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William Ruckelshaus, the CEO of Blucora, has announced he will resign as president and CEO once a successor is found. The decision came on heels of its purchase of HD Vest Financial Services and plans to explore alternatives for its InfoSpace and Monoprice businesses, with divestiture of those web-based businesses likely.

The move is aimed at ending Blucora's reliance on the volatile web search and content market in favor of recurring revenue in the tax and advisory arenas. The company also plans to reduce overhead by 30 percent in connection with the change in focus.

Blucora, then called InfoSpace, purchased TaxAct in 2011 after the government blocked H&R Block's purchase of TaxAct. Blucora will spend about $580 million for HD Vest, with cash on hand and $425 million from a new debt facility. The company said the deal will provide the opportunity for its advisors to offer retirement and investment products to TaxAct customers. TaxAct is said to have 5.5 million tax filers and 19,500 paid preparers. The company also expects some TaxAct tax professionals will become financial advisors. Vest has more than 360,00 clients and more than 4,500 securities licensed tax professionals.

The tax preparation business has performed well. For the six months ended June 30, the company had $112 million in revenue, an increase of 13 percent from $98.7 million in last year's corresponding period. But that came as changes in the online market hammered InfoSpace, Blucora's historical business that provides search services and web content.

The search and content business was hammered as relationships with search companies changed, falling to $72.8 million in the most recently ended half, off 66 percent from slightly less than $149 million. Now potentially on the block, InfoSpace is Blucora's historical business and provides search services and web content with Google accounting for 71 percent of that unit's revenue for the six months ended June 30. That was down from a high of 88 percent for fiscal 2013. InfoSpace and Yahoo Inc. and Yahoo EMEA also terminated an agreement effective December 31, a contract that otherwise would have automatically renewed for one year. There has been no word on the possibility of a new agreement.

In the last 18 months, Blucora had continued in an acquisition mode with InfoSpace purchasing HowStuff Works on May 30, 2014 for $44.9 million in cash. On July 2, TaxAct acquired SimpleTax software, which markets online tax preparation for individuals in Canada. The company was to initially pay about $1.8 million in cash and up to rough $3.7 million contingent payments over three years. The company said it would limit M&A for the near term.\
Vest had $272.5 million in revenue from 2014 from the activities being acquired by Blucora. Operations that produced another $32.4 million are being retained by Vest. Blucora cited the high rate of recurring revenue as one reason it sought the deal. Vest has $36 billion in assets under management, including more than $9 billion in fee-based advisory assets under management.

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