The Hackett Group, Inc.

Welcome to the Hackett Group Third 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.

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us to discuss the Hackett Group's Third Quarter Earnings. 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 4.05 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 on 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'll 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 products. At this point, I would like to turn it over to Ted.

Thank you, Rob, and welcome, everyone, to our third quarter earnings call. As we normally do, I'll 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 provide our quarterly guidance. We will then review our market strategy-related comments, after which we will open it up to Q&A. This afternoon, we reported total revenues of $72 million and revenues before reimbursements of $71 million, and adjusted earnings per share of $0.37, which was above our quarterly guidance, and up 19% on a year-over-year basis. Our results were driven by 11% growth in revenues before reimbursements from our global SVT group, which also reported year-over-year segment profit growth of 18%. This growth was driven by our strong SBT consulting performance and by the growth and increasing revenue mix of our higher margin research advisory and IPS service offerings. This highlights the reasons why we have accelerated our investments in this area. The quarter benefited from the growth of our IPAS revenues as our contract we discussed last quarter continued to ramp. We also continue to be actively engaged in contract and pilot discussions with other several large software and service companies to help them bolster their value selling and value realization efforts. Our results also benefited from the growth of our research advisory business. During the quarter, we launched our first of three new market intelligence programs that we plan to launch by year end. These programs allow us to compare the differentiating capabilities of software and services providers which should help them strategically support their sales and marketing efforts. The global SBT or strategy and business transformation segment revenue growth was partially offset by the results of our Oracle and SAP segments, which were down as expected in the quarter. Both groups have been rebuilding their pipelines after strong 2021 performance. We now expect year-on-year revenues for both segments to level off in Q1 and return to growth in Q2 of 2023. Our investments that we made to fully digitize our IP and 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 highly differentiate all of our offerings and also develop develop new licensing and research 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 today we announced the expansion of our credit facility and a $120 million Dutch tender offer to acquire over 5 million shares of our company's common stock. This tender offer should be strongly accretive, especially when you consider that the reduction of the dividend payment due to this buyback is expected to offset more than half of our net tax interest expense that we expect to incur. As we have discussed on our last few calls, we wanted to be more aggressive with our balance sheet by expanding our credit facility to fund acquisitions into 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?