Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Kelly Services Second Quarter Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to our first speaker today, Scott Thomas, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good morning, and welcome to Kelly's Second Quarter Conference Call. With me today are Kelly's President and Chief Executive Officer, Peter Quigley; and our Chief Financial Officer, Troy Anderson. Before we begin, I'll remind you that the comments made during today's call, including the Q&A session, may include forward- looking statements about our expectations for future performance. Actual results could differ materially from those suggested by our comments. We do not assume any obligation to update the statements made on this call. Please refer to our SEC filings for a description of the risk factors that could influence the company's actual future performance. In addition, we'll discuss certain data on a reported and on an adjusted basis. Discussion of items on an adjusted basis are non-GAAP financial measures designed to give insight into certain trends in our operations. For more information regarding non-GAAP measures and other required disclosures, please refer to our earnings press release, presentation and once filed, Form 10-Q, all of which can be accessed through our Investor Relations website at ir.kellyservices.com. With that, I'll turn the call over to Kelly's President and Chief Executive Officer, Peter Quigley.

Thank you, Scott, and good morning, everyone. Before I share my reflections on our second quarter results, I'll discuss the CEO transition update that we announced earlier this morning. Following a rigorous search process with the full engagement of Kelly's Board of Directors, including myself, Chris Layden has been selected to serve as the next President and CEO of Kelly. Chris will formally join Kelly and step into the role on September 2. I will remain with the company as a strategic adviser to Chris and the Board to ensure a smooth transition. Chris is a dynamic industry leader with extensive experience leading organizations through transformations to advance go-to-market initiatives and accelerate profitable growth. He joins Kelly from workforce solutions provider, Prolink, where he served as Chief Operating Officer and oversaw a period of rapid growth. Prior to Prolink, Chris spent nearly 2 decades at ManpowerGroup, where he served in a range of senior roles spanning general management, regional leadership, corporate strategy and sales. After many conversations with Chris, it was clear that his skills and experience are uniquely suited for this moment in Kelly's strategic evolution. He brings a track record of executing enterprise scale transformations and driving commercial excellence as well as visionary leadership that aligns well with our commitment to accelerate profitable growth and value creation. Under Chris' leadership, I'm confident that Kelly will build upon the strong foundation we've established and reach new heights of profitability and growth. I look forward to formally welcoming him to Kelly when he joins us next month and introducing him to our talent, customers and shareholders. With that, let's review the highlights from our second quarter earnings. In the second quarter, we saw the benefits of our focus on more resilient markets to drive growth, with each business unit delivering…

Thank you, Peter, and good morning, everybody. We're pleased with our performance in the first half of the year given the evolving macro environment and are encouraged by the adaptability and resiliency of our teams that we're seeing across our business. As referenced last quarter, we made changes to our operating model for 2025, which reduced our reportable segments from 4 to 3: Enterprise Talent Management, or ETM; Science engineering and Technology, or SET; and Education. We realigned certain customers and businesses as part of these changes. The 2024 results of ETM and SET have been recast accordingly. Please refer to our prepared remarks from the first quarter and our 10-Q for further details. As a reminder, our reported results for 2025 include MRP and its portfolio of businesses and Children's Therapy Center, while our 2024 results only include them from their acquisition dates. To provide greater visibility into the underlying trends in our operating results, I'll discuss year-over-year changes on a reported and organic basis, with the organic information excluding these items. MRP will be fully in our year-over-year comparisons beginning in the third quarter. Revenue for the second quarter of 2025 totaled $1.1 billion, an increase of 4.2% versus Q2 last year. We saw a number of positive trends across the business during the quarter. However, we also experienced a larger-than-anticipated negative impact from the evolving macro environment. On an organic basis, year-over-year revenue was down 3.3%, including a 1.3% negative impact from reduced demand for federal contractors in the SET and ETM segments, and a 3.5% impact from a few large customers within ETM who materially decreased demand in conjunction with internal cost-reduction initiatives. We expect the full impact of these actions to be realized by the end of the third quarter. For Q2 organic revenue by…

Thanks for those insights, Troy. As we move forward into the second half of the year, I remain confident in Kelly's ability to navigate this dynamic macroeconomic environment. Building on the meaningful progress we made in the first half, the company will continue to execute on its priorities. As employers' needs continue to evolve, we'll quickly adapt alongside them. Whether driven by macroeconomic shifts or advancements in AI, we stand ready to provide tailored workforce solutions that will enable them to maintain a competitive edge. From staffing and outcome-based solutions to manage service provider and recruitment process outsourcing, our differentiated portfolio of solutions leads the market. This is how we've continued to capture market share, and why Everest Group named Kelly both a leader and star performer in each of its contingent talent and strategic solutions Peak Matrix, marking the first time a company has achieved this feat. We'll further refine our go-to-market approach within our realigned SET and ETM businesses, to ensure that our teams, processes and technologies are optimized to enhance efficiency and effectiveness, while making it easier for both employers and talent to engage with Kelly. And we'll continue to align resources with demand, leveraging our operational discipline to respond quickly to changing trends and maintaining our capacity to capture growth in more resilient markets. Executing on these priorities and remaining agile in the face of persistent change will enable Kelly to deliver on the commitments we outlined at the start of the year. And with greater scale in our chosen specialties, a streamlined operating model and enhanced profitability, the foundation is set for the next generation of leadership to take Kelly into a new phase of its strategic evolution. As I prepare to conclude my nearly 23-year career here, I'm grateful to each member of Team Kelly for their contributions on our journey to realize our collective vision for this great company. Their resilience, agility and unwavering commitment to our noble purpose are the driving forces that continue to propel Kelly forward in pursuit of profitable growth. As the team moves forward together with Chris at the helm, I'm confident in their capacity to unleash Kelly's full potential and create long-term value for all of the company's stakeholders. Operator, you can now open the call to questions.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Joe Gomes of NOBLE Capital.

So you touched on it briefly. I missed a part of the business, but I wanted to try and see if we get a little more color kind of how the quarter trended on a monthly basis or sequentially. Are we seeing any improvement throughout the quarter? Or was it more very lumpy throughout the quarter overall for the business?

Joe, this is Troy. Thanks for the question. You have to remember, our business portfolio is not as monthly sensitive as maybe some of the other players in the space. With our Education business, which has a distinct seasonality associated with the summer holiday -- the summer break from school to school season. Our outcome-based businesses tend to be more stable. Really, the ETM staffing business, which is only about 25% of our revenue, is where you see more of that monthly up and down fluctuation. We did see a little bit of incremental pressure there as the quarter progressed. That's one of the areas that -- or the primary area where we saw a little bit more macro impact beyond the large customer impact that we called out. As we're looking at July, we've seen some more stability there, and we feel good about the expectation we set overall. For the quarter, if you look at Q2 relative to our Q3 outlook and you make the adjustment for government and the large customers, we're about the same, roughly around 1.5 points at the midpoint of expected growth, which is roughly where we were for Q2 when you take out the government and large customer impact we called out.

Okay. And kind of going back to these large customers, which I'm assuming was somewhat unanticipated. I guess the question is, how do you kind of -- or what steps do you guys take or are taking because as quickly as that switch has gotten thrown off, they could get thrown back on. So I'm assuming you're not wanting to cut too far, too fast, but it's a challenge. I'm sure is trying to figure out how far that is without carrying that cost when you don't know how quickly that switch can get back on. So kind of maybe just give us a little color, how is the thought process and how dealing with customers in an environment like this that are moving rapidly one way or the other.

Joe, it's Peter. Yes, as you noted, this is a feature of working with really large global enterprise-sized customers. They can flip that switch on and off very quickly. And in this case, due to the macroeconomic conditions, they responded, as you said, in unanticipated way. But we are in a much better position than we have been historically to both flex with the decrease in demand, but also to ramp up. We're more streamlined in our operations, and we're very confident that when -- whether it's the specific customers that had an impact in Q2 or just overall demand when it returns to more normalized levels, we're confident we can quickly ramp up to respond to that.

And yes, Joe, I'll just add, this is Troy. The one -- there's 3 specific customers, and we understand we can't just pick and choose what we call out. There's 3 specific, one we highlighted in the contact center space. That is -- that will end in the third quarter. Still an important relationship from a customer perspective, and we'll look for other ways to service that customer. But that particular element will be completed in the third quarter. The other 2 are just material reductions in demand as they're addressing their business needs given their macro exposure.

Okay. And then one more for me, if I may, on the guidance. So I went back and looked in the second quarter -- or excuse me, in the first quarter, your guidance for the second quarter, you're pretty confident in that. And obviously, if we look at the numbers that you provided and the numbers that actually were derived, we're off from those. And just given this environment, I guess the question is how confident are you in the third quarter guided numbers?

Look, we're using the best available information at any given point in time to provide expectations to the investment community and even setting our own expectations, how we manage the business internally, to Peter's comments earlier. So we feel confident based on the information we have as we -- as I commented in the first question you asked, we see some stabilization. We have good visibility into our pipelines and many elements of our business. The macro -- keep in mind, back in May, we were 30 days out from Liberation Day. We were 90 days out from DOGE initiating actions. I mean there's quite a few moving pieces that are not things that we directly control, not that we control everything inside how we operate. But overall, I think we all see a little bit more stabilization, and we have a little bit better predictability in terms of what we see and how we're executing.

Our next question comes from Kartik Mehta of Northcoast Research.

Peter, first of all, it's been a pleasure working with you. Thank you for everything. And Troy, I wanted to go to your third quarter guidance. It seems EBITDA margin expansion, even though you're going to have a revenue decline, is very positive, and you also said that for fourth quarter. I'm wondering what are the drivers to that? Is that just you're taking cost out? Or is it that you're anticipating just a higher margin revenue to grow -- continue to grow faster?

It's both. And we referenced in the prepared remarks about taking decisive actions. We came into the year, we realigned the 2 segments, P&I and OCG into the ETM segment. We've been with the passing of the earnout period with the MRP acquisition, we had been spent that time planning for the integration efforts and now are rapidly executing on integration efforts. So those are all driving efficiencies. We've continued looking at all of our cost structure, driving efficiencies throughout leveraging AI, leveraging technology. We've talked about with the MRP integration and enhancing our moving toward a modernized technology stack initially with the SET business unit, but that has benefits to other functions. So a number of different actions across the business, really continuing the efforts that the company has been executing against for the last several years, while also improving our go-to-market, focusing more on the higher value specialties, driving growth in the areas where we can generate higher margin. We have a declining -- lessening decline in the SET segment, which is higher value. Education, we'll come back with a bit stronger growth in the back half of the year than the front half of the year, and we continue seeing growth in the outcome-based business within ETM, which is a higher-margin business. So it's a mix of all factors, but frankly, purposeful and intentional.

And then just from an industry standpoint, what are you seeing in terms of price competition? Especially if you look at it as each individual business, I'm wondering if any one of them is seeing pricing pressure or what the market is currently like?

Yes. Generally speaking, I'd say we're stable. The one area we do see a little bit of pressure is more in the light industrial commercial space. We are seeing some aggressiveness in the market as different players are trying to navigate the sustained demand challenges there. But otherwise, education is stable. We see actually some lift in a number of the areas within SET. So we feel good about our positioning and our offerings. And again, to your first question, driving towards higher value and higher margin opportunities in the market.

Our next question comes from Kevin Steinke of Barrington Research Associates.

I wanted to start off by asking -- again following up on your comments there just now on SET. You mentioned in your prepared remarks that excluding the government impact, you think you're outperforming the market. Can you just add a little bit more color on that statement about the outperformance and kind of the evidence you're seeing to support that?

Sure. Good question. And so when we parse out the public competitors' information and we get a like-for-like view relative to our SET business, as close as we can at least, geography and offerings mix, again, just based on public disclosures, we see that we are consistently 1 point to 2 points better than their performance in aggregate. Again, so there's some puts and takes across there. And that's been a fairly consistent trend really over the last 2 years or so, 18 months to 24 months.

Kevin, we also take a look at industry sources like staffing industry analysts who analyze both public and private companies. Troy's comments reflect our ability to look at public company disclosures, but we also refer to industry indices to gauge our performance versus the market.

Okay. Great. And you mentioned there are some ranks in the telecom and engineering areas within SET. Can you just elaborate on what you're seeing there currently?

We're well positioned in the market. We're a top player with the scale that we've built through the MRP acquisition and organically, so we're just continuing -- and we've now refined that go-to-market strategy with the SET reorganization that we spoke about now with -- post the earn-out from MRP acquisition and realigning the 5 distinct verticals within SET. And so we're just seeing good traction in the market, and we have a really strong existing customer base, and we continue to identify new opportunities as well. So it's no one specific new contract or anything like that, I think it's more just a continued evolution of that business and are more deeply penetrating the opportunities in the marketplace.

And Kevin, we do think -- and specifically, you referenced engineering and telecom, we do think that the big beautiful bill CapEx, tax advantages could boost some R&D investments, in particular, those areas.

Okay. Understood. That's helpful. Going back to the third quarter guidance, the underlying revenue growth of 1% to 3% excluding the government impact. Can you just kind of walk us through how you get to that underlying revenue growth number?

So yes, to be clear, the headline of down 5 to 7, there's about 8 points of impact between government and the 3 discrete customers we referenced, which is elevated relative to Q2. Q2, it was about 1.4 on government and about 3.5 on the customer. So 5 aggregate goes up to 8. That's peak. So that will be a full impact in the third quarter. And it's roughly evenly across government and each of the 3 customers, that relative impact. So when you back that out, that gets you the 1% to 3%. When you now parse out, well, where does that come from? Education will continue to grow likely at an elevated pace relative to what we saw in the first half of the year. SET has been on the lessening decline as we commented on a favorable trend in the last few quarters, and we expect to see some continued improvement there. And then some puts and takes within ETM between talent solutions and staffing, maybe some stabilization in staffing, but not improvement -- but some improvement in Talent Solutions as we land some of the -- or implement some of the new wins that we've had in the MSP and RPO space.

All right. That's helpful. Appreciate that. And you mentioned there expecting stronger growth in Education in the second half of the year. What leads you to believe that, that will be the case?

Well, it's a very predictable business. It's -- the school year starts in, in some cases, July, but August, September, at the latest. And the new business cycle -- the renewal and new business cycle largely occurs in the first half of the year and is complete. Usually by May, June, we did have some lingering decisions given some of the broader macro environment, but no real lost or funding concerns in that space. So as we go into the back half of the year, we have a high degree of certainty of what our book of business looks like. Our fill rates are excellent. We sustain them in the accounts where we're mature and we ramp them in the newer accounts and up to 90-plus percent in most cases. And so it's -- at this stage, we have very good line of sight into what the back half of the year looks like.

Okay. Good. And then lastly, just -- I think you mentioned that the integration and realignment costs will be coming down. Is that correct? And I think there were $6 million in the second quarter. Just trying to think about run rate of costs over the next couple of quarters in the second half year.

Yes. Clarification. Maybe my comments were not as clear as I was hoping. The -- we had $11 million in Q1 and that decreased to $6 million in Q2, and that's what we expect the run rate for the next few quarters given the time line of the execution and implementation work that we're doing.

Okay. I probably didn't hear that correctly. I appreciate the clarification. And Peter, let me add my congratulations and best wishes to you.

Thank you, Kevin. Appreciate it.

Our next question comes from Marc Riddick of Sidoti.

I wanted to echo similar sentiments, congratulations, and certainly, it's been a pleasure working with you. I was sort of curious as to -- most of my questions have already been answered, but I was sort of curious as to how we should be thinking about cash usage and prioritization. And then maybe as an offshoot of that, are there any thoughts as to sort of maybe what you're seeing currently or how you're viewing potential acquisition pipeline or maybe what you're seeing out there in valuations in the space?

Yes, sure. Good questions. The -- from a usage perspective, again, we had a nice quarter from a cash flow perspective, both seasonally strong as well as some incremental benefits from timing of collections and also the final settlement on the EMEA sale that occurred at the beginning of last year. So that -- as we indicated in our -- in the last quarter, our preference or at least our near-term priority given the macro backdrop was more focused on debt paydown and reducing interest expense. And so that all the extra cash went towards that this quarter. We continue to actively explore acquisition opportunities. We have a team that's focused on that. We have an active pipeline. We have many different sources of opportunities for that pipeline. We've kick the tires on a few different things. At this point, more on the smaller scale tuck-in type assets, but nothing pop, nothing to announce at this juncture, but that's been an important part of our model and will continue to be as we've now accumulated scale in a number of areas through acquisition and organically. We have the opportunity to be a bit more selective and really more gap fill or look for adjacencies versus really trying to build scale, although we certainly wouldn't turn down a good opportunity to do that. So that's really how we're thinking about it, how we're focused on it at this juncture.

That's very helpful. And then I might have missed this, but do we -- where did we end on the share repurchase authorization at the end of the quarter?

So we didn't execute any additional share repurchases in the quarter. So we still have the $40 million remaining on the authorization. And again, that doesn't expire until December of '26. So we have plenty of time to execute against that as we navigate through the macro landscape. Again, that's an option by the way, from a capital allocation perspective. It's not a guarantee, but it's certainly one of the paths we could deploy capital to be opportunistic and generate value creation for shareholders.

[Operator Instructions] I am showing no further questions at this time. I would now like to turn it back to the President and CEO, Peter Quigley, for closing remarks.

Thank you, Amber. I think we're good for the call. So we can end the call. Thank you very much.

Thank you, everyone.

Thank you for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect.