HireQuest (HQI) Q1 2026 Earnings Transcript

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Date

Tuesday, May 12, 2026 astatine 4:30 p.m. ET

Call participants

• Chief Executive Officer — Richard Hermanns

• Chief Financial Officer — C. Hartley

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Full Conference Call Transcript

Richard Hermanns: Good afternoon, and convey you for joining our telephone today. Our First Quarter 2026 was different coagulated 4th of operational execution and profitability for our concern that demonstrates the resilience of our franchise staffing exemplary successful divers markets. While galore successful our manufacture person struggled to support up with the shifting lawsuit demands and a brushed marketplace for staffing services that has been impacted by a dilatory and sometimes adjacent frozen hiring market, we proceed to present accordant results and sustained profitability for aggregate reasons. First, our franchise staffing exemplary aligns incentives by making our franchisees owners alongside us. In different words, erstwhile our concern is performing well, everyone benefits.

Our exemplary besides provides enhanced disbursal power with little request for determination oregon mediate absorption and our vulnerability to divers lawsuit verticals and recurring gross streams astatine the section level helps america to mitigate macroeconomic risk. Put simply, our show successful the archetypal 4th continues to bespeak the resiliency and spot of our model. It is important to accent that arsenic a absorption team, we instrumentality a semipermanent presumption of the concern and worth creation. We person driven affirmative results dating backmost to earlier COVID. The institution has not mislaid wealth successful a azygous twelvemonth since our enactment and has delivered double-digit compounded yearly maturation successful system-wide sales, gross and adjusted EPS from 2019 to 2025.

This maturation has besides outpaced the broader market. Our full income grew astir 57% from 2019 to 2025 aft adjusting for the divestiture of MRI Network compared to a diminution of astir 3% successful income during the aforesaid play for the broader U.S. impermanent staffing industry. Specifically, our commercialized sales, arsenic truthful adjusted, accrued astir 80% during this period, portion the broader manufacture declined by astir 23%. All the while, we person maintained a beardown equilibrium expanse with nary debt. Looking forward, we are not wavering from our strategy that combines disciplined M&A with integrated franchise growth, which has resulted successful the concern much than doubling successful size implicit the past 5 years.

Furthermore, we person been capable to support our SG&A comparatively unchangeable arsenic a percent of system-wide income contempt persistent economical headwinds implicit the past mates of years. I talked astir tentative greenish shoots successful request implicit the past mates of quarters, but those tended to beryllium isolated and fleeting. In Q1, contempt a unsmooth start, towards the 2nd fractional of the quarter, we started to spot immoderate accordant favorable play year-over-year comparisons crossed the business. And truthful far, successful Q2, those comparisons person go adjacent much favorable. This is encouraging for a fig of reasons.