Nice post Willy, but to be clear, let's revisit that phase out of the low margin printing biz. Below are two quotes from the earnings conference call from Rory. The paragraph in red describes the biz, and the paragraph in blue tells that instead of just simply doing away with the business and revenue, they have partnered with another company to farm it out to them. They will share in the revenue and not have to do any of the work, pay any of the workers, or hold any of the inventory.
Absolutely brilliant! Win-win for everyone involved. It is relatively seamless for the customer and they won't have to have their printing needs done elsewhere. Verb's printing partner gets a whole lot of new business and one that is already set up for them. The employees that were effected by the decision all keep their jobs. Verb gets to offload all the low margin biz and now would look to grow that business since it is all margin for them. And we shareholders enjoy the additional revenue.
So effectively, while the revenue may go down, the profitability just took a moon shot as the cost of goods sold just went to almost nothing. There is now real incentive for Verb to push that product offering for their clients and I would not be surprised to see this grow.
Essentially they turned a low margin business into an all margin business with the stroke of a pen. Net net, win win for everyone.
"The legacy business: Printing, fulfillment and shipping is relatively low-margin business. In fact, some of that business was no-margin business. That business revenue is not recurring, is very unpredictable and can be very costly as it requires us to maintain warehouse facilities to store merchandise and supply for clients — and supplies for clients as well as costly equipment that needs to be maintained and a full-time staff that may be busy some weeks and some weeks not. Because that type of business is nonrecurring, nonpredictable and low margin, it commands a very low multiple. Accordingly, when valuing our business as a whole, one might incorrectly apply a lower multiple to the combined revenues than a higher multiple for the digital business. Knowing this when we acquired the company, we announced then, and I’ve repeated it on every earnings call we’ve done since then, that we developed a plan to gradually phase out of that business and focus on the growth of the monthly recurring subscription business. I provided clear guidance repeatedly that our exit from that business would have an impact on our top line revenue and will, therefore, not be an accurate or reliable metric to measure our financial performance."
"I have previously provided guidance, and our focus is on growing a high margin recurring subscription-based digital revenue while we continue to exit the legacy low-margin printing and fulfillment business, and that revenue from that legacy business would be down quarter-over-quarter. However, as we now look forward to Q2 2020 and beyond, we’ve developed and executed a plan to actually begin growing that legacy revenue without any cost to us. In February, we entered into an agreement with a company in the business of providing enterprise-class printing, sample assembly, warehousing, packaging, shipping and fulfillment services. We have established an automated process pursuant to which they receive orders for samples and merchandise from us as and when we receive them from our clients and users and they do the printing, assembling, storing, packaging, shipping of the samples of merchandise on our behalf. The agreement provides a revenue share arrangement that is designed to guarantee net revenue to us from every sale, enhance our relationship with our clients by continuing to service their nondigital needs while eliminating the labor and overhead costs associated with the provision of such services by us. So effectively, we’ve gone from a low-margin business to an all-margin business.'
Absolutely brilliant! Win-win for everyone involved. It is relatively seamless for the customer and they won't have to have their printing needs done elsewhere. Verb's printing partner gets a whole lot of new business and one that is already set up for them. The employees that were effected by the decision all keep their jobs. Verb gets to offload all the low margin biz and now would look to grow that business since it is all margin for them. And we shareholders enjoy the additional revenue.
So effectively, while the revenue may go down, the profitability just took a moon shot as the cost of goods sold just went to almost nothing. There is now real incentive for Verb to push that product offering for their clients and I would not be surprised to see this grow.
Essentially they turned a low margin business into an all margin business with the stroke of a pen. Net net, win win for everyone.
"The legacy business: Printing, fulfillment and shipping is relatively low-margin business. In fact, some of that business was no-margin business. That business revenue is not recurring, is very unpredictable and can be very costly as it requires us to maintain warehouse facilities to store merchandise and supply for clients — and supplies for clients as well as costly equipment that needs to be maintained and a full-time staff that may be busy some weeks and some weeks not. Because that type of business is nonrecurring, nonpredictable and low margin, it commands a very low multiple. Accordingly, when valuing our business as a whole, one might incorrectly apply a lower multiple to the combined revenues than a higher multiple for the digital business. Knowing this when we acquired the company, we announced then, and I’ve repeated it on every earnings call we’ve done since then, that we developed a plan to gradually phase out of that business and focus on the growth of the monthly recurring subscription business. I provided clear guidance repeatedly that our exit from that business would have an impact on our top line revenue and will, therefore, not be an accurate or reliable metric to measure our financial performance."
"I have previously provided guidance, and our focus is on growing a high margin recurring subscription-based digital revenue while we continue to exit the legacy low-margin printing and fulfillment business, and that revenue from that legacy business would be down quarter-over-quarter. However, as we now look forward to Q2 2020 and beyond, we’ve developed and executed a plan to actually begin growing that legacy revenue without any cost to us. In February, we entered into an agreement with a company in the business of providing enterprise-class printing, sample assembly, warehousing, packaging, shipping and fulfillment services. We have established an automated process pursuant to which they receive orders for samples and merchandise from us as and when we receive them from our clients and users and they do the printing, assembling, storing, packaging, shipping of the samples of merchandise on our behalf. The agreement provides a revenue share arrangement that is designed to guarantee net revenue to us from every sale, enhance our relationship with our clients by continuing to service their nondigital needs while eliminating the labor and overhead costs associated with the provision of such services by us. So effectively, we’ve gone from a low-margin business to an all-margin business.'
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