Keith Waddell: Well, they’re all so different, and there’s never been as strong an underlying labor market. We’re right through the softness like there’s been this time. So one would like to think that that would provide some buffer, make this one milder. As I said earlier, this is the most anticipated downturn ever and the debate continues about soft landing, hard landing, recession, no recession. So I can’t really say it feels like the financial crisis or it feels like the dot-com. It’s just too different. Clearly, COVID-19, it’s way different than that. But what is the same, and I’ll say it again, in every one of those cycles, no matter what their duration, no matter what their intensity, we came back and made new highs. And we’re very confident we will come back and make new highs.
We have our most experienced people absolutely engaged and in place to help us participate in that upside when it comes. Our cost structure is as nimble as it’s ever been. So we feel good about what our cost structure looks like, what our margins will look like until that happens. But the point is when it gets better, we will be there, and we’ve proven that many times.
Kevin McVeigh: That’s helpful. And then did you €“ and if you can . Did you say what the impact of the R2 acquisition was in terms of the guidance on the first quarter €“ is the revenue contribution…
Keith Waddell: It’s very small. I think they had a total of 70, 75 people. It’s very small. But important, but important and gives us a capability we didn’t have, and that’s an important capability. So we love as part of the family.
Kevin McVeigh: Got it. Thank you.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Kartik Mehta with Northcoast Research. Please go ahead.
Kartik Mehta: Mike and Keith, I wanted to ask you a little bit more about permanent placement. Mike, you had indicated that the first part of a quarter, especially first part of a month is difficult to gauge. And I’m wondering if you look at your clients and the number of job openings they have compared to maybe what they had before, if that’s a way to kind of look at it and maybe that’s why the conservatism on your part on the conversion. And just on the permanent placement, just trying to figure out maybe what the reality is compared to maybe what the first three weeks of January might have shown?
Keith Waddell: Well, you can’t really look to the number of openings either because it takes so much longer to close an opening today than it did a year ago. And so if your client very urgently is filling a need, the time from order to fill is going to be pretty close. If in fact, they don’t sense that urgency, they’ve got all kinds of reasons how they can slow play you, slow walk you, however you want to call it, it just takes longer. And so there’s no magic metric that we can say, well, we understand the revenue say this, but in fact, the order say this, the order flow isn’t bad. But it’s the time it takes to close an order that’s the issue, not the presence or absence of an order.
Kartik Mehta: Fair enough. And then just one last one. Just on Protiviti. In terms of competition, are you seeing anything change? Or would you say the environment is about the same?
