Good day, and welcome to the Greenhill second quarter 2021 earnings call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Patrick Suehnholz. Please go ahead. Thank you. Good afternoon, and thank you all for joining us today for Greenhill's second quarter 2021 financial results conference call. I am Patrick Suehnholz, Greenhill's Head of Investor Relations, and joining me on the call today is Scott Bok, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. Today's call may include forward-looking statements. These statements are based on our current expectations regarding future events that, by their nature, are outside of the firm's control and are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and assumptions. The firm's actual results and financial condition may differ, possibly materially, from what is indicated in those forward-looking statements. For a discussion of some of the risks and factors that could affect the firm's future results, please see our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including our annual report on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, and current reports on Form 8-K. Neither we nor any other person assumes responsibility for the accuracy or completeness of any of these forward-looking statements. You should not rely upon forward-looking statements as predictions of future events. We are under no duty to update any of these forward-looking statements after the date on which they are made. I would now like to turn the call over to Scott Bok. Thank you, Patrick. We reported second quarter revenue of $43.2 million and a loss per share of $0.45. For the year-to-date, we had revenue of $112.2 million and a loss per share of $0.34. Revenue for the year-to-date was 2% lower than our figure from last year when we had a slow first half that was followed by a strong second half. Industry data makes clear that global M&A activity has been very strong for the year-to-date. We see that in what has been a significant increase versus last year and the year before in the number of new assignments we are winning. We also see the result of a more active market in the number of deal announcements we are associated with, as shown on the transaction list we regularly update on our website. This past quarter, we announced the second highest number of transactions in any quarter in our history. On a trailing four quarters basis, our number of transaction announcements is at the highest level ever by a meaningful margin. Many of those transactions have been for major companies, but for the year-to-date, the sizes of deals that have completed have skewed toward the smaller end of the scale, resulting in soft year-to-date revenue. In the second half, we expect the size of completed deals and related fee events to significantly increase, such that we should get to a full-year revenue outcome that shows improvement over what was a respectable year for our firm in 2020. We saw the first versus second half play out similarly to the way I'm describing both last year and the year before. On a regional basis, for the full year, we expect to show a stronger year than last year in the U.S. and Canada and a much stronger year in Australia, offset by reduced revenue in Europe, where we had a particularly strong revenue year last year. By type of advice, M&A is where we are seeing the greatest opportunity. Restructuring activity is materially lower given the strength in credit markets, but we are making progress in our strategic initiative to be more active in financing advisory assignments of various kinds. In the private capital advisory area, we continue to be busy with secondary transactions in Europe and Asia, including an increasing number of complex fund restructuring transactions led by fund general partners. In addition, over the course of the year-to-date, we've succeeded in building out a global primary fundraising team, and we expect to start seeing revenue from that group already in the current quarter. In all our businesses, we are making progress on our strategic initiative to do more business with financial sponsors. With respect to recruiting, our press release notes another recent hire on the M&A side of the business, in addition to two more recruits in the private capital advisory area. We have other recruits in progress. We already see this year as an important one in terms of recruiting, and we should see more success in that regard in the second half. Now turning to costs. Our compensation costs were lower than last year in absolute terms, given our objective to bring quarterly compensation more in line with quarterly revenue, but our compensation ratio was still higher than our target range. Our objective is to bring the ratio down to our target range for the full year while still paying our team increased compensation in absolute dollars. Where we end up in terms of compensation costs and expense ratio for the year depends, as always, on our revenue outcome for the year. Our non-compensation costs were materially lower than last year and are running at a rate slightly better than our target. Our interest expense continues to trend lower given declining debt levels and continued low short-term interest rates. We continue to estimate our annual tax rate will be in the mid-20% range after adjusting for the impact of charges relating to the vesting of restricted stock, which is consistent with our prior guidance. We ended the quarter with $92.5 million of cash and $306.9 million of debt, and we paid down another $15 million of that debt after quarter end. We also declared our usual $0.05 quarterly dividend. Lastly, as of quarter end, we have bought back 1.5 million shares and share equivalents for a total cost of $23.8 million and had an additional $26.2 million of repurchase authority available for the year ahead through next January. As I said last quarter, our principal focus is on deleveraging, but we also intend to continue to purchase shares in a prudent manner to further enhance the upside potential for continuing shareholders. Our employees currently own about half of the economics of the firm through stock and restricted stock and are thus fully aligned in trying to drive shareholder value in the quarters and years to come. To sum up, we recognize that our first half is an outlier relative to peers in what is a strong M&A market. At our smaller scale, the random timing of deal completions has a large impact and can result in a weak quarter or even multiple quarters. Last year, we saw that same phenomenon, yet with the help of a record quarter at year-end, got to a very respectable full-year result. This year, we have the benefit of what is a significantly higher pace of new assignments and of deal announcements. Looking beyond this year, the same smaller scale that today results in greater quarterly volatility is what creates future upside potential for our shareholders. First, the strategic moves we are making should reduce future quarterly volatility as well as increase annual revenue. The effort to develop a financing advisory business and to devote more resources to serving financial sponsors should be particularly important in diversifying and growing our revenue base. Second, the successful rebuilding and expansion of our private capital advisory business should also add to revenue diversity and scale starting later this year. Lastly, with our lower cost, declining debt and interest expense, and much reduced share count, the benefit of increased revenue would be magnified in terms of net income and shareholder value creation. With that, I will take any questions. Our first question comes from Devin Ryan with JMP Securities. Please go ahead. Hi, thanks. This is Brian McKenna for Devin. You talked about a material increase in new client assignments, and that number of deal announcements is at an all-time high over the past year. Could you just give us any additional color on this, like the absolute number of new deals and how that compares to, say, last year, or what specific teams and regions are driving all this activity? The deals listed on the website, I think there were 77 for the last four quarters, and that doesn't include our Private Capital Advisory Business, which obviously those deals are pretty much all private, so we don't tend to list those. That gives you some sense. I don't think we've been above 70 before, so that's a pretty significant increase, and we think that trend's going to continue just based on announcements quarter to date and things we've seen start to move into the near-term pipeline for the next couple of months. As to where that's happening, as I said, we've been very busy in Australia. Frankly, it's all the areas that were very quiet last year seem to be very busy this year. Australia, certain sectors like industrials, Canada, that did okay last year, but all those are doing much better this year. Obviously, there's less restructuring, but bottom line is it's fairly broad-based between all the regions we work in and pretty much focused on M&A. We've had some notable successes in financing advisory as well, but no real trend other than just frankly more activity all across the firm. Got it. You also cited full-year results should be another respectable period for the firm, just based on the pipeline, which implies a significant ramp in second half revenues. How should we think about that as it relates to the third and fourth quarter? Is it likely to be more evenly split between the two quarters or more weighted to one or the other? Last year it ended up for random reasons, really very heavily concentrated in the fourth quarter. I think this year will be much more evenly split between the two, if I had to guess. We can never predict exactly what's going to happen in a quarter, but I think last year's was a pretty unique event where one quarter was so important to the whole year for us. Great. Thanks, Scott. Thank you. Our next question comes from Michael Brown with KBW. Please go ahead. Okay, great. Thanks for taking my questions. Scott, I was looking at the MD headcount. Looks like it's at 71. Last year was at 76 in the second quarter. I heard you correctly and read in the press release, looks like there's been 10 additions year-to-date. Could you just give us a little color as to what's the delta there? Is it retirements or moving to maybe senior advisor roles or just net loss in headcount there and just trying to help me parse through those MD changes year-over-year? I think the biggest factor there is toward the end of last year, as you'll remember, we had several members of our private capital advisory team leave. It was the team pretty much all in the U.S. In Europe and Asia, we're pretty much unaffected. It was a very top-heavy group in terms of numbers of MDs versus supporting cast. We've rebuilt a tremendous amount of that group and really have a much broader business than we did a year ago because now we can do primary as well as secondary, and we're certainly doing more with fund general partners as well. It won't be as top-heavy a group in terms of MDs. We've had some increase in MD headcount over year to date versus a year ago, but for that one group that left. I think we'll add some more before the year is over, and I still think it will be already a little bit of a net positive year for us, and I think it'll be significantly net positive. We've had a few other departures here and there, but nothing in the slightest bit material, just normal, around the edges, people who just didn't have tremendous success with us and thought they might have more success elsewhere. I think all very healthy, but for the one group that we really did have to rebuild, which we've pretty much done. Okay. Then as a follow-up, there have been a lot of significant changes, and you touched on a big one there. As you've done a lot of hiring over the last couple of years, and there's been changes as far as individuals that have joined and left. How would you characterize Greenhill's key strengths today? Obviously, again, that's evolved over time. I'm just curious how you would characterize that and where do you see Greenhill growing and evolving over the next couple of years? I think every region and sector is, of course, different in terms of its development. But if you said, what are some of our strengths today, I would say we have a great team in Australia. I'd say we have a great team in Canada. I would say we have a very long history of working for FTSE 100-type quality companies in the U.K. market, particularly in a lot of public transactions. I'd say in the industry sector space, we have by far our largest team in industrials, and I think we have most of the various sub-sectors, the many sub-sectors in that space filled, and we do that from Stockholm to Australia, to Chicago to Frankfurt and all the places where industrial companies tend to live. There are other areas where we've had a lot of consumer, I actually add consumer also as an area that's very important for us year in, year out in both the U.S. and in Europe. Then there are some areas where, look, we've had some really notable successes, but we have a lot of potential to get much bigger, and those would be things like healthcare, technology, media, where we've had some terrific successes, but still have a relatively small team and could stand to add quite a lot more talent. Okay, great. Thanks for taking my questions, Scott. Okay. Thank you. As a reminder, if you have a question, please press star then one to be joined into the queue. Our next question is from James Yaro with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead. Good afternoon, Scott. I'll just start with a follow-up on your comments around the second half being much stronger than the first. Is part of this due to some of the deals that you might have originally thought would close in the second quarter slipping into the second half? Or perhaps there were fewer pull forwards than you would've anticipated? Or is there something else at play with that dynamic? We certainly don't control, of course, the timing of transactions. We don't forecast these things, but if you privately asked me at the beginning of the year or even three months ago, I would've thought things would be a little more smoothly spread across quarters two, three, and four. It just evolved a little bit. It did the same thing last year. Last year, it evolved into really one very big quarter that offset three fairly soft ones and got us to a net good result. This year, as I was saying a minute ago, I think it'll be more smoothly spread across the second half versus the first and again, get us to a pretty good place by the end of the year. Okay. Then perhaps on the outlook for Europe, which obviously has historically been one of the stronger areas for you. Has the weakness in Europe been driven by the new COVID variants, or is there something else going on there? Is that something that we could expect could weigh on U.S. M&A going forward? I frankly look at it a little bit in the opposite way. I would say if you think about places where business sort of got back to something a little more like normal, I would've said Australia was first. I realize they have occasional sort of regional shutdowns. Still, there were people having face-to-face meetings with clients there months ago already. That market, from our perspective, seems to be booming in terms of opportunity. I think the U.S., which clearly, despite the Delta variant, there's an awful lot of positive business activity in this country. That market seems very active. Europe, I think, has been a little bit behind. They were a little behind the U.S. in terms of vaccination rate. If you look at just when we had really robust positive GDP, they still had some negative GDP quarters. I think as Europe comes out of COVID more thoroughly, which I don't doubt they will, their vaccination rate, I think, has actually even surpassed ours at this point. I suspect that the economic rebound and the transactional rebound will be very similar to what we're seeing already in Australia and the U.S. Okay. Makes a lot of sense. One last one. You did see record low non-comp expenses this quarter. Is there any further leverage from here? Do you expect economies reopening and leading to more travel for your bankers to put upward pressure on the non-comp from here? I think the real leverage for us is that non-comp is largely kind of a fixed figure. Yes, travel will pick up some. It already did pick up a little bit. It'll pick up some more for sure. I think the real opportunity for us in terms of operating leverage there is that non-comp is pretty sticky. It'll move up a little bit, but as revenue goes up, non-comp won't go up much at all and should lead to stronger profit margins. Okay, thanks for taking my questions. Okay, thank you. I think that's our last question. We thank everybody for joining. We look forward to speaking again next quarter. The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.