Participants

Phil Carlson; IR; KCSA Strategic Communications

Tracy Curley; Chief Executive Officer, Chief Financial Officer, Treasurer; iSpecimen Inc

Leslie Hoyt; SVP of Operations; iSpecimen Inc

Matt Hewitt; Analyst; Craig-Hallum Capital Group LLC

Presentation

Operator

Good day, everyone, and welcome to ICE customers First Quarter 2024 Results Conference Call. (Operator Instructions) This conference call is being recorded. A replay of today's call will be available on the Investor Relations section of our specimens website and will remain posted for the next 30 days.
I will now hand the call over to Phil Carlson, Investor Relations for introductions and the reading of the Safe Harbor statement. Please go ahead.

Phil Carlson

Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone. And welcome divestments First Quarter 2024 conference call. With us on today's call is Tracy Curley, Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer, and [Leslie Hoyt], our Senior Vice President of Operations.
Before we begin, I would like to remind you that today's call contains certain forward looking statements or information made within the meaning of Section 27 A. of the Securities Act of 1933 as amended in Section 21 E. of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 as amended concerning future events or such as may, should put, projects, expects, intends, plans, believes, anticipates, hopes, estimates, variations of such words and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to numerous conditions, which many of which are beyond the control of the Company, including those set forth in the Risk Factors section of the Company's 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2023 filed with the SEC. Copies of this document is available on the SEC's website at www.SEC.gov. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. The Company undertakes no obligation to update these statements for revisions or changes after the date of this call, except as required by law.
Now it is my pleasure to introduce Tracy Curley, Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer.
Tracy, please go ahead.

Tracy Curley

Morning and thank you for joining our call in the first quarter of 2020 for our full focus largely on revogene, our streamlined operational infrastructure to advance the specific initiatives we undertook in the second half of 2023.
On today's call, I will provide an update on our success in advancing these initiatives to create a runway for continued growth and scale for our business. I will then turn the call over to our Senior Vice President of Operations, Leslie Boyce, who will speak specifically about how these operational achievements are enhancing the way in which a specimen interacts with can provide value to our supplier partners and researcher customers, thereby continuing to transform the BioZ specimen procurement process.
Finally, I will review our financial results for the first quarter and open the call for questions.
As we noted during our fourth quarter 2023 earnings conference call. We have undertaken a measured and disciplined strategy to ensure our long-term financial success. We are strategically reducing our capital and operational expenditures and realigning our resources to focus on key market opportunities. We are setting the stage for revenue growth in the second half of 2024 and beyond, strategically reducing our spending in various operational areas to focus on our core capabilities has resulted in a reduction in our quarterly cash burn compared to the first quarter of 2023.
We reduced compensation costs by 41% and technology cost by 66%. In addition of the $2.5 million cash used in the first quarter of 2024 $1.2 million was attributable to one-time events, which included consulting and legal expenses, franchise tax compliance and fees associated with our ATM offering. Without these one-time charges, our burn rate for the quarter would have been approximately $1.2 million or a little over $400,000 per month, which is significantly improved from where we were a year ago.
Now that we have secured a strong foundation to scale our business. We're diligently focused on maximizing the potential of our online marketplace and uncovering additional value in our supplier network to strengthen our competitive position and drive increased top line growth opportunities in the fourth quarter of 2023.
We share the success of our next day quotes program, which significantly reduces the amount of time from opportunity to quote and improves our quote to purchase order conversion ratio. Given the incredible impact this program has had on strengthening our sales flow and the benefit it is providing to our customers to successfully advance their scientific research. We are diligently working with many of our suppliers to participate in the next stage program and to advance this program through 2024.
Leslie Hoyt, our Senior Vice President of Operations, has played an integral role in developing the next day, quote program reshaping our entire supplier network to better engage with the suppliers that offer the strongest capability. This effort aligns with our goal of improving the quality of our supplier network as opposed to simply expanding it in size and in the process, creating the highest quality supplier network in the market.
I would now like to turn the call over to Leslie to review the operational achievements we've made in the first quarter and how they are reshaping the BioZ specimen procurement process with the goal of delivering the most highly sought after by assessments in real time and produce greater financial returns for a specialist Leslie. Please go ahead.

Leslie Hoyt

Thank you, Traci. As Tracy mentioned, we are advancing a lean and efficient business model by continuing to streamline our operations, cutting unnecessary costs and focusing on quality over quantity. To that end, I am pleased to report that we have made incredible progress in the first quarter recontracting with our supplier network to deepen our relationships with bio specimen suppliers capable of adapting to today's increasing BioZ specimen demands. We are seeing strong initial results from both our next-day quotes program and supplier network refresh initiatives next day quotes, the percentage of total quotes and orders qualifying for the next day quotes program, including remnant and biobank specimens as well as prospective collections, continues to increase quarter over quarter.
Next day quotes program continues to grow for all quotes provided to customers in Q1 2024, 40% qualified as next day quotes as compared to 34% in Q4 2023 and 25% in Q3 2023 in the first quarter of 2024. Across all lines of business, 50% of all purchase orders originated with next day quotes.
Our next day quotes program is fueling significant growth in our prospective collections line of business in the first quarter of 2024, 91% of prospective next day, quote dollars converted to purchase orders as compared to 32% in the fourth quarter of 2023. Also, the next day quotes prospective purchase order dollar value increased by 190% in Q1 2024 from the fourth quarter of 2023.
Overall, the next day quotes program's highest value is and improving conversion rates from quotes purchase orders. The overall year to date conversion rate for all next-day quote opportunities was 52%, which means that greater than 50% of next day quotes were turned into sales. These growth metrics clearly demonstrate the value our next day quotes program and driving stronger sales growth. Higher network fees as we are focused on the highest quality provider sites and growing our next-day quotes program. We strategically reduced as part of our supplier network, refresh the size of our supplier network, terminating over 100 contracts tied to the lower suppliers, reducing the size of our supplier network from 243 suppliers in January of 2024 to the current 140 suppliers.
The terminated supplier contracts represent sites that were not providing consistent and or quality. Human specimens are collaborating with us in a manner that benefited both parties as part of the supplier network refresh program, we have identified opportunities to expand our embedded coordinator program as we see evidence of supplier capability, potential expansion with additional resources. We've been working diligently to renew existing contracts with the remaining suppliers, including an in-depth discovery of their capabilities, re-alignment on pricing and increasing the transfer in use of their inventory data.
By doing so, we have identified new types of specimens and services to offer our customers and have successfully added those capabilities to the next day quotes program with fewer suppliers to manage. We are working closely with our remaining suppliers to better understand the breadth of their capabilities so that we can optimize how we collaborate with them and more efficiently supply specimens to our end customers. The goal is to partner with the best suppliers with the highest quality product in the marketplace for achieving these goals will greatly enhance our competitive position, allowing us to begin fulfilling BioZ specimen orders in some cases before our competitors can even provide a quote as we move forward.
A key component of the supplier network refresh initiative is increasing the number of specialized and monthly inventory files we receive from suppliers. Receiving data from suppliers allows us to market existing inventory and allow customers to choose specimens directly. This enhanced automation is intended to fuel sales and grow the next decor program. In short, we are well on our way to vastly improving our operations, offering greater capabilities to serve the medical community due to stronger collaborations with capable BioZ specimen suppliers.
I will now turn the call back over to Tracy to discuss the technological advancements made to the assessment marketplace.

Tracy Curley

Despite changes to our technology staffing model over the last year, we have kept a keen eye on organizational efficiencies and growth opportunities fueled by technological advancements. The success of the next day quotes program has relied heavily on our sales team's ability to quickly and accurately determine the feasibility of a customer's request. This matchmaking is fueled by the capabilities and inventories provided by our global network of suppliers and powered by ICE specimen proprietary technology beyond our emphasis on proprietary technology, enhancing the acumen of our sales, marketing, operational and site development teams through deliberate business intelligence strategy has significantly amplified our capacity to recruit and respond to customer demand.
This proactive approach has assisted in a markedly improved conversion of quotes to purchase orders discussed earlier, set a new benchmark for performance. I would like to now turn the discussion to our revenue enhancement initiatives. Our embedded coordinator program remains a key priority for our long term growth and has been impacted by the rollout of our supplier network refresh program. We currently have embedded coordinators at three sites, each of which and very strategic growth plans tied to them. These sites have all moved over to the next day, quote program due to the support of our embedded coordinators.
Our goal is to place embedded coordinators in additional sites as we work in partnership with suppliers on our supplier network refresh program. Our cancer sequencing initiative remains an important longer-term growth driver now that we have created inventory of mutation characterize formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded FFPE cancer tumor tissue, there is significant value in having access to the BioZ specimen due to the fact that they are extremely difficult to find and hold significant potential to support Cancer Research.
As we had mentioned in our call at year end, we established a pipeline of new business opportunities in the fourth quarter of 2023. That pipeline now totals approximately $1.5 million from new and existing customers through our internal due diligence, we have 27 confirmed new orders across 65 ongoing projects. As we stated previously, several outstanding projects that had not resulted in a win with a direct result of not having found the best markers being requested given the pricing and value proposition. This program continues to be well accepted by our customers, and we will provide further updates as we are still working to upgrade the targeted marketing plans for this program.
I will now turn to our financial results for the quarter ended March 31, 2024 revenue was approximately $2.3 million compared to approximately $3 million for the quarter ended March 31, 2023. The decrease in revenue for the first quarter of 2024. It's primarily due to a decrease of 3,388 assessments or 39% in specimen count from 8,629 specimens in the three months ended March 31, 2023. 5,241 specimens in the quarter ended March 31, 2024.
The effect of the decrease in specimen count was partially offset by a change in the investment mix, which caused the average selling price per specimen to increase by $95 per specimen or 28% from approximately $342 per specimen in the three months ended March 31, 2023 to $437 per specimen in the three months ended March 31, 2024.
Cost of revenue decreased by approximately $147,000 or 13% from approximately $1.1 million for the three months ended March 31, 2023. So approximately $1 million for the three months ended March 31, 2024, although there was a 39% decrease in the number of specimens per session during the quarter ended March 31, 2024 over the same prior year period the average cost per specimen increased by $58 per specimen or 44% from $133 perspective for the quarter ended March 31, 2023 to $191 per specimens for the quarter ended March 31, 2024.
Technology expenses increased by approximately $78,000 or 9% approximately $912,000 for the quarter ended March 31, 2024 from approximately $834,000 for the same period in the prior year. The increase was related to increases in amortization of internally developed software of approximately $99,000, professional fees of approximately $11,000 and general operating expenses of approximately $1,000, which were partially offset by decreases in headcount and payroll and related expenses of approximately $33,000.
Sales and marketing expenses decreased by approximately $296,000 for 31% to approximately $660,000 for the quarter ended March 31, 2024 from approximately $962,000 for the same period in the prior year. The decrease was primarily attributable to decreases in payroll and related expenses of approximately $217,000 external marketing expenses of approximately $95,000 and general operating expenses related to sales and marketing of approximately $20,000, which were partially offset by an increase in advertising and promotion expense of approximately $36,000.
General and administrative expenses increased approximately $286,000 or 16% from approximately $1.8 million for the quarter ended March 31, 2023, to approximately $2.1 million for the quarter ended March 31, 2024. The increase was attributable to increases in professional fees of approximately $329,000, taxes and insurance of approximately $267,000 and bad debt expense of approximately $45,000, which were partially offset by decreases in compensation costs of approximately $250,000, general operating expenses of approximately $78,000.
Depreciation and amortization of approximately $23,000 in utility and affiliate expenses, approximately $4,000 as of March 31, 2024 assessment had approximately $2.1 million of cash cash equivalents and approximately $466,000 available-for-sale securities with maturities ranging from one to six months, a combined total of approximately $2.6 million compared to a cash balance of $5 million as of December 31, 2023 for the first quarter of 2024, $1.2 million of our $2.5 million of cash used was attributable to one-time charges, which included consulting and legal fees, franchise tax compliance and fees associated with our at-the-market offering.
As I mentioned earlier, without these one-time charges, our burn rate for the quarter would have been approximately $1.2 million or a little over $400,000 per month, which is significantly improved from where we were a year ago. Also, as we mentioned in our last earnings call, on March 5, 2023, we entered into an at-the-market offering agreement. We may issue and sell shares of common stock from time to time with an aggregate offering price of up to $1.5 million through our shelf registration statements.
We may also seek additional funding through public equity and other sources to fund further capital investments or for general corporate purposes, reductions in our work force in 2023 and continuing through the first quarter of 2024 resulted in an estimated reduction in monthly compensation costs of approximately 41% in the three months ended March 31, 2024, when compared to the same period in the prior year, which was possible after streamlining operations and rationalizing resources to focus on key market opportunities. While we have taken steps to reduce the current number of suppliers, in our network.
As just discussed, our long-term strategy is to add additional customers and suppliers increased revenues through our revenue enhancement projects and our next day quotes program while continuing to reduce and manage expenditures to improve our financial position and ensure continued funding of operations.
This concludes our prepared remarks. Now I'd like to open the call for questions. Operator, please go ahead.

Question and Answer Session

Operator

(Operator Instructions) Matt Hewitt, Craig-Hallum Capital.

Matt Hewitt

Good morning, and thank you for taking the questions. Maybe first up a remarkable increase in the conversion rate on your next day quotes. I'm just curious, is that sustainable? How should we think about, especially as you had several more on kind of people embedded with those customers. How will that kind of drive or accelerate growth as the year progresses?

Tracy Curley

Good morning, Matt. Thanks for that. I have a huge smile on my face because we are really excited about this, and we do believe it's sustainable.
I'm going to turn this over to Leslie to talk a little bit more.

Leslie Hoyt

That nice to meet you. And I agree, Tracy, next day quote is absolutely sustainable and will always plan to be the way we operate on two fronts with our banked and remnant business as we continue to work through our supplier network refresh program, we are working with each and every supplier to understand where they are in their ability to and provide inventory data files to us. And all of those conversations are moving them towards where they are in towards getting us more and better data were then able to have more data in our inventory. We can market more specimens. Customers can look at them directly on those are all next day quotes and how we will grow our banked and remnant Mexico program.
On the prospective side, it's a little bit different. It's understanding and partnering with prospective sites, entire supplier contracts, if you will, where we understand their capabilities and trust and their ability to perform adequately. And we allow those whole sites and what they do into our program. And we have got added three sites in the last two months onto that program, and we'll continue to do so on.

Tracy Curley

So yeah, extremely sustainable in the business plan going forward and automated coordinators that triangle can bottle coordinates on would be most helpful for us in a prospective area.

Matt Hewitt

That's fantastic. And kind of similarly on with that reduction in suppliers, how does that change access to samples? Or are your remaining 140 sites, are they able to increase their supply or the some of the things that maybe the prior suppliers weren't capable of providing data on or whatnot?

Tracy Curley

That's a good question.
It has good questions, Matt. But the answer is we've been really energized and excited about the conversations we're having with suppliers and the [15] remaining [100 plus] because we are finding out that they have more capabilities than we were aware of. And so while we are contracting the size of our supplier network, we were able to expand the capabilities of those that are existing because of the and more robust conversations we are having with them right now, frankly, maybe you can add a little bit more to that than I just did.

Leslie Hoyt

Yes, I 100% agree, Tracy. We actually have access to more supply with less suppliers. And the reason why is we have time on to be able to focus on those suppliers and understand the breadth of their capabilities. And we I would say it's been in almost every case as we renew our relationship that those companies have grown and their ability to provide different services and different types of specimens. And we're now able to grow with them because we have the time to understand their pricing, understand their capabilities and for that to be known across the company for them to be used from sales and marketing, do acid feasibility process. And we are probably halfway through this process of recontracting and already have a greater supply, some of our investments, if you will, and with less suppliers.
The last thing I'll say is the other reason that is true is that the supplier contracts that we terminated, more suppliers that we weren't working much with Matt may really weren't representing a quality supply of specimens, nor were they working with us in an efficient way on where we were able to deliver these projects on time and under expectation. So not much lost on the terminated contract and not gained on the recontracting process.

Matt Hewitt

That's great. Thank you. And then maybe one last one. I'll hop back in the queue. But bird flu has been hitting the headlines quite a bit here recently. And I'm just curious if that creates an opportunity for you, if so, have you already started to work with some of your supplier network to ramp up their capabilities sort of obtaining samples and the necessary data. Are you already seeing demand on the purchasing side of those types of samples? Any color on that front would be helpful. Thank you.

Tracy Curley

And so any opportunities like that are always unfortunate for our fortunately for Acthar and unfortunate in our for the general population are an opportunity for us on we know well, we had a lot of requests for, for example, the share, but that's largely airplanes. You know, specifically?

Leslie Hoyt

I have not yet heard of demand from bird flu, but we'll certainly follow up on that right after the call, Tom, I agree Tracey's. We're getting the usual flu A. and B and market demand wanes with the different threat to us. But I will follow up on that I have not seen any demand yet.

Matt Hewitt

Understood. Thank you.

Operator

(Operator Instructions) I show no further questions in the queue. I show no further questions in the queue at this time. I'd like to turn the call over to Ms. Tracy Curley, CEO, for closing remarks.

Tracy Curley

I'd like to thank everyone again for joining us on our call today and for your continued support we believe the operational advancements made this quarter will play a significant role in our future growth. We are changing the landscape of our business from the bio specimen procurement industry at-large by more rapidly and effectively connecting via second suppliers with researchers. Our next day, quote program has proven successful, and we are really excited about the long-term capabilities of that. And we look forward to updating you with our continued rollout of this program. With that, thank you and have a great day.

Operator

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect and have a good day.