Hirequest Inc (HQI) 2025 Q3 法說會逐字稿

Good afternoon and welcome to the HireQuest Inc. third quarter 2025 earnings conference call. (Operator Instructions).

It is now my pleasure to turn the floor over to your host, John Nesbitt of IMS Investor Relations. John, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Tom. I'd like to welcome everyone to the call. Hosting the call today are Higher Quest Chief Executive Officer, Rick Hermans, and Chief Financial Officer, David Hartley. I'd like to take a moment to read the Safe Harbor statements.

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, in terms such as anticipate, expect, intend, may, will, should, or other comparable terms, involve risks and uncertainties because they relate to events and dependent circumstances that will occur in the future.

These statements include statements regarding the intent, belief, or current expectations of Higher Quest 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 by Higher Quest’s periodic reports filed with the SEC, and the actual results may differ materially from those contemplated by such forward-looking statements. Except as required by federal securities law, Higher Quest undertakes no obligation to update or revise forward-looking statements to reflect changed conditions.

I would now like to turn the call over to the Chief Executive Officer of Higher Quest, Rick Hermans. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon and thank you for joining our call today. As you can see from our third quarter results, the staffing market is much the same as it's been for the past 10 quarters now in terms of staffing demand and broader market sentiment.

With that said, I'm pleased to report that we delivered another quarter of profitability, highlighted by net income of $2.3 million or $0.16 per share, and we continue to keep our expenses in check despite market uncertainties. Our results in this quarter underscore the flexibility and strength of our franchise model, which has consistently enabled us to remain profitable in soft markets when many others in our industry have struggled.

Over the history of HireQuest , our model has proven to perform well and, importantly, be profitable in all cycles. Since its exceptional inception over 20 years ago, HireQuest been profitable each year through all of the economic downturns and has consistently provided valuable operational and financial support to our franchisees. Over the long term, we are confident that this is a winning formula for shareholders.

The overall staffing market has provided some mixed signals throughout 2025, which has been impacted by a variety of macroeconomic factors including tariffs, immigration policies, and impending interest rate cuts.

Our temp staffing and day labour offerings are outperforming permanent placement and executive search, which can be less predictable by nature. While demand for temp and day labour staffing can fluctuate based on locations and seasonality, our franchisees have a keen understanding of the market, and with our support and resources, they are able to provide the very best in temporary and day labour staffing services. This dependability and service quality is what keeps our customers coming back to HireQuest in the many geographies that we operate in throughout the United States.

Snelling, our nationwide temporary and direct hiring recruiting service, performed well in the third quarter relative to our other offerings, with some of these franchisees scoring big wins, indicating at least a slight increase in demand for longer-term staffing in the light industrial and administrative fields.

Permanent placement and executive search continues to lag, which has been the case for well over a year now, as many of you know. In addition to macro uncertainties that have been amplified by tariffs and other uncertainties, the MRI Network mostly saw that one of the biggest problems was that several MRI Network franchisees elected not to renew their franchise agreements over the last few quarters, which has negatively impacted year-over-year comparisons.

While this is unfortunate, our current MRI Network franchisees saw shrinking declines in their perm placement business over the quarter, which is positive. I do want to emphasize that MRI franchises operate differently from the traditional franchise model that you see in our HireQuest Direct or Snelling.

Our MRI offices are more of a network of somewhat related recruiting firms. In fact, many of them have their own names instead of a tight network of offices that share the same name, brand, and operating standards like HireQuest Direct, for example.

In other words, these are essentially independent recruiting offices operating under the MRI umbrella, making franchisee retention less of a sure thing than our traditional model, especially in a down market.

As always, M&A remains a key part of our growth strategy. There are several opportunities that we are looking at that could be immediately accretive to the HireQuest model, and we're keeping our ears close to the ground for any new deals. This is an especially interesting time for deals given the status of the market, where smaller firms or long-term owners eyeing retirement may be planning their exit strategies. We're constantly scanning for new opportunities, and we're well equipped with a proven strategy that's helped us to close and successfully implement numerous acquisitions over the lifespan of the company.

With that said, I'll now turn over the call to David to provide a closer look at our third quarter financial results.

Thank you, Rick, and good afternoon, everyone. Appreciate you all joining us today. I'll now provide a summary of our third quarter results.

Total revenue was $8.5 million compared with revenue of $9.4 million in the prior year, or a decrease of 9.8%. Our total revenue is made up of two components: franchise royalties, which is our primary source of revenue, and service revenue, which is generated from certain services and interest charged to our franchisees, as well as other miscellaneous revenue.

Franchise royalties were $8.1 million compared to $9 million for the same quarter last year, and our service revenue for the quarter was $387,000 compared to $428,000 last year.

Underlying these franchise royalties are system-wide sales, which are not a part of our revenue but are a helpful contextual performance indicator.

System-wide sales reflect sales at all offices, including those classified as discontinued.

System-wide sales in the third quarter were $133.6 million compared with $148.6 million last year.

Sequentially, system-wide sales increased about 6.1% this year over Q2, which was favourable compared to last year when the increase was only 1.7%. The third quarter is typically our best sales period for HireQuest Direct and, to a lesser extent, Snelling, and this year both offerings saw double-digit sequential growth compared to only mid-single digits last year.

Selling, general, and administrative expenses in the third quarter were $5.1 million compared to $5.4 million in the third quarter of 2024.

I'd also like to point out that we recognized a workers' compensation benefit in the third quarter of just under $100,000 compared to Q3 of last year when we had a net expense of $500,000.

We are pleased with the results from the changes we've implemented to our work comp program, but just so you don’t get the wrong idea about the other expenses, I think it would be helpful to break down SG&A just a bit more.

Core SG&A, which excludes the impact of workers' comp insurance, MRI ad fund-related expenses, and any other non-recurring operating expenses, was $4.6 million for the quarter, which is flat with last year.

We provide a table in the press release issued earlier this afternoon with a detailed reconciliation of core SG&A to SG&A, as well as tables for the non-GAAP profitability metrics: net income to adjusted net income, and net income to adjusted EBITDA, which I'm going to talk about shortly.

Our net income after tax this quarter was $2.3 million or $0.16 per diluted share compared to a net loss of $2.2 million or a loss of $0.16 per diluted share last year.

Adjusted net income for this quarter was $3.4 million or $0.24 per diluted share compared to last year when it was $2.8 million or $0.20 per diluted share.

Adjusted EBITDA was $4.7 million compared to $4.9 million last year, and our adjusted EBITDA margin this quarter rose to 55% from 52% last year.

For both adjusted net income and adjusted EBITDA, a large component of the favourable year-over-year results this quarter can be attributed to our controlling of workers' comp expense. And while there have been times over the past few years where it would have been nice to be able to include it as an adjustment, we're pleased that the changes we've implemented in recent years are moving us in the right direction.

Moving on to the balance sheet:

Our total assets as of September 30, 2025 were $94.9 million compared to $94 million at December 31, 2024. Current assets included $1.1 million in cash and $46.9 million of net accounts receivable, while current assets at 2024 year-end included $2.2 million of cash and $42.3 million of net accounts receivable.

Working capital was $31.5 million as of September 30th compared with $25.1 million at 2024 year-end.

Current liabilities were 42% of current assets as of September 30 versus 49% at December 31, 2024.

We had a $2.2 million draw on our credit facility as of September 30, 2025, and that gives us about $42.5 million in availability assuming continued covenant compliance.

So that puts our net debt at the end of this quarter at around $1.1 million, which is down about $1 million from the end of Q2 and down about $11 million compared to September 30, 2024.

So as we stand today, we have a good amount of flexibility and room for short-term working capital needs, as well as the capacity to capitalize on potential acquisitions.

We've paid a regular quarterly dividend since the third quarter of 2020. Most recently, we paid a $0.06 per common share dividend on September 15, 2025, to shareholders of record as of September 1st.

We expect to continue to pay a dividend each quarter, subject to the board's discretion.

With that, I will turn the call back over to Rick for some closing comments.

Thank you, David. As always, I'd like to thank our employees and franchisees for their hard work and commitment, and we can, we look forward to speaking with you again when we report our year-end results in March. With that, we can now open the line to questions. Thanks.

(Operator Instructions)

Kevin Steinke, Barrington.

Great, thank you. Wanted to start off by asking about the day labour business—sounds like a little more optimism around that business this quarter.

I think on the second quarter call you talked about some of the softness in the manufacturing environment impacting that business, so I'm just wondering if there was a meaningful improvement in trend in that business that you saw in the third quarter compared to the second quarter.

So Kevin, thanks for the question. Good to talk to you.

I don't know if I would go as far as to say it's been improving—stabilizing, I think, is the best way of putting it. It's been generally a reasonable market for on-demand labour in many markets. We have a couple that are still a bit more troublesome, typically related to one or two clients that have either stopped using temporary staffing or there's just not the same volume that's there.

So anyway, that's a muddled way of saying: we're approaching the bottom, we think. But we were still down a bit overall—obviously not where we want it to be. But again, there is room for optimism.

And I would say the other part is, in the fourth quarter—we're five weeks in—and of those five weeks, half of them beat our prior year-over-year comparisons for the Snelling and HireQuest Direct divisions. The other couple of weeks we've been down, but there's room for optimism that we've hit that bottom.

Okay, good. And then you called out some big wins for the Snelling franchises in the quarter. Should we think about those as competitive takeaways or, as you said, at least some stabilization or small improvement in the market?

So I think the large wins are more just the result of exceptional franchisees earning more business. That said, in most markets, it's been better, and Snelling in particular performed pretty well.

Now again, obviously large accounts are great when you get them—and they're terrible when you lose them—but this past quarter we've been fortunate in picking up a couple more than we lost. So again, it's more competitive wins than overall improvement. But that said, it feels pretty stable right now.

And I say "feels"—I point back to where we are so far in the fourth quarter, with a couple of weeks exceeding the prior year period.

Okay, got it.

Okay, got it. And in the discussion about MRI, you talked about some non-renewal of franchisee agreements. Were there any meaningful non-renewals specific to the third quarter, or were you talking about quarters prior to Q3?

Yeah, and I think we—I don't recall which quarter we addressed it—but there were a couple of good-sized departures, especially in the first quarter. So we're obviously seeing those in the comparisons now.

What I would say is a positive sign is that during the quarter, the same sort of active, ongoing MRI franchisees by the end of the quarter were starting to run almost flat with the prior year period. So again, while the active offices were still declining, that levelled out by the end of the quarter, whereas most of the decline came from those who had left the network.

Now look, I'm not going to sugarcoat it—people leaving the network is not good for us. But like I said, from a sentiment of where the market stands, it again indicates that the market seems to have bottomed out or is certainly stabilized.

Okay, understood. Maybe just a couple more. You mentioned you're looking at several accretive M&A opportunities. Just wondering what the pipeline looks like in this market environment. Has it picked up a bit given some of the stress on smaller competitors?

It's been surprisingly stable. We're obviously always in the market to buy competitors, and there are always competitors that are available.

I would have thought there would have been a bit more opportunities than there are, but there's plenty—so don't read that the wrong way. There's certainly plenty. I think part of it is that we tend to see more activity around this time of year anyway. People try to get through the year, so they have full-year results to package when they go to sell.

Whereas a lot of people aren't going to optimize their exit multiple if they're working off interim numbers. So I would expect a bit more opportunities over the next, let's say, 3 to 6 months. But there are plenty of them right now. I'd like to think they would be better, but again, they are better than what they were certainly three years ago, which reflects the state of the market.

Okay, understood. And lastly, I just wanted to ask about tighter immigration enforcement. You talked on last quarter's call about that driving some new business for you, given less competition from undocumented workers or companies that use undocumented workers. Is that trend continuing? Is it still helping your pipeline?

So here's the thing—there are absolutely a couple of decent-sized business wins that we can point directly to immigration enforcement, without question.

I have to be honest with you—a lot of the reports I've seen state that more than 2 million people have self-deported. I really would have expected a much larger uptick in our demand if that were the case. So I'll admit, I'm sceptical about that.

That said, a lot of this is cumulative as well. We're in a situation where the number of people coming in has been at a very low point now for 10–11 months. Part of that takes a while to roll through.

I think what's going to be important in combination with immigration enforcement is once some of these reshored facilities actually start employing non-construction people—meaning, staffing up the factories themselves—that will also hopefully push up demand.

So when you read that Japan has agreed to invest $500 billion in American plants, it doesn't mean you snap your fingers and those plants are built and suddenly there are 150,000 to 200,000 new jobs. Those are going to take a while to fit in.

But again, if immigration remains at such a low point and that continues, it should be a very favourable trend for us—or it should create a big tailwind for us.

Okay, great, well, thanks for the insight, I will turn it back over.

Thank you, Kevin.

(Operator Instructions) I would now like to hand the floor back to management for closing remarks.

Here’s your revised version with spelling and punctuation corrections only, keeping the original wording intact:

Thank you. This does conclude today's conference call. You may disconnect at this time.