Well, welcome to everyone to our Insperity Investor Day 2024. Thank you so much for joining us today. We are super excited to discuss what we believe is an excellent business and investment opportunity. And our purpose today is to share with you some significant information that we know is of interest to investors, but also, we are sharing our enthusiasm about where we are today and where we see this going from here. I can say after 38 years, of course, being a co-founder of this company, that I have never been as excited as I am today about how Insperity is positioned as never before. Relative to value creation, I believe we are on the front end of an incredible period of value creation. And of course, today, the focus of our Investor Day is really twofold.
We are going to reinforce the historical and ongoing strength of our Insperity business and financial model. It's been a powerful business model. In addition to that, I'm going to explain how the Workday strategic partnership and the potential that that brings to our business model is a catalyst for our growth, and it increases the likelihood, degree, and speed of success of Insperity going forward. We're going to provide an update on this partnership, how it's been established, how it's progressing, and we're going to describe the four major pillars of projects that are involved in making this successful, including our own site, which is our own corporate instance of Workday that we'll be using. Also, the client site that is a foundation of the product that we'll be taking to the marketplace together.
And then also, of course, our go-to-market strategy and the development of our own enablement and deployment team to be able to support our clients with this new solution. So we're also going to talk about the foundation of the ultimate return on investment of this investment and strategic partnership, which I know is, of course, of interest. But I really want to focus that the most important word on that screen in front of you right now is the word catalyst. A catalyst is an agent that provokes or speeds significant change and action. And the whole point there is to understand that it is our proven business model that is going to be accelerated and enhanced through this new business relationship.
So I want to start with just a discussion of the big picture about the actual joint relationship that we have, our strategic partnership with Workday. And what we'll be doing in this, in this relationship, the essence of it, is for us to go to the market together, a target market that we have identified that is underserved and a huge, tremendous opportunity. And so we are developing a preeminent solution for that targeted market of small to medium-sized businesses. You'll see me talk about this in a minute, but generally between about 250 employees up to about 5,000 employees. And this strategic partnership is attacking that target through a co-branding, co-marketing, and co-selling relationship, where we are taking our products and services, and especially this new solution, to the marketplace together. And of course, it combines Workday's HR technology and Insperity's HR services.
It's literally the best of both worlds coming together in a powerful fashion for this target market that needs exactly what we're putting together. It's literally creating a hand-in-glove fit for this target market. Now, I also believe this has potential to be competitively disruptive in the marketplace, primarily because to have this type of technology and this type of services, the amount of effort that it takes, the amount of investment that it takes, the length of time it takes to put things like this in place, all of those can be accelerated, cost reduced. We're going to be able to bring a solution to the marketplace that doesn't exist out there. And what excites me most about this relationship is that this is so client-centric.
Both companies, Insperity and Workday, have the client's best interest at heart, and we know that this service and product that we're putting together and the way we're going to be able to implement it, it brings a new opportunity into that space that is fulfilling a critical need to help those businesses be successful. So this highly scalable technology and service solution is going to be very exciting for this target market. In fact, I believe it's got the potential to greatly enhance the likelihood, degree, and speed of success of these clients. That's what makes it such a perfect fit. It's also important to note that Insperity has an exclusive partnership with Workday, to put this together, and it's an exclusive partnership for five years at a minimum. We believe it can and will be, much longer.
So let me talk a little bit about what you're going to hear today and who you're going to hear from. Our agenda is to provide our business and financial model drivers to reinforce those that many of you know about, but we're also going to talk about how this new strategic relationship affects each of those drivers, because that's what is the foundation for accelerating our success into the future. You're also going to hear from other members of our team. I know you're used to hearing from myself and Doug Sharp. We are first on the agenda, but you'll also hear from two other executives on our team, Jim Allison, who's an Executive Vice President and our Chief Profitability Officer.
And you're also going to hear from, Steve Arizpe, who is our President and Chief Operating Officer, and he will be interviewing some others, that you'll be hearing from. The others are management team members, including Tom Gearty, who played a key role in putting this relationship together. And so we're excited about what you're going to hear today from this team. So let's start at the big picture of what Insperity is really all about. You know, our mission is to help businesses succeed so communities prosper, and the way that we do that is by delivering a people strategy.
Because what we have found is many companies in the small to mid-sized business world do a great job on having a sales plan, an operations plan, a financial strategy or technology strategy, but the one part of a business strategy that falls behind in many small and mid-sized companies is a people strategy. And that's so strange, because it's the people that are the ones that are effective in putting the other strategies to work. So having a people strategy is really critical, foundational, and really does take the lid off the potential for these businesses. Now, having a people strategy, having the human resource, the HR part of your business, really refined and much more effective, has really become a top-of-mind issue in the marketplace. And I have to say that it's really through the pandemic that we all went through.
When COVID came through, it had a dramatic effect on, obviously, the people and all the changes, working from home and trying to deal with the emotional issues that were going on, and how companies could keep going. How could they compensate? How could they know what was going on in their businesses? How could they effectively communicate with people and help them do their roles going forward, even through a pandemic? I have to say, coming out of that, what we have seen is that we have this unbelievable seat at the table now that's different from it was before. It's not just the clients or the prospects, people that run and manage these small and mid-sized businesses, but it's even board members and investors.
That makes a big difference, and this marketplace is more ready than ever for a comprehensive solution, and that's what we bring to the table. Now, the beauty is that between Insperity and Workday, we both have that common mission of bringing the best to this target market space and to help these businesses succeed. And so it's a great foundation for our relationship. Now, Insperity's history was based on the fact that we started this business by creating a novel legal construct called co-employment. This was a way for Insperity to become the HR department for a small to mid-sized company by co-employing the entire current staff, including the owner, the top executives.
It was truly a disruptive new service in the marketplace, and we've been able to leverage that very successfully, because what that allowed us to do was provide all types of administrative relief, cost containment, compliance. We went shoulder to shoulder through co-employment to take on some of these employer-related responsibilities, and we moved what I call regularly scheduled business interruptions from the client's point of view, so they could manage their profit opportunities, grow their business, and not have to deal with so much that are stumbling blocks along the way. We were also able to, with this relationship, to provide benefits that would level the playing field so that these smaller and mid-sized companies could attract and retain key people and optimize both the individual and team performance through getting this part of your business right.
So it's leveling the playing field for small businesses, even sharing those liabilities. Now, traditional employment, the way people have always done this, we have gone into as another offering, and I'll explain in a moment, and that was to begin more of a customer-for-life strategy, to meet companies where they are and help them move through their lifespan more effectively. So from the big picture, it's a proven business model. We have a history of capitalizing on a significant, vast market opportunity. We do that through a premium service and brand that we bring to the marketplace, and we have this growth engine that is a valuable asset in attacking this marketplace.
We have a history of balancing both growth and profitability through taking this service out to the marketplace, but being a premium brand and pricing at a level that manages our profitability, and we don't sacrifice one for the other. Now, it is a model that's designed to produce double-digit growth. So we have a model for growth that produces double-digit, 10%-12% unit growth, that produces faster growth in profitability at the gross profit level, and then even higher rates, over 20%, in the growth of our Adjusted EBITDA. That is kind of the model. Now, this new strategic partnership literally enhances that model. It's not a new model.
It is a catalyst to have our basic model grow, because it drives three of the key drivers, our sales, our retention of clients, and our pricing and client profitability drivers. So this is a powerful new relationship. Now, this is one time where we're making a significant investment. We're gonna talk more about that, but it doesn't change our view of managing growth and profitability over the long haul. It just should reinforce how much we believe in this investment, because it's gonna have such a powerful effect on the business. So let me talk about this vast market opportunity and how things look going forward under this new relationship. So we generally target companies that have, you know, 5 to 5,000 employees, and that's about 60% of the number of people that are employed in the marketplace.
It's about over 80 million people that are employed, and as you can see from this picture, only about 8% of those are currently on a co-employment solution. So for our core business, do we have a vast market opportunity? We most certainly do. But let me explain that we started our business on the less than 100 employee group. That was 5 employees to 100 employees, or about 28% of the marketplace, which today represents about 36 million employees. We moved up over time because we were helping businesses become successful. They were growing beyond the 100 employees, and ultimately, we ended up moving into this other group of 100 to 5,000 employees, and we've been successful bringing products to that market.
But this new relationship is gonna make a huge difference, and we have a long way to go, only at 8% in the core market, and the opportunity is extensive and vast, as you can see. But what I wanna do is drill down a little bit on this group that represents the 100-5,000 employees, 'cause that becomes the target now for both of our firms, both Workday and Insperity. Workday's coming down market, we're going up market, and this represents a marketplace with 31% of all the employees that work in the marketplace. Now, the reality is, if you look at these two, I've just kind of put a split in here between firms that have 100-500 employees and groups that are from 500-5,000.
What you'll see there, that splits it to 13% and 18%. As we sit here today, the reality is that Insperity has a better likelihood of success with companies with 500 or fewer employees, or the blue-light blue section, and Workday has more opportunity and more success at the top end of that space as they're coming down market. Both entities together are producing a solution that optimizes what this space really needs. We know what this space needs. This space needs both the premium technology and the premium service, needs to have that in combination to have an effective people strategy that helps their business succeed. We believe that this new solution will be the best fit for the highest number of clients in this space, and so we're excited about how this is going to market together.
It has significant possibilities for both companies in sales, retention, and taking their businesses to the next level in this target market. Another way to look at it is to kind of put it in the life cycle picture that you see on your screen now. You can see that it shows that the HCM business, the Human Capital Management business, that technology business, of course, that Workday is the leader in, is at a more mature phase of development into the marketplace than the PEO business or Insperity's co-employment world. So we are in a more of an early adoption period. They're more of in a later adoption period. What's interesting is they started at the top end of the market with the largest companies, and so their late majority are smaller businesses in this target market that we're speaking to.
Now, in our business, we start at the bottom of the market, the 5-100, and our early majority is now moving up into this space. So here we are together, coming at this target that is the most, very important target market for both companies. Now, it's exciting because as we go up market together, what we're bringing, as you can see on this screen, this concept called software with a service. We have always believed that having great technology is important, but we already know that the smaller the company is, the more they need outside service support from HR and technology professionals to even use technology effectively to have a powerful business, or people strategy in your business.
So we have, as a company with 4,400 corporate employees, we are already a highly scalable HR services organization, and we have some powerful technology that I wanna discuss that was designed for the smaller end of the space. But we know for sure, and it's common knowledge, that Workday's technology is at the very high end and is the highly scalable technology solution. So what we are bringing together for this target that I have here on the screen, we're bringing now an, a level of scalability in both technology and service that is not in the marketplace today. Now, when we look at the target market, if you put all businesses, all 7 or 8 million small and mid-sized companies, into this box on this screen, we would put them in categories by...
vertically, we'd put them in industry categories, and then horizontally, you can see on business success, how successful they are. And I use the term, you know, struggling, surviving, producing, and thriving at the very top. But it's important for us to analyze risk to target our space because we have a co-employment relationship. And so our efforts over the years is focused on being a trusted advisor to the what I call the best small and mid-sized companies that are in the top right-hand side of this picture. And so we have about 35% of the industry categories or so 65% of the industry categories are in the box, 35% are not. And then we target the companies that are already have a degree of success, 'cause we don't wanna take financial risk when we're taking so much employment risk.
When I describe employment risk, I'm talking about a composite scoring that we do internally about the type of risk that a company has, anything from safety risk to litigation risk, things like average pay rates and turnover rates. Turnover rates, of course, are a risk in the human resources space. So all these different types of risk are assessed, and we're in that top right. So that's the demographic profile, but there's also a psychographic profile that we're after. We're after companies that really care about their people. We're after companies that understand that if you get the people part right, it's gonna accelerate your business. So it's a psychographic profile of companies that care about their people, care about taking their business to the next level through the role people play.
Now, that's interesting because people that are seeking out the Workday solution fit that same profile. They see Workday as the premium brand in the space, and they're investing to get the people strategy of their business right, to do a better job with and for their people. So we have not only a common demographic profile that we're after in this target market, but there's a commonality to the psychographic profile as well. Now, so we have always, in our history, looked at over 600,000 out of the 7 million businesses as a very good fit with our service. Now, with this new solution, we do see an expansion to that, and we see that we're now even a better fit for a higher percentage of those companies in that space.
So we do see that we'll possibly even have some companies that will be interested, that maybe were of a profile where they had some certain types of risk that we'll be able to tolerate because of this new solution. Maybe they won't. For example, maybe they won't want to have their own, they'll want to have their own benefit plan, not a benefit plan with us. That puts them in a little different category, 'cause if they're more technology-focused, we'll be able to serve them without having that type of risk. So there's no question in my mind that this both makes us a better fit for more of our target client base and also expands that base in, to a degree.
Now, in our world, market by market, what the output is, what the outcome is, is that you see this type of variety of spreading of our client base across certain industry categories. And so this is kind of replicated market to market, and so it we don't have the type of risk you have with high-risk accounts. And so we currently have, you know, over 12,000 clients on our co-employment Workforce Optimization solution, many other clients on our traditional employment solution. Interestingly, Workday, of course, is also somewhere around the 12,000 client range. Now, theirs are much bigger than ours are, so the employee base is a lot bigger.
But our margin per employee is a lot larger than theirs is, so the companies think alike on this issue of per employee per month or per employee per year and what we earn. So, there's a great match and a great opportunity for the two together. Now, let me also go on to a couple other things here. But, we need to just move that slide 'cause it's not working right this second. Let's see if we... There we go. Now it's working. So let me talk about the solutions very quickly. We have comprehensive HR solutions today, both a traditional employment and the co-employment solution. So these two options are to meet prospects where they are and take them through more of what I call a customer for life strategy.
So our WX solution, Workforce Acceleration, is leveraging the investment we're already making in having such a large sales staff all across the country. This literally was a pipeline for our co-employment business that's working very well today. Now, adding the new solution, I want to make sure you understand that what we are doing here is we are embedding the Workday HR technology as our client-facing technology within our service. So it's our product going to the marketplace to this target, but it is embedding Workday's HR technology. So it's built on top of our Insperity PEO co-employment compliance platform, and so that's what's taking some time and effort to get this right. It's a new co-employment version of our service with a different client-facing technology.
Now, I want to make sure we understand that our Premier technology that we built for the clients, less than 150 employees, is a perfect fit for them, and we intend to keep building that and making it better and better for them. And so our platform upgrade closes what I would call perceived gaps for the larger clients that we originally didn't build our software to develop. And now it's a perfect, immediate step up in fulfilling that gap and improving both our sales and retention to that or the, to that type of company with more employees, with by bringing scalable, automated workflows, seamless integrations, a user experience designed for that size account. So, let's go on to the next slide, please. It looks like this is not working for me yet... Okay, so let me just talk about how Insperity is different.
It really depends on how you look at Insperity from where you're coming from. If someone looks at us and says, "Oh, you do payroll and, and administration for companies, you look like a business services company." Some of us look and say, "Wow, you provide benefits to all those employees and their families. It's more like an insurance service." Now, some companies look at us and say, "Wow, look at the technology you're providing in the marketplace to these small business. You guys have a powerful software services company." What we are is an amalgamation of those three, and all three of those powerful components are delivered as an advisory service to our target companies. It is a powerful category of one, highly scalable, customizable HR service delivery engine, and now we're adding the exclusivity of the most scalable HR technology to that, model.
Now, our clients always say it the best. When they say, "What's the difference of Insperity? What's our competitive advantage?" They describe it as the breadth, the depth, and level of care. The breadth of our services, we do so much. The depth of those services, we do so much behind the scenes that they don't have to deal with, that is for their benefit. But what they see and feel the most is the level of care that is the touch of our people, helping them do the best for their team and for their people. Now, we do this, the way we have grown this business is we have in place a national platform with sales and service together in over 100 offices across the country. We have a growth engine that's designed for consistent, predictable growth.
It's not impervious to the things that happen in the marketplace, but it's a powerful engine that we have really developed in a great way. Over 750 business performance advisors are out there working with clients day in and day out, that call on accounts with fewer than 150 employees. And then those, that group also provides the warm leads to our BPCs, business performance consultants, that bring on our larger accounts and help those accounts develop their people strategy. So this is a pipeline in the new strategic partnership to... This is actually the pipeline for the partnership to attack that target space. Now, very quickly, how do we go to market? I mentioned the business performance advisors, and our whole system for recruiting, training, compensation, management support is a powerful engine.
But our marketing program is also very powerful and successful. Our marketing programs contribute to more than 60% of our sales production through digital, social, and, of course, now, AI-driven lead production, also loyalty, referrals. Our referrals from our clients are a tremendous engine. And, of course, we have had channel partnerships historically, and now we're adding the new Workday strategic partnership. And, you know, I want to just use one example. We've developed a powerful partnership with the insurance, sales, and agency community over the years, and we have significant lead production through that organization, that we started through UnitedHealthcare, working together with them. In this strategic relationship, we know what we can do and how to go about getting this in place for a powerful go-to-market strategy.
In summary, I just want to say the key thing to remember today is that the Workday relationship is a catalyst, a catalyst for the current business model that has been tremendously successful attacking this marketplace. It's a catalyst for growth through co-branding, co-marketing, and co-selling. It's a catalyst for profitability through this new solution and the value pricing and other revenue stream potential. In addition to that, over the longer term, the operating leverage in sales and technology is new to our business. We've had operating leverage on the service side, but we see, for long-term potential, a new level of operating leverage in the business. Most importantly, it's a catalyst for our return to shareholders in the form of improving our likelihood, degree, and speed of success at our historical market that we are capitalizing on.
So before I finish now, I want to introduce a video for you because the thing that makes me so confident about our future and so excited about it is the commitment of leadership on both sides, both Workday and Insperity, and you're going to hear more about that later. But we have followed through on just the organizing to get this done, and the resources and relationships that have already been established are making a huge difference. But what I'd like to show you at this point is, on the day that we signed this agreement, we literally were negotiating up to the point in the morning when people were getting on the plane to head our way. And when we finalized it, very quickly, we said, "They're coming here to sign.
You know, what we need to do is we need to have..." Really, there were hundreds of us involved in actually bringing this together on both sides. And so we wanted to make sure we had the people who worked on this strategic partnership to witness the signing of these forms, and so I want to show that to you. This has been an amazing effort to get all the way to this day, where I've got these two little pieces of paper in my hand for signatures from these two CEOs that will do that at—as, as a celebration together. I wanted you to be involved in it, but I want to make sure you know how much I appreciate what you've done... to get us to this stage.
We've had a great day so far, and we've got to learn more and more about the collective leadership team here at Insperity. If you were sitting in this room with myself and Paull, you would understand how powerful this partnership is today and will be going forward. Because the one thing that became super apparent from the minute we walked through the door this morning is that we are absolutely aligned on values and our culture. We are two companies that have tremendous brands. Our brands are respected, our brands are trusted. Going forward, from this day, we'll be servicing a market opportunity that is immense, that gets both Workday and Insperity into new market segments, and we couldn't be more excited about that.
So what this is gonna do is we're gonna be able to go to the marketplace and increase the likelihood, degree, and speed of success for these small and emerging growth and mid-sized companies, and it's gonna make a huge difference out there in those communities.
On behalf of Workday and our 19,000 workmates around the world, thank you for your partnership. We look forward to the future together.
Thank you so much. So as you can see, Carl said it well, and we are off to a great start. You're gonna hear all about that today. The next section, I'm gonna pass it on to Doug Sharp, to talk about how this business model has produced such a powerful financial model, and how this new relationship will even enhance that. Doug?
Okay, Doug Sharp, Executive Vice President of Finance and CFO. As Paul mentioned, you know, we talked about our proven business model that's reflected by really the proven financial model that we have. And what we're gonna do, over the next few minutes, is review the key drivers and the metrics of that proven financial model, and how we believe the Workday partnership solution is a good fit and a catalyst for further growth. So if we take a look at the growth and profitability, each of the two factors and the strong cash flow. First of all, I think Paul mentioned this, we've been all about balancing growth and profitability along the way. And it's been a key component of how we've operated the business.
If we look at some of the other components of growth and profitability is, first of all, we're targeting prospects that want a premium offering, not a save-you-money type approach. What that results in is clients that are typically financially stronger than the small business marketplace as a whole, or those looking for a save-you-money, that typically shop from year to year. What that results in is higher client retention for us, even in periods where the economy may be weak. Typically, our clients who are place a value in HR do have that higher client retention and stay with us longer. We also feel like if we're offering a premium offering to clients that wanna invest in their people, that typically, the higher—there's typically higher growth through hiring, net hiring in our client base.
So that's another strong feature of our growth. One thing we really love about the model is the recurring revenue model. We're not starting from scratch, selling every quarter, to achieve our revenue growth. It's really about this recurring revenue model. We'll get into some of the drivers as it relates to sales, client and client retention, and the net hiring by our client base. The strong feature, we believe, of the model is the operating leverage over the long term, and we do that through service efficiency. Obviously, implying technology and improving and enhancing technology along the way, where you can have some automated services, which our clients like to do. I mean, some of us, they wanna do self-service, and that generates more operating leverage.
Obviously, we have some further operating leverage in the back office of the office system, where in the gross profit area, finance areas, things like that, where you can get leverage off of the growth. On the other side of the picture here is really the strong cash flow generation. It's a very capital-efficient, cash-efficient business. It's a very short billing-to-cash cycle, where we're billing and collecting in connection with the payroll. We're not holding a bunch of receivables out there that we have to collect at a later date. Another thing relative to the strong cash flow is our low CapEx expenditure. We're a sales and service company, and therefore most of the CapEx investment is on the technology side.
Some of it is when we expand into open markets, we do lease our sales offices and service centers, and there's some CapEx associated with that. But at the end of the day, it's a very strong cash flow model. We can grow organically through the growth of the BPAs. We talked about some of the investments we have to make here... But it has positioned us for a very historically, a very strong return to our shareholders through our dividend and our share repurchase programs. Generally speaking, you know, we have a regular cash dividend. Typically, what we're looking at there is targeting a 2% yield or so, and a payout ratio of 40%-45%, in that range.
Share repurchases, you know, we've and we'll get to this on a later slide, purchased quite a few shares over the course of our history, sometimes more so than others, through tender offers and, buying more opportunistic at certain times. But typically, we put in a share repurchase program about $20 million-$30 million a quarter, and it's typically structured such that it does pick up and weighted a little bit higher, should there be dips in the price, and taking advantage of that. But all that, I think, leads to a strong model and historically, a model that investors have been interested in. Well, so our financial model, it really all begins with strong growth, and our worksite employee growth.
If you look at our 10-year compounded annual growth rate for worksite employees, it's 9%, but that's through various economic cycles, but also what we think and hope is a one-time pandemic. If you look at the 5-year period pre-pandemic, the compounded annual growth rate of paid worksite employees is in the 12.5% range or so, and that's more sort of where we wanna be on a long-term basis. Now, obviously, there's 3 drivers to our worksite employee growth, more on the controllable sides. One is, less on the controllable side. Obviously, it all begins with sales. The front of the ship for sales is the growth in the number of BPAs.
You can see over 10 years, the growth rate there has been 9%, pretty much matching with the 10-year CAGR on worksite employees of 9%. But we are constantly looking at ways to improve that sales efficiency and to get leverage out of the sales force. And so, we do that by growing the sales force, but also, looking at BPA tenure, keeping the turnover as low as possible, such that BPAs move up in their tenure. Their quotas are higher as they reach certain tenures, and obviously, they get compensated for being in those higher tenures. We are also looking at different BPA commission programs as a way to improve sales efficiency. Obviously, marketing and handing off warm leads to the BPAs can also improve that.
But we also believe that the Workday partnership will improve this sales efficiency number, and we'll get into that a little bit later. But particularly, obviously, selling into the mid-market and into our emerging growth segments. A second driver is client retention. It's really your most efficient, cost-efficient way of growing the business. You're not having to replace employees with new sales and the effort and the money that it takes to grow the sales portion of it. And so I think one thing you've seen over the 10-year period is an improvement in client retention from around 80%-83%. A lot of that has to do with how we have handled the mid-market service, sales and service operations. They are... Obviously, on the sales side, you're selling to a different constituency.
You're selling to, you know, a CEO, someone over the sales, someone over the HR departments, the CFO, typically, versus a small business, where you're typically selling just to the small business owner. And so we've come a long way in learning that sales process, but they'll also, they're serviced very differently. They have different needs. We'll see that when we talk about the Workday partnership, and we have a separate service organization that attends to those needs, and that's another reason for the improvement in the client retention over that ten-year period. The more non-controllable piece of our growth drivers is what's happening within the client base about whether there are net hiring or net layoffs going on with the base.
You know, obviously, our target prospect base is those that are thriving, growing, and looking for ways to, a value add type, buy as far as the HR, services that we can provide, and not more of a save you money type deal. As a result of that, we typically get higher hiring within the small, mid-sized community base than this, than that as a whole. You know, obviously, it can be... It can vary, at times, depending upon the macroeconomic environment and also the tight, tight labor market. You go through cycles in that, but we feel like and where we are today, you know, typically in a normal type environment, it adds about 4 or 5% or so of our growth, because of the reasons that I just discussed.
Where we are today, with more of a weak economy, with inflation out there, and, you know, still somewhat of a tight labor market, and access to financing being a little bit less at this point. There, as you noticed from our recent earnings calls, there has been less contribution from net hiring within the base at this point. It's, you know, we talked about in the last half of 2023, that it was really a net negative, going into January of 2024. We saw a little bit of improvement in January and February of this year, but it's really going up and down, and, I would say in total, we're sort of, at about a break-even point on, on that contributor of our worksite employee growth.
Moving down from growth, it's all about balancing growth and profitability, and it really starts with our gross profit area. This is the area that's focused on pricing along with direct cost management. I think one thing you see in the chart on the left there is the improvement in that gross profit per employee number from the $257 in 2013 up to $277 in 2023. It's been in that 270-280 range now for some recent years or so. Obviously, a lot of that has to do with meeting our pricing objectives, which is to match or exceed our primary direct costs, which are benefits, workers' comp, and unemployment taxes. Pricing...
Not only having a pricing for the HR service fees that we provide, but also earning a management fee for managing these direct cost programs. We put a lot of work in managing the employee benefit plans, and even on the unemployment tax side, where certain unemployment claims can be contested, et cetera, and obviously on the workers' compensation program. Jim will get into a little bit more of the details when he gets in this particular area. The third component of gross profit is in the additional services. One thing we want to point out here is the co-employment model obviously has some insurance aspects to it, the employee benefits, the workers' comp, which introduces some risk component to that particular model. On the additional services, we're looking to add, like workforce acceleration.
You know, that's an area where there is a non-risk addition to gross, to gross profit. And so our current focus is definitely on continuing to grow that Workforce Acceleration business. It allows us to sell clients that don't normally fit into the PEO model for risk purposes. There's some that want to just get a taste of the Insperity service offering and are a good candidate for migration into the higher margin, and what we feel is a more complete offering, in the PEO model. So you take, really, you take those things together. Driving the growth, the objective is in the, you know, low to mid-double digits, getting further expansion in our gross profit area and the gross profit per employee, and generating growth in Adjusted EBITDA.
So we talked about, for over the 10-year period, a 9% increase CAGR in worksite employee growth, generating a 14% increase along those same line in adjusted EBITDA. And I do have to point out that, obviously, the pandemic caused quite an interruption during that period. Again, if we look at the 5-year period, 2014-2019, prior to the pandemic, it was a 24% increase in EBITDA. We also look at our margins, and we looked at them as a percentage of that gross profit, which is really a net proxy for our net revenue number. And if you compare to some of our peers out there, that's the best measurement, is looking at that gross profit line.
So when you look at the margins, adjusted EBITDA, the percentage of gross profit, you can see the improvement from 23.5% up to 34%. So improvement there for all the reasons that I've discussed. And we also look at it on a per-employee, per-month basis, going from $60 in 2013 to $94 in 2023. So we talked about the fact that it is a very cash-efficient model. If you look at a 10-year CAGR in our free cash flow of 15%, very strong free cash flow, low capital expenditure needs, and therefore it allows us to provide very strong returns to our shareholders through our regular dividend program, and at times, some special dividends, and through our share repurchase program.
If you look over the 10-year period, that's about almost $1.6 billion of monies that we have returned to our shareholders through those two programs. And I think even sort of a more remarkable metric there is over those 10-year, the average return on capital as a percentage of free cash flow is 87%. So we're obviously focusing, you know, on returning cash and strong returns to the shareholders. It obviously has to be balanced with growth in the business, and now we're moving into this Workday investment in the Workday partnership. And so we still expect, you know, the dividend program to be ongoing, and we'll be looking at how the share repurchase program fits into our investment in the Workday partnership.
Okay, so let's shift a little bit into the the partnership between Insperity and Workday. I think the bottom line is we're taking a very strong financial model and adding a catalyst for unit and earnings growth with the Workday partnership. I think one question we wanna answer is, what are each-- what's each party contributing to the investment in this partnership? So we'll start with the Insperity investment. You know, I talked about, I think it was a couple earnings calls ago, about a rough estimate of an incremental investment that we're making in the $150 million range over a 5-year period. That's primarily gonna be running through the P&L versus capitalizing those costs. So obviously, that's been part of the guidance, earnings guidance that we provided for this year.
We also talked about the fact that the investment will be weighted heavier in the two years, where you have more of the development effort taking place. And I think that's also demonstrated by, when you look at the breakdown of that incremental investment into the 4 main pieces here, about almost 50% of the investment is in the client tenant development. And as an example, we'll get into some more detail also on, on the work we're doing there. But, you know, as an example, feeding data between Workday and our proprietary PEO system, where you have all the compliance. Being a PEO, you also have the pricing module within the PEO, and even the funding element of, funding payroll and billing and, and getting that money back from the clients.
That's part of the work that goes on there. Another 25% of our costs will be in internal business resources, and I think, as you would expect, building up our deployment and enablement side of this partnership. Obviously, investing in sales and marketing and some operations, back-office operations group. As you would expect, even post-initial development, there will be ongoing, recurring expenses related to the client tenant and the post-development. That's another 25%. Last but not least, although it's a smaller component of the investment, of 5%, we are implementing corporate Workday for our corporate tenant development. We learn a lot. This will come on in a sooner timeframe than the client tenant development.
We're gonna learn a lot during the experience of installing that corporate tenant, so it's a great learning experience. And also, you know, we wanna practice what we preach, and we feel like it's a very good fit for our 4,400 or so employee client. And we'll talk about where we are on that timeline, but we've already made some pretty progress along those lines. So that's really our side of the Insperity investment. On the Workday investment, I think it's pretty obvious that they're delivering a fully developed premium HCM product, one of the best, we feel, the best out there. You know, what was the alternative? Our internal development of a similar product, where they have such a large head start, it would have taken us a very long time to get to market and a pretty costly investment.
So them bringing that to the table, you know, is huge to their side of the investment. What they've also committed to is resources, providing resources to make product modifications to this, to their HCM product that is specific to our partnership solution. So there's certain things that we have to do between us to get this partner solution up and running and launched, and they have committed resources to that. Another feature is, with their product being the premium HCM product, obviously, throughout their years, they've had releases from time to time about ongoing enhancements to their product, but also maintenance enhancements. That's on them. So they, they'll be investing the dollars as it relates to keeping that Workday product current and improved and handling any maintenance issues.
Another investment they, they've made, and this has been more recent, is developing quite a few resources and training our deployment and enablement resources. It's a lot of work for our people, going through all the detail and workbooks, et cetera, and learning you know the implementation and deployment and implementing this Workday product. We've spent a number of weeks, months between the two different parties. We've come a long way there, and I think we've made great progress there. But obviously, they've spent some resources enabling us to do that. We'll get into this a little bit, I believe, in our marketing in our panel discussion, but obviously, the co-branding, the co-marketing, the co-selling...
You know, will bring a big benefit to our business, not only in selling the mid-market and emerging growth, but even if you have yourself aligned with Workday out there in the marketplace, we even feel like that could help out even our core, smaller sales efficiency. And the last thing being the sales lead flow, and we'll get into the discussion a little bit later, but, you know, some of the sales, warm sales lead flow from them to us, where we can sell our PEO services along with the Workday product. Okay, so that's sort of the investment we're making, and Workday is making on the partnership. What are the key drivers to the return on investment? Well, sales efficiency, client retention, and pricing and profitability.
I would say the sales efficiency and the client retention, we could see improvement there before the launch of the product itself. As far as the sales efficiency, you know, obviously, mid-market is needing more of a sophisticated HCM product to sell into these larger clients. And having that out there gives us the ability to sell that even prior to the launch, because you're selling to a mid-market client that ultimately wants that solution out there as they continue to grow. It's really the same on what we call our emerging growth clients, those in the 50-150 range that have every intention on growing into the mid-market space, and they're always looking way down the road and, you know, what kind of solutions you'll have there.
Having this Workday product should also help out selling into that particular segment. It's really the same things, factors that impact the improved client retention. You know, if a mid-market client is growing, now needs a more sophisticated HCM product. We've got the product there. We talked about earlier this year in our year-end transition, in our guidance, we did have some large clients leave for that particular reason. And we've had some subsequent calls to them, and we can get into this when Roger and the service team talk. But you know, that would be a way of obviously keeping some of those clients. And client retention is our most effective, cost-effective driver.
You don't lose a large client, you're not having to replace it with 20 small clients and go through that whole sales effort and cost. So that's, that's very important to the business. The third factor being the potential to improve profitability. And so Jim will get into this, but it gives us the potential to have higher enrollment fees because we're gonna be implementing the product on behalf of our clients, on higher ongoing service fees for their use of the product. And another way we feel we can improve profitability is you have larger clients, a longer client tenure, you get further operating scale and further operating leverage. I wanna spend a little bit of time, and this is really just a sensitivity table, to talk about...
We talked about the three different components, and let's take a look at the sales efficiency and how it affects our model. We define sales efficiency as sales per BPA per month. We always have an ongoing effort to improve sales efficiency, whether it be through our marketing efforts, our selling process, the commission programs to incent our BPAs and sales management. But on top of that, we really believe the Workday partnership solution can improve that sales efficiency. So this is a chart really to show the sensitivity of sales efficiency on growth, and ultimately on how it could impact our adjusted EBITDA and keeping the other growth factors constant, like retention and growth in the base. That we keep that just constant, and how can this improve it?
I think the bottom line is for every 10 basis point improvement in sales efficiency, you're getting about a 2%, excuse me, improvement in worksite employee growth over a five-year period. By the time you hit year 5, it's about a $50 million improvement for every 10 basis point improvement in sales efficiency over that five-year period. Rather material, and it's always been, again, a key component of the business model. Same sort of thing on the client retention side. You know, we can move client retention, for those same reasons, up, up, you know, 2%.
You would expect about a 1.5% improvement, everything else being equal, 1.5% improvement in average growth over the 5 years and by the 5-year period. When you hit that 5-year, about a $35 million improvement in EBITDA. Okay, so I think, you know, just wrapping up, I think we are very confident that we have a very strong financial model for sustained long-term earnings growth. I want to remind everybody that this Workday partnership is an offensive move. It's not a defensive move. It's all about the potential to accelerate our growth because it provides an opportunity for improved sales efficiency, client retention, and additional revenue streams off of the Workday partnership and operating leverage.
So we're feeling very good how it fits into the long-term plan, and we're very excited about it. And at this point, I'd like to pass the call on over to Jim Allison.
Hey, good morning. It's good to speak with everybody today. My name is Jim Allison, and as I get started this morning, I'd like to just give you a little bit of background about myself. I've been with the company for 27 years. I spent my first 14 years with the company in the finance department in a variety of roles, working mostly for Doug Sharp. And next 7 years after that, I headed up our pricing and cost analysis team. Our focus there was on setting new and renewing pricing for all clients, and also the client renewals process, as well as all the analytics and data that was used by both the direct cost side of the business and the revenue side of the business to make sure we were all using the same information.
Over the last six years, I've added to that role, the responsibility for all of our benefits programs and the related services of those programs, including the healthcare, workers' compensation, and retirement areas. I have two topics for today. The first is, to talk about a little bit more detail about the proven approach that we have to managing our pricing, our direct cost programs, and our profitability. Then the second topic is, the enhancements that we expect from the Workday strategic partnership. Doug showed this slide, a few minutes ago. Gross profit per employee growing from $257 ten years ago to $277 last year. The additional services are a relatively small portion of the overall gross profit, although they're growing quickly now, and, especially because of Workforce Acceleration.
But, the total service fee, which is the PEO pricing, that is the biggest part of our gross profit, and it really breaks down into two categories. The first one, I'm gonna focus on is in the middle, you know, the management fee or the surplus that we earn from our direct cost programs. That's a really important part of us providing sustainable long-term profitability. And over the last 10 years, that management fee has grown by about 200 basis points. On the HR service side, those have declined somewhat over the last 10 years, really for two strategic factors. The first is the significant mix change related to our success in the middle market segment. In 2013, middle market represented about 19% of our total worksite employees.
Last year, that was up to 26%. Those clients, mid-market clients, typically have a little bit lower pricing on a per-worksite employee basis, but a more similar level of profitability due to the efficiency gains that we have with larger accounts. So our, you know, we've also, the second part of why that's gone down a little bit is the pricing policies that we've put in place. We've really seen a growth in acceptance of the PEO market. And as we've done that, we have made pricing changes to try to gain market share, as well as enhance our customer lifetime value by keeping customers for a longer period of time.
So our overall goal, you know, historically and moving forward, is to match or exceed our direct cost trends with pricing increases, and that really happens in two ways. The first way we do it is try to bend the cost trends down. Every dollar that we don't have to pass through to a customer is beneficial to the company and to them. So we do that through very active claims management, you know, a variety of ways. So we're managing claims as they come through the door. We're also engaging employees in well-being programs, in care management programs, return to work programs, loss prevention and safety programs, all aimed at trying to reduce the level of and cost of claims.
But we also try to bend the trend down by focusing on strategic changes to our program structures, to our plan design and program design, and then we also use our pricing methodologies to influence that. All of those changes would be aimed at incentivizing the behaviors of our clients and employees to move towards more efficient, you know, use of costs. When we set that out at the beginning of each year, and we have a plan a couple of years in advance, we constantly monitor and adjust and forecast our direct cost trends as we go through the year. And as a result of that, we adjust our pricing targets and then we apply those changing pricing targets to new client sales and client renewals as we go through the year, month by month.
This helps us to, you know, reduce the level of long-term volatility overall. The pricing methodology is a really key part of our long-term success, and it's really focused on three areas of focus. The first one is in the risk assessment area. We use a very holistic and multifaceted risk assessment process that spans all the different HR-related risks that we manage. Our goal in that process is to attract and retain clients that fit our risk profile, that reduce the risk for adverse selection, and sustain a solid demographic profile of clients and worksite employees over time. If we do that well, which we have over time, it allows us to focus on long-term pricing stability for clients, and that's something that's very unusual for small and medium-sized clients in the marketplace. Generally speaking, time is our friend.
We manage a lot of different kinds of risk. Clients are you know, generally on the small side. They have good years, and they have bad years. They have more good years than bad years. And so from a pricing perspective, we are very measured in the pricing decisions that we make for individual clients, and this helps promote client retention, and ultimately, that helps enhance customer lifetime value. The third piece is our proprietary pricing and billing system. We call that AllocIT. There's many different components to our pricing, as I mentioned earlier, and some of those are priced as a percentage of payroll. Payroll taxes and workers' comp being the two big examples. Others, like employee benefits and HR services, are priced on a per-employee, per-month basis.
Now, our system prices and quotes and bills our clients in a way that lines up very well with the way our direct costs are incurred, and this helps us to most effectively match price and cost over time. But it also mimics the real world, and so it's familiar to clients and prospects when we're having proposal discussions about pricing. The key takeaway that I want you guys to have is it's the integration of our direct cost programs and our pricing methodology that really unlock value for us and for our clients. When I say the integration of those two, the decisions that we make in our direct cost programs help advance the cause of providing, you know, lower cost to our clients through lower pricing.
So the economies of scale that we get in our programs are really important, and the efficiencies that we gain through program structure as well. At the same time, we can utilize components of our pricing methodology to try to incentivize clients to then take actions that will help control cost over time. So it's the two of those working together, and the sharing of information, making sure we're all working off the same sheet of paper, that makes all that go around. And it becomes a key part, not only of reflecting the value proposition to our client, but it becomes an integral part of the value proposition we deliver to our clients, and it's also a key driver to our long-term success.
So now I want to transition to talking about, you know, what we see in our area of the business around the Insperity and Workday strategic partnership, and also the findings from some of our initial market research. So we have worked with a top-tier product positioning and pricing consulting firm. They have extensive experience in a wide variety of service and technology industries, and they have specific experience in both the PEO market and the HCM market. And their research with us helped focus on the product positioning of the new PEO solution that's being developed on the Workday platform, as well as the potential pricing power of the joint solution relative to our current PEO solution that we provide today to the larger clients.
So as we look at some of this research, we first want to focus on product positioning. So this chart really focuses on, you know, the importance in the eyes of companies in the 200-2,500 space, the importance as a value driver of certain criteria. The green ones are PEO criteria, the blue, the dark blue ones are HCM criteria, and then the final one is total cost of ownership. So the Y-axis is really measuring the importance of those criteria as value drivers, and you can see that we've identified a lot of really key value drivers in the eyes of our clients.
A lot of the things that we do and the HCM capabilities we bring to the table are really important to that for those-- that size company, and that's in the top two quadrants there. Then, focusing over on the top right-hand quadrant, there's really two thoughts here. One is that HCM capabilities are really top of mind for this target market that we're looking at. And secondly, you know, when you start to look at the, on the, on the X-axis, the relative performance improvement that participants in this research expected by by utilizing the Workday platform, there, there's a lot of of perception of improvement in HCM capabilities with the Workday platform. The final thing I would say is that, the light blue dot in the middle is total cost of ownership.
Total cost of ownership, obviously, a very important feature for anybody who's making an important decision about the products that they're buying. But I think it's important to recognize here that as we're seeing value driver improvements in the functionality and the services that we're delivering to clients, there's also an improvement in the view of the total cost of ownership of the service, even at higher pricing levels. So, digging in just a little bit deeper on some of our key feedback. I think a couple of takeaways from this is we got a lot of validation regarding our initial beliefs about the Workday strategic partnership and the fact that it combines the best of both worlds, high quality, scalable technology, along with premium customer service. So the top two sections here are related to technology.
Clearly, we saw in the research that Workday is seen as being the best HR technology out there. Secondly, what it allows businesses to do with the technology, one of the very largest priorities is scalability and automation for larger companies. And we clearly saw that come through in feedback. Moving down on the bottom relates to the customer service components. All the best technology in the world is great, but if you don't use it or don't use it well and don't do things right, you're not gonna get out of it, what you wanna get out of it. So this is a client segment that really needs help and expertise in utilizing technology to the best of their ability.
It's a marketplace that does have acceptance of the PEO industry, and good long-term relationships. So, you know, great service is something that is really key, that came across into clients. And then the last one is time to value. What we see here is that quicker implementation is clearly a value driver for these customers. Six months was really kind of the general view of what the appropriate amount of time that they would like to spend or could spend, to bring value to them. And you can see this one particular customer says, if it could be implemented in 3-6 months, that's a real value add. So important feedback as we start to think about our product positioning.
The third view on product positioning that I wanna talk about is, just the product segment fit. So there's a couple of things here. The blue line here is our current PEO solution in the marketplace, and one of the things that you see is that we have good market acceptance of our current product, but it does decline somewhat as client size gets larger. As we did the initial research around the joint solution using the Workday platform, what we saw in that research was a very consistent high level of appeal across a very wide part of the market, and that's the orange line. You can see that consistently high level of fit.
That's really important for us because we wanna make sure that we can go after this market, you know, very strongly and very consistently, as we move into the longer term. So, thinking about again, the impact for us financially, I think heavily in my role around customer lifetime value. One of the things that I'm very interested in is how this partnership can impact each of the core elements of customer lifetime value. We're encouraged by the initial market research that we've had in this area. The first thing, dealing with the left-side client acquisition cost driven by sales efficiency, we do believe that the new offering will improve sales efficiency, it'll reduce client acquisition costs.
As Doug mentioned just a minute ago, this starts even before the rollout of the new solution with the sharing of leads that we expect will add additional prospects for our BPAs. But as we look further out to the new solution, we also see that we have a broad appeal in our target market because of the complementary nature of Insperity's PEO solution and Workday's HCM technology capabilities. And so this consistent product segment fit gives us a market-leading position, especially for companies over 250 employees. And that opportunity should increase our opportunities at the top of the funnel, but also could improve our win rate when we get in front of those prospects. Now, moving to the other side of the chart here, thinking about client retention.
We believe that, we will improve client retention, as well, both in the short run and in the long run. We've had a lot of great conversations with our clients about the coming solution. There's a lot of interest in seeing how this develops. As we look at the new solution, historically, we've utilized a lot of multiyear contracts with larger customers, typically two years, and that helps provide some certainty and a level of insight around client retention in any given year.... In the technology industry, three-year contracts or longer are very common. And so, we believe that this is going to give us the opportunity to utilize more and longer-term contracts to help better manage client retention, in this larger target segment.
We also have in our initial research we were validated in understanding that the Success Penalty that we have with our clients is typically the result of a difficult decision that clients have to make. This is a trade-off between technology capabilities and service. So simply put, our customers desire a more sophisticated and scalable technology platform, but they don't want to give up the PEO solution that they love and the service that we provide. And so the new solution should help reduce or delay the Success Penalty, as we move forward. And then lastly, the middle part of the chart is really focused on client profitability. We charge an enrollment fee today. Workday projects will always include an implementation fee.
Our initial research indicates a willingness to pay a significantly higher enrollment fee for the new solution that we're looking at. Now, we anticipate that that higher enrollment fee will still be lower than the total of our enrollment fees today and, and Workday-related implementation fees as well. Because many parts of the PEO solution are curated in advance, and that means they can be set up in our setup that we're doing right now, our upfront implementation. And so that means that a lot of parts, a lot of what we're doing right now is reusable or even universal as we bring on individual clients in the future.
So from a pricing perspective around enrollment fees, we're really going to be looking to set those at a level that are acceptable in the market, that cover our client onboarding costs, and also monetize a portion or portions of our upfront investment over time. So the last piece I want to mention is recurring fees, and in here, I'm talking about our ongoing PEO service fees. So going back to the chart about how our pricing works, we don't really expect any change to the way we quote, price, and bill our clients. We're going to do that largely the same way we do today. But we do expect that we can receive a premium price compared to the middle-market client pricing that we have today.
Again, it's based on our initial research that revealed high adoption rates at significantly higher pricing above the level of HR service fees that we have in that segment today. And that was driven by a strong appetite and value attributed to Workday capabilities, particularly around HR administration, recruiting, and talent and performance management. We also see that there's an opportunity for us to collaborate with our clients in new ways through the Workday platform, which can further link technology with service delivery and unlock additional value for our clients. So we expect that most of the functionality, most of the modules of Workday are going to be delivered inside the PEO solution. But certain components of that may be a better fit as a separate add-on service.
Probably the biggest example right now is ongoing deployment and enablement, enablement support, which is highly valued by customers. But I think a decision on whether or not to set that as part of the HR services PEPM pricing or priced separately, maybe as a block of hours, that requires further investigation on our part. There are also some additional components that likely would be utilized by a smaller portion of our clients that could be candidates for pricing as a separate service. And this would be similar to the way we do direct placement, recruiting, or retirement services, today. So in summary, we're very excited about the value drivers that have been identified, and about the early indications that we've received about pricing. They both validate our enthusiasm about the Workday strategic partnership.
As we get closer to launch, we'll continue to refine and optimize our go-to-market strategy over pricing, with the goal, again, of making not only our pricing reflective of the value proposition we deliver to clients, but making it an integral part of the value proposition. So now, we are going to take a quick, 10-minute break, let everybody get a little break in.
Ladies and gentlemen, the Investor Day 2024 will resume in 10 minutes. As a reminder, we will be having a Q&A session later this morning. We will begin with questions from our analysts and then move to questions from our institutional investors. If you would like to submit a question, please enter it in the Q&A box at the bottom of your screen.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Investor Day 2022 for Insperity. Welcome back to Insperity Investor Day. Please welcome to the stage Senior Vice President, Corporate Development, Tom Gerrity.
Welcome back from break. My name is Tom Gerrity, and I'm the Senior Vice President of Corporate Development for Insperity. My role at the company is to look for new ways to generate revenue, including ways to capitalize on market opportunities by improving on our current offerings. I led the effort that validated and negotiated the strategic partnership with Workday, and due to the significance of the opportunity, I expect to continue leading our execution efforts until we launch the new joint solution. I'm ultimately responsible for both supporting our strategic partnership and bringing the joint solution from idea to reality. Before the break, Paul, Jim, and Doug spoke about how we expect the Workday strategic partnership will be a catalyst for growth. I'm going to spend my time with you discussing the efforts required to bring the joint solution offering together and our efforts to organize around that work.
I'll also share more detail on how we're approaching the joint solution itself and the progress we're making. But before that, I'm going to share a little bit more about how we arrived at this strategic partnership. For quite some time, we've been considering the need for an additional solution for our larger clients. In fact, Workday had been top of mind as an example of what we were seeking. With our own growth, we'd already been exploring a move to Workday for our own corporate employees, and so the time seemed right to test interest in a bigger relationship, becoming both a Workday customer and creating a strategic partnership that could open new market opportunities for both companies. In October of last year, we had completed our internal corporate evaluation of Workday's platform, and the recommendation was made to move forward.
Paul then made the outreach that put us on the path to where we're at today. In late November, we kicked off an effort between Insperity and Workday to validate the possibility of jointly developing the preeminent solution for target businesses, where Workday would become the client-facing technology and Insperity would deliver our premium HR services. We believe that combination would be competitively disruptive, and through that combination, we could greatly enhance our clients' likelihood, degree, and speed of success. Our teams spent the next few weeks working together through the key requirements of our business and the functionality of Workday's platform. Those efforts culminated with a mid-December, 1.5-day meeting between our executive teams, where a mutual recommendation was made to proceed.
Over the next 6 weeks, our technology teams, supported by functional subject matter experts, conducted highly detailed, deep dives across all areas of our business, gaining even more confidence that the joint solution was possible. We also negotiated the details of our strategic partnership, including important commitments from both sides on resourcing, platform licensing, a minimum of 5 years of exclusivity from the time we launched the solution, Workday's role in getting us ready to deploy and provide service on the platform, active lead sharing between our companies, and the co-branding, co-marketing, and co-selling of the new solution. All areas that are critically important to the success of the strategic partnership, which we announced on February eighth. What came through in those conversations was a clear commitment from both companies' executive leadership to make the strategic partnership a success.
While we're still early on in our, our efforts, the commitment has already shined through as we've moved from idea to execution... Now let's move on to how we've organized and are executing on these efforts. Due to the large scope of work, we broke the master project plan down into four main efforts that we're calling the four pillars, which represent the deployment of our corporate tenant, the creation and deployment of the joint solution or the PEO client tenant, the deployment and enablement efforts needed to support both tenants, and the development and execution of our mutual go-to-market strategy. Both Insperity and Workday have expressed a commitment for speed to market, and to help stay on track, we've established a formal governance process.
The strategic partnership is sponsored by chief executives of both companies, and there's an executive steering committee that meets regularly to review progress and break through any roadblocks that come up. You'll notice that this executive steering committee is populated with a selection of the top executives of both companies. The project is being led jointly by Insperity and Workday's program management offices, with established groups focused on the large efforts for technology solution development, deployment and enablement, go-to-market, and co-selling that represent our four pillars. Our organizations have created teams of subject matter experts to address the technology, deployment, and go-to-market aspects. These teams are working together and meeting with greater frequency, and the cultural fit between our companies makes this work very naturally. Now let's look at each pillar and how it fits into the master project plan.
The decision to put the deployment of our corporate tenant on the front end of the overall effort was made for several reasons. With our current size and our expected growth plans, we've reached a point where we could benefit from the added capabilities of the Workday platform. Historically, our corporate HR function has been handled by the same system that we use for our PEO clients. Many of the requests from our corporate HR team have echoed the requests we heard from our larger clients. We also believe we could gain important insights from the type of package scope, pre-configured tenant launch experience we intend to use with clients going forward into the new solution, and view it as a foundational step for our internal employees to gain familiarity and expertise with the platform.
The work needed to move our corporate employees from our proprietary system to a new Workday tenant is also a subset of the work needed to ready the PEO client tenant, which provides additional benefits for the process. I'm pleased to say we've made exceptional progress against the deployment plan to the extent that we've already been delivered our foundational tenant. We'll continue to work on refining our internal processes, building out the corporate-specific integrations, and begin testing with the goal of transitioning our corporate employees to the Workday tenant in January 2025. Now let's move on to the PEO client tenant, where I'll be able to share a little bit more detail on how we're approaching the building of the joint solution.
The PEO client tenant is the new joint solution that we believe provides us with the additional market opportunity that you heard my colleagues earlier discuss. Here's how we envision the joint solution. It'll be a single Workday tenant with client-level separation. The platform will be embedded in our comprehensive solution for our larger clients who elect to join the solution. Workday will be the client-facing technology, and we will implement, support, and maintain this tenant. We're building the solution from a broad selection of Workday's offerings, which are shown on the next slide, based on all our market research to represent what we believe will be the highest impact for our largest clients. The Workday platform modules that we plan to build the joint solution from are shown in the arc above our core PEO elements.
We anticipate that Insperity's current proprietary system will continue to serve smaller clients in our current PEO solutions. However, this system is also foundational to the joint solution. The reason that some of the elements in our proprietary system are specific to the PEO business and do not reside in Workday, for example, the compliance elements that are illustrated below the arc in this graphic. Above the line is where we add the power of the Workday solution to this compliance underpinning, giving us the ability to add more robust capability for our larger clients. Now, bringing the functionality of these systems together requires a significant investment of resources and will be one of the drivers of our ultimate timeline. So I'd like to explain that further as well.
We've identified over 175 integrations with nearly 70 vendors that will be required for the solution to perform the way we want it to. About half of those will need to be built prior to the launch of our corporate tenant and have been scheduled to be built at the front end of the project. The other half will need to be completed before we go live with the joint solution. We've begun pre-design sessions with targeted vendors, have prioritized the integration builds, and have scheduled them all into design waves, with the first wave launching within the next few weeks. I've just shown the areas of functionality that we expect to pull from to build out the joint solution and discuss the integration efforts that we're proceeding through to enable its performance.
Now, let's walk through a handful of improvements that we expect should be present in the new joint solution. Through the introduction of Workday's platform as our client-facing technology, we plan to offer the key elements of our PEO solutions with significant uplifts in our areas important to larger clients. We've already identified a number of expected improvements in the joint solution. Here are a few examples of the improvements that we're targeting. By staying native to the Workday platform from applicant tracking through time tracking, payroll, and beyond, we expect to eliminate several integrated point solutions with differing user interfaces. This should also eliminate some duplicative data entry, as well as multiple single sign-on scenarios that and the need to maintain different credentials between systems. We expect a faster payroll calculation time, reducing the turnaround between payroll submission and cutting checks.
The Workday platform offers more robust client alerts, reminders, and notifications of processes with deadlines, and we plan to offer an improved ability to bulk upload data into the system. We also anticipate that the Workday platform will consolidate more HR functions, including payroll and recruiting, into a single system of record. We plan to offer simplified employee management by way of more automated workflows and an enhanced ability to delegate and automate business processes that travel through the system. We expect clients will be able to leverage real-time reporting and predictive analytics for better future planning, to offer advanced analytics that pull from a single data source, and a robust reporting engine that's more adept at crossing functional lines.
Workday offers a much more extensive list of seamless integrations within their point solutions integrations library, and due to the ubiquity of Workday platform adoption, they enjoy a better 360-degree support of those integrations than we do today. This new functionality, combined with our core competencies, creates a solution we believe does not exist in the market today, and we expect it to be the best available solution for mid-sized growing businesses. The development work is well underway, and the Insperity and Workday teams are functioning in close alignment. The cultural similarities between both companies really shows up here and helps to make the complexity of the efforts easier to work through. While we're not going to dive into a detailed technology discussion here today, you'll note that we're past the planning phase and into architecture and configuration.
We expect to receive our foundational tenant in July, with a thorough testing period to follow. After running through the next two pillars, I'll discuss a few of the project milestones and the work underway to determine the ultimate launch date. Our third pillar, deployment and enablement, includes all the efforts we are undertaking to establish our internal Workday expertise. We're working very closely with the Workday team to identify the training and certification needs of the various operational personas for both our technology teams and service providers that will be required to configure, deploy, support, and maintain the new solution. For each of these personas, we're developing a training and certification pathway based on Workday's extensive course catalog to prepare the teams to perform their roles in the system.
Our current focus is squarely on training to enable the joint solution, but in doing so, we'll be developing key capabilities that we expect will allow us to perform more advanced configuration services within a client's environment. Longer term, we believe this will create the expertise to allow us to perform select services for clients migrating to an owned Workday tenant in the future. The fourth and final pillar represents the efforts both companies are pursuing to establish sales and marketing dynamics that are foundational to the success of the strategic partnership. By matching the strength of the joint solution with the collective power of our trusted brands and the broad reach of both of our sales teams, we expect to capitalize on an unmet need in the market and to create more clients.
These efforts include immediately establishing lead sharing between the companies to create more clients inside the solutions we offer today. Workday currently receives interest from companies that don't fit their ideal size and investment profile, and many of these prospects fit squarely in our targeted buyer profile. By introducing Insperity into these opportunities now, we expect to collectively build another pipeline for the joint solution together, as these companies start out in our current solutions and continue to grow into the joint solution. Insperity will reciprocate by referring larger prospects to Workday that we determine better fit their solution or once a current client's needs are beyond their joint solution. They also entail the co-branding of the joint solution.
We intend to make both of our strong brands visible in the branding of the joint solution to convey the power of the combination of Workday's technology and Insperity's service delivery, and leverage the market's familiarity and trust in both companies. We'll be pursuing co-marketing efforts with Workday. We've connected our respective marketing and business development teams to build and execute efforts to engage, guide, and support prospective clients to the Insperity or Workday solution that best fits their needs. And we're creating active engagement today between our sales teams to collectively win more business.
We've established a co-selling council between our companies' sales leadership to discuss active opportunities in the middle market and enterprise space, to create policies and recommend incentives that eliminate conflict and reward the sales professional for acting in the best interest of the prospective client, and to drive engagement at the account executive and business performance consultant level. Now, let's review where all these efforts come into play and the milestones that will show our progress. Identifying and planning all the tracks of work necessary is critical to the determination of project milestones and the setting of timeline goals leading to the target launch date.
There are master project plans for each of our four pillars, which are too detailed to share, but this slide summarizes the many work tracks that are part of them, and that, when further understood, will enable us to refine our timelines and establish a launch date. Now, I'm extremely passionate about the opportunity that we have in front of us and for the strategic partnership we've built with Workday. Our efforts to create a new solution where businesses won't have to sacrifice service and support to gain functionality can be game changing for clients and for the marketplace, and I'll continue driving our teams to bring that to market as quickly as possible. Now I'd like to introduce our President and COO, Steve Arizpe.
Tom, thank you, and welcome everyone to our final session before our Q&A session immediately following this. We are really excited about this opportunity, and, I'll be joined by a, an esteemed panel here shortly to, host our, our panel. And the, the whole idea here is that we want to change this little structure of our meeting today from presentation, which I'm sure has been very beneficial to everyone, but we wanna change it to a conversation. And, what we're gonna focus on is really highlighting the fact that we've built an amazing business, and we're gonna do a little bit deeper dive. You've heard a lot of information related to that this morning, and we're gonna introduce some stories and make this even more meaningful than what has already been communicated.
We're also gonna discuss some of the key differentiators that really provide a competitive advantage for Insperity. Then obviously, the hot topic today is we want to spend the balance of our time discussing this Workday strategic partnership and how the opportunities, we believe, are powerful for both firms. So to do this, we're gonna go through a panel. I'll start with my introduction. I'm Steve Arizpe, President, Chief Operating Officer with the company. 35 years with the company. I wasn't here at the beginning, but I got here as fast as I could. And my areas of responsibility are sales, marketing, our service operations, technology, corporate HR, and then our traditional employment solution that you've heard referenced as Workforce Acceleration. Excited to be here hosting it.
I'll be joined today by Laura Wilbanks, who is our Senior Vice President of Marketing and Business Development. And while only here for a year, has already made significant impact. She brings 25 years of strategic marketing experience and expertise to our company. So she's earned a reputation for linking the company's vision to its marketing strategy and influencing change. So she leads all activities related to marketing, campaign marketing, strategy, digital, relationship, and communication. So in her 13 months, she has led some significant change here at the company. She inherited a highly functioning marketing department and just simply has made it better.
Secondly, Keith Simmons, who currently leads our mid-market sales organization, joined the company 20 years ago, representing our services as a BPA, as a business performance advisor, had immediate success in all of that and was soon promoted to district manager and led that up until about 10 years ago, where he now leads our mid-market sales effort, including national accounts and private capital markets. Keith, thanks for being here with us. And last but not least, is Roger Nicholson, our Senior Vice President of Service Operations, joined the company 22 years ago as a frontline service professional, meeting and exceeding the needs of our clients, interacting with entrepreneurs, CEOs, and key influencers within our target base, and delivering on that promise. Was promoted into as a general manager for the Eastern region.
I think it was referred to as all offices from Miami to Maine, so a large market, which has now since been divided into two different service regions as we exist today. In 2021, was promoted to his current role and leads our 1,700 team of service professionals, delivering our high profile and highly needed HR solutions to our clients. So welcome, panelists. It is great to have you here with me. What do you say we get started?
Absolutely.
Let's go.
All right.
You bet.
Let me start with this first question. We've accomplished here a lot here at the company.
Mm-hmm.
Been very successful. What is it, from a sales and marketing and service operations, perspective, has made us successful? Keith, let's start with you.
There's a lot. I could, I could go on for the rest of the 40 minutes that we have today. I'm not gonna do that. I wanna make sure that Laura and Roger get their time. But I'm gonna talk about two components that I think have really helped drive our, our success over, over the 38 years that we've been around. The first is the, is the business performance advisor, the BPA. That's, that's a huge part of it. And the second is organic growth, how we've been able to build organically over the years. You know, to start off with the profile of a business performance advisor, these are the folks that are out meeting with our prospects, having the business conversations. They average 7-10 years-
Mm
... of sales or ownership of a business experience, and average age is in the mid-40s. This is not typically their first rodeo. They have been around, they are seasoned, they understand business, and that allows them to go out and have a strong business conversation with business owners all over the country, and they represent our full suite of HR comprehensive services. And that's unique in our world versus our primary competitors. That is— We do it a little bit differently, and that allows that business conversation and understand the goals, the objectives-
Mm-hmm
... of what the business is trying to accomplish, not trying to pigeonhole them into a specific product or service. And what that does is allows us to see where we can really plug in, and because they represent the full suite of services, they are able to do that successfully. And when we run into private capital markets or a mid-market account or a national account, we have some specialists that the BPA partners with, so they don't leave. They stay there. They're part of the entire conversation. We have an example of a workforce acceleration mid-market opportunity that a BPA brought to us. And so we're having the conversation, things are going great. Part of the conversation, we learned that they're moving forward, gonna start a franchising model. Well, we have a national accounts program. Works out pretty good.
So BPA brings in mid-market, we bring in the national accounts, they're all in the room together having a conversation. Now we have a new, new client for traditional, and we have a new national account partnership because the BPA had the foresight to have the, the strong business conversation. The other part is the organic growth.
Mm-hmm.
You know, over the last 10 years, we've added 400 business performance advisors. We've opened up 50 new sales offices in 20 new markets. Now, I think everybody realizes you don't just wake up one day and say, "We're hiring 400 people. Let's do that tomorrow." So, you know, this took a lot of planning from all the different departments, 'cause sales is the tip of the spear. Everybody has to be ready. Roger has to be ready, Laura has to be ready. So everybody working together to plan and develop and execute, that works beautifully when you do it right, and we've done it right. You know, I think about our Sales Performance Improvement group.
That's a lot of BPAs coming through, a lot of new district managers coming through, and they had the foresight to build the curriculum and the learning environments to make sure that we have consistent messaging, consistent results coming out throughout the entire organization. And when you have these two things, when you have a strong caliber BPA, and you have an evolution through organic growth, you can evolve your infrastructure, your policies, your compensation, and you're not making massive changes, you know, throughout the entire sales force, which allows them to keep focused and do what they do best, which is have business conversations and focus on trying to help businesses succeed so communities prosper. And we're able to keep the secret sauce that has made us great for 38 years.
You know, we talk a lot about sales efficiency, it's in everything that we do, and one of the items related to sales efficiency is talking to the right prospect, you know, which is the psychographic and demographic fit, which kind of really leads into our marketing efforts. So, Laura, you're, you're the newbie here on this panel.
I love it.
So you've got a great perspective-
Yeah.
as you've come into our company
Yeah.
in these last 13 months. What is it from your area that has made us successful?
No, I agree. I think there's a number of things. I am really proud of the fact that marketing has been such a contributor to the success of the organization, and we heard that from Paul earlier. I will say from my experience, the way that a company views marketing makes a really big difference. In the case of Insperity, Insperity absolutely believes, and it's been proven, that marketing is just one piece of the growth organization, the other one being sales. And so the partnership between sales and marketing is so instrumental. Our goals are shared together. So to me, that really sets us up well, very well from a success perspective.
And as you mentioned, I joined the company just over a year ago, and I came into a situation where there was a really strong marketing foundation already in place. We had a talented team with very deep experience and understanding of the market. So I felt very fortunate with what I inherited. And as you know from the time that we interviewed together, what I was most excited about, and to me, what really distinguishes Insperity is the brand. And we have this incredible, strong brand in place. And we're known for our exceptional business performance advisors that Keith talked about, our really deep HR experience, the fantastic, excellent service competencies, advanced technology, and frankly, those agile processes that really scale with our customers.
And one of the things that you heard earlier from Paul, and honestly, from the video that we shared with Workday, we are known as a trusted advisor.
Right.
You don't have to take my word. We actually just, within the last year, completed our brand survey, and among our primary competitors, we were rated number one as a trusted advisor, which really, to me, reinforces what we are all about. So I love that. You know, the other thing that I found as I came into the organization, and I've been in B2B marketing for, as you said, 25 years, I have never seen such a strong relationship marketing program.
Mm-hmm.
It really does distinguish, and we talked about that a little bit earlier, but the fact that much of our marketing is really focused on having more of a personalized interaction with prospects and clients through our networking events, our center of influence events, strategic partnership, that really sets us apart-
It does.
And I find that to be incredibly unique for any B2B company and certainly within our ecosystem. And then, of course, I cannot forget, in my opinion, what really sets us apart. It is the culture.
Mm-hmm.
I think you've heard it a couple times today. It is 4,400 passionate employees, all focused on the purpose and mission: helping clients succeed so communities prosper. The first time I heard that, with my father being a small business owner, I thought, "That, that, that hits at the heart," right? And so the passion to really help our clients succeed, understanding that really helps the larger community, that is absolutely a distinguishing factor. And having been here for a year and a half, we live that every day. So those are the things I would bring up.
That's excellent. Yeah, we have to talk about this consistency of the, the interaction that our prospects-
Mm-hmm
and then clients, you know, receive, starting with marketing and sales
Yeah
Teeing this up to have a customer. That's what it's all about.
Indeed.
Now it's up to the service organization, right?
Yeah.
So what is it that's made us successful, Roger?
You know, Steve, I would be remiss if I didn't start in the same spot.
Yeah.
Our people are the difference makers. They are specialists in a number of different areas of expertise, from payroll and benefits to HR and employee relations and performance. It is a remarkable group with remarkable tenure across the organization. With 22 years at the company today, I often find myself as the rookie in the room. When I walk in and I'm talking with a number of our teammates. But, I would agree with my teammates here-
Mm-hmm
-that it's the people ultimately that make the difference. Now, we've built strategic models from which to serve our clients, and those models meet our clients where they are. We have the opportunity to meet them where they are, understand their goals and objectives, and build a customized service plan to take them where they want to go. And that evolves over time, and they can move from one model to the next, and it's that flexibility that makes our model special. Beyond that, I would tell you that the teamwork, the synergy that exists, that's really reflected right here-
Mm-hmm
-between, between the three of us, but, but that, that works at the grassroots level, too. In our field offices, our sales and service teams live and work together, and-
Yeah
Each day, they get the opportunity to learn from one another. What prospects are telling us is important to them today as the market ebbs and flows and things change, we know what's going on in the moment. And what our clients are telling us is really important to them right now as they navigate a labyrinthian kind of market with the complexities that a regulatory environment as complex as today often yields. So, they learn from one another, they help one another, we grow together, and we build customer relationships that last a lifetime, and that's something that's truly unique that we're working toward together constantly.
Mm-hmm.
Now, ultimately, I would tell you from a service perspective, and obviously this is probably a bit biased, because I lead our service organization, and I work with our teams day in and day out, but we do hard things really, really well.
Mm-hmm.
Give us a Rubik's Cube of sorts to solve for, and we're gonna tell you what the answer is. From payroll, which, if you've ever done payroll, can be very complicated, to 99% accuracy on that very first payroll, to benefits, whose plans, by design, change on an annual basis, time and attendance, and all of the permutations that it takes to get that just right, those are our foundational services. We get those right each and every time. To more specialized services, the specialized services like, as an example, our EEO teams or-
Mm-hmm
our compensation services teams. Those are much more complicated things to deliver in the marketplace, and the vast majority of our peer group don't even endeavor to try to deliver on those kinds of services. So, we run the gamut from the blocking and tackling to the most sophisticated kind of HR service that a client might require, and we're proud to do it everywhere in between. You know, when it's all said and done, it's the how-
Mm-hmm
We get things done that ultimately matters. The breadth of expertise, depth of expertise really matter, but it's the level of care, the wrapper that we put on those things, that we will go to the nth degree to make sure that a client's needs are taken care of.
Roger, what's interesting about the tagline that you just mentioned, the breadth, the depth, and the level of care-
Mm-hmm.
when that was developed
Mm-hmm
The level of care portion of that statement came from our customer. It wasn't anything that we came up with.
That's right.
We were just doing what we thought was the right thing. I've got a story I think that is important-
Mm-hmm
-that would really bring this home. It had to do with... This was during COVID, and I don't know exactly how deep we were into that. This has now been, you know, 4 years ago, when we were all sent home.
Yep.
And a call came into our contact center. Our contact center specialist introduced herself and said, "I'm with Insperity. How can I help you?" And they began to talk about the challenges that they were all facing, because it wasn't just our clients that were facing it, we were, too. We're people, too. We had our own challenges along the way, but we were there to lend some support. And they began to talk about those challenges and, you know, started to get into several minutes into the call, and finally the professional said, "Well, what can I do for you?" And the response was this: "Actually, I just needed a friendly voice.
Mm-hmm.
I needed to talk to someone." And I think it demonstrates so powerfully that of all the people that this individual could have called... they chose to call a friend at Insperity, which is really powerful and really, you know, speaks to the culture-
Very much indicative of the caliber of our people.
Well, that's what we hear. So, you know, it is. It's what we hear from our clients-
That's exactly right.
all the time.
Exactly right.
Fantastic.
All right, let's move to our second question, and we're absolutely gonna spend a lot of time on the Workday partnership, but I need to ask one more question before we go-
Mm-hmm
... go to that. And that is, there's been recent changes. That's what I love about our company-
Yeah
... is we are never satisfied. So if we could kind of go just around the table here and talk about some of the recent changes that have really improved our business. And, Roger, I think we're gonna start with you.
Happy to start with me. You know, innovation is a fundamental driver of success, and that's actually one of our core values at Insperity. We are in perpetual motion, if you will, on trying to improve things, whether that's the product itself, our service or a process or a system, we are forever working toward getting better every day. We actually have an acronym that we live by, BEST. It's Better Every Single Time. We are working very, very hard to make sure that we continue to improve. Along that continuous improvement continuum, we needed part of the organization to be devoted to that. It's the reason we started centers of excellence in service.
Mm-hmm.
We have half the organization that is... More than half the organization, constantly focused on the delivery and execution of the work that we do for our clients, and we have our centers of excellence that are working on the development and refinement of the systems and processes and tools that our people use to take care of our clients. I'll give you a couple of recent examples of change and our commitment to change and improvement, one being our deployment of Salesforce. This last year, we implemented Salesforce for the entire organization in August. It was over a two-year span. And last August, we covered the rest of the organization, and what that did, it enabled us to bring-
Yeah
... a 360-degree view of this client relationship into harmony with each of the, the various departmental inputs. And that's providing us some remarkable insights on what's going on in the client relationship-
Mm-hmm
... where they have pressure points, where we have the opportunities to better provide service to them. Another recent change was the advent of our Workforce Acceleration option.
Mm-hmm.
For years, we had Workforce Optimization, which we all still believe today is the way to go the furthest, the fastest, with a single stroke of a pen, to sit down and embark on a WO relationship. But for some reason, a client may not be ready to make that kind of investment, or they may have a risk tolerance with which we're not particularly comfortable. We needed another option for them. So we built Workforce Acceleration around a wonderful technology platform. They get the opportunity to experience elements of the HR care and concern that we provide for Workforce Optimization clients, and they're in the Insperity ecosystem now.
So our incredible business performance advisors and business performance consultants now have something else to talk about, to meet that prospect where they are in the moment, and we, as service professionals, have an opportunity to keep a client for life as those business needs change, as dynamically as the market is today. So we are committed to change on a very progressive-
Yeah
... basis, and it's a wonderful place to be in the organization 'cause no two days are the same.
Yeah. Thanks, Roger. The question relates to recent changes, so arguably, Laura, Laura, everything that you've done has been a recent change.
Yes.
Why don't you speak to that?
It's been a lot of change, yes. So, well, as I mentioned, I came into a situation that, you know, as I said before, I felt so fortunate that there was this incredibly strong marketing foundation and had already been contributing to the success of the organization. But you did not hire me to maintain, right?
Right.
So there has been a lot of change, and really, the change has been focused on ensuring that not only can marketing support the business of today, but we're meeting the changing market, and it is changing rapidly.
Mm.
Buyers' behaviors are changing.
Yes. Mm-hmm.
So that's, that's really been the focus. And, you know, although I had really strong skill sets in place already as I joined, I really wanted to make sure that we had the skill sets and the specialists that could really take us into the future, and so that's been a big focus. I've got a brand-new leadership team. They all have a number of years of experience. They're all specialists within their respective marketing center of excellence. So we did establish marketing centers of excellence as well, and we've made several external hires that really are able to augment that very talented team we already had in place. And so again, for me, it's the people, right? I mean, really focusing on having the best people in the right role.
So that's definitely been a big focus. You know, I wanna go back. We talked about this incredibly differentiated, successful relationship marketing program. And so that's an area that we said, "Hey, it's been really successful, so why don't we focus even more effort to make that even better?" And so that has been a big focus. And you know, that program is all about nurturing and building relationships on a much more intimate level than you can certainly do through other marketing programs like digital marketing. And so that's been a big focus. And frankly, what we've done there is, historically, relationship marketing, the various programs, again, just to, as a reminder, that's everything from loyalty programs, it's local sponsorships, it's strategic alliances, it's our channel partners.
They've sat in different parts of the organization, and so what we did is we pulled those together, because by pulling those together and looking at common best practices and having a very intentional approach, we can actually really amplify that particular program. Frankly, our goal is to create these ecosystems where we're building a sense of community and trust, and so that's been a really big change. You mentioned Salesforce, right? And so every marketer today will talk about leveraging technology and data differently. And I cannot tell you how excited I was when I came into the organization, and I found that we had already implemented Salesforce, because I've been through a few of those. And so really, enhancing our digital marketing capabilities and tactics, leveraging the investment in Salesforce-
Right.
to derive insights, that's been a really big focus. Deploying automation capabilities to really streamline those processes, and then certainly using data. We love data. The more data we can get, we can really fine-tune our targeting, we can amplify our messaging. And the reason we do that, at the end of the day, it is to provide the best customer experience, right? Across the entire customer journey, so that's been a big one. I think the last change I'll talk about is really looking at our marketing mix, and so ensuring that we've got a really good balance between brand marketing initiatives and demand gen initiatives. We're leveraging national campaigns, just like we've always done, but we've recently really moved to leveraging both the national, but also augmenting those with very regional-specific and persona-based campaigns.
Because we can do that now because of the investment in Salesforce, we can get much more personalized. And so that is a best practice approach. And what that does is that really enables us to maintain that strong brand awareness and consideration that we have, but it also really enables us to produce more quality at-bats for our sales teams. So I know that's important.
That helped too.
Yes.
Well, you have definitely upped our game-
Yeah
in area marketing.
It's been fun.
Thank you for your contribution.
It's been fun.
Keith, what's going on in the sales world that's different and making us better?
Well, this is where my excitement level is gonna start to heat up.
That's okay.
I think it's why I'm sitting next to you. You can keep me in line here. So there's a couple of different things that I'm excited about, and Laura mentioned a part of-
Mm-hmm
... one of them, which is our Account-Based experience that we're rolling out right now. And the other one is our private capital markets approach that we've refined. So just talk a little bit about the Account-Based Experience. Now, this is absolutely in partnership with Laura and all of her team. This is where we get all the insights and the data utilizing Salesforce.
Mm-hmm.
We're rolling it out, we're assigning out accounts, and those accounts are going through internal marketing cadences. So our sales folks, the BPAs, BPCs, they know exactly the right time and the right message to go after the right type of prospect. And when you have... I've already talked about how great the business performance advisors are in my eyes. Now, you arm them with that type of message and timing, it's already starting to show success. The last couple of days, as we've rolled this out, the success stories-
Yeah
that are flying around the entire organization-
I've seen those, yeah.
- on how awesome this thing is working, the excitement level from the entire sales force, it is something that everybody is all in on, and it is already starting to show. And then the private capital markets.
Yeah.
Now, we've had a lot of success in the private capital markets, both private equity and the venture capital segments. And, but we've done it, a lot of it, through going up through our portfolio of companies, we're out meeting with businesses, and, and we're having a lot of success there, and sometimes we're able to move up into the private equity firm, develop those relationships. Well, now we're doing it on purpose. Now we are going after it, and we are like, "All right, we know the, the right type of messaging." We can put a wrapper around the service side of it, the, and, and the sales side of it to make sure the messaging is right, and then understanding the dynamics of how to onboard them appropriately, because there's a lot of tiny factors that go in with transactions. And, that it is...
Both, both of these are exciting new changes, and they're already starting to show big results. Just one quick little story. We are out at DealMax, out in Vegas a couple weeks ago, and we got introduced by two separate firms into one another private equity firm, and that firm said, "You know, if you're getting introduced by two separate people, I don't have to go talk to anybody else, because this is clearly the way to go." So it's awesome.
Yeah.
This reminds me a little bit about 10 years ago, you moving into mid-market. Absolutely having a focus on growing that segment of the business. We learned that our clients grew into mid-market size-
Yep.
and then we got aggressive at finding those. All right, let's move on to the Workday partnership, which has been a focus of this morning, and as it absolutely should be. And, so how do we anticipate... We've heard the word catalyst. How do we see this as an accelerator-
Mm-hmm.
to our business? We've just heard from all of you on the recent changes that we've made, now a very significant one, not only for us, but also for Workday.
Certainly, yeah.
This is a true partnership.
Mm-hmm.
So Roger, why don't you talk a little bit about how you see this benefiting, you know, us?
Well, first and foremost, I want you to know how excited the 1,700 professionals are in our service organization about this. We have the opportunity to take the lid off the situation that we've experienced with our clients over the years. We've had what we call, and you may have heard this expression this morning, a Success Penalty over time.
Yes.
We build a relationship with a client, we become a part of their team, we're part of their success equation, and they grow. We've seen clients grow north of 7,000 employees, and they reach this point where they perceive, whether it's real or imagined, in many ways, we think it's real on the technology front, that, gosh, we're a really big company now, and we need to do something else, something because we have more complicated needs today. Certainly on the flexibility and the scalability front, we can see where they're coming from. For our service teams, who become so embedded in these relationships-
Yeah.
Deeply over time, it's like a heartbreak.
Yeah.
It's a breakup of sorts, when you lose a client-
Mm-hmm
...because we didn't have the next thing that they needed to grow and evolve. And so Workday presents us that opportunity, to remove the glass ceiling, if you will, on our relationship, and allow our clients to continue to grow with the benefit of Workday's world-class technology and the HR services team that they've come to rely on so heavily over the years of their success. And so that historical success, being able to keep that in place, those relationships in place, incredibly important to our clients. You know, I would tell you, over the long haul, that we expect this improves our retention equation dramatically.
Yeah.
Dramatically. Because a client will be afforded the opportunity to make the decision that's right for them. No longer will they hit that crossroads decision, where they have to do one or the other.
Yeah.
They can do both in concert with one another. And so we're thrilled that we're gonna have the opportunity to keep going with relationships that we treasure so much, and the work that we're doing right now is gonna set the stage for that. We're building our deployment and enablement teams today. As we speak, our teams are working on this, and their experience they're bringing to the equation, to have conversations with our friends at Workday, so that the configuration and architecture is in place that does the kinds of things that we're gonna want to be able to continue to provide for our clients, while taking advantage of Workday's very sophisticated platform. We couldn't be more excited.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. This is a key factor to our growth, the retention side of our growth-
Absolutely.
-which you're held responsible to. Very, very exciting. Laura-
Yeah.
Give me your comments about Workday.
No, I love this, right? I mean, you've heard that the co-marketing, the co-branding, the co-selling, and marketing fits in each of those pieces. And so from a marketing perspective, we see the potential for the Workday partnership to really accelerate in a couple ways. And I think what's really important to remember is that this has already started, you know?
Yes.
We're not waiting for the joint solution.
That's right.
These benefits are starting, have started, not just starting now, they have started. And we see the opportunity in two areas. The first is through lead sharing, where Workday provides us with leads that don't meet their target profile, and so that strengthens our sales funnel. So that's one. The second one we've talked a lot about today is around the brand, and the opportunity to realize the synergy of these two very strong brands in the marketplace. So I'll start with lead sharing. Since the announcement, there's been a tremendous amount of work that's already gone in to recognize and realize the benefits of the lead sharing.
And what that's all about is part of the agreement. Workday has will be providing, has provided leads that don't fit their ideal client profile. And so that strengthens, again, our sales funnel. We have already received historical leads. We've pulled those leads in, we've integrated those into our proven go-to-market approaches. So that has already happened. We've also just recently, as you know, we've started to receive those leads on a going-forward basis. And I think what's really important there is that these are leads that have already been warmed up by Workday. I think that's a really, these are not cold leads that they're just surprising and giving to Insperity. If a prospect, again, does not meet their ideal client profile, they will introduce Insperity.
That prospect has the ability to click on a link that comes into a landing page that is co-branded between the two companies. And so there's already that nice, warm introduction between the two companies. And frankly, the results that we've seen, they're promising. So I mentioned the historical leads, and with those historical leads, about 60% of those, which is a big deal, 60% of those were net new for Insperity. And out of the 60%, we were able to score against our own ideal client profile score, about 50% of those. And the reason that's important is that really enables us to focus on those leads where we believe that we have the greatest chance for success, and so very excited about that prospect.
And brand, I think we've talked a lot about today, that's the second area that we're very excited about. And I thought the video just did such a tremendous job-
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Talking not just about the, the combined value of the brands, but to me, the video really talked about how similar the brands are positioned in the marketplace, right? Both of us are known for trust, reliability, quality, commitment to the market and, and to our clients. And so as we think about pulling those brands together, you know, really providing our customers access to, to the combined synergy of what those brands represent, both before the solution is launched, but then certainly afterwards. So those are, those are two areas that we really believe are gonna have some-
Very powerful.
Yeah, nice potential. Mm-hmm.
Keith, what are your thoughts?
Well, this is in the wheelhouse. You know, being over in the mid-market space, this is obviously very exciting. We've had... It was mentioned earlier, you know, the worksite employee mix over the last 10 years has shifted from 19% to 26%. We're already having a lot of success.
For sure.
You know, our business performance consultants, who are some of the most tenured and most successful salespeople at Insperity, well, now they have a whole another option. They are so pumped up, and, you know, their knowledge runs deep in the organization. They've been here a long time, they know the company, and they pool these resources. Roger's team is on calls with the. We haven't closed a deal without service in so long, I can't even remember, and we know when to pull people in, and they do a great job. And, you know, so now all we're doing for them is keeping that same level of service and bringing in a world-class technology that is built and designed specifically for our target market in the middle market enterprise space. Yeah, we're pretty excited.
All of that allows us to keep the plug-and-play, you know, value proposition that we currently have right now. You know, I suspect, and I believe that our sales efficiency is gonna improve because of that. You know, the nice thing about it, you know, a lot of times when you roll out big initiatives-
Yeah
...you're hoping, like, "Okay, one day we're gonna be able to realize the value of this." Well, we're realizing the value of this-
Now
like, right this minute.
Yeah.
As a matter of fact, we had a prospect that we've been working with. Just so happened that they came into corporate to meet with us the day after the announcement, but we are in the very final stages of getting a large prospect done. And they've cited when we've walked them through that day, the announcement, they're like: "Well, this is, this is-- This takes away a lot of our questions. You know, it's the right service model. Now we know when we get there, it's gonna be the right technology-
Yeah
“and we want to come on, and now we know we have a place to stay for the long term.” That's, that's pretty powerful stuff. And so, you know, Laura mentioned the co-branding and the co-selling, and the co-marketing. We have co-selling as well, and there's a couple of different councils that we're pulling together that are both comprised of folks from Workday and from Insperity, senior sales leadership. And the first one is co-selling council. And what this does is, this is where we're working on the strategy and the messaging and the compensation, because we have to make sure those things are right, to have the right actions and activities happening out in the field. And then, the other one is an opportunity review council.
As the joint solution starts coming together and getting closer, we're gonna review opportunities together because both companies see this as a customer-centric value proposition.
Right.
We want to make sure that we're putting them in the right-
Yeah
-spot. It's either Insperity with Premier, Insperity with Workday or Workday alone... You know, everything is focused on doing the right thing for the, for the-
Yeah, for the prospect.
What's best for them?
Yeah.
That's, that's, that's the name of the game.
Obviously, you have a great level of excitement-
Yes.
About this.
Mm-hmm.
We're coming to the end of our time.
Okay.
Quick question to wrap this up: How has the dialogue changed with your team? You know, and obviously, the BPC is very excited about this target market, and but how's the conversation also changed?
Yeah, I'm the tame one of the group. They are very, very excited, and-
Yeah.
We had the team in last week for one of our semiannual retreats, and the conversations are changing dramatically. And once again, they're happening right now. You know, as we're going through this, and we had a prospect that we're meeting with, that they had a failed implementation with another HCM solution out there. Their board member happened to be a client of ours and said, "Insperity and Workday just announced its strategic partnership. And before y'all talk to anybody else, their service is outstanding. We need to learn more about this." So they reached out, and we are talking with them specifically because of that. That's a massive change in the conversation.
So what we've done is taken some of the best salespeople at Insperity, and while we're excited about all the things that we're bringing to the table, they are probably most excited about something that's being taken away. The number one objection that we deal with on a daily basis, which is, "We are too big for a PEO.
Mm-hmm.
You absolutely aren't too big for a PEO now, and you certainly aren't going to be too big for a PEO with the Insperity Workday solution.
Wow! Love it.
Roger, you're leading the service organization. Soon after the announcement, we began to roll this out to our largest customers. What's been the client feedback that you've heard?
You know, Steve, it's been incredible. We've had the chance to talk to all of our large customers-
Right.
-and hundreds more, and the excitement has been palpable. It's really been remarkable, their excitement about where we're headed and again, taking that perceived barrier away for the long haul. As they grow, they're going to have the opportunity to continue to grow with us. We have clients that have asked to be part of the beta test as soon as we're ready to go, and that's indicative of the trust they extend to us-
Yeah.
that they're willing to put themselves out there, invest in the beta process, so that they can be on the front end of what this solution is going to be able to provide. And we've already got clients that have asked to extend their relationship with us based on the promise, what they've seen us produce in the past and what they know this new union together between this partnership between Workday and Insperity is going to provide them just a remarkable capability. So, excitement abounds.
Right.
in our client base, I guess, is the best way that I would wrap it up.
All right, Laura, you've got the hardest question-
Yeah.
Because we can all sense the excitement across the board.
Yeah.
What are you most... If you limit it to one, what are you-
Sure!
most excited about?
Well, I think, so marketing, at the end of the day, we're storytellers. And, and so think of this incredible story that we get to tell, right? And Workday and Insperity, we both have been going after this mid-market. We've had success. We're introducing new capabilities, joint sales opportunities, powerful brands, and, and marketing efforts. And so what an awesome story for marketing to get to tell, and so that's what we're most excited about. Yes.
So the three of you lead 3,400 of our 4,400 employee organizations. So we are all excited that you're excited. Because that will filter through our entire organization.
Absolutely.
Our audience today certainly has sensed that in every presentation. I want to thank the panelists for being with me-
Thanks, Steve. Appreciate it.
Sharing, you know, your vision and your excitement about this, and I hope that has transferred to our audience here. So we want to wrap up this panel discussion. I'm going to dismiss you guys.
Yeah.
You have stuff to do, I know. And then, I'd like to invite Paul and Doug and Jim to join me here for our question and answer-
Wonderful.
Session.
Thank you, Steve.
Thank you.
Wonderful.
Appreciate it.
All right. Well, Steve, that was an excellent session, and it was great to hear from some of our others on our management team and to see how things are moving down through the organization. And at this point, we're going to do our Q&A, and of course, you have up here myself, Doug, Jim, and Steve, and we're happy to answer any questions that you may have. You're able to go ahead. If you are an institutional investor, and you want to put a question in, there's a place on your site you can do that. Now, in addition, we're going to start with questions from our analysts, and so we're going to let each of them have a little bit of a question period, and we'll try to address their questions. And after that, we'll take......
Questions from institutional investors, provided we have time to do so. So first, we're gonna go ahead and start out with Tobey Sommer from Truist. So Tobey, if you're out there, we're ready to take questions from you.
Thank you very much. I wanted to ask a question about margins, perhaps on a unit basis or, on a company income statement basis, margins to improve once the book is converted to the new?
So if I understand your question, you kind of cut out on us a little bit, but I think you're asking us about potential margins relative to this new relationship and our new pricing. So really, from our perspective, that really relates, of course, to how you can move gross profit up. And you know, we're kind of EBITDA per worksite employee is kind of how we look at things. Jim, that's pretty much in, in your world. Do you want to comment on that?
Yeah, I would say, you know, it's very early on in the process, right? I mean, we have early indications that, people have a willingness to pay, you know, pretty significantly higher, you know, prices. But, the thing that I would say is, you know, market research and when somebody actually, you know, takes the time to write a check, and become a customer, you know, those dot prices can maybe differ a little bit. So I don't want to get overly, excited about that, but I will say that, you know, if, if we didn't think that, it, it was a good margin opportunity, we wouldn't be doing it.
That's definitely certainly part of the analysis and, you know, it matches up. We're very pleased with the early indications of how all that fits together. Tobey, go ahead.
Thanks. In terms of your worksite employee growth, volume growth, how do you expect that to change over time as a result of the new partnership?
Yeah, so, you know, again, this relationship is focused on the two companies working together to go after this target market. And so even right now, we are beginning to do things that work together toward taking the current products we have to the market together, and then ultimately having the new solution that we believe is a hand in glove fit. So there's no question that, you know, this translates to us. And really, it's interesting because Workday thinks in terms of number of employees on their system, you know, you know, the per employee per year, if you will, and they will think in terms of per employee per month. So your question about worksite employee growth is right in the heart of this. That's what this driver is.
Now, now, Steve, you know, you've got the sales organization, and, you know, this is about sales efficiency gain, driving future worksite employee growth. So kind of what's your assessment of that?
I'd say it's really twofold, certainly from a sales and marketing perspective, lead flow is everything. What do we want our salespeople to do? We want them to go tell our story to as many people as we can. Secondly, what we're identifying is these are warm leads, folks reaching out for an HR solution. That is very different than a cold call that a BPA might make. So the quality of the lead and the starting point is much better, which should translate into, you know, higher close rates.
But secondly, the second growth factor, the retention side, we are already hearing, and Roger, you mentioned this, but I did hear a story of when we made the announcement of the partnership, we had a client that was ready to begin a complete process of looking at their HCM solution, whether it was Workday or UKG or pick your, you know, pick your partner. And they have immediately stopped that, and they're anxious to see how this is going to work. So we're already affecting retention, a key driver to the target group.
That's significant. Of course, we're after this for the long term view of continuing double-digit growth and being able to even do that more reliant on just our efforts as opposed to some things going on in the marketplace, et cetera. So at this point, I think it's time to move on to. I'll give Tobey one more question. Should we do that, Tobey?
One more for us?
Sure.
Thank you very much. With respect to your investments over the period, you've given us a number for this year. Do you have visibility to the cadence of that investment, over time at this stage?
So, yeah, Doug, this is probably your wheelhouse, so why don't you address that?
Yeah, I mean, I think, going back to some earlier comments that we had, we talked about the incremental investment of about $150 million over the five years. It's a rough estimate. We're still fairly early on in the stages of development, and I think that probably will be refined over time. But we did make the comment that in this, in 2024, in our budget and in our guidance, both the incremental and some redeployed resources going into this initiative was to the tune of $60 million or so. So $60 million, of, somewhat related to that 150. We also talked about the fact that the first two years would be where the concentration of the investment would take place.
I think it's just, you would expect that because that's where most of the development's taking place, particularly on the client tenant side of things, and even the corporate instance, which is a smaller piece, but that's gonna be front-end loaded thereafter for years 3, 4, and 5, you know, it'll be just some ongoing development, costs associated with primarily the client tenant. So, so that's how we thought. That's how we framed the amount of the, the timing of the investment itself. I think another thing to point out is because it's a new solution for us, it's a little bit of a different accounting treatment, where we've had the old PEO system, and we've added products and features to it, you're able to capitalize that investment, amortize it over a period of time.
This is a new solution that has a different treatment, so everything's being flushed through the P&L, just on, on the investment, and that's why you're seeing the impact on the P&L this year, and you would expect to see some impact, some impact again next year.
Thank you.
Thank you, Tobey. Now we're going to move on to Jeff Martin at Roth Capital. Jeff, it's-
Thanks. Good afternoon. Wanted to, first of all, say thank you for taking the time and effort to put this together. It's helpful. You know, first question is, do you have any sense of timing in terms of launch of the joint solution? You know, it seems like we're probably looking at, you know, sometime in, in late 2025 or early 2026. Is that the right way to think about it?
So that's a good way to think about it. It's not time for us to pin down that launch time, because we are in the process of detailing out all the components that lead to that. And there's... The timeframe will become more and more apparent, soon. You know, we have the foundational site will be going up fully soon this summer, and then a lot of validation work goes on through that, and that will help us pin down timing. But I want to make sure we all realize that the launch, you know, we're not a technology company, and the launch date is not even the most significant day in this relationship. It's already going. It's already started, companies working together to go after a target market with the solutions we have today.
As soon as possible, we want to take that solution as well. But the benefits from this relationship have started and will be continuing to ramp up. When that exact launch date happens, we aren't ready to pin that down yet, but there's a ramping up of activities and even pre-sales of potential LOIs. There's other things, that we'll be doing together with low revenue streams, et cetera. So that launch date is important. We're focused on it as a new product launch, so we want that to be as soon as we can do it really well, but we're not ready to pin that down yet.
Great. And then second question is, is in regards to the PEO industry in general, it's 8% penetrated today. Seems like cracking the code for the mid-market could, at least for Insperity, make your addressable market significantly larger. Curious if you could comment on that, and then relative to that as well, second part of the question is: how might your HR services offering evolve over time as a result of this partnership? You know, are there tools that you envision that could further reduce the risk of the Success Penalty in the middle market?
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for the question. I'll let Steve answer a little bit about that, as well, you know, how it affects our Success Penalty. But I just want to say that when I look at our service organization, the amazing job that they do today serving our mid-market customers in this target market, that has seriously expanded through this relationship. And they do an incredible job, but it's mostly throughput. And once the technology improvements are enhanced and delivered in the next solution, you know, I get to see their life changing and our ability to really deliver even more impact to these clients.
Well, there's no question that in 38 years, what we do today is much different than it was once.
Sure.
And maybe we owe the credit to our government with new legislation and compliance and all of that. That's kind of, you know, good news for, for the clients then. But where I really see the benefit again, is more in our efficiency, because the technologies that were being implemented at Salesforce, you know, we did that 2 years ago for our growth part of the organization, roll that out to the service orientation and the rest of the company. So today, all one CRM platform for the first time in our history, and now with Workday-based solution, there are going to be things that our service professionals are not going to have to muscle through year, year, year after year anymore. And I think this is gonna raise this whole level of efficiency and capacity model for, for our people.
I think there's an element of better service and an element of reduced costs, potentially, not having to hire as fast for HR support and those types of things. I think there's just true business impact, you know, through this.
That's really true. To me, I get excited about the consultative services that we're able to provide into this space and the insights with AI and all the things that we're doing in that area. I just think we're going to become a bigger and bigger important piece in the puzzle for clients in the space. Very excited about that. Jeff, next question.
Okay, last question for me is, you talked about, you know, customer feedback would be a real value add if you had 6-month implementation times. Just curious how realistic that is, and do you foresee that kind of being the standard implementation period once this joint offering go to market and, you know, implementation strategy is refined?
... Yes, absolutely. That's a great question. Keep in mind that the way we implement large clients onto our platform today is a 2-3-month time period. Part of it is recognizing the processes we've been discussing with Workday, is how we go about that. And it's really kind of, you know, if you apply this to a new solution, it has to do with the pre-configuring and the actual process that you work through with the client to give them clear choices rather than working from a blank slate, which is how it normally goes when you're going to, you know, put in a new significant technology solution like this. That's not how it's going to be working with our customers, because we already know how things work in that size of town.
So all this work that we're doing with our 20 and the April 9 team, we're mirroring how we go about it today, how will we work through with each client? You know, is it six months out? I hope it's way shorter than that. That's my optimism here. I know what we can do and how we can do it. But the people are gonna do that in the best part, how we're organized and building out this whole technology along with the pre-configuration of selections that are available to anybody. You know, we're not kind of on that quality. You know, the pre-configuration is absolutely key to cutting the time to implementation. But we have a history of success and quality and the expertise that exists.
But we have. I recognize that this is a new, will be a new product for us, but we know how to go about this, and that's the work that we are doing as we go. And I want to add to that, because just the time to deploy or to implement is only one part of the puzzle. What has become more apparent to us in this last 90 days of work we've been working on this, is how much we're going to be able to add to the time to value, the time to actually get the value out of this. It's amazing how these types of implementations, it's a real effort just to get to deployment, but then it takes quite a bit of time before you're really getting some real solid value out of it. And we will be a much shorter time than that.
All right, next one.
Hey, good morning, and thanks for doing this. Really appreciate it. Understand that it's still really early in the timing of the relationship, but I was... You did mention, you know, late 2025, early 2026 in terms of, you know, a tentative time period. When you do launch, can you talk a little bit about, like, how visible the co-branding is going to be? Because I do think it does, you know, help to elevate, you know, that you already have a really trusted brand, but it is perceived, you know, to be more appropriate for smaller clients. So how visible is the branding going to be? What's the creative media and digital strategy going to be? How prominent will it be?
Will you be funding all of that, or will Workday contribute to that as well?
Great question. First of all, let me just say, listen, the Workday staff has been incredible. I don't even have a way ahead of that. But this is not trying to announce that, but like I said, the launch day is not as significant as the whole lot that's happening already and will continue to run up, including what they're describing to us, the whole marketing effort. And I can tell you that from competitiveness standpoint, the co-branding is special on this new solution, so we intend to optimize the value of both brands each other. Now, I don't have specifics for you yet, because that is a part of the effort that our team will be doing in the right time frame to produce exactly that, profile.
So there will be, I expect, if you understand it, we're already more excited about the incentive of these two brands working together in a perfect marriage of powerful technologies. The reality is they really don't want to see themselves as a service company. They introduced other companies into the implementations. They're so excited about having a much service plan attached to theirs, because that's what their target market is, needing to solve for a good service, solve for that as a service. They need to solve for a good service. So I guess that's, I think you're going to see that happening.
That's great. And then can you talk a little bit more about, you know, how you're thinking? And again, I recognize it's early, lots of things need to be worked out, but just in terms of the pricing and then also you, how you would approach, you know, your existing clients in that 250-2,500 range that already have the service. You know, would you try to upsell those clients proactively, or would you wait until, you know, there's some discussions with regards to, you know, whether or not they're feeling, you know, 100% satisfied or starting to feel like they're outgrowing the service? How are you going to approach that?
...
... Hey, Paul, it's Mark. I don't know if you can hear me well, but your audio on your end is, at least on my end, breaking up. And I heard the same thing from Andrew, who's in a different office, so not sure if anybody else is having that problem. If you can hear me, I had one last question, which is: what's the ongoing expense that you would expect? And would you anticipate cross-selling some of Workday's other solutions outside of their HCM modules? And could you get some sort of spiffs or incentives or marketing stream from that?
Hi, everyone. Thanks for taking my questions. I'm in a similar boat to Mark, and I'm having a hard time hearing you. So some of my questions, I apologize if they've been answered, we'll go to the direct recording for that. But the first one that I wanted to ask was just around on the addressable market. I thought the slide that you put up with the sliver of the market that the joint solution is targeting was super helpful. And so I just wanted to ask a little bit more about that kind of 18% and 13%, or that 31% in the, you know, 100-2,500, or maybe it's a 100-5,000 range.
Like, what do you think the market share of PEOs in that market is today? And maybe what are clients in that ecosystem currently doing on the tech and benefit side? Is your expectation that you will be benefiting from customers' kind of success penalties of competitor PEOs? Are they customers that already have kind of point solutions and are done trying to do it themselves? Just trying to understand how that kind of prospect looks relative to your traditional prospect in kind of the sub-20 employee starting point range. Great. And then, for my follow-up, you know, Laura talked about the leads a little bit more, and it was super helpful to hear that I think 60% of historical leads are net new. For Insperity, I think 60% of them...
Of that 60%, half of them look like they're attractive prospects that kind of fall in your window. You know, I'm just kind of curious, is there any way to quantify the volume in, in terms of a number, and maybe how that compares to what your traditional outreach marketing efforts have, brought in? Just trying to understand, you know, if it's a multiples of the normal leads, what, what kind of needle mover that could be. Great. And then if I could do one more question, if that's okay. Just maybe stepping away from the Workday partnership on BPAs and BPA growth. It's obviously been a major driver of Worksite Employee growth over the past 10 years. I think on Doug's slide, he cited 9% CAGR in, in both metrics.
So I was hoping you could speak to maybe the recruiting process, how you bring in salespeople, and your ability to keep up with that level of growth as the base gets bigger. And I know, you know, in part of the earlier presentations, there was a conversation or a discussion about maybe increased tenure amongst your sales force relative to some of your peers, how the sales force looks relative to the primary competitors. Any additional insight on kind of how you think your sales force stacks up and where you're differentiated would be helpful. Thank you.