Korn Ferry (KFY) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. I'm Emily Marzo. I'm associate on the Business and Information Services team. We are pleased today to have Bob Rozek, the Chief Financial Officer, Executive Vice President and Chief Corporate Officer from Korn Ferry. Thank you for joining us.

Glad to be here.

Round 2 back here.

Yes. It's a sequel.

For those who are new to the story, can you tell us about Korn Ferry? And what is the client value proposition you have to offer?

Sure. So Korn Ferry was started back in 1969 as an executive search firm. And as time rolled on, when our current CEO, Gary joined, he was an audit partner at KPMG and he looked at the search partners and the relationships they had with their clients and said, well, it's really strong, better than what an audit partner would have. So his whole strategy evolved into, let's leverage those relationships, build a company that is what we would call organizational consultancy. So we deal with human capital issues at companies. It's really was leveraging the search partners and relationships to build those adjacencies around and use it as a sales channel into the clients. Today, we're -- if you think about our core solution areas, we have total rewards, leadership development, obviously, talent acquisition is a big one, assessment and succession in what we call org strategy. It's a little bit different. It's not like the Bain and McKinsey when you think about your business strategy. This is, once your business strategy is set, going in and helping clients implement it through their people.

And what do you say the value proposition you have?

Yes. I would say that our value proposition is we're really an industry of one. So again, if you look across all those core solutions I just talked about, there's not another company in the world that has all of that, that we do. And we actually touch every aspect of an employee's engagement with his or her employer. And the thing that's really -- there's a couple of things that are really interesting. So as we go in and we start to meet with clients, sometimes they would have somebody do their assessment work and then they have somebody to do the development work and somebody else do total rewards, right? Everything is done on different taxonomies, different ways of looking at things where Korn Ferry is kind of one-stop shopping, right? We have all same science, same language, everything permeates from the center of the organization into our solution areas. So I think that's number one is one of the primary value propositions. I also think, if you think about what we've done over time, right, we have an enormous amount of data, intellectual property and content that sits at the center of the organization. I'll just give you an example. So we have over -- we've assessed over 100 million executives over time, right? So we have a pretty good idea of what good looks like. We have 25 million paid data points all across the globe. So we know what it takes to compensate somebody. And just to give you an example, Gary, who's on the call with the CEO of Anthem about -- probably about 2 or 3 weeks ago, and we had assessed thousands of their people, and he was able to get on the call and bring insight into that conversation that the CEO just never realized.

All right. And as you've built this diversified portfolio, could you talk about the resilience of the business model and maybe for each segment go through?

Sure. Yes. So part of the strategy was to take a -- what is a cyclical business, which is Executive Search is really tied to economic cycles and build out the adjacent services that are more resilient, more durable. And we've done that over time. If you go back, when I joined in 2012, it was our first, what I would call, big acquisition at that time. And we bought a company called PDI, and they had brought a full assessment protocol into the equation. Hay Group was 2015, very transformative for us. And they brought the total rewards, the org strategy and a little bit of leadership development. And what we're finding right now as we go through the current environment is you look at our consulting business, you look at our digital business, they're actually growing. You look at our talent acquisition businesses, and they're moderating, although we have seen stabilization of late. So yes, I look at the business, I said, okay, it's very -- from a revenue profile perspective, very different from what it was when I joined, we were about 85% in Executive Search back then and today Exec Search is probably 30%, 31%.

Okay. And what would a soft landing in the macro look like versus a hard landing?

Yes, I would say soft lending would really get no real impact to us. We usually try to get out in front and we took action at the end of our second quarter. We did about an 8% reduction in headcount. And some of it was driven off of what we're seeing in the environment, and some of it was actually driven off of the productivity that we believe existed as a result doing Zoom and not having to just working different, not having to go in the office and commute 2 hours each way every day. So that was really the primary driver. So from a soft lending perspective, I would say, well, we would just continue to manage business as usual. If it got really bad, then we would obviously reevaluate the size of our organization and adjust the capacity accordingly.

And the more macro-sensitive cyclical segments. What are you looking for to the macro for an inflection point in those?

It's really all about confidence, right? You read about whether it's CEO confidence, but business confidence. So if you head started in positive GDP and you see signs where people are confident, that's when they make investment decisions.

Okay.

And we're actually coming through our third quarter, we actually started to see not only stabilization but some green shoots. So we started to see our Pro Search business ticking up, right? Exec Search has stabilized. Our interim business, which is new to us, we're starting to see that tick up as well.

Okay. And in the challenging labor market that we've seen, what tools does Korn Ferry have in order to attack those challenges?

Yes. For us, it's kind of interesting. So when the world is in chaos, that's actually good for us because companies are trying to figure out what do I do? How do I -- what do I need to do differently? Do I need to have a different workforce? Do I need different skills? Should I be organized differently, right? And so that all lends itself to the solutions -- the core solutions that we have that we can bring to bear to help companies figure out what their human capital challenges there through all the different cycles.

And we've seen some layoff headlines. You said you've seen some stabilization. Could you talk to us about what demand looks like right now and maybe how that's changed in the last 6 months?

Sure. So our demand over the past 6 months has started to moderate. This is on the talent acquisition side. It was moderating and now it's kind of stabilized. But the thing that's really interesting, if you go back prior to the pandemic, and I'll use North America as an example, we would do 250 to 275 searches a month, and that was a good month. Then pandemic hit, it went down to 180 and then coming through the recovery, we were up at like 325 to 350 a month. And then it happened for a number of quarters in a row. And then the middle of our fiscal '23, that's when we saw it start to moderate. Today, we're doing about 220 to 225. So it feels like a larger drop off what we were coming off of sort of exaggerated levels. But if you go back to where we were prepandemic, we're not that far away.

And in terms of geography or segment specific, are you seeing any changes like in the labor market when it comes to EMEA versus the U.S.?

Yes. We've -- most of the moderation that we experienced was primarily North America and Asia. Asia was driven a lot by China and North America was just the economic environment that we're in. And the one that's really surprised me is Europe is our Europe volume never really came down from the postpandemic highs. And we have an excellent team over there in Europe. They've done a great job of recruiting as well as they really function as kind of what I would call One Korn Ferry better than any management team that we have across the globe. And I think that really contributes to their success.

And is there any like sector-specific like health care or anything that...

Yes, we're seeing, especially in our RPO business because we were strong in technology and strong in life sciences. And those are 2 -- you read the headlines and those are 2 industry verticals that are challenged at this point in time. So we're seeing a little bit more moderation coming from there in our RPO business. I would say in Executive Search, there's really not an industry that would stick out. It's more across the board and Professional Search is kind of the same thing. So it's really just RPO. But the thing that's interesting about RPO is, on our last earnings call, we talked about -- and if you go back and look at over time, so we'll sign up a contract, it will be 2, 3, 4 years to hire 5,000 people a year for clients. And if you go back over time and look at what they actually ended up doing, they were actually about 106% of the original contract value. And so today, as you look at that business, it has moderated. But again, they're -- we have a green shoot, they're coming up in the fourth quarter. And if they just get back to their original contract value, not even the 106%, it will add about another $50 million of revenue to -- on a run rate basis, annualized basis.

So you don't need -- you don't need great, you just need normal.

You just got to normalize.

You've talked about the business world being in the midst of a multi-quarter reset. I guess how are different customer bases preparing and reacting to this reset?

Yes. I think one of the areas that for us has been really strong, especially in our consulting areas, what I call Org. Strategy. And that's where individual businesses are really trying to work through what -- in this environment, how do I grow? Like how do I retain employees? Do I have the right employees? Do I need employees with different skill sets? And so that's what they're coming to us for and say, hey, Korn Ferry, you guys are -- you're like the Bain or McKinsey of human capital, help us think all this stuff through so they can adjust and moderate through the current work environment.

And over the past couple of years, you've alluded to the transformation, the core solutions, the data, the insights. Can you walk us through the transformation changes?

Yes. What I talked about earlier, so when I joined, we were 85% search, we bought PDI for their assessment capabilities. And prior to that, our assessments would look at an individual based on competencies and experiences and they brought this concept of traits and drivers. So it's what makes you up as an individual. And the whole theory behind their assessments was we need to make sure people are going to fit in an organization because when they don't, the cost of turnover is way too high. And the other thing they brought was we were playing at the C-suite. They went all the way down to lower professional levels in an organization. So that was really big for us. And then the Hay Group was one that really transformed us to where we are today. So now we have our 5 core solutions. And that's -- again, that touches every employee aspect of their engagement with their employer. Where it gets really interesting is when you start to take bits and pieces of those core solutions and weave them together into an integrated solution. So company has, let's say, M&A transaction, right? So how do we bring these 2 companies together, who goes, who stays, what type of culture do we want to have, are these employees engaged, right? We help companies by cobbling together bits and pieces and come up with what we call an integrated solution. And then if you go one step further, I think it gets even more interesting when you look at all the data that we have, right? You can bring that data into those solutions and actually have very unique and rich insights to that we can provide to clients.

And where do you see of those like the greatest opportunity moving forward?

I would say that there's a couple of things that are our greatest opportunity moving forward. To me, it all really focuses on our digital business, and that's where we're actually selling subscriptions and licenses to our data, to our IP content and development. And I think that business has the -- as I look at the company, the biggest opportunity to have real impact on us as we move forward with that. We have a new leader who's coming. He's got different perspective than the prior leadership did. And he comes from a background of the tech products company. And so he's got different views on what to do with that business and really trying to drive the subscription and licenses. So we get to get more durable, resilient revenue streams. I mean, right now, we're probably about 12 to 15 months away because it's really important to think about all the data and other assets that we have. We built some, we bought companies. And so we don't necessarily have a common platform today. And so Mathias, that's #1 on his agenda is to bring everything into a common platform. And the reason why it's important is we can use it today, but you have to like login, you're doing reward work, then you log out, then you log in to development, then you log out, log in to succession. And people have to be able to move freely across the different solution areas. That business and then the other business I think I'm really excited about is RPO once the world fog lifts. That business is growing high teens, low 20s, 4 or 5 years in all. In fact, the year everybody struggled through COVID, they grew 7%. And so I think that business is really well positioned to get back to those growth levels.

Yes. And your top line today is 40% higher than prepandemic times. Going back to COVID, what are the biggest changes you've seen since COVID? And as we lap those prepandemic highs, what are the biggest?

Yes. I would say the biggest change is I look at our employee base and prepandemic we had about 9,100 [indiscernible] colleagues and today we have about 9,200, right? So as we've been thinking about driving efficiencies into the work that we do, it's made a huge difference for us in terms of our cost base. We also have taken out a lot of real estate that we just people weren't showing up to offices. And so we've really moderated the cost base quite a bit. Back to on our last earnings call, if you go back to the quarter right before the pandemic hit, and you had the same revenue mix that we had in that quarter, our adjusted EBITDA margin would have about 200 basis points lower. So those are the types of costs that we've taken out. And to me, it's all about just doing business differently today.

And perm placement has settled down from the pandemic highs. Do you think this is the new normal for perm placement? How should we be thinking about that?

Yes, I don't think it is. I think there's still not a lot of confidence where people are actually going in and making the type of investments that we would expect once the economy gets back to a normal stage. So I think there's upside in Exec Search, there's upside in Professional Search, and there's upside in RPO as well.

And we've seen larger employers bring staffing internally. How does this change your go-to-market strategy?

Yes. I would look at it probably a little bit differently. I would say that large employers the -- what they've done is they had staffing capabilities in the organization. And as you go -- we're going through the downturn that we are, normally they would let them go. They're retaining those recruiters now. So it's not like they're bringing it in-house, we're just not letting people go and so they're feeding with the volumes that otherwise would have come to us. So once the world settles down and it gets back to normal volume levels, then we'll get our fair share. It's interesting when you go back to the pandemic, when we were coming through the recovery, the curve is so steep and everybody was just slammed trying to get hire people, and there was actually an article in The Wall Street Journal that talked about recruiters being the toughest job to recruit for. And so there's a concept out there. I don't know if Gary coined it or not, but he called it labor hoarding. I actually hear him talking about it on CNBC now. But the concept is basically they're just retaining people that they otherwise would have let go in the past.

And have you seen any signs of loosening in that in the last 6 months or so?

No, I would say we try to really reinforce the word stabilization in our last earnings call, and that's predominantly what we're seeing. And like I said, we have a couple of green shoots, but you have a month or 2 where you see some positive activity and for us, that's not -- it's not a trend yet, right? So we need to see sustained over 3 or 4 months before we would actually claim victory.

Let's go back to your margins. Your adjusted margins are coming back in line with the prepandemic times with the different mix, as you mentioned.

Yes.

How sustainable are the current margins? And where do you see the most room for expansion moving forward?

Yes. I think our current margins are definitely sustainable. That's why we adjusted our capital allocation. We increased our dividend quite a bit. At the end of the second quarter, it was about an [ 83% ] increase. And we're back to buying shares back at the level we were the past 2 years. So we're very confident in the margins that we have today, which is kind of -- we just did 15.2%. We guided to 15.3% to 15.5%. In longer term, we have a range of 16% to 18%. I think once the Executive Search and Professional Search businesses come back, we'll definitely be in that range. And then as we grow as an organization, depending on if they were investing more into interim, that would probably leave us at the lower end of the range, if we get digital business where we believe it should be, because margins in that business are north of 30%. So that will put us towards the top end of that range. And if we're really successful on digital, I think we can definitely blow through the top end of that range.

And I guess in the near term -- so those are midterm, in the near term, what levers do you have to pull when it comes to a more challenged market?

Yes. Right now, the primary levers we have to pull would be Korn Ferry colleagues, people. Like I said, we did an -- we took an action at the end of the second quarter. So I don't -- there's nothing planned for us to do anything further at this point. And the big drivers that cost for us are people first, real estate second and then business development, travel, meetings and all that. I talked about the headcount reductions that we've gone through. Our real estate footprint today is about somewhere between 30% and 35% less than it was when we're at pandemic. And then our BD, travel, all that spend is probably about 40% of what it was. We were spending about $11 million, $12 million a quarter. And today, we're down to roughly, I would say, $4.5 million, $5 million.

Let's talk about some of your new wins, especially in consulting. What trends are you seeing drive the new business wins, the new higher bill rates? Like what are you seeing that's driving that demand?

Yes. I think there's a couple of things happening there. So we have seen our bill rates climbing. And a lot of that is driven by the fact that we're now selling large integrated solutions, right, which you have a leverage model for. So you're -- what you're going to realize on those engagements is greater profitability than you would if like I'm Bob, I'm a great rewards guy, but I can't scale myself, right? So all I can sell is me versus selling a team that's going to come in and help clients. Another area that consulting has been really successful on is we call it coaching at scale. So we have 3 very large kind of like Fortune 10 companies that have come to us and said, hey, we love your development materials, we love your coaches, we want you to train our next level of leadership. And so we'll sign a 3- or 4-year contract with millions of dollars a year to do that for them. We just signed right after the earnings call, that's when we just signed a very large one with the financial institution. So that's an area that we're seeing -- we're really enjoying success in. So I would say, org. strategy, leadership and professional development are the 2 primary drivers. And then compensation is always on the top of everybody's mind, everybody wants to get paid, paid more. So that business is doing well for us. The one area in consulting, where I think we have some upside opportunities on our assessments. And we've -- all of our assessments, we built ourselves, right, with PDI and all that. And we had somebody come in and take a look at them and they're all based on psychometrics. And so they evaluate came and say, hey, your science is best-in-class, your user experience is dated. So we're going through a refresh on that right now.

And I guess when it comes to the refresh and walking across your existing current base, like how is cross-selling working for your large marquees and the regional groups?

Yes. We've been very successful in cross-selling. To me, I grew up at Pricewaterhouse as an audit partner and I got paid. This is going to tell you how old I am here, so before Sarbanes-Oxley. So I got paid to sell work, right? It was tax work, consulting advisory. And a lot of what I sold had nothing to do with the audit, right? Projects were independent of each other. But here at Korn Ferry, our solutions are so tightly knitted together. To me, it's so easy to work across the organization than cross-selling. I think we have an outsized opportunity to continue to drive that. And just to give you an example, I was a search partner and I got you job as a CEO. So I've just changed your life, right? You're going to take...

Feel free to.

[indiscernible] So you'll take my call. So we're talking and you're saying, hey, Bob, I've got this team, I'm not sure it's the right team. I kind of want to go this way. It feels like they're taking me that way. How can you help? So we would come in and to a top team effectiveness, right? We'd assess everybody. We have a norm that would be established based on conversations with you in terms of the types of individuals, the culture you want to have and all that. And then we would look at the assessments lined up against your norms and say, okay, here's a bunch of folks that are really good. Here's some that are good, but there's a couple of derailers. So we can take our development content and help them overcome that. And then here's a group of folks that just you're never going to get there with. So we can help you find new ones. And then we step back and say, okay, let's get your organization pull together. So kind of boxes on a page, roles, responsibility, success profiles for each jobs, layers and spans of control, I get that all job architected for you. And we would finish up by saying, okay, now let's put an incentive program in place for you to give to your leadership team so they drive the strategy that you want. We're right there in one sentence, I kind of walked across everything we do, right? And as I look at that today, man, it's so easy to sell across this organization. We were -- prior to buying the interim companies, we were about 30% of our revenue came from cross line of business referrals. Today, we're right around 25%, 26%. And the primary driver of it is the interim businesses while they're integrated, they're not fully integrated into our go-to-market yet. And so once that happens, I expect our cross line of business activity to go back up to 30%. And I think we could take it to 35%, 40% over time.

And how is that integration process going?

Well, the -- we have a phenomenal playbook for M&A, and we've built a company that's what I would call, plug-and-play. So common systems, platforms, controls, processes across the globe. And so when we buy these companies, basically, you pick them up and you just plug them in. And so right now, we have all of the interim businesses are plugged into our systems and so on. And the one area that we're still working through is the go-to-market. So making sure that all of our legacy Korn Ferry folks really understand the interim business, and it's easy for them to take that out to their clients and sell. The thing that's interesting, my number is going to be probably a little bit off, but we bought the Lucas Group back in November of '21. So that's when our foray into interims really started. Since that point in time, we've had about 1,500 incremental opportunities, and we've won, say, 850 of those. And those are opportunities that were brought from other parts of the business into interim. So they never would have had that opportunity had they not been part of our ecosystem.

And is there a specific niche that Korn Ferry focuses on?

There is, on the interim side, yes. We are -- if you think about our business talent acquisition, we play at, obviously, C-suite levels and then upper management and then professional levels. And so what we're doing with the interim business is we're trying to mirror that. So we would -- you wouldn't see us go out and placing admins. You wouldn't see us go out doing factory workers, any of that. So we're going to stay in the areas, the functional areas that we're good at. The other thing we've done with it as well is we do have -- we bought a company that places C-suite, but we also bought 2 companies. One is focused on IT. And then the second one is focused primarily on finance and accounting, but a little bit of HR. So we're trying to stay true to those verticals as well as staying at the levels where the rest of our business operates because you don't want to -- if you start going down -- downstream, you have the potential to injure your brand, and we don't want to do that. I would say there's probably a couple of other verticals over time that we'd be interested in if you had engineering things that are, again, at a more professional level.

Okay. So you -- do you see some synergies...

Absolutely.

Already taking place?

Yes, and it's easy. It's really easy because I look at our search partners and some of them are really good at selling the whole firm. A lot of them, I think some of the things we do on the consulting and digital side, it's more of a challenge for them to really wrap their head around it, but they place bodies and chairs for a living and interim is the same thing, it's just not permanent. So it's really easy for them to understand that. And in fact, one of the things we're actually seeing is now when we're brought on to do a search, one of the first things we ask is, do you need temporary help, right? So we can bring that body and while we're doing the search, and then we're done, find the permanent person and that person moves off and you deploy him somewhere else.

And maybe if we could talk about the digital and how the digital feeds the consulting and the total ecosystem for Korn Ferry?

Yes. So our digital business, again, if you think about digital, it's about the data that we have, it's about the assessment protocols that we have, the pay data and then all of our content -- development content. And right now, we're roughly 30%, maybe a little bit north of 30%, where we have a consulting engagement where digital is brought in to that. And our goal is to get that up to 60% to 65%. And we want to have our consultants leading with our digital assets as if you think about those assets, you use those and any company uses those in their HR cycle, it creates huge stickiness because you don't rip that stuff out every year, right? So it creates huge stickiness for us to be part of whatever their HR cycles are. And so our goal is to expand what we call it the sell-through of digital into consulting.

And what would you say are the biggest demand drivers for the digital offering?

To me, there's -- well, 2 things. One is the -- we call it insights through analytics. So cracking the code on bringing real insights to companies by using our data is one. The other area that I think is going to be a real growth driver for us, ultimately, in it's really early stages is what we call them partnerships and alliances. So if you think about a lot of the large technology companies today, like Microsoft, for example, I've actually been up there twice in the past couple of months, and they came to us and they said, hey, we're looking for the next Office 365 and everybody opens up their computer every day, and we're right there. So why can't we own the employee experience? The only problem they have is they sell to CIOs and CTOs, right? They sell licenses. And it said to me that our sales force, they don't even care people use them, they just want to sell them. But they said if -- what we want to get into here, we think that there has to be -- we got to drive usage. So the subscriptions recur. And I said, you guys have all the relationships, you guys understand human capital. So it actually came to us, and we're looking to partner with them as they start to explore what they call owning the human experience. Another thing, they bought a big company called Glint that does engagement surveys, are your employees engaged, and they don't want to do the consulting around that. So they came to us and said, would you be our preferred provider to do that? Another really interesting example is Salesforce, where we bought a company back in 2019 called Miller Heiman, and it's kind of best-in-class sales force, management selling technique methodologies, how do I incent my sales force, how do I organize them? And right now, we're building apps that will actually sit on Salesforce on the chassis and if somebody is using it and they're struggling with something they can just tap into our development content, right, get trained up in a 15-minute video or whatever, then go back to their day job. So that's an area that I'm actually very excited about. When -- as I grew up in Pricewaterhouse, I became friends with a fellow named Tim Ryan, and he actually leads the U.S. firm. And I talked to Tim once a quarter, and we were talking about our business, and he made the comment to me that you will never scale that business without getting into partnerships and alliances because that's what they did, right? Yes, all the systems implementation. So yes, I'm pretty excited about the opportunities that sit in front of us for that.

And you've talked about a few acquisitions you've made. Could you talk about your capital allocation priorities when it comes to the dividend, M&A, repurchases?

Yes. So our -- it's been pretty consistent since I joined. We've always taken a balanced approach, but our first priority is to put the money back into the business. We really believe deeply in the strategy. I think our performance indicates that it's the right thing to do. And so we'll hire people or teams, we'll invest back into digital and getting that business prepared to stand up the way that it needs to. And then M&A, we do generate a lot of cash. So we're always going to be in a position to have cash to distribute. And we try to be pretty balanced between dividends and share repurchases. It's kind of interesting over time. I always ask everybody, do you have a preference, and it's pretty much 50-50. Half the people like buybacks and half like repurchases.

In the last minute here, what do you think is the most misunderstood part of your business?

Well, I think just a couple of things. I think the -- how -- the example I went through in terms of cross-selling, how easy it is and how well connected our solutions are. I'm not sure folks really grasped how powerful that can be is one. And then the second thing is, the company that we bought, the assets that we have, again, we're an industry of 1, and we've built something that the world wants and needs today. So everything is all about human capital. I need better talent, different talent, talent that can operate in an AI world, right? And I need to transfer my workforce. I need to grow postpandemic. And we're right at the epicenter of that. And I look at that and say, look, this isn't our 15 minutes of fame, right? This is our top of the first inning in a very long ball game. And I'm not sure people understand how relevant what we built is today. And I think we still get painted with the executive search brush. So we have continuing work to do to get our story out there and help people really understand what we're all about today.

Thank you for joining us. It's great to have you.

Thank you.