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Intrinsic Value is all-important and is the only logical way to evaluate the relative attractiveness of investments and businesses.
Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Q4's Second Quarter 2022 Earnings Call. My name is Sara Pearson, and I'm Q4's Director of Investor Relations. I'm joined this morning by Darrell Heaps, our CEO; and Donna de Winter, our CFO and COO, to review our second quarter results.
Please note, a copy of today's presentation will be available on our website. Please be aware that today's prepared remarks are being posted live. Following the prepared remarks, we will be looking forward to welcoming our research analysts onto the call for a live video Q&A session. [Operator Instructions]
We need to remind participants that certain information discussed on today's call may be forward-looking in nature. Such information reflects the company's views with respect to future events. Any such information is subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements. For more information on the assumptions related to the forward-looking statements, please refer to Q4's public filings available on SEDAR.
During the call, we will be referencing certain non-IFRS financial measures. Although we believe these measures provide useful supplemental information about our financial performance, they are not recognized measures and do not have standardized use under IFRS. Please see our MD&A for additional information regarding our financial measures, including for reconciliation to the nearest IFRS measure.
Please note that unless otherwise stated, all figures are in U.S. dollars.
And with that out of the way, I will pass it over to our CEO, Darrell Heaps. Darrell?
Wonderful. Thanks, Sara. And good morning, everyone. It's my pleasure to welcome you all to our second quarter's earnings call and to be joined here with our newly appointed CFO, Donna de Winter. Welcome, Donna.
Thanks, Darrell.
Today, we're going to be walking through the progress that we've been making in the second quarter and along with the macro environment comments in terms of what we've been kind of working through during the quarter and the progress that we've been making. If we can bring up the slides, we'll get into some of the prepared remarks.
I want to kick off today's call a little bit -- talking a little bit about our business and the market. When I set out to create Q4, the idea was always that if we could create web-based software that exists at the intersection between public companies and investors, that would be a business that could last forever.
Fast-forward 15 years, and this is what we have built and are continuing to build. Today, this platform is serving millions of investors each day as they access our websites, events and apps across the web to research companies and engage with management.
Today, I'm going to spend some time talking about our platform and some of the exciting things that we are doing here. However, before getting into that, a brief comment on the macro environment. In terms of the macro environment and the public markets, what's clear is that during the second quarter, we saw dramatic repricing evaluations across the board. The impact of this macro environment on our business is twofold. The first, and positive, is that current customers, more than 2,685 of them, lean into us more using more of our products, analytics and advisory services to help them navigate a challenging market. As Donna will cover in more detail, this can be seen in our continued growth in multiple product adoption, seen with our 65%-plus of our ARR coming from our clients using 2 or more product categories.
Average revenue per account growth, continued high controllable renewal rates of over 96% and more than 40-plus growth in our Capital Markets platform services segment.
On the flip side of this, with valuations at record lows, it causes potentially new customers to slow purchase decisions when switching vendors and causes companies to delay or cancel going public, making it more challenging for us to add new customers at the rate that we were adding during previous quarters.
The thing that I want to focus on is that the business that we have built, which sits at the intersection between companies and investors, is incredibly durable. Even in a market such as this, which is arguably the most challenging we have seen since 2008, we are still able to deliver solid double-digit recurring revenue growth and increased platform adoption across our large and diversified client base with more than 100 customers upgrading their subscriptions with us this quarter.
My point here is that as the market improves our ability to deliver value to our customers, expand their spend with us and attract new customers to the platform, we'll continue to strengthen and enable us to continue driving impressive growth similar to what we've achieved over the last few years.
This quarter, we made significant progress in building out our platform ecosystem that all sides of capital markets will utilize to connect with one another. We launched Capital Connect along with the unified data layer across all products. This new platform gives us the ability to now bring forward new apps and partnerships designed to expand our engagement with our customers.
The launch of Engagement Analytics app is a great example. It's been very exciting that we have begun to realize our vision of being able to analyze the behavior of investors across our platform. What is really amazing is the sheer scale of our platform and the number of active companies and investors using it. Over 4 million daily users accessing more than 2,600 investor sites and thousands of events. We are analyzing hundreds of millions of data points each day.
But what makes Engagement Analytics very unique is that we're also able to understand investors' actions in the market, both through standard data sets like 13F filings, but also our own market surveillance services. This gives us deep insight into what they are buying and selling. This combination gives us a unique view into the patterns of the market and helps us make better recommendations to our clients on who they should be targeting and engaging with. This is just the start of where we're going with this ability.
In future quarters, you'll see us expand the insights and recommendations that we provide, along with releasing expanded functionality to help companies and investors engage with one another.
In June, we also launched the website management app onto the platform, allowing customers a faster and easier way to make changes to their investor websites. This critical feature is now being used by more than 1,500 customers on a daily basis. We are committed to delivering the best customer experience in the industry, bar none.
As we scaled quickly during the pandemic, our response time started to grow, but through the launch of this app and the maniacal focus on fast turnaround times during trading hours, I'm absolutely thrilled to see the consistent flow of customer 5 star ratings across all of our service teams.
Finally, around the middle of the quarter, we started to roll out a new product called Q4 Login. You may have actually seen this as you registered for this call. Simply, it allows an investor to choose to create a Q4 account and then be automatically logged into any quarterly earnings call hosted by Q4 in the future. Our vision is to connect the capital markets across our platform, and this is a big step in that direction. This is the first of many investor- and issuer-focused features that we'll be rolling out onto the platform over the coming quarters.
As of today, we've had more than 85,000 investors create an account just this quarter and we are excited to see this database grow and help augment our larger database of 350,000 investor profiles. This is really an important step as we begin to unify all of the capital markets' experiences across our platform.
On the partnership front, we continued to sign partnerships focused on bringing our customers access to the best quality products and services. This quarter, we are pleased with the addition of Diligent, who provides governance solutions and extend eSSENTIAL Accessibility who offers digital accessibility expertise to better serve our client needs.
Working with the expanded NYSE program has begun to show new business opportunities with the addition of Q4 Virtual Event services. Our expanded role within the revised program is promising as it allows NYSE corporate issuers the flexibility to leverage the investor relations products and services that are right for them.
On the M&A front, this continues to be one of our strategic priorities, and we have been making really good progress on a number of fronts. This year, time has been on our side as we have seen the environment improve for buyers over the second quarter along with private company valuations continuing to come down, although still at a slower pace than in the public market. Having said that, we remain absolutely committed to bringing forward highly accretive and strategic assets that will help to accelerate our vision and path to profitability. More to come on this front.
This quarter, I'm also happy to report that we have completed our planned OpEx investments for the year, and I would describe this quarter as being the peak investment quarter. These investments have enabled us to build out our platform, unify our data across our products and bring differentiated high-value insights to our customers. These have also helped us to enable to build out our expansion sales efforts, helping to drive continued growth in platform adoption and average revenue per account. And finally, the build-out of our European go-to-market efforts setting us up well to grow our European business over the coming quarters.
With these peak investments behind us and in response to the current macro environment, we are positioning the business for profitable growth. Through a multipronged strategy with a focus on expanding our operating leverage, initiatives are already underway to improve sales efficiency and utilize low-cost geographies to drive down operating expenses. Combined with our gross margin expansion, these will bring forward our commitment to cash and EBITDA positive by H2 2023, well in advance of our prior expectations. This acceleration will ensure we remain very well capitalized through to profitability while also ensuring we remain very well positioned to deliver strong growth moving forward.
Finally, I'm pleased to announce some recent news here with Donna de Winter accepting her role as permanent CFO. I'm just super excited to be working with Donna each and every day and her contributions to our efforts are -- have already had a big impact and really looking forward to future quarters.
And so with that, I will pass it over to Donna to take us through the financial results, and then we'll have our Q&A session. So over to you, Donna.
Thanks so much, Darrell, and good morning, everyone. I'm really looking forward to immersing myself in the CFO role and continuing to work with the team to lead our financial strategy.
As Darrell covered, during the second quarter, we continued our progress against our overall strategy and vision despite the current market dynamics and we are able to continue executing our growth strategy, focusing on product deployment, development and innovation.
Diving into the numbers, we saw flat sequential quarterly revenue directly impacted by the market conditions and partially influenced by disproportionate percentage of our Q2 sales closing in June and not providing any revenue benefit in the quarter. With continued growth and expansion selling and Q3 sales occurring such that it can contribute to the in-quarter revenue, we expect to restore modest growth in the current quarter.
Our total revenue for the second quarter was $13.8 million, representing an 11.5% growth in normalized revenue over the same quarter in 2021 of $12.3 million. This excludes the impact of the onetime VSM revenue from last year. The revenue growth was driven by expansion sales into our client base of subscriptions as well as additional platform services.
The impact of including the $5 million VSM revenue in Q2 2021 results in a 20.5% decrease in revenue year-over-year. We made the decision to discontinue the VSM business line last year due to its nonstrategic fit and pressure to our long-term gross margin expansion.
Our Capital Market platform revenue grew by 9.4%, excluding the VSM revenue from the comparable quarter last year. The increase in normalized revenue can be attributed to our new logo acquisition as well as our efforts to drive higher ARPA into the client base. Notably, our platform services grew by 41.2% on a year-over-year basis attributed to the increased demand for value-added website services. Our ability to be a one-stop shop is incredibly valuable to our clients in all market conditions. And our revenue base continues to be highly predictable with 89% of year-to-date Capital Markets platform revenue coming from recurring and long-term customer contracts, ensuring our core business remains strong and intact.
At the end of the second quarter, ARR was $53.3 million, an increase of 12.4% year-over-year, driven in part from 107 existing customers purchasing additional subscriptions with us. It is exciting to see so many customers increasing the scope of their relationship with us. Our investment into the development of additional subscription offerings that are valuable to our existing clients, coupled with the ramping investment in our expansion sales capabilities, has fueled this growth channel. As well, our bundled sales approach focusing on selling platform has continued to work very well with annual contract value of new sales increasing in both North America and Europe.
However, the acquisition of new logos slowed as a result of tougher market conditions that dramatically impacted the pace of new IPOs in the market and corporate customers delaying their IR spending.
Average revenue per account, or ARPA, was $18,642 at the end of the quarter. This represents a 4.1% increase over the prior year and also generates an increased growth rate compared to the first quarter -- compared to the first quarter's 3.2%. Expanding our offerings into the existing customer base contributed the majority of the ARPA growth in Q2 and delivers early ROI on the investments to build that expansion capability. The combined efforts of our expansion sales and our client success team produced the highest quarterly increase of ARPA on record. Additionally, our team continues to enact renewal billing increases to ensure we can absorb the increasing inflationary costs while maintaining the highest quality service levels.
Product adoption continues to move towards customers leveraging 2 or more products. This quarter, 65.4% of ARR was generated from these customers, up from 63.2% a quarter ago. These clients also have a strong propensity to engage with us for value-added services, supporting overall revenue growth.
Our integrated platform strategy is evolving as anticipated, as shown in the chart, with clients buying a higher number of solutions and services driving increased value in the hands of the clients and increased retention for us. It is a true driver of ARR and ARPA.
As customers adopt additional products and gain unique values through our platform approach, we are further entrenched in the customer workflow. This creates a strong moat around our core business and will help us retain customers.
In the second quarter, we saw the addition of 79 new clients, of which 61 became subscribers. Our quarter ended with 2,685 customers on the platform. A notable strain on our ARR growth and retention during the quarter was uncontrollable churn tied to M&A in the public markets causing customer consolidation. This trend continued from Q1 when we saw the majority of our revenue churn come from these uncontrollable types of events.
However, our controllable logo retention remained strong at 96%, consistent with last quarter. Our low churn level supports the durability of our business and our ability to be valuable to customers in tough economic times.
Looking at gross margin in the second quarter. We saw costs impacted by inflation, which, when combined with lower revenues, slowed our gross margin expansion resulting in gross margin for the second quarter being relatively flat for the comparable quarter last year at 56.5% and 56.8% comparatively. It decreased slightly in sequential quarters, primarily because of inflation. And that unfavorable trend is being addressed with additional margin expansion initiatives. We are still tracking to exit '22 with mid-60s gross margin and mid-70s next year.
We remain focused on the original pillars of our gross margin expansion strategy, but we feel that they alone are insufficient to deliver the margin outcomes we expect. The first of our original pillars is to consolidate and reduce the fixed cost of our data and other direct costs. On a percentage basis, these costs reduce over increased revenue volume. But we have also targeted an assessment and rationalization of providers to generate absolute savings.
The second pillar, which is the vertical integration of our Virtual Events platform, delivered significant progress this quarter. We completed the migration of our North American customers and we'll continue with the migration of our European customers over the next quarter.
The third pillar relates to investments we are making in product automation to improve the customer experience with less manual effort for us and the customers. As Darrell mentioned earlier, the launch of the website management app is a perfect example as it has made it easier for customers to manage their websites while also making it much easier for us to manage these requests.
But to help us realize our gross margin expansion, we have added 2 additional pillars. The fourth pillar is an expansion of our workforce into new lower-cost geographies where we don't currently operate while remaining intensely focused on service excellence. This hiring strategy is underway and will impact COGS in Q3 and beyond.
And the fifth and final pillar is to increase prices to offset the negative impact of inflation on our costs, while maintaining our ability to provide premium customer service. These price increases began rolling out in Q2 and will positively impact Q3 and future quarters.
As you can see, maintaining our customer base through service excellence is our paramount strategy. We also believe that a strong balance sheet and the income statement creates a sustainable ability to serve these customers.
In the second quarter, operating expenses, excluding depreciation, amortization, foreign exchange loss and other expenses, totaled $17.3 million. This quarter's operating expense was at our highest planned level of spend. The leading investments we have made in sales and marketing and research and development this quarter provide a foundation for our future growth with a solidified infrastructure and the ability to scale our platform sales without further investment.
Sales and marketing costs were $6.5 million or 47% of revenue, an increase of $2.1 million compared to Q2 last year. The increase included necessary investments in our expansion and European sales capabilities.
Research and development came in at $5 million or 36% of revenue, an increase of $2.2 million compared to the second quarter cost last year. The increase supported the continued investment in both the improvement of current products within our Capital Markets platform and the development of new offerings.
G&A for the quarter was $5.8 million or 42% of revenue for the quarter. This increased $1.2 million from the comparable period in the prior year when we were private, primarily because of the expenses associated with operating as a public company. G&A expenses will level off as a percentage of revenue into the back half of this year as we scale and find leverage on our costs associated with going public.
Our adjusted EBITDA was negative $8.7 million or negative 63% of revenue for the quarter. This reflects the high investment levels associated with the hyper growth strategy that we feel is challenged in this macro environment. As we execute our accelerated plan to profitability, which I'll touch on in a moment, this loss will narrow considerably over the second half of the year and become positive in 2023.
In terms of our balance sheet, our core working capital metrics remained strong and consistent with historical trends ending with a working capital balance of $40.2 million. As of June 30, 2022, we had $45.1 million in cash, net of net operating -- negative operating cash flow in H1 of $18 million. As described, this is primarily the result of investments made across sales, marketing and research and development.
As of June 30, we had no outstanding debt with a total revolving facility of $22.5 million.
Our balance sheet continues to be well positioned to execute against both our organic and inorganic growth opportunities. Our intention is to maintain that strength.
We have weathered previous cycles of challenging macroeconomic conditions. We recognize the durability of our business model and the importance of adapting the pacing of our strategic priorities to combat the headwinds we are facing. As such, we are taking deliberate measures to shorten our time line to profitability through enhanced focus on cost management and business efficiency.
I wanted to reaffirm that we are still expecting gross margins to exit this year in the mid-60s and in the mid-70s for 2023. As I mentioned earlier, our strategies on this front are well underway and will impact Q3 and Q4 in an effective manner.
Of equal importance to EBITDA is optimizing the return on OpEx with initiatives for improving sales efficiency and utilizing low-cost geographies to drive down OpEx, expanding our operating leverage through the remainder of 2022 and 2023.
This will result in the business being cash flow and EBITDA positive in the second half of 2023, ahead of our earlier expectations of reaching EBITDA positive in early 2024. Accelerating this path to profitability will ensure the business remains well capitalized, giving us the ability to singularly focus on executing our organic growth strategy while ensuring we have ample capital for inorganic opportunities.
And with that, I'll now pass it back to Darrell.
Fantastic. Thanks, Donna. That was great. And with that, we'll now switch over to the Q&A session. So I will pass it back to Sara to kick us off.
And we're back on the Q&A for the Q4 earnings call. We're going to go back to our first question with Kevin McVeigh at Credit Suisse.
Yes. Congratulations on the execution in a tough environment. Was just hoping to get a little bit of sense of the sequencing of the revenue in Q3 and Q4 just to try to reconcile that against the gross margin objectives if possible.
Sure. Thanks, Kevin. Maybe I'll let Donna answer that question. But first, I just want to just acknowledge that the outage that we just had on the broadcast was due to an Internet outage that happened with one of our video partners. So just our apologies for the delay. Hopefully, you've stuck with us during the call, and we look forward to going through the Q&A session with the analysts.
And so with that, now we'll take your question, Kevin, and over to you, Donna.
Great. And thanks, Kevin. When we think about the gross margin expansion, it is in the context of modest sequential quarterly revenue growth, not our historical growth rates. So the margin accomplishment will be in that modest environment on the top line and not against, as I said, historical trends. So there's high certainty to getting to those levels.
That's great. And then as we think about the incremental pillars because it's just really, really impressive that you're able to maintain that. Is there any way to think about what the potential benefit from pillars 4 and 5 are? And obviously, it offsets probably some revenue headwinds, things like that. But just if we think about the components of what those incremental actions help on the margin line, if at all?
Well, we're not providing absolute guidance on the magnitude of the dollars except to say that it brings forward our EBITDA into H2 2023, positive EBITDA, versus early 2024.
But I think the -- we know now, Kevin, the size of the service and the type of the service that it takes to be truly excellent with the clients. So there's both been creating that environment at non-North American cost levels and really exploring how to attain both, having some resource availability in lower-cost geos and having North American challenge as well. And so that combination drives to the margin materially.
The second one is more point in time, having experienced the inflation over the last 12 months and really adjusting our understanding of how to flow that through maintaining and our obligation to maintain the premium service levels. So it is as much about retaining clients and giving them the value that they have come to expect from us and balancing that with the inflation that we're experiencing as an operating entity.
Very helpful. It sounds like you have even more control of the outcome than you did 6 months ago, which is a great outcome.
Absolutely.
Absolutely, and thanks for that.
Our pleasure. Thank you, Kevin. Back to you, Sara.
Our next question is going to come in from Stephanie Price.
I was hoping you could talk a little bit more about the demand environment, what prospects are you seeing? And if you've seen any impact of the sales cycles just given the difficult macro environment?
Sure. So maybe I'll take that one, and Stephanie, thanks for joining the call today. So I think, as I mentioned in the prepared remarks, the macro environment is really as a result of kind of the dramatic change that happened starting in Q1, but really during Q2. And I think when you see kind of a dramatic repricing and valuations happen across the board, there is a, I would call it, kind of like a shock factor of companies.
Now as I mentioned, the ones that are existing customers, their adoption and use of our products and our services actually increases during that environment because they're looking for more help to be able to understand what's going on, understanding what's going on with their peers in the market as they execute their programs.
But the other -- this other aspect is when we're having conversations with customers, they are looking at the valuation has changed dramatically. And so what ends up happening it takes longer to convince them to kind of move over to a new vendor during that environment. I think what you've seen is, in a lot of cases, companies also looking at cost cutting, looking at budgetary aspects.
So in that environment, when you have kind of like hiring freezes happening or procurement freezes happening, that's what makes it a little bit harder to be able to close those new customers onto the platform. And certainly it impacts IPOs as well.
But what I will say is that, that is really kind of a like a shock to the system that occurred during the second quarter. I think what we see going forward is not -- valuations have certainly come down. We -- and I'm not forecasting the market, but it's not -- we don't think there's a huge other leg to come down in the market. So we think we have bottomed out from the impact it has on our business. So we should be able to get back to not experiencing that same dynamic as much in the third quarter and the fourth quarter. So that's how we're thinking about it now. And hopefully, that's helpful.
That is helpful. And maybe a follow-on to that. On the existing customer base, you mentioned more than 100 customers have upgraded subscriptions. Can you talk a little bit about the key services that are driving that cross-sell and upsell?
Sure. The -- so the one thing I'll mention to you, I know in the remarks we made was about the 100 buying additional subscriptions. And that's what drives ARR and that's what drives ARPA.
But the other thing that happens is customers also buy what we call like attachment products. So these are really upgrades within their existing product category. So that would be things like additional like redesigns on their website or onetime events or investor days or things that are not typically kind of like ARR in nature.
So the ARR products that they're buying are really around CRM, analytics, and other packages that would be like Virtual Event kind of subscription packages. So that would be like add-ons to their earnings events, but done as a subscription annually. So it's predominantly -- the onetime stuff ends up being mostly kind of web and events. But it's CRM and analytics.
And the one final thing I'll mention as well is we have additional subscription products in ESG and in accessibility. There's been actually a lot of demand on the accessibility side, so we've been able to package all those as incremental subscription purchases.
Our next question is going to come in from Stephen Boland from Raymond James.
Can you hear me okay?
Yes.
Absolutely.
We can hear you. Thanks, Stephen.
Okay. Maybe the first question is on total deferred revenue. That number fell quarter-over-quarter and I always thought that was like a signal of billings that would be basically earned over the period of the year. So what is -- when it falls, maybe just give me an idea of what that means again? Is that revenue is -- although you're saying it's modestly going to grow, but maybe not all revenue goes through deferred revenue? Maybe just explain that decline.
Yes. I think there's -- one of the comments made in the prepared remarks was around the fact of the linearity of the sell that occurred in the second quarter and it really being loaded into June, a good portion occurred being in June not hitting deferred -- not hitting revenue, but -- and definitely not hitting deferred revenue. So there is, what I would say, an adjustment going to happen early in July when all of that late-stage invoicing makes its way on to the deferred, those products go live with clients, whether it's CRM, analytics or websites and the more robust deferred occurs.
The only other impact I'd say in the quarter was the [indiscernible] and that impacting renewal, what we would call deferred revenue. But it really just speaks to the freshness of the bookings in Q2 and fully expecting that to restore in Q3.
Okay. So when you say -- so sorry, when you say sales closing in June, there is a lag between that sale translating into deferred revenue. Is that the way to look at it?
That is correct. Yes.
Okay. That's great. And then the second question, Darrell, I mean, you mentioned the cash down $18 million year-to-date. And then when I look at that versus what is going to occur probably for the rest of the year and then couple the M&A strategy on that, I mean, are you in a position now where you're being priced out of certain acquisitions that you may have looked at 3 months ago or 6 months ago in terms of having available capital to execute?
So I think when we look at the market out there and the targets that we are most interested in, I think the -- we are certainly very cognizant in terms of what cash do we have available to put against the M&A strategy as well as what availability we have from a debt perspective. Those 2 things as well as utilizing, to a degree, our own stock and facilitating those deals. So when we look at kind of the available financing options that we have, whether cash, stock, bringing on leverage, we still feel that we are very well suited to execute the strategy that we've mentioned in terms of this accelerated path to profitability while also ensuring that we remain -- that we have cash -- we have resources available to continue executing on M&A.
I mean, certainly, with that, it's not unlimited. We don't have kind of -- we can't do every single deal out there because there is certainly a certain amount that we can utilize, but that's something that we feel is -- gives us all the firepower that we need for the targets that we're looking at.
Our next question is coming in from Richard Tse at National Bank.
Hopefully you can hear me. I just sort of late logged in now so apologize if I repeat any questions. In terms of the environment, it's changed a lot since you first became public. I'm curious to see if there's anything that strikes you as surprising or things you didn't expect in the business now that the environment has normalized somewhat?
So first off, Richard, thanks for joining and apologies for the technical glitch that happened there, but it's nice to speak with you again. I think that certainly, when we went public, which was the end of October, the market was certainly still at a very high point. So I think the kind of the -- we certainly weren't expecting the market to continue to be at record highs forever. However, I think that when you look at the second quarter and just how quickly the valuations came down, I think that and how broadly that impacted the entire market, I think that, for us, along with kind of I think probably everyone in the market, that was certainly unexpected the kind of the velocity that occurred during the second quarter.
Now I'll say that when you look at kind of the longer time frame, you think about how many periods have been like this that have had that. We go back to kind of the financial crisis of 2008. I think early in the pandemic, maybe it looked like it, but as we all know, that rebounded incredibly quick. So when you look at that, we really look at the second quarter as being quite an isolated event in terms of a change.
Now going forward, what we're not assuming is that we're going to get back to kind of record high valuations like 9 months ago. But we do believe that as the market stabilizes, then we're able to continue executing our plan, bring new customers onto the platform, expand their spend, et cetera. So we think kind of Q3 to Q4, we get into a much more normalized patterns versus kind of the dramatic change that happened in the second quarter from a market perspective.
Okay. And sorry, I guess my second follow-up question related to that. Has that caused you to sort of permanently change how you run the business in any way? Like I understand that you're obviously moderating your spend, but in terms of whether it's practices on the sales side and the marketing side, given a normalized environment, what has sort of changed permanently here going forward?
So maybe I'll ask Donna to answer that.
It's a great question. And I think the first part is that the tenets of the business that went public a year ago or 9 months ago remain intact. The plan is being executed, and I don't see that changing in any meaningful way. Where I think age, experience and durability in the model says you can't -- you have to have a better balance of short-term, midterm and long-term priorities, there can't be as many go-gets or leading investments that have a longer time to ROI. So I think those are really important aspects that you have to overlay on a 3-year vision. It was a 3-year vision and we're 9 months in, so you don't abandon that kind of business strategy and business value.
So it is more about making sure that every dollar has an ROI, making sure that there's balance in that ROI, making sure that what has been built has both scalability to come out of it quickly, to respond when we're coming out quickly, but that it's also highly efficient in this challenging macro.
So I would say it doesn't change the strategy, but definitely the day execution has more focus and more certainty around ROI, more certainty around revenue and spending against that certainty instead -- with less leading against some of the more uncertain growth.
So our last question is coming in from Doug Taylor. He sent in his question via our Q&A application. So I will read the question out to you guys. The question is, "There's a lot of increased discussion about achieving cash flow and EBITDA breakeven earlier than previously targeted. What are the revenue growth assumptions required to do so versus the prior 30% growth target?"
Do you want to take that?
I can take that one. Thanks, Doug. So I -- as we talked about on the -- in the prepared remarks, we think about modest sequential revenue growth, not in half in that kind of range of what we would have experienced in heavier markets. And so our margin targets are against that modest revenue outlook and not against historical trends or historical growth patterns.
Maybe what I'll add to that as well is that our ability to execute in market, and we talked a lot about customer service and customer success, that aspect, coupled with our ability to sell when we talk about kind of the modest growth rate, bringing that down while looking for efficiencies across OpEx and delivering on the gross margin expansion, all of which brings profitability sooner. We're also making the assumption that, although, as I mentioned, it's not another shock kind of is coming like the second quarter, but we're also not expecting kind of like high-growth market that's coming back with those assumptions.
So we are being conservative in terms of what the health of the market is going to be, what the demand cycle is going to look like in the interim while we execute this. And I say that because as the market does return, and as we all know, the market will return, growth will come back. And as growth comes back, we will be very well positioned to be able to continue executing to drive that kind of accelerated growth into -- during that period.
Yes. I think our conservativeness, when we refer to double-digit growth, that's modest. We're conservative in our approach. And thanks for adding that context, too, Darrell.
Yes. Absolutely.
That was our last analyst question. So with that, we're going to wrap up the call.
Okay. Very good. Thank you, everyone, for joining us on the call. And again, apologies for the technical glitch we had halfway through. Thank you for sticking with us during the call if you're still here.
And have a wonderful day, everyone. Take care.