Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Good morning, and welcome to AgileThought's first quarter, 2023 financial results conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the Star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press Star then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, again, press Star one. Participants of this call are advised that the audio of this conference call is being broadcast live over the Internet and is also being recorded for playback purposes. A webcast replay of the call will be available approximately 1 hour after the end of the call through August 3rd, 2023.
I would now like to turn the call over to Mariana Franco, the company's Head of Investor Relations.
Good day, and thank you for joining AgileThought first quarter, 2023 earnings conference call. Our speakers today are Manuel Senderos, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Eric Purdum, Chief Revenue Officer, and Amit Singh, Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, allow me to remind you that some of the comments on our call today, including our business and financial outlook and the answers to some of your questions, may be considered forward-looking statements. Such statements are subject to the risks and uncertainties as discussed in the company's earnings release and other filings with the SEC. The content of this call contains time-sensitive information that is accurate only as of today, May 12, 2023. Except as required by law, AgileThought disclaims any obligation to publicly update or revise any information to reflect events or circumstances that occur after this call.
Today's remarks will also include references to non-GAAP financial measures, such as adjusted operating income, which is how we track performance internally and the easiest way to compare AgileThought to our peers in the industry. Additional information, including reconciliation between non-GAAP financial information to GAAP financial information, is provided in the associated earnings release. This conference call will be available to replay via webcast through AgileThought's investor relations website at ir.agilethought.com, where you can also find a copy of our earnings release. I'd now like to turn the call over to Manuel Senderos, our CEO.
Thanks, Mariana. Good morning, and thanks to everyone for joining us. It is a pleasure to be here with you today to talk about the work and results from our first quarter of 2023. We finished the first quarter with revenues of $41.8 million, representing a year-over-year decline of 5.4% and a sequential decline of 2.8%. Growth in this quarter was partially impacted by the market uncertainty beginning in the second half of March, which delayed some projects by a couple of months. This market uncertainty is also slightly delaying the ramp-up of our newly hired sales team members. As you might remember, at the beginning of the year, we increased our sales team by almost 50%.
Under the new leadership of our new CRO, Eric Purdum, we have also actively started exiting several small accounts that do not have the potential to grow materially, but are a huge burden to our SG&A and gross margins. During first quarter, our gross margin was 34.2%, an increase of 290 basis points year-over-year. Gross margins have been performing better than expected due to our accelerated exit from non-core businesses and of small accounts discussed before, also because of the quality of the work we are delivering to our clients. As we mentioned on the previous earnings calls, focus on digital work at clients that have the potential to become $10 million-plus annual revenue clients is a priority and very important part of our strategy to take AgileThought to steady industry-leading top-line growth levels.
Because of our strong efforts towards gross margin improvement, our gross profit increased 3.4% year-over-year and 5.2% sequentially. On the demand environment, as I mentioned, in the second half of March, following the volatility in the banking sector, we did witness an impact in our financial services vertical, which continues in the second quarter. We witnessed volatility across other industry verticals as well due to the slightly challenging broader macro environment. That said, we are now witnessing deal activity starting to pick back up again, and we expect a much stronger second half of the year. Digital transformation that helps companies drive revenue growth makes them more competitive and also helps them save costs is still a priority for businesses across the industries.
During our last earnings call, I talked about how we have been investing to strengthen our sales structure, first by hiring new sales team members, and finally by appointing Eric Purdum as our new Chief Revenue Officer. Eric is now reporting directly to me, leading our sales and demand generation efforts. I'm sure Eric's leadership and customer-centric vision will bring our innovative approach to digital transformation to each customer experience, ensuring we make the most out of the huge market opportunity in front of us and deliver the market leading top line growth we have planned. Now that we have a strong sales foundation and have all the pieces in place in the delivery structure and people structure, we are ready to focus on AgileThought's growth.
Eric's disciplined approach will continue to guide our team to carefully pick our new customers and focus on those accounts that can become large accounts with industry-leading margins. During the first quarter of 2023, we added 4 new logos and opened several new opportunities in some of our more established clients. We will continue to add logos, the right logos, but it is also exciting to see how much space for growth we still have in most of our clients. We have a good record on client trajectory, starting with small projects on a specific area or technology and growing into other business areas and geographies. A good example is one of our clients in the financial services vertical, which is one of the top 10 wealth management companies in the U.S. and has been our client for over eight years.
We are helping them with a multi-year modernization program of high priority that is essential to the different departments in a highly regulated market. This is a complex initiative that will integrate numerous internal and third-party systems to enable faster decision-making processes, incorporating more data points among other strategic initiatives. We are helping to drive cultural changes by embracing agile methodologies, which creates operational efficiencies. This long-lasting partnership represents the kind of business we want to continue creating, where we contribute to strategic multi-year initiatives, helping the client to be more efficient and provide better experiences for their employees and customers. While we create more and more stable jobs, it adds value to both companies. The digital world is constantly changing, which makes it vital to continuously reimagine everything, including yourself.
As this bank, many other companies are working to keep up with the changing environment, trying to invest in the latest technologies to always stay ahead. A good example is this AI revolution. At AgileThought, we have been investing in AI for several years now, but the time has come where everyone from science to business and education are turning to AI and want to make it a part of their business. We have seen an increasing demand from clients and potential clients to understand how AI can help them, and we have decided to launch our Applied AI Guild. Up to now, Applied AI was part of the Data and AI Guild. With this guild, we will be able to better focus on helping our clients digitally reimagine and imagine intelligent businesses using an AI-first, human-centric, and platform-driven approach.
Our Applied AI Guild will have three main practices: Generative AI, Causal AI, and Bespoke Machine Learning. Generative AI is nascent, but there are already 250 companies in this space, and so far it has seen six companies reach unicorn status. This wave in the space is rapidly expanding the use cases for Generative AI, tackling everything from search engines to motion capture animation, and will allow companies in every space to leverage on it. We are currently working with a company in the healthcare sector, a group of analytical laboratories. We are using large language models like ChatGPT-4 to automatically generate relevant content that relates their offering with trending conversations and news. We trained it to know and understand our client offering, and it is constantly screening the news and posts to produce real-time blog posts for its website.
This results in a significant increase in the website's traffic and engagement, which will ultimately translate in additional revenue for our client. In today's world, customer experience and customer engagement are probably some of the most valuable capabilities for businesses, and the gaming industry is a leader in that matter. We believe that the principle of gaming design and gamification can be applied to a variety of industries, from education and healthcare to finance and retail, and we decided to launch a Gaming Guild. AgileThought has been working in the gaming industry for seven years now, constantly growing the practice in size and complexity and gathering enough expertise to apply it to the rest of the verticals we work on. Our Gaming Guild will provide tailored solutions from game development to player support and metaverse.
That with our deep understanding of the gaming industry and commitment to excellence will guide our clients, gaming or non-gaming, to succeed and thrive in this exciting and rapidly evolving field. As always, we look forward to enhancing our relationships with our clients by bringing the latest technologies into their businesses. With that, I turn it over to Eric Purdum, our CRO.
Thanks, Manuel, and hello to everyone. I'm happy to be here today. I'd like to start by telling you a little bit about myself. I've been in the industry for over 25 years and worked in multiple global businesses and built and ran digital transformation practices. During this time, I have led business units centered around IP management, custom engineering, application managed services, product management, and many others. Prior to joining AgileThought, I was the Global Head of Banking Solutions at DXC Luxoft, where I helped to transform the global team consisting of sales, offerings, product management, marketing, engineering, and delivery into a unified team delivering digital transformation programs at scale. Let's now focus on our clients and their industries. AgileThought operates in five key market units, and they are all going through a transitionary period.
Starting March, we saw some softness in our clients' investments in both growth initiatives and roadmap items. Some of the rationale for this was due to their own missed targets and EBITDA losses. Also, due to economic pressures, some of our clients paused to take a deeper look into how they were spending their investment dollars to maximize return on investment. This pullback was felt across all industries and across the competitive landscape. Now that the second half is approaching, we are already seeing the industries shift again towards commencing of strategic and digital initiatives, especially those that have TCO savings, ROI around digital transformation, and further adoption of new technologies, with one significant example being AI, as Manuel mentioned earlier.
As AgileThought has existing and mature client relationships in each of our market units, we are seeing our clients depend on these relationships as key to solving their business challenges in the second half. We have worked with many of these clients to help them understand the importance of those investments to solve real business problems and how AgileThought is the continued choice for their initiatives through our exceptional delivery abilities and deep understanding of their industry. To solidify the growth of the second half, we have focused on three key areas. First, we are continuing to drive the culture of sales for our internal workforce. In most cases, to deliver top industry growth, companies need to go through a transformation stage where the culture and interaction among the different structures unify become client-centric and growth-focused.
This is what we've been doing at AgileThought, but it is a process. We've worked to encourage everyone in the company to become an ambassador for our brand and our values. We want our customers to have a great experience with us from the moment they hear about us to the moment we deliver the service. This is not just the responsibility of our sales team, but of the entire organization. Simply put, every Agile thinker is accountable for every interaction with our clients every time. Second, we have carefully selected existing and new clients with the potential to become $10 million plus revenue for us and committed to growing them exponentially through 2023 and into 2024.
This directly relates to our proven ability to create deep relationships with our clients, understand the industry as to which they operate in, and hyper-focus on their business problems and how AgileThought's technology prowess can solve these problems. In conjunction to that, as Manuel spoke before, we will also continue to make key exits on accounts that we do not see as strategic or growth accounts and are expensive to deliver. These accounts detract from our focus on industry-leading delivery and profitability. Third, and finally, we have continued to attract and retain some of the best talent in the industry. From bringing in top industry sales talent to recruiting the foremost technical and delivery personnel. We truly believe that this investment in our people is what continues to drive the exceptional service for our clients.
This is why AgileThought continues to have over 22 accounts that have been with us for five or more years and seven accounts that have been with us for over 10. Let me walk through some additional key facts about our business, and then Amit will walk through the numbers. Number one, AgileThought is focused on around half of our current accounts across the five market units that make 99% of our revenue with good profitability. These numbers show good diversification of accounts and markets. Number two, AgileThought has nine accounts, all generating over $5 million in revenue over the last 12 months that continue to strengthen their portfolio and show good organic growth towards becoming $10+ million accounts. We also have identified an additional 11 accounts to focus on that also have the potential to become $10+ million dollar accounts.
Number three, the remaining of our accounts are being restructured to maximize profitability. Number four, and finally, the pipeline that is driving the second half growth is seven times larger than where the company was last fiscal year at this time. Based on these key facts, the AgileThought business is in a prime position to grow in the second half and continue that growth into fiscal year 2024. Now I will turn the call over to Amit Singh, our CFO, who will provide additional insights into our financial results.
Thank you, Eric. Good morning, everyone. Let me start by summarizing the results of our first quarter 2023. I will then discuss our guidance for the year. Revenues for the first quarter of 2023 were $41.8 million, representing 5.4% year-over-year decline and 2.8% sequential decline. As discussed before by Manuel and Eric, revenues in this quarter were impacted by the market volatility that started around mid-March, resulting in some of our projects being postponed. In addition, this market volatility is leading to a delayed ramp-up of our newly hired sales team members. Our decision to focus on long-term growth and profitability also impacted our revenues this quarter as we continued to exit non-core work.
As Manuel and Eric mentioned, during this quarter, we also decided to start exiting other small non-strategic accounts which do not have the potential to become large clients but are very expensive on SG&A to manage. On gross margins, during the first quarter of 2023, we delivered gross margins of 34.2%, representing a 290 basis point improvement year-over-year and 260 basis point sequential improvement. This improvement is the result of our focus on profitability I just talked about and to the robust deal governance process we have in place. The average gross margin on the projects we closed during this quarter is already above 35%. We expect this improvement to continue until our gross margin gets to industry leading levels.
The strong improvement in gross margin led to gross profit being up 3.4% year-over-year and 5.2% sequentially. In the first three months of 2023, we had a material increase in our SG&A, both sequentially and year-over-year. This increase was mainly due to the strong investments in our sales, delivery, and people function that began in late 2022 through early 2023. Adjusted operating income for the first quarter of 2023 was -$1.2 million, down from $1.1 million in the same period of 2022. Adjusted net income for the quarter totaled -$4.2 million, down from -$0.4 million in the same quarter of the previous year.
Adjusted diluted EPS for the first quarter of 2023 was -$0.09, based on 47.3 million average diluted shares for the quarter, compared to -$0.01 for the same quarter of the previous year, based on 46 million average diluted shares for the quarter. We have been focusing on profitability and strategic accounts, It will continue to be our top priority for the year. In addition to our efforts on top line and gross margins, we also recently launched our SG&A optimization plan. This initiative has been a collaboration among all the teams across the company to analyze and identify efficiencies and has allowed us to significantly reduce our full year SG&A forecast by more than 15% and is helping us, along with our gross margin improvement, to target a higher adjusted operating income for the full year than we previously expected.
Moving on to the balance sheet. Our cash and cash equivalents as of March 31, 2023 added up to $3.2 million. During the first quarter, we repaid debt of $2.1 million. We additionally paid $2.1 million interest expense and approximately $0.9 million of debt related cash expenses. Total debt, net of unamortized debt issuance costs as of March 31, 2023 was $84.5 million. Now, I would like to give an update on our financing activities. As we previously disclosed, on April 18, we entered into a forbearance agreement regarding our $64 million financing agreement and our $21 million credit agreement, as to which are in both payment and covenant compliance default. The forbearance agreement terminated by its terms on May 10. We are in active discussions with our lenders regarding extending such forbearance.
We also continue to work with our legal and financial advisors in evaluating all strategic alternatives. Although we remain confident, there can be no assurances that we can reach such an extension agreement or recapitalization plan on acceptable terms, if at all. As I trust you can appreciate, we are unable to comment on any of these discussions at this time. Now let's talk about our outlook for the full year 2023. We remain focused on executing revenue growth acceleration, and we'll continue working towards improving our profitability year-over-year. We will also continue to focus on strategically selecting the right customers and projects while exiting non-core and small non-strategic accounts that together will help us deliver industry-leading growth and margins.
Our successful efforts to exit the non-core business, as we announced a couple of quarters ago, should be completed during the second quarter of the current year, which along with the ramp up of all the new sales team members, should lead to strong revenue growth towards the second half of the year. We now expect full year 2023 revenues of $185 million or 4.6% organic year-over-year growth. We now expect gross margins for the full year in the range of 34.5%-35.5%. Additionally, as a result of our strong focus on profitability, we expect the full year 2023 adjusted operating income to be at least $13.7 million, implying at least 20.2% year-over-year growth. Thanks everyone for participating in the call.
I'd like to turn the call back to Manuel for any closing remarks.
Thank you, Amit. In conclusion, we believe we are very well positioned to make the most out of the digital transformation demand across the world and bring strong sustainable growth for the long term. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to the operator so that we can begin the questions and answer session. A note. In the Q&A session, we will not discuss anything related to our financing, forbearance, and liquidity.
At this time, I would like to remind everyone in order to ask a question, press Star, then the one on your telephone keypad. Your first question comes from a line of Maggie Nolan from William Blair. Your line is open.
Hello, good morning. With respect to new client additions, have the financing activities impacted your ability to add new logos? How do you feel about your prospects for adding new logos over the course of the rest of the year?
Good morning. This is Eric Purdum. I'll take that question. We actually have done very good so far with adding new logos. I think Manuel already spoke to our additions we did in Q1. We are looking at a possibility of up to 20 new logos in Q2 of this year. We actually have not seen a degradation in our ability to add new logos so far this year based on any of the news on the refinancing.
Thank you. In terms of the margins, perhaps, Amit, you could comment on the cadence of the margins over the course of the year that you expect, given that the back half is expected to be stronger than the first half, but you also have the dynamic of that non-core revenue roll-off annualizing.
Yep. Yep. Thanks, Maggie. How are you? You should expect, you know, our margin growth to trend up as we go, you know, towards the end of the year. Quarter-over-quarter, you should witness margin improvement. Q2 will be a little, you know, Q2 could see a little, you know, flattish or decline in gross margins. We're still, you know, looking into all the numbers. From there on, you should see the margins increasing. As I said in the prepared remarks, the new deals that we are signing, they are already, you know, much above the current margin level that we have reported. As those deals get converted into revenue, you should start seeing gross margin improvement. The same thing should happen on the SG&A side too.
As I discussed in the prepared remarks, the SG&A optimization plans that are being put into place, they should start delivering results as we move through the year. The overall adjusted operating margin should trend upwards as we move forward from second quarter towards the end of the year.
Okay. Thank you for the update.
Thank you.
Your next question comes from the line of Brian Kinstlinger from Alliance Global Partners. Your line is open.
Great. Thanks so much for taking my questions. I think you had 90% visibility last quarter and clearly identified the adjustments to guidance. Obviously, with one quarter behind you, visibility is better. In regards to your $185 million revenue guidance, what % of this is in the form of signed contracts or commitments? What does it assume about revenue from new business wins, and how does it contemplate, if at all, additional delays or cancellations?
Good morning. I'll take this question. This is Eric again. We're about 80% confident in our ability to solution the $185 million that we talked about earlier, which I think is an excellent position to be in only five months into the year. We're very confident of that number. We're very confident we'll solution the remainder 20% of that number throughout the year.
Great. Are delays or cancellations, is it all contemplated or are you feeling that's behind you from, especially from the banking sector?
We are starting to see the uptick, as we talked about earlier in the prepared remarks. We did see at the beginning of the year some softness and some push out of projects from some of our key clientele, but those projects are now coming back into scope, and we're able to drive that to fruition now as we go forward into the second half. We did see some softness in the beginning of Q1, but again, we're starting to see those projects come back online and staff accordingly to make sure we can hit those targets.
Thank you. In regards to the delays, was it generally existing customers that in the last 2 weeks stopped projects, or was it new logos that were expected to ramp that maybe did not?
I think it's a combination of both, but I would say that because of our good relationships with our clients, we knew ahead of time as they started to delay some of these initiatives. From a new logo perspective, we obviously only saw four in Q1, but we see an uptick in new logos in Q2. It's hard to determine if the market initiative slowed us down at all on new logos. What I would tell you is that the uptick in Q2 is very promising for the rest of the year.
Great. One last question for Amit. Looking at the first quarter SG&A, was a bit higher than I would have thought. Is there any one-time items in there or non-recurring hiring costs, for example? I'm just trying to understand how low you think-
Yeah.
SG&A is gonna get, in the second half of the year after some of this falls off.
Yeah. No, definitely. Thank you. As you know, most of the hires that we did in our sales team happened, you know, at the beginning of the year, and then a lot of related hires in delivery, people function all came in around that time. You know, most of that expense was very much related to first quarter. As we move from here, you know, that, call it expense, you know, we're not gonna have incremental expenses related to that going forward. On top of that, for each cost center, we went through a very diligent exercise of driving SG&A efficiencies.
As we move through the year, you know, you should see SG&A as a % of revenue keep coming down to around that, you know, and you can get that number from the adjusted operating income guidance that we provided, but that around mid-20ish%. I think as a company, and I'm not just talking about this year, as a company, as we move forward, there's a very strong path in front of us in the very near future to get to that low 20ish% SG&A as a % of revenue. Then as we build out some scale to hopefully even bring below 20%, you know, SG&A as a % of revenue.
Sorry, just to be clear, you're talking about when you just do the back of the envelope math, run rate in SG&A of at least $2 million lower than the first quarter. Is that right?
Yeah. You would put SG&A as a % of revenue as you. Remember, like second quarter, you know, revenue is gonna be, you know. There's a lot of moving parts in there. As you're looking at SG&A overall, First of all, As a revenue, you're gonna see revenue pick up a lot in third quarter and fourth quarter. To your point, SG&A, you will see SG&A, you know, significantly declining in third quarter and fourth quarter.
Okay. Thank you.
Your next question comes from a line of Josh Siegler from Cantor Fitzgerald. Your line is open.
Yeah. Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my question. I guess, you know, first of all, when do you expect to see an increase in productivity from your sales personnel? Is that really gonna kick off in the back half of this year?
This is Eric, Brian, so I'll take that question. Yes. We normally see a three to six-month ramp when we hire a new sales personnel to start contributing to that top-line revenue number, that's where you're starting to see our uptick in the second half. That investment we made in Q1 and back in 2022 is starting to pay off now as we increase our pipeline as well. Like we mentioned earlier in the call, you know, our pipeline is 7x, 7 times where it was last year. That is why we are really looking to the second half as to bringing those numbers higher. Also keep in mind too, like we mentioned earlier, we did delay it a few months based on the ramp, right? Based on what we're seeing in the market conditions.
There's a few things to keep in mind there, but absolutely, yes, we're starting to see that payoff now in the second half.
Got it. On the market conditions front, I'm curious if this increased demand and interest in AI and Generative AI is helping to offset some of the more cautious spending that you're seeing generally throughout your verticals? If you could comment on that would be helpful.
Sure. Absolutely. I think all of us read the news, and we see all the excitement and activity going on around AI right now. Our customer base and client base is no different, right? There's a lot of discussion about how AI can help facilitate a more efficient business, a better look at your data, a better look at decisioning across the board. Those conversations are very active right now within our client base and some of our new logos as well. I think you'll see us continue to increase our AI presence as we go into second half and certainly into fiscal year 2024.
Understood. Thank you.
You're welcome.
Your next question comes from a line of Mayank Tandon from Needham & Company. Your line is open.
Thank you. Good morning. I just wanted to ask about sort of employee morale and what have you seen in terms of the attrition in your business, given the liquidity issue, and also related to that would be your ability to hire key people for key projects, just given the situation currently?
Yeah. Thanks for the question. This is Manuel. No, we think that the morale is actually good. Our attrition levels came down significantly from last year, almost 70% from the beginning of last year to first quarter, and we continue to see the same levels even trending lower. Low teens on attrition still for Q one and Q two. We think that the morale is holding up even as we go through this difficult times in refinancing and all of that. People are generally excited about the type of work that we're doing, the clients that we're capturing, and the opportunities that we're working on. I think we're good on that front.
Okay. Just another question I had was on the sort of wind down of certain revenue. If I recall, you also had some sort of maintenance revenue, which I don't know if that's already run off completely. If not, I would assume that's higher margin revenue, more of a cash cow traditionally in the IT services business. Is that still something you have in your bag that you could maybe slow down, which helps profitability, at least gives you more time to sort of steady the ship and resolve the liquidity situation? Just curious on that.
I'll take this. This is Eric. Again, like we mentioned before, right, Q2 really where it runs off completely. I get your point, but I think we have to look at it from all sides. We also have to look at how much it costs us to support that revenue as well. What I would tell you is the team has done an excellent job of looking across the board, not only at our top line revenue, but the profitability of each account and the expense it costs us to support that account. We're making those decisions very strategically. Where you may see us exit some revenue, but we're doing it on a very controlled and decisive fashion to make sure we do the right revenue with the right profitability.
Got it. Thank you for taking my questions.
Just to add on that, I think for me, the highlight is that the gross profit actually is improving quarter-over-quarter. You see then sequentially from Q4 to Q1, gross profit grew about 5%. That's a key indicator for us, even as, you know, obviously market wants to look at top line, but for us internally, gross profit is super important at this time.
Also, you know, if you look at the guidance for the full year, yes, you know, the revenue growth is mid-single digit. We are guiding to adjusted operating profit above 20% year-over-year. I think, you know, all in all, sometimes, you know, that's the decision we are making, right? I mean, do we wanna just focus on revenue or do you wanna focus on highly profitable revenue? Because in the end, what matters is the operating profit that we are generating as a company.
Sure. Understood. Thank you so much.
Again, if you would like to ask a question, it's star one on your telephone keypad. Your next question comes from Joseph Vafi from Canaccord Genuity. Your line is open.
Hey, everyone. Good morning and welcome on board, Eric. Eric, could you just remind us if you look at the second half ramp and visibility there, you know, where you... You know, if you could break down where you think that ramp is coming from between existing and new logos. Then a quick follow-up.
Yeah. I would say that, you know, not quoting exact numbers 'cause I think it will fundamentally change as we roll into second half. I would think a majority of our growth this year is around our organic customer base. Again, it goes back to the fact that some of these projects were delayed. There was some softness in the decision-making in Q1. We're starting to see that really ramp up. Again, we have very mature client relationships at Agile, some that go back multiple years. For us, you know, that is where that's driving to. That doesn't mean we're not focused on the new logo because that will implement or supplement some of that additional revenue top line that we'll get in Q2.
Majority of it's organic at this point, but again, we'll still continue to grow the new logos, and I think that'll really impact our fiscal year 2024 as well.
Okay. That's helpful. I know. I think, Eric, you mentioned your largest cohort of clients at, like, the $5 million level. I mean, that's not necessarily really large given probably the size of their IT budgets. Do you think that those largest customers at this point are gonna grow at? Do they contribute to growth, or do you think that they could grow slower than overall growth and, you know, as we move through?
No, I actually. Oh, sorry.
Go ahead.
No, I actually think they'll contribute quite a bit. If you think about the customer base that we have and large customers that are in that base, right? There's a lot of untapped opportunity with each of those clients that enables us to go in there, talk about the great work that we've done already to facilitate net new business with new buyers at those accounts. What I would tell you is we're hyper-focused certainly on that organic growth because I do think that there's a lot of opportunity within our existing client base to grow.
I would add one more thing is, if you're a company that delivers well like us, you know, to go into a new buyer at a company and to really talk about the work we've already done there goes a long way in generating net new opportunities. I think the reality is, you know, organic growth will be on tap this year to help us really grow with those new logos bringing us into the fiscal year 24.
Okay. Maybe... Then I'll just ask one more quick one. Kind of given the balance sheet constraints, are there any levers to pull on utilization or other things, relative to, you know, I guess, you know, more capability that you have without having to perhaps hire right now? Thanks a lot.
I think, you know, I can, I can take that question. I think as we have been, call it, improving our overall business by exiting non-core, doing more and more high-end digital work, you are seeing, you know, metrics like revenue per billable employee materially improving over the last, call it one year, where we have gone from, you know, just a year ago, revenue per billable employee being $70,000-$72,000 to now above $82,000. We are. The utilization remains in that low to mid 80 level, which is I think the ideal level for our company. I think as a company now, we are the type of work that we are doing, driving one of the highest revenue per billable employee.
It is making us deliver, you know, revenues without having to necessarily, you know, hire at that level. Obviously, our headcount has been a little impacted recently because of the exit of non-core. But overall, the steps that the company is taking is in the direction of, you know, more quality, more higher revenue per billable employee moving forward.
Got it. Thanks, Amit, and good luck with the financing.
Thank you very much.
There are no further questions at this time. I will now turn it back over to management for some final closing comments.
This is Manuel. We just really appreciate everybody coming on to our call. I hope we answered most of your questions and gave more clarity to where we're going. Thanks very much.
This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.