Earnings Call Transcript - EVER Q4 2024

Operator, Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. My name is Desiree, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the EverQuote Fourth Quarter 2024 Earnings Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker’s remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. I would now like to turn the conference over to Brinlea Johnson with The Blueshirt Group. You may begin.

Brinlea Johnson, Investor Relations

Thank you. Good afternoon. And welcome to EverQuote’s fourth quarter and full year 2024 earnings call. We will be discussing the results announced in our press release issued today after the market closed. With me on the call this afternoon are Jayme Mendal, EverQuote’s Chief Executive Officer; and Joseph Sanborn, Chief Financial Officer of EverQuote. During the call, we will make statements related to our business that may be considered forward-looking statements under federal securities laws, including statements concerning our financial guidance for the first quarter of 2025. Forward-looking statements may be identified with words and phrases such as expect, believe, intend, anticipate, plan, may, upcoming and similar words and phrases. These statements reflect our views only as of today and should not be considered our views as of any subsequent date. We specifically disclaim any obligation to update or revise these forward-looking statements, except as required by law. Forward-looking statements are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties that could cause the actual results to differ materially from our expectations. For a discussion of those risks and uncertainties, please refer to our SEC filings, including our annual report on Form 10-K and our quarterly reports on Form 10-Q on file with the Securities and Exchange Commission and available on the Investor Relations section of our website. Also to note, starting this year, as we look to simplify our investor communications, we will be referring to Variable Marketing Margin as Variable Marketing Dollars or VMD. Going forth, Variable Marketing Margin or VMM will refer to VMD as a percentage of revenue. Finally, during the course of today’s call, we will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures, which we believe are helpful to investors. A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP measures was included in the press release we issued after the close of market today, which is available on the Investor Relations section of our website. And with that, I’ll turn it over to Jayme.

Jayme Mendal, CEO

Thank you, Brinlea, and thank you all for joining us today. The state of EverQuote is as strong as it’s ever been, thanks to remarkable progress made by the team over the last year in an improving auto insurance market. The EverQuote exiting 2024 would be almost unrecognizable to the EverQuote which entered the year, thanks to rapidly accelerated growth, improved operational efficiency and a strengthened balance sheet. In 2024, we grew revenue by 74% to cross the $500 million mark for the first time and we grew adjusted EBITDA to nearly $60 million. We entered 2025 with over $100 million of cash on the balance sheet and no debt. In 2024, our unwavering support of carriers and agents helped them emerge from the auto insurance downturn. Many enterprise carriers ramped marketplace participation over the course of the year, contributing to carrier growth in our business of over 200% year-over-year. Our local agent business also accelerated over the course of the year despite a challenging start in Q1, to achieve 65% year-over-year growth in Q4 and we continue to build deeper ties with local agents. Our customer relationships have never been better, and consequently, we have a strong foundation for sustained and balanced growth moving forward. Our ability to support customers’ return to growth was enabled by strength in our traffic operations. Our customer acquisition teams continue to demonstrate a remarkable ability to execute in a dynamic environment. Last year’s traffic landscape moved fast and became more competitive, as carriers often made sudden and dramatic changes to their marketing budgets and as the industry prepared for a now vacated FCC rule. Against this backdrop, our team grew consumer volume by nearly 20% year-over-year in Q4, at healthy margins. They did so through operational rigor, focused growth initiatives and continued refinement and improvement of our AI-powered bidding solution. On the technology front, we made great strides, advancing towards more modernized and simplified platforms across all facets of the business. Advances in our tech stack are enabling faster development of a better and broader suite of products for customers moving forward, as experienced with recent releases of new agent- and site-features. In our technology and beyond, we continue placing heavy emphasis on efficiency, investing in automation and AI tools throughout the business. The impact of this can be seen in the immense operating leverage achieved over the last year and we have more room to run. With the strong recovery of our business, we are taking the opportunity to make investments in our team and our culture. In the last year, we ramped hiring in a highly disciplined way, focusing mostly on high leverage technical roles. We also implemented a return-to-office policy and upgraded our offices into new space to enhance in-person collaboration. We remain extremely committed to strengthening our team and culture and ensuring EverQuote is a highly desirable place to work. As we look to the future, I’ll first share some perspective on the current landscape in which we operate, beginning with the auto insurance market. I believe we’ve returned to broad-based healthy underwriting profitability. While several states and carriers continue to lag, most carriers have restored campaigns with wide geographical footprints and healthy budgets. The homeowners’ insurance market, whose recovery has lagged that of auto, is also beginning to see a return to healthy underlying combined ratios, which bodes well for growing carrier demand in the year to come. The regulatory landscape was another prominent dynamic in 2024. We spent much of last year preparing to implement changes in response to a new FCC rule, which the industry has referred to as one-to-one consent. After we implemented the requisite changes, the courts vacated the rule, reverting the industry back to its pre-one-to-one consent state. While many others have rolled back changes entirely, we decided to keep certain changes in place where they benefit our customers and advance our strategy. Looking ahead, based on the current administration’s regulatory posture, we believe that the one-to-one consent requirement is behind us for the foreseeable future. This favorable market backdrop aligns nicely with EverQuote’s sharpened strategy. Over the last year, we have refocused and clarified our vision to become the number one growth partner to P&C insurance providers by efficiently delivering; one, better performing referrals; two, bigger traffic scale; and three, a broader suite of products and services. We oriented our 2025 planning to advance this strategy and expect to make significant progress across all fronts in the upcoming year. As we enter 2025, I can confidently say that not only did we weather the worst hard market in U.S. auto insurance history, but we have emerged from the downturn with record performance and all the ingredients for sustained, strong, profitable growth in the years to come. We have sharpened our focus on P&C, allowing us to more fully serve the needs of this increasingly healthy and growth-oriented market. Our execution has been improving quarter-after-quarter, with a team that is capable, hardened and hungry. Our teams and technology platforms have been streamlined, contributing to our efficiency and enabling us to move faster in supporting insurance providers’ growth moving forward. I’m incredibly proud of what the team has accomplished over the last year and look forward to carrying the momentum into 2025. I’ll now turn the call over to Joseph to discuss our financial results.

Joseph Sanborn, CFO

Thank you, Jayme, and thank you all for joining. I will start by discussing our financial results for the fourth quarter and full year 2024, before providing an update on what we are currently seeing in the auto insurance sector and our guidance for the first quarter of 2025. Our strong momentum continued into Q4, as we again exceeded guidance across all three of our primary financial metrics, total revenue, Variable Marketing Dollars or VMD and adjusted EBITDA. We produced a record level of revenue and net income, as well as a record level of adjusted EBITDA. These impressive financial results were due to three primary factors. First, we continued to experience strong execution from our operating teams, who emerged from the auto carrier downturn battle-hardened and laser-focused on helping our P&C carriers and agents grow profitably. Second, we benefited from investments in our technology platforms that allowed us to better leverage our data assets and drive incremental operating efficiencies. And finally, our strategic focus on the P&C industry has created significant operating leverage in our model and positioned us to benefit from an increasingly favorable auto carrier landscape. Total revenues in the fourth quarter grew to $147.5 million, up 165% from the prior year period and also increasing 2% sequentially, a deviation from our normal seasonal pattern of Q4 declining sequentially from the third quarter. Revenue growth was primarily driven by stronger enterprise carrier spend, which was up nearly 500% from the comparable period last year. Our agency operations also grew 65% year-over-year in Q4. Revenue from our auto insurance vertical was $135.9 million in Q4, up over 200% year-over-year. For the full year, revenue from our auto insurance vertical grew 96% to $446 million. Revenue from our home and renters’ insurance vertical was $11.3 million in Q4, up 15% year-over-year. For the full year, we drove record revenue in our home and renters’ insurance vertical of $52 million, up approximately 27% year-over-year. VMD increased to $44 million for the fourth quarter, up approximately 113% from the prior year period. Full year VMD increased to $155.2 million, up 55% from 2023. Variable Marketing Margin or VMM, which is VMD as a percentage of revenue, was 31% for the full year, and as expected, moderated as we progressed through the period, ending at 29.9% for the fourth quarter. Turning to operating expenses and the bottom line. We continue to be disciplined in managing expenses and leveraging investments in our technology platform. We have been successful in driving incremental efficiency across our operations, which is expanding our operating leverage, as we scale and drive topline growth. In the fourth quarter, we reported record net income of $12.3 million. For the full year, net income increased to $32.2 million, compared to a loss of $51.3 million loss in 2023. Adjusted EBITDA was also a record $18.9 million in Q4, an improvement from a loss of $900,000 in the prior year period. Adjusted EBITDA as a percentage of revenues remained at approximately 13% in the quarter, as we continued to benefit from our strong operating leverage and higher VMD flowed through to adjusted EBITDA. For the full year, adjusted EBITDA increased to $58.2 million, compared to an adjusted EBITDA of $500,000 in 2023. We delivered strong operating cash flow of $20.1 million for the fourth quarter, ending the year with no debt and cash and cash equivalents of $102.1 million, up from $38 million at the end of 2023. Cash operating expenses, which exclude advertising spend and certain non-cash and other one-time charges were $25.1 million in Q4, unchanged from the previous quarter. Before turning to guidance, I want to provide an update on our current outlook for the auto insurance industry. We believe that the long-term thesis of insurance advertising spend shifting to digital channels remains firmly intact and we remain optimistic that the benefits that we are seeing from the auto insurance recovery will continue this year. With auto premiums up over 40% since the beginning of 2022, we believe that auto carriers have largely achieved underwriting profitability and are broadly focused on growth, with digital channels representing a preferred avenue given the ability to more specifically target desired consumers. At the same time, the rate of increase in auto insurance premiums are forecasted to return to more normalized levels in 2025, which we expect will lead to our revenue growth rates also normalizing after the first quarter. Now turning to guidance for the first quarter of 2025. We expect revenue to be between $155 and $160 million, representing 73% year-over-year growth at the midpoint. We expect VMD to be between $44 million and $46 million, representing 46% year-over-year growth at the midpoint. And we expect adjusted EBITDA to be between $19 million and $21 million, representing 163% year-over-year growth at the midpoint. We also wanted to share an update with you on our investment plans for 2025. Last fall, we outlined that once we had addressed the anticipated operational complexities associated with transitioning our operations to conform to one-to-one consent requirements, we planned to increase investment in our technology and data assets in the second half of 2025 to position EverQuote for long-term growth. As a result of the 11th Circuit’s decision to terminate this regulatory change in late January, we have already started redeploying capacity and management attention to focus on accelerating investment in key strategic areas. This includes leveraging AI capabilities to improve existing offerings, develop new products for our insurance providers, and drive greater operational efficiencies across our entire organization. We believe these key investments are essential for building a more powerful competitive moat and positioning EverQuote for strong future revenue growth with expanding profitability. As we make these investments, we will continue to be disciplined in balancing incremental operating expenses to generate adjusted EBITDA margins at or near current levels. In summary, we delivered an outstanding 2024 and continued to drive record results across all of our key financial metrics in the fourth quarter. We emerged from the auto insurance downturn as a stronger company, with a refocused strategy, efficient cost structure, and a leading market position. As we look into 2025, we are very excited about our ability to continue to leverage our traffic expertise, data assets, and technology to support our insurance providers in successfully growing their business. Before turning to Q&A, we want to take a moment to thank our team for their hard work and dedication this year and for our shareholders for their continued support. Management remains laser-focused on driving growth, profits, and long-term shareholder value. Jayme and I will now take your questions.

Operator, Operator

Thank you. And our first question comes from the line of Michael Graham with Canaccord Genuity. Your line is open.

Michael Graham, Analyst

Thank you and congrats on the awesome quarter. Just wanted to ask two questions. First, on your guidance. I know you referenced premium growth kind of slowing down. I think I saw some stats that the market was expecting sort of 8% growth in premiums relative to 17% last year. And you sort of referenced after really strong growth in Q1, you expect growth to slow down a little bit in the balance of the year. Can you just spend a moment maybe just trying to help us understand with a framework where we should think about you guys growing relative to the overall premium market? And then I have a follow-up after that. Thanks.

Joseph Sanborn, CFO

Thanks, Mike, for the question. So just giving you context on the environment. So I guess the comments you’re referring to in our script gave the backdrop of we’ve had 40% plus growth for the carriers and auto insurance premiums in 2022 through the end of last year, providing a very healthy backdrop for the industry where carriers are getting underwriting profitability, generally speaking, and getting stability broadly in a broad geographical footprint. So if we think to this year, the context last year, last year we had 74% growth, which obviously extraordinary topline growth. We see that continuing into Q1 if you look at the midpoint of our guide. What we see is as we start to look through the last three quarters of the year, we’ll see normalization of our growth rate. And how exactly that plays out, I’d probably look to two things. One, you’d say normalizing does it sort of average more towards our long-term growth for the last three quarters of the year would be one thing. And the second thing we’d look to is the seasonal pattern. And as we’ve talked about in the past, the seasonal pattern is never perfect in EverQuote, given various things can happen in the broader macro sense that impact it. But that being said, it is a tool we use here internally and we’ve shared it with you and other analysts, which is as follows, which is Q1, as you start the year, tends to be from Q1 to Q2, usually have a sequential decline, single-digit percent, low single-digit percent. Q3 tends to be sequentially up mid to high single digits and Q4 tends to be down sort of mid-single digits. So I think about that normalized growth rate for the rest of the year on average overlay with that seasonal pattern to give you a sense of topline.

Michael Graham, Analyst

Okay. That’s helpful, Joseph. Thank you. And then the other one I just wanted to ask is on your traffic operations, you referenced kind of the ability to scale traffic a few times, you referenced some investments there. I just wonder if you could add a layer of depth around some of the things that are working for you there?

Jayme Mendal, CEO

Yeah. So there’s a number of things. First, I’d just point to the team’s operational rigor is like, continued to get better and better over the course of the volatility that the market’s experienced over the last couple of years, where we’ve had to react to changes quite often. And I think we’ve developed a set of sort of operating norms that allow us to really manage the business tightly in a dynamic environment like that. Number two, Mike, is the traffic bidding platform. So we have this ML-based traffic bidding platform that we’ve talked about before, that we’ve been kind of building out over the course of the last couple of years. This has really automated and made more effective a lot of our traffic bidding and that just continues to get tuned and improved with more data and more work with every passing quarter. And so that’s been a big part of the team’s success. Beyond that, it’s just continuing to expand channels, partners, where we see opportunities to continue to grow. And as monetization has come back into the marketplace, it has unlocked channels that for a period of time were less profitable for us.

Michael Graham, Analyst

Okay. Thank you, Jayme.

Jayme Mendal, CEO

Thanks, Mike.

Operator, Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Cory Carpenter with JPMorgan. Your line is open.

Cory Carpenter, Analyst

Hello. Good afternoon. You made a comment in the prepared remarks about maintaining some of the one-on-one consent changes, despite the order being stayed. Hoping you could kind of elaborate on that in the rationale. And then maybe, Joseph, for you relatedly, just now that that one-on-one consent was stayed, but you’re still maintaining some of it, just how should we think about the impact that’s going to have on financials relative to what you kind of framed last quarter for us? Thank you.

Jayme Mendal, CEO

Thank you, Cory. I'll address the first part of the question. The changes regarding one-to-one consent are primarily focused on giving consumers more control over the outreach they receive. This ultimately leads to higher quality connections from an agent's perspective. When agents win leads where consumers have explicitly opted in, it reduces competition for those consumers, resulting in better lead performance and an enhanced consumer experience. This situation truly benefits both sides of the marketplace. Looking at EverQuote's strategy, we hold a leading position with local agents and have been investing to strengthen that leadership. A key element of our approach is not just being the largest but also delivering the highest quality product to customers. The one-to-one consent testing changes we implemented helped us enhance the quality of the product we provide to agents, allowing us to optimize it with minimal trade-offs to our economics. Consequently, we've decided to maintain these beneficial changes and continue to develop around them, fully aligned with our strategy.

Joseph Sanborn, CFO

And Cory, I’ll just a little bit on VMM percentage for you. So just to give some context, Q4 was just under 30%. We said things would go towards the high 20%s and we just came into that in Q4 at a little over 29.5%. If you look for our guide for Q1, it implies sort of 28%, 20% to 29% range, sort of midpoint 28.5%. So if you look at the impact of what Jayme just described, of keeping some of the one-to-one in place, as we continue going forward, we see it as an opportunity to do that at sort of a modest impact to our margin. And also looking at how do we bring quality more broadly into our traffic operations so we think about building stronger long-term relationships with clients. The net impact of that is we’d say VMM margin sort of assume it in sort of in the high 20%s as we go past this quarter, 20% to 29% now sort of stays in the high 20%s as you look out for the rest of the year as our current view.

Operator, Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Zachary Cummins with B. Riley. Your line is open.

Zachary Cummins, Analyst

Yeah. Hi. Good afternoon. Jayme and Joseph, congrats on the strong results. Just double-clicking a little more on the vacation of the FCC’s one-to-one consent rule. Acknowledging that you’re keeping some of the standards in place, I was just curious of some of the feedback that you’ve been getting from carriers. From my understanding, some carriers are still wanting to maintain some of those standards even with the ruling being vacated.

Jayme Mendal, CEO

So that’s not accurate, Zach. The majority of the carriers, the requirement that the carriers have put out is that their partners, their providers remain in compliance with the laws. We’ve had no major carriers try and impose anything beyond that. I do think there are, as we have concluded, I think some of the agents and probably some of the carriers saw through the data, the limited data they had or some of the testing data late last year, that, you can generate a higher quality lead product by implementing some of the one-to-one consent sort of mechanisms that folks rolled out. And so I think there is interest and appetite both from the agents and from the carriers themselves to continue to receive this higher quality product and benefit from it and there’s some willingness to pay for it too. And so this is kind of path that we’ve chosen to follow is to maintain some of these changes in effect, maintain some of the sort of pricing increase that has come along with the higher performing, higher quality product, and just move forward with the requirement or without, at least on portions of our traffic.

Zachary Cummins, Analyst

Yeah. Understood. That’s helpful. And just my one follow-up question is, can you speak to the feedback you’ve been getting from just the broader set of carriers as they go into 2025? Seems like underlying profitability is better across the board here. So just curious of what you’re hearing from maybe the enterprise side of the business versus maybe some of the agent-led channels.

Jayme Mendal, CEO

Yeah. I would say that it’s somewhat consistent, for the first time, I think the agent-led channels and the enterprise, the direct carriers are kind of converging. My sense is we’ve returned to broad-based, healthy underwriting profitability. There are a handful of states, a handful of carriers, small handful that are lagging, but most are really back to a pretty wide geographical footprint, healthy budgets and auto, even homeowners, which was lagging auto for a bit. If you look at some of the latest prints, you’re seeing a return to healthy underlying combined ratios in home as well. So I think by and large, the orientation is swinging heavily towards growth. I think we’ve seen the sort of profitability box checked across much of the market and now the focus is back on growth.

Zachary Cummins, Analyst

Understood. Well, thanks for taking my questions and best of luck with the rest of the quarter.

Jayme Mendal, CEO

Thanks, Zach.

Joseph Sanborn, CFO

Thank you.

Operator, Operator

Next question comes from the line of Mayank Tandon with Needham & Company. Your line is open.

Mayank Tandon, Analyst

Thank you. Good evening. Congrats, Jayme and Joseph on the quarter. Well done. I wanted to just get a little bit more of an understanding in terms of the underlying driver. So could you unpack the growth between traffic and RPQR? And just would be curious to hear your thoughts on monetization. What is driving the growth there? Is it more bundling and/or is it more like-to-like pricing? Any sort of details you could provide on some of the underlying drivers behind the growth?

Jayme Mendal, CEO

So, I think it’s been a, it’s been a balanced growth story over the last year. So we’ve benefited from growth, both in our consumer volume, as well as in monetization. I think, if you had to sort of look at the scale between the two, that the balance would tip a bit in favor of monetization. But we had double-digit consumer volume growth in 2024 across auto and home. So it’s being really driven by both of those things. And there’s a compounding effect when you have both volume and monetization growing, and that’s how you get the kind of growth that we produced last year, 70%, 80% growth.

Mayank Tandon, Analyst

Got it. That’s helpful color. And then maybe I’ll switch over to the balance sheet. Obviously the balance sheet’s in very healthy shape. So any thoughts, Joseph, around capital allocation? I know you’ve done M&A in the past. What is your thought process around potential acquisitions and use of cash?

Joseph Sanborn, CFO

Sure. Thanks for the question. Looking at the balance sheet, we are pleased to report that we ended the year with $102 million in cash, up from about $38 million the previous year. This reflects our progress in driving cash flow and the leverage we have created within our business model. As we consider how this affects our investment and capital usage, I’d like to address three key areas. First, regarding organic investment, we are beginning to adopt a medium- and longer-term perspective on the types of investments we make. With cash available, we can think strategically over several quarters about significant investments, particularly in our technology platforms, which will strengthen our competitive position over time. The second area is acquisitions. We have noticed an increased interest in M&A opportunities and anticipate that this will continue. Our strategy remains focused on the property and casualty market, as discussed in previous updates, and we will maintain our discipline in evaluating acquisitions based on financial criteria, such as their potential to be accretive and to drive cash flow. While we have no immediate acquisition plans, we are open to opportunities as they arise throughout the year. Lastly, we consider how to build shareholder value in other ways, such as potential buybacks. We are aware of the need to balance buybacks with their effect on our public float, but this is an avenue we may explore. As we move through this year, we will communicate more about our approach to capital investment and allocation with a medium-term focus.

Mayank Tandon, Analyst

Got it. Good position to be in, though. Congrats again.

Joseph Sanborn, CFO

Thank you.

Jayme Mendal, CEO

Thanks, Mayank. Thank you.

Operator, Operator

Next question comes from the line of Jed Kelly with Oppenheimer. Your line is open.

Jed Kelly, Analyst

Thanks for taking my question and great job on an awesome year. I want to follow up on Mike’s question regarding the balance of the year. If we get back to a normal seasonal pattern, does that suggest that the year-over-year growth rate for the second half will be high, maybe in the low double digits? Is that a fair perspective, or do you expect the market to continue to grow? Additionally, for Jayme, considering the over $100 million in cash now, how do you plan to make the business less volatile as we move beyond this phase where the industry is experiencing high earnings? Thank you.

Joseph Sanborn, CFO

Sure, thanks for the question. To address your first query about growth for the remainder of the year compared to the start, I won't go into too many specifics. We are providing guidance for Q1 but not for the full year. At a high level, we believe the industry is healthy and the environment is favorable for us. We anticipate that digital channels will remain the preferred choice for carriers as they return to growth mode due to their ability to target customers. The lack of specifics is because there are various factors influencing how carriers will recover; some states may recover more quickly than others, with California being particularly unpredictable in terms of how carriers will adjust. These elements will impact how the quarters will actually unfold. Our guidance reflects that we expect the balance of the year to normalize towards a long-term average growth rate. Some quarters may exceed others, and it's essential to consider where we are regarding comparisons since the second half of the year includes stronger comparative periods, like Q4 of 2024, which was seasonally high and actually increased from Q3. This could lead to a lower year-on-year comparison mathematically. These are the points to consider, but I can't provide more specifics since we're not offering full-year guidance.

Jayme Mendal, CEO

Yes, to address your question about stability, we have experienced a historically volatile period in the industry from 2022 to 2023. Prior to that, the business was much more stable, and we anticipate that things will begin to normalize. The disruptions of 2022 and 2023 are not expected to be permanent. However, we've learned lessons and need to take steps to ensure we achieve the stability required for long-term growth. Our strategy includes a deeper focus on property and casualty insurance, aiming to become the leading growth partner for P&C insurance providers. This means diversifying beyond our auto insurance concentration to build up other verticals such as homeowners insurance. There is also demand from customers for additional products within the P&C sector, like motorcycle, boat, RV insurance, and small business commercial offerings. We will be expanding our portfolio across these areas. Additionally, we plan to invest in new products and services that allow us to deepen our relationships with existing customers, leveraging our technological and data advantages. Our goal is to be an essential growth partner for these carriers. A notable example of our progress can be seen in the agency business: we previously focused on selling leads to agents, but now we offer a wider suite of services, fostering stronger, more strategic partnerships rather than just transactional relationships. If we successfully implement this strategy, we hope to maintain a stable market for the coming years. In future instances of instability, the structure of our business should be different enough to help us navigate the challenges with reduced volatility.

Jed Kelly, Analyst

Thank you. Very helpful.

Jayme Mendal, CEO

Thanks.

Operator, Operator

Our next question comes from the line of Ralph Schackart with William Blair. Your line is open.

Ralph Schackart, Analyst

Good evening. Thanks for taking the question. First, Jayme, just on the product that you’re contemplating this year, maybe some more color you could provide just in terms of how we should think about it, both from your carrier partner side, as well as the consumer side and how you see the quick advancements in AI or GenAI augmenting your product approach. And then, Joseph, just a clarifying question, I think, in the script or Q&A, you talked about EBITDA being near current levels for 2025. Is that, I’m assuming, on a percentage basis and should that be fairly consistent through the year or are you talking more about a 2025 level? Thank you.

Jayme Mendal, CEO

Certainly. Ralph, regarding your initial question about products, I mentioned a few points earlier. From a consumer perspective, we are starting to consider increasing our investment in non-auto sectors. Our current focus with carriers is on utilizing AI and machine learning to improve their bidding efficiency in the marketplace. EverQuote possesses extensive proprietary data about consumer behavior that can enhance carriers' bidding strategies. Many carriers are now entrusting their bidding processes to us through our smart bidding solutions, an area where we plan to continue investing this year. For agents, while there's a component related to improving bidding for traffic, it encompasses a wider range of needs. Agents engage in various activities to grow their businesses, so as we deliver leads, we are also starting to offer value-added services and introducing new products related to the lead product. Our vision is to create a comprehensive growth solution for local agents.

Joseph Sanborn, CFO

Regarding your question on EBITDA margins, Ralph, I’d like to provide some context. Looking back over the past year, we had negative EBITDA margins if we consider where we were a year ago. Over the course of last year, we improved significantly, achieving an average EBITDA margin of 11.6% for 2024. In Q3, our margin was approximately 13%, and Q4 was just under that at about 12.8%. We have made substantial progress in our EBITDA margins. For this year, our guidance for Q1 suggests margins around 12.5% at the midpoint. As we move forward, we expect to maintain EBITDA margins at these current levels for the remainder of the year. In our prepared remarks, we discussed investment plans for the second half of the year. We mentioned in our November call that once the FCC process was completed, we anticipated making incremental investments starting in the second half of 2025, focusing particularly on technology and AI. Now that the FCC process is behind us, we are transitioning to these plans sooner than anticipated. We expect to increase our investments in the latter half of this year while remaining disciplined, balancing these new operating expenses with the goal of maintaining our EBITDA margins. It's worth noting that our average margin of 11.6% at the end of last year was double what we achieved at our peak before the downturn. We have made solid progress and expect to continue to do so, with our guidance for this year intended to keep margins stable. There will, of course, be some fluctuations quarter-to-quarter due to seasonality, but overall, we anticipate maintaining these levels.

Ralph Schackart, Analyst

Okay. That’s helpful. Thanks, Joseph. Thanks, Jayme.

Jayme Mendal, CEO

Thank you all for joining us this evening. For those who have been following our journey for some time, I believe you will recognize that this past year marked the successful completion of a significant transformation within the business. I want to emphasize that EverQuote at the beginning of this year is almost unrecognizable compared to EverQuote from just a few years ago. To illustrate this, let me share a few key statistics. We ended last year with nearly half the workforce compared to what we had at the start of 2023. We've reduced our headcount by almost 50% along with our expenses. Despite this, we achieved over 70% year-over-year growth last year, surpassing the $0.5 billion revenue milestone for the first time. This progress has allowed us to move from breaking even on an adjusted EBITDA basis to nearly $60 million in adjusted EBITDA last year, maintaining strong cash flow and achieving positive net income. Consequently, our balance sheet strengthened from a modest position to $100 million in cash with no debt. The business is in a robust state, representing the future of EverQuote. We are focused on helping our customers succeed, pursuing profitable growth, building the best team in the industry, leading the insurance sector, and creating technology and AI solutions to assist providers in the digital era. This truly marks the start of our next chapter, and we value your interest in being a part of this journey. Thank you.

Operator, Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today’s conference call. You may now disconnect.