CBIZ, Inc.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for the CBIS third quarter in nine-month conference call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Lori Novickis, Director of Corporate Relations. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for the CBIS third quarter and nine-month 2020 results conference call. In connection with this call, today's press release has been posted on the investor relations page of our website, cbis.com. This call is being webcast, and a link to the live webcast, as well as the replay and transcript, can be found on our website. Before we begin our presentation, we would like to remind you that during the calls, management may discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations of these measures can be found in the financial tables of today's press release. Finally, remember that management may also make forward-looking statements. These statements are based on current information and management's expectations as of this date and do not guarantee future performance. Forward-looking statements involve certain risks, uncertainties, and assumptions that can be difficult to predict. Actual results can and sometimes do differ materially. A more detailed description of such risks and uncertainties can be found in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Joining us for today are Jerry Grisco, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Ware Grove, Chief Financial Officer. I will now turn the call over to Jerry for his opening remarks. Jerry?

Thank you, Lori. Good morning, everyone. I am pleased to speak with you this morning about the very strong results that we experienced for the third quarter and year to date. But before I get into the details on our performance, there are a few key points that I would like to emphasize, starting with the resilience of our business. As we expected, the fundamental characteristics of our business have allowed us to continue to perform well in the current economic environment. Demand for our core accounting and many of our core benefits and insurance services remain strong. These essential and recurring services, which make up approximately 70% of our revenue, have fueled our performance through this quarter and from the start of the pandemic. We are also starting to see increasing demand for a number of our advisory and more project-based services. These were areas where we experienced some decline in the first and second quarters. Our financial results were bolstered by the prudent responses to expense management that we put in place at the onset of the pandemic and the proactive steps that we've taken throughout the last nine months to protect the company. These moves have been effective in allowing us to preserve the substantial investment that we've made over the years in our team, which will position us to accelerate growth when the economy begins to improve. We also continue to be proactive with our outreach to our clients and our prospects. Our clients turn to us for advice and solutions in times of change and uncertainty, and we've been hard at work over the past nine months to help them mitigate the challenges and pursue the opportunities presented by the current business climate. For example, earlier this year we mobilized quickly to help our clients understand and access the wide range of federal stimulus and relief programs, like the Payroll Protection Plan and the Main Street Lending Program. We are watching current discussions around a new economic stimulus package carefully and are prepared to once again assist our clients in taking advantage of opportunities as they become available. These efforts allow us to expand and strengthen our client relationships, which ultimately leads to higher retention rates. Similarly, our timely thought leadership and digital marketing efforts have resonated with prospects. The breadth and depth of our services and expertise and our ability to provide holistic solutions truly differentiates us from many of our competitors and has led to a full pipeline of prospects. A great example of our ability to offer more comprehensive and coordinated services is the recent launch of our accelerated recovery webinar programs. These programs feature CEDA's experts on topics that can help our prospects respond to their most pressing issues, make better decisions, and act on them to advance critical strategies for their own recovery. The market response has been overwhelmingly positive as prospects recognize how CBIS can provide value quickly in a wide range of areas. Overall, we are very pleased with our third quarter in year-to-date performance, given the unique circumstances that the current business climate presents. The quarter played out as expected, with the changes and adjustments we've made having the intended effect. For the third quarter of 2020, revenue was $238.4 million. a slight decrease of $1.4 million over the same period in 2019. However, income from continuing operations improved by 12.5%, and EBITDA increased by 8.3% for the most recent third quarter compared to the same period a year ago. From a year-to-date perspective, we recorded revenue of $752.8 million, an increase of $7.5 million over the prior year. Income from continuing operations improved by 8.6%, and adjusted EBITDA improved by 7.6% over the same period in 2019. Within our financial services segment, our core accounting and tax services continue to perform well, which reflects the steady demand for these essential services. As expected, the extension of tax filing deadline from April 15th to July 15th shifted revenue from the first and second quarters to the third quarters. That work is now completed, and we would expect that the remaining revenue related to tax-compliant work to be relatively consistent with more normal years. Our results within this segment also reflect continued strong performance from our litigation support practices. In the second quarter, we know that M&A transactions were largely put on hold, as most businesses shifted their focus to addressing issues brought on by the pandemic. These delays impacted a number of our advisory services that focus on transaction support. Recently, we have seen signs of improved activity in this area, which is good news for a number of our advisory services businesses. Turning to our government healthcare consulting business. While we continue to experience reasonable growth within this business, the rate of growth has slowed as a result of COVID-related issues. On our last call, we talked at length about the slowdown in delivery of information from our clients and constraints around being on-site to complete certain aspects of the work. While we ended the third quarter in a better place than when we started and the demand for these services remained strong, the timing of certain work will remain a question in an area that we will continue to monitor closely. Some of that work may be delayed into 2021, and we will know more as we progress to the fourth quarter. Within our benefits and insurance segment, we are seeing strong performance from our employee benefits business, our 401k advisory business, and the personal and commercial lines portions of our property and casualty insurance business. We have experienced some softness in our payroll business related to early decline in the number of people on payroll of certain clients based on layoffs and grifts. After the initial drop in April, the number of pays improved in May and has remained fairly stable since that time. Also, our clients and prospects continue to express interest in our new upmarket payroll platform, and our pipeline of new business for this product is very encouraging. Before I turn it over to Ware to provide more specific details on our financials, I wanted to take a few minutes to talk about two acquisitions that we completed in the quarter. We've completed five acquisitions so far this year, and we started the year with the strongest pipeline of opportunities in recent history. While we paused our M&A efforts at the onset of the pandemic, our most recent transactions demonstrate our readiness to pursue strategic opportunities and our ability to close transactions in this business climate. On our last call at the end of July, I touched briefly on the acquisition of Prince Woods Insurance, an independent agency and leading provider of financial, Insurance and Advisory Services located in Woodbridge, Virginia. Prince Wood is the second property and casualty insurance related acquisition so far this year. As we continue and invest in areas of our business, like property and casualty insurance, that have been strong contributors to our historic growth. In September, we also completed the acquisition of ARC Consulting and ARC Placement Group, APG. Both companies located in San Francisco, California. The acquisition of AHRQ and APG adds to our advisory services capabilities within our financial services group. AHRQ consulting assists finance departments with complex accounting, reporting, and compliance needs that require a high level of technical knowledge, including GAAP and SEC requirements. The AHRQ team is often engaged to assist clients with complex capital structures with the potential for public offering or strategic exit. APG focuses on interim and direct placement of finance and accounting talent to meet the needs of ARCs clients. This acquisition was already underway when the pandemic hit. Rather than moving forward at that uncertain time, we put the deal on hold as we continued to monitor their performance. We were pleased to see the resilience in their business during this time frame, and we moved quickly to complete the transaction this summer. The expansion of advisory services within our financial services group is another critical step to establish the right mix of services to respond to our clients' and prospects' increasingly complex needs. Our mix of core essential services, along with advisory and specialty services, has enabled us to maintain our performance while positioning the business for long-term growth. In many ways, our experience in 2020 has further validated CBiz's business strategy. Strategic acquisitions will continue to be an important part of our efforts for short-term recovery within the business, as well as long-term growth. Towards the end of the second quarter, we reactivated our M&A sourcing team and are in discussions with a number of very attractive acquisition prospects. We believe that there will be new opportunities in the near term, especially given companies and firms' recent experience with COVID-19. Given the unique attributes of our business, and our demonstrated resilience, I believe we can offer potential targets a level of stability and opportunity that many others cannot. We can better articulate now the value of being part of a large, well-capitalized, and resilient organization like CBIS that is able to emerge even stronger from the current economic environment. At this point, I will turn it over to Ware Grove, our CFO, to provide more specific details on our financial performance for the third quarter and year to date. Ware?