HireQuest, Inc.

Greetings. Welcome to the HireQuest first quarter 2026 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 HigherQuest 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 HigherQuest'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. Our first quarter, 2026, was another solid quarter of operational execution and profitability for our business, that demonstrates the resilience of our franchise staffing model in diverse markets. While many in our industry have struggled to keep up with the shifting customer demands and a soft market for staffing services that has been impacted by a slowed and sometimes even frozen hiring market, we continue to deliver consistent results and sustain profitability for multiple reasons. First, our franchise staffing model aligns incentives by making our franchisees owners alongside us, In other words, when our business is performing well, everyone benefits. Our model also provides enhanced expense control with less need for regional or middle management, and our exposure to diverse customer verticals and recurring revenue streams at the local level helps us to mitigate macroeconomic risk. Put simply, our performance in the first quarter continues to reflect the resiliency and strength of our model. It is important to stress that As a management team, we take a long-term view of the business and value creation. We have driven positive results dating back to before COVID. The company has not lost money in a single year since our formation and has delivered double-digit compounded annual growth in system-wide sales or revenue and adjusted EPS from 2019 to 2025. This growth has also outpaced the broader market. our total sales grew almost 57% from 2019 to 2025 after adjusting for the divestiture of the MRI network, compared to a decline of approximately 3% in sales during the same period for the broader U.S. temporary staffing industry. Specifically, our commercial sales, as so adjusted, increased almost 80% during this period, while the broader industry declined by about 23%. All the while, we have maintained a strong balance sheet with no debt. Looking forward, we are not wavering from our strategy that combines disciplined M&A with organic franchise growth, which has resulted in the business more than doubling in size over the past five years. Furthermore, we have been able to keep our SG&A relatively stable as a percentage of system-wide sales, despite persistent economic headwinds over the past couple of years. I've talked about tentative green shoots in demand over the past couple of quarters, but those tended to be isolated and fleeting. In Q1, despite a rough start, towards the second half of the quarter, we started to see some consistent favorable weekly year-over-year comparisons across the business. And so far, in Q2, those comparisons have become even more favorable. This is encouraging for a number of reasons. First, I think we can attribute some of the improvement to the surge in undocumented workers that came from 2021 to 2023 have finally been resolved. Secondly, we are starting to see the impact of our investments in our national accounts program and the efforts of our franchisees starting to pay off. Looking ahead, We believe we're in a favorable position to benefit from what looks to be an improved staffing market in 2026. With that, I'll now turn over the call to David to provide a closer look at our first quarter financial results.