Beeline Holdings Inc (BLNE) 2024 Q4 法說會逐字稿

Thank you for standing by. This is the conference operator. Welcome to the Beeline Holdings Year End Business Update Call. As a reminder, all participants are in a listen only mode and the conference is being recorded. (Operator Instructions)

I would now like to turn the conference over to Geoffrey Gwin, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Welcome to Beeline’s 2024 annual earnings and business update call. I am Geoffrey Gwin, and I’m glad to be introducing the new CEO and executive team today, Nick Liuzza, CEO; Chris Moe, CFO; and Jess Kennedy, Chief Operating Officer of our Beeline Financial Holdings subsidiary.

To avoid confusion, when we use the word Beeline, we mean our public company; and when we use the old phrase Beeline Financial, we mean Beeline Financial Holdings, Inc., our wholly owned subsidiary.

We have a lot to discuss today, but let me start off with the following statement. This conference call contains forward looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including, but not limited to, statements regarding Beeline Holdings’ strategy, future plans and objectives and expectations for future growth, trends and operating results, the integration and expected benefits of the merger in which we acquired Beeline Financial Holdings and shifted our business focus to the FinTech mortgage business.

Our ability to expand our presence in the mortgage origination space through technology and artificial intelligence, the anticipated capabilities and impact of our AI tools, including Bob and BlinkQC, the market potential of MagicBlocks, expected future product launches, enhancements and partnerships, trends in the real estate and mortgage lending industry, the potential growth of our software as a service business model and our expectations related to the interest rate movements and their effects on our business performance and strategic opportunities.

Forward looking statements are typically identified by words such as believe, expect, anticipate, plan, intend, seek, estimate, will, could, would, should, may, continue, forecast, target, potential, project, undertake and similar expressions.

These statements are based on management’s current assumptions, beliefs and expectations and are not guarantees of future performance. Actual results may differ materially from those described in the forward looking statements due to various risks and uncertainties. These include, without limitation, the risk factors we provided in our 2024 10-K, which we just filed with the SEC, including the risks arising from the impact of The United States tariffs on the economy and our need to raise additional capital.

In addition, there is a risk that our new technologies we are developing may not work as expected. We caution investors not to place undue reliance on any forward looking statements made during this call. All forward-looking statements speak only as of the date of this presentation and are based on the information available to Beeline as of today. We undertake no obligation to publicly update and revise these statements or reflect events or circumstances occurring after today’s date, except as required by law.

Now with all that said, let me turn the call over to Nick. Nick?

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining our year-end 2024 earnings call. I’m Nick Liuzza, Co-Founder and CEO of Beeline and Co-Founder of Beeline Financial. I’m also the largest investor in Beeline and have been planning to grow a mortgage originator and tech SaaS platform as a public company for over a decade. This is an especially meaningful call for us as it is our first year-end call since contemplating our milestone merger with Beeline Financial late last year.

The transformative merger, which was approved by our shareholders in March, effectively rebranded the company as Beeline Holdings and set the stage for our future as a FinTech driven business. We are no longer a craft spirits company. We are now a technology driven mortgage lender and title provider with a fully digital platform focused on simplifying home financing. This merger and name change marked the beginning of an exciting new chapter for Beeline, giving us a Nasdaq listing and the access to capital to accelerate our vision.

Since the merger, our team has been laser focused on executing our strategy and building momentum starting with a 33.5% increase in Beeline Financial revenues in 2024, an increase in origination volume by $48 million versus the previous year combined with new products to be released during the second quarter of 2025 that are expected to accelerate our market growth for the second half of 2025.

We entered 2025 with a clear mission: to leverage our proprietary technology and innovation to transform the mortgage industry. Beeline has built an end-to-end, all-digital, AI-enhanced loan platform that provides homeowners and property investors with mortgage solutions seamlessly, rapidly and at a lower cost.

In short, we’re taking what was a traditional paper-intensive process and reinventing it as a fast, efficient online experience. Importantly, we are meeting a need of a key demographic, millennials and Gen Z who see a home purchase as a huge challenge and we’re meeting them where they solve problems: on their phones.

The market opportunity is enormous. The US Mortgage origination market is massive, about $1.8 trillion in total originations in 2024 according to the MBA. Even after the industry’s steep decline in 2022, we saw a recovery beginning in early 2023. We believe that by deploying superior technology and AI, Beeline can capture even a small fraction of this trillion-dollar market, which would translate into very substantial growth for our company.

We don’t need to boil the ocean to be successful. Even a few basis points of market share in this industry can drive significant revenue expansion for Beeline. How will we do it? By continuing to expand our product offerings, partnerships by focusing on property investors and millennials and continuing to introduce AI tools to broaden our reach in the origination space.

In 2025, as a complement to the revenue we generate through mortgage originations and title, we announced a series of strategic initiatives and innovations aimed at tapping new segments of the market and enhancing our platform. In January, we launched a new division, Beeline Labs, dedicated to generating B2B SaaS revenue.

Its first product, BlinkQC, is a groundbreaking AI-powered mortgage quality control solution that automates loan auditing. BlinkQC is designed to save other lenders time and money while ensuring compliance with industry standards. This represents a new revenue stream for us, selling our technology as a service and underscores that Beeline isn’t just a mortgage lender or a FinTech product company at our core.

It is important to note that Beeline Labs will only license our technology products that improve mortgage production with quicker turn times and at a lower cost. Newly developed consumer-based lending and associated products that drive customers will be kept inside of Beeline to fuel our own origination business, providing Beeline with an advantage to increase market share. We undertake to protect these products from being shared with our competitors.

We also announced the external capital raise for MagicBlocks in February. MagicBlocks is an AI company we incubated which builds highly customizable virtual AI sales agents for mortgage origination and other industries. The platform enables businesses to convert leads into sales more efficiently at a higher success rate and at a lower cost by deploying plug-and-play AI sales departments. We retained a significant equity stake in MagicBlocks and negotiated a long-term exclusive license for its technology.

Why is this important? Because MagicBlocks AI tech is embedded into our own operations, notably our chatbot Bob, ensuring continuous innovation within Beeline’s ecosystem. This structure allows us to benefit from MagicBlock’s success externally while also leveraging its AI capabilities internally. As our COO, Jess Kennedy, put it recently, delivering high-level service while reducing cost is more important than ever and MagicBlocks gives us a powerful advantage. In short, MagicBlocks helps fill our origination funnel and drive our sales at near zero marginal cost, which I’ll elaborate on when I talk about our AI chatbot.

We’ve been forging partnerships to extend our platform’s reach. A great example is our partnership with RedAwning, the vacation rental platform. In February, we integrated Beeline’s investment property loan application directly into RedAwning's marketplace, so users can get tailored mortgage quotes and even an approval within minutes on the same platform where they’re selecting their property. By seamlessly bridging property selection and financing, this collaboration offers a faster, more intuitive experience for modern real estate investors. It effectively fills the need for the growing market of short-term rental investors, many of whom are millennials looking to build income streams.

Indeed millennials were 38% of home buyers in 2024. This RedAwning partnership is a model for how we can embed our lending technology into partner ecosystems to capture demand at the source. We also partnered with CredEvolv to address another part of the funnel, borrowers who initially don’t qualify for a mortgage. CredEvolv is a platform that helps credit challenged applicants improve their credit scores through HUD-approved counseling. By integrating CredEvolv's credit improvement program, we can take applicants we would have had to decline and put them on a path to a mortgage.

Once they improve their credit, they can come back to Beeline where much of their information is already on file for a streamlined approval. This partnership strengthens our ability to help more borrowers achieve homeownership, truly making a Beeline back to us when they’re ready. It not only embodies our customer centric ethos, but it also boosts conversion rates on our leads in the long run.

As we expand, we are also adding top talent and experience to guide our growth. We recently appointed David Kittle, a 49-year industry veteran, former Chairman of the Mortgage Bankers Association, as a special advisor to our company. David has literally helped shape the mortgage industry over decades and he knows our business well, having served on our Subsidiary Board from 2020 to 2024.

Now he’s working closely with our executive team on strategy. As I said in the press release, we are in full growth mode, gaining market share against large more established lenders. David’s insight and connections will be instrumental in accelerating our success. Bringing someone of David’s caliber on board is a strong vote of confidence in our vision and it’s already helping us refine our approach as we scale our business.

Through these initiatives, new SaaS products, AI innovations, partnerships and advisory expertise, we are expanding our opportunity in the mortgage space on multiple fronts. We’re attacking inefficiencies in the industry with technology, opening up new customer segments and creating additional revenue streams alongside our core business. All of this is building a more robust, diversified Beeline well positioned to grow in 2025 and beyond.

I’d like to address the current market environment because it’s a critical part of our story. As everyone on this call knows, the past three years have seen a sharp rise in interest rates and a significant downturn in mortgage activity.

Industry origination volumes hit historic low levels in 2022 and 2023. The mortgage industry saw its revenues fall to 30-year lows outside of the crash of 2008. This is a challenging backdrop in which we have all been operating. However, I’m very proud to say that Beeline not only withstood the storm, we continued to grow through it. In 2024, while many lenders were retrenching, Beeline's revenue grew 33.5% year over year.

Our loan originations increased by $46 million, up 38% in 2024 versus an industry growth of only 9%, meaning we outpaced the broader markets by 29 percentage points. In other words, we kept gaining share even if the pie shrunk. How did we manage to thrive when rates were high and refis dried up? The key is our cost-efficient, technology-driven operating model. In a higher rate environment, cost management and efficiency become absolutely critical, and this plays directly to Beeline’s strengths.

We’ve engineered our platform and processes to be leaner, faster than the traditional mortgage banking model. Let me give you a sense of this with a comparison. Traditional lenders often take 45 to 60 days to close a loan with an underwriter or processor able to handle maybe 1.5 to 2 loans per month. It’s a very manual, linear process, lots of back and forth, waiting and human labor sequences.

Beeline's process is very different. We have launched version one of a proprietary task-based workflow engine, which we call Hive, that breaks the loan process into parallel micro tasks handled by automation and a much smaller human team. As a result, we can cut closing times down to 14 to 21 days in some cases. We can close loans in two to three weeks that might take other lenders two months, and our productivity is higher. Each employee can process two to four loans at scale per month, roughly double the traditional volume per person.

Our team had tremendous success and we were one of the pioneers in introducing task-based processing to title with Linear Title, which we merged with RealMatters and brought public on the TSX in 2018. The bottom line, Beeline can and will continue to do more with less, which dramatically lowers our cost. That’s a structural advantage, especially when volumes are low. We believe our technology-driven approach will continue to distinguish us in a challenging mortgage environment because we don’t carry the heavy fixed costs that many legacy lenders do.

There is a lot of work to do here. As mentioned, we are only on version one and the results are already meaningful, but we also know from experience the economies will only improve over time as we continue to build our task-based journey.

Furthermore, we haven’t been afraid to keep investing in innovation during the downturn, which did accelerate our losses, but has positioned Beeline to capitalize on an improving market. Those losses were painful to endure in a poor market. I’m excited to announce that those decisions are starting to pay off for Beeline. April of 2025 will be our strongest revenue month since rates started to rise in 2022, coupled with improving margins and improving conversions. While others pulled back on tech budgets, we kept building. We expanded our product, adding offerings like investor loans, DSCR loans and other non-QM products.

This diversified our lending capabilities and attracted new customers. We also continued to refine our automated underwriting and risk engines. This means as the market starts to recover, we are extremely well prepared to scale up quickly without a proportional increase in costs. In fact, we’re already seeing potential signs of a better rate environment ahead.

The MBA forecast 30 mortgage rates will dip to 5.9% by the end of 2025. If that holds, it could unleash some pent-up demand. But even if rates stay higher for longer, we’ve built the company to withstand volatility. We proved that in 2024 by growing through the challenging environment presented in that period. To echo what I expressed in one of our releases, our timing wasn’t ideal starting out as a young company just before rates spiked, but we didn’t slow down. We kept our heads down and continued to build.

Now coming out of this cycle, Beeline has a strong foundation. We maintain operational discipline, focusing on execution and efficiency and now we’re ready to seize the opportunities of an improving market. We remain focused on driving revenue through mortgage origination and on monetizing our proprietary technology. In short, we’re committed to building long-term shareholder value and bringing much needed innovation to an industry in need of modernization.

Before I move on, I want to highlight that this management team has real skin in the game and confidence in our strategy. In fact, I personally increased my investment in Beeline. During the first quarter of 2025, I invested additional capital in our Series G offering at a price over double the market price at the time to ensure the company is well funded for growth. I even donated the warrants from that investment to charity as my goal wasn’t short-term gain, but to underscore my commitment to Beeline's future.

Along with some open market stock purchases I made, I invested over $4 million of my own money since December to support our growth. I mentioned this to make clear, our leadership strongly believes in what we’re building here. We are fully aligned with our shareholders and we’re putting our money where our mouth is.

I’m now going to turn the call over to Jess Kennedy, our Chief Operating Officer, for a deeper dive. Jess?

Thanks, Nick. I’m going to speak briefly about the size of the market and our strategy as well as our implementation of AI. Given our efficient model and expanding toolkit, even gaining a modest share of the mortgage market can translate into incredible growth for Beeline. Our roughly $200 million of origination last year is a tiny sliver of the $1.8 trillion mortgage market. The room for growth and market share gain is vast. Beeline can capture more market share by finding niche opportunities in underserved segments.

We’re not trying to be everything to everyone. Instead, we’re targeting segments of the market with volume potential that leverages our strength. For example, we’ve gained traction with real estate investors through products like DSCR loans and partners like RedAwning and the self-employed or gig economy borrowers with bank statement loans. These are the areas where traditional lenders often do not play or cannot win in their model, but where our digital process and focus gives us an edge.

At the same time, we’re starting to see more conventional homebuyers return to the market as the rates ease. Our platform appeals to younger tech-savvy buyers like millennials and Gen Z populations who are entering the market. These people expect a fully online and speedy experience. We’ve built a frictionless journey where consumers can apply in the fewest seven minutes online. It’s a fundamentally different consumer experience, and it’s one that we believe will allow us to continue taking share from our competitors. We truly are, as we say, the shortest path to your home loan.

Being smaller and more agile can be an advantage when you have the right strategy. We can adapt quickly and adopt new tools like [AI] far faster than most of the other players in our industry. We demonstrated that in 2024 with our growth, and we plan to build off that momentum. We often say internally, we’re just getting started, and that’s exactly how we feel about our potential.

Let me also highlight a major differentiator in our strategy, our AI chatbot, Bob. We launched the first version of Bob in mid-2023 and significantly upgraded him in early 2025. Bob is revolutionizing how we acquire and communicate with customers. Operating 24/7, Bob engages website visitors in a natural conversation, answers questions and provides guidance, all with impressive results. Since launching Bob 2.0 this year, we’ve seen a 6x increase in lead conversion and an 8x increase in the submission of full mortgage applications, all at a near zero incremental cost. Bob fills the top of our sales lead funnel around the clock, which is especially important outside of traditional business hours when approximately 60% of our leads arrive.

By the time our loan officers get the lead, prospects are well qualified and engaged. But Bob isn’t just a bot. It’s a smart adaptive piece of software that personalizes conversations, switches languages and soon will handle voice, SMS, scheduling, and even parts of underwriting. It’s a powerful blend of automation and human support that’s reducing acquisition costs and scaling our business. Bob’s success inspired our MagicBlocks spin off, which is now licensing this technology to other companies. It’s a strong validation of our AI capabilities and another way we’re creating value beyond lending.

So to sum up our AI strategy, we’re using AI not just as a buzzword, but as a practical tool to give growth and efficiency. From Bob on the front lines of sales to BlinkQC, ensuring file quality and compliance, to eventually AI and underwriting and in the back office, we are weaving artificial intelligence into all aspects of mortgage origination. This will enable us to scale rapidly without a commensurate rise in cost, and it positions Beeline at the forefront of an AI driven transformation of mortgage lending. It’s an exciting advantage for us and one that’s difficult for traditional lenders to replicate quickly.

With that, I’m going to turn the call back over to Nick.

Thanks, Jess. In closing, I want to reiterate how far Beeline has come in a short time and how optimistic we are about the future and remind everyone, while I am the CEO and a Co-Founder, as mentioned, I’m also the largest investor in Beeline. I sit side by side in the trenches with our investors. For four years, my salary as a CEO has been $30,000 a year. I am certainly committed to our success.

I have a proven track record as an entrepreneur and as a CEO, and I’m very excited about the future. We’ve navigated one of the toughest mortgage markets in decades and still delivered growth that significantly outperformed the industry average. We have built a strong foundation, a lean digital platform that delights customers and a diversified strategy that generates multiple revenue streams. As we look ahead, we see market conditions beginning to normalize and even improve. If interest rates continue to stabilize or fall, we expect more homebuyers to reenter the market.

Regardless of the macro environment, Beeline will continue to execute on what we control: innovation, efficiency and customer experience. We will keep pushing to make the home financing journey faster, easier and more cost effective. I’d like to thank the entire Beeline team for their hard work and adaptability through this transformative period. I’d also like to thank our shareholders for your support and confidence. We believe we have tremendous momentum as we move forward in 2025.

Our tagline is: the shortest path to your home loan. And we’re proving that every day to more and more customers. With our continued focus and the initiatives we have underway, I’m confident that the shortest path of value creation for our investors is to stay on the course we’ve set.

Now Chris will share the numbers for the consolidated company comprised of the Beeline Financial business and the legacy spirits business as of December 31, 2024, and then we will get into a q-and-a. Thank you.

Thanks, Nick, and good afternoon. I’ve known Nick for a decade, and I’ve been with Beeline for nearly two years. Given that this is Beeline’s debut as a public company and the recent merger with Eastside Distilling and the various challenges of forward merger accounting according to ASC 805, I am not going to do a sequential quarter comparison, but I will provide year-over-year comparisons, especially where relevant or meaningful.

Let’s go to the balance sheet. On the current asset side, our cash position improved from $306,000 in 2023 to nearly $1.2 million in 2024. Our mortgage loans held for sale net at fair value increased from zero in 2023 to $6.9 million in 2024, which is a direct result of the merger. Inventories from Spirits decreased by 44% to just under $1.5 million. Total current assets increased from about $4.5 million in 2023 to just over $10 million in 2024.

On the long-term asset side, goodwill increased from zero in 2023 to $33.3 million in 2024, which was a direct result of the merger and the related forward merger accounting treatment. Property and equipment net was similarly affected by the merger, growing from $169,000 to $14.8 million, primarily reflecting the increased value of Beeline’s proprietary software. Right of use assets more than doubled to $1.7 million in 2024 as our rental footprint grew.

Lastly, nearly $9 million of current and noncurrent assets held for sale, which refers to Eastside’s legacy investment in the digital accounting business, were disposed of in October 2024 just prior to the merger with Beeline Financial.

Turning to liabilities. There are three items worthy of mention. The $6.1 million increase from zero of the warehouse line of credit used to support the growth in loans held for sale on the asset side, the 3.8 multiple year-on-year increase in current liabilities, which is then nicely offset by only a 6% year-on-year increase in total liabilities. Lastly, total shareholders’ equity increased 57.4 times from $853,000 in 2023 to nearly $49 million in 2024 for an increase of over $48 million

Let’s turn to the beeline income statement. This is where things become somewhat non-intuitive. As you read this, remember that 2023 reflects only Eastside’s Bridgetown Spirits business because the Craft Canning business was treated as discontinued ops and does not include Beeline because Beeline had not yet been acquired. 2024 is very different because it contains 52 weeks of Spirit’s results, 52 weeks of Eastside corporate expenses and only the last ten weeks of Beeline. I know, it seems weird, but welcome to forward merger accounting. Total net revenues at about $3.8 million barely changed from 2023 to 2024, but the revenue components changed significantly.

For 2023, it’s all spirits. For 2024, spirits revenue has declined by about $1.2 million but substantially replaced by ten weeks of revenue from Beeline Financial. Total operating expenses more than doubled from $6.2 million in 2023 to $12.8 million in 2024. However, bear in mind that $3.4 million is a onetime noncash expense from impairment loss caused by a write down of the Azunia brand and spirits; and professional fees more than doubled to $1.1 million for onetime costs largely related to the merger and related financings.

Loss from operations, otherwise generally referred to as EBIT, was just over $9 million for 2024, up from $2.4 million the prior year. Total other income for 2024 was $2.8 million and total other expense for 2023 was $2.4 million, representing a net increase of nearly $5.2 million. As a result, the pretax loss from continuing operations decreased to $6.2 million for 2024 and increased to $4.8 million for 2023.

Lastly, cash flow. Net cash used in operating activities increased by $1.4 million from $1.8 million in 2023 to $3.2 million in 2024. Net cash used in investing activities was $532,000 in 2024, while net cash provided by investing activities was $104,000 in 2023. Net cash flows from financing activities increased by $3.2 million from $1.4 million to $4.6 million.

So looking ahead, we anticipate ongoing market fluctuations, especially concerning the existing as well as the proposed Trump tariffs and effect on interest rates and the economy. However, we’re encouraged by our sustained momentum and increasing market share, particularly in originations. Our strategic investments in mortgage and technology and additional growth initiatives position Beeline well. As the broader mortgage market recovery progresses, we remain focused on our long-term vision. We are confident that our enhanced platform will drive accelerated growth as conditions normalize.

And with that, we’ll open the call for questions. Operator?

(Operator Instructions) Glenn Mattson, Ladenburg Thalmann.

Congrats on getting this first call underway and thanks for taking my questions. The unique company, people are still getting to know it, it’s kind of new to the market. Can you give us just a little background and thoughts on who you view as the best comps and maybe just some more detail on how you think you can outcompete them in the marketplace?

Hey, Glenn. Yes, great question. By the way, had a great lunch with Nick Sturgis today. That’s a question when we drew up Beeline that we thought through and one that we kind of revisit from time to time. The simple answer is to look at the other publicly traded mortgage lenders out there like Rocket, LoanDepot, Guild, Better and compare us to them.

But it’s really not that simple. I just don’t think there are really a lot of good comps for Beeline. And this is the reason why. First off, we are an emerging micro cap originator that also has a SaaS platform. I don’t know of another mortgage company that has a mortgage SaaS platform and is willing to actually license its software out to its competitors like we are.

The reason why we’re so interested in doing that is because the market opportunity is massive and technology in the industry isn’t great. And so while we are developing software for ourselves to drive our business with 871 mortgage bankers out there, we see an opportunity to create another revenue stream that’s not necessarily tied to just mortgage origination and gives us a bit more stability in the marketplace.

Also, those other companies, they were able to capitalize on a very favorable rate environment over the years and build their brands. Better mortgage to a lesser degree than the others. But we launched into a really tough market, and it was difficult to get our brand out there competing in a very small piece of the pie with large budgets and large competitors. And so I think stay tuned as it relates to who our comps are because I don’t really know who they are at the moment.

I think we’re really optimistic about the future for a lot of reasons. I mean, number one, we’re focused on this next generation, this millennial generation who currently represent about 38% of the market. And that’s only going to continue to grow. Our brand speaks to those guys. Our technology allows them to get through the loan application faster. And as a result of that, we’re continuing to focus our brand recognition and our tools toward that generation.

And I think that as we grow and get better and stronger and the market improves, we actually see a very significant opportunity. So, we only need 0.02% of the market to be running at $100 million in revenue. That’s a very small slither, and you have to take into consideration there are 75 million millennials out there and the next generation behind them, Gen Z, is coming on strong.

So I think if you look at our April production, which is our strongest month since the market turned around and you take a look at that and you take a look at what we’ve built and you understand that our big expenses are behind us and the market is ripe for improvement, I think the end result is it’s a very optimistic future for us.

Thanks for the question.

Yes, very helpful, Nick. Thanks for the detailed answer. Obviously, the homeownership industry has been slow to modernize but seems like you have a great platform and a lot of opportunities to make change here. So good luck going forward.

(Operator Instructions) Matthew Campbell, Laridae Capital.

Nick, it’s nice to meet you on the phone here. And just want to give you an observation. Your market cap seems to be pretty small and yet you’ve invested a fair amount of capital. I don’t know if you said it $3 million to $4 million. So you clearly believe that you’re heading in the right direction. And my hat off to you for giving away your warrants to some non-profit organizations. I think that’s what a real leader does. And maybe we’ll give you -- we’ll vote for you to get a $40,000 salary one of these days.

But in all seriousness, there’s been a lot of movements, a lot of pieces Chris just had to go through. I’m sure you’ve really enjoyed the last six months of your introduction to the public company CFO role. If I were to think about this though, when you guys rolled out Bob 2, I heard you have a sixfold increase in generation and an eight-fold submission loan and April is your best month. So could you give us just a sense about like sequential growth?

Just it was a double digit from the time you released Bob 2? And do you just feel like -- it sounds like -- do you have a sense that this is only going to continue to go up to the right and you’ve already made a lot of the investment in your cost structure, so we’re going to see a lot of leverage in the model from here. Is that correct?

Yes. Listen, first of all, Matt, thank you for your support. I appreciate it. And it’s nice to meet you on the phone as well. Yes, it is correct. I think that, again, when you look at kind of where we are as a micro-cap public company and the fact that we built our platform, it’s live, it generated over $5,000,000 in revenue last year, which is certainly not boiling the ocean, but we were in a tough market and our heads were down building software and preparing for a better market.

And so while we were focused on growing our top line, I would say that, one, that would be the number one goal. But the 1A goal was also building the software, building the platform, getting Bob ready and putting ourselves in a position to capitalize on an improving market. And so now that it’s built, right, we’re in the batter’s box and we feel like we have an advantage on the pitcher now. And we feel like what we have built is ready to take off.

And so when we grow our revenue 35% and the industry only grows 9%, even though the revenue is very small, those numbers are just going to increase as the market improves. And so, I would just basically say that we’re laser focused on growing our revenue and we’re laser focused on two sectors: the millennials, as I mentioned and property investors as well. Two areas that we’re really good at. We speak to those people really well. We process their loans very quickly.

And look, just go to the reviews, just google Beeline, google reviews, and you just read them. You’ll get a sense basically of what we’re doing. And that sense will help you translate, I think, what the revenue opportunity looks for us. Again, the market is massive and we’re just starting to get our hands around the market and the opportunity.

And again, we only need to generate or capture 0.02% of the market to be running at $110 million in revenue. And so that means 0.04 is $220 million of revenue. That doesn’t even include our SaaS products. So I would say that we feel pretty good. And yeah, writing those checks were some of the easiest checks I’ve ever wrote in my life because I’m really bullish on where we are.

So I could just have a follow-up because I’ve been doing this for thirty years and it seems like there's a disconnect between what investors actually know about this company and what you’re doing. It seems very exciting. It sounds like you’re going to have tremendous growth one way or another. Whether the market turns -- and I’m a betting guy that after two years of down -- the worst market for thirty years, we’re going to probably see improvement. So that’s one thing.

But it feels like the investor base doesn’t really know what they owe. So with that, I would just give you some advice to get out and start telling the story and getting to some people who can understand what this opportunity is because it sounds pretty exciting to me.

Yes. Listen, I think that’s really -- that’s great advice. Look, we haven’t been able to play offense, i.e., get out there and tell our -- get in front of family offices and other investors and do road shows until we will receive the Nasdaq approval. And we just received that, what, I think four or five weeks ago. So we were kind of in this cooling off period, this period where we couldn’t get our story out. And that’s the reason why this call is so long. We purposely made this call longer than most so we can get more content out there and who we are and what we do.

That’s another reason why we put a lot of press releases out so we can start building a library of who we are. And I think you’ll continue to see probably a bit more press releases than most companies do because we are looking to build that library and let people know that we’re here, we’re new and we’re pretty motivated. So, I think it’s very astute. Thank you.

Frank, Private Investor.

Hi, Nick. It’s Frank Dias. First, let me commend you and the Beeline team for what you’ve built so far and for that excellent presentation. I certainly have seen you build a number of companies in the past very successfully and look forward to that happening again with Beeline.

My question is, can you talk a little bit about the current marketing strategies and maybe any future planned marketing strategies in order to reach the cohort, particularly the target, the millennials that you mentioned? How is that word getting out? And how do you intend to increase the word and the visibility?

Hey, Frank, appreciate the question, man. Good seeing you on the call and hope all is well. Jess, do you want me to take that or you want to take that? I hate to put you on the spot, but --

No, it's okay. We can tag team it. Hey, Frank, this is Jess Kennedy, COO. I work very closely with our marketing team. So because we’ve undertaken for 2025, we undertook a really robust planning process, right, strategic planning for the next three, five plus years. And as you’ve heard on this call, a real focus in the investment property space and sort of the demographics that we know really want to use technology products like what we’re putting out.

And so our marketing team has a really deep background in going to digital sources and digital platforms where we know people to be looking for transactions like this.

And then we couple that knowledge with a ton of data and looking at the data on how those leads are playing out from all these different digital platforms, whether it’s based on the demographic of age or are they investors? Are they investors in certain states? Because we know certain states have higher density of investment population where people are looking for properties in that particular location. And so it’s highly data driven and it has to be constantly retested and looked at on a rolling basis.

And so we have a ton of reporting around that. But we really use the data models to drive our decisions and where we put our marketing spend and how we’re going to leverage the money. And we then calibrate that against like what’s that return on the ad spend that we’re getting to ensure that we’re getting the revenue out of the back of it that we would anticipate based on that marketing spend and continue to refine that to improve over the course of the year as part of our strategic planning process. So I hope that kind of helps give a little bit of context. We’re heavily in the Google Space obviously, as part of that as an example.

Let me add a little context to it as well. So one of our strong value props is we are providing investment property loans to consumers looking to buy investment property. And so we’re one of the few platforms where an investor can come and can qualify for a conventional mortgage or a non-qualified mortgage. DSCR loans or debt service coverage ratio loans are very popular right now. Those are investment property loans where the underwriting is based on the rental income of the property being bought more so than the individual investor.

And so if you’re looking to do a investment property transaction, the cheapest money is going to be a conventional mortgage, but an easier qualification may be a DSCR. And it’s a little more expensive, but it could be 50 basis points higher than from a rate perspective than a conventional mortgage and maybe another $1,000 in origination fee. So it’s not terribly more expensive. But again, if you go to any of the major banks, you won’t be able to get a DSCR loan. If you go to most -- top 50 lenders, they don’t offer DSCR.

And so we were one of the first lenders to actually merge a conventional mortgage with a DSCR mortgage. And so when we carve up content, push out marketing content out there, build splash pages to drive consumers to our platform, we’re very specific with the content we put out. We accelerate or accentuate, if you will, our value prop and we push content out all over the web to drive these transactions. So that’s just one example. We’ve got hundreds of splash pages out there that are geared toward driving these consumers.

So I hope that answers the question.

This concludes the question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Nick Liuzza for any closing remarks. Please go ahead.

Yes. Look, I’ll use the baseball analogy again. I feel like we’re in the batter’s box and the count is in our favor. Certainly didn’t feel that way a couple of years back. Felt like every time we got in the batter’s box, it felt like it was a three-zero count -- zero-two count. And it feels like it’s going the other way for us now. So I would encourage everyone to stay tuned, continue to support us and we’ll do the right thing and show up to work every day and create more value for our shareholders. Thank you, guys. Thank you very much.

This brings to close today’s conference call. You may disconnect your lines. Thank you for participating and have a pleasant day.