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

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John Gibson: Yes. I would add to that, I think it’s important to understand that particularly on the insurance attachment side in the PEO, remember, that’s a lot of pass-through revenue, not a lot of margin. But it’s a big dollar number. So a small percentage change in any direction has probably an over-weighted impact on the revenue in the PEO, right? And so extra 1% or 2% and then another 1% or 2% participation within the base, I think, is critical. And to Efrain’s point, you have this opportunity to reset your insurance portfolio every open enrollment, and you’re hoping that you have the right portfolio of cost and the type of plans that people can afford and they want to gravitate to and what they’re going to do. And that cycle comes up every fall and into the winter.

So certainly, we’re taking a lot of data. We’re doing a review of every market for the PEO and looking at our health insurance line up, making sure it’s competitive. We’re taking an affordable for clients. We’re talking to our clients. We’re already in the process beginning to reset that and talk about that reset. So, we’re confident that we’ll have the right lineup and the right opportunity, and then as Efrain said, historically, most of Paychex PEO sales really prior to our acquisition of Oasis was coming from upgrading ASO clients into the PEO business, a lot of inside the base. Now it’s far more outside the base, but we still have that capability inside the base. So, we think there’s additional opportunity inside our client base to upgrade them to PEO and that not only increases the revenue, but it also increases the lifetime value of the customer to us, it’s the right thing to do for the business, and we’ll be looking at plans to do that as we go into next year as well.

Ramsey El-Assal: Let me sneak one follow-up, you called out higher revenue per client as a driver in the quarter. And I’m just curious, over time, have you seen the kind of overall growth algorithm of the business shift more such that, that higher rev per client metric is sort of more important. I guess the underlying question is, do you expect sort of ongoing gains there to sort of persist or is it — was there something a little more lumpy about it that we should be aware of?

Efrain Rivera: No. For sure, I mean, if you look at — if you parse all the data, I’m not sure you get it from all of the public fiscal you get pretty close. You’ve seen persistent growth in revenue per client. So I think we’ve been very skillful at finding new opportunities, both with product attachment, but also the ability to create new products and services within our client base to drive that revenue higher. So yes, we can talk about an algorithm that’s about units and price, or we can talk about an algorithm that’s really around revenue per client and revenue per client has become more important, certainly in the last five years.

John Gibson: I think it’s important, Ramsey, keep in mind, we’re in states where we’re driving more value to the customer and both through our technology as well as our advisory services and that value is driving retention. It’s driving pricing power, and it’s driving an openness to add additional products and services over time. So the old traditional model we’ve always had, which is we’ve always been able to drive price increases over time to cover our cost increases. We’ve been able to go into the base and drive attachment. I would lay on top of that because we focus so much on the HR value proposition and driving customers up our kind of value continuum, that the other benefit we’re seeing here is revenue retention. And now they’re looking at us as their trusted adviser and they’re saying, I want my 401(k) with Paychex, I want my time in time and attendance with Paychex. I want my other digital offerings from Paychex. I want my insurance from Paychex.

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