You just to give a brief introduction to the company-
Sure.
And then we can get into the fireside.
Sure. As Mark said, yeah, you can look at this big circle here. When I joined back in 2012, the circle was primarily that exec search. We were about $750 million in fee revenue, and about 85% of that was executive search. Then through a series of acquisitions, as well as, you know, organic initiatives, we've now grown to a company that's almost $3 billion in fee revenue, and that executive search bubble is about 30% of our business today. So we're on a journey of evolution. It's been really interesting, a lot of fun, and I look forward to continuing it.
That's great. And it's, it's interesting 'cause I mean, even though you've expanded a lot, particularly when we take a look at some of these areas, you have a lot of room to expand further.
Oh, we do. Absolutely.
And we'll get into all of that. One of the place to wanna start with is just, you know, take a look at some of the employment data that's been out there. You guys have a unique look at, like, what's occurring in the professional, as well as the upper end of the market. You also have this RPO division that handles a lot of hiring for a lot of different organizations. People are wondering, you know, hey, does it seem like the economy is getting a little bit softer? Today, we got the data from ADP, basically showed a little bit of a slowdown. When we take a look at the JOLTS data, openings are down, you know, relative to where they were. So it's still a solid labor market, but it seems like it's cooled.
How are you guys seeing it?
Yeah, I would say, Mark, well, one of the things I do is, I mean, there are obviously a lot of different statistics you can look at out there, right? And then a month later, they correct them and so on. I really, I use that stuff directionally. I look at our new business as a real barometer, whether it's exec search, Pro Search , RPO, you know, consulting, and so on. And as I see what's happening with our new business, you know, and I get a picture across the globe every day, that's really what drives our actions and the initiatives that we take. And I would say, you know, we talked on our last earnings call that we're, you know, seeing stability, and I think we're still at, you know, at that point today.
It's interesting. We take a look at, you know, some of your competitors, like Heidrick & Struggles. They've actually shown, you know, some signs of improvement. Do you think that there's a little bit of a difference in terms of what we're seeing, broadly speaking, relative to what's occurring at the upper end of the labor market?
There's probably some of that. Yeah, I think there's some of that. 'Cause I think if you look at our business, for example, and you look at the moderation that happened in an exec search versus professional search, professional search moderated more than executive search did. So I think there is some stratification happening within there. The thing that's interesting about the company that we've built, right, the moderation that I'm talking about is in our talent acquisition area. Our consulting business is growing, right? There was an article in the Journal a couple of weekends ago, Bain and McKinsey are not bringing on as many partners anymore. Some of the Big Four firms are delaying start dates. Our consulting business is growing today. Our Digital business, same thing.
We've evolved into something different than just talent acquisition, and our whole thesis has been, you know, by doing that, we're gonna create a more durable, resilient fee revenue stream, and we're seeing it play out, you know, before our very eyes now.
I mean, that's a perfect segue in terms of just... On the organizational consulting, there has been a delta between your performance relative to, you know, some of the, the consulting firms that you ended up mentioning. You know, you've been investing in that area for a while. I think it's probably beneficial, number one, just to, you know, talk a little bit about the types of-
What we do?
consulting that you do.
Sure.
'Cause not every. That's one of the questions I always get is like ... tell me a little bit more about what exactly they do from a, from a-
Yeah
-consulting perspective.
So there's really four areas, right? So first is what we call Organizational Strategy , and it's not like a business strategy, like a Bain and McKinsey you would get, but it's the next step. So once they get that business strategy, we built a business that helps companies implement that through their people, right? Whether it's, you know, job architecture or design, you know, roles, responsibilities, Success Profiles, layers and spans of control, all that. And then we have an Assessment and Succession practice that really came on the map back in 2013. So we had an assessment business ourselves, that we have I/O psychologists , PhDs, who created all of our science, but they were focused on competencies and experiences. We bought a company called PDI, and they actually broadened it to look at somebody's traits and drivers.
So what makes you up as a person? 'Cause it's all, really all about fit. And they went, they went deep into an organization. They call it the Vital Many. So we got Organizational Strategy , succession and assessment. We've got learning or Leadership and Professional Development , so we have a lot of content. So a natural synergy is you assess somebody, and then you can put them on a development program. And one of the things that's really interesting that our guys in the think tank are coming up with now is they're actually taking competencies and aligning competencies to business strategies and figuring out which competencies drive, you know, which business strategy the most.
And so as somebody says, "Here's what we're trying to do strategically," we assess their people, and we can show, okay, if you do this or, like, put them in this development program, it's a higher likelihood of driving your, your strategy. So Leadership and Professional Development , and the last area is what we call Total Rewards . So we basically touch every aspect of an employee's engagement with, his or her employer across the spectrum.
... Can you talk a little bit about how you charge for some of these, consulting arrangements?
Sure.
The scope of them, because some of them are, you know, very discrete, finite, and some you've been scaling.
Yeah.
So can you talk a little bit about that?
Sure. So it's like any most other consulting firms, when you get a proposal, you propose on a job, and you kinda cost it out based on the labor inputs you think is gonna be necessary to deliver it. You know, our rate per hour is actually pretty high. Right now, we're averaging somewhere around $430-$435 an hour in our consulting business, and historically, we really got on the map with consulting when we bought the Hay Group, and they were very, very good at selling what I would call point solutions, right? So I'm Bob, I'm a rewards guy, I'm gonna help you with your reward problem. And today, what we're doing is we're shifting all that over to more what we call integrated solutions, right?
So I would sit, you know, say I'm a partner at Korn Ferry, I would sit with you and understand what your human capital or business issues are, turn around into the firm, and bring together bits and pieces from our core solution areas into an integrated solution that we would then use to solve your problems. I would say our average deal size, you know, at one point, was probably less than $50,000 in engagement, and today, we're some are probably north of $200,000. So we're migrating up the food chain, but we are getting quite a few engagements, whether it's in Digital consulting, our RPO is very large, where we're getting multi-year, multi-million-dollar engagements with the clients now.
That's great, and I mean, you've got, you know, a strategy to really tap into your top, you know, clients and to provide a full suite of services. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, the feeding of the, you know, the orders and the advantage that you have in terms of, you know, having relationships at the C-suite through your executive search consultants and being able to refer-
Sure
... these consulting engagements in?
Yeah. So as Mark said, you know, if you go back all the way to day one, our CEO, Gary, when he and Paul Reilly started this strategy, it literally was looking... 'Cause they came from public accounting, they were audit partners, had great relationships, and they sold work in. We looked at our search partners and said, "Wow, that relationship is so much better, so much stronger, and it's untapped." So that, that's what initially drove the strategy, is trying to tap into it and build these adjacencies around it. You know, where we are today, the individuals themselves do a great job of bringing all of Korn Ferry to bear, but also, when you think about the solution sets that we have, there's so much connective tissue between them, right?
So if I'm a search partner, Mark, and I, I place you as a CEO, right? And we, you and I talk, and you say, "Hey, I've got this strategy of mine, it's kinda going this way, and my team's going that way. You know, how do you help me?" So we would come in, and we would do, sort of sit down with you and say, "Okay, let's establish the norms and, culture, anything you wanna drive." We'd assess your people, and some would be good, some would be good, but they have derailers, so we develop them, and some are never gonna get you there. So we would help you find new people. We then help you get yourself organized, right?
Boxes on a page, roles, responsibilities, all the things I talked about previously, and then we would finish up by saying, "Okay, let's put an incentive program in place to help your team drive your strategy." So right there, I just walked across all of our core solutions in one sentence, and to me, that's how easy it is to cross-sell in this business. I mean, I think we have an unbelievable opportunity to drive top-line synergies, and even with our more recent acquisitions in the interim business, right? So if I'm a, again, a search partner, and you call me up and say, "I lost my CFO," I would come in and say: "Okay, I can find you one. It's gonna take six months, but in the meantime, we can get you an interim person to help bridge that gap," right?
Then when the new person comes in, they leave and go and do another assignment.
That's great. And then, what percentage of the consultants in North America and globally would you say are fully engaged in terms of cross-selling at this point? 'Cause initially, when you first started the initiative, there were some consultants who were, like, a little hesitant, or they just-
Yeah
... wanted to stay in their lane. But it's-
Yeah, it-
... it's evolved.
Yeah, we've evolved our whole go-to-market. So initially, when we started out, we were using the search partners on the basis of the relationship I explained earlier, and then what we found is, if you put them on a bell curve, you had about 15% that were really good, and you had about 20% that really didn't care, but that's okay because we still have to pay our bills, and you got this big slug in the middle that were okay. They would respond if somebody called, but they weren't necessarily out having the conversation. So we moved down a path of bringing on these global account leaders, right? And today, we have about 65 of them, and those are individuals who prof- that's what they do.
They, they meet with clients, they understand their issues, they come back, they help to architect a solution that we bring out to our, to our client base. So I would say today, in terms of the number of people we have operating like that, you know, it's probably well over 150.
Great.
One of the things we're doing for this year coming up is we've now gone and looked at the next layer down, so the next people to advance, and we've picked 90 of them, and we're actually teaming them up with an individual who's really good at that, and then putting them through our development courses.
That's terrific. And then, can you talk a little bit about Digital and the solutions that you offer there? And how should investors understand the Digital solutions, and which ones are truly on a subscription basis at this point?
Yeah. So the Digital business is, to me, it's one of the things that I think is the most interesting, it's one that has the ability to have the most impact, on, on our company, I think, and on our stock price. And if you think about what we've done on assessments, we've assessed over 100 million executives over time, so we have all that data. Right, we have 25 million data points on pay across the globe, industries, you know, geographies, different functional areas, and so on. We've got 12,000 Success Profiles, again, across the globe, and so having all of that data is great, but if you can't do anything with it, then it's really not worth anything. So what we're doing right now is we brought a new person in to, to lead our Digital business, and he's doing two things.
One is, our assets actually sat on independent platforms, so it was a little bit clunky to use them. You had to kinda like log in, log out, log in, log out, and so he's building one platform which everything is gonna sit on. So from a consumption perspective, if you're a client or you're a consultant using it, it'll be really easy to get in and use that data. Right now, what we're driving our subscription and license business, I mean, it's not small. It's about $135 million today out of a $400 million Digital business, and we do a lot of paid database.
We give a lot into our leadership and professional development, so people will license access to those databases for a 1, 2, 3-year period of time, and even on the assessment, on the assessment front. Those are those are three primary areas today that we, we license stuff.
On the subscription side, can you talk a little bit about the pricing model?
Yeah, so it would be, you know, similar to what you buy with software. It's so much per seat that you get. It's priced out, and then based on the number of seats in an organization and the period of time which you wanna use it over, it would just translate to, you know, $2-$5 million over 3 or 4, you know, 3 or 4 years.
Great, and I mean, that business has got really high margins.
It does
... relative to, you know, the rest. So when we're thinking about that $400 million revenue business, how big do you think that could ultimately end up being, just the Digital part? And you've had some really interesting deals with really large organizations where you've sold some, you know, ten-figure deals.
Yeah.
Can you just talk a little bit about that?
Yeah, so, you know, we have, within Digital, the other area that I didn't mention earlier was we bought a company, it was called Aspen Companies , but the primary asset was Miller Heiman, which is all about sales methodology, sales effectiveness, incentive programs, so on. And we actually licensed our sales methodology to Salesforce, and they use it internally, which actually creates an interesting opportunity for us from a partnership perspective, right? We sell to, we buy from, and then we sell with, so we're actually starting to learn how to go to market with partners. But I would say the Digital business market, if, you know, in the next, you know, three to four or five years, if that thing isn't at least double, I would be really disappointed.
We have a new person that has a more of a tech subscription license background, and so I'm really excited about Mathias and what he's able to bring to that business.
That would be fantastic. And then in terms of consulting, you know, right now, we're basically running at, you know, $700 million. How big can that portion of the business be, like, three, four years out?
Yeah, I would say if... That, that has to be, you know, kinda north of $1 billion, three or four years from now. I think, the biggest issue I see with that business is just, we're, we're subscale. We just need to continue to bring on, you know, as the time gets right and things get back to where there's a little bit of sunshine outside, bring on enough bodies to continue to drive that type of growth.
Now, one of the things you mentioned is you've got this tremendous database with regards to pay for professionals, as well as, you know, the most senior-level executives. What are you seeing in terms of your data, just in terms of wage rate increases at the mid and upper end?
Yeah, I don't see... We don't see a ton. It's funny 'cause we have our comp committee meeting next week, and Pearl Meyer consults with our comp committee, and when they do their analysis, they do a trending factor. So they look at what's in the proxy, and then they apply 4% or 5% trend to it, and I always ask them why? 'Cause, I mean, I don't, I don't get annual pay raises for 4% or 5%, right? And you don't see, I just don't see a lot of movement at the in the C-suite level, especially with proxy officers. You know, down below, there was huge wage inflation coming through the pandemic recovery.
Right.
That's pretty much subsided now. I think we're back to more of a normalized state.
And are you... What are you thinking is normalized?
You know, we're seeing probably, I would say, you know, 3%-5% increases, depending on what, you know, part of the globe you're in.
Right.
On average, somewhere in that vicinity.
Okay, great. And let's talk a little bit about RPO and then Professional Search. On the RPO business, obviously, that boomed for a long period of time-
Yeah
... and particularly coming out of COVID, because first thing that a lot of organizations did when they got into COVID was they fired their internal recruiting departments-
Exactly
... thinking, "Hey, we've got no need for recruiters," and then we had all the stimulus, and business just... It was already doing well, and then it just exploded.
Exploded.
But now we're on the other side of that. How are you thinking about the RPO business?
I'm actually pretty excited to see that business come through once we, you know, get into, again, where there's a little bit of sunshine outside. I think there's two things that are impacting that business this year. One is the base has definitely seen some moderation, right? And the good thing about that business is, like, exec search is a light switch. It's either on or off. I'm gonna do it, or I'm not. RPO, we can sign a contract as to hire 10,000 people-
Does everybody know what RPO is? Just show of hands, who doesn't understand RPO?
It's a recruitment process outsourcing, so we basically take over your recruiting function, and so they may hire us to hire 10,000 people a year, and then you hit a rough patch, and instead of doing 10, they're gonna do 7,500. So it's more of a dimmer switch, that business. I'm excited to see that thing come out the other side, and Tiffany did some analysis last quarter, where we went in and looked at historical contracts and, you know, there's always pluses and minuses, but on average, we do about 106% of the contract value over time.
You know, and today, if we take where our business is, and you just go from that moderate level up to the contract value, it's about another $60 million in revenues annually, and then obviously, when you go up to the 106%, you would, you would drive more. The other thing that's impacting that business is in FY 2022 and FY 2023, if you looked at our new business, about 70% of it was what we call a new logo, so it was new to our company. 30% was renewals. This year, for the first three quarters, it's kind of flipped. It's about 70/30, 65/35 renewals versus new logos. We, we expect it to flip back the other way. We just happen to be in a period of time. There's not- not like we're losing opportunities. It's just how about the, the new business-
Your win rate is really high.
It's really high.
And-
We have a differentiated solution.
You have a very differentiated-
Yeah
... solution. Can you talk about— So, you know, last year it was... This year it's down a little bit, but last year it was around $425 million. If we think about, you know, again, going out 3-4 years, that business has grown really nicely-
It has
... over time.
It has.
Still a big opportunity, particularly internationally. How big could that business be-
Yeah, that, that-
- 3-4 years from now?
In 2, 3 or 4 years, that, that business should be double. It was growing. Remember, prior to the pandemic, it was growing high teens, low twenties-
Yeah
... for years in a row.
Yeah.
I expect it would be able to get back to that, to that level.
So, I mean, and that's also a high-margin business, relatively.
Yeah.
High.
Yeah, it's about, you know, right now it's going at around 14%-15%.
Yeah.
The beauty of that business for us, as I said earlier, is the revenue stream, right? It's not on/off, it's a dimmer switch, right? So it gives us durability and resilience.
Okay. Then, executive search, you know, there are some limits to the growth of that particular market. You're the number one player, but it's a great feeder to a lot of different-
Yeah
... other areas, but what's a reasonable expectation over 3-4 years if we take a look at your total executive search business?
Yeah, I look at exec search as more of a share play.
Yeah.
Like, the executive search market, you know, when I joined the company, was, you know, kind of $10-$11 billion. Today, it's $10-$11 billion. So it's really all about how much share you have, and one of the advantages we have with the company that we've built and the assets that we have, it gives us a competitive advantage in terms of not only retaining our people, but attracting new consultants in, and when they come in the organization, I always come up, say: "Hey, you know, welcome. How can I help? Why'd you go join Korn Ferry?" Without exception, they say, "It's because of your platform. Our clients were asking us to do these things, and at my old firm, we just didn't have the assets to do it." So we couldn't do it, plus it gave them the opportunity to make more money, right?
'Cause they're gonna do the same number of searches there in here, but they can also sell all these other services, which are gonna get paid for. So that gives us a real competitive advantage. I would look at that business market as probably a, maybe a low to mid-single-digit grower-
... a little bit better than GDP 'cause we're taking share.
And then the last opportunity, the latest area for you to get into is this Professional Search, and, you know, that was a little bit of a controversial move. It's different, because-
You mean the interim portion of pro search?
Right.
Yeah.
Just going into that level, where it's like, okay, there's some concern about, Hey, are you diluting the brand? But on the flip side, you know, whenever you acquire an organization, you're elevating their brand.
... their positioning, both with candidates as well as, clients. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about, you know, the various acquisitions that you've made-
... in professional and interim search, and how well those have fit, what the learnings have been, and how you're thinking about the long term with that.
Sure. So, and maybe, let me start with maybe a little bit of background on why we went down that path. So there's a real secular change happening in the workforce today. People, younger, individuals coming out of school and so on, don't want to be tethered to a company for their whole career. Like, I got out of college, I started at Price Waterhouse. I thought I'd spend my whole career there, right? So it's very different. We actually have clients coming to us, within our consulting organization, saying: "Hey, historically, we've been 90% perm, 10% contract. You know, we're thinking about shifting that. Should it be 75%/25%, 70%/30%?" So companies themselves are thinking along those same lines. So, you know, as we talked about it internally, it's like, well, this is a huge opportunity. The market is massive, right?
And so we decided to move down that path. What we've done, though, is the interim business that we're creating, if you were to look at our executive search and professional search, you know, in a mirror and just do it on a temp basis, it's the exact same business, right? So we're doing C-suite, we're doing professional level. A couple of verticals we're focused on, finance and accounting, IT, HR, so it's trying to stay within, you know, those particular verticals, but having businesses that look like our legacy search and exec search and pro search businesses.
And again, the interim example I gave was, if I'm contacted to do a search, I can bring a temp in real easy, put him in place, and then when the new person comes in place, that person moves on and goes to his next assignment.
And talk a little bit about the margins, and what did you-- I mean, you made four different acquisitions.
We did.
Can you talk about what you learned from each one?... and how that's gonna shape the forward path in terms of M&A for you?
Yeah. So, I mean, the biggest learning was, I mean, those businesses were really different from what we've done historically, right? 'Cause the timing of getting the ask and then filling the request has to be really fast, right? And so that was a bit unique for us, and they have a whole different system 'cause you have to payroll people, and so on. So there was a lot of learning that we went through, but by bringing it in and combining it with our professional search business, right, and then also educating our executive search, we were able to create enormous synergies.
Like, within the first, I would say, first 18 months, we probably had 850-900 new opportunities from people just talking to each other and introducing each other to, you know, to their clients and their situations. So it's created enormous synergies for us. You know, where we are right now, I think on the M&A front, you know, our CEO, Gary, is very disciplined on M&A. He won't do a deal just for sake of doing a deal. He looks for three things: It's gotta be a strategical, strategic aligned... Obviously, the math has to make sense, which for us is kinda easy to do 'cause we're common systems, platforms, processes, everything across the globe, so we're plug-and-play.
Then the biggest thing is culture, and a lot of the companies that we've bought, Gary has known for a long time. So he wants to make sure that when, you know, you bring somebody into Korn Ferry, that they're gonna say, "I don't wanna work there," and everybody leaves, and then you have nothing. So that was a lot of the, you know, the thinking, plus just taking advantage of those secular changes.
It's obviously a really big market. How much do you want to expand into that market? And, I mean, if we take a look at your, you know, your current revenue run rate in, in professional search, you know, we're basically looking at $223 million prior to the-- and that's because of the recent softening. Before that, you were almost running at $300 million.
Yeah.
So how big can that-
I would say pro search and interim should be within 3-5 years, a billion-dollar business for us. Should be a billion-dollar. If you think about the market, Mark, for professional search, right, I said, exec search was, you know, kind of $10-$11 billion. Pro search is about 5x. And to Mark's point, we were $225 million before we did the interim acquisitions. So just think about the opportunity for growth within that marketplace. It's huge.
I would imagine you'd be the preferred buyer for a lot of these organizations because they can obviously see what the potential synergies are.
To your point, when people come into our organization, you know, and you talk to them, everybody always tells me, "Man, I can't believe the access that you guys have. I never would've got that meeting if it weren't for your search partner or your consulting partner," whatever.
We only have 1 minute and 50 seconds left, so I just wanna. You've done a great job in terms of, you know, taking the margin profile up since you joined the company, and obviously, Gary's been a huge supporter, and all of your division heads have been big supporters. But when we think about the. Well, sometimes they want more money.
Yeah, exactly.
They're like, "Let me-
I say, "No, I don't get so much support.
Yeah, but you've done a great job in terms of the discipline there. Can you talk a little bit about, you know... Okay, you've achieved this year's margin targets. What - How are you thinking about margin targets from a longer-term perspective?
Yeah, so our longer-term margin targets are 16%-18%. Now, as we look at that, though, if you know, Digital does what we think it can do, it could give us the ability to go beyond that. You know, we've taken out about a third of our real estate costs. I've taken about 60% of our what we used to call business development travel costs out, and our headcount today, so if I go back to the quarter before the pandemic hit, we did $515 million of fee revenue with about 9,000 people. Today, we're about $700 million with 9,200 people. So that's a 31% increase in productivity.
I think the next leg for us, and things that we're looking at, is how do we take AI and drive it into our business to drive more efficiencies? And I don't necessarily think about that as, as a cost play, 'cause as I said before, our, our issue in consulting is just scale. And so if I can free up capacity, I've got a ton of backlog sitting there, and I can take that capacity and use it to drive revenue growth.
Great, and then lastly, let's talk about capital allocation. How do you think about that? You ended up... You've got a dividend, been an active, you know-
Buyback
... buyback-
Yeah
... program. How are you thinking about that? Particularly when we think, I mean, we add up all the, the revenue numbers that you're talking about in terms of 3-4 years, right? Company's gonna be significantly larger, margin targets 16%-19%, potentially, if Digital really takes off. You put that together, the stock is pretty darn cheap relative to what the earnings power is. How are you thinking about buybacks, capital allocation, M&A versus the buyback?
Yeah. So right now, our preference is to put money back into the company. We really believe deeply in our strategy, and so that's gonna be our first priority. Obviously, we generate a lot of cash, and so you hit a point of diminishing returns, and so we put a dividend in place. We actually did a big increase back in Q2, 'cause we benchmarked ourselves against other employment industry, and we felt our yield was too low, so we bumped that up. We'll continue to do annual increases on the dividend. And then the stock buyback, you know, we did in 2022 and 2023, about $100 million a year. This year was a little bit less. We were cautious in Q1.
Right.
Q2, we couldn't buy back 'cause we had MNPI, 'cause of the restructure. But I would, I would envision us somewhere around the $100 million, and if we have M&A, it may go down a little. If we don't, it may go up a little bit.
Great. Unfortunately, we're out of time. Please join me in thanking Bob for a terrific discussion.
Thank you.