But I would say, if I were to say a differentiator would be that aspect and then our team has just been crushing it from an execution standpoint. I mean their resiliency and persistency has played a big part. And I guess I would say this, you know, we’ve seen probably a 15% year-over-year deterioration in our largest customers and we’ve only seen 5% in those customers that we are more early-on in our relationships. And what I get excited about there is similar to the pandemic when some of our largest customers, things really tightened up and our team had to diversify and get into new customers and that’s what they’ve done here once again and this is a tough time to penetrate into new clients. And what that really gets me excited about is, as things stabilize and start to recover, all those larger clients back online and we’re going to get more acceleration out of the customers that have been developed and diversified in our footprint.
And when you kind of put those two things together, I would attribute a lot of our exponential growth coming out of the pandemic was because of both of those things happening simultaneously. And I see those same things playing out because of our team’s efforts as this recovery were to come about.
Trevor Romeo: All right. Thanks, Joe. I appreciate the comments.
Joe Liberatore: Sure.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Kartik Mehta from Northcoast Research. Please go ahead.
Kartik Mehta: Thank you. Good afternoon. So, I was wondering, Joe, just on assignments, you know, if you looked at three months ago, I think you and others had talked about, assignments were just being delayed and not canceled, which was a positive sign. And I’m wondering if you’re seeing some of those assignments that, you know, were delayed coming back on, or is it just that your existing customers are feeling a little bit better and spending more money?
Joe Liberatore: Yes, I would say it’s probably the latter. We haven’t seen any major changes from what we’ve been seeing earlier in the year in terms of your question. What we’re really more so seeing, and Dave and Jeff touched upon this, the retention that we’ve seen with our consultant base, we have seen a noticeable difference as we move through the third quarter. I would say one of the other things that we’ve been observing is that our conversions have actually come down. I mean, on a year-over-year basis, our conversions are down roughly 55%. So, what those things really point to me is, you know, in this industry, in every recession or cycle that I’ve been involved with, the first thing that happens is clients start to exit consultants.
Then the next segment is, they start to tighten up on their FTEs and start to align their full-time workforce. And then the third stage is, they start to bring flexible consultants back on while they’re waiting for certainty that the economy is off to the races. And — so we could be seeing some of those earlier dynamics, right. We experienced this last year, I think we had three sequential quarters of negative sequential growth in our Tech Flex business. Historically, if you were to go back to the financial crisis and you would go back to the pandemic, we had two down sequentially. And if our stabilization holds as we put in within our Wall Street guidance, basically here in Q4, we would start to turn positive on a sequential basis. And then what would typically happen after that is, you start to see the expansion as customers start to bring on more and more Flex consultants.
So, I mean, I don’t have a crystal ball. I don’t know where the ultimate economy is going, but, I mean, I’m just looking at history versus the [Technical Difficulty]. So, we kind of see this cycle has started to play out similar to prior cycles.
Kartik Mehta: No, that’s helpful. You know, the last quarter or three months ago, you know, you weren’t the only Company, almost every company that was in temporary staffing and others talked about the uncertainty in economy and I don’t think that uncertainty has gone away, at least not from some of the comments you’ve made. But just out of curiosity, based on your experience, what do you think — what changed do you think that where companies are feeling a little bit better about spending money or is it the type of projects? What do you think has changed from three months ago when you gave guidance to today where you do sound a little bit more positive?
Joe Liberatore: Yes, I would say and again, you know, just in listening to our people and what they are experiencing inside the clients and the client feedback, you know, and again, I’ve seen this every cycle, people cut too far and now they can’t get the mission-critical work done that has to be done. And we could be seeing some of those things that are unfolding here, which is why, and this isn’t just Kforce, I mean, if you listen to our competitors that have announced prior to us, you are hearing about a general stabilization on the technology front and that’s typically what happens when they go a little bit too far, because you got to realize, the amount of backlog of projects and it’s not the nice to have projects, it’s the must-do project.
