Heidrick & Struggles International, Inc. (NASDAQ:HSII) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Heidrick & Struggles International, Inc. (NASDAQ:HSII) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript May 6, 2024

Heidrick & Struggles International, Inc. beats earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $0.667, expectations were $0.58. HSII isn’t one of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of the third quarter (see the details here).

Operator: Thank you for standing by. My name is Pam, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Heidrick & Struggles 2024 Q1 Earnings Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker’s remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Thank you. I would now like to turn the conference over to Suzanne Rosenberg, VP for Investor Relations. You may begin.

Suzanne Rosenberg: Thank you, and welcome to our 2024 first quarter conference call. Joining me today is our CEO, Tom Monahan; and CFO, Mark Harris. We posted our accompanying slides on the IR homepage of our website at heidrick.com and we encourage you to view these slides for additional context. Please note that in the materials presented today, we may refer to non-GAAP financial measures that we believe provide additional insight into underlying results. Reconciliations between these non-GAAP financial measures and the most comparable GAAP measures may be found in the earnings press release. Also, in our remarks, we may make certain forward-looking statements. We ask that you please refer to the Safe Harbor language also included in today’s press release. Tom, I’ll now turn the call over to you.

Tom Monahan: Thank you, Suzanne. Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining us today. I’m incredibly excited to lead Heidrick & Struggles forward and build upon 71 years of impact. Client organizations are navigating a world of continued economic volatility and geopolitical complexity. More than ever before, driving great corporate performance requires discovering, accessing, evaluating and enabling exceptional leadership. The urgency and importance of this need for companies in every industry around the world makes for an ever-expanding addressable market. In this work, I’m also very pleased to be teaming with Tom Murray in his new role as President in addition to his continued oversight of global executive search. Tom and I have navigated the early onslaught of two Tom’s jobs effectively and are working quickly to get the company positioned for sustained growth and impact.

Beyond sharing a first name Tom and I share a far more important attribute. We both began our Heidrick journey as clients. We bring first-hand understanding of the client’s perspective. We are committed to leveraging this experience with the unmatched expertise of our people, to create what we are calling client-led growth. Together with our talented executive team, we are strongly positioned to create long-term shareholder value. Today, we appreciate the opportunity to bring you up to speed and the current performance of our business and the opportunities we see for greater growth, profitability and impact in the future. I’ll kick off the call with an overview of our first-quarter performance. Next, I’ll touch on some themes and observations as well as our priorities to continue growing the scale and overall impact of our firm.

Mark will then provide a more detailed discussion of our financial results and outlook for the second quarter. We’ll then open the call for your questions. Let me start with financial performance. Our clients continue to face a complex operating environment, which is likely to be the new normal across industries. While this creates a challenging environment for our clients to operate in, it also creates a permanently volatile world with what are ever-less predictable. And so, the whos and the hows are ever more important. It is a wonderful time to be in the who and how business. In most of our markets economic growth continues to be solid, albeit at widely different levels. At the same time, a combination of still robust valuations and an uncertain monetary policy are creating real pressure in the C-suite.

And of course, many of our major markets are facing elections this year, sometimes exacerbating already pronounced divisions in the workplace and society. Turning to our financial performance, we are committed to transforming client value into shareholder value and our results demonstrate this. In the first quarter, we delivered strong growth on the top line. Adjusted EBITDA margins were solid even with the growing contribution from our recently accretive and attractive acquisitions of Atreus and B4Z. We also maintained a strong financial position with a pristine balance sheet which includes no debt. Let me now turn to our key priorities. While I’m new to Heidrick, I’m no stranger to the challenges faced by corporate leaders around the world or the importance of having the right talent to meet these challenges.

As we have worked to set and reset corporate priorities, two themes have struck me. First, there is no question that our work serves a huge and growing market. The importance of developing sound human capital strategies and effectively executing on them will only grow. Importantly our brand permission, outstanding client work and the strong relationships we have with the very tops of organizations serves as an entrée to expand our scope and create substantial value across the enterprise. Given the scale and importance of what we do, we have a major opportunity to grow our impact and our values for our clients, our people and our shareholders. Second, we come to market with an incredible and strong collection of assets and expertise to support our growing client base.

We bring a unique set of capabilities built upon a treasure trove of powerful intellectual property and advanced technology to all key dimensions of C-suite leadership. This includes executive Search, assessment, succession planning, access to interim support and tools drive performance through executive development and culture. Increasingly, we augment the work of our great teams with digital two-way. In a world as complicated as the one we now operate in, we always want to be agile and respond to the client needs. But our team is focused on three important global objectives. First, to be the most trusted partner to the C-suite and board. We will aim to continue growing our search and assessment capabilities and to find new ways to convert this expertise into ongoing client impact and more holistic revenue streams.

Second, to help clients master the new world of leadership. The very nature of the leadership is changing and clients need help developing, accessing and enabling talent in new ways. Each of the seismic events we’ve seen across the past five years has reshaped the way leaders must lead and changed how companies must develop and enable leaders. The pandemic changed the world of work forever. The advent of GenAI has only begun to reshape how companies organize and operate, ongoing geopolitical dynamics have complicated international strategy for every client’s, existing leaders need new support to lead in this environment to change and grow how they lead and companies need to shape the next generation of leaders and access talent in new ways.

Our Heidrick Consulting and On-Demand Talent assets are built to help clients in this now more permanently complex world from leading assessment and development capabilities to helping leaders lift performance through cultural change for Heidrick Consulting platform is well-matched to client need, and our On-Demand Talent business gives clients a new weapon in their performance arsenal. he ability to engage and leverage new sources of talent in a work world roiled by the aftermath of the pandemic and ongoing demographic change. Third, we aim to be a bionic innovator. We are pleased with the digitization of our business, but understandably not yet satisfied the needs of our clients and our people and the richness of available technology is changing far too quickly to be satisfied.

The next horizon is compelling as we further develop into tech-enabled service business and differentiate our services across all lines of business. With a diversified portfolio of proprietary, data enabled and digital solutions, we have made important foundational investments such as the Navigator platform, which we believe will allow us to roll out new offers quickly. We’ve already seen early success with next-generation enterprise assessment and development platform on Navigator and see more innovation to come. But this is just the beginning of a commitment to leveraging advances in technology and AI to lift the work of our elite colleagues and mind our rich intellectual property. It’s, obviously, early days for Tom and me but he, I and our management committee colleagues know there is real work to do to accomplish these objectives.

By doing this, we can drive client and shareholder value. A few early areas of focus stand out for us. Loosely we call them Clarify, Simplify and Amplify. Given our incredible people and wealth of resources or perhaps because of their range, we have a significant opportunity to make Heidrick easy to work for and easy to work with. Getting this right will require us to first clarify, how we operate, so our people can bring the best of Heidrick to bear on every client interaction. For example, near-term we see an opportunity to tighter offering set of solutions and Heidrick Consulting and be incredibly precise about how we create value for our clients and achieve scale in core areas such as assessments. Second, simplify our message to clients in the market.

Heidrick has an unrivaled richness of expertise and insight, which has grown rapidly for the past several years. As you can imagine, this exceptional breadth of offerings will make it harder for clients to easily access and understand all the ways we can drive performance. Third, amplify the impact of what we do. We are going to be cleaner and consistent and telling our story wins and for our clients. Done right, this work should enable us to accelerate our strategic impact on clients, grow the business more quickly and expand margins consistently. One last note, before I hand the call to Mark. Nothing we have accomplished or plan to accomplish in the future would be possible without the energy and commitment of our exceptional Heidrick colleagues globally.

I recently attended our global consultants conference that wrapped up last week. It was a powerful experience to be with leaders from across the firm from countries around the world, representing all our businesses and deep expertise in every facet of client problem. The energy was palpable and the time together not only allow me to meet many colleagues for the first time in person but also gave our teams the opportunity to strategize, collaborate and clarify, how we can better serve our clients. Any organization that has been a market leader for seven decades is a secret recipe for success. In our case it’s not so secret, the exceptionally talented people in our organization and the unique culture they have forged, our unmatched resource for client impact.

I’m grateful to be part of it and take very seriously the responsibility to grow our people and nurture and protect our culture of impact. I will now hand the call over to Mark to provide a detailed review of our financial performance and outlook.

Mark Harris: Thank you, Tom. And good afternoon and evening to everyone on today’s call. As Tom described, our clients are operating in a complex environment, feeling pressure at the C-suite and board level and increasingly facing urgent human capital business needs. This led to our first quarter results, which reflect all of our businesses posting solid growth from the year ago period. We further continued to generate strong top line performance that met the high end of our guidance range and solid adjusted EBITDA margins, while maintaining an enviable balance sheet position with zero debt. From a macro point of view, we expect to have choppiness in our markets in 2024, given the influences causing an uncertain rate cut environment coupled with geopolitical unrest in key parts of the world and the US presidential election this November.

Thus far, we are seeing some of that choppiness in our Asian and European markets. But as our results demonstrate, the Americas have remained relatively isolated so far. With this backdrop, we remain optimistic that 2024 will be comparable to the strong performance delivered in 2023. Before speaking to our first quarter results, let me remind all on today’s call that these results include a full quarter of both Atreus and B4Z, whereas last year’s quarter had two months of contribution from Atreus and none from B4Z. After this quarter, all acquisitions will be lapped and will be in our full segment results. Turning to our first quarter results. On a consolidated basis, revenue was $265 million or 11% above revenue in the first quarter of 2023, driven by all three business units Search, Heidrick Consulting and On-Demand Talent.

Adjusted EBITDA of $25.9 million improved slightly from $25.6 million in the first quarter of 2023 and adjusted EBITDA margin was 9.8% compared to 10.7% last year. I think it’s important to call out that the first quarter adjusted EBITDA was primarily impacted by higher general and administrative expenses, which I’ll discuss in a few moments, as well as costs associated from our global consultant conference that took place last week. Excluding the conference costs, adjusted EBITDA margin was 10.4%. As we stated in past calls, were at-risk and before that carry lower margins versus executive search. Nevertheless, given the long term high growth businesses, even with lower margins, we expect more aggregate dollars flowing to the bottom line and thus should be EPS accretive.

Now let’s turn to each of our businesses. Executive Search revenue increased 6% from the first quarter 2023 to $201 million. Regionally, we saw revenue grow 7% in both the Americas and Europe, while Asia Pacific was down 4%. On a constant currency basis however, Europe was up 4% and Asia Pacific essentially flat. Most of our practice groups exhibited growth over the period. We also saw consultant productivity annualized in the first quarter of $1.9 million compared to $1.8 million on the same basis in the year ago quarter. Importantly, Executive Search generated profitability with adjusted EBITDA of $48.4 million compared to $47.8 million in the same quarter last year or a margin of 24% compared to 25.1%. On-Demand Talent, revenue was $38 million, up 22% compared to the first quarter of 2023, driven by the positive impact of our Atreus acquisition.

Without the acquisition of Atreus, our revenue would have decreased by 8%, as we experienced market slowdown in the quarter as it pertains to our legacy business driven by market dynamics. As you’ll remember, we have several different offerings within this product line. Some of which are not correlated with temporary staffing cycles, but a couple of offerings deal and thus are more exposed to those market dynamics over time. Overtime, we expect this exposure to decrease as we deliver faster growth in areas of less cyclicality. Importantly, we’re seeing demand increase in the Americas. And in the first quarter we saw increases in total contract values reflecting longer duration projects along with higher extension values. On-demand Talent recorded an improved adjusted EBITDA loss of $0.9 million versus a loss of 1.3 million in the first quarter of 2023.

We continue to see On-Demand Talent as a high-growth opportunity and an important complement to our search business to address our client needs. As we identify, prioritize and execute key projects and programs to more rapidly scale this business, we expect future growth to come from both products and geographical perspective. Heidrick Consulting first quarter revenue grew 46% year over year to $26 million, primarily due to the acquisition of B4Z along with growth of our legacy Heidrick Consulting business, driven by our leadership and culture purpose practices. Backing out the acquisition, we saw our legacy Heidrick Consulting revenue increased 17%. Overall, Heidrick Consulting posted an improved adjusted EBITDA loss of $2 million versus a loss of $2.8 million in the first quarter of 2023.

We believe we have significant opportunities in our consulting product portfolio to drive a more consistent performance and we look forward to sharing our progress as we work to increase the profitability and achieve greater scale in the most strategically important parts of this portfolio. Turning to operating expenses, including our recent acquisitions, we saw salary and benefits increased 9.8% from the first quarter of 2023. As a percentage of net revenue, selling and benefits was 65.8% in the first quarter of 2024 versus 66.4% in the prior year quarter. Variable compensation increased $10.2 million in the quarter, given the increase in production. Fixed compensation increased $5.4 million versus last year, primarily due to base salary and talent acquisition and retention costs, partially offset by a decrease in retirement and benefits.

General and administrative expenses increased $7 million to $41.4 million or 15.6% of net revenue versus $34.3 million or 14.3% of net revenue in the year ago period. The increase versus the year ago period is primarily due to the business development travel, which includes our conference, office occupancy and noncash intangible amortization and accretion from our acquisitions as we have previously discussed. Stripping out the costs related to the acquisitions and the conference to get a better sense of our baseline run rate, our G&A was approximately 14.1% of revenue in the first quarter of 2024 compared to 13.8% of revenue in the same quarter last year. We expect that G&A will remain slightly inflated while the intangible expenses run off over the next 24 to 36 months and come down to a more normalized level of around 14%.

Cost of services increased $4.6 million to $27.4 million in the first quarter of 2024 versus $22.8 million in the prior quarter, a 20.1% increase. This increase was due to the expansion of our on-demand talent business, which typically has approximately 65% to 68% of the segment’s revenue and cost of services. Finally, we continue to invest in development of Heidrick Navigator and digital assets across our other business units of Search and On-Demand Talent through R&D spending. R&D expense for the first quarter was $5.7 million or 2.2% of net revenue versus $5.5 million or 2.3% of net revenue in the first quarter of 2023. Moving to bottom line profitability. Net income for the quarter was $14 million and diluted EPS of $0.67, which compares to net income of $15.6 million and diluted EPS of $0.76 from the same quarter last year.

The primary reason for this decline was a meaningful higher tax rate of nearly 39% this quarter versus 32% last quarter. This increase was predominantly driven by the non-deductibility of acquisition earn-out costs. For comparative purposes, without the higher tax rate, first quarter 2024 diluted EPS would have been $0.05 higher or $0.72, more in line with last year’s quarterly performance. Moving forward, while we expect our rate in 2024 and 2025, to temporarily be around 38%. Once these acquisition costs run off, we expect the tax rate to come back into the low 30% range, assuming no other statutory tax changes. As we look at our balance sheet, we ended the quarter in a strong cash position of $252.8 million, up $48.1 million from the $204.7 million at the end of March 2023.

The year-over-year improvement was mainly driven by payments for the BTG earn-out and an Atreus acquisition, which we did not have this year. This balance, coupled with our $200 million credit line gives us nearly $0.5 billion of liquidity to execute on our strategic plan and return capital to our shareholders. Moving forward, while we continue to navigate a choppy macro environment, we still see good demand signals across our business. Therefore, we expect the second quarter revenue to be in the range between $255 million and $275 million. Our guidance contemplates executive search in the Americas to remain strong, moderated from the Q1 levels, coupled with some slowdown in Europe and APAC, given the operating environment. To conclude, I’d like to thank our teams around the world for a strong quarter and a great start to 2024.

We believe we’re extremely well positioned to continue to successfully navigate through a rapidly changing global environment. As always, we remain committed to driving long-term profitable growth and delivering sustainable value to our shareholders. With that, Tom and I will be glad to take your questions.

See also Republican Congress Members and Insiders are Buying These 10 Stocks and 15 Best Places to Retire in Louisiana.

Q&A Session

Operator: Thank you. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] And your first question comes from the line of Tobey Sommer of Truist Securities. Please go ahead.

Jasper Bibb: Hey, good afternoon. This is Jasper Bibb on for Tobey. I wanted to ask about Search confirmations. I think 11% over the fourth quarter historically. I’m pretty sure you get a bit of a seasonal tailwind there sequentially. So, how do you characterize the new business trend versus your expectations for the first quarter?

Tom Monahan: Sure. Happy to try to jump on. In terms of the first quarter, yeah, I think we were a little bit surprised. Usually in the fourth quarter, we drop off, as you roughly pointed out, you have in the United States, Thanksgiving November holiday and then globally, you have the other holidays that hit you in December and really the summer becomes more of a shutdown month, so to speak. So Q1 always usually has a pretty good strength to it. In terms of our expectations, they were — we came in much better than what we had expected. We’re very happy in terms of the strength of the general market that we saw in the Americas. Europe was pretty much spot on in terms of what we expected and specific was a little bit behind what we expected.

So overall, just had a very good sense of what we’re seeing. We have similar expectations, which is in our guidance in terms of what we think we’ll see in Q2, but I think Q3, as you rightly will know it slows up a bit, because the month of all gets in Europe, a lot of people take that time off as well as the US mid-July to end of August. And then we run right back into Q4, it really kind of slowing down so to speak, because again, not just the holidays, but because most people, if they have open engagements might want to wait until the bonus runs that kind of takeoff on — and curtail those as well as generally in terms of people not really looking at the same time. so, I should say a typical Q4 typical slow although again in 2021, that didn’t hold up, but there was reasons for it.

Jasper Bibb: Got it. And then curious if you could stratify what search demand might look like for and CEO and Board searches relative to the rest of the positions you approved forward?

Mark Harris: In terms of the positions or in terms of the market?

Jasper Bibb: I guess the market would be fair, yes.

Mark Harris: Yes. So, as I said, the Board searches are pretty much on their pace and cadence than we normally would see in terms of how those were looking. So, I don’t think we’ve seen anything in the data that describes to us that it’s either higher or lower of what we normally see in market. CEO practice, definitely a little bit stronger than we’ve seen historically and generally in the market that we’re starting to kind of see come through. There’s been some pretty good data on there in terms of time and seat as well as aging in the CEO suite. So, we would expect that to kind of continue to have we expect expected to have good strength as we think through 2024. Again, some of the choppiness in the market can curtail that a bit, but right now we’re not seeing a lot of it at that level.

And I think it’s probably — again other ways downstream would be more in the VP side of it that we’re starting to see a little bit more of a slowdown so to speak that the C-level at least as of right now.

Tom Monahan: Yes. Just to add some color there Mark when you think of CEO has been in seat for five years today have been through a pandemic, a spike in inflation, had been through some stuff. So, there is a — I don’t know whether it’s dog years or whatever, but CEOs are feeling like their calendar in chair understates the what the work they’ve had to do in the past cycle.

Jasper Bibb: Got it. Last one for me. I don’t know if you gave any color on R&D spending plans, what you’re expecting over the balance of the year just given where you are with the hydrogen aggregator progress?

Mark Harris: Our expectation is Q1 will maintain that kind of cadence through Q2, Q3, Q4 on a similar level. I don’t think we’re going to see a major on slop. And remember it was kind of interesting when we had this conversation a couple of years ago, we’d say normally you would start to see that kind of curtail itself down. And we caution that with unless something new happens in the market that we need to invest our time into. And the reason I say that is because AI has become something that we are now obviously seriously putting our thoughts, energy, and money behind. So, I’d say that until the next great one, two, three years, I mean the technology advancement, especially as it applies to Heidrick is pretty cool and how we can use that in terms of gaining leverage on into the company, into the business.

So, right now let’s say maintain that cadence, that’s probably the right thing to do. And then whether the next AI interesting technology development that could be really applicable to our business, we’re going to invest in and we think it’s really important for our investors to do that and maintain profit performance at the same time.

Tom Monahan: The other point I’ll make there is the same win that Europe complicates our life in terms of making sure we’re deploying AI service to our clients hits our clients very hard and that they’re looking for and new roles, new types of leadership, new ways of organizing things. So, our people certainly has us working hard, but the good news is it does create some secular long-term demand for people to think about the talent they need and how they organize to get after this opportunity.

Jasper Bibb: That’s helpful. And thanks for taking the questions.

Operator: Your next question comes from Kevin Steinke with Barrington Research. Please go ahead.