Okay, I think we'll get started. I wanna welcome everyone to our RGP Investor Day. We haven't done this in a very long time. We are so excited to be here. We're excited to share our love of this company with you. We're excited to share the state of the business today. We've been quiet for so long, maybe too long, but we're ready to share how the company has evolved, and we may go deep in some areas. We hope you engage, learn, and enjoy the content today. I'll start by introducing my colleagues who will be presenting with me. I'll start with Tim Brackney, who's our Chief Operating Officer and President. Bhadresh Patel, who is RGP's Chief Digital Officer and the CEO of Veracity. Next is Jen Ryu, our Chief Financial Officer.
Steve Del Vecchio, give us a wave, who is the founder and head of HUGO, and Mairtini Ni Dhomhnaill , who is the founder of Countsy. I'm excited to share the stage with these incredible business leaders, and they will share more about the businesses that they run. I hope you'll experience the breadth of our management capability in this session today, the meaningful evolution of our capabilities, and the fact that it's a new day at RGP. This slide I have to show. It's our forward-looking statement admonition. For those of you who may know, I'm a former lawyer in the room, but I will not read this to you. Please feel free to enjoy it in our electronic version. As I said before, welcome. We're so glad to have so many of you in the room, and we're also glad to have those of you who are participating virtually.
This is still an uncertain time, and so we welcome those that couldn't be in the room today, but are participating virtually. I've been the CEO for a little over five years, and we've accomplished a lot, but there's much more to come for this business. We're driving towards $1 billion in revenue in the midterm, and we also have a clear goal to deliver adjusted EBITDA of 12%+. Over the next two hours, we'll take you on the journey, and you'll hear how we will deliver growth and improve profitability from the business leaders who will make it happen. I wanna share my roadmap for today. I will cover three topics. I'll start with themes, macro themes that create opportunity for our business.
Next, I'll turn to our brand heritage and company fundamentals, and I'll end with the opportunity to drive growth, and I will cover our brand clarity work and amplification. By clarifying our brand, it's all about making it easier for clients to buy from us and our people to sell. Let's dive in. We've seen these headlines. We see these headlines every day. Headlines about the Great Recession, headlines about talent wanting to work differently, headlines about the war for talent. These themes are real, and they create opportunity for RGP. We'll talk in a little bit about how we're helping our clients fill gaps in their professional needs, and we're also helping clients deliver transformational project outcomes. The world of work is fundamentally and irreversibly changed. Work today is both a noun and a verb. Work, where it is done, when it is done, who does it?
Technology, culture, strategy, execution, these are all pieces of the world of work today. Diversity, purpose, and empathy are also overriding considerations in today's changing workforce environment. The second theme that I wanna share is what we call the rise of the project economy. More business activity is being accomplished today through project work than ever before. Think about it. It's not role-based work any longer. The war for talent, as I said before, is real, and therefore clients need to move their objectives forward with project talent, project managers, change managers, and subject matter experts. In fact, the Project Management Institute has estimated that project activity will grow from $12 trillion-$20 trillion, that's a little bit of a tongue twister, over the next 10 years, and RGP is perfectly positioned to deliver in this space.
It's also estimated that we'll need 88 million people to work in project management. There aren't currently enough project managers, and that is an opportunity for RGP as well. This is the marketplace in which we operate. Now I'll turn to the company fundamentals. For those of you who are newer to our story, I thought it'd be interesting to pull out some of the statements we made in our original S-1. They're really more relevant today than ever. We talked back in 2000 about flexibility being core to what we were building in the business model. We talked about project-based careers. That's so relevant today. We talked about the power of women in business and the fact that we were built with diversity in our DNA from day one. It's such a powerful need in today's environment too.
We call RGP trendy before it was cool, and maybe we were born too soon, but we're certainly born for now. Who are we really? We are a global consulting firm that focuses on project execution. We do it differently than the competition, and we do it better. What do I mean by that? We deliver our project execution services with experienced talent. Talent that has sat on both sides of the desk. Talent who is there by choice because they want to deliver impact on the project on which they're engaged. We don't give advice that somebody else has to figure out how to execute. We execute, and that's what clients appreciate about us. We deliver, again, with project management, change management, and subject matter expertise. Mentioned a moment ago, our consultants are motivated to execute on the projects.
They've purposefully chosen this career path, and 20 years ago, that might have seemed a curious choice. In today's environment, giving professionals control, choice, and transparency and flexibility is what the world of work is all about. It could not be more relevant for RGP today. Why do projects fail? Projects fail generally for three reasons. You have the wrong people, you don't bring the right project management approach to stay on budget and on time, and you don't invest enough and early enough in change management. We solve all three of those problems, and as a recent client just said to us, "RGP, you make change happen." That's the experience we wanna create in our talent base. There are some seats up here if you'd like to come up, and welcome. I wanna pause for a minute about our recent recognition.
What's special about these recognitions is that they come from client feedback, and they also come from consultant and employee feedback. We highlight these because we're very proud of this recognition. We're proud of this company, and I think you'll hear that today from many of us. We're also proud because we've received these recognitions several years in a row. This isn't an anomaly. A little bit more now on our company fundamentals. As I touched on a moment ago, we've been built on diversity and inclusion. Over 52% of our North America employees are minorities or women. If you just look at racial minorities, more than 35% of our employees in the U.S. are diverse. No other professional services competitor can compare to those numbers. Clients comment to us that we show up differently, and they love that we show up differently.
We agree that it creates better business outcomes. We've also been recognized by Paradigm for Parity for the number of women on our board, and that's always been a fundamental and important voice in the boardroom for RGP. I mean, if you look around this room, we have many female leaders in this room. We're proud of working together. We're proud of the perspective that we bring to solving the world of work problems. Who do we work with? Who do these high-quality, diverse consultants work with? I'll give you a taste. This is just a sampling of our client base, but I think you'll agree with me, we should be very proud of this client base. These, aside from perhaps Truist, which is new to the marketplace from the combination of two incredible banks, these are long-standing relationships we've had at RGP.
We enjoy fantastic client retention. It's something we're proud of. We recognize that in a world of technology, relationships still matter, and that our penetration in our client base is important. We have 2,500 clients globally, and we have the right to do business in more than 1,800 of them today. We generally deliver our work through a statement of work. We're clearly on the consulting side of the continuum versus staffing, and we'll talk about that a little bit more in a moment. We serve clients in 45 countries. We go where our clients need us.
We have a fantastic global client base, and we serve them where they need us. We may not know what project we're working on, say for Alphabet year over year, but we do know we'll be on their org chart as part of their project resources team. Increasingly, we've started to build captive talent pools. What that means is clients who have significant project initiatives, they know they will have long-term needs on those initiatives, and so we ring-fence a group of talent to deliver just for them. They don't want the delay of onboarding, and they want to be able to execute out of the gate. That's new for RGP. It's an exciting statement about the trust that our clients are placing in us in this very dynamic world of work. How do we deliver these services for our clients?
I wanna talk about how we bring agility to the project economy. Again, RGP was born for this 20 years ago, and the world has finally caught up to what we're doing. What's exciting about us today is that the trends are happening on both the talent side of our business and the client side, so impacting both supply and demand. When we describe what we do in a project basis, we look at a two-dimensional framework. For me, it's a very simple way of looking at how we engage with clients. There are needs in this category we call run the place, operational, ongoing, non-discretionary needs. The war for talent and the great resignation have accelerated opportunity for us in this space. Clients have gaps, they have important work to accomplish for operating their business, and they increasingly turn to us for help.
Technology disruption, supply chain issues, war for talent, immigration policy are all impacting transformation initiatives in our client base as well. That's what we call change the place, and we do lots of work with our clients based upon their project agendas, where they're transforming their business, responding to regulation, responding to crisis, and we can step in as an experienced, high-quality, diverse group to deliver the impact they need. We serve both sides, and we do it with a portfolio of transformative brands. Let me talk for a minute. You're probably most familiar with RGP, that's our core. We're a global consulting firm, again, focused on project execution. Our newest business is HUGO by RGP. HUGO stands for Human Go, and it's our newly launched digital engagement platform to allow millennial talent and millennial buyers within a client base to engage directly for finance and accounting talent.
I like to describe it perhaps as Match.com for finance and accounting professionals, where clients and talent get to engage directly. You'll see more about HUGO as Steve presents and shows you some of the functionality we're bringing to the marketplace. We're excited to have Mairtini present as the founder of Countsy. Countsy's changing the way the world works for startup companies. Countsy is a finance and HR as a service business built on a suite of state-of-the-art technology products to allow startup companies to focus on the core of their business, and Mairtini and her team focus on the back office. Do that until an organization reaches a certain level of maturity and is ready to hand off to build its own infrastructure. Then Veracity. Veracity is the business we acquired a little over, well, it'll be three years in July.
I almost said a little over two years ago, to build more digital transformation capabilities in our client base. We were starting to receive questions about, "How can you help me in the digital arena?" We knew we needed to add capability. What's perfect about what Veracity does today is that they're really helping our clients help their own employee groups work differently. Meaning those employee groups in today's environment have to work with more automation, collaboration, knowledge sharing, etc. Almost all of our clients have an agenda to improve those experiences, workplace experiences through digital tools. This portfolio of transformative brands, what links us all together is we help the world work differently in different ways. It's all about working differently. These are the capabilities that will help us achieve the goals I mentioned earlier.
Now I'll turn for a moment on our enterprise growth drivers. You'll see this slide repeat throughout the presentation because each of these business leaders will talk about the growth driver relevant to their business. I am going to take the first one, because if you've ever looked me up on our website, I say my title is CEO and Chief Brand Believer. I love this company. I love what we do to engage talent and employ them in ways that they love. I love that we serve our clients. We help deliver some of their most important projects. But what we do need is a brand that's a bit better understood within our client base and better understood as we go to the market for talent.
I'm calling it our brand clarity project, and I'm gonna walk you through some of the results of the work we've recently done. Tim will bring the voice of our consultants into this investor presentation when he presents in just a moment. Let's talk about what we did. We started with a deep dive. We engaged a brand strategist, a boutique firm based in Los Angeles. They happen to be called Innovation Protocol, led by a CEO named Sasha Strauss. We engaged him to work on this strategic planning and brand clarity exercise, and we started with a deep dive. We did our research. We interviewed almost 75 people, including internal employees, clients, and analysts, to understand how did they talk about us? Why did they hire us? Why did they choose to put their professional careers in our hands? We learned a number of things.
What we learned is that clients trust us. Clients consider us a partner they can turn projects over to. They can turn projects over to us, and project execution is our sweet spot. What did we learn from our employees? We learned that clients trust us to deliver on their most important projects, that we are about taking strategy to impact, and we do it better than others. We do it with experienced, diverse talent who is there for a reason. We don't work with politics. We don't bring a lot of ego. We're a little bit unusual in the professional services space because of that, but it creates an experience in our client base that is unique and appreciated. That's some of the magic of RGP, because strategy is one thing, but execution is everything, and that's really where the magic happens.
We realized our sweet spot is project execution. This is not to show just an in-between space, because it's not an in-between space. What it represents here is we've drawn on attributes from staffing, and we've drawn attributes from consulting to create a new dimension for us that we can own and we can own better than anyone else. We took agility and flexibility, financial flexibility from the staffing companies. We took subject matter expertise, methodologies, a point of view, project management and change management from consulting, and we've created a new space for us that we can own better than anyone else and declare our purpose for being. We are the project execution firm of choice, and our clients have asked for that because our clients have said, "Clarify your brand for me so that I can be a brand champion within my own organization.
I wanna go to my peers and colleagues and say, "You should hire RGP," but I need to be able to say exactly what you do with more clarity. That's what we're delivering here to both sides of our business, our clients and our consultants. We have a new brand voice today, and I'll walk you through it quickly. We are experts that execute. It's the simple positioning, and it's clear to everyone. We're owning our expertise, we're declaring our space, and we know we do it better than anyone else. Our vision, which informs, it's the big idea that informs all of our decision-making, is that business does transform when projects perform. Every client will tell you they don't want more advice. They want someone to help them get it done.
Get it done as efficiently as possible and create a positive experience in their own employees, and that's what we do. Our employer brand mantra that we brought to the marketplace about four years ago, which is A Toast to The Power of Human, has served us so well in the past four years. We're moving that tagline to be our employer brand mantra as we reveal a new external tagline for our business in today's environment. Before I do that, I wanna show you a few other taglines and share with you what is a tagline supposed to do. It's supposed to create inspiration. It's supposed to give you a sense of confidence, and if you do it well, it leaves the viewer wanting more. They want to know more. Here are a few examples of taglines from peer companies and others.
Some of these are clients. You can see some of the taglines are aspirational. They don't describe everything that the company does tactically, but they create a sense of confidence and a sense of inspiration. Our new tagline is Dare to Work Differently. What we love about this is it speaks to both sides of our business. It has relevance from a talent-facing perspective, and it has relevance from a client-facing perspective. It implies that there's a better way of working for talent than the Big Four pyramid, and we hear that all the time from our consultants. It leads to a conversation that is oh so relevant in today's environment about flexibility, project choice, borderless engagements, and a hybrid way of working.
From a client perspective, and for all the brands that I shared with you earlier, it recognizes that the traditional employment model is stale. We are innovating in today's environment, and RGP is at the center of that innovation. If you walk away with one thing today, two things actually, that our consultants are fantastic and that we are perfectly positioned strategically for the needs of today's business. It leads to a conversation about the project economy and the future of sustainable business, and that more and more economic activity happens in a project dynamic. As I said before, it speaks to what Veracity does, helping companies with their own employees work differently with digital tools. It's so multidimensional. We're so excited about how it serves both parts of our business. Dare to Work Differently.
It's a rallying cry for all of us, and our consultants love it. They love that it inspires them with their choice of professional career, that they've chosen a portfolio approach to their professional careers. With our brand voice comes a new brand architecture. You'll see this over the next year as we evolve our website to lead with our expertise out front and to lead with the front doors of the practice areas that mean the most in today's business environment. These are areas that clients, CEOs, business leaders are constantly worrying about how to solve. Talent innovation, the war for talent. How do we evolve our workforce strategy to rent some talent, own some talent? How do we create an environment that uses both? Finance transformation. So much is happening with RPA, artificial intelligence, automation, new technologies, et cetera. Digital.
Everything digital is on our clients' agendas. Supply chain and logistics transformation, and certainly risk and compliance. All areas that are top of mind for business leaders today. You'll see our project staffing business powers our project consulting. You'll learn from Tim that we're going to deliver that in a slightly different way with a segmented account approach and more technology enablement from HUGO. Again, we have a new brand voice today, and we have a new brand architecture that leads with our expertise out front. How clear it is for a client to say, "You should hire RGP. They're a global consulting firm that focuses on project execution better than anyone else. They don't bring a pyramid model. They don't bring junior folks to learn on our dime. They deliver strategy to impact," and that's our sweet spot.
You can see here how Veracity, Countsy, and HUGO fit into our brand strategy, and we can drive business together, and you'll hear that from my other business leaders who are presenting today. I'll just close with three thoughts. We believe in our business model, and we believe in our consulting capabilities. We believe in our people. We are confident we'll achieve our financial goals that we outlined today. Finally, we're more strategically sound as a business than ever before. Thank you very much, and I'll welcome Tim Brackney to the stage.
Thank you, Kate, and good morning, everybody. I have to say it's nice to be in a room where I can connect with people in the third dimension. It's been a while. For those of you out on camera, nice to see you as well. My name's Tim Brackney. I'm the President and Chief Operating Officer of RGP. I will say a few things I'm really grateful for. One is the ability to connect in person.
The other is to look and see that we've selected a pre-pandemic photo of me for this particular shoot. I'll say that, you know, when you look at your life in logos, it's sort of a distillation of kind of the journey that you've taken in a career. If I'm completely transparent with all of you, I really thought that there would be a lot more logos in my career. When I got to RGP, it quickly determined it was a very special place. Kate talked about that.
It's a special place because of culture and people, but it's a special place because we've had an ascendant commercial model that I now think is as relevant, maybe more relevant than it's ever been. Anyway, I'm very excited to be here and share some thoughts with you. You know, Kate talked about our new tagline, "Dare to Work Differently," and I think that's a really exciting and inspirational look at kinda who we are as a company. I wanna take a second to go back to our old tagline, to "The Power of Human," which was kind of a cheeky toast to the importance of humanity in a world filled with automation and artificial intelligence.
When you actually think about kind of who we are as a business, our most important customers are our consultants and our clients. We sit at the nexus of those two important groups. If you actually then take a step back and say, "Let's talk about actually the words, the power of human," the trends that have been intensified over the last few years, and especially accelerated during the last couple of years of the pandemic, have really given rise to a new way, a new power for labor. Talent is really in the driver's seat now in a way that's different than maybe any time in history. There hasn't been a lot of disruption in the labor model maybe since the advent of unions. Just think about where we are now.
It's one of the tightest labor markets we've ever had, and people are opting to work in a different way, and they're betting with their feet. If they don't find what they want, they're going to leave, or they might not choose to even go to your interview. What does that mean? It means that labor is in control, right? They're looking for a number for a host of things. One is flexibility, and I think Kate showed you almost from the outset, that was sort of one of the key tenets of our business model was to offer flexibility to our workforce. The other is to actually put real action behind the term work smarter instead of harder, right?
People talk about that a lot, but do they adjust their KPIs to really emphasize, you know, outcomes versus output? The other is diversity, and I think diversity has been sort of a huge buzzword for a number of years. I think over the last couple of years, what I've seen. I speak to every new joiner in the company, and I try to get them within the first six weeks of joining the company. What I noticed 18 months ago or so is that almost every one of them said, "Look, I googled your leadership team. I googled your board. I wanted to make sure that at the top of the company, that there was diversity represented." Diversity in all kinds of categories, and specifically diversity in perspective.
That is definitely a difference. The last thing is the ability to have continuous learning. I think that you wanna have control. People want control over their portfolio of experience, but they're gonna select employers who give them opportunities for different learning experiences, and that is very different, right? It's not a question of what talent desires anymore. It's what they're demanding and what they're doing with that leverage and that power. You know, I think Kate said this, and I'll say it again. I mean, we were gig before gig was cool, right? I mean, the word gig was not in the lexicon when we were founded. In reality, you know, I'll take it a step further. We really invented professional gig at scale. We own that.
You know, I think I said earlier one of the reasons, you know, I sort of force myself every year to fall in love, and I think that's a healthy thing. I talk to all the people on my team, and I say, "Make sure that you're still here and that you love being here." There are a lot of reasons to love being with a company, but one is to know that you kind of have owned a space that's important. Owning professional gig, putting our stamp on it, I think has been very important for us.
I think the way that you can best judge whether we've had any success with that is to think about which is probably one of our best statistics, which is that our average tenure approaches three years. If you think about our model, and you think about some of the risk, at least initially, people were taking on not knowing where their next project was gonna be, the fact that we've had people who've been with us, we have 3,500+ consultants on average for three years of tenure, is really incredible. Admittedly, I'm biased, so don't believe me. Let's actually hear from our consultants. You'll notice that Cindy, Asif, and Natalie have been here for a number of years with us, and I think it's important that you hear directly from them.
Working for RGP, only one word, flexibility.
Being a consultant at RGP means variety and flexibility. As a working parent with two kids who's also taking care of parents, I need that flexibility in my life. What it means to me to be a consultant at RGP is to become part of a team, a very valued member of a team. To me, RGP's sweet spot is authenticity and long-term relationships.
At the end of the day, it's all about people, and that shows, we wear the badge of RGP at a client with a lot of pride.
I feel valuable to the clients. I feel valuable to RGP. I feel like everybody at RGP is trying to make me the most successful I can be, so that I, in turn, can help my client to be as successful as they can be.
In my case, I have been with RGP for 17 years now, and I have never looked back.
I can honestly say I've had the same experience as Asif. I don't know how many years I've been here. I stopped counting at 15, but like Asif, I've never looked back. Let me just say this. I mean, we've talked about the rise and the importance of labor and some of the changes that have been occurring, but that's also sort of happened at the same time as ways that people are thinking about reimagining their own workforce planning. Companies are reimagining their own workforce planning. The speed of change, the number of initiatives that companies take on, they don't take them on and sequence them anymore. They're taken on simultaneously. The impetus for these initiatives sometimes comes really quickly, and I'll give you a couple examples of that.
When you think about it, you know, table stakes for being a successful company now is the ability to be agile. It's agility. If agility is the new table stakes, I would say to you that talent is the new oil. Being able to rapidly deploy and have access to talent that can help you pivot or be resilient in the moment is exactly what we're about. I'll give you two examples about the sort of rapid deployment and resiliency. One is from a California health provider who through the pandemic had some changes that they had to take on really quickly. Their needs were very specific. One was, we need help modeling, project managing, and then standing up mass vaccination sites, right? This is not something that was in Kaiser's roadmap in 2019. It wasn't in anywhere in 2020.
It was in nobody's roadmap then. They had to quickly pivot, and they had to say, "Hey, we don't actually have the amount of talent on hand right now to help us to quickly come up to speed on this." RGP, we helped with the financial modeling, we helped with project management, we helped with strategic communications, and we helped with change management to get these vaccination sites set up. Secondarily, they had an ongoing initiative to sort of pivot to telemedicine. I don't think they anticipated being 100% telemedicine or 98% telemedicine, so they had to quickly kind of hit the acceleration on that initiative. Because that was an ongoing initiative, what they needed was very specific assistance around change management and the ability to help their constituents have a similar experience than the on-premise experience that they'd had before.
We were able to help them with that. Again, the key to that was rapid deployment. Those were two very specific use cases. I'll give you one other that was a little more general and sort of brought around by the market that we're in right now. A technology company in Silicon Valley was undergoing a lot of large-scale initiatives, in particular, a large finance transformation. As they started to assess the situation, and they looked around and they said in their own workforce, they were being hit by the great resignation, the great reassessment, all the greats, right? Like, they were dealing with turnover. They were dealing with the inability to attract people to their own platform, and they recognized they didn't have the luxury of being able to slow down.
Knowing that they had a number of initiatives, they decided to commit to and ring-fence a level of talent that had finance competency, project management, and change management, knowing that they didn't actually have specific seats for them right now. These were sort of empty boxes on their organizational chart that they knew that they needed, and most importantly, they didn't want to cede that talent to any of their competitors. That is more of a proactive, nonspecific, a less specific use case, that's really about managing, having access to and managing a captive talent pool.
You think about that, you think about the macro environment that we're facing, you think about the operational model that we've had and the company ethos that we have of agility through impact, and you wonder, you know, how do we actually take advantage of that? In go-to-market, there are a few things that we're doing immediately and some things that we think have a sort of long-term runway for us to be able to pull on levers of growth. The first two are really more client-centric, and they are, especially the first one where we've talked about and have stood up a strategic client program. The whole idea around that is I better get back to the microphone. I'm sorry for you in video land that I stepped away from the microphone.
Generally, nobody worries about me being quiet, but I'll make sure. It is to make sure that we focus on the places where we have the most opportunity. The most opportunity being that we have strongest relationships, we have the talent to actually do the work, we have a host of raving fans, and we're likely only in one area or part of the business, either a function or at a level, and we have the ability to get altitude and breadth within those accounts. We've seen as we've grown from that initial 9 accounts to, you know, we think around 75 this year and eventually to 100+, that these are accounts where when we spend the effort, both in the short term and long term, we can strengthen the relationship and actually turn that into growth.
Similarly, in sort of the longer tail of our business, we have accounts where the experience and the potential is a little more episodic, is a little more volatile. It's usually based on one or two small projects, and we have the opportunity to sort of think about them a different way. Most of the projects we do within this space are in project staffing. Most of them do not require sort of a similar level of white glove service as our strategic accounts and some of our other Tier 1 accounts. We're gonna serve them a different way. We'll serve them more centrally. We'll leverage technology, and we think that that's technology, specifically HUGO, and you'll hear more from Steve and see a little bit more about the HUGO technology that we've developed.
It's really an opportunity both to kind of hit the growth lever, but also to do that in a way that serves us from an operational cost perspective as well. I think many of you, if you're in the go-to-market team, you hear me talk about pricing all the time, and if you've listened to our last investor calls, you know that we think that there's plenty of upside opportunity for us here. As a business, we've always had good consistency around our gross margins, but we think that there's a tremendous amount of upside on the pricing side of our business.
You know, in the order of magnitude, rough order of magnitude is about 6 million hours that we bill every year, and so if you do the math, you can see what even small increases in bill rate can do for leverage to our business. The last thing I'll talk about is digitizing and optimizing the experience for our most important stakeholders. You know, I think this is less about being an immediate growth lever, but one is just sort of foundational and existential. For us as a company, we have to recognize that there need to be digital pathways for clients to find us. You'll see that in the HUGO demonstration. But we see that I think in all of our business. The trends of procurement and how you procure services are different.
What they are today is certainly not what they're gonna be tomorrow. For our consultants, from the time they fill out an application to the time that we deploy them on an engagement, we want to give them an experience that allows them to self-select the sort of career and learning pathway that they want to be on. We have some work to do there, and we know that right now we're sort of an analog platform. I joke and say this is, we kind of hug our consultants, physically hug them, you know, to kind of keep them, to make them understand how much we care about them. In order to scale, we have to be able to do that. We have to be able to hug more digitally.
Anyway, I want to pause there, and I also wanted to say that we will have a couple of different opportunities for us to be able to do Q&A. One of them will be after I introduce our Chief Digital Officer, Head of Veracity, and my good friend, Bhadresh Patel. Thank you.
Thank you, Tim. It's gonna be hard to top that speech of his. I'm Bhadresh Patel. I'm the Chief Digital Officer of RGP and CEO of Veracity. Today I'm going to focus on our Veracity segment and share more insights with you about what we do as a business. Our mantra at Veracity is very straightforward. We believe the future of digital is human. We believe in strengthening the synergy between people and technology through powerfully connected experiences that empower employees, engage customers, and transform businesses for the modern world. To give you some background, Veracity was founded in 2015 and acquired by RGP in 2019. Our rationale for the acquisition was very straightforward across three core pillars.
One is to leverage RGP's global client presence and introduce Veracity's digital transformation capabilities as ways to add new market segments and personas around CMOs and CIOs. Second was to align RGP's domain strength and back-office knowledge with Veracity's digital transformation capabilities and create a massive differentiator and disruption in what Kate talked about was a workplace experience. The third was to teach Veracity how to scale with agile talent that RGP's already figured out. Soon I'll share with you how we've really realized all three of those rationales over the last three years. We have built now capabilities that enable end-to-end digital transformation for our clients. Our clients look at their world from a digital perspective in two big domains. One is from a customer perspective, right? It's very important that they acquire customers, they retain customers.
At the end of the day, they wanna grow revenue from digital channels. On the flip side, our customers all have employees, and their employees either directly or indirectly serve their customers. However, they have to do it in a manner where they're reducing cost and also optimizing and servicing them in a matter of time and also making sure that they're doing it in a quickly self-service mode. What we have done to address these objectives is built end-to-end digital transformation capabilities. We typically work with our clients to define their digital strategy and implementation roadmap, and we fuel those implementations with powerful industry-leading technologies like Sitecore, ServiceNow, and Akumina. We also differentiate because we take the human factor into play in making sure we deliver these technologies to the experiences desired by the end users and the capabilities they need them.
Alongside that, we have deep technical bench that allows us to glue these technologies into our complex technical architectures of our clients. To bring this to life, I'm gonna share a few case studies. Our first one, our client was MassMutual, and what they were looking to do was build one-stop solution where all of their employees could go to not only find information about MassMutual, find information about the departments they work in, collaborate with each other, put in tickets from help desks, put in tickets to HR for any questions they have. We used Akumina's powerful digital workplace platform to implement the solution.
Ironically, the solution actually went live on week three of the pandemic when the pandemic hit, and it became so vital to MassMutual's employees because they were able to go to one place to get any information they needed or updates they need around COVID, any information they needed as they were transitioning from the office to the home around IT and setup, any information and support they needed from HR. We had within the first six weeks, over 60%-70% of MassMutual's organization was going to this one central site and getting everything they needed. Our second example, a longstanding client of RGP engaged us, a Fortune 100 innovative pharmaceutical company, to digitize and automate workflows using the ServiceNow platform. We built a predictive analytic solution to help identify potential fraud in their drug and coupon programs.
We automated significant number of manual processes, and there were over 80 different manual touch points, using automated digital workflows as well as case management capabilities. When we went live with this solution, our client was already identifying thousands of potential frauds that were occurring in various drug programs and coupon programs and are able to recover millions of dollar and route them to the care that people needed. Our third experience is for a large Fortune 500 food distribution company that delivers food products to small independent restaurant operators. They needed a customer experience that was beyond email, phone calls, and salespeople. We ended up using Sitecore as a digital experience platform to implement capabilities simple as how we're used to working with Nordstrom's and things like that. We have an account. We can order food products online.
We can look at our order history. We can invoice, right? More importantly, we also help them innovate and helping them realize that just because you're at the back of the food chain, right? You're a distributor and distributing foods, why don't you actually become innovative for your own customers and start giving them ideas of menu recipe ideas so they don't have to think about, you know, what they should put on their menu because their independent operators are just trying to make a living by running their restaurant and, you know, making money. I think, you know, as we look at this and Tim and Kate and everyone have been talking about enterprise growth drivers, we at RGP see Veracity and the digital transformation business they work with have seen significant growth.
At a macro level, the current market at $608 billion, right, is expected to expand at a CAGR of over 23.1% over the next five to eight years. Majority of our clients have already taken a digital-first strategy, and a lot of our clients are also creating digital organizations with their full responsibilities to transform their business from to a digital state. Digital transformation initiatives are getting funded at a rate of 3x of overall IT spend, and more than half of CIOs interviewed are planning to increase staffing to accelerate digital initiatives. The why? The market says the why. We already knew the why when we started the business, right? We wanna create efficiencies. We want speed to market. We want to reduce cost. Most importantly, we want to improve our employees' experience, right?
When they come to work, they feel like they're doing great work. They don't feel like they're going to disconnected systems to do their job. The same for customers, right? You wanna feel connected, you wanna feel up to date, you want the data when you need it, whatever channel. These are some of the many whys as to why this market is gonna continue to grow. I think also as the market continues, Veracity as being part of RGP has also benefited from this growth in an accelerated level. We have been able to extend our client relationships. Over the last couple of years, we've gotten into clients like Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Cisco, Microsoft, MetLife, Bacardi, just to name a few. Which I know alone, as Veracity as a small business when we were acquired, could not have done that overnight.
We've been able to expand our transformation capabilities by leveraging RGP's change management and digital analytics capabilities. As a result of it is helping us generate new business and also expand capabilities into existing clients. We've been leveraging RGP's domain strength, whether it's in healthcare or finance or supply chain, and differentiating transforming those organizations from a digital perspective because we have the domain knowledge and know-how of those businesses and how they work from an operational perspective. Lastly, but most importantly, what we have learned from RGP is really how we can efficiently and effectively scale projects by relying on agile talent resources to scale our delivery rapidly, as rapid as we are accessing into RGP's client base. In addition, we wanna capitalize on these strong and favorable market demands for digital transformation.
We recognize that the core of our investment and our success has been our people, and we wanna continue to invest in that. However, over the next, you know, 12-18 months, and Jen will talk more about this in a little bit, we're gonna continue scaling sales and marketing. We're gonna scale North America as planned, and we're also going to create a presence in Europe. We're going to expand service offerings, and we've already started scaling an offshore development center of excellence, and we're gonna pursue acquisitions that are very complementary with complementary capabilities to drive synergistic growth for our business. I thank everyone for allowing me to speak today and share our business, and we're gonna open up some time, and I'm gonna invite Tim and Kate for some Q&A.
I got it.
Yeah, we will.
Okay. Thanks, everyone. This is Vance Edelson with ICR. I'll be moderating. I think it's the mics up there that might be on.
Oh.
Okay. We only have one on here. I'll be moderating the Q&A sessions today sitting in the front row here at Nasdaq MarketSite. Those participating via the webcast can ask questions via the chat functionality. I see we've already received a few questions. We're gonna start here in the room and see if anyone here has a question. Right behind you.
Hi. Thanks so much. It's Jennifer Ralph Oppold from Alpine Peaks. Tim, you touched on the go-to-market approach, and I was wondering just how that may have changed too with your orientation toward more, towards more project-based work and as you magnify the strategic account program, to what extent the actual go-to-market in terms of sales force structures or incentives has changed over or you plan to change in the coming years?
Thanks, Jennifer. I think I didn't quite hear the question. I think so were you talking about changing incentives based on the change in go-to-market? Is that what you're asking about?
Yes, basically asking how your go-to-market approach has changed in terms of how you structure the team or incentives to deliver on your new strategic account focus.
Yes. Well, Jennifer, I think you know, you've been with us for a while, so you know that when we started out really as a purely geographically focused business, almost a franchise model. Even over the last four years, we've made some pretty big changes relative to both the way that we structure our go-to-market and but also how we pay for performance and incent. What we outlined here today is really more of an evolution on that same theme. It's about making sure that we have consistent motion around the right opportunities. Really this is sort of simple client segmentation to say that a dollar is not a dollar. Where our opportunity is, where our biggest opportunity is, I like to say is like we wanna put our boat over the fish, right?
The fish for us are the relationships with the clients where we feel they have the most initiatives going and where we have the strongest relationships. Those are our Strategic Accounts and our Tier 1 Accounts. That's not to say that probably the newest thing that we'll do. That doesn't portend a huge shift to our actual go-to-market structure, because that's more of an emphasis on things that we've already established. The Emerging Accounts is a different program, and it's one that we're gonna stand up this year. It's to take a look at what I call the long tail of our business, to say, you know, call it on a rough order of magnitude, somewhere between 500 and 700 clients that generate a smaller percentage of our revenue.
We're going to have a small, but mighty band of humans that are focused on that group, but really heavily leveraging technology, both HUGO, but also marketing automation to make sure that we've got sort of an outbound, more of an outbound and reactive, motion than we do with some of our stronger accounts.
Great. Thank you, Tim. Let's alternate with the questions on the webcast. Here's one probably for Kate. There's a lot of talk these days about a possible recession this year. It sounds like RGP did okay during the pandemic, but part of that was related to the desire for remote work, which helped you. What if we just have an ordinary recession this year? Can you remind us how RGP has performed during past downturns and how well prepared you are if there's a significant economic pullback?
Sure. Okay. Thanks, Vance. I'll comment first about our performance during the last downturn, and it was a very different day at RGP. We were heavily focused on Sarbanes-Oxley compliance work, and not only did the recession hit at the time, but that work became more commoditized, and we also had an advent of VMS programs. Today, we're a very different business. I hope you're learning that. You'll continue to learn that through the rest of this session. We're more diversified. We're in areas that are non-discretionary. Simply because a recession hits, it actually creates opportunity for us. We're built for agility and resilience. The needs in our client base don't go away. Headcount freezes happen, which creates opportunity for us.
We really think of ourselves as a resiliency play for the largest clients in the world whose businesses are not going to stop because of a recession, and we're their quality partner.
Wonderful. I see we have a question here, over the website from Andrew Steinerman, analyst at JP Morgan. He writes, "What is the average years of professional experience which the RGP professionals on assignment have, and has this professional experience level changed over time?
That's a good question, Andrew. Yes, I would say the answer to the shift is yes, it has changed. We're seeing more people who are attracted to our platform at earlier stages in their career. When I joined, many moons ago, it was probably closer to 15 years of experience, and now I would say it's kind of on a range of eight to 10 years.
I'd also comment, because I love what we're building with HUGO, is that HUGO can provide opportunity for earlier career talent too to have a place in our business. We're excited to see how that group of Millennials and Gen Z's even will come into the company.
Terrific. Let's pause again and see if we have any questions here in the room. Otherwise, we have plenty coming in through the webcast. Okay, let's go back to the webcast. Here's one for Bhadresh. Since being acquired by RGP a couple years ago, can you describe the integration process? Were there any challenges? And do you feel like Veracity is performing better now than it would have on its own?
It's a great question. What I'd like to say is, the first time I sat down with Kate, we had dinner, and I remember telling my wife, I was like, "Hey, I have a dinner. I'm meeting this lady by the name of Kate Duchene. I think I'll probably be an hour and a half, and I'll be home." Ended up being a three-hour dinner, and we talked about culture. We talked about the importance of people in a people business and treating them like humans, and we bonded immediately. As Kate and I started talking about our distinct businesses, what we both recognized is that Veracity was coming into RGP and addressing two additional buyer personas that RGP did not have access to, which was the Chief Marketing Officer and the Chief Information Officer.
As a result of it, you know, and I also in my presentation talked about the rationale for our acquisition. We stayed true to that rationale and kept each other honest, right? The intent was really it was an additive acquisition. It was exposing Veracity and RGP to new buying centers, and we focused on that. Our entire leadership team is still here, right, three years later. I think the other piece of it is if we had one challenge, it was really starting to understand each other's businesses because from a go-to-market perspective, what we quickly learned is that the marketing and the IT buyer personas from a sales perspective do require a certain type of archetypes. Tim and I quickly got together after learning each other had a good conversation about it and figured out how to solve that as well.
That's the reason why we're in these large SCA clients, right? That RGP is already in and having a significant amount of, you know, transforming these large Fortune 500 businesses, right? That we normally would not have been, you know, three years later if Veracity was eight years old today.
Wonderful. While you're at it, Bhadresh, I see another question just came in on Veracity. This investor writes, "Good to hear from Bhadresh. North America is a huge market for digital transformation, and RGP has a big footprint. How much of the growth is focused in North America versus Europe?
That's a great question. I mean, from a digital perspective, what I find most interesting is that it's not a geography thing. Our clients are global, right? So when we work in initiatives, whether I talk about MassMutual, or I talked about, you know, Pfizer, or I talk about J&J, we're involved in global initiatives. While the question is dead on, we are highly focused in North America because it's our closest opportunity. We're also recognizing the fact that we're ready, right, over the next fiscal year to start to expand into Europe and do it the same way we've done in North America. Leverage RGP's footprint. That hard work's been done for us already. They have clients there. They have people there. They have office infrastructure.
Now we just need to bring the skills and the capabilities there to scale and grow, and that's where we're headed.
Great. Makes sense. Okay, here's another question that just came in. "For RGP base business, could you talk about expectations for rates paid to consultants relative to bill rate? Spreads between bill rate and pay rate have improved over the past few years. What are your expectations for that trend? Please provide any quantitative detail if possible.
Well, I would say that it's hard to predict the labor cost component of that, but I can predict with relative certainty that we will increase our bill rates. The RGP folks on my team in the room are nodding their heads vehemently right now. We are focused on that. We see that as a big upside opportunity for us. We also understand that it's a constricting labor market, two things. One, we don't wanna negotiate with our talent. We wanna be able to pay them market.
We know that because we have upside opportunity, that I expect those spreads will stay consistent or improve because I think our bill rate improvement opportunity is higher than what I would see the labor cost aspect is.
I'll just add, as we work on our brand architecture, and you can see that we're squarely positioning the business for project consulting, that's a different pricing model, and Tim's really leading a lot of activity to change the mindset of pricing, which is not cost plus, but really looking at value delivered, okay? Value delivered. That then will increase our bill rates, and still we believe we're the value provider in professional services. Our project staffing business will continue to be cost plus. You'll hear from Steve. We expect perhaps our gross margin requirements in that business will be lower than in our project consulting business, but the cost of service or the cost of sales will be lower. We'll be driving better operating profit in the business, and that's a strategic decision that we're making, and we're excited about that future direction.
Perfect. Here's another question that came in, probably for either Kate or Tim. "You have five distinct brands now, HUGO, Countsy, Veracity, Taskforce, and Sitrick, in addition to Resources Connection and your go-to-market name, RGP. Is there a chance all of this could be confusing in the marketplace, and have you given thought to streamlining the branding?
Yes and yes. Let me talk about that a little bit. You know, we do recognize all of these brands come together, as I said in my prepared remarks, because we're changing the way work happens in the world. We're relevant together. You'll understand there's more interconnectivity as Countsy matures businesses and can hand them off into the RGP portfolio, how HUGO will help us leverage and deliver our project staffing business. We do think we will consolidate under the RGP brand over time, but we're not going to do it too soon. We're gonna make sure that the marketplace understands the direction, and then we'll create the migration when it makes sense.
Okay. Terrific. Let's go to a question probably for Tim on this one. "So it sounds like you're still fairly focused on international expansion, but to many of us, the U.S. seems like the safest bet given geopolitical instability. Can you tell us whether you see international operations becoming a significantly larger part of the mix over time? And related to that, what are the margin implications from expanding internationally?
That was a lot of questions there, Vance. Let me just say this. I mean, what we're really focused on is being where our clients need us. If you think about that, we'll always be opportunistic about being able to meet our clients where they are. A lot of our business is headquartered in North America with outposts or business units in other parts of the world, and if there are places where we need to be, we will continue to be there. I agree with the assertion that we have a lot of upside opportunity in North America, and we will continue to focus there to start.
Like Bhadresh was saying, relative to thinking about Europe for Veracity, we kind of feel the same way, you know, maybe a different order of magnitude in terms of just making sure that we can serve our clients at the places that they need us to be. I don't see any big margin implications for that because we're focused more on account development.
Great. I think you answered all the questions. Let's take another look at the audience, see if we have any questions here in the room. Okay. We'll do one more question online, and then we'll take a break. Let's see. Oh, you know what? Speaking of a lot of questions, someone asked five questions, and I'm gonna choose one of them here. I do like this one. A few quarters ago, you mentioned SPAC work on your quarterly conference call. This business line has presumably slowed. Is this an area of concern? Can you or have you transitioned this talent to new projects outside of the SPAC area?
Well, I think, you know, when we think about SPAC, we kind of put that in the bucket of transactions, you know, so whether it's SPAC or IPO or divestiture or merger and acquisition. I think SPAC was one of. Even though, by the way, I think while SPAC has slowed, it hasn't gone away. We still. There is still business that we are pursuing and closing. But I would say a lot of the business that we're focused on in that bucket has to do more with transactions and a fair amount of carve-outs and mergers and acquisitions. I don't see it as being a material change even though the SPAC market itself has slowed a little bit.
Great. You did so well with that, I'm gonna give you one more from this same investor. His name is Michael.
four out of five.
Yeah. He's got a lot. This is number four out of five. Does the SEC's recent proposal around climate disclosures and verification present an opportunity for RGP similar to SOX compliance in the past?
The short answer is yes.
Okay. Good. You did so well answering that I'm gonna go back to another question. Let's just ask one more. This is probably for anyone. How much of the strong growth that you're seeing right now is either pent-up demand following the pandemic or project work in response to changes brought about by the pandemic, suggesting perhaps that once this wave is over, the overall rate of growth could slow?
You wanna start?
Tim and I can talk for hours about this business. I hope you're getting the feeling that we really love this business, and we love problem-solving in this business. I'll just start, and then Tim, please add. You know, there is some pent-up demand, and the trends that we talked about earlier were starting to percolate before the pandemic, but certainly accelerated. The level of business need is not going away post-pandemic. I mean, what we've learned is that talent, as Tim laid out beautifully, wants to work in a different way. We believe those changes are fundamental and will be lasting and provide great opportunity for us. We know that disruption is happening, everywhere in business today, speed to market, technology disruption, immigration policy, the war for talent. I mean, those needs in our client base are not going away.
Think about the clients we serve, the Fortune 500 global businesses. They need to compete and win every day. Their project agendas are growing. We don't see that changing. Going back to your SPAC question, I was amazed the last time I visited our New York office. I said to the talent team, you know, "What's our most critical need right now?" And they said, "Finance and accounting talent, like technical talent." That talent is necessary every day in business, and we find it and deliver it every day. So I don't see the opportunities diminishing ahead. I see them growing. As we've created more relevant capabilities across our platform, our opportunities are very bright.
Yeah, I agree. I just would add one thing, and that is we talked about the real shifts relative to the labor market. You know, companies are thinking more about co-delivery. That is not a wave, right? It is a wave in that it came on quickly, but it's staying, right? These are what we believe are permanent shifts, both in the way that companies are thinking about the way they structure teams to get initiatives done. Also more importantly, it sort of matches with really how talent wants to work now, with a portfolio of experience, collection of projects that helps them learn and get experience. Yes, we got a little bit of propulsion from the pent-up demand, but we believe that it's a large piece of that is structural and permanent.
Perfect.
Tim, if I may. I think, you know, from a digital transformation perspective, if COVID has done anything, it has accelerated the need for digital and transformation in organizations. If you look at digital, you know, 20 years ago, it was all about the customer. Today, it is a lot about the customer and a lot even more about the employee. They wanna give their employees amazing experiences like they actually get when they're going in the other customer side at work. We're seeing that happen. We're seeing organizations recognizing the fact they have so many technologies in-house, right? And they can't replace them. They're putting layers on top of them to connect all the technologies and automate these workflows. It's simple for me, who needs something from HR or IT. I don't have to go to two different systems. I go to one.
We're seeing even a larger spend, and we're gonna continue to see that over the next few years.
Perfect. Thank you for that. Thank you all for answering the questions. We're gonna take a short break now, about 10 minutes. We'll be back at 10:25 sharp.
Thank you.
We're gonna have to do this a little, I think.
Either clicker works, right, Dan? Okay.
Okay, we're gonna get started now with Steve Del Vecchio. Steve, all you.
Okay. All right. Hi, folks. Let me just make sure I get down like. There we go. Okay. All right. I'm gonna start by saying that, Kate, Tim, Bhadresh did all of my work for me already. I mean, how do you, how do you not listen to such an entrepreneurial, fantastic company and not say, "You've gotta have a digital solution for this. Just lay it on top. It's an easy kill." I'm Steve Del Vecchio. I'm the head of, HUGO, the founder and head of HUGO, and, I'm very excited, to share HUGO's story with you today. I'd like to share that story in three parts. I'm gonna talk about the market opportunity available to HUGO.
We're gonna do a product demonstration, and then I'm going to explain how we are prepared for HUGO's success. Let's dive right in. Okay, what is HUGO? HUGO is a digital work platform. It's focused on professional staffing with an employed model. What is an employed model? It means that every consultant on HUGO is provided the protection and benefits of an employee. We launched in October of last year, and we've been very pleased with the results so far, and also pleased to share with you that the leading industry expert research group, Staffing Industry Analysts, just put into one of their reports recently in March that we were a first mover in this space for professional gig work, professional digital gig work.
We've also been very pleased that the clients we've signed up, clients like Salesforce and NVIDIA and some great consultants as well. It's been very encouraging since our launch, and you'll see a little bit later on how we intend to keep rolling with this, and some of the plans we have going forward for HUGO. Why HUGO? I spoke a little bit about how great it is to be part of this in RGP. That's part of it, obviously. We'll talk a little bit more about that later. Clients and talent, they're ready for this. I think we've all experienced the digital revolution that came with the pandemic. On top of that, hiring managers now consist of millennials. Their average age is 34, and this is how millennials buy things. Millennials want this.
Second, the staffing industry is overdue for this. We've all seen how the internet has revolutionized the way we buy shoes, travel, shop, buy stocks. Why hasn't the staffing industry done this yet? Well, we're here to do it because, like I said, we're ready for it and we're gonna make that change happen. Also, third, this is an untapped revenue stream for RGP in a lot of ways. HUGO affords RGP the ability to pursue staffing and focus on that in its current client base, to penetrate those clients, to cross-sell, and to capitalize on the existing relationships that RGP already has through the HUGO brand and provide staffing that way. Margin and OpEx synergies, the fourth reason why HUGO is here.
By its very nature, a digital platform enables self-service, and with self-service from our clients and consultants, that comes with certain overhead advantages. They're going to do a lot of the work themselves because they choose to do the work themselves. It's an omni-channel strategy. It means that the clients and the candidates choose to do it, and they can obtain what they want in either way, offline or online. That also enables certain price and margin protections in what we're offering to sell as well. That is why that's why there's a HUGO. Let me tell you a little bit more about why we will win. I kicked off with why RGP is the perfect company to do this, but let me drill into that a little bit more. RGP, obviously a very entrepreneurial company, and it...
As you heard before, they've been doing this in a lot of ways. This is the digital instance of RGP. This is RGP. RGP has all of the assets that a startup does not have. For instance, infrastructure, processes, compliance. All of that is necessary for us to really do this with what really is the future, which is an employed model. RGP has that. Startups don't. RGP also doesn't have the potential cannibalism, the potential disruption that a larger company that isn't pursuing accretive revenue has. Let's talk a little bit more about that. Like we mentioned before, there's a large existing client and talent bases here to penetrate for HUGO. One of the best parts about that too is the amount of data that is available to us.
26 years of data for HUGO to consume and start developing things like AI and ML. Let's talk about our enterprise-grade technology. We planned to build HUGO the right way. We planned for scale, and that strategy is paying off, we think. We built HUGO to be resilient, to be integrated to RGP, and to be a platform built to scale. That's why HUGO will win. Without further ado, I'm very excited to actually show you the product. What I'd like you to take away from seeing this, it's a video, and I'm going to walk you through that video and the product in a short 4.5 minutes for a very deep product.
What I'd like you to take away is some very key things that we put into HUGO to make it successful. It's simplicity, the amount of simplicity that users will feel in getting what they want, which is incredibly important, the amount of accessibility and control that our users experience there as well. 24/7 availability and support at any time. Hopefully those are the takeaways you see when you see HUGO. Here I go. I'm gonna start the video. Revolutionary technology, unexpected humanity. Times have changed, and the world of flexible work should too. We asked ourselves, "What if the future of work meant empowering companies and workers?" You're about to meet HUGO, an intelligent digital staffing platform that combines powerful technology with the credibility and support of RGP.
Starting with accounting and finance gigs, HUGO brings transparency, control, and expert support to our users. Let's take a look at how HUGO is going to transform the services industry by putting control back in the hands of our companies and professionals. When you first visit HUGO, it's immediately clear just how we intend to reshape the staffing industry. You'll see right away that users come to HUGO for transparency, control, and choice. All of this with the credibility and support of RGP, the best of all worlds. Whether you are an accounting and finance professional or looking for one, getting started is fast and easy. HUGO's clean and simple designs allow you to tell us exactly what you want anywhere you want, highlight your favorite skills, tell us your preferred location, and name your rate.
It's all easy on HUGO, as its sophisticated technology learns how to match you with some of the most beloved brands and skilled talent, all of whom have been carefully screened and submitted by our skilled services team. Better yet, with HUGO, you get to interact directly. Receive invitations right to your dashboard, apply directly as clients and candidates get to express exactly what they want. With HUGO, we never leave it all up to technology. Our skilled HUGO team ensures that great candidates are always invited to the best jobs and that the best jobs always have the greatest candidates to choose from. With HUGO, you'll also never be inundated. Our skilled team ensures that we only submit the top finalists. When you're ready, you get to see elegant, detailed, and uniform profiles and job descriptions, allowing you to make fast, informed choices. Wanna meet?
Interviews are fast and easy on HUGO. No waiting, wondering, or confusing communications getting in the way. Clients and candidates get to decide what works for them by interacting directly. Next comes maybe the most exciting part of HUGO. You get to negotiate rates directly with total transparency. We make it easy. Make an offer, counter that offer, and eventually accept. You're in control. At any time, help and support is always just a click away with HUGO. Whether it's completing or improving your job post, scheduling interviews, or managing offers, the HUGO team can join you in your account to help you with any step along the way. Best of all, HUGO is backed by RGP.
It's part of RGP, a renowned professional services firm with decades of experience employing our flexible workers, managing employment compliance, and providing great benefits, professional development, healthcare, and PTO. We will take care of all of that from here. When it's time for that next gig, tell your friends and family, try the technology that's built to care. Be part of the future of work that empowers you. That's HUGO. All right. Let's go on. Thank you. All right. Enterprise growth drivers, you've heard some great ones from the other speakers. Let's talk a little bit about how HUGO is going to contribute to these. A lot of things are converging all at once for HUGO, and they were there before the pandemic, and the pandemic has accelerated them now.
I think if anyone that understands how just how our lives have been changed by the internet and digital has seen what's happened over the past few years, this is a great time for HUGO. Let's just talk about these three things. First, the contingent workforce, the part of enterprises that are contingent continues to grow, and that's gone from 19% today to 25% in five years. Remote and hybrid models, this is a great one. Remote, 2% in 2019, people working remotely, grew to 50% in 2020, and it's here to stay. It's going to be at 20% hereafter, so great digital trends.
The staffing industry just continues to be resilient and perform even through the pandemic. It grew 16% and recovered beautifully last year. All those things came together largely because of the new digital environments. We've mentioned this before. Millennials are now hiring managers at an average age of 34, and this is how they want to buy things. Digital staffing platforms grew 191% last year, and these things, this is nascent, but 191%. They went from 1% - 3% of global staffing, and that's a big jump in 2021. HUGO's here at just the right time. Digital tools and transformation, I won't belabor. We all know what that's been like for all of us on constant digital meetings and how that's facilitated us, and that's here to stay as well.
All of this with all of the synergies of RGP to help fuel this platform, but not just to help fuel HUGO, but to cross-sell. HUGO should be able to drive a lot of lead generation and cross-selling opportunities inside of all the other parts of the business, and well, it just makes a lot of sense for there to be a HUGO. Untapped revenue. All of this has created a lot of excitement for us in the HUGO team and in RGP, so I'm very excited to share with you our plan for the coming fiscal year. The way HUGO is going to be rolled out is a combination of a geographical rollout plus introduction of some fantastic features that we think will both together be driving great experience, which is what you wanna do on this platform, is you wanna learn what works.
That's what this soft launch has been in Tri-State, which has gone really well. We're gonna do it again in California, where RGP has a presence. It's also the largest staffing market in North America. In Q2, Texas, the second-largest staffing market in North America, and also a HUGO feature drop as well. Why these two? California, I mean, it's digital. California's got a great adoption rate, and it's home to great clients of RGP's like Google. Texas similarly, rising tech community, great adoption rates. When we head into Q3, it's gonna be a great growth inflection point for us because we will have learned a lot with a very disciplined rollout. We will complete our final major feature drop, hit critical mass in our talent pool, and then we're gonna start marketing hard, and we're gonna start really cross-selling and pushing.
From there, Georgia, another big presence, another big staffing market for us, and beyond, where we're gonna offer more exciting functionality, consider other service offerings, maybe outside of finance and accounting, and adding great features like AI and ML. With that, I'd like to pass it over to Mairtini, the founder of Countsy.
Good morning. I'm Mairtini Ni Dhomhnaill . I'm the founder of Countsy. We joined RGP a number of years ago as part of the Accretive Solutions acquisition. I'm really hoping to present Countsy to you today so you understand what we do and how we do it, but also the client base that we service 'cause it is quite unique to the RGP portfolio. We focus exclusively on venture-backed C-corps, early-stage companies that have raised their first rounds of funding. If you look at the venture capital market, U.S. venture investment has almost doubled from 2020 to 2021. It's astonishing the rate of new money that's coming into venture capital. That led to almost 6,000 new companies being founded in 2021 alone. 6,000 companies that raised their first round of funding, whether that was an angel round, a seed, or a Series A.
Those companies are our potential clients. Despite that there's so much dry powder in VC funds, hundreds of billions of dollars waiting to be deployed. When you think about that over the next couple of years, so many more new companies will be founded because they really have a short window. They have a 10-year window typically, so they like to invest in the first third of that 10 years as their companies scale, and then they'll, you know, whether they go merger and acquisition or IPO. There's a lot of new companies about to be founded in the life science and tech space in the next couple of years. We work with companies that need to scale rapidly. They often need to grow from zero to 100 employees within the first couple of months.
They may need to open internationally or launch their product within months of starting their company. To do that, they really need scalable business processes and systems in place from the beginning 'cause the pace of growth is so rapid, they really never get a chance to stop and to up-level their infrastructure. Our whole approach with clients is that we're putting them onto that infrastructure very early in their life cycle, that they're able to scale rapidly and never really have to look back or take a pause. We provide them with an outsourced accounting HR function to actually do the work. We're a combination of putting them onto an infrastructure and then providing that back-office support. We can have a new company fully established, up and running on everything in days or weeks from their founding, not months.
We have a repeatable process that allows us to do this for many, many companies at the same time and really allows us to be super effective on getting companies started very early. All of our systems are enterprise-class products. They're enterprise-class security. We're working with products like NetSuite and Dropbox, Bill.com and Expensify, all the sort of products that these founders want to be working with. We were the founding BPO partner actually for NetSuite, and we've won their BPO partner of the year business process outsourcing partner of the year award for the last number of years. We were the very first enterprise deal that Dropbox signed, and Bill.com and Expensify have recognized us as being one of their major channels.
Once we have the company on the right infrastructure, we provide them with a fractional team, and that's actually pretty important that it's a fractional team. A lot of these early-stage companies really don't need a full-time anything. They need a fractional team. They need a part-time CFO, a part-time controller. That's sort of the beauty of Countsy. We can give them that range of skill sets across their team in a fractional model. That's pretty hard to do. That's one of the biggest parts of what we do. We're not consulting. This is really 100% outsourcing the function. We own it. Someone doesn't come to work on Monday, payroll is still getting processed. What we do, we really do everything. It's a little bit hard sometimes for people to understand that. We're doing everything across a function.
Think about an accounting function. We're processing payroll. We're running AP. We're collecting their AR. We're their controller. We're closing their books. We're showing up at their board meeting with a CFO who's experienced, who understands this market, who understands their investors, who can really report to those investors properly. So we're doing everything across the function. Similarly, on the HR side, we have CPOs and HR support teams that are really allowing those companies to manage rapid headcount growth and scale. The bottom line is that VC-funded companies really need a sophisticated accounting function and HR function. This isn't a bookkeeping service. We really are providing a GAAP accounting and a full, completely sophisticated and professional accounting function and HR. This is just a sample of the thousands of companies that we've worked with over the last couple of years.
One of the reasons I really love doing what I do is that we get to work with companies that change the world. A lot of our clients have been the first mover in any industry vertical. We get to work with companies that are developing new drug treatments, satellite and drone technology, EV infrastructure. Digital health has been a big, big part of the landscape for the last couple of years during the pandemic. We have many digital health companies. That's what makes it really fun. Our clients are multi-industry, multi-vertical, but their defining feature is that they are venture-backed C-corps. I'm gonna play a short video that I hope can show a little bit more about what we do and how we do it. It's actually available on our website, countsy.com.
We do find, as Steve had mentioned with millennials, a lot of our founders are very young, and they really like to do things digitally. A lot of our new clients do come in through our website, so we do find that this video is quite effective that way.
As the founder or CEO of an early-stage startup, you have countless responsibilities with limited time. You'd like to focus on activities that quickly and directly drive your product to market, but find yourself spending much of your time managing non-core activities. It's time to delegate your business operations to someone you can trust, a partner who understands your immediate accounting and HR needs as well as your long-term goals. That's where we come in. Countsy has helped thousands of startups grow from the ground up, break free from operational headaches, and establish a professional accounting and financial infrastructure for scale. Countsy adapts and right-sizes to your unique needs today and tomorrow. We give you a CFO partner focused on your business strategy, forecasting, board reporting, and investor meetings, all while overseeing daily accounting and HR activities.
In addition, you have access to a broader team of financial and HR experts, so you benefit from the cumulative brainpower of an entire department at a fraction of the cost. The Countsy team leverages a streamlined and scalable technology platform to report and manage your burn, process employee onboarding and payroll, bill pay and expense reporting, stock plan administration, and financial reporting. Choose Countsy and tap into a leader with startup experience who understands your challenges and priorities. Scale your operations and take your business to the next level so you can focus on what matters most, delighting customers, perfecting solutions, accelerating growth.
Thank you very much. It was great to get an opportunity to present that to you. I'm gonna hand you off to my colleague, Jen.
Let me move this down. Good morning, everybody. My name is Jen. I'm the CFO of RGP. It's great to be here today. My colleagues have walked through a lot of growth strategies. I hope you've enjoyed the topics covered today and are learning about RGP and the bright future that's ahead of us. Now I get the honor to close us out today by synthesizing and translating all of the growth strategies into our financial outlook. Before we look ahead, I would be remiss if I did not start by talking about the solid foundation that we've built over the last three to five years and the financial performance that we were able to perform over fiscal 2020 to fiscal 2022.
Just to talk about the progress that we've made over the last five years, we've built a stronger sales culture with better sales motion. We have been laser-focused on client centricity, and what that means is that we're identifying where the opportunities are, and we're focusing all of our time and efforts to areas where those opportunities are the richest. We built a performance culture by aligning all of our people compensation strategy to business outcomes, and that's extremely important in driving the right behavior and getting the entire organization behind business performance. From a cost perspective, we've made huge progress. We've streamlined our cost structure from an organizational standpoint primarily in our go-to-market team in both North America and Europe, and we've also streamlined our real estate footprint.
We've reduced our real estate footprint by 100,000 sq ft over the last two years and shrank our occupancy costs by 30%. All of our internal efforts, coupled with favorable macro tailwinds that you guys have heard other speakers talk about today, has really allowed us to make some solid progress and achieve these numbers that you're seeing. The other point that I wanna make too is that with the amount of cost streamlining that we've done over the last two years since the pandemic started, now Europe is also profitable. With European profitability, the sustained profitability is allowing us to be able to utilize all of the historical NOLs that we weren't able to capture before.
While, you know, reversing valuation allowances is not a an operational item, but it does improve our free cash flow drastically and allows us to become more tax efficient. Let's take a look at our numbers. This is a comparison between fiscal 2020 and fiscal 2022. Let me ground us first. With fiscal 2022, this is our guidance, three quarters of actual performance plus our Q4 guidance at midpoint. Fiscal 2020 is largely a pre-pandemic year. Remember, the pandemic started hitting during our fourth quarter, and we were impacted starting the latter half of our fourth quarter. Fiscal 2020 also had a an extra week, so that largely offset the impact from the pandemic. I wanna point that out because I wanna make an apples to apples comparison.
This is really how we performed this year compared to a pre-pandemic year. If you look at our revenue over the last two years, we grew 7% CAGR. Our adjusted EBITDA margin has improved. It will have improved after we finish fiscal 2022, 320 basis points. We're expecting to reach 11.7% adjusted EBITDA margin this year. From an adjusted EBITDA dollar perspective, we've grown 27% on an annual compounded basis. We're expecting to finish the year with almost $100 million of adjusted EBITDA dollars compared to $60 million back in fiscal 2022. Of course, our SG&A leverage improved hugely because of some of the cost initiatives that I just talked about. Lastly, our GAAP diluted EPS, this is where the European profitability comes in.
Of course, we had stellar performance, but that able. Our ability to be able to use the NOLs also definitely boosted our GAAP diluted EPS. Now that we've set a solid foundation, where do we go from here? What are our future opportunities? You've heard all of my colleagues talk about growth drivers. I think while growth is really important, you know, we focus on profitable growth, and that's where efficiency and margin drivers come into play. What's on here is additional opportunities we have to be able to drive margin even further. We've done a lot, as I said, in streamlining our cost structure and reducing our fixed costs.
In order to take it to the next level of leverage or efficiency, what we really need is technology. It should not be a surprise that the first two items on this slide is related to technology, is technology-oriented. We've kicked off a project to implement a global technology platform, which I'll talk about on the next slide in greater detail. Speaking of HUGO, our intent is to migrate our staffing business onto the HUGO platform over time. You guys have seen the demo.
Hopefully, you can see that the self-service nature and the automation that the platform provides is going to transform how we operate. In addition to driving ROI from a technology investment, we expect to also continue to work on our operational efficiency, really through the differentiated go-to-market structure that Tim talked about. We have a differentiated client segment, and each client segment has a different set of attributes and opportunities. It's really key to align our resources to serve our clients where the needs are. This is both a growth strategy as well as a cost to serve strategy. Lastly, we're gonna continue to execute on our global real estate reduction strategy.
As I said, we reduced our footprint by 100,000 sq ft over the last two years, and we think that we have another 70,000 sq ft that we can reduce over the next few years. We have 43 offices around the globe today, and we think that we can reduce that down to the mid-30s to create further efficiency and reduce costs, fixed costs even further. We're also going to leverage the advantage of using coworking spaces to provide us more flexibility and agility as our business evolves geographically. Okay, let's talk about the Global Technology Modernization Program. I'm gonna describe the scope and the what and how this is going to benefit us.
What we're doing is we're implementing a talent management system, a modern talent management system, a professional services automation system. Between those two systems, that's where our core operations sits. It's about supply and demand matching, and it's about how we manage our resources, time entry. With these two new modern system, it's gonna create huge efficiency in the business. Of course, we're also putting in a brand-new ERP system as well. On top of this, these systems that provides really the backbone for our operations, we're also going to put in features to enhance user experience and digitize processes, to make our end user experience more favorable.
Let me talk about the business outcomes that we're expecting and how this is going to strengthen our financial performance even further. In our business, the key element, the most foundational element of operating successfully is the alignment between supply and demand. Modern-day ATS systems or talent management systems have innate features or functionalities that's going to facilitate and speed up that process. With a faster match between supply and demand, we expect faster revenue conversion. We're also expect to capture lost opportunities that perhaps is happening today because our process today is extremely manual. With an ERP system, we would be able to to execute on billing and collections and cash applications much faster, and that leads to faster cash conversion.
The next bullet, I think, is pretty self-explanatory. Technology is all about automation and simplification of business processes. The technology is an enabler for us to be able to operate more efficiently. With that comes reduced operating costs and increased scalability. I think this increased scalability probably to a certain extent is even more important than reducing operating costs because it's really going to allow our business to grow without adding additional variable cost. The third bullet here is about client and talent retention. As I said earlier, we're going to improve our user experience, and with that, we expect better retention, less attrition, therefore leading to less costs, acquisition cost. Let me give you an example of what better user experience looks like.
You know, in user experience, that those terms have, you know. It's very commonly used, but what does that mean exactly? Since in today's world, our talent does not have clear visibility into our pipeline, at least not in a digitized way. What if, in the future, we build a feature where we give our consultants a way to have visibility into our pipeline so they know exactly what opportunities are there, what projects are there? What if we start pushing out information to our talent to let them know what's the in-skill demand, and that will allow them to then decide which areas they wanna upskill or reskill. I bet that retention would go up, and now our platform would be much more sticky.
The last point here is about really business intelligence, data analytics, and that's gonna allow us to be able to have more visibility into the business and drive better business decisions. We've experienced the power of visibility and data analytics back three years ago when we implemented Salesforce. The fact that we were able to make the progress we did that you guys saw on the first slide is the fact that with Salesforce, we had more visibility into the business. We knew our pipeline. We knew our project starts and stops that allowed us to make better decisions in order to drive growth. I'm gonna pivot a little bit now to talk about our balance sheet and cash flow.
RGP's always had a very strong balance sheet with sufficient cash flow, with sufficient cash and low levels of debt and with great leverage ratio. Over the last year, at the end of 2021, we closed a multi-bank credit facility that expanded our borrowing capacity from $120 million - $175 million. That really increased our liquidity to what you're seeing here, $170 million, at the end of Q3. We took advantage of an extremely borrower-friendly environment at the time and really positioned ourselves with more flexibility and liquidity should the right opportunities arise for us to invest back into the business. From a cash flow perspective, we've had a healthy free cash flow generation.
In fiscal 2021 and 2022, there were some anomalies, really primarily related to two items under the CARES Act. The first one is we defer some payroll taxes in fiscal 2021 and the deferral of our payroll taxes plus a timing of the payment for the deferral created some timing impact between fiscal 2021 and 2022. The other item was really related to our tax planning strategy that we undertook at the end of fiscal 2021 that required us to make additional payments, tax payments up front, but we're anticipating a huge tax refund at the beginning of fiscal 2023. If I were to normalize for those timing differences or impact, and this is what our free cash flow looks like.
As you can see in fiscal 2022, our free cash flow increased as our margin is expanding, as our EBITDA is increasing. From a cash flow conversion standpoint, I do expect the conversion rate to normalize over the next few quarters. In fiscal 2023, the conversion dipped a bit because of the aggressive revenue growth that we've seen in the business. Okay. With robust free cash flow generation, here are our near-term capital allocation priorities. First, as I talked about, we are going to invest in our technology and digital platform, and that investment is going to range in the range of $25 million-$30 million, and the implementation is gonna take between about 18-24 months. As we go live, we will start to realize benefits from this investment.
Of course, as you guys know, the adoption of any large scale ERP systems or systems it is going to require a little bit of time in order for us to fully realize the benefit as we optimize the use of the new systems and optimize our user adoption. From an organic investment standpoint, that's our second area of capital deployment that is really gonna be focused on our digital transformation business. As you heard from Bhadresh earlier, we're really looking to scale our sales and business development capacity. We're looking to build offshore capabilities so we can increase infrastructure or capacity from a development standpoint. We're also looking at expanding into international markets, the appropriate ones.
Lastly, looking at acquisitions that is going to scale and expand our service capabilities, which I'll touch on, you know, on the next slide. The investment in this area is expected to be up to $10 million, and it is going to take place over the next 12-18 months. From a return standpoint, we expect to see returns, you know, at a reasonable timeline. We can see our revenue; we're expecting our revenue to increase as early as, you know, late fiscal 2023, early fiscal 2024. Other uses of capital, we expect to continue to support and maintain our quarterly dividends, of course, subject to our board's approval. We're gonna pursue acquisitions.
These are going to be tuck-ins or bolt-on acquisitions, which I'll talk about in a little bit. Then lastly, to balance the remaining cash between share buybacks and debt repayment. This is the last growth enterprise growth drivers. You've heard organic growth drivers, and we're gonna talk about M&A. As I said, our strategy is to pursue smaller tuck-in, bolt-on acquisitions. Our philosophy in our acquisition is, of course, looking for a good strategic fit that is going to scale and expand our capabilities. We also look for a good cultural fit because as you heard Bhadresh and Kate talk about how important cultural alignment is.
In addition to finding a good fit strategically and culturally, from a financial standpoint, economically, we pursue acquisitions that are accreted from an EBITDA perspective immediately. With that, what areas are we going to target? Talent innovation. This one is really speaking to the macro trend of now of work. Kate talked about project economy. As the project economy continues to expand and grow, companies are now being forced to rethink and shift their workforce strategies. This area is really our objective here is really aimed at getting additional advisory capabilities around the adoption of more agile talent workforce model.
This will serve as a tip of the spear and so that we can, RGP, our core business, can then go in there and be able to execute on the workforce strategy that's more agile and be able to provide them our agile talent platform to, for our clients to really execute on that strategy. The next area is digital transformation. We talked a lot about digital transformation, and we're gonna approach this from an M&A standpoint as well. To the extent that we find an existing asset that is going to allow us to scale and expand our current capabilities, we will consider buying, in addition to building, organically. The core capability expansion, this one I would say that we would pursue a bit more opportunistically.
This is also about scaling and expanding our existing capabilities in our core, which is finance and accounting, tax, risk and compliance. Think about those areas. An example here could be, you know, a tax automation firm that is, aligned with our tax practice or a firm that has added supply chain capabilities that we can tuck in, very easily. Okay, now this is my last slide, and I'm gonna close us out with, you know, all of that, growth strategies and initiatives and investments, and how does that translate, into our, near-term financial outlook. Let me just, first say that our approach to managing this business is always focused on long-term value creation, while we balance out our short-term performance.
Through the next few years, we'll be focused on driving sustained top-line growth from both volume and pricing, as you heard Tim talk about. We're gonna expand gross margin through pricing. From an EBITDA perspective, we expect to incrementally improve our EBITDA performance while we are making investments in the business. Coming out of one of the highest revenue years in RGP history, we're expecting to finish fiscal 2022 at $801 million. Coming off of that high base, we expect to continue to grow our top line over the next three years in a range of 6%-9% CAGR. This is tracking with the guidance that we provided earlier in the fiscal year, which is double-digit revenue growth over the next few years.
That's a comparison to fiscal 2021. As you know, fiscal 2021 was impacted by the pandemic. Notwithstanding the investments that we're making in the business starting in fiscal 2023, we expect to incrementally improve our SG&A leverage to 27% or below, which in turn would expand our margin to 12% or above. The cadence of margin performance over fiscal 2023 and 2024 could fluctuate a bit due to the timing of our investment and the return on those investment. We will look at different SG&A levers to balance out the investments that we're making in the business. In closing, you know, RGP is perfectly positioned for the future.
We have built a solid foundation, and we're making investments in key areas of our business, to position us for growth, for sustainable, profitable growth, going forward. We have never been more optimistic about our business as we continue to lead our clients to work differently and as we continue to be the preferred home for professional talent for them to work differently as well. With that, I'll invite my colleagues up, and we'll take some questions.
We're just gonna pause a moment for all the speakers to assemble on stage.
She's such a horse. Yeah.
Okay, we're gonna get started. Thanks for all those wonderful presentations. It's time for our extended Q&A period. The questions have been flooding in via the webcast. We're gonna try to end by the bottom of the hour, but might end up going a little bit longer. Before we go to the webcast questions, let's just check if anyone in the room has questions. Okay, we'll dive right in. We got a bunch for Steve, for Mairtini, and for Jen. Let's start there. Maybe I'll rotate amongst you. Starting with a question that came in for Steve. What are the major limiting factors when it comes to rolling out HUGO more broadly? Is there any reason you can't just go nationwide or worldwide much quicker?
Have there been any major surprises so far, proving that this measured rollout was in fact the way to go?
Yeah, just press the button. Sorry, technology confuses me. The reason that question is so great is for the audience here. I think, they are going to truly understand the answer. All you have to do is understand the compromise that a Lyft and an Uber had to make as it was growing, and look at their growth today. Any marketplace has to make that compromise. They have to enter a market. They have to reach critical mass. When they've reached critical mass, they have a great experience. The objective is to get to critical mass in any marketplace as quickly as possible. For us, even though the pandemic has proven that working remotely has worked, we're all starting to see the news now that companies want them back.
The timing of that question is great for me right now because that's been pretty much proven now that we're all gonna be heading back to the office at some point. Geographic rollouts just make a lot of sense, which is why we're in New York, California and then Texas, the biggest markets to create critical mass there first. There were no true surprises in the rollout, if I remember the end of that question. This went pretty much according to plan so far, and I think the core driver behind this, which is the talent engine first and then the client engine second, were just fully enabled by RGP being in those markets as well. They're the biggest markets.
Okay, great.
Exactly.
Thanks for that, Steve. Let's rotate over to a question for Mairtini . It seems like the Countsy business in particular must be cyclical given its relationship to startup ventures. How has the business typically performed during downturns, and are you seeing any signs of weakness over the past month with the IPO and SPAC markets slowing down?
Thanks for the question. Actually, in the last downturn, post-2008, when a lot of pure consulting firms actually were significantly impacted, down 40%-50%, the Countsy business stayed flat and modestly grew. What really happens in a true economic downturn in the startup world is that companies are really being instructed by their venture capital firms to cut their burn, to maintain their runway so they can wait it out to get a higher valuation. They're almost caught in a state of stasis where we continue to operate with them. We might not have quite as many companies coming in at the bottom of the funnel, but we maintain a lot more clients at the top of the funnel, where they're already larger and we're generating more revenue. Our business is pretty robust in a downturn.
The IPO and SPAC market doesn't really have a big impact on us. It has a big impact on the valuations our clients receive for their funding, but it doesn't necessarily impact the gross dollars they raise, and so they still have a need for us. That really does not have a big impact on our business.
Okay. Makes sense. Great. Question for Jen that came in. How are you dealing with inflationary pressures which might get worse? Are you confident you can maintain a healthy spread between what you pay your knowledge workers and what you charge your clients?
Yeah, thanks. As Tim mentioned earlier, we talked about pricing and pay/bill spread. I mean, we have huge upside opportunities from a pricing perspective. As Kate also said too, going forward in how we manage our staffing business versus our consulting business, we're gonna take a little bit of a differentiated approach. On the project consulting side, we definitely have you know a lot of room to price to market and price to value. I'm confident that we can maintain our spread.
Great. Okay. As promised, I'm going to continue rotating. Back to Steve, based on your presentation you just made. Someone asks, how unique is HUGO and what makes it special? It seems like there are competing platforms or that there will be soon, even if you do have a first-mover advantage. Can you discuss what your competitive moats are?
Well, first mover is a gigantic competitive moat. Users don't like to relearn platforms. That's been proven. The faster we can move HUGO forward, get more users on there and get to that critical mass is a gigantic moat. The other thing that makes us extremely unique is obviously that we are part of RGP. We bring that credibility and support. That strategy's been proven by a lot of industries right now. There's a lot of pure digital companies that have moved towards the middle. I mean, just look at Amazon buying Whole Foods. Zappos was another model like that as well. Service coupled with digital is a big differentiator and a moat for us. I think we have a lot of case studies.
I could probably go on and on, but.
Great.
Yeah.
Thank you, Steve. Question that came in for Mairtini . What is Countsy doing to evolve? It sounds like many of today's speakers talked about investments in technology and other improvements being made that will keep RGP on the cutting edge. Does Countsy have any initiatives to do things differently or better in the years ahead?
Well, we're very tech forward. We've always been very tech forward. We're constantly scanning that landscape and the accounting infrastructure landscape for new products and products that we can use in our services. For example, a number of years ago when we first started, we exclusively used Bill.com and Expensify, just two examples. In the last couple of years, that spend management space has really changed. A company called Airbase has raised a lot of money at a high valuation. We're now adopting that product as part of our services. A company called Ramp is really changing the space around corporate credit cards. They recently raised, I think, $100 million at an $8 billion valuation, and they're only a three-year-old company, and we're already using that product exclusively and extensively.
A couple of years ago, I went out on a pitch to a new client, a company called Front, and they wanted to use our service. Normally what I do is I like to hear about the company, what stage they're at, what are they doing, and then we talk about what Countsy does. We were probably like 10 minutes into the founder talking about her product, and I said, "Hold on a second. We need this." As a company, it's the entire way we manage our incoming tasks. It's a product called Front. It's an email collaboration tool, and we use that product exclusively. We also did outsource their accounting function for the first couple of years of their business, but they've now gone on.
They've hired their own team, and we have a very close relationship with them, but that's just. We're constantly evolving. You can't stay static in this business. Obviously, since we've joined RGP, we've opened an office in Manila, just an ability to be able to provide higher margin to RGP services to our clients. Because as our clients grow, we need to be able to work around the clock. We often finish at 5:00 P.M. in the U.S. and pick up the workload in Manila. Just from a point of view of new service offerings, because we're so deep in the NetSuite space, as we hand off our NetSuite licenses to our clients, in the last year, we have started an outsourced NetSuite support and maintenance service, where we continue to be their NetSuite admin and we continue to manage their NetSuite infrastructure.
Okay.
Thanks for the question.
Terrific. Thank you. Here's a question that came in from Stephanie Yee, who works with Andrew Steinerman at JP Morgan. She writes, "You mentioned that RGP's bill rates and pricing will be a blend of consulting pricing, value delivered, and project staffing, cost plus. What is RGP's business mix currently, and what is the target mix? In other words, today is most of RGP's business priced on cost plus, but over time we'll see more consulting pricing introduced into the mix.
Yeah. Yes. You know, going forward, as I said, we should have more upside on the project consulting side. I'm sorry, Vance, can you repeat the second part of that question?
Sure. What is RGP's business mix currently? What is the target mix? In other words, today, is most of RGP's business priced on cost plus, but over time will we see more consulting pricing introduced into the mix?
Yeah.
If you want me just to add, I think that, you know, we've disclosed publicly that the consulting versus staffing is about 60% project consulting oriented and 40% staffing. We've seen growth in both coming out of the pandemic. Even for our project consulting business, we still have a little bit of the legacy of the cost-plus mentality, which we are shifting. That's the opportunity. I think the best example, and one thing that we haven't talked about yet today, is our healthcare business. We have the leader in the room. She's doing a fantastic job, Joni Noll. She has really taken that industry focus and said, "We need to price to value here. Our clients need us. We're delivering incredible value. We don't want to be the cheapest solution anymore." Because what does that mean? That means we're not bringing the best people.
We want to bring the best people to the problem at hand. Joni's done the first early work with her team on improving pricing in our healthcare space.
Okay, terrific. Here's a question that came in. Sorry, did you have something?
I was gonna ask, like.
This is the non-Zoom version of you're on mute, I guess. I think it's important to say that I think the Yes, we want to worry about the mix, but I think what we should really determine is that the pie itself is going to get bigger, and that the margin profiles between project consulting and project staffing will be more different than they are right today. Pie gets bigger, you get more volume out of project staffing, and you get more spread, higher bill rates from project consulting.
Great. Thanks. Thanks for adding that. A question that just came in for Bhadresh. Are there many synergies with the rest of RGP, especially with other brands, or does Veracity largely do its own thing autonomously within the broader company?
I think it's a great question. I covered today organically what Veracity does as well as with RGP. We do think there's significant room with other brands, especially Countsy. We're also taking a measured approach, right? We wanted to first learn the bigger ecosystem of RGP and how to work with them and how to penetrate their client base. We do have plans in the near future to start to leverage Countsy and their client base as well to expand into those startups that are highly venture backed and have funding to do digital transformation initiatives.
Okay. Got it. Here's a question directly from Andrew Steinerman at JP Morgan, this one directed towards Jen. Can you specifically name which new tech systems will be implemented at RGP? Is that a new ERP system and ATS?
Sure. Yeah, we are implementing Workday as our ERP system as well as our PSA system. From the talent side, we're implementing Avature as our ATS system, talent management.
Perfect. Here's one that came in, I think, for Steve. Can you elaborate the HUGO talent number trajectory to date as you have entered markets?
to quantify the amount of talent?
I think they're looking for sort of a headcount associated with it from what I see here.
Well, I don't think we're ready yet to start sharing the exact numbers. I would have to say what we're building towards is to start sharing the user growth for certain in coming quarters. It's extremely encouraging, and it's moving very quickly.
Excellent. Here's a question maybe for Kate. It reminds me of some of the things you mentioned during your presentation. This investor asks, "In rough terms, what's the breakout between run the place versus change the place work? Is it fair to assume change the place is more cyclical in nature?" Rough breakout, and is change the place more cyclical?
I could not answer that. I'll be honest with you. I can't answer that breakdown off the top of my head. I think the important thing is we're seeing opportunity on both sides of that dimension, that framework that I talked about. I don't think the pace of change is cyclical. I think the competitive pressures in today's market, the drive to efficiency, speed to market, are keeping transformation agendas active. You know, I disclosed this a couple of years ago, but. 20 years ago, large enterprises had at most two enterprise projects going on. Today it's estimated that large organizations have 25+ transformation projects going on. It's all about competition and what both the democratization of knowledge and technology has done to create competitive pressures from small companies, and everyone has to pay attention. I don't see that as being cyclical.
I think it's a changed world today. You know, we talk about in our business, the pace of change is fast, and it will never be this slow again. Think about that. That creates opportunity.
Great.
All the logos on Mairtini's slide, every company out there is scared of them, right? They're all coming.
I think the other piece, just to add to that, is even in the digital space, there's constant innovation. Right? Just as you think you've solved something, someone comes out with another idea. That change is going to be constant for the foreseeable future, and as a result of it, I think it's not going to be a cyclical thing.
Okay. Thank you, Bhadresh. Here's a question directed toward Tim. Who do you compete against? For example, when you're responding to RFPs, who do you often come up against, and how are you winning in the marketplace? Two-part question related to that, do you think you're taking market share?
Yes, we're. Let me start with the second one. We're taking share for sure. You know, who we compete with is sort of a broad array of competitors depending on the type of project that we're on. Specifically in the RFP world, it's typically a larger consulting firm, maybe the consulting arm of a Big Four firm, and we will compete with them on value. We always have. We run a flatter pyramid where we have more experienced people who are actually delivering the work, which is a very different model than traditional consulting, which is people learning on the job with sort of fractionalized access to actual experience and competency. The other thing I would say is that if it's sometimes we compete with boutique competitors in an RFP situation.
If we're doing a technology implementation, Bhadresh and his team run into maybe more boutique elements, and there are a number of ways through which we can win against them, which would include the fact that we are, you know, that we have breadth, so we can bring more to the table than just the specific ask. Secondarily, many of them don't have the global reach that we have.
Great. Okay, we're almost out of time. Let's do one last question for Jen and then another question for Kate to wrap it up. For Jen, would M&A be incremental to the long-term revenue and EBITDA outlook you provided today? In other words, does today's guidance already assume some M&A, and can you confirm that it would definitely be a positive influence if it happens?
Sure. The guidance given today is organic growth only. To the extent that we execute on some acquisitions, it would definitely be accretive to the company guidance that we provided today. As I said, our strategy when it comes to M&A is really looking for targets that are already EBITDA accretive immediately. It would be a positive addition to the company's performance going forward.
Okay, that's great. We have time for one more question, and then, Kate will take us home the rest of the way. This question, I'll read it. It sounds like the macro and secular trends are really going your way. How much of this is just RGP being in the right place at the right time as opposed to conscious decisions that have been made to position the company for today's world of work?
I think it's a combination, as I said before. I mean, as you looked at the comments we made in the S-1, we were all about flexibility, choice, project orientation way back when. We were probably born a little too soon. These trends were starting to percolate, certainly accelerated by the pandemic, and now the world has changed forever in the way work will get done. You know, I think it's a combination. We are taking advantage of the opportunity-rich macro environment, but we've done a lot in the business over the last five years to better position ourselves to execute and execute efficiently. I'll just close out. I wanna thank you all so much for attending today, giving us your time, whether it's been in person or virtually. I'm super proud of my colleagues.
I thank them for the delivery and the conversation about our business together. We're in this together. We're a team, and we're going to deliver for our shareholders. Thank you very much for being here.