Good morning, everybody. My name's Mark Marcon. I cover human capital technology and solutions for Baird. With us today, we have Korn Ferry. Korn Ferry, as I think most of you know, is really well known as being the world's leading executive search firm, but increasingly, and more importantly, it's really an organization that's helping organizational consulting on talent as well as talent acquisition and getting the most out of your talent. With us today, we're very pleased to have Robert Rozek, the Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer, and Chief Corporate Officer of Korn Ferry. We also have Tiffany, and for those of you that follow the company, you all know what a terrific resource she is with regards to the company. Robert, I can't believe that I was looking back, and it's like you've been the CFO since 2012, and I remember when you first joined, and it's like time really does fly, and the organization has really changed a lot. I've got a series of questions. Sure. I want to discuss both the financial metrics as well as what your view of the state of the labor market is, but also some of the big initiatives that you guys have in place right now. Sure. I want to start with, there's one question I'm asking literally every company that I cover, and I'm hosting 15 companies at this conference. One question is just your view of the state of the U.S. labor market. Not specific to you because I'm going to come back to you in terms of your performance has been exceptional. Relative to what you see and what you're hearing from corporate executives. Sure. What's your view of the state of the labor market, both from a cyclical but also from a structural perspective as it relates to AI? Okay. A lot to unpack there. Yeah. I ask one question, and then it goes for five minutes. I think the labor market's tough right now in the U.S. There's no doubt. The job creation has tamped down. Unemployment's kind of hanging in where it's at. The participation rate continues to decline. I think there's multiple factors, but it's a pretty challenging environment. What's interesting to me is I see, every day, you pick up the journal, and you read, and one day, AI's taking away everybody's job, and the next day, we're hiring more college grads than ever. There's a lot of confusing data points out there, and obviously, you pay attention, you read that stuff. What I really look at, Mark, is our business and how we're behaving in this particular environment. For us, and again, we're going to announce our fourth quarter in a couple of weeks, so there's not a lot I could say on the fourth quarter itself. Right. I haven't seen any real change in our business performance. That's great. Well, let's delve into your performance. What's really interesting is it has been a well-publicized, challenging labor market. Most of the public companies that you get comped against, fairly or unfairly, haven't been doing as well. You've been growing and actually accelerating the growth. Yeah. I'm wondering if we could start with executive search. What do you attribute the strength? Because you're seeing both volume growth and fee per engagement growth. Yeah. Which has been really impressive. What I'm wondering is, what do you, and I'm talking about North American executive search specifically, what do you attribute that to? Yeah, I think it's the continuing bringing on of better talent, right? The elevation of the brand in the world, we're just playing in a market I love. If you go back over the past couple of years, and it's hard because when you look at C-suite engagements, a number of them come in, and they are confidential, so it's marked confidential. You don't really get the full effect. If I go back over the past couple of years from an average fee perspective, we're up about 9.5%, from a volume perspective, about 6.5%. Yeah. For what we identify as C-suite, the ones I can specifically look at. I think it's just the elevation of brand, and just the talent we have in this place is incredible. Yeah. One stat that I read was that of the last seven well-publicized CEO searches. CEO searches. You ended up doing six of them. Yeah. That's right. Which is pretty amazing. When I first started covering Korn Ferry back in the Well, I guess it was 2000. You basically had Heidrick & Struggles, you had Russell Reynolds, you had Spencer Stuart, and they were all viewed as being higher brands than. Yeah. Korn Ferry, now it seems like you've surpassed them. No, we absolutely have, and I think a lot of it is the evolution of company. Mark talked about me joining in 2012. At that time, we were about a $700, maybe $750 million business. 85% of that was exec search. Today, our executive search portion of our business is about 30%, and it's close to a $950 million run rate. The business is bigger. Yep. We've grown. I think as you think about looking to somebody to help you with talent, Heidrick, Russell, those are all good firms, but if you're looking for somebody who's a more holistic talent partner. That's really where we come in. We touch every aspect of an employee's engagement with his or her employer, and if you're a consumer of that, you can go to firm A for rewards, firm B for development, firm C for talent acquisition, then you have to cobble all that together yourself, with us as kind of one-stop shopping. That's great. Then one thing I was wondering about is, to what extent do you think either it's going to come or you're already starting to see a benefit from it, just Peak 65, and thinking about the retiring baby boomers? I think we're definitely seeing a benefit from it right now. In fact, it's benefiting us, in my view, in two areas. One is obviously in exec search, so as you get that turnover. There's a lot of people who are still at a point where they may not want the daily grind, but they still want to stay relevant, so they come in and will work on projects. That helps our interim business. Remember we bought. Yes Patina. I know Patina well. yeah, they're focused on C-suite project or interim type work. That's great. Do you think it's going to become a bigger deal as we start going towards Peak 65 or not? I think we're probably in the, I don't know, second or third inning of that cycle. I think the other thing that's kind of interesting is clients are now coming to us and looking at our RPO business and they're basically saying, "Hey, you guys are managing all this perm, why wouldn't you manage all this temp?" They're even stepping back and saying, "You know what? Before we get there, we really need your help in thinking through what does my workforce of the future look like. Is it 70/30? 80/20?" Right? So doing a lot of consulting work around just structural how do I bring together a workforce for the future. Great. Just staying on the labor force for one last question, but how do you view AI as impacting the roles that you place? Is that going to be an aid or is it going to be a headwind? I think ultimately, if you think about AI, again, all the rhetoric, if you go back six months, nobody was going to have a job ever again, right? That pendulum is starting to swing over now. What we're seeing with our clients is they've gotten themselves what I'll call AI-ready, tools in people's hands. As I step back and think about it, if everybody in this room had AI and we said, "Okay, now go use it," it's really hard to collect any productivity because you'll use it differently, Tiffany uses it differently, I'll use it differently. What we're focused on with our clients is not so much, it's two things. One, do you have the right skill sets in your employee base? To us, it's AI + humans. How are you deploying AI? I'll give you example. We're using it ourselves, and my view with our folks is we have to go and figure out where we've got critical mass, where there's redundant, repetitive activities, and we're running pilots now. How do you get organized use of that tool to really drive productivity? I'm doing it within the corporate functions, and the one area for me that was kind of an easy one to get my head around was order to cash. As I sat with a guy, his name Daniel, who's doing it for me, he actually took me through the whole workflow process into say it's 15 steps. He said we can use AI here, and here, but the rest is human. Right? I think once companies start to really get granular and understand that, it's really going to be, and this is what our philosophy is, it's AI + human, it's not AI or human. Then you have to be really smart about what you do with the productivity that you gather from that, right? It's easy to fire a bunch of people. If I have $2 billion in backlog, why wouldn't I take those resources, put them against that backlog, and grow faster? Right. Well said. Bob just came back from London, and one of the topics that a lot of people who aren't familiar with Korn Ferry don't really fully appreciate is the wide scope of the services that they have. Historically, people had been siloed. Yeah. In terms of their roles, but now you've got this We Are Korn Ferry, where you're basically teaching people to cross-sell everything. And I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about the We Are Korn Ferry? Sure. Strategy. It was probably about a year and a half ago, I was talking with Gary, and he asked me the question, "What does success look like five years from now?" I said, "Gary, for me, it's really simple. I go out and introduce myself as being from Korn Ferry and I stop. I'm not consulting, I'm not digital, I'm not executive search. I engage my client in a conversation, understand their business talent issues, and not that I'm an expert in everything we do, but I'm conversationally competent to the point when I walk out, they're saying to themselves, 'Well, these guys can really help us.'" I said back then, "Today we probably have 60, 70 people that can do that. We need 1,500 that can do that. If we do that, we'll be wildly successful." We started on this journey of We Are Korn Ferry, and you're right, the way that we've managed this business historically is by each of our solution areas. If I had a problem in consulting, I'd call Lesley Uren and say, "Hey, Lesley, what are you doing about this?" Digital, "Mathias, what are you doing about this?" We did create this siloing. Right now what we're doing is we're trying to break all that down, right? It's not so much what I would call cross-selling, it's more collaborative selling. How do we come together around our clients? Everything is client-centric at this point, right? We start with the client, and you meet clients locally where they're at, right? We're bringing teams together to help solve our clients' business and talent issues, rather than in the past, we were opportunistic, phone would ring, and somebody would react. This is much more intentional, right? It was interesting, Mark, we have that business referral program. First quarter, 25% of our revenues were referred across the firm. If you go back the prior five or six quarters, it was 25%. We started this We Are Korn Ferry back at last May 1, and what we're seeing is in Q2, we saw that go up to 27%. Q3 it was 27.5%. Q4 is going to even be better. We're starting to see some cause and effect of bringing everybody together and coming together. Our next step, and that's why we're doing all these sessions, we have Gary's leadership team now functioning that way, but now their team and their team's team has to do that. That'll be the next leg of our journey, is to really roll it out much deeper in the organization. The other thing I tell Gary all the time is, this is absolutely right to do, but it's not a light switch. I grew up at Pricewaterhouse, and I observed partners interacting with their clients and bringing the resources of the firm to bear. When I made partner, it was part of my DNA. That's what we need to get to. It's going to be kind of a top-down, bottoms-up approach or journey that we're on over the next couple of years to really embed that mindset in the organization. You guys are really analytical, and you've got a lot of data. Is there a way to measure what the level of productivity is as people are fully engaging in this? In other words, from an investor perspective, it's great that you're doing this. What sort of revenue lift should we expect relative to a baseline if you weren't doing this? How do you think about that? Yeah, I would say that as we've gone through the various stages of our journey, we've grown revenue somewhere around 10, 11% on a CAGR. I think you'll see us continue to do it. I think bringing the forces of the firm together to face off with clients is going to help us continue to extend that. Obviously, there'll be some M&A that we'll throw in there. People go into market by themselves, you can't scale it. Right? You've got to bring teams together, and that's the only way you're going to scale what we do. Given the solution sets that we have, all the data, intellectual property, science, that's the only way we're going to continue to scale this place, is by facing off with clients in a much more collaborative fashion. Great. One of the things that's interesting about that is you do have a wide scope of solutions, and I'm just curious, by show of hands, how many people here are really familiar with Korn Ferry and have a good sense for all of the various divisions? If you feel like you've got a really good sense of that. The majority don't. Right. So why don't we- That's why we're doing this. Yeah. Why don't we cover some of the areas? Yeah. One of the things that's kind of interesting is that you've got a wide set of solutions that cover everything related to human capital. There's very disparate and distinct margin profiles for some. Yeah, there is. One of the things that I'm excited about with regards to We Are Korn Ferry is, if we can get digital going, as an example. Yeah. Which is your highest margin business. Can we go through just a really quick description. Yeah. Of each one of the areas? I think most people are familiar with executive search. Yeah. Why don't I start with all of our talent acquisition? We do executive search, professional search, which is the levels right below executive. We don't go deep into an organization. Everything we do is at a professional level and above. We have what we call recruitment process outsourcing. That's where we'll hire thousands of people annually for very large companies. You saw our new business last quarter was over a couple of hundred million dollars. We just re-signed Honeywell; we're doing like 25,000 hires a year for them. We have interim, which is we're newer into that, but that would be taking advantage of some of the secular changes out there with contract labor, temporary help, or the Peak 65 folks who don't want to retire and still want something to do. That's kind of all the talent acquisition that we do. We have what we call org strategy, and it's not like a business strategy, you think about McKinsey or Bain. It's what happens after that strategy is developed. We would come in and help companies execute and implement that strategy through their people. Think about organizational design, roles, responsibilities, job descriptions, success profiles, layers and spans of control, things like that. Helping companies get themselves set up with job architecture. In fact, that's an interesting area now for us with pay transparency. People are looking at jobs and say, "Well, I'm not just going to increase everybody's pay. Let's make sure we have really different jobs or same job before we make that call." We have what we call assessment and succession. We're the largest assessment shop in the world. It's our own assessments, our own science. We have about 35 or 40 behavioral science PhDs. We've created an assessment that looks at you not just from competencies and experiences, but traits and drivers. What makes you up as a human? We really believe that when you're putting somebody into a role, it's not just their capabilities, but whether they'll fit as a human being in your organization. That's really important. We have leadership and professional development. We'll coach. We've got very large tech firms that have come to us and said, "Hey, we love your coaches, we love your science. Can you develop my next level of leadership?" Then we do Total Rewards. We have actually, that's in two segments, executive pay and governance, right, where you're consulting with comp committee chairman or chairwoman, and more broad-based managerial reward consulting. We think about every aspect that you experience with your employer. We cover all of that. When you think about the We Are Korn Ferry and getting everybody to be collaborative, what areas do you think would see the biggest lift? I would say it's probably going to be more ultimately in the consulting and digital area. Just to give you an example, I look at our organization, and we have so much connective tissue across those solutions. Let's say I'm a search partner, Mark, and I get you a CEO job. We're talking, and you say, "Hey, Bob, I've got this leadership team, and my strategy goes this way, and they're taking me that way. Can you guys help?" First thing we do is we sit down and say, "Okay, Mark, here's our 38 characteristics. You tell us what's important to you," and we create a success profile for your organization. We would build the assessment off of that and go in, and we'd assess your leadership team, and you have some folks that would line up well. You have some that would line up okay, but they have some derailers, so we can develop them to overcome that. Then you have some that are never going to get you there, so we'll find you new talent, right? Then we help you get organized, boxes on a page, roles, responsibilities, all that. Then when we're all done, we'd say, "Okay, Mark, here's a incentive program to incent your team to drive your strategy." Right there, in one sense, I kind of walked across everything that we do. Again, in my view, I think the connective tissue is so strong, and that's why I think we do a great job of selling across the organization. Do you think digital, for example, would get a decent lift off of this as your? I think ultimately, the way that our thinking on digital continues to evolve, right? Okay. Digital- I keep harping on digital because it's the highest margin. Yeah, it is. Digital really houses all of our, what I would call our talent intelligence. All of the data, IP, content, right, behavioral science, all that. Digital actually elevates the whole firm. By definition of elevating the rest of the firm, because all that fits into. Yep. Permeates our solutions, digital by definition should be elevated as well. Great. What's interesting is it should elevate also your revenue lift. If we think 90% of your business comes from 4,500 clients, and the average of those basically only use one and a half to two of your solutions. Yeah. We should have a huge uplift. Yeah. From that perspective over time. That's our focus right now. We can go out and chase new clients all we want, but it's a long sales cycle, high cost of sale. To your point, Mark, we have 4,500 clients, 90% of our revenue. That whole group on average uses one and a half solutions. We went in and stratified it, the first 1,000 or so or 2,000 do one and a half, and it's like $170,000 per client. You go to two solutions, and it's $350,000 per client. Two and a half is $750,000 per client, and then it's like $3 million or $4 million from there. Our focus right now is, and obviously we'll take new clients when the opportunity arises, but our focus is on deeper penetration of our existing client base because of the shortened sales cycle and the lower cost of sale. We're talking about $150,000, $300,000, $750,000. You actually have some contracts with some extremely well-known companies. Oh, yeah. That are going up into eight figures. We've got, I would say probably five client relationships now that are at or slightly above or below $40 million a year. Yeah. Yeah. That's the level of scale that we can get off of some of these. We've only got 6.5 minutes left. Let's move to Talent Suite. Okay. How would you explain Talent Suite to somebody who doesn't know Talent Suite? Yeah. Again, this is something that our thinking on this has kind of evolved. When we started down this path, as we thought about Talent Suite, we were kind of thinking like, this is Talent Suite, you buy this. Really what it is, it's a platform, right, that enables effective and efficient access to all those data points, the assets that we have at the center of firm. We call them our foundational assets, and it allows us to bring those up into our solutions. Giving you an example, like RPO. Our RPO business wins more than its fair share, and I believe a lot of it's because of the platform that they have. They bring our assessments into their platform. They bring our pay data into their platform. They bring our success profiles into their platform, and that's part of their delivery platform that they go to market with. It's very differentiated. To me, Talent Suite is, again, a platform that gives access, and our folks are going to use it to deliver their solutions. If you have a client who's a bit more sophisticated, they can actually license access to it for some period of time if they want to do pay or they like the assessment tool. Right? Where we're focused now is we have about 6,300 clients on Talent Suite, 75% of those use. There's 10 apps on it. Yep. Use one app. Again, it's no different than the 4,500. It's land and expand within that client base. There's a lot of room for opportunity there. Why don't we shift over to the financials in terms of the margins? You've done a great job in terms of bringing discipline to the organization, managing to the margins. Even during the challenging time, you've maintained. Yeah. The margins in that 16%-17% range in terms of EBITDA margins. With all of the initiatives that you have in place, which should end up lifting revenue on a continued pace, combined with some of the automation initiatives, how should investors think about the margin profile? Obviously you've got some businesses that are well below 17%. Right. You've got some that are well above. Yeah. How should we think about that? I think you'll see us. Right now we're sticking to our 16%-18% range, and a lot of that's going to depend, to your point, on the mix at any one point in time. I think over time, we run a really tight ship, so we don't have a ton of corporate people. As we continue to grow, we'll get leverage out of that. For us, using the AI tool is going to drive productivity. Again, that may not necessarily shrink all of our headcount, but it'll give us freed up capacity to throw against that. I think over the long haul, I would be disappointed if we're not breaking through the top end of that range, especially if we get digital to where we believe it can be. What sort of timeframe? It's probably a two or three year, four-year journey that we're on. Okay. Yeah, it's not a light switch. We're on a journey. We continue to evolve the company, and complement the service offerings that we have. I would say, over the next three to five years, you'll see that. Okay. Then what do you think the upper limit is? On the margin? Yeah. In my mind right now, it could be 19%, 20%. Okay. That's best in class. Yeah. The overall revenue multiples. Oh, yeah. If you look, Gary tells. We are going for these sessions. He's up in front. We are going to be a $10 billion organization, and he really believes that. Again, it'll be obviously a combination of- Yeah. M&A and- Nobody would've believed back when I first started covering you that you'd be at this size. Oh, yeah. I'll be honest with you, Mark, I look back, again, when I started. When I got the opportunity, I first said no to it, because it was kind of small, and I said, "I'm really not interested." Then when I went out and met with Gary and I understood the opportunity, I was like, "Okay, this could be kind of cool to be part of a company that you got your fingerprints on growing. Yep. I have to be honest with you, if I go back and put myself in my mindset about the opportunity back then and where I am today, we're light years beyond whatever I thought we'd be capable of. Right now we're, over the next five years, you're going to see some very interesting things coming out of this company. That's great. Let's go to capital allocation and the balance sheet and free cash flow. Balance sheet's in great shape. Free cash flow has been really good. You've raised the dividend 7x in the last six years. You're buying back stock. Talk a little bit about capital allocation, priorities. Yeah. Particularly vis-a-vis your valuation. Because relative to your performance, your valuation's quite low. Yeah. I think too many people still look at us as executive search. You saw the show of hands there, right? Yeah. We've got work to do to get the Korn Ferry story out there so people really understand. The thing I always tell our board, because we talk about, "You tell a story different, tell it better." I say, "Guys, I can tell nursery rhymes, but the performance has to be there." That's what we're doing right now. We've got three or four quarters where, to your point earlier, our competitors are doing less worse. We're growing. Right? We've got the track record now showing that this company- Is different. Is different. On the capital allocation front, we've been very consistent. Our first priority is always to put the money back into the business. You're going to hire individuals, teams. We'll invest back into our employees from a development perspective and so on. We'll do M&A. We're not what I would call serial acquirers. Number one, it has to align to the strategy. Two, you obviously have to make the math work. The most important thing is cultural fit. Gary, when we do deals, he spends an enormous time with the leadership teams of those companies to make sure that day two, they show up at work, right? M&A is going to continue to be an important part of what we do going forward. Like you, to your point, we're not serial acquirers, and we have capital that we do return to shareholders. Dividend right now is about a 3% yield. We're comfortable at that range. On the buybacks, when we don't have a good deal to do, we lean more heavily into buybacks, and we'll continue to do. Actually shrinking the share count. Yeah. That's fantastic. We'll continue to do that. Unfortunately, we're out of time. Please join me in thanking Bob for a thorough discussion. Thanks.