Good morning, ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the Cross Country Healthcare Conference Call for the Fourth Quarter and Full Year of 2014. This call is being simultaneously webcast live. A replay of this call will also be available until March 19, 2015 and can be accessed either on the company’s website or by dialing 800-395-7443 for domestic calls and 203-369-3271 for international calls, and please enter the passcode of 2015. I will now turn the call over to Bill Burns, Cross Country Healthcare’s Chief Financial Officer. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you and good morning everyone. With me today is our Chief Executive Officer, Bill Grubbs. This call will include a discussion of fourth quarter and full year results for 2014 as disclosed in our press release and will also include a discussion of our financial outlook for the first quarter of 2015. After our prepared remarks, you will have an opportunity to ask questions. I’d like to remind everyone that the press release is also available on our website at www.crosscountryhealthcare.com. Before we begin, we need to remind you that certain statements made on this call may constitute forward-looking statements. As noted in our press release, forward-looking statements can vary materially from actual results and are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors, including those contained in the company’s 2013 Annual Report on Form 10-K and quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, as well as in other filings with the SEC. I would encourage all of you to review the risk factors listed in these documents. The company undertakes no obligation to update any of its forward-looking statements. Also, comments during this teleconference reference non-GAAP financial measures such as adjusted EBITDA or adjusted earnings per share. Such non-GAAP financial measures are provided as additional information and should not be considered substitutes for or superior to financial measures calculated in accordance with U.S. GAAP. More information related to these non-GAAP financial measures is contained in our press release. In order to facilitate a better understanding of underlying trends, we may refer to pro forma information on this call, giving effect to acquisitions as though they were included in the prior period results. And lastly, results below adjusted EBITDA continue to include unusual or non-recurring items that impact our pre-tax and net income from continuing operations, which I will touch on later in the call. With that, I will now turn the call over to our CEO, Bill.

Thank you, Bill. Thank you, everyone for joining us this morning. I am pleased to report a strong fourth quarter. Overall, we had pro forma year-over-year revenue growth at 8.4%, increasing from 6.8% in the third quarter. Our management team and all of our staff have done a good job staying focused on delivering our services during our integration. Our adjusted EBITDA was $6.2 million or 3.3% of revenue, which includes the impact of a non-cash adjustment for unamortized insurance premiums. Excluding the impact of this item, adjusted EBITDA would have been 3.8% of revenue at the higher end of our guidance and up from 3.5% in the third quarter. I believe this underlying adjusted EBITDA is more indicative of what our future performance is likely to be. So, let me just clarify that a little bit. There was a little over $1 million of additional costs in the quarter that really had nothing to do with Q4. So, for me, I need to worry about what we have really done from an operational standpoint and then what we look like going forward. So, to me that had nothing to do with Q4. We did 8.4% revenue growth and a 3.8% adjusted EBITDA, which was right in line with our expectations. Bill Burns will talk a little bit more about that $1 million charge when he talks about the numbers in more detail. This strong performance was predominantly due to strong results from our nurse and allied segment, which had pro forma year-over-year revenue growth in the quarter of 11.4%. Our other human capital segment also contributed to this growth with 14.5% year-over-year revenue growth significantly up from the third quarter. However, this growth was partly offset by continued weak performance in our physician staffing segment. For the fourth quarter,…

Thanks Bill. Let me first review the consolidated results for the quarter. Turning first to revenue, total revenue for the quarter was $188.1 million, up 72% from the prior year and flat sequentially. On a pro forma basis, revenue for the quarter was up 8% from the prior year. The year-over-year increase in revenue was driven by robust demand in our largest segment nurse and allied staffing as well as stronger quarterly results in our other human capital management services segment. Growth – gross profit margin for the quarter was 25.3%, down 90 basis points from the prior year and up 30 basis points sequentially. Gross profit margin was negatively impacted by an adjustment for unamortized insurance premiums that related to prior policy periods. Excluding the impact of that adjustment gross profit margin would have been approximately 50 basis points higher for the quarter and in line with our expectations. It is important to note that this prior period adjustment was not deemed material and will not have an impact on future results. Moving down to the income statement SG&A for the quarter was $41.5 million, up 54% on a year-over-year basis and 2% sequentially. The year-over-year increase was primarily due to the impact of the MSN acquisition and to a lesser extent the Allied Healthcare acquisition in late 2013. The sequential increase was primarily attributable to higher recruiting cost as we continue to make investments in the business to meet the high demand for our services. As a percent of revenue, SG&A was 22.1%, down nearly 260 basis points year-over-year and up 50 basis points sequentially. During the fourth quarter, we continue to carefully manage our cost to continue improving the operating leverage in our business. Adjusted EBITDA was $6.2 million representing a 3.3% margin, which was below our…

Thank you, sir. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Mr. AJ Rice of UBS. Your line is now open.

Hi, this is Brandon Fazio for AJ. Couple of questions. One, some of the cost initiatives and you guys have given a bucket list of margin sort of savings or margin enhancements and sort of key cost initiatives that you are working on. What are those this year that will get you to that 5% number? And then also is there any weather impact that you guys are seeing or assuming in your first quarter guidance as well? Thank you.

Yes, I will talk about the weather and then Bill can maybe touch on some of the things we are doing from a cost perspective. Weather is certainly going to be a factor. And I think its part of the reason why we are trending to a slightly lower year-over-year revenue growth number in the first quarter. It’s – I don’t have any analysis yet that tells me that it’s worse than it was last year, because weather was pretty bad last year, if you remember correctly. It feels a lot worse and my team is telling me it’s a lot worse. In fact today, my education business at Nashville was shutdown again. And there is always a little bigger impact of weather when you have a bigger branch structure, the branches get shutdown, people just can’t get to work and you just have to make up the work that you lose on the day shift business from a branch location. So, I do think weather is partly a factor, but I don’t have a number associated with that. We will do that when we announce the first quarter, but I do believe the quarter.

Okay.

And then in the cost additions?

Yes, on the cost side, Brandon, so we expect to obviously fully realize the synergies coming out of the MSN acquisition. We previously communicated the $12 million to $14 million will be at a full run-rate for that starting in the first quarter of 2015. So that will certainly be part of the leverage that we will get in the business. The company continues though to execute on other operating efficiencies to centralize and standardize and automate different processes. It’s hard to size the exact dollar amount of the impact that gets you to the 5%. It’s going to be a combination of things. As Bill mentioned in his prepared remarks, we are continuing to see pricing increases and we expect that will help uplift margins and we will continue to make and fund investments in the business. So, it might be a little bit difficult to see the exact dollar amount of the cost savings initiatives, but we are actively going out.

Yes, the 5% is going to come from continued growth. We expect to have continued year-over-year growth, which will obviously contribute – we will get some leverage out of that by the fourth quarter and then some additional cost savings, but also the first quarter ends up with much higher cost anyway with payroll resets and a couple other things that are happening related to our integration that kind of inflate the cost base in Q1 that we expect to come back in subsequent quarters.

Sure. And that’s one quick follow-up here, adjusted tax rate, we should be thinking about in terms of if you are looking at the adjusted net income sort of numbers, kind of 40%, 45% or what kind of tax rate you think we should use for that?

That’s an interesting question. The tax rate is obviously very difficult for us to predict. We operate with a full valuation allowance. So really the only thing affecting the income tax expense line are the indefinite-lived intangible amortization which pretty much is set throughout the year, it’s based on how the assets amortize for tax purposes. There are some state and international taxes, small amount of taxes for that and as well as anything changes in FIN 48, but it’s hard to get to a rate because the full valuation allowance kind of mutes that and you don’t really see the impact from it.

Okay. Thank you, guys.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Tobey Summer of SunTrust. Your line is open.

Thank you very much. Good morning.

Hi, Tobey.

Good morning Tobey.

I had a question for you, what proportion of sales is derived today from acute care versus ambulatory or other settings and how might that mix change do you think over the medium term?

Tobey, I don’t have that number handy, I apologize for that. It’s certainly higher in non-acute care now that we have a larger branch operation than we used to, because they do a lot more local business and a lot more ambulatory business. I don’t have a breakout of the mix to be honest with you.

Okay. How much growth have you seen in your recruiter or kind of sales generating headcounts and what should – what are you planning for like early this year, do you need to have a kind of a bolus of hiring and expense associated with ramping that up or is that something you have kind of been on top of for the last 6 months or 8 months? Thanks.

I think we have been on top. We got a pretty early start. We started to see positive order trends in April, May, June of last year. So we got a little bit ahead of it. I think we announced in early November in our last earnings call that we were up 20% in our recruiter headcount in nurse and allied at that point year-to-date. We are up another 13% from that point as of the end of February. And we have enough people in the pipeline that are in process that we will be up another 10% from the current number by the end of May. So we continue to invest in adding producer headcount. Mostly on the recruiter side we have made some investments in sales, but mostly on the recruiter side and were to bring in new applications and make sure that we can increase our fulfillment.

Just to make sure I understand the up 20% comment that was on the third quarter call and that was year-over-year, but then the 13% number and the forecasted 10% number by May are sequential from that kind of November time period?

That’s right. So from the end of October in essence we are up another 13% over the last 4 months and we will be up another 10% from the end of February number by the end of May.

Not to ask you to do too much math, but to try to keep apples and oranges separate would that what did you – what would you guess that would be from a year-over-year standpoint either now or May?

Year-over-year, okay, let me try to do the math real quick…

And I can ask you another question while what you are trying to do that. Do you the flu has impacted your orders over the last couple of months and are you cautious at all about some sort of falloff in orders as the flu season generally winds down too?

Yes. So we tracked the flu trends quite a bit and we saw that there was a peak this year certainly higher than last year not as high it was a couple of years ago. But it was a bit more robust flu season than normal. But we did not see any real change in those. Orders have remained I mean within a few percentage points pretty static now for 6 months on a week over week over week over basis they just seem to stay the same. I would have expected to see a drop off already due to flu season. If we are going to see a drop off, then I haven’t seen that yet as of the first week of March. So I think demand has stayed steady and I expect it to stay steady going forward. So very little flu impact from what I can tell.

So historically if there has been a flu impact the orders have slowed kind of by this time in the calendar year?

Yes, usually they start to fall off by the end of February.

Okay. Perm grew real nicely, what kind of growth rate range, not a specific guidance thing or something like that, but how should we think about that going forward and I know it’s a small slice of the business, but that was a nice growth rate.

Yes, I don’t plan on 38% every quarter. I do expect that we will be able to grow it. I am hoping that we will be able to grow it at double-digits for the whole year. And my goal is to get that business significantly larger than it is. It has the ability to have a decent contribution. It’s just very small as you mentioned. So, I would like it to be a bigger part of our overall business. And right now, we are seeing some – we have a new leadership in there. They have done a good job. The team has done a good job and we see some good demand there. So, we expect double-digit growth this year.

Okay, I will ask one more question and I will get back in the queue. Are there any anticipated adjustments in 1Q and I apologize if you mentioned this, I probably didn’t jot it down, acquisition and integration or restructuring cost that we can know about for modeling?

There maybe some small costs coming through in Q1, but we really do expect it to taper off quite a bit. I would expect the acquisition integration cost line to be of people about $500,000 in that ballpark at most. So, it’s hard to say specifically, but most of the actions as I said were either had already been occurred late in the fourth quarter or have occurred in early 2015. So, we really do expect this to taper off quickly.

Okay, thank you. I will get back in the queue.

And on the headcount, it’s hard for me to say, but it’s probably up 25%, 30% year-over-year overall when you add it all up together.

Thank you.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Mr. Randy Reece of Avondale Partners. Your line is open.

Good morning. When you look at your fourth quarter revenue result versus the guidance range, what were the primary variances versus your assumptions that you used to assemble guidance for the fourth quarter?

Well, I think we are within the guidance. Yes, we are within our range and towards the lower end I agree, but we are in the range. I don’t think this is – I am taking a look now and I don’t believe we have really fallen off drastically from the guidance range. The only business that when you look at relative to what we were hoping for I think would be physician staffing has continued to perform a little bit weaker than expected.

The other one I would talk about is only because it’s newer to us we bought MSN at the end of June. So, we have only had it for two quarters. It’s a little bit less predictable on a branch basis to predict than it is the travel business. So, I think we are very good at forecasting the travel and we are still kind of getting our arms around the branches, which have more of a day and weekly kind of trend to them, not a monthly trend like travel nursing does. So, I think we probably didn’t quite get as much out of the branches as we expected. That’s a little bit hard to predict.

Business, what – how does their revenue mix differ from the rest of Cross Country?

Well, it’s all integrated now. Our branches are integrated with their branches. So, our old branches plus the Allied Health Group acquisition we made, plus the MSN branches are all integrated together. Now, we don’t see any revenue from any entity other than a combined branch entity today, but they are predominantly local per diem, local contract nursing and local allied business.

Did the allied business just the market demand trends through ‘14, did allied continue to strengthen as much as it looked like it had through the first nine months of the year?

Yes, allied was still pretty good, both travel allied and local allied was still pretty good in Q4. Rehab in particular was up 21%. IRL was up about 33% year-over-year. So, we saw some good trends in certain sectors or segments within allied.

Alright, very good. Thank you.

Thank you. We have another question from Mr. Tobey Summer of SunTrust. Your line is open.

Thanks. That was quick. How is – any turnover at the branch level, I am thinking of the MSN properties, but like you said you have integrated them, so maybe I will just make the comment more broadly, because I was curious about you said maybe it’s a little bit more difficult to predict, wondering what the root causes maybe?

Yes, I mean, it’s not because of turnover, although turnover in branches is always a little bit higher than in the centralized operations that it’s just the nature of a distributed branch operations. I don’t think that’s the case. I think it’s just that branches are new to us and a lot of work in branches is done with 2 to 3 days notice and it’s just a little bit harder to predict out a whole quarter as to what’s going on. But we were within our range of revenue in the fourth quarter and I don’t think we are that far off on any of the segments to be honest with you. As Bill said, physician tends to be more of a drag than anything else in our business today. So, we have little bit higher turnover, but nothing that’s worrisome and nothing to do in particular with the acquisition or integration. It’s just a little bit higher turnover in the branches to begin with, but it’s well in line with what my expectations were.

Okay. And I just want to make sure I cut this way, when do you think the changes that you’ve made in physician staffing, maybe – may help you achieve growth?

Yes, not soon enough, but I was up there again a few weeks ago and I am actually very pleased with what’s going on. I am not pleased with the numbers, but I am pleased with what’s going on. We are bringing in more physicians more providers as we call them than we ever have before. And we have a lot more submittals – submittal activity than we have had in the past as well. That’s all good, because future growth is going to come from better activity and so we are seeing the better activity, the model seems to be working. It just takes a little while to manifest itself into revenue growth. So, I would expect to see I am hoping for some stability in Q2 year-over-year revenue growth. I would like to see it in Q3 maybe will be year-over-year breakeven in Q3 and maybe some growth in Q4. I would like to see growth in the second half though.

Okay. And last question for me, it relates to your capital structure, any plans to make the structure more efficient, are there any kind of time constraints as to when that may limit your flexibility? Thanks.

Yes. I mean, I will make a comment then I will turn it over to Bill. We really can’t do anything on the subordinated debt in the convertible loan until after the end of June. Well, we can’t do anything on the convertible loan anyway. So, well we can’t do anything on the other $30 million term loan until the end of June. We will talk to our Board at the board meeting next week as well as in May about our capital structure. We know that some of our debt is a little higher than we would like it to be and we are much better performing company that when we were when we took that debt on. So, we believe there is a very good chance of getting more favorable terms going forward. So, I will turn over to Bill and he could talk about some of the things we talked about.

Yes, I think you just said it perfectly. I think it’s something we are going to be planning to do in 2015 is taking a look at our capital structure. I think we all agree the interest rates are higher than we would like to see. We think that they were competitive rates where we were at the time, but nevertheless, it’s something that, that is something we are keeping a close eye on and we will be looking at as we go into 2015.

And we would like to build if we do that, we would like to build in some flexibility and scalability so that we have the option to do acquisitions if they come available and we find that’s a strategic and a good deal financially. So, we are looking at that and we are talking to the Board and we will address it as we get closer to making a decision.

Thanks. I guess I fibbed. One last question, I am curious about your perspective on the Supreme Court ruling on subsidies and healthcare reform and maybe what you are hearing from customers just so that we can over the next several months interpret what different outcomes could mean for your business and your customers? Thanks.

Yes. I have to say a couple of months ago, I was a lot less worried about it, but now all the hype since the hearing has actually started or the arguments have actually started with the Supreme Court, now there is all this talk that maybe this will knock 7 million people out of the healthcare system. That’s really true, knocking 7 million people, I mean, I guess 11.4 million people now have signed up a 12% increase over last year, knocking out three quarters of them would be a problem. No doubt about it. My customers do not believe that’s what’s going to happen. Most of my customers believe that Supreme Court is going to rule in favor of the government and the subsidies continuing, but I don’t know what information they have to do that. That’s what they believe is going to happen. They probably have more people in tune with what’s happening in DC than I do. So, I wasn’t that worried about a couple of months ago, because I don’t think it will knock that many people out. Even if some of the subsidies go away, there is still the tax penalty and there is still the employer mandate that I think will keep people in the system anyway, but I think I am leaning towards what my customers are saying, which is I am hoping that it is ruled in favor of the government and that we don’t cut off the subsidies.

Thank you very much.

Thank you. At this time, we don’t have any questions on queue.

Okay, great. Well, thank you everyone. I appreciate you joining us this morning. I look forward to updating you with our first quarter results in May. Thank you.