Earnings Call Transcript - IZEA Q2 2025

Matt Gray, Vice President of Marketing

Good afternoon, and welcome to IZEA's earnings call, covering the second quarter of 2025. I'm Matt Gray, VP of Marketing at IZEA. And joining me on the call are IZEA's Chief Financial Officer, Peter Biere; and IZEA's Chief Executive Officer, Patrick Venetucci. Thank you for being with us today. Earlier this afternoon, the company issued a press release detailing IZEA's performance during Q2 2025. If you'd like to review those details, all our investor information can be found online on our Investor Relations website at izea.com/investors. Before we begin, please take note of the safe harbor paragraph included in today's press release covering IZEA's financial results and be advised that some of the statements that we make today regarding our business, operations and financial performance may be considered forward-looking, and such statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. We encourage you to consider the disclosures contained in our SEC filings for a detailed discussion of these factors. Our commentary today will also include the non-GAAP financial measures of adjusted EBITDA and revenues excluding divested operations. Reconciliations between GAAP and non-GAAP metrics for reported results can also be found in our earnings release issued earlier today and in our publicly available filings. And with that, I would like to now introduce and turn the call over to IZEA's Chief Financial Officer, Peter Biere. Peter?

Peter J. Biere, Chief Financial Officer

Thank you, Matt, and good afternoon, everyone. This afternoon, we released our results for the second quarter and filed our quarterly report on Form 10-Q with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Today, it's my pleasure to review our operating results for the quarter ended June 30, 2025, compared to the second quarter of 2024, including some year-to-date comparisons to discuss certain balance sheet highlights and to update you on our stock buyback initiatives. Revenue during the 3 months ended June 30, 2025, nearly all of which was Managed Services, totaled approximately $9.1 million, increasing 0.4% over the prior year quarter. The prior year quarter included $0.8 million in revenue from Hoozu, which we divested in December 2024. Excluding Hoozu, Managed Services revenue increased 12.9% in the current quarter compared to the same period last year. Managed Services bookings is a key metric that reflects current period demand for our Managed Services. On average, booked amounts convert to recognized revenue over approximately 6 to 7.5 months. However, in some cases, the timing of revenue conversion may extend up to 12 months depending on certain factors such as customer marketing fund allocation and campaign execution. During the second quarter of 2025, Managed Services bookings totaled $5.6 million, bringing the total bookings for the first half of 2025 to $13.1 million. This compares to $9.6 million in the second quarter of 2024 and $18.3 million for the first half of 2024, excluding Hoozu in all periods. The decline in the first half 2025 bookings was attributable to three primary factors. Roughly one-third of the year-over-year decline reflects a timing difference as one of our largest customers front-loaded a portion of their 2024 spend in March of that year, whereas a comparable commitment was made in the fourth quarter of 2024. We also undertook a strategic shift towards larger, more profitable, and recurring accounts, intentionally reducing our emphasis on smaller, less profitable projects. As a result, fewer internal resources were allocated to these lower-value engagements. Finally, a number of customers have paused on a meaningful portion of their marketing budgets in response to macroeconomic pressures, including some tariff-related uncertainties affecting certain industries. As of June 30, 2025, our Managed Services backlog, representing unrecognized revenue from ongoing contracts and recent bookings not yet invoiced totaled $11.5 million. Our total cost of revenue, including both external creative and internal labor costs totaled $4.4 million or 48% of revenue in the second quarter of 2025 compared to $5.2 million or 57% of revenue in the same quarter of the prior year. Removing Hoozu, our cost of revenue increased by approximately 1% in the second quarter of 2025 compared to the prior period. Expenses other than the cost of revenue totaled $4 million in the second quarter of 2025, down from $6.8 million or 41.4% compared with the prior year quarter. Sales and marketing costs totaled $1 million during the second quarter, a 70% decrease from $3.2 million in the prior year period. This decrease reflects cost savings from our targeted workforce reduction and a temporary pause in certain marketing initiatives. General and administrative costs were $2.9 million in the second quarter, down 14.1% from the same period last year. The decrease was primarily driven by lower employee-related costs, reduced reliance on external contractors and decreased spending on professional services, software licenses and data storage fees. We were profitable in the second quarter, generating $1.2 million in net income or $0.07 per share on 17.8 million shares compared to a net loss of $2.2 million or negative $0.13 per share on 16.4 million shares for the second quarter of 2024. Our results are particularly significant in that this is the first quarter in IZEA's history where profitability was driven by operating results. In the second quarter of 2025, adjusted EBITDA was $1.3 million compared to a negative $2.2 million for the prior year quarter. As a reminder, we updated our non-GAAP measure of adjusted EBITDA in the fourth quarter of 2024 to exclude non-operating items, primarily interest income from our investment portfolio. The prior year comparison was restated for comparability. You can find a reconciliation of adjusted EBITDA to net income at the bottom of our earnings release. As of June 30, 2025, we had $50.6 million in cash and investments, a modest decrease of $0.4 million from the beginning of the year. Operating cash flow is positive for the year-to-date period, inclusive of normal working capital timing variances and covered approximately half of the continued investment in our stock repurchase programs. We previously announced our commitment to repurchase up to $10 million of our stock in the open market, subject to certain restrictions. During the second quarter of 2025, we purchased a total of 121,788 shares at an average price per share of $2.29 under our programs for an aggregate investment of $0.3 million. Through August 8, 2025, we've purchased 523,268 shares, investing $1.3 million since the beginning of our current programs in September 2024. We earned $0.5 million of interest on our investments during the recent quarter. Lastly, we do not have any debt on our balance sheet. With cash on hand and liquidity from our investment portfolio as required, we're well positioned to execute organic business growth and capitalize on future acquisition opportunities. With that, I'll turn the call over to Patrick Venetucci, our Chief Executive Officer.

Patrick James Venetucci, Chief Executive Officer

Thank you, Peter, and good afternoon, everyone. Less than a year ago, the leadership team and I made a commitment to accelerate our path to profitability. Today, I'm proud to announce that we have delivered on that commitment. For the first time in the history of this company, we are profitable. In our effort to fortify, simplify and focus, we successfully reduced the cost structure back in Q4 2024 without sacrificing growth in the first half of 2025. This demonstrates that we have designed and activated a better business model, a model that puts America first and limits our international exposure, a model built for higher growth and more profitable market segments, a model that serves our top customers even better powered by our proprietary technology, a model that's attracting capable talent and M&A opportunities, a model that we believe to be sustainable. In addition to the financial accomplishments, there are a number of operational activities in Q2 worth highlighting. We won new business from Jeep, Nestlé, Kellogg's and more. Our sales pipeline is full of leads with larger opportunities and higher-quality clients. We produced exciting new work for Jeep, F1: The Movie, Superman and Owens Corning to name a few. We kicked off a new tech initiative that will enhance our campaign management product and inject even more AI into our business processes. Finally, we hired our first VP Talent acquisition, Cecilia Peralta, to attract more leaders and elevate our brand among talent in the industry. In summary, Q2 was another exceptional quarter in which we achieved our financial commitments. We continue to grow revenue by double digits, achieved profitability and generated cash from operations. This is strong evidence that our new model works and positions us to continue to deliver results. We see and are pursuing a number of additional value creation opportunities ahead of us. For this reason, we are optimistic about the future of this company and our ability to deliver additional value to all of our stakeholders, shareholders, clients and employees alike. Thank you for your time today. I will now open the call for Q&A from the analyst community.

Operator, Operator

And your first question today will come from Jon Hickman with Ladenburg Thalmann.