Welcome to the FTI Consulting fourth quarter and full year 2021 earnings conference call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note that this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mollie Hawkes, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead. Thank you. Good afternoon. Welcome to the FTI Consulting conference call to discuss the company's fourth quarter and full year 2021 earnings results as reported this morning. Management will begin with formal remarks, after which they will take your questions. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that this conference call may include forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 that involve risks and uncertainties. Forward-looking statements concerning plans, objectives, goals, strategies, future events, future revenues, future results and performance, expectations, plans or intentions relating to financial performance, acquisitions, share repurchases, business trends, ESG-related matters, and other information or other matters that are not historical, including statements regarding estimates of our future financial results and other matters. For a discussion of risks and other factors that may cause actual results or events to differ from those contemplated by forward-looking statements, investors should review the safe harbor statement in the earnings press release issued this morning, a copy of which is available on our investor relations website at www.fticonsulting.com, as well as other disclosures under the headings of Risk Factors and Forward-Looking Information in our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2021, and in our other filings with the SEC. Investors are cautioned not to place undue reliance on any forward-looking statements which speak only as of the date of this earnings call and will not be updated. During the call, we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures such as total segment operating income, adjusted EBITDA, total adjusted segment EBITDA, adjusted earnings per diluted share, adjusted net income, adjusted EBITDA margin, and free cash flow. For a discussion of these and other non-GAAP financial measures, as well as our reconciliations of non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures, investors should review the press release and the accompanying financial tables that we issued this morning, which include the reconciliations. Lastly, there are two items that have been posted to the investor relations section of our website for your reference. These include a quarterly earnings presentation and an Excel and PDF of our historical, financial, and operating data, which have been updated to include our fourth quarter and full year 2021 results. Of note, during today's prepared remarks, management will not speak directly to the quarterly earnings presentation posted to the investor relations section of our website. To ensure our disclosures are consistent, these slides provide the same details as they have historically, and as I have said, are available on the investor relations section of our website. With these formalities out of the way, I am joined by Steven Gunby, our President and Chief Executive Officer, and Ajay Sabherwal, our Chief Financial Officer. At this time, I will turn the call over to President and Chief Executive Officer, Steven Gunby. Thanks, Mollie. Mollie, can you hear me okay? All good. Well, good afternoon to everyone, and thank you all for joining us. Let me start with a couple of preliminary remarks before we get into it. First of all, thank you all for juggling your time. I know that we had to, at the last minute, switch this time of this and everybody on this call has busy calendars, so I apologize for the inconvenience and wanna express our appreciation for you all juggling your calendars to be here. Second, my second point was gonna be, I thought, a positive point. I was gonna, maybe for the first time ever, begin to talk a little positively on the COVID situation. I was gonna express my hope that we are finally in many places around the world, and I hope where you are, starting to see some movement towards normality. I still hope that, but I think, you know, the events in the Ukraine in the last little while remind us that the hope to normality, unfortunately, is not just limited to COVID. I wish many good wishes to you and any colleagues, family, friends who are affected by that situation. Let me turn to what I think is a much more positive set of messages. Today I'd like to share three messages about our company before I turn the call over to Ajay to take you through our financials. The first one, if you don't mind, I'd like to spend a couple minutes upfront thanking and complimenting our team for what I believe has been spectacular performance over the last year and in fact, over the last while, a longer period of time as well. As I'm sure many of you have by now already seen, 2021 was another terrific year. In the face of the global pandemic, and as we'll talk about, the worst restructuring market in probably the last 15 years. We delivered another record year. Let me stress that word another. We've now had seven years in a row of Adjusted EPS growth. seven years in a row in the face of COVID, fluctuating restructuring markets, turning around core strategies, expanding geographies, entering new adjacencies, lumpiness from big jobs coming or going, heightened competition and attracting talent, among lots of other challenges. Seven years in a row of growth. In Adjusted EPS, which is the easiest thing to measure, but also to me, far more important in the underlying drivers of those financial results, the talent level of our organization, the ambition of it, the energy, the commitment of our people, the leadership, the number of great assignments we are working on, the client relationships we forged, and the enhancement of our reputation that all those factors have driven. We don't have a single business that is guaranteed automatic growth every quarter. In fact, if you look back over these several years, many of our teams and sub-businesses during this period were down multiple quarters in a row as they faced difficult markets or made big investments or had big jobs end. What I believe our results have shown is that over any extended period of time, those short-term factors don't matter. Rather, over any extended period of time, when our teams do the right things, they control our destiny. We create our own future. Over time, we have shown ourselves able to attract great talent, to support the growth of that talent in our organization, to double down and reinforce core positions in core markets, expand into new adjacencies, and as a consequence of all that, make ourselves ever better able to serve our clients, to build our businesses, to build our brand. It is that commitment, those efforts by our leaders and our teams that have allowed us to grow seven years in a row. Over those last four years, in the face of good markets and bad markets, to average double-digit organic top-line growth. To me, that demonstrates something important. It demonstrates that FTI is not the cork on the restructuring wave that some described us as when I joined. Rather, I think our teams have shown that when we do the right things, we have multiple businesses that are each powerful growth engines that of course can get buffeted by markets or other short-term factors. Over any extended period of time, engines that can plow through markets, plow through them and find their way towards success in attracting and developing talent, success in brand building assignments, and success in financial results. Over the past several years, I believe we've seen examples of that in every business. This year, in the resilience of CF, the comeback of FLC in some parts of econ business. In the last several years, the extraordinary performance of our tech business following the strategic changes they made five years ago, or the performance of our Strat Comm business over now seven years. I think the story is similar if you think about it instead of by segment, but by geography. Just think about the challenges our teams had of taking on difficult positions in, say, Australia or LATAM. They were not small, nor is the challenge of conquering new markets in Europe. That's why I think our teams very much deserve the sense of excitement and pride that they have when they turn those platforms positions into platforms for growth. Let me start with my thanks and my congratulations to our teams. For the second point, let me pick up on that word platform. What I'd like to underscore is that to me, the successes we have been having are not the end, but rather the beginning. The success we have had has left us with powerful platforms that we can leverage going forward to extend that growth, to build upon it. The success we have had gives us the ability now to bet boldly in Germany, in France, in the Netherlands, in China, in the Middle East, and in other places in a way that we could never have done a few years ago. It gives us the ability to invest behind that successful tech business and that successful Strat Comm business to drive our investigations business, to grow all those non-restructuring services in Corp Fin, and in the face of a slow restructuring market, to commit to continue to grow that business, to extend that global leadership, confident that it will eventually pay off in a big way in brands, assignments, in leadership positions, in attracting great talent. To me, to my knowledge, this company has never had such a rich set of opportunities before it as we do today. That brings me to the third point, to preview something Ajay will discuss, which is there is always near-term risk in these sorts of investments. Let me spend a minute on that. As you know, our investments are typically in hiring. If one instead buys a company, the investment shows up as capital. If, on the other hand, you hire a lot of people, it shows up in EBITDA. This year, our ambition is to have the highest organic growth rate during my tenure, and my guess is during the company's entire history, the highest organic growth rate. There's no way to make those sorts of bold bets without facing some short-term financial risk. If you wanna underscore some of the negatives, we're making those bets at a time when our most profitable business, our restructuring business, is facing market demand that is lower than it's been in 15 years according to one measure, and 20 years according to another measure. We no longer have the rollover of the large restructuring jobs from the early parts of 2020. We're facing compensation pressure due to wage inflation in a tight talent market. At the same time, we're expecting rising SG&A expenses due to a rebound in travel expenses post-COVID, as well as investments in infrastructure to support the growth. One can get worried about the number of bets we're making. One could wonder in the face of that, could we cut back on our bets? Of course, we could. Let me underscore something else. I don't believe that's how one makes a company like this soar. It's not how we've built this company over the last seven years. It's not how we've achieved the growth we have. My experience is when you have great people and great bets to make, you commit to those people, you commit to those opportunities, and you make those bets, and you live with any potential short-term dislocations in the P&L. Because if you do, even if there are short-term dislocations in the P&L in a couple quarters or a year, in the medium term, the company soars. It delivers for your clients. It delivers for the people whose energy and sweat makes that success happen, and ultimately, thereby, it delivers for the shareholders, as you have seen now over the last seven years. We are making those bets this year, and there is some risk in the near term P&L. I will say, those bets, those opportunities have left me never more excited about where we can take this company over the next while. I so look forward to sharing that journey with each of you. With that, let me turn the call over to Ajay to take you through our financial results in more detail. Ajay? Thank you, Steve. Good afternoon, everybody. In my prepared remarks, I will take you through our company-wide and segment results and guidance for 2022. I will begin with some highlights from our full year 2021 performance. Revenues of $2.78 billion increased $314.9 million from $2.46 billion in 2020. GAAP EPS of $6.65 increased $0.98 from $5.67 in 2020. Adjusted EPS of $6.76 increased $0.77 from $5.99 in 2020. Adjusted EBITDA of $354 million was up $21.7 million from $332.3 million in 2020. Our record performance this year is primarily because of 12.8% revenue growth, once again demonstrating how beneficial it is to have the breadth of our service offerings. In 2021, demand continued to decline for restructuring, often our highest margin service offering, as access to capital remained abundant and many pandemic-related moratoriums and insolvency proceedings were extended. Conversely, the continued high level of liquidity in the market spurred record levels of M&A activity, which drove strong demand for our Economic Consulting and Technology segments, as well as our transactions practice within our Corporate Finance & Restructuring segment. Our Forensic & Litigation Consulting, or FLC, segment, which was heavily impacted by pandemic-related travel restrictions and court closures in 2020, saw activity levels rebound across almost all practice areas in 2021, though FLC has not yet reached pre-COVID-19 levels of business activity across the entire segment. Lastly, our Strategic Communications segment recovered well from COVID-related impacts in 2020 and delivered a record year. We also continued to invest in people. Our total headcount increased 7.3% year-over-year on top of the 13.5% increase in total headcount in 2020. Revenue growth more than offset the increase in direct costs, primarily from headcount growth and higher variable compensation, and an increase in SG&A expenses. Now I will turn to fourth quarter results. For the quarter, revenue of $676.2 million increased $49.7 million or 7.9%, with revenues increasing across all business segments compared to the fourth quarter of 2020. GAAP EPS of $1.07 compared to $1.57 in the prior year quarter. Adjusted EPS of $1.13, which excludes $0.06 of non-cash interest expense related to our 2023 Convertible Notes. Compared to adjusted EPS of $1.61 in the prior year quarter. Of note, the fourth quarter of 2020 included a significant tax benefit resulting from the use of foreign tax credits in the U.S. and a deferred tax benefit arising from an intellectual property license agreement between our U.S. and U.K. subsidiaries, which boosted both fourth quarter of 2020 GAAP and adjusted EPS by $0.32. Net income of $38.2 million compared to $55.6 million in the fourth quarter of 2020. Adjusted EBITDA of $62 million compared to $82.3 million in the prior year quarter. Now, turning to our performance at the segment level for the fourth quarter. In Corporate Finance and Restructuring, revenues of $231.5 million increased 5.3% compared to Q4 of 2020. The increase was due to higher demand for business transformation and transaction services, as well as an increase in passthrough revenues and success fees, which was partially offset by lower demand for restructuring services compared to the prior year quarter. Business transformation and transactions represented 62%, while restructuring represented 38% of segment revenues this quarter. This compares to business transformation and transactions representing 44% and restructuring representing 56% of segment revenues in the prior year quarter as business transformation and transactions grew 50%, while restructuring revenues declined 27%. Adjusted segment EBITDA of $22.2 million or 9.6% of segment revenues compared to $35.4 million or 16.1% of segment revenues in the prior year quarter. This decrease was primarily due to higher compensation, which was largely related to an increase in variable compensation and higher SG&A expenses. In FLC, revenues of $138 million increased 8.5% compared to the prior year quarter. The increase was primarily due to higher demand for Health Solutions and investigation services. Adjusted segment EBITDA of $8.5 million or 6.2% of segment revenues compared to $7.6 million or 6% of segment revenues in the prior year quarter. This increase was due to higher revenues, which was partially offset by an increase in SG&A expenses and compensation. Economic Consulting's revenues of $172.3 million increased 7.4% compared to Q4 of 2020. The increase in revenues was primarily due to higher demand for non-M&A-related antitrust and financial economics services, which was partially offset by lower demand for M&A-related antitrust services compared to the prior year quarter. Non-M&A-related antitrust services represented 33% and M&A-related antitrust services represented 20% of total segment revenues for the fourth quarter. Adjusted segment EBITDA of $30 million or 17.4% of segment revenues compared to $31.3 million or 19.5% of segment revenues in the prior year quarter. This decrease was primarily due to higher compensation. In Technology, revenues of $64.6 million increased 10.2% compared to Q4 of 2020. The increase in revenues was primarily due to higher demand for investigations and litigation services. Adjusted segment EBITDA of $7.8 million or 12.1% of segment revenues compared to $10.2 million or 17.3% of segment revenues in the prior year quarter. This decrease was primarily due to higher compensation, which includes an increase in variable compensation and the impact of a 14.7% increase in billable headcount as well as higher SG&A expenses. Lastly, in Strategic Communications, revenues of $69.9 million increased 15.5% compared to Q4 of 2020. The increase in revenues was primarily due to higher demand for corporate reputation and public affairs services. Adjusted segment EBITDA of $14.9 million or 21.4% of segment revenues compared to $11.7 million or 19.4% of segment revenues in the prior year quarter. This increase was due to higher revenues, which was partially offset by an increase in compensation and SG&A expenses. I will now discuss certain cash flow and balance sheet items. Net cash provided by operating activities of $355.5 million compared to $327.1 million in the prior year. Free cash flow of $286.9 million in 2021 compared to $292.2 million in 2020. Primarily due to an increase in net cash used for purchases of property and equipment, which includes capital expenditures related to our new office in New York City. There were no share repurchases in Q4 of 2021. For the full year 2021, we repurchased 422,000 shares at an average price of $109.37 for a total cost of $46.1 million. Cash and cash equivalents at the end of the year were $494 million, $494.5 million. Total debt, net of cash of -$178.2 million on December 31, 2021, decreased $199.5 million compared to December 31, 2020. Turning to our 2022 guidance. We are, as usual, providing guidance for revenues and EPS. We estimate that revenues for 2022 will be between $2.92 billion and $3.045 billion. We expect our EPS to range between $6.40 and $7.20. Of note, due to our adoption of a new accounting standard change that went into effect on January 1, 2022, we will not record non-cash interest expense related to our 2023 Convertible Notes. As such, assuming no other future special charges or adjustments, we currently expect EPS and Adjusted EPS to be the same in 2022. Additionally, pursuant to the first supplemental indenture for our 2023 Convertible Notes that was effective on January 1, 2022, the company is now required to settle the principal amount of our 2023 Convertible Notes that is due upon conversion in cash only, versus at our option in cash or stock or a combination. We retain the option of settling the premium, if any, due upon conversion of our 2023 Convertible Notes in cash or stock or a combination. Importantly, none of these changes affect the calculation of Adjusted EPS in the prior periods. Turning to our guidance. Our 2022 guidance range incorporates several assumptions. First, as we have the wherewithal, intent, and opportunity to invest for growth, our plans include aggressive hiring globally. Though there is no certainty that we will be successful in such hiring, aggressive headcount additions typically result in reduced profitability in the short term. Coupled with investment in headcount, there is also increasing pressure on wages, and not all of this expense may be recoverable in price increases. Second, though we believe we are the leader in restructuring globally, and we intend to maintain that position, we currently expect restructuring activity to improve only moderately over the course of 2022. Additionally, many of the large restructuring engagements we supported in 2020 and 2021 have now concluded. Moody's trailing twelve-month global default rate for speculative-grade corporate issuers was 1.7% as of the end of 2021, down from 6.9% in December of 2020. Moody's is currently forecasting that this rate will fall to a bottom of 1.5% in Q2 of 2022, and will gradually rise to 2.4% by the end of 2022. Some analysts don't expect a rebound in restructuring activity until 2023. Third, global M&A activity, which drives demand in our Economic Consulting and Technology segments, as well as our restructuring transactions, business and Corporate Finance & Restructuring, was at record levels in 2021. Though we currently expect that this elevated level of activity will continue, regulatory scrutiny, fiscal policy, and other events globally may dampen such demand. Fourth, demand in our FLC segment improved significantly in 2021 compared to pandemic-related lows in performance in 2020. However, over the course of 2021, demand for these services weakened. Our current expectation is for a rebound in such demand in 2022. Fifth, certain aspects of SG&A, such as travel and entertainment, have remained depressed due to the pandemic. Our expectation is that in 2022, SG&A may revert back closer to the per person levels we saw in 2019. Six, we expect a higher effective tax rate in 2022. We currently expect our full year 2022 tax rate to range between 22%-25%, which compares to 21.1% in 2021. Overall, based on our expectation for a gradual improvement in demand for restructuring and FLC services, our guidance assumes that the second half of 2022 will be stronger than the first half. I must point out that our assumptions define a midpoint and a range of guidance around such midpoint, which I characterize as our current best judgment. Often, we find actual results are beyond such range because ours is largely a fixed cost business in the short term, and small variations in revenue may have an outsized impact on income. Now I will close my remarks today by emphasizing a few key themes. First, we believe FTI is unique in having such a diverse mix of services, and that helps us thrive regardless of business cycle. Second, our investment to build expertise in areas like information governance, privacy and cybersecurity, public affairs, and in industry verticals like energy, power and renewables, and financial services, and in geographies including continental Europe, the Middle East, and Australia, are paying off, and we intend to double down on these and other investments. Non-U.S. revenues have more than doubled in the last five years, while U.S. revenues have grown by a third over that time frame. Third, our leadership remains focused on growth with strong staff utilization and realization. Finally, our business generates excellent free cash flow, and our balance sheet is exceptionally strong. We have the capacity to continue to boost shareholder value through organic growth, share buybacks, and acquisitions when we see the right ones. With that, let's open the call up for your questions. We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. Our first question will come from Andrew Nicholas with William Blair. Please go ahead. Hi. Good afternoon. Thank you for taking my questions. First question I had was just on FLC. Obviously a little bit of a challenging quarter on the utilization front for that business. I think, Ajay, you mentioned expecting a rebound in 2022. I was hoping you could spend a little bit more time about, you know, what's been driving the weakness over the past quarter or two, whether or not the fourth quarter number was at all surprising to you, and then maybe thoughts on how the segment is setting up for next year. Not sure whether court system throughput is a component to what you've seen in 2021 or if it's back to pre-COVID levels or not, but maybe touch on that as well. Thank you. Sure. Thanks, Andrew. I'll take that. No question about it, the utilization in aggregate in FLC is lower than we would like to see it. There's no question about that. We expect a better utilization, improved performance as we go out. That masks a bunch of stuff. It masks the fact that we are continuing to make massive investments. In places like Europe, for example, we can't reasonably expect that investment to, you know, turn around and generate, you know, profits on day one. It's a combination. We do expect better utilization, but there is also the factor that one must note of making those significant investments in a whole bunch of new geographies. That's one aspect there. The second point I'll make is that, you know, we do have large jobs, but we don't have the same volume of large jobs that we had in sort of the first, second quarter of last year. Since then, that volume of large jobs has diminished. We don't have evidence that others are getting those large jobs either. Perhaps it's a lag in when the regulatory scrutiny which drives our business will, you know, manifest itself in sort of work for us. That could be a factor there too. I don't want to minimize COVID, though I don't want to make an excuse for COVID. In certain geographies like Asia, you know, there is a COVID effect. In certain segments like health, in our certain sub-practices like Health Solutions, you know, hospitals have deferred operational work. It's a combination of factors. Bottom line is we expect to do better. We have the talent, the capabilities, the investment in various geographies that we ought to do better. Ajay, maybe I can add a minute to that if I could. Let me maybe go out a little further out in timeframe. Andrew, let me talk to some longer timeframes, which I think you're also familiar with. You know, we've had a great business in FLC for a long period of time, but I think what's easy to forget is at one point this business, for a long time, this business was equally as sizable a contribution to the growth and profitability of this company as Corp Fin. We've obviously gotten Corp Fin on this incredible growth trajectory. If you look hard, over a ten-year period, actually FLC was flat in terms of EBITDA. I think if you look at 15, 16, 17. We weren't much higher in EBITDA in 15, 16, and 17, which actually masks the fact that some underlying businesses where we invested were growing vibrantly, like our Construction Solutions business and our Data Analytics business. That in turn means we had other businesses that are stagnating, which was not acceptable. What we are doing, and we're in the process of doing, is investing to put this back a concerted effort to put this thing back on a long-term major growth trajectory. If you think about it, we had quite a bit of success with some of the first investments in 18, 19. We got a little bit thrown off in 20 and 21, but we really have, but we're continuing. We've got a multi-year path in this way. Right now, we've been really successful in getting a bunch of very senior people in new geographies and in adjacent spaces. What we're committing to this year is to bet behind those people and to realize the long-term future. I think Ajay's right. We hope that that'll come along with higher utilization this year. You can't absolutely be sure, but we're not planning to run this business at low utilization forever. This is part of a multi-year trajectory to get this business, which has some great people in it, back to the position it should be in the company. Does that help, Andrew? Yeah. No, that's very helpful. Thank you. I guess for my follow-up, it's probably gonna be another multi-part question, but I wanna ask about kind of wage pressures broadly, and the ability to pass on kind of rate increases via higher billing rates. I think I asked a similar question last quarter as well. Kind of doing some back-of-the-envelope math, on your top-line growth expectations and EPS guidance, it seems to me, given the higher tax rate, that there are, you know, there is some margin pressure year-over-year. Correct me if I'm wrong. With that kind of in mind, how much of that is wage pressures? How much of that is T&E or pass-through costs? Just trying to understand, you know, what I think is all things considered a pretty constructive margin guidance. Just trying to understand where wages and hiring talent and the expensive nature of the current environment fits into the overall puzzle. Thank you. Well, yeah, let me give you a quick answer, and then Ajay can maybe give a little more detail. Look, I think you've hit the right issues. The truth is, you don't know how much you're gonna be able to capture back in price. My experience is in inflationary environments where you have, you know, talent costing you more and, you know, real estate costs and T&E going up, you know, that happens to everybody and it eventually gets reflected in bill rates. You never know whether you're gonna get it that first year or not. You can set your list bill rate up, but it's always also around realization. Look, anybody who tells you they exactly know how much they're gonna recapture this year is well, I guess, smarter than Ajay and me, I guess, is the point. I think you've hit the right sort of factors. All of those things are going on, you know, we've tried to estimate how that shakes out in the P&L. Ajay, I don't know if we give more details on that. I'll leave that to you. No, we don't, Steve. Mercifully, we don't. That's why we give guidance in a range, Andrew. I mean, listen, I mean, it's when we give revenue and EPS guidance, right? We've given you the tax rate, which is slightly higher. You can ease in the midpoint of that earnings guidance, and you can take a midpoint on the revenue guidance. Essentially, we're saying revenue growth resulting in flat EPS. That's what you would surmise from those midpoints. That must mean margin contraction somewhere along the way, you know, when you have that statistic. Then you have a range around it. That margin contraction is due to two, you know, among the three main reasons, which is, you know, headcount growth not sufficiently offset with productivity growth in the same period. You know, wages not sufficiently offset with price increase or realization therefrom, and increases in SG&A, especially T&E. It's those three factors. Where you end up in those three factors is that spectrum. One more point I will make. We are a very successful company. Look at those cash balances. Look at, you know, the earnings growth over a period of time. One of the reasons we don't give margin guidance and precision, or we don't give, you know, exactly what headcount we aim to hire is because we intend to be opportunistic. The most difficult part is hiring the right people in the right geographies. If we find those opportunities to do so, which is not, you know, obvious, then even if it is margin impacting, we ought to do so given the capacity that we have for further growth. We don't want to be, you know, handcuffed with every position in our P&L. Makes sense. Thanks a lot. Thank you, Andrew, and thank you for your flexibility on the schedule today. Again, I apologize for asking for it, but I appreciate it. Our next question will come from Tobey Sommer with Truist Securities. Please go ahead. Thank you. Good afternoon. Hi, Toby. I wanted to ask about what are the lines of business that you are seeding and investing in today that you would consider early stage and analogous to the ones that we know about now and talk about now as growth drivers that were in that position in your first few years at the firm? Well, that's a good question, and I'm gonna think about whether I'm actually gonna answer it, though, because we don't like to tip off our competitors a view of where we see the opportunities. Right. I understand you might not give us that in year one, but if there's something in year two or three, you might. Let me take it a different direction. Rather than business areas, let me do this in terms of geography. You know, we had a business in Germany, we had a business in France. We didn't have a business in the Netherlands. We had a business in the Middle East. We had a business in Latin America. We had a business in Australia. We didn't have many businesses that we could get behind for a long time. We had a very good German StratCom business, but nothing else in Germany. We had mixed, we were going sideways for a long time in France. We weren't in the Netherlands. Australia, you heard us talk about for a long time as a turnaround. Latin America, we had to do a cleanup in. The Middle East, we were kind of mixed talent for a long time. What we have done over the last while is put in place teams in every part of that market and positions that are worth betting on in a way that is just radically different. They're small. They fit your definition of early-stage bets. You know, I love the team we have in tech in Germany or in FLC in Germany or in construction in Germany. You know, the corp fin business we now have in Germany is a terrific platform for growth. The new hires we just had in France are great. The Middle East is the strongest it's ever been. The Australia business has now turned around, and we have real growth aspirations. All of those countries actually meet your criteria for kinda early stage. I mean, we're not new into Germany, but compared to where we could be in Germany, we are. We're just at the early stages. I think every one of the countries I just mentioned and then the sub-practices within those countries meet your definition. It's not just in those countries. In the U.K., we're investing behind some of our non-bankruptcy services in a way we never did in the past. We're investing in Financial Institutions practice, which we always had. I think there's a lot of bets, but maybe that gives you a little bit of granularity. Did that help? It did. Thank you. I don't expect specific numbers, but I'd love to get a flavor for the inputs into your revenue growth guidance. In the broadest strokes, I see headcount utilization and realized bill rate as sort of the broadest categories that could contribute to that. Since I didn't ask for specific numbers, any way you could rank order those or give us some color about how you get to your revenue growth? Well, let me talk about it conceptually and then ask Ajay whether, you know, he wants to comment on the arithmetic. Look, I think the real issue is, when I talk about all these investments, the first place we start is either by betting behind a new senior team that we've promoted that, you know, is coming into their own, either MDs or SMDs that are coming to their own or we've hired and are excited about. You know, the real question at the end of the day is how fast can they penetrate the market that we believe. Those are bets that we believe those people can penetrate the markets, but you never know how fast it can be, and sometimes there are constraints. If they're hired laterally, we honor non-competes. If they're promoted, they may be incredible talent but not have the footprint that some of the laterals have. There's a bet on how fast that goes. Then there's a tendency to say, "Well, why don't we not hire junior people below those people until they start selling?" That never has worked in the history of professional services firm. You know, when you go in for a huge investigation, people say, "You're fabulous. How big is your team below?" "I have four people." That never sold the huge investigations in the history of the world. Once you've made the decision to bet on the senior people, you bet on the junior people. Then you make a forecast of how fast it's gonna be, and Ajay likes to call it a forecast, I sometimes call it a guess, on how fast it is to realize. My experience is it's not. We have not made that many mistakes. Most of the bets we've made have worked. We're I mean, it's an exceptional track record on that dimension. In terms of predicting how fast it was, it's sort of a little bit more mixed. Ajay, you wanna be more precise than that or leave it there? No, I won't be exactly precise, but I'll put it in the context of some numbers and some opportunity. The two areas where, you know, we give utilization numbers in corp fin, FLC and econ, right? Our utilization numbers in corp fin and FLC are low and are lower than we had in the prior years. What I'm trying to paint a picture on, Tobey, is that we have a lot of avenues or paths to significant revenue growth. Simply improving that utilization statistic would get us very significantly higher revenue growth as well as profitability. Now, we also have clearly said today that we'd like to hire lots and lots of people globally, right? Again, it just our desire to hire people doesn't necessarily mean people will come to us. I mean, that's always. We have to go out there and get them similarly with the business. We have many avenues for growth there. The first, the utilization piece would impact your bill rate and take that bill rate higher. The headcount piece, if it's not followed immediately with revenue growth, would take your bill rate lower but would get you the headcount growth. This is the reason we have the range of, you know, range of revenues in there and range of estimations, you know, that around that midpoint. You know, in terms of the geography, I don't know whether you noticed in the supplemental disclosure that in the last six years, Toby, our revenue outside the U.S. has grown from 28%, I think, to 38%. U.K. has doubled in revenue. The rest of countries other than the U.K., other than the U.S., have more than doubled, and the U.S. has grown by 1/3. I mean, there is, as Steve mentioned, there are now platforms for growth. If you have one partner in one country, that may not necessarily be an adequate platform. When you have 50 or 100, it certainly is. We have platforms for growth in various places. We never had Information Governance. We never had privacy and cybersecurity. We never had an ESG offering. Tremendous avenues for growth. Thank you. Last question for me, if I could ask one more. Could you give us a sense for the mix of lateral senior hires versus when you're gonna be able to be generating a substantial mix of internally promoted MDs and SMDs? 'Cause I think that's where you start to get into a sort of a different orbit, where you're nurturing this talent internally and fueling your growth that way. Yeah. I don't know if we have the numbers here, but at the same time, I think you know we've been doing record numbers of lateral hire SMDs. I think maybe over three years, I don't know, maybe 150 over three years or something like that. I don't think the homegrown promotes are that far behind. We've also had record numbers of homegrown promotes. I mean, it's not like you know, some firms that never have hired laterally, where 80% of the people are homegrown, but we are making real progress on the homegrown. L uckily, at this point in time, it's our story is one that allows us to supplement it. I don't think we could today meet our growth aspirations with only homegrown, but we're getting stronger, and there's a commitment to it that there never was. We can get you the exact numbers. I think, Molly, we can get you the exact numbers of homegrown promotes out too. Yes. It's a pretty impressive number too. It's not just the laterals. Terrific. Thank you very much. No, thank you. Thanks to you also for juggling your calendar. Again, if you have a question, please press star then one. Our next question will come from Marc Riddick with Sidoti & Company. Please go ahead. Hi, good afternoon, everyone. Hey, Marc. I was wondering if we could sort of head in a slightly different direction. Maybe you could talk a little bit about what you've seen. There were a couple of acquisitions last year, which were certainly additive. I was wondering if you could spend a little bit of time on those and maybe talk a bit about what the pipeline looks like. Based on commentary, it seems as though the pipeline might be a little more attractive or complementary on the international side, but maybe you could spend a little bit of time on that. Well, look, the acquisitions we've done over the last several years, I'm very excited about. We look at poor Jeff Amling, but not only Jeff Amling, looks at a whole lot of acquisitions. We don't do very many. That is not our primary growth vehicle. We now have a management team that believes, understands and believes that our day in, day out responsibility is organic growth, and that's what we do. We will supplement that with great acquisitions when we find them, but they have to be great acquisitions. That is two constraints, both of which are pretty substantial constraints. One is a financial constraint. Right now, with the looseness of private equity, with the looseness of bank money and the aggressiveness of private equity, a huge number of deals are going at prices that have no historical precedent. We've not gotten into a bidding auction, I don't think. I don't think we've ever gotten on a bidding auction while I've been here, and not certainly any of the deals we've done. T here's a price constraint. M ore important than that, there's a fit constraint. I think, you know, some of our history was doing acquisitions which looked good at the first time, and we never integrated them. They didn't click with the culture of the company. Then after five years, even if there was good financials, people went poof. If you actually look at it, when you look at it over five years, there's never been an acquisition, I don't think, in the history of professional services, that if everybody disappears after five years, the cash on cash is a good return. W e really screen aggressively for, you know, people who we think will grow on our platform better than they are on their current platform, who will be excited to be here. You know, so we're really pleased when we find those, but those are hard to find. I think both the deal we did in the Netherlands and the construction deal we did this past year, we're really excited about both of those, as we were on the German acquisition and the Delta acquisition before it and the CDG acquisition before it. Those are hard to find. If we could find 30 of them, I'd do them. We don't have a constraint on cash. We're saying we only can do three, but it's hard to find them. The more we find, the more we'll do. Our day job, day in, day out, is not the acquisitions. It's to build out organically. Does that make sense, Marc? Did I answer your question or at least? No. You did, actually. That's perfectly fair. One thing I was sort of curious about, I think you made a little, you touched on this a little bit, but I was sort of curious about maybe what you're seeing as to pick up on your end of things as far as pick up of sort of visiting clients. Are you beginning to see folks kinda get out there and travel a little bit more, not just from an expense side, but just from an engagement perspective? Thanks. Absolutely. Look, I think I've personally done this. I spent, you know, three weeks in Europe in January. I went over there in September last year. When there were lulls in the summer, I started traveling around the U.S. My sense is people. Clients are people too, and people, humans are starved for contact. Zoom is good and Teams is good, but I mean, there's something about the quality of a face-to-face engagement that really matters. I think there's an unlocking of that now. It's happening, interestingly enough, in my observation, quite differentially around the world. I mean, there's just parts of the world that have essentially emotionally declared COVID is over. You know, I think the U.K. felt more like that than New York. I mean, it just I think it has to do with the history of COVID and how cautious that has made people feel. You can feel that desire to put it behind us and go back, not to the same as before. I think there's a huge amount of travel that will never happen because Zoom is actually very effective, and there's a huge amount of work remotely that will happen. To supplement that with the essence of person-to-person connection, and I feel that internally, but I also as I've visited clients, we're not alone. The clients, as I say to people, you know, clients are humans too. Does that resonate with you? I assume it's true in your firm too, Marc? It certainly is. I was sort of thinking about what we've seen on the leisure side of things from folks who are in the travel business, and I just wanted to get sort of a sense if we're beginning to see a little bit of an impact from that on your end. I guess the last thing for me is that it really seems as though that part is part of your guide, you're expecting more travel and more face-to-face going forward within the firm, and that sounds like it's part of the investment that you're doing. The last part I would sort of add to is from the hiring timeframe perspective, things like that. Is it fair to... I mean, we're a couple of months into the year now, so fair to assume that that process has already begun? Yeah. Sure. Look, I think a lot of the senior-most hiring has already happened. I mean, the bets we're making a lot of. I mean, look, I think actually we've had incredible run on senior hiring even this year. A lot of the bets that we were thinking about here had to do with the great set of senior hires we were doing during the course of last year or the last year or two, which were in place. That we're now hiring less tenured people below them in various geographies around the world. Got it. There's a lot underway. Second issue, of course, is we always have pre-committed for the entry-level hires, right? Because the entry-level hires come from schools. The timing of that means, you make those decisions quite a bit ahead of time. A lot of hires, not all the hires are pre-committed, but a lot of hires are not just intellectually in our minds, but we're either we have in place or are right now interviewing people for. Does that answer your question, Marc? Yep. That sounds very encouraging. Thank you. This concludes our question and answer session, which also concludes our conference for today. Thank you for attending today's presentation. Thank you all for attending. You may now disconnect your lines at this time.