John Kelly: Yes. So from a performance improvement perspective during the year, I think that’s an area of the business where the guidance initially at the beginning of the year, called more mid to upper single-digit growth within that business just, because they had such a record performance in 2023. Obviously, we’re off to a good start in that business with the growth that I described in the first quarter that’s outpacing that. So that’s an area, where there’s potential upside, if the year goes on. But these were relatively conservative in the original plan. And then, as far as the people business goes, the old student group business I referred to, that’s an area of the business where we’re planning for modest, call it, low single-digit growth during the year?
Jasper Bibb: Got it. That’s helpful. I guess maybe stepping back, any thoughts on the FTC’s move to ban non-competes and what that might mean for your business?
Mark Hussey: Yes. This is Mark. We’re – at this point, first of all, we all know it’s going to get litigated. So, I don’t think we really know the outcome, for several months. But having said that, we are not overly concerned about it in our business. It’s certainly something we use and manage all the time. And candidly, might be more of an opportunity, as an example for us. But it’s not something that right now, is paramount in terms of our concern list.
Jasper Bibb: Got it. Last one from me, like head count growth came in a lot faster than we expected this quarter, and maybe some of that was GG&A, but how should we think about the pace of head count adds? And the corresponding impact on utilization, over the balance of the year?
John Kelly: Yes. There’s a couple of things to think of as you think about the headcount, because you referenced you’ve got the addition of GG&A, which is think of that as about 100 FTEs. We’ve also been building out our managed services capabilities, from a global delivery perspective – global delivery perspective. I’m using our India team as a base there. And so we’ve had some more aggressive headcount adds there as we continue to win new assignments in that area, and build out that part of our business, but that tends to skew to a lower expense item than in some other areas. And then the other thing that’s probably in the numbers is, we had really record low attrition during the first quarter this year. And that’s on top of what was low attrition in 2023 as well. So I think it’s all those factors that you see generally low attrition environment, and that’s focused as in some of the areas that we’re investing for growth.
Jasper Bibb: Makes sense. Thanks for taking the questions.
Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Bill Sutherland of Benchmark. Your line is open, Bill.
William Sutherland: Thank you. Mark and John, hi and John, I just want to make sure I got the speaker on, can you hear me?
John Kelly: Yes. Sounds good.
William Sutherland: Good. Cool. So just to follow-up, I guess, on that headcount question. It was particularly strong in healthcare quarter-on-quarter. I think it was like 11%. So I guess all those factors, John, you just referred to apply to healthcare, is there any other color, particularly for the segment? And then, how do we think about kind of sequentially for the rest of the year, the headcount trend there?
John Kelly: Well, to the broader point, so a lot of the headcount growth that you see there, Bill, is the additions to our Managed Services team during – over the course of the past year. I will say, it comes through the numbers, this is an area where we continue to see excellent growth potential business. So, it’s definitely still an area of the business, where we’re hiring, we’re adding talent in order to meet the needs of our clients, and continue to see continue to growth, for the remainder of the year. And so, from a modeling perspective, I think when you look at it longer term over the course of the year, I think it’s still safe to think of an expectation that headcount growth is going to ultimately kind of land in line with revenue growth for the year.
I think that’s a safe assumption. Now there may be areas as the year progresses, where we do some additional investments. So, there may be areas where we end up with higher utilization, and a little bit less headcount add. But generally speaking, I think thinking of headcount percentage growth and revenue percent growth, is probably being the same for the remainder of the year, the way we look at it.
William Sutherland: Okay. I know utilization can bounce around quarter-to-quarter. Pretty big moves in Digital and Consulting. Digital up, Consulting down. Consulting, I assume it’s basically just catching up with the hiring, including the acquisition. I’m not sure what their utilizations were. But is that fair to say? And then on digital, is that sustainable?
John Kelly: I’ll offer two things, Bill, on the Consulting side. There was a little bit of pressure on the utilization metric, related to the acquisition just in the first month by onboarding some of those employees. Again, the low attrition environment in general, is another factor that we have a very low attrition environment that can put a little bit of pressure on the utilization metric. From a Digital perspective, I think that we actually have room, to improve that metric as the year goes after, where it land in the first quarter. So it was up year-over-year. It was actually down a little bit sequentially, if you look at the fourth quarter versus the first quarter. So, we think that there’s more room to run on that metric.
And the final point, I made when we’re talking about expenses earlier, I referenced the large that we had that was about 70 basis points of expense during the quarter. That also has a utilization impact. And we don’t want a precision around it, I think we estimate that, the impact for the consulting utilization related to that was about 1.5%. So I think that, that’s not clearly a significant kind of one-time item that you see in the first quarter.
William Sutherland: Got it. What’s – did you guys talk about this in the prepared remarks, I had to step away for a second, kind of – your thoughts on capital allocation now that you’ve done or a significant share buyback. I know you’re going to moderate, but how are you looking at perhaps the M&A environment? Does there seem to be good opportunities? Or are you going to watch’ and see at this point?
