Insperity, Inc. (NYSE:NSP) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Insperity, Inc. (NYSE:NSP) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript May 1, 2024

Insperity, Inc. beats earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $2.27, expectations were $2.11. NSP isn’t one of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of the third quarter (see the details here).

Operator: Good morning. My name is Jenny and I will be your conference operator today. I would like to welcome everyone to the Insperity First Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please note this conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to introduce today’s speakers. Joining us are Paul Sarvadi, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer; and Douglas Sharp, Executive Vice President of Finance, Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer. At this time, I’d like to turn the call over to Douglas Sharp. Mr. Sharp, please go ahead.

Douglas Sharp: Thank you. We appreciate you joining us. Let me begin by outlining our plan for this morning’s call. First, I’m going to discuss the details behind our first quarter 2024 financial results. Paul will then comment on our recent accomplishments, including the progress we have made in implementing our Workday strategic partnership solution. I will return to provide our financial guidance for the second quarter and an update to the full year guidance. We will then end the call with a question-and-answer session. Now, before we begin, I would like to remind you that Mr. Sarvadi or I may make forward-looking statements during today’s call which are subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions. In addition, some of our discussion may include non-GAAP financial measures.

For a more detailed discussion of the risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from any forward-looking statements and reconciliations of non-GAAP financial measures, please see the Company’s public filings, including the Form 8-K filed today, which are available on our website. Now, let’s discuss our first quarter results in which we reported earnings above the high end of our guidance. We reported Q1 adjusted EBITDA of $142 million and adjusted earnings per share of $2.27. These results reflect the average number of paid worksite employees within the range of our forecast, continued strong pricing, lower than expected benefit costs and operating expenses in line with our budget. As for our growth metric, the average number of paid worksite employees in Q1 was approximately 304,000, a decline of less than 1% when compared to Q1 of 2023.

As you may recall from our prior earnings call, this slight decline was expected due to net layoffs incurred in our client base over the second half of 2023 into January of 2024, and the loss of a handful of large accounts during our year-end transition. Additionally, we experienced a 42% decline in net hiring in our client base in Q1 of 2024 when compared to the first quarter of 2023. Worksite employees paid from sales was at a similar level compared to Q1 2023 and when combined with client retention, came in at forecasted levels. Gross profit increased by 4% over Q1 of 2023, as strong pricing through our year-end transition of new and renewing accounts combined with a lower-than-expected benefit cost trend. This lower Q1 benefit cost was associated with a favorable adjustment to our reserves at the end of 2023 based primarily on subsequent claims runoff through the end of February 2024.

Regarding the last month of Q1, we believe the timing of claims payments under our plan in March were affected by the industry wide impact of the cybersecurity breach at Change Healthcare. Upon a detailed review of our claims data and discussions with our insurance carrier, we believe we have appropriately reserved additional amounts for Q1 2024 claims incurred but not yet reported due to the impact of this breach. The combination of our other direct cost areas, including workers’ compensation and payroll taxes, were generally in line with our forecast. Q1 operating expenses were also managed to budgeted levels, increasing 12% over Q1 of 2023. Operating expenses reflected our continued investment in our growth and our service and technology offerings, including approximately $5 million of costs related to the initial phase of implementation of our Workday strategic partnership.

First quarter’s effective tax rate came in at 29%, which was higher than Q1 of 2023’s rate of 23% and our forecasted rate of 26%. This was primarily due to changes in our stock price that resulted in less tax benefit on employee stock awards vesting at end of February. We believe that our financial position and liquidity remain strong, as we continue to invest in our long-term growth plans while providing returns to our shareholders. During the quarter, we repurchased 233,000 shares of stock at a cost of $23 million and paid out $21 million in cash dividends. We ended Q1 with $206 million of adjusted cash, an increase of $35 million over the December 31, 2023 balance. We continue to have $280 million available under our credit facility.

Now, at this time, I’d like to turn the call over to Paul.

Paul Sarvadi: Thank you, Doug and thank you all for joining our call. Today I will begin with comments on our solid first quarter performance including initiatives supporting our plans for future growth. Second, I will provide insights from our view into the economic climate and the reactions in the small to mid-size business community. Third, I will provide an update on the initiation of our new strategic partnership with Workday and provide a glimpse into our upcoming Investor Day. Overall, we had an excellent quarter exceeding the high end our adjusted EBITDA range against a backdrop of an economic slowdown. Our fundamentals are solid, and we expect our plan for the balance of the year will help mitigate the effects of the economic climate on our target small to medium size business clients.

New booked sales of our Workforce Optimization solution were strong in the first quarter. We experienced a double digit increase over the same period last year reflecting the growth of our BPA team and an improvement in closing rates driving sales efficiency. This improvement reflects the experience gained over the last year by Business Performance Advisors and effective incentives for prospective clients and the sales team. Booked sales by our mid-market Business Performance Consultants was the highlight of the quarter. They continued their excellent performance since the last half of last year exceeding budget. Sales of our larger accounts have become more consistent over the last year. The steady flow from Business Performance Advisors funneling qualified leads into this process and our growing number of Business Performance Consultants is the reason for this improvement.

This is well timed for our new Workday strategic partnership I will discuss in a few minutes. We also had a strong quarter in our traditional employment Workforce Acceleration business as our WX employee count on this service increased 21% over the same period last year, including a notable improvement in client retention. Total client retention in our Workforce Optimization business for the first quarter was in line with last year except for the large accounts we discussed in last quarter. We also achieved an important marketing objective exceeding our lead generation goal for the quarter, however conversion of these leads into discovery call appointments was just under 90% of target. Reaching sales activity objectives remains challenging in this environment.

We have several initiatives to drive sales activity including the launch of our Account Based Experience marketing and sales strategy. This approach made possible by our investment in Salesforce provides insights from advanced technologies to leverage the ideal client profile and buyer intent signals to improve Business Performance Advisor effectiveness. This is a more strategic approach in sales research, planning, and execution focused on high value accounts and building relationships with key decision makers. All BPA’s will begin with assigned target accounts this quarter, which we believe can lead to more Business Performance Advisor time in front of qualified prospects. We have additional initiatives underway leveraging our investment in Salesforce and AI enabled technology to drive efficiencies, speed, quality, and insights for our teams as they serve our clients and operate and grow the business.

The move to our enterprise-wide Salesforce platform as well as our implementation of modern data engineering and analytics technologies are well underway allowing us to put in place a data strategy that we believe will accelerate predictive analytics, AI, and other emerging capabilities. Now let me provide some insight regarding the economic climate our clients are facing evident from our client data, our interaction directly with business owners, and our recent nationwide survey. The key data elements we monitor to assess the small and medium size business climate are net hiring, wage inflation, overtime hours worked, and commissions paid to the sales staff of our clients. As Doug mentioned, net layoffs incurred in our client base over the second half of 2023 and has continued through the first quarter this year.

Wage inflation which peaked near 7% in 2022, has continued a downward trend all the way to slightly below the 2%. Overtime as a percentage of regular pay is down to 9%, the lowest number in few years. The most important metric that provides some insight to client sales and near-term revenues in their businesses, is commissions paid to their sales organization. This metric was down to 6%, also the lowest number in the last couple years. Recently, we have also had the opportunity to have direct discussions with a representative number of clients. While normal business owner optimism is still alive and well, comments about the effect of interest rates, inflation, and an economic slowdown were common. Our recent client survey reinforced these anecdotal comments across the broader nationwide client base.

Clients who feel their organization will perform better during 2024 than during 2023 has decreased to 66% from 74% one quarter ago. The percent of clients who expect to increase staffing has dropped to 39% compared with 54% a year ago. One-third of the respondents expect the economic climate to have at least a somewhat positive impact on their organization, while 42% anticipate a negative impact. Consistent with past quarters and looking forward to 2024, client optimism about their own business performance exceeds that of their expectations for the economy. Two thirds of clients surveyed were still optimistic for their own company performance similar to January. Now let me shift to the exciting update about our newest significant catalyst for growth, our exclusive Workday strategic partnership.

My enthusiasm for this opportunity was evident on our last call and after the first three months working together and gathering client feedback, has been reaffirmed. Our view of this strategic partnership as a potential game changer in the marketplace and at the same time, significantly elevating the trajectory of our company driving long-term growth, profitability, and value creation for Insperity has been strengthened. As a reminder, through this strategic partnership, Workday and Insperity are committed to jointly developing, marketing, selling, and supporting the preeminent solution for targeted small and medium-sized businesses that combines Workday’s HR technology with Insperity’s HR services. We expect to offer this unique combined solution to the target market for less upfront capital cost, ongoing expense, complexity, and implementation time than currently available to those businesses.

We believe this new solution has the potential to be competitively disruptive. Insperity and Workday are now strategic partners focused on four major objectives. All four of these priorities are off and running after just the first few months working together. First, a foundational step for this strategic partnership to be effective, is Insperity becoming a Workday customer for our corporate staff, which is ideal for our 4,300 employee company with dynamic future growth. We believe it is important to have our entire staff on Workday to be ready to support our clients as we launch our new solution. Our corporate Workday tenant project plan is progressing on schedule. A significant milestone for this to be started and completed effectively is the completion of the initial corporate HR data workbook in order to build the foundation tenant to use in configuration sessions.

This was submitted to Workday and the development site is up and running. Second, we are developing and embedding an instance of Workday as the client facing HR technology within our Workforce Optimization offering to create this new joint solution for the target market of larger accounts. This new Insperity Workday client tenant instance is a significantly more complex implementation. It is challenging to even describe how much work and detail planning has already happened on this project. We are very pleased significant progress has been accomplished detailing out the master plan for this project and the teams are working together extremely well. Third, we are establishing a deployment and enablement team within the Insperity service organization with the help of Workday.

Our goal for this team is to deliver implementations and provide support for the new solution in a similar efficient and effective manner as we do today. We are also off to a great start establishing this Insperity enablement team. A significant number of our service professionals have already completed training programs to establish a foundation for this team. The fourth major objective of the strategic partnership is a go to market plan for Insperity and Workday to address this target market including co-branding, co-marketing, and co-selling. The most significant effort accomplished since the launch has been the organization, staffing, and alignment of the teams to ensure the success of the strategic partnership and the go to market plan.

We are very pleased with the demonstrated commitment reflected in the leadership of both companies’ roles and responsibilities to make this partnership dynamic and effective for both companies. The first three months establishing the framework for this strategic partnership has not been without challenges as this type of relationship is new to both companies. However, the corporate culture match between the two firms continues to reaffirm my confidence around our opportunity for long-term success. My confidence is also supported by the client centric nature of this strategic partnership and the potential to deliver a highly scalable HR technology and service solution to a significant underserved market. Dialogue with clients and prospects about this solution has also been exceptional.

We were able to have personal interaction with over 200 business owners at recent client events and the energy from these discussions was encouraging. We are very excited about our upcoming Investor Day coming up on May 16 at our corporate office and available remotely online. The focus of this event will be an update on the fundamental drivers to our powerful business model and the specific ways we expect our new Workday strategic partnership to be a catalyst to improve the likelihood, degree, and speed of our success into the future. At this point I would like to pass the call back to Doug.

Douglas Sharp: Thanks, Paul. Now, let me provide our Q2 guidance and an update to our full year 2024 guidance. While we outperformed our earnings guidance in Q1, we are forecasting adjusted EBITDA over the remainder of the year consistent with our initial guidance. We are now thinking uncertainty and weakness in the macro-economic environment could persist over the remainder of the year. Based upon these factors and our starting point going into Q2, we have reduced our 2024 outlook for worksite employee growth to a range of flat to 2%. However, we expect the impact of this lower growth rate on our full year earnings to be mostly offset by continued strong pricing and slightly lower direct costs and operating expenses. We are now forecasting full year 2024 adjusted EBITDA in a range of $254 million to $293 million.

While we have lowered our overall operating expenses from our initial budget, we expect 2024 operating costs relating to our Workday strategic partnership to remain in the neighborhood of $60 million. As for adjusted EPS, we are now forecasting full year 2024 in a range of $3.17 to $3.90. This revised guidance assumes an increase in our 2024 effective income tax rate from 26% to 29% primarily due to less tax benefit on employee stock awards vesting in Q1, as I have previously mentioned. As for Q2, we are forecasting paid worksite employees to remain down about 1% compared to Q2 of 2023. As for Q2 earnings, we are forecasting adjusted EBITDA in a range of $53 million to $66 million and adjusted EPS from $0.61 to $0.83. This guidance considers our typical quarterly earnings pattern, where our Q1 results are typically higher than subsequent quarters, as we earn a higher level of payroll tax surplus prior to worksite employees reaching their taxable wage limits, and benefit costs typically are lower in Q1 and step up over the remainder of the year as deductibles are met.

Now at this time, I’d like to open up the call for questions.

See also 10 Best Performing Biotech ETFs in 2024 and 15 Most Black States in the US.

Q&A Session

Operator: Thank you very much. [Operator Instructions] Your first question is coming from Andrew Nicholas of William Blair. Andrew, your line is live.

Andrew Nicholas: Great, thank you and good morning. I wanted to start with a couple of questions on the Workday partnership. Paul, a lot of really good color here as you worked through that partnership for the first couple months. I guess two questions specifically. One, are there any kind of early signs on the productivity or opportunity around the sales leads that Workday is funneling your way? And then second, and I apologize if I missed it in your prepared remarks, but do you have any additional insight or detail on the expected timeline now that you’ve done, it sounds like a pretty considerable amount of planning work and some implementation and integration conversations?

Paul Sarvadi: Yes, thank you for the question. That’s great. I’ll start with your second question first, but we are not ready yet to actually pin down a detailed launch date, if you will, but we are certainly well down the road in terms of looking at all the elements of what has to happen for the launch to occur and are comfortable that it’s within an acceptable timeframe within the range that we had anticipated when we put the deal down. So, we – again, this is the kind of thing that gets more and more clear literally on a week-to-week basis and the teams are really working super together and they’re making great progress at a really appropriate rate that I think it’s important that both of our companies are looking at this, as a product launch.

So, it’s a different frame of reference on how we’re approaching getting to the finish line and so making sure that we do that in a product that fully fits what we’re designing but getting there as quickly as possible to take advantage of the market opportunities out there. So, I can’t give you a timeframe yet, but we will go into more detail about what we’re doing here in just a couple of weeks at our Investor Day meeting and you’ll have a better sense of that when we get through that. Now, also, it’s very exciting on the lead front. As I mentioned last quarter, , our go-to-market efforts would start with a whole planning process around lead flow back and forth between the two companies. The focus has really been on the process and, what it takes to make sure that these are not just, dumping a bunch of names from, one group to the other but rather a warm handoff.

So, keep in mind that just lead flow, I put that in the co-marketing category, but we want people to land on sites that have some co-branding in it and we want to make sure that as leads are handled by both firms that there’s a co-selling component where there’s dialogue between the two companies about specific accounts and appropriate warm handoffs going on. So, we’re well down that road. There’s also technology work that has been advanced to get to the point where we can literally flip a switch and have this stuff going. So, my original plan was for this to get planned out in that first quarter or so, get implemented within that second period in a way that those leads flow and we start to see, literally start to see sales results in the last half of the year.

And I feel very good that we’re on target for that.

Andrew Nicholas: Great. Thank you. That’s really helpful. And then I guess for my second question, I wanted to revert back to the core business. It does sound like net hiring expectations have come in a bit versus maybe what you expected at the beginning of the year with your initial guidance. If you could just kind of clarify or quantify that, that would be helpful. And then also, what is the assumption now on the Worksite Employee front in terms of the back half of the year? I think even at the low end of your revised Worksite Employee Growth Guidance, there’s a decent amount of sequential improvement baked in in the second half. So, is that a function of some of those warm leads converting from Workday? Is it an expectation that the macro environment stabilizes or even improves some? Any additional context on kind of macro assumptions embedded in the Worksite Employee Guidance would be helpful.

Paul Sarvadi: Thank you for that question. It really is more the simple fact of the way the business model actually works in terms of how sales flow throughout the year. Each quarter, our sales, our budget and what we sell every quarter goes up. And the retention goes up throughout the year, once you get past that first quarter, which we’ve already got past. So, we have really built in, this outlook that I discussed that we’re seeing in the client base, where even though they’re, optimistic on the sentiment side, they are not doing what aligns with that optimism. They have battened down the hatches. And so we’ve built that into our going forward that we’re not expecting to see in an election year. That is a backdrop. So, we’re not assuming, any benefit to speak of from the net change in existing in the client base.

And actually, I’m not really, budgeting a huge upside from even the lead flow, because I just don’t think it’s prudent to take a new strategy like that and build stuff in when you don’t really haven’t done it yet. I’m optimistic about that but this forecast is really based on some benefit from that, but more just the continued execution of this BPA team that, is further down their effectiveness that already evidenced in their sales efficiency in the first quarter. And the work that we’re doing to make sure we have good lead flow. Our leads I mentioned from our own marketing efforts were strong in the quarter. Some of that backdrop of the economic climate, affected some of the appointment settings. So, we’re working other ways to make sure we are effective in that area, especially that ABX system or that we’ve got to actually assign specific accounts and work specific relationships to target high value accounts that are more likely to be more ready to visit and to potentially to find a solution.

So, that should help you with that approach. What happens in our business model is sales increase throughout the year, retention is low, the balance of the year. So, that’s what’s really driving the quarter-to-quarter growth.

Andrew Nicholas: Very helpful. I’ll get back in the queue. Thank you.

Operator: Thank you very much. Your next question is coming from Tobey Sommer of Truist. Tobey, your line is live.

Tobey Sommer: Thank you. How do you compare and contrast the seemingly mixed signals conveyed by higher mid-market client turnover around the year-end transition with what you’ve described as sort of enhanced new sales momentum in that category over the last few quarters?