Full Transcript: HireQuest Q1 2026 Earnings Call

HireQuest (NASDAQ:HQI) reported first-quarter financial results on Tuesday. The transcript from the company's first-quarter earnings call has been provided below. This transcript is brought to you by Benzinga APIs. For real-time access to our entire catalog, please visit https://www.benzinga.com/apis/ for a consultation. Access the full call at https://www.webcaster5.com/Webcast/Page/2359/53938 Summary Hirequest Inc reported a 12.7% decrease in total revenue for Q1 2026 to $6.5 million, largely due to the divestiture of MRI Network assets. The company's franchise staffing model has shown resilience, with consistent profitability and growth in system-wide sales, despite a challenging staffing market. Hirequest Inc has maintained a strong balance sheet with no debt, and continues to focus on a strategy of disciplined M&A combined with organic franchise growth. Future outlook is positive, with signs of improving staffing demand and optimistic year-over-year comparisons in Q2, bolstered by reduced undocumented immigration and investments in the National Accounts program. The company made a $105 million cash offer for True Blue's People Ready segment, aiming to expand its HireQuest Direct division. Full Transcript OPERATOR Greetings, welcome to the HireQuest first quarter 2026 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press Star 0 on your telephone keypad. Please note this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to your host, Walter Frank of IMS Investor Relations. You may begin. Walter Frank (Moderator) Thank you Operator. I would like to welcome everybody to the call. Hosting the call today are HireQuest CEO Rick Hermans and CFO David Hartley. I would like to take a moment to read the Safe Harbor Statement. This conference call contains forward looking statements as defined within Section 27 of the securities act of 1933, as amended and Section 21E of the securities Exchange act of 1934, as amended. These forward looking statements and terms such as anticipate, expect, intend, may, will, should or other comparable terms involve risks and uncertainties because they relate to events and depend on circumstances that will occur in the future. Those statements include statements regarding the intent, belief or current expectations of HireQuest 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 in HireQuest's periodic reports filed with the SEC and that actual results may differ materially from those contemplated by such forward looking statements. Except as required by Federal Securities Law, HireQuest 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 CEO of HireQuest, Rick Hermans. Rick Hermans (Chief Executive Officer) Good afternoon and thank you for joining our call today. Our first quarter 2026 was another solid quarter of operational execution and profitability for our business that demonstrates the resilience of our franchise staffing model in diverse markets. While many in our industry have struggled to keep up with the shifting customer demands and a soft market for staffing services that has been impacted by a slowed and sometimes even frozen hiring market, we continue to deliver consistent results and sustained profitability for multiple reasons. First, our franchise staffing model aligns incentives by making our franchisees owners alongside us. In other words, when our business is performing well, everyone benefits. Our model also provides enhanced expense control with less need for regional or middle management, and our exposure to diverse customer verticals and recurring revenue streams at the local level helps us to mitigate macroeconomic risk. Put simply, our performance in the first quarter continues to reflect the resiliency and strength of our model. It is important to stress that as a management team we take a long term view of the business and value creation. We have driven positive results dating back to before COVID The company has not lost money in a single year since our formation and has delivered double digit compounded annual growth in system wide sales, revenue and adjusted EPS from 2019 to 2025. This growth has also outpaced the broader market. Our total sales grew almost 57% from 2019 to 2025 after adjusting for the divestiture of MRI Network compared to a decline of approximately 3% in sales during the same period for the broader US temporary staffing industry. Specifically, our commercial sales as so adjusted increased almost 80% during this period while the broader industry declined by about 23%. All the while we have maintained a strong balance sheet with no debt. Looking forward, we are not wavering from our strategy that combines disciplined M&A with organic franchise growth which has resulted in the business more than doubling in size over the past five years. Furthermore, we have been able to keep our SG&A relatively stable as a percentage of system wide sales despite persistent economic headwinds over the past couple of years. I've talked about tentative green shoots in demand over the past couple of quarters, but those tended to be isolated and fleeting in Q1. Despite a rough start towards the second half of the quarter we started to see some consistent favorable weekly year over year comparisons across the business and so far in Q2 those comparisons have become even more favorable. This is encouraging for a number of reasons. First, I think we can attribute some of the improvement to the surge in undocumented workers that came from 2021 to 2023 have finally been resolved. Secondly, we are starting to see the impact of our investments in our National Accounts program and the efforts of our franchisees starting to pay off. Looking ahead, we believe we're in a favorable position to benefit from what looks to be an improved staffing market in 2026. With that, I'll now turn over the call to David to provide a closer look at our first quarter financial results. David Hartley (Chief Financial Officer) Thank you Rick and good afternoon everyone. Appreciate everyone joining today. I'll now provide a summary of our first quarter results. Total revenue for the first quarter of 2026 was 6.5 million compared with revenue of 7.5 million in the prior year, a decrease of 12.7%. As a reminder to everyone, we completed our divestiture of certain MRI Network assets which comprised of the permanent placement franchise operations on January 1st of this year. So the first quarter of 2026 does not include any revenue or SG&A from that portion of the business. As a point of comparison, the first quarter of 2025 included approximately 574,000 in total revenue related to divested MRI network assets. 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 in the first quarter were 6.1 million compared to 7 million for the same quarter last year. The first quarter of 2025 included approximately 500,000 in franchise royalties related to the divestiture. Underlying franchise royalties are systemwide 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 first quarter were 102.6 million compared to 1 18.4 million in the first quarter of 2025. The first quarter of 2025 included approximately $16 million in system wide sales related to the divestiture. Service revenue in the first quarter was $462,000 compared to $512,000 last year. The first quarter of 2025 included roughly $75,000 in service revenue related to the divestiture. Selling general SG&Administrative expense in the first quarter was 4.3 million compared to 5.3 million in the first quarter of 2025. Included in SG&A is workers compensation expense which totaled 39,000 for the first quarter compared to 28,000 in the first quarter of 2025. Additionally, the first quarter of 2025 included approximately 700,000 in SG&A related to the divestiture. For Q1 2026, Core SG&A, which excludes the impact of workers comp SG&Any non recurring operating expenses was 4.2 million. We provide a table in the press release issued earlier this afternoon with a detailed reconciliation of core SG&A SG&A along with tables for the non GAAP profitability metrics, net income to adjusted net income and net income to adjusted EBITDA, which I'll discuss shortly. Net income after tax was 1.6 million in the first quarter or $0.11 per diluted share compared to net income of 1.4 million or $0.10 per diluted share last year. Adjusted net income for the first quarter was 1.8 million or $0.13 per share compared to adjusted net income of 1.8 million or 13 cents per diluted share in the same period last year SG&Adjusted EBITDA for the first quarter 2026 was 2.7 million compared to 2.8 million last year. Given the size of non cash operating expenses running through our P&L, we believe adjusted EBITDA SG&Adjusted net income are both relevant metrics for us. Moving to the balance sheet, our total assets as of March 31, 2026 were 91.1 million compared to 88.2 million at December 31, 2025. Current assets included 1 million in cash and 44.7 million of net accounts receivable, while current assets at 2025 year end included 3.9 million of cash and $39.3 million of net accounts receivable. Working capital was 32.5 million at the end of the first quarter compared with 33 million at the end of 2025. At the end of the first quarter we had $0 drawn on our credit facility and that provides us with 40.3 million in availability, assuming continued covenant compliance. We have paid a regular quarterly dividend since the third quarter of 2020. Most recently, we paid a $0.06 per common share dividend on March 16, 2026 to shareholders of record. As of March 2nd, 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. Rick Hermans (Chief Executive Officer) Thank you, David. I'd also like to highlight that we issued a press release this afternoon which described a new offer to the Board of Directors of True Blue. Our new offer is $105 million cash for the on demand portion of True Blue's People Ready segment. As previously disclosed, HireQuest made multiple offers to True Blue in 2025. Last year we were prepared to initiate a tender offer directly to the TrueBlue shareholders incurred substantial costs in its preparation. However, we postponed that process in hopes of engaging with the True Blue Board of Directors directly on a friendly basis. Now, roughly a year after we first made our interest known and made it public, nothing has materialized. We are once again exploring our options. We believe that the on demand portion of True Blue's People Ready segment is very complementary to our HireQuest Direct division and as such made an attractive all cash offer earlier today to True Blue's Board of Directors. This part of True Blue's business has been an underperformer for them for years and our proposal gives the opportunity for them the opportunity to divest these offices and raise a substantial amount of cash. We hope True Blue's board will view this opportunity as a clear path to create incremental value for their shareholders. As always, I'd like to thank our employees and franchisees for their hard work and commitment. And we look forward to speaking with you again when we report our second quarter results in August. With that, we can now open the line to questions. Thank you. OPERATOR Thank you. At this time we will be conducting a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star two if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. One moment please, while we poll for questions. Once again, please press Star one if you have a question or a comment. Our first question comes from Kevin Steinke with Barrington Research. Please proceed. Kevin Steinke (Equity Analyst) Great, thank you. Wanted to start out by asking about just the trends you saw throughout the first quarter. You mentioned a rough start. Is that at all related to maybe some weather, headwinds or headwinds from the holidays? I know, I've heard other companies talk about that. And then you talked about the second half becoming more consistent and that continue into the second quarter with even some improvement. So maybe just a little more color on the trends as the quarter progressed and as you've moved here into the second quarter. Rick Hermans (Chief Executive Officer) Yeah, absolutely. Thanks Kevin. So yes, what you said is absolutely. And what other people have observed, the beginning basically until mid February, the results were, our results were impacted significantly by sort of the placement of New Year's Day. So the holiday was just set at a really pretty much it became basically a 20 business day month. January was bad, February is always traditionally bad because it's a short month. And so January was just as bad because of the placement of New Year's Day. On top of it, the weather was unusually bad over an unusually large swath of the country. But what we noticed was starting around mid February, our results became perceptibly better, particularly compared to the year over year comparison. And as you know, towards the end of the quarter it continued to get, it continued to get better. And if you look at the numbers that David had stated, for example, really if you exclude the system wide sales impact of the MRI network divestiture, we were nearly flat year over year as far as system wide sales. The good news or the better news is that in the first five weeks of the second quarter, our results of our comparisons have become even more favorable. And so in absence of some black swan out there, we're feeling really good about, we're feeling really good about Our demand right now. Kevin Steinke (Equity Analyst) Okay, yeah, that's helpful. And so you mentioned the year over year comparisons becoming more favorable as we enter the second quarter. And I had noticed as well that excluding mri, the system wide sales were flat year over year in the first quarter. So should we kind of think about you've moved into a more, you know, actually growth year over year on a weekly basis over the last few weeks? Rick Hermans (Chief Executive Officer) Yeah, I mean, I would say look from your lips to God's ears. I mean, yes, I do think I do feel much more optimistic now than I have in the last, certainly the last two years. You know, we have some really, we have some really solid momentum right now now again, and it's been more sustained. We've, you know, you and I have had these conversations, you know, in this forum over the last, you know, five, six quarters and it's always, yeah, we've had a few good weeks. Gee, it seems like it's getting a little bit better. And then frequently it would fall off. And for the last, I mean, we've really, for the last even eight, nine weeks, we've really had pretty consistently, you know, consistently decent results compared to the year over year period. Kevin Steinke (Equity Analyst) All right. And yeah, you mentioned maybe a couple of the factors helping you out there, reduced undocumented immigration and also your national accounts program. So maybe just kind of touch on how you believe those things have benefited the results recently here. Rick Hermans (Chief Executive Officer) So two things in particular. One, obviously between 21 and early 24, depending on whatever source you believe in, that probably at least 10 million people came into the country illegally or legally. That's about three times the size of the staffing industry. And so while obviously not everybody who comes in is competing for our jobs, a lot are. I mean, you think of, you know, a lot of those workers work in food service, things like that, that are traditionally in hospitality, you know, jobs that frequently are filled in, particularly our segments of the staffing industry. And so, you know, it really wasn't, you know, really has had an impact. Well now, net immigration is much lower, and even as the economy has grown, it's absorbed some of the, you know, sort of some of the excess labor that came from the amount of immigration we had. What really kind of drove that point home for me, even a couple weeks back, I was reading even like what the population, population growth in the United States in 2025 was one of the lowest in recorded history. And you know, again, so we're starting to see more normal patterns. It's like it was always a hard thing for me to understand. And I mused about it on these calls even at different points. How in the world can we have declining staffing demand with, you know, 3.7 or a 3.9% unemployment rate? It never, you know, it, it never computed in the 35 years I've been in this industry. That was just never the experience. And now we're actually starting to see where the staffing industry is tracking much more with, you know, true increases or decreases in unemployment. And so for us that's a good, you know, for, that's a good thing because we are still in a relatively low unemployment environment. And so I think we're just starting to see, you know, we're starting to see the return of certain segments of business that really had not been there in a while. And the other part is we briefly touched on it back towards the end of last year, but we made some pretty good sized investments in our national accounts department and we're definitely getting some pretty significant wins in, you know, from that investment. And so we're, we're also seeing, you know, organic growth that's just related to our efforts, not necessarily due to the macroeconomic trends. Kevin Steinke (Equity Analyst) All right, great. Maybe just to touch on the true blue offer of the offer for the on demand segment, the people ready, can you maybe just give investors a sense of, you know, the size of that business you're targeting in terms of system wide sales or you mentioned it was unperforming, underperforming, you know, and maybe if you were to acquire that, how you feel like you could improve its performance and its profitability. Rick Hermans (Chief Executive Officer) So unfortunately I'm not at liberty to speak of anything beyond what's been released. So your questions are valid, they'll just probably have to be for a different point. Kevin Steinke (Equity Analyst) No. Okay, completely understand. Just maybe lastly, you know, you mentioned the positive year over year comparisons. Are you seeing that in any particular markets or segments of your business, commercial versus on demand, or is it kind of pretty broad based in terms of the stabilizing and improving trends you've seen? Rick Hermans (Chief Executive Officer) Commercial is where it's at right now. I have to say our on demand is doing okay and by say, okay, let's say it's flat, it's doing reasonably well given, you know, just given the overall macro environment. But the commercial side has been really strong strong and not geographically limited either one of the things, and this is part of what draws it back, even to the immigration issue. There are a lot of different, maybe it's related to reshoring, maybe it's just more an application of robotics, etc. To our industrial economy. But there are a lot of retrofits and things going on and a lot of those are, you know, shorter to medium term projects as an example. And that's what I'm saying. We're, we're starting to get a lot of wins on things like that. Kevin Steinke (Equity Analyst) And you know, which, which again is more of a return to traditionally what staffing, you know, is really, you know, a very good product for. And so again, we're very encouraged with it. And again, broad based. Okay, sounds good. Appreciate the comments. I'll turn it back over. OPERATOR Thanks once again. If you have a question or a comment, please press Star one. The next question comes from Keegan Cox with DA Davidson. Please proceed. Keegan Cox (Equity Analyst) Hi. Thanks for the question. I just wanted to ask how results came in versus your expectations for the quarter. I mean, excluding MRI like you said, system wide sales flat, looks like service revenues improved, but franchise royalties down, I guess kind of. Is that just all weather related? You kind of talked about it, but walk me through it again, I guess. Rick Hermans (Chief Executive Officer) Well, I guess it depends on as far as my expectations it would have been depending on what time of the quarter you asked me. If you'd have asked me in early February, I'd have been crying over my beer thinking, you know, we're, you know, we're going to have a terrible quarter. And so and simply and of course because I can't control the weather and I can't control what day New Year's falls on. And so I would say the second half was particularly given the results of the first quarter were, you know, ended up balancing it out. And so I would say we were frankly probably right about where we would have expected overall, uniformly just based on what, you know, sort of on what transpired. I do think that again, I feel, I feel good about the second quarter and you know, and again the rest of the year. But we are obviously tied to macroeconomic circumstances that are way beyond our control. Keegan Cox (Equity Analyst) Got it. And then you kind of talked about it already seeing a return of some segments of business that haven't been there for a while. You mentioned the retrofits. I'm guessing, you know, you're seeing a lot more on the industrial side too, and construction wise. Rick Hermans (Chief Executive Officer) You know, construction is improving, but construction is not. Construction isn't what it was, let's say a year and a half ago. It's not, it's recovering, but slower. Unless you get into the big data centers or the really big projects, which again, we're Cracking more into. But really the real action for us is just. It really is in the industrial and manufacturing side. It's definitely improved. Keegan Cox (Equity Analyst) Got it. And then just my final one is there we follow a few indicators. I mean, if I look at True Blue and PeopleReady, it looked like that business accelerated this quarter. Other industry publications show that temp staffing demand is improving. I guess, you know, looking at your results, why wouldn't your trends be holding up relative to these indicators? Rick Hermans (Chief Executive Officer) Well, they are. That's the thing. So in fact, I think it was today, maybe it was yesterday. Staffing industry analysts pulls out the bullhorn. The bullhorn, you know, job report. And it showed a really, you know, fairly. It showed a 7% gain. Quote me on that part. But like a 7% gain last week in temporary staffing jobs. So it's fair. You know, that's very consistent with what we're seeing. And temporary staffing jobs actually rose in March, April, and appear to be accelerating into May, which, you know, is, you know, for two months in a row for actual growth has been Keegan Cox (Equity Analyst) a big deal for the staffing industry compared to the last three years, as we pointed out even in our prepared remarks. I mean, the staffing industry is down 3% overall since 2019. And so like I said, it seems like that trend is finally starting to break. Got it. OPERATOR Thank you. We have reached the end of the question and answer session and I will now turn the call over to management for closing remarks. Rick Hermans (Chief Executive Officer) Again, I want to thank everybody for being with us today. This is an exciting time for the company as we hopefully are at the cusp of a period of higher demand for our services. And of course, we remain hopeful that our bid for the on demand portion of True Blue's people ready segment will be taken seriously and will lead to greater opportunities for everybody. So again, thank you for joining us and we will look forward to speaking with you again in August. Thank you. Disclaimer: This transcript is provided for informational purposes only. While we strive for accuracy, there may be errors or omissions in this automated transcription. For official company statements and financial information, please refer to the company's SEC filings and official press releases. Corporate participants' and analysts' statements reflect their views as of the date of this call and are subject to change without notice.