Good to go? All right. Well, thanks, everyone. Really happy to have Adam Ante here, CFO of Paycor. Adam's gonna start off the presentation with a quick slide deck, run through a few slides for 5 or 10 minutes, and then we'll jump into a fireside chat. But Adam, I'll turn it over to you to kick things off. Cool. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Thanks for joining. We'll just give a quick overview, just a couple of the key topics, and then we'll jump into some of the questions like you mentioned. So just a little level set, we provide HCM solutions to the mid-market, primarily in that 10-1,000 segment, up to 2,500, now 5,000, as we continue to expand upmarket. We really are focused on modernizing, excuse me, the employee and just generated over $550 million of revenue this last year. We're really focused on a couple of key strategies, both driving expansion out of the Midwest, which is really where we focus and grew up as a company. Driving distribution expansion, adding employees onto the platform, and then expanding our product suite, which we can show just a little bit about how much we've expanded over the last couple of years. We really see the market as, as massive and continues to grow, and I, I think this is a point, of consideration, and for more than 20 years, we again, focus on that 10-1,000, moving up and extending into the 2,500+ range. You have a couple of other key competitors, like ADP is, is how we see, sort of the legacy incumbents in that sort of gen one, provider. They have, platforms up and down the stack. They compete in all markets, and we see them in almost every single deal. They're really... In terms of how we compete against ADP, we sort of simplify the user experience. Their user experience is more complex. Of course, they have functionality that we don't. In some areas, they, of course, have more global capabilities as well as they get upmarket. But we really focus on simplifying. UKG is very similar. They said, we're gonna compete against that with a single database. It's really limited their ability to add new products and expand the HCM suite. And also, where we focus is on interoperability of the platform, exposing our platform to other providers like 401 providers, GL integrations and ERPs, POS solutions. Those sorts of integrations have enabled us to compete more effectively across the mid-market and into the enterprise space, as well as improve and maintain, you know, strong retention rates. And while we see Paychex, it's really at the lower end of the market. We don't compete with them a ton. From, like, a who we see perspective and where most of our business comes from, it's really between ADP and regional and in-house providers. Regional and in-house providers still, from our perspective, comprise half of the entire market, and we still see creating that single pane of glass. And then we've developed a pretty deep product suite, really expanding quite significantly over the last couple of years, over the last 4 or 5 years, going from what I would say is product disadvantage to product advantage and leapfrogging, you know, a lot of the competition where we've gone deeper in the talent attraction and performance management, talent management side of the business, which has really been a tailwind for us for the last, you know, 4 to 5 years now. And we've built out this partner ecosystem and this interoperability engine, which has enabled us to be a little bit more competitive on acquisitions and be able to buy IP and build that into the platform seamlessly and quickly, as well as to expand into a new indirect channel over the last year, which we've announced here. We've gone from less than 20% coverage, and coverage meaning: How many sellers can we fit into a market? How many do we have, and how many can we fit into a market? So under 20% covered just a few years ago into the mid-36 or 30% range and continues to grow in that tier one coverage over the last year. The source of bookings, like I'd mentioned, there is a... We get a lot of questions like, well, if ADP is continuing to prove retention and it sounds like growth is slowing, you know, maybe the growth in the market is, you know, saturated. I think this point, you know, the graphic on the right really shows that a huge portion of the business comes from non-ADP, non-Paychex companies, where payroll solutions is part of an ERP, and we win pretty handily against those every day. It's a big part of the business. This is just a snapshot of how we've grown and expanded that product suite. We went from sort of mid-$30 range in terms of the suite of our whole product suite. It spans across these four key areas. Our HCM core is table stakes. You have to buy the HCM core as part of the business, which includes, of course, the payroll and the HR. We continue to add functionality to the HCM core suite and then have really expanded the talent attraction and talent management suite significantly over the last couple of years as well. This does not include price increases as part of this. This is all organic or inorganic products adding into the suite. So that, that's the quick overview, and maybe, Jacob, we can just jump into it if you're ready. Yeah, that sounds good. Well, thanks for that kickoff, Adam. I guess just to kick things off in our kind of fireside chat format, a common feedback that we get from investors around the payroll space is just, it's a really large market, it's attractive, but there are a lot of players there, and especially some larger ones in the space. So when you look at that type of market, like, how do you compete effectively, and how do you become one of the long-term winners in the space? Yeah, I mean, we looked at the evolution of the market, and there's a couple things that SMBs and mid-markets really appreciate, and you can see it more and more today, is that having a single solution and the depth of that solution, you know, with a single point, you know, single pane of glass, so to speak, like we just talked about, is really important. So the user experience has got to be great, and that's how we win against a lot of the legacy incumbents. And in continuing to expand that HCM's product suite and continuing to go deep now into talent attraction, talent management, that's been a big point of differentiation for us, as well as that interoperability. We think that the interoperability is key. Being able to point your data and connect into the other tools that you use is becoming not just table stakes in HCM, I think it's important across all, you know, software solutions. We're seeing that become more and more of a competitive advantage for us. Yeah, that's helpful. And then, you obviously are competing a lot against the legacy vendors, winning a lot of share from the ADPs, Paychex of the world. You have the in-house providers, but I'm curious if the competitive environment has changed at all over the past few years. I'm thinking particularly down market as some of the newer private companies make more noise in the space. Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I, I think when you look back and Raul, our CEO, he's been in this since, like, the eighties. He's like: "Look, it's the same competitors," that he was seeing, you know, when he was growing up. And the newest real competitor is Gusto. They've been in the market for 20 years, and they're, they're in the down market. They win really well there, and we still don't see them a ton. I mean, we have a third of our portfolio is under 10 employees, and that's where Gusto would, would show up, and we still don't see them enough, you know, in the win rates. 'Cause there's just new folks that come in, and they focus usually on the coasts, and they have, like, a fun software and, you know, technology companies like it, but it just never gets to a level of scale for them to sort of break out of the, you know, the $100 million range. It feels like $100 million is a really tough level for companies to break through. And there's some others that we've heard of more recently, of course, that are on the come up. Can't really tell. I mean, you folks will probably know better than me exactly what the numbers are, but we still don't see, you know, those newer names enough inside of the win-loss, you know, competitive dynamics. No, that makes sense. And then I think a lot of investors focus on ADP, Paychex, the opportunity there, but one that gets less focus is the opportunity with in-house and regional providers. Yeah. So just curious, how big of an opportunity do you think that is? And when you talk to customers, what's the catalyst that really unlocks them to get off those regional or in-house solutions? Yeah, I think this is, like, the hardest part of the thesis, because it's hard to put a name. There's no names that folks know when you go into the regional and in-house providers, and you say: "Well, it's this ERP." And you're like: "Oh, I've never heard of that ERP." And you're like, "Yeah, we didn't hear about them either until yesterday when we ran into this competitor." And, you know, a lot of these solution or a lot of these companies have non-scale businesses, $5 million, $10 million portfolios, maybe $20 million on the high end. And they can't compete effectively from a software perspective. Compliance is harder for them. They can't get out of their own geo. So a lot of those folks are... You know, they have maybe a software solution, that's very regionally focused, and if you, as a company, start to expand or work outside of that region, they don't have the compliance. They can't maintain the tax. They can't make payments to the taxing authorities that you're moving into. So it becomes really difficult for those competitors to be competitive outside of that market. No, that makes sense. And then the obligatory macro question, because you're operating in the payroll space, but just how has the macro impacted Paycor over the past few years? And then, has there been any notable changes recently? Yeah, I mean, there's been a couple of tailwinds, positive, you know, very positive things from the macro, broadly. Interest rates, while they, you know, smash the multiples in growth and software, they're a positive recipient of that from an interest income perspective. But also, the labor market's been growing fairly well for the last, you know, couple of years. And really, post-COVID, 2021, 2022, we saw, you know, a handful of points, up to 6 points of growth out of the labor market that contributed across the business. And then ERTC was another program that, you know, the IRS or the government ran, that I think, you know, most payroll companies were supporting their customers, enabling them to, you know, file for credits. And of course, that program is now gone, so these sort of tailwinds have become, you know, headwinds in terms of the incremental growth going as we look into this year and then into FY 25. So, the labor market has clearly slowed down. It hasn't it hadn't necessarily fallen negative yet, but it has slowed down considerably, and that's been a couple points of headwind. And then the ERTC program is effectively wrapped up, so we're not expecting any more, you know, production or revenue from that program any longer. No, that makes sense. How sensitive is the model towards employment changes, whether on the upside or on the downside? If we do see some headwinds over the next year or two on the employment side of the house, how sensitive is the model versus what you can cross-sell into your customers from a PEPM perspective? Yeah, I mean, generally, the way we think about it is that one point of same-store sales growth or non-farm payroll growth in the market is gonna be something less than one point of revenue growth for us. And, and so it's impactful only on the margins in that case, right? When you look back at non-farm payroll growth, even post-recession, for since, like, the eighties, the labor market has continued to grow one, two, three points post-recession. And it sort of depends, of course, on how the, you know, how deep any sort of labor market recession goes, and it's nothing that we've seen thus far, but it's a slightly less of a point than, you know, than the overall non-farm payroll growth. Yeah, that's helpful. Then you obviously put up the slide there about expanding into Tier One markets, but on the last earnings call, you talked about some churn within the sales organization. So maybe you could just flesh out what exactly happened there. What are the changes you're making to kind of course correct some of those issues? Yeah. So we've been growing the sales force by north of 20% for the last two years, and as part of that, the team about 18 months ago started to or decided to segment the seller job bands effectively. And what we in our field today, or originally, we all of our field focused on 50 employees and above. That's how our field went to market, and then we had an inside team focused on 50 and under, and our client-based team that would sell across the whole portfolio. As we were growing there, that 20%, we decided to segment from 50 to 250 to have that first band of field sales, a focus there, and then we'd have upmarket sellers above 250. We saw some early success, you know, as we piloted that program that we decided to launch it across, you know, all of our geos. And what we had realized, you know, as we're sort of getting through retention and seller attrition, we were seeing that seller attrition continued to just run a little too high. And of course, we're looking at, you know, the job profiles and comp, how we design the compensation plans, sales training. We evaluated all these, you know, potential impacting items and landed on the fact that the job bands were just a little too narrow. So from 50 to 250, we would hire these field sales reps in, and they really have to have a real high velocity deal. They would need to sell, you know, close to 20 or, I mean, twice as many, deals than they had anticipated going into the deal. And so we, we decided to expand that from 50 to 500. It's also, you know, more competitive with other similarly focused, you know, SMB field sales, companies. So we've recently expanded that from 50 to 500. That just launched in April, and of course, it's, it's too early to tell, like, where, you know, how that's gonna go, but I'd, I'd say that it has been positively received. And folks are running hard, of course, at closing out the year. June is a big year-end period, and, and, it's a, it's a big, you know, ramp in the selling season. I think what's gonna be important for us to just see how that is progressing is the September, October, November timeframe, that fall sales cycle is really important. And so if our sellers feel like they have an opportunity to be successful, they're gonna stick through that cycle, and we'll be able to see what that, you know, performance looks like. And then January, February will be, of course, an important barometer for how the success of the program broadly. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And then there were also just some a little bit of moving pieces around the ERTC forms filing. You mentioned it in your presentation. Maybe help us understand what exactly happened there, and then when we look into your guidance for Q4, just what exactly you've baked into expectations on that front. Yeah, I will. So first, we took it out of guidance for Q4, and in retrospect, probably should have just had it out for Q3 at this point. But I mean, the program really ramped up in calendar 2021 and 2022, and started to... It peaked in 2023, and it slowed down. You know, it's finished. It's not that it just slowed down, but the program is done here in 2024. We were expecting to see maybe a little bit more, but last year we got about 2 points of our revenue from ERTC, and the form filings now will be, you know, less than 1% of our revenue. So it'll be about 1.5, 1 to 1.5 of headwind here in 2024. But that's all really coming in the first half of the year. So we really saw very little in Q3, and again, our guidance includes nothing for Q4 now. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. And then if we take a step back, one of the recent dynamics in the HCM industry is just kind of tool consolidation onto these broader platforms. And so just what are some of the industry dynamics driving those consolidations? And then how does that impact your, your competitive positioning moving forward and ability to take share? Yeah, I mean, there are just like all the other software solutions in the industry. I mean, there's 10,000+, you know, as reported by other analysts, 10,000+ software solutions around HCM broadly. And, you know, as you're managing an organization, this is a huge burden when you have so many different point solutions. You're trying to drive connections, you're trying to manage if anybody's even using the damn solutions in the first place. And so as like the CFO and the CIO, this is an important dynamic, and you want to limit it as best you can. You want to try to consolidate. I think we've seen, you know, over the last couple of years, a consolidation to platform tools that have, you know, the breadth and the depth that the SMB wants. I think that's part of our competitive positioning, and the value prop into the SMB space is that we have an ability for you to collapse a lot of the solutions, you know, around our HCM tool. And I think that trend is likely to continue for some time, and I think we've seen it broadly as well across other software. Yeah. That last comment kind of leads me into my next question. So you expect it to continue. Is that regardless of the macro, or do you think this kind of belt tightening and just platform consolidations is reflective of the more sensitive macro environment that we're in? Yeah, I don't see it as much as a macro issue. Of course, I think, like, you'll put pressure on the organization when you see, you know, broader macro pressures inside of your company, to belt-tighten, but I don't think it's just a belt-tightening. I mean, I think when you have 20 solutions and you can consolidate to 10, it just makes it easier for your company to operate. And so I do think that that over time will continue to be the path, is that, you know, fewer point solutions and deeper platform solutions like ours. That makes sense. And then on the go-to-market front, you've talked about close to half of your bookings coming from the benefits brokers. What do you think's allowed you to do so well in that channel? And then moving forward, do you think that that half of bookings is consistent, or is there ability to kind of change the... how much those benefits brokers are able to present you from an opportunity perspective? Yeah, I think that, you know, we've been intentional about managing into it with brokers. I think that's just part of it, is being intentional in the space and building long-term relationships. We've developed a program to really focus on the top eight brokers, what we call our Lead Eight partnerships across the country, and that's driven a lot of success just to have the focus there. We've really focused on prioritizing and implementation for them, and that's the number one challenge that, you know, most companies have when they, when they migrate to any HCM company, is going through the implementation. It can be really painful, and brokers don't want you to screw up the deal for them. Mm-hmm. You know, they don't usually. Brokers only have, like, 8, maybe 12 total deals in their portfolio, and they're trying to manage it, you know, over the long term. So if you sort of mess up one of their deals, it's a big point of frustration. So we've tried to focus on enabling a really strong implementation and a single point of contact for our broker partners. And then we have also a dedicated service model for brokers, so that when brokers call in, they get the same sort of experience. And that we've seen success there, and that's probably part of the reason why we've seen the outsized performance. One of the other dynamics is that we are agnostic to the benefits administration platform, and that's by design. We use a third party, bswift, as our benefits admin tool. And so we can sell that and enable that for the brokers, but we can also enable, you know, any other tool that they're looking for, like PlanSource or Employee Navigator or Ease. We integrate with all those providers, and so I think that's been a part of the advantage as well. In terms of where we want to take it, you know, at any one period, it will fluctuate between 40% and 50+%. You know, I think that, strategically, over the long term, I think I'd actually rather see it become a little bit less of the portfolio, you know, over the next three years or so, three to five years, as you just think about continuing to diversify the lead sources and, you know, we get about half from that. We get another, you know, 25%-30% from marketing and demand gen sources, and then we see, you know, self-gen as well. I'd like to see those, you know, just continue to, you know, even out. Yeah. And then just thinking about the macro, how influential are those benefits brokers, and do they become more important as we get into a more sensitive macro environment? Yeah, I'm, you know, I think that the companies are evaluating their benefits every year, right? Yeah. So they're working with their benefits brokers annually, and the benefits brokers can really see if there's technical issues, if there's payroll issues, if there's HCM issues within the company, and they're sort of leading the way in a sense. So I'm not sure that the macro necessarily changes their relationship. I mean, they're definitely important. They've been important, and we think it'll continue to play an important role in those SMB and mid-sized companies. But they can really be, you know, the leading edge for us as they see issues inside of their customer base. Yeah, that's helpful. And then I think one of the most exciting opportunities at Paycor is the embedded opportunity. So maybe if you could just walk through what the embedded opportunity is, when you came up with the idea, how long this has been in the market, and just where you see it going over the next few years. Yeah, I mean, we're really excited about this as well. We think it's a bright spot, and it has a huge, you know, opportunity over the right time period. You know, so over the last couple of years, we've really been investing in our interoperability engine. We've exposed a lot of the platform, enabled APIs really to start on the IP acquisition. So to enable our acquisitions, you know, to come in as seamlessly and quickly as possible, it's enabled us to do a lot more partnerships and build these integrations into third parties that our customers want to use. I actually came to the payment space, spent a lot of time with a company called Vantiv, which really acquired this company called Mercury, which pioneered this alongside folks like Stripe, where, you know, in the payment space, they've, they started with embedded, you know, quite a long time ago. Payroll, I guess, was behind, but payments have been doing this for, you know, 15 years or so. When we saw this opportunity, and we ran into a portfolio where there's a vertical specific ERP solution that has a payroll solution that was struggling. They were pulling down, it was pulling down on their value prop for their customers. Their value prop is really this vertical specific ERP and workforce management tool. But they had acquired a payroll solution, and it was under-scaled. They couldn't operate the distribution and the operations well, and so they were screwing up a lot of payrolls. So when we talked about this with them, we started down this path of saying: Well, let's white label our solution. We'll take your portfolio, and then we'll white label everything into your solution. You take us to market, and then we'll just charge you like you're, you know, a customer of ours, and you also take the sort of tier one service level. And that started actually about two years ago in terms of, you know, the beginning of that conversation. We really formally launched it in Q1 of this year, of this fiscal year, inside of the September quarter, as that partner, that initial partnership, really started to ramp onto the platform. It's really taken most of this year for that platform to ramp on, and we have our second partner. They're ramping on here in 2025, and then we've signed a couple other smaller platforms as well, and we really... Those, those won't come with portfolios, but those will be more, you know, net new business out of the gate. And, we're really focused with these new partners on enabling them first with payroll and, helping them in the go-to-market strategy, making sure that they understand, you know, the value prop and how to position the pricing. And then, you know, we'll continue to build that out with new partnerships. That makes sense. And so the initial partnerships that have onboarded onto the platform, how have those gone thus far? What are they adding? And then just moving forward, what type of milestone should investors be looking out for along the way, just for success in the embedded opportunity? Yeah, the embedded over the last couple of quarters has added, you know, 2 points of employee growth per quarter. And so, that's really just the initial partnership, you know, joining and onboarding and ramping. So, I think there's a lot of opportunity. We really haven't baked in any incremental, you know, partner performance to the guide, and we'll be thinking about that as we look into 25, of course. You know, but it's still early days. I think one of the reasons why we wanna see a couple more partnerships really come together. But the early success has been, you know, on the back of just a couple of these partners, and, you know, we're really pleased about it. We think it's a huge opportunity. Again, there's a lot of ERP solutions, there's a lot of POS solutions, and their customers are asking them for payroll solutions. And these partners are thinking, "Am I gonna build something?" And that just makes sense when your, you know, your software focus is in ERP versus workforce management to build a payroll platform from scratch, nobody's doing that. Or to buy something, but then you got to figure out how to operate it and integrate it, and you got to scale it. And payroll broadly is horizontally scalable, right? It scales across all industries, the majority of it does. And you just see very few payroll companies, and I say payroll specifically, 'cause HCM is a little different broadly into talent solutions, but payroll specifically, you don't see vertical specific companies as much. Usually, that's a result of a go-to-market strategy versus the technology forcing the vertical specific nature. So we feel like we can really help, you know, ERPs and POS solutions and workforce management solutions scale a payroll solution in this market. That makes sense. And then you, just last one on the embedded opportunity. You talked about two points of employment growth from one of those portfolios that are coming over. Mm-hmm. How many of those bigger whale partners are still out there? Like, how big is that opportunity to bring those types of partners over? Yeah, I mean, it's huge. So the pipeline that we've created, even just since Q1, there's a significant number. If you think about just broadly, software companies, in the space, there's thousands and thousands that fit in the mid-market and serve the mid-market with ERP, workforce management, POS solutions. So, you know, we're excited about where the pipeline is today. We're excited to see the growth and of course, if, you know, we wanna just hit a couple of those larger names. We haven't released any of the names, just yet for competitive reasons, but would love to see a couple of those larger brands, you know, come out. Yeah, that makes sense. And then you, you showed the slide around PEPPM going from 30-35 to 53 over the past few years. Maybe talk about, like, what, what are some of the bigger product launches that you've, you've been able to release along the way, and what, what's gone well on the... over the platform over the past few years? Yeah, we've been able to develop quite a bit in the platform. We've been able to acquire quite a bit as well. I think it's been a good environment for the last couple of years to find really high-quality IP and bring it into the platform. We acquired a passive candidate sourcing tool enabled with AI just about a year ago, and we've seen a lot of success in that. We built it into the platform really rapidly. We've expanded into, you know, skills enablement within our talent platform, deeper compensation management tools, micro learning and learning management capabilities. So we've seen a lot of expansion around that. We've also deepened our payroll functionality in HR, core HR functionality, deeper into analytics, deeper into, you know, position management related capabilities. You know, we don't, we don't feel like there's any critical gaps any longer. We've covered those gaps. Like, the last gap that we had was an expense management capability that we added to the platform a couple of years ago. And now it's just really around continuing to deepen and try to be out ahead a little bit. Yeah, that makes sense. So you view kind of... In terms of actually doing, expanding effective PEPPM, you view it much more about going deeper within the actual solutions that you have on the platform versus keeping going, broadening the platform from a horizontal perspective. Yeah, I mean, that's something clearly we evaluate constantly, is how much deeper should we go versus how wide should you go? We wanna see the right level of engagement in the product. You wanna see the right usage and uptake. Even if we're, you know, including it in the bundle, you wanna make sure that the clients are using it. So I think that there's an opportunity to continue to expand PEPPM. We've been really consistent with that $3-$5 annually. We see plenty of opportunity to continue to do that. At the same time, go deeper and make sure that we have the right level of functionality for, you know, the markets that we're serving and the customers we're serving today. That's helpful. And then last question on my end: so what, what is the AI opportunity and monetization opportunity for Paycor, when it comes to AI? Is it more about increasing win rates, improving retention, or do you see over time there being actual SKUs that you can increase PEPPM with? Yeah, I mean, so far for us, it's been a combination. We like our candidate, our passive candidate sourcing tool has it had an incremental fee, and we've seen a lot of success and uptake from that. But then we also are adding other sorts of capabilities into the platform that are more like nudges or, you know, a job description generator that's built right into the tool that's enabled with an LLM. And that sort of stuff doesn't seem like it commands necessarily an incremental price at the point of sale, as much as we point to it as we increase prices, and then we continue to just add new functionality into the platform. So I think it's gonna be a combination of those two. That's helpful. Well, thanks, Adam. Sure. Appreciate you spending the time with us. For those interested, the breakout session will be in Jenner B, but appreciate all who joined in the room and over the webcast. Thank you.