Kate Duchene
Analyst · JPMorgan. Please proceed
Thank you, Alice. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to RGP's first conference call in fiscal '20. I'll start by welcoming Jenn to the call and to her role as our Interim Chief Financial Officer. I am very pleased to be working directly with Jenn, and I'm impressed with the impact she has made in our accounting and finance group. She contributed significantly to the strategic actions we took this quarter, and while Jenn joined RGP in April, it does feel like she's been with us far longer, given her insights, decisiveness, judgment and technical knowledge. Jenn, thank you for your outstanding contributions thus far. We expect to make the Chief Financial Officer decision permanent by the end of the calendar year. Next, I'll turn to briefly discuss our financial performance in the first quarter, given the significant activities we've completed in the past 90 days. These include an acquisition, a divestiture and an office closure. Our total revenues for the first quarter of fiscal '20 were $172.2 million. This represents a 3.6% decline over Q1 of fiscal '19, primarily because of a continued slowdown in Europe. The expected decline in our technical accounting revenue in North America, given project completion, and some slowing of client decision-making related to revenue opportunities in our largest markets. As we pivot to higher level project and advisory work, we are also experiencing longer sales cycles. Tim will provide more color on the actions we're taking to strengthen pipeline and momentum in Q2 and the balance of the fiscal year. The revenue bright spot this quarter is Asia Pacific, a region that delivered strong growth of 11.8%, 13% constant currency. This growth is led by Japan, India and Singapore, which we continue to see as expanding markets. The second bright spot in our financial performance this quarter is gross margin. We achieved gross margin of 39.2%, up from 38.2% in the quarter a year ago. This improvement is largely attributable to improved bill pay ratios, as Jenn will discuss later in the call. We're also increasingly utilizing the seller-doer leaders within our Advisory and Project Services team throughout the sales cycle, which will positively impact our results moving forward. In addition, as we have shared previously, we're building more advisory and strategic work in our client base, which improve the halo effect in positioning and pricing. With respect to SG&A performance in the quarter, I want to provide further details, so you better understand some of the strategic moves we have made in the past 90 days to strengthen the business in the mid- to longer-term. While we delivered results within the estimate we provided during the previous earnings call, specifically $57 million. This SG&A number includes approximately $2.3 million of one-time expense tied to two notable activities. First, we incurred one-time expenses related to the divestiture of the Nordics business and the closure of the Belgium practice. This decision followed an in-depth critical review of our geographic footprint and the number of strategic clients we serve in various markets. The practices we exited were not directly aligned to strategic clients and have been a drain on shareholder return for several years. We are bearing costs now to enhance our financial performance in the mid- and longer-term. In fiscal '19, Sweden and Belgium practice resulted in negative operating profit of $0.5 million. The other notable activity in Q1, which increased our SG&A spend was the completion of the acquisition of Veracity Consulting Group. To remind everyone, Veracity is an advisory and consulting business based in Richmond, Virginia, with approximately 110 employees. This consulting firm allows us to dive deeper and more broadly in the digital innovation space, especially in the health care ecosystem. The healthcare industry is right for transformation and has enormous opportunity for improvement through digital innovation. Veracity offers broad capabilities spanning strategy and roadmap, design and brand and client and employee experience. They also bring deep technical expertise and best-in-class technology partnerships, including ServiceNow, SiteCore, Akumina and MuleSoft. This is an important acquisition for the future of RGP as we expand our mix of services and offer additional advisory level digital and technology transformation services. Following the close of this acquisition and working closely with RGP's digital innovation function, we have implemented a 100-day plan to build pipeline and opportunity across the two enterprises. We are particularly focused in building opportunity in our top health care clients, who have significant project interest and budget dedicated to digital transformation as well as a targeted group of our SCP clients with interest in this space. As I outlined on our last earnings call, our digital innovation group is also focused on building products to be delivered within our finance transformation, project management and risk and compliance services. This team has nine products in development, both internally and externally focused, which include an internal audit automation tool, a digital-light project management framework and a tax automation product. This team will be commercializing two to three products throughout the balance of this fiscal year. We remain committed to enhancing our services delivery through digital innovation to drive better outcomes in our client projects with speed and value. The third area of focus for our digital innovation team is the build of our digital engagement platform or human cloud product, which is one of the products mentioned above. I'm very pleased to report that this week, we launched the digital match feature internally across North America. Our talent management group will now be using the product to assist them in improving alignment between supply and demand, closing opportunities with greater efficiency and speed and testing the algorithm to ensure we are getting the outcomes we desire before taking the platform to the external market. The team behind this product is led by Steve DelVecchia, who joined RGP from a small digital disruptor, which he founded in 2010, Adaptive Professional Solutions. Steve and his team just returned from the collaboration in the Gig Economy Conference in San Diego, which was hosted by staffing industry analysts and they are very excited about our product positioning and the opportunity ahead. A main differentiator for RGP's product is our focus on employees, not independent contractors. I'll share more in a minute about why we think that matters. The takeaway right now is that our vision is clear, the product strategy is sound and our timeline is credible. Let me close my remarks by addressing two macro trends that support our business model and can underpin further growth as we move through fiscal '20 and beyond. First, AB5, which is the newly enacted independent contractor law in California. It became law on September 18, 2019. AB5 imposes significant additional hurdles and risk on companies who engage with independent contractors directly for project work. In California, as many of you know, misclassification of independent contractors carries with it step civil and statutory penalties that can entitle contractors to collect various wages and benefits, while also exposing companies to scrutiny by taxing authorities. In most instances, AB5 softens the standard by which companies are subjected to these risks. It is a law intended to challenge directly the Gig workforce operating outside the employer-employee relationship. Although as written, it has even broader impact. We believe this regulatory change, which is likely to be followed by other states, offers expansion opportunities for RGP because we run a traditional employment model, with the important and desirable gig features. Specifically, we provide our consultants a curated employment experience with a full suite of associated benefits, and at the same time, flexibility, transparency and choice of project work offered with a gig orientation. Thus, RGP's model does not create risk for our client base as we operate fully as the consultants' employer. We believe this is an important differentiator. Second, there is continued research and survey data around the future of work trends, which are perfectly aligned with RGP's client service and talent platform. As I've said before, clients want to engage talent in more agile ways and talent wants to work in more flexible ways. Randstad Sourceright issued results of a new survey last week stating that 25% of global enterprises and mid-sized companies are shifting permanent roles to contingent positions this year to remain agile. The executives responding to the survey, said that these workers are having the same, if not more, impact upon the company's talent strategies. On the supply side of the equation more than 55% of working professionals indicate that they are more open to non-traditional work arrangements than they have been in the past. This new research continues to build on the change that is happening in the professional services landscape toward new approaches to total talent management and is validated through our own experience and interfacing with our most important clients. Again RGP's platform fits perfectly into the new realities surrounding the future of work. I'll now turn the call to Tim for additional color on operations and priority initiatives and trends in Q2.