T ech conference. I'm Bryan Keane. I cover the Payments Processors and IT Services here at Citi. We're excited to have a fireside chat with ADP, and Peter Hadley, as CFO, is here to help us understand the latest and greatest over at ADP. I'll run through a bunch of questions, and if anybody has a question in the audience, just feel free to raise your hand, and we'll bring a mic around. With that, Peter, thanks for coming.
Thank you, Bryan. Good to be here.
I think I wanted to kick it off and ask the obvious question, just thinking about ADP having such a great look at the macro environment, how would you characterize the macro? And I'm thinking about Pays Per Control, wage growth, bankruptcies, and the overall spending environment.
Yeah. No, it's an interesting question, and never more topical, honestly, than literally right now, and there's a bunch of noise some of you may have seen around even from the Fed around our data. Our numbers came out this morning, I'm sure everyone's seen it, a little bit lower, I think, than what the market was expecting.
I don't see those numbers, nor does Maria or our board even, certainly not our IR team, until they come out, so we all get them at the same time that you do. But I would say not a huge surprise for us. I think the macro has been really following a trend of... Depends how you look at it.
In the short term, there's quite a lot of volatility from day to day, week to week, whatever, but I think if you take, like, a six-month view, 12-month view, it's a fairly consistent trend and of a gradual slowing, continued gradual slowing. We've been talking about that, calling that out in, you know, in our numbers, in our guidance, and so on. The underlying, I think, fundamentals are still quite good. We're still seeing employment growth, wage growth in particular continues to be strong.
It certainly surpassed our expectations in fiscal 2025 for us, both in our PEO business, which generates a good chunk of its revenues based off of the payroll levels of the PEO clients, as well as in our client fund balances, which grew, you know, beyond our expectations, you know, to a really healthy level. So I think wage growth is still there.
I think, you know, in terms of the employment numbers, there's not a, you know, the number of additions has certainly slowed, as has the number of sort of layoffs or voluntary departures. So the market, I think, is relatively quiet in that respect, which might sound counterintuitive to all the headlines we read, but I think it's we're seeing a gradual slowing.
It's not particularly moving at a pace that is surprising us, either positively or negatively. It's sort of there. But for us, I think the most important underlying fundamental is the demand environment, and the demand environment, you know, continues to be strong. Sales cycles have elongated. We may talk about that, Bryan, in your questions, but certainly the demand environment for our services and what ADP offers, you know, we believe continues to be strong.
How about new business starts and bankruptcies? Any changes in those two metrics?
Not a lot. On the new business formations number, actually, they've been pretty healthy in recent months and quarters. So you know, that's again another positive sign, if you like, the economy. It's funny that these days, you know, each day delivers a metric, and one day it'll disappoint, the next one you receive is sort of positive.
But certainly, new business formations continues to be pretty healthy. Bankruptcies have been edging up a little bit, but more or less back to levels that we were used to. Probably not even quite there yet, but towards levels at least that we were used to, you know, prior to the COVID period. So again, you know, there's a lot of healthy underlying fundamentals.
There's also a lot of, I think, I don't know, indecision perhaps, or, or stagnation, you know, around decision-making, just given, potential, whatever, you know, policy or economic things that, that are going on out there, and companies, perhaps are, you know, are, are waiting to see what happens. But I think, I think underlying, you know, consumption now perhaps is, is.
The confidence index might be softening a little bit, but, but there's positives and there are negatives. And, and again, I think, I think in terms of bankruptcies and, and business, new business formations, you know, that remains pretty healthy, as does really the underlying fundamentals of the, of the U.S. economy, albeit it continued, you know, on a continued slowing trajectory.
Wanted to ask, ADP being the largest player in the HCM market, and just kind of thinking high level here, given your size, how can the company reach that 6%-7% midterm revenue growth that you guys have outlined, I think, in the Analyst Day? And that would be above kind of industry average growth of kind of mid-single digits. I mean, slightly above, but just thinking of your size, how do you guys able to grow above kind of industry growth rates?
Yeah, I mean, we are a big company, obviously, as everyone here, I think, knows. We have you know a lot of benefits from being a large company. I think the great thing for us, though, is while we are the largest player, we believe, at least in the HCM industry, you know, we have tons of room to grow, we think.
We size our market opportunity, and we did this at Investor Day a couple of months ago, at $180 billion. Obviously, we are a little over 10%, maybe 11% of that number, based on our last reported revenue numbers. So you know, we have tons of room to grow.
We've also been, over our decades, at least, of our history, the largest player in the HCM industry, and we've had a record, I think, of growing faster than what we see, at least, as industry growth rates. So, you know, we have lots of opportunities. We can, you know, point fingers at many areas.
I would say, you know, in the down market, we continue to be really successful, I think, in adding clients to our offerings, be they new clients, be they, you know, in our client count growth. You may have seen that reported in our 10-K. You know, continues to be really healthy in that space, notwithstanding the fact we have over 900,000 clients.
We have additional offerings, which are really successful, but they still have, you know, relatively low penetration, like retirement services, our insurance offering, you know, our PEO. I think we sized that, too, in Investor Day. In terms of the market opportunity, we see plenty of room for growth.
And then, in the enterprise and global space, in particular, where I think on the domestic enterprise space, at least, you know, we've perhaps not performed as well as we would've liked over the last decade or so. We have our offering, Lyric, now out in the market, about 12 months, coming up to about 12 months, getting a lot of great traction there. Enterprise, in particular, takes time.
It's a slower segment in terms of moving the needle, just due to the size of the companies, the size and length of the sales cycles, the length of the implementation cycles, the change rates, and what have you. But over, you know, taking a sort of medium to longer-term view, we think there's tremendous opportunity there. And then, putting that together with our global opportunity, we've done very well in global payroll.
We've been somewhat nascent in global HR, and we have a little bit of global team, but not a great deal. So between Lyric, our WorkForce Software acquisition, and our global continued strengthening of our global payroll opportunities, we don't feel at all bound by, you know, or constrained, if you like, by our size.
Nor do we feel constrained to, you know, market growth rates, 'cause we see there's a lot more opportunity out there than what we've tapped to date, notwithstanding the success the company's had for seventy-six years and our size.
Yeah, I was gonna ask about some of the history, just thinking high level again on the top line. I know previous Analyst Days, I think two Analyst Days ago, the target for revenue was kind of 7%-8%. I think the most recent one, we've been talking about 6%-7% for revenue, and then you guided fiscal year 2026 revenue growth of 5%-6%. So just these are slight moderations. Can you help us understand how much of that is just economically driven or maybe some maturity in the market?
Yeah, I would, yeah, I would say it's very much more macro-driven than maturity in the market. So I go from Investor Day, November 2021, to Investor Day, June 2025. I would say exclusively, you know, they were very different times. Obviously, we were coming out of a pandemic.
There was, you know, a difficult period but with tailwinds coming out, and there was, you know, some getting back to normal, so to speak, or whatever the phrase we used a few years ago, collectively in society around, you know, exiting that pandemic. Now, we're in a bit more of a slowing economy with a little bit more headwinds, I would say, than tailwinds, but not, again, not dramatically. It's sort of a gradual slowing.
So that, you know, that was really predominantly the difference, if you like, between the November 2021 and the June 2025 objectives. Again, we don't feel any more constrained by sort of the market or the competitive environment now than what we did then. If anything, I think we probably feel better about our relative competitive positioning now, based on what I was just saying moments ago around the enterprise space.
I think our PEO is really coming into its own, and, you know, when you look at what's been going on with medical inflation and the way some of our competitors in that space, you know, take more risk onto their own books, and that can be a short-term opportunity for them.
But over time, you know, we don't believe in that model, and so I think we're coming into our own there. We're continuing to find new channels, be it Embedded Payroll and so on, in the downmarket. You know, we feel strongly. In terms of the current year guidance versus the midterm, I wouldn't personally draw a lot of conclusions from that.
I think the midterm is just, you know, a three-to-four-year type of, you know, view on average. I think we said at the time, at Investor Day, that some years could be a little above, some years could be a little below.
I think there is some conservatism, I think justified conservatism around we don't necessarily know how the macro environment will play out this year, where we're not assuming major changes, but there could be some changes, whereas that our midterm is a bit more of a steady-state type scenario. But we are very committed.
The most important thing, I think, is we're very committed to delivering the medium-term objectives we gave at Investor Day. We'd very much like to hit those numbers this year. I think if we perform at the higher end of our current year guidance ranges, we will be, you know, more there or thereabouts on all of those medium-term guides.
Ideally, over the medium term, we'll do what we did last medium term, which is come in at the top end of all the key metrics.
Great. I wanna ask about... And you mentioned the enterprise capabilities, and those have meaningfully enhanced with the launch of Lyric and the acquisition of WorkForce Software. When do you expect those to have a more meaningful impact on the revenue growth?
Yeah, I mean, they're, they're already having a meaningful impact on our, on our growth. In terms of the absolute size of the company, you know, we're a large company, it takes time for it to bed in. But certainly, if I look at, if I decompose our, you know, our sources of growth as we, we do that when analyzing our performance and our, you know, setting our objectives, it's, it is playing an important role already in, in, you know, the sources of our, of our bookings growth, and obviously, retention is sky high, being, being a new product and, and also being in that enterprise space.
As long as, as long as, you know, we are able to deliver, which we have a good track record of doing, that, you know, those clients tend to hang around, you know, quite a lot longer than the line average that, at our company level or our Employer Services level, retention statistics would imply.
So, you know, I think in terms of moving the needle on our $20+ billion of revenue, it will take some time. As I was saying before, the sales cycles take a little longer in that space, just due to the complexity of the deals. As we go international, that adds a little more. The implementation cycles, you know, are longer than what we're used to in the downmarket and the midmarket.
Again, this is not new information for us, not new learnings. We've been in this space for a long time. It's just, it takes time for it to feed through and move the needle on $20+ billion of revenue, but in terms of the importance of it to the growth that we're expecting and have been experiencing over the last year or so, it's already an important contributor, if that makes sense.
Yeah. Yep, definitely. One of ADP's greatest assets I always think about is its distribution ecosystem. Can you provide color on the ecosystem, and specifically, the new Embedded Payroll channel?
Sure. Yeah, I mean, it's one of the great strengths of ADP since we began, I think, and, you know, we have 10,000+ sellers. We have, you know, huge amount of territory coverage. We are, I won't be able to do it justice in a chat like this, but just the degree of infrastructure behind the ability to source, onboard, train sellers, and also, you know, retain the, particularly the ones we want to retain. It's a huge machine. It's a really great asset of the company. The other thing about it is we continue to be innovative. You know, whether it's adding new channels, Embedded Payroll is just another channel, you know, one we're excited about.
But we've been working channels for years, be they, you know, in the downmarket, accountants, banks, brokers in the mid-market, ERP players in the mid-market and the upmarket systems integrators. You know, it's an important channel.
It's another, sort of initiative to continue to, you know, enhance that distribution capability that we have, as is some of the tools, including AI, and, you know, our tool, The Zone, that we spoke about, which is, a combination of Salesforce technology, Salesforce.com technology, as well as our own, some of our own proprietary, tools and AI that we are enabling our sellers, to really become more efficient, but hopefully, more than efficient, be more effective, be more knowledgeable, you know, when they go to the sale, pulling insights, you know, identifying, the propensity for certain buyers to be interested in our solutions. Which solution are they...
You know, for example, are they a 50-person company that's just added employees in a couple of different states? Maybe they're gonna be a, you know, an opportunity for our PEO business. Do they have benefits or not? You know, it's really about making the sales force, I guess, more effective through intelligence and so on, and then just broadening our reach through distribution.
So yeah, I would concur, I think, with the line in your question, like, it is a huge asset for ADP, and one that we find we feel really differentiates us from our competition. It's also to have that many sellers, and sellers are, on a relative basis, expensive.
They're an expensive resource, more so than maybe some of the other resources, you know, in a business like ours, so just being able to have the balance sheet and the size, financial capability, and capacity to continue to maintain and grow that investment. I think is also, you know, an advantage that we have.
I know ES new bookings get a lot of attention, came in just slightly below expectations in fiscal year 2025. What gives you the kind of confidence that the growth will accelerate in fiscal year 2026?
Yeah, yeah, good question. We, it, the number did come in a little lower, but we were, again, still very pleased, I should say, to deliver, you know, $2.1 billion in new business bookings for our Employer Services. You know, it was 3% growth. We are confident. A number of the things are around sort of what I was just saying, around, you know, additional capabilities we're adding to our sales force.
We're not just investing in tools and not just investing in channels, we're also investing in the sales force headcount itself. So we continue to grow our sales force headcount, as well as sort of the capabilities and the maturing, if you like, the continued maturing of some of our newer products, like Lyric, like WorkForce Software, those...
You know, the amount of work that's going on in integrating those solutions, not just the two of them together, but with, with our global payroll, with our Workforce Now offering, you know, we're in a better place than we were, you know, a year ago with respect to that. So, you know, those things help us.
I think the other thing that gives us some confidence, and again, we don't have full control over the, the macro, but is when we see within the number, how the different businesses are performing, and there's no clear, structural challenge in any sort of segment.
We spoke about this on our earnings call, I think, like, in our third quarter earnings call, we spoke about, you know, how our international bookings had been affected, that we had a, you know, a better performance in international in the fourth quarter, which is sort of the typical biggest period for many of our businesses, but international in particular.
So that was encouraging. It was not, okay, we don't have a structural issue. Is international gonna be difficult for a few years? Time will tell, but we don't feel like that's the case because we've seen sort of some challenging quarters and we've seen some strong quarters.
We saw the same, albeit the order was a little bit reversed in our HRO, ES HRO offerings, where we had a very strong first half of the year, sort of softened a little bit in the back half. The PEO, which we don't report the numbers, but the bookings we commented, you know, we're really pleased with the PEO bookings in FY 2025, particularly in the fourth quarter.
So we don't feel that there's anything, at the moment at least, that is structural. There's certainly the continued gradual slowing, which is a little bit of a headwind, but we feel we can overcome that through the investments we're making, both in distribution itself, as well as the products and services that our sellers are out there selling to our prospects and our clients.
What's the typical growth rate you guys grow the sales force every year, and what is it gonna be this year?
Yeah, so we grow around half or maybe slightly above half of sort of the bookings growth we're anticipating is headcount growth, and the difference effectively comes from what we call sales force productivity, which is driven by a number of the things I was talking about, the effectiveness of channels, the tools, you know, the products themselves, and offerings.
So our formula, you know, we don't necessarily give the exact numbers, but you could think about it as around half or maybe slightly more than half of our sales growth, we expect to be able to deliver through additions to the sales force, headcount growth, and the difference coming from sales force productivity.
Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about how the bookings number, Employer Services, hits the revenue and organic growth number? I know we all look at the bookings numbers so heavily, but it only has a minor impact on the organic growth of the company.
Yeah, I mean, it certainly has an impact. It's not, as I know I've spoken to some of you about this, it's not the easiest one to model. We appreciate that. It's very important to the revenue number. It's the lever, again, when I think about our revenue model itself, it's the lever that moves the needle the most, because retention, you know, we can talk about retention if you like, but retention is very high.
Obviously, that's not necessarily guaranteed. We have to do a lot of work to maintain that, but we don't see a lot of movement there. Pays per control and other things, price and what have you, also are smaller levers that in terms of moving the needle.
So it is really important, but it's challenging to model because I guess our diversity and you know where the bookings are coming from. We obviously try to give color on that. We don't report the numbers, but we try to give color on where the bookings are coming from.
But again, like, bookings in the downmarket space might start literally within hours or days, perhaps a couple of weeks, depending on the client's desire and need from when the booking is made, whereas go to the other end of the spectrum, you know, a twenty-two country, multi-country payroll and perhaps these days, you know, Lyric HCM system of record, that could take three years to roll out.
Now, again, doesn't take three years to get the first dollar of revenue, but it progressively builds. So, you know, it really depends on the segment mix, if you like, of the bookings as to how it flows through. But for ADP, the way we run the company internally and with our sales force is a booking ultimately is only a booking once it becomes revenue generating.
So again, like, we can, we could sell a deal, for example, in the enterprise space, and if that deal did not go live twelve months later, then the booking that we may have taken gets reversed. You know, obviously, if we don't think it's gonna go live, we wouldn't book it to begin with, but sometimes circumstances changes with clients.
Ultimately, every dollar that you see in terms of what we report in bookings makes its way into revenue. It's a question of when, which segment it's coming from, but it certainly all flows through. I think, you know, people have, and we try to give as much color as we can to help with the modeling, but you may see, you know, as we continue to strengthen in the enterprise space, you know, the conversion rates may have to shift a little bit just due to the sales and, well, not the sales, but the implementation.
Yeah, 'cause international, those deals take a little longer to close, and implementation, I assume, is a little longer than the U.S.
Yeah, yeah. And the booking don't get recognized until the sale is closed, obviously, but the implementation cycle can, can certainly influence-
Right
... you know, the timing to revenue.
Yeah, I did want to ask about client retention. I know it improved ten basis points to 92.1% in fiscal year 2025. You know, that's a high number, obviously, as you said. You know, is there room to grow there, or is that pretty stable number, and what was driving kind of the improvement to begin with?
Yeah, I mean, I think there's. We always think there's room to grow. I mean, if you look at structurally, one thing that can impact the aggregated number, obviously, is the mix. So if we're growing, and we have grown, as you all know, I think very strongly in the downmarket. The downmarket structurally has a lower retention rate because of the, you know, the ease of change, I guess, for smaller businesses versus, you know, enterprise clients is easier.
The bankruptcy rates are obviously a little higher in the downmarket and so on. So the mix can play a part, if you like, in the aggregated number. For me, you know, in terms of how we run the business, we're very much focusing on...
The total is important, but certainly, the trends by segment, by business unit is important. And we believe that we have opportunity in pretty much all of our businesses, I think, to improve retention, whether that will manifest in the total in a meaningful number is hard to say. You know, we have had steady improvement over recent years, I think, as you're aware.
We think that we don't think we're at a ceiling in terms of, you know, our guidance. Again, that's, and we've gotten a lot of questions on that. We don't necessarily have an insight that tells us retention is going to... A specific insight, I should say, that retention may decline this year.
Our guidance is predicated around the continued macro slowing, and our experience with macro slowing is that those bankruptcy rates that you were talking about earlier do tend to rise, you know, as macro slow. Again, we know that we've said the same thing for the last couple of years, and this has not manifested. We've been happy about being wrong on that one. We'd be happy to be wrong again this year, but we don't think we're at a ceiling.
And in terms of what's driving it, many things, I think, but the most important thing, I think, is our focus and intention on delivering for our clients at all the time and in every way we can, and whether that's through great service, through great products, it's all of those things. But, you know, we have really an extremely strong focus on that. Maria, in particular, comes, not that Carlos did not.
Of course, he did, but Maria, in particular, comes from very much the commercial side of the organization, from sales, from client service and operations. And I can tell you that the culture and the attention to delivering for our clients has never been stronger in the almost twenty-four years I've been at the company.
You know, we will continue to control that to the best extent we can and deliver, control what we can control. The macro will do what it does, but and we'll see how that manifests on our retention. But I don't feel like we're at a ceiling, to answer the first part of your question again, in any way. I think we have opportunity, but I would caution, just given our size, you know, and also the mix. I wouldn't necessarily expect it to go from 92.1 to 96 overnight. It's not. It doesn't move like that, but gradual improvement is our objective.
You mentioned PEO and the strength in PEO bookings you saw towards in that fourth quarter. What would it take to get back to that double-digit growth rates in PEO?
Yeah, it's a good question. I think first and foremost, we are happy with how the PEO is going. Of course, we would rather be the 10%, 12%, 14%, whatever it was, you know, rates of a few years ago than sort of where we're thinking we are now, where even we delivered in 2025, which was, I think, really good.
There's a couple of things. The primary one is sort of the same-store sales metric. You know, we are at similar levels with our PEO, slightly above, but not meaningfully above. Very similar to sort of what we do report for Employer Services, and that's quite different.
You know, we're talking 400-ish, maybe even a little more basis points lower than, you know, where that number was, 4% or 5% lower than where that number was, you know, a number of years ago when we were driving those type of growth rates. So that's probably the main driver. I think we had some execution challenges a couple of years ago.
We've made a number of changes, including in leadership in the PEO, as well as, you know, some focus on the product and just the way we're addressing our clients that is, you know, is certainly helping us. So, you know, continued bookings strength, and growing that bookings number is an important lever.
The other one, I think, sort of depends how you look at it, but, but, you know, medical inflation, I guess, helps the, the, the headline revenue number in the context of, you know, the, the, zero margin pass-through stuff. You know, as we pass through, again, we don't take any, any medical, underwriting risk on our books, so, so that flows through.
It also has a bit of an impact on retention. Our retention has not been declining. I think we spoke about a, a moderate, improvement in retention in 2025 over 2024, but, but certainly, and I-- by the way, this is not a base case assumption of ours that, that medical inflation is gonna, gonna ebb meaningfully in any, anytime, too soon.
It doesn't necessarily feel like the underlying dynamics are going that way, but, you know, that if that were to happen, you know, and we're able to take advantage of that, if you like, with some sort of, you know, noticeable for us, improvement in the retention rate, while at the same time, Pays Per Control, we're returning to levels they were, then, you know, lifting our growth rates, perhaps to or at least in the direction of those numbers, is certainly possible. Like I said before, I think our market opportunity there, we have around seven hundred and fifty thousand worksite employees.
I think we sized the market at around 4.5 milion-5 million, and I think the PEO space, I'm trying to look, phone a friend here, but I think is maybe 30%-40%, if you like, of that, you know, four to five million numbers. So I think there's plenty of room for the business to grow and the offer to take effect.
We're very good at mining our own existing ES client base for PEO client candidates, which is not cannibalization of our revenue. We get good revenue uplift from doing that. Certainly, it's all possible, but you know, the biggest thing that we could benefit from in terms of lifting our growth rate up from the levels we're talking about would be, you know, a return to employment growth.
But again, it's not our base case assumption, not just this fiscal year, but it's not our base case assumption in our medium-term guide, as you can tell from the 6%-8% we were talking about in the medium term.
Yeah. You know, I gotta ask you the popular question on rate cut potential. So, you know, 2025 to a hundred basis point rate cut, how do we think about that impact to the model?
Yeah, so I mean, our current year guidance contemplated the, I think it was around a hundred basis points that the market had baked in when we were pulling our forward curve. So we don't come up with our own prediction of rates, we just use the forward curves that exist at the time when we give guidance.
You know, if there is a hundred basis points over our fiscal year, which again, we're in the first quarter at the moment, then that should have no impact, if you like, on us being able to deliver our current year guidance with respect to Client Funds Interest.
You know, for us, we have more interest rate exposure, if you like, to the little further out on the curve than Fed Funds. You know, if you look at Fed Funds, I don't have the numbers to hand, but they're in our 10-K filings, what a 25 basis point move in short-term rates only is single-digit millions of dollars. And again, we have contemplated. I think we actually explicitly said that in our prepared remarks for our last earnings call. So a hundred basis point move in Fed Funds, all else being equal, shouldn't have any impact on our numbers.
And again, our exposure is a little further down the curve than than Fed Funds when you look at sort of our Client Short and our borrowing numbers, is a somewhat of a close natural hedge there. So, you know, I'm not. We're not concerned about that. Should that happen, if anything, that might actually be a net tailwind to ADP, if it does, you know, if it does sort of help the broader economic environment, you know, should that happen.
But in terms of our Client Funds Interest, no, not expecting that those rate cuts, if they materialize, to have an adverse effect on, you know, the numbers that we've been talking about for the year. We're much more, again, our model for those who follow it, is much more.
The best thing you can do to look at sort of where ADP's heading in CFI, at least in this year and the next couple of years, is each fourth quarter we produce, in our earnings materials, we produce a schedule, a maturity schedule, which shows the dollars maturing and the embedded rates.
That's the biggest driver, not so much changes in absolute rates even. Because if we look this fiscal year, we have $7+ billion maturing at an embedded yield of 1.5%. So you can apply your rate. And again, they're not invested at Fed Funds, they're invested typically, you know, over durations out to 10 years.
So, you know, that's, that's what moves the needle much more for us, is sort of those yields from, call it, two to seven, eight years is more what moves the needle for us, and moves relative to our maturity stack than you know, just the growth in the balances themselves.
We got about 60 seconds, so I'm gonna do what every analyst always tries to do, which is cram in two questions, long questions-
All right
... that you're gonna try to answer in sixty seconds.
All right.
The first one, just, you know, there's been tremendous margin expansion at ADP over the last five years. How much more is there left, and any key drivers you can point out in thirty seconds, and then I got another one.
Yep. I think more than five years, I think we've had a great track record with margin expansion. We expect that to continue. Again, we gave our guidance, many things. Again, growing the company is the most important thing in terms of delivering margin expansion. That's what I would say. We have plenty of opportunity, I think, with AI and other initiatives we have, to improve our productivity. It's important for us. We continue to invest, but growing the company is the most important thing for us in terms of margins.
And then I'll leave you with this. You've been a couple of months in your CFO seat here at ADP, what surprised you the most?
The good thing is, I've been at the company for, like I said earlier, more than a little over a couple of decades, so not a huge number of surprises. The transition was very well managed by the board, Maria and Don, my predecessor, so not a huge number of surprises, just excited about the opportunity in front of us, and, you know, plenty to do, plenty to execute on, but really looking forward to it.
Great. With that, Peter, thanks so much for being here.
Thank you, Bryan. Appreciate it. Thank you, everybody.
That was great.