Alight, Inc. (ALIT) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

My name is Pete Christiansen. I'm on Citi's Equity Research team covering business services, fintech and crypto as well. Thanks for joining us today. I'm really glad to have Dave Guilmette, newly announced CEO of Alight and we're also joined by Jeremy Heaton, CFO of Alight. Great to have you both gentlemen. Thanks for coming.

Thanks for having us.

Dave, brand new on the scene. So it's a great opportunity for you to me and ambassadors and to talk about maybe some of your initial impressions. First, maybe why don't we start off with talking a little bit through your background, you spend some time, obviously, running a big health care portion of Aon. Just we would love to know how you see your experience melding into what the vision is for Alight?

Sure, Pete. Thank you, and thanks, everybody, for given us a few minutes of your time this morning. I've been called the industry veteran, which is a polite way of saying I've been doing this for a long time. So over 40 years in the industry, always with enterprise clients and health care. So health care and employee benefits. I retired from Aon back the end of February 2024, where I was the CEO of the Health Solutions line of business. That's the big advisory arm for employee benefits in health care for large companies around the world, working and advising across 6,000 colleagues, 120 countries. Before that, I spent about a decade at Cigna in an executive leadership capacity, ran our national accounts business from the time it was there through time I left, had the Global Employer segment. So think of that as expats, TCNs, NGO and IGO business and in-country health and benefits where employers offered private schemes at many times [indiscernible] on top of what the public arrangements were and some joint ventures that we manage through that process, Mainland China and India. And before that, about 20 years at Towers Parent, which is one of the predecessor companies to Willis Towers Watson, similar capacity to Aon. So it was leading the business when I left. But when I started there, grinding it out as a consultant every day, advising big companies on benefit design, vendor selection, pricing, financing strategies. So I know the industry pretty well.

It sounds like it. So February, you retired, you joined the Board of Alight in May, I believe. Curious like, what was part of the genesis of deciding, hey, maybe I'd be a great fit for a CEO here and perhaps maybe you can view what do you tell like? What are the strengths that really drew you in or the opportunities, I should say?

So I was putting together a portfolio of things my wife told me I needed to do to stay busy, which is another way of her saying get out of the house. And I was approached by Stephan at Alight, and they said, "Gee, would you be interested in considering joining the Board as an independent board member. we're looking for somebody with industry expertise." And my immediate reaction was, hell yes. And the reason for that is I've known Alight in its various configurations all the way back to when Hewitt was in the administration business, and I was a [indiscernible] parent. And I had the fortune of having the 2 largest client relationships in the firm that I was overseeing, both of those were benefit administration clients at that time and both of them we lost to Hewitt. So in a way, Alight is always kind of been there in my experience and some capacity, the sort of ban of my existence back in towers days because it was the venerable market leader. And then when I was at Aon, actually with Cigna, I had the private exchange portfolio and Aon with their benefit administration capabilities were the first to approach Cigna saying, would you participate in our exchange and all of that played out. And then at Aon, we were partners with Alight because they served about 45 or 50 or so of our clients that were in our private exchange. And obviously, we had a pretty strong relationship there. I had the retiree health exchange under my remit at Aon, and we sold that to Alight. So in many different ways, my breads kept connecting up with Alight. And so when I had this call and the opportunity to join the Board, I said it would be an honor, and I didn't make a mistake.

It sounds interesting. I'm [indiscernible] as well. I remember being a user years ago and now current user of Alight. Just curious what your impression is from the -- first from the outside. What you knew of like, what it is today? Like -- maybe like what has changed about maybe it's the core or it's the culture? Just curious on your view there.

So [indiscernible] from the inside, I have a perspective on the culture and the people and how the business is run, which you really can't get a full appreciation from the outside. As far as the products and the offerings are concerned, I'd say my impression leading up to my joining the Board was that Alight was the market leader and the largest in the core benefit administration services business. And I knew that it had made some acquisitions to enhance the value that would bring to its clients using its platform, but frankly, hadn't really gone that deep to understand what that all looks like. So my immediate impression was joining like we have some great assets, and we've done a lot of the hard lifting, and I would thank Stephan and the team for doing that to take us into the 21st century from a technology standpoint, right? So that's not a small lift. That's a big expense in a hard effort to execute well, and we've done that. So moving on to the cloud really enables us to be able to use that platform in an integrated capacity to help our clients not only with the transactional aspects of what we do to support employee benefits every day, but to really help the customers understand what they need to give them help from a navigation standpoint, to give them help if they have clinical needs, understanding what their insurance or employee benefit needs are, understanding the benefits that are offered to them. So often employees don't appreciate just what that portfolio looks like and what they should be electing or what they should be using if it's something that's available to them around the clock all year long. So I think there's an enormous opportunity when we look at the assets that we have, the platform that we have to add even more value to our existing clients and to take more share in the marketplace?

I mean we would certainly agree. I think we have an appreciation for the assets for the firm. And yes, there's been a lot of tough work that has been done, first becoming public, the spinout is back and then obviously, the recent divestiture and the recapitalization of the balance sheet. So a lot of that's been -- that heavy lifting has been great. Now on the path forward, maybe you can discuss what hasn't do you think done? So -- hasn't been executed so well to this point? Or maybe there are some opportunities that were missed. What do you think needs to happen to perhaps get the growth engine back.

I'll answer the question -- in terms of how I see my immediate priorities over the next 30, 60, 90 days. I'm here meeting with investors this past week, I've been in the seat all of 8 or 9 days talking to consultants, talking to the TPEs who are so influential in big companies decisions on where to go and what to do in our space, talking with clients, right? So the team is called it sort of a listening tour. And for me, it's complete absorption like what is the market saying, what does the market need to hear about the Alight story. And I would say that's something that perhaps we didn't do as much of over the last couple of years. And at times, I hear where are you today and where are you going? And a little of that might have been just because of the emphasis around the technology and that shift like your technology firm. We're a technology-enabled services firm, right? That's what we are at our core. And once we divested the Payroll business and the Proserve business, it allowed us to really double down and focus on that. So to me, that's the opportunity, is to take that back and to really reestablish, if you will, that market-leading position. We're the largest in the industry. We've been around the longest, and we're that venerable leader and our clients in the market want us to lead. That's what we're going to do.

I mean we've been drawn to the tech-enabled portion, and it does sound like this and really great innovations that have happened at Alight in the last couple of years. Now it seems like it's the services angle. Maybe it's the go-to market, that kind of part of the equation where perhaps you can come in and affect some change.

Without a doubt, I mean the reaction has been reassuring for me over the last week or so, hundreds of folks have reached out, senior individuals and consulting firms, clients, all saying wonderful to have you and look forward to you connecting with us and having a chance to hear where we're Alight is headed and giving you feedback along the way. And that's -- for those who've known me in my leadership roles, that's how I roll. It's got to be in the market. That's what you're going to learn. That's where you're going to deliver. Not that you're not inside running the business every day, but we've got very capable folks on our team that I'm relying upon to do the day in and day out, but I've got to be listening. I've got to be there, and that's where I'm going to be.

That's very good to hear. I'm glad to hear that. Jeremy, I do want to talk a little bit more about some of the financials. You think about the pipeline, which you've disclosed, and it looks very healthy, in fact, trending in the right direction for sure. Retention, still pretty fantastic. I think investors are trying to fill a gap right now as they think about '25 is getting back to that medium-term growth target that [indiscernible] hopefully on the upper end of that. Is there any way you could break that apart from us between the BPaaS business, the non-BPaaS kind of side of it, the components there, and help us gain some confidence in the ability for the company to get back to those midterm growth targets?

Sure. So we talked about ARR bookings and disclose that in terms of a growth rate for the first time this past quarter. ARR, you'll hear us talk more and more about, which is just for everyone on the same page, it's annual recurring revenue. It's derived from our long-term contracts, which have high retention levels and really is the core of the business. It's greater than 90% of the business. It drives that revenue under contract that we talk about. And so in the growth algorithm, based on the revenue under contract in this business, based on the momentum that we have commercially from our new -- the realigned go-to-market structure from last year based on the high retention rate within this business, and frankly the history of growth that we've shown in this business, we're confident in the 4% to 6% growth rate for this business. And the algorithm is key there, and we put a page to kind of lay that out for investors at earnings, which is on average, about 6% to 8% of growth as a percentage of revenue from new wins going live within any particular year, right? And so we've talked about where our bookings have been? 2023 was a lower bookings profile. And so that's a bit of a driver here for 2024, but why we've got so much focus on that ARR momentum and that growth that we're seeing in the business. The second piece of that model is participant volumes, just number of eligible participants. That's how we get paid. We're per employee per month. And so over a very long period of time, it averages 1% to 2% of additional growth every year for us on average. And so -- and then finally, there -- we don't retain 100%, so there is some churn, there is some loss in the market. And so those are the 3 components that we watch. And as you think about revenue retention, you think about new growth and wins going live, of course, the types of products and the timing of that go-live can certainly impact any particular year. But over a long period of time, we've shown that we can grow the business at that 4% to 6% rate. And we're starting to see the real momentum now kicking in from the realignment of our go-to-market that happened last year. So Greg George came in, realigned our commercial structure. So we've got a strategic accounts team that manages the top customers that we've got. Dave and I were just going through the top list of customers. Again, it's 70% of the Fortune 100, half of the Fortune 500, but there's a ton of product that a lot of those clients do not have today. So we can grow significantly in a big part of the growth model is continuing to cross-sell and upsell within the current base. And then with that, we also have new coverage geographically east and west across our enterprise accounts and new logos. And so that's going to be -- that was always a big change for us over the last few years, but to really get better coverage in the market, which is now driving a bigger pipeline of ARR deals, and it takes time to build that pipeline. So we expected that we'd have a period of time where we needed to build, but we're now seeing the increased growth in the bookings in the first half. We expect double-digit growth in bookings in the second half around ARR. We have got a stronger pipeline, and we're seeing win rates that are higher. So a higher quality of pipeline that we're closing deals. And so those are the drivers that then drive that 6% to 8% new wins going live and is probably the most important component of that revenue growth model for us going forward. So we feel really good in terms of the progress there, we need to continue that. So as we think through 2025 and into the out years, maintaining that momentum is going to be very important for us within the model.

It's time to time for one reason or another, usually a macro. We do have an election this year and some other phase is going on, but decisions light does pop up either from the implementation side getting -- going live with a new logo or even from the sales side as well. Just any sense of the temperature there that you could provide us if there's anything to call out in recent or you see momentum pretty good here?

Sure. We see the momentum. The demand is in the market. This is mission-critical work. I mean every day, we are delivering mission-critical services on behalf of for the largest, most complex companies across the world. And that demand doesn't go away. Again, you might have participant count changes, you might have delays on onetime in nature, nonrecurring project work. But at the core of this business, the greater than 90% that is recurring business, it's mission-critical. And so we still see demand in the space. We've got a value proposition of an integrated work-life platform that competes against many players in the market, but nobody does everything that we do in terms of what we can provide across health, wealth, navigation, leaves administration, and point solutions. So we've just got an integrated value proposition that still we see strong demand in. And again, it's mission-critical, so you see less volatility in terms of that demand. But once again, it is, as you think through the different environments that we're in, cost consciousness is a bigger part today of those conversations than it was 3 years ago. But we've got products and solutions, health care navigation as one example where we can bend the cost curve on health care claims. I mean health care costs are expected to go up another 8% to 10% next year. That still plays well within this market and is a big driver of the demand that we see. And so that's a big driver of what we're seeing in overall pipeline growth and the deals that we're seeing come through.

Maybe I'll add a little color to that. So coming off of the experience I had at Aon and seeing where the market is today for the last 3 or 4 years, and it started with COVID, but it was also sort of the compounding of the war for talent, the low unemployment rates, big employers didn't make significant changes to their benefit offerings. So it was pretty much status quo, especially coming out of COVID, right? How do we settle down? Are we make sure that there's no noise, et cetera? And then as entering in election year, that's always a big variable, right? Am I going to shift to the left or the right as it relates to my benefit program. Well, some of that depends a little bit on who ends up in office, whether there are regulatory changes or laws that could pass that impact employee benefits. So we -- for the most part, coming into 24 at a sort of a status quo year and what that means for our business is there's really less demand for project-specific work, right? Significant communication, efforts to talk about new plans, changes in benefit design, new vendor configurations, and so we felt some softness relative to that piece of our revenue in 2024, but there's always that need, right? So as you think past that into '25 and beyond, as we put the building blocks in place for the multiyear annual recurring revenue relationships, I'm confident that we'll see a derivative project work flow off of that as well.

Dave, you stole my next question.

Anyway.

Some journey project work. If you could have confidence to have get it rebound and that makes a lot of sense there. When there's change, and I think it was telegraphed pretty well on the last call that when there's change, then there's a demand for that -- is it also onboarding as well that helps bring on some of that project work?

Onboarding, like Dave said, right. The base is that ARR business, it's the relationship. We win that work. Nobody else is taking that work. As Dave said, it will cycle back. We are in a period of time. M&A is lower today. I mean the 3 big areas, benefit plan changes, M&A work and regulatory changes. And so the new regulatory changes will be low in an election year. M&A has cycled a bit, but still not anywhere where we've seen it historically and of course, benefit plan changes as just a cost for employees. And importantly, it's a margin driver. So different than the business we sold, which was payroll and professional services. That professional service business was project work, but generally lower-margin, capital-intensive, Workday-certified employees doing that work. Contrary to that, our benefits project work is higher margin. You've got teams on site working day to day. You can leverage the team that's already on site to do that work, and so typically very high margin. So as you think about that cycling back for us, it's additive to growth as it cycles back. It's also very additive in terms of the margin profile for the business moving forward. And once again, the more we're building that ARR base, you can almost think about it as an attachment rate [indiscernible] with this opportunity for us on the project work within those new clients that we're winning and is a driver for us.

I'd add to that. So we have a macro force that I think is going to be a tailwind for us, unfortunately, and that's health care trend. Recent reports from Aon, WTW, Business Group on Health, they're all signaling for '25, costs going up anywhere from 9% to something double digits. And that's on top of the compounding that's been occurring, right? So at about $15,000 an employee for the medical plan alone and up at, say, 10% a year, without benefit plan changes, who's going to absorb that cost. And there's a lot of leverage right now in the benefit offerings, deductible plans, right? What we all pay out of our paycheck for those benefit programs. So there's probably not a cost shift opportunity that exists for these large employers. So they're going to take that hit. That's going to drive a very different discussion around plan design changes and other initiatives, whether it's new vendors, et cetera, that come in. So I think that bodes well for the kind of project work that we think we'll be asked to do to help our clients who use this every day.

I do want to ask about since the divestiture, [indiscernible], obviously, you still have a relationship with Strada who took that over. But how does that changed your go-to-market? I think of it as Payroll is a tough sell. It's also a tough implementation. It's usually what corporations change last. It's the last kind of thing. I would feel that I would -- my hypothesis would be that now the go-to-market for Alight is a little less unencumbered, has a little bit more freedom to accelerate, close sale cycles, that kind of stuff. I don't know if you could share any feedback on that.

Yes. I mean I'll start and Dave can chime in as well. I think importantly, right, so with the sale, Strada remains a big partner for us, right? They still have work life, still integrates within the payroll system. So that integrated value proposition of having payroll integrated with where benefit sits remains the same. We have a commercial agreement with them in terms of prospecting and opportunities that are out there. So we have the advantage of them as a key partner in the evaluation before the sale was this ecosystem exists within partnerships that are very key. We didn't necessarily need to own the assets to still benefit from the value proposition and what we can bring to customers. And you're right, the sales cycle can be different. The buyers can be different within payroll versus on the benefit side. You can have the CFO on the payroll side versus HR and total rewards on the benefit side. And I think just in this new chapter for the company, we are more simple and streamlined in terms of how we go to market, how we deliver and the opportunities that we have to operate the company moving forward. So I think we still maintain the advantages of that value proposition that again is differentiated in the market. But we're more capital efficient as a business moving forward.

Absolutely. But does this also open an opportunity for new partnerships, perhaps?

It does, absolutely does. Absolutely does.

That's great. I do want to get into a little bit post transaction here. You gave second half guidance for '24. Give us a sense how you're thinking about the outlook on a quarterly basis, the cadence is a couple of days of the payroll business in... Then you have the cost saves starting to phase in. I guess more of that's more Q4. Just walk us through like how should we think about that over the next 2, 3 quarters?

Sure. And importantly, the seasonality in the go-forward business is pretty similar to what we had even when we had payroll and professional services, which is the third quarter. We will start to accelerate into the back half of the year and really the fourth quarter being the largest revenue driver and margin within this business has annual enrollment and all the work that happens and significant project work even in a lower cycle. And so what you see in the third quarter is typically, on the -- it will be on the -- we expect to be it on the lower end of the guidance range we gave for the second half from a revenue perspective and EBITDA to be slightly below where it was last year for the same -- for the third quarter -- on a pro forma basis, EBITDA margin, slightly lower, just given the project dynamics that I mentioned, right? We always -- but we always have a cost build as well. So that's always typically the most depressed from an EBITDA margin quarter. And then really just because you have a mismatch of cost and revenue. And then the fourth quarter is the highest EBITDA margin period for the year for us, and we expect it to be ahead of where it was last year in the fourth quarter. And so -- and very importantly, I want to discover, we do expect to continue to sequentially improve quarter-to-quarter the recurring revenue growth for the business. So again, as some of the dynamics with the COBRA volumes that we've had over the past 12 months start to abate as we finish out the third quarter. So that will be a help and a tailwind for us as we enter the fourth quarter on the recurring revenue. And then as you mentioned, as part of the EBITDA driver in the fourth quarter, even with project revenues down, which carry higher margins, we start to see the benefits of the $75 million annual run rate benefits on the cloud migration. So about $20 million of that starts to come into the fourth quarter as an EBITDA benefit. So those are really the drivers as we think about...

I'm sorry, on an annualized basis or...

Annualized will be $75 million. So $20 million we expect to see in the fourth quarter -- and then you'll have an incremental $55 million as we move into 2025.

And that second cloud migration first, then some real estate rationalization, I guess, going into the first half of '25. Just want to understand those components of the cost saves, the immediate cost saves?

Sure. So it is $75 million from -- we've completed the cloud migration. It was a 2-year program. With that cloud migration, we're out of the on-prem data centers. So you have real estate savings, you have technologists that operate those data centers, which we have less of that today. We're not operating dual technologies anymore, and we just have the efficiencies within the business that we see. So together, that all equates to $75 million of annual run rate, which starts in the fourth quarter of this year.

Fantastic, fantastic. I do want to talk about AlixPartners and how they're driving value for the company here. Beyond 2024, when -- maybe you can talk about what exactly are they doing? And what are some of their priorities?

Sure. So it's great having a partner from an outside perspective to come in and look at how we operate the company. As I mentioned, this is a new chapter for us. We have a real opportunity to streamline this business. We're much simpler without the global payroll infrastructure whether it's the G&A functions across the company and how we think about a simplified business that operates within different COEs and different aspects of how we look at operating the business and the kind of the core processes that we have. But the bigger piece is for AlixPartners to dig in on is now that the cloud migration is complete, we have a real opportunity on our delivery operating model, so moving really to standardized versus custom support for our clients, huge COEs that can drive really process effectiveness, better experience for our clients, leveraging technology, how do we deliver for our clients every day. And so that will be a big part of the next 18 months in terms of margin expansion for us. And Alex is just to help us execute on the projects, prioritize what we're working on, and they're great in terms of the tools and the technologies that exist out in the market to assist as we go through really just relooking at reengineering process for the company. And the second piece I'd tell you is the call centers. We've been effective in taking down call volumes and using tools and AI and chatbots over the past couple of years, that will accelerate now with AlixPartners and what we're doing post the transaction.

When I hear reengineering process, realigning delivery and certainly capturing some cost benefits from doing that and getting more efficient. But I also think there's a little bit of investment cycle that could be a part of that. Should we...

Nothing which, I mean the big lift was the last -- I mean, really 4 years of transformation. The first 2 years on Worklife on the front-end technology and putting Worklife together and integrating that, the last 2 years on integrating the back-end cloud migration and getting out of the data centers, there will be tools and processes, but I don't think of these as material restructuring programs versus there's a lot of different applications on a smaller scale that drive big benefits for us moving forward. And so that will be an aspect of how we look at technology, but there was a tech stack that needed to be addressed, as Dave mentioned, and there was a lot of heavy lifting over the last 4 years. We don't anticipate anything in front of us that's necessary to drive what we have as a margin opportunity.

That's good to hear.

I would only add that, look, as I've gotten into this and seen the plan, I think it comes down to 2 things, right? We're going to rightsize the company because we're smaller than we were 6 months ago, right? So there are staff functions that are bigger than they need to be. So we're going to go through that and make sure that we've rationalized how we run the company every day. And then we're going to retool and reengineer the processes in the back end just because of what's happened with the technology shift. Great opportunities for us to be leaner, more nimble, provide more value to our clients and do that at a cost of goods sold or are less than what we have today.

That's great. Sounds interesting. And certainly, I think what investors are anxious to see. And is this a multi -- do I think about this effort here? Is this a multi-year? Is this a multi-quarter? And I'm not going to stick you to tell any targets here, but is this an upside either profitability, cash flow realization, that kind of thing to what you potential upside to what you've put out to the street.

Yes. So we've talked about the 28%. I mean I think that's how we look at it today. Post the transaction, we're at 25% EBITDA margin business. We see a real path to 28% on the topics that I talked about earlier. But I said it in earnings as well. We're not stopping there, right? I mean we are going to continue to look at the opportunities. Again, all within the view of a client experience as well, that is paramount for us in terms of how we deliver for our clients. I have that experience, right? And so that's the part, Pete, I think, to how we manage the timing of how we transform here and always watching the dials around customer delivery, customer satisfaction, the experience and the technology, this should be a win-win. We think we can operate more efficiently and drive a much better experience for our clients. That's going to be important. But we -- 28% is how we've talked about the go forward from a midterm perspective, but we're not necessarily gated by any particular number at this point.

I certainly appreciate that, and you demonstrated that, I think, about the implementation of U.S. Trust. That business is huge and how well that went. But I guess you think about it, you do have this potential upside from additional cost efficiencies or the way you operate the business at the same time. How should we think about maybe incremental margins when you do get to that midterm growth kind of algorithm? Obviously, there's mix shift and what kind of products you're selling add-ons, all those things. But is there an operating leverage, or at least from the revenue side, do you think that is supportive of that margin expansion from 25% to 28%. Is that a part of that?

It is a part of that, and we included that in the walk that we've shared around it. Again, I think the bigger pieces are on that operating -- just the delivery operating model, just given the size of the cost base and what that takes day to day. I think that, along with the call centers and the infrastructure that we've already moved to the cloud are the bigger pieces. But absolutely, operating leverage is a piece of -- as we move forward. That's why things even like the G&A functions, I think we get operating leverage there. And then again, the mix shift on when project does cycle back, that does carry, again, revenue with very limited incremental costs coming from the system.

That's great. And then [indiscernible] capital allocation where we are right now, investment and continuing to invest in the business versus share repurchase, offsetting potentially some dilution, all that kind of stuff. Where is the company's head right now in terms of that. You do have an existing repurchase authorization out there and -- we did $100 million I think...

There's about $93 million...

That's right. That's right.

We've been active. I think it's been important -- I mean, the proceeds of the sale, we delevered $740 million. And so our net leverage today is 2.8x. And so that's right in the sweet spot that we talked about of below 3x being the target. I think importantly, it's share return, and we view the valuation of the company is an opportunity for us, right? And so we've been more aggressive in terms of the share repurchase program. We have capacity. We'll continue to be active. And again, there will always be some level of investment in the company that's required, but we don't anticipate anything material from where we've been. And so it will be important as we think about capital return and what's in the best interest for shareholders.

That's great. Checking a lot of boxes here. We do have a little bit of extra time. I'm not sure if anybody from the audience has -- wants to pine in with a question. Okay. This has been a great conversation. I think you are checking a bunch of boxes here. Now it's just about proof in the pudding. Dave, I'd just love to hear if you have any final words, first impressions, goals over the next couple of weeks. Obviously, you're listening to us right now. Just how are you feeling about the next couple of weeks as you think about changing or affecting your vision for what the company -- for the company's next step?

Sure. So a couple of thoughts on that. One, I really like our business, and I like our position and I like that we're going to be able to get that momentum swinging back in our direction as the market leader. We have enormous goodwill that's embedded in our existing client base. We've got not only the best client list and the envy of our competition of the Fortune 100, 150 of the Fortune 500, but many of these have been with us for 25, 30 years. right? So they've been like fans. They want us to win. They ask for some clarity on where we're at and where we're going. We're going to provide that to them, and we're going to articulate why we can add more value to them through the platform that we have and the various capabilities and products that we can bring to them. So I'm bullish on that front. I'm also bullish about the team. Again, only been in this a little over a week, but there was no honeymoon period. I think the first couple of days, I've under been in 13 or 14 hours of operating with the meetings, things that have already been scheduled, and I just dove right in. And it gave me a real chance to see the team in action, right? Not just meet and greets, but like let's really dig into what's going on. And we've got a great team. The commercial team has been retooled. As Jeremy mentioned, we've got real market-leading commercial selling capabilities. These are enterprise sellers who are as good in the game as anybody. And I wouldn't trade my team for anybody's team. And I've seen a lot of teams over the years. So I like where we're at relative to that talent. I like where we're at relative to our operating talent, technology folks we have, our ability to take analytics forward and share with our clients' insights on how they can better get value out of the benefit portfolio they offer and address some of the real cost pressures, right? How much health care cost looks to be for their benefit programs now and going into the future? So we've got the assets, we've got the talent. We've got a great client base. We've got good momentum in the marketplace. We have to execute, and we're going to execute. I'm really confident we can get that done, and we'll like the results.

All very encouraging. This has been great. Dave, fantastic to meet you, join me as always, great to have you. Thanks for being here.

Thank you. Appreciate.