Jeff Eberwein : Yes, I would say we’re seeing a lot of strength in health care and health care for us is life sciences, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, you know other companies. My other providers might focus on hospital chains and health care providers. That’s not really what we mean when we talk about Healthcare. So that’s the area of particular strength, but we’re also seeing some strength in select consumer, particularly high end and manufacturing industrials. There’s some pocket of strength there, and there’s some pockets of strength in financial services. So it’s really – there’s a lot going on under the surface, but in general those have been areas where we’ve won new business. Clients are continuing to hire at healthy rates and by far the weaker sector as we talk about is the technology sector.
And even there we’re €“ our team is repositioned, and there are a few areas where there is still some decent activity like IT Services, and we’re starting to see some activity with AI related companies, and those are typically backed by venture capital firms, but we’re seeing more and more of those startups get funded and need to partner with someone like us to help them ramp.
Marc Riddick: Great, and then one €“ I’ll sneak in one last one, sorry. I wondered €“ see if you had any update as to maybe what you’re seeing with RPO trends and recent activity given the macroeconomic environment. Thanks.
Jeff Eberwein: Yes, it continues to be healthy. So enterprise RPO, which is the vast bulk of what we do had a really good year last year, and we think we’ll have another good year this year. And like I mentioned just a minute ago, by far the biggest opportunities are in health care, and I would chalk that up to it being somewhat independent of the economic cycle or what’s going on in the banking sector. But I would also chalk it up to just kind of coming out of COVID. A lot of those companies, either want to use RPO, have an RPO solution for the first time, and they’ve been studying it for a while and they just were kind of on hold because of COVID, because that was such a distraction and they were dealing with that. And then another thing we’re seeing is that they are unhappy with their incumbent provider, because the incumbent provider didn’t, wasn’t as in some cases as flexible as they needed them to be.
And so we’re seeing more opportunities than usual to pitch for business where the client is already convinced RPO is the way to go and they are just not satisfied with their current partner.
Marc Riddick: Thank you.
Operator: Our next question comes from Ignacio Bernaldez with EF Hutton. Please go ahead.
Ignacio Bernaldez: Hey! Good morning, and thank you for your time. I’m calling on behalf of Eddie Reilly. Two questions here. The first, regarding the new business wins mentioned in the press release, just curious what’s driving these wins given the current macro environment.
Jeff Eberwein : Yeah, well there’s always as someone on TV says, there’s always a bull market somewhere. And when I look at this, it’s probably one of the more encouraging things we’ve won a healthy amount of new business in the first quarter. I would estimate it at around $3 million, and that number is an annualized net revenue number. It doesn’t mean $3 million additional in 2023, that’s when it’s fully up and running what the annualized run rate it. And it’s a collection of gaming, healthcare. We won a pretty decent size account with a specialty chemical company that focuses on clean water products, hygiene products, and so it’s really just looking for where the need is and responding to that client need. I think we’ve all seen situations like during COVID, where a lot of sectors, a lot of countries were on pause and then coming out of COVID it was to varying degrees; all sectors, all countries at full steam ahead.
And I would just say the current environment is more mixed. There’s a lot going on in some countries, some sectors, some companies and the real epicenter of the weakness from what we see is the tech sector, particularly you know the West Cost of the U.S. That’s the real epicenter, and it’s as bad as other severe downturns like after the dot-com burst and during the great financial crisis.
Ignacio Bernaldez: That’s really helpful, thank you. And then just secondly hear, just kind of looking ahead at 2023, wondering what your top strategic priority for the yeah is?
Jeff Eberwein : Yeah, that’s a really good question. It’s really just to continue to execute well and make sure that our investments are prudent and delivering the results we expect them to deliver. While we’ve talked in the past about how much we’ve increased investment spending, and we’re €“ we believe we’re in a growth business. We believe we’re a growth company and the areas where we have significantly increased our spending versus say four or five years ago are the areas of sales, marketing, technology, and we continue to invest in those areas. We think it’s very high ROI and that’s why we think, that’s why we’re seeing a pretty healthy pipeline of new business opportunities. It’s because of those investments we’ve made. And so it’s really just making sure that those are playing out the way we expect them to, given the investment that we played out.
