Thryv Holdings Inc Aktie

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining today's demo showcasing our new Thryv growth platform. My name is Cameron Lessard, and I lead IR at Thryv.

Our guests today are Joe Walsh, Chairman and CEO; Grant Freeman, our President; Rees Johnson, our Chief Product Officer; and Ben Kaplan and Crystal Rees from the product leadership team that built what you're about to see. Our agenda is as follows: a 10-minute demo of the platform. And once the demo wraps, we'll open it up to Q&A with our covering analysts. For investors following along, they can e-mail questions directly to the [email protected] mailbox or to me directly.

With that, let's turn it over to Joe.

Thank you, Cameron. Appreciate that. Well, thank you all for being here. We really appreciate it. This is a big day for us. This is the unveiling of our Thryv growth platform, which we're super excited to tell you guys all about.

For decades, we've been working with local service businesses, plumbers, lawyers, dentists, chiropractors, all the service businesses in the local economy. And in most cases, these are people are really good at what they do. They like to be a chiropractor or they like to be a plumber. They're practicing their craft at a high level. But -- and they built real businesses. But the frustration that they have, we hear from them all the time is around advertising and around wasted money on advertising. And the ambitious ones that want to grow and want to scale their businesses up are constantly tinkering, trying to figure out how to solve this wasted advertising problem. And then you layer on the technological shifts where we've gone from analog to digital and now within digital, there's a constant movement there.

It's very difficult to figure out what works and something that is working might stop working at some point. And it's just been a challenge. And so there's a lot of different software companies and a lot of different marketing companies that have tools that they've signed up for. In some cases, they're using 2, 3, 4, 5 different tools, trying to keep track of it. And they're still trying to be the roofer while they're doing that. And so there's an overall frustration there with this. And over the last number of years, our Thryv product portfolio has been evolving. We came out with Marketing Center. And Marketing Center began to address that, began to tell them exactly what worked and exactly how it works. Tim, maybe I'll throw up that first slide for me.

So over the last few years, we've seen an acceleration in growth of this Marketing Center product. It's going up and up and up. And if you look at our Market, Sell, Grow package, you can see there's just tremendous growth. And so building on that success, building on those conversations we've had with customers, we've really made a really key insight. And that's a lot of these small businesspeople, they want control. They want to know what it is. They want to be able to understand it. They want to go to put their hands on it. They don't just want to go hands-free and give it to an agency and be in the dark and kind of hope for the best. But there are points along the journey once they're comfortable that it's working, they kind of want to turn it over to somebody else. And so we've got an ability to do almost like a hybrid model where we can do it with them, we can do it for them. And we have the AI doing a lot of it for them in this new product. Maybe put up that next slide, Tim.

So this is all about getting found on that vast kind of online map of all the places that people could be, about growing your business, getting leads, keeping your order book full and about investing smarter, about knowing exactly what is and isn't working and being able to monitor that. If you've done an expensive truck wrap, is that pulling calls? You can actually track that. If you've got a yard sign in front of the business that you're working on, you can track that, too. You can track everything that you're doing digitally and analog, all in this platform that we've built, and you can actually figure out exactly what works and what didn't. Next slide, please.

What we're finding in the beta period and the early run-up to this release is that we're delivering 1.5x faster closes with the AI insights that we're able to deliver and about 40% more revenue per client because you know with precision what the problem is and the sales conversation and everything is going right at the heart of it, you've got scored leads that are showing you. And a very high percentage of the sales that you're coming through are coming through these AI scored leads.

So the new platform does a lot. We're super excited about sharing it with you. We've got Crystal Rees here today with us to take you through this new platform, and then we're going to have an opportunity to answer a whole bunch of questions. So Crystal, if you could take it away.

[Presentation]

That's terrific. I'd like to bring our other panellists in, we're going to be doing a question-and-answer session now. Look forward to your thoughts and your questions. Tim, we're going to bring in the analysts as well, or...?

Yes, sir. I promoted them to panelists, and they have to turn the camera on and unmute their mics.

That's great. Look forward to taking their questions. Crystal, that was a terrific job telling us about it. Thank you. It was really nice. Very concise, very clear.

Yes. Thanks, Joe. It was fun just being able to talk to the customers, too. I mean, we like to launch new products, and it's always fun for a company, but it makes such a difference for our customers when it works for them, and that's what excites us in the product team.

I think watching the demo, it's one of those products that just kind of makes sense. And I'm sure when you get in the hands of customers, they can figure it out pretty quick. You kind of showed some of the self-service go-to-market. Could you just talk a little bit more? Obviously, like if you're a one-man shop, right, you're the IT department as well as the plumber or whatever your main business is. How are you ensuring that customers are successful right away and kind of figure out everything that the platform has to offer?

Yes, good question. We can see how customers are successful right away by optimizing their Google Business profile, taking their Google -- all their listings and pushing it out into dozens of other listing platforms and then seeing what kind of leads come in, also seeing what kind of presence, web activity, web clicks, impressions, also the social calendar, if they get their social calendar up and running and they start pushing content out to multiple different people -- multiple different platforms, excuse me, such as different Meta platforms or others. So those are some of the ways we see the customer really getting traction. The first one they do is often optimize Google Business profile, push out their listings.

If I could just piggyback on that to get deeper into your question. Ben Kaplan is on the screen here, the handsome gentleman with the glasses. He comes to us from Constant Contact, a lot of experience of engaging with free trials and freemium offerings. And so they've made the self-onboarding and self-provisioning very simple. It's step by step. It's a guided journey. And along the way, AI is popping up recommendations where it's already created what you're supposed to do next. And it really shifts the dynamic of the business owner from creator, which is where they get stalled, to approver. And so we're seeing success in onboarding that way. So we don't have to have a bunch of humans helping them along the way for the smaller customers.

Yes. It's really exciting, Matt, in the sense that, that smaller business, we want to be able to serve them, but in a very self-serve type of way, right? And so basically, what the exciting part of the platform is that we can serve basically 2 markets with 1 product, right? So we will get those smaller SMBs. And Crystal showed in the video that it's very intuitive of what they're supposed to do next because we've built this experience that is designed to be self-serve.

And then for larger businesses who are more -- a little bit -- have a little bit more experience, a little bit more complicated use cases, the product actually adapts to that, right? Because we are asking during the initial setup of like what type of business they are, what's their vertical, what are their goals. And we sort of understand intuitively from that information what the experience should morph into be so that we can serve those 2 different markets, but within that same experience, right? So we're really excited about that -- the product's ability to do that because it expands our sort of addressable base because we're able to serve 2 markets with 1 product.

Yes. And I'll say one of the businesses actually was telling us about how it does it for him. It was actually a pet boarding business, said before Thryv, she'd go weeks without posting because she had that blank page, right? Like I don't know what to post. I've got a business, but I don't know what to do. I don't know what to put in my listings. So she said, we put the tools together and put posts together for her in minutes using the platform. We weren't doing it for her. AI was doing it for her in the approver state. So she said she immediately felt more polished. She was getting more business because of it because new client inquiries come from checking your social presence.

Matt, do you have anything else? We jump over to...

Sorry, I didn't know if you wanted to jump back and forth or just keep going. Could we -- talking just kind of about like that flywheel that the customer example is talking about, which is -- I mean, exactly I'm sure you imagine this platform working where the return on ad spend gets reinvested back into Thryv, which leads to more revenue for them, which leads to more money on Thryv and everybody is happy. Can you talk about kind of the data side of that as well? And kind of are there use cases that you can use data across customers for benchmarking and things like that? Or kind of just how, I guess, that side of the flywheel works?

Rees, do you want to talk a little bit about that? That's really data and just the sheer volume of transactions we're able to study.

Yes, excellent. There's -- from a social -- from a benchmarking standpoint, we actually do have a dashboard that is coming out in a follow-on release for different platforms, for example, social platforms, that will show how you compare to others from an industry standpoint. We already do that relative to things like CTR, like click-through rate. We're more than double the standards for social, for Meta Platforms, for example. And also -- so we definitely are doing industry benchmarking because of our vast trove of data.

Joe asked me to talk a little bit about the data from the ROI perspective. So far, we've had -- we've done a measurement, and we've been working on this for a while. So we've had this in beta for a while. And we have from November 2025 into 2026, 2.7 million leads scored -- we have 35,000 MCs that are now available for this functionality in addition to our new Thryv growth platform, a lot of this functionality. And we've noticed that what happens is if you tap the lead scoring turned on versus if you don't have it turned on, and this is real data. This isn't survey data, right? We have 416,000 new clients with an AI lead score, 121,000 without. So really, really clean, strong data of with and without. And so those scores that Joe showed is real-world data that our customers do convert at 50% higher the rate of a lead when they have this functionality in this platform. And they do get 40% more revenue per client.

For example, we've got a cosmetic dentist on the East Coast, and they're getting they've gotten 2,700 leads so far as part of this program. And they're able to set up 2 dozen additional appointments per week because they have this insight and they can focus right into where to call back and where to spend their time. Very good.

Jason, how are you today? This is a big day for us. So we're excited.

Good to see you. Thanks for hosting. I just wanted to talk about like a push versus pull in terms of like a cross-sell, upsell opportunity. Obviously, you're embedding a lot of self-serve into the platform. But at what point does a salesperson get interjected into the conversation and try to push the client into something that might serve them a little bit better?

Yes. I mean, it's really a matter of spend. So this thing -- there's a free version. There's a $99 version where you kind of put your own credit card in, and it's all set up to do it without you and the AI without really us getting too involved. But we'll be monitoring all that. And if your firmographic information is of a bigger company and you are showing certain other kind of green signals, at some point, that gets promoted to an SDR talking to you about maybe meeting with one of our business advisers. We're really trying to deploy our business advisers at $400 a month and up. So a little bit bigger spend, a little bit bigger customer.

It's just hard for us to afford to do it for the smallest. And so we've created this kind of dual track where we've got the self-serve and then the -- we go help you out. But within that group of people that are coming in through the free trial or coming in through the entry level, do it themselves, there's going to be some great leads coming out of that and some great people that we can grow.

Joe, can I share one more use case? Something that the business advisers, Jason, were super excited about at the rollout on Monday was that if somebody didn't say yes after the first couple of appointments, they kind of had to leave and there was no free version that they could give the upmarket prospect to get their hands on and connect some things and feel the power before just asking them to convert. So now when they can't close the deal, they can help them by activating the free trial, which, in essence, is just the great platform on its own, free for 30 days. They can get them set up really quickly, and they can now come back and have a more relevant conversation and somebody is experiencing the power of the platform versus them just talking about it every time they come back. So that's a really exciting way that they're going to use this to land more of the upmarket customers as well.

I love this, Grant, because you and I have talked about free trials for a couple of years now. Can you share anything -- I mean, we've talked about how this has been in beta for a long time. Can you share anything about the effectiveness of a free trial and what your thoughts are on conversion and that ability to grow through that means?

Ben, why don't you take that one? Ben, you're muted. But I'm sure it's very good what you're saying.

Sorry, Joe. Yes, we are seeing really, really strong engagement, right? Given that this is a brand-new motion for us, I couldn't be happier with what we're seeing from the level of engagement from our customers, right?

It is a tremendous amount of work that the team has put in over a tremendously long period of time to build this experience that we believe in, right? And in terms of -- and what I mean by that is it is extremely simple to sign up. It is extremely simple to get started. And we have done a really good job at explaining the value of the platform in terms of get your listing set up and why that's important to the business, why it's important to connect to your social, why it's important to do Google Business profile as we've talked about and connect the CTN to it, right?

So it is extremely intuitive. And what we're seeing -- what we saw week-over-week in terms of the beta was that we were driving engagement up into the right, which is exactly what you want to see when you come out with an effort like this. So we are seeing extremely good engagement from our customers. When those customers end up speaking to a sales rep in the terms of if we know that they're going to be a $400 a month customer, what we're finding is those customers have a much better understanding of what we do as a company. Therefore, our sellers are having a much easier time having a conversation with those prospects about our overall holistic offering and having a much easier sale and conversion effort.

Joe, can I squeeze in one more?

Sure.

So if I'm an existing Thryv customer using a Marketing Center, a Business Center, full suite of services, whatever that may be, what does the process look like for me, whether something has already happened or something is going to happen in terms of migrating to this new platform versus what I'm using today?

Yes. So as I mentioned in the opening, I mean, the impetus and the confirmation that we needed, the direction we wanted to go ahead came from the success of Marketing Center. But Marketing Center was initially written before this kind of AI explosion had happened. So it had some elements in it, but it wasn't really written from the studs up as AI. So this is really Marketing Center on steroids, on steroids. So the transition over for them, they won't lose anything. They'll gain a whole bunch of stuff.

So today, right now, the customers being put on the new platform are the ones buying it new. And we have a plan of migration that will happen over the next period of time. We're not prepared to go through every detail of it today. But it's not something where there's going to be -- they're going to lose a function or they're going to have a big price up. It will just be -- we'll upgrade them, and we'll be there with client experience to make sure they understand kind of how to leverage it.

Alinda, you got some good zinger questions for us?

Yes, I do. It says I'm there is Arjun Bhatia, but Alinda Li here for William Blair on for Arjun Bhatia. Joe, in terms of the AI score, that's something that is -- sounds very interesting, sounds something that customers do really want, especially in the new era of AI. Could you give us a little bit more insight in terms of what is the measurement behind the AI score? And so how this score comes about? And is that different per industry depending on each customer. So maybe a customer is in the HVAC industry. Maybe is the measurement for that a little bit different than another customer of yours using a platform in a different industry?

Crystal, can I pitch that one to you?

Yes. No problem. I'm actually really glad you asked that, Alinda. I think you said, Alinda?

Yes.

Awesome. Yes, I'm glad you asked. I get to brag on the team a bit here. Lead scoring, it's not something that's new for us as a company. It's actually something we used to do with real humans listening to calls. And then we talk to thousands of businesses.

We've been doing it for a very long time. And we know exactly what the different verticals. We know what a plumber, a roofer, a med spa. We know what they qualify as a lead. We know what they want to get notified about. Some of those, they're on the roof, they don't want the notification for everything, but they have to have that control, and we've learned that against all the verticals. And we've used that to build AI lead scoring. And what we do that's different and more than everyone else is that we've already scored 2.7 million leads through this platform already. We allow them to customize what the score means. So -- if we say it's a 3, we help them learn, but then they have that customization where they can change that and say, this to me is not as important. I really want to focus on my 4s and 5s.

So we help them focus that. So they get the lead summary, they get the score, they get smart tags or tasks that they can actually have as follow-up items. So it's more than just that score, but we -- it's core to how we've designed it against all of the verticals.

That's super helpful. Another question is with the new platform, what do you think customers are most excited about? Any particular parts of the platform that you think is particularly interesting that you're also very excited about? I know what they're excited about.

They're excited to have connected tools. They get really excited about being able to post to social and to connect all their listings. Right now, people -- they understand listings a lot. They connect their Google Business profile. They have a Yelp. They can do that on their own. But what they can't do is the 16, the 60, the dozens of different listings. They can't keep up with them. They have a digital marketing score that actually tells them where they are and exactly what they need to do next. And for most of that is, hey, you've got a couple of listings, we'll give you 60 of them and help you publish that consistently. That's what they're excited about.

It saves them time, but it's more about the connected tools. A lot of them come with their own website. We score it and say -- hey, you can use one of ours, we can build one for you, but we actually meet you where you are, and that includes telling them what their website needs. Sometimes it's an AI chatbot they need on theirs or there's something else that they need for data tracking, but that's what they're excited about. It's the digital marketing score that brings it all together and tells them the health of their business, what to do next because they're less interested about learning about a new software, they want to know their business in this.

Yes, I totally agree. Alinda, AI is an opportunity and a threat. Because if you don't sort of smile for the camera just the right way, you end up being shunted down to the bottom of the pile. And most people have figured that out and are trying to figure out how to get good at it. And this is very relevant for answer engine optimization, everything that we're doing here to help you come up and to know where you are missing or where you're hitting, and that all goes into that score.

Helpful.

Matt, any more questions?

Yes, always. When -- I think now instead of eating your own dog food, we now say drinking your own champagne. I think that is now what we're supposed to be using. But when we're talking about lead scoring, can you just talk about how you can kind of utilize the same methodology in terms of how you go to market and kind of like what makes the ideal customers and kind of how you're thinking about like what the characteristics of who's best suited to utilize this platform are?

Yes, I'll give that one to Grant.

Yes. So again, we're sort of serving 2 parts of the market, right? We have the solopreneurs starting out with the free trial, self-onboarding and then converting most likely to a $99 offering. And then we do have more of the upmarket customers as well, Matt.

So what I would say is we use a variety of tools to score the opportunities, but what we're sort of bumping that against is we want prospects that have 5 or more employees that are generating $750,000 or more in annualized revenue. That's sort of the sweet spot from there on up. And so as we do an analysis of the prospects that are coming in using entities like ZoomInfo, et cetera, that you heard of before, as we qualify those, those are the ones that would get the salesperson's attention, right? So we have a lot of lead scoring and lead routing that's been built over the course of the last 6 months in preparation for this endeavor. So I feel like we're really well positioned to get the right prospect in the right hands.

I'm going to connect with the investor question, if you don't mind. We got a few of these on the same topic. So I'll just -- what is the new Thryv growth platform? What does this mean in the context of the recent announced -- recently announced strategic partnerships with Wix and Ooma? And do you think this will expand on other partnerships in the future?

Yes. I mean, directionally, we're -- we see ourselves as having a nice, neat patch within the kind of ecosystem of small businesses. And that patch is around growth, around growth, around driving leads in, filling your order book, measuring what works, what doesn't work. And we have the announced partnerships that we've already announced and others that are in the works as well. And there's a lot of energy and excitement around this new platform that will go into these partnership efforts.

One of the things that we can do -- Ben talked about the free trial. We can actually offer the free trial into another base. So they can actually give real value to somebody and they can get some favorable experience and then we can build on that for a possible sales conversation. So that's not something we had before. In prior partnership efforts that we had, the call to action was get a demo. And not everybody wants to sign up for a 45-minute or an hour demo with a salesperson. And the ability to get in and muck around the product, use it and see its value and see where it lives in your business is a difference maker, we think that will make those partnerships much more salient, much more effective.

Matt, you got clipped on the end of your follow-on question there. Do you want to add one?

Cameron clips his wings hard.

Cameron is rough.

Not nice, Matt. Not nice at all. Sorry about that.

It's okay. Yes. No, I was going to ask about kind of like the tiering. And so it seems like the natural transition from freemium is about like the 30 days, right? But what are kind of like the I don't know if roadblocks is the right word, but like the use cases that push people from tier to tier as kind of like that key pain point that moves you to that next level or like the key successes, I guess, would be a nicer way to put it that bring you to the next level.

Ben, do you want to take that one?

Yes. So yes, it's a great question because we obviously want the customer to grow with us, right? When they start with us, that is our starting point. We want to understand what that business is all about, what their goals are, and we want to cater or put them into the best package that suits their needs, right? So in the case of $99.99, it could be a simple fact that they stagnate out in terms of growth, right? We only expose their business to a limited number of listings platforms, right? At some point, we're going to tell them, hey, you could get 3x the visibility and awareness by moving to this -- moving to the Signature package and you'll boost your visibility, which ultimately leads to more leads, right?

So we've tried to build the packages in a way that provides a good amount of value for the price that you're buying or the price the purchase price, but not giving them everything in a way that makes it them never want to upgrade, right? So we limit their functionality within those packages so that they eventually cap out and then we would do a good job over the course of their time with us mentioning that, hey, during the time that you've been in the Starter package, you've got an X value.

If you want to grow 10%, 20% more, upgrade to signature and unlock these features, right? That could involve a call, it could be an in-app message -- it could be an e-mail, but we will do a good job of nurturing that customer through their journey so that they understand the value they're getting in that package and then also exposing them at the right place at the right time for how they can turbocharge their business. And maybe they get a boost, right?

They start to understand the ecosystem that we have. They could offer or they could be offered a professional service, right, that we do something for them, which again just exposes them to more and more of what we offer in terms of do-it-yourself or do it for me. So there's a lot of different ways that we can get a customer into a higher price point that makes sense for that business at the right place and the right time.

Yes. And if I could add on to that. The data as a moat concept, too, anyone out there can rent an AI model and use data, but they can't get our data. We know exactly what businesses have been doing to grow that no one else has that. And we've seen their growth, and that's where we come in. We've gotten so much smarter about it. We don't just say, okay, at 30 days, at 1 year, we will upsell them this. We say, you know what, the data says, they're really interested in social. They need a little help in social. We have something to come alongside them. So it becomes about what feature area they need help in, not just about an upsell, it really becomes about their business and where they want to grow.

All right. Yes, that was my follow-up question. It was about meeting them kind of in the moment instead of on like a stationary renewal cycle.

It's a big shift. It's a hard shift from a product team trying to build the product to learn that. There's so much data that goes behind it, but it's something that it's unifying all of our sources. It's unifying all of our knowledge of all the real humans that have been with us this whole journey, but it's -- it's the exciting part when you have to put the data in the system that actually makes sense. It's a hard puzzle to solve, but it's one that we like doing.

I have a follow-up question on that. In terms of the add-on, so the boost, respond to reviews and also running a social ad. Is that something that customers will be able to buy separately in addition to their subscription? Or is that something that they will have to upgrade to the higher tier in order to have access to those services?

No, they can buy it separately. They can add it, they can pulse it, they can take it up, they can take it down, they can move it around. So you have the base software platform that's measuring how everything is working. And then you can turn the boost on and off and elevate them in the way that you think makes sense.

Got it. That's helpful.

So you have seasonal businesses, like we have a lot of businesses in the upper Midwest, where it's bitter cold for a few months in the winter. Some of them work like crazy 10 months a year and for about 2 months a year, they go to Florida. It's just like, I'm not going to fight the snow, I'm not going to bother. And so they might pause a campaign or take it way down during that period and then turn it up big time in the spring. So we are able to sort of meet them where they are, which they like a lot. Some of our prior offerings didn't have as much flexibility, and we would end up grinding with the customers over some of those issues.

And real quick, just one more comment on that. The power of the platform when you do add the leads products to it and we service that for them is that as they come in, as we do the AI leads insight sentiment analysis and scoring, the system learns which media outlets are delivering the most 4 and 5 scored leads, the leads that have the highest probability of conversion. And automatically, we have an AI budget optimization layer in the platform that will reallocate the customer spend to the channels that are yielding the greatest return. And so that's the sort of kick on flywheel effect at the customer level, where we're using their own data to get them ever-increasing results month after month, which is also a big retention and expansion play.

Yes. And if I can pile on -- and that changes. What works maybe in the spring could be different by September, just by movement in the market. And this thing is monitoring it, and it's recommending that you be over here. And that's big. Yes.

Cameron, any more questions from the folks out there in audience land? You're on mute.

I have one. This will be for Rees. Can you give some more examples of either in the beta phase of clients experiencing the Thryv growth platform? Any anecdotal information you can share?

You bet. Thanks, Cam. So there's a couple of different -- if we take a look at Mr. Minis, let's double-click on that a little bit. His revenue growth was $120,000. So 5x, right? $600,000. It's the same 3-month window year-over-year, number one. Number two, so here you are, you've got your search presence, your Google presence in the Hudson Valley market. He was #17 plus, right? It depends on what day you checked it, where he would land. And he moved that up to #1. So clearly, boom, first, he was #1. So as you can imagine, that helps with the AI chatbots as well. That comes up. You've got to be in the top-3. And so it's even more critical with AI search that the AI search engines are popping you up to the top-3 because very rarely does it mention more than a couple.

Third, he had 85% more leads across all channels. I love how Grant tried to -- he went ahead and explained kind of our Thryv leads product with our AI budget optimization. We have a little over than a dozen lead sources, right? And we have arrangements with all these companies. And we're able to using our AI engine move the budgets around very effectively and Alinda, to answer your question as far as additional add-ons. And then you can pop on also an SEO product or a social ads product. So there's kind of like 3 big products on top of this platform that you can add that increases our AVO quite significantly. And then his lead close rate was pathetic. It was actually 10%. And so his lead close rate went to over 85%. So that's just kind of digging into the Hudson Valley account. We could also dig into like a cosmetic dentist that I met with recently that's fun if we have more time.

Why don't we hold there and see if there's any other questions. We're getting coming up on time pretty soon here.

Thank you for that, Rees.

That's great. Cam, do you have any more from...?

Yes. There's one for Grant. Does this mean the company no longer sells Marketing Center?

Well, correct. Moving forward, we will be selling the Thryv growth platform. We have a couple of other things that we still have to connect, but that's right. Moving forward, we will be selling the Thryv growth platform to all net new. But as referenced earlier in the conversation, we still have that sort of big body of Marketing Centers that over the course of time, we will be migrating efficiently and seamlessly over to the platform.

And then for Joe, how do you think about your addressable market now when you're selling Thryv growth platform? You no longer have to compete with CRMs. How do you think about partnering or selling to businesses that already have a CRM?

So that's a big deal. As we have been -- look, we're learning, like you guys are learning in your job, we're learning in ours. We've been at this software thing for a decade. In the early going, we're bringing fire to caveman -- here here's software. But as things have moved along and matured, we've learned that these very smaller businesses are churnier. So we really wanted to move upmarket. And as we went out and started to call on the customers that had $1.5 million of revenue, they had a CRM, and they weren't necessarily super anxious to buy ours because they already had one. They looked at switching like a root canal. And even if ours might be better, somewhat better or a lot better, it still meant a switch.

So we sort of embraced this this agnostic approach that said, bring the website you have, bring the CRM you have, bring whatever you're already doing. We'll plug into it, make it easy for you. So you don't have a root canal. And we'll help you get more leads, fill up your order book and move forward. And that was really a breakthrough for us. And if you look at our quality clients, $400 or more spending, you see it's steadily moving up. And we're having a lot of success at making those bigger sales. And part of it is we're not asking them to do a root canal.

Matt, any final ones from you?

No, I think I've used up all the airtime I am allowed in here. I appreciate it though.

That's great. Alinda, any more from you?

All good on my end. That's all. Thank you.

Jason's back. Look out.

I just went off video. No, I think this was really helpful. But thank you, Joe. I appreciate it.

Thank you very much. We really appreciate everyone attending, including the people who weren't on the panel here, and we look forward to updating you on our results again soon. Thanks, everybody. Thank you. Thank you, everyone. Have a good day. Bye-bye.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us and welcome to the Thrive 2 Q 2026 earnings call. After today's prepared remarks, we will host a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a please press star 1 to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press star 1 again. I will now hand the conference over to Cameron Lessard, Senior Vice President of Corporate Development and Strategy. Cameron, please go ahead.

Good morning and thank you for joining us for Thrive Holdings second quarter 2026 earnings conference call. With me today are Joe Walsh, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Grant Freeman, President, and Paul Rouse, Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you call may contain forward-looking statements, including statements about our business outlook and strategy, future financial results, growth prospects, and other matters that are not historical facts. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, and our actual results may differ materially. Please refer to our most recent filings with the SEC for a discussion of factors that could cause our results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements. We do not undertake any obligation to update these statements. In addition, today's discussion will include references to non-GAAP financial measures.

These refer to the press release we issued this morning for a reconciliation of our non-GAAP measures to the most comparable GAAP measures. The press release and investor presentation are available in the investor relations section of our website at investor.thrive.com.

With that, I'll now turn the call over to Joe Walsh. Thank you, Cameron. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. Let me start with the Q2 headline, Thrive Delivered on the Quarter. And I'm going to start by focusing on our strategy and highlight the numbers that tell the story. Cameron will take you through some new partnerships that we've landed, and Grant will focus on our new Thrive Growth platform. Following that, Paul will walk you through our Q2 results and updated guidance, our Our transformation to a pure play SaaS company is not something that happened to us. This is something that we have executed year after year, running two motions at once.

Streamlining and taking costs out of our business while growing a leading SMB software business inside it. Every year, leaner. Every year, more software. That's the work that's making this a fit company. And fit companies win. We took more of these actions this quarter, and we'll walk you through the restructuring. and savings elements at the end of the call. You will see that we are revising our full year outlook. As we made a choice, we narrowed our focus to Marketing Center, its add-ons and getting the Thrive Growth Platform to market. During this period, we invested less in sales headcount and marketing in order to prioritize the push we're now making behind a new growth platform launch.

SAS is now 76% of total revenue, and this This quarter, that transformation has been validated. We've been added to the JICs as a software company. The market now classifies us as what we have spent years achieving. The engine of that progress is our growth platform and its add-ons, what we call our market sell-grow or MSG. MSG grew 1% year over year. And that's not a one quarter story. It has grown double digits quarter after quarter up into the right for more than a dozen quarters.

And it's working, especially as we move up market. ARPU grew 12% year over year this quarter. 72% of our clients now spend $400 or more with us, up two points from the prior quarter. Bigger clients spending more on the platform we have put at the center of our clients Yesterday, August 3rd, we took the biggest step yet. We rolled out the Thrive Growth Platform, an AI native product built from the ground up for the AI era. The Marketing Center has served us well, but it has been in the market for a few years. Designed before this generation of AI existed, You cannot bolt the future onto a product like that. You have to rebuild around it.

And that is exactly what we did. This upgrade is a huge positive for our clients and the timing is deliberate. In this new AI world, we cannot compete with everyone across every product. So we made a choice. We are sharpening our focus on the Thrive Growth platform. Rather than being an all-in-one software business, we are driving growth with businesses small and large through that focus. We invite investors and analysts to attend our webinar featuring a demonstration of the platform this Thursday, August 6th at 2 o'clock Eastern Time. Further information on the event will be provided later today.

Grant is going to take you inside the platform in a few minutes, and I will let him tell you that story. What I want to do first is have Cameron go into more detail about exciting news around some of our recent announcements and how it fits into our strategy.

Thank you, Joe. I'm excited to talk about a few announcements today because a great product only wins if you can put it in front of enough of the right owners. And that brings me to distribution. This quarter, we entered two strategic partnerships, Wix and UMA. We also are happy to announce two new integrations. Breezy and Jobber. These are not side deals, but done with partners. We own the layer where small business growth happens. The marketing, the leads, the customer relationships, everything else, we go find the best in the world and plug it in.

Let's start with Wix, a partnership we are very proud of. It brings together two of the most recognized platforms serving the SMB market. Wix drives comprehensive marketing platform and Wix is global website and unified commerce solution. Each of us is a leader in what we do. Wix has built one of the great digital platforms in the world, the place where businesses establish their online presence and transact with customers. Thrive built the platform where local service businesses market, win, and keep those customers backed by decades of relationships and one of the largest dedicated SMB sales organizations in North America, Australia and New Zealand. Apart, we each serve a piece of the small business owners day.

Together, we cover it end to end, winning the customer and getting paid. That is why this is a broad, multi-pillar agreement, not a single integration, and is positioned to deliver significant value to our combined base of hundreds of thousands of SMB customers. Among the early benefits, our clients gain access to Wix's world-class payments and commerce capabilities, online, point of sale, on the go, plus business checking and access to growth capital. Essentially, getting paid becomes as easy as getting found. And the strategic fit runs deeper still. Many of the businesses Wix serves are exactly who we built the Thrive Growth Platform for, the established local service business. This partnership puts our best product in front of them.

When two leaders built for the same customer decide to build together, that customer wins. And so do both companies. We expect to be announcing new pillars of this relationship in the future. Now let's talk about Uma. We have spent our careers making phones ring for small businesses. So believe us when we tell you the phone is still where the money shows up and the missed call is a lost job. UMA is one of the most respected names in business communications, ranked at the top of its category time and again, with more than a million users and a base full of exactly the entrepreneurial service-based owners the Thrive Growth Platform was built for. That is what this strategic partnership is really about for us. Thrive will be featured inside the UMA office customer portal, right where UMA's business customers go looking for ways to grow.

Joint webinars, sales incentives, and cross-promotions launch this quarter. Every one of those touch points is a warm introduction to an owner who already invests in their business and already fits our platform. And because the growth platform now opens with a free trial, those introductions have somewhere to land. An owner can step in, see what it does for their business and convert without us spending a dollar of traditional acquisition costs. We will be recommending Ooma to our clients as a communication solution we stand behind because our clients need great phones and UMA delivers them. Beyond partnerships, we shipped two new integrations this quarter and they follow the same playbook. We own the lead and we connect it to wherever the work gets done.

The first is Breezy AI, an AI operating layer built for franchise-based home service organizations. This is how it will work. Thrive drives the inbound leads and customer engagement on the front end. And Breezy converts those opportunities into revenue, giving owners visibility from the first market touch point to the final invoice. The handoff is clean. Franchise leaders can now see which marketing sources produce the best jobs, where ad spend is being wasted, and where opportunities are slipping through the cracks. This integration is live today, and it extends Thrive's reach into a segment we have not yet seen. fully served before, multi-location franchise organizations. The second is Jobber, one of the leading field service management platforms for home service businesses.

Thrive is now live on the Jobber marketplace. Qualified leads generated by the Thrive Growth Platform are automatically scored, summarized, and synced into Jobber in near real time with AI-driven intent and lead summaries powered by our AI Lead Insights built Built-in score filtering means only high intent leads reach the customer's job or pipeline. and their existing workflows and system of records stay intact. We do not ask the owner to change how they run their business. We just make the pipeline better. Here is why this matters to the business we are building. Wix and UMA each serve large communities of small business owners. And these partnerships give us a natural path into those communities, a warm introduction rather than a cold call, without buying that reach and without building it.

Breezy and Jabra make sure that once a lead is ours, lands wherever the owner actually runs their business. But none of it works without something at the center strong enough to receive all of those introductions and turn them into growth. That is the Thrive Growth Platform, and it is the reason every partnership and integration I just described exists. No one knows it better than our president, Grant Freeman. So I will let him take it from here. Grant, over to you.

Thank you, Cameron. Good morning, everyone. I wanted to spend a few minutes on the Thrive Growth Platform because everything Cameron just described, whether it's partnerships with Wix and UMA or integrations with Jabra or Breezy, all of that only matters if what sits at the center is strong enough to receive it. So that's what I wanted to spend a few minutes talking about. As Joe said, on August 3rd, the platform became general, generally available. But to understand what that means, you really have to understand who it was built for. There are millions of established local service businesses, plumbers, lawyers, dentists, chiropractors, run by owners who have built something real. They've gotten some traction, but then they hit a ceiling that they can't break through alone, because at their core, they're not marketers.

Their marketing runs on a patchwork of disconnected tools. Good leads slip through while they are out doing the work. The software industry sells them tools and walks away. The agency world can be costly and often keeps them in the dark. Nobody has served the owner who wants both control and results. That is a large underserved sector. and nobody knows this owner better than we do. So we built the platform around one structural insight.

The choice between running your own marketing and having someone run it for you should not be permanent. It should be a dial, not a door. Software when they want it. Our done-for-you boost products when they want us. And AI working underneath all of it, reading every lead, scoring which ones are worth their time, pointing every marketing dollar at what works. The work of a full marketing department delivered at a price a small business can afford. Early results support this. Clients are seeing 40% more revenue and AI scored leads close one and a half times faster. It's important to understand this is also a completely new platform platform, 70% new code, built AI native from day one.

Marketing Center is a strong product, but it was designed before this generation of AI existed. You can't bolt the future onto a product like that. You have to rebuild around it, and that's what we did. So why does this model win? It's because of the feedback loop. Agency can tell you an ad ran and a phone rang and you got this many clicks. But our loop runs all the way through the money, the lead, the job, the invoice, the customer created. That closed loop trains our AI.

Better AI improves client outcomes and better outcomes retain clients longer and longer relationships deepen the data. It's a flywheel. wheel, and every quarter that it spins, our advantage compounds. A point solution cannot replicate it. An agency can't replicate it. The hybrid lane is ours to lose. One more decision shapes the economics. The platform works alongside the tools small businesses already run, Jobber, HubSpot, Housecall Pro, and others. We do not ask owners to rip out what works, we fill those systems with better leads.

That removes the biggest objection in every sales conversation and is exactly why the integrations Cameron described matters so much. For shareholders, three things. First, revenue per client becomes a staircase. Owners land on the software and layer on services as they grow. Our next dollar of revenue increasingly comes from clients we have already won, which is the cheapest, highest quality revenue a company can book. Second, lifetime value expands. The deeper the platform sits in a client's business connected to their existing tools, scoring their leads and running their campaigns, the harder it is to leave and the less reason there is to leave. We are playing for duration, not the quarter. Third, category leadership is available. It's wide open.

The hybrid lane has no dominant brand. We have the footprint, the relationships, the data asset, and now the platform, and we intend to take it. We are starting with net new clients through our direct sales channel, letting the platform prove itself before we begin migrating our existing base in 2027. Disciplined rollout protects retention and retention is the foundation. Everything I just described is built on. The promise to the owner is simple. Get found, grow your business, business, invest smarter.

We will report progress the way we always have, measured, transparent, grounded in the numbers. And starting August 3rd, the numbers began. Paul, over to you.

Thanks, Grant. Let's dive into the numbers. SAS reported revenue was $114.5 million in the second quarter and within our guidance. SAS adjusted gross margin was 66.6%, and SAS adjusted EBITDA was $13.6 million. million in the second quarter, resulting in an adjusted EBITDA margin of 12%. Postmargin movement is a mixed story. More of our clients are purchasing add-ons alongside our marketing center, and that revenue carries traffic expense. So it arrives at a lower gross margin than our platform software. It is a trade we can accept right now, because add-ons are doing exactly what they were designed to do, moving us upmarket, attracting larger clients, and driving higher spend per client.

In the second quarter, SAS ARPU grew to $394, an increase of 12% year over year. We ended the second quarter with 95,000 SAS subscribers. Seasoned NRR of 90% reflects the natural attrition of smaller, lower-spend clients within our base. Multi-product adoption continues to be strong, with clients clients with two or more SaaS products, representing 29% of our base in the second quarter, compared to 28% a year ago. Moving over to marketing services, second quarter revenue was 36.2 million and above guidance. second quarter marketing services adjusted EBITDA was 7.3 million, resulting in an adjusted EBITDA margin of 20%. Consistent with our expectations, this performance reflects the natural second half weighting of our print publication schedule from a revenue recognition standpoint. Second quarter marketing services billings totaled 48.7 million, down 36% year over year.

These results reflect the deliberate execution of our strategy. as we systematically migrate legacy digital marketing services clients to our SaaS platform. The decline will continue, but at a pace we control and anticipate. We ended the second quarter with net debt of $241 million, bringing our leverage ratio to 2.5%. Before I take you through the guidance, let me cover the restructuring program we announced today. We are simplifying the business around a single growth platform and consolidating teams, systems, and vendor spend as non-core products wind down. We expect a charge of approximately 25 million, primarily severance and related employee benefits along with contract exit and early termination costs. Our expectation is that roughly half of these charges will be incurred in 2026, with the remaining half in the first half of 2027. return, we expect approximately $60 million in run rate savings.

Now let's dive into our guidance starting with marketing services. For the full year, we are raising the low end of our marketing services revenue guidance, bringing the range to $161 million to $163 million. On marketing services adjusted EBITDA, we are revising full year guidance to a range of $31 million to $33 million. Now for SAS. In the third quarter, we expect SAS revenue in the range of $111 million to $112 million, and SAS adjusted EBITDA in the range of 8.5 million to 9.5 million. For the full year, we are revising SAS revenue guidance to a range of 453 million to 457 million, and SAS adjusted EBITDA guidance to a range of 42 million to 44 million. This revision reflects deliberate resource allocation decisions we made in the first half. I want to walk you through the sequencing.

In the first half, we were deliberate about where every dollar went. We directed investment into product, deepening marketing center and add-on products, and building the Thrive Growth Platform to be ready for market. You are more measured with other spend, including sales headcount, while that work landed. We chose to build the thing worth selling before we scaled the team to sell it. The near-term costs were visible. Lighter headcount pressured revenue, which flows through to EBITDA, along with elevated traffic expense as we drove expansion within the installed base. But the investment is now in market as Thrive Growth Platform. With the platform now in market, we are redirecting investment towards sales and marketing and ramping through the back half.

We enter 2027 at full strength and expanded product set. a sales organization size to monetize it. We recognize the optics. We are lowering guidance while stepping up investment, but this is disciplined sequencing. Product first, narrowing our focus, then distribution. Absorbing this in 2026 is a better trade than arriving at a larger opportunity in 2027 unprepared to capture it.

With that, operator, let's move to questions. We will now begin the question and answer session. Please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press star 1 again. We ask that you pick up your handset when asking a question to allow for optimum sound quality. If you are muted locally, please remember to unmute your device.

Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Scott Berg with Needham and Company. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Hi, everyone. Thanks for taking my questions here. I guess a couple of them. Joe, I just want to talk about general strategy for what you're seeing on the SaaS side. I know the business is going through a lot of different, a bunch of transformations here as you focus, obviously, on the marketing center side of the business. When do you think we get to a spot of stability in both product and go-to-market strategy? I ask the question because the new guidance and Paul's explanation of some of the changes that are going on kind of reflect... I guess, tweaking different aspects to it. And I think we always, we should expect every company to tweak things as they go, but they seem to be, you know, a little bit bigger jumps than maybe what we're expecting than something that should be a little bit more consistent here.

So just help us understand when we think we'll be at a kind of a consistent, you know, kind of level, both on the product side and the go-to market side. so we can get to some pretty consistent expectations.

What a polite way to ask that question. Thank you, Scott. I appreciate it. So the new platform came out yesterday, went GA. And on Thursday, we're going to have a... you know a demonstration webinar opportunity to come in and take a tour and see it and understand it in more detail it's been a heavy lift we've spent a couple of years really working very hard developing this ai native new platform that that replaces marketing center and is vastly vastly more up to date, vastly better. And look, the world around us with AI is moving much, much faster. And the marketing center platform is only four, four and a half years old, and it aged very quick with AI. so much going on in ai with customers expectations uh moving the way they did and so on so um You know, I accept and respect the point that we've been pivoting around a little bit trying to find exactly where we want to be. The decision we've made about that, and it's been backed up with a lot of strong data, is focusing on the growth of local businesses.

That's really where we kind of came from originally. And we spread out beyond that. And we've made a decision to really sharpen our focus on really just that. And so, to sum it up and answer your question. The new platform is now out. We're ramping the sales organization and our marketing into this new platform. And we expect over the next few quarters, for that growth that we've been seeing within marketing center and its add-ons to become the main story in the company.

And, you know, the, directory business and some of the other software initiatives that we have will continue to be run-off businesses as we focus on driving growth around this new growth platform.

Thanks, Joe. Help Paul. And then, Paul, as I look at the updated guidance here you brought down in JustDBDA on the SAS We'll call it $30 million round number. I think about the interest payments that you have on the debt in the second half. I'm struggling to come up with how you service your debt and make those payments here. effectively for the rest of the year because you haven't paid down any of the debt year to date. How do we think about your ability to hit those kind of requirements here? And how do we start thinking about maybe early next year if it's not too early to ask?.

Hi Scott, thanks for the question. Yes, yes, this cash flow is still strong. So we don't see any problem. you know, making our debt payments. We were focusing really on lowering the, um, a revolver as opposed to the term loan. And from a cash flow point of view, particularly when we have these cuts in place, we don't see any issue servicing our debt for remainder of this year into next. Thanks for taking my questions.

The next question comes from the line of Arjun Bhatia.

William Blair. Your line is open. Please go ahead. Linda Lee, Arjun Bhatia, Thank you for taking my question. question here. Joe, what's the partnership with Wix and UMA and by the way, congrats on the partnerships there and how should investors expect or should investors expect more partnerships to come with similar partnerships that that has happened for this past quarter here?.

Yes. Think of it as when I used to talk about hunting in the zoo, basically going out into the big base of marketing services customers and talking to warm relationships, warm prospects. These partnerships are really designed to give us more zoos to hunt in. It's really following the ecosystem. system-led growth model of plugging in to complementary services. In order to do that, we narrowed our focus in on this growth platform that we've built and the add-ons that go with it. allow us to be very complimentary when we work with, uh, you know, other tools like CRM tools in the market or in the case of UMA, um, you know uh voice over ip so uh i i think you're going to see we're going to continue to do more partnerships and and be very much running an ecosystem plug-in type strategy fitting nice we believe that will propel uh faster and more growth and uh you know great margins as well.

Got it. And then in terms of restructuring, how much of the restructuring is anticipated to be related to workforce reduction versus.

VENDOR EFFICIENCY. I'M GOING TO TURN THAT OVER TO CAMERON AND LET HIM TALK A LITTLE BIT ABOUT OUR THOUGHTS ON RESTRUCTURING. CAMERON? Yes, ALINDA. SO ROUGHLY THE 25 MILLION THAT WE QUOTED IN THE PREPARED REMARKS, HALF OF IT IS GOING is vendor spend and the half of it is workforce reductions. And think of it as, know, half taking place in fiscal 26 and then the remaining half in the.

kind of first half of 27. Okay, that's all. Thank you.

The next question comes from the line of Matt Swanson with RBC. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Great. Thank you so much for taking my question. Maybe kind of building off the first questions about how the model normalizes, the slide that you guys have on the SAS RPU by the three different lines, the one that's really interesting is that Thrive initiated upgrades of the the people that you're bringing in, kind of this product-led growth strategy to try some of the new features. Could you just talk about how you think about the renewal cycle for those customers? And just like anything you've seen in terms of when those features shift to kind of that cross-sell, up-sell motion.

expect that to impact the business. I'm going to let Grant take that question. Grant?.

Yes, good morning, Matt. So it's a really good question. I think that when we bring in these customers on the Thrive Growth Platform, probably the most important thing to realize is that all of the native AI features do a far better job than ever at proving the value of the foundational platform itself, and as you You spend time in the platform, you are receiving suggestions, AI generated suggestions for how to increase the value that you're receiving through performing different actions. And some of those obviously result in upsell and in cross-sell. And as you've seen before, with the percent of our revenue that's now with quality clients and our ever-increasing output, we are growing to be a more stable software base. And a lot of that is down to the expansion that's taking place now. And we expect that to continue with the invention of the Thrive Growth platform as well.

I appreciate that. And then, Joan, your prepared remarks, you talked a little bit about the age of AI also being part of this idea of going more around depth and breadth of platform, which leads to some of the integrations and partnerships as well. Can you just talk a little bit if you've seen anything from AI that is changing the competitive environment at all, or is this more company-specific, self-directed that you're trying to get out of things?.

Yes, look, I think our original kind of OG software product, Business Center, was an all in one management tool for small businesses. at the heart of that is really a straightforward CRM. And in the current environment, I think CRM has been commoditized a little bit and, you know, we don't really want to make our primary focus on something that is more kind of in the crosshairs of how the market changing. And at the very same time we've seen a dozen consecutive quarters of of double digit or better really strong growth on our market sell grow initiative. Our sales force is getting phenomenally good feedback out there in the field. And we're using these very strong capabilities that the company has in these areas to move up market. And so that's why you're seeing more quality you're seeing our crew go up because each sale that we're making is a larger sale to a larger business, which we believe over time will have stronger retention characteristics and be stickier. So in answer to your question, I think certain certain areas within software, I think would be here going forward.

If you just had a fairly simple generic CRM, I think that business gets commoditized in the future.

Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Jason Krayer with Craig Hallam. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Thank you guys. I just wanted to ask about the go-to-market strategy for the Thrive Growth platform. How is that different going after the existing customer base versus going after greenfield opportunities?.

Grant, why don't you take that one? Sure, Joe. Good morning, Jason. So I would say a couple of ways. Number one, we just spoke about the partnerships that we're forging. So that will be a relatively new go-to-market strategy for us, which is hunting in a new zoo, a zoo where people are already investing in their business, and that have an ICP profile that's more akin, very aligned with what we're going after. I would also say that the traditional, using the direct sales force and going to market locally, that will continue. However, we'll be able to target them. As you know, we already are targeting them towards more upmarket businesses, but now we'll be able to target for people that we have deep integrations with.

So we'll be able to walk with people that are already using the job or CRM, for example, and let them know that we have a deep integration where we can put the jobs in jobber. So really narrowing the focus and using sort of precision for who we go after to give us a higher efficiency in the field. And then in addition to that, we will still have an inbound motion and we'll be able to And with the launch of the Thrive Growth Platform, obviously comes the unlocking of a free trial, which will help us in distribution to larger ecosystems via partnerships and also in the realm of inbound also. So we're pretty excited about how the new growth platform and the new partnerships that we're forging give us a couple of new vectors of potential growth.

MAYBE I CAN BUILD OFF THAT LAST POINT YOU MADE THERE, GRANT. YOU TALKED ABOUT FREE TRIALS. AND I KNOW THAT'S SOMETHING YOU AND I HAVE TALKED ABOUT FOR THE LAST COUPLE OF YEARS. CURIOUS HOW THAT STRATEGY IS DIFFERENT ON THE THRIVE GROWTH PLATFORM OR DIFFERENT WITH SOME OF THESE PREVIOUS customer partnerships and what your expectations there are for, you know, tapping into that greenfield opportunity by using free trials.

Yes, great question, Jason. So I think it's going to help us in the long term, a couple of things. It will be used in a few different ways. Number one, if you can imagine, right now, Marketing Center, it did not have the ability to try all the software for free, whereas as of yesterday with the launch of the Thrive Growth Platform, it does. It's relatively a full-time job. unlock of the powerful platform that if you can imagine a local salesperson that used to go through a sales process and then at the end of the customer was on the fence, they sort of had to leave and leave them with nothing. Now, instead, they can tease them. They can help them get set up a little bit and come back seven days later and show them the value that the platform has already delivered. And we believe that that's that can aid in conversions as well.

In addition to the free trial opening up the ability to more easily get into the Wix ecosystems, the UMA ecosystems as well, where it can be served up at the point of purchase of when somebody buys a website through Wix, for example, or when somebody is highly active in their website, we'll be able to serve up a free trial version, which will mean that everything is not beholden to a salesperson's direct interaction. So we do think that it unlocks a lot of doors for us and will give a really good sense of the value that the platform can deliver to people.

Great. Thank you, guys. There are no further questions at this time. This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.

This live transcript is auto-generated without human intervention or review.

[Call has ended.]

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us, and welcome to the Thryv First Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions]

I will now hand the conference over to Cameron Lessard, Senior Vice President, Corporate Development and Strategy. Cameron, please go ahead.

Good morning, and thank you for joining us for Thryv Holdings First Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. With me today are Joe Walsh, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and Paul Rouse, Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that today's call may contain forward-looking statements, including statements about our business outlook and strategy, future financial results, growth prospects and any other matters that are not historical facts. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, and our actual results may differ materially. Please refer to our most recent filings with the SEC for a discussion of factors that could cause our results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements. We do not undertake any obligation to update these statements.

In addition, today's discussion will include references to non-GAAP financial measures. Please refer to the press release we issued this morning for a reconciliation of our non-GAAP measures to the most comparable GAAP measures. The press release and accompanying investor presentation are available in the Investor Relations section of our website at investor.thryv.com.

With that, I'll turn the call over to Joe Walsh.

Thank you, Cameron, and good morning, everyone. I will highlight our first quarter results and key trends and hand it over to Paul Rouse to walk you through the numbers, and then Cameron will take you through some of our forward guidance. We had a strong quarter. SaaS revenue of $117 million came in ahead of expectations, and Marketing Services outperformed as well, resulting in total company adjusted EBITDA that beat our guidance. Quality customers now represent 70% of revenue and annualized client spend has eclipsed $4,500. We are now a 70% SaaS revenue company.

A few years ago, we were a marketing services business with software on the side. Today, that equation has fully flipped, and it happened because small businesses are telling us through their buying behavior that they need what we offer. The clearest signal of that is Marketing Center, which grew around 30% year-over-year in Q1. Small businesses want to get found online, drive high-quality leads and convert those leads into lasting customer relationships. That's exactly what Marketing Center does, and the growth reflects that fit. It is the centerpiece of our Market, Sell, Grow strategy, and its continued momentum validates that strategy is working. We're also seeing strong results in our upmarket motion, attracting and winning larger small businesses than we've historically served. These are clients with more complexity, more needs and more to spend, and that's showing up directly in our numbers. ARPU grew to $378 a month, up 13% year-over-year with annualized client spend eclipsing $4,500, a direct result of serving higher-caliber clients. And because larger businesses engage more deeply and expand their spend over time and stay longer, the lifetime value of these clients is fundamentally better.

You'll remember, we've talked about moving from 4,000 to 8,000 over the next kind of 4 or 5 years. We feel strongly that, that upmarket move is gaining traction at this point. Quality customer count grew 6% year-over-year and now represents 70% of SaaS revenue, up from 62% a year ago. That trajectory tells you the mix shift is working, and it's a dynamic we're leaning into deliberately. I also want to touch on AI because the early results are genuinely encouraging.

On prior earnings calls, we shared that we were rolling out a suite of AI-powered capabilities across the platform, and it's validating to come back this quarter and report that the engagement numbers are really strong. AI image generation, AI lead scoring and our AI guided dashboard are all seeing strong early adoption since rollout. AI review responses, our AI website builder and AI caption round out the suite and are performing well, too. These are not features that we are still testing. They're live now. They're being used by clients who are engaging with them. That matters because AI embedded in the daily workflow is what makes Thryv stickier and more valuable over time. We said we were building it, it's built and it's working.

In sum, the business is on solid footing. Our core product is growing. Our client base is consistently upgrading toward higher-value relationships and our AI rollout is exceeding early expectations. That's the story of Q1.

Now, I'd like to hand it over to Paul Rouse and Cameron to walk you through the numbers and update you on our guidance.

Thanks, Joe. Let's dive into the numbers. SaaS reported revenue was $116.7 million in the first quarter, representing an increase of 5% year-over-year and exceeding guidance. SaaS adjusted gross margin was 67% and SaaS adjusted EBITDA was $10.8 million in the first quarter, resulting in an adjusted EBITDA margin of 9%. Adjusted gross margin in the first quarter was diluted by the strategic upgrade of our low-margin large digital agency customers from our marketing services base of customers on to SaaS with no change in pricing. Historically, we lacked an upgrade path for these clients with Business Center, but market so grow now provides the motion. With key marketing automations representing a significant upsell opportunity that will drive improved economics over time.

This gross margin compression was the primary factor of adjusted EBITDA coming in below guidance for the quarter. We view it as a deliberate near-term investment in a previously underleveraged segment of our customer base. In the first quarter, SaaS ARPU reached $378, an increase of 13% year-over-year. We ended the quarter with 96,000 SaaS subscribers. Seasoned NRR of 93% represents the natural attrition of smaller, lower spend clients, within our base. Importantly, churn among our high-value clients has been trending favorably, underscoring the effectiveness of our client experience initiatives and our confidence in long-term health of the business. Multiproduct adoption continues to accelerate in the first quarter. Clients with 2 or more SaaS products grew to 26,000 or 30% of our base compared to 24,000 or 25% a year ago.

Moving over to Marketing Services. First quarter revenue was $50.9 million and above guidance. First quarter Marketing Services adjusted EBITDA was $13.2 million, resulting in an adjusted EBITDA margin of 26%. As anticipated, this performance reflects the natural cadence of our print publication schedule, which is weighed towards the second half of the year from a revenue recognition standpoint. Importantly, this time dynamic has no impact on billings or free cash flow generation as our book-over-book decline patterns have remained consistent and predictable over time.

First quarter marketing services billings totaled $54.5 million, down 33% year-over-year, reflecting the intentional shift in our strategy, as we continue to initiate upgrades of legacy digital marketing services products for clients to our SaaS platform. The decline will persist, but at a managed pace. We remain on track to exit marketing services by 2028 with cash flows lasting through 2030, ensuring strong liquidity as we fully transform to a pure-play software business. We ended the first quarter with net debt of $258 million, bringing our leverage ratio to 1.7x.

Now, I'll turn the call over to Cameron to walk through the guidance.

Thanks, Paul. Let's dive into guidance. For the second quarter, we expect SaaS revenue in the range of $114 million to $115 million. For the full year, we are raising the low end of our SaaS revenue to a range of $463 million to $471 million. For the second quarter, we expect SaaS adjusted EBITDA in a range of $12 million to $13 million. For the full year, we are maintaining SaaS adjusted EBITDA guidance to a range of $70 million to $75 million. For the full year, we are raising our marketing services revenue to be in the range of $157 million to $163 million.

For the full year, we are maintaining Marketing Services adjusted EBITDA guidance to a range of $30 million to $35 million. One thing worth keeping in mind as you model the year, Q2 carries a lighter print publication schedule relative to other quarters, which will create some timing variation in EBITDA due to the cadence of revenue recognition. This has no impact on billings or free cash flow and as print volume ramps in the back half of the year, Marketing Services EBITDA will reflect that accordingly. The quarterly phasing is outlined in the investor presentation and the full year range is unchanged.

Before we close, I just want to step back for a second. This transformation is working. SaaS is now 70% of our revenue, something that felt like a distant goal not long ago. And as we look towards 2027, we expect to return to overall top line growth. For those of you who have been watching the story and waiting for the other side, we're nearly there. The business is at a genuine inflection point. We're no longer managing around decline. We're leaning into growth, advancing our AI initiatives and building something we're really proud of. We appreciate your continued support and your belief in what we're building. We look forward to updating you next quarter. Thank you.

Operator, let's move to questions.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Scott Berg with Needham & Company.

Joe, I guess first question is, you're talking about your move upmarket that you seem on the SaaS side, at least that you seem to be continually more positive on. Any anecdotal evidence on how many more modules those customers are taking or how much larger the ARPU of your larger kind of customer segment is? I think that would be helpful if you have any details there.

Sure. Thanks, Scott, for the question. We are moving upmarket. Our overarching plan here is to move our ARPU from $4,000 to $8,000 and we're making steady progress, 13% ARPU growth in the most recent period. As with everything with us, our metrics don't move in a perfect straight line because there's a lot of noise as we continue to transition the old business away. But we're having a lot of success moving upmarket and we're doing it in a few ways. Firstly, and maybe most importantly, we put very sophisticated sales automation in place over the last few years, and we're targeting all of our sales efforts at larger businesses. We literally have a list of who we want you to go and talk to. And what that means is that rather than selling the solopreneur who maybe has $300,000 or $400,000 of annual revenue, we're selling a midsized business that has $1 million of revenue and 12 employees or something. And it makes a big difference for us in terms of retention, their willingness and ability to pay and their ability to buy more from us over time.

So, that is actually the big story here is if you look at quality customers, and I know that there's noise in our gross number of customers. And that's because we're transitioning legacy customers and legacy systems as we wind down this gigantic marketing services business, it's bringing over some subscale customers. And sometimes we're able to get those customers moving and engage with software and buying more and heading in the right direction. And sometimes they churn out. And so those -- that process is a little bit noisy, which is why gross numbers haven't been a perfect measure.

But if you look at quality customers, it's steadily growing. And ARPU is pretty steadily growing. Again, it bounces around a little bit, but the overall direction is up. So, as far as your question about modules, we're increasingly having more and more success with people buying multiple products from us and becoming stickier. You see that number moving up. And these bigger businesses, a lot of times are coming in bigger to begin with. So, if you look at our new sales velocity, they tend to be bigger. So, you got your finger on the story. It's us moving away from solopreneurs, moving to bigger businesses and all the noise that, that creates, Scott.

Understood. And then Joe, you talked about the engagement story and some of your AI functionalities improving. I think we're all looking for evidence amongst different enterprise software vendors and how customers are leveraging these technologies through these vendors out there today. As you have more experience or your customers have more experience with this functionality, how should we think about the monetization efforts of these going forward? Are you able to monetize any of this functionality separately? Or do you think this is really something that you embed into the core product and we realize some of those financial benefits through just the core pricing maybe improvements over time?

It's a terrific question. So, that first -- excuse me, the way you finished is, I think, the way we start. And that's that we are massively enhancing the product by putting AI features, by clustering agents around what we're doing so that we can deliver better results, we can dial in people's campaigns. And there's definitely a data moat that builds over time because you get smarter and smarter with their data, with their campaigns and there's a switching cost if someone were to ever leave that. So, I think it helps -- really helps our retention, helps us deliver a better experience with the customer, things -- some things that were harder to do or that they needed to spend time on the software to do can just happen without them even logging in as you move along here. So, I think all of these make the software more attractive, easier to use, will improve retention and improve our ability to get price without having discrete pricing.

Now having said that, when I look at our road map of what we're building and what we're doing, I do think that there will be significant monetization opportunities down the road, but we are not going for that at the moment. We're just going for making the product easier to use and more powerful, so that we have stronger retention.

Your next question comes from the line of Arjun Bhatia with William Blair.

This is Alinda Li on for Arjun. Joe, what are the early customer feedbacks from customers on the new AI products? And how are you seeing that in early conversations with prospective customers as well?

So, I mentioned some of them on the call, things like image generation and review response. Those have been in for a while, and it's just steadily building. People are discovering that when they go to do their social posts, it's just easier to use these tools and so on. So, that's been a steady melt up now for a while and going very well. I think some of the stuff that we're coming out with now is really exciting. We're taking a lot of the key functionality, melding everything together. And we're able now to take a lead, give you a transcript of the lead, grade the lead 1 through 5 based initially on a set of assumptions we make based on the words in the lead, but over time on your own data, dial that in for you. And those people that are using these tools are experiencing quite a bit stronger conversion of leads. No leads are falling through the cracks. So, we've got particularly some of our partners have been taking the lead on that as we've been initially rolling this stuff out in beta and now it's out now, kind of teaching us what's possible with it.

So, we're pretty excited about this. We think it's going to be -- make our software easier to use. The dream scenario is that this software helps you efficiently grow a local business without having to log in all the time that gets working in the background for you. And that's the big deal. It's always hard to get the roof or off the roof to get the chiropractor to let go with the patient and go in there and mess with the software. And so, when the tools do it for them, it makes a big, big difference. So that's really -- it's moving it closer to them and making it easier for them to get value.

That's helpful. And last quarter, you talked about the initiative of Market, Sell and Grow. And can you just give us a little bit more update of how that initiative and strategy has been going? I know there's a lot of integration in terms of the Keap automation inside of the Market, Sell and Grow initiative. Can you just give a little bit more color from last quarter?

Yes. We also, in the last quarter, mentioned the new platform that we're developing. So, at the moment, we have Keap and Marketing Center. We have a method that we're able to deliver the value of both. It's sort of -- I hesitate to say bundle, but it's sort of almost like a bundle where we're using them together. And that's sort of that Market, Sell, Grow footprint of things that we're doing. But the new platform just puts it all together. It's not a bundle, it's not separate. Everything is together and unified. And it's all AI from -- written from the ground up. We basically have rewritten the whole thing. It's been a lot of work to do, but it's incredible. And it's in the hands of some customers right now, and we're dialing, dialing in everything. So -- but Market, Sell, Grow really is -- it's our -- markets are super fast-growing main thrust, which is Marketing Center, which is about efficient growth for local kind of bigger small businesses. And then with Keap, you have what are essentially automations or agentic assistants that help them through the process of responding to leads, if they're busy and they don't follow up right away, it continues to nurture them. And then after a sale is made, it continues to keep that customer warm and stay in touch and create a connection so that the next time they have a need, you get them back. And these are the kinds of things that really genuinely help the small business. These are the tools that they're looking for and that's what Market, Sell, Grow is all about.

Your next question comes from the line of Matt Swanson with RBC.

Yes. fantastic. Maybe following up on the question that was just asked, Marketing Center being up 30% is awesome and it clearly shows the success you guys are having with this new go-to-market. Last quarter, I think, Joe, you had mentioned there was some potential for cannibalization just kind of as you shift the focus. Can you just give kind of an update on that, I guess? And just how that 30% growth in Marketing Center will kind of increasingly be reflected in your overall growth rates as maybe some of these other headwinds get offset?

Yes. I mean I think over time, that is the company is, we're replacing the current Marketing Center platform with a new one very soon. And the new one has Keap fully integrated and is written from the ground up with Agentic tools everywhere and an NCP layer on it. So, I mean, it's very, very cool. But yes, our sales organization and our customer base see the power and results of Marketing Center, and that's the center of gravity for the company. Everything is moving in that direction. And so, the sales reps are not as much running around out there trying to sell stand-alone Keap or stand-alone business center. Everything is driving towards this Market, Sell, Grow platform. Everything is driving toward Marketing Center, particularly the new one.

So, your read on it is right. And everything is driving up market. So, if you think about our business, if I were to look at it from the outside, I would look at the quality customer progress and the way that's moving up, and I would look at Marketing Center as really the company and look at those, and I'd put my projections in my ruler on the progress there. We're not going to be building Keap out in the future as a separate thing. We're bringing the powerful unbelievably good functionality it has inside of the main try offering. And similarly, we really are not adding a lot of new business centers. The sales rep when presented with the choice of selling a business center or Marketing Center, all the rapid development, a lot of the heat and light are on Marketing Center. So, that's really what they're selling. So, I think you got to -- I'm reading in the way you asked the question that you haven't figured out.

All right. That's good to hear. Another -- the quality SaaS client bar chart in the deck, I think it's also telling a pretty compelling story. Could you just give us some context from like a product standpoint of what that $400 threshold looks like, if that makes sense? Just kind of like what is the customer spending $400? What does that mean from a product standpoint?

Yes. We've got a bunch of extensions or add-ons that are beginning to sell really well. You will know we control a pretty big part of the kind of marketing universe and there's a -- for small businesses, there's a battle for them out there. When they look at getting customers, there are 2 giant trolls standing between them and their customer, Google and Facebook. And those leads are super expensive. I mean they're very, very efficient at monetizing those leads. And so, when you talk with particularly service type businesses, they're like, is there some way I can get leads around Google or around Facebook, like not have to go to them. And so, think about all the directories we control around the world in Australia and New Zealand and the U.S., we control these big directory sites. And then we've built a network of other directory type sites, whether it's Nextdoor and Yelp and Citi Search and all these other site and we have that all network together. So, we have a pretty significant amount of non-Google traffic that we are able to source. And we've packaged these really cool kind of growth packages together that we're able to sell to customers.

And in an age of AI answer engines, they're having renewed buoyancy because the AI answer engine doesn't look it up in Google and then give it to you. It goes out and searches the stuff itself directly. And so when you look at a yp.com fence contractor in Tupelo, Mississippi, that's been on our site for 17 years, they look at that as solid authoritative content that answers the query that you put in, and it delivers that answer. And so, it's pretty cool. So, anyway, back to your question, we've got add-ons where we're drawing from who we've been in the past and pulling all that together. And that's working great because not only are we helping you measure your marketing, but we're helping you do some of it, too.

Your next question comes from the line of Jason Kreyer with Craig-Hallum Capital Group.

Joe, can you just maybe step back and talk about the sales motion and the difference between the upmarket clients and those at the low end? And then how do you position the sales team to be in the right place to capitalize on the upsell opportunity?

Yes. Great question. So, look, we -- job one for us is to wind down the old Directory business. So, every morning we get up, that's the first thing we got to do because we've got this big business, and it's got some legacy technology and legacy processes and systems, and we're winding that business down. And in so doing, we're variabilizing and collapsing that legacy cost structure down. And we're good at this. We're doing it every day. But to do it, a lot of times, we've got customers that are sitting out there on legacy platforms or legacy tools that we need to move off of those in order to shut them down and turn them off. And the upgrade over to our modern stack is phenomenal for them. But there's communication involved.

There's a lot we have to do. So, that eats up some of our time. And it does bring over some subscale customers. There are some customers over there that are just solopreneurs or very small businesses that may not be our perfect ICP. That's why you see noise in the gross client number because we brought over some unnatural SaaS customers. And some of them we were able to talk to them and get them moving and they buy more stuff and they say, "Hey, this stuff is really cool, and they become a good source. Others are like, no, it really is not for me. I was just trying to buy listings in a phone book or something.

So, that takes some of our time. When we go outside and start prospecting, we, both through our marketing and through our excellent sales force, we're deploying them against a targeted list of our ideal clients. And so, to think about it this way, the HVAC company that has 4 or 5 trucks on the road would be our target versus the guy who works -- his wife runs the office and he does it and his brother-in-law helps him in the summer. That had -- the total company has got like $400,000 of revenue. That's not our target. We're not really going and looking for that guy. We're putting our sales energy against selling the bigger ones that maybe have $1 million of revenue, or $1.2 million or $1.3 million of revenue because they tend to be much stickier and they tend to have a willingness to pay and an ability to buy more stuff over time.

And I would say, Jason, if I'm really honest, in this journey. If you could go back and maybe change things or whatever, when we first started our software business, we pretty much would sell anybody who would talk to us. And that gave us a lot of experience because when we studied our customer base, we found that the very, very smallest ones were churnier and the bigger ones were steadier. And that's just a better way to build our business. And now we've spent a lot of time developing Marketing Center for those larger guys, for those bigger businesses. And we brought in Sean Wechter from Boomi, and we've become really good at integrating with other software tools. And so, if you're on ServiceTitan or you're on, I don't know, some other big CRM tool and you need your marketing cared for, we are interconnecting and working well with those tools.

So, that was maybe more than you wanted, but gives you some sense of where we're spending our time and how we're focusing.

Yes. No, that's good. I do have a follow-up. Maybe this is for Paul, but just trying to get a sense of the trajectory on both the customer count and the dollar retention figures. Just if you have any insights into, are we stabilizing now when those things can start to peak up in the next few quarters?

I'll tell you what, I'm going to share this answer with Cameron. Cameron is my data expert. So, I'm going to get him involved here. Look, we sort of guided you guys directionally that we would probably be about flattish to maybe down slightly for the year as some of the conversions that we made over the last year or so stick and some didn't. And now the sales that we're making, each sale that we're replacing them with are much larger. So, in some cases, 2 leave and then 1 new coming in is as big as the 2 that left. So, there's a little bit of just qualitation going on, if you will. But let me let Cameron assist with the answer a little bit. Cam?

That's right, Joe. So, Jason, what you're seeing in the overall customer count is that effect. You're adding larger customers and losing the subscale customers. So, I think we expect that to stay flat starting from the beginning of the year to the end of the year. On the seasoned NRR metric, that will probably stay around the same range as well. You are losing some subscale customers, and that will weigh on that. But I think if you step back and look at what we've done over the past 12 months, our overall churn has trended in the right direction on the overall customer base, and that will be reflected in the season base overtime. And our quality customers, roughly 70% of the revenue, they have excellent retention as of right now. So, that will start to trend NRR in the right direction as you move out. And so, we want to make sure that we keep those quality customers having the best client experience and making sure that retention stays strong. So overall, I think you won't see a lot of big changes in those metrics throughout the year. So, I would just forecast relative flatness.

There are no further questions at this time. This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us, and welcome to the Thryv Fourth Quarter 2025 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] I will now hand the conference over to Cameron Lessard, Senior Vice President, Corporate Development and Investor Relations. Cameron, please go ahead.

Good morning, and thank you for joining us for Thryv Holdings Fourth Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. With me today are Joe Walsh, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; Sean Wechter, Chief Technology Officer; and Paul Rouse, Chief Financial Officer. During this call, we will make forward-looking statements that are subject to various risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from these statements. A discussion of these risks and uncertainties is included in our earnings release and SEC filings. Today's presentation will also include non-GAAP financial measures, which should be considered in addition to, but not as a substitute for our GAAP results. Reconciliation of these measures can be found in our earnings release.

With that, I'll turn the call over to Joe Walsh, Chairman and CEO. Joe?

Thank you, Cameron, and good morning, everyone. 2025 was a solid year, and our team accomplished a lot. SaaS revenues grew 34% year-over-year, and SaaS adjusted EBITDA margin was strong at 16.8%. We are accelerating on the AI front. It is advancing our product road map, and we are well-positioned as a leading SaaS platform for small businesses. I want to spend my time today clearly framing the future of Thryv, and I want to be direct about what we're building because the results you see for the quarter and our guidance for the year only make sense when viewed through that strategic lens.

Over the past several years, we've communicated our transition from legacy print and marketing services into a leading SaaS company. This has been a successful transition that's well underway. What we haven't shared yet is our next phase, not just evolving into a leading SaaS company, but becoming the platform of choice for small businesses who need to market, get found and chosen, who need to sell with automated follow-ups and capture every lead, and who need to grow by reaching more customers than ever before. Let me explain why this is important and what we've been building toward.

Our Marketing Center is our fastest-growing product, a differentiated and valuable offering in the market that's growing north of 50% year-over-year. In fact, in 2025, it more than doubled in revenue. It's -- if you look at our old paradigm of centers, it would be our largest center. But we recognize the gap. We were very good at helping businesses get found online and attract customers, but we needed to be equally strong at helping them convert those leads into sales, turn those customers into repeat buyers, and scale the entire cycle. Small businesses simply don't need more leads, they need to drive more revenue. That requires mastering the full journey, get found, land the sale, deliver great service, earn repeat business, and do it again and again, a network effect with increasing efficiency. That's precisely why the Keap acquisition was so strategic for us. We acquired years of development time and product sophistication that would have been nearly impossible for us to replicate internally.

The value isn't in Keap's revenue today, it's in the platform capabilities and the engineering talent integrated into our new platform that's led us to accelerate our entire road map by multiple years. That's exactly what we've been engineering, combining Marketing Center's proven ability to grow your business and get found online with Keap's powerful capability to move leads through the sales` funnel and turn them into customers, all in one unified platform. No more separate products, no more fragmented experiences. Going forward, our entire strategy centers on one powerful offering, the Thryv platform, powered by AI, we'll be launching later in 2026.

The Thryv platform represents a fundamental paradigm shift from selling individual products and centers to delivering a unified growth platform for small businesses. This is an architectural go-to-market and operating model transformation designed to help businesses market, sell, and grow within one integrated system. Historically, our software portfolio evolved as a collection of distinct solutions. That structure worked in the sales-led world. But small businesses don't think in terms of products. They think in terms of outcomes. How do I attract customers? How do I convert demand? How do I manage relationships? And how do I grow revenue with limited time and expertise?

The Thryv platform is built to deliver those outcomes through a single experience with 3 tiers aligned to where a business is in its life cycle, from a very small business just getting started to growing small businesses, and then eventually to established businesses that want one platform to run their growth. A critical foundation of this platform is our CRM and automation layer. We invested here because the system of record is essential to building modern, product-led experiences. CRM is no longer a stand-alone tool. It's the backbone, really, that facilitates onboarding, automation, AI-driven insights, and expansion across the customer life cycle. At the same time, we're modernizing the platform around AI to reduce the effort required for customers to see value.

AI is embedded directly into the customer journey to accelerate time to value, guide next best actions, and help small businesses grow without needing specialized marketing or technical expertise. This platform strategy also underpins a major evolution in how we go to market. We're moving deliberately toward product-led growth and a product-led sales hybrid model. Entry-level customers increasingly come in through self-service, product-led motions, while our sales organization focuses on higher value tiers, more complex needs, and expansion over time. There's one additional point I want to address directly as you think about our outlook. Over the past several years, our SaaS growth benefited materially from these initiated upgrades, where we took marketing services clients and moved them from legacy platforms onto our modern SaaS platform. That motion was effective and helped us scale quickly, but it was always going to reach a conclusion.

As we exited 2025, that upgrade pool is largely behind us. We have some remaining in our road map for the next few years, but they're smaller as a proportion of our overall revenue growth. And going forward, our growth will be fueled by 3 primary drivers: organic customer acquisition, expansion, and retention. The Thryv platform is explicitly designed for this next phase. As a result, near-term growth rates will moderate, but the underlying quality of that growth improves meaningfully as we move out. So how to think about us going forward?

Let me discuss how you should evaluate Thryv's performance because I think there's an important distinction between signal and noise in our metrics. I want to make sure you're focused on what exactly matters on our long-term business value. Our business quality is fundamentally defined by customers spending $400 a month or more. We call these quality customers. Now this isn't an arbitrary threshold we picked for convenience. This is where our unit economics work and where retention is materially stronger, where stronger expansion is attainable, and where we're building a compounding business model. Who are these customers? These are established small businesses, typically doing close to $1 million or more in annual revenue, and they have 4, 5, 6, even more employees. These aren't solopreneurs agonizing over a $50 expense. These are real businesses with real operational complexity. We're spending $400, $500, $600, $700 a month on a platform that drives customer acquisition, manages their sales pipeline, and helps run their operations is, frankly, a straightforward return on investment decision.

The data on this segment tells a really clear story. Retention rates are significantly higher than our blended average, and they're improving. They tend to expand over time, adding capabilities, increasing their monthly spend and deepening their investment in the platform. This segment is growing both in absolute customer numbers and as a percentage of our total base. These are businesses that integrate Thryv into their core operations, and they see measurable returns. Together, we become true partners in their growth. This is where we win, and this is where we're deliberately concentrating our product development, sales resources, and our customer success efforts.

Now let me address what has created noise in the overall numbers. We carry a legacy tail of smaller customers, many spending well under $200 a month that came into our base through acquisitions, upgrades initiated by us, or promotional offers that made sense at different points in our history, but don't align with our current platform value proposition or our current pricing structure. These are fundamentally different businesses. These are micro businesses, solopreneurs, side hustles, operations where $100 or $150 a month is a meaningful recurring expense that they're constantly evaluating. We manage this segment in 2 ways. First, we actively upgrade these customers into higher-value packages. We run targeted outreach, demonstrate additional capabilities. We show them the ROI of expanding their use of the platform, and it works. Many do upgrade. They see value, scale their usage, and transition into that $400-plus segment where the retention and expansion economics really kick in. And you can see evidence of this working in our ARPU trends.

The second way we manage them is we accept the fact that these smaller customers do sometimes churn, and we're okay with that outcome. While it creates some pressure on our aggregate retention metrics, it does have minimal impact on our overall revenue. So here's the key distinction. If you evaluate us purely on total customer count or on blended retention metrics that treat all customers equally, you're essentially measuring the wrong thing. You're giving equal analytical weight to a $75 a month customer, a solopreneur who's extremely price sensitive and likely to churn software vendors regularly, and a $600 a month established business with $1 million in revenue that use Thryv as mission-critical infrastructure for their operation. Those are not the same business relationships. They don't have the same economics, and they shouldn't carry the same weight in how you think about our business trajectory.

So what should you be measuring? Growth in quality customers spending $400 a month or more is 18-plus percent in the fourth quarter of last year. We've had steady growth in that segment. Quality customers now account for 69% of our revenue in Q4 compared to 60% in the prior year.

Marketing Center is our largest and fastest-growing center within our market sell growth strategy. At 2/3 of our SaaS revenue growing 34% in Q4, it's one of the clear signals of where this business is headed. Marketing Center, as a center, is actually growing faster than the 34%. The 34% refers to the whole kind of platform of Market cell growth. This matters enormously because Marketing Center represents an AI-enabled platform. And these are customers saying, "I want technology that helps me acquire customers, manage my pipeline, and grow my business, and I'm willing to pay for it. And here's what we're learning. Customers genuinely love software when it delivers results. Marketing Center customers fit our ideal profile almost perfectly. They're spending meaningful amounts. They're seeing return on investment they can measure. They're expanding into additional capabilities as they see value and they're sticking with us because the platform becomes increasingly embedded in how they run their business. This is our business model. This is what Thryv looks like at scale. It's the right product for the right customer profile. And the performance validates everything we've been building toward.

So when you're thinking about how to evaluate our performance and trajectory, don't just look at the blended customer counts or aggregate metrics. Look at the growth that we're seeing in our market sales growth strategy. Look at the $400 a month cohort expansion. Those are your forward-looking indicators. That's where you can see proof that when we execute our strategy with our target customer base, we can drive strong, sustainable SaaS growth. Let me bring this together. The performance of MSG proves the model works. Now we're taking those learnings, combining them with Keap's customer conversion and life cycle capabilities, and scaling that proven success across the unified Thryv platform. Judge us on the quality and trajectory of our customer base, not just the quantity. That's where the real value creation story is unfolding.

With that context, let me introduce our Chief Technology Officer, Sean Wechter, who will talk about the progress we're making on the AI front. Sean has multiple tours of duty at market-leading public and private technology companies and joined our company about half a year ago. I'll hand it over to Sean now to share a bit about what his team has been focused on. Sean?

Thank you, Joe, and good morning. My name is Sean Wechter, and I'm the CTO of Thryv. I joined Thryv in October and have been super impressed with the foundation that we've built and the large customer base we have to build on. The first 2 levers I pulled when I arrived was to amp up our AI efforts and our data assets, get them cleaned up. I was fortunate to be starting on third base because the products and ecosystem at Thryv are already API-rich. Okay. So since we're going to be talking about artificial intelligence, I just wanted to go over a few caveats. Things in the AI world are rapidly evolving. And our strategy is to adopt the latest and greatest AI tools and partners, and this may change as new leaders emerge. Our strategy is also to conduct a portfolio of experiments and double down on the winners. What we're going to cover today, we're going to go over a summary of our AI strategy and my favorite AI programs. A summary of our AI strategy at a macro level is that we want to partner with the latest and greatest AI solutions on the market. And then when we think about our strategy, we break it into a few buckets. We have the enterprise, we have our engineering team, and we have our product. On the enterprise, my favorite author is Jim Collins. He wrote the book Great by Choice and Good to Great. And he has this concept of bullets versus canon balls, which means you try lots of things and then you double down on the winners. So we're going to do that exactly that in the sales, customer success, and engineering domains.

The reason for that is there's lots of new AI solutions hitting the market every day, and some of them are great, and some of them are not so great, and you got to sit through them all, and thus bullets versus cannon balls. On the engineering front, developer productivity is the name of the game. We want to make sure that our engineers have the latest and greatest tools in their hands. And we also want to be great at rapidly integrating and interoperating within our customers' ecosystem and our ecosystem. And then on the product front, we want to bring AI down market to small businesses in an ambient way, meaning ideally, AI does the intended task for you, hopefully, proactively. For example, if you want to reschedule your next appointment or move a lead from one system of record to another, simply do it by voicing your request and it's done. We want to be strongly embedded in the top AI models. We believe that that's going to make our products more sticky, and we want to partner like crazy with the winners and rapidly evolve and iterate as those winners rotate every 6 to 12 months.

Okay. My favorite uses of AI so far at Thryv is one, our budget optimizer, which is a super cool program that uses AI to transcribe calls, then used AI to score those transcripts. And then we use machine learning to optimize that data for the best lead sources and the best use of the customer's budget. When we think about our data and our scale, we have LLM data like everybody else, but we have industry data and customer-specific data that helps us on our AI journey. Another cool program we have is the New Zealand Directory Assistance program, where we used market-leading AI voice interaction solutions with market-leading AI workflow automation solutions and our data to bring a fully AI directory assistance experience to New Zealanders. And then we have our MCP solution, which really helps us integrate with the top frontier models. I think we were second to market in launching our native MCP solution, which made me happy because we're in the race. We're going to keep it right now as a frontier program because MCP in general is still maturing, but we're committed to being deeply embedded into the best AI models.

So to wrap up, we're working to accelerate our AI efforts meaningfully. I'm really proud of the teamwork and excited about this next chapter of the technology industry. 10 years ago, our customers needed a mix of technologies to market and sell and grow their business. 10 years from now, they're going to need a mix of technologies to market and sell and grow their business, and I'm committed to ensuring we're leading the way.

And with that, I'll turn it over to Paul Rouse, our CFO.

Thanks, Sean. Let's dive into the quarter. SaaS revenue increased 14.1% to $119 million in the fourth quarter and was within guidance. Keap contributed $16.2 million in the fourth quarter. SaaS revenue increased 34.2% year-over-year to $461 million for the full year. SaaS adjusted gross margin was 70.4% in the fourth quarter. SaaS adjusted gross margin increased 70 basis points year-over-year to 72.7% for the full year. SaaS adjusted EBITDA increased to $20 million in the fourth quarter within guidance, resulting in an adjusted EBITDA margin of 16.8%. SaaS adjusted EBITDA increased to $73.8 million for the full year, resulting in an adjusted EBITDA margin of 16%. We ended the fourth quarter with 100,000 SaaS subscribers. SaaS ARPU reached $373, representing a 15% increase year-over-year. Seasoned NRR stayed flat at 94% for the quarter.

Growth in quality customers spending $400 a month or more grew by 3,000 or 18% year-over-year and now represents more than 20% of our client base. Multiproduct adoption continued to accelerate in the fourth quarter. Clients with 2 or more SaaS products grew to 19,000 or 23% of our base compared to 15,000 or 16% of our base 1 year ago. Thryv clients with 2 or more centers was 15% at the end of the fourth quarter compared to 12% in the prior year. Marketing Services revenue was $72.6 million for the fourth quarter, in line with our guidance. Marketing Services revenue was $324 million for the full year.

Marketing Services adjusted EBITDA was $18.8 million in the fourth quarter within guidance, resulting in an adjusted EBITDA margin of 25.9% Marketing Services adjusted EBITDA was $78 million for the full year, resulting in an adjusted EBITDA margin of 24.1%. Fourth quarter marketing services billings totaled $60.9 million, down 34% year-over-year, reflecting our intentional shift in our strategy as we continue to initiate upgrades of legacy digital marketing services products for clients to our SaaS platform. The decline will persist but at a managed pace. We remain on track to exit marketing services by 2028 with cash flows lasting through 2030, providing liquidity as we fully transform to a pure-play software business.

Free cash flow was $31.1 million in 2025. And for the first time, we expect the number to grow meaningfully to $40 million to $50 million in 2026, a direct reflection of our software business having reached a size and scale that is now driving the majority of our profitability. We ended the fourth quarter with net debt reduced by $15 million to $251 million, bringing our leverage ratio to 1.7x.

Turning to our outlook for 2026. For the first quarter, we expect SaaS revenue in the range of $114 million to $115 million.

For the full year, we expect SaaS revenue in the range of $461 million to $471 million. For the first quarter, we expect SaaS adjusted EBITDA in the range of $12 million to $13 million. For the full year, we expect SaaS adjusted EBITDA in the range of $70 million to $75 million. For the full year, we expect our Marketing Services revenue to be in a range of $150 million to $160 million. For the full year, we expect Marketing Services adjusted EBITDA in the range of $30 million to $35 million.

Now I'll turn the call back over to Joe.

Thank you, Paul. You will have noticed in Paul's guidance that's a little bit conservative on the quarterly guide and the guide for the year for SaaS. We have a tremendous amount of faith in our market, sell, grow platform, this initiative I talked about in the opening. We basically have struck oil. This is really selling very quickly and working well. But as we are setting up this transition, we expect slower growth for a few quarters, reaccelerating later in the year, and going strong into next year. And so we're taking a conservative guide as we work our way through that transition.

I'll turn it over now to the operator for questions.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Arjun Bhatia with William Blair.

Some interesting announcements there. Joe, with the new platform, maybe we can touch on that first. I'm just curious how you kind of envision the adoption kind of curve of the new platform? Like is there going to be a migration of existing customers? Like what are the kind of -- is that disruptive for customers? How do you plan to do that? And then just how long might it take before the new platform is sort of fully ramped up for your entire customer base and you're selling it to new customers as well?

That's a great question. Thanks, Arjun. So it's interesting. We -- Marketing Center has been around, and it's been steadily building, and we've been sort of dialing it in. And it's fitting in beautifully in a market where there are a lot of people with vertical CRMs and other kinds of offerings. But we're uniquely placed in this ability to find customers. We still own and control lots of big directories like YP and Super Pages, and we've got a big network of partners like Yelp and Nextdoor and many, many others, both here in the U.S. and over in Australia and New Zealand. So we're really plugged in, and we're really good at finding new customers and bringing them in.

This top of the funnel thing we've always been amazing at. What Keap gave us was it gave us sort of the bottom of the funnel. the ability to follow up and convert, and then once the customer was a customer to nurture them for more business for a longer lifetime value run. And what we've done is we've engineered everything together into one platform. And the more progress we've made on that and the more we've met with customers and begun to put that in place, the more we realize that we've just captured lightning in a bottle. This is really good. And you don't have to get somebody to take out their other CRM to put it in. We can actually be agnostic about what CRM you have, and we can work with you.

And it's really opened up a whole new Vista for us of people to work with, the partners, the whole bit. So we're really excited that this is a space that we have a tremendous right to win in. I'm not sure we have a right to win in just the kind of original BC product. There are people that are doing a lot of work deeply down into verticals, mapping processes in particular industries and all that. And that is a harder put, if you will. So back to your question, how do we see it sort of developing? Well, it's -- the Market sell grow platform is made up of some bits that we've been doing for a while and some of the newly developed AI kinds of tools that Sean talked about a couple of minutes ago. We've sort of replatformed everything and are building it in that way. So it's well over $300 million in revenue already. And yes, there's a little bit of cannibalization where it's eating up some of business center customers who may be -- who bought it, who really more had an interest in growing in lead gen and some of those tools. So there are -- there is -- there has been some people moving from Business Center over to this exciting new platform.

And look, you know how this happens in a company. When you bring out something that's just hot and really working well, everybody gets excited about it. And so it becomes the thing that they really believe in, and they want to talk to customers about. So in some cases, that enthusiasm is transferring into them moving customers over because they feel it's a better fit, and it's going to really help them. So we're still selling some new business center customers, and we have a large, large installed base of business center customers that are using it and doing well on it. But it doesn't have the heat and light that it had before because the market sell grow platform has really captured everyone's imagination, and that's where the focus is. So hopefully, that answered your question. There's kind of a little bit of cannibalization. It's mostly selling new out there, but there is a little bit of people moving from business center too.

I appreciate that color. And then going back to just how you think about your customer base and the new sort of segmentation around quality customers. How should we just view the retention metrics and LTV dynamics of this quality customer cohort? And how does it differ? Or maybe the better way to phrase it is, what's the overlap with the seasoned customer metric? Are these all tenured customers? Or are there new customers that are also spending over this $400 mark per month?

There are definitely some new customers that are coming in right away. I mean if you look at what our field sales force is selling right now, on average, they're selling customers that are over $400 a month. They're out there selling big, and they're having a lot of success selling this kind of fully hatched program. We tried to talk about it a little bit in the press release and prepared remarks. We've been transforming the directory business of the past into this SaaS business. And in so doing, we -- some of the legacy platforms that date back to some of the old regional Bell operating companies that were bought and rolled up and were a part of this where some of these platforms were 20 years old and older that clients were running on. And we literally needed to shut those down and get them off. And we landed them on our modern SaaS platform, and we gave them a lot more value. We gave a lot more functionality, a lot more tools. And we moved them over without disrupting them with a big price increase.

And so a lot of these people came over, and they were below our rate card and not necessarily natural SaaS customers or natural customers that really were wanting to invest and build and grow their business. And so we've been working with them trying to get them engaged with their tools. And in many cases, they are getting engaged, and they're buying more and they're becoming quality customers. But in some cases, they're saying, look, I don't really care about this. It's not really what I want, and they're churning away. And that's part of why you're seeing noise in the gross customer number and why we've kind of pointed you to what's going on under the hood. You've got this $300 million-plus business that's growing fast. It's really strong, and you've got this big client base, about 69% of our clients are this quality metric, where we make good margins. These are a little bit larger businesses. These are businesses that have the ability to buy more from us. And so I get it. There's so much noise in our numbers. It's hard to kind of see it all. But that's kind of been our approach.

Your next question comes from the line of Zach Cummins with B. Riley Securities.

Joe, I wanted to ask you how your go-to-market approach is going to evolve now with this greater focus on quality customers. Can you just dive a little bit deeper in terms of how you're thinking of serving the lower end versus your direct sales approach and maybe even working with some larger partners over time?

Yes. Thank you. We made sort of a natural mistake, if you will, in the early going. We were anxious to build a software company. We're anxious to talk to anybody that would talk to us to sell it. So we sold anybody who would talk to us. And in the process, we did a massive experiment to figure out who our ideal client profile is. And we sold a lot of solopreneurs, very small businesses where they may have come in for an initial kind of $300 a month-ish kind of deal. And that was a big bill for them, and they worried every month about it, and they weren't necessarily able to fully utilize all the functionality in the software. At the same time, we went out and we sold some bigger businesses. And we saw them really engage with the product, really begin to use it. We saw them buy more and so on.

So what we pretty much have decided is that our phenomenal in-person sales organization should really spend its time with the larger businesses. And we should develop more of a untouched by human hands motion for the smaller. And so we're -- we've been building this sort of product-led growth approach where for a smaller business that wants to come in, we're going to have products that they can buy, and they'll be able to do that. There'll be all kinds of communities, frequently asked questions, and videos they can watch, and so on. But we aren't necessarily going to deploy somebody who makes 6 figures out there calling on them to help them with that. The economics of that just are tough to support. And so we really have put most of our emphasis and most of our focus on marketing to and prospecting for larger businesses, more businesses with more like $1 million of revenue or close to it, and less of the kind of very, very small person that works alone or maybe a 2-employee business. And those we hope will still come in and come in through our product-led growth motion that we're developing. And we think the majority of where we'll spend our time is with these bigger businesses.

And just one follow-up question around the launch of the new platform. Can you clarify how much more development work needs to be done and when you're planning to really kind of broadly roll out this new MSG platform as you referred to it?

Yes. We're selling it right now, and it's going really, really, really well. What's happening, though, is we're doing more work to put more functionality, and I don't know if any product is ever really done. And bringing it further along, there are some really bold AI initiatives where we use the MCP layer, and we're making it do all kinds of interesting things that are sort of happening in the lab that will be coming into the product fairly soon. So it is progressing nicely. We have a trial version out and a small beta that will be expanding more broadly fairly soon. So it is all coming together now. So it's not like a flash cut where we're not doing it, then we're going to do it. We're selling it right now. But there's dramatically improved versions of it that we plan over the course of the year.

Your next question comes from the line of Matt Swanson with RBC.

I was curious on the years of kind of how you're pricing the new platform. I think it makes a lot of sense from kind of a streamlined standpoint. What are you seeing? Or kind of what are your expectations in terms of how your quality SaaS customers are going to transition over at what tier? And does that have any kind of distinct differences from a pricing standpoint compared to the existing products they're on?

I think it's more -- so it's a great question because you've got different kinds of businesses. You've got the very small kind of dreamer just getting started business. And we are going to have a product for them. As I mentioned, we're not really going to talk to them about it per se. We're going to let them come to our website and sort of do it on their own. And then we've got -- we're going to have kind of a mid-price thing that's a nice step up for those people who start on that trialer tier. And that second tier might also be an area that an in-person salesperson might be able to land somebody on. And then there'll be a higher tier. My experience is to scale anything, you need to keep it relatively simple. It can't really be a blizzard of different choices and all that just becomes too confusing. And so that's why we're coming up with this more streamlined, simple approach. So there'll be add-ons and things that you can buy over and above that initial triplicate of choice. so that we can continue to grow the customer. But we will have an offering at the low end for a smaller business so that they can come and they can buy. But we're not going to deploy a whole bunch of sales or services costs against that.

And maybe following up right where you left off there, and just kind of thinking about some of the efficiency gains that you could have by having such a simplified or centric go-to-market approach. Would the plan be to end of life the other centers or other products over time? Or is it just too early to think about that?

I think it's too early to think about that. I mean the Market cell growth platform is pulling across our product range, all the things that we think support that. So what was it at onetime reporting center is powerfully in the middle of that now. Business Center is a separate thing. And I mentioned, quite honestly, there are some numbers of customers that have opted more toward the Market cell grow piece because that's really what they want. They really want the phone to ring. They really want a bunch of business coming in. And they maybe weren't prepared to really fully use all the functionality of an operating system in their business. So that's kind of right. That's the way it's working out. And that's part of the reason that you're seeing a little flatness in our top line revenue growth in our guidance is we're trying to give a little room because we're seeing some of that cannibalization.

In terms of the longer term, we've got a very large base of business center customers engaged and using it and happy. And we don't intend to kick them off. We want to continue to serve them, and we're really happy with them. And in some cases, they've got Business Center and they also are buying all the marketing tools and doing that as well. But we've more cleaned up and segregated that. So we feel like we can scale bigger, better, faster and run a more efficient business with a more streamlined set of product offerings.

Your final question comes from the line of Jason Kreyer with Craig-Hallum Capital Group.

So Joe, I was wondering if you could talk more about the AI functionality that you're embedding in the platform, how that creates more value or more efficiency for your customers?

I'd love to. I'm going to share my answer with Sean. I'm going to give him a look at it because Sean is -- I think his middle name might be AI. He's Mr. AI. But I'll start a little bit, and then I'll give it to Sean. There's just a long list of different things that AI can do. And I know there's a lot of debate out there about will AI replace software or will it augment it or whatever. Look, the price point that we're operating here it's not worth your time to sit down and try to figure out how to hack together your own stuff. I mean we're organizing and pulling it all together and making everything in a complete package to help you accomplish growing your business. And most of the people that we work with don't have a lot of expertise in marketing. They don't have a lot of expertise in AI. They're good plumbers or carpenters or whatever they do, and they really need us.

So it's sort of AI with human in the loop, but the whole idea is this platform becomes easier and easier to use. If I'm really honest with you, our biggest problem over the last decade has been getting the small business to really engage and do even small things that they need to do to make the whole wheel work. And the AI can come in now, and it can do those things to kick it over and create a cycle that works. and the automations that we got and keep do that same thing. So there's a lot of really cool stuff, like customer calls you and this thing can capture the transcript of the call. It can grade, was it a 1 through 5 lead? Where should it go in your lead funnel? It can follow up on that thing for you. It's really incredible stuff it's doing. So Sean, why don't you just -- I know you've got some observations the way you think about it. I can't seem to shut you up about it when we talk about it.

Yes. I'm equally excited about it as well, Joe. And Jason, we sit in the value chain between buyers and sellers and have for a long time. So that means we've got a lot of really rich data around that from call transcripts to leads. to form fills. And so we're just trying to get creative on how to use that to benefit the actual small builder and small business. And so -- and then there's just things that a small business needs to evolve into like we call it AEO answer engine optimization. You had SEO, well, now you have to show up in all the frontier models and helping them do that. We have website generation. We have social posting, call analysis, AI receptionist, they're missing calls. And so they can now have an AI help them take that call, transcribe it, moving data around from a mix of ecosystem solutions in their ecosystem, systems of record for finance and other CRMs and so forth.

And so eliminating that complexity is pretty exciting. So when I talked about our strategy, there's new awesome tools that are popping up left and right, and we're committed to taking the best of them, simplifying them and bringing them down market to our customers. And that's really just a race without an end. Did that answer your question?

That was great. I appreciate that. Maybe just one follow-up for me. Curious if you have any expectations for churn as you migrate customers kind of from where they are into these higher-value packages?

Yes. I mean we're seeing churn overall gently trend down. Now we definitely had a little bit of a hump of churn following the massive migration. I mean you'll remember if you've been tracking our numbers closely, we went from around 50,000 customers to 100,000 really fast. And that was just a whole bunch of systems that we were sunsetting in the old phone company marketing services and Yellow Pages environment that we wanted to move over. And so we've had a chance now to really work with those customers. And some of them, we worked with them out and some we worked with them up. And there's a little bit more of that to go. But I would -- the way I would say, Jason, is I think that when you look at our business over the next, say, 3 years, kind of the arc of where we're going, we are suddenly moving upmarket. And as we move upmarket, I think we'll get lower churn.

Just when I study the base that we have now, those customers that are down in that lower spend tier or the smaller businesses have churn profiles that are higher than the bigger businesses that we're selling. When we sell a business that has 8 or 10 employees and maybe $1.5 million of revenue or something like that, they tend to be very stable and behave really well. They have a persistent need for leads. They have an employee staff that's counting on the business ticking over and doing that next thing. When we sell a solopreneur or a 2-employee business, they sometimes hit a rough patch and just decide to go get jobs and stop doing the business anymore. And it becomes a churn, has nothing to do with our software. So I think my expectation is where we're trying to run the business is for lower churn over time. Now I'm not saying we're going to go to enterprise level churn because we still are dealing with small businesses. But I think you'll see it trend down over time.

There are no further questions at this time. This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us, and welcome to the Thryv Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions]

I will now hand the conference over to Cameron Lessard, Vice President of Corporate Development and Strategy. Please go ahead.

Good morning, and thank you for joining us for Thryv Holdings Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. With me today are Joe Walsh, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and Paul Rouse, Chief Financial Officer.

During this call, we will make forward-looking statements that are subject to various risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from these statements. A discussion of these risks and uncertainties is included in our earnings release and SEC filings.

Today's presentation will also include non-GAAP financial measures, which should be considered in addition to, but not as a substitute for our GAAP results. Reconciliations of these measures can be found in our earnings release. As a reminder, on this call, SaaS revenue reflects the combined performance of Thryv and Keap. We will only specify Keap's performance when discussing its revenue contribution for the quarter and fiscal year.

With that, I'll turn the call over to Joe Walsh, Chairman and CEO. Joe?

Thank you, Cameron, and good morning, everyone. I'd like to give you an update on our business transformation, some of the progress that we're making, and then Paul will take you through this quarter's numbers after that.

First thing I want to do is update you on our grow conference. Two weeks ago, we had out in Arizona, a small business growth conference. It was broken into two pieces. The first couple of days were a partner conference, a lot of the partners that both Keap and Thryv have, which is really now one partner community.

And I have to tell you, when we first met them a year ago, they were a little bit angry. They were saying, we've not been invested in enough by the prior ownership of Keap. And we feel like you owe us certain deliverables. And so, I must say our partner results this year have been okay, but they've not been the kind of big lift that we were looking for.

And so, we worked really hard with these partners to figure out what kind of updates they need, what kind of partner portal they need, what kind of rest API updates, what kind of product improvements and which things really mattered, and we've delivered a lot for them. And so, this partner update was like Christmas, us delivering on the value that they were looking for. And so, I have better expectations as we go into '26. I think these partners are pretty impressed at the pace at which we are delivering and innovating the software. So that was great.

And the second part of the conference was small businesses. Hundreds of small businesses came in. Obviously, some existing customers came to learn more about how to use the tools, but I was surprised at how many prospective customers came, customers that, in some cases, are on some other tool or aren't on any tool, who came to learn more about how to market their business.

And we presented to them a really simple growth model of market, sell and grow and show them how particularly Marketing Center can give them the foundation for growth. Marketing Center is our fastest-selling product. It's really become the tip of the spear for us as we've settled in on this kind of market sell growth strategy. And it really gives you all the good hygiene. It gets your listings managed all across the web. It gives you a well-built website that's not only search engine optimized, but it's answer engine optimized, which is really important because the answer engines are gaining share every day. So, we've built the knowledge graph on these sites, and we're continually tweaking the sites to make sure that they're really answer engine friendly and bringing you up high on those results.

And so that's been really big as well. When you have a Marketing Center, you have call tracking numbers, so you can track results everywhere online, offline. So, you can figure out the truck wrap that you have, does that pull calls, the yard sign you have in front of the job that you're doing. When you're doing stuff in social, how is that pulling? And you can even look at one social sort of personality versus another and what's pulling the best. If you're running search campaigns, you can track everything.

And what we're finding is a lot of people are using Marketing Center, even if they're using someone else's CRM, that they might be on one of our sort of competitor CRMs, but then using Marketing Center in order to manage their marketing because it's the best thing available in the market.

So, we're pretty excited about the progress we're making there. The Grow Conference was really a confirmation that -- these small businesses want to get their marketing right. They really want to find a way to be found and consistently measure what's working. So, we're excited about that.

We were also able to update the attendees on the AI developments that we've experienced. We're rolling out lots of AI within the software. We've got social captioning where when you do social posts, it can help you write that social post in your personality. If you are posting a photo, it can help you capture that, suggest several captions. You can pick the one that you think works the best.

Review response is a big deal because lots of these small businesses have a tough time keeping up with reviews. So, the software goes and finds review, brings it to you, make sure you don't miss it and suggest several review responses. And you can just pick the one in the middle or the one that you think is the best voice for you and it posts it, and it's all taken care of. And you don't have to kind of make a sticky note to remember to do it. It's all happening in real time.

Your listings, it is helping you with everything with service descriptions. If you've got a new area of your business or something, you can use the AI to help you write a very professional service description of what you do. So not all of our customers are the best wordsmithers, so it kind of gives them a more polished space.

Everything to do with websites. We've got obviously, a service that we provide as a company to build big powerful websites for customers. But sometimes they don't need all that. And so, we've got a simple AI website builder now. It will be out in a couple of weeks that will allow a small business to come in and just spin up a quick website using AI.

Copywriting assistant. When you're sitting there and you're doing any kind of copywriting for landing pages or trying to build a little e-mail campaign, we've got that built right into the tool where that's happening. You've got call analysis. This is something we've had in beta for a little while. It's working really well, where it takes your calls and actually gives you a transcript of the inbound call and then does lead scoring on it.

I was talking to one of our partners at the conference who was in on the beta, and he was telling me about a dentist that he has out in the Pacific Northwest, who, over a 2-day period of time, got 27 leads. He got a full transcript of the entire call, and they were all lead scored. And the lead -- the dentist was just dumbfound. He said, I can't believe this. But this 27 leads and they scored all the details and the partner said, "Hey, it's just the beginning. This is the future. This is what these guys are delivering. So really excited about the lead scoring and call analysis.

So AI is being used throughout the product to make it easier for small business people, kind of meet them where they are. And obviously, AI is doing a lot internally for us as a company. All the fulfillment that we're doing where we're building sites, doing social, we're using AI to amplify our productivity.

Our legal department uses it. We're using it in accounting. We're using it all over the company. So, you probably heard from other businesses that they're finding meaningful efficiency there.

And then maybe most importantly, in our software development team, they're using all the latest tools to amplify and speed up the road map of development and then obviously using AI for QA, trying to make sure that the quality is there and speed up the process of finding already bugs, get to the bottom line, get it sorted and get them squared away.

So, AI has been a big lift for us. It's been a big part of our progress that we've made this year. and really feel as though the availability of AI in the software is a big tailwind for us as we go into next year. Really excited about that.

So, I've got a couple of other comments to make later, but I know you're anxious to hear the numbers. So, let's turn it over to Paul and let Paul take you through the numbers. Paul?

Thanks, Joe. Let's dive into the numbers. SaaS reported revenue was $115.9 million in the third quarter, representing an increase of 33% year-over-year. Keap contributed $16.8 million in the third quarter. Excluding Keap, Thryv SaaS business grew 14% year-over-year. SaaS adjusted gross margin increased 80 basis points year-over-year, reaching 73%.

In the third quarter, SaaS adjusted EBITDA increased to $19.6 million, exceeding guidance and resulting in an adjusted EBITDA margin of 17%. We ended the third quarter with 103,000 SaaS subscribers, including 13,000 from Keap, representing a 7% increase year-over-year.

With a large established customer base now in place, our focus is on increasing spend per customer by driving adoption of more products and solutions, especially among our high-value clients and larger businesses. This approach meaningfully expands SaaS lifetime value and is a more efficient driver of profitability.

In the third quarter, overall SaaS ARPU reached $365 with Thryv at $355, up sequentially and Keap ARPU remaining strong at $437. Seasoned NRR declined to 94% this quarter, primarily reflecting noise introduced as we transition legacy digital marketing services clients on to our modern SaaS platform.

As we systematically wind down older tech platforms on our marketing services side, we are upgrading clients to our current software offerings while honoring their previously committed pricing, vastly improving the value they receive by introducing a wave of smaller accounts into our base, which temporarily impact ARPU at the time.

These accounts from our Q3 2023 migration are now cycling into the seasoned NRR calculation after crossing the 12-month threshold. The performance we're seeing from this group is consistent with the minimal initial commitments and lower propensity to expand spend compared to our higher-quality software clients. This is all part of our broader business transformation.

And while some SaaS metrics will show temporary noise during this transition, we are making steady progress building a solid software client base with strong underlying fundamentals.

Multiproduct adoption continues to accelerate in the third quarter. Clients with two or more SaaS products grew to 17,000 or 20% of our base compared to 15,000 or 16% a year ago. Thryv centers per client was 50% at the end of the third quarter compared to 12% in the prior year.

Moving over to Marketing Services. Third quarter revenue was $85.7 million and above guidance. Third quarter Marketing Services adjusted EBITDA was $21.2 million, resulting in an adjusted EBITDA margin of 25%.

As anticipated, this quarterly performance is subject to the dynamics of the print schedule, which performed better than expected and returned to normalized levels starting in the second quarter.

Third quarter Marketing Services billings totaled $70.6 million, down 33% year-over-year, reflecting the intentional shift in our strategy. As we continue to initiate upgrades of the legacy digital marketing services products for clients to our SaaS platform, the decline will persist, but at a managed pace, we remain on track to exit marketing services by 2028 with cash flows lasting through 2030, ensuring strong liquidity as we fully transform to a pure-play software business.

Total company billings were $184.2 million, down just 4% year-over-year, underscoring the company's steady progress as it transforms into a leading SaaS business and positions itself to stabilize total revenue and return to sustainable growth.

In the third quarter, we generated free cash flow of $14.6 million, which brings the year-to-date free cash flow to $18.8 million. We ended the third quarter with net debt down $9 million to $265 million, bringing our leverage ratio to 1.9x.

Turning to our outlook for 2025. For the fourth quarter, we expect SaaS revenue in the range of $118 million to $121 million. For the full year, we are updating our SaaS revenue to a range of $460 million to $463 million.

For the fourth quarter, we expect SaaS adjusted EBITDA in the range of $19.2 million to $21.2 million. For the full year, we are raising SaaS adjusted EBITDA guidance to a range of $73 million to $75 million.

For the full year, we expect Marketing Services revenue in the range of $323 million to $325 million. For the full year, we are updating Marketing Services adjusted EBITDA guidance to a range of $76 million to $78 million.

Now, back to Joe.

Thanks, Paul. I'd like to talk a little bit about our vertical initiative. We talked earlier this year about our HVAC vertical. We had taken the Keap automation tools and Thryv Marketing Center and kind of packed them together and created these really interesting vertical applications.

The first one that we applied was to HVAC. And I was recently talking to the kind of the pilot or pioneer customer on that. And they have been really pleased. They've gotten a very strong response from what we put in place. And I just want to give you some sense of the statistics that they've given us.

They've had around a 10% lift in jobs booked, a 25% increase in total revenue. They're generating 50-plus qualified leads every month. And they're seeing an increase in repeat business, about 12% increase in repeat business because the automations have automated reminders that are reaching out and tickling their customers and saying, "Hey, what about this, what about that?" And it's stimulating business out of their base. They also had felt as though they weren't as good at social media as they'd like to be that you could put almost any small business in that category. And they've seen a 45% boost in engagement in their social tools and what they're doing with social.

So, they are really happy campers. We've had very strong sales within our HVAC vertical, and we're now about to roll out a broader home services vertical that gets at more of the home improvement type broader categories. And we've got a bunch queued up behind that. So, the model that we use where we use the automations, customize them around the vertical is, I think, a terrific model.

I want to say one other thing, just for those of you that are thinking about how we fit in the market and our competition and all that. This customer I've just described in detail how happy they are with Marketing Center. They are a ServiceTitan customer. This is a very big HVAC company with tons and tons of trucks on the road. And they are a ServiceTitan customer. ServiceTitan tracks the Freon and the wing nuts and where the trucks are, and we handle the marketing. And that paradigm, I think, is increasingly building where people are using some really deep vertical CRM and then using our tool for the marketing.

And we do have a CRM. Our CRM is more a horizontal. We haven't done as much down -- deep down in the verticals. So, when you get to a larger, more sophisticated business, they often are using one of these in-industry CRMs. And that's fine with us. We're agnostic about that. Our marketing center fits perfectly in with that. And we've got a lot of integrations, and we're adding more all the time.

So, I want to just say that, one of the pieces of this transformation journey that's happening as our software platform is building out now and becoming more complete, we're beginning to move upmarket. You might say, well, Joe, your ARPU has been bouncing around. It has bounced around because we've been converting legacy marketing services people off of platforms.

In some cases, they came in at pretty low billing numbers because we were looking to just shut down a platform, and we allowed them to come over and we kind of grandfathered in their preferable rate that they've had in the past. But in terms of what we're selling, we're moving from that $4,000 to $8,000 at a very rapid clip.

Our U.S. field sales force is selling up in the $6,000 range with the run rate sales that they're making every day. And as we build products, as we're focusing our marketing initiatives, it's all moving upmarket. And so upmarket has been a big deal.

And one of the things we've been looking at lately to try to help investors understand that as we've been looking at the $400 and up a month segment, which is growing steadily and strongly and has grown very predictably. And these customers have very good retention metrics. We make good margins on those customers. And it helps sort of weed out the noise that's there with some of the smaller customers that have come in through these conversions. So, we'll talk about that more in the future, but our transformation as a business is continuing at a nice pace.

And as my last comment here, I want to mention Sean Wechter, our new Chief Technology Officer. I think his middle name could potentially be AI. He is all AI all the time. And we're really excited about what we think we can do with Sean in the year ahead to really up-level even further our integration of AI, and our pace of throughput through our engineering team. So really excited to welcome Sean to the company, and I'll stop there and turn it over to questions. Operator?

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Scott Berg with Needham & Company.

Joe, I wanted to start off on the SaaS business. Obviously, growth remains reasonably strong, but you did miss your guidance in the quarter on a very minimal amount, but did come in at the very low end of the range. Help us understand kind of what's happening, whether it's on the new sales side or the expansion side to kind of drive the results versus your expectations 90 days ago?

Yes. I mean, look, we -- as you say, we are making really good progress, transforming what used to be a phone book business into a SaaS software business. And there's a lot of execution involved, and our execution wasn't flawless in this quarter. You guys often ask me about the macro and whether it's the economy, I can't blame anything outside at all.

Our execution just was a smidge shy of where we wanted to be. And I think we are doing the things that we need to, to make sure we continue to execute even better going forward. So, I don't think there's any big message or any big trend here. We just didn't deliver it perfectly. But I don't have any complaints about the market or anything like that.

And then in your pre-scripted remarks, Joe, you had talked about how I'll paraphrase partner results have been just kind of okay to date maybe relative to your expectations. Where -- how do you -- I guess, how do you improve some of the partner opportunity with the Keap ecosystem that you all obviously brought over? Is this purely just a function of the additional innovation that you spoke about with some more time with these partners? Or as you've had a chance to kind of work with them in the last 9 months or so, have you been able to find anything else differently maybe that you have to implement in your strategies there to maybe leverage that ecosystem even more?

Yes, Scott. I mean, you know the old infusion Saas -- Keap really well. And they have primarily built their business through the partner channel. They just have those really gigantic icon conferences with over 2,000 people, and it was partner-driven.

And then under some different leadership and ownership or whatever, they sort of pivoted away from partner and attempted to try to build a more down market direct channel for a few years. And they really -- the partners felt neglected.

And so, when we showed up at the initial Grow Conference, which was days after we made the acquisition, I had a line of partners wanting to basically not yell at me, but pretty close and say, we've been neglected for years. You guys -- the innovation has slowed down and some of the basic tools and things that we need we haven't been getting and these guys haven't really been listening to us.

And I hadn't fully understood that during the diligence process. I was thinking we could dump some gas on the fire and really get that partner thing rocket right away. And they wanted some service first. And so, we worked really hard over the course of this year to listen to them, prioritize their needs and begin delivering them. And we have, in fact, delivered a bunch of them.

And the feedback I got at our Grow Conference 2 weeks ago was way to go. We really appreciate it. And I think that, the partner morale and enthusiasm for what we're doing is rising beautifully right now. And I think some of these partners work across different tools than just Keap. And it's not the only thing that they do. They also work with other partners. And I think they're turning back our way more excited about what we're doing. So, I was probably polite when I talked about last year's partner performance. It was weak compared to what I was counting on. It's probably the primary difference in the results versus what I had planned.

But having just pressed the flesh and spent 3 days with a whole bunch of them, I have a really good sense for a reacceleration in 2026 based on what we've done and based on several deliverables that are coming out over the next number of months. So, I don't think it's a permanent or terminal problem. I think it's difficult when you do an acquisition to really know all the sentiment and all the momentum around everything that's going on in the business. And I still would have done the acquisition. I still happy with it, still excited about where we are. There just was a little bit of a one step back before we could move forward.

Your next question comes from the line of Jason Kreyer with Craig-Hallum.

All right. Can you guys hear me okay?

Yes.

Okay. Great. So Joe, look, you just held this user conference. Just curious, any takeaways from customers as far as what the current environment feels like? Any changes to purchasing decisions? You had admitted in the last question that like you're not playing in the macro or anything. But just give us a tone for how things feel out there.

I think they're pretty decent. I've said to you before, generally speaking, our customer base fix the nasty things in life. So, we're not doing high-end retail here or dining or all the consumer is a little soft or that's really not us. When you're -- air conditioning doesn't work or it's cold in your house or you have a broken window, you call our guys and they take care of it. So, we're not that economically sensitive. When we don't deliver, it's mostly our fault. I really can't -- there's probably better people for you to tap into the macro. We really -- even if the macro were crappy, we could still crush our numbers with great execution. It's really down to us.

So having said that, just talking to people, I think the market is fine. I don't really think there's any -- I mean, obviously, it's a bifurcated market. The highest end of the consumer owns stocks and is watching them go up and is excited about it and it seems to be a little softness at the other end. I mean, just -- it seems to be a general observation, but I don't think that's affecting Thryv's results.

Appreciate the thoughts nonetheless. I wanted to just follow up on the vertical sales emphasis, the HVAC stuff. As we look out over the next several quarters, how does this manifest in fundamentals? Like is this -- does this drive NRR? Does this curb churn? Or does this grow ARPU? Like maybe you could walk through what we should expect over the next several quarters?

Yes. I think it will certainly be gradual. We're not -- we got a pretty big company with a pretty big customer base. So, we can't just -- it isn't going to instantly be all vertical all the time. But Jason, the thing that we're trying to do is moved from $4,000 a year per customer to $8,000. And as I mentioned, the run rate of our premise sales team is more like $6,000 right now. And the overall number is lower in part because of some of the conversions of legacy marketing services. And some of those people have come over at much, much lower price points.

And I mean, just for the avoidance of doubt, our sales force isn't even calling on them. We don't really call on anybody at much under about $350, $400 a month. That's -- they're sort of inert just doing their thing. We're not really working that group very hard. So, it's hard to get much NRR out of people you aren't even calling on.

So anyway, back to what's going to happen with verticals. I think these early sales in the verticals that we're working have been coming in more like the 8,000 that we're going for like right now. So, we're ending up making larger sales, and we're selling to a little bit larger businesses, which is ultimately our goal. This might surprise you, but a solopreneur who has less than $500,000 of revenue is churnier than a business with, say, $1 million or $1.2 million or $1.5 million of revenue that has 7, 8, 10, 12 employees.

And in our base, we still have a reasonable number of these solopreneurs, and that's where some of the churn noise comes from. So, what the vertical push is allowing us to do and as well as a number of other things that we're doing in our whole go-to-market data strategy, is we're putting our sales resource against a little bit bigger businesses. These are not giant companies. We're talking about 10 employees, 15 employees. But we're calling on those a little bit bigger employees that are -- excuse me, a little bit bigger businesses that are a little bit more stable.

And the vertical program is allowing us to really get traction there because sometimes when you call on a bigger business, they'll say, "Oh, I already have a CRM" because obviously, we offer a CRM. But what they often are not happy with is how they're managing their overall marketing, how they're measuring their marketing, how they're doing with social media. A lot of them are befuddled with the answer engines, concerned about trying to make sure that they're coming up high in the answer engine results, and don't really have an answer for that. They need some help.

There's a number of elements there. Some of them are doing search engine marketing, with some guy out of the chunk of his car, and it's okay, but not that great. They want to professionalize it, and they want to be able to measure how it works. So, we're a great answer in all those areas.

And so increasingly, what's happening is we're sitting in alongside of other people's CRMs and where we're doing the marketing and they're doing the back-office stuff. And so, I think you said, what will we see? I think you will see steady improvement in ARPU. I think just the things that have dragged us closer to $4,000 I won't say we're all the way through it, but we're through a lot of that. And I think that, our sales organization have a lot to sell now. We've built out the product line a lot. And I think we'll be able to make larger sales to customers on which will make higher margins, have lower churn.

And you can see it when you look at that quality metric beginning to really settle in and move. And I don't focus as much on the absolute gross customer amount. I'm focused on building that quality metric because there's a little bit of noise in our base from some of those conversions. So anyway, that hopefully gives you some sense for the vertical strategy, Jason.

Your next question comes from the line of Arjun Bhatia from William Blair.

This is Alinda Li on for Arjun Bhatia. With the onboard of the CTO, Sean, for a little over a month now, Joe, what are the early strategies in the works to achieving operational efficiency, product acceleration and also AI innovation?

Yes. AI. I mean, Sean's all AI all the time and the guys he's bringing in are all AI all the time, too. And not that our team wasn't, we were doing a really good job with AI, but he's taken it to another level. I mean, he's focused on it. And I think really inspecting what we expect, making sure they have at the ready all the tools that they want, that they're using them, looking at how they're using them.

And so, I expect the output of that to be as we span across 2026, the pace of development against our product road map, I think, will quicken. It's been quickening already. We're doing a good job, but I think you're going to see it go faster. And I'm excited about that because there are a bunch of things these larger customers we're working for -- working with are looking for that, I think we'll be able to deliver quicker with this thinking and this approach that he's bringing.

The second thing I'd say about Sean is his recent background with Boomi was all about integrations and making software work together. And as you move upmarket, as we are now doing, you must be able to work and play well with others. You've got to be able to have interoperability because a going concern, even with 12 or 15 employees that has some workflows doesn't want to change them all in order to embrace your tool, even if your tool is great. And so, you've got to be able to dovetail with what they're doing.

And as he's often saying to me, Joe, this is a solved problem. It's something we can handle, don't worry about it. And I just really appreciate that confidence there. And Sean is just an incredible leader, and he will lead our tech organization in a way that, I think will create high morale, his sort of NPS Scores, if you will, that he gets his morale scores when he leaves the team are exceptional. And I think we'll just have a faster road map with a bunch of happy campers in our development teams.

Awesome. And with the new vertical product in home services, are you approaching the product development in a similar way as with Thryv for HVAC, where you work with the industry leader in the market in creating that product? How should we think about this product road map in the future in terms of vertical play?

Yes. I think it's -- as you know, we've got these powerful automations that are kind of, if win, if win, if win processes. And it's a question really of working with a leader the space and understanding what best practices are, what they do. And once you get inside of home services, whether it's electrical or roofing, they start to get to be pretty similar. There can be some nuances around insurance or some other details, but there are a lot of similarities. So, you're not starting from scratch. So that team are working hard.

I was talking to the leader of the team last night about the sales organization's ability to actually digest the pace that he thinks his team can run at and cranking these verticals out. So, we -- it's a chicken or egg problem. Initially, we needed the verticals. And now he's turning them out, and it has a road map to turn them out maybe faster than we can train on them and absorb them. So that's -- we're thinking about how to manage that and how to deal with that. But yes, so they just find a strong business and spend time with them and map it out.

Your next question comes from the line of Zach Cummins with B. Riley Securities.

Joe, I wanted to start off just a little more focus on these Answers-based engines. I know it's been a big concern for many publishers and small businesses around visibility of their websites within this evolving dynamic. So, can you talk a little bit more about what Thryv is doing to make sure that your customers are remaining visible within these answers-based engines?

I'd love to. That's great. Yes, we spent a lot of time understanding what the answer -- how the Answer engines operate, what makes them bring back results and so on. And I'm not today going to go through every detail of that with you. But all in all, we think it's a really good thing for us, Zach. It's a tailwind for us because remember, we have been competing with Google for years.

If you go back 20 years, we had more traffic than Google did. We were the giant thing with Yellowpages.com and DeskOS and SuperPages, and we had these big sites. And we still have these big sites, and they still have a lot of traffic. But over time, Google spent a lot of time trying to compete with us and basically take away as many of those references as they could.

And all of a sudden, with the Answer engines, Google's just hammerlock on all things search is broken. And they -- are they the majority? For sure, still the majority. But now these answer engines often go, and they look at Yellowpages.com or DeskOS or SuperPages or our similar sites in New Zealand or Australia, and they bring those authoritative answers back out of that content, and not getting it from Google and Google can't have any influence on what that search result is.

So, we've got really the pioneer in the Internet age sites of these online Yellow Pages directories with very authoritative, very detailed, very rich content about small businesses in Tupelo, Mississippi or Rapid City, South Dakota that never really embraced Google. And those answers are popping right up in these answer engines, which is awesome for us. It's allowing us to deliver more value than we might have without this. So that's good.

And then secondly, remember, we build and host websites for people, some 54,000 or something like that at the moment, and more coming in every day. And we're really good at this. We understand how to create sort of a knowledge graph in a way that the answer engine is looking for it. And we understand how to do AEO, Answer Engine Optimization, how to make sure that everything about the way we present a small business' information, both on their site and even off-site if we're working with them in social or some of the other listings management areas that we care for customers and some of our add-ons, and we can optimize them and help them do better.

And that story I mentioned briefly about the partner who had the dentist. In addition to just going with Thryv, he had also authorized doing some of these extra things. And that 27 leads overnight was like a shock for that guy. He was really excited about it, because he basically turned the spigot on, let us do our thing.

And the Answer engines are part of our thing now. So, I would say if you offered me a world where I had the Answer engines or not, I mean, I would take them all day and twice on Sunday. I mean, it's really been great for us. And I don't mind Google loosening their grip just a little bit on everything.

Understood. And my one follow-up question is just around balancing ARPU expansion with looking for ways to continue to grow the customer base. Obviously, ARPU expansion has been the bigger driver here in recent quarters and it looks like that's going to continue to be the case as you get more quality customers within that SaaS customer base.

But can you just give us a sense of maybe when we hit that inflection point and we start to see stabilization in that gross customer count and maybe you're getting a little more of a balanced contribution from both customer growth and ARPU expansion?

Yes. Look, we have a bunch of very specific initiatives underway to build our business outside of the Zoo. But if we were just to rush out there and make it and try to do it, we would be just like any other software company. And we'd be dealing with cost of acquisition that didn't play well with the lifetime value. And so, we've had a real almost unfair advantage by having this gigantic customer base of people that like us who take our phone call and talk to us, and we're leveraging.

And so let me answer your question this way. If we started -- let's just say we didn't add any customers. We just replaced churn customers and just hung out where we are. We could still take this business from whatever it is, a little less than $500 million revenue we're running at right now to $800 million or $900 million revenue just by doing what we've talked about, growing the ARPU in the base. So, we have -- you're going to see us grow very strongly and do a very good job even before we add anything.

And then in terms of adding, we're obviously managing the economics of the adding, making sure that the model of our cost of acquisition to lifetime value is right. And when you make larger sales to a little bit larger businesses, that's all a lot easier. So, we're working on processes internally to do that. But I would say, at the moment, we're not pushing really hard for really any sub growth in the next short period of time, the next few quarters.

We're getting strong growth by making sure all those customers that we brought over are getting visits in a lot of cases, in-person visits or in some cases, could be online visits via Zoom visits. But we're spending time with them, making sure they understand what they have and talk to them about their options to do more. And that's super productive for us right now.

Our sales force is really happy, because they're writing a lot of business doing that. So, we don't have an emphasis on pushing that number up. I wouldn't be in your modeling saying we're going to put huge gains in the short run on that base. I think over the long haul, we will. But in the shorter run, right now, we're pretty focused on bedding down and engaging and growing the ones that we've brought over.

Your next question comes from Matt Swanson with RBC.

I really appreciate the quality SaaS client metrics new disclosure, as you mentioned, reducing a lot of that noise. Can you just talk a little bit more, maybe as a follow-up to that last answer of the trends you're seeing within that cohort, especially now that we've gotten to 77% of the client base, the assumption would be that, that group is going to start to be much more broadly reflected in the business results overall. So just kind of trends that you're seeing in that group relative to the overall business.

I'd love to. And I really -- Matt, I appreciate the question, because it's really at the heart of this. I think sometimes people look at our business and they have a hard time really perceiving it because it's in transformation, and you see the top line revenue bouncing around based on the pub schedule within the print business as it runs off.

And then there are customer bases or customer groups, in some cases, that came over in clumps, some of which are pretty far below the spend levels that we're spending time with our field sales force. And so, it creates noise in the numbers and you're like, okay, what's the pattern here?

And so, I think if you look at these customers spending $400 or more, they tend not to be solopreneurs. They tend to be businesses with multiple employees and a little bit of billings. They're actually kind of real companies. And so, they tend to churn less. And their willingness, their interest, their ability to buy more tools from us, buy more software from us and utilize it is greater.

And so, we find we're able to talk to somebody in the business who's managing the marketing or managing the software, and we're able to work with them and talk with them about that. So that's very rewarding for us.

And a lot of times, these businesses are also succeeding. They themselves are growing. And so, year-over-year over year, they have more revenue. They have more resources, and they have a greater ability to buy more. And it's a virtuous circle where our offerings are helping them get leads and grow and build their order book.

And with that growth, they then can buy more stuff. They start getting more and more employees and they can put them on workforce center and all these other kind of virtuous circle things. So that's pretty much what we talk about every day in the company and what we're working on is these customers that we're actually able to spend time with and work.

And we have kind of a little bit of a sort of an unwritten rule, but we're trying to service those very tiny customers through online channels and chat and so on and really not spend as much time with them because it's -- obviously, our time is super expensive. So, we're spending time with the larger businesses where we think there's upside to grow.

So, I think you will see over the coming quarters, that quality metric is what we've accomplished. And you're going to see that thing steadily building. And they're buying multiproduct. Their spend levels are good. Their churn levels are fairly low. And I think you'll see us building on that. And that's really the core of what we've established here through this process.

That's really helpful. And then I just wanted to kind of combine 2 comments that we made earlier in the call. At one point, we were talking about there were some regions that in the SMB space never like fully adopted things like Google. And now we're rolling out AI and optimized search. And I just -- I was curious about, first, you develop the products, but then also, how do you go to market with some of this brand-new cutting-edge technology to businesses that might be a couple of generations behind technology-wise and really like letting them know or like perceive kind of what the value to them is going to be from this.

We were just talking about this yesterday. You don't go around walk in there talking about automations and AI and blow in their mind, you make it pretty simple. And you talk to them about their ads and listings and the directories, making sure they're right, making sure their listings are correct all across the web, making sure they have a good hygiene, basic website and a good foundation. You keep it all pretty basic and straightforward.

But like that ad in the old days for the tomato sauce, Ragu, it's in there. I used to say it's in there. If they have questions about any of these latest things, you can explain, it's in there. I mean, AI is right in there, and it's available. But we don't lead with that. You can intimidate a customer really quickly with a bunch of acronyms and throwing around all kinds of fancy terms. So, we try to build it up off of a foundation and Marketing Center is an amazing foundation. For a century, people have been saying, I know, a lot of my advertising is wasted. I don't know what it is.

And within Marketing Center, you can tell exactly what works. We are able to put call tracking numbers on offline things, online things, everything you do. You can take a look at heat maps for your website, bounce rates for your website, you can put widgets on your website, chat tools. Every which way somebody can come at you. We can measure it and facilitate it and improve it through Marketing Center.

And for a lot of people, the money they spend on outreach to try to make the phone ring and bring in more leads is near and dear to them. And the promise of having a way to optimize it and measure it and then tie it back to their order book even for somebody in Rapid City, South Dakota, that's something that's an exciting prospect. And we just try to keep it -- keep the jargon out of it.

And remember, we've got a guy that's been in Rapid City, South Dakota for 140 years, maybe not that exact guy, but as a company we have. We started in 1886. So, we have that relationship. We're there. We're already working with them. And those flyover replaces, we do really, really well in those flyover replaces. Matt, did I answer your question?

There are no further questions at this time. This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.