We're ready to get started. Good morning. It's now 8:32 A.M. here on the East Coast, and we're ready to begin with our presentation. My name is Mark Riddick, a senior analyst with Sidoti & Company, and I want to thank you for joining us at the Sidoti & Company Small Cap Virtual Conference. Our presenting company is Heidrick & Struggles, the ticker is HSII. Joining us today is Tom Monahan, CEO, and Nirupam Sinha, Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, just a reminder, we will have plenty of time for Q&A following prepared remarks. We also have Suzanne Rosenberg from Investor Relations joining us as well. If you do need to ask a question, just feel free to submit those at any point by clicking on the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen. There's no need to wait until the end. With that, I can turn the floor over to Heidrick. Good morning. Terrific. Good morning. I am Tom Monahan, as Mark said, really excited to be here. We're delighted to share the Heidrick story with you all. We appreciate people making time for us. We thought we'd just put a few framing thoughts out there about why we're so excited about the future for Heidrick and hopefully lay out why we think that makes us a great investment proposition. With your permission, Nirupam and I will spend a few minutes just talking through the basic highlights of the company's strategy and its recent performance. I'm sure Mark will have some questions for us, and I'm sure the group will have some questions for us. Let's jump on in. I will not read the safe harbor stuff out loud, tempting though it might be. Let me dive in. Just, if you're not familiar with Heidrick & Struggles and you're stuck sitting next to me on a plane or train, here, here's what you'd hear. Number one, we believe we are the preeminent leadership consultancy advising the world's leading companies on their most important talent and leadership decisions. We work at the top of the house. We have a unique and strong collection of assets and therefore a right to win. We have two things that give us great opportunity to grow. One is incredible access. You know, we talk to CEOs, heads of HR, CFOs, and the leadership suite and the board on a regular basis. They obviously turn to us for a set of decisions today, and we see opportunities to help them with an expanding set of decisions, going forward. We also have proprietary technology and IP that undergirds the great work of our consulting teams. We, you know, like, every, everyone has a TAM slide, and we will spare you ours today, but it's safe to say you all talk to as many leaders as your calendar allows, and no one ever says, "Gee, all my leadership needs are met. I have the right leaders in the right roles leading the right way everywhere." As the world gets more complex, these needs grow, the need to have the right leaders grows in scale and urgency. We have an enormous opportunity right in front of us without changing our business model or without doing anything wildly different, just continuing to have great people in touch with clients and empowering them with great technology. Nirupam and I are new here. I'm lapping probably my 14-month mark at this point, and he is lapping his two-and-a-half-month mark at this point. We are new. We put new service line leaders in across the board. Tom Maurer was elevated to President at the same time I came in as CEO. They've got a great new leadership team. We are just doing really deeply focused on that issue that I talked about, which is clients have incredibly complex needs, and we are really well situated to help them be successful. We did some restructuring last year, to accelerate growth, get resources lined up against our most interesting and powerful growth ideas. We keep expanding capabilities and expertise. Most of this is just making sure we are investing properly in intellectual property, great new teams in areas of potential growth, and technology to bring that all together. We see the opportunity to continue expanding margin, both the work we've done on the restructuring side and the fact that we have built some assets that we think can scale, should allow us to continue to achieve gains in margin structure across the coming years. It's a great financial model. We have zero debt. We have strong free cash flow. We've got a disciplined capital allocation method that we think properly balances opportunities to grow with returning capital with shareholders. I'll spend one more slide just to talk about, you know, kind of how we take this incredible collection of assets and bring it to bear first to create value for clients and then through that to create value for colleagues and investors. You know, that's how we think about our strategy. We aim to build differentiated, deep, and durable relationships. We want to work at the top, work on their largest problems, and work with them consistently across time. You can see this as at the core, you know, our core differentiator is our access to the C-suite. That has a couple of benefits for us. One is obvious access. They take our phone call. Secondly, we know what's on their mind. We know what the world's leading companies behind the closed doors of their boardroom or their executive team meetings are worried about. We can make sure that we're in line to address those challenges. Second, deep, everyone at Heidrick knows that every, if you think of our core executive search business, our flagship executive search business, every single leader we place has a mandate to drive change. You know, no one goes out and says, "Get me a new CEO. just to keep everything just the way it is. Get me a new CFO. Keep everything the way it is. Get me a new Chief People Officer. Keep everything the way it is. Get me a new chief people officer. Keep everything the way it is." Every one of those leaders has a mandate for change, and it's always on. They might be doing a cost out. They might be doing a digital transformation. They might be doing a reorganization to get into a new market. Whatever it is, they have a mandate for change, and we have resources to help them achieve those transformational objectives. Third, durable. We, you know, we want to be working with clients on a very regular basis. We want to, we, we see an interesting dynamic unfolding, which is, leadership issues used to be sporadic. You would have a situation where a board would say, "Oh my gosh, you know, we need to start thinking about a CEO because our CEO is 67 years old." Increasingly, that CEO on the first day of their job says, "We're going to work on succession planning every quarter till I retire." We are starting to see clients pull us into more consistent long-term relationships. Planning, bringing, what we see happening is people are starting to bring the same rigor and scrutiny and consistency to leadership decisions that they bring to financial management decisions. We think that's a huge opportunity. Undergirds our investment in IP and undergirds our investment in technology. With that, I'll turn it over to Nirupam to talk about how we've been doing, how we've been converting those great assets into these strategies and therefore into financial returns, and then talk about how we see that performing going forward. Great. Thanks, Tom. Thanks for having us. As Tom said, appreciate all of you taking a few minutes to hear our story. As Tom said, you know, it's two and a half months in, but, you know, it's been great, sort of joining the business, and I really see opportunity for us to deliver for clients, and that obviously translates, as Tom said, to employees and shareholders. I am pretty excited about what we can do ahead. If we go to the next slide, Tom, maybe we can just quickly touch on how we've done, in terms of each of our service lines, and how we see that going into the future. Our most durable service line, as Tom mentioned, is executive search. I think it's what, you know, the largest portion of our business is. We feel good. I mean, coming out of the fourth quarter, we saw 10% year-over-year revenue growth. We saw adjusted EBITDA margin of 25%, which is where we sort of see that holding. We continue to see gains in a few key metrics: confirmations, productivity, and average revenue per executive search increase. Those are all sort of good health metrics. Now, certainly, that's not the only thing we do. As Tom said, one of the pieces that we're very excited about is how we bring different service lines to our clients. In on-demand talent, we also have seen good growth in terms of 3% year-over-year revenue growth for the fourth quarter. There we continue to see the business well positioned. We saw an EBITDA adjusted loss for the fourth quarter, but as we kind of head into this year, we've, you know, you'll see in the next page a little bit of kind of where we see that business going and where we see the, the future of the, of the targets. We feel like we're on course for that. Same thing with Heidrick & Struggles. We saw, you know, some pretty significant growth in the fourth quarter of 11.5%. We saw confirmations up in that business in the fourth quarter as well, over year over year. You know, that's a business where we did do some work last year, and some of the restructuring that we did has helped us and will continue to help us as we go into 2025. Now, underpinning each of these businesses, search, on-demand talent, and Heidrick & Struggles is investments that we make on R&D and digital enablement. This is sort of the platform that we're creating that enables and allows us to provide the services to our clients across all of these service lines. You see that there's an asset and an IP that we've sort of built here that we're very keen to leverage, and we think there's good scale that's going to come from that. If we go to the next slide, I think this is something that we've put out before, and we just wanted to make sure that we shared with you today. As I said, Heidrick & Struggles. We kind of saw the growth year over year. I think we felt very good about it. Longer term, we're kind of buying 4-6% through the cycle growth in that business. The margin is 25% Q4. That's kind of where we think it'll be. We think it's a good, solid sort of, you know, margin that allows us to then invest in other parts of the business and use that cash to return to shareholders as appropriate. In terms of Heidrick On-Demand, again, 7-11% growth through the cycle. We have a little bit of work to do as we head into 2025 here. Our longer term adjusted EBITDA margin target for that business is high single digits. Consulting, again, the revenue growth of 8-12%, we felt good about where that was in coming out of Q4. Longer term, we see that as low double digit sort of, EBITDA margin target. I think the way to think about this is we feel good about where all of these businesses are positioned. Search is sort of at the targets that we would like to see, and the others are on their way to those targets. With that, I think we'll probably leave our presentation and for us to sort of talk for a little bit, and we'll turn it over to Mark for Q&A. Thank you very much. As a reminder, folks, if you would like to submit a question, just click on the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen to submit those. We will get started with a few that I sort of wanted to sort of cover the big picture topics of the day, if you will, with the amount of uncertainty that we're seeing in the current environment, stock market volatility, and now talks of a potential recession. Maybe you could talk a little bit about how Heidrick has managed through times of uncertainty in the past and how you're prepared for the future if there's more economic challenges. Yeah, I think it, you know, without question, our business has cyclical natures like a lot of others, right? There are portions of our business where clients will, you know, a lot of things that clients can't stop altogether, but they will slow down. As someone who has a new CFO, it would have never occurred to me, even during a difficult time, to say, "Well, I'll just do without one." So there are portions of our business that are just need to have, and that gives us a lot of ballast. You know, so if you look back, Heidrick has, you know, what you tend to see, we talked about this at Investor Day, Mark, as you know, you tend to see if you look at sort of just a quarter, you can see some volatility at the quarter level. If you take a four or six-quarter rolling average, you know, a client might say, "I'm going to hold off starting this project," but they'll flip the switch again 45 days later. When you smooth out those quarterly decisions, you see very consistent client usage. To the other side, look, we have variable costs that are natural stabilizers of profit and cash flow. You know, if we have a year when stuff moves from one year to the next, our compensation tends to reflect that a little bit. I think more broadly, when we think about, you know, challenging economic times, we also are reminded that that's when clients need us most, right? If, and I'd say probably it doesn't even need to be challenging. We're not in a recession. If I could call macro, I wouldn't have to wear a tie to work. My sense of where the economy is going is as good as anyone else's. We do know when there's complexity, volatility, and tumult in the world, clients need help. They need help to understand what should I be focused on, what sort of leadership do I need, what gaps might I have in my team, you know, do I need to double down here versus there? Complexity is our friend. We joke internally, no one ever got to an end of a meeting and said, "Everything's going great here right now, exactly as we want it. Let's call Heidrick." Right? Those are, when things are smooth sailing, they're not like, "We need new leaders leading in new ways." Complexity and volatility are our friends. It's our job to be in front of clients taking advantage of it. Maybe just a couple of things to add. One is to underscore, I think, Tom's point there. I mean, change is our friend, right? Our business thrives on change and partnering closely with clients. I think the other thing that's something that we've worked hard on is I think we have more stickiness with our clients, you know, some of that durable, differentiated, that Tom was talking about that we didn't have before. Our platform and approach, you know, I think we've created IP, technology, global reach, data insights that are kind of diversifying our revenue streams. That's also a piece of the business that if you look back to choppiness in prior periods, we didn't have. I think we feel that the change can be something that we withstand better than we did previously, but also that clients need us more than ever. Excellent. Tom, you referred to the Investor Day. Now, it's interesting. The Investor Day was in December. We had our change of administration in January. It's only been about four months, I guess, or so since the Investor Day, but maybe it feels longer than that. Can you talk a little bit about what you're hearing from clients, particularly since the change of administration and maybe what they're talking about as far as how it's affecting their outlook? Look, I think, you know, Heidrick has literally thousands of clients that we support, and they're all over the world in different markets and different industries. Every client use case and every client conversation is different, and that's always true. You know, I think generally what we're hearing, if you sort of pull all the way back, Yogi Berra famously said, "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." This didn't start with the election. If you think of a board of directors sitting down in autumn of 2019 and trying to pick a new CEO or a new CFO for the next five years and a person was going to encounter, they would have missed a pandemic, they would have missed inflation, they would have missed supply chain. There's no, we have all the specs from that period. We had no one had any of these things. I think in general, when we talk to boards and leadership teams, what they're saying is, "Look, the world is a lot less predictable." The types of leaders and leadership we need are changing. We can't, you know, we can't, we don't want someone who's had a playbook that they've done twice because the odds are pretty good it's not going to work again, let's say in the era of AI. That's probably the first most important thing. When we look at our client data, they're saying, "Hey, I need a leader who can lead through multiple environments because they're likely to see them." That's probably the first thing. I think secondly, you know, what we see is, while no one, and this is a broader thing, having nothing to do with the election, but I would say, you know, people are thinking, "Okay, what does it mean to be global?" No one's saying, "Hey, we're not going to be global." No one's saying, "Hey, we're going to hunker down." They are thinking, "You know, where do I put people? You know, where, you know, is my supply chain sufficiently resilient? Do I have multiple sources of supply to help me in that world? Am I able to think about how the company is set up for a world where there may be some fragmentation in some industries? Do I need new capabilities in new markets?" Those are obviously great questions for us, right? We can engage them and help them think about how to build out those capabilities. You know, loosely speaking, macro and geopolitics are just, they were already a concern. The election only, you know, made some of those issues more significant, but I think people are already looking at it over the past decade and saying, "How do I think about these things? How do I think about talent in different markets, etc.?" That helps. I think those are the two. Then third, you'd, you know, you'd be completely unsurprised to find out, you know, in hundreds of clients' conversations I've had, a phrase I've never heard has been, you know, "We've got this AI thing figured out and locked down." You know, nothing to do here, nothing to look at, right? They're looking and saying, "Do I have the right talent to execute on this? Do I have the right strategy? Am I organized the right way? Are my, you know, my technical leaders the right ones? Are my business leaders, accessing the technical leaders, the right ones?" You're going to be unsurprised to find out that, you know, even the, you know, you read an earnings call transcript and you hear about all the great things the company's doing with AI and you get on a call with the CEO who says, you know, "Help, help, help." I think those are the three major themes that kind of percolate across. Again, every client has its own. You got the first one, leader's going to have to lead in multiple different environments. Who can do that for us? Second one is the definition of global is being global is changing. People aren't pulling back from it, but they're just thinking about it differently. Third, I think people are on the front end of this major technology wave and people are still wrestling with, you know, moving beyond the experimentation stage and really scaling their impact, and that they realize that's a people issue. That's not a which LLM, which platform I put stuff on. Those are the big three we see. Gotcha. Excellent. It's interesting. Moving from sort of the macro to the, you know, the controlling the controllable, if you will, Tom, you've been leader of the company now for a little over a year. I know you're going with a long-term approach and you've communicated that, communicated that at the Investor Day. Maybe you could talk a little bit about where you are in that process, in the transformation or investment cycle for Heidrick & Struggles and how we should view this year as sort of a pivot to new direction and continuing to need to continue to make investments, both in the business and then maybe, if you talk a little bit about, you know, where you see the timeframe of the payoff and benefit from some of the changes in investments that you've already undertaken. Terrific. I, you know, I'll start and I'll let Nirupam finish, so we can talk specifically about how that rolls through this year. I think, as we said in our prepared remarks, we made substantial change to the leadership team, including the two folks on screen here. You know, it's a new team that is tightly aligned against the objectives we shared. Our clients will tell you and they tell us and they pay us to say that's the most important first step in any transformation, is do we have the right team focused on the right stuff. You saw us take additional steps with the restructuring last year to accelerate growth and improve the economics of Heidrick Consulting. You saw that already pay off, right? That, and that, and they're not, that team, that team thinks they're, it's not yet baseball season and it's a global team. Many of them wouldn't even know what I mean by they think they're only in the first or second inning, but they know they've got huge opportunity in front of them. We see opportunity ahead to, we've made substantial changes to drive growth and margin and you see great outcomes from some of those already. There's work ahead to keep scaling the returns from the investments we made and, you know, think about what's in our R&D line, which is a combination of some technology investments and some investments in very scalable IP. The way we talked about that at Investor Day is that, you know, it, it's un, you know, that number should grow at a very different rate than the top line, right? That's the, those are scalable, that should be a scalable thing. You do expect to see that going forward. As we think about the year, maybe Nirupam, I'll have you talk a little bit about how we see this coming together in a 2025 context. I think a couple of thoughts there. One is, you know, in terms of just pure guidance that we've given, you know, we've said, you know, for Q1, $263 million-$273 million. I think we feel good about where that would leave us for the rest of the year. In terms of the margin piece that Tom mentioned, I think we are cautiously optimistic about where we think margin can be this year. We do think that the back half of this year will see some margin expansion. That will start being the beginning of a cycle where hopefully we continue to get the return of the investments that Tom mentioned have already been made. I mean, as we talked about in the prior part of this conversation, there is a little bit of choppiness out there too. We just have to keep mindful of that and, you know, the little bit of delay from a client saying, "Hey, you know, I want to start this project 30 days later," that has some impact that will roll through the year. I think we're optimistic about where we are with the business, but obviously the macro environment is something we just have to, you know, make sure we keep in mind as we think about the rest of 2025. Excellent. For those who may not be familiar with you, Nirupam just joined just a few months ago. Congratulations on your role there. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about your views and priorities, particularly around balance sheet and capital allocation, levels of comfort, leverage ratios that you think is appropriate for Heidrick and how you view the, you know, sort of balancing out the views of, you know, between paying the dividend and share repurchase activity and that prioritization. Yeah, sure. Thanks, thanks for the wishes, Marc. As I said earlier, it's been great, and very exciting to get going here at Heidrick, two and a half months in now. Look, I think primarily for us, we're very committed to executing a strategy to drive organic growth. We feel good about where the lines of business are as we've shared with you today, and we see that as priority one. We do think that there's just so much to be done with clients that the incremental dollar going into organic growth will have the best kind of return at this point. Having said that, you know, in our business, there's always, you know, some inorganic opportunities that can accelerate growth and kind of explore those agencies. Just to give an example of what that can look like, it's often, you know, we're having a conversation to bring in some great, great talent that we are looking at. It's a smaller sort of boutique firm, and that ends up becoming a M&A-like type acquisition when it's effectively aqua-hired. That is where, you know, there are kind of opportunities potentially for us in terms of using the balance sheet a little bit to accelerate the hiring of talent and bringing in great talent. That can be true in each of our service lines, though I think most people think of that as in the search business. I think we feel good about the balance sheet we have. We also have access to liquidity to help achieve any of this that we need. I think we feel very good about kind of where we are from the organic growth journey and the opportunity to use the balance sheet as appropriate to accelerate that. Of course, you know, we think all of that will pay off for shareholders as we continue this story. Great. Maybe you could talk a little bit about what the acquisition pipeline might look like at this point, how active you might be comfortable in participating there, as well as maybe if there are any particular, you know, levels, whether we're talking larger acquisitions, smaller acquisitions, any particular return targets that you might be looking on or how should we think about the sort of both the prioritization and then maybe what the pipeline might look like, given the current environment. Yeah, sure. I mean, as I said, I think, I think for us, you know, generally we're on an organic growth, you know, kind of journey here. For us, that's the priority. Having said that, we're always, you know, it's our job, right, and our duty to make sure we're looking at all opportunities that can accelerate the business. We're open to the right sort of acquisitions. I think mostly that's going to be smaller in nature, tuck-in like. As I said, gave the example, often, you know, in any of our service lines, but particularly search, you know, as we're looking at good talent, and that bringing in onboarding of good talent that turns into an acquisition. I think that's kind of where, you know, we've seen the most opportunity. I think as we think about the rest of this year, that's where we're going to continue to see opportunity and we're going to be, you know, smart and pragmatic about how best to bring in the talent, whether that's acquisition or not. Okay, great. We have about a minute left. I did want to, first of all, again, thank everybody for participating, but I also wanted to leave a moment for some closing remarks, Tom, if you'd like to share those with the audience. Sure. You know, I think we laid out the most important parts of the Heidrick thesis. It's an exceptional platform with incredible assets and incredible access. We've got a clear strategy for converting those assets and access in great returns for clients first and foremost, and through that, great returns for shareholders. We're excited, you know, we laid out some targets. We're feeling good, obviously, our performance to date. Those are multi-year oversight targets, but our performance to date shows that we have the capacity to go after them. We have the ability to go, we're demonstrating the ability to go execute on the huge opportunity in front of us. We know that creates value for clients, colleagues, and shareholders. Excellent. Certainly compelling story. I want to thank you for joining us today and thank all of our participants for taking time and, everybody have a wonderful and productive remainder of the day. Thanks, Marc. Thank you so much, everyone.