Consulting Group, the ticker is HURN. Joining us today is John Kelly, Chief Financial Officer. Now, before we begin, just a reminder, we will have time for a Q&A at the end of the prepared remarks, but you don't need to wait until the end. Feel free to just click on the button at the bottom of your screen and submit your questions throughout the presentation, and then we'll be able to get to those at the end. With no further ado, I can turn the call over to John. John, thank you. Good afternoon, thank you for joining us.
Thank you, Mark, and good morning and good afternoon, I guess, depending on where you're calling in from, for today's call. Definitely recognize there's a lot of good sessions and investment opportunities to investigate, so we appreciate everybody spending a little bit of time with Huron. I'll scroll slowly through the forward-looking statements and the non-GAAP financial measures, and then get to our lead slide here. For those of you who are not familiar with Huron, we are a global consultancy that partners with our clients on really what are often their most pressing strategic, operational, and technology matters. That part I really want to emphasize.
You know, a question that I'll sometimes get from investors is, you know, "As a consultant, are you worried if, you know, there's financial constraints or cash flow constraints that, you know, discretionary spending that's set aside for consultants could get cut, and that could impact your business?" And the reality is, a lot of what we're doing from our clients are their highest priority items. They're the most mission-critical items. Oftentimes, we're helping clients that are going through periods of financial strain, that are in the midst of a restructuring or a turnaround, that are dealing with very dated systems that are either creating security risk or inhibiting them from being able to operate their businesses the way they need to, or going through critical capital raising, M&A, things like that.
And so the pressures that are out there in the market often are actually the things that create demand for our services, just based on what we're doing for those clients. And so if you look towards the left-hand part of the screen, it gives some good information about the industries where we play. This is also how we report our segments. You can see that healthcare is about 50% of our revenue. How do we define healthcare? For us, that is large, typically not-for-profit, hospitals, healthcare systems, academic medical centers. From an education perspective, that's about a third of our revenue. How do we define education? Education for us is U.S. higher ed, and for us, the majority of our revenue comes from the top 200 research universities in the U.S., so the big institutions.
And then from a commercial perspective, that is by definition, everything that is not healthcare education, but within that segment, we've got, some real bases of strength in industries like financial services, industries like energy and utilities, federal government consulting, as well as industrials and manufacturing. So those are the primary building blocks within that segment, and where we see opportunity for growth moving forward. You can see in the call-out box at the bottom, about 43% of what we do now is digitally enabled, consulting, either implementations of cloud-based tools or deployment of our own products and analytics. And that's gone from nearly nothing, 10 years ago, certainly, so that's been a big part of our growth story.
I won't spend a lot of time on the right-hand side of the slide, just given that it's kinda old news at this point, but it is our last full year that we reported, 2023, and it was a great year for Huron. You can see 20% revenue growth, 70 basis points of margin expansion, 43% expansion of our Adjusted Diluted EPS growth. And then when you look down at where we got the growth from, it was a nice story across our segments. Our healthcare segment, which of course is our largest, grew 26% in 2023 over 2022. Very proud of that metric. Our education business grew nearly 20% last year from a full year basis. Our commercial segment grew in the high single-digit range at 9%.
And then across all industries, our digital capabilities grew 17%. So it was a strong story for us in 2023 across the board. I'll now transition to our 2024 story, which continues to be strong performance, and the stats here are comparing our second quarter of 2024 to the second quarter of 2023, but I'll also give some color on how that fits into the full year picture. Our revenue growth in the second quarter was 7%. That fits into a guide for the full year, that is in the 7%-10% range, of which, nearly all of that, except for 1%, is organic revenue growth.
Our adjusted EBITDA margins expanded 100 basis points during the second quarter of two thousand and twenty-four to 15% versus 14% a year ago. That is actually very consistent with our full year guidance, at this point, which is for EBITDA margins to expand by 100 basis points for the full year. Our adjusted diluted EPS growth in the second quarter was 22%, which, just by coincidence, also happens to be very consistent with our full year guidance at the midpoint of guidance, which is also 22% from a full year expectation. We generated $98 million of free cash flow in the second quarter, which was a record for us. Our guidance for the full year is $115 million-$145 million of free cash flow.
That, I guess, you know, could raise a question, if you're not familiar to our story, of, like, what's going on in the other quarters. The thing to understand there is, during the first quarter is when we have our annual incentive payouts, which is a big cost area for us. So it's typically very negative cash flow during the first quarter, reflecting those bonus payouts, and then strong cash flow in the second, third, and fourth quarters to arrive at our annual targets. In terms of where the revenue came from during the quarter, 9% growth in our healthcare segment, which we're very proud of our team in terms of delivering that growth, given it was 26% growth last year for that part of our business, and the biggest part of our business.
So for them to be able to continue their momentum, is very encouraging to us, and that's really reflective from a demand trend perspective of, many clients in the not-for-profit healthcare provider space going through some financial strain right now, which is good for our parts of our portfolio, like our performance improvement team, our restructuring team, our financial advisory team in that area, really helping clients going through some of those challenges. But at the same time, some clients have reached more stability in healthcare during the year, certainly compared to a year ago, and that's caused some of those clients to start making investments, whether it's in their, digital infrastructure, whether it's in strategic projects, whether it's in healthy, capital raising or M&A activity, again, for our financial advisory team.
We've seen growth now in those areas, too, where that was a little more constrained a year ago because of just the strain that was across the entire sector that has improved for some clients during the year. Our education segment, based on really what was broad demand across all of our offerings there, grew 11% during the quarter, and our commercial segment was the only outlier in terms of, they were down 6% year over year, and the commercial segment for us has been a little bit more challenging this year, primarily in the digital space, really reflecting clients who have been just slower in going forward with opportunities. The sales conversion cycle's been a little bit slower.
What we hear from our clients on that is, you know, interest rates are a factor there in terms of making big capital investments in some of the projects that we do. I think uncertainty around the economy and their own end markets has been a concern. The good news for us and so while that's kinda created some negative comparisons this year and some pressure on our growth rate this year, the good news for us is the overall pipeline remains robust. Those projects aren't going away. They're still there, and in fact, the pipeline's expanding.
Our viewpoint is that once our clients start to feel more stability, maybe if there's some improvement in the interest rate environment, that some of those things may cause some of those projects now to convert more quickly, and that there's good demand that's been building in that area, which gives us optimism moving forward. Final note on the quarter, we did deploy $34 million in share repurchases, which brings our total for the year up to nearly $100 million, $97 million, representing a million shares that we've bought year to date in 2024. I'm gonna take a detour from the financial slides for just one second, to talk about something we're really proud about, which is our people, and I think it is relevant to investors.
A question that you'll commonly get when you're a professional services company is: "Hey, your talent, it goes up and down the elevator every day. Are you worried that, you know, you could lose that talent? How do you get comfortable in your growth rates and things like that in a people business?" And the reality is, we're very proud of the culture that we've built at Huron, and we measure that culture via engagement survey scores. We measure it by looking at our attrition rate for consultants. We measure it looking at our ability and the speed with which we're able to recruit people into our platform. And all those indicators are above industry benchmarks from our perspective, and to us, that speaks to a strong culture.
And then these awards here, which we're all very proud of, you know, kinda speak to that as well, and I think that really speaks to the foundation of talent that we have and the strong culture that's gonna really support that growth going forward. I won't go through all of them. I will highlight the Glassdoor one, just because when you see the thirty-second position out of a hundred of the best places to work, that's not, like, thirty-second out of all the consulting companies or mid to large consulting companies. That's thirty-second out of all companies. And, it's self-reported by our people, which is what really makes it, so important to us and so valuable, and so we're really proud to have that score this year.
And again, we just think it's a good indication of the talent that we've built and the culture that we have as a company. If I transition quickly to our strategy, you know, I've talked about a lot of this, but we have leading positions in two critical end markets: healthcare and education. These are large industries, disrupted industries, growing industries, industries that are going through technological change. So we feel like they're really good spots to be consultants, and those are places where you know, we're differentiated in terms of the credentials and the depth that we have there from having been in those industries for decades at this point.
The credentials that we have on doing some of the most complicated projects across a number of different areas within those industries are not easy to replicate, and our consultants know that it's not a hobby to us. This is our day job in those industries, and it makes us a very attractive platform to recruit people into. Continuing to expand our offerings within those industries is a key part of our strategy. Growing our commercial presence, excuse me, the commercial segment is 20% of our revenue right now. We see great opportunity to take the capabilities that we've built across all industries, including healthcare and education, and to deploy those into the commercial segment, and in some ways, replicate the playbook that we've successfully built in healthcare and education and other key industries in the commercial segment.
And I think you're gonna see us continue to invest in that opportunity because we think there's upside for growth there. Growing our digital capability. You know, right now, and for the foreseeable future, we're able to give, you know, clean statistics about our digital revenue. But the reality is, we think those lines are gonna blur going forward, and increasingly, it's hard to find projects that don't have some element of technology, some element of analytics, data, and I think that's gonna continue. Automation, that's gonna continue moving forward, and I think you might someday in the future look and say everything Huron does is digitally enabled.
We've been investing in our digital business for the past 10 years to kind of prepare ourselves for that moment, and to be the provider of choice for our clients with those types of projects, and I think that's gonna provide a great growth opportunity for us. We think our platform is ripe for continued margin expansion. You'll see in a second, we've been able to continue to grow our margins for the past four years, since 2020, and we see clear opportunity to continue to take those stairsteps moving forward. I think a big thing there that I'd impart upon investors is we're at a different scale now than we were four or five years ago. In 2020, our revenue was in the $800 million range.
In 2024, it's gonna be in the $1.5 billion range. That leap, in terms of scale, has really created some headroom for us to both expand our margins and maintain our commitments to the street as it relates to margins, but also to be able to reinvest in the business and continue growth, and I think that's a really important part of our story. And then, you know, I'll talk about our capital allocation approach at the end, but, you know, an inherent part of our model is strong, free cash flows, having a strong balance sheet so that we can reinvest in our business. We had an Investor Day back in 2022, if you look at the right-hand of the slide, and we talked about... It was March of 2022.
We talked about expectations and being able to grow on average at a double-digit annual rate from a revenue perspective. We're pacing well ahead of that at this point. We talked about getting to the mid-teen level, 14%-16% of Adjusted EBITDA margins by 2025. We believe we're on track for that to get into that range by next year. We talked about high-teen % annual EPS growth, and we're pacing ahead there, and in terms of cash flows, we talked about being able to take 25% or 50% of our total cash flows over a five-year period of time, from 2022 to 2027, and deployed in share repurchases. We're pacing ahead there, too, just given some of the opportunities that there's been in the stock from a valuation perspective over the past couple of years.
This slide I'll just touch on quickly, and I wanna be sensitive to time and make sure that we've got enough time for questions. This just speaks to our end markets, and the really important takeaway for me is, aside from the size of some of these end markets, and for both our capabilities on the left-hand side and the industries on the right-hand side, is we've been investing, both in terms of our offerings, but also in terms of changing our operating model, to more seamlessly get our full set of capabilities into, all of our industries. That, has really expanded our addressable market within these industries.
So if you're to look at Huron five years ago, 10 years ago, and you looked at, you know, say, the pie chart of that $53 billion of potential opportunity in healthcare, we were doing a pretty narrow sliver of that total opportunity based on what our offerings were at that point in time. Based on the way we've transitioned internally, the way we've invested in growing our portfolio, we feel like we now have access to a much bigger slice of that pie within those industries, and I think that's a big part of our growth. Even if you look at the left-hand side when you talk about consulting, even there, we've been expanding our offerings.
We've moved from, you know, pure operational consulting into strategy consulting, into financial advisory consulting, as examples, which has opened new avenues for revenue growth, from a capability perspective, too, and of course, we've been building out our digital capabilities, robustly over the past 10 years. To what started as a pretty small EPM business now is kind of a full suite of, technology offerings that we have for our clients. In terms of what gives us confidence about our revenue growth in a professional services firm, where so much of our work is project work, it's those deep client relationships. You see the stat here that 90% of our revenue in 2023 came from repeat clients.
Another thing I'll get asked about from investors sometimes is: Well, if you've done, you know, a big performance improvement project or some sort of other project at a client, does that mean you're done with them? You know, it was kind of a one-and-done sort of deal, and that's really not the way our business works at all. We have clients that we've been at every single year since two thousand and two, or clients where we've got, you know, major initiatives that are multi-year that are going on, and we're not doing the same thing at those clients every year. We're doing different projects with those clients, and as we continue to expand our portfolio of offerings, that just creates more opportunities. We've seen our project size increase over the past couple of years.
Increasingly, clients are saying, "We don't just want an operational consulting project or just a digital project or just a strategy project or even managed services. We-- You know, our scope and what we really need kind of encompasses all those things." And so we're able to bring our teams together seamlessly to work on those types of projects, and that's had the effect of expanding our project size across industries and getting more parts of Huron involved in those sorts of projects. And then for the three buckets over to the right, you know, our recurring revenue in 2023 was 11%. We'd like for that to be an even higher percentage.
The challenge we've had is the consulting part of the business has been growing so fast that it's hard to increase the percentage, but we've got a solid base to grow from in terms of managed services, and that's primarily healthcare, revenue cycle managed services, as well as research, administration, managed services on the education side. We've got the leading product in terms of research, administration, and compliance in higher ed that provides SaaS-based revenue for us. We've also got analytics tools around the revenue cycle and around clinical operations within healthcare that provide SaaS-based revenue, and then we've got some other revenue types where clients are able to get access to some of our IP on more of a subscription basis that's recurring versus necessarily a consulting project.
Those are all areas of our business that we think we can grow and expand our percentage of recurring revenue. Talked a lot about revenue. Just a couple couple comments here on this slide. Based on just what we see in terms of need in our end markets, it's been a great growth story, as you can tell, from two thousand and twenty to two thousand and twenty-four guidance. We continue to be encouraged about our opportunity to continue this trajectory going forward based on the opportunities that we see in our markets. Other things, just from a timing perspective that I'll note is oftentimes you see in the fourth quarter of a year, sequentially, some decline in revenue just because of the holidays at the back half of the year.
This year, when we look at our backlog and, you know, ramped start up certain projects, I think that's gonna be a little more even between the third and fourth quarter this year, as opposed to higher in the third quarter, and a sequential step down in the fourth quarter. Just a little bit of the timing of our projects and the way it's gonna be spread this year, but just kind of a modeling note there as we look now towards the final half of the year. From an adjusted EBITDA margin perspective, you can see the trajectory that we've had since two thousand and twenty. I'll just highlight for you what we really think are the four key levers that will allow us to continue to expand our margins.
Utilization improvement, we see opportunities to more effectively price our projects with our clients. Scaling our corporate SG&A, as I referred to earlier, that's a really big item, and then another big part of our story is we've gone from a business in India that was, you know, low hundreds of employees as recently as five years ago, to now 2,000 of our employees are based globally and in India, and that provides a margin-accretive way for us to deliver, particularly on large digital transformation projects. We note in here, you know, a couple things that go the other way, that are embedded in the, what is the overall positive trajectory. To the extent our digital business continues to grow, that does tend to blend in at a lower incremental rate than our consulting business.
We think that's well accounted for in our guidance around margins, but, you know, we do wanna call it out, and then we always want to invest back in our business, and we're always gonna make organic investments, and that's what really keeps the organic growth story going, and so in some ways, that's kind of the governor on why we landed the mid-teens versus something that's even higher than that. From a free cash flow perspective, you can see the performance here from a capital allocation perspective. I'll just note, you know, we've been heavy in the share repurchases the past couple years. Think there's continuing opportunity there, so I think you will see us continue to buy back shares, but we also see increasing opportunities in terms of tuck-in strategic type of M&A.
Very rare that we acquire something that's more of what we already do, but in terms of adding capabilities, adding industries to pull our capabilities into, those are the types of things that we look at typically of a tuck-in size that we think can supplement growth in the long run. And we, in our mind, we always wanna end the year with leverage that's about two times - two point zero times or less, and so that's kind of our governor. It's important to us to maintain a strong balance sheet. And then my final slide here. You know, we're proud of the business that we've built in core industries, again, that are going through significant disruption and are very important to our economy and our opportunities that we have there.
We're excited about the opportunity to take those capabilities, expand them into other industries. We think the margin trajectory that we've been able to execute on, that there's still good runway left in that moving forward. And just intrinsically, we have a strong cash flow model business, which we think serves us well. With that, I'll open it up to questions, and while I'm doing that, I'll just flip through the reconciliation slides just so we make sure that we get those on record.
Excellent. Thank you very much. And as a reminder, everyone, feel free to click on the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen if you'd like to submit any questions. I'd like to maybe start with, for those who may not be as familiar, can you talk a little bit about some of your, some of the key competitors that you cross paths with from time to time, and maybe some of the competitive areas of differentiation that you'd like to?
Yeah. Yeah, Mark. So we often compete against the big, consulting... the big accounting firms, so the consulting arms of the Big Four accounting firms. We'll compete against the Big Three strategy firms. There's other kinda large-scaled, technology consulting or platform-type firms that we'll compete against. That, that's typically who we're going up against, and I think our differentiation is really, certainly within healthcare, education, financial services, energy. I think it's our deep industry domain expertise that we have in those industries that differentiates us, coupled with the ability, you know, despite only being a $1.5 billion company, and I say "only" comparing it to some of those mega firms that I referenced, we've got a similar broad set of capabilities.
And so what our clients tell us is our ability to seamlessly bring those different capabilities to our clients is differentiating versus maybe the experience they have with some bigger competitors, where they maybe have the capabilities, but it's a little bit more difficult to bring them together at the project level for a client, particularly clients that are, you know, say, middle enterprise in the commercial industry, for example, which is a big focus area of ours and may not be as much so for other of our competitors.
All right, and then we do have a few questions that have come in. One of which, so can you talk a little bit about maybe the margin difference between education and healthcare and maybe talk a little bit about sort of how that breaks down?
... So our margins in the healthcare part of our business, the segment operating margins blend into the mid- to upper-20% range. Education is close. It's you know, probably any it can even swing quarter to quarter to where education has even been higher in some quarters, but that typically blends to more mid-20% range. I think it can be reflective of the mix that's going on within the segments at any point in time. I think in the healthcare segment you know, oftentimes, our performance improvement projects, so those are projects where a client is under financial strain, they're concerned about their days' cash on hand, and we come in to either improve the yield on their revenue cycle or improve their cost structure.
Oftentimes, those projects, at the client's desire, can have a performance improvement or I'm sorry, a, performance-based fee element to it, which, you know, we're happy for that because that keeps us aligned and keeps us all very focused on the objectives, and it can drive great benefits for our clients. But those sometimes can be margin accretive for us, particularly as our teams do a great job of executing. So that's one reason why it might be a little bit higher in healthcare than what you see in education.
Okay, and then we do have another question that came in regarding the commercial segment. Maybe you could talk a little bit about and provide a little greater detail around the commercial segment's current demand structure. And kind of maybe... You made some commentary on this earlier, but maybe you could talk a little bit about maybe what you're seeing there and what can sort of, you know, drive improvement going forward.
Yeah, so if you look at our commercial segment, it's about two-thirds digital offerings within that segment, and then a third of more consulting. The consulting is a mix of our strategy business in the commercial industries, as well as our restructuring and turnaround business within the commercial industries. And so we've got a little bit of a tale of two cities there from the perspective that the demand for the restructuring and turnaround part of our business has been very strong, and that's a high-margin part of our business. You know, as clients have been going through strain, that's been created demand for us. On the digital side, that's where we've seen some of the caution that I referred to.
We're not the outlier, and, you know, many of your investors who maybe cover companies in the tech services space would be familiar with this. We're not the outliers in this regard. In fact, our performance has generally been at the upper end of kind of the broader competitive set within IT services consulting. And it's really related to, again, some of the just macro concerns that clients have had and just a little bit of a slower conversion cycle to kick off projects. I think for us, what's important in that part of the business to really pivot to get to growth is to continue to grow that pipeline because we know the projects are there.
We know that eventually they'll need to be done, and we can't fully control, you know, the market and some of the pressures that our clients are facing. But to the extent that they get to the point where they gotta pull the Band-Aid off on some of those digital transformation projects, being well-positioned to meet the needs when they're there, I think that, for us, is the biggest thing we can do operationally to be ready for when that happens.
Great. And then you talked about in toward the end of your prepared remarks around the capital allocation mix and what you've done historically. Maybe you could talk a little bit also, though, about maybe what you're seeing with the M&A environment, potential pipeline valuations, and the like. I think you've had a couple of transactions over the last twelve months or so, but maybe discuss a little bit about that and maybe what you see out there today.
I think we're seeing a strengthening pipeline there. And, you know, there was a period of time that I think is well documented over the past couple of years, where valuations kinda reset, and it slowed down, I think, deal making because, you know, some sellers, I think, were, you know, kind of thinking of multiples from a couple years ago. Buyers, based on just the current conditions, you know, had a different viewpoint. I think that maybe slowed down the pipeline a little bit of deals happening.
I think we're seeing more of a convergence now of those things in terms of valuation expectations, and I also think we just see kinda more activity of you've probably got ownership structures at certain, you know, potential M&A opportunities are getting to the end of their cycle now and looking to, you know, get a return and put their capital back to work. I think we're seeing all that kind of play out in the market, even in the smaller end, you know, some of the tuck-in type size acquisitions that we do, and so the way it works specifically for us is, I think when we look at our pipeline, which is bigger, it's also bigger with quality assets, quality targets, things that maybe would've been a little more hesitant a couple years ago.
I think we're seeing some pretty good deal flow of those types of opportunities now.
Excellent, and then we're right close to our the end of our time together, but I do wanna squeeze in one more, and that's around the political angle. A lot of investors certainly looking at potential regulatory changes and the upcoming election. Maybe you could sort of share some thoughts and views as to what you might see there?
We honestly, right now, our viewpoint is we don't see anything clear from a policy perspective that's gonna impact what are our demand trend lines in our key industries right now. Obviously, you know, there's certain themes that are important to, you know, both political parties in terms of, you know, things like affordability of care, access to care, things like that, that could, you know, have some impact on the industries, but nothing at this point that you'd point to that would really change the fundamental demand drivers for what we offer for our clients. So we're watching it like everybody else, and obviously there's, you know, a lot of different ways it could go as the election approaches, but right now there's nothing significant.
Like, when we sit and we look at the policy proposals that are out there, there isn't anything that we look at and say, "Oh, well, this would be very good for our business," or, "This would be very bad for our business." It's just, from our perspective, not the way it appears to be working this election cycle.
Great. Well, with that, I do wanna thank all of our participants for joining us this afternoon, and thank you,Hur on, for presenting. John, thank you very much. It was very helpful, and, I hope everybody has a wonderful and productive remainder of the year.
Thanks very much, everyone.