Forrester Research, Inc. (NASDAQ:FORR) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Forrester Research, Inc. (NASDAQ:FORR) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript April 30, 2024

Forrester Research, Inc. beats earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $0.25, expectations were $0.22. FORR isn’t one of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of the third quarter (see the details here).

Operator: Good afternoon, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Forrester’s First Quarter 2024 Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker’s presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. Please be advised that today’s conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Vice President of Corporate Development and Investor Relations, Ed Bryce Morris. Please go ahead.

Ed Bryce Morris: Thank you, and hello, everyone. Thanks for joining today’s call. Earlier this afternoon, we issued our press release for the first quarter 2024. If you need a copy, you can find one on our website in the Investors section. Here with us today to discuss our results are George Colony, Forrester’s Chief Executive Officer and Chairman; and Chris Finn, Chief Financial Officer. Carrie Johnson, our Chief Product Officer; and Nate Swan, our Chief Sales Officer, are also here with us for the Q&A section of the call. Before we begin, I’d like to remind you that this call will contain forward-looking statements within the meanings of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Words such as expects, believes, anticipates, intends, plans, estimates, or similar expressions are intended to identify those forward-looking statements.

These statements are based on the company’s current plans and expectations, and involve risks and uncertainties that could cause future activities and result of operations to be materially different from those set forth in our forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ are discussed in our reports and filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the company undertakes no obligation to publicly update any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. Lastly, consistent with our previous calls, today, we will be discussing our performance on an unadjusted basis, which excludes items affecting comparability. While reporting on an unadjusted basis is not in accordance with GAAP, we believe that reporting numbers on this adjusted basis provides a meaningful comparison and an appropriate basis for our discussion.

You can find a detailed list of items excluded from these adjusted results in our press release. And with that, I’ll hand it over to George.

George Colony: Thank you for joining Forrester’s Q1 earnings call. With me today is Forrester’s Chief Financial Officer, Chris Finn, who will provide a financial update following my remarks. We will then be joined by Carrie Johnson, our Chief Product Officer; and Nate Swan, our Chief Sales Officer, for the Q&A portion of the call. Today, I’d like to cover five key themes: number one, our financial performance in Q1; two, the Forrester Decisions migration; three, investments in generative AI; four, improvements to our sales process; and five, a preview of our Q2 events. In the first quarter, CV decreased 4% in alignment with our plan. Our key metrics have stabilized with wallet retention up slightly from the prior quarter at 88% and Forrester Decisions client retention at 82% flat compared to Q4.

Overall, Forrester Decisions client retention continues to outpace our legacy research products, with retention of the new platform running 10 points better than its predecessors. As we complete our migration, we anticipate retention to improve, creating a base for a return to contract value growth, and Chris will provide more detail on our metrics shortly. While our CV business is stabilizing, we have continued to see challenges in our consulting business, and effective continues from 2023. The macroeconomic environment, especially within tech remains difficult, with many companies still adverse to spending for projects. We plan to drive this business forward in Q2 and beyond with more focused sales and marketing efforts. We are in the final year of our transition to Forrester Decisions, and I am pleased to report that our migration efforts remain on track.

Since launching our new platform in August of 2021, we have moved 70% of our contract value and are poised to hit our goal of 80% of our CV on Forrester Decisions at year-end. We continue our evolution from a library model, one in which mid-level executives use research to build a reference center for answering one-off questions, to a new engagement model as a more strategic, continuous research and advisory partner. This model enables Forrester to focus research on client problems and needs, enabling them to accelerate transformations, better align their functions, and drive growth through customer obsession. Now, how do we do this? At the onset of a Forrester Decisions relationship, we systematically collect the initiatives and outcomes of clients, the work that companies are engaged in and the results that they’re looking to achieve from that work.

At the end of Q1, we had recorded initiatives for 85% of Forrester Decisions leader seats, up from 80% in the prior quarter. We think of initiatives and outcomes as the golden thread guiding the relationship through time and we believe that this will lead to stickier multi-year engagements. Here’s a quote from an IT client and a large multinational food processing company. When you introduce the Forrester Decisions model it really resonated with me that we could think through an initiative end-to-end and plan a series of engagements that help progress that initiative. We could bring a business case forward, put a project around it and then successfully deliver outcomes. Now, it feels that with the Forrester Decisions model, you are partners in that endeavor.

Forrester Decisions is helping us to expand our business with IT clients. Two research themes are currently resonating with CIOs and their staffs, generative AI and high-performance IT. Now, the world is in the first inning of generative AI, so much of our research continues to be focused on early applications and sorting through the widening field of technologies and models. Unlike previous emerging technologies, GenAI is going to touch all of our clients whether they sell tires, insurance, software or banking services. It is the topic most in demand by our clients and over 50% of Forrester’s analysts are directly engaged in GenAI research. Unsurprisingly, it will be front and center at our two largest events of this quarter, B2B Summit and the CX Summit.

Departing from traditional thinking, high-performance IT recognizes that there’s no one-size-fits-all IT organizational structure. Counterintuitively, this stream of research shows that the best large companies are deploying several different styles of IT simultaneously, enabling them to respond to a multiplicity of diverse market conditions. This further complicates the lives of tech vendors who must gear up to create different solutions for different divisions of the same customer. In addition to the groundbreaking research of Forrester decisions, we recently made our generative AI tool, Izola, available to all of our approximately 1,500 Forrester Decisions accounts. Izola can rapidly synthesize our research, data and insights, short-cutting clients straight to solutions.

We are very proud to be the first major tech research firm to deploy a proprietary generative AI model for clients. Early Izola feedback has been quite positive, with customers describing it as useful, objective and fast. An executive at a cloud-based software company put it simply and I quote “It’s absolutely critical for customers of research to have tools just like this.” We are also using AI to increase productivity at Forrester. Employees are using Izola for knowledge discovery and topic alignment. We have also rolled out other predictive and generative AI point solutions to automate work in the company. One of these tools, Scout, was recently deployed with our customer success organization to quickly match client interactions with the appropriate analysts.

I believe that expertise in generative AI is a critical asset for all companies and I’m very proud of how quickly we have built that expertise at Forrester. We continue to advance toward a high-performance sales culture. Under the leadership of Nate Swan, the Forrester salesforce is focused on Net Contract Value Increase, or NCVI, calling higher and larger organizations, operating using a standard process and methodology, selling more multi-year contracts, and a culture of continuous coaching and improvement. Forrester sales executives are focused on increasing their insight into client accounts, becoming more influential with our clients, all in the cause of building trust. This enhanced sales motion is matched to the on-your-side and by-your-side design of Forrester decisions, a continuous engagement that enables clients to achieve their outcomes faster, and the strategy is progressing.

The North American new business team, for example, is significantly outpacing its first half performance from a year-ago. Important large renewals in migrations of existing business occurred in Q1, including a $1.6 million research contract with a technology services client, and a $500,000 Forrester Decisions enrichment with the U.S. federal government agency. Before I turn the call over to Chris, I’d like to share a preview of our Q2 events. As we’ve stated before, events are a critical driver of contract value, bringing Forrester’s research to life for prospects and existing clients. In the second quarter, we will host four events globally, B2B Summit, North America; and CX Summit in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. At B2B Summit, we will recognize Verizon Business, DDI, and ADP as winners of our Return on Integration Honors for delivering impactful customer experiences through the alignment of marketing, sales, and product.

To complete my remarks, I want to reiterate my optimism about our long-term business. As I’ve said in previous calls, we are transitioning to a major new product in a time of general economic challenges and a retrenchment in the technology industry. These conditions have affected our financial performance, but we remain confident that we are making the right moves to set the company up for long-term health and CV growth. I will now turn the call over to Chris for our financial update. Chris?

Chris Finn: Thanks, George, and good afternoon, everyone. Our first quarter results were mixed as our CV research business performed in line with our expectations, while the consulting business underperformed as it continues to be impacted by a challenging budgetary environment and the broader issues affecting the tech market. Despite these uneven results, we saw some positive green shoots in Q1, including reaching the 70% threshold of CV in Forrester Decisions, an uptick in new business supported by interest in our high performance IT and GenAI content, the stabilization of our key retention metrics, and the expanded rollout of our AI tool, Izola. Q1 saw a 4% CV decline in the quarter, and overall revenue decreased 12%. For the total company, we generated $100.1 million in revenue compared to $113.7 million in the prior year period.

As we noted on a prior call, we expected revenue declines this year due to the impact from the decline of bookings during 2023. The revenue decline in the first quarter was higher than expected, though, by approximately 4 points, largely driven by our advisory and consulting businesses. We continue to believe that macro headwinds will perpetuate throughout 2024, and this is causing our clients to put out buying decisions or modestly shrinking their overall research budgets. This is significantly impacting our consulting business, and to a lesser extent, our research and events businesses. And, although we expect to return to bookings growth in the second half of 2024, the revenue impact will be muted this year. In terms of our revenue breakdown for the quarter, research revenues decreased 5% compared to the first quarter of 2023, with revenue from our subscription research products down 3%, coupled with declines in our reprint and other small and discontinued products.

Overall, client retention of 72% was flat, and wallet retention of 88% improved slightly compared to Q4. While Forrester Decision specific client retention of 82% was flat, and wallet retention of 88% improved versus the fourth quarter. Although overall client count is down from the prior quarter, Forrester Decision’s client count continues to grow, and Forrester Decision’s client retention remains well above overall client retention by approximately 10 points. As we complete the Forrester Decision’s migration in 2024, we expect retention metrics to steadily improve throughout the year. We remain on track for our Forrester Decision’s migration plan, and we now have approximately $225 million of CV, with 70% of total CV on the platform.

Our consulting business posted revenues of $23.1 million, which was down 27% compared to the prior year. Both consulting and advisory product lines had a challenging quarter, and we expect these challenges to continue throughout 2024. And finally, regarding our events business, we did not hold any events in the first quarter, and posted revenues of $0.4 million, representing a decrease of 65% compared to the first quarter of 2023. Continuing down our P&L on an adjusted basis, operating expenses for the first quarter decreased by 9%, primarily driven by lower compensation and related costs. Specifically, on headcount, for the first quarter we were down 14% compared to the same period in 2023. We continue to monitor headcount hiring and attrition very closely, and we are encouraged that attrition has remained very low throughout 2023 and into 2024.

Operating income decreased by 54% to $3.4 million or 3.4% of revenue in the current quarter, compared to $7.5 million or 6.6% of revenue in the first quarter of 2023. Lower operating income and margin were primarily driven by declines in our consulting business, coupled with seasonal trends which impact the business in Q1, including traditionally not holding events during the first quarter. Interest expense for the quarter was $0.8 million consistent with the first quarter of 2023. Finally, net income and earnings per share decreased 46% and 48%, respectively, compared to Q1 of last year, with net income of $2.8 million and earnings per share at $0.14 for the current quarter, compared with net income of $5.1 million and earnings per share of $0.27 in the first quarter of 2023.

Looking at our capital structure, first quarter cash flow from operating activities was $0.6 million and capital expenditures were $1.4 million. Cash flows were negatively impacted by the payment of the litigation settlement this quarter, as well as severance payments under our restructuring plans. We had $118.5 million of cash and investments as we exited the quarter. We did not pay down any debt during the first quarter. However, we did repurchase approximately $4.1 million worth of shares in the period. In addition, the Board just approved a $25 million increase to the repurchase program, bringing the remaining authorization to $89 million. Guidance for 2024 remains unchanged, so let me provide some additional comments on the outlook for the year.

Revenue is still expected to be in the range of $430 million to $450 million. This guidance assumes the outlook for the research business to be a mid-single-digit decline, a decline in our consulting business in the mid- to high-teens, and a decline in our events business in the high-single-digits for the year. Operating margins are still expected to be in the range of 9.5% to 10.5%. Interest expense is expected to be approximately $3 million for the year, and we are continuing to guide to a full-year tax rate of approximately 29%. Taking all this into account, we are maintaining earnings per share in the range of $1.50 to $1.70. As expected, 2024 will be a challenging year as we complete the Forrester Decisions migration and continue the evolution of our go-to-market team.

We believe we will start to see momentum gather as we progress through the year and into 2025. Our focus is on returning to CV growth driven by flagship Forrester Decisions product. We expect to see ongoing headwinds of the non-CV businesses, specifically in our consulting business. Despite these challenges, we believe Forrester’s research has never been more relevant or needed in the marketplace. The expanded rollout this quarter of our GenAI tool, Izola, is a testament to our ability to stay at the forefront of technology trends. Furthermore, we believe these technology disruptions will be the fuel to drive future demand for our products. Thank you all for taking the time today and, with that, I will hand the call back to George.

George Colony: Thank you, Chris. Before we open up the call for Q&A, I want to reiterate the fundamentals of our business. Large corporations continue to need research and advice to navigate tech changes and shifts in customer behavior. The dynamics that drive long-term demand for Forrester services are not abating, and Forrester Decisions is the research platform that allows us to seize this expanding opportunity. I’m now going to hand the call back to the operator, and we will now take questions.

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Q&A Session

Operator: Thank you, sir. [Operator Instructions] And I show our first question comes from the line of Andrew Nicholas from William Blair. Please go ahead.

Tom Ross: Hi, good afternoon. This is Tom Ross on for Andrew Nicholas. I wanted to ask about what kind of selling environment you saw during the quarter, and kind of how it progressed relative to your expectations as well as the fourth quarter?

Nate Swan: Just to clarify, you said what type of selling environment are we seeing? I want to make sure I heard that clearly. This is Nate, by the way.

Tom Ross: Yeah, the selling environment.

Nate Swan: Great. So the selling environment, certainly, we remain very confident in selling to senior executives. We saw with our new business teams especially that we really increased year-over-year on that new business motion, up very significantly, and we see that as a big opportunity in Q2 as well to continue. On the high-tech side, we saw really great progress on our ideal customer profile. So really staying focused there. And that actually is turning in some really good results. But, certainly, challenges in other parts of the business, in the high-tech side of the business, with some of the retention challenges that you would see with the tech recession that is out there. We’re seeing really good results in the certain sectors, like the government sector, we’re seeing some good results around the world. So, feel confident in the selling environment and facing some of the same challenges that I think others face in selling to vendors right now.

George Colony: Yeah, Europe and Asia, I think feel stronger than the U.S. Yeah.

Nate Swan: Yeah.

Tom Ross: Great. Thanks. And then, for my follow-up, I was wondering what kind of feedback, again, on Izola so far, and kind of what kind of benefits you’re expecting as we go through the year, whether it be on retention or maybe new sales?

Carrie Johnson: Sure. I’ll start with that. This is Carrie. Hello. Client feedback on Izola has been incredibly strong. Part of their reason here is that we have developed this sort of side-by-side with clients, taking small groups and expanding them in terms of access and really starting to understand the context of a question. So, generative AI can certainly produce some nonsensical results. And we have worked really hard to make sure that the answers are from our trusted research only. And that is what clients have been responding to, that it’s really helping them get fast answers from across our trusted set of research, longitudinal research, and also then inform the conversations that they’re having with our experts more.

So they’re getting sort of a leg up in the conversations. They’re coming to the table with part of the answer and then we’re having deeper conversations with our analysts. I’ll let Nate talk a little bit about the Izola as a competitive differentiation in the selling environment. Izola is only available to Forrester Decisions clients, which is a big selling point, we believe for the new portfolio as we look to both migrate customers and also from a new business perspective. And it’s also quite appealing to leaders who are looking for their teams to get up to speed quickly on key initiatives.

George Colony: Although some legacy clients want Izola, right, they’ve asked for it.

Carrie Johnson: They do, and it’s only available to Forrester Decisions clients.

Nate Swan: Yeah, and as far as in the selling environment, it certainly makes it easier. You’re getting two answers quicker, so clients are looking for answers, they’re looking for answers quickly. And so if we can help save them time, it is certainly well received. So our existing clients and our prospects have given us great feedback that it is a great time-saving effort and it’s given them really good answers.

George Colony: It’s also saving time on the Forrester side, because CSMs don’t have to get involved with those questions.

Chris Finn: Yeah, and I’d also just add one more thing, too, just around from a sales perspective. It is opening doors for us, and we’re having the conversations, obviously, and that’s been helpful.

Tom Ross: Awesome. Thank you.

George Colony: Good question.

Operator: Thank you. And I show our next question comes from the line of Anja Soderstrom from Sidoti. Please go ahead.

Anja Soderstrom: Hi, thank you for taking the questions. I have a follow-up on the Izola solution. You mentioned some legacy clients want to use it as well. Have you been a driver for them to transition to the Forrester Decision platform or to still see a citation there?

Nate Swan: I think both Carrie and I can comment on that. Forrester Decisions is where we are making the investment into our products. We are not planning on bringing Izola to our legacy products. And so that is another reason to make that migration. It is a difference maker for people. As Chris stated earlier, we are on our path to getting to 80% by the end of the year. And that is one of the big drivers is making it easier for people to do their jobs. So, I think it really is a differentiator for us, and it shows that we’re out front in the market and living what we talk about all the time, which is putting something into action that can really help your business.

Anja Soderstrom: Okay. Thank you. And then in terms of the client sort of shedding of smaller clients and stick with the [lemon grab] [ph] clients, why do you anticipate that to stabilize and we should see client count increase again?

George Colony: Yeah, that’s a good question, Anja. I think as we talked about with CV, right, we’re approaching 80% at the end of this year. That’s the target. We’re just certainly on track to get there, and we’ve said, we will start to see CV growth stabilize this year as we get into the back half, and then start to grow slightly flat, slightly up as we exit the year. So, our expectation is that we should start to see client growth move in a positive direction as we exit the year along with CV. I’d also note just on the – from a legacy perspective, where we have left for CV, it’s approximately $50 million that are in the heritage products. We expect about half of that to actually migrate successfully, and I do expect the conversations around Izola to be part of those migration discussions.

And then the other half, we expect it to either migrate, but at lower overall span or likely not renew at all, and that’s obviously built into our expectations and our guide for the year.

Anja Soderstrom: Okay. Thank you. And in terms of the larger clients that are remaining, are you able to sort of measure the sort of expansion opportunity with them and set targets there, and also set targets for your own sort of wallet retention?