Accolade, Inc. (NASDAQ:ACCD) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Steve Barnes: Sure. Cindy, thanks for the question. Let me give me some comments and color on that for the third quarter and also on the look ahead basis. For the Q3, over our performance versus our guidance, we saw strength across the different categories. Advocacy has strong performance. PlushCare businesses continue to grow in the range of 30% on top line, and Expert Medical Opinion business has rebounded quite a bit from a couple of quarters back. As we look ahead, there’s strong bookings that we seen in this calendar year that Raj spoke about in his comments, give us a lot of confidence that the advocacy part of the business is on track to begin to get back to that 20% growth rate, in addition to PlushCare continuing and perform over and above that 20% growth rate on the virtual care business.

And the expert medical opinion business growing in the neighborhood of 20%. So importantly, Cindy, the diversification of the platform and the different revenue streams that we have and the different business units and sources of revenue we have are really turning to be quite an asset in terms of new business as well as ongoing customers.

Operator: Thank you. One moment for next question. Our next question will come from the line of Craig Hettenbach from Morgan Stanley. Your line is open.

Craig Hettenbach: Yes, thank you. Raj just had a question on just the element of cross selling in the portfolio today. So after the acquisitions of PlushCare and 2nd.MD, now that you have many quarters under your belt, just how are the customer discussions changing in terms of what they’re valuing the most? And how may that be kind of helping you in the marketplace?

Rajeev Singh: Appreciate the question, Craig, great to talk to you again. I think the — let me approach this in a different — from two different vantage points. Existing customers who would take advantage of our advocacy solution have a platform by which they can drive engagement for other solutions. They’ve known that forever, because we’ve been coming to them with our trusted partner ecosystem, talking them about Berta, talking to them about Cara , talking to them about SWORD, and we saw great uptake in those solutions within our customer base, because those customers knew that we could drive engagement at higher levels than they could do independently. When we came to market with an expert medical opinion and a virtual primary care and mental health solution, our customers had to first evaluate the capacity of those solutions.

Were they functionally superior? Did they deliver the value that they were expecting or better and how did they compare to our competition? What they found was that we checked all those boxes. We had best-in-class solutions that drove extraordinary value independently. They already knew that we could drive extraordinary engagement. And so what do we see post those that that early evaluation process post the acquisition, we saw great uptake. I think we talked last quarter about the fact that 10% of our lives are now live on more than one solution at Accolade, that number continues to grow. And what we’re seeing is most of our new deals now switching to the second vector, new deals and new transactions, new customers getting to know us full stop are buying more than one solution as they go through the process.

I think maybe going back to a macro trend track that you and I have talked about in the past. Benefits buyers are fatigued by the idea that thousands of solutions that they’re getting approached by every single day. They want a single place to go to find the value that they need, but we think we’ve done exceptionally well over the course of the last 2 or 3 years is we’ve together the highest value solutions. Those things that provide the most clinical value with the right levels of engagement, and in turn drive lower costs and better satisfaction. And so we’re seeing in both of those vectors, that the conversation is now shifting to when should we deploy it? And what order should we deploy it versus are these the right answers for us.

Operator: Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question will come from the line of Glen Santangelo from Jefferies. Your line is open/

Glen Santangelo: Oh, yes, thanks for taking my question. Good evening. Steve, I wanted to talk to you about the forward guidance. If I look at the fiscal ’24 guidance you sort of laid out, it kind of assumes rough numbers like an incremental $45 million to $50 million in revenues, and maybe about 14 million of an improvement in EBITDA at the midpoint, which would kind of imply an incremental 30% adjusted EBITDA margin, is that the right way to think about it? Because what I’m trying to do is sort of extrapolate that through to ’25, right, I mean, to get, depending upon what you think the incremental margins are, I’m trying to get a sense for what you’re expecting, revenue growth to be in fiscal ’25. And sort of comparing that to what you told us a long time ago, historically about the long-term EBITDA margins of the business in the 15% to 20% range. Thanks. So if you could just sort of reconcile all those numbers, that’d be helpful.

Rajeev Singh: Sure. Thanks, Glen. Thanks for the question. First of all, we’re really pleased on the strong bookings of fiscal ’23. Here are coming off the calendar ’22, to be able to provide preliminary guidance at that 410 number. That’s north of 20%, excluding the Comcast termination this year, and to reiterate over and again, the importance to us by fiscal ’25, breaking Q2 to breakeven. And so Glen, we think it’s a combination of a few things. First of all, diversification on the top line and growth rate, we’ve got good visibility to that and confidence in coming off of the booking season this year. Secondly, with respect to gross margins that certainly has continued to expand over time, we can see — we see that on a continued march up from there.

And then finally, we’re continuing to see leverage on OpEx, while at the same time we’re investing in the business against that growth opportunity. All that taken together because of that profiles words, what we laying — what we’re laying out today and seeking essentially the EBITDA loss from 10%. 11% of revenues into that 5% to 7% range, and then to breakeven and positive 2 years out from now. In the fourth quarter call when we finish out the year, we’ll provide more color on all of that and more detail on the forward guidance. But I think all of that sets up and what we’re essentially saying today is we’re reaffirming with confidence that model that we’ve laid out and that steady march towards breakeven and profitability while we’re growing the top line of the business in a very, very healthy way.

And maybe just to add to the question and we can jump to that. So let’s add Steve’s answer for Glen’s questions before we jump to the next one.

Steve Barnes: Yes, Glen, what — I think what we tried to lay out today with a view to fiscal ’24 revenues is just based on the performance of the business so far this year that we feel really good about top line next year. In fact, we took the top line guide to a little bit ahead of the consensus numbers that are out there right now. And we feel really good about our path to profitability. We’ll give a ton more guidance around how all that works. As you noticed, I think in the — in your preliminary note earlier, we don’t typically give a whole bunch of detail in the Q3 call. We give a lot more detail in the Q4 call. We plan on doing that in the Q4 call when we talk about ’24 and a preview to ’25 as well.

Operator: One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Jonathan Yong from Credit Suisse. Your line is open.