Earnings call transcript: ACCESS Newswire Q2 2025 earnings miss forecasts

Access Newswire Inc. (ACCS) reported its Q2 2025 earnings, revealing a miss on both earnings per share (EPS) and revenue forecasts. The company posted an EPS of $0.14, falling short of the projected $0.185. Revenue for the quarter came in at $5.6 million, missing the forecasted $6.22 million. According to InvestingPro data, the stock is currently trading near its Fair Value, with analysts setting price targets between $13 and $15. Despite the earnings miss, the stock price remained steady in premarket trading at $12.1, unchanged from the previous close.

Key Takeaways

• Access Newswire missed both EPS and revenue expectations for Q2 2025.
• The company reported a 7% year-over-year revenue decline.
• Operational improvements included a 12% reduction in expenses and a 3% sequential revenue growth.
• Stock price remained stable in premarket trading despite the earnings miss.

Company Performance

Access Newswire’s Q2 2025 performance was marked by a revenue decline of 7% year-over-year, totaling $5.6 million. Despite this, the company achieved a sequential revenue growth of 3% from Q1 2025. Cost-cutting measures led to a 12% reduction in operational expenses, reflecting a focus on efficiency amid challenging market conditions. InvestingPro analysis reveals impressive gross profit margins of 76.3%, though the company operates with short-term liquidity constraints, as current obligations exceed liquid assets.

Financial Highlights

• Revenue: $5.6 million, a 7% decrease year-over-year
• Earnings per share: $0.14, below the forecast of $0.185
• Gross margin: 76%
• Operating loss: $249,000
• Positive cash flow from operations: $135,000

Earnings vs. Forecast

Access Newswire reported an EPS of $0.14, missing the forecasted $0.185 by $0.045. Revenue also fell short, coming in at $5.6 million against an expected $6.22 million. This marks a notable miss in both key financial metrics, which could weigh on investor sentiment.

Market Reaction

Despite the earnings miss, Access Newswire’s stock price remained stable in premarket trading at $12.1, unchanged from the previous close. The stock is currently trading below its 52-week high of $13.35, indicating potential for recovery if future performance improves. InvestingPro data shows strong momentum with a 22.1% return over the past six months and a year-to-date gain of 35.4%. Get access to 7 additional ProTips and comprehensive financial analysis with an InvestingPro subscription.

Outlook & Guidance

Looking forward, Access Newswire aims to expand its subscriber base to 1,500 by year-end and increase annual recurring revenue (ARR) to $15,000 per customer. The company is also focused on developing comprehensive PR engagement reporting and enhancing its product offerings, including AI-powered systems and platform integrations. According to InvestingPro’s Financial Health assessment, the company maintains a FAIR overall score of 2.19, with particularly strong ratings in cash flow and price momentum metrics. Analysts predict profitability this year, with an EPS forecast of $0.43 for FY2025.

Executive Commentary

CEO Brian Valverney highlighted the company’s strategic focus, stating, "ARR growth is not just about top line expansion, it’s about building a resilient revenue base." He also noted, "We are seeing sequential revenue growth and healthy demand for our core business," and identified "white space opportunities in the market."

Risks and Challenges

• Continued revenue decline could impact future growth prospects.
• Market saturation in the corporate communications sector presents challenges.
• Economic uncertainties may affect customer spending and subscription growth.
• Execution risks related to new product developments and integrations.

Q&A

During the earnings call, analysts inquired about the synergies from the recent sale of Access Newswire’s compliance business and sought clarity on the company’s subscription strategy and product enhancement roadmap. The management also addressed questions regarding social media partnerships and their potential impact on future growth.

Full transcript - ACCESS Newswire Inc (ACCS) Q2 2025:

Oscar Roque, Accounting Manager, Access Newswire: Welcome to Access Newswire’s second quarter twenty twenty five earnings conference call. My name is Oscar Roque, and I work in the finance team as the accounting manager. And as of this September, I will have been here six years. I started working at the company in 2019 in the compliance division as an XBRL compliance specialist and for the past three years in the accounting and finance department. It’s such a pleasure to be your host today.

In just a moment, you’ll hear from our founder and chief executive officer, Brian Bowery, and our chief financial officer, Steve Nir, who will walk you through the company’s performance for the quarter. Before we begin, I’d like to read a brief version of our Safe Harbor statement. I’d like to remind you that statements made in this conference call concerning future revenues, results from operations, financial position, markets, economic conditions, product releases, partnerships and any other statements that may be construed as a prediction of future performance or events are forward looking statements, which may involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors, which may cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such statements. Non GAAP results will also be discussed on the call. The company believes the presentation of non GAAP information provides useful supplementary data concerning the company’s ongoing operations and is provided for informational purposes only.

With that said, I’d like to introduce the company’s founder and chief executive officer, Brian Valverney, and our chief financial officer, Steve Ner. Brian?

Brian Bowery, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Access Newswire: Good morning and thank you, Oscar. I’ve enjoyed watching you progress over the years from working within our compliance team at the beginning, then becoming a member of our accounting department to you sitting and passing your CPA exams just recently. And by passing, I mean crushing it. And now in the recent quarter, becoming our new accounting manager. Congratulations, sir.

You exemplify everything a company and a coworker could ever ask for. Your passion for the business, your coworkers, and our customers are truly amazing. I have no doubt you will continue to thrive and continue to contribute in an absolute meaningful way. Little fact I hope Oscar won’t mind me sharing. Not only has Oscar converted thousands of financial statements into XBRL and and tied dozens of quarterly statements under Steve’s direction, but most impressively, Oscar is multilingual and speaks four different languages.

As you know, regardless of how busy or focused we are at any given period, we have to enjoy having a little fun with our team each quarter. Having them host a company call, it builds a connection beyond management to the shareholders, partners and listeners. With that, good morning, everyone, and welcome, and thank you for taking the time to speak with Steve and I today on the second quarter results performance. Our press release, which is accessible in our newsroom, was released pre market this morning and provides key takeaways on the performance for the quarter. Revenues delivered from second quarter were $5,600,000 compared to $6,000,000 in Q2 last year and $5,500,000 in first quarter of this year.

The year over year decrease is attributable to our product mix transformation from a pay as you go business to a subscription based business. As this begins to shape our business long term, this is an indicator of the sequential growth that we are now seeing from first to second quarter. The shift drove further ARR on our subscription business higher for the quarter over the prior year. Specifically, our subscription customers increased 12% to nine seventy one from eight sixty seven in Q2 of last year and also up 2% from Q1 sequentially this year of nine fifty five. ARR also increased 10% from $10,000 to a little over $11,000 in the second quarter of the year compared to last year and sequentially consistent from the Q1 of this year.

We are encouraged to see gross margins coming in at 76% for the quarter, something I know we need to continue to evolve. Customer experience and editorial continue to be the focus of improvements, refinements and automation. This is something to build on. I think we’re on plan and we’ll continue to be mindful of further efficiencies to deliver at these levels without sacrificing customer satisfaction. Before I turn the call over to Steve to discuss the results in more detail, I wanted to highlight some of the go forward metrics that we will discuss on today’s call.

Total customer accounts, total subscriptions, ARR of our subscription business, news distribution volumes, and something new to discuss is our ARR per employee. There’s a lot more to talk about today, so I will turn the call over to Steve to cover the quarter and year end highlights. Steve?

Steve Nir, Chief Financial Officer, Access Newswire: Thank you, Brian, and good morning, everyone. As Brian mentioned, we had a solid quarter, generating increased EBITDA, non GAAP net income and positive cash flow from operating activities. I will now discuss some of the details which led to these results. Total revenue for the 2025 was $5,600,000 a decrease of $399,000 or 7% compared to $6,000,000 for the same period of 2024. For the 2025, total revenue was $11,100,000 a $495,000 or 4% decrease from $11,600,000 The decrease was due to a slight decrease across our various product lines, including a decrease in core press release revenue of 42%, respectively, due to lower revenue per release as a result of product mix.

However, we experienced an increase in volumes of 86% during these periods. As we move customers to subscriptions, we expect to see some ebb and flow regarding average price per release as we learn our customers’ behaviors. During the quarter, our gross margin percentage decreased 1% from 77% of revenue to 76%, however increased overall for the 2025 to 77% of revenue from 76%. The increase for the six month period is primarily driven by optimization of our operational teams and lower headcount. The quarterly results were impacted by higher distribution costs as we continue to enhance our distribution network as well as the lower revenue reported during the period.

Gross margin decreased $362,000 or 8% and $273,000 or 3% for the three and six months ended 06/30/2025 respectively, as compared to the same period of the prior year. Moving to operating loss. We posted an operating loss from continuing operations of $249,000 for Q2 twenty twenty five and $926,000 for the 2025, compared to operating losses of $531,000 and $1,400,000 during the same periods of 2024. The decrease in operating loss, despite the decrease in gross margin, is a result of lower operating expenses. General and administrative expenses decreased $90,000 or 5% for the 2025 compared to the 2024 due to a reduction in headcount and employee related expenses, including stock compensation expenses.

For the 2025, general and administrative expenses increased $224,000 or 6% compared to the 2024, which was primarily driven by a one time benefit recorded in the 2024 of approximately $340,000 due to the reversal of stock compensation related to the resignation of an executive officer. Sales and marketing expenses decreased $481,000 or twenty five percent and $958,000 or 24% for the three and six months ended 06/30/2025, as compared to the same periods of 2024. This decrease is due to lower employee related and advertising expenses, partially offset by additional rebranding costs incurred during the six month period of 2025. Product development expenses decreased $64,000 or 9% during the three months ended 06/30/2025, as compared to the same period of 2024 and remain consistent for the six months ended 06/30/2025, as compared to the same period of the prior year. Decreases in costs related to consultants were partially offset by declines in capitalized software.

Overall, operating expenses decreased by $644,000 or twelve percent and $740,000 or 7% for the three and six months ended 06/30/2025, as compared to the prior year, as we remain focused on developing efficiencies and optimizing our teams. On a GAAP basis, we reported a loss from continuing operations of $239,000 or $06 per diluted share during the 2025, compared to a net loss of $683,000 or $0.18 per diluted share during the 2024. For the 2025, net loss from continuing operations was $1,000,000 or $0.26 per diluted share compared to a net loss of $1,500,000 or $0.38 per diluted share in the 2024. Net loss from discontinued operations was $236,000 or $06 per diluted share for the 2025 compared to net income from discontinued operations of $690,000 or $0.18 per diluted share in the 2024. For the 2025, net income from discontinued operations was almost $6,000,000 or $1.54 per diluted share compared to $1,300,000 or $0.35 per diluted share for the same period of 2024.

The increase is primarily as a result of the gain from the sale of the compliance business. Looking to some non GAAP metrics, EBITDA was $480,000 or 9% of revenue for the 2025 compared to $211,000 or 4% of revenue for the 2024. For the 2025, EBITDA was $476,000 or 4% of revenue compared to $282,000 or 2% for the 2024. Adjusted EBITDA increased as well to $836,000 or 15% of revenue for the 2025 compared to $528,000 or 9% of revenue for the 2024. For the 2025, adjusted EBITDA more than tripled to $1,400,000 or 13% of revenue compared to $415,000 or 4% of revenue for the 2024.

Non GAAP net income for the 2025 increased $455,000 to $556,000 or $0.14 per diluted share compared to $101,000 or $03 per diluted share in the 2024. For the 2025, non GAAP net income increased over 1,000,000 to $762,000 or $0.20 per diluted share compared to a non GAAP loss of $265,000 or $07 per diluted share during the 2024. On the cash flow statement, we had another quarter of generating positive cash flow from operating activities, generating $135,000 for the quarter compared to negative $190,000 for the 2024. For the 2025, cash flow generated by operating activities increased to $882,000 compared to $796,000 for the 2024. Adjusted free cash flow also increased for both the quarter and 2025, amounting to $250,000 for the 2025 compared to negative $491,000 for the 2024, and for the 2025 amounted to $1,200,000 compared to $491,000 for the 2024.

I will now turn it back over to Brian, who will provide some updates on the business, customers, subscriptions, with everything else we have planned for the remainder of the year. Brian?

Brian Bowery, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Access Newswire: Thank you, Steve. I wanted to acknowledge the dedication of our team and the continued trust of our customers. While we continue to see industry headwinds in the quarter, we also achieved measurable progress in the areas that matter most for our long term strategy, growing reoccurring revenue, improving operational efficiencies and continuing to enhance the value relationship. The revenue trends and sequential growth that we’re seeing in the quarter, as Stephen has said a few minutes ago, total revenue for the second quarter came in at $5,600,000 representing a 3% sequential increase from Q1 year over year. We were down 7% compared to 6,000,000 in the same quarter last year.

And we anticipate that given the focus spent on post close compliance business service agreements, but the sequential growth tells a more important story. We’re finding our footing again and the underlying demand of our core business is healthy. The average revenue per employee and operational leverage is something else I’d like to talk about. One of the most encouraging metrics this quarter is our annual reoccurring revenue per employee or ARR. This is an important measurement for us in the business as it reflects both our productivity and the scalability of our business model.

Over the past several quarters, we have been disciplined about staffing levels while continuing to invest in automation and efficiency tools while shedding our compliance business. The result is that our ARR per employee has grown meaningfully even in a challenging revenue environment. This is not just cost control story. It’s about building a business that can scale profitably as we add more customers without adding additional equivalent head count. It’s about creating operational leverage so that each incremental dollar of ARR carries more margin to the bottom line.

ARR on a full time basis for FTE came in at $216,000 for the period ended June 30, a business KPI we believe we can continue to increase by year’s end. For context, according to Virtual Research, SaaS medium ARR per full time equivalent comes in around $283,000, and top performing enterprises deliver a little over 300,000 per employee. As a comparison, at the 2024, ARR per employee was 205,000. Obviously, key to this is top line revenue growth and continued operational efficiencies, but we feel strongly we can deliver top SaaS performance over the next eighteen to twenty four months. Our shift towards subscriptions.

Another major focus area is our ongoing transition to a more subscription driven revenue mix. Historically, a meaningful portion of our revenues had been tied to project based and transactional activity. While those can be high margin and valuable, they are still less predictable. We know that our sustained growth and shareholder value creation, we need a higher percentage of our business coming from renewable subscription based contracts. We’ve been systematically repositioning our offerings, our sales process and even our pricing structure to support this shift.

This includes bundling services in a way that creates more value for the customer while locking in multiple period commitments. It also means investing in onboarding and customer success so that once a client comes in, they see enough immediate value to stay for years, not just months. This is an area that we need to continue to get better at and feel confident in our platform and our people to deliver. With the transaction of compliance, we spent a good bit of time since February dedicated to the separation of the business units, something we expected to be done sooner. And as a result, our product development and feature rich expected add ons were delayed slightly for good reason, something we are fully confident we will have back on track in the second half of the year.

The internal AI advancements and proprietary language models have been deployed. We ended the prior quarter talking about this coming and the internal press release validation process has been delivered into production for our staff, saving approximately 5%

Brian Valverney, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Access Newswire: of the

Brian Bowery, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Access Newswire: editorials time spent per article. In the second half of the year, we will be releasing the customer facing components to this, so that we expect it will deliver clearer, more actionable stories for our customers that we also further deliver operational efficiencies of another 5% to 10% of editorial time. To deliver on this growth, we have to become a complete platform for our customer communication needs. Therefore, we will be delivering before years end some significant partnerships that will integrate our platforms with leading social media management tools. The use of segments in a press release is going to be a key driver to how a brand message is delivered to its audiences via traditional news outlets, social platforms, internal corp comm systems, as well as how the media and influencers cover the brand and how we report and benchmark the impact of the story.

Our subscriber growth targets. We’ve set clear goals by year’s end, we still aim to have over 1,500 subscribers on our platform. This is an ambitious target, and we are going to do everything in our ability to deliver on the target. But a shift in keeping customers stickier has become a priority and believe there is more work to be done here in order to move our business closer to 75% reoccurring subscription revenue by the end of the year. We ended the quarter with growth in subscription count.

And more importantly, the quality of those subscriptions are still continuing to improve, meaning longer contract durations, larger leverage contract values and higher cross product adoption. We look forward to our sales funnel and see strong conversion rates and areas that we need to improve Our sales and marketing teams have been focused on specific verticals where our value proposition is strongest and our pipeline going into the second half of the year supports our confidence in hitting our subscriber revenue numbers. Our ARR growth at to the year end road gives a key metric that will define our 2025 success. As I mentioned earlier, ARR per employee is trending upwards, but we’re also focused on the total ARR expansion. We believe that by leaning into subscription sales, leveraging up sale opportunities with our existing customer base and continuing to expand our distribution reach, we can finish the year with ARR meaningfully higher than we were where we’re standing today.

I want to emphasize that ARR growth is not just about top line expansion, it’s also about building a resilient revenue base that we can count on for quarters and quarters, even when market conditions are less predictable. It’s about creating visibility for our investors, stability for our employees, and ongoing value for our customers. New subscriptions sold in the second quarter were an average ARR of almost $12,000 Now if we move along to cost structure and margin improvement, something we’ve talked about in prior calls. Earlier this year, we committed to reducing our operational expenses. I’m pleased to report that these reductions have been realized and you’re seeing them here in Q2 results today, and they’ll continue to be fully reflected in the second half of the year, absent the investment that we’re making in our sales and marketing teams.

This is evident in our cash flows from operations as well as our adjusted EBITDA numbers Steve just spoke about. Combined with our shift towards higher margin subscription revenues, we expect these savings to flow directly into improved operating margins. This positions us well for the second half of the year and beyond, with incremental ARR growth should yield us even greater profitability without proportional increases in costs. Before I close, I want to take a moment to talk about the broader market landscape. The communications and investor relations technology sector is evolving rapidly.

Customers are looking for integrated solutions that combine content creation, distribution, analytics and engagement in a single platform. They also expect faster turnaround times, deeper reach, and more actionable insights. Axis Newswire is positioned to deliver exactly that. Our Axis distribution network is not only competitive in terms of reach and reliability, but it is also backed by a platform that makes it easier for customers to create, manage and measure their communications. This is an important differentiator.

Many of our competitors focus on one piece of the puzzle, but our integrated approach allows us to capture more of the customers’ workflow and potentially increase stickiness and lifetime value. Another advantage is our scale and target verticals. We’ve developed strong transactions and industries like life sciences, small cap public companies, newly formed SMBs and certain regulatory sectors where our backgrounds of compliance expertise make us a differentiator. These verticals often require ongoing frequent communication with investors and the public and the markets, making them ideal candidates for subscription based services. A controversial area that I’m pushing our teams to think about is something that is very bold and internally have called killthereport.

And not only really get rid of the distribution report, but revolutionize the traditional way it is delivered and consumed by the customer. The industry has grown old, okay, very old of the five day PR report and nothing more than links to your releases traffic counts and geographic locations of your engagement. If you’re lucky, brand monitoring reports from a third party for an additional fee. Often not shareable or easy to benchmark against. We are somewhat guilty.

Following the market and what the customer perception for is for a deliverable. It’s what I actually used to call the PR report as the deliverability report. I envision a very different concept here. One where the report is built based on what you want to know by the hour, by the day, or by the week. A report that delivers on every metric you could ever want in one interface.

Not like today where companies are buying several different analytic systems and brand monitoring and benchmarking softwares to help them measure their engagement. We will deliver on this by the 2026 for all of our subscribing customers. This will also be a deliverable we believe we can drive further also help improve retention and differentiation in the market. On our next quarterly call, we will talk a lot about the details of this new product. We’re seeing sequential revenue growth and healthy demand for our core business.

Our ARR per employee is improving indicating we’re gaining more productivity and efficiency from our teams evident in our operating expenses decreasing 12% for the quarter. We’re well on our way to transitioning into a new subscription led business model. Our target subscribers by year end is aggressive, but within reach, supporting by healthy sales pipeline and strong retention. Cost disciplines are in place and we expect incremental margin improvement in the back half of the year. Our marketing position is strong with clear competitive advantages in our target verticals.

We believe these steps will create a stronger, more predictable and more profitable access newswire, one that’s positioned to grow not just in size, but in quality of earnings. With that, I’ll turn the call over to the operator for the question and answer session. Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. At this time, we’ll be conducting our question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. And you may press star two if you would like to remove your question from the queue.

Our first question is coming from Luke Horton with Northland Securities. Your line is live.

Luke Horton, Analyst, Northland Securities: Yes. Hey, guys. Thanks for taking the questions here. Just wanted to start on kind of an overall update on the new business today. So you sold the compliance business.

You’ve combined the Newswire and Accesswire brands. Just wondering if any incremental synergies or benefits to the business from these actions that maybe you didn’t expect originally?

Brian Valverney, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Access Newswire: Hey, good morning, Luke. Anything additional that we were able to achieve has yet to show through in the financials. I would tell you that there’s likely some infrastructure costs that we’ll see benefits for in the back half of this year, likely after this month that that will flow through in the OpEx savings side of the equation. I tell you that the core Access Newswire business as a headcount perspective and an OpEx expense perspective is likely fairly consistent today as to what it will be through the end of the year. So we’ll see some, you know, probably call it a 100 to a $150,000 in in savings here in a quarter and a half from infrastructure costs.

And and going into next year, we’ll we’ll continue to see that. But I would be fair to caution the fact that, to be honest, as we scale infrastructure for natural language processing and AI, you’re likely gonna see some of those costs come back as customers begin to use more of those solutions on our platform. We will also see some additional AI benefits to automation that will also help optimize some headcount levels both inside and outside the company. And so we’ll definitely talk about that in the next quarter or so.

Luke Horton, Analyst, Northland Securities: Okay, got it. Yeah, and then just kind of shifting over to the kind of new customer pipeline. I know you’ve got a big existing base of customers who aren’t on subscriptions yet. I guess, how much of the focus is on the existing customers getting over to the subscription model versus kind of net new customers you’re going after? And could you just give us a reminder of what kind of the sweet spot is here for new customers or for the new customer pipeline?

Brian Valverney, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Access Newswire: Yeah. In the last three quarters, we’ve worked through our customer demographic profiles of usage and spend to delineate which ones we believed would be most advantageous to convert from a pay as you go or a bundle product or a stand alone product into a full subscription. So, generally, we’re targeting customers that had annual previous spends above 5,000, sub 15,000, and and this is the majority of those customers. We’ve done a fairly good job of converting the ones and now those categories. But as you climb up and spend, the customers are generally very different.

And so that’s where we see some of the ARR benefits to us both on an ARR per customer as well as per employee is that like we showed and talked about today, we’ve got some large cap customers coming in, buying the platform at $30.40, $50,000 and two year deals that we are getting confidence there that we’ll be able to start focusing on those folks at the back half of the year. But look, to be fair, to get to our numbers, we’ve got to have an inbound flux of customers coming in, finding value in our subscriptions, both public and private, to be able to continue that growth.

Luke Horton, Analyst, Northland Securities: Got it. And then, I guess, just on on subscriptions for for your customers that do have subscriptions, is there a percentage that are under multiyear subscriptions? Is that kind of a focus here, or or is mostly just annual renewals kind of as pricing is still working itself out here? Or are you focusing more trying to get more of those multiyear subscriptions?

Brian Valverney, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Access Newswire: Yeah. I I I think it’s indicative to believe that a multiyear subscription comes from a more enterprise and larger mega cap company. Right? The the SMB categories, if I can just kinda put those in a in a bucket of, you know, small micro nano cap companies and just private companies in general, call them SMBs, they typically are not gonna commit for a long term contract. And that’s not just us.

That’s kind of an industry standard thing that we see and have seen for years. But if you think about companies like, know, and Sir William’s or, you know, a a Blackberry or Moderna, some of the larger brands that we’ve got, they’re they’re generally buying in two, three, four year deals or buying on terms that give them the right to have the fixed pricing for multi years. So that I think is not going to change. To be fair, as we launch our pressrelease.com single circuit platform next month, we likely are gonna see maybe even a shorter term subscription as we get customers really wanting to utilize the benefits of the platform to get them stickier. So yeah, I don’t know that that’s as big an issue as much as it is.

I’m just making sure that we’re showing value to the customer every day and it keeps them coming back.

Luke Horton, Analyst, Northland Securities: Got it. Yeah. And then just lastly here, I know you touched on this in your prepared remarks, but could you just kind of go over some of the product enhancements you mentioned that are slated for the back half of the year and kind of what you’re most excited about as we progress through ’twenty five and into ’twenty six?

Brian Valverney, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Access Newswire: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And a lot of them, I wish that we would have been able to talk about the show today, but for obvious reasons with TSAs, with our compliance business, there’s only so much that can be done. Here this quarter, we likely will take what we’re calling internally is our PR Checker and Validator system that is helping our editors move through articles much quicker than previously. We’re gonna review that tool in an interface with our customer this quarter to allow the client to have access to it.

So what that’s gonna do is check the tonality, check their messaging, run through our compliance distribution requirements, and and before even the editor sees it, give the customer some sort of benefit to what they should expect to get out of this press release. What kind of engagement will they get at picking the right distribution? Should they be selecting different distribution and using our media database to pitch those customers all at the same time? So that, although does not sound like a very, to be fair, sexy add on and feature benefit, it is going to move the customer throughout the ecosystem and the platform, getting them to use more of the tools, which in our belief creates a more sticky process. And that’s kind of a stepping stone to what we talked about at the end of the call is what the new distribution engagement profile will look like for a customer.

Is that it will not only pull where your article is going, who’s seeing it, but also who you pitched and who they engaged, and what your ranking is against your peers. And so that will be kinda late this year, early next year as we release some of those. You’ll see some Sprinkl features that will come into the system. We’ve got a very significant upgrade coming to our White Glove webcasting platform that’s about to happen here in about a month and a half. It’s a big refresh, something we have not had in quite some time.

It’s one of our most stable sticky LTV products that we’ve ever had in the subscription side. So we’re advancing that solution to make our earnings calls a little more active with our clients and much more scalable because we’re seeing audiences starting to grow again across the board in webcast and less in teleconference. Yeah, there’s a whole slate of them next quarter. We’re gonna talk specifically about them and spend a good bit of time. And and if we’re fortunate enough with our webcast upgrade, we’ll be able to actually show some real time things for folks to see as well.

Luke Horton, Analyst, Northland Securities: Okay. Great. Awesome. Well, I appreciate the updates there, Brian, and and thanks for taking the questions, and and congrats on a nice quarter here.

Brian Valverney, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Access Newswire: Thanks Luke, I appreciate it.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question is coming from Jacob Stefan with Lake Street Capital Markets. Your line is live.

Jacob Stefan, Analyst, Lake Street Capital Markets: Hey. Good morning, guys. Appreciate you taking the questions. I just wanted to touch on a comment you guys made in the prepared remarks. You kind of mentioned ARR should be meaningfully higher than today.

I think last quarter, we kind of talked about ARR of $14,000 per customer for new onboards. But I mean, has that shifted at all? Or is there anywhere that you’re maybe exceeding that number or falling short?

Brian Valverney, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Access Newswire: Yeah. I think you’re you’re right. I think new deals in q one were 14, but I think the the sequential growth when you look at all subscriptions for q one compared to q two had some minimal gain there. Average deals sold in q two were about $12,000. I think it’s $12,039 is what the number was.

So, yeah, sequentially a little down, but it’s it’s really not a benchmark that we’re looking at as a barometer to suggest if our subscription business is healthy or not. Some of that comes weighted into larger deals that happened during the quarter. I think for us, the more the more salient thing is for us to look at the frequency. How many are we getting? What is the demographic profile?

And where are they coming from? And and one of the things we didn’t touch on in our prepared remarks, I think is worth noting in this, is that we as a marketplace in the corporate communications, investor relations, public relations space, you have an industry CAGR of single digits. And there is a tremendous amount of what we call internally white space in the market to where we can go find new opportunities where our peers and competitors are not. And we’ve identified several of those places, and that’s where we get the confidence and where we’ll be able to grow this number, in the quarters to come is because there’s areas that the industry is just not focused on that we’ve identified, and that we believe that we can be successful there, that’s gonna drive and fuel a good amount of our growth over the next several quarters and into the next couple of years. So I’m not concerned about the number being different sequentially.

Year over year is higher, and I think that’s the important barometer for us. And lastly, I think the reality for us is we’ve gotta get stickier. We’ve gotta continue to have feature advancements and get to our customers and be talking to them and do case studies and white papers. And we just have not been able to do that in Q2, but we’re focused on trying to achieve that here in the back half of the year.

Jacob Stefan, Analyst, Lake Street Capital Markets: Got it. That’s really helpful. And then maybe just to touch on kind of Luke’s question from from the last one here. The social media partnerships that you guys announced in in the second half here that should be coming, maybe help us kind of understand, you know, what does this do for, you know, your customers? How does it kind of change the, the overall, the value prop for them?

Brian Valverney, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Access Newswire: Yeah. It’s I I don’t wanna profess. I’m gonna use an analogy here, I don’t wanna profess that we are them, but, we’re taking a very Apple esque model to this. We don’t we we have not been first to market in social media. Right?

Like like a lot of things that Apple do really well, they let others go do it first. What we’ve we’ve looked at what Cision did, for example. Cision, I think, at last count spent 5 to $600,000,000 buying social media platforms trying to integrate it in Decision. And when you go to Decision today to draft a press release or monitor media or pitch, there’s six or seven different platforms to log into. So the customer has no value to this.

And so the reason why I bring this up is that if we’re going into SMBs or established enterprises, everybody has to make the assumption and understand in this industry that the customer has already long picked their social media platform. Right? Corporate communications and other departments in the organization that have that budget have already picked their tools. Right? They’re already integrated their enterprise into whatever social media monitoring, pitching, and analytics system they’ve got.

It it really would be very short sighted of us to believe that we could build something that they would want to buy, in, you know, in materiality, or two, even integrate somebody else’s solution to believe that we’re gonna get them to change. So the the focus that we’ve had in our product team is go out and find the top three social media platforms that both SMB and enterprise use and partner with them. So the reality would be as a customer in the back half of this year will will log in to their Access Newswire platform, and they’ll be prompted to connect those tools automatically with single API sign ups. And then we’ll be able to share and pull analytics back and forth between those systems to create an environment of which we’re not asking them to switch or change. And if they don’t have one of those tools and they wanna subscribe, we’ll have a partner referral agreement with them that they’ll be able to create an account on the fly automatically.

We believe that’s the best approach. To be fair, we’re not in the business of wanting to to litter shareholders and raise tens of millions dollars to try and buy some social start start up company. The risk factor is just doesn’t meet our profile for investment, and we think this strategic side of partnering is the best way to approach this.

Jacob Stefan, Analyst, Lake Street Capital Markets: Okay. Maybe just last one. You know, I I think the 1,500 customer target by year end is kind of a new metric, a new kind of detail that you’ve given us. Maybe help us kind of think through that in terms of what that means for ARR. Do you expect most of those to be new customers?

Do you expect them to be more transition customers from existing or just kind of help us think through that?

Brian Valverney, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Access Newswire: Yeah. I think it’s seventy thirty for growth, 70% coming from new, 30% coming from current customers that are that are upgrading, and or converting from, you know, single PayGo solutions that they’ve had in the past. I think that is a big going to be a big driver. It is an aggressive number. Right?

We said that a year ago what the what the goal was. You know, look, in hindsight, you look at your customer account numbers. We had compliance customers in there that were subscribers during that time. And so when you pull the numbers back, it is an aggressive target for us to hit, but we think both the the social media partnerships and add ons that we’re gonna bring and the additional things will drive, some customer activity. And we do have some new platforms, like pressrelease.com that’s scheduled to to be rereleased at the end of this month or early next month that we feel like will will fuel our opportunities to find customers that are willing to pay into a subscription model.

Jacob Stefan, Analyst, Lake Street Capital Markets: Okay. Got it. Very helpful. I appreciate the details here, guys.

Brian Valverney, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Access Newswire: Yeah. Thank you. I think I missed the ARR add on. Know, will the number get to 15? I think it was our goal by the end of the year.

Right? I think we’ll we’ll come really close. I think it’s it’s a if both are aggressive numbers, feature product add on is gonna be key to us to be able to get to that point. And look, if we see something changing in the next quarter, we’ll definitely message that. But at this time, we’re seeing the opportunity for us to get there.

Jacob Stefan, Analyst, Lake Street Capital Markets: Okay. Thank you.

Brian Valverney, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Access Newswire: Thanks, Jacob.

Operator: Thank you. Thank you. As a reminder, you have any questions or comments, please press 1 on your telephone keypad at. I’d like to turn the call back over to Bob Burney for any closing comments.

Brian Valverney, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Access Newswire: Thank you, Alex. We’re pleased with where we’re headed, and we have a clear focus on strategy on where we’re going here this year and into next year. We know that revenue growth is the ultimate, barometer, and getting the business to scale is paramount. We will deliver on this, and we will continue to see these levels of gross margins, expanded cash flows from operations and EBITDA percentages back to where we all want them to believe where we want them to be in the next couple of quarters. Thank you all.

Have a good, good day.

Operator: Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. This does conclude today’s call. You may disconnect your lines at this time, and have a wonderful day. And we thank you for your participation.

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