Our presenting company is Charles River Associates. The ticker is CRAI. And joining us today is Paul Maleh, Chairman and CEO; Chad Holmes, Chief Corporate Development Officer; and Dan Mahoney, Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, just a reminder, we will have time for Q&A following prepared remarks, but if you would like to ask a question, submit a question, you don't have to wait until then. Just click on the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen. And with that, we can turn the call over to CRA. Thank you for joining us this morning, gentlemen. Great. Thank you, Mark. Good morning, everyone. My name is Paul Maleh. I'm President, CEO, and Chairman of Charles River Associates. This is the speed dating version of our presentation. I will try to tell you everything about CRA in about twenty minutes or less. Hopefully, it piques your interest enough to inquire about some more information on that. Joining me today, I have Dan Mahoney, our Chief Financial Officer, and Chad Holmes, our Chief Corporate Development Officer, just in case I am stumped by any of your questions. So let's get going here. This past weekend, I gathered with about 150 of our vice presidents for our annual officers' retreat, and this is the same slide I started the state of the company with them, which is covering CRA's mission. And that mission has been largely constant since 1965. CRA will be celebrating its 60th birthday, in this coming year. But what we've been trying to do, for our entire history, is to bring state-of-the-art academic quality research and quantitative methods in economics, to businesses to help them make more informed decisions. That is the commonality across all of our practices and all of our services at CRA. We have two main lines of business, that of legal and regulatory consulting, which makes up roughly 80% of our revenue, and the remainder being what I would call more traditional management consulting side. You know, with respect to geographic footprint, it is also largely 80% North America and 20% international on that. Just as with any professional services firm, our quality and success starts and ends with our people. And I have a tremendous group of colleagues here. As you can see from the upper left-hand corner here, about 40%—more than 40% of my senior colleagues, you know, have PhDs in their various respective fields. We are very selective in who we let into our family. At CRA, we accept less than 2% of campus applicants that come in. And what, quite frankly, what I'm most proud of is when people select to join CRA, they tend to stay at CRA. Our average retention is as strong as any company in the professional services space, and my job is to keep it that way. I always view the job of a CEO is to create an environment for really special people to do amazing things. Another measure of our success in doing that is the fact we're keeping our people, particularly our top revenue generators, who have plenty of choices, among other consulting companies. So the upper right-hand corner is a statistic I share with our board of directors every year. I present to them our top 25 revenue generators, in each respective year, and we go through the various characteristics. If I look over a five-year period of time, and I look at the union of that top 25 list as people go in and out, it's probably about 50+ people strong. In five years, we have less than 10% voluntary turnover in those ranks. That's not 10% annually, that's 10% in aggregate, so only about one person a year there. And the reason that's important is when you retain and develop your people, it makes growth so much easier to achieve because we're not filling holes with the departures, we're just getting to add to the overall strength of our portfolio. I mentioned the two lines of business. If Life sciences our energy practice, auctions and competitive bidding, and Marakon make up management consulting services. All other practices are on the legal regulatory side of the house. The part that most people are not familiar with is the legal regulatory side. So you're gonna be hard-pressed to see a merger being discussed in the press or a large antitrust enforcement action, whether here in the States, or in Europe. CRA is working for one of those parties. We have that kind of strong market share. These next two slides just show the depth of our client base, and this is just in the last two years. Now, I just wanna highlight, we are not an annuity business. These clients are coming back to CRA over and over again because of the quality of services they receive. In just the past two years, CRA has worked with 82 of the Fortune 100 companies. On the legal regulatory side, these are the ultimate clients. The law firms make up the intermediary client here. And the statistics even more impressive here, if you look at the top 100 law firms and, you know, in the U.S. here, CRA is, you know, has worked for 97 of those firms in just the past two years across a number of our different services. Again, these are multiple projects, across a number of our services, so we're quite proud of the stickiness of our client base, but we don't take it for granted. I realize that we constantly have to strive to create value for our clients, and if ultimately financial performance and stock price performance is any indicator, I think we're doing a pretty damn good job. This is a little snapshot of CRA's financial performance, and I include a couple of things here. I include revenue and profit growth, and I include the distribution to our shareholders across a number of periods of time. Why do I do that? Because CRA is able to do both, fully funded by the internal operations of the firm. We have no debt. We have a line of credit we access during the year as a working capital vehicle, but that's about it. Practically every year, that is paid down to zero by year-end. So we're doing this with the cash generated by the business. What you see is whether you wanna go back five years, whether you wanna look at the first couple of quarters of 2024, we've been growing roughly, you know, and this was covered during our retreat for the last 15 years, at over a 9% revenue clip, and the profitability has grown even faster than the revenue growth, which means we are expanding margins on that. So that, again, goes to the quality of the services and the efficiency of the operations. The other thing that we sort of made an aim to our shareholders about four or five years ago, in that we're gonna try to return about half of our adjusted cash flow from ops back to our shareholders. Why are we doing that? Because we have observed over an extended period of time that we're able to grow in a value-creating manner, and still return substantive capital back to our shareholders. So to give a little more transparency and direction to our investor base, we stated that aim, and we have basically been coming very close to that target year after year. Does that mean that share repurchases take precedence over any investment priority? No. I'm always gonna invest in the company first. If there's talent available to make our portfolio stronger, I'm gonna go there time and time again. But absent that, it's share repurchases would make up about 70- 75- 80% of the total redistributions back to our shareholders and a cash dividend that we instituted a little more than a half dozen years ago, for the main purpose to get more eyes on CRA stock. We, You know, I don't believe we are fully valued. The cash dividends were instituted just to get a different investor base in there. On the share repurchases, the one thing you'll see is in the unbolded numbers there, you'll see the average purchase price. We are a very active purchaser of our share in 2023, and with the volatility that was experienced in our broader market in 2023, there was questions about, "Oh, should you be buying, you know, these shares at $100+ a share?" It's funny that here we are, a little 12 months later, and $106 average price seems like a bargain. You'll see that being repeated basically year after year, in that the positive returns from our share repurchases are proven in very short order on that. We're value-based decision-makers at CRA. Everything we do, the way we redistribute capital, the way we invest our capital, all is with a value lens. Our overall objective is to maximize CRA's long-term value per share. I want to maximize the return of my shareholder base. Here, this is more just bragging, just showing you the year after year growth. The other thing that's astonishing here is that each of these years are record-breaking years, so there's no easy comp for CRA. We're growing, we're growing attractively, growing profits, each off of a record base in the prior year. The other thing, and this is for all of you to do your homework afterwards, there is a large non-cash charge flowing through our income statement related to our talent investments, and that non-cash charge is non-cash amortization of forgivable loans. It is not netted out when you look at EBITDA. So in order to make comparability or to see the true cash-generating capacity of this firm, I would recommend then when looking at our profitability, take EBITDA and add the non-cash amortization of the forgivable loans there. That's the way we look at profitability. It's the way our lenders look at profitability. It's the way the executives are comped relative to budget on it. I just can't add those two numbers for you. The SEC says that's a no-no, so I'm trying to stay on their good side here. But in order to look for comparability, I would recommend adding those two figures there. A lot of people then will question, well, is it really a non-cash expense? Is it really an investment? So these next handful of slides, all we're trying to do is I'm showing you the total uses of CRA capital, okay? And what you see at the end of the day, we have no debt, so the total uses equal the total sources of our capital with it. And as you can see, a large chunk goes to talent. Another large portion goes to the redistribution to shareholders. And we are not a heavy CapEx firm, so a relatively small piece is going back to what I would call more traditional CapEx. The talent investments, again, we are very selective on who we let into our family, and the goal is to make our portfolio deeper and stronger. I like our portfolio of services. I do not have any intention to add new lines of services. We're looking for strength and near adjacencies into that talent portfolio. The CapEx is, again, more traditional CapEx, maybe some investments in our computer and computing needs, and also some real estate expenditures when needed. Then comes the redistribution back to shareholders, and you can see just in the last, you know, five years there, we've returned almost $180 million back to our shareholders while still achieving those financial levels on that. And, you know, this is just saying in the last five years, we reduced share count by 13%. If you go back to about 2010, so about fifteen years ago, our share count has been reduced by, I believe, over 35% while not reducing the overall liquidity of our shares. If anything, the reduction of the shares and the stock appreciation is that the dollar volume, the dollar value of our trading volume has actually gone up, through time, even with the reduction of shares, so we're gonna maintain this playbook, going forward, at CRA. It's working. We're able to grow the business attractively. Here you can see we finally got below the 7 million shares outstanding threshold, and then, at the end of Q2, we were right around 6.8 million shares outstanding for it, so we've give annual guidance. We provided our initial annual guidance with the Q4 fiscal 2023 call. We raised the revenue guidance, and we raised the profit guidance after our Q2 call, because of our just belief in the business and the strength of the services being provided. We always aim at a mid seventies utilization. I think that's our happy place as an organization. Why mid seventies utilization? Because I think that enables us to deliver the quality of services that our clients expect of CRA, while also pursuing the growth opportunities that are resident in our marketplace. So, Mark, I did that in a little less than twenty minutes. I would be happy to take any kind of questions from any of our listeners today. Okay, thank you very much. And, for all those listening, as a reminder, if you have any questions, feel free to just click on the Q&A button at the bottom of the screen. We do have one question that's already here, so I'll start with that one. There's a question regarding how your capital allocation compares to maybe some peers, particularly maybe the mix as far as talent investment. I think all of our competitors are out there trying to add talent to their portfolio pool. I think if we are looking for uniqueness between CRA and that of the publicly traded peers, it's the mix of talent investments and redistribution back to shareholders. I think that is really the differentiating factor here. I can't think of any CEO out there who's not wanting to make their portfolio stronger. So we do not shy away from larger talent opportunities, but it really has to fit our portfolio. We've been more of a rifled approach to talent pursuits, looking at individuals, group hires, but if the right larger acquisition opportunity is present, we're all ears. Excellent. And then I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about... You made mention of the increase in full year guide that was provided after 2Q. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about maybe some of the drivers that went into that, and as far as some of the positives that you're able to have with, you know, given the level of visibility. Sure. I think in order to give a little bit of color on that, I have to go back to 2023. We saw volatility in the demand for our services in 2023. The business opportunities coming across the transom were very healthy and actually in line with our expectations throughout 2023. Where the volatility reared its head is the conversion of those business opportunities to new project originations. We saw the conversion rate drop significantly below what I would say our historic norm has been. So let's fast-forward to 2024. We saw in Q4 of fiscal 2023 conversion rates consistent with what our historical norms are. We're very happy with that. Q1 of fiscal 2024, again, attractive conversion rates with still expanding project leads. And in Q2, same thing, expansion of new business opportunities with conversion rates consistent with historical norms. So I felt pretty good about having nine months of what I would call consistent business intake and consistent conversion on that. And then it was hard to overlook the fact that Q1 was a record quarter, and Q2 was a record quarter. It is the best six months that CRA has ever delivered on a revenue and on a profit basis. So with all that, you know, it was really the addressing of some of the risks that we were concerned with as we entered fiscal 2024, and just the strong performance through the first six months gave us the confidence to raise that guidance. Great, and then we do have another question here regarding pricing, and- Yeah ... specifically, if you could describe the pricing power that you have with customers, and how their responses have been to pricing? Yeah. CRA is an expensive provider of services. If my explanation stopped there, that really wouldn't be good. Right? What you wanna do is you don't want your clients to ever mention how costly you are. You want them to talk about the value they received on those services. So when we think about raising prices, we also have to always think about the commensurate quality of the services being rendered. I think we've done a good job of balancing that, in the marketplace on an annual basis. The effective rate increase is, on average, probably in the 2%-4% range annually that we're getting from rate increases, across the board. And there, there's a question here regarding sort of market share, but maybe I'll expand that a bit as to maybe you could talk a little bit about the competitive environment and some of the key competitors that you are battling with every day. Yeah, so the investor who asked that question, and our board is constantly asking me about market share measures, and the fact is, it is really hard to estimate what our market share is, because many of our competitors, particularly on the legal regulatory side, and quite frankly, on the management consulting side, are privately held firms, so their data is not readily available. We do the best we can, to track the performance of CRA relative to data we can observe, and I think we have more than held our own in the legal regulatory space in terms of growing revenue at a faster clip, and even in the management consulting space, relative to some much larger, players, CRA is at or above, those average growth rates. So if growing at a faster rate is indicative of taking share, then yes, we have taken share. But in terms of on a case count, I don't have a great measure of our share of the pie. And another question that came in, which is actually particularly timely, particularly with given my coverage today. Question regarding how investors should think about the regulatory scrutiny and the geographic regions you operate. Maybe I can also expand that to segment client segments as well, and any potential changes you see in the upcoming months. Yeah. So we're a global consultancy, and in particular, when you're talking about the merger market or overall regulatory enforcement, you are talking about a global marketplace. There's very few things that operate solely in one geography anymore. So I think the European regulatory environment has been steadily increasing on regulatory enforcement. In fact, I think their regulatory enforcement has been, you know, a little ahead of that of the U.S. I see no signs of that waning in Europe in, you know, in the years to come there. There's always a question with respect to the U.S., particularly with the presidential election around the corner, as what will happen to it. So all else being equal, let's put aside the specific candidates here. Typically, when the Democrats come into office, we see that accompanied with greater regulatory oversight in the operation of our business world, and you see more business-friendly approaches with the Republicans coming to office. They both have benefits to it, you know? One may have more GDP growth. More GDP growth would mean more discretionary dollars, and that is always good for consultancy. Higher regulatory oversight means more complexity in decision-making, which is also good for a firm like CRA. What I don't know is if the Republicans take the office of the presidency, whether I'm gonna see something more akin to what I observed the last time President Trump was in office, or are we gonna see something, you know, more lax in terms of regulatory oversight? I think we saw a little bit of both in his last administration, so, I'm taking a wait and see, you know, view on that. Great, and then we do have another question regarding just sort of one of the drivers, I suppose, around what might cause underperformance or outperformance relative to the updated guidance that was provided following to Q. You know, what I'm trying to do, when I communicate with investors, is I'm trying to give all the same information that I'm privy to and sharing, so people can try to make also their own expectations or check on the expectations I'm sharing. You know, going into the second half of 2023, I saw a lot of the positive factors that I talked about today, and I thought we would have a good second half. The Q3 really did give me a head fake of 2023. So I understand that volatility is possible, but what we saw, it was just that. It was a head fake. It wasn't a shift down of the overall demand environment. We quickly rebounded in Q4, posting a very strong Q4 of 2023, and then record-setting first half of 2024. So even if I experience volatility, I have the utmost confidence in the quality of the portfolio for that volatility to be relatively short-lived. I think we do a pretty damn good job of pivoting and working to our strengths as an organization. And then, Paul, you made mention as to some of the thoughts and views around the importance of talent acquisition. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit maybe about sort of the broader M&A environment that you're seeing there currently, and maybe any thoughts around availability of attractive targets and maybe how valuation has maybe changed, if at all, throughout the course of the year. Sure. Let me start with the last question. I haven't seen any kind of noticeable shift in the cost of inorganic pursuits, either up or down. They're not getting cheaper, and I see the general price of inorganic pursuits to be consistent with what we've seen in the past handful of years. There's some shocks to the various talent markets, both on the management consulting side and the legal regulatory side, and what you do when you're trying to bring in talent, you wanna make sure that you're not getting a bad draw, that the individuals who may be displaced or looking for other opportunities are of the quality that, you know, they're describing. So we're trying to ramp up the due diligence a bit more during times like this, so our inbox is rather full. And we have a lot of attractive possibilities. We just need to be very diligent on the review and then try to bring them home. Because when you're talking about top talent, the fact is, almost by definition, they're successful with their current employer, right? And chances are they're getting paid market wages. So when you're offering the value proposition of your firm, of your platform, that's the key of the attractiveness. We're not blowing away people with compensation or with purchase price. It's really about the long-term value creation that we think exists with joining the CRA platform relative to their alternatives. Excellent, and that brings us to the end of our time together, so that's a perfect place to conclude. I do wanna thank CRA for joining us today, and thank all of our participants for all of their questions, and I hope everybody has a wonderful and productive week. Thank you, Mark, and thank you, everyone. I appreciate your time. Thank you, everyone. Bye-bye.