CBIZ, Inc. Q4 FY2021 Earnings Call

Good morning, everyone and welcome to the CBZ Fourth Quarter and full-year 2021 Results Conference Call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. Please also note today's event is being recorded. At this time. I'd like to turn the floor over to Lori Novickis, Director of Corporate Relations. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone. And thank you for joining us for the CBIZ Fourth Quarter and full-year 2021 Results Conference Call. In connection with this call, today's press release and quarterly 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, as well as an archived replay and transcript can also be found on our site. Before we begin our presentation, 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 in the investor presentation on our website. Today's conference call may also include forward-looking statements, including statements regarding our business, financial condition, results of operation, cash flows, strategies, and prospects. Forward-looking statements represent only estimates on the date of this conference call and are not intended to give any assurance as to actual future results. Because forward-looking statements relate to matters that have not yet occurred, these statements are inherently subject to risks and uncertainties. Many factors could cause future results to differ materially, and CBIZ assumes no obligation to update forward-looking 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 Grisko, President and Chief Executive Officer and Ware Grove Chief Financial Officer. I will now turn the call over to Jerry for his opening remarks.

Thank you, Lori. We're proud to share our fourth quarter and full-year results for 2021 and our outlook for this year. From nearly every measurable perspective, 2021 was at or near our strongest performance in recent history. Most notably, for the full year, total revenue was up 14.6%. Organic revenue grew 7.7%. Adjusted earnings per share was up 16.9%. Our adjusted EBITDA improved 12.4%. Our stock price increased 47%. And with the addition of Marks Paneth announced in early January of this year, we made seven acquisitions, adding over 200 million in annualized revenue. Our strong revenue growth for the first nine months of the year continued into the fourth quarter, where our total revenue was up 15% and our organic revenue grew 9.4%. Our full-year results are the direct outcome of the strategic direction that we established for the business over five years ago. The investments that we've made to support that strategy, the fundamental attributes of our business, and the commitment and character of our over 6000 team members across CBIZ. An important note, our full-year growth came from nearly every major service line across the business. Our results demonstrate important alignment and focus among our team and our commitment to sustain growth and our success in 2021 provided important momentum for the coming year. Within our Financial Services group, demand for our central accounting and tax services remained strong throughout 2021. Our clients rely on us for these services to conduct their businesses, and they turn to us to provide them regardless of the business climate. An important difference in 2021 versus the prior year was a significant increase in demand that we experienced for our advisory services, much of which are project-based and more discretionary. We saw a decline for those services in the first half of 2020 as businesses navigated the uncertainty of the pandemic. Demand for those services began to return in the second half of 2020 and that trend continued and gained momentum throughout 2021. We also benefited from the multi-year investments that we've been making to improve our processes, systems, tools, support, and training that better equip our teams to improve pricing and profitability in our client engagements. We saw the impact of these investments in 2021 as a more consistent and disciplined approach to pricing helped to fuel growth across many of our service lines. One area where we experienced somewhat slower growth than in prior years was our government healthcare consulting business, where the rate of growth was in the low single digits. The slower rate of growth in this business was caused by several factors, including the loss of a large federal contract that we were awarded but was then subsequently canceled, and the number of states that have not yet fully reopened following the Omicron variant surge. While we've proven to be quite effective when working remotely in this area, being present on site often improves productivity and enables us to be more proactive in identifying opportunities to better serve our government clients. Now turning to our benefits and insurance division, we experienced strong growth in performance across nearly every major service line. Payroll being the one exception, as I will explain in a moment. I want to start with our employee benefits business where we experienced our strongest rate of organic growth in six years. Our growth in this area is being driven in large part by the investments that we've been making over the past several years to increase the number of producers, enhance and standardize the sales and marketing and services process, and leverage digital marketing strategies. Client retention rates are over 90% and they improved even further last year. Further, our producer count, a key growth indicator for this business is also up by 15% over the prior year with the new hires added through 2021. Our property and casualty insurance business also experienced high client retention rates and strong production in 2021. The commercial side of the business continues to perform well and improved demand for our program services line bolstered our performance in this area. Similar to our employee benefits business, we're also investing in standardizing our sales management processes and in increasing the number of producers within our P&C business. The retirement and investment solutions business experienced similar trends with strong production contributing to growth, while favorable market conditions aided the defined contribution investment strategies components of this business. And while they make up a small segment of our benefits and insurance division, our advisory and project-based businesses, such as our executive search and compensation consulting business, also benefited from strong demand in 2021 and are off to a similar start this year. Now turning to Payroll, while we continue to experience strong demand for our Payroll platform targeting larger clients with more complex Payroll needs, the impact of the pandemic on our legacy Payroll platform, which generally serves our small business clients, dampened our overall performance within the service line in 2021. Overall, as I mentioned in my opening remarks, we are exceptionally pleased with the outstanding performance of the business throughout 2021. While the number of significant factors that could impact the business climate remain uncertain for 2022 based on our strong financial performance over the past two years, the high demand for our services that we continue to experience, the investments to accelerate growth that we've made in the business, our strong balance sheet and outlook for 2022, we will once again be providing financial guidance for the year. Similar to last year. I want to caution that we do expect more volatility in our financial results from quarter to quarter than we've historically experienced. This is due in part to the significant number of acquisitions completed in the past 12 months. As a result, we advise against comparing any given quarter to the same period in the prior year. With this, I will turn it over to Ware Grove, our Chief Financial Officer to provide more specific details on our financial performance for the Fourth Quarter and the full-year of 2021.

Thank you, Jerry. And good morning, everyone. Let me take a few minutes to go through the highlights of our fourth-quarter and full-year results for 2021. And also comment on our outlook and guidance for 2022. The strong revenue growth we reported through the third quarter of '21 continued to the fourth quarter. The fourth quarter total revenue was up 15% compared with the fourth quarter a year ago. Same unit revenue grew by 9.4% in the fourth quarter. For the full year, total revenue grew by 14.6% with same unit revenue up 7.7% for the full year. As we reported earlier in 2021, eliminating the second quarter net impact of the $30.5 million legal settlement with UPMC and eliminating the $6.3 million gain on the sale of empty Donahoe, the wholesale insurance brokerage business that was divested in the second quarter, earnings per share adjusted for these items was $1.66 per share for the full year, up 16.9% from the $1.42 reported a year ago. We will continue to say that it is our goal to achieve margin improvement of 20 to 50 basis points a year or more. In 2021 however, there were unique year-over-year COVID-influenced patterns to expenses. In addition, the second half of the year and particularly the fourth quarter was impacted by the seasonal nature of the mid-year acquisitions we made during 2021, combined with a higher level of related acquisition fees and legal expenses. The acquisition activity that occurred in 2021, will position us for strong growth in 2022. The full-year impact expected in '22 will be very accretive, and this will help fuel our growth in 2022. However, with the seasonal nature of these financial services businesses that were acquired during mid-year 21, this caused a larger fourth-quarter loss. Also, with heightened acquisition activity, we incurred an increased level of legal and acquisition-related expenses in the fourth quarter this year, and combined these two factors impacted earnings per share by $0.10 a share in the fourth quarter this year. Beginning mid-year '21, we also talked about the expected second-half normalization of expenses, such as healthcare benefits, travel and entertainment, and marketing expenses that would present headwinds in the second half of '21. When compared with a lower level of expenses during the same period of 2020, these higher expenses impacted earnings per share by $0.04 per share in the fourth quarter compared with the prior-year. In comparison with 2020, these expenses in '21 had a negative impact. In 2022, these expenses are expected to level out at close to pre-pandemic levels, with the exception of travel and entertainment expense where migration to virtual and digital communications with clients and prospects is expected to result in future travel entertainment expense at approximately 50% to 60% of pre-pandemic levels. Within the financial services, total revenue grew by 18.7% in the fourth quarter and grew by 16.6% for the full year. Same unit revenue grew by 11.7% in the fourth quarter and for the full year, same unit revenue grew by 9.3%. Growth was recorded across all lines of service with exceptionally strong same unit growth reported within our advisory services, which includes private equity consulting, risks and advisory services, valuation and others. Within our Benefits and Insurance Services Group, total revenue grew by 9.0% in the fourth quarter and grew by 11.6% for the full year. Same unit revenue grew by 5.3% in the fourth quarter and was up by 4.6% for the year. With the exception of Payroll services, all services contributed to growth. Most notably the property and casualty service line with strong market conditions combined with strong new client business development and strong client retention factors, all favorably aligned. Within benefits and insurance, we are happy to see positive results gaining traction with our continued investment in new business producers. I spoke earlier on the seasonal nature of the mid-year 2021 acquisitions and the impact on earnings in the fourth quarter. There is a normal seasonal pattern for these businesses to record strong first-half results followed by a relatively weaker second half. These acquisitions are performing in line with expectations and contributed 5.6% to total revenue growth in the fourth quarter and added 6.9% to total revenue growth for the full year of 2021. Cash flow and liquidity continue to be very strong. During '21, we used $83 million for acquisition purposes, including earn-out payments on prior acquisitions. With the Marc's panel transaction occurring in early January of 2022, we used an additional $72.5 million for a payment upon the close of that transaction. During 2021, we used approximately $97 million to repurchase a total of 3.0 million shares, depending on a number of factors including our future acquisition pipeline. We intend to continue to repurchase shares. The fully diluted weighted average shares for 2021 was approximately $53.7 million shares. We expect to share count within a range of 53 to 53.5 million fully diluted shares for 2022. Total debt outstanding on our $400 million credit facility was $155 million at year-end 2021. After giving effect to the payment to close Marks Paneth in early January, the outstanding balance was approximately $228 million. As we indicated during our Investor call on January 12th, unutilized for our Inc. capacity on the credit facility was approximately $160 million at that time with leverage measured against adjusted EBITDA at approximately 1.5 times. This leaves sufficient unused capacity to enable us to continue with acquisition activities and conduct future share repurchases. Looking forward, estimated future payments for earn-outs, including future payments estimated for Marks Paneth, are $24.5 million in 2022, $40 million in 2023, $43.6 million in 2024, and $23.1 million in 2025. Capital spending for the full year of '21 was $9 million with $2.5 million in the fourth quarter. We expect capital spending within a range of $10 to $12 million looking ahead to 2022. Performance on receivables continues to be good. Days sales outstanding at year-end 2021 was 71 days compared with 72 days the prior year. Bad debt expense for the full year was 32 basis points of revenue compared with 46 basis points of revenue in the prior year. The effective tax rate for the full year of 2021 was 23.8%. Going into 2022, considering increased operating activities within New York and California, both of which have relatively higher state income tax rates, we expect the consolidated effective tax rate to be approximately 25% but we should note that the effective tax rate can be influenced either up or down by a number of unpredictable factors. Adjusted EBITDA was $148.5 million or 13.4% of revenue in 2021 compared with $132.1 million a year ago. As we turn to 2022, there are a number of items to consider. With annualized revenue of $75 million, the acquisitions made in 2021 will have a positive full year impact to revenue and will be accretive to earnings for the full year of 2022. The core financial services and benefits and insurance businesses are continuing to perform very well with improved margins expected in 2022. On January 10th this year, we announced the acquisition of Marks Paneth. The Marks Paneth acquisition is expected to contribute $138 million to revenue growth in 2022. In our conference call on January 12th, we outlined our expectation that due to anticipated first-year transaction and integration costs, the GAAP reported earnings impact from Marks Paneth is expected to be minimal in 2022. Adjusting to eliminate the impact of these first-year costs, the expected earnings impact will be approximately $0.10 per share. Longer term, we expect the contribution to be in the $0.20 to $0.25 per share range by 2025. In 2022, we expect the adjusted EBITDA contribution from our expansive similarly adjusted to eliminate first-year integration costs at approximately 11% to 12% incremental revenue, or approximately $15 million, growing to a range of 16% to 18% of future projected revenues by 2025. As you look at adjusted EBITDA outlined in our release for 2021, depreciation and amortization expense was approximately $27 million. With the expected increases associated with Marks Paneth in 2022, the level of depreciation and amortization expense is expected to increase to approximately $34 million. We project adjusted EBITDA for '22 to increase approximately 24% over the $148.5 million reported for 2021. So in summary, as we look at '22, we are projecting continued strong performance of our core business, further enhanced by the impact of Marks Paneth. Revenue growth will be in a range of 19% to 21% over the $1,104,900,000 reported for 2021. The full year effective tax rate for 2022 is expected at approximately 25%. And of course, this can be impacted either up or down by a number of unpredictable factors. The fully diluted weighted average share count is projected within a range of 53 million to 53.5 million shares for 2022. Compared with the adjusted $1.66 per share reported in 2021, we expect to GAAP reported earnings per share in '22 to grow 14% to 16% or within a range of $1.89 to $1.93 per share. With the expected earnings contribution from Marks Paneth, adjusted to eliminate first-year transaction and integration costs, adjusted earnings per share in 2022 is expected to grow within a range of 20% to 22% or within a range of $1.99 to $2.03 per share over the adjusted earnings per share reported for 2021.

Thank you, Ware. Given the importance of acquisitions on our growth strategy, I wanted to spend a few minutes on our approach to M&A. What we accomplished over the past 12 months and our outlook for 2022. We started 2021 with one of the strongest M&A pipelines in our recent history, a testament to our ongoing investment in our internal team that focuses on identifying potential acquisitions along with improvements in the processes and systems that support our work in this area. We also continue to see increasing interest in CBIZ as a potential partner, which is both a product of the overall acceleration of M&A activity in our industries, but also our long track record of making successful acquisitions. We've talked before on how our performance through the early onset of the pandemic created an opportunity for us to better tell our story. Firms now see our long track record of growth and success, the resilience of our business, and our ability to perform well and continue to invest regardless of economic conditions. All of which leads CBIZ to being recognized as an acquirer of choice. As a quick reminder of our M&A strategy, we look for acquisitions that will allow us to enter attractive and growing geographic markets, strengthen our presence, scale, and capacity in our existing markets, expand our service offerings to include additional services or specialties that we know our clients want and need, and to access top talent. For the six acquisitions that we completed during 2021, totaling $75 million in annualized revenue. Each of these deals was aligned with these strategies. These acquisitions also demonstrate our ability to identify, cultivate, and pursue acquisitions that will make us a stronger company and add to our longstanding record of achieving sustained growth and delivering meaningful shareholder value. Which brings me to our most recent acquisition, which capped off a year of exciting M&A activity. A few weeks ago, we announced the acquisition of Marks Paneth, a leading accounting and tax firm with multiple locations in Metro New York and with offices in Philadelphia, Boca Raton in Washington, DC. This acquisition brings over 600 professionals to our team, with annualized revenue of approximately $138 million. Similar to the transactions we completed in 2021, Marks Paneth aligns with our strategic goals around expanding our presence in attractive markets, strengthening our service offerings, and adding valuable talent. One of the many reasons that CBIZ appealed to the Marks Paneth team is the unmatched depth of expertise and breadth of services that CBIZ offers. The Marks Paneth team also recognizes our commitment to continuing to invest in technologies, tools, products, and services that will be necessary to bring differentiated value to our clients while at the same time strengthening and developing our outstanding team. Finally, an acquisition of size always raises questions around integration. Over the years, we've made substantial investments to continue to improve our approach and processes in this area. We recognized that the integration experience is critically important to welcoming teams to CBIZ and to realizing the desired value from acquisitions. I am confident that we've committed the resources and capacity to successfully integrate and onboard a firm with the size and complexity of Marks Paneth, as well as similar sized firms in the future. We've already made important progress in this short time with Marks Paneth, and we look forward to accelerating these efforts at the end of the traditional busy season this spring. Our acquisition of Marks Paneth was a great way to begin the new year and speaks to our prospects for the future. Our M&A pipeline remains very strong, and we're constantly speaking with new prospects. We have the financial capacity to remain aggressive in pursuing acquisitions, and we look forward to sharing more information on our success in this area during future calls. With that, we will move to our Q&A.

Ladies and gentlemen, at this time, we'll begin the question-and-answer session. We'll pause momentarily to assemble the roster. Our first question today comes from Chris Moore from CJS Securities. Please go ahead with your question.

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for taking a few questions. Let's begin with same-store growth, which was a strong 7.7% in fiscal '21. When considering the 19 to 21% guidance for '22, what assumptions are you making regarding same-store growth and the contributions from financial services versus B&I? It would be great to hear your thoughts on this, particularly since same-store growth was primarily driven by financial services in '21. Let's start with the same-store growth figures included in your guidance.

Good morning, Chris. It's Jerry. I want to take a moment to provide some context regarding our guidance before we explore your question further. Initially, we decided to exclude Marks Paneth from our evaluation. Looking at our projected total revenue growth for next year, we anticipate it to be between 6.5% and 8.5%. Typically, this growth is divided roughly equally between organic growth and acquisitions. Although we haven't made any new acquisitions recently, we do have the residual effects of last year's deals. Furthermore, we aim to improve our margin year-over-year by 25 to 50 basis points, and we expect to surpass the 50 basis point improvement within that guidance. When considering ongoing operations, we also account for Marks Paneth, which we estimate will contribute approximately $138 million to our top line. However, it will have a minor impact on our earnings next year due to the usual one-time expenses associated with onboarding and integrating that unit. This explains the year-over-year guidance we are providing. In terms of growth between financial services and benefits and insurance, we expect continued organic growth that is relatively consistent with what we've seen this year, with strong performance in financial services and solid contributions from our core advisory services. We are particularly encouraged by the returns on the investments we’ve made in the producer team within the benefits and insurance sector. Overall, we are pleased with last year's results, feel optimistic about the momentum we have going into this year, and are enthusiastic about how the business will perform in 2022.

Got it. Very helpful. Marks Paneth, you're discussing a $138 million contribution this year. I’m trying to understand the cadence of cross-serving. Does it typically take about a year for significant cross-serving to occur? Is there some easy opportunity that could arise in 2022? Is that additional to the $138 million or is it already included?

No, Chris. Any cross-serving that occurs in Marks Paneth would be in addition to the $138 million. We announced that transaction on January 6. They are just starting and are now in their busy season. We typically, and in this case, will not burden them too much with the learning around CBIZ and the other services they can offer to their clients. We will begin those discussions right after the busy season, around mid-May or early June, and will be working on this for the rest of the year. However, I don't expect those discussions to yield immediate results. While we have had transactions with significant cross-serving opportunities right away, we do not rely on that happening.

Got it. Last one from me, just government healthcare services, you walked through the reasons why low-single-digit growth in '21. I guess I'm trying to understand, are you looking for better than that in '22? I know on-site helps. Are you on-site more and more these days? Just a sense in terms of what you're seeing on the growth on that side.

Remember, one of the reasons we didn't see stronger growth was that we actually were awarded two contracts, but one is a really significant federal contract. We were awarded it. There is an appeal process. They pulled that contract back. We don't know if it will come back or not, so we would have seen stronger growth even then in '21 on the government healthcare business, but for a couple of pretty unique situations. With that said, it's difficult to predict what the government is going to do, as far as bringing people back into the offices. In certain states and in certain areas, we are back and fully working side-by-side with our government partners on the other side of those transactions, in other cases, we're not. We've really kind of stopped trying to predict when that will fully happen, although yes, to answer your question, we are expecting stronger growth year-over-year than we experienced last year.

Hi. Good morning and thanks for taking my questions. First one I had was just on recruiting and sourcing talent in the current environment; seems like across the professional services space, that's top of mind for a lot of management teams. So I'm curious how that's going, how adding talent in a tight labor market is impacting your outlook for this year and beyond. And then also tangentially related to that, is difficulty or any difficulty in sourcing talent or adding new employees impact how you think about the attractiveness of acquiring assets or talent.

Thank you, Andrew. It's clear that we are in a very competitive labor market across the country and within our industry, and we are certainly feeling that pressure. However, we believe we offer several compelling advantages compared to many of our competitors, and we are actively working to enhance our competitiveness in this environment. When it comes to recruitment, we have had significant success in attracting talent across CBIZ. Recently, we are particularly pleased with the outcomes from our digital outreach program, which proactively connects us with potential candidates and helps them learn more about us. This strategy has proven effective in areas experiencing some attrition, allowing us to replace talent effectively. Nonetheless, the labor market remains competitive, and we are being proactive with wage strategies, the timing of wage increases, and offering flexibility in how and where people work. One of our advantages is the quality of work we provide to our associates, which tends to be more engaging compared to smaller competitors. Additionally, we are proud of our culture, having received 93 awards for being one of the best places to work last year; we believe this is also a strong attraction for potential employees. While we are not exempt from the challenges, we will continue to enhance our appeal to the workforce. Regarding acquisitions, we always assess the culture within potential organizations, including their turnover rates. A high turnover would certainly raise concerns and prompt us to investigate further. The firms we have acquired have demonstrated strong cultures, even as they face the same labor shortages as the rest of the industry. One of CBIZ's key strengths is our approach to talent sourcing, particularly through our national recruiting offices that have been successful in hiring both new graduates and experienced professionals. Our size and scale allow us to share resources across offices nationwide; this capability helps alleviate staffing challenges, as we can redistribute work among offices where there might be availability, enhancing our overall recruitment efforts.

Makes sense. No, that's really helpful. Thank you. And then for my follow-up, you touched on government healthcare consulting a bit, but maybe to speak to another piece of financial services and kind of the outlook for '22 organically. Obviously, M&A-related activity was really strong in 2021. Is that something that you're expecting to slow down just given the difficult comps or how are you thinking about advisory solutions in 2022, given all those dynamics?

There were several questions, Andrew. Let me clarify. If I understood you correctly, you're asking about our perspective on advisory services for 2022 within the context of the growth we experienced in financial services. That's an excellent question, and we monitor that closely. We're off to a very strong start this year. Last year, we had a favorable environment for transaction-type work, which significantly contributed to our organic growth and the results we achieved. We continue to see robust demand for our advisory transaction services, although we have visibility of only about 90 to 120 days in that area. This is our primary focus right now. Beyond that, we cannot predict precisely; as long as the business climate stays favorable, demand for those services will remain high, and we will likely continue to succeed. If the climate slows down, that area may also decelerate somewhat. Therefore, we are somewhat exposed to the business climate outlook and the volume of transaction work concerning those advisory services. Nevertheless, even in slower times, we typically perform reasonably well, although it would inevitably slow our growth a bit.

Once again, if you would like to ask a question, Our next question comes from Marc Reddick from Sidoti and Company. Please go ahead with your question.

Hey, good morning, everyone.

Hi, Marc.

Morning, Marc.

I wanted to briefly discuss the upcoming tax season. Are there any year-over-year timing differences, complexities in the rules, or other factors we should consider that might be beneficial, detrimental, or important for the key season?

Yeah. Marc, interesting question, and particularly insightful in light of what we experienced in 2020, when the pandemic hit, and that season was pushed off, and we had some anomalies as to how we might look at that relative to our typical cycle. I would tell you that unless something dramatic changes in the regulatory environment, we would expect that this season would look more like pre-pandemic, so more like the seasons that we saw prior to 2020. So a typical busy season through April 15th. And then obviously into the fall, we have plenty of work to do between those two periods of time, but a more traditional cycle.

Sure, I would appreciate some additional clarification. You mentioned some of the digital outreach from a recruitment perspective, but I'm curious about other areas related to the significant digital outreach that occurred during the pandemic. Could you elaborate on that? Is it possible to quantify the benefits to your organic growth this year, and what expectations do you have moving forward? I'd like to hear your thoughts on how that timeframe has helped you and your overall experiences with it.

Yes. Thank you, Marc. We look at that in some of the lessons that we learned through the pandemic, and the question came up earlier on cross-serving. What we've learned, particularly with some of our mid-market clients. So our larger clients were really proactive account planning. We're in front of them all the time. But as the clients get smaller, sometimes it's hard to get to them, right? And where we really saw a significant opportunity in growth in reception into the communities was through our digital outreach really beginning in the pandemic, our clients obviously were facing a very challenging business climate. We had solutions for them. We weren't able to pick up the phone all the time or getting for those clients. We reached out to them digitally, and have had really tremendous success. So we've built on that throughout 2021, we will continue to build on that into 2022. We saw a significant incremental revenue through those efforts last year in 2021, and we would expect for that to continue, so that's a great observation and one that we're very focused on, and very encouraged by the results that we're seeing. You're welcome.

Ladies and gentlemen. With that, we'll be concluding today's question-and-answer session. I'd like to turn the floor back over to Jerry Grisko for any closing remarks.

Yes. Thank you. Before we wrap up today, I want to thank our shareholders and analysts as we always do for your continued support. As a reminder, there are additional investor relations resources available on our website, including a recording of the Virtual Investor Day presentation that we hosted in the fall of last year, and a recording of our discussion last month and our M&A strategy in our recent acquisitions, including Marks Paneth. I also want to take this opportunity to express my sincere gratitude to our team. We're now over 6,000 professionals strong nationwide, and I could not be more proud of what this team has accomplished over the past couple of years. At our core, we're a people business and the results that we discussed today are the direct outcome of the hard work and dedication of each of our team members. We couldn't thank you more. As we look forward to 2022, we have a great deal of momentum to propel us to even greater heights. We're excited about the transactions we're seeing within our businesses, as well as our very strong pipeline of increasingly larger M&A opportunities. Most importantly, our strong financial position provides us with the ability to capitalize on these opportunities while continuing to invest in the areas of our business that will bring differentiated value to our clients, our team members, and our shareholders. With that, we'll conclude our comments. Thank you and enjoy your day.

Ladies and gentlemen, with that, we'll conclude today's conference call. We do thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect your lines.