Korn Ferry (NYSE:KFY) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Mark Marcon: Great. And then 1 last one and then I’ll jump in the queue. With regards to the expense reductions that you outlined, how much of that is going to be rightsizing the personnel versus the real estate footprint?

Gary Burnison: Yes. We’re going to continue to look at real estate. I mean this is transitory period in many, many respects and one of those is hybrid working for sure. And so we’ve got to continue to look at that. We would actually like to do more there but it just doesn’t make economic sense. So it’s something we’re going to look at our total cost base which does include the real estate. I would assume we’re finalizing the plans right now but I would assume probably 2/3 or so, maybe something like that is from rebalancing the workforce. And what we’ve been doing is we’ve picked up some major contracts. And over the last few months, we’ve been working very, very hard to see how we can shift our own resources around. But at the end of the day, we’re going to have a mismatch between language, geography, skills between some of the areas where we’re seeing pullback than some of these new exciting wins.

And so I — this is not a broad-based layoff, it is nowhere near that. It’s very, very targeted. It’s something I wrestled with for several months. Absolutely, hate to do it but we have to rebalance our workforce to take advantage of the opportunities that we see on the horizon.

Operator: Our next question comes from George Tong, Goldman Sachs.

George Tong: Sorry for the audio difficulties earlier. So a question around the cost savings program. It sounds like it’s going to be a balance of personnel, real estate. Are the cost cuts going to be more concentrated, perhaps in Exec Search where you’re seeing more of an inflection in new business trends? Or is it going to be relatively broad-based across the company?

Gary Burnison: No, it’s very targeted and I’m not going to get into exactly where it’s going to be because we’re still finalizing the plans. But I would tell you that we have secured some major wins for the organization, strategic wins. And as we’ve looked at meeting those demands, we have an imbalance. And there is excess capacity that we cannot solve because of language and location and things like that. So that it’s very targeted and we’ll, certainly, on our next call, we’ll tell you what we did.

George Tong: Got it. And then related to that, as you think about the recovery in margins back to — call it mid- to high teens, what would the time frame be for when margins can get back to historically what you said would be the long-term margin target of circa 18%.

Gary Burnison: Well, look, I think there’s a couple of wildcards. We do see a massive market opportunity around the Interim Services. And when I sit on account calls, it is absolutely clear with the career nomad landscape that this is a really, really good way to further differentiate our firm. And so you’ve got a huge market. It could be as big as $100 billion. We’ve taken that from essentially 0 to a run rate this last quarter of $225 million. And I think over a 3- or 4- or 5-year period of time, that could be a big driver of differentiation for Korn Ferry. So we’re pursuing a larger market there. Now what comes with that is lower margins that you would have, say, compared to Consulting or Executive Search. And so there is a mix change that’s happening.