SmartRent, Inc. (NYSE:SMRT) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Lucas Haldeman: Hey, Sidney, thanks for the question. I’ll give an answer and Hiroshi can add some color if he has anything else to say. I mean I think what – what we said in some of the prepared remarks and I’ll just kind of reiterate is really this was – Q3 was sort of a culmination of a lot of internal development of technology to improve how we deploy resources as well as a transformation of how we actually go about doing the install. And so as you’ve seen sort of a stair-step function I feel like this is coming into Q4 is the first quarter where you’re not going to see that sort of stair step. It’s a – we’ve deployed a new strategy that’s materially different. And the whole idea around this Sidney is that we can achieve breakeven or slightly positive margins on professional services, regardless of the volume of installs that we’re doing.

And so it’s a transformation, driven by technology of moving from really a heavy fixed cost installation model to a much more variable cost model, so that we don’t have to think about it in the same ways like to your question we think about it as I have to achieve x to hit breakeven. That really that can move as the pace of install moves up and down.

Hiroshi Okamoto: Yes. I think just to add to that. Sorry, we’re not providing guidance on our gross margins but I think you could see a significant improvement in Q4. We hope to get that positive sometime in 2024, Professional Services I’m talking about.

Sidney Ho: Got it. I got it. That’s very clear. Thanks. My follow-up question is it’s great to see that your booking units improved a lot this quarter. I think last quarter you talked about some customers not willing to put in new orders until the existing orders are fulfilled. How have those conversations changed to drive that unit kind of booking unit growth that you saw? And along the same line, I noticed that booking dollars didn’t grow as much as units. Can you talk about that dynamic as well?

Lucas Haldeman: Yes. I think we feel like we had a good quarter of bookings. And just to reiterate, bookings will be lumpy. It moves around if not a linear function, and it’s not really driver or indicator of our demand. There’s a lot of different things at play depending on the customer. But I think what drove the strong bookings quarter — this quarter in Q3 was really around we did wrap up a fair number of customers’ projects and took new orders, as well as we had a good quarter of selling to new customers getting some new customers on board.

Sidney Ho: Okay. Maybe if I just squeeze in one more. Understanding, it’s too early to give guidance for next year, but considering the several changes in strategy that you guys are going through this year, conceptually how should we think about what’s driving revenue growth next year? Maybe revenue is not the focus like you mentioned earlier Lucas. Is it more unit deployment? Is it higher hardware ARPU, or mainly on software SaaS? Maybe broadly speaking what are the top priorities for the management team?

Lucas Haldeman : Well, I think the priorities continue to remain. We’ve said within six months will be free cash flow positive next year. So the priority remains achieving that which is really about driving our most profitable revenue. So internally we don’t think myopically about new units, but really around where our levers to drive growth. And cross-sell and upsell continues to be a successful area where we’re able to sell additional products to new customers. And then I think it really — as you’ve seen and we did a press release we’ve added another new product that we’re selling the package rooms smart package room. And so when you start looking across the landscape and say, we have a large number of customers who have deployed IoT only now we can offer access control Wi-Financial, smart package rooms work order management property operations software that really optimizing that with our customers.