DLH Holdings Corp.

Good morning and welcome to the DLH Holdings Corpus Fiscal 2023 Second Quarter Earnings Conference Call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press stars and one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press stars and two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to Chris Witte, investor relations advisor. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. On the call with me today is Zach Parker, president and chief executive officer, and Catherine Johnville, chief financial officer. The company's earnings release and PowerPoint presentation are available on our website under the investor page. I would now like to provide a brief safe harbor statement, which is also shown on slide three of the presentation. This call may include forward-looking statements that relate to the company's outlook for fiscal 2023 and beyond. These forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results and events to differ materially from these statements. Please refer to the risk factors contained in the company's annual report on Form 10-K and in our other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. We do not undertake any duty to update any forward-looking statements. On today's call, we'll be referencing both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of our non-GAAP results to our reported GAAP results is included in our earnings release and in the investor presentation on DLH's website. President and CEO Zach Parker will speak next, followed by CFO Catherine Johnbull, after which we'll open it up for questions. With that, I'd now like to turn the call over to Zach. Please go ahead, Zach.

Thank you, Chris, and good morning to everyone. Welcome to our 2023 second quarter conference call. We continue to make good progress since last quarter, and we are also remaining on track for a strong fiscal year despite the macroeconomic headwinds in the business. We owe a debt of gratitude for the outstanding performance by our workforce that remains committed to our clients' missions and delivering differentiated value on our programs. Beginning with slide four, I'll first provide a high-level overview of our quarter's financial highlights. With GRSI, our most recent acquisition under our belt, the second quarter revenue essentially reached 100 million, reflecting our first full quarter of operations post-closing. Of course, We have surpassed 100 million mark before during the first two quarters of last year due to the large short-term COVID-related FEMA contracts that we had, including Alaska. But this year's milestone reflects the ongoing business space that we expect to build upon going forward. The company has substantially expanded our technology-enabled solutions profile, particularly in the areas of health IT, digital transformation, and cyber. This is, of course, consistent with our growth strategy that we have articulated over the years. Our recent couple of quarters have been very active with regard to proposal development and program shaping for future organic growth leveraging these competencies. Our reported operating income of 6.0 million, while EBITDA rose to 10.5 million, Our improving EBITDA margins reflect a strategy of expanding our business through highly differentiated services. We ended the quarter with roughly $204 million in debt, but after the end of the quarter, paid down an additional $8 million. Catherine will review that in greater detail in a few moments. And we will continue to use the company's operating cash flow to deliver the balance sheet as quickly as possible, consistent with our history. Our reported EPS was $0.06 per diluted share, and our backlog at quarter end was nearly $941 million. Turning to slide five, I wanted to briefly provide an overview of some recent developments, including two important contract awards. The first gave us a seat on a highly coveted contract vehicle to provide technical solutions and support to the National Cancer Institute Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology. This program will allow DLH to continue to build its expertise to the national imperative of scientific research for cancer causes and treatments. It's a great opportunity to apply our advanced IT solutions and expand our business base with the National Cancer Institute. The estimated aggregate ceiling value of this multi-vendor blanket purchase agreement is $1.7 billion. And we hope to see the opportunity to compete on multiple task orders in the not too distant future. Also, after the end of the quarter, we won a contract to expand our national information warfare business, our naval information warfare business. Through this award, valued at roughly $15 million, we will continue to provide turnkey management solutions for information systems and cybersecurity, leveraging advanced logistics and artificial intelligence to assist in capacity planning and architecture modernization. Such wins and our significant pipeline of future opportunities underscore the strength of our advanced, innovative offerings and the value that we have built through our long-term growth strategy, including the acquisition of GRSI. In addition, we continue to strengthen our governance and board of directors, recently adding Judy Borlas, former chief financial officer for Mantec, to the company's board of directors at her annual meeting in March. Given her nearly unmatched expertise and experience and strong track record within our industry, we are truly delighted to have her on board. She has already made a positive impact on our organization, and we look forward to her playing a key role in our continued success. is built to compete favorably in the government services market as a technology provider, underscored by our advanced capabilities, bolstered again through our most recent couple of acquisitions and the demand for services that we provide. Our highly credentialed staff and innovative offerings are in line with the major government priorities for fiscal 23 and beyond. In fact, the White House's fiscal 2024 preliminary budget calls for historic investments in research, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and digital transformation, which are all in our wheelhouse and bode well for future top-line performance. We believe we're at the beginning of an exciting new chapter in DLH's evolution where we're combining technology leadership with our longstanding mission support and scientific research credentials. We have strengthened our position across many of these areas, building our existing track record of innovation, cloud computing, enterprise IT, systems engineering and integration, cyber and secure data analytics, across a host of government agencies and programs. Now more than ever, our highly differentiated capabilities and strong customer relationships are paving the way for greater overlap between the government's needs and that which we can provide. Once again, we owe this success to our dedicated professional workforce who rise to the challenge every day of delivering on our clients' expectations, and in doing so, accelerating the company's organic growth trajectory. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to our Chief Financial Officer, Katherine Junk. Katherine?