SurgePays, Inc. (NASDAQ:SURG) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

So we want to get out there very quickly. We want to leverage, it’s not even a competitive advantage because we really don’t have competitors specifically in this channel. We want to land rush this thing as hard as we can. That’s why I’ve, basically given Jeremy the green light to bring on as many sales folks as he needs to manage the sales funnel, get all of these deals on board, everything from California to New England, all the way down to Florida. We’ve got various integrations going all over the country. So we definitely expect to see those numbers continue to skew. And it’s my hope that you’re looking at 70%, 80%-plus by the fourth quarter of our sales coming from the stores.

Michael Diana: And as part of your guidance, I think you said you expect to have more than 13,000 stores by the end of the year. Is that the right number?

Brian Cox: That’s the number we’re going to go with right now. My hope is that it’s beyond that number, but we want to put out a good number that we feel we can attain. Yes.

Michael Diana: Okay. Great. Thanks Brian.

Operator: And the next question comes from the line of Ed Woo with Ascendiant Capital. Please proceed with your question.

Ed Woo: Yes. Congratulations on a tremendous growth this year. I think I’ve asked in the past about how your business is a little bit countercyclical. It’s obviously, the consumers that you guys are targeting will have to look for increased opportunity to save money. Have you seen any significant changes in your customer base in the past three months? Whether people are moving down in economic ladder at all?

Brian Cox: That’s an interesting question. That’s one of those that’s going to take us a little while to see. I don’t know that it’s such an instant impact. Now, I will say this. The federal government when it comes to ACP has, definitely made it, I don’t want to say made it easier, that’s not the right phrase, but they’re putting an emphasis on the program. They put a lot of grants out for companies to promote it into areas where there’s not an awareness or not companies making an effort to sign folks up. So we know that the program’s being a success, but as far as the kind of call it the macroeconomic global impact of everything that’s going on in the world, people falling into our category, I don’t know that we’d be able to directly see that.

And the reason is, we’re at such a hyper-growth type arena, we basically are pushing out all of the devices we have. So I think you almost have to get to that edge of slowing down your growth to see, oh, hey, there’s a new group that came in. So now our growth, we got a blip. We’re able to grow so fast right now, I don’t know that we would see or can see that the market has expanded. Now we definitely know that there’s millions of potential customers out there, and one of the things, without getting way off in the weeds, one of the things that I’m passionate about is using one of the — using the ACP to get in the stores as we’ve talked about, but also keep in mind every one of these subscribers that we sign up is using talk text and data. Well, that’s building a relationship with the carriers; that’s ultimately giving us more leverage to better negotiate with the carriers on pricing.