Upland Software, Inc. (NASDAQ:UPLD) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Jack McDonald: I think the business, as you rightly point out, has gone through phases. I think when we look at the business in balance, we’ve built a strong portfolio of products. We’ve got a cohort of those products that we think have great growth potential. We’ve got a great customer base. And we need to do a better job on the go-to-market piece of it. We probably ran margins a touch too high. And we’re going to make a bigger investment right now in growth. Again, we’re going to take those margins down to the mid-20s. But our goal at scale is to bring them back up into that 30% to 35% range. Again, the core goal here is to get that organic growth — that core organic growth up to 5% to 10%. And again, we think it’s scale that supports 30% to 35% EBITDA.

Jeff Van Rhee: If I could sneak one last in. I know you don’t want to get into product-by-product analysis. But if you look at the portfolio of products and you look at those that are showing the most churn/the least growth, is there any commonality to that group, namely in target markets, verticals, geographies, age of the acquisition, other characteristics?

Jack McDonald: Yes. So we did a pretty thorough review of the portfolio as we were putting this plan together and really looked at common points of leverage amongst the products, everything from customer support leverage to tech stack leverage, to go-to-market leverage, to competitive characteristics in the marketplace, to the growth of those markets that those products are serving. And based on that analysis, we really liked what we saw for 90% of the portfolio. We need to do a more effective job of bringing those products to market and getting attached for our sales team. We did identify some areas where we could make some targeted product investments to be more competitive. And as I say, roughly one-third of this comprehensive growth plan is directed toward that.

But what we really saw is the need to focus our product groupings, and again, to invest in a more modern digital marketing capability and that inside sales capability. And those are all efficient motions that will enable growth with expanding margins. It was really just that one piece of the business, the sunset assets, that did not fit our business strategy going forward, as I say, roughly 10% of the revenue. And that’s the part that we are taking off the field.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Jake Roberge from William Blair. Your line is open.

Jake Roberge: Appreciate all the color on this new growth plan. But just focusing more on the quarter and guide, so really strong quarterly results with even better growth on a constant currency basis. But then the guide is obviously calling for a decline in total revenue. Could you kind of parse out how much of that decel is related to the macro versus the sunsetting of these product suites that you’ll be sunsetting in 2023 and 2024?

Mike Hill: Yes. Jake, it’s Mike. It’s really — you can really attribute it to the sunset, as Jack just described, sort of defocus on that 10% of our ’23 revenue group and just kind of the refocus where we have the leverage point. So I would attribute it to that.

Jake Roberge: And then I understand the margin scale and how $500 million or $600 million revenue, that’s when we start to get to that long-term target margins. But could you put any more time lines or milestones around those targets you laid out in terms of how many years we should expect the incremental $15 million of expenses? And how long until we could expect that core organic growth rate?