Kforce Inc. (KFRC) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning. I'm Wahid Amin, and I work on the U.S. business and information services equity research team here at BofA. We are pleased to have Kforce with us. We have Jeff Hackman, Chief Financial Officer; and Michael Blackman, Chief Corporate Development Officer. Thanks for coming.

Thank you.

So I want to turn it over to the Kforce team for a brief introduction on the company and its history. From there, we can go into a fireside discussion, and we'll open it up for Q&A, if anything. So Jeff and Michael, I'll let you take it from here.

Great. Thank you. First of all, we want to thank Heather Balsky and the whole BoA team, and of course, Wahid, thank you for being here this morning with us. We thought it would be helpful to spend a few minutes giving an overview of the Kforces says today -- of today and as well as what we are seeing in the market. The Kforce team executed well in 2023 in an environment that proved to be more challenging than originally expected. In 2024, we know that there are still many things that are uncontrollable. At Kforce, we know we must control what we can control, stay close to our internal associates, support our consultants and continue listening to our clients, while maintaining a long-term view in our decision-making. As to our strategic priorities at Kforce, we have meaningfully advanced our integrated strategy, which capitalizes on the strong relationships we have with world-class companies by utilizing our existing sales, recruiters and consultants to provide higher-value teams and project solutions that effectively and cost efficiently address our clients' challenges. We also made significant progress in our multiyear back-office transformation efforts, with the selection of Workday as our future state enterprise cloud application for HCM and financials and the selection of our implementation partner. Workday will complement our Microsoft front-end applications to create a unified and streamlined technology suite for the firm once fully implemented over the next few years. We are incredibly fortunate to be partnering with these 2 market-leading companies who are at the forefront of investing in artificial intelligence. As we look ahead for the remainder of 2024, we expect to continue to make the necessary investments in our strategic priorities to sustain our long-term growth ambitions and achieve our financial objective of attaining a double-digit operating margin at slightly greater than $2 billion in annual revenues. Jeff Hackman, our Kforce CFO, here with me today, will speak further to this in a few minutes. We have continued to broaden our technology service offerings, now 90% plus of our revenue beyond the traditional professional staffing to include managed teams and project solutions. Clients consider access to the right talent at the right time, essential to their success, and we will see our services as a cost-effective solution for their project requirements, as demonstrated by more than 90% of our managed teams and project solutions being executed with existing clients. And as a reminder, we are in approximately 75% of the Fortune 500 in our clients' portfolio. Our integrated strategy capitalizes on the strong relationships we have built over the past 60-plus years within world-class companies by utilizing our existing sales, recruiters and consultants to provide these higher-value teams and project solutions that effectively and cost efficiently address client challenges. Our client portfolio is diverse and includes market-leading customers who are the largest consumers for the services we provide. It's important to remember, we work across industries, placing technologies versus having a focus on the technology industry per se, which while we do have some clients, that's not our primary focus or anywhere near our largest revenue bucket. Across the industries, our clients [ are pride our ] technology investments to maintain their competitive advantage. Our focus on addressing their strategic needs continues to be critical in our ability to drive sustainable long-term above-market performance. While short-term disruption may occur with certain clients or industries, our diverse client base provides an outstanding platform for consistent long-term growth. The strength of the speculator drivers of demand and technology accelerated significantly coming out of both the 2008 and '09 great recession, with advancements in mobility, cloud computing, among many others. And again, in the 2020 pandemic with further digitalization of businesses and the continued progression around GenAI technologies. I have seen a lot of economic cycles in my 33 years at Kforce and in the business, and each one behaves a bit differently. What remains clear to us through is that broad and strategic use of technology, including increasingly AI technologies will continue to evolve and play an increasingly instrumental role in powering businesses. Over the long-term, we firmly believe that AI and other new technologies will continue to drive demand for rather than replace technology resources and that the pace of change will accelerate. We are ideally positioned to meet that demand. Our reputation has been established over our 60-plus years of operating history has demonstrated as we continue to carry the highest glass store rating within our peer group. Jeff?

No, Michael, thank you for that. You covered a lot of great points we hit. I'm just going to make a couple of points and then I'll turn it over to you for the Q&A and the fireside chat. We prudently managed our business by driving solid organic growth over many years. That's resulted in a consistently strong result in a pristine balance sheet with very minimal debt. Our Board of Directors recently approved an increase to our dividend, the fifth consecutive annual increase and an increase in our share repurchase authorization to $100 million. These actions again demonstrate our financial strength and continued confidence in our business. Our pattern of returning significant capital to our shareholders has been consistent over many years, not just in this operating environment. In fact, since we initiated our dividend in 2014, we've increased it nearly 400% since 2007, we have reduced our weighted average shares outstanding from 40 -- bit over 42 million to about 19 million. All in, we've returned slightly more than $900 million in capital to our shareholders since 2007, which represented about 75% of the cash that we've generated. We remain committed to returning capital regardless of the economic climate and our threshold for any prospective acquisitions remains high. Our strong balance sheet and the flexibility we have under our credit facility provides us with the opportunity to get more aggressive in repurchasing our stock if there is a dislocation between expected future financial performance and the valuation of our shares. Our decision to grow our technology business organically with a consistent refined business model tailored to providing highly skilled technology talent solution that as Michael pointed out, world-class companies in the domestic market has been critical to our success over many years. We also remain confident that our firm is well positioned in the future for as the market conditions improve. Technology today is greater than 90% of our revenue with approximately 98% of that being a run rate business. In 2023, we experienced a decline in our Flex revenues in our technology business of about 7%, which closely resembles what we experienced in the Great Recession in 2009, and we were one of the very few in our space that grew sequentially in the fourth quarter of 2023. Just to remind everyone, our technology business significantly outperformed the market in 2022 and 2021, growing 43.5% over that 2-year period, all organically. We believe the technology decline that we experienced in 2023 was due to an acceleration of strategic technology investments made during 2021 and '22 to address the implications of remote work and other digital transformation efforts, combined with the caution exercised by companies in a very uncertain environment. Overall average bill rates in our technology business were very stable in 2023, remaining near record levels at approximately $90 per hour, which was encouraging for us given the macro backdrop. While clients have been acting with restraint over the last 12-plus months, the backlog of desired investments has continued to grow. We expect these important technology investments to be high priorities once the macro uncertainties begin to clear. We say it on our call that technology investments are simply not optional in today's competitive and disruptive business climate. There's simply no other market we would want to be focused in other than the domestic technology down in this space. Looking beyond what we expect maybe shorter-term macroeconomic uncertainties, we remain extremely excited about our strategic position and prospects for continuing to deliver above market growth, while continuing to make the necessary investments in our integrated strategy and the ongoing transformation of our back office that will help drive long-term growth and profitability improvements. We've mentioned our longer-term financial objective of attaining double-digit operating margin. We believe the key contributors are increased scale, productivity improvements, including through our back-office transformation program and advancements in AI technologies, driving a greater mix of managed teams and project solutions business and further reducing our fixed costs. As a point of reference, in 2022, our operating margin was approximately 7% at $1.7 billion in revenue. As we look forward, the anticipated benefits associated with our back-office transformation program are about 100 basis points compared to the current level of investment. When you combine this benefit with the benefit of scale, we believe a reasonable revenue level for us to attain double-digit operating margins is slightly more than $2 billion in annual revenues. We built a solid foundation at Kforce. We will continue to invest in our strategic priorities, and we believe we're well positioned to take additional market share and continue to create a significant long-term returns for our shareholders. So, Wahid, with that part [indiscernible].

Thanks, Jeff. Appreciate it. So that's impacted that you gave a really, really good explanation of the business and what you guys have been expecting, can we just unravel a little bit about the current economic environment? That's when happening over the past year. And David, you've mentioned you've seen a lot over your past 3 decades in this field. So can you discuss what's been happening in the economic environment and where do you see going from here?

Yes. Yes. So it's Michael. I'll take the first shot, and Jeff, please jump in. Yes. So every cycle is somewhat different. To give you a little history in the '08, '09 Great Recession, at that point in time, we were in many different businesses. We had a medical coding business, a pharmaceutical business, a government business...

Nursing, scientific...

Yes, nursing, scientific. So we noted, a, you had the advent of course in '08, '09 of this little thing called mobility. Secondly, you saw general stopping in that period down 20%, 25%, 30%. Jeff, our technology Flex business in the corresponding period before...

7%.

Right, it was only down about 7%, which aligns with...

What we saw in 2023.

Aligns -- what we saw in 2023. So coming out of '08, '09, we then made a decision to narrow the focus to domestic technology. Subsequently, we divested of those other businesses, narrowed our footprint. As Jeff alluded too, it's 97% plus of run rate business, average bill rate, $90 an hour, broad and diverse domestic client footprint, that's very important. Again, I'll reiterate, we place technologies, but airlines, cruise lines, grocery chains, I mean, across the spectrum. So I know there's been a lot of technology company headlines out there. So let's fast forward. So the pandemic hits in March 2020. Yes, the world came to this -- hit a wall. Jeff, how did the quarters performed in 2020?

I think we're down 2 quarters sequentially and then improved in the fourth quarter; we were effectively flat for the year.

Right. Effectively flat for the year in technology -- in 2020 that, as Jeff alluded to in '21 and '22, in technology, what was it up? 43%?

Right.

Up 43% organically. Okay. Let's start to 2023. Calendar rolls to 2023, it was pretty much universally held that recession was coming. The most widely anticipated recession ever except for one little detail. It didn't happen. So in 2023, you were coming out of a period '21, '22. Well, I do think it's fair to say there was a degree of pull forward of technology spend. Why? Because literally overnight, client set a distributed workforce. They had to do every transaction digitally. There was a lot you had to do. So 2023, people widely anticipating almost universally a recession. I think people pulled back on the throttles, but underneath that and of course, we ended out technically, of course, not having a recession in 2023. So very candidly, the performance in the technology staffing and solutions sector might have led one to believe that there might have been. So what happened? So people pulled back, concerned about a recession. Meanwhile, on CFO's desk tested projects ever stopped piling up. No. Certainly not. Do you get calls daily? We got to do it. Okay. So fast forward to today. As Jeff noted, we guided and we're indeed on a billing day basis, our technology business improved Q3 to Q4 2023. I think coming into 2024, you're beginning to hear the word normalize. I don't have the answer on the economy. I -- just this morning, we see the work of a lot of different economists and 2 very well-known ones, have 180 different degree views. So that's not how we run the business. We are data-driven and act accordingly. So I think that the demand side is now lining up with the normalization side. And indeed, Jeff, on the Q4 call back in February, alluded some of the trends we saw, job order-wise, activity-wise. Yes. And certainly on the call, we highlighted this, right? I mean year-end assignment ends which is very typical technology staff, staffing in general, the technology staffing in particular were a bit higher than what we had experienced in the prior year. The year itself got up to a little bit of slower start, but certainly saw some of the leading indicators on job orders and send outs, which is what we commented on our February call. Improved back to Q3 to Q4 levels, which for us would really encouraging. So I think the environment, Joe Liberatore, our CEO, the mantra that we've been working through this more tepid environment like it is a control what we can control, mindset. Economic prosperity is going to come, economic difficulties are going to come and they're going to go. And the beauty about having a highly variable compensation-based model is there's a natural adjustment that happens in managing the business through economically softer times. Of course, in July of this past year, we made some adjustments in the business based on where we saw revenue trends going that generated about $14 million in annualized savings. Not unusual in that regard or atypical. We saw that in the market. But our launch has been held on to our most productive, most tenured people. To Michael's point, we'll see how the rest of 2024 plays out. But we're playing for the long-term and the investments that we're making, and -- making the adjustments that we need to make and that are prudent to make and in softer times. But continue to make the investments in our strategic priorities that are going to get us to the financial objectives that we have, which is continuing to grow and outpace the market and profitability to double-digit operating margin. So that has not changed. Great. Was that helpful?

Very, very helpful. Appreciate the color on the demand side. I just want to switch over to the supply chain side of what you're seeing with candidates in this environment. Anything -- any color you can provide there as to what you're seeing in supply of candidates whether that's going to -- it doesn't sound like it's going to impact your growth, but I just want to know on different economic scenarios. How it will be impactful?

Yes, yes. So there's a lot of noise out there in the headlines and I like math, because math is pretty true. Jeff, I mean, our bill rates would reflect what and our ability to maintain spreads would reflect what about supply and demand. And then I may add a little more commentary afterwards.

Yes. In the short answer to COGS -- time constraints that we're inevitably going to have here. But bill rates, I mentioned in my opening comments were very stable in 2023, roughly $90 an hour. During times like this and if you look at that $90 an hour stability that we saw that, that's an encouraging sign in this environment. Earlier in 2023, we did see some price sensitivities of clients. So the spread between bill rates and pay rates as we've seen in prior cycles did compress to a degree. That was predominantly in the early part of '23. What we've seen since then is really good stability. And if we can rewind the clock further than that prior to 2023. Our spreads were very stable in 2020. This is technology-centric comment 2020, '21 and '22, our Flex margins were dead d*** flat. When you break apart that onion, Mike, we have had a little bit of compression in our traditional staff augmentation business. We did, to Michael's opening comments, the more project solutions to manage teams' orientation as that business is organically scale over time, those margins are running 400 to 600 basis points higher than what our traditional staffing business is running. So that's had a mitigating effect to bring some stability to our margin profile. So in this environment, Michael, to your initial question. We've seen good stability with our average bill raised at roughly $9 an hour. That's a very high-end technology skill labor, whether traditional staffing or labor as part of a team or labor as part of a team delivering a solution to our clients. And that I think for us encouraging. Michael?

Yes. No, spot on is that.

Of course, of course, you pretty much answered my next question which is what you saw in the traditional technology staffing versus the managed teams and private solutions offering, I appreciate the color. Unless you want to add a little bit more on this.

Yes. No, I would just say, we're very excited about it. Again, Paul, what do they say here in New York is follow the money.

Right.

And the economics of Kforce in that realm are extraordinary. Yes, I want to be very clear. We're not going to disintermediate, pick the big names. But on the other hand, clients are not just going to continue to pay those kind of bill rates and markups. I mean, Jeff, very briefly. I know we're doing an internal project. An example of a carve-out we did.

Yes. I mean there's been probably 2 or 3 instances as part of this overall. One of the large consulting names is our implementation partner and has been for the last 2-plus years. So there's been aspects of that overall project that we've been held to, I would say, lower cost is so very qualified providers and things like job architecture and others. So -- and I think it's -- I think it's an important part of the Kforce story. So I don't play it over this.

Yes. And the average margin profile there?

Yes, it's 400 to 600 basis points, not higher. This is something for us that we've been organically investing in since 2017. And the beauty about when we talk about our integrated strategy, the beauty about having 75% of the Fortune 500 as clients of ours and develop those relationships over a number of years, not only are they spending a significant amount of money and more traditional staff obligation services, but they're also spending a tremendous amount and even larger amount on higher-end IT services. And in 2017, we started seeing clients coming to us with a greater increase frequency and looking to us to assume a greater level of responsibility on engaging. And when it all comes down to, for us, is finding quality talent. Now that the foundation of Kforce has been built on for 60-plus years. If the client comes to us and it makes sense for that solution to be traditional staffing, we're going to support them to that. If it makes sense for us to form a team of quality talent and then manage that team for the client, we're going to do that. And alternatively, the other not makes sense, which is form the team and manage with the liberty of that technology for the client. That's what we mean by project solutions. It doesn't really matter. It's all about finding the talent, forming the talent and being accountable and making ourselves accountable to delivering that for our clients. So we're super excited about it. We've got a very clean model when we report externally. We talk about our technology offering overall. It's clear over many years that the more managed teams and project solutions-oriented offering has been performing relatively speaking better than traditional staffing that has been true that was true in 2023 as well. And the margin benefits to Michael's question, the economics make sense for our client, and it makes sense for us. So we're excited about that growth prospect going forward.

Perfect. Just quickly, before I open it up to Q&A in a few minutes. You talked a lot about your view on double-digit operating margins. I think you've covered a decent amount on the topic, but I just want to unravel a little bit. Could you maybe just talk about what internally you guys can focus? I know there's a lot of stuff going on in the background, but internally, what can you guys focus on so you can attain that double-digit operating margin?

Yes. And the first thing I'll say is this is not something new to Kforce. As you look back at our operating margin, historically, we've done a great job of not only scaling the business, but doing that profitably. So when you look back at our operating margins over the last probably 5 or 6 years, we've grown them by 200-plus basis points. So in my opening overview, I had mentioned it, we finished 2022 at 7% operating margin. And of course, there's some compression in 2023, given the softer top line. When you look at that 7% in the path forward to double digits, you got 300 basis points there. When you break that down to the contributors, scale is a meaningful part of that contribution story. The other part that I mentioned in my commentary, and we've referenced our back-office transformation program compared to the level of investment that we're currently making in that program, we can take that and the benefits that we expect from technology that gets you 100 basis points of operating margin accretion just with that back-office transformation program. So you take a tail plus that. We are continuing to make investments in technology more broadly speaking, in our business, not only in the back office but also in the front office to make it easier for our associates to drive good visits with our clients. That's the third component. And the fourth one is, we've done a great job of controlling our fixed costs. Heading into the 2020 pandemic, we had 50 offices, we now currently have about 1/3 and the ultimate square footage that we've been using given our [ off occasional ] work environment, it is likely to be down close to 70% compared to what it was pre-pandemic. So what does that mean? We have a smaller real estate footprint, which means reduced fixed costs. So we've done a great job of continuing to do that. And it's a culture that we breathe within Kforce, being mindful on where we're investing our shareholders' money, and we expect an appropriate return on those investment dollars. So it's a story that we need for us that we've been after for quite a few years, as I mentioned. What we hadn't offered investors and analysts in a sense for what that future looks like. And in my comments, and we introduced this first on the earnings call that a reasonable revenue level where we would expect to obtain double-digit operating margin is slightly more than $2 billion. So we're excited about it. We're encouraged about it. When you do the math on that, it's a meaningful shareholder appreciation. So we take it very seriously in terms of [indiscernible] at Kforce.

Well said.

Michael, do you have...

Well said. Appreciated. Given that we're short on time here, just one last question in order to talking about your use of capital. You talked a lot about your capital allocation strategy and your history about 400% increase in 2014. Moving forward, can you just touch a little bit on how you're thinking about that, managing that with your investment strategy?

Yes, the short answer is expect more of the same. The color and the context around that comment is important. I had mentioned in my comments that over a long-term, we've been returning about 75% of the cash the business has been generating. We look at that as a balance between share buyback and dividends. We've had our dividend program now almost 10 years running. The yield is in the 2%, 2.5% range at the range where we're completely comfortable with it. The benefit of continuing to buy back shares is the cash that's needed for dividends also continues to go down in the future with those share buybacks. So the beauty about this business is we generate a lot of cash. And for the last 15-plus years, we've been returning that cash to our shareholders. I mentioned that we've reduced our share count from 42 million to about 19 million. And I think more of the same as we look forward. From an acquisition standpoint, we could do an acquisition in over 15 years. And acquisitions in a human capital-centric business. We always talk about 1 plus 1 rarely equal 2. And we take that very seriously. And we pride ourselves on that. Clearly, the organic growth that we've been driving over many years is indicative of the cleanliness of our story, both internally and externally. So more of the same is the short answer.

Appreciate it. Appreciate it, Jeff, and appreciate it, Michael. Thank you, guys for participating in the fireside.

Well, thank you.

Thank you, appreciate it.

Thank you, everyone, for dialing in.