NASDAQ:NRC National Research Q1 2024 Earnings Report $10.69 +0.06 (+0.56%) As of 04/24/2025 04:00 PM Eastern Earnings History National Research EPS ResultsActual EPS$0.27Consensus EPS N/ABeat/MissN/AOne Year Ago EPSN/ANational Research Revenue ResultsActual Revenue$35.31 millionExpected RevenueN/ABeat/MissN/AYoY Revenue GrowthN/ANational Research Announcement DetailsQuarterQ1 2024Date5/7/2024TimeN/AConference Call DateWednesday, May 8, 2024Conference Call Time11:00AM ETUpcoming EarningsNational Research's Q1 2025 earnings is scheduled for Tuesday, May 6, 2025, with a conference call scheduled on Wednesday, May 7, 2025 at 11:00 AM ET. Check back for transcripts, audio, and key financial metrics as they become available.Conference Call ResourcesConference Call AudioConference Call TranscriptPress Release (8-K)Quarterly Report (10-Q)Earnings HistoryCompany ProfilePowered by National Research Q1 2024 Earnings Call TranscriptProvided by QuartrMay 8, 2024 ShareLink copied to clipboard.There are 4 speakers on the call. Operator00:00:01Good morning or good afternoon all and welcome to the National Research Corporation First Quarter Earnings Call. My name is Adam and I'll be your operator today. I will now hand the floor to Linda Stacey to begin. So Linda, please go ahead when you are ready. Speaker 100:00:20Thank you, Adam, and welcome, everyone, to National Research Corporation's 2024 First Quarter Earnings Call. My name is Linda Stacy, the company's Principal Financial Officer, and joining me on the call today are Mark Scudder from our executive leadership team and Helen Hurdie, our Chief Customer Officer. Before we continue, I'd like to point out this conference call includes forward looking statements related to the company that involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results or outcomes to differ materially from those currently anticipated. These forward looking statements are made pursuant to the Safe Harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. For further information about the facts that could affect the company's future results, please see the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Speaker 100:01:08With that, I'll turn it over to Mark. Speaker 200:01:10Okay. Thanks, Linda. Today, we'll talk about markets and strategy and then organizational changes and investments and then our financial results and outlook. To start, we have big financial goals over the next several years. First, doubling our total addressable market through portfolio additions, acquisitions and partnerships. Speaker 200:01:332nd, double digit annual revenue growth 3rd, expanding our margins and 4th, creating significant value for investors. The leadership team is highly aligned to these goals and we're very motivated to deliver. And the strategy for doing that is to combine historical strengths, healthcare DNA founded on decades of benchmarks and trusted thought leadership, unrivaled client service and a mission driven organization with an expanding portfolio of products and innovative new technologies. We think the combination of technology and specific healthcare insights is important in our market and to enhance outcomes and experiences for everyone in the healthcare journey while improving our clients' bottom lines. Our clients generally come from the top 400 healthcare systems in the United States. Speaker 200:02:29They're under enormous pressure to improve health outcomes, control costs, retain qualified employees and expand market share, all while dealing with increasing regulation. The challenge for patients and consumers of healthcare is no less significant as all of us navigate the changing landscape. For our clients, the projected value of patients has never been higher, measuring both estimated lifetime spend and as an influencer of other consumers choice of their provider. At the same time, the cost of losing qualified caregiving associates has never been greater. Meanwhile, they have competition among healthcare systems and from new entrants like never before. Speaker 200:03:16There are correlations between consumer patient and associate experiences that impact loyalty outcomes and reputation. Therefore, the insights we deliver can improve lives and our clients' revenue and costs. We've talked with our clients and the way we're going to do that is through a broader experience perspective, greater strategic alignment, innovation and actionable insights that deliver more value. To deliver on these goals, we are filling portfolio gaps to provide enterprise wide experience solutions, offering clear thought leadership at a strategic level, applying a generative AI overlay across all of our solutions and aggressively building our sales team and sales approach. We're already making progress on these goals. Speaker 200:04:06We'll soon be in the market with new tools and insights across patient customer and employee experience solutions. Our AI and product teams are working with customers to prioritize and roll out a new generation of solutions to enhance care and improve experiences. And we expect to be in the market with AI enhanced healthcare specific solutions later this year. We also have exciting developments in our associate team which Helen will cover in a few minutes. And one last thing I'd like to mention is PACE. Speaker 200:04:371 of our key organizational themes is now. We're accelerating decision making and streamlining as many processes as possible. This benefits our clients and our associates as more resources are devoted to high value activities and the successes compound. With the changes and investments we're making, we believe we're well positioned to capitalize on all of our goals. And now I'll turn it over to Helen. Speaker 300:05:01Thanks, Mark. We had an exciting Q1. This was a quarter of transformation where the groundwork was laid for us to achieve new Our revenue team has moved under the executive leadership of Jason Hahn. During the quarter, we've added several new leaders and sales associates, restructured compensation plans, changed territory coverages and implemented new training programs. We think these additional investments and focused expertise will help accelerate pipeline growth and conversion. Speaker 300:05:44All service functions are under my leadership. The restructure allows the team members to have more time to focus on strategy with their client base, and it gives them the opportunity to increase their interaction levels and depth of contacts within the client organizations. We've also expanded our executive rounding. We previously announced the addition of Jennifer Barron, who will be joining us soon from serving as the Chief Experience Officer at UC Davis Health. Jennifer will be instrumental in expanding our thought leadership programs and providing peer level executive support to our clients. Speaker 300:06:25Christophe Louvien is the executive leader of our product and technology teams. Our technology teams have been reorganized into small, nimble teams with defined product domains that allow for autonomy and customer centricity. We've also invested in new AI and product leadership to ensure we will be delivering innovative AI solutions to our clients at a pace unmatched before. As a leadership team, we've developed company wide goals and objectives that align with our strategic goals. The company is working together to streamline, automate, innovate and create operational excellence. Speaker 300:07:09I'll now turn it back to Linda to discuss the financial results and outlook. Speaker 100:07:14Thanks, Helen. Our financial results were consistent with our expectations and relatively flat year over year. Our focus remains on executing our strategic plan. The main levers for revenue and expenses are reaching an expanded TAM or total addressable market by broadening our CX, PX, EX solutions as a portfolio across all of healthcare as well as a generative AI overlay across all of our products. We expect this to double our TAM. Speaker 100:07:45As part of this effort, we expect to increase our IT investment, especially in AI over several quarters. Rolling out new products developed through internal innovation, acquisitions and partnerships through an expanded sales force that we expect to grow substantially with a steady build over the next 2 to 3 years. From a revenue perspective, given the sales cycle and multiyear contract model prevalent in our industry, we expect sales from new products and additional sales associates to ramp a few quarters behind the initial cost, but to generate TRCD of several times the annual investment. Our goal will be to offset as much of the ramp up cost as possible through a combination of internal process improvement, AI to replace manual tasks and a tightly managed procurement. From a balance sheet perspective, as of March 31, 2024, we had approximately $40,000,000 of net debt, dollars 23,000,000 available on the line of credit and $56,000,000 available under the delayed draw term loan facility. Speaker 100:08:46We expect net debt to increase over the balance of the year for the reasons explained above, but to remain at a comfortable level. We are continuing to follow our capital allocation priorities to fund organic innovation and growth investments, dividends and share repurchases. For the Q1 of 2024, our operating cash flows increased to 12,000,000 compared to $8,000,000 in 2023. During the quarter, we funded $4,000,000 for innovation and growth, including facilities improvements, and the company returned $18,000,000 to stockholders through dividends and stock repurchases. We retain flexibility to be opportunistic with our capital decisions, With approximately $11,000,000 remaining in our facilities investment to be funded over the next 3 to 4 quarters, we will gain additional flexibility beginning early in 2025 as those investments are completed. Speaker 100:09:37Overall, we are making good progress on our plan and remain committed to developing the solutions our clients want and providing the high level of service they've come to expect. That concludes my comments for this morning. Thank you for your time today. Operator, I will now ask you to open the call to any questions. Operator00:10:27As we have no questions, I'll hand the call back to the management team for any closing remarks. Speaker 100:10:32Thank you, Adam. Thank you all for joining our call today. We look forward to sharing our results again next quarter.Read morePowered by Conference Call Audio Live Call not available Earnings Conference CallNational Research Q1 202400:00 / 00:00Speed:1x1.25x1.5x2x Earnings DocumentsPress Release(8-K)Quarterly report(10-Q) National Research Earnings HeadlinesNational Research Appoints New Financial OfficerApril 22 at 5:14 PM | tipranks.comNational Research Stock Short Interest Report | NASDAQ:NRC | BenzingaApril 21, 2025 | benzinga.com[Action Required] Claim Your FREE IRS Loophole GuideThis shouldn't surprise anyone who's been paying attention, but... Pres. Trump may be about to unleash the biggest "dollar reset" since 1971.April 25, 2025 | Colonial Metals (Ad)National Research Stock Price, Quotes and Forecasts | NASDAQ:NRC | BenzingaApril 20, 2025 | benzinga.comShould You Be Impressed By National Research Corporation's (NASDAQ:NRC) ROE?April 18, 2025 | finance.yahoo.comA New Era of Trust: NRC Health’s 2025 Experience Perspective Report Reveals Insights to Elevate the Healthcare ExperienceApril 10, 2025 | finance.yahoo.comSee More National Research Headlines Get Earnings Announcements in your inboxWant to stay updated on the latest earnings announcements and upcoming reports for companies like National Research? Sign up for Earnings360's daily newsletter to receive timely earnings updates on National Research and other key companies, straight to your email. Email Address About National ResearchNational Research (NASDAQ:NRC) provides analytics and insights that facilitate measurement and enhancement of the patient and employee experience. Its portfolio of subscription-based solutions provides actionable information and analysis to healthcare organizations across a range of mission-critical, constituent-related elements, including patient experience, service recovery, care transitions, employee engagement, reputation management, and brand loyalty. The company also offers marketing solutions that allow the tracking of awareness, perception, and consistency of healthcare brands; assessment of competitive differentiators; and enhanced segmentation tools to evaluate needs, wants, and behaviors of communities through real-time competitive assessments and enhanced segmentation tools. In addition, it provides experience solutions, such as patient experience, employee engagement, health risk assessments, care transition, and improvement tools. Further, the company provides reputation solutions that allow healthcare organizations to share a picture of their organization and ensure that timely and relevant content informs consumer decision-making; and governance solutions for not-for-profit hospital and health system boards of directors, executives, and physician leadership. National Research Corporation was founded in 1981 and is headquartered in Lincoln, Nebraska.View National Research ProfileRead more More Earnings Resources from MarketBeat Earnings Tools Today's Earnings Tomorrow's Earnings Next Week's Earnings Upcoming Earnings Calls Earnings Newsletter Earnings Call Transcripts Earnings Beats & Misses Corporate Guidance Earnings Screener Earnings By Country U.S. Earnings Reports Canadian Earnings Reports U.K. Earnings Reports Latest Articles Seismic Shift at Intel: Massive Layoffs Precede Crucial EarningsRocket Lab Lands New Contract, Builds Momentum Ahead of EarningsAmazon's Earnings Could Fuel a Rapid Breakout Tesla Earnings Miss, But Musk Refocuses and Bulls ReactQualcomm’s Range Narrows Ahead of Earnings as Bulls Step InWhy It May Be Time to Buy CrowdStrike Stock Heading Into EarningsCan IBM’s Q1 Earnings Spark a Breakout for the Stock? Upcoming Earnings AbbVie (4/25/2025)AON (4/25/2025)Colgate-Palmolive (4/25/2025)HCA Healthcare (4/25/2025)NatWest Group (4/25/2025)Cadence Design Systems (4/28/2025)Welltower (4/28/2025)Waste Management (4/28/2025)AstraZeneca (4/29/2025)Booking (4/29/2025) Get 30 Days of MarketBeat All Access for Free Sign up for MarketBeat All Access to gain access to MarketBeat's full suite of research tools. Start Your 30-Day Trial MarketBeat All Access Features Best-in-Class Portfolio Monitoring Get personalized stock ideas. Compare portfolio to indices. Check stock news, ratings, SEC filings, and more. Stock Ideas and Recommendations See daily stock ideas from top analysts. Receive short-term trading ideas from MarketBeat. Identify trending stocks on social media. Advanced Stock Screeners and Research Tools Use our seven stock screeners to find suitable stocks. Stay informed with MarketBeat's real-time news. Export data to Excel for personal analysis. Sign in to your free account to enjoy these benefits In-depth profiles and analysis for 20,000 public companies. Real-time analyst ratings, insider transactions, earnings data, and more. Our daily ratings and market update email newsletter. Sign in to your free account to enjoy all that MarketBeat has to offer. Sign In Create Account Your Email Address: Email Address Required Your Password: Password Required Log In or Sign in with Facebook Sign in with Google Forgot your password? Your Email Address: Please enter your email address. Please enter a valid email address Choose a Password: Please enter your password. Your password must be at least 8 characters long and contain at least 1 number, 1 letter, and 1 special character. Create My Account (Free) or Sign in with Facebook Sign in with Google By creating a free account, you agree to our terms of service. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
There are 4 speakers on the call. Operator00:00:01Good morning or good afternoon all and welcome to the National Research Corporation First Quarter Earnings Call. My name is Adam and I'll be your operator today. I will now hand the floor to Linda Stacey to begin. So Linda, please go ahead when you are ready. Speaker 100:00:20Thank you, Adam, and welcome, everyone, to National Research Corporation's 2024 First Quarter Earnings Call. My name is Linda Stacy, the company's Principal Financial Officer, and joining me on the call today are Mark Scudder from our executive leadership team and Helen Hurdie, our Chief Customer Officer. Before we continue, I'd like to point out this conference call includes forward looking statements related to the company that involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results or outcomes to differ materially from those currently anticipated. These forward looking statements are made pursuant to the Safe Harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. For further information about the facts that could affect the company's future results, please see the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Speaker 100:01:08With that, I'll turn it over to Mark. Speaker 200:01:10Okay. Thanks, Linda. Today, we'll talk about markets and strategy and then organizational changes and investments and then our financial results and outlook. To start, we have big financial goals over the next several years. First, doubling our total addressable market through portfolio additions, acquisitions and partnerships. Speaker 200:01:332nd, double digit annual revenue growth 3rd, expanding our margins and 4th, creating significant value for investors. The leadership team is highly aligned to these goals and we're very motivated to deliver. And the strategy for doing that is to combine historical strengths, healthcare DNA founded on decades of benchmarks and trusted thought leadership, unrivaled client service and a mission driven organization with an expanding portfolio of products and innovative new technologies. We think the combination of technology and specific healthcare insights is important in our market and to enhance outcomes and experiences for everyone in the healthcare journey while improving our clients' bottom lines. Our clients generally come from the top 400 healthcare systems in the United States. Speaker 200:02:29They're under enormous pressure to improve health outcomes, control costs, retain qualified employees and expand market share, all while dealing with increasing regulation. The challenge for patients and consumers of healthcare is no less significant as all of us navigate the changing landscape. For our clients, the projected value of patients has never been higher, measuring both estimated lifetime spend and as an influencer of other consumers choice of their provider. At the same time, the cost of losing qualified caregiving associates has never been greater. Meanwhile, they have competition among healthcare systems and from new entrants like never before. Speaker 200:03:16There are correlations between consumer patient and associate experiences that impact loyalty outcomes and reputation. Therefore, the insights we deliver can improve lives and our clients' revenue and costs. We've talked with our clients and the way we're going to do that is through a broader experience perspective, greater strategic alignment, innovation and actionable insights that deliver more value. To deliver on these goals, we are filling portfolio gaps to provide enterprise wide experience solutions, offering clear thought leadership at a strategic level, applying a generative AI overlay across all of our solutions and aggressively building our sales team and sales approach. We're already making progress on these goals. Speaker 200:04:06We'll soon be in the market with new tools and insights across patient customer and employee experience solutions. Our AI and product teams are working with customers to prioritize and roll out a new generation of solutions to enhance care and improve experiences. And we expect to be in the market with AI enhanced healthcare specific solutions later this year. We also have exciting developments in our associate team which Helen will cover in a few minutes. And one last thing I'd like to mention is PACE. Speaker 200:04:371 of our key organizational themes is now. We're accelerating decision making and streamlining as many processes as possible. This benefits our clients and our associates as more resources are devoted to high value activities and the successes compound. With the changes and investments we're making, we believe we're well positioned to capitalize on all of our goals. And now I'll turn it over to Helen. Speaker 300:05:01Thanks, Mark. We had an exciting Q1. This was a quarter of transformation where the groundwork was laid for us to achieve new Our revenue team has moved under the executive leadership of Jason Hahn. During the quarter, we've added several new leaders and sales associates, restructured compensation plans, changed territory coverages and implemented new training programs. We think these additional investments and focused expertise will help accelerate pipeline growth and conversion. Speaker 300:05:44All service functions are under my leadership. The restructure allows the team members to have more time to focus on strategy with their client base, and it gives them the opportunity to increase their interaction levels and depth of contacts within the client organizations. We've also expanded our executive rounding. We previously announced the addition of Jennifer Barron, who will be joining us soon from serving as the Chief Experience Officer at UC Davis Health. Jennifer will be instrumental in expanding our thought leadership programs and providing peer level executive support to our clients. Speaker 300:06:25Christophe Louvien is the executive leader of our product and technology teams. Our technology teams have been reorganized into small, nimble teams with defined product domains that allow for autonomy and customer centricity. We've also invested in new AI and product leadership to ensure we will be delivering innovative AI solutions to our clients at a pace unmatched before. As a leadership team, we've developed company wide goals and objectives that align with our strategic goals. The company is working together to streamline, automate, innovate and create operational excellence. Speaker 300:07:09I'll now turn it back to Linda to discuss the financial results and outlook. Speaker 100:07:14Thanks, Helen. Our financial results were consistent with our expectations and relatively flat year over year. Our focus remains on executing our strategic plan. The main levers for revenue and expenses are reaching an expanded TAM or total addressable market by broadening our CX, PX, EX solutions as a portfolio across all of healthcare as well as a generative AI overlay across all of our products. We expect this to double our TAM. Speaker 100:07:45As part of this effort, we expect to increase our IT investment, especially in AI over several quarters. Rolling out new products developed through internal innovation, acquisitions and partnerships through an expanded sales force that we expect to grow substantially with a steady build over the next 2 to 3 years. From a revenue perspective, given the sales cycle and multiyear contract model prevalent in our industry, we expect sales from new products and additional sales associates to ramp a few quarters behind the initial cost, but to generate TRCD of several times the annual investment. Our goal will be to offset as much of the ramp up cost as possible through a combination of internal process improvement, AI to replace manual tasks and a tightly managed procurement. From a balance sheet perspective, as of March 31, 2024, we had approximately $40,000,000 of net debt, dollars 23,000,000 available on the line of credit and $56,000,000 available under the delayed draw term loan facility. Speaker 100:08:46We expect net debt to increase over the balance of the year for the reasons explained above, but to remain at a comfortable level. We are continuing to follow our capital allocation priorities to fund organic innovation and growth investments, dividends and share repurchases. For the Q1 of 2024, our operating cash flows increased to 12,000,000 compared to $8,000,000 in 2023. During the quarter, we funded $4,000,000 for innovation and growth, including facilities improvements, and the company returned $18,000,000 to stockholders through dividends and stock repurchases. We retain flexibility to be opportunistic with our capital decisions, With approximately $11,000,000 remaining in our facilities investment to be funded over the next 3 to 4 quarters, we will gain additional flexibility beginning early in 2025 as those investments are completed. Speaker 100:09:37Overall, we are making good progress on our plan and remain committed to developing the solutions our clients want and providing the high level of service they've come to expect. That concludes my comments for this morning. Thank you for your time today. Operator, I will now ask you to open the call to any questions. Operator00:10:27As we have no questions, I'll hand the call back to the management team for any closing remarks. Speaker 100:10:32Thank you, Adam. Thank you all for joining our call today. We look forward to sharing our results again next quarter.Read morePowered by