Brian Scott
Analyst · UBS. Your line is open.
A.J., it's Brian. Yes, I mean, the fourth quarter, I think, played out overall as expected. We see the labor disruption event went longer than we anticipated, and that added some additional revenue in the fourth quarter and is flowing through into our first quarter guidance. If you try to strip that out of both quarters and also take out the kind of $5 million-ish sales reserve reversal that we've talked about, we are looking at a little bit of a decline probably in the – particularly midpoint of our guidance in Q1, call it, $15 million to $20 million or so. And there's a few pieces there. I think to Cary's point, I think we're seeing much more normalization. There's still some residual flow-through of some of the changes with client behavior, some runoff from early client exits during 2024. But for the most part, as we think about as we're moving into Q1, seeing really good trends in locums. I think overall, we'd expect that business to be flat to slightly up in the first quarter, which is pretty normal for it to be up. We're still working through the MSDR integration, but the booking trends especially over the last few weeks have been really positive, which gives us confidence in the first quarter, but also that we'd expect to see growth in the second quarter and beyond. Language services continues to grow sequentially – it grew in Q4, we expect it to grow in Q1 and through the year. International is still a bit of a headwind, right. As we talked about, as we have retrogression continuing, we have about a $4 million to $5 million reduction expected sequentially in Q1. And then with the Nurse and Allied business, a little bit of a decline on the nursing side as you see some of the winter orders start to roll off. But underneath that, there's still, I think, a more normal kind of buying behavior due to some of the seasonal impacts that are on there. And then with VMS also down a little bit in the first quarter as well, again, more reflective of the market environment and some client losses from 2024 that just are kind of working their way through the system. So Q1, I think, sets a really good foundation for 2025, and it's a good marker ex that strike. And as we think about the rest of the year, we see good opportunities for the businesses to grow and a lot of really good momentum in most of our service lines.