Derrek Gafford
Analyst · Baird. Please go ahead
Yes. Thanks for the question Mark. So let's break it down as you suggest that talks short-term and longer term here. Let's start with the short-term, just taking a look at where we stand, third quarter and going into the fourth quarter. So in the third quarter SG&A was down 31%, about 3 points of that -- 3 and 4 points were some government subsidies, so excluding that we collect 28%, which is still higher than what our revenue decline was. Generally, that's not our intent is to have SG&A go down at that level. So, as we are looking into the fourth quarter, the guidance that we basically prepared is for SG&A to be down about 20%, which if you take a look at where our trends are headed, as we go into October, at least for our staffing businesses, we're down in the teens. So it's directionally aligned with where the revenue is headed. It's an important consideration for us, because we want to continue to be aggressive on our cost discipline but at the same time, as things start to recover and we build some momentum, we've got gross profit dollars here to look out for. And that's really all about taking really good care of the customers that we got, we don't want to lose any of those. And as more volume comes in, obviously, we have less people to spread around and take care of that as well as business development opportunities, but still a healthy decline in SG&A expense and you could probably trend that out into the first quarter, just based on your own revenue assumptions. As we get around to the second quarter, of course, we're going to anniversary a big amount of the fall off that we had from a revenue perspective. And then we did our cost cuts, kind of we didn't space them out of the year, we went pretty heavy right up front. So the majority of them, not all of them started coming in April. So those would be a few things that I would just suggest as you take a look going forward into 2021. And then also be mindful that we did have some one-time expenses in 2020, which we've excluded from our adjusted EBITDA and adjusted net income calculations, which you can refer to. Now to the broader question that you're asking, hey, look, tell me more about this PeopleReady piece and what this could really look like. Overall, for the company, we've cut over $100 million of SG&A this year. About I'd say a quarter of that is variable expenses just going to come on with revenue, bonuses, bad debt stays at the same percentage, but you got more revenue, dollars, things of that nature. There's another 25%, the cost is just not sustainable where we made salary cuts, or we didn't -- we cut the matches to the retirement programs and so forth. That leaves about another half of the cost that we cut on the table to potentially keep out permanently. And so when we're talking about PeopleReady, it's about a mixture of what we can keep off the table and from coming back on, it's also -- there is opportunity that we think to further reduce the cost. When I talk about employee attrition, it's a bit of a message to our employees. We're not planning on having a big layoff of any sort. And so what we need to do in 2021, is to do a variety of testing. Because how this will work is, as you know, Mark within a metro market, we might have 8, 10,12 branches, with three, 3.5 people in each branch versus another staffing company that might just have one really big branch. So to harness the savings that we need to do here, we need to repurpose some more job roles and centralize some of those work activities some nationally and some locally and we gain some efficiencies by doing that, alongside also additional, efficiencies we can get with technology. And then, as we close or consolidate branches, we also have to repurpose a lot of jobs that were customer facing. We have some branch managers that are going to be much better in an operational setting, maybe around recruiting or running something that centralized we have some that are more -- they just have more business development, athleticism, they're great in front of clients. We need to restructure those to face clients. All the while we have a company that is built up an understanding of how to do business built around branches, we have systems that are based around that, standard operating processes that are based around that. And there's a lot of deep seated culture around that. So it's not to say we can't do the change, we can absolutely do it. But as we go through we need to test it in pieces because what we have to make sure is that the clients are not impacted at all while we do this change. It's very doable, but we need to do some testing and we need to be thoughtful about it and what we're saying here is in 2021 this broader repurposing of jobs and doing centralization on a larger scale don't expect a ton of that from us in 2021, drop to the bottom line, we'll be experimenting. But we'll keep you apprised along the way. We'll talk to you about it, how it's going, where we're investing, where we're getting some savings what we're seeing ahead, we're just going to need some time in 2021 to vet that out.