Wag! Group Co. (NASDAQ:PET) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Jeremy Hamblin: Well, okay, great. Thanks for taking all the questions. Best wishes.

Garrett Smallwood: Thanks, Jeremy.

Operator: Thank you. The next question comes from Tom White with D.A. Davidson. Please proceed.

Tom White: Great. Thanks for taking my questions, guys. Walking dogs in a nice weather in a nice neighborhood, sounds like a gig I need right about now. Two if I could, I guess first on the fourth quarter revenue outlook, it looks like you beat the high end of the Third quarter guide, but you’re holding the full-year kind of unchanged. And I guess at the midpoint kind of implies the fourth quarter could be down a little bit sequentially. Is that just seasonality or some of the weather implications that you touched on, Alec, or is there something else about the fourth quarter that maybe you’re thinking a little bit differently about than you were a few months ago? And then I have a quick follow-up.

Garrett Smallwood: Hey, Tom. Great to hear from you. We love to have you. So, to answer your question on Q4, I don’t know if you’re falling, but we expect a lot of incremental weather this quarter. I think California is already expecting catalyst catastrophic storming next week, which obviously is a headwind in terms of some of the services business. Second thing is that we certainly saw a really strong Q3 in our wellness business as a function of pet insurance products, wellness plans that are premium health care products. We’re unclear if that trend will stay, although we’ve certainly been excited about their initial Q4 results that we’ve seen. But just to be really clear, we’re really just thinking about 2024 and 2025 at this point. Most of our focus is on next year and making sure we’re growing profitably with strong margins.

Tom White: Okay. That makes sense. And I guess just to follow up on the wellness piece and specifically the pet insurance. I’m just curious whether you’re seeing any kind of change in behavior on the part of those advertiser partners that maybe could be related to the macro look in terms of bid levels for leads or any volatility in the bidding? I’m just — I guess I’m just trying to see whether the macro might be having any kind of influence there. It doesn’t seem from the numbers, but I guess maybe just kind of looking ahead, are you seeing any?

Garrett Smallwood: No, yes. I think we’re seeing strong demand. I think you saw in Q3, actually, people were leaning in further asking if there more that could be doing a partnership with us. I watched something, I think on CNBC this morning, on a progressive CEOs are going to be leaning back in aggressively in 2024. It’s a good sign broadly for insurers. So, we’re seeing strong demand, we expect to see continued strong demand. I think the macros cooling a bit, I don’t know if that’s true two quarters ago, maybe felt a little more volatility. But I think that certainly calms. And people certainly it’s going to be in a better place.

Tom White: Okay, great, guys. Thanks. That’s it from me.

Garrett Smallwood: Thank you.

Operator: The next question comes from Matt Koranda with Roth Capital. Please proceed.

Matt Koranda: Hi, guys. Good afternoon. So, two questions, first one is just more near-term in nature. In the services platform, specifically, have you observed any change in behavior with your customers that in response to any of the macro crosscurrents that have happened in the last couple of months? Just curious what you’ve seen quarter to date in terms of behavior, maybe just mix of services. If you could unpack how to think about that if there’s any discernible change?

Adam Storm: Hi, Matt. This is Adam. Yes, I think that, our daytime services, as we’ve said, is a function of office occupancy, which is challenge relative to, let’s say 2019, but no. No real change there, quarter over quarter. That’s something that we’ve kind of been pretty open and honest about. Whereas the sitting and boarding segment, the overnight segments is more so a function of travel and travel is doing great. Travel is actually above 2019 levels for the TSA data. So, the services mix is probably going to be a little bit more overnight, as we think about Q4, which is seasonal in 2024 generally. But we’re really just letting the consumer lead us to what they want and then kind of investing behind them.

Matt Koranda: Okay. That’s fair. And then the other question was on platform participants. Nice growth this quarter, whether you look at it sequentially or year-over-year. I’m curious if maybe you could unpack for us where the split of platform participants by the segment. And I guess the other question that I had for you, which may be harder to answer is how many of the platform participants that you say are attaching to more than one of your segments? Just curious to get a sense for cross-sell between the segments that you have.

Garrett Smallwood: Yes. Hey, Matt. Garrett here. I wish you wanted to walk dogs a ton. No, we don’t really talk about the platform participants by the revenue group because there’s so much happening dynamically in a given quarter where that’s less caregiver doing daytime or doing overnight, that leads that to be a different number or more people cross-selling any given quarter because seasonality to things like, let’s say, buying wellness plan to return products or just talking to the vet. But I generally think that you should look at two things. One of the revenue divided by platform participants to get a good sense of it and kind of how that trend is going. Obviously want to see that continue to stay going up frankly, like I mean, we’re doing a good job of cross-selling and monetize the consumer base.

The second thing, which is the revenue split by platform participants, is probably a good way to think about. I mean, all these products are premium products, they are all somewhat expensive again. I don’t know if you looked at Maxbone recently, but rompers are $90. So, generally, I think two things. One is there’s certainly a strong cross-sell happening. That’s something we expect even lean into further as we brought in our bench of products and services The second thing would be to think about revenue divided by platform participants are going to help you understand how we think about monetizing those customers.

Matt Koranda: Okay. Helpful, guys. I’ll leave it there. Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. At this time, I would like to turn the call back over to management for closing comments.

Garrett Smallwood: Thank you all. Two things I want to add that we didn’t talk about on the earnings presentation. One is — we’ve got a lot of questions around the impact of AI and how we think about its efficacy in the Wag! Organization. We actually are really excited about AI and its potential. We think it’s been a great tool for employees to accelerate their efficiency, their task and ability to just create more, frankly, like do more with less. As a result, we’re really thinking about headcount and SG&A efficiency in 2024 as a function of AI and automation. We don’t expect much headcount changes. We think we’re going to see that operating leverage in the business. The second thing is we’re very excited about the future for Wag! and 2024 specifically, I think you’ll continue to see us leaning into long-term profitable growth.