I want to acknowledge that. In terms of the base trends, I think that — one way to think about it is what we’re giving you for Q4. And obviously, Q4 of last year was the first quarter where we saw a significant decline in the base, the first time, honestly, since 2020 that we saw that. And we saw that decline get larger in base growth through the first 3 quarters of this year, largely based on the comps more than anything else. And so if you kind of flow that through and look at consistent levels against that, we expect the Q4 number that we’re putting out there still has base declines in it because the Q4 of last year was not as significant a base decline as what we’ve seen through the first three quarters of this year and so you can kind of flow that through and draw your own assumptions.
But yes we’ll provide more color on that on our Q4 call.
Andrew Steinerman: That’s fair Josh. Thank you very much.
Operator: Our next question comes from Kyle Peterson from Needham. Hello Kyle, can we just check your line is not on mute? Unfortunately, we’re not getting any flow from your line, Kyle, so we’ll have to move on to the next question.
Kyle Peterson: Hello?
Operator: Hello, we can hear you now.
Kyle Peterson: Hi, yes, I guess, good morning. Thanks for taking the questions. I want to touch on the base growth softness that you guys saw as the quarter progressed. Were there any verticals or geographies that drove that weakness or had an outsized impact or was it truly pretty broad-based across the business?
Peter Walker: It’s Peter. So I would say that it was broad-based across the business. And then in terms of kind of our top performers, they’ve been consistent with what we’ve been [indiscernible] all year, healthcare and industrials kind of really led the U.S. and EMEA led international.
Joshua Peirez: We may have lost you, Kyle.
Kyle Peterson: Can you guys hear me?
Joshua Peirez: Now I hear you again.
Kyle Peterson: Yes, just a follow-up. Would you guys consider upping the buybacks here? You guys have pretty healthy liquidity position, obviously, to help to defend the stock here, especially since there seems to be more of a macro disruption rather than anything structural. I just wanted to get your thoughts on buybacks and capital deployment at these levels.
Joshua Peirez: So I think our view overall on our capital allocation has not changed. Our first and primary effort is to focus on investing in driving organic growth. We think that continues to benefit us in the new business generation and the cross-sell/up-sell, so investing in things like identity and monitoring. Those are important. We think that, that is the best thing that we can do to return shareholder value. I think the second thing has been M&A. I gave commentary on that to one of the earlier questions in terms of where we would prioritize. But again, we’re not going to overpay in the CRA market for a tuck-in, given where we are right now, particularly in the U.S., as I mentioned earlier. And then third is in returning value to shareholders, which we’ve done through buybacks.
I think our view has been that we want to make sure we’re balancing both the great opportunity we have to invest in our stock at these very low prices, which we think do not accurately reflect the value of our company because of the challenging macro. So that is attractive, and that’s why we’ve been doing our buybacks. However, we are cautious to remain in our 2 to 3x leverage, as you see at 2.4x even with the acquisitions we’ve done and the buybacks we’ve done. So that’s something that we are continuing to be committed to, absent some sort of a unicorn opportunity for a short period of time. And then finally, I think our view on the buybacks is we want to make sure we balance the liquidity needs in our stock that is important to our investors with our own opportunity to buy.
And so we think we’ve been very prudent in our approach and have not gotten to that point. And in fact, we were able to get that follow-on offering done when we did it, which has helped with that liquidity issue. And so we’re committed to making sure we don’t create a new liquidity issue. But will we look at doing more buybacks or less buybacks based on the macro based on the stock price, based on investor feedback? Absolutely. We always do that, and we’ll definitely be taking a look at that over time.
Kyle Peterson: Thanks guys.
Operator: Our next question comes from Shlomo Rosenbaum from Stifel. Please go ahead.
Shlomo Rosenbaum: Hi, thank you for taking my questions. Hey Josh, last quarter you talked about numerous deals we head [indiscernible] to closing. Are things closing on the pacing that you had expected or things getting pushed out? Can you just talk about kind of the cadence of the deals? And then just there was a comment made by a competitor about a takeaway in the quarter, they didn’t specify who, but would you comment if there were significant positive or negative takeaways amongst the top 3 that impacted you guys?
Joshua Peirez: Sure. So let me just start with the new deals ourselves. I think as we shared in the prepared remarks, we closed more deals, larger deals, have a larger pipeline of advanced opportunities and overall have closed more in terms of expected dollar volume than we did last quarter, which was also higher than the quarter before. So all those trends are very strong in terms of timing. It’s playing out pretty much as we expected in terms of timing of closing deals. More importantly, I think, is the timing of ramping deals, which so far, we’ve continued to see happen according to our expectations. Generally speaking, things always move a month here or there, up or down. But I think we’ve been generally accurate with those expectations from the last call.
