Automatic Data Processing, Inc.

Good morning. My name is Michelle, and I'll be your conference operator. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to ADP's first quarter 2023 earnings call. I would like to inform you that this conference is being recorded. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. Instructions will be given at that time. I will now turn the conference over to Mr. Daniel Hussain, Vice President, Best Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Michelle, and welcome everyone to ADP's first quarter fiscal 2023 earnings call. Participating today are Carlos Rodriguez, our CEO, Maria Black, our president, and Don McGuire, our CFO. Earlier this morning, we released our results for the quarter. Our earnings materials are available on the SEC's website and our investor relations website at investors.adp.com, where you will also find the investor presentation that accompanies today's call. During our call, we will reference non-GAAP financial measures, which we believe to be useful to investors and that exclude the impact of certain items. A description of these items, along with the reconciliation of non-GAAP measures to the most comparable GAAP measures, can be found in our earnings release. Today's call will also contain forward-looking statements that refer to future events and involve some risk. We encourage you to review our filings with the SEC for additional information on factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from our current expectations. And with that, let me turn it over to Carlos.

Thank you, Danny, and thanks, everybody, for joining the call. As you saw this morning in the news, we have a little bit more excitement than normal, but I promise you that an hour and a half from now we'll go back to our boring selves because we do have a business to run. But before I talk about the quarter, I thought it was appropriate to just share a few thoughts given the transition from me to Maria as our new CEO. As you know, I'm going to continue as the exec chair, but obviously that's going to be a role primarily just supporting Maria and also helping the board and not really involved in day-to-day operations. So it's definitely going to be my last earnings call, which is, you know, hard to say because it's been 44 earnings calls for me. But it's really been an incredible ride. Obviously, I could thank a lot of people. You know, one person in particular that I do want to call out is John Jones, who's going to remain our lead independent director. And a combination of John and Les Brun before him were incredible mentors to me, incredibly helpful in providing advice and guidance on behalf of the board, and I also am proud to call them friends. I also want to thank Gary Butler and Art Weinbach, my predecessors, who gave me the opportunity to be here today and also helped me a lot in terms of making me the person I am and the leader that I am today. I'm proud of a couple of things. I'll just mention a few. One of them is I'm proud of our growth. We doubled our revenues over the last 10 or 11 years. And today, as you know, we reached an important milestone of a million clients. So I appreciate, I wish I could say that it was anything other than a coincidence, but however it happened, it's a great thing to have happen here on my last earnings call. We made it through a lot of challenges. Economic, we went through what I would call financial repression in terms of interest rates, which fortunately now we have a little bit of the opposite situation, which we'll talk about today. So there's many QEs. I think there were three QEs over my tenure. And then the final straw that almost broke the camel's back was interest rates. Even on the tenure going, I think it was like under half a percent in the pandemic, which was really kind of incredible to see happen. We also made it through a pandemic that hopefully only happens every 100 years. And we had some dissident shareholders that also had some opinions about how to run ADP that we had to deal with. I'm also proud of our associates. I'm proud, as I've always said, about their commitment to our clients and to ADP. There's something that my predecessors in the culture have around our client centricity, which is really remarkable. And our associates always step up to the plate and deliver in a business that, again, we don't get a lot of credit. And I know that we're not quite up there in terms of the list of first responders and people who save lives. But we do keep the economy going and we do, I think, make sure that commerce worldwide operates well. smoothly, so our associates are the ones who get that done, and I'm proud of them. The person I'm most proud of is Maria. She's now been tested, she's prepared, she's been through a very thoughtful and long succession process, and she's gonna be what is only the seventh CEO of ADP, and I know that she's the right person. Starting from the ground up, I wish I could have said that because That's what makes this place special. We love to bring in talent from the outside, but we have some incredible people that grow up and know this place, understand this place, and know how to make it continue to hum the way it's been humming for more than 70 years. Most importantly, she not only knows our industry, but she knows our clients' needs deeply and takes great interest in that, and that is going to serve us well, as well as her growth orientation, which I think is going to be very important for ADP's future. Last thing I'll say is that I recently told our team at a senior meeting that I strive to be what I learned about many, many years ago, something called a servant leader. And I try to be that way to my team and to my organization here at ADP. But I want all of you to know that I try to be that also to all of you and to our shareholders, as much as I try to be that way for our clients and our associates. It's been truly an honor of a lifetime to serve at AAPCEO and we are kind of a company that likes to fly under the radar. We kind of like it that way. So I know that nobody's going to write any books about us or they might not even write any articles about us today, but this is one of the most successful commercial enterprises in history. All you have to do is go back and look at the track record. Most people don't do that. They don't go back and look at the 10 year, the 20 year. and in our case the 50 year, the company went public in 1961, I encourage you to look at our history, our results, and our TSR and compare it to some of the greatest investors and investments of all time, and I think you'll see that ADP ranks right up at the top. Anybody who knows me knows how much I love sports and what a sports nut I am, so I was trying to think of an analogy and You know, I feel like not only did I join the championship team, but I won the Super Bowl being here at ADP. It's really been an incredible, incredible ride. But right now, it's time to pass the torch. It's always great to have change, especially in a company like ADP, because I know you can, you know, rely on consistent, predictable results, but we also have to continue to grow for decades to come. And the only way to do that is to bring in fresh thinking and to have change. And that's exactly what we're doing with Maria. So before I talk about the quarter and the results, I'm going to turn it over to Maria and let her say a few things.