Advantage Solutions Inc.

Greetings and welcome to the Advantage Solutions fourth quarter and full year 2025 earnings call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question again, press the star one. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. Thank you.

Welcome to Advantage Solutions' fourth quarter and full year 2025 earnings conference call. Dave Peacock, Chief Executive Officer, and Chris Grohe, Chief Financial Officer, are on the call today. Dave and Chris will provide the prepared remarks after which we will open the call for a question and answer session. During this call, management may make forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws. Actual outcomes and results could differ materially due to several factors. including those described more fully in the company's annual report on Form 10-K filed with the SEC. All forward-looking statements are qualified in their entirety by such factors. Our remarks today include certain non-GAAP financial measures, which are reconciled to the most comparable GAAP measure in our earnings release. As a reminder, unless otherwise stated, the financial results discussed today will be from continuing operations, and revenues will exclude pass-through costs. And now, I would like to turn the call over to Dave Peacock.

Thanks, operator. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us. I want to thank our teammates across the organization for their ongoing commitment, successfully serving our clients as they navigate the market uncertainty and volatility, helping them adapt and succeed. Before turning to our results, I'd like to highlight several strategic actions we've taken over the past few months to strengthen our foundation for shareholders, employees, and customers, and to position the company to drive sustained performance in 2026 and beyond. First, we moved towards refinancing our debt later this month. We had over 99% acceptance of a new debt package from our lender group, extending maturities to 2030. This refinancing is intended to provide operating flexibility and enhance our liquidity profile, while helping us achieve our long-term leverage target of 3.5 times or less, This provides us with greater financial flexibility and ensures we have the capital necessary to continue investing in our core capabilities while delivering exceptional service to our clients. This planned refinancing includes a paydown of approximately $90 million of our debt. Second, we further sharpen our portfolio through the divestiture of three non-core businesses. These transactions streamline our focus and allow us to redeploy capital into higher return opportunities aligned with our long-term strategy. As a result of these actions and our strong cash flow performance, we ended the year with $241 million in cash and a strengthened balance sheet, positioning us in a place of greater stability and optionality as we enter 2026. Finally, our upcoming reverse stock split supports broader institutional accessibility as we enter our next phase of growth. Taken together, these initiatives increase our strategic flexibility, enhance operational focus, and allow us to move from defense to offense. Turning to fourth quarter results, net revenues of $785 million were up approximately 3% year over year, reflecting an improving trajectory in experiential services, while branded services continue to face cyclical headwinds, and retailer services face slowing spend and some revenue timing shifts. Combined, our overall company delivered adjusted EBITDA of $88 million, which reflects the ongoing mixed shifts toward more labor-intensive, lower-margin businesses. Our cash flow generation was strong, and in the second half of 2025, we generated $174 million in unlevered free cash flow, a significant increase from $50 million in the first half, and representing over 100% unlevered free cash flow conversion, excluding the payroll timing factor. One reason for this was our successful SAP implementation earlier this year. Net free cash flow of $74 million in the second half exceeded our target of 30% of adjusted EBITDA, excluding payroll timing. And as I discussed earlier, our cash position strengthened materially. We believe our liquidity position provides ample flexibility to serve our clients effectively, invest selectively, and further improve the balance sheet. As I mentioned earlier, we further streamlined our portfolio in recent months, including in early 2026, with several small divestitures of non-core businesses resulting in approximately $55 million in proceeds, further bolstering our cash position. Before discussing our strategy going forward, I want to briefly reflect on how we arrived at this point, both from an external and internal perspective. Externally, consumers continue to be cautious, value-seeking, and selective. This is affecting overall shopping behavior spending at retail with lower-end consumers buying more on promotion at lower price points, while higher-end consumers are shifting purchasing habits away from expandable consumption categories to healthier options. These two dynamics affect our business in three ways. One, we can see overall lower commission revenue where we manage sales for CPGs or private label manufacturers. Two, we see CPG and retailer P&Ls challenged, leading to some lower spending on merchandising projects, resets, and remodels. And three, we are seeing overall pullback in traditional marketing as retailers demand more investment in their retail media networks. These pressures are real, and many are cyclical in nature. Despite them, we made meaningful progress adapting our business to these conditions to compete more effectively for the long term. Internally, we have been proactively investing in a multi-year IT transformation that concludes this year. These investments required upfront spending that are already driving efficiencies across the business. We expect our capital spending to decline in 2027 reflective of ongoing support rather than transformation investments. we continue to rationalize applications to reduce complexity and support efficiency in our IT platform. We also experienced some client losses in certain areas, particularly where clients became more price sensitive or chose to bring work in-house. At the same time, overall retention remains high, and we continue to execute against our pipeline of new clients, reinforcing the fact that there is continued demand for our services when we compete on the full value of our offering. With that context, let me turn to what we are doing to structurally improve performance and strengthen the balance sheet. First, we're improving productivity across the organization with our centralized labor models serving as a core driver. This model is strengthening our high volume labor businesses by improving utilization, execution, consistency, and cost efficiency. Throughout 2025, we advanced the rollout of this model and experiential services, and it is already delivering tangible results, including reduced reliance on third-party labor, improved execution rates, and better profitability per labor hour. Expanding this rollout remains a key priority for 2026. Technology will continue to be another critical driver of our productivity while also differentiating our ability to better serve our clients and customers. Given our investments in new systems, we are able to rationalize many of our legacy applications and systems to provide a more efficient IT backbone Our enterprise transformation, including our new SAP and Oracle systems, in addition to our Workday implementation later this year, creates a strong and modern platform to provide insight-driven services to our clients and customers. Our new technology platforms are enabling efficiency gains, better workforce optimization, faster data integration, and sharper visibility into performance, positioning us to operate as a truly insight-driven organization, which we believe will propel us to a leading position in the industry. In parallel and in conjunction with our materially upgraded systems, we are integrating AI where it drives the most impact. One example is AI-enabled staffing and scheduling, which is already making us more effective and efficient, reducing manual work while improving speed, predictability, and labor utilization. We are focused on driving growth that deepens client relationships, expands our addressable market, and leverages the capabilities we have built. Our partnership with Instacart is a good example as it continues to progress, combining their in-store audit capabilities and consumer insights with our retail execution network to help CPG brands improve on-shelf and overall in-store performance. We remain focused on pursuing new partnerships with retailers outside the grocery sector, which would significantly expand our addressable market. Our efforts are focused on retail segments where our capabilities translate well. We will share more as these opportunities progress. Finally, we are leveraging our industry leading data investments through our alert based sales system called Pulse. This is an AI enabled decision engine that integrates proprietary retail data with real-time capabilities to help clients anticipate demand and drive growth while more quickly identifying opportunities. Pulse will help our key account managers either remediate underperformance in an account or accelerate growth by more quickly providing the causal analysis and recommended actions. This was enabled by our migration to the cloud and creation of our data lake, which is helping us ingest and analyze more data than ever before. Turning to our segments, Experiential services delivered strong Q4 results and stands as the clearest proof point of our progress in 2025. Accelerating demand, improved hiring velocity, higher labor readiness, and more consistent execution drove increased event volumes, stronger execution rates, and better predictability positioning us well entering 2026. Branded services remained under pressure, consistent with prior guidance. Softer CPG spending. tighter procurement, and client insourcing continue to weigh on performance. While we are not expecting a near-term inflection, we believe many of these pressures are cyclical. In 2026, our priorities are stabilizing the revenue base and converting new business even faster. Our pipeline of new opportunities has expanded, and we expect to provide more visibility into conversion and win rates as the year progresses. We are also managing costs and continuing targeted investments in data and analytics and partnerships to drive measurable client ROI. Retailer services results were affected by channel mix shifts, project timing, and cautious retail spending, particularly in grocery. Some activities shifted into early 2026, creating a timing mismatch as costs were incurred in 2025. Overall, while performance varied by segment, the underlying theme is clear. Execution discipline and operating consistency are improving, particularly in experiential services, which gives us confidence looking ahead. Turning to our outlook, we are approaching 2026 with cautious optimism as we shift from heavy investment to enhanced execution. 2026 is the final year of our elevated IT spending, and we expect to begin seeing the operating benefits of these investments flow through our results. While the industry faces continued macro headwinds, We expect revenue to be flat to up low single digits, excluding divestitures, driven by continued momentum and experiential services, a more stable trajectory in retailer services, and a move towards stabilization in branded services over the course of the year. We expect adjusted EBITDA to be flat to down mid-single digits, excluding divestitures. I want to be direct about why. This reflects ongoing macro uncertainty and mixed shifts toward more labor-intensive, lower-margin services, while some higher margin businesses remain challenged. That said, execution discipline, labor productivity initiatives, and technology investments should drive an improving margin profile as the year progresses. Cash flow remains a core strength and priority. We expect unlevered free cash flow of approximately $250 to $275 million for the year and net free cash flow conversion of at least 25% of adjusted EBITDA. excluding the incremental costs related to a potential debt refinancing. This reflects continued working capital discipline, including further improvement in our DSO performance and a steady CapEx profile as we enter the final stage of our IT transformation. Overall, this outlook reflects both the realities of the current environment and our confidence in the progress we are making. We are building a more durable, predictable, and cash-generative company, and the actions we are taking across labor, technology, and execution position us well over time. I'll now pass it over to Chris for more details on our performance and guidance.

Thank you, Dave, and welcome everyone to our call today. I will review our fourth quarter and full year 2025 performance by segment, discuss our strong cash flow results and improved capital position, and expand on Dave's guidance commentary. Starting with branded services, in the fourth quarter, we generated approximately $259 million in revenues and $39 million in adjusted EBITDA, down 9% and 29% year-over-year, respectively. For the full year 2025, branded services generated $1 billion in revenues and $143 million in adjusted EBITDA, down 9% and 21% year-over-year, respectively. Performance reflected sustained softness in CPG spending throughout the year. which continue to pressure results in the fourth quarter, along with challenges in the sales brokerage and Omnicommerce marketing businesses. Insourcing remains a headwind, but we believe this is cyclical in nature. We are focused on converting our large expanded pipeline of new business to counteract this trend. We continue to manage costs tightly while prioritizing execution and positioning the business for recovery as client spending improves. In experiential services, fourth quarter performance once again exceeded our expectations. We generated approximately $280 million in revenues and $28 million of adjusted EBITDA of 19% and 115% year-over-year, respectively. Results reflected higher event volume of 15% in the quarter and faster and more responsive hiring with execution rates exceeding 93%. The EBITDA margin was once again in the double digits as the incremental margin in the quarter reached over 30%. despite elevated labor-related costs, including workers' compensation and medical benefits. For the full year of 2025, Experiential Services delivered $1 billion in revenues and $101 million of adjusted EBITDA, up 8% and 34% year-over-year, respectively. This segment experienced a strong second-net finish to the year, supported by our hiring initiatives, strong execution, and robust demand, supporting momentum as we move into 2026. In Retailer Services, Fourth quarter revenues were $246 million, with adjusted EBITDA of $20 million, up 1% and down 22% year-over-year, respectively. As Dave mentioned, performance was impacted by delayed projects, leading to costs being incurred ahead of revenue being recognized, and ongoing pressure in advisory and agency work due to channel mix. A portion of planned project activity shifted out of the quarter and into early 2026, while associated labor onboarding and training costs were already incurred. We also saw higher workers' compensation and medical benefit costs in this segment as well. For the full year 2025, retailer services generated $944 million in revenue and $87 million adjusted EBITDA, down 2% and 12% from the prior year, respectively. Looking forward, we believe this business is positioned to grow in 2026 in a more normalized environment for retail project work. expanding our retail partners beyond the grocery segment, and an exciting suite of new value-added services we are developing. For the year, shared services and IT costs increased as systems moved fully from build to live operations, which is in line with our expectations. We see shared service costs rising modestly in 2026, inclusive of higher IT spending as we near the end of our transformational IT investments. We do expect the growth in these costs to moderate after 2026, allowing us to capitalize on the efficiencies created through our shared service infrastructure. Moving to the balance sheet and cash flow. We ended the quarter with $241 million in cash, up roughly $40 million sequentially. The strong cash performance was driven by improved working capital performance, proceeds from recent divestitures, as well as the partial settlement on the Take 5 litigation. Specifically, we sold our minority interest in Action Food Service in September for approximately $20 million, And we sold Smalltalk, our small marketing-oriented business, in December for approximately $20 million. In January, we divested part of our stake in Advantage Smallin for $27 million. And we also received the final $27.5 million cash payment in early 2026 from the sale of June Group. We did not repurchase debt or shares during the quarter. Our net leverage ratio was approximately 4.4 times adjusted EBITDA at quarter end, in line with the third quarter, but above our long-term target of 3.5 times. and we're executing against a clear plan to reduce. Given our strong cash position, we expect to apply approximately $90 million to debt pay down as part of our refinancing. Over the course of 2026, we expect our strong cash flow to contribute to continued debt pay down. With cash on hand, expectations for improved cash generation in the year, and approximately $440 million available under a revolver, we believe our liquidity position supports our needs amidst this still volatile macro environment. Turning to cash generation, DSOs improved during the fourth quarter to approximately 57 days, the lowest level in our history, reflecting improved working capital management, an intense focus on collections, and normalization following earlier system-related disruptions in the year. Optimizing DSOs has been a priority for the organization, and we will continue to make progress in reducing DSOs as we move through 2026, which will contribute to additional cash flow generation. CapEx was approximately $24 million in the fourth quarter, due to heavier IT-related spending against our transformation plan. For the full year 2025, CapEx totaled $53 million. Turning to cash flow, we generated approximately $75 million of adjusted, unlevered free cash flow in the fourth quarter, and the conversion rate was nearly 130%, excluding the payroll timing shift. Cash flow performance exceeded our expectations, driven primarily by strong working capital execution, including improved ESOs. For the full year 2025, Adjusted unlevered free cash flow achieves an approximately 80% conversion rate, excluding payroll timing, reflecting a materially stronger second-hand performance. As Dave mentioned, the planned extension of our debt maturities from 2027 and 2028 to 2030 provides meaningful financial flexibility for the business while improving the balance sheet over time. We believe this outcome will be favorable for all stakeholders and will allow us to execute our strategy and remain focused on delivering, improving operating and financial results. the strategies we have in place are the right ones to achieve that goal. Turning to our outlook for 2026, our guidance reflects a measured and prudent view of the macroeconomic environment coupled with confidence in our cash flow generation. Excluding divestitures, which contributed approximately $20 million to revenues in 2025, we expect revenue growth to be flat to up low single digits with continued strength in experiential services, a more stable performance in retailer services as project timing normalizes, and a gradual recovery profile in branded services over the course of the year, also excluding divestitures, which contributed over $10 million to Justity Bada in 2025. We expect Justity Bada growth to be flat to down the single digits year over year, reflecting continued macroeconomic headwinds, the last year of our major IT investments, and mixed shifts toward lower margin, labor-intensive businesses, particularly within experiential services, but also within branded services. While we expect execution and profitability to improve through the year, Our guidance assumes a conservative margin profile early in the year and does not rely on a near-term inflection in branded services. Cash flow remains a core focus in our outlook. We expect unlevered free cash flow of $250 million to $275 million for the year, with net free cash flow conversion of approximately 25% of adjusted EBITDA, excluding any incremental debt refinancing costs. This outlook is supported by improved DSO performance and disciplined working capital management and a steady CapEx profile. We expect CapEx to be approximately $50 million to $60 million in 2026, consistent with 2025 levels, and this represents our final year of elevated CapEx levels before we start to see a meaningful reduction in future years. While we do not provide quarterly guidance, we do expect a widening of the first half to second half adjusted EBITDA breakdown, with the second half representing approximately 60% of EBITDA. Importantly, This guidance reflects our current assumptions around consumer spending, the labor environment, and timing of known project activity. As always, we aim to plan our business prudently and responsibly. Thank you for your time. I will now turn it back over to Dave.

Thanks, Chris. Our expertise and range of services position us well to navigate through 2026 with resilience and agility. We continue to execute with discipline and advance our productivity and growth initiatives. We are making measurable progress. and our transformation and see proof points across the business. Finally, our focus on long-term shareholder value creation is unwavering. Operator, we are now ready to take questions.

Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. If you have dialed in and would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad to raise your hand and join the queue. If you would like to withdraw your question, simply press star 1 again. If you are called upon to ask your question and are listening via speakerphone in your device, Please pick up your handset to ensure that your phone is not on mute when asking your question. Again, press star one to join the queue. And our first question comes from the line of Luke Morrison with Canaccord. Your line is open.

Hey, guys. Thanks for taking the questions here. Maybe just first on the debt exchange. So it seems like clearly the right move to me, extending the runway. 2030 and removing that near-term maturity risk. I guess my follow-on question is just around the rate step-up from 6.5% to 9% and, you know, whether that changes the sequencing or urgency around getting to sub-3.5 times leverage and just sort of your path to that level.

Thanks. Yep. Thanks, Luke. Just to give you some perspective on that, you're right. It does step up, and obviously the terminal one steps up in cost as well. you know, your overall borrowing rates going up, you know, call it 150 basis points, roughly that. And I think, you know, through this time, to get that incremental time in terms of our ability to extend the debt to 2030, there was an incremental cost related to that, which we were aware of. I think you'll see, you know, call it roughly 10 or so million dollars of incremental interest costs in 2026, and then we'll see the full sort of annualization of those costs In 27 that I would just note that on the, on the term loan, you know, it's a, it's a sofa plus 600 basis points. So, so far has come down. That's led to a little less incremental cost. But I think what I'd say is that that certainty around the runway we have right now to 2030. you know, another four plus years for the debt. That incremental cost, I think, was very much worth it and gives us the ability now to invest, right? And we've been investing, you know, very heavily back in the business. We're calling sort of this year to be the end of that heavy transformation investment. And now it gives us the time to kind of put that into action, if I can say it that way, to, you know, start to really accelerate the growth of the business.

Yeah, yeah, makes sense. And then maybe just to follow on, Just looking at the guide, you know, you explained the spread between revenue and EBITDA growth a little bit. Maybe just like double click there and help us think about the structural cost base and, you know, what's the eventual path to those two lines converging over the medium term?

Yeah, I mean, I think when you look at the business, you know, we see a couple of drivers, especially with the fourth quarter. One, we had unusually high labor costs, largely in the benefits area due to higher claims. This is something where we've brought in a new benefits advisor immediately and have started looking at options to bring those costs in line. We've seen pretty significant inflation across the benefits lines over the last couple of years. And then the other has been mixed within our business, both cross-segment and intra-segment mix. you know, lower margin businesses, some of our labor-intensive businesses growing faster than some of the businesses that are less labor-intensive. I'd say that as we look to stabilize the branded services segment in the back half of this year, later part of this year, and then obviously aim to grow that long-term, that's going to help. And then we're also seeing strong incremental margin in our labor businesses. we're going to get to a point where the margins that are being generated from some of these labor businesses get up to the average margin in our overall business. So we do see that arresting over time and those lines ultimately inflecting differently, where you've got EBITDA growth and revenue growth either more in line or EBITDA performance even ahead of revenue performance. The last thing I'd say on it is, Some of the technology adoption we, you know, Chris talked a lot about our new systems and some of the efficiencies that will come with those. I think like a lot of firms, we are early in the stages. I think. Anyone who says they're late in the stages is probably not truthful on the AI front and there are. Significant efficiencies to be gained there. Both what I call in personal productivity, but also an enterprise wide productivity that. We're just, I think, scratching the surface like most companies, but are excited about the potential.

Excellent. Thank you.

Our next question comes from the line of Greg Parrish with Morgan Stanley. Your line is open.

Hey, guys. Good morning. Thanks for taking my question. May I just start? Maybe the revenue guide is flat to up single, low single digits. Twenty-five was down one and a half. Maybe like kind of how bridge that step up, if you will, like, you know, what's kind of baked into your expectations on which segment is improving implied in the guide to get here in 26?

Yeah, Greg, it's Chris here. And thanks for your question. I would just say that, you know, in the fourth quarter, we did grow revenue. So that's a good indication as the year went on. You've seen that really significant step up in the growth of experiential. We talked last quarter and talked the last couple quarters about just the demand signals there being very strong. And then really want to give credit to the organization to come together to achieve the hiring needs and the execution rates that we needed to satisfy that demand. We talked about 93% execution. I hope that's even higher here in 2026. Against this rising demand, so that's going to be a key driver of our 2026 momentum and there's certainly momentum in that business. I think we do see the retailer segment growing. We do think branded services moves more towards stabilization throughout the year. So, I think that's 1 that will be a bit of a drag early on, but get better as the year goes forward. I think that's the construct we expect for the growth in the year. I think the difference versus Q4 is we do expect the retailer services segment to grow, and that'll be kind of the key components of what we expect for 26 growth in revenue.

Okay, that's helpful, Collar. And maybe just to double-click on branded here, I think you said you're not, you know, competent in an inflection year term, but maybe just help us, like, you know, what's the catalyst here over the next 6, 9, 12 months to get that on the right track in the second half? I mean, is it mostly market volumes or are there other factors that you think that could drive upside?

I think some of it, Greg, is we saw some client losses where price became a significant issue relative to the competition. And we're lapping those, number one. Number two, frankly, we've got some new leadership in position and really a renewed focus on what I call the foundations of the business. This is not a difficult business. I tell our team all the time, if you simply do what you say you're going to do and follow up consistently with both our retailer customers and our CPG clients, it's amazing how easy this business can be. And, you know, frankly, I think between transformation and some macro noise in the market that has certainly been difficult and disruptions around pricing that can relate to tariffs and other things, disruptions in supply chain. We still have some clients that are struggling to meet market demand with supply and just other macro headwinds. I think we've allowed ourselves to get too distracted and need to be focusing on executing at peak levels despite the conditions we may be competing in. So we feel very good about some of the things we're seeing with clients. the way we're operating with them, the fact that some of our clients that we've had long-term relationships with are starting to shift accounts to us to cover versus insourcing and maybe reversing some of those decisions. And so I think all of these things give us confidence as we head into the latter part of 2026 about the branded services space. And then our new business pipeline has really never been this robust, if you will. And a lot of it can be market driven. So it's not always the large CPG that you're thinking about. It can be a lot of the emerging brands, the midsize CPG companies, and then just picking up a couple of accounts with various CPG companies at the market level where there's not a lengthy RFP process, but that the conversion rate is much quicker. So that gives us some optimism as we head into the back half of 26.

Great. That's very helpful. And maybe just lastly for me on the divestitures, can you size how much revenue that is? I think small ones deconsolidated, but I don't know, maybe just sort of rough numbers, like what the divestitures would impact. Thanks.

Sure, Greg. It's Chris. So, and I did give these in my script, so you can just go back to check those, but $20 million of revenue in 2025, and then about a little more than $10 million of EBITDA. And I think you hit the nail on the head the reality of the so 2 of those businesses that we divested. Think our action food service stake, which occur we've already told you about, which occurred back in the 3rd quarter. And then the advantage small and have no revenue effect, but they haven't even done effect. And then you've got the small talk business, which is a marketing oriented business that we sold in December. That's the totality of the revenue. So when I take the revenue from that one business, but on the EBITDA from all three, I get that over $10 million effect on EBITDA. So it's just the point is to try to keep that in mind. Our guidance is based on, call it the pro forma base, excluding that $10 million. Yeah.

Okay. That's helpful. Okay.

Thanks, guys. You got it. Thank you.

There are no further questions at this time. I want to turn the call back over to David Peacock for closing comments.

Thank you. We want to thank everybody for joining and we look forward to connecting with this group next quarter. Thank you.

This concludes today's teleconference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.