CBIZ, Inc.

Good morning, and welcome to the CBiz Third Quarter 2023 Conference Call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode, and should you need any assistance during the call, 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 that this event is being recorded today. 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 months 2023 results conference call. In connection with this call, today's press release and investor presentation have been posted to the investor relations page of our website, cbiz.com. As a reminder, this call is being webcast, and a link to the live webcast can be found on our website. An archived replay and transcript will also be made available after the call. Before we begin, we would like to remind you that during the call, management may discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations of these measures can be found in the financial tables of today's press release and investor presentations. Today's call may also include forward-looking statements regarding our business, financial condition, results of operations, cash flows, strategies, and prospects. Forward-looking statements represent only estimates on the date of this call and are not intended to give any further assurance of future results. Because forward-looking statements relate to matters that have not yet occurred, these statements are inherently subject to risks and uncertainty. Many factors could cause future results to differ materially, and CBIS assumes no obligation to update these statements. A more detailed description of such factors can be found in the filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Joining us for today's call are Jerry Grisco, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Ware Grove, Chief Financial Officer. Jerry?

Good morning and thank you for joining us for today's call. We're pleased to share our third quarter performance and to discuss our outlook for the remainder of the year. For the third quarter, our businesses performed as expected. and we experienced strong organic growth over the same period last year. The same goes for our year-to-date results, as we successfully built on the positive momentum demonstrated earlier in the year. Encouragingly, we continue to see nice growth across all major service lines, and demand for those services remains strong. I do want to take this opportunity to follow up on two items that we mentioned during our earnings call for the second quarter. The first was unanticipated contract delays in our government healthcare consulting business, and the second being the extension of tax filing deadlines in California, which is a major market for CBIS. For the third quarter, our government healthcare consulting business rebounded, and we benefited from the launch of a number of new projects and the addition of new business that enabled us to achieve our expected growth targets. For the California market, as expected, much of the work that was delayed in the second quarter was completed in the third quarter. California also ended up extending the tax filing deadline again, and we expect to see some of this work shift into the fourth quarter as well. Ware will go into more detail during his remarks in a few minutes. Now, turning to the performance of our two primary practice groups. Our financial services division continued to experience strong demand for our core accounting and tax services and our more project-based advisory services. We have also been able to maintain our pricing initiatives and are seeing the impact of those efforts in our results. Within our advisory business, we experience growth across nearly all of our major service lines due to the healthy demand for many of our services, including transaction services, risk advisory services, and valuations. In the transaction advisory space, a good portion of this demand is being fueled by an increase in the volume of transactions that we're seeing, albeit smaller deals. We're also pleased to see some signs that the IPO market is returning, which benefits the services we provide to help businesses prepare to go public. Within our benefits and insurance business, we continue to achieve growth across all major service lines in Q3. For our employee benefits and our property and casualty businesses, increased service revenue from new production and strong client retention are among the factors contributing to our growth. Our producer count is also up for both of these service lines compared to last year, as we see traction from investments that we made in our internal recruiting team and external agencies to grow our pipeline of new producers. For our payroll business, higher interest rates on client deposits, continued strong demand for our upmarket payroll platform, and continued success with our pricing initiatives have all contributed to our growth. The growth in our retirement and investment services business is coming largely from a continued uptick in project work for our actuarial team. Based on the performance throughout the third quarter, I'm pleased to reaffirm our revenue and adjusted fully diluted earnings per share guidance for the full year that we announced on our investor call for the second quarter. With this, I will turn it over to Ware Grove, our Chief Financial Officer, to provide additional information on our financial performance for the third quarter and year to date.