IZEA - NASDAQ

Greetings, and welcome to the I

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to I

Thank you, Ryan, and good afternoon, everyone. I'll review our operating results for the quarter ended June 30, 2023, compared to the prior year's quarter and discuss balance sheet highlights. Total revenue for the second quarter of 2023 was $10.7 million, 15% or $1.9 million lower than the prior year quarter. Our net cash loss or EBITDA was negative $637,000 for the quarter compared to a gain of $254,000 for the prior year quarter. Our net loss in the current quarter totaled $1 million or $0.07 per share on 15.5 million shares compared to a loss of $170,000 or $0.01 per share on 15.6 million shares. These share counts are adjusted for our June 2023 four-for-one reverse split. Managed services bookings for the second quarter of 2023 totaled $7.3 million compared to $9.3 million for the prior year's second quarter, a 21% decline. Early this year, we announced that we are parting ways with one large customer, which I'll refer to as our non-recurring customer. Bookings from this non-recurring customer were approximately $70,000 for the current quarter and totalled $3.5 million in the prior year's second quarter. Stripping out bookings from this non-recurring customer, ongoing customer bookings, which include both new and existing customers, totalled $7.3 million in the current quarter, 24% above the prior year's second quarter total of $5.8 million, and which represented 99% of total bookings in the current quarter. Our order count from these ongoing customers was 25% above the prior year quarter and the average order size was unchanged. Importantly, bookings from ongoing customers also grew 25% sequentially from Q1 2023, showing strength in our core demand and that we're well on our way to replacing the sizable historic demand from our non-recurring customer. Managed services revenue totalled $10.6 million during the second quarter of 2023, which was $1.6 million or 13% below the second quarter of 2022. Revenue from our non-recurring customer totalled $3.3 million in the current quarter and $5.3 million in the prior year's second quarter, declining 37% and explaining more than the comparative revenue decline for the current quarter. Managed services revenue from our ongoing customers totalled $7.3 million during the quarter, 6% higher than the previous year's second quarter, which totalled $6.9 million. Gross margins are still impacted by the mix of revenues from our non-recurring customer, which has depressed our overall margin by about 20% on average for the last six quarters. We expect our average gross margin to improve over the next two quarters as we complete the backlog related to this non-recurring customer. Delivery time between bookings and revenues, which has averaged nine months during the past seven quarters, has improved to about 7.5 months currently. Our managed services backlog, which represents the total of unrecognized revenue for contracts that are underway, as well as recent bookings that we haven't started to invoice, totalled $12.7 million on June 30, 2023. Approximately $1 million of this backlog is related to our non-recurring customer, and we expect to recognize the majority of this amount as revenue in the third quarter. SaaS services revenue totalled $71,000 in the current quarter of 2023, down 82% from $400,000 in the prior year quarter. We previously announced that our I

Thanks, Peter, and hello again, everyone. In our last two earnings updates, I shared that our management team was focused squarely on finding signals from the noise surrounding our broader advertising industry and keeping the organization accountable for things that we could control amidst contradictory macroeconomic indicators, and our understandably distracted brand clients who are being faced with many of the same challenges. Yes, budgets unexpectedly shifted or paused on certain initiatives, and timelines were challenged by these factors overall. However, our long-term view on the creator economy, paired with our resolve to meet our clients at their respective need state with an unmatched level of flexibility and value, has made a meaningful difference in the front half of 2023. Our team utilized the first two quarters of the year to drive new logo acquisition for our managed service business in particular. Said simply, we were not satisfied with our client concentration risk coming out of the 2022 fiscal year, and our sales leadership believed there was greater opportunity for I

Thank you, Ryan. 2023 continues to be a period of transition on multiple fronts as we lay the foundation for our next phase of growth. In the first half of this year, we made a strategic decision involving trade-offs regarding near-term revenue and customer counts in order to focus on more sustainable, diversified and profitable growth long-term. We are early into the back half of the year, but have growing optimism that our changes are going to bear fruit, particularly in managed services, where we are seeing large year-over-year pipeline growth, as Ryan mentioned. Managed Services is what drives nearly all of the revenue for our company today. We will continue to make investments in our team in the U.S. and see significant global growth opportunities as well via our emerging markets workgroup. Foundational to our managed services team success, is the technology that powers our campaigns, from identifying influencers and benchmarking brands to making payments and measuring results, but we do not intend for our managed services to be our only significant business unit of I

I would like to turn the floor over to Ryan for closing remarks.

We would like to thank each of you for joining us this afternoon, and as a friendly reminder, you can find all of I