Paychex, Inc. (NASDAQ:PAYX) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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That’s one. Then we had to overcome all the obstacles, I think, simultaneously to that, interest rates started to go up, and the cost of capital started to go up. And I think a lot of small business owners who said it, hey, I don’t need it. It’s not worth my time. I don’t want to be associated with the government program. I may get audited. And most business owners, small business owners are concerned. An audit would put them out of business worse than anything else. So they — I think they were avoiding it. I think as we saw that happening now, the receptivity and the demand that said, hey, I really need that $180,000to bridge inflation to be able to bridge the cost of capital to grow my business. And so I think we had those two things us being more precise in terms of our messaging and getting our sales and our education teams out there.

And then second, I think there were some macro pressures on small business owners that created that tailwind that exceed what we expected.

James Faucette: That’s really helpful color. And then just last thing for me is, Efrain, you talked about that at least initial planning stages, you think margins next year can expand some. If I reflect back on where you’ve talked about your margin targets in the past, we were kind of getting towards the upper end of that. Are we at a stage we can start completing that maybe the margin structure can even move above what you’ve talked about in the past? Or what would have to happen for that to be the case?

Efrain Rivera: That’s a good question, James. So — and that’s the benefit of listening to what I’ve said over a period of time. If you would have said to me persistently, we could be above 40%. And I would have urged caution because I didn’t know whether we had all of the set of initiatives that could drive us there. The short answer to that is I don’t have a great answer. I have a sense of when we’re probably getting closer to the ceiling, I do think that you’re right in saying that it’s been reset a bit, and it’s been reset a bit because of technology. So technology keeps giving us opportunities to automate things that we — if you would have said seven years ago, is that a chatbot could be as good or better than in answering 275 questions that are 90% of what clients want to know, I would have said — I don’t know about that.

And short answer now is — that number is not 275, it’s probably 375 or 400 question. So short answer is technology is going to set the limit especially in the tech services business. And so I think we probably have developed some more headroom with some of the actions that we have taken. And it’s not just pure technology, but I think we wanted to become more automated efficiently. A lot of the initiatives that John started years ago have paid these dividends.

Operator: Thank you. Our last question will come from Andrew Polkowitz with JPMorgan.

Andrew Polkowitz: just wanted to — just wanted to ask, you mentioned earlier that it was a fairly competitive selling season. So I just wanted to ask if you could share where that competition is coming from, whether it’s new or entrance usual suspects like the regional and if there is anything to call out different from history regarding balance of trade?

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