Presenting company is Charles River Associates, ticker CRAI. And joining us today is Paul Maleh, Chairman CEO, Chad Holmes, Chief Corporate Development Officer, and Daniel Nierenberg, Chief Financial Officer. Now, before we begin, as a reminder, we will have time for Q&A following prepared remarks. If you'd like to ask a question, however, feel free to submit those at any time. There's no need to wait until the end. Just click on the Q&A prompts at the bottom of your screen. And with that, we can turn the floor over to Charles River. Good morning, gentlemen. Thank you for joining us.
Great. Good morning. Good morning, Mark, and thank you and good morning, everyone. My name is Paul Maleh, President and CEO of Charles River. I have a handful of slides that I'll try to get through as efficiently as I can and hopefully have ample time to take your questions on that. Of course, I need to figure out how to do the turn the page here. Okay, so 2025 has been a pretty remarkable year for CRA, and that's not just because of our financial performance, but CRA celebrated its 60th anniversary in 2025 and more than 27 years as a publicly traded company. The picture before you is a number of my colleagues and I had the privilege of ringing the opening bell on Nasdaq back in June. This wasn't the first time we had such an honor. We did it at our 50th.
And the part that I want to highlight for you is, as the folks at Nasdaq gather all my colleagues like that, the opening bell starts, and then they ask you, "Start clapping." And we are, "Why?" Because your clapping and enthusiasm will drive the price higher. And we did this at our 50th, and the price at the time that we were trying to eclipse was $22 per share. And we were all clapping like crazy, and I think we got a few pennies above 22, so the day was a success. So 10 years, lots have changed, but also a lot has stayed the same. And I'm hoping the things that changed are things that make our shareholders and prospective investors happy, like almost a nine-fold increase in the price over those 10 years.
but what has stayed the same is CRA's strategy and direction and commitment to creating value for all our constituent groups. so, as you could have guessed, with 60 years under our belt, we were founded back in 1965 by professors from Harvard and MIT that their goal was to bring quantitative methods in economics to the business world. Through insights into information, we wanted to help business leaders make more informed decisions on their most important challenges. and I think we've done a pretty good job in our history distinguishing CRA from that of our competitive marketplace on executing on this original mission. The firm has two primary lines of business: legal and regulatory and management consulting. Legal and regulatory makes up roughly 80% of the firm's revenue, and management consulting makes up the remainder of the revenue pool here.
We'll touch upon who our clients are, and I think many of the clients you have clearly heard about. We are an international firm with more than 20 offices across 10 countries, and the revenue split is about 80% North America and about 20% international at CRA. So, surprise, surprise, as with many consulting firms, the quality and our success as an enterprise starts and stops with the quality of my colleagues. So here's a group of some selective statistics that I thought I would try to highlight for you. About three-quarters of my senior colleagues have advanced degrees, over 40% have PhDs. So we are very much academically oriented as an institution at CRA. If we were a university, we would probably be the most selective university in the world, accepting less than 2% of our applicants.
We want to hire the best and brightest, irrespective of nationality, university, geographic orientation. We want to hire the best people at CRA. And this commitment is, I think, the true driver of our success. Our colleagues hail from over 70 countries and across six continents, speaking more than 35 languages. In case anyone's getting excited, I'm going to stick to my only language of competency, and that could be even questioned, and that's English. We are successful because we're able to attract, develop, and retain our colleagues. That simple formula has been the foundation of all our success during the 65 years, during the 60 years. Got a little ahead of myself. The box in the upper right-hand corner I wanted to talk a little bit about. It reads, "Less than 10% voluntary turnover among top revenue-generating employees over the past five years." So what does that mean?
Every year, I present to the board our top 30 revenue generators, and we analyze how those revenue generators are distributed across our practices, our geographies, how they're compensated. If I look at the union of that top 30 revenue generators over the past five years, it's about 55 or 60 people. So when you look at this 10% voluntary turnover, one of the clarifying points here is it's 10% in aggregate, less than 10% in aggregate. It's not 10% per annum. So that means over the past five years, we have probably lost less than one key revenue generator per year. The fact that I'm highlighting these people is these individuals can go anywhere they want and probably get a nice acquisition price to boot, but they're electing to stay at CRA, and they're electing to help us drive our business and our success forward with it.
We talked earlier about two main lines of business. What I'm going to do here is begin by telling you what of these practices make up our management consulting offering. It starts with our life sciences practice, one of the top three practices in the firm, followed by our energy practice, auctions and competitive bidding, and maritime practices. Those four practices make up the 20% of the enterprise. All the other practices listed here make up the 80%, led by our antitrust and competition economics practice, which makes up roughly 40%-45% of the firm's total revenue at CRA. What does the antitrust and competition practice do? You're going to be hard-pressed seeing any major merger being discussed in the press that CRA isn't working for one of the parties on that.
You're going to be hard-pressed to see any kind of antitrust investigations being done here in the United States or being done abroad that CRA isn't a significant party to, and the same kind of market presence exists for our finance practice, intellectual property practice, labor and employment practice that help clients navigate their challenges in the legal and regulatory arena on that, so you may not have heard of CRA, but I'm pretty sure you've heard of these companies, so just in the past two years, CRA has worked for 85 of the Fortune 100 companies. If I showed you this chart last year, or I showed you this chart from five years ago, it's going to have 85, 87 of the Fortune 100 companies, and the reason I think this is an important slide is we are not an annuity-based business. We are not a subscription business.
We gain these companies' trust on a project-by-project basis. That means our ability to have 85 of the Fortune 100 companies is that they are coming to CRA time and time again on their most pressing business challenges here. Oftentimes, in the legal and regulatory world, we have law firms acting as the middlemen in our retention on behalf of the Fortune 100 companies. Here, in the past, just the past two years, same kind of guidelines exist that I just covered for the Fortune 100, and 98 of the Am Law 100 law firms have worked with CRA in the past two years. A pretty good breadth of clientele also goes to our consistency of performance and our consistency of excellence, the fact that these clients who have choices come to CRA year after year on helping deliver these matters.
The clients, of course, serve as their foundation, and this is a summary of the output that we've enjoyed by delivering excellent services. So it starts with the bottom row of our financial performance over the past five years, then 2024, and year to date 2025. Past five years, we've grown revenue more than 50%. Headcount has grown 20%. EPS has grown 142%. You're going to see the same kind of gaudy expansion of our profitability, whether you look at EPS, net income, EBITDA measures, in that they are growing at a faster rate than revenue is growing, meaning that we have expanded our margin and expanded it pretty consistently throughout our history at CRA.
Not only are we growing attractively and growing our profits at an even faster rate, we're also returning a substantive amount of capital back to our shareholders through share repurchases and dividend distribution, more than almost $200 million in total redistributions back to our shareholders. And we're doing this not just because we have capital, but we're doing it because our share price continues to be an attractive investment opportunity. Average share repurchase price over the past five years, $88. Last I checked, we were trading today above $190. So pretty nice return for all of our stakeholders here. 2024, similar kind of success in that we're growing, growing attractively and growing profits at an even faster rate. Same kind of success in 2025, year to date.
I think 2025 will be our eighth consecutive year of record performance if we deliver based on our updated guidance that we communicated during our Q3 Earnings Call, so with all the success, growing profitability, what is our investment thesis at our firm? The investment thesis is really quite simple, and it's to maximize CRA's long-term value per share. We are value-based decision-makers. We want to earn returns north of our cost of capital, and we use this framework in deciding all capital allocations in the firm, whether it's for talent, whether it's for share buybacks, or other kind of key investments into the enterprise. If we exhaust all of our value-creating investment opportunities, we give the money back to all of you, thus the per share ending to that. On it. We talked about the revenue growth, setting records on each of the past seven years.
I don't think that one includes 2025, but I feel pretty good as we exited Q3 that we were going to make that eight consecutive years. This chart shows you no real new data, but anytime you can show a chart with growing revenue as attractively as this, I'm going to take that opportunity. Something I want to highlight for you. So we highlighted revenue, we highlighted net income. The other thing that I want to highlight is within our income statement, we have a very large non-cash item that flows through our income statement that is not captured by EBITDA, right? Even though it's a large non-cash amortization of what we call forgivable loans, it is not in the DNA that makes up EBITDA on it. So what do we use this non-cash amortization of forgivable loans for?
The primary use of these outlays are to acquire and retain talent at CRA. So it's not like if you have a traditional acquisition of a C- Corp or an LLC where the accounting rules are really rather straightforward, that the majority of the purchase price ends up residing on your balance sheet here. When you acquire individuals or you acquire groups of individuals, the traditional accounting rules for acquisitions don't apply. Even though there's that same outlay at time zero to the entity we're trying to bring on to CRA, we enjoy the incremental revenue, we enjoy the associated costs of delivering that revenue. But in addition, we have this large non-cash amortization charge. It is 100% a cash outlay when we are acquiring individuals and groups of talent, but it does not flow through our GAAP financial statements.
So unless you make an adjustment to our income statement or our cash flows from operations, you're going to double count our flows of funds going to acquire inorganic pursuits on that. A number of years ago, we had a profitability measure called Adjusted EBITDA that added these non-cash amortization of loans back to EBITDA. The SEC didn't really like that and said, "Paul, you can talk about EBITDA, you can talk about the forgivable loans, you could even put them on the same page, but you can't add them together for prospective investors or shareholders." So thus we put it here. So when you're thinking about what the true cash-generating capacity of our profits are, it's really the sum of EBITDA and that non-cash amortization.
And to try to demonstrate that this isn't smoke and mirrors is we have this pie chart that looks at the uses of the firm's capital over the past five years. And the reason it's proof that it is not smoke and mirrors is that we have no debt. Everything we do at CRA to drive our growth is funded by cash from internal operations on that. So when you talk about uses of capital, it has to foot with the cash being generated by the enterprise. Three main buckets: the bucket for talent, the bucket for redistribution to shareholders, and CapEx. So quickly take you through the components here. On talent, which is one of the major slices of the use of capital, we have deployed about $185 million of talent of capital over the past five years to bring on talent that adds depth to our portfolio.
As the first bullet shows here, we brought on roughly $230 million of revenue associated with these outlays, and that includes talent that we may have brought on in 2024 that is not at full revenue-generating capacity here, so even with the 230, still a very attractive multiple in acquiring inorganic revenue additions to our portfolio. With that said, the majority of the growth at CRA happens organically. Roughly about two-thirds of our growth is with genuine organic expansion of the revenue base. CapEx. We're a consulting company. We don't have large CapEx in the traditional sense, in that our real estate, we still have excess capacity across our office, so I don't anticipate any kind of large real estate outlays in the next five years. We haven't in the previous five years, and CapEx is more modest, like for new computers or general outlays for running the enterprise.
What we have outlaid in the previous five years, probably could expect to have a similar outlay in the next five years. And then the redistribution of our capital. We touched upon a lot of that during the summary slide of our financial performance. And not only are we buying the shares, but we're making substantive reduction to our share count. If I look at the last 10, 12 years, we are reduced more than 30% of our shares outstanding just in the previous five years. The net reduction is more than 13% at the average share price of $88. Not only are we repurchasing shares, we also have a dividend that we launched back in 2016 that has grown fourfold over that time period too. We recently have increased our dividend again during our Q3 call up to $0.57 per share.
That goes to one, the cash-generating capacity of the business and our confidence in the business going forward. And here's just another depiction of the share reduction here. So Mark, I'm going to stop there. There may be topics that we come back and visit, but I'll turn it over to you to see if there's any questions that people may have.
Thank you very much, Paul. And as a reminder, folks, if you would like to ask a question, feel free to just click on the QA button at the bottom of your screen. Why don't we sort of start off with going back to when you reported earnings, and it was a very solid earnings report, as well as the increase of guidance on full year. You had talked at that time about some of the drivers that were behind that.
Maybe you could talk a little bit about some of the practice areas that maybe don't get as much attention as or maybe investors might be underappreciating beyond the larger contributions from Management Consulting and competition economics and the like.
Sure. I guess the good news is that you probably heard about all the practices because having broad-based success within our service portfolio means that we are able to highlight almost all of our practices. You'll see us use that term time and time again in terms of broad-based contributions. I believe we had seven. Is that right, Chad, Eric? Seven of 11 practices growing year over year with five practices enjoying double-digit revenue growth year over year. So we typically will highlight those enjoying the double-digit revenue growth. So lucky for me, I get to talk a lot about our antitrust and competition economics practice.
We got to talk about our life sciences practice. We got to talk about the intellectual property practice, which is really enjoying a nice trajectory of growth as the world for intellectual property becomes more complicated in many areas, including AI, which is calling into question a lot of the property rights that exist here. The other area that has also been touched by AI is our energy practice, and you said, "Why would our energy practice be impacted by AI?" It's not necessarily for the efficiency and delivery of the services, but many of the utilities, many of the tech companies are coming to CRA to help them negotiate and decide where to put data centers, how to negotiate the power contract with the various utilities on that front, so it has also been a nice wind in our sales going forward.
So lots of contributions from across the portfolio, and I don't see that changing either.
Okay. Excellent. We have a couple of questions that are in the pipeline that are actually kind of similar in the sense that maybe you could sort of share your thoughts on the current operating environment that you're dealing with and then sort of how that plays into what you're seeing with the new business pipeline.
Sure. There's been lots going on in both our competitive environment and also the market for our services on that. There's been some disruption with some creation of a new entity out there in the economic consulting space. And you saw some partners, key constituents move.
But as I said back in our earnings call, I believe it was the beginning of March, I think, net-net at the end of the day, CRA will be a net positive, and that's exactly what has turned out to be. We are a net positive with all the shuffles of talent that may have existed during 2025. We have welcomed more than 20 new vice presidents into CRA across our practice portfolio, across our geographic portfolio. So we're pretty excited about that. Chad also has a rather robust pipeline of new talent opportunities going forward. And with respect to the demand drivers, M&A activity is gaining steam. Not only is it gaining steam, but they're very large, complex deals. And as I said, a lot of the deals are confidential, and I can't talk specifically about them.
But I say with confidence that if you're reading about a deal, we're probably involved with one of the parties assisting them navigating the regulatory environment there.
There's certainly been quite a bit of that in the headlines over these last few days. It certainly sustained momentum there. One of the things you talked about on the earnings call I just wanted to touch on is I know we're getting toward the end of our time together, but I did want to talk a little bit about the litigation activity that you had discussed because that was sort of a bit of a surprise of the strength that we saw in the third quarter. Is there a sense of maybe where that's coming from or what catalysts drove that? Yeah.
Quite frankly, we try to gain as much insights into what the future may hold, okay, both in terms of things that we could directly observe at CRA, like lead flow or new project origination, but we also look at the broader industry to try to give our shareholders a little more insight as to what the future may bring. This past call, we saw, for lack of a better word, that we thought was an anomaly in new case filings or new court decisions being levied on it. We checked it more than once, and it seems to have held true. It seems to be rather broad-based. It's not just an antitrust. It's not just an IP, but in general, litigation more broadly. We'll see whether that momentum continues. I hope it does, but I never want to declare victory or overexuberance with one observation point.
But the Q3 records of litigation filings was about as robust as we've seen in the past several years.
It's certainly encouraging on top of everything else that's taking place there. Well, we're pretty much out of time now, so I do want to thank you for joining. I just wonder if you had any closing remarks.
No. Again, thank you for everyone for joining us today. Thank you for the shareholders who continue to show confidence in CRA. We're quite excited about the year we've put under our belt in 2025 and look forward to more successes in the quarters ahead. So happy holidays, everyone. I appreciate your confidence in the firm.
Thank you so much. And thank you to all of our participants today for joining us. Everybody have a wonderful and successful remainder of the day. Thank you so much.
Thanks.