Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the First Quarter 2022 Conference Call for LifeWorks Incorporated. Please note that this conference call will contain forward-looking statements, which reflect management's current beliefs and expectations regarding corporation's future growth and results of operations. Actual results could differ materially from these anticipated. I would now like to turn the meeting over to Mr. Stephen Liptrap, President and Chief Executive Officer of LifeWorks Incorporated. Please go ahead, Mr. Liptrap.

Thank you, Paul. Good morning, and thank you for joining us. On the call with me today is Grier Colter, our Chief Financial Officer; and I've invited our new Board Chair, Bob Courteau, to sit in with us since he's in the office for AGM later today. Welcome Bob. And Bob will be available later in the call if anyone has a question for him. Earlier this morning, we released LifeWorks' financial results for the first quarter of 2022. Later this morning, at 10.30, we will be holding our virtual Annual General Meeting. Today, I'll kick things off by reviewing our results and the highlights in the first quarter and talk about those in the context of lockdowns, followed by a few brief comments on our strategic plan. I'll then turn it over to Grier to cover our Q1 financials in more detail. As we have seen in the earlier quarters of this pandemic, hard lockdowns have an impact on our fee-for-service businesses as most of these are delivered in person at a client-site. Good examples are training business where clients want us to talk to their employees on-site or our trauma business where we help employees who may have been part of a robbery or other significant event. The shutdown of these businesses impacted our growth temporarily in the quarter, as it did in Q1 and Q2 of 2020. However, these will come back as we start to open up in Q2 and we see being back to normal for Q3 and Q4. On the other side, our core mental health well-being, EFAP, and absence management businesses continued to perform well, and we continued to grow our market share. Our mental health and well-being businesses, traditional EFAP plus grew at over 5% in the quarter. And our absence management…

Thanks, Stephen, and good morning. We made very good progress in Q1 as it relates to our pricing initiative, operational improvements and performance in our most strategic service lines. We are very pleased with our margin improvement in Q1 to 18.7%, as we continue on our path to higher and more traditional margin levels. Our overall earnings quality improved in Q1 due to the completion of our Workday ERP project in Q4 2021 and we saw lower year-over-year CapEx in the quarter, resulting from the completion of our GTA office consolidation project in Q4 of 2021. As we announced last quarter, we have combined our HPS and IHS businesses into a single line of business and we have expanded the service line disclosure within that business to provide better transparency. As Stephen touched, on we saw solid growth in our core mental health and well-being services at 5.1%, and I would think of this as our core recurring E&P and revenue driven from customers that are on the enhanced well-being platform. We have separately disclosed fee for service revenue, representing non-recurring service lines which are impacted by lockdowns such as training and trauma, which declined 29% year-over-year. We expect that our fee-for-service revenue will improve as economies continue to open up, and this will be a factor and getting back to normal growth rates in the mid to high single digits. Coming off a year of very strong growth in our Administrative Solutions business which grew at over 6% on a constant currency organic basis in 2021, this business slowed in the first quarter to 0.2%. Recall that this business is concentrated on the mid-to-large end of the market and it is not unusual for this business to have somewhat lumpy revenue patterns, which we are seeing in Q1. But…

Thanks, Grier for your comments. Paul, do you want to go ahead and open the lines for questions?

[Operator Instructions] Thank you. So the first question is from Etienne Ricard from BMO Capital Markets. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

So, on - first on pricing, if I heard you correctly, you expect to realize $7 to $8 million in higher pricing for your mental health and well-being business this year and by the end of this year a run rate of $15 million. So in other words, what percentage of your contracts do you expect to have renewed at a higher pricing by the end of this year?

Stephen here, I'll start and then Grier can add some comments. I think at a really high level what we wanted to do was take a very surgical approach to that. So, we actually went client by client, we took a look at utilization, we took a look at ROI, we took a look at returns and we took a look at pricing of those contracts. And then, we essentially reached out to those clients a pilot basis and then, as I mentioned, we're moving implementation. We're into it right now, and really went back to them and talked about ROI for them and the fact that we needed to invest more in our counselors, et cetera. As a result, we've got phenomenal feedback. We had a lot of really, really good comments coming back from clients. I think they very much appreciated what we're doing and that's what gives us confidence on 100 basis points kind of Q3, 150 basis points in Q4. But we have gone through all of our contracts and some of them were increasing larger amounts and some of them smaller and some were already at a reasonable rate. So, it really is a mix.

Okay, understood. And is there in the opportunity for you - given the average life of the contract is 3 years to 5 years, is there an opportunity for you to renew all contracts before then?

Yes, what we did - and I think Grier team and business leaders did a really nice job, again going through contract by contract, and they were kind of in three different buckets. So, the first one were contracts that already had call it, built in and we obviously enacted and put those in place. The second were contracts that had significant usage but we're in the middle of, and that was really a conversation with clients that for us to be able to provide the fastest service and counseling connection we needed to invest a little bit more in our counselor network, in our call center and we needed them to be part of that and we had those solutions. And many of those clients came on-board the said, yes, that made sense. And we have a few clients, a very small number, that said, no under kind of my contract terms and we'll have conversations with them and those contracts come up. But most people really do understand in this world trying to retain people, trying to recruit people, trying to give the best for your employees, that they are able to get faster mental health support and well-being support, that's the competitive edge for them.

And on the margin, I mean in Q1 salary costs were the lowest in the past 5 quarters. Was there a notable drop in the number of cases this past quarter, considering some lockdown measures, or do you see this as a good run rate considering the shift in the mix of in-house counselors?

Maybe I'll start, Etienne and Stephen can jump in as well. So, I think this is a result of a couple of things. So it is the mix changing. So certainly, we've made very good progress on the mix. And moving to salary providers as also, you'll recall, in Q4 we put the IHS and HPS business together and part of the rationale for that was making this more efficient. We're seeing show up. I'd say those are the two largest factors.

The next question is from Graham Ryding from TD Securities. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Grier, you touched on it there but this question is for either Stephen or Grier. But now that you've incorporated iCBT, that product within your IHS division more broadly longer term, or is there an opportunity here to use that product on a more regular basis so that it's more efficient in how you use here in-house therapist and ultimately drive your margins higher through spreading your therapist and sort of resources and capacity across a higher amount of VAP utilization?

Yes, hi, Graham. It's Stephen here. You're absolutely right. The reason that we really wanted to put those businesses together is we knew we're sitting on an amazing set of mental health services. When you think about EAP, think about iCBT, think about depression care, and the fact that we delivered some of that through benefit programs and we delivered some of that through EAP and some of that through iCBT contracts, pulling all that together and then we are going build a phenomenal front end in front of that to just make the experience seamless for every single person, just create a far better user experience, solve the client issue around all of these one-off solutions that people don't know how to use because they're buried on in Internet and then exactly to your point, we also have the ability to help people in multiple ways by doing that right. And it could be that I need accounts or I need to see them face-to-face. It could be that I need to watch a video. It could be that I need a couple of modules with an iCBT or frankly I think the future is going to be a mix of those things. So, I think someone [technical difficulty] we're going to do a quick chat with them, we're going to get them calmed down, we're going to let them watch a couple of videos, we're going to have them go through a couple of iCBT modules. They it might have a setback. They're going to go see a counselor face to face and then come back to some machine learning artificial intelligence. So, we see all of those coming together and we think we have phenomenal opportunity to pull those together.

So, is this something that I - like it's kind of a work in progress here where you're trying to figure out the right balance between charging I guess incremental to the iCBT product on one hand but on the other hand, using it more across your therapist to sort of operate more efficiently, you could - is it somewhat fluid at this point, is that - I guess that's my question.

Yes, I would say it's a natural evolution of our product and where we're going. So, iCBT was a great success pulling that together and fully integrating it in with what we're doing on mental support. So, even today if someone's coming again, we have the opportunity to leverage digital solutions and get them some help, both digitally and in person. And we'll just continue to evolve that as we move forward. But lots of opportunity I think in the long run on the margin standpoint, but even more importantly I think phenomenal opportunity to help people in more ways than we've been able to do in the past, which is getting at the ROI for our clients at the end of the day.

Okay, understood. When you talk about win-backs versus digital compare - competitors, are you referring to sort of renewing an existing contract that's put up for RFP or are you actually winning a contract that you previously lost?

Yes, this is winning a contract that we previously lost. So we have - we continue to have phenomenal retention rates. We're always between 95% and 98%. We absolutely continue that. We've seen nothing change against retention rates at all. But these are new sale win-backs. So, these are clients who might have gone and tried a digital-only or digital first competitor and their employees for those clients in particular were not satisfied with what they got. So, they've chosen to come back to us and get back to phenomenal service for their employees.

Okay, understood. And then my last question if I could, I think, Stephen, you made a comment about getting to mid to high single digit organic revenue growth this year. Is that - like are you targeting sort of a run rate as you exit the year or are you - or is that a target for 2022 overall?

Yes, that's our target for 2022 overall, Graham. We - if we take a look at all of the metrics that we track on a regular basis, so you think about our wins, you think about our sales pipeline, you think about our win rate, you think about our funnel and everything out there, all of those indicate that as we get to the end of the year we should be able to have 2022 growth in that mid-single digit range.

Thank you. The next question is now from Scott Fletcher, CIBC. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Thanks, good morning. Nice to see some win-backs in the quarter. I just have some follow-up question on there. Can you give us sort of an idea of whether those win-backs are coming back at a similar margin to what they would have been before they were there or maybe there is an opportunity to raise price as they come back, given that the contract just rolled off? Just some color there would be helpful.

Yes, great question, Scott. For the most part, they are either coming back at similar margins or enhanced margins. It really depends on the clients and what the rate was before. So, we look at all of them as we kind of do the bid when they went back to market. And as I said, we're pricing at the rate that allows our clients to get access to very quick either in-person or digital care. So yes, they're coming back similar margins or better.

Okay, that's good to hear. A separate question for me, it looks like the tech-enabled recurring revenue was down sequentially. Could you just dig into that a little bit?

We had a slower quarter, as Grier alluded to, within our Admin business. Again, we continue to grow and win new contracts, but that business tends to be a little bit lumpier, as you win very large stakes and things like that. So, the tech-enabled within Admin was a little bit slower in the quarter.

[Operator Instructions] The next question is from Jaeme Gloyn from National Bank Financial. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Yes, thanks. Just want to make sure I heard the answer to Graham's last question. The organic revenue growth, that - you think it could get back to mid-single digits for the full-year 2022 over 2021 or run rate by the end of 2022? I just - sorry, I confused myself when you were speaking.

No problem, Jaeme, and thanks for asking for the clarification. Yes, I did say we're going to get back to you, the full year in the mid-single digits on a revenue basis.

Good. On the pricing pilot, and don't take this negatively because I think getting anything done on this front outside of contract renewal time is a positive. Is the $15 million run rate, is that kind of the maximum that you would expect to generate out of the pricing pilot or is there a blue-sky scenario that sees you get something more than that?

Yes, Jaeme, let me start because I think there is a psychological piece to this where, yes, we're going to get the $15 million run rate as we come out of Q4. However, I think probably the more important thing is, as we work and we train and we talk to our client folks and our sales folks, I think they are seeing as we worked through it that what we offer is so much needed out in the marketplace. There's such a demand for it. And because of our either network or the number of our staff counselors we have, we've got the right and we have the ability because we provide faster service than anyone else to be able to say to folks that we - that costs a little bit more in general. So, we've really got the opportunity to get out. So, I think as we go forward, we will continue to be better at this. I think what Grier talked about on the pricing relates to this year. But we will continue to look at how do we add more services, how do we add more general care for the employee. And as a result of that, I think we're going to be talking to clients and I think there'll be ability over time to continue to taking pricing as we demonstrate more ROI to our clients.

Got it. On the counselor mix, just want to quickly refresh. We're at 59% today, it's up nicely from the last quarter though the target is somewhere in the low 60s I believe. I just wanted to confirm that. And then, also where were we in the debt, let's say, of the counselor mix issues. I just want to get that back in my head.

Yes, so a couple of numbers, James, so a year ago, we would have been about 43%. Last quarter, as you know, we moved that up to 53% and then this time - 56%, sorry, and then this time we're 59% as we kind of go through that. Our target has been in the low to mid-60s. We think that's what makes up for the provider mix where we were before. We're on track to get there as we move through Q3 and Q4. So, everything within the work that the team is doing on that project is going very well and we continue to be able to add staff counselor capacity.

Okay, great. And last theme for me is just around the impact of I guess Omicron and some of these fee-for-service items, obviously a pretty big step-down there. So, is that - like what is in the fee for service in there, is it iCBT in there or is it all just like the in-person childcare services, other in-person services that's in that - that's in the new HPS bucket?

Yes, that's one of the reasons, Jaeme, that we really wanted to strip that out for people so you could see that overall our market share is increasing in the core businesses and in our recurring revenue business, and the one-time fee for service - and you probably recall that when we had our calls around Q1 and Q2 of 2020 we faced the same thing. So to your question of what's in there, it's training. So - and otherwise, we go on site, we will train in organizations and employees. So, we continue to do some of this virtually, but there is still a number of services the clients go. With everything going on in the world, I don't need to run a wellness seminar on site and things like that. So it's that type of thing. It's trauma where every single time that there were significant events, you can talk about bank robberies and things like that, we would go on site and we would do on-site counseling, we would put our people, there for - it might be a week or something like that. And obviously, there is a lot less of that going on when you're into a lockdown. You're exactly right. It's child support services where people bring their kids to us for speech therapy and things like that. And with Omicron, we had to shut down those facilities. We couldn't provide those services. So, it really is the in-person stuff that people pay for on - through fee basis. And every time there is a lockdown, as we saw in Q1 with Omicron, as we saw in Q1 and Q2 of 2020, those businesses get impacted, which is why we thought we would call that out and make it easier for all of our investors and our documentation.

Okay, so that -

So, Jaeme, I was just going to say, those should come back obviously as we move through the year and people get back to the workplaces and teams get together and everything else.

Okay, great. And as I'm just thinking about some of the variable revenues, the 15-5 in Q1, would there have been anything in that quarter to lift that revenue line, maybe there was some pent-up demand from previous quarters not being executed. I guess, how - is the $4.5 million delta, is that fully recoverable or is maybe Q1 a bit higher than maybe a normal quarter for maybe its variable revenue line?

Yes, Grier might have a couple comments but me, no, there's - it should be fully recoverable. There's no reason it wouldn't be. It will come back as people bring their employees back to the office. I don't know if you want to add any color, Grier?

I completely agree. I mean I think that Q1 2021 is more of a normal type number for that, Jaeme. So, if you look at Q1 2022, I think what we're saying is it's been impacted, it's not normal.

Yes, okay. So that - like that $4.5 million drop would be something that I could say is like Omicron related impact or lockdown related impact? That's it from me. Thanks.

Thank you. There are no further questions registered at this time. I will turn the call back to Mr. Liptrap.

Thanks very much, Paul. We continue to execute against our strategic plan and are excited about the future. We welcome you to join us at our virtual shareholder meeting at 10.30 today. Login details are available at our website. I'd also like to end by expressing my thanks to everyone on the call. We continue to appreciate your interest in our Company, and we look forward to other opportunities in the future, including these calls, to keep you up to date on what we're doing to drive our growth and success as a business. Thank you.

Thank you. The conference has now ended. Please disconnect your lines at this time and we thank you for your participation.