we, through Monarch, have enabled our sales team to have better information at their fingertips so that when they have opportunities with customers, they can optimize win rates as well as optimize margins. And there's always a delicate balance between the two. And so the technology we installed through Monarch is given our individual sales people, our AEs, our account managers, better information on how to price each and every opportunity. It gives our sales managers better information on how they can look at each member of their team and say how well are their sellers doing in regards to that delicate balance between robust win rates and strong margin management. So Monarch has been very instrumental in that. That is a big part of the GP uplift associated with Project Monarch. And we're, as I mentioned on the last earnings call, and I'll reiterate again, we're actually ahead of schedule on the pricing uplift we're seeing as associated with Project Monarch versus the original business case. And then when we look at Project Monarch overall, we are on plan to deliver the $25 million of EBITDA uplift in 2022 that we've discussed in the past.
spk07: That's great. Can you talk about customer health by customer type and size? And would you call out any verticals as being particularly strong or weak?
spk06: Yeah, so I wouldn't...
spk05: call out any verticals that were unusual with the one exception of the Canadian provincial governments. Seemed to slow down in Q1. We're not 100% sure if it's related to the elections or not, but there's something that sort of slowed down in the Canadian provincial governments. It's not just Ontario, it's several of the governments that... seem to have all experienced that. But other than that, I would not point to any other vertical where there was a either a slowdown or an accelerant versus normal growth rates.
spk06: Okay, thanks.
spk07: And was currency a bit of a drag this quarter?
spk03: No, currency didn't really have any impact. So as a reminder, we are relatively hedged. When the Canadian dollar strengthens, we see a slight benefit on GP growth, but that's offset on the cost side. When we look at it year over year in Q1, it had very immaterial impact on both GP and operating expenses, and that's EBITDA, so. Not part of the story, like we saw more volatility in 2021, where it did have more of an impact in each of those lines and slight impact on EBITDA, but not in Q1 2020.
spk07: Great. Thanks for that. Last one for me. I see that revenue retention rate of 112%. Why is it higher than... What drives... that number being higher than gross profit growth overall? And apologies if I missed an explanation of this earlier.
spk03: Well, the revenue retention rate is an LTM metric. And so we measure it and kind of, you know, what is our revenue or gross sales with our customers from a year ago or, you know, customers a year ago versus today in the LTM period. So the year-over-year spend for that same cohort of customers. And so you can see on a quarterly basis where kind of the growth in GP in the quarter could be higher or lower than the LTM retention. So I would look at more at our LTM, you know, it's really growth sales growth year over year, and it would be kind of north of what's implied in the 112% net revenue retention.
spk06: Okay, thanks. That helps. That's it for me.
spk01: Thank you. And there are no further questions at this time. Mr. DePalma, you may proceed your conference.
spk05: Okay. Thank you, everyone, for joining us today. We look forward to having some follow-up conversations, and we'll look forward to seeing you all at our Q2 call in August.
spk06: Have a great day.
spk01: Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes your conference call for today. We thank you very much for participating and ask that you please disconnect your lines. Have a great day.
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