Cigna earnings beat by $0.04, revenue topped estimates
Access Newswire reported a notable improvement in its financial performance for the first quarter of 2025, highlighted by a higher gross margin and a reduction in operating losses. The company’s revenue saw a slight decline, but strategic adjustments and innovations are positioning it for future growth. According to InvestingPro data, the company maintains a market capitalization of $34.55 million, with analysts predicting a return to profitability this year despite current challenges.
Key Takeaways
- Gross margin increased to 78%, up from 75% in Q1 2024.
- Operating loss reduced to $677,000, showing improvement from the previous year’s $862,000.
- Access Newswire plans to launch new AI tools to boost efficiency by 10%.
Company Performance
Access Newswire demonstrated resilience in Q1 2025 with strategic cost reductions and a focus on innovation. Despite a 1.7% drop in revenue to $5.48 million compared to the same quarter last year, the company improved its gross margin to 78% and significantly reduced its operating loss. These results reflect a disciplined approach to managing expenses and leveraging technology to enhance productivity. InvestingPro analysis reveals the company’s strong free cash flow yield of 9%, though it currently trades at a high EBITDA multiple. Get access to 6 more exclusive ProTips and comprehensive financial analysis with InvestingPro.
Financial Highlights
- Total Revenue: $5.48 million (down 1.7% from Q1 2024)
- Gross Margin: 78% (up from 75% in Q1 2024)
- Operating Loss: $677,000 (improved from $862,000 in Q1 2024)
- Non-GAAP Net Income: $206,000 (compared to a $365,000 loss in Q1 2024)
- Adjusted EBITDA: $564,000 (10% of revenue, up from $61,000 in Q1 2024)
Outlook & Guidance
Access Newswire is optimistic about its future, with plans to reach 75% recurring revenue by the end of 2025. The company is targeting an increase in subscriptions and aims to introduce a lower-entry subscription product to attract more customers. With a current ratio of 0.78 and total revenue of $23.06 million in the last twelve months, the company’s transformation efforts are crucial. Dive deeper into Access Newswire’s financial health and growth potential with InvestingPro’s comprehensive research report, part of our coverage of 1,400+ US stocks. The introduction of AI-powered tools, such as the Press Release Content Validator and enhanced AI writer "Amy," is expected to improve operational efficiency and drive growth.
Executive Commentary
CEO Brian Balberny emphasized the company’s strategic focus, stating, "We are emerging as a very focused lean communications business." He also highlighted the importance of their subscription model, saying, "The market is telling us that... growth will come from our access PR subscriptions."
Risks and Challenges
- Industry Contraction: The PR industry is experiencing a contraction in revenues and volumes, which could impact Access Newswire’s growth.
- Market Shift: The move towards consolidated communication platforms may require further adaptation.
- Subscription Conversion: The company’s success hinges on converting non-subscription customers to its subscription model.
Access Newswire’s Q1 2025 performance indicates a positive trajectory, with improved margins and a strategic focus on innovation and subscriptions. The company’s ability to navigate industry shifts and leverage new technologies will be critical in maintaining this momentum.
Full transcript - ACCESS Newswire Inc (ACCS) Q1 2025:
Conference Operator: Greetings and welcome to the Access Newswire First Quarter twenty twenty five Earnings Conference Call. Please note this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to your host Mr. Sean Carlos. Sir, you may begin.
Sean Carlos, Director of Sales, Access Newswire: Welcome to Access Newswire’s first quarter twenty twenty five earnings conference call. My name is Sean Carlos, and I serve as the company’s director of sales. I’ve been in the press release and communications industry for nearly eleven years, including the past seven here at Access Newswire. It’s a pleasure to be your host today. In just a moment, you’ll hear from our Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Brian Balberny and our Chief Financial Officer, Steve Ner, 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, market, 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 and implied by such statements. Non GAAP results will also be discussed on the call. The company believes that 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 Belbernie and our Chief Financial Officer, Steve Nurt.
Brian?
Brian Balberny, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Access Newswire: Thank you, Sean. Your hosting today is a treat for us. I’ve enjoyed watching you progress over the last almost seven years. You’ve been a great mentor and knowledge treat for your team and our organization. I have no doubt you will continue to succeed, and we all look forward to seeing what the next seven years brings.
It’s exciting to go to market with you each and every day. Most of you don’t know this, but Sean purchased his very own Jedi fighter helmet a while back and he puts it on each day and now serves as his internal organization’s headshot. I love seeing this Sean, but our customers can rest assured that Sean surely takes it off before each and every call. Keep up your Jedi ability, sir. We love having a little fun here each quarter with our team.
Having them host our company call also gives you a little bit of our human approach to how we work together. With that, good morning, everyone. Welcome, and thank you for taking the time to speak with Steve and I today on our first quarter twenty twenty five performance. Our press release, which is accessible in our newsroom, was released pre market this morning and provides key takeaways on our performance for the quarter. Revenues delivered from Q1 were $5,476,000 compared to $5,572,000 in the first quarter last year.
The 1.7% decrease in revenues were a result of less public company activity in the period. Market driven volatility drives this customer profile to perform in this manner, something we believe will improve later this year. With that said, our core press release business grew 1% in revenues and 2% further in volume. Strategically, becoming Access Newswire and not a compliance and communications company was and is the right decision as we continue to believe in the addressable market for our public relations subscriptions and press release products. We are invigorated to see gross margin improvement, something we messaged last year that we believe would prove itself out this year.
Seeing results deliver 78% gross margins, 3% higher than Q1 last year at the 75% number is something to build on. I think we’re slightly ahead of pace and we will continue to be mindful of further efficiencies to deliver at these levels without sacrificing our customer satisfaction. Moving along to KPIs on customer counts and subscriptions. In the prior quarters, as we’ve been transitioning to subscription focused sales, we messaged that the average reoccurring revenue ARR would continue to increase with guidance that by the end of the year, ARR would be 14,000. For Q1, new subscriptions signed were $14,059 moving our average from 9,300 in Q1 last year to just over 11,139 this year in Q1.
That’s a 20% increase. If we look at total subscriptions, they were up 9% for the quarter compared to last year, up to 955. Keep in mind, these are communications subscriptions only as we have removed all compliance related metrics as a result of the sale of that compliance business. To reaffirm, we still believe that we can get to the 1,500 subscriptions by the end of this fiscal year, something I will talk a good bit about later in the call. Before I turn the call over to Steve though to discuss results in more detail, I want to be sure that we intimate to our stakeholders a few obvious points.
We recall from our prior year end call last Q4 at the end of Q1 this year, the financials would be a little bit messy with discontinued operations of our compliance business. We reduced the debt on the balance sheet by 78% as a result of the sales compliance business. We completely rebranded our business, the product offerings, pricing strategy and internal systems to drive this long term growth that we’re talking about today. We reduced headcount to realign with our go forward business, and we deliver gross margin messaging, ARR increases and customer growth, speaking of which also increased over 12,001 from last year. We are pleased on where we are, and we have a clear focus strategy on where we are headed.
We know that revenue growth is the ultimate goal and getting the business to scale is needing as paramount as we deliver this, we will continue to see these levels of gross margin, expanded cash flows from operations and EBITDA percentages back to where we’ve seen them several quarters ago. There’s a lot more to talk about today, so I’ll turn the call over to Steve to cover the quarter and year end
Conference Operator: highlights. Steve.
Steve Ner, Chief Financial Officer, Access Newswire: Thank you, Brian, and good morning, everyone. As Brian mentioned, a lot was accomplished during the first quarter of twenty twenty five that we believe will put us on the right path for growth in the quarters ahead. But for now, I will highlight some of the results we achieved during the first quarter of twenty twenty five. Total revenue was $5,500,000 a decrease of $96,000 or 2% compared to $5,600,000 for the same period of 2024. The decrease was due to slight decreases across our various product lines.
However, revenue from our core press release business increased 1% due to an increase in volume during the quarter. During the quarter, we experienced an increase in our gross margin percentage, which increased to 78% during the first quarter of twenty twenty five from 75 during the first quarter of twenty twenty four. Gross margin also increased to $4,300,000 from $4,200,000 The increase in gross margin percentage was due to optimization of our operational teams and lower headcount. Moving to operating loss, we posted an operating loss of $677,000 for the first quarter of twenty twenty five, compared to an operating loss of $862,000 during the first quarter of twenty twenty four. In addition to higher gross margin, operating expenses decreased 96,000 to $4,950,000 The decrease was primarily due to a reduction in sales and marketing expenses as a result of lower headcount and advertising costs, partially offset by an increase in general and administrative expenses due to a one time stock compensation benefit recorded in the first quarter of twenty twenty four of approximately $430,000 On a GAAP basis, we reported a loss from continuing operations of $765,000 or $0.20 per diluted share during the first quarter of twenty twenty five, compared to a net loss of $783,000 or $0.21 per diluted share during the first quarter of twenty twenty four.
Income from discontinued operations, net of tax, increased to $6,200,000 during the first quarter of twenty twenty five, compared to 6 and $44,000 in the first quarter of twenty twenty four. This increase is primarily the result of the gain on the sale of the compliance business Brian discussed earlier. Looking to some non GAAP metrics, EBITDA was negative 4,000 for the first quarter of twenty twenty five, compared to $245,000 or 4% of revenue for the first quarter of twenty twenty four. However, adjusted EBITDA for the first quarter of twenty twenty five increased $503,000 to $564,000 or 10% of revenue from $61,000 or 1% of revenue during the first quarter of twenty twenty four. This increase is primarily due to adding back more stock compensation because of the benefit recorded in the first quarter of twenty twenty four I noted earlier, as well as adding back the loss recorded on our interest rate swap in the first quarter of twenty twenty five compared to subtracting the gain we recorded in the first quarter of twenty twenty four.
Non GAAP net income for the first quarter of twenty twenty five increased 5 and $71,000 to $206,000 or $05 per diluted share, compared to a non GAAP net loss of $365,000 or $0.10 per diluted share in the first quarter of twenty twenty four. Switching over to the balance sheet and cash flow statement, our deferred revenue balance, which is revenue we expect to recognize primarily over the next twelve months, increased 6% to $5,000,000 as of 03/31/2025, compared to 4,700,000 as of 12/31/2024. We also increased our cash generation from continuing operations, which amounted to $809,000 during the first quarter of twenty twenty five, compared to $77,000 during the first quarter of twenty twenty four. Adjusted free cash flow was $1,029,000 for the first quarter of twenty twenty five compared to negative $126,000 for the first quarter of twenty twenty four. I will now turn it back over to Brian who will provide some updates on the business, customers, subscriptions and volumes, along with everything else we have planned for the remainder of the year.
Brian?
Brian Balberny, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Access Newswire: Thank you, Steve. For the remaining time today, I’d like to speak about and articulate our go forward products, where we see growth coming from recent wins, our product innovations, as well as further efficiencies that we can see in the business. The reason why I wanted to go back to this is last quarter, I do not think I did an adequate job putting the products together for you in each of their respective subscriptions, as well as what we keep as a result of the compliance business sale. Of the 10 individual products I highlighted last quarter and the three different subscriptions, here is how they’re sold. Access IR includes our investor relations websites, our corporate newsrooms, and our quarterly earnings calls.
Access PR includes our news distribution, our media monitoring, media database pitching, and corporate newsroom. Additionally, we have stand alone product subscriptions that are sometimes sold as add ons to both the access IR and access PR subscriptions. Those are our PR optimizer, our events platform for investor meetings and annual meetings. And then the two compliance products that we kept as a result of the sale was our SEDAR filings, which directly tied to our Canadian public companies for press release distribution to file with SEDAR in Canada, as well as our incident management whistleblower services, which is a New York Stock Exchange subsidy product that we wanted to continue on our platform. The all access subscription is essentially a combination of both our IR and PR subscriptions that I just mentioned above.
The market is telling us that by pipeline insights that all signs for the remaining part of the year and into next year will be the majority of our growth will come from our access PR subscriptions, an offering that typically starts at around 9,000 ARR and tiers all the way up to 17,000 plus. Breaking it down a bit more, since approximately half of our revenues that come from subscriptions today, approximately $12,000,000 annually, about 75% of it is Access PR and growing. To get to our 1,500 target number, it’s going to be heavily driven by the Access PR platform and its new innovations slated for this year, some of which we have talked about in the past. We will see platform add ons through the remaining part of the year, some of which are internal efficiencies to help drive margin and prepare us for scale and volume. That innovation was released here just a few weeks ago internally.
It is referenced as our press release content validator. We believe in industry first enhancement to our editorial process, whereby editors on our team can utilize our proprietary language model to detect keywords, phrases, and or acronyms we know our content guidelines, partnered networks, and prohibited contents policies will show. It will not accept automatically this information and flag it for reference by the customer and our editorial teams. We expect to see up to a 10% efficiency gain by utilizing this tool. And as we learn and allow our agents to get smarter, we expect to make this feature available to our customers in the back half of the year, whereby they can pre validate their voice in the press release, but also utilize our enhanced version of Amy, our AI writer to help tenacity, project engagements across audiences with some very innovative customer suggestive and internally developed processes.
These are two of the areas that we see product innovation coming from this year and are also going to be impactful to our customer, helping solidify growth channels and differentiating our product offering in the market. We see comprehensive social interactions and messaging tonality as being the two intersections of convergence, whereby our platform can become a centralized communications ecosystem for a company’s message that is distributed beyond just a press release and into more of a focused medium selection of a storytelling platform. Fact is IR, PR, and CorpCom are all utilizing social mediums, content scheduling platforms, AI engines, hopefully secure closed platforms and not open LLM, unsecured data systems and press release services like ours to tell their story. We envision a storytelling platform whereby our customer can create a message, enrich it with our system, post, target, and monitor each medium performance and outcome using our All Access platform. We are excited about these back half of the year developments and what they will mean for our customers and our ability to gain further market share.
Customers that recognize this product roadmap are buying into our subscription vision. These recent wins during the first quarter continued in the momentum of customer growth, further securing large brands and cross selling current brands. Our Access IR offerings saw big brand wins like UPS for the quarter. Our all access platform saw upsell value driven deals from companies like Blackberry and our access PR not only saw growth, it also saw big brand wins from Conoco Minolta, and even the Chicago White Sox. Something that we touched on earlier in the call, our PR volumes and revenues continue to grow for the quarter, a trend that will continue and further expand as we move through the market as the number three volume player, something that we want to be sure that is known, although we are continuing to grow volumes and revenues in our P and business.
The industry is retracting both in revenues and volumes, whereas our growth, we are seeing pipeline, pricing improvements, the number of inbound customers interested almost at an all time high. Not to mention, we have fielded a good bit of interest in the market with very acquisitive tones that will likely bode well for us as we continue to execute on our growth strategy. Lastly, and something else I am personally excited our product and dev teams are spending some time with the business initiative we have that is to narrate a story in an auditorial format that brings to life one’s views, missions, and storytelling into a near real time spokesperson ish kind of way. This incorporated technology advancement will be industry first advancement, and for the reasons I will be a little brief here today, if you don’t mind. But I am super crazed about the possibilities and look forward to showing you a demo on our next call.
As we continue to move forward, we are emerging a very focused lean communications business led by our subscription platform and our first growth market news distribution brand. Our new name, our new strategy and compelling go to market plans is setting us up to emerge in 2025 as the leader in the space, illustrating growth in our customer accounts, revenues, gross margins, and earnings power, as well as continued cash flow from operations. In closing, last quarter I said, anticipate over the next couple of years, we will derive the majority of our revenues from reoccurring subscriptions. Our goal was to reach 75% by the end of twenty twenty six. We believe that we are far ahead of this and will be very close by the end of this year, far ahead of our initial projections like gross margin improvement and customer counts and ARR, we are built to deliver on our guidance.
And now we need to show the top line that can also continue this similar advancement. As always, it’s nice spending time with you today to talk and discuss our results for the quarter. Operator, can we please go ahead with the Q and A portion of the call?
Conference Operator: Yes, sir. At this time, we will be conducting our question and answer Our first question is coming from Jacob Stefan with Lake Street. Your line is live.
Jacob Stefan, Analyst, Lake Street: Hey, guys. Appreciate you taking the questions and congrats on all the progress here. Hey. On the gross margin, can
Brian Balberny, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Access Newswire: you just give us a
Jacob Stefan, Analyst, Lake Street: little bit better sense on maybe some of these efficiencies you’re seeing? Obviously, nice outperformance in the quarter, but how do you expect gross margins to kind
Brian Balberny, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Access Newswire: of trend throughout the year? Jacob, nice to talk to you again. It’s a great question. As Steve highlighted in some of his prepared remarks, a little bit of the gross margin improvement came from staff realignment on the top line of the business as we prepared to exit the compliance business and really hone in on what scale could look like for a communications focused go forward platform. But the second component is is what I touched on is this PR analyzer product internally that we’re using as a compliance check.
It gives our editors more time to focus on articles, handle volumes greater than what they had in the past. And so we’re able to see some efficiency gains there. As we continue to approve it, I think they used the word agent. It really meant, like, AI agents and AI bots that are running in the background to continually find new things that can advance that we expect that even to continue. We don’t see pricing pressures in the market.
If anything, we see less in price both on a on a pay as you go basis as well as bundled subscriptions moving up market. So we’ve got some insulation on top line. It just now becomes a scale game, but we really do believe between seventy five and seventy eight percent is where we’ll see the remaining, quarters.
Jacob Stefan, Analyst, Lake Street: Okay. Very helpful. And then next one, maybe dissect a little bit on the, you know, new subscribers and being onboarded, you know, at 14,000 plus, ARR. Is that more of a function of a change in pricing, or is it more product uptake?
Brian Balberny, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Access Newswire: It’s a combination of both, really. We we’ve done well. As I highlighted, we’ve got, groups like Blackbird coming back into the platform to to, you know, kinda trade up. I’ve been using this, the the the the nomenclature inside the organization, excuse me, about trade up and trade in. We’re doing a really good job of customers trading up.
Right? Meaning, they’re buying a introductory or a small platform, and they’re coming back within the year to upgrade. And BlackBerry is a great example of that. There’s many others that are causing lifts in ARR. And then secondarily, we see, you know, the kind of the trade in.
How do we get customers to come into our product platform from the competitive landscape that’s out there, meaning they buy three or four or five vendors, consolidate to one, we’re seeing those prices start to come in at a higher rate as well. And it also does impact having large accounts with with a much, you know, kind of disproportionate ARR in the top line. But we’re seeing it across all areas, which is a good indicator to us that the stickiness of the product platform is starting to happen within the customer base. We’ve invested heavily in our customer experience teams. We love our customer more, as we say, to get in and show them the demonstrated values of each of the components and how they use them across all their mediums.
And we think that’s starting to progress for us, which will ultimately help on retention and nutrition and everything else.
Jacob Stefan, Analyst, Lake Street: Okay, thanks. Maybe just one more. Kind of UPS, Blackberry, White Sox, obviously, some big brand name wins here. But what’s the sales cycle like here? How different is it from maybe onboarding a smaller public company?
You know, how are how are these customers finding out about access?
Brian Balberny, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Access Newswire: Yeah. The the rebrand of our business has really driven home traffic and volume inbound interest. We’ve just from a if we if we approach this in a couple different ways, from a traffic perspective, we’re driving about two and a half to three times more traffic to our platform, which means both customer login traffic as well as, you know, eyeballs, people like you and I reading news articles every day, which means increased engagement for our customers, which is good stickiness for them. Educated customers where this market has really, over the past couple of years, changed significantly, I think, like many other industries and verticals, is that the customer is educated. They’re doing their research before they come inbound, before they make the call, or before we even contact them.
They know what they want. They know how they want it, and they know what price point they need to be at. The large accounts actually from a initial touch to close are sometimes just as quick as the small. The only difference is once you get past the, you know, the decision maker, you then have the back office compliance of of SOC two and security concerns and everything else that you’ve gotta go through for vendor management, which takes a little longer. But the the contact, the demo, the proposal to close, in many cases, is very similar.
A lot of them are one call closes on the small side, and and the larger cap mega cap companies tend to be, you know, three to four call closes with a couple of meetings in between. So we’re seeing this the sales cycle shorten to part of your your point, whereas we could then start to see some velocity in this. And we continue our marketing and branding, and our sales teams continue to to work those accounts. We should begin to see a lot more of those large numbers happen for us in the back half of this year.
Jacob Stefan, Analyst, Lake Street: Got it. Very helpful. I appreciate it, guys.
Conference Operator: Thank you, Jacob. Thank you. Our next question is coming from Mike Grondahl with Northland Securities. Your line is live.
Mike Grondahl, Analyst, Northland Securities: Hey, Brian. A question about you know, you said in the quarter that the the subscriptions you signed averaged $14,000. And prior to the quarter they averaged $9,000 Is there a typical you know, what does a $14,000 customer look like versus a $9,000 customer? Is there a common package they purchased? Is it a longer term?
Just help us understand the difference, if you will.
Brian Balberny, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Access Newswire: Yeah. Absolutely. And I think it’s important to articulate. Thanks to talk to you, Mike. Thank you.
I appreciate the question. Q one last year was 9,000 and change. And and that number, if you guys go back in history, and and I can put an update to the slide deck on our investor presentation to kinda show the progression of this every quarter. It’s continued to increase. And we messaged two quarters ago, 14,000 would be our average ARR that we’d in three deals by the end of end of twenty twenty five, and a lot of folks were questioning whether or not we could deliver that.
And and to your point, we’ve done it by targeted distribution that drives value. So the Access PR subscription product platform, which is our leading subscription product, is is made up of media database, pitching analytics, and news distribution. Early on, when we started selling that product before we rebranded, we were selling it to much more of a smaller business that was buying a budget product, and budget was budget distribution. So it didn’t really go everywhere that you’d expect, like a national or a premium or a North American press release. The the early or or the not the early adopters, but now the adopters of buying the subscription today are buying into, more of a North American premium or a US premium product that rises the price and limits the number of releases they can do.
So we’re seeing that ARR lift. And so I think at the end, and Steve, keep me honest here, at the end of q three last year, we were about 11,000 things. We ended Q4 about 12,000 and change, meaning the deal signed in the quarter averaged that. And in Q1, they’re already at 14. And so to be fair to that number, we believe we can continue to drive ARR higher, on product expansion adjacencies, things like we talked about social integration, things that we talked about with tonality checking and optimization, and then the third item that I briefly touched on, which is a very audit auditorial kind of product that will be added to this in the back half of this year.
However, we do also think about having a lower entry point subscription product that could drive significant volume of subscribers. And so we wanna balance this. We’re not gonna come off of our 14,000 number this year guidance and and go beyond. We may think about next year having a more entry level product like many other subscription based businesses do. You’ve got an entry point that you can get tens of thousands of customers to come in for a very small amount.
So we’re keeping our eye focused, but for today, we believe we’re gonna continue this progression and continue to add on, which could further drive this 14,000 number.
Mike Grondahl, Analyst, Northland Securities: Got it. So it’s kinda been add ons have driven it, but also some repackaged a little bit as a premium product. Are those the two biggest drivers if I heard you right? That’s
Brian Balberny, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Access Newswire: correct. Yes.
Mike Grondahl, Analyst, Northland Securities: Then how should we think about you have 955 subscribers, 12,000 customers, if I read it right. How are you targeting those 11,000 that aren’t on a subscription?
Brian Balberny, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Access Newswire: Yeah. There there is targeted messaging that goes to those that group. And and so we examine the group with kind of the cohort of what what do they offer in the opportunity for us to convert them? What do they have as a as a package price today? So here’s an example.
We have hundreds and hundreds of customers, likely thousands that are buying what we have called in the past a value pack or a bundle of press releases. This is the good and the bad about the press release industry, and that you can get a lot of companies to purchase at a discount a committed number of press releases. And you take the money up front or over. But you get to recognize the revenue as they use the press releases, which then causes it to be a little seasonal and lumpy and not consistent like in our our product. We’re focused in on those customers spending kind of 3 to $6,000 and moving them to a subscription product.
We talked about this a couple quarters ago. That was where our initial access PR, what we call media suite at the beginning, excuse me, was really found, you know, kind of success. 70% of the subscriptions we sold in q three last year came from existing customers, and we used a kind of a a 5 to to 9,000 rate dollar value to convert those customers. And so now we’re gonna come down market a little bit and saturate those customers. And so we believe that there’s another kinda 600 plus potential customers that we can get to convert based on their current spend and based on the add ons they’ll get to drive to our 1,500 number and beyond.
And that, you know, that, I think, answers your ties into your prior question is how do we drive volume there? And so we think about a lower subscription because there are thousands of customers that come in and buy a press release. Right? And and so they may spend 5 or $600 once, and they have nothing else to talk about. And so we want to figure out how ways to drive those customers because that is going to be the key here next year as we can continue to brand and market.
We get five to 10 of these folks every single day coming in and buying press release. What can we do to convert them into something that’s more of a recurring model?
Mike Grondahl, Analyst, Northland Securities: Sure. And then, hey, just lastly, where is headcount today versus, say, maybe, I don’t know, year end ’23?
Brian Balberny, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Access Newswire: Yeah. That you know, it’s probably an estimate number I’d give you. We’re we’re likely about a hundred today. We’re probably down from one twenty, one 20 five from the prior reference period. Some of the reduction, obviously, is members of the compliance division went with the business.
And and then others were just areas of the organization that because of the the transaction, we were able to lean up and become more efficient. IT, HR, you know, back office kinds of things. You know, we we believe we’re at a good headcount, you know, kind of g and a wise. We do want to spend and invest in sales and marketing. We will read our our 10 k here shortly and likely can pick it up from the eight k filed with the earnings, press release already this morning.
You know, we had a reduction in sales and marketing as we approached the rebrand. We really wanted to be careful of how much we’re investing in sales as we were changing a bunch of brand names and product offerings. And now that we’ve gotten that behind us, we’ve got likely two to three new salespeople to be added this quarter. We’re rounding out interviews now. We’ve got additional marketing headcount coming in as well.
So we wanna invest in those areas because it’s gonna help accelerate this business even more. But call it around a hundred today compared to the ’1 ’20 ’5.
Mike Grondahl, Analyst, Northland Securities: K. Fair. Thanks a lot. Good luck this summer.
Conference Operator: You, Mike. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Okay. As we have no further questions on the lines at this time, I’d like to turn the call back over to Mr.
Balburni for any closing comments.
Brian Balberny, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Access Newswire: Ali, thank you. Sean, thank you. Steve and I also appreciate everyone spending time with us this morning to talk about the q one results. A copy of this transcript and the presentation that we shared with you today will be available at our Investor Relations website here shortly. For reference, it’s investor.accessnewswire.com.
Steve and I, as always, are available for follow-up calls. We look forward to talking to you again, as always, in the future. Thank you. Have a great day.
Conference Operator: Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today’s call, and you may disconnect your lines at this time. And we thank you for your participation.
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