And then this company was a combination of two large divisions seven, eight years ago. If that was a private transaction seven or eight years ago, and at least in my experience, you would have just put together a plan much like the best-in-class companies that do acquisitions in the public and private space and fully integrated every process, every system around the world. That wasn’t done, and that’s being done — has been done, is being done and needs to continue to being done. But that journey, we’re still building. We’re still working off some legacy integration that just frankly wasn’t there. And frankly, one of the reasons that I’m here is that we’re going to move all aspects of that forward at a much more faster pace and focus on the fundamentals because that’s what’s going to deliver us a better platform to grow from.
Ashwin Shirvaikar: Makes senses. Good to hear from you. Thanks.
Raul Fernandez: Thank you.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Jason Kupferberg from Bank of America. Your line is open.
Jason Kupferberg: Thank you. Raul, welcome. I wanted to follow up a little bit on that. I’m just wondering, as you think about the different elements and areas of execution. I know you said across the board, it needs to be better. But I guess, if you were going to really highlight one or two areas that have the most room for improvement. Sales, marketing, service, implementation, whatever it may be, we would just like to get some of your initial impressions on that front.
Raul Fernandez: So, in this change, in our go-to-market model change, one of the things that we will be able to get a better end-to-end accountability on and then be able to track is pre-sales solutioning, sales execution, use of existing resources, net new resources that we need. So if you think about the whole life cycle of solutioning something, staffing something, delivering the product or the service or the application or solution and doing it in a way that you plan to do it, meaning the budget was right, you’re hitting it or beating it. That is one, let’s call it, fundamental operations in that workflow that we’re very, very focused on. So that’s one. The second one is absolutely on marketing. And I’m not talking about marketing with logos on cars because we’re relooking at all of that.
It is great for some brands, and it’s appropriate for some brands. But frankly, I see a lot of value in putting those marketing dollars at the business units level so they can make a great connection with their customers. We have a great relationship with our partners in some of the global spend in marketing. We love the work that we do. We appreciate them. We love the brand association. But I think as someone that sees the different buyers that we have by business unit, they’re probably best served by having more control over their marketing spend and targeting it more efficiently and effectively against the 100 or 200 buyers that really matter in their business units. So global brand is great. We love our partners. But I think going forward, you’ll see a more business unit-centric approach to thinking about it and then executing on it.
Jason Kupferberg: Okay. That’s good color. And Rob, maybe one for you, just looking at organic revenue growth, I know you came in right in line with the middle of your range for the third quarter. You talked about some tough comps for the fourth quarter. Those were factored into the original guidance. So I just wanted to isolate what’s interest (ph) since last quarter, since I know we are taking the overall full year organic growth down a little bit for the year.
Rob Del Bene: Yeah. So our guide from — for the full year from two quarters ago had somewhat of a recovery in our project-based businesses in the back half of the year and that really has not materialized in either apps or A&E. So that’s the primary reason for the taking down of the guide. Now going from third quarter to fourth quarter, we see GBS is — the fourth quarter will look a lot like the third quarter. It’s going to be flat in the range of flat year-to-year. The mix is a little different. In the third quarter, we had apps and apps declining, and we had insurance and A&E growing about 2% each. In the fourth quarter, with the good bookings that we had in apps, we see improvement in that business. We see a little bit of a decline quarter-to-quarter in the A&E business, and then we have a really tough comp in insurance.
So that — but bottom line, GBS will be about flat again year-to-year. GIS in the fourth quarter will deteriorate a little bit, the decline will get a little bigger and that is almost entirely due to modern workplace where we had — first, we had a tough compare to last year in resale, plus we have a quarter-to-quarter decline in resale going from 3Q to 4Q. So the entire deterioration is really a modern workplace statement, and it could be isolated to resale. The services modern workplace will be flat quarter-to-quarter. [Multiple Speakers] And we did have — we’re encouraged at the bookings in the third quarter in the GBS business were strong, and that gives us — that’s promising.
Jason Kupferberg: Thank you. Appreciate it. Operator Your next question comes from the line… Sorry, go ahead, sir.
Rob Del Bene: Yeah I think — one more question, please, operator.
Operator: Yes. Than you. And your last question comes from the line of James Faucette from Morgan Stanley. Your line is open.
James Faucette: Great. Thank you very much for the questions. I wanted to ask a couple of questions that maybe as follow-ups. Well, it seems like in your commentary, you feel like that there’s been a lot of resources that are being used that could be better directed or where you could get better return, etc.? And I guess I’m wondering, particularly in the context of capital allocation over the last few years, whether you think that you have all the necessary tools and resources to make the change you’re looking for or is there incremental investment that we should think about? And it goes a little bit to Ashwin’s question, I guess, and I’m just looking at the kind of the growth rates and even some of the things that are happening in the market generally and wondering if there isn’t a need to at least increase some incremental investment to accelerate the change or just would love to get your opinion on that view.
Raul Fernandez: Yeah. No, great. And I came in, obviously, with some knowledge and an open mind. And while I think we’ve done a great job on capital allocation, and we’ll continue to use most of it on the buyback program, I don’t rule out like could some of that be used to increase the value and increase the performance of the company faster. I think we have the leadership, we have the best practices, we have execution experience that we have all lived through. We need to apply that here. There is a lot of upside to working smarter, working better, working more collaboratively with the tools we have in place, the people we have in place and the investments we have in place. So that’s my first goal is to optimize what we have in place.
There’s — like I said before, there’s multiple ways to win here, and we don’t have to get them all right at 100%. But if we work on it and again, going into the business units and getting very detailed, on their action plans, if we work on it, we can make ourselves better, and that will show up across the board.
James Faucette: Great. I appreciate the candor on that. And then Rob, I think in your prepared remarks, you indicated particularly on the GBS side, the time of — time to revenue is extending a bit, and it seemed like it was in part because of decision making and prioritization of customers. What’s your sense in terms of where we are in that process? Are we starting to see some stabilization or is there’s still a fair amount of uncertainty as to kind of what that time to revenue and beginning of work and cadence is going to look like on a go-forward basis?
