Be able to find material from today's session, including a reconciliation of the non-GAAP to GAAP measures posted to the Investor Relations section of our website. Again, thank you for joining us today. As you can see from this agenda, you'll hear from a number of our business leaders about what has fueled our strong performance since our last Investor Day and why we are confident in our strategic and financial aspirations. With that, let's get the session started. At Huron, we have the privilege of serving some of the most prestigious organizations in the world, and we're truly a unique partner for our clients. It's our size and scale that gives us the industry depth and the breadth of capabilities that our clients need to solve their toughest challenges. At the same time, we're nimble enough to bring the best solutions to bear for our clients. We're innovative and entrepreneurial, and candidly, I like to think of us as a startup at scale. Every day, we compete with organizations that can be up to 50 times our size. At Huron, you feel like you're in a small company or working with a small company, but you have the support of a billion-dollar organization behind you. It's only made possible because of our strong collaborative culture and the integrated operating model that brings us together to work as one team here at Huron and really distinguishes us apart from our competitors. It's a unique combination, and that one delivers meaningful impact for our clients and one that really fosters growth and development for our people. The Huron team really understood the work and really came in and acted as a great guide for our team, bringing in other people from Huron, other expertise. All those things really were more than I expected. I think when everybody saw how beneficial this was to everyone, including the providers, it's really been a really hugely successful project. It's sort of the breadth of expertise in large, complex implementation projects, and layered in with that, the knowledge of higher education really across the whole team in a really profound way. Huron has been a great partner with us, not just on the automation space, but rather on the strategic point of view as well. We have been partnering with Huron in many different programs of work, and being that automation is one of the biggest pieces that are going to bring a lot of value to us internally and externally. The colleagues that I work with every day, I wake up in the morning knowing that I have an army, my Huron colleagues with whom I can go to battle with and solve most of the challenging problems. I love the energy, the vibe, the synergy that we see at Huron. are different reasons people join Huron, but I'd say if there's one thing that ties us all together and connects us, it's the people who come here who really want to make a difference. They're passionate for their clients, and they're passionate for one another. Good morning. I'd like to add my welcome to everyone today, both in person and virtually. Thank you for taking the time to join us. My name is Mark Hussey, CEO, and I've been, maybe just as a way of introduction, I've been at Huron now coming up on 14 years. I joined as the CFO in 2011, and in 2014, became COO as well. At the end of 2016, I handed the CFO reins over to John Kelly, who you'll hear from in just a moment, and stepped into our healthcare practice for a couple of years until I, Jim Gallus, who you're going to hear from this morning as well, took over in 2019, and then served as president until about three years ago. We had our Investor Day, and at about that time, we announced the CEO transition. I have been here now in this role, I guess officially coming up, starting my third year. We are also very happy to have our senior leaders here. These are the leaders who actually are in the market speaking with their clients. I think it's a great opportunity for you to hear directly from them. I am here to, would love to acknowledge our Board Chair who was here with us today, Hugh Sawyer, who took over as Chair effective January 1. We have a very simple goal for today, which is to share with you the basis for our confidence in continuing to deliver sustainable revenue growth and continued margin expansion for the next five years. We hope today provides you the opportunity to learn more about our businesses in detail and the markets from our senior leaders, and along with their teams, they are the drivers of our real success in the marketplace. I also hope today gives you an opportunity to understand our strategy for revenue growth and margin expansion, our capital deployment in the context of our updated medium-term financial goals. I'm going to start my comments today by highlighting four primary factors underlying our confidence in our strategy, in our business, and our outlook. First, let me start by looking back to three years ago when we started our last Investor Day in March of 2022, almost three years to the day. Our medium-term financial targets shared back then were framed by a simple strategy that we believed would lead to strong financial performance and create significant shareholder value. Three years later, we've now market-tested this strategy, and through disciplined execution, we've achieved our financial targets and driven significant shareholder value. Second, we've strengthened and expanded our leading market positions in the healthcare and education industries, and that positions us very well to benefit from the tailwinds of solid demand in these end markets and to capitalize on the expertise, the capabilities, the substantial credentials and track record that we built over many, many years. In addition, the ongoing digitization of organizations to remain competitive in their markets, whether it's in healthcare or education or across commercial industries, remains a very core tailwind for a growing digital capability. Third, we've demonstrated the ability to consistently expand our margins, and that's led to strong earnings, cash flows, and a healthy balance sheet, which gives us substantial flexibility to invest in growth opportunities while returning capital to our shareholders through share repurchases. Finally, our unique collaborative culture, our integrated operating model, and the incentive program that are aligned with shareholder interests are working well together to drive growth, innovation, and competitive differentiation. Together, we believe these are the four factors that position Huron to continue to drive strong revenue and earnings growth, free cash flow, and significant shareholder returns. We shared our medium-term financial targets at our last Investor Day, and we've referred to them often on our investor calls. Our targets included low double-digit revenue growth, expansion of our adjusted EBITDA margins to mid-teens by 2025, high EPS, high-teens EPS growth, along with strong cash flows, effective capital deployment, and a healthy balance sheet. As you're going to hear today, this talented team has executed well against this strategy. Let me briefly comment on each of these five strategic pillars. First, revenue growth at our core strongholds in healthcare and education have increased at a 21% compound growth rate from 2022 to 2024. Second, we've expanded our presence in commercial industries, achieving a 5% compound growth rate despite a challenging economic environment during that time and at a time when our primary focus was getting our new operating model up and running in our core of healthcare and education. Next, our digital capability, which came together as part of our operating model, grew 21% compounded over this period and is very well positioned for continued growth as well as expansion into new solutions and continuing to build scale to effectively compete against larger competitors. Fourth, in terms of margins, we expanded our adjusted EBITDA margins by 270 basis points through a strong focus on driving efficiencies from our integrated operating model and by aligning a meaningful portion of our incentives to margin expansion for the enterprise. Finally, as a result of strong top-line growth and expanded margins, cash flows have also been very strong. Our flow-through from adjusted EBITDA to free cash flow has enabled us to fund $367 million of share repurchases while maintaining very low leverage with our year-end leverage ratio at just 1.4 times. In summary, we've made significant progress against these goals and coming into today, we believe the time is right to update our financial aspirations for the next five years. I hope it's apparent that we strongly believe in the power of simplicity and clear focus that are focused on the appropriate levers that are going to drive exceptional shareholder value. Value creation in our business starts with sustainable revenue growth, and that is the single most powerful lever to create value. Internally, we describe our strategy in a single word: it's growth. Our people understand that growth drives career opportunities and compensation increases for them, opportunities to build an exciting career doing meaningful work and a strong culture, and that leads to highly engaged employees who satisfy and help retain our clients. Satisfied clients, in turn, are the foundation of a healthy revenue base, and that is, in turn, foundational to creating shareholder value. Our focused efforts on margin expansion have clearly driven value, but they've also driven growth. Expanding margins enable us to invest in organic growth and innovation while increasing returns for our shareholders through higher earnings per share and cash flows. While the model is quite simple, it is quite powerful, and as we hope, it sets up a virtuous growth cycle. In summary, our revenue before reimbursable expenses, RBR, as we call it, has averaged an 18% compound growth rate from 2022 to 2024 as our adjusted EBITDA margins have expanded, as I said, by 270 basis points. Our adjusted EPS has increased 148% over this period, and our stock price has increased by a similar percentage. Now, as we look ahead, I would like to now share our updated medium-term financial targets, which are shown on the right hand of the slide. I will start by affirming our target of low double-digit revenue growth, which we expect will be predominantly organic in the mid- to upper single-digit range. We also expect several points of contribution from programmatic M&A, which is very integral to our growth strategy. In terms of EBITDA margins, we see opportunities to expand into the upper mid-teen range of 15%-17%, and we expect that we will deliver margin increases each year in the range of 50-75 basis points. Along with continued effective capital deployment and careful management of the balance sheet, we are targeting our EPS to double by 2029 from our base year in 2024. Over this horizon, we expect to generate significant cash flow from our business model that converts about 75% of our adjusted EBITDA to free cash flow. We've modestly updated the five pillars of our strategy, but they're largely consistent with the strategic pillars that we shared back with you in 2022. In healthcare and education, we're focused on sustaining now the accelerated growth that we've been able to achieve in these two core industries of healthcare and education. In the commercial segment, we expect to accelerate our efforts to strengthen our industry presence and expand our capabilities to drive greater value for clients. That focus will include both organic hiring as well as programmatic M&A, like our fourth-quarter acquisition of Axia Consulting, which added supply chain and logistics expertise to our portfolio. Our digital portfolio is quite solid today. It's in and of itself a significant-sized business. It will continue to expand both organically as well as through targeted M&A. We are now at a scale where the range of our capabilities is competitive with many larger firms, but we have the agility and nimbleness of a much smaller company. We are going to continue to focus on driving efficiency into our business through scale and technology, expanding our margins as we build on this integrated operating model to drive growth, scale, and differentiation. Finally, we will continue to execute against this disciplined capital deployment strategy that we have been following, balancing returns to investors with investments in M&A. In summary, we are very excited about the opportunities to take Huron to the next level of growth and value for our shareholders. The markets that we compete in are very large, and I am going to just share a few comments about them. Most of them are characterized by complexity, by regulatory change, and many companies within them are facing disruption from a rapidly changing competitive landscape. These are the factors that often lead to healthy levels of spending on consulting, and that's, in fact, the case in the markets in which we compete. Our right to win in each of these markets starts with our expertise and the client relationships that we've built within these industries. When clients are considering consultants, the first and foremost thing they want to know is whether we understand their business. It's quickly followed by a second question: do we have leading capabilities that are going to bring them the best solutions to address their challenges? The issues for which we're engaged involve complex, multifaceted issues and challenges that require an integrated team to effectively solve them. That invariably includes expertise beyond just a single function or capability. The best solutions are driven by bringing together the best team possible, regardless of our internal lines or silos, to collaborate with the client at the center and bring them comprehensive, sustainable solutions. That is exactly the model that Huron has built in the past three years when we launched our new operating model. It has worked extremely well, and I'd like to now share some of the results that underscore our confidence. Intuitively, we always believe that going to market as Team Huron would result in a more competitive solution for our clients. Collaboration has been one of our core values for many, many years. We also felt that collaboration could be more than just a value; it could actually be a meaningful strategic advantage and a competitive differentiator for Huron. When we aligned our incentives across industry and capability, that is, vertical and horizontal, with the client at the center of our collective focus, we began to experience accelerated growth. Through jointly established goals and our budgets and aligned incentives, that is, coming together across industry and capability to set those goals, we took most of the friction out of going to market together. What you see on this slide here are the three-year growth rates of our two largest segments, healthcare and education. In green, what you see is the growth rates of our specific offerings in the industry. That is the core. Essentially, it represents the results of our industry consulting teams. In blue, you see the accelerated growth rates of our intersectional offerings, where industry and capabilities overlap. That is, where the industry vertical and the horizontal capabilities come together. Just as a reminder, the horizontal competes in other industries, so this actually accelerates their penetration into the market and gives them a strong competitive advantage. What these results tell us is that when we go to market together holistically on an integrated basis, our growth rates are significantly higher than the core, albeit on a much smaller revenue base. Overall, when you look at the total segment results, the collaborative approach has added between 170 and 250 basis points of incremental growth compared to the core offerings. We think these benefits reflect the true opportunity for us of going to market as one company, as Team Huron. While our efforts are in the early stages of our commercial segment, those engagements in which we've also taken an integrated approach have resulted in competitive wins and extensions on multiple occasions of the initial incitements that we've had. In summary, sorry about this, we've got something that came up here on the screen. Hang on a second. If you can help us out here. That's what happens when you have a big finger and a small button. In summary, we think the accelerated growth rate is the real power of the integrated operating model. These results increase our confidence that client-focused collaboration as one firm will help us achieve our growth aspirations for sustainable low double-digit revenue growth. Now, among our peers, our growth has been quite strong over this period. We've had solid demand in our end markets in healthcare and education, for sure, have been a very important contributor. We believe our collaborative culture and integrated operating model has helped us optimize our growth. At the size and scale of Huron, as a $1.6 billion company, we're a very small competitor compared to the GSIs and the Big Four, as an example. However, especially in the middle-market size clients, and that is, I'll define that as clients that are, say, $5 billion-$15 billion in revenue, our approach to the market is quite effective, and we see considerable runway for growth against competitors who tend to be less agile and more siloed due to their size and less focused on these, for them, smaller clients. Along with favorable end markets, we believe our company can continue to grow among the top quartile among our peers, and we see these growth opportunities extending outside of the health and education markets. In summary, we believe we're well positioned to be among the leaders in the market, both among professional services peers as well as IT services competitors. Now, growth is certainly the most important measure of our performance, and that leads us to focus on client retention and satisfaction. Together, growth, client retention, new client acquisition, and client satisfaction are all key indicators of the health of our revenue base. We always want to see our client retention close to 90%, which is an indicator of the impact that we have on our client. Our track record of real impact is what brings clients back to Huron, and selling to your client relationships is also the most cost-effective way to grow revenue. Strong client retention leads us to a steady stream of referrals, which is the best way to acquire new clients. We've won many clients as key leaders in our clients have advanced to new levels of responsibility in their careers and moved to new organizations. In terms of client satisfaction, we measure net promoter score, or NPS, for all of our clients, and we've achieved a very high net promoter score of 72 across our company since 2022. For those of you not familiar with NPS, that level of score is excellent. Some might even describe it as world-class. Now, professional services, at its core, it's a people business, and success always comes down to attracting and retaining the most talented people. We're fortunate that we don't have anyone at Huron who could not get a job at many other places tomorrow. It's also worth mentioning that we do not have a star system in which the MD is the brand. It's really the company that's behind the growth. It's all about the team and delivering value to the client across many resources. We operate the company to create an outstanding culture, recognizing that our employees at Huron have many choices, and that is why we're so focused on building our employer brand in the market. Employees choose Huron because of our culture, our focus on serving clients, seeing the impact of their actions, and a place, candidly, where they're not one of hundreds of thousands of people. Our employee engagement scores are quite high, and our voluntary attrition is quite low compared to the industry at less than 10% in 2024. As you're going to hear later today, our compensation model is very different and highly aligned with the interests of shareholders. Stock-based compensation with four-year restricted stock is a key part of our MD's compensation, and we see that as a huge advantage for Huron for many reasons. As a result, our managing directors and principals are highly connected into our strategy and very interested in driving shareholder returns for the enterprise. In summary, we feel our story represents a clear and compelling investment thesis for Huron. Our market strategy has been tested now, and it's working well, and we see multiple opportunities to take it to another level. Our end markets are favorable for continued spending on consultants, and Huron is very well positioned to help clients navigate complexity, disruption, and regulation as they strive to strengthen their own competitive positions and achieve their missions and goals. Our strongholds in healthcare and education, along with a strong competitive position in our digital capabilities, set the stage for continued growth in these end markets. Our distinctive integrated operating model, highly collaborative culture, and aligned incentive program all work very well together to place the client at the center of what we do, and it distinguishes our go-to-market approach as a unified firm against a wide range of competitors. Guided by a set of clear financial targets, we're going to continue to focus on driving exceptional value. With that, I'm going to now welcome John Kelly, our CFO and Treasurer. All right. Thank you, Mark, and good morning, everyone. We really appreciate everyone who's here in person, as well as all the participants that we know are participating virtually right now. For those of you that I have not met, I'm John Kelly. I'm the CFO here at Huron. I've been with Huron since 2006. I was initially a consultant in what is today our business advisory practice, and I've been the CFO at Huron since 2017. That experience, having been in a variety of different roles at Huron, has kind of given me the opportunity to experience our business from a variety of different angles, and I hope to take that experience and both bring it to my role as CFO, but also to my remarks that are here today. Let me quickly touch on our 2024 performance to start. 2024 was another strong year for Huron, consistent with the financial goals that we established at our 2022 Investor Day, which, as Mark noted, was almost exactly three years ago today. In 2024, the execution of our strategy drove record revenue before reimbursable expenses, or RBR, as we'll refer to it, and expanded our adjusted EBITDA margins for the fourth consecutive year. Collectively, these results created significant value for shareholders as our stock price increased 21% in 2024. These results were only possible because of our highly talented and dedicated team and our clients who continue to engage Huron as their trusted partner. Now, let me put 2024 in context relative to the financial goals that we discuss at our 2022 Investor Day. From a financial model perspective, we described our aspirations as following back in 2022, using 2021 as the base year: annual RBR growth in the low double-digit range, with the large majority of that growth being organic, adjusted EBITDA margin expansion to the mid-teen range by 2025, and deployment of 25-50% of our capital available for deployment to share repurchases, and annual adjusted EPS growth in the mid or the high-teen range. This hypothetical picture shows what those results might have looked like, culminating in 2024 with revenues just over $1.2 billion, adjusted EBITDA just under $170 million, and adjusted EPS just under $5. We believe this scenario would have generated significant value for our shareholders compared to the valuation back in 2021. The good news is that we've been able to significantly outperform those targets from 2022. The actual picture in 2024 and guided picture for 2025, which is based on our recently announced guidance from February, which we are reaffirming here today, looks significantly stronger than our 2022 model. In fact, for 2024, our RBR and adjusted EBITDA dollars are nearly 20% higher than what we modeled in 2022, and our adjusted EPS is over 50% higher. In many respects, we have pulled the entire five-year model forward to three years. Our broader team is very proud of this accomplishment. At the business unit level, our teams have proven to be nimble and responsive to the evolving needs of our clients in industries that are growing both in terms of size as well as complexity. I'll talk about this more in a few moments, but the strong culture that our teams have created has proven to be a differentiator, as we've been able to attract and retain market-leading talent. At the enterprise level, we've realigned the way that we operate starting in 2022 to make it easier to bring the full power of Huron's talent to market to our clients in ways that are differentiated and seamless compared to our competition. We've realigned our incentives to promote this collaboration and tie a significant portion of our incentives to the success of the entire company. From a capital deployment perspective, we've been able to take advantage of our strong free cash flow model to repurchase shares that we believe significantly underestimated our value, as well as to add talent to the team via strategic tuck-in acquisitions. As you can see, these results have culminated in strong value creation for our shareholders. We believe the collective talent of our team, our culture, and the changes that we've made to enhance incentive collaboration are lasting in nature and set us up for continued success as we move forward. I am excited to provide you now with more detail on how we envision this to unfold over the next five-year horizon. Transitioning now to our medium-term aspirations that Mark laid out just a couple of minutes ago, I would like to start with some commentary about our expected RBR growth. Excuse me. We heard from Mark a few moments ago about our enterprise strategy for continued growth, and shortly, we are going to hear from our leaders of our healthcare, education, and digital businesses, as well as further commentary from Mark on our commercial segment positioning and strategy. These presentations are going to provide significant details on our growth potential and our differentiation and competitive positioning within each of these markets. I am not going to repeat all those details now. In aggregate, we reaffirm here today our expectation of double-digit% RBR growth over the next five-year time horizon. The core of this growth will continue to be organic expansion, and we expect mid to upper single-digit% organic RBR growth over the next five years, with an additional 2-4% of annual growth via contributions from strategic tuck-in acquisitions. Breaking this consolidated expected RBR growth down by segment, we expect mid to upper single-digit% growth from our healthcare business. The following attributes give us confidence in this growth rate. The U.S. healthcare market is a very large and growing area of spending in the U.S. economy. We have significant competitive differentiation as a result of our leading performance improvement consulting business. We've expanded our addressable market in new growth areas of digital, strategy, financial advisory, and revenue-cycle managed services. We expect upper single-digit to lower double-digit growth in our education segment, another large industry going through significant amounts of disruption that create opportunities for us to assist our clients with their most pressing items. Our combination of enterprise-level strategy, operations, institutional resilience, research, digital, and global philanthropy offerings are unmatched in market, and along with our credentials of delivering on the largest and most complex projects in the industry, serve as significant points of differentiation for us. We expect to grow in the low double-digit% range in the commercial segment, based first on our mix of expanding digital capabilities and the magnitude of expected spend by our clients to modernize their digital infrastructure over the medium term. Second, our ability to bring the full breadth of Huron's capabilities to our middle enterprise clients, as Mark described, in a way that is more nimble and responsive than our larger competitors. Third, growing areas of industry differentiation within the commercial segment. Mark's going to share more on our evolving commercial strategy in just a little bit. In terms of capability mix across all of our segments, we expect consulting and managed services to grow in the high single-digit% range and digital to be in the low double-digit% growth range over this horizon. Beyond our overall expectations for RBR growth in that by-segment, by-capability view that I provided, I'd like to provide additional context on three additional attributes of our business that give us confidence in our growth trajectory moving forward. First, the secular drivers for demand in our key industries of healthcare and education tend to be independent of the broader macro environment, and we've built our portfolio to reflect a good balance between cyclical and contracyclical offerings. While the majority of other sectors in the economy have largely experienced growth with only periodic periods of caution or retraction over the past eight years, with the exception of the COVID period in 2020 and 2021, there's been persistent financial strain and margin pressure characterized by escalating costs and revenue constraints in the healthcare and education industries. Our offerings are tailored to help clients operating in tight margin environments, either with offerings directly aligned to expanding margins or improving revenues or cash flows via performance improvement, or offerings related to growth and innovation that often come with a very clear ROI proposition. One of the most critical strategic shifts that we've made over the past 10 years has been to broaden our portfolio of offerings to reflect much better balance between contracyclical areas that are designed to help clients working through financial strain and procyclical areas supporting clients investing in growth and innovation. This slide shows how that RBR mix gives us confidence in our ability to continue growth in a variety of different economic markets. As you can see from a consolidated perspective, contracyclical and neutral offerings make up about 60% of our portfolio, driven by our performance improvement offerings in healthcare and education and our restructuring and turnaround offerings in the commercial segment. I should note that most of our offerings are flexible in how they can meet clients in different financial situations and can be tailored to meet market conditions in any given year. For example, a digital project that you might typically think of as a procyclical investment can be tailored to prioritize business process efficiencies and savings in a constrained environment. This flexibility allows us to capture accelerated growth in a variety of market conditions. The second attribute is our people. When discussing Huron's growth potential, we often rightfully focus on the demand trend lines in our key industries for our key capabilities. Beyond market demand, our growing and market-leading supply of talent also provides a strong foundation for growth. Huron's attractive culture and people platform provides steady development of leadership-ready managing directors through internal promotions, an attractive platform for recruiting the very best talent from industry and other consultancies, and also an attractive platform for M&A targets, where a desirable landing spot for sellers who want the opportunity to still drive their business forward, but as part of a larger winning team. Our managing directors and principals are the key drivers of our business in terms of sales, delivery on projects, and the growth and mentorship of our people. We exited 2024 with approximately 260 managing directors and principals. We promoted approximately 20 new managing directors and principals at the start of the year to start with a total of approximately 280 managing directors and principals. In order to support the growth that I've discussed, we'll need to exit 2029 with approximately 450 managing directors and principals. Our low managing director and principal turnover rate, our steady pipeline of internally developed managing director-level talent on average 20-25 promotes per year at our current size, and our ability to add leadership talent in new areas via experienced hires, group hires, and strategic tuck-in acquisitions gives us strong confidence in our ability to grow the leadership talent needed to meet the market demand. The third attribute relates to our programmatic M&A capabilities. As it relates to that 2-4% of inorganic RBR growth per year from programmatic M&A, we consider this to be part of our talent acquisition strategy and have a robust capital allocation process supported by the Finance and Capital Allocation Committee of our Board of Directors to support allocating capital in a way that we believe maximizes shareholder value. From a financial perspective, we look for acquisitions that minimally either drive accelerated organic growth after the acquisition or enhance our consolidated adjusted EBITDA margin percentage. Ideally, we seek acquisitions that do both, and minimally, we also expect all acquisitions to be adjusted EPS accretive in year one. Our expectation is for tuck-in size acquisitions, so the type that fit into that 2-4% of annual RBR growth profile, we expect them to be aligned with our business strategies and our talent expansion plans. Elizabeth Entinghe, our Vice President of Corporate Development, will provide more detail on our M&A pipeline and strategy in just a little bit. That covers our expectations as it relates to RBR growth. I'd now like to pivot to a discussion of our continued adjusted EBITDA margin expansion and the factors that give us confidence that we'll be able to continue this trend over the next five years. Over the medium term, we expect adjusted EBITDA margins in a range of 15-17%. Our 2024 actual adjusted EBITDA margin was 13.5%, and our guidance for 2025 is to achieve adjusted EBITDA in a range of 14-14.5% of revenues. Our expectation is for 50 to 75 basis points of continued margin improvement over the next several years. Structurally, we believe there are several factors that leave us well positioned for the top end or even above that 15-17% range, partially offset by continued investment in organic growth and some mixed pressure as our digital and managed services offerings grow at an above-average pace over the next four years. Drivers of margin improvement from the 13.5% levels in 2024 fall into four primary opportunities. First, improved project-level contribution margins. There are several operational levers that fall within this bucket, including continued expansion of our global India-based capabilities, the benefits of continued process automation and leveraging AI capabilities, careful management and optimization of third-party spend, contractor spend, and fully taking advantage of our leveraged staffing model to enhance project-level economics. We've seen 330 basis points of improvement in our average project contribution margin, which also includes pricing, since 2021, and anticipate these levers can contribute another 75-100 basis points of additional improvement over the medium term. Second, we see an opportunity to enhance utilization. Due to historically low attrition levels in 2024, we ended with blended utilization around 75% versus our target in the 76-78% range. Each point of utilization represents over $10 million of margin uplift, which means it is a 60-180 basis point opportunity for us over the medium term. Third, we see margin expansion opportunity from continued pricing excellence. We continue to execute on initiatives that drive discipline in our pricing with the objective of realizing fees that effectively reflect the value that we're driving for our clients. Based on initiatives underway, we've captured over $30 million of value over the past two years and see 50-100 basis points of further improvement in coming years. Finally, there remain opportunities relating to the scaling of our corporate SG&A. While our margin expansion is not contingent upon double-digit RBR growth, as we grow into the medium term, we believe scaling of the fixed portions of our SG&A expense can reliably produce 25-50 basis points of margin scaling per year. While we believe that we have the ability to oversolve our margin objectives with these levers, we're also conscious of the need to continue investing in the business, which may come in the form of hiring managing directors and principals with skills in new industries and new capabilities, growing the rest of our team in advance of anticipated demand, or investing in tools and data that fuel our consulting services. We expect that we'll be investing at least 2% of our RBR and growth initiatives each year, consistent with what is embedded in our 2025 guidance. That amount may vary time to time depending on the opportunities that we see, the opportunity to add capabilities via M&A, and our commitment to hitting our annual margin objectives for our shareholders. Another factor to consider is the above-average growth that is expected from our digital and managed services businesses over the coming years. We do expect this to be a modest mixed headwind, as these capabilities tend to have operating income profiles in the low 20% range versus consulting offerings that tend to have operating income profiles in the mid to upper 20% range. We expect growth across all of our capabilities within our portfolio over this time horizon, and as such, would expect the mixed shift headwind to be in the 20-30 basis point range per year. The most important takeaway from our perspective is that we have multiple pathways to continue our margin expansion from the past four years and achieve our go forward margin expansion goals. Everything doesn't have to go perfectly in order for us to hit our objectives. Over time, we believe that all of the levers I just discussed are achievable and critically are tied to our team's incentives. I'd now like to spend a couple of minutes talking about capital allocation. From our perspectives, there are two North Stars to consider in terms of capacity to deploy capital, either as return to shareholders via share buybacks or accretive tuck-in M&A. The first is that we target ending every year with a bank definition leverage ratio in the 2-2.5 times our trailing 12 months adjusted EBITDA range or lower. For example, in 2025, we ended the year with leverage below 1.4 times. While our senior credit facility allows for leverage up to 3.75 times our bank covenant EBITDA, which was in excess of $250 million for the trailing 12 months ended 12/31/2024, our preference is to maintain a conservative posture to maintain flexibility as well as a strong balance sheet. I'll note that we expect to have seasonally higher leverage in the first quarter of each year as a result of our annual incentive payouts, which occur in March. The second guiding principle is that we expect, as Mark noted earlier, that on average, 75% of our adjusted EBITDA will convert to free cash flow. This strong conversion of adjusted EBITDA to free cash flow reflects the strong cash nature of our business, as well as the fact that we do not adjust stock-based compensation out of our reported adjusted EBITDA or adjusted EPS metrics, as we believe these are real expenses of the business. However, this presentation may be different than how adjusted EBITDA is reported at other companies. Within these parameters, we expect to generate in total over $1.5 billion of capital to deploy over the next five years. On average, and it could vary year to year depending on the opportunities we see and priorities, we would generally expect to allocate about half of our available capital to support programmatic tuck-in acquisitions and about half of our available capital to be deployed in return to shareholders, which at this time we'd expect it to be in the form of share repurchases. We think this formula for capital deployment provides sufficient capital to continue the growth and margin expansion of our business while presenting a compelling return opportunity for our shareholders, much like how it's worked over the past three years. The compounding impact of this financial model, a simple model, as Mark described earlier, double-digit RBR growth, largely organic, adjusted EBITDA margins expanding to the 15-17% range, strong free cash flow conversion, and balanced allocation of our capital presents a highly compelling adjusted earnings per share growth story over the next five years. As Mark noted, our expectation is that we will double our adjusted earnings per share between 2024 and 2029. This doubling comes on top of a tripling of adjusted earnings per share in the period between 2020 and 2024. We expect the expansion of our earnings per share to be fairly ratable over the years, reflecting mid-teen percentage range annual increases in adjusted EPS growth. As I prepare to wrap up the financial overview section, I wanted to quickly emphasize a key factor in our ability to achieve these financial goals. We believe our incentive programs are very effectively structured to drive alignment of our teams toward the accomplishment of these goals. 50% of our team's annual bonus funding formula is tied to annual team organic RBR growth. 25% of our team's incentive funding is tied to the team's operating income percentage targets. 25% of everyone's annual bonus funding is tied to Huron's overall adjusted EBITDA margin percentage target. Now, flowing from these goals, every managing director within Huron has individual targets that tie out to the broader team targets and are focused on the key operating metrics that will drive the company's desired financial outcomes. In addition, our executive team also has significant funding tied to long-term adjusted EPS goals. A significant component of our executive, Managing Director, and Principal compensation is paid in the form of company stock with either a three or four-year vesting period, which drives significant alignment to shareholders and creates strong wealth creation and retention programs for our key leaders. The picture that we show here is that while the stock that's issued under those programs does increase our diluted share base, that's been more than offset by our share repurchases over the past three years. In closing, we believe that we are well positioned in large and critical markets going through significant disruption to help our clients with the most pressing issues on their agendas. Our collaborative culture not only allows us to bring the very best of our capabilities seamlessly to our clients, accelerating our growth, but it also creates a vibrant environment for our growing team and makes us an attractive platform to recruit talent into. We believe these factors will drive above-average growth. On top of that growth, we believe that we have a number of tangible levers that will drive consistent margin expansion. The RBR growth, coupled with margin expansion and strong free cash flow conversion, can create the opportunity to deploy capital to further grow our business and provide meaningful return to shareholders. We believe the compounding nature of these factors creates a highly compelling investment opportunity in our company, consistent with the returns that have been generated over the past three years. With that, I'm now going to turn it over to Jim Gallas, our Healthcare Industry Leader. Thanks, John. Hello everyone. I'm Jim Gallas. I am Huron's Healthcare Industry Leader. I've got 40 years. This is year 40 of serving the healthcare industry. I've been with Huron. This is now year 14. Let me talk a little bit about healthcare and our healthcare team. We've seen very, very strong growth within our core provider market, nearly doubling our healthcare revenue in the last four years. We'll talk about how we did that over that time horizon. On average, we serve over 1,000 or about 1,000 clients per year. We're really acknowledged as a premier partner for a healthcare provider, financial health transformations. We've worked really with all different levels and shapes and sizes of healthcare organizations, but we've worked with 93 of the top 100 health systems over the years. We've got 2,600 dedicated plus healthcare professionals across consulting, digital, and managed services, and this includes 100 clinicians. So that's doctors and nurses for the most part. We're a leading provider, full-service provider of consulting, digital, and managed services to hospitals, health systems, and physician groups. We continue to expand in adjacent markets, including payer and private equity and the like. We also serve a variety of other healthcare clients, such as behavioral health and post-acute organizations as well. We're very strong, and we've seen strong growth in EHR. So that's Epic, Cerner, now Oracle Health and Meditech, also ERP with Oracle and Workday and digital overall. We've seen recognition. We've received recognition from several industry organizations regarding the quality, actually, of our digital healthcare solutions. We have a very intense focus on delivering value to our clients in terms of ROI and with sustainability. Once you kind of go through a Huron financial health transformation, it's enduring. That creates strong client relationships with very high NPS and high repeat revenue, also strong referenceability going forward. Our NPS, the metric Mark mentioned, the average for the last three years is 73, so quite strong, but we've actually improved upon that. We ended 2024 at 77, and we've started 2025 strong with a score of 80 year to date. As I mentioned before, we have full-service capabilities across consulting, digital, and managed services. The breadth of our capabilities really allows us to be trusted partners to our clients, serving many of them for a decade or more, starting maybe in one solution or one capability area, proving up, providing value, and then the next, and so on. We really serve kind of both ends of the market too. We are well adapted. We can serve those that are in growth and investment mode, as well as those that are financially distressed as well. Several years ago, we unlocked further growth really through improved incentive alignment, weaving in our digital, our FAS, and our strategy capabilities into what we do and deliver in healthcare. In 2024, all but one of our top 25 clients worked with more than one team within the healthcare industry, and 16 of those clients worked with more than three capability teams. Our clients' confidence really stems from our proven results. We improve revenue when engaged between 5% and 15% plus. We reduce total operating costs by 10%-20% and really turn organizations around. Over time, and if you go back, really 2014 and before 2014, we were predominantly a performance improvement firm without the other strong capabilities that we built over time. We invested organically, inorganically. We expanded our portfolio, adding strategy, financial advisory, revenue cycle managed services, digital managed services, and digital capabilities overall to really complement and enhance our core performance improvement capabilities. We made investments throughout this whole time horizon, adding and upleveling our talent, advancing our solutions, and improving our solutions by better leveraging technology and increasing our value proposition to our clients. We started our automation journey really in 2019. We've leveraged AI to automate 100 plus client processes at this point. A few examples of our solution growth. We were strong. We've been strong in our whole history in terms of revenue cycle consulting, but we only got into the revenue cycle managed services business in 2019. Really starting from scratch, and that's now an $80 million plus business, really poised for growth as well. Financial advisory, we've grown that to nearly $30 million in healthcare in 2024. Strategy and innovation, we purchased Innosight in 2017, and since that time, through better integration, we've been able to deliver a 37% compound revenue annual growth rate in strategy since 2021. The Perception Health acquisition has really been key towards expanding our market data and analytics and strengthened our care, physician, and strategy and growth capabilities. What we have now is really a balanced portfolio across financially distressed clients as well as those seeking to invest in digital modernization and optimize their businesses for growth. Because of what we can now deliver and bring to market as a unified team, we've seen revenue per client almost double from 2021 to 2024. How did we see such a nice growth trajectory? We really strengthened our core. We upped the value we provide our clients. We diversified our portfolio. That led to more sustainable growth and margin expansion in our business. We delivered a 19% compound annual growth rate, really nearly doubled RBR since 2020, and have consistently delivered high contribution margins. Now I'm going to turn it to Andy Waldeck, who leads our Innosight strategy capability for a client impact story. Andy. Thanks, Jim. Good morning. I'm Andy Waldek, the Innosight capability leader. I also lead our healthcare strategy efforts. As Jim said, I wanted to share a client story. It's one of these intersectional opportunities that Mark talked about. The client story that I'm going to describe is a health system. They do about $5 billion in revenue. They operate 12 hospitals, 100 ambulatory sites of care. They will see in the last fiscal year about 100,000 inpatient admissions. They'll do 1.3 million ambulatory visits. They employ about 30,000 people. Within their community, they're well known for their quality, in particular at their flagship hospital, where they're known for delivering really excellent, high-quality, complex care. That client was dealing with some significant complexity and challenges that resulted in them losing about $1 million a day when we were engaged. They were on track to lose over $400 million in the course of the year. They faced a number of internal challenges. First and foremost were labor costs, in particular contract labor, which has been a particular issue in the healthcare industry coming out of COVID. They were spending four to eight times per month what they had budgeted. Beyond that, they were feeling stagnant growth. They had convinced themselves that they had captured all of the incremental growth that existed in that market. Lastly, they felt that they were at capacity. As they looked across their flagship hospital, their community hospitals, they felt that they were doing all they could to maximize revenue, which was then making the growth and expense even more significant of an impact on the bottom line. Externally, the market's not standing still. One of their closest competitors at the time was engaged in a scaled combination with a significant system in the state adjacent to them. They also had to deal with the issue of the growth in the senior population. As seniors start to age and the impact that that's going to have on their care model, by 2030, half of the Medicare recipients are going to be over 75. That places tremendous stress on the care model that's required to deliver care in the community and the connectivity that those individuals require. The other external challenge that they had to deal with was continued pressure from the state and its complex regulatory environment. Lastly, this is an organization that's dealing with tremendous burnout coming out of the COVID pandemic, and so tremendous fatigue across the institution. As well, there are a bunch of longer-term challenges that they have to wrestle with. Number one, they have their own questions of scale. How big do they actually need to be? What geographic footprint do they require in order to be successful and sustainable? I talked about some of the care model challenges that only get more complicated as the years go by. Lastly, they also have to deal with the question of how do they digitize this institution? How do they drive digital across their hospitals, across their ambulatory footprint? How do they bring digital to home for the people that they're entrusted with caring for? You can imagine, this is a tremendous amount of complexity that they have to deal with internally, externally, near-term, and long-term. The approach that we followed, we called dual transformation, which is how do you help an organization to do two things at the same time? Number one, how do you help to arrest the near-term financial challenges? How do you optimize for financial viability? While at the same time, how do you redesign the entire system to create a long-term sustainable model? To be able to pull that off, we had to leverage every capability that Jim described. In the near term, our operations team went in. They redesigned the entire labor management system to help them deal with the challenge of contract labor. We went in and found efficiencies in supply chain. We found efficiencies in purchase services. Our physician enterprise team went in, partnered with the local physicians to find ways that they could see one more patient per day across all their sites of service, opening up access. Our strategy and growth teams took the idea of Tiger Teams that come out of NASA, create small teams partnering with physician leaders, partnering with operations leaders to find ways that we could create growth in sooner than 120 days. We did that by doing things like turning on transfers. Out-of-market relationships, people who had complex needs, who lived outside of the immediate geography, how could we get them into our system to drive more higher complexity care? We wrestled with the question of things like block utilization. How do we ensure that we're best taking advantage of the capacity that we have, and how do we optimize the OR suite? That drove near-term progress. That drove near-term credibility. That allowed us to then also work on problems of a longer duration. Our physician enterprise team really tackling the question of access. How do you go in, redesign physician templates? How do you create more standardization? How do you create more capacity to bring patients into the system? Our strategy and growth teams partnered with their key service line leaders. How do we create strategies that create new growth? As well, how do we solve the capacity problem by decanting? Moving procedures that could be done closer to a patient's home, whether it's a community hospital, whether it's an ambulatory side of care, those don't need to happen at the flagship institution. How do we redistribute where the work happens, create more capacity for them to take on complex care at the flagship institution? Lastly, we wrestled with the questions of how do you really establish the long-term trajectory that's required? How do we really innovate the care model to be able to deliver against the pressing needs that seniors have as they continue to age? How do we create distinctive clinical programs that draw volume not just locally? How do they draw volume regionally? Potentially, how do they draw volume nationally? To make all of this possible, we had to reinvent the operating model, moving from a hospital facility-based orientation to one that is market and one that is consumer. When you sum all of that up, the grand impact was we created over $500,000,000 of recurring annual benefit for our client. We helped them in two quarters to achieve break-even. As you can imagine, with that level of complexity and financial distress, getting to break-even in two quarters created tremendous confidence in the organization that allowed them to go faster and go deeper to make the $500,000,000 benefit target real. When you step back and you say, "What's the power of an integrated approach?" This couldn't have happened if we didn't bring our entire team. Our performance improvement team helped to reduce the burn that then created the space and the ability for the institution to think about how to do things differently. Our physician enterprise team created tremendous access and standardization across their clinical programs. Our strategy team helped create new growth, convincing the organization of what they had convinced themselves was not possible. Our financial advisory team was essential in creating a cash-based culture so they could convert the improvement in operating income into an improved balance sheet and longer and better financial sustainability. Last, and certainly not least, our digital team played a critical role. How do we help the organization to do a much better job around data management, data governance, and also creating the capability to drive the necessary analytics to provide the insights across the rest of our teams to be able to do the work that we did? When you step back and you look at our integrated set of capabilities that Jim described, it gives us confidence in our ability to be able to meet the challenges facing the industry over the next five years. Jim? Okay. This is really just a picture of what we're seeing in the market, all right? If you look, the workforce challenges, the disruption that we had from COVID, really that started in the COVID period, 2021 and the like, really kind of continued for most of our clients on into 2023 and 2024. We saw a very strong performance improvement, financial health transformation market for sure. If you look forward now, all right, the pharmaceutical, high pharmaceutical costs, high supply chain costs, still workforce disruptions, those really still continue on into 2025. If you page forward to now what we're seeing on the regulatory front, while everything isn't fully baked yet, there's high, high probability with looming cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and the like, and also cuts to research and administrative cost recovery for our AMC client set. There's going to be increased financial pressure, intense financial pressure on our main client set, which is large health systems going forward, all right? We really believe that we're very, very strong and well-suited to be able to meet that need and capture that growth in really all types of the market, not only those, again, that have severe financial distress and needs, but also those that are poised for growth and need digital modernization as well. All right. You can page forward. Internally, kind of we're focused on portfolio enhancement. We're always trying to continually improve and up our value proposition by upping our talent, improving our methodologies, improving really what we do and what we take to market. We see tremendous opportunity to grow our revenue cycle managed services business going forward. We saw a 19%, actually 18% compounded annual growth rate in that service capability, but we see really, in a financially distressed market, a high need for revenue cycle managed services going forward. We're going to continue to invest in emerging technologies, including automation, analytics, and AI. It really has the performance improvement leaders or one of the leaders in the industry. I think we have every opportunity to do that. We're going to go into adjacent markets even further. We've got a strong and viable presence in the payer market. We're looking to expand that as well. You can page forward. All right. Just a few key takeaways. If you look at what we've built in terms of reputation, the value that we can provide to our healthcare provider clients and health systems, it's really hard to replicate with 2,600 dedicated healthcare professionals, very, very seasoned individuals. Many times they've sat on the client side and have joined Huron and have strong credibility with our clients. The proven, consistent track record of results. When you can deliver $500 million plus in annual operating income improvements for an organization like Andy described, it's really, really compelling and it begets then more business. Friends talk to others, executives talk to others, and we're able to grow. It is really a story of sustainable growth. We continue to invest. We continue to expand and look for adjacent markets and the like. We see no opportunity that we shouldn't be able to really follow that growth trajectory that John added to his slides and that I showed earlier going forward. All right. Now I'm going to turn it over to Mark Finlan, who's going to talk a little bit about our education industry. Ally, I think the battery may have gone on this clicker, so we might want to switch it. A broken clicker as I come up here. Hi, everyone. I'm Mark Finlan. I'm the head of our education industry team. I'm just going to flip through a bunch here. I have been with Huron for about eight years, and I've been in the consulting industry for over 25. Our healthcare team is a hard act to follow, but I think you're actually going to hear a lot of similarities between the growth story and success we've had in higher education, very similar to what Jim and Andy talked about in healthcare. There we go. Just to kick us off, there are a few things I wanted to set up that I want you all to take away today. First is just to talk about the amazing leadership positions that we have in the market, and a lot of that's been driven by our client relationships as well as our broad and deep expertise offerings we provide. Second is our proven growth strategy. Again, this can be very similar to what Jim described. Some of this is continuing to maintain the relevance of our core offerings, but also expanding into new offerings and clients as well. That's really been a repeatable formula for us. Third is to talk some about the market trends in higher education, including the dynamic regulatory environment. I'm sure there are going to be zero questions from all of you about the dynamic regulatory environment before the day is over. We do believe these complexities and challenges, which have been compounding some of the complexities and challenges in the industry, are going to continue to drive need for partners like Huron. Lastly, just shared at a high level of how all of those factors together we really think is going to allow us to maintain our growth trajectory going forward. First, I want to share a little bit about what differentiates our team. We have served nearly 600 clients per year since 2022, partnering with over 700 institutions in 2024 alone. Our primary focus is with traditional large research universities, but we work with all different types of institutions. Over here on the left, you can see we work with about 40% of our revenue comes from four-year public institutions and 30% come from four-year private institutions. The majority of those are the large research institutions. We also do have significant work with standalone academic medical centers, research institutes, university system offices in states that have system offices, as well as community colleges. Some other things that I think help reinforce our strong client relationships, you've seen some of these metrics for other parts of our business already. A very strong net promoter score, 75 on average over the last three years. Also, over 90% of our revenue comes from repeat clients. I think one of the things that's helpful to emphasize here is 24 of our top 25 clients last year bought multiple services and products from Huron. So they're not just coming to us for one thing. They're coming to us and buying our entire breadth of services. You also just noticed in the top left, we've worked with all of the top 100 comprehensive research institutions, as well as all of the 71 members of the AAU. A very strong client base that we work with. Second, before I dive into our expertise, there are two important distinctions I wanted to talk about for our practice. The first, if you think about the mission of these large research universities, they generally can be talked about in a few broad brush categories. First is their academic mission. Second is their research mission. In the case of some of them, the academic medical centers, it's their clinical mission where we partner very closely with Jim's healthcare team to work with them. Then that underlying foundational administration of the institution. We're the only firm that is able to cover all of those different aspects of their mission, as well as the underlying administration of the institutions. I think that's a really important point of distinction for why they come to us. We're the only ones who can help them across all of those areas. Secondarily, if you look at our competitors, a lot of them have their higher education practice tucked into a larger public sector practice. We're the only firm of our size and scale and breadth that has a dedicated higher education practice and really messages to the industry how much we focus on this area and these clients. The other thing I did want to talk about is just overall, let's just illustrate one of the clients' challenges. I think that really helps you understand how the breadth of our services is so valuable and important. I wanted to pick one that hopefully everyone can relate to. If you think about an athletic director and what they're facing in the industry right now, whether it's conference realignment, name, image, and likeness, or what you might hear called NIL, pay for play for athletes, Title IX, these are lots of different complex challenges on their own, let alone all of those together. We're one of the only firms that you can go to that can support them across all of those challenges. Now, extrapolate that and walk in the room with the president and their entire cabinet. That's not just the athletic director, that's the CFO, the CIO, the CHRO, the head of facilities, enrollment, research, student affairs, fundraising, the entire leadership team. Running a university is like running a small city. We're the only firm that can come in for each one of those individuals and help them address all of their challenges individually, as well as help them as a collective leadership team address all their challenges across the institution. I think that depth and breadth of services really highlights why we've attained our market leadership position. All right. Next beyond that, I wanted to talk about our proven repeatable growth strategy. The first element of that strategy, very similar to what Jim mentioned for healthcare, is our core. What we've traditionally been known for in the market are things like research administration, performance improvement, ERP implementation, and these continue to fuel our growth. Now, some of those are being driven by market dynamics. We'll talk about, as you can imagine right now, performance improvement over the last few years has been something we've talked to our clients a lot about because there's been financial instability in the industry. I also think it's helpful to talk about where we've invested to maintain a leadership position. Maria is going to come up and talk about our digital portfolio in a little bit. I think ERP implementation is a perfect example of how Huron has maintained its leadership position through investment. If we rewind back about a decade, what did clients have? They had on-premise systems like PeopleSoft they were using to manage their finances and their HR enterprise. Now everyone's making a move to the cloud. Huron still is a leader in providing ERP implementation. Now the primary vendors are Workday and Oracle Cloud. How have we maintained that position? If you look at the complex finances of a university, what do you need to understand? You have to understand research and research grants and how those finances work to help clients successfully implement these systems. When you look at their people, it's not just their staff, it's their faculty, in some cases clinicians and academic medical and researchers. How do you understand those workforces to help them implement those systems? There are also industry-specific systems like the student information systems that bolt onto these ERP systems. Obviously, we understand the education industry better than our competitors. Technology has changed over that decade, but the one thing that hasn't changed is Huron's leadership position driven by our expertise. I think that's helpful to understand when we say strengthen and invest in the core. What does that mean? Second element of our strategy is how we've gained share by offering new areas or adjacent areas. We've done this both organically and inorganically. One of the most recent examples, which will dovetail nicely to when Elizabeth talks about our programmatic M&A strategy, is fundraising or what we call our global philanthropy team. What we did was took our existing position in CRM implementation, largely Salesforce, which helps in lots of areas. It helps in enrollment. It helps in alumni engagement. It also helps in fundraising. That business alone came via an acquisition we did a number of years ago called Cloud62 to build that CRM business as an adjacent offering. We've now added onto that GG&A, which was the industry-leading provider of fundraising consulting, and now Advancement Resources, which is the industry-leading provider of learning and training for fundraising professionals, and have brought that together into a single industry-leading team. This is the perfect time to describe. These were smaller acquisitions, but how did those small acquisitions when brought into Huron? How is that going to provide us differential growth? Elizabeth will talk about this some more, but I think this is just one of the great examples of that. First, you can imagine you just heard Jim talk about how we're in over 1,000 healthcare organizations. I just said we're in over 700 education institutions. We now have access with these services to all of those different parts of the market in the way that these small firms didn't on their own. Secondarily, it's a very fragmented market. There was no firm that any institution could go to that had a fundraising could say, "I want digital services. I want consulting services. I want learning and training." We're the only firm that now provides those services together. These services fit nicely into the other core services we offer. When you're going into doing a performance improvement engagement, whether it's in healthcare or education, one of the levers they want to pull is how do we increase our fundraising as part of balancing our budget? As you're setting a new growth strategy for them, one of the ways they execute on that growth strategy is going and tapping into their constituents and alumni base and driving philanthropy to invest in those growth pillars. We now can fit that directly into the strategic work that we're doing. That's really how we take one plus one and make it three in these programmatic acquisitions that we do. The third piece of this, actually, within the gains here, there's also the organic piece. I did mention athletics. There's other areas we've built up as well, enterprise risk management. You can imagine a lot of institutions are thinking a lot about risk management across their enterprise right now. Campus health and wellness. If you go and talk to a president, the mental health of their faculty, staff, and students is always one of the top five priorities that they're focused on. These are other areas we've built up organically, and that's largely by hiring experts from the industry into our team. Bringing those proven experts who have driven change within the industry onto our team gives us a lot of credibility with our clients and makes our offerings a lot more market relevant as well. It will move forward here at some point. Maybe, maybe not. The last piece is growing our addressable market. This is really twofold. It is growing the institutions that we serve, as well as growing, to a lesser extent, the geographies that we serve. With regards to the institutions, I mentioned this before, we have diversified more into private liberal arts colleges, community colleges, and university systems. In addition, we are doing our digital implementation work with what our vendors would refer to as middle enterprise institutions. Those are still in our core market, but tend to be more of the mid-sized universities and colleges that we work with. Related to that organic growth strategy that I mentioned, expansion into fundraising has opened up new verticals for us. That That includes independent schools, boarding and day schools, as well as nonprofits like arts and culture organizations. We also disclose another acquisition in the advancement space, Helpin, that has expanded our reach, particularly into the U.K. and Canada as well. That is going to not just strengthen our ability to deliver fundraising in those geographies, it gives us a foothold to pull through our other services and our education practice as well to those universities and other nonprofits in the U.K. If you kind of wrap that up at the bottom, and then we will go into the finances on the last slide. This formula over the last four years has really balanced out our portfolio and provided sustained strong top-line growth. A slide similar to what Jim showed, you'll see our overall revenue growth has been about 25% over that time period, as well as sustained strong margin expansion as well. Part of what we're going to talk about now coming up is why we believe we can continue to sustain this growth going forward. Now what everyone's been waiting for is some talk about the market dynamics. I think one of the things that's important, first of all, we've seen more articles and discussions in higher education in the last two months than we probably have in the last two years. I think that's making people forget that higher education was already an industry facing some challenges. One of the ones we pointed out here in the top left is really the struggles that institutions are facing with enrollment. They're facing with financial instability. They're facing with leadership turnover. These have all already existed. A lot of what we're now just seeing this year is exacerbating some of those challenges. A number of the other trends that I've already mentioned, migration to the cloud, the prevalence of AI, these are things that the industry was already experiencing. I do think some that are worth pointing out is around the academic portfolio. Institutions are being expected by the consumers to provide more workforce-ready graduates. We're actually seeing changes in some of the major rankings where some of the rankings criteria are pointing more toward salary upon graduation than it has in the past. A lot of institutions are thinking about what are the market-relevant academic portfolio offerings we're providing to the students coming in. The talent challenges are also something the institution's facing. We just went through a tumultuous time at all university campuses with COVID, and now it feels like there might be some significant disruption again. Can we actually retain and attract leaders to an industry that's already been challenged to maintain competitive compensation, given some of the turmoil leaders are facing as well? The last piece to mention here is just some of the recent changes we're seeing in the regulatory environment. This is from research dollars to federal funding being cut to impacts on the Department of Education. These are all just putting more pressure on some of those different areas I mentioned, on the financials of the institution, on the enrollment of the institutions, on the leadership of the institutions. One of those big pressure points is research right now. As I mentioned before, we have the leading research practice in the industry. We think this is all just going to create more challenges for our clients, and challenges for our clients means they're going to need more help from us. That's part of the dynamic we've seen over the last three years, and we think that dynamic is going to persist going forward. Okay. Going forward, and this is just starting to wrap up some of the points I made. In terms of the repeatable formula, we're going to continue to strengthen our core. This is a large market, much like healthcare is a large market. That's going to include how we partner together in those academic medical centers between our healthcare team and our education team to bring, I mentioned this before, our clinical, our research, and our academic solutions all together to the market in a way that no one else can. Second, we're going to continue to diversify our portfolio. Digital continues to be a big opportunity for the industry and for us, whether this is AI, analytics, or strengthening our position in the student academic space. Also, as I mentioned before, continue to expand our portfolio and continue to grow our share with new end markets and geographies. The four points I shared at the beginning, we have a clear differentiation in the market, and that's really driven by the breadth of our services and the reach and relationships we have with our clients. We have a proven growth strategy over the last number of years. It's a dynamic market, and it continues to be a dynamic and challenging market. We really feel like all those factors together are going to sustain our growth trajectory. With that, I actually get to transition you to a break instead of to someone else. We will take a 10-minute break or maybe closer to a 15-minute break, and then we will all come back together. Thanks. Back, everybody. I appreciate it. My name is Mario Desidario. I am the Huron Digital Capability Leader. I've been with the organization approaching 10 years now. Came through an acquisition of ADI Strategy roughly about 10 years ago. My background, I've worked at a Big Four. I started my career there, but then took very much an entrepreneurial route, starting three consulting firms, recently exiting the third one at Huron. I always comment that sometimes it takes me three times to get something right. The third time has been a fantastic experience. I say that because it does reinforce the culture of the organization. One of the key points of our strategy has been doing some tuck-ins, and many of those leaders are still here. That tells you about reinforcing the startup at scale, embracing that culture, and not only embracing it, but providing a platform for entrepreneurs to really grow their business here. I thought it was very, very positive. As we look at a couple of things as we move forward, there we go. I also want to mention a couple of things. I had the privilege of leading a team where I received some individual awards, but obviously they are very much team awards where in 2024, Consulting Magazine Top Consultant and then Top 25 Leader in Technology for two years. Also recognized by E&Y as Entrepreneur of the Year. That goes back to the entrepreneurial nature of the individuals that ultimately I lead. I'm excited to share how the digital business has grown here at Huron, but more importantly, how do we make sure that we continue that growth as we move forward? As we've scaled, we've now achieved a really nice balanced portfolio. You heard from Jim and Mark around healthcare and higher education, but also as you look at the commercial industries, it's a balanced portfolio between our three major industries. We are becoming a larger and larger player as it pertains to the digital capabilities as we move forward. Our growth has been recognized by the industry, but also by our channel partners. Those channel partners include the likes of Oracle, Workday, Salesforce, AWS, Microsoft, Epic. It goes on and on and on. I think it's very key in our industries to have a tight relationship with those vendors. As we look at orchestrating capabilities from all those technology software, really providing them the end-to-end solution. We have also been recognized with various industry awards. In 2024, we won the Innovation Partner of the Year from Workday, North America Partner of the Year for Informatica in 2022 and 2024. This one is very important. Informatica is one of those leading vendors in enterprise data management and data quality. In the advent of AI, data quality and data management is very important to fuel a lot of the models that are out there. In 2022, our education group won the Salesforce Innovation Partner of the Year also. Many of our clients have been recognized for the innovation and the leveraging technologies and the innovations they have served. Last year at Oracle, five of our clients got recognized for their innovation with our partnership with them. Those recognitions reflect this strength across all our industries. Since 2022, our Net Promoter Score has increased from 72 to 79 last year. It is a reflection of the quality of services and the impact we're making to our customers. The elevated Net Promoter Score is really a dedication of our steadfast dedication to our client satisfaction and the agility we provide. If you look at our customers, we've achieved an 86% repeat business from our customer base. Very, very healthy. As you can see, we've built a nice comprehensive portfolio. It ultimately starts with strategy and advisory consulting. A large part of that component is some of the premier services we do have in enterprise data management and providing insights. Very important in today's world as it pertains to AI and the enablement of AI within businesses. The people and operational transformation models. With technology and as you look at disruption, it's not just the technology that has to be successful. You have to look at the organizational model. How do you now create new learning paths? How do you organize differently? How do you reduce friction within an organization that technology ultimately allows you to make happen? Performance management. We've always been a firm that has been focused on improving performance and efficiencies in the back offices. You've heard strengths in ERP, Enterprise Performance Management, most recently with Axia and the addition of our supply chain capabilities. Supply chain disruption has been around since COVID. With the recent tariffs, it's going to be more and more disruptive. We are really, really happy about having that team on board as we now have expanded our solution offerings. We continue to serve the core of higher education and healthcare and the commercial industries through those distinct industry solutions. We mentioned a lot of these broad platforms as it pertains to Oracle and Workday and Salesforce, but it really is what makes us different around research, Epic, Cerner, around the EHR, student in financial services, financial crime and compliance. A lot of these edge solutions that complement our core brings us industry differentiation, and that connective tissue that exists within the digital footprint is a very, very key strategy for us. That allows us to serve a broad persona-based customer base. If you look at it from a CFO lens, CHRO, Chief Marketing Officer, the CIO, Chief Revenue Officer, the ability to go broad within an organization just proves that our portfolio of capabilities are really, really resonating with our customers. Huron has demonstrated both organic and inorganic through acquisitions. Over the last 10 years, we've been able to deploy $250 million in capital, but that has built a $622 million digital consulting firm, roughly making up about 42% of the total revenue with Huron. What I think is really key about that stat, though, is if you look at the portfolio 10 years ago, Mark Finlan alluded to it, we were doing a lot of on-prem work. PeopleSoft, these were technologies and capabilities that are no longer relevant today. Many of the portfolio and technology, every let's call it five to seven years, you have to reinvent yourself. What is relevant five to seven years ago aren't capabilities that are relevant now. Everybody's moved to a SaaS platform. Modern data platforms have come into the mix. AI, intelligent automation. Not only have we been able to grow organically, we've had to reinvent ourselves every time we do that. This team is well capable of dealing with those changing environments and then continue to grow that platform. Very, very, very proud of what our team has been able to do. As you look at the inorganic side, we had mentioned the acquisition of Axia. It's going to strengthen our position in industrial as well as supply chain. We had mentioned Perception Health around the healthcare analytics side. Being able to aggregate and harmonize data externally and internally and providing insight really unlocks the value that we can when we talk about monetizing data in the future and really enabling our consultants moving forward. Most recently, our growing partnership with Microsoft, not only from the business application side, whether it be finance, supply chain, manufacturing, but if you look at what Microsoft is doing in their relationship with OpenAI and their analytic fabric solution, their Power Automate solution, we're taking a lot of the technology capabilities that our large leading vendors are innovating, and we're now applying them to our customers. When we look at how we're leveraging these advanced platforms, there are organizations that are spending a lot of money creating platforms. We're taking an approach where we're partnering with our vendors. When it comes to AI, we can stay leading edge by partnering with AWS, by partnering with Microsoft, and Salesforce, you name the vendor. We've had a tremendous amount of success in deploying their technologies in our customer base. This combination of organic and inorganic really positions us well as we move forward. Let me talk to you a little bit about the technology disruption and the advancements in AI. Jim had commented that 100-plus use cases that we've deployed within healthcare. If you look at across the industries, we have really deployed hundreds of scenarios there. I do want to give you maybe an example that is outside of some of our core healthcare and higher education. Let's talk a little bit about industrials. One of our clients came to us with a problem where they were spending millions of dollars around machine outages and break fixes. They had asked us to take a look at how do we leverage IoT and predictive modeling in helping us with some of these outages. As we now started to connect to their machinery through an IoT environment and look at it from a preventive maintenance standpoint to more of a predictive maintenance standpoint, we've saved that organization $20 million in just providing connection with their machinery and look at it through a machine learning perspective and an AI perspective. These are perfect use cases of leveraging our vendor technology clients, but really bringing them into the real world. Cloud platforms. The increasing M&A activities of a lot of these vendors are really looking to provide those end-to-end solutions. We're well positioned in working with them to go from the front office to the mid-office to the back office. The concept of hyper-personalization is becoming very, very relevant. The days of doing mass campaigns, hoping that I service my customers, are long gone. The ability to leverage data, to leverage journeys to better meet the customer where they want to be met, when they want to be met. Hyper-personalization is a very key theme that's been around for a while, but it also is now really accelerating with the advent of AI to drive loyalty as well as additional revenue models. The other key trend that we've seen is hyper-personalization or hyper-automation. As you look at automating back office, as you look at driving efficiencies, as you look at reducing cost, hyper-automation has been a theme now in our organizations that we've adopted, what, six, seven years ago when we first started this journey. We're really seeing the realization of those capabilities being delivered across all our industries. Financial pressures. That's going to be a theme from now until, quite frankly, forever. A lot of our organizations are dealing with the macro trends. One of the key things that if you look at our portfolio, we do really, really well in those highly regulated industries. One of the advantages of working in highly regulated industries is that there is must spend that we can, in essence, help our organizations as they deal with the regulatory uncertainty, as well as just the operational efficiencies and the operational efficiencies of organizations through greater analytics and insights. Tariffs have become, as well as supply chain disruptions, ever since COVID has been a trend that we've been working through. The most recent acquisition of Axia really allows us to faster innovate and deliver more cost efficiencies and make sure that supply chain resiliency is top of mind for our organizations. If you look at just some of the evolving agile type of approach, a lot of our clients are dealing with speed, quality, and innovation all at the same time. How do we accelerate those outcomes within organizations? No longer are they the two-year, 24-month, 36-month programs. We have to be able to deliver time to value in that expedited timeframe. The rise of data analytics, the convergence of the physical as well as the digital world has become something that has been very, very relevant for our customers. When we talk about the physical and digital world, physical is upskilling individuals, making them more productive. You can imagine in the digital world, the advent of AI agents that exist within the enterprise is becoming more and more disruptive. How do we make sure that as we're supervising and we understand what individuals are doing, what are those AI agents in the enterprise also doing? As we're bringing together skill sets, making sure that we're balancing the physical and digital world is a trend as well as the checks and balances that need to be in place for that to operate efficiently. How are we positioning ourselves for the future? There are three components to that. You've heard this time and time again, whether it was from Mark, whether it's from Mark Finlan, whether it's been from Jim. It really is around advancing the current portfolio. How do we make sure that we're driving sustainable growth by identifying new opportunities, new products and services to engage our customers in new operating models too? Within technology, that's great. We've got a disruptive factor. There is always new technology being introduced. When it comes to disruption, sustainable opportunities, that is a path that is being driven by the market. Quite frankly, we have had experience and been very successful in following that market. If you look at expanding the portfolio, if you look at it through that commercial lens, many of our customers are international. A lot of the expansion that we have been able to achieve on an international basis has really been customer-driven. We had one deployment with one of our customers where we deployed a CRM transformation over 56 different countries. As we move forward, globalization is a key theme, specifically in our commercial markets, and something that we are very, very excited about being able to work and leverage our team in India, our teams in Singapore, our teams in Europe now to be able to deliver on a global basis. As we look at growing our portfolio and driving it through sustainable growth, it is new markets. It's new opportunities for fostering new products. If we look at it through the product lens, we've got a leading product in our research organization, our healthcare analytics. Product and accelerators are a key part of how we create repeatability and find additional revenue streams. It's not just a consulting revenue stream we have. We have recurring revenue as it pertains to products as well as accelerators, which ultimately makes us very sticky with our clients. It allows us to provide that long-term value for them. Finally, the portfolio enhancement. As we deliver and identify new opportunities, we have a great team in India as we look at incubating new offerings, creating new products, new accelerators. Six, seven years ago, when we ventured into a global delivery model, that team has added tremendous value and continues to add tremendous value for us. Being able to deliver at a global, but also to be able to innovate globally is a key part of our enhancement of our portfolio. Okay, a couple of takeaways. If you look at enhancing the market position, our digital has strengthened, and we do have a differentiating partnership ecosystem that continues to grow. As we look at gaining the market share, we have captured and expanding our total addressable market, both on an organic and inorganic standpoint. Those are trends that will continue as we move forward. Navigating an evolving market. You look at the ability to adopt technology at scale, at an expedited pace. That is always a trend that's going to continue as we move forward with our clients. And the sustainable growth. Through the investments, both organically and inorganically, we do see a competitive advantage because of our size. We've got those partnerships that extend broad within the ecosystem, but our size allows us to move much more quickly in a more nimble approach and be able to compete at scale. We've proven that we've been able to do that over the past 10 years too. Mark, let me turn it over to you and talk a little bit about commercial. There you go. Thank you. We often do not talk about commercial, but we have had questions from investors in the past that said, "Why are you even in this business?" I want to spend a few minutes giving a little bit of history and perspective as to what has brought us into this business and the opportunities that we see for us ahead. If we look back, say over the last 10 or more years, the investments that we have made have really expanded our capabilities in our core businesses in healthcare and education for the most part. At the same time, they have built greater scale in many commercial industries. The majority of the M&A transactions that we have done have been acquisitions of digital capabilities that have been across a pretty broad spectrum of technologies and solutions. Those transactions are often as capability-focused. They often include a multi-industry presence. That is really important for us for two reasons. One is it's important for employees in those businesses who specialize in the skills, and they want to continue to pursue them after the acquisitions, not only in just one industry, but in multiple industries. Collectively, the other reason I want to mention is those industries in the commercial side of the market are often several years ahead of what you see in healthcare and education. That gives us the opportunity to deploy some of the technologies that Mario has talked about. Through those learnings and focus, we can turn them into opportunities that we can bring leading practices into healthcare and education. Those clients, in fact, ask us often, "What have you done outside the industry?" They want to know, "Where else have you done this?" They are talking specifically about the things that have happened in commercial industries. Collectively, these acquisitions have really propelled organic growth that cumulatively now has created a pretty sizable business in the healthcare segment. If you were to go back and look at the company's 2012 10-K, what you would see is the origins of what the commercial industry is today. It was the financial advisory business that we had back at that time. It was $22 million. It was on a $626 million base. It was 3% of the company's revenue. Through M&A and organic growth over time, this commercial segment today has grown to over a quarter billion dollars, and it is 17% of our RBR through 2024. If you take the outlook that we have for 2025, where we've taken the Axia acquisition and we look ahead, it annualizes to about a $300 million acquisition. It is big, and it has grown quite a bit. Now our focus is on how do we continue to scale it in the context of our integrated go-to-market strategy and operating model. Where do we go from here to create more value? Let me share just, first of all, a few more details about the commercial segment today. The portfolio is diversified from an industry perspective, and it reflects the fact that these technologies have a broad applicability across multiple sectors within the industry. The industries of focus are financial services, energy utilities, industrials, and manufacturing. I'll mention the public sector as well, which today is a very small, it's a small percentage of our commercial portfolio. It is a portion of our healthcare practice that has done well through some of the regulatory reviews and the like. These industries are facing significant disruption or regulatory change, and that is, again, as I mentioned earlier, conducive to spend for consulting. In terms of capability mix today, you see that the segment is about two-thirds digital in focus, with the other third focused in consulting across restructuring, strategy and innovation, and a small but growing presence in financial institution advisory, which we've built organically. We've continued to grow our commercial segment at a 5% compound annual growth over the past three years, despite a more challenging economic backdrop. Obviously, this year, we're outlooking to accelerate that. Based on that foundation, we're going to build on the scale that we've achieved to date in the digital capability, and we'll continue to selectively add advisory capabilities through programmatic M&A as well as through ongoing organic hires. Now, we share the success we've experienced when we've collaborated together across the full range of capabilities and gone to market as a unified firm in healthcare and education segments. Our experience to date in the commercial segment, as I mentioned, it's a much smaller scale than we've seen in the other segments, but it also gives us confidence that this integrated approach to going to market will effectively propel our growth. In fact, if you recall the video at the beginning, the last speaker on that video was from Grab, which happens to be the Uber of Singapore. That's a perfect example where our strategy and innovation capabilities together with digital differentiated themselves against what was a client owned by one of the big players. We were able to go in and basically win that client through a differentiated story. That is the kind of power of going to market together that we've experienced. While we're earlier in the maturity of our efforts to build out this integrated model, again, I've mentioned our focus has been on getting the health and education part of our businesses right. We'll continue to advance these. Acquisitions like Axia Consulting, which Mario talked about, are bringing the kind of capabilities and growth that we think are important building blocks of our strategy and our success going forward. As we not only expand our digital portfolio, as I mentioned, we'll continue to expand our advisory capabilities today. For as an example, our strategy and innovation capability, which is much more of a longer-term focus of strategy today, will focus on adding more near-term operational consulting like the balance that Andy described in healthcare. That will increase our near-term impact and value to clients. In summary, we have built a pretty sizable commercial segment over the past decade from a very small base. With the favorable end markets that we are in today and these dynamic markets, we think offers continuing significant growth potential for Huron. In particular, we think we can build on this integrated approach that we have seen over time. These learnings we feel are pretty fully applicable to what we are going to see in commercial. Now, while the commercial segment may not be the headline story about Huron Growth's potential today, we think we are going to continue to see this advance. I think as the proven track record of doing M&A transactions that we've been able to build on and accrete in a broader portfolio context, we'll continue to see those moving ahead. That is a good opportunity for me to welcome Elizabeth Entein to the stage, and she's going to talk a little bit more about how we approach programmatic M&A. Thank you. Thank you, Mark. Thanks for being here, everyone. We're excited to have all of you in person and on the phone. I joined Huron 12 years ago as a member of the corporate development team. After a few years of that, I joined the executive team as their Chief of Staff and held dual responsibilities as the Chief of Staff and also supporting Huron's M&A strategy for the second half of that. Given my responsibilities at Huron, I've worked closely with all of our business leaders since I've joined the firm, providing me with a really strong understanding of our businesses, their strategies, as well as a deep understanding of our enterprise strategy, having helped shape it with the leaders that are here today. This experience provides me with a unique perspective in my M&A seat, really understanding the strategic goals, having strong internal relationships, and understanding the distinct nuances of a specific acquisition and how that can have an impact on our business, and also as we think about integration to make sure we're maximizing the results of that opportunity. Acquisitions have played a key role in shaping who Huron is since almost day one of our firm. We've consistently demonstrated the impact of M&A on our growth strategy over time, which has largely been driven by smaller tuck-in acquisitions, which you can see here. Let me give a couple of examples to highlight this. The foundation of our healthcare segment, which is rooted in two acquisitions, one in 2007 called Wellspring, one in 2008 called Stockamp, those then came together and grew from some smaller additional tuck-ins, but largely grew organically into the business that Jim described today. Second, the digital business, as Mario just mentioned. Over the last 10 years, we've successfully deployed $250 million of capital while organically building that investment into a $600 million plus RBR business today. Beyond financial growth, we've also gained significant talent via acquisitions, including three out of our six business leaders and our Chief Operating Officer. We have always used M&A also as a tool to shape our portfolio, not just adding, but also divesting assets to drive focus and investment in the areas of the business we believe have the greatest returns for our shareholders. Leveraging the foundation of these acquisitions and then building on them organically has been one of our key strengths. M&A has had a profound impact on shaping our portfolio, fueling our growth, but also strengthening our bunch of talent and our collaborative culture, which, as you heard, is really important to our business. As you heard from the leaders today, M&A has and will continue to be a critical role in strengthening our competitive advantage while also supporting our strong growth trajectory. It's important to note that our inorganic strategy largely focuses on filling white space. Adding in those adjacencies like Advancement Resources that Mark Finlan touched on, or adding net new offerings that help us move into new markets, new channels, or new capabilities like Innosight. We have a proven M&A approach, which starts with really deep alignment to our enterprise and business strategies. When we're working together, the leaders and I, we're working on refining the strategic priorities, especially evaluating build partner buy opportunities to ensure we're deploying capital in the right areas. While corporate development takes the lead in our deal sourcing process, we work really close with our business leaders to identify and build relationships with targets, as most of the deals we ultimately close are proprietary. Many of our deals are where we're already partnering together in the market, proving the theory of the case in advance of an acquisition. What does this kind of look like from a pipeline perspective? In 2024, we looked at nearly 200 opportunities. We issued eight offers, including several in several-led banker processes, and we closed on three, two of which came through relationships in the market and one which came through a market scan from corporate development alongside with our team. Going forward, we will continue to leverage our proprietary deal sourcing, our market relationships, and our investment banking partners to help identify opportunities that can continue to help us fuel the growth that you saw here in our discussion earlier today. Let me touch on our deal criteria. We are continuously learning through and after each acquisition. These lessons learned have helped us shape our deal criteria when evaluating our build buy strategy for a new focus area, while also helping us shape our analysis of a specific target and planning for integration. On each acquisition, we review these deal criteria not only with our business sponsors, but also our executive team and the Finance and Capital Allocation Committee of the board, leading to strong governance and decision-making as we think about deploying capital. As you can see, financial alignment is only table stakes as we're moving an opportunity forward. Equally, if not more important, are the strategic and go-to-market alignment, as well as cultural aspects of a deal. We focus heavily on those areas in our evaluation of a target, the actual due diligence, and the integration planning to ensure our deal thesis is sound and that we're gaining a business leaders and team who can thrive while also driving greater impact once they're part of Huron. Our strong culture is one of our greatest competitive advantages. You've heard it a couple of times today. We make cultural fit one of our greatest priorities in deal reviews pre and post the acquisition itself to ensure we are bringing the right teams to bear and growing and fostering that culture going forward. While our track record isn't perfect, we do have a strong track record of successful acquisitions. Here are just a few from the last several years to bring this to life. I won't go into all of them, but I do want to touch on one, Perception Health, which is what Jim mentioned earlier. Our healthcare team had been partnering with Perception Health in the market for a few years, bringing their proprietary tools and data sets together with our consulting offerings to successfully deliver for clients. We came to a point where we were working together so well that we knew that we needed to take our partnership to the next level in order to achieve the strategic vision that lay in front of us based on the market demand. In 2021, we closed the acquisition and have not only grown the standalone Perception RBR at a CAGR of 48%, but we've also embedded them into our performance improvement, strategy and innovation, and CRM work to bolster our go-to-market approach and further differentiate our business in the market. This has led to an additional multi-million dollar RBR for our business outside of the standalone Perception RBR. Let me just close and say that M&A has and will continue to play an important role in our growth strategy. While we have a strong track record, we do not take that for granted. We continue to refine our approach and evaluative criteria to identify the right opportunities for our business, ensuring we're deploying capital in the areas of greatest return for our business while driving further value creation for our shareholders. Before I turn it back to Mark, I do want to make a comment about Q&A very quickly. Mark's going to close, and afterwards we'll have a Q&A session. I encourage everyone on the phone to type your questions in the chat, and then we'll also take questions from those in the audience here as well. With that, I'll turn it back to Mark. Thank you so much for the opportunity to be here today with you. I would like to just touch briefly, I guess, to recap some of the key points that we had. You know, when you look at what we've tried to build at Huron over the last three years, it's just pretty simple. It's pretty clear. It's about building on our strongholds at our core end markets, driving organic growth, complementing that with very focused M&A on an integrated basis, having aligned incentives that help us work together to unlock the greater value, not only from going to market, but at scale and creating the margin opportunities and synergies from an integrated company as opposed to a federation of practices that you often see in other firms. Based on that, we see we're very pleased with where we've got to today. The platform we built from a people perspective, if we look at the next one, next slide, becomes a place that all of these things come together. We are a premier global consultancy. We have no problem attracting some of the best talent in the marketplace. They're very, very pleased to come here and prosper in their careers. Our industries, you know, with hearing from Jim, Mark, Mario, and Andy, you hear in much greater detail some of the fundamental challenges that are propelling us for the future. With these tailwinds of demand, we feel like we're very well positioned in the market to continue to have this as a core base as we continue to expand in areas like our commercial area. We're really, you know, before our operating model change in 2022, our digital capabilities were distributed across the company. I used to say that one of our best kept secrets was that we actually have a very sizable digital capability within IT services, the size of many competitors out there or larger. The breadth of what we do is a tremendous asset because, as you can hear today, digital solutions are integral to sustainable solutions for our clients over time. That combination of bringing advisory and consulting as well as managed services together creates a real differentiator for us in our marketplace. Our margins, we've made great progress in them. I would tell you what I'm most pleased about is that we've gotten here not on the backs of just making our people work harder through higher utilization goals. What we've done is really taken value that we've been able to extract by working in a much more intelligent, integrated basis. We're not done. We have plenty of runway ahead of us to continue to realize that value. That's partially from the aligned incentive model that we have, which, again, I think really sets us apart, tied into stock as a very important component of compensation, which is very, very attuned for shareholder and our leadership alignment. Then our balance sheet and cash flow. We are very pleased to have the kind of cash flow and liquidity that we have. It gives us great flexibility to create value. It's a very powerful engine to create growth as well as margin expansion and value through all of those levers. I think we're really well positioned from a, if you look at our thesis, a very simple story, but lots of things to like about it. Finally, I'll just end with just a brief shout out to our people. 7,300 people around the world, 2,700 of them in India as Mario alluded to, and has grown tremendously over the last several years. We have growing opportunities across the world because of our clients who are multinational and base in scope. The experiences we've had outside the U.S. also demonstrate that power. For us, again, it's a people-based business. It's people first, clients second, shareholders third. I'll respectfully, you should just understand that you need happy people to have happy clients, and you need happy clients to have happy shareholders. We start and end with people, and we think that sets everybody up for success going forward. I think that's a good way to end today and then invite our colleagues to come up for Q&A. Thank you very much. Yeah. I'm going to move the stools for us. You should be in the middle. You should be in the middle. All right. Thank you again for joining us. We are going to start with current questions or questions from our current analysts, and then we will transition to other questions that come in. I'm going to start with a couple of questions from Andrew Nicholas from William Blair. The first question is around the messaging around the potential regulatory impact on healthcare and higher education segments remains quite positive. Can you please touch on the potential headwinds? Are there risks to client decision-making in the near term? Let me start by just framing that when we issued guidance, as Janelle reminded everybody as well, we contemplated the range of scenarios as to what we thought these regulatory disruptions might mean. We are affirming that guidance today. On the low and the high end, we do believe there are cases for more of a gray swan, if you will, and more black swan, but also lots of potential for upside. In that context, let me start with Jim and ask him to just comment again, just expand on how those regulatory changes might transpire and what you think it means for the business potentially. Sure. I mean, you really over the years, anytime there's reimbursement cuts or any type of financial pressure on hospitals and health systems, it really swims kind of to our strong suit. If you look at what's happening, you know, with DOGE and the like and coming cuts possibly to Medicare and Medicaid, also the research cuts that some of which have already happened, it's going to create intense financial pressure, which then turns to companies like Huron, like us, to be able to help people in other ways and in direct ways, reimbursement-wise, revenue cycle improving, becoming more efficient, and really find ways to be able to produce a positive operating margin going forward. You know, the second part of the question was, is there any potential negatives? I think on balance, it should be overwhelmingly positive for our business, you know, given our strength again in financial health transformation and performance improvement. You could conceivably see a client saying, well, maybe I'll wait a year to do my digital modernization, or maybe this acquisition or merger maybe is a little bit too much right now as we sort through the regulatory changes. We haven't seen any of that yet, all right? You know, that could be a possibility too. Good. Mark, why don't you? I would think I would just add to Jim because a lot of what he said applies to education as well. I think the breadth of services here is important. As you look at some of the changes to federal funding, to research, clients are going to be struggling with some of the financial challenges Jim mentioned, but also strategic questions. What does the future of research look like for my institution? How do I attract and retain talent? How do I fund that? Do I need to turn more to corporate partnerships, more to fundraising, and less through to federal funding than I have in the past? Those are strategic questions for them to answer. They also need to think about how am I going to leverage data? How am I going to leverage AI to both deliver that research as well as think about how I can change how I deliver this in a more efficient manner administratively as well. I do think the breadth of services there on top of some of the forces Jim mentioned really put us in a position to be the partner that our clients are going to turn to for support. Yeah. Maybe just to round it out, Mario, from your perspective in the commercial markets as well. Yeah. Listen, I think, you know, we saw the disruptions in supply chain because of COVID, but more recently now on the tariffs and working in, you know, whether it be manufacturing, industrial, supply chain resiliency needs modernization, insourcing, globalization. You accomplish that and drive efficiencies through digitalization of those channels. We see a lot of organizations reaching out to us to drive some of those efficiencies and make sure that they're managing risk and doing a better job around demand planning and doing financial modeling as well as the logistics associated with that. We have, you know, seen a pickup because of that. I think with every disruption, the ability to provide greater insights and to drive operational efficiencies and make sure that resiliency is there, technology is a key enabler of that. Excellent. Our next question from Andrew relates to AI. Can you discuss how you're thinking about the AI adoption timeline in healthcare and education? Are these end markets ready for AI at this stage, or would you expect them to act on a bit of a lag to the commercial end markets as they have in other areas of digital transformation? Mario, you want to start, and then we just have Jim and Mark add perspective. Yeah. Listen, I think because of our broad portfolio, we're well positioned. There are some industries that are adopting AI at a very rare and rapid pace. A lot of the intelligent automation that we've been doing over the years have come out of the commercial industries, taking that technology and bringing them back into healthcare and higher ed. I think what we're finding with AI is it's a bit of a supervised champion challenger approach. You're not letting AI just run wild. It is being supervised. The ability to make sure that the biasness of those models are eliminated, the importance of data management becomes very, very key. You know, if you look at the use cases we're seeing in financial services, we're seeing in retail, they've been embracing that for the last three to four years, quite frankly. How does that then translate into some of the, you know, let's say mid-adopters or later adopters? The capability is here within Huron. Having that capability to ultimately meet the industry or meet the client where they're at has been a hallmark of what our success has been in digital lately. Yeah. Jim, in healthcare? As far as AI in healthcare, you know, it's critical. You're impacting people's lives, right? You know, understandably, you know, most of the early action in AI and automation has been in the administrative function. Supply chain and revenue cycle and the like, you know, but I see it advancing in the very near future to really, you know, get into the kind of core clinical aspects of a healthcare provider. In particular, reducing the administrative burden on physicians and nurses so that they can spend more time not on their computer documenting, coding, and the like, but really, you know, be with patients and providing critical comprehensive care. Mark. I think one of the helpful things to point out here is one of the offerings we're providing to our clients right now is to help them answer that question. Advisory services around what is going on in the industry right now. What access do you have through the tools you already have on campus to AI? Where are you on the maturity curve in terms of leveraging AI in your enterprise? Again, I'm going to go back to our breadth of expertise. They're grappling with questions with their fundamental mission. How are people going to consume knowledge going forward? How is AI going to impact the education environment? How is it going to impact discovery? How is it going to impact research? How is that going to change? As well as the administration of the institution as well. I think where we feel like we really have a differentiated ability is to help them understand that entire ecosystem of AI and what's coming in through tools they have, what they can buy, as well as what we can bring to the market. We do have data that no one else has. We have expertise in areas like research and philanthropy that no one else has. We do think we can bring some products and services to the market, specifically to the industry as well. Excellent. Final question from Andrew, and then we'll move on. Both Elizabeth and John cited the requirement for acquisitions to be accretive to EPS and margins in year one. How much does this limit your transaction pipeline? Would you be willing to be more flexible on this requirement for the right opportunities? Also, how should we think about the upper end of the size of the type of deal you'd be comfortable doing? Maybe I'll start with the last question for Mark and John and China. Sure. When we describe that you're the overall framework, when we look at the tuck-in-size acquisitions, we kind of think annually in that adding, in that 2-4% of revenue sort of range. With that said, we'll look at different things that come through or different opportunities. We're open-minded to what comes through. I would say if you think about 5% of revenue, something like that from that perspective, that's probably near the upper bounds depending on what type of things come through the pipeline. In terms of the question about, you know, the priority on the acquisitions being margin accretive, the priority of the acquisitions being EPS accretive, I think from our perspective, we don't find that to be a limiting factor. I think it's important in our business that the targets that we're looking at have built credible businesses, have stability in the revenue base, have figured out on their own how to make money in the businesses that they're at. For us, as you've heard from Elizabeth, Mark, myself, and others talk about, it's really then about taking those businesses and how does it drive organic growth two years down the road. Outside the first year of acquisition. For us, we tend to heavily weight businesses that have already kind of proven it in the market, which I think coincides with some of that profitability day one. Yeah. The only other framing comment I would make is that, you know, we're paid to drive value, not just as growth. Growth is a way of driving value. It is a matter of really looking at what is the overall proposition of a larger deal. Inherently, they have higher risk because there is more capital involved. They tend to be higher priced because they are often coming through processes. It is not that we will not look at those, but I would just say we are pretty clear on the criteria. I think with the board's perspective as well, I would anticipate we will focus a lot more on the tuck-ins. Not that we will not look at those, but we just have a higher degree of scrutiny because they need to work to create value in a very clear, compelling way. Just to hit the point that John made also, the pipeline, that has not been an issue in finding the right opportunities for us, especially as you think about the revenue and margin profile that we are thinking and how it aligns with what we are looking at. We have been really fortunate, and I think it also demonstrates again the dynamics and the decision-making process that goes into this also with our business sponsors and making sure that we are thinking about the ultimate impact to the Huron financials as well. Our next question, I am going to turn to Tyler Barshaw from Truist, who is with us here in the room. Grab the mic. Perfect. Hi. Thank you. With the velocity of change in the administrative state, is it causing any pause in consulting work as clients are kind of just pausing and saying, let's pick up in six months when we have some more certainty? Yeah. Jim and Mark, why don't you take those two? From a healthcare perspective, if anything, it's accelerating needs and demands. You know, we're seeing a lot of clients that are trying to get out in front. They're anticipating severe financial pressures, as I mentioned before, reimbursement changes and the like. They're seeking ways to, you know, address that and find other ways to improve operating income. Right now, it's actually sparking demand. The thing I would add, and you can go back in history and look at some of this, you know, when COVID was happening, some of the things we were helping institutions with was standing up and executing protocols on campus to get students and faculty back into classrooms. I think some of this comes to Huron is nimble and can pivot to help our clients with what they need. What we're seeing right now is a lot of needs thinking about cash management, how do we think through the different levers we might need to pull to balance the budget, some of the financial pressures that Jim mentioned. It might be a shift of focus of existing resources in terms of what they specifically need, but we haven't seen any pause or slowdown in the pipeline. Just one more. Talking about like current client engagements, are you mostly seeing new clients coming in or existing clients accelerating use of resources? Just curious about the sense of current client engagements. Yeah. John, maybe you want to comment about the pipeline and then again, Mark, Jim, Mario, talk about new client acquisition. Sure. From a pipeline perspective, you saw probably in some of the slides that we had up there, particularly when we talk about the healthcare industry and the education industry, the large majority of our work comes from repeat clients. That is really where the breadth of our capabilities come into play and the credentials that we have established at many of those clients come into play. We have been at certain clients in healthcare and education, some of them every year for 20 years now, doing different sorts of projects at those clients. When we look at the pipeline, the majority does come from existing clients. With that said, we also see new clients every year too, where our reputation precedes us, our credentials and things that we have done at other places opens new doors for new opportunities at new clients. It's a mix, but it's heavily weighted towards repeat clients. I would just say through the digital lens, our commercial business is rapidly growing. The more successes we're having in market with large organizations, we are becoming an alternative to the Big Four, quite frankly, with the breadth of services and the capabilities we have. We are seeing acceleration in commercial, specifically in those highly regulated industries, whether it be financial services, whether it be energy specifically. As we get into energy, you look at the asset-intensive industries where supply chain and manufacturing and asset management come into play. I think the commercial market, a lot of them is net new just because of the success we've had with our clients, as well as the success we've had with our technology partners too. Okay. Our next question will come from Bill Sutherland from Benchmark. In the 2022 Investor Day presentation, India was beginning to add consulting to Pure Delivery. Can you share a little bit more about where that mix is today? At this point, our India headcount is up north of 35% of our total headcount. They're primarily serving our digital clients and our global digital projects. That's oftentimes for North American clients where our global delivery team is providing key resources and talent on those projects, as well as our managed services business within the healthcare business. I'd say at this point, they probably touch overall about 50% of our clients if you think of the digital mix of our business plus the growing managed services business within our healthcare team. All right. Second question from Bill. What is the percent of revenue under multi-year contracts? Recurring revenue was identified as 15% in 2015, percent of revenue in 2022. What is it today? I'll start with just, again, the reminder about kind of the sticky nature of our client relationships. This is something we talked about in the last Investor Day. It dovetails with what we just talked about. A lot of our revenue comes from repeat clients where we've done different types of work over the year in the healthcare and education industries anyway, which covers 80% of our revenue. It's in that 85%-90% range. That's one layer in which our revenue is sticky. We also have projects where the scope of them goes on for multiple quarters, multiple years. If you think about the example that Andy talked about earlier, that wasn't a quick project, right? That went over a longer period of time, which also gives us good visibility. To Bill's specific question, we talked at that Investor Day in 2022 about 15% in that range being recurring revenue, so under multiple-year contracts. That's actually gone down since the 2022 Investor Day. The reason it's gone down, though, is kind of one of those good reasons. It's because we've had such strong growth on the consulting and digital side of our business that it's actually outpaced the growth there. In absolute terms, our revenue under those types of contracts has had nice, healthy growth over the past three years, but as a percentage, it's been blended down just because of how strong the growth has been in other parts of the business. Okay. Our next question comes from Kevin Steinke at Barrington. Kevin asks, can you discuss further how Huron's culture and focus on collaboration are competitive differentiators? Also, can you discuss the financial incentives in place for collaboration and how much collaboration across practices has contributed to growth? Yeah. Let me start on that one. In terms of the culture of collaboration, we've always had this opportunity to work together. If you think about our businesses, it makes sense because when you have academic medicine as the intersection of healthcare and education, you kind of already have inherently a connected ecosystem of a continuing of client relationships. You bring in digital, which is again pervasive across all we do. There's a very good ecosystem and opportunity to collaborate because of just the nature of not having things so completely siloed that it doesn't make any sense. Having said that, when you look at the financial incentives, it does come back to something different. I think when we plan together our annual operating budgets, you have the industry teams jointly collaborating with the capability teams to establish goals. What are we going to go achieve this year? What is the opportunity in market for us to do? When you do that, what happens is that goal becomes distributed to the industry client relationships to help drive those, as well as across the capability relationships. That friction that many times is whose bucket is going to count in, it gets diminished. I'm not saying it's perfect because you always have a human element in everything you do. Having said that, I think a lot of the growth that we've unlocked is really because we've taken, if you look at the penetration, the repeat revenue that Jim and Mark have had in their particular markets, it's a penetration strategy. It's not new client acquisitions. We have so much repeat revenue, but our ability to serve a broader part of our client's business is much, much broader. Now, what we see, and as Mario said, like about being an alternative to the Big Four, because of bringing that team together as one unified team, we differentiate ourselves versus the largest competitors. Do they have 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 times our capabilities? Yes, they do. When you talk about how do you actually deliver them at the client to get them to work in market shoulder to shoulder with the client at the center of what you do, that is hard for them to go do. I'm not saying they can't do it and they all have, we'll say they have matrix models. The power is not in the matrix. The power is in the focus on the client and unlocking greater value because that's where you're focused. That's for us where we see the differentiator from other competitors. We think this is where our size and scale is a great advantage because we can be pretty nimble. Things get done quickly. Our focus is really we know who to talk to to make decisions. We can get, you know, when you work across silos and collaboration, sometimes in these large organizations, it's not even clear who you need to talk to to get something approved or done in market. We just feel like right now we have a great advantage for how we're going to market together. While it's very soft in the eyes of many people, it's very real for us in terms of what we've experienced. I think I would just add, you can't fake caring about our clients. All the clients, particularly the ones Jim and I work with, hospitals, health systems, academic medical centers, universities, and colleges, those employees are there because they genuinely care about what they're doing. Those faculty and physicians are there because they care about it. People come to Huron and work in these practices because they care about the mission of the institutions we work with. They feel that and they sense that when they work with us. That translates over to the internal way we work together and our collaboration is that genuine caring about the missions of those sectors we work in, Jim. Yeah. You know, I would just add like the magnitude of the challenge that we see oftentimes in healthcare turning organizations around by $300 million or $500 million or more, all right, we have to bring all of our talent to bear. All right? We have to address all of the viable opportunities to increase revenue through growth. We bring on our strategy team and Andy and others. All right? We bring in our financial advisory team with Flint, who's here today. It's all powered by digital, coupled with our strong performance improvement capabilities. There's just an imperative that, you know, given the magnitude of the need, you have to architect in all of these different subject matter experts and solutions and capabilities in order to deliver what the client wants to achieve. All right? And that's been key for us. Now, the other thing in terms of internally, how do we get people to work together? I think it was probably 2018, we went to an internal system within Healthcare First to work it out where it incensed individual managing directors from different parts of the practice or different parts of the industry to work together on a sale and then on an engagement. If they do, they get 200% credit, which then goes to their achievement of their goals. You know, since that time, I mean, magically, people started working much better together. All right? It has been a kind of a key driver of our growth. Really most recently, we have taken that same system and spread it throughout the company. The other thing I'll add is our clients are also forcing this to happen. You saw the individual from Grab and partnering with Innosight. They were looking to go from servicing one out of every 10 customers in the ASEAN region to one out of every two. You have got to think very, very differently as to the future of engaging your customer. Innosight brings that future-back approach as to how do I now service the customer in the future? How do I reduce friction from engaging a customer to ultimately the fulfillment? Grab has also a bank around electronic payments. How do I then ultimately receive cash and process a payment automatically? Very much like an Amazon experience, right? To be able to bring multiple capabilities is the only way we are going to meet the client where their problem solution needs to be. It is being not only driven internally through collaboration, but also through our clients asking for a broader, broader transformation. All right. Our next question from Kevin. Are there any specific focus areas for talking acquisitions that you can discuss in terms of capabilities? And do you see acquisition opportunities in each business segment? Yeah. I'll start there. I'd say the answer is the latter one, yes. We see opportunities across every single one of the segments. You know, we have tremendous adjacencies within healthcare. We have new areas that we can definitely add into. The same thing in education, which you've already seen, the addition of some of the philanthropy acquisitions that we've done. The commercial space is wide open. We see plenty of opportunities to really take an architecture of what we think is a model that really works well and find those organizations that plug in well. We feel like just because we're at the size and scale that we are, acquisition opportunities often are that we have a different value proposition for them because we're not just giving them capital like private equity and then you're kicking the can down the road for a transaction or you're going to a, you know, a $50 billion acquisition strategic that wants to acquire you and your firm is just going to get vaporized into their infrastructure. We're putting them into a role within the organization that fits and is different. That's one of the reasons why we're successful in getting our acquisition candidates to stay. I would just say the areas of focus will continue to be in digital and some of the advisory areas. I would say in some of the selected industry areas of focus as well, as well as, as I said, in some, even in some of the strategy and innovation, some areas that we think we can add some additional expertise that will be accretive to the overall model. Yep. Our final question from Kevin is coming back to the regulatory component and talking specifically about tariffs. How have commercial clients been reacting to uncertainty in the macro environment around tariff policy specifically? I'm sorry. Can you repeat that? How have commercial clients been reacting to uncertainty in the macro environment around tariff policy? Listen, I think it, you know, started in COVID. There has been a lot of, again, looking at their supply chain, looking at manufacturing facilities, looking at logistics and distribution. I think if anything, it's just been a continuation. Some of that has now been accelerated, quite frankly. You know, we've seen a pickup in demand because of that acceleration. A lot of scenario modeling happening right now as we've been working with customers. That's where some of the, you know, analytic capabilities that we've been able to bring to bear, some of that enterprise performance management solutions so that we can do some simulation models to look at supply chain, supply chain disruptions, look at investment thesis, look at deploying capital. As we look at bringing all our capabilities together, it's an exciting time for Huron right now. Excellent. We welcome questions from the audience as well. You mentioned the commercial business grew 5% CAGR over the last couple of years, but the forward outlook has you at low double digits. Maybe you could just flesh out a bit further what's going to drive that acceleration. Maybe you could kind of talk about the M&A versus organic components. Yeah. John, you're on it. Yeah. I can start then. The trajectory for the commercial business was actually a lot higher entering 2024. 2024 was a more challenging year for our commercial business, largely just because it was a year of some macro uncertainty that really, particularly for digital projects, caused a little bit of a pause there. I think prior to that, we saw some pretty healthy double-digit growth in that area within the commercial industry. As we turn the corner into 2025 and we look at our pipeline, we look at our backlog, it feels like things have stabilized a little bit, at least for our client base in terms of returning to some of those investments, which our viewpoint has always been they may be discretionary in the short term in terms of whether you're going to choose to do it this year or next year. In the longer term, when we look at the investments that our clients are making that we think we're well positioned to help them with, they need to be done over the course of time. I think that that higher growth rate really reflects the expectation that over time, clients will need to make those investments. Yeah. Mario, you talked to the client and clients in market. Yeah. If you look in market, you know, a year ago, if not a little bit earlier last year, a major focus for us was financial services with SVB. If you go back to those days, there was a lot of disruption, interest rate sensitivity. People were, you know, holding back on some of these large digital deployment. We've seen an acceleration of that now. It's probably a little bit more normalized versus some of the holdback that we saw. Financial services was a big component of some of that slowdown. If you look at how we've been able to broaden the portfolio, there's been a lot of investments in the energy side. You know, last year was a really good year for renewables. We got to take advantage of that. Having that diverse commercial portfolio allows us to ebb and flow, and we still ultimately grew during that time period. I think as things are becoming a little bit more normalized here and we're starting to see financial services with the interest rate environment at now, we're starting to see some more deployment of capital for monetization efforts. Yeah. M&A, you also asked about, Ben. Many of the deals that we look at, and especially it's been true in the digital space in particular, have been people that we've worked with in market and gotten to know through just being in the same setting. In fact, one example that we talked about with Axia, we had a common client. Maybe, Mario, you can talk to, you know, our early experience there. Yeah. I think that's been, you know, maybe a recipe for our M&A environment in that, you know, the digital portfolio is broad. There's a lot of what's called boutique firms that ultimately partner together to ultimately deliver an end-to-end solution. We happen to be working with Axia, one of our industrial organizations. We knew the leadership team just by reputation. We were able to engage, got to know them very, very well and realized from a culture, from a synergy, we didn't want to do an acquisition to just scale resources. We wanted to make sure that it was complementary offering. Quite frankly, now that we brought the two organizations together, we've seen clients award us work because now they can look at our organization to be more end-to-end versus just niche solutions. We've seen some nice healthy wins in the first half of this year because of that too. Yeah. One other point that I'd make about commercial digital is we've seen that, you know, some of these acquisitions and even the organic growth on the commercial side within digital, that's oftentimes really where the cutting edge of some of the deployment of technology is. It's been a great environment of innovation for us there on the commercial side, which then we kind of build out the capabilities that then are very helpful to redeploy back to the industries of education and the industries of healthcare. For us, it's been kind of a leading place to seed some of those capabilities that then turn around and nourish some of the growth we've seen from a digital perspective in the core industries as well. My second question is, you know, given the expansion and breadth of services over the last several years, maybe you could just talk about how the average project size has evolved over the last four years or so. Yeah. Ben, the size of the projects has increased. At this point across our entire business, if you look at the average size of a typical consulting project, it's probably now in the, you know, think of it as the low single-digit millions of dollars versus before it was probably closer to $1 million. There are probably points in time in the past where that average was even below $1 million. We have seen that go up. I think a big part of why that's increased is the topics that we've already touched upon in terms of the integrated scope of those projects where we take our collective capabilities has gone up too. It's really pulling in some of those different disciplines that's driven that increase. A stat that kind of relates to that, if you go back to maybe 2017 or that time frame, if you looked at our revenue and said how much of that revenue really was drawing in talent from different teams, different broader buckets across the organization, it was 10% or less. If you look at that same stat now in 2025, it's going to be over 50% of our projects have talent coming from different parts of the team, which just speaks to what all the different leaders have commented on. With that does tend to come expanded scope and larger project sizes. The early days, especially in digital, I remember in the earliest days when we had acquired, we had one up there for Bluestone. I think ADI saw the same thing. We used to count projects that were $1 million, and we had a handful of those. After a while, we were counting the ones that had $5 million. We were not so excited about the $1 million projects anymore. I think. Oh, we're still excited about that. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's just the evolution that we've seen is that the ability to take those solutions, create more value by upselling them, sometimes they're in multiple phases, but essentially that to me is a good healthy indicator of the effectiveness of our strategy because we should see an increasing project size over time. I think that's just the orchestration nature of these end-to-end solutions. Where in the past we may have been a single vendor, we'd go in there with a Workday solution or Oracle solution or Salesforce. Now you've got to look at it through an AI lens. You got to look at it through an intelligent automation lens. You got to look at it through an analytic lens. You have to look at it through an integration lens. Now that we've built out a portfolio of capabilities that allow us to do that end-to-end, those project sizes have just gotten larger and they've got more material. You know, the need to always reinvent and expand our portfolio is really driven based upon the client needs and our ability to orchestrate those solutions, let alone innovation and change management, op model design, the advisory pieces. We're putting all those capabilities together to really, really make an impact for our clients. Other questions? Okay. I will turn it back to you, Mark. Thank you for spending so much time with us today. We really appreciate that you took the time to join us. Everything's recorded. If there's anything that happens there that you want to go back and look at, John and I am always available as well to follow up for your calls. We just appreciate the support that we've had today and look forward to continuing to deliver value for you for the future. Thank you.