The Hackett Group, Inc.

Welcome to the Hackett Group second quarter earnings conference call. Your lines have been placed on a listen only mode until the question and 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.

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon everyone, and thank you for joining us to discuss the Hackett Group's second quarter results. Speaking on the call today and here to answer your questions are Ted Fernandez, Chairman and CEO of the Hackett Group, and myself, Robert Ramirez, Chief Financial Officer. A press announcement was released over the wires at 4.15 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 on this call and 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 that are 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 second 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 review our detailed operating results, cash flow, and also provide our quarterly guidance. 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 all of our service continued into the second quarter of 2022. Correspondingly, this afternoon we reported total revenues of $75.9 million and revenues before reimbursements of $74.8 million and adjusted earnings per share of $0.38 above our quarterly guidance and up strongly on a year-over-year basis when you exclude the non-recurring SAP software sale, which we highlighted on our second quarter earnings call last year. Our results were driven by a 24.5% revenue growth from our SMBT group, which also resulted with significant yearly year margin expansion of over 450 basis points. The margin expansion was driven by our strong SBT consulting performance and by the growth and increasing revenue mix of our higher margin research advisory and IPM service offering. This highlights the reasons why we have accelerated our investments in our IP service area. Of special note, in June we finalized a three-year multi-million dollar agreement with one of our IPaaS relationships that we have been working on for quite a while now. This contract will ramp up throughout the balance of the year until we reach our targeted contract volumes. We believe this relationship is transformative in many ways. It demonstrates our ability to support a global partner efficiently and in many ways on a self-service basis, utilizing our market-leading benchmarking, benefit case, and value realization IP, which are critical components of our quantum leap and our digital transformation platforms. It also expands our data capture, the industry segments we serve, and our global reach beyond our market-leading capabilities. All are very valuable to our long-term revenue growth and profitability, it's also worth noting that we continue to be actively engaged in contract and pilot discussions with several large software and services companies to bolster their business case development and value selling as well as value realization efforts. Our research and intelligence programs are highly complementary to our IPS service offerings to partners that desire to license our IP and brand and license RIP and our grant permission. They leverage RIP and platforms and also result in strong downstream opportunities to our digital transformation services. The SBT group revenue growth rate was partially offset by the results of our EEA group, which grew 2.5% in the quarter, excluding the software sales transaction. The EEA growth was impacted by the pipeline rebuild in our historically high-performing SAP The EA Group has a tougher comp in Q3 and is forecasted to be down on a year-over-year basis before we expect it to level off in Q4 and resume its year-over-year growth thereafter. Our international group, which was down in the quarter, is expected to be up in Q3 consistent, reflecting the European market conditions. Large SBT engagements, along with increasing leverage of our higher-margin, IP-based, benchmarking, research advisory, and ICES offerings, as well as the efficiencies from our virtual sales and delivery business model, are favorably impacting our performance. We expect the accelerated growth of our IP offerings to continue, which should allow us to perform at the higher end of our long-term growth and profitability targets for the year. It is clear that our investments that we made to fully digitize RIT in the 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 starting to pay off. These platforms are allowing us to develop new relationships with software and services providers across the enterprise. 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 have discussed on the last few calls that we continue to plan to be more aggressive with our balance sheet and expand our current credit facility to fund acquisitions and buy back 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 that work. I will make additional comments on strategy and market-related conditions following Rob's comments. Rob?