HireQuest, Inc.

Greetings. Welcome to the HireQuest, Inc. fourth quarter and year-end 2025 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. Please note, this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to your host, Walter Frank of IMS Investor Relations. You may begin.

Thank you, operator. I would like to welcome everybody to the call. Hosting the call today are HireQuest CEO Rick Hermans and CFO David Hartley. I would like to take a moment to read the Safe Harbor Statement. This conference call contains forward-looking statements as defined within Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 as amended and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 as amended. These forward-looking statements and terms such as anticipate, expect, intend, may, will, should or other comparable terms involve risks and uncertainties because they relate to events and depend on circumstances that will occur in the future. Those statements include statements regarding the intent, belief, or current expectations of HireQuest and members of its management, as well as the assumptions on which such statements are based. Prospective investors are cautioned that any such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve risks and uncertainties, including those described in HireQuest's periodic reports filed with the SEC and that actual results may differ materially from those contemplated by such forward-looking statements. Except as required by federal securities law, HireQuest undertakes no obligation to update or revise forward-looking statements to reflect change conditions. I would now like to turn the call over to the CEO of HireQuest, Rick Hermans.

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining our call today. As we've spoken to on previous calls, the macro environment has driven a challenging time for the staffing industry. That said, we remain solidly profitable and executed well in 2025. As many of you already know, we acquired MRI Network, our global executive search and permanent placement brand, back in 2022 as a way for us to tap into the increasing demand for executive search and permanent placement staffing offerings. Since we acquired the business, hiring for both executive search and permanent placement have slowed. and that dynamic impacted our ability to scale and grow MRI. MRI Network had two components of its business, a permanent placement executive recruiting piece and a contract staffing piece. After careful consideration during the fourth quarter, we announced our strategic decision to change the ownership structure of MRI Network by divesting the permanent placement piece of the business into a new entity and transitioning majority ownership to a newly formed leadership group made up of current and former franchise owners. We believe this is a positive strategic shift for MRI Network and the future growth of the brand. By restructuring ownership and aligning MRI's leadership with experienced franchise owner operators, we're making sure the network is being guided by the people who live its mission every day. This reset is focused on growing and strengthening client partnerships to unite a global network of executive staffing and permanent placement offices into a cohesive, high-performing organization. Importantly, HigherQuest remains fully committed to MRI Network and will continue to retain partial ownership and support the brand with essential infrastructure, purchasing power, and shared services across our staffing and recruiting network. So what that means for HigherQuest and you as shareholders of HigherQuest is that as of January 1st of this year, the permanent placement portion of MRI is operating under this new entity in which HireQuest has a minority ownership stake in. And HireQuest continues to operate and have full ownership of the contract staffing piece of the MRI business, which is the part that more closely aligns with our other franchise offerings. In another development, we announced in December that HireQuest's board of directors board of directors had approved a share repurchase program that authorizes the company to repurchase up to $20 million of its outstanding shares of common stock. We believe that a share repurchase program is currently an efficient use of our capital, reflects our commitment to prudent capital management and deployment, and reinforces the confidence that the board and management team have in HireQuest's long-term strategy while also returning capital to our shareholders. Prior to the close of the year, we surveyed over 400 offices across our HireQuest Direct, Snelling, and MRI brands to get a better sense of the overall job market and hiring trends as we headed into 2026. The data we collected points to a steadying market with fewer extremes and early signals of reallocation across industries. In other words, while we don't expect 2026 to be defined by a hiring boom or bust, We do expect more balance in the labor market that appears to be stabilizing around new priorities, including flexibility, fit, and the kind of skilled work and labor that can't be automated by AI. Some key statistics from the survey include 68% of offices surveyed said time to fill for open roles steadied in 2025, while 35% saw increases. This is generally considered to be a clear indicator of market stability. 61% of recruiters expect the time to fill to remain stable in 2026, while 15% expect improvement as candidate supply normalizes. On average, employers are moving faster to secure top candidates in full-time roles, demonstrated by the late 2025 hiring urgency uptick. Looking ahead, we expect several trends including AI and automation, reshoring and tariff relief, and economic and political shifts to be key forces that shape the 2026 hiring landscape. HireQuest is keeping a close eye on the many markets in which we operate, and we believe that we're well-positioned with our franchise staffing model to benefit from a stabilizing market and to meet the shifting demands of employers in 2026. Lastly, I'd like to acknowledge that on March 3rd, Snelling, our nationwide temporary and direct hire recruiting service, celebrated 75 years of continuous operation, placing it among the longest running staffing firms in the United States. On behalf of all of HireQuest, we congratulate them on three quarters of a century of success and look forward to many more years as a leader in their respective markets. With that, I'll now turn the call over to David to provide a closer look at our fourth quarter and full year financial results.

Thank you, Rick, and good afternoon, everyone. Appreciate you all joining us today. I'll now provide a summary of the fourth quarter and full year results. Total revenue in the fourth quarter of 2025 was $7 million, compared with revenue of $8.1 million in the prior year. a decrease of 13%. For the full year, total revenue was $30.6 million compared to $34.6 million in 2024. Our revenue is made up of two components, franchise royalties, which is our primary source of revenue, and service revenue, which is generated from certain services and interest charge to our franchisees, as well as other miscellaneous revenue. Franchise royalties for the quarter were 6.6 million compared to 7.6 million for the same quarter last year. And for the full year 2025, franchise royalties were 29 million compared to 32.7 million in 2024. Underlying franchise royalties are system-wide sales, which are not a part of our revenue, but are a helpful contextual performance indicator. System-wide sales reflect sales at all offices, including those classified as discontinued. In the fourth quarter of 2025, system-wide sales were 122.3 million compared to 134.8 million in Q4 2024, a decrease of 9.3%. And for the full year, system-wide sales were 500.2 million compared with 563.6 million in 2024, a decrease of 11.3%. Service revenue in the fourth quarter was 392,000 compared to 428,000 last year. And for the full year 2025, service revenue was 1.6 million compared to 1.9 million in 2024. Selling general and administrative expenses in the fourth quarter were 4.5 million compared to 5.1 million in the fourth quarter last year. SG&A for the full year was 20.7 million compared to 21.4 million for the full year 2024. Included in SG&A expense is net workers' compensation expense, which totaled 89,000 for the full year compared with about 2 million in the full year of 2024, a decrease of 1.9 million that demonstrates the progress we've made to reduce the impact of this expense on our business and lower it back to historical levels. Core SG&A, which excludes the impact of workers' comp, MRI, ad fund expenses, and any non-recurring operating expenses, was $4.1 million for the quarter and $8.5 million for the full year. We provide a table in the press release issued earlier this afternoon with a detailed reconciliation of core SG&A to SG&A. along with tables for the non-GAAP profitability metrics, net income to adjusted net income, and net income to adjusted EBITDA, which I'll discuss shortly. Net income after tax was 1.6 million in the fourth quarter, or 11 cents per diluted share, compared to net income of 2.2 million, or 16 cents per diluted share last year. For the full year, net income was 6.3 million or 45 cents per diluted share compared to 3.7 million or 26 cents per diluted share in 2024. Adjusted net income was relatively flat year over year for both the fourth quarter and full year. And in the fourth quarter of 2025, adjusted net income was 2.7 million or 19 cents per diluted share compared to adjusted net income of 2.6 million or 19 cents per diluted share in Q4 2024. And for the full year, adjusted net income was 10 million or 71 cents per diluted share in 2025 compared with 9.9 million or 71 cents per diluted share in 2024. Adjusted EBITDA in the fourth quarter was 3.4 million compared to 3.8 million last year. And for the full year, adjusted EBITDA was 14.1 million compared to 16.2 million in 2024. Given the size of non-cash operating expenses running through our P&L, we believe adjusted EBITDA and adjusted net income are both relevant metrics for us. So now moving on to the balance sheet, our total assets as of December 31, 2025, were $88.2 million compared to $94 million at December 31, 2024. Current assets included $3.9 million in cash and $39.3 million of net accounts receivable, while current assets at 2024 year-end included $2.2 million of cash and $42.3 million of net accounts receivable. We ended 2025 with... about 33 million in working capital compared to 25.1 million at the end of the year in 2024. The biggest driver for the increase in working capital is that we ended 2025 with $0 drawn on our credit facility down from 6.8 million drawn at the end of 2024. So at December 31, 2025, we had $40.3 million in availability, assuming continued covenant compliance. We have paid a regular quarterly dividend since the third quarter of 2020. Most recently, we paid a $0.06 per common share dividend on March 16, 2025, to shareholders of record as of March 2. We expect to continue to pay a dividend each quarter, subject to the board's discretion. And with that, I will turn the call back over to Rick for some closing comments.

Thank you, David. As always, we'd like to thank our employees and franchisees for their hard work and commitment. And we look forward to speaking with you again when we report the first quarter results in May. With that, we can now open the line to questions. Thanks.

Thank you. At this time, we will be conducting a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star 2 if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. One moment, please, while we poll for questions. Once again, please press star 1 if you have a question or a comment. Our first question comes from Kevin Steinke with Barrington Research. Please proceed.

Thanks. Good afternoon, Rick and David.

I was just wondering about the environment you described in terms of stabilization and some clients moving more quickly. If you see that benefiting any of your divisions or brands more than the other? I'm thinking of FireQuest Direct versus Snelling.

Hey, Kevin, appreciate the question. I would, I would say that it hasn't necessarily been more pronounced in any particular division, but it's very, it's very apparent and it's, it's carried through into the first quarter. So the, the, the market has definitely, you know, throughout the quarter, it is, it is definitely seems to have found its bottom. And again, again, I just don't want to contradict what we just said, which means it certainly doesn't seem like it's setting up to be a boom year, but after three years of a steady decline, we're pretty hopeful that that's over with.

Okay, thanks.

Circling back to the MRI transaction, can you maybe just give us... a sense of quantification of how we should think about that affecting the numbers as you move forward in terms of just the revenue and expense impact from the ownership change in that business as it flows through your income statement.

Yeah, I'm going to leave that question to David other than as far as getting into some specific numbers. I will say, generally speaking, about 35 to 40% of, let's say, from 2025 of what we had in MRI has been retained via the contract staffing. So there will be a decline from that portion, if that makes any sense. Now, realistically, the term placement division was, you know, was break even at best. So from an actual income standpoint, um, the effect will literally be nothing should be nothing. But David, if you have any more on that.

Yeah. So, so in 2025, um, the executive search portion of MRI contributed about 65 million of system-wide sales and just a touch under 2 million for royalties. And like Rick said, from an expense side of things, it was, you know, it was, it was break even to, you know, to this past year slightly down a little bit in terms of profitability. So those are kind of – that's kind of what we should see, you know, as things start to normalize in 2026.

And, of course, we did – Kevin, do you have an additional question?

Yeah, just quickly, you didn't mention acquisitions or the acquisition pipeline. Just wondering if you had any update there.

Well, thanks for that question. You know, we had, you know, in the middle of the fourth quarter, we had one that we were hopeful and I would have, if you'd have asked me and November, I would have said there's an 85% chance we were going to, you know, we were going to close on that thing. And then, you know, they, they got cold feet and, um, you know, they got cold feet. So, you know, look, we're all, again, we're always looking for it. However, um, you know, clearly we've had a bit of a dry spell in finding any decent ones and, And at the end of the day, we're just simply not going to chase a deal, you know, just for the sake of having it. It just doesn't really, doesn't really help us. And so I would say what we're finding more, you know, more than what we want is ones with like client concentrations. And so we try to avoid, you know, we try avoiding those because those are the ones that tend to fall apart when you buy them. And so we've had probably a bit less activity than really what I would expect because of the fact that we've had three years of a down market. I would have thought there would be more that are there. But the only thing I can say is after doing this for 35 years, it's just when I say that, that all of a sudden some nice deal will fall in our lap. So You know, we're just, we're always out there working, you know, you know, working, you know, working the phones and trying to get deals. And so, you know, you know, that said, you know, right now we don't, you know, we don't have anything right now.

Once again, if you have a question or a comment, please indicate so by pressing star one on your touchtone phone. Once again, that's star one if you have a question or a comment.

Okay, we currently have no questions in the queue.

I'd like to turn the floor back to management for closing remarks.

I want to thank everybody for joining us today. I think that, again, the results presented just further our contention that the Higher Quest model is a very stable, profit-centered, proven method to be resilient in difficult circumstances. The fact that we went from nearly $7 million of debt to debt-free, for example, in a year that was really by any macro sense of things was down, again, just indicates sort of the strength of our model. And so, again, we just thank you for joining us today and look forward to presenting our first quarter results here in, I guess, in about six weeks. Anyway thank you and have a good day.

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