FTI Consulting, Inc.

Welcome to the FTI Consulting fourth quarter and full year 2021 earnings 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. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note that this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Molly Hawkes, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good afternoon. Welcome to the FTI Consulting Conference Call to discuss the company's fourth quarter and full year 2021 earnings results, as reported this morning. Management will begin with formal remarks, after which they will take your questions. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that this conference call may include forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 that involve risks and uncertainties. Forward-looking statements concerning plans, objectives, goals, strategies, future events, future revenues, future results and performance, expectations, plans or intentions relating to financial performance, acquisitions, share repurchases, business trends, ESG-related matters, and other information or other matters that are not historical, including statements regarding estimates of our future financial results and other matters. For a discussion of risks and other factors that may cause actual results or events to differ from those contemplated by forward-looking statements, Investors should review the safe harbor statement in the earnings press release issued this morning, a copy of which is available on our investor relations website at www.fticonsulting.com, as well as other disclosures under the headings of risk factors and forward-looking information in our annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2021, and in our other filings with the SEC. Investors are cautioned not to place undue reliance on any forward-looking statements which speak only as of the date of this earnings call and will not be updated. During the call, we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures, such as total segment operating income, adjusted EBITDA, total adjusted segment EBITDA, adjusted earnings per diluted share, adjusted net income, adjusted EBITDA margin, and free cash flows. For a discussion of these and other non-GAAP financial measures, as well as our reconciliations of non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures, investors should review the press release and the accompanying financial tables that we issued this morning, which include the reconciliations. Lastly, there are two items that have been posted to the investor relations section of our website for your reference. These include a quarterly earnings presentation and an Excel and PDF of our historical, financial, and operating data, which have been updated to include our fourth quarter and full year 2021 results. Of note, during today's prepared remarks, management will not speak directly to the quarterly earnings presentation posted to the investor relations section of our website. To ensure our disclosures are consistent, these slides provide the same details as they have historically, and as I have said, are available on the investor relations section of our website. With these formalities out of the way, I'm joined by Stephen Gumby, our President and Chief Executive Officer, and Ajay Sabharwal, our Chief Financial Officer. At this time, I will turn the call over to President and Chief Executive Officer, Stephen Gumby.

Thanks, Molly. Molly, can you hear me okay? All good? Well, good afternoon to everyone, and thank you all for joining us. Let me start with a couple of preliminary remarks before we get into it. First of all, thank you all for juggling your time. I know that we had to, at the last minute, switch this time of this, and everybody on this call has busy calendars, so I apologize for the inconvenience and want to express our appreciation for you all juggling your calendars to be here. My second point was going to be, I thought, a positive point. I was going to maybe for the first time ever, begin to talk a little positively on the COVID situation. And I was going to express my hope that we are finally in many places around the world, and I hope where you are, starting to see some movement towards normality. I still hope that, but I think the events in the Ukraine in the last little while remind us that the hope for normality, unfortunately, is not just limited to COVID. So I wish many good wishes to you and any colleagues, family, friends who are affected by that situation. Let me turn to what I think is a much more positive set of messages. And today I'd like to share three messages about our company before I turn the call over to Ajay to take you through our financials. The first one, if you don't mind, I'd like to spend a couple of minutes up front thanking and complimenting our team for what I believe has been spectacular, spectacular performance over the last year. And in fact, over the last while, a longer period of time as well, as I'm sure many of you have by now have already seen 2021 was another, another terrific year in the face of the global pandemic. And as we'll talk about the worst restructuring market in probably the last 15 years, we delivered another record year. And let me stress that word another. We've now had seven years in a row of adjusted EPS growth. Seven years in a row in the face of COVID, fluctuating restructuring markets, turning around core strategies, expanding geographies, entering new adjacencies, lumpiness from big jobs coming or going, heightened competition and attracting talent, among lots of other challenges. Seven years in a row of growth. In adjusted EPS, which is the easiest thing to measure, but also, to me, far more important in the underlying drivers of those financial results, the talent level of our organization, the ambition of it, the energy, the commitment of our people, the leadership, the number of great assignments we are working on, the client relationships we've forged, and the enhancement of our reputation that all those factors have driven. We don't have a single business that is guaranteed automatic growth every quarter. In fact, if you look back over these several years, many of our teams and sub-businesses during this period were down multiple quarters in a row as they faced difficult markets or made big investments or had big jobs end. What I believe our results have shown is that over any extended period of time, those short-term factors don't matter. Rather, over any extended period of time, when our teams do the right things, they control our destiny. We create our own future. Over time, we have shown ourselves able to attract great talent, to support the growth of that talent in our organization, to double down and reinforce core positions and core markets, to expand into new adjacencies, and as a consequence of all that, make ourselves ever better able to serve our clients, to build our businesses, to build our brand. It is that commitment, those efforts by our leaders and our teams that have allowed us to grow seven years in a row. And over the last four years of that, in the face of good markets and bad markets, the average double-digit organic top-line growth.