Huron Consulting Group Inc. (NASDAQ:HURN) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Mark Hussey: Yes, Bill, this is Mark. Innosight had a more flat end of the year. And as John said some of the macro uncertainty played a little bit into that, but the outlook is good for Innosight. They’ve got good strength across their portfolio. And so I think, I have good expectations for Innosight in terms of their ability to continue driving growth and expanding the business.

Bill Sutherland: Great. In education do you — I’m kind of interested in the constraints to growth if there are any? I mean just based on the low double-digit guide. You can — I mean is hiring an issue if the client is kind of in a place where they can work at the level of implementation that you might want to do for them? And then what’s the status of the student system cycle? Is that really starting to make a difference in your backlog?

Mark Hussey: So Bill let me try to take the beginning of the question. I’ll have John jump in as well. I don’t — 48% I’d love to say there’s a new growth rate but — and it really was broad across everything we do. So it really wasn’t just in the implementation areas. And we certainly saw the digital number which we talked about was also equally strong. Hiring has not been an issue for us. I mean I’m not going to sit here and say we aren’t working really hard at that level of growth to keep up with what we’re doing, but we’re able to do it. And so as we look ahead I think again just — it’s a reflection of some of the challenges that are going on in the industry. And there’s — the breadth I think of that portfolio is perhaps the strength is that we do so many different things for our education clients that we are serving at all different ranges of the market.

And then we’re just really well positioned to continue to have that growth. Student life cycle again continues to have good progress and momentum. And I think it’s just got a good trajectory outlook, but that really was not necessarily the leader across everything we did this year but it has a tremendously positive outlook.

John Kelly: Yes. And I’ll add Bill if you look at the guidance range at the midpoint we’ve called the low double-digit percentage growth for education, which probably is just acknowledging that 48% was exceptional for the year and being a little bit more measured particularly this early in the year about the outlook for 2023. But if you were to think about the higher end of the revenue guidance range that would certainly be the scenario where probably isn’t going to be 48% again, but where we have stronger growth coming from that education team just based on the demand that we see within that market. And from a student perspective, we are seeing nice growth in that area. I know that that historically has been an area where — it’s been taking a little bit of time I think just in terms of the buying cycle for clients.

And oftentimes the student technology implementation is on the back end of the finance and HR and limitations. But we’re now getting to the point in the cycle where we’re seeing both at some of our large research institutions, our clients now implementing those tools as well as a growing business that we have with some of the smaller institutions in that space. So, we feel good about our progress in that part of the business and we continue to believe if you look out over the next few years that that’s going to be a major area of growth for Huron.