The Hackett Group, Inc.

Welcome to the Hackett Group First Quarter Earnings Conference Call. Your lines have been placed on listen-only mode until the question-answer session. Please be advised the conference is being recorded. Hosting tonight's call are Mr. Ted Fernandez, Chairman and CEO, and Mr. Rob Ramirez, Chief Financial Officer. Mr. Ramirez, you may begin.

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us to discuss the Hackett Group First Quarter results. Speaking on the call today, I'm here to answer your question to Ted Fernandez, Chairman and CEO of the Hackett Group. Myself, Robert Ramirez, Chief Financial Officer. A press announcement was released over the wires at 4.05 p.m. Eastern Time. For a copy of the release, please visit our website at www.thehackettgroup.com. We will also place any additional financial or statistical data discussed in this call that is not contained in the release on the investor relations page of our website. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that in the following comments and in the question and answer session, We will be making statements about expected future results, which may be forward-looking statements for the purposes of the federal securities laws. These statements relate to our current expectations, estimates, and projections and are not a guarantee of future performance. They involve risks, uncertainties, and assumptions that are difficult to predict and which may not be accurate, especially in light of COVID-19. Actual results may vary. These forward-looking statements should be considered only in conjunction with the detailed information, particularly the risk factors contained in our SEC filings. At this point, I would like to turn it over to Ted.

Thank you, Rob, and welcome everyone to our first quarter earnings call. As we normally do, I will open the call with some overview comments on the quarter. I will then turn it back over to Rob to comment on detailed operating results, cash flow, as well as comment on outlook. We will then review our market and strategy-related comments, after which we will open it up to Q&A. Consistent with the momentum we experienced through last year, strong demand for our services continued into the first quarter of 2022. Results across nearly all groups exceeded our expectations. Organizations recognized the need to embrace digital transformation as a requirement to remain competitive, and the rate of digital innovation and related change is unprecedented. Correspondingly, this afternoon, we reported total revenues of $75.7 million and revenues before reimbursements of $75.1 million and adjusted earnings per share of $0.38, both above our quarterly guidance and up significantly on a year-over-year basis. U.S. results were up 16.5%, driven by strong performance of our Strategy and Business Transformation Group and the performance of the Oracle and OneScreen practices. Strategy and Business Transformation Group continued its outperformance trend with increased revenues and gross margins. Additionally, our higher margin research advisory offerings grew at a higher rate than our Strategy and Business Transformation consulting offerings, favorably impacting margins. Our EEA Group, or ERP, EPM, and Analytics Group's growth was driven by strong oracle and one-screen growth, as our SAP Group is rebuilding its momentum after its strong performance in 2021. We also saw better than expected results from our European group, which benefited from large cross-Atlantic U.S. engagements. Some of that overperformance will not continue in Q2, unfavorably impacting overall sequential guidance. In summary, large strategy and business transformation and EEA engagements, along with the increasing leverage of our higher margin IP-based benchmarking, research advisory, and IP as a service offerings, as well as the efficiencies from our virtual sales and delivery model are favorably impacting our performance. This increased momentum should allow us to perform at the higher end of our long-term growth and profitability targets. Additionally, the investments we have made to fully digitize all of our IP and development of our digital platforms, which include Quantum Leap, our state-of-the-art global benchmarking platform, and our proprietary Hackett Digital Transformation Platform, or DTP, are allowing us to highly differentiate and expand our offerings and are important drivers of our long-term growth and profitability targets. These platforms are allowing us to develop new relationships and rapidly growing cloud workflow automation and process mining technology providers across all areas of the enterprise. We believe that these new and potential relationships are key to our digital transformation strategy and are important components of our growth strategy as well. It is worth noting that our reported results were achieved without any additional IFAS relationships that we believe should benefit our future results. On the balance sheet side, our ability to generate strong cash flow from operations has allowed us to increase our dividend and our buyback program. We also plan to expand our current facility to fund acquisitions we identify or buyback stock while continuing to invest in our business. With that said, let me ask Rob to provide details on our operating results. cash flow, and also comment on outlook. I will make additional comments on strategy and market conditions following Rob's comments. Rob?