Crawford & Co

NYSE:CRD.B

Earnings Call Analysis

Earnings Call Transcript 2023-Q2

[Operator]

Good morning. My name is Ennis, and I’ll be your conference facilitator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Crawford & Company Second Quarter 2023 Earnings Release Conference Call. In conjunction with this call, a supplementary financial presentation is available on our website at www.crawco.com under the Investor Relations section. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers’ remarks, there will be a question-and-answer period. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, ladies and gentlemen, this conference is being recorded today, Friday, August 4, 2023.

Some of the matters to be discussed in this conference call and in the supplementary financial presentation may include forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. These statements may relate to, among other things, our expected future operating results and financial condition, our ability to grow our revenues and reduce our operating expenses, expectations regarding anticipated contributions to our underfunded defined benefit pension plans, collectability of our billed and unbilled accounts receivable, financial results from our recently completed acquisitions, our continued compliance with the financial and other covenants contained in our financing agreements, our long-term capital resource and liquidity requirements, and our ability to pay dividends in the future.

The company’s actual results achieved in future quarters could differ materially from results that may be implied by such forward-looking statements. The company undertakes no obligation to publicly release revisions to any forward-looking statements made in this conference call to reflect events or circumstances occurring after the date of the call or to reflect the occurrence of any unanticipated events.

In addition, you are reminded that operating results for any historical period are not necessarily indicative of the results to be expected for any future period. For a complete discussion regarding factors which could affect the company’s financial performance, please refer to the company’s Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2023, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, particularly the information under the headings Risk Factors and Management’s Discussion and Analysis of financial condition, and results of operations as well as subsequent company filings with the SEC.

This presentation also includes certain non-GAAP financial measures as defined under SEC rules. As required, a reconciliation is provided for those measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures.

I would now like to introduce Mr. Rohit Verma, Chief Executive Officer of Crawford & Company. Sir, you may begin your conference.

[Rohit Verma, Chief Executive Officer]

Thank you, Ennis. Good morning, and welcome to our second quarter 2023 earnings call. Joining me today is Bruce Swain, our Chief Financial Officer; and Joseph Blanco, our President. After our prepared remarks, we will open the call for your questions.

During Q2, we continue to build upon our strong start to 2023. Our sustained momentum drove improved results across all segments of our business resulting in revenue growth and margin improvement for the company.

Before I jump into specific achievements in the quarter, I think it’s important to take a moment to step back to highlight our market position and some of the broader trends we’re seeing in the business. As many of you know, Crawford continues to strategically scale our business across complementary service offerings within the claims space. We operate globally manage over $18 billion in claims annually and have approximately 10,000 employees and thousands of field resources.

Our customer base is diversified and growing, including a wide spectrum of brand names who are increasingly looking to Crawford as a claims solution provider. That said, we estimate our market share to be in the low-single digits. Clearly, we have a large market opportunity in front of us.

There are some important growth drivers that support our confidence in the long-term opportunity before us. First, natural catastrophes are becoming more prevalent and our services are increasingly called for as carriers and other providers need increased resources to help policy holders recover in the aftermath.

Importantly, we do not take underwriting risk, an issue that many carriers wrestle with as loss patents continue to get more frequent and more severe. Rather, we work with carriers, self-insured corporations and captives to deliver outsourced claim solutions that offer expertise, timeliness, scale, proximity, and most of all quality of service that is representative of their brand.

Second, there continues to be a long-term tailwind driving the outsourcing of claims processing. P&C margin pressure is leading to more outsourcing of major and complex claims, and there is a greater need for a more nimble and empathetic response to major CAT events.

Third, the independent loss adjusting market in the U.S. is fragmented, and our growing scale is a considerable competitive advantage in a market where the reliability and resiliency of service providers are becoming more and more critical.

Fourth, a key strategic focus of mine since I assume the role of the CEO has been to strengthen our strategic partnerships and relationships with key clients across all our customer segments. Our relationships have unquestionably grown deeper and this has led to increased business with our existing customers as well as uncovering new opportunities.

And finally, we have industry-leading insurtech capabilities that are creating double-digit growth across our platform segment. We are investing in innovation, whether it’s machine learning, data visualization, or other SaaS-based offerings, improving the claims process and experience. We are keenly focused on driving technological evolution in our sector.

Now let’s get into the results for the second quarter. We delivered another quarter of strong results. Revenue grew by 9% or 12% on a constant currency basis, and operating earnings nearly doubled year-over-year. We achieved revenue growth and profit expansion across all segments, highlighting the underlying strength of our business model and solid execution of our stated strategy.

Our second quarter results mark our 11th consecutive quarter of revenue growth, reflecting the hard work and dedication of our value teams across the globe. Their unwavering commitment to quality and customer excellence is enabling us to execute our long-term strategy and bring our envision future to life. We added $26 million in new enhanced business in Q2 2023. This growth included contributions from all of our business segments helping to drive margin expansion and improved profitability.

In the first quarter of this year, we had a slightly negative operating cash flow as we leveraged our liquidity to fund working capital needs related to the storm activities in Australia and the U.S. As expected, we saw a significant improvement in cash generation in the second quarter with $27 million in operating cash flow, strengthening our position to be able to continue to invest in the business and return capital to shareholders.

To that end, we have decided to raise our quarterly dividend to $0.07 going forward. Finally, our net promoter score, a metric used to measure customer loyalty, which we track closely, was a healthy 46 in the quarter, and we are continuously looking for opportunities to improve our score.

Two years ago, we communicated our strategic commitment to grow organically and improve margins across our business. Our subsequent financial results have demonstrated progress across our organization, a reflection of the continual execution of our strategy. While we may see quarterly fluctuations due to weather, our overall trajectory is ahead of our plan velocity.

In our North America Loss Adjusting segment, we’ve focused on driving low to mid single digit revenue growth and improved margins through efficiency on the volume side and investments and expertise on the major and complex side. Our ongoing investments in onboarding expert adjusters, increasing coverage density of our adjusters in the U.S. and delivering industry leading quality have continued to drive growth in the U.S. loss adjusting business.

Additionally, during the second quarter, our improved utilization drove meaningful margin expansion. We’re seeing some softness in Canada, which we expect to continue for the rest of the year. While we’re optimistic moving forward, we may face a tough comparison in the fourth quarter if we have a benign hurricane season.

You may recall the fourth quarter of last year included activity from Hurricane Ian and winter storm Elliott. We are very pleased with the progress we’re making in our international business, although, there’s still work to be done. Our goal has been to get international to a mid single digit growth target. In the second quarter, we saw just under 2% or 8.3% growth on a constant dollar basis. And we have a clear strategy to continue to enhance organic growth in this segment.

International delivered significantly improved operating earnings of $3.7 million as compared to an operating loss in the second quarter of last year. We’re still seeing slowness in Asia, but the UK and Latin America have bounced back well. This turnaround is largely the result of the specific actions we have taken to address pricing and productivity and to better align our cost structure with current market conditions.

For Broadspire, our focus has been to capture share in alternative markets and leverage data to offer cutting edge analytic services to clients. Similar to Q1, overall sales momentum in Q2 was driven by new client wins and accelerated improvement in Medical Management revenue. We expect continued recovery in Medical Management as claim frequency improves through new and existing client wins. We’re also increasing unbundled offerings for Medical Management and data analytics. We are on course for what may very well be one of our best sales year in Broadspire.

Platform Solutions is performing extraordinarily well and we continue to scale this business to deliver double-digit revenue growth and a strong flow through to the bottom line. Platforms is our highest margin operating segment and continues to serve as a key growth engine for our business. We delivered double-digit revenue growth in the quarter driven by improved utilization in contractor connection, along with increasing our market share with our top five carrier partners in our CAT business and growth in our subrogation business. We expect continued strength moving forward supported by healthy underlying margins and solid execution.

Turning now to capital allocation. We continue to maintain a disciplined and prudent capital allocation strategy. As expected, we saw a significant improvement in our cash generation this quarter over the previous quarters. Our stated goal was to have our leverage ratio below two times EBITDA by the end of 2023, and we achieved that ahead of plan coming in at 1.8 times at the end of Q2.

Our positive earnings results and conservatively managed balance sheet gives us tremendous flexibility to make strategic investments for the benefit of the company. As we already shared, last week, we raised our dividend to $0.07 from $0.06 per share for both CRD.A and CRD.B. We have also reinstated our share buyback program further highlighting our commitment to deliver shareholder value. As a point of reference, we have returned more than $120 million of capital to shareholders through share buybacks and dividends since 2019.

With that, I’d like to hand the call over to Joseph, who will discuss our business line results for the second quarter.

[Joseph Blanco, President]

Thanks, Rohit. As most of you know, we report our business in four operating segment. North America Loss Adjusting encompasses primarily our loss adjusting business in the U.S. and Canada. Our International Operations is comprised of all reported service lines outside of North America. Broadspire is our TPA in the U.S. and Platform Solutions includes Contractor Connection, our Networks business, including Catastrophe and WeGoLook as well as our Subrogation business.

As you can see, revenue contribution is fairly evenly spread across the reportable segments. Beginning with North America Loss Adjusting, we achieved revenues of $75.8 million, representing 15% year-over-year revenue growth. Operating earnings were $3.9 million, and we expanded our operating margin by 112 basis points. Strength in the quarter was driven by specialist adjuster additions as Crawford continues to seek and secure the highest quality industry talent.

Additionally, Q2 revenue increases are attributed to new account nominations and overall increased utilization of adjusters in the U.S. due to severe convective storm activity. We continue to see progress in an International segment, where second quarter revenue was $95.3 million and operating earnings were $3.7 million.

Notably, as Rohit highlighted a moment ago, operating earnings grew by more than $4 million year-over-year and margins expanded by 463 basis points. Our ability to significantly improve operating metrics is a direct result of our actions to improve pricing and productivity, as well as simplifying our cost structure.

We saw growth in our UK TPA business and large loss performance in Latin America with continued volume improvement in Brazil and Peru. Our Australian business continues to see benefits from the tail of 2022 CAT activity. For Europe, revenue growth is primarily attributed to growth in high margin areas, including Holland and the Middle East.

Furthermore, efficiency improvement measures in Europe help drive to increase margins. As Rohit mentioned, we remain focused on enhancing organic growth in this segment.

Looking at our Broadspire business, Q2 revenue grew 5%. Medical Management services continued to perform well with revenues growing 7% as we saw sales momentum in alternative markets and data and analytical services. Our innovative technology, including advanced data analytics and predictive modeling is driving market share and we retain 97% of our business year-to-date.

Platform Solutions also delivered strong results with double-digit revenue growth of 22% over the prior year. This was led by networks, which grew 18% as we continued to deepen our relationships with two of the top five carriers in our property and flood businesses. We are expanding relations now with a third carrier in this space and are excited about the prospects. We saw increased contribution from contractor connection, benefiting from pricing actions and improved utilization along with continued market share gains. And our subrogation business had a stellar quarter.

With that, let me turn the call over to Bruce for a deeper look at our financial performance.

[Bruce Swain, Chief Financial Officer]

Thank you, Joseph. Company-wide revenues before reimbursements in the 2023 second quarter were $320.7 million, up 9% from $293.3 million in the prior year second quarter. Foreign exchange rates decreased revenues before reimbursements by $7.5 million or 3%. On a constant dollar basis, revenues before reimbursements totaled $328.1 million, increasing 12% compared to the 2022 second quarter.

GAAP net income attributable to shareholders totaled $8.4 million, increasing 45% from $5.8 million in the same period of 2022. GAAP diluted EPS in the 2023 second quarter was $0.17 for both CRD.A and CRD.B compared to $0.12 for both share classes in the 2022 period.

On a non-GAAP basis, second quarter 2023 diluted EPS was $0.24 for both CRD.A and CRD.B compared to $0.15 for both share classes in the prior year period. The company’s non-GAAP operating earnings totaled $22.8 million in the 2023 second quarter or 7.1% of revenues, up 85% from $12.3 million or 4.2% of revenues in the prior year period. Consolidated adjusted EBITDA was $31.5 million in the 2023 second quarter or 9.8% of revenues compared to $21.2 million or 7.2% of revenues in the 2022 quarter.

I will now review the second quarter performance for each of our segments. North America Loss Adjusting revenues totaled $75.8 million in the 2023 second quarter, increasing 15.3% from $65.8 million reported in the last year’s quarter due to the continued addition of expert adjusters in the segment and the impact of severe weather in the quarter. The segment reported operating earnings of $3.9 million in the 2023 second quarter, increasing from $2.6 million reported in the last year’s quarter. The operating margin was 5.1% in the 2023 quarter compared to 4% in the 2022 quarter.

International Operations revenues totaled $95.3 million in the 2023 second quarter, up 1.7% from $93.7 million reported in last year’s quarter, including $600,000 from the Van Dijk acquisition. On a constant dollar basis, international revenues totaled to $101.5 million growing 8.3% over last year’s quarter. The segment reported operating earnings of $3.7 million in the 2023 second quarter improving significantly from losses of $700,000 reported in last year’s quarter. The operating margin was 3.9% in the 2023 quarter compared to negative 0.7% in the 2022 quarter.

Broadspire revenues were $83.9 million in the 2023 second quarter, increasing 4.7% from $80.1 million in the 2022 period, driven primarily by improving Medical Management revenues. Broadspire operating earnings were $8.1 million in the 2023 second quarter up from last year’s second quarter operating earnings of $7.7 million. The operating margin in this segment was 9.7% in the 2023 quarter, improving from 9.6% in the 2022 period.

Revenues for Platform Solutions were $65.6 million in the 2023 second quarter, increasing 22.1% over the $53.7 million in the prior year quarter, due to growth in networks, subrogation and contractor connection. Operating earnings in Platform Solutions totaled $8.1 million or 12.3% of revenues in the 2023 second quarter compared to operating earnings of $4.6 million or 8.6% of revenues in the prior year quarter.

Unallocated corporate costs were $1.1 million in the 2023 second quarter compared to cost of $1.9 million in the same period of 2022. The decrease was primarily due to an offset to certain internal allocations and other cost reductions. During the 2023 second quarter, non-service pension costs were $2.1 million compared to a $600,000 credit in the 2022 period.

These costs and credits are not a component of operating earnings and are added back for non-GAAP earnings and EPS. We recognized a pre-tax contingent earnout expense of $700,000 in the 2023 period compared to $300,000 in the 2022 quarter. This was related to the fair value adjustment of certain earnout liabilities arising from recent acquisitions. During the first six months of 2023, the company did not repurchase any shares of CRD.A or CRD.B. As a reminder, approximately 1.8 million shares are eligible to be repurchased under our 2021 share repurchase authorization.

The company’s cash and cash equivalent position as of June 30, 2023 totaled $47.5 million compared to $46 million at the 2022 year end. Our total receivables were up $22.1 million from the 2022 year end, primarily due to increased U.S. revenues. The company’s total debt outstanding as of June 30, 2023, totaled $242.8 million compared with $238.9 million as of December 31, 2022.

Net debt stood at $195.3 million as of June 30, 2023, while our leverage ratio under our credit agreement closed at 1.8 times EBITDA. Additionally, our pension liability was $25.3 million at the end of the second quarter, reflecting a funded ratio of 93.4%. We made no discretionary contributions to our U.S. defined benefit pension plan for the second quarter of 2023, and we do not intend to make contributions during the remainder of the year.

Cash flow from operations for the first six months of 2023 totaled to $27.2 million with free cash flow of $9.2 million. This compares to cash used in operating activities last year of $12.8 million and negative free cash flow of $28.4 million. This significant improvement in cash flow was driven by the increase in net income and an improvement in working capital.

With that, I’ll turn the call back to Rohit for concluding remarks.

[Rohit Verma, Chief Executive Officer]

Thank you, Bruce. This quarter reinforces our confidence in the long-term strategy we’re implementing at Crawford. The company’s financial strength and liquidity provides us with the flexibility to grow our market share as we continue to invest in our industry leading capabilities. These top quality services differentiate us as a reliable and trusted partner, which is of critical importance in a landscape where customers are increasingly outsourcing service elements and responding to higher volume of CAT events.

Crawford is an industry leader in the next generation Insurtech capabilities, a very exciting opportunity for us reflected in the strong growth we’re seeing in our platform’s revenue, and we will continue to leverage new and existing customer relationships in order to create deeper and more durable partnerships. This is an exciting time to be part of Crawford. And as we advance through 2023, we’ll continue to work towards driving shareholder value while delivering top quality services promptly for our customers.

Thank you for your time today, Ennis, please open the call for questions.

[Operator]

Thank you, Mr. Verma. [Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from Mark Hughes with Truist. Please go ahead.

[Mark Hughes, Truist]

Yes, thank you. Good morning. Rohit, how much of the momentum in your business you think is being spurred by just the harder personal lines market, a lot of inflation out there, a lot of pressure on carriers. How much is that contributing to the good momentum you’re seeing?

[Rohit Verma, Chief Executive Officer]

Mark, I think it’s a factor. As you know, inflation environment per se doesn’t change for us. It just doesn’t change the business trajectory for us. So I don’t – I won’t attribute too much to inflation. We do have some parts of our business that are impacted by inflation, but as a macro trend, I don’t think that is what’s impacting our business. I do think that as the property market is putting pressure on our clients, they’re looking for new and improved ways in which they make the claims outcomes better, and I think they’re increasingly looking towards us to help them with that. So I do see that as a factor.

[Mark Hughes, Truist]

You had mentioned more outsourcing of complex claims that’s one of the results of all this pressure. Could you talk a little bit more about that? Is there a – how do you gauge that? I know you’re seeing your own flow of business, but that’s a kind of intriguing point.

[Rohit Verma, Chief Executive Officer]

Yes. I think three things. Number one, as severe convective storms have increased in the U.S., we’re seeing more and more attention of the claims adjusters inside the organizations focused on those. And that’s creating an opportunity for us to get more overflow of claims. And a lot of times, those are the large and complex claims, because they just have a longer trajectory.

Second factor that I believe is that they’re just more large and complex claims period, right? The number of $1 billion buildings that you had in the world is more today than it was two years ago or three years ago. So I think that there’s just that frequency. And then the third thing is that the complexity of claims is not just increasing, because of the values, but also because of the structures that are there. Today, there are – a lot many policies that are being written with multiple carriers using quota shares or layers as opposed to before where the capacity was more easy to come. So I think those are the three biggest factors that are creating more outsourcing of the large and complex claims.

[Mark Hughes, Truist]

So the complexity of the claim just because the – you’ve got more participants in the coverage tower leads to – yes. Okay, interesting.

[Rohit Verma, Chief Executive Officer]

Anytime you have more than one participant in a coverage tower, the general rule is to bring an independent adjuster in the mix.

[Mark Hughes, Truist]

Yes. Okay. Fascinating. And then you had mentioned in Broadspire part of the pipeline is the alternative markets opportunities. Could you expand on that?

[Rohit Verma, Chief Executive Officer]

Yes. I think it’s – that is also related to what we’re seeing in terms of market trends. We’re seeing more and more business moving to alternative markets. And alternative markets, we define as MGAs, MGUs, captives, sort of other instruments that are being used by risk bearing entities, both from a distribution perspective as well as sort of risk transfer.

And in a lot of cases, those new sort of entrants don’t have the claims capabilities and are relying on providers like us to provide those claims capabilities. We think it’s an attractive segment. We also think it’s a segment, which is less price sensitive than say, at the corporate segment and is looking for more technology and more value. So – and we are well positioned to take charge of that segment.

[Mark Hughes, Truist]

And one final one you mentioned in networks your two top five clients and adding the third – is the third also in the top five, top 10 and does it…

[Rohit Verma, Chief Executive Officer]

I would say top 10. I don’t have the best list in front of me, so I can’t tell you if they’re top five or not, but they’re definitely top 10.

[Mark Hughes, Truist]

Yes. And do you think those will scale like – or that will scale like the other two have?

[Rohit Verma, Chief Executive Officer]

That’s our intention to scale it, but as you know, with a lot of these large clients, it takes time to scale as we’ve shared that with you all before.

[Mark Hughes, Truist]

Yes. Yes. Okay. Great. Thank you very much.

[Rohit Verma, Chief Executive Officer]

Thank you, Mark.

[Operator]

Your next question comes from Kevin Steinke with Barrington Research. Please go ahead.

[Kevin Steinke, Barrington Research]

Good morning.

[Rohit Verma, Chief Executive Officer]

Hi, Kevin.

[Kevin Steinke, Barrington Research]

I wanted to start off by asking about, you talked about continued investments in technology and leading the technology revolution for the industry. Just wondering what you’re seeing from the competition. I mean, if you feel like you’re continuing to build a competitive differentiation through those investments. And when you go out and competing for a new business, how much of a differentiator your technology investments have been?

[Rohit Verma, Chief Executive Officer]

Sure. Kevin, we are extremely excited about this space. We definitely believe that it is a competitive advantage for us. We don’t believe that we’re seeing the same thing from our traditional competitors as much as we have seen that from more of what I would call Insurtech competitors. And as you know, that the Insurtech market has been challenged, because of what’s happening in the capital markets broadly.

And as a result of that, we believe that our history in this space, our brand name, our expertise in claims space already is giving us the edge to sort of push forward on these technology solutions. And because of our history, because of our brand, because of our expertise, we’re edging out even the Insurtech competitors in this space. So we feel very good about the progress that we’re making here. And we certainly believe that a lot of the business that we’re winning as an example in our Broadspire unit can be attributed to our superior technology capabilities in that space.

[Kevin Steinke, Barrington Research]

Okay, great. Why don’t you could just get an update on your hiring of specialist adjusters. I think you talked about last quarter surpassing that goal of 200 hires, and if you’re continuing to make progress there. And maybe just talk about if your platform is really something that’s helping to attract those skilled professionals to Crawford in terms of just your stability and your expertise and client relationships, et cetera.

[Rohit Verma, Chief Executive Officer]

Yes. When in 2020, we set our strategy and we set our vision, a critical element of our vision was to be the place where experts want to be. So we’ve been investing a lot in our culture, in our approach to people to be a place where experts want to be. And yes, we had this target that we surpassed in Q1 that we had targeted to surpass by Q4 of this year. But we’re not slowing down. We are certainly continuing to attract experts and we’re continuing to add experts into our business. Even in Q2, we added additional experts.

So we don’t see that slowing down. Yes, certainly, we’re getting to a point where we – within markets, there are not – no longer are there that many experts left for us to attract, but we’re also starting to build our own quite a bit now. So we’re investing quite a bit in internal development of our people, so that we not only attract experts from the outside, but build and develop experts and then retain them to be part of the Crawford family.

[Kevin Steinke, Barrington Research]

Okay. That’s interesting. The development of experts internally is – can that be a little more attractive from a financial standpoint? Or are the investments in growing them similar to maybe trying to attract experts from the outside.

[Rohit Verma, Chief Executive Officer]

When we say growing them from within – it is about giving them the exposure and the experiences that they need to become experts. It is about mentoring and coaching them for them to become experts. So there’s definitely an element of financial investment that comes with it. But it’s also about a mindset and attitude, which is focused and geared towards learning, which is something that we have been pushing across the organization.

At the end of the day, we are an expertise based organization. People come to us, because we have the expertise, so it’s important that, that’s an area that we continue to invest in. As you know due to the demographics, it’s becoming a – age is becoming a big factor in our industry. Many people refer to it as silver tsunami. So we’re also focused on that for the long-term view of our organization and the industry. We’re continuing to bring in new talent into the industry, or I would say, talent, which has a significant more runway or tenure left, so they can have longevity of their career in this space.

[Kevin Steinke, Barrington Research]

Okay. That’s great. Maybe just a few questions on the particular segments. You talked about your growth aspirations within international and you saw a sequential improvement in the quarter in your operating earnings, both on a absolute dollar basis, as well as the operating earnings margin. How much more room do you think there is to run do you think on international profitability in terms of the ability to improve margins in that segment?

[Rohit Verma, Chief Executive Officer]

As I mentioned during my prepared remarks that there is still more work to be done and we’re continuing to do the work. We believe that there is absolutely more room in our international segment to get more margin. And I’m proud to say that the entire international team is diligently working on that. And over the coming quarters, you should see continued improvement. As you see with our North America business where there can be fluctuations on a quarterly basis just based on volumes coming from either a CAT event or onetime project events. We might see something similar international, but the overall trajectory is towards improved margins both over the short-term as well as over the long-term.

[Kevin Steinke, Barrington Research]

Okay. And you just kind of touched it on there, I guess within North American – North America Loss Adjusting, the operating earnings margin was up year-over-year, but down sequentially. Could you just speak to a little bit more to the sequential trend that you saw there?

[Rohit Verma, Chief Executive Officer]

So couple of things that impacted the sequential trend, as you know, we had quite a lot of business that that we were carrying into Q1 that was coming from Q4 storm activity. So – and as you’ve been working with us, you’re aware that typically we have some costs that are upfront loaded on a CAT event. So I think what you saw in Q1 was the costs were more probably in Q4 of last year versus what came into Q1. So you saw that was one effect. Second effect is certainly that we are, as I’ve mentioned, continuing to invest in adding more people into our business where we see expertise. We continue to do that in Q2, so there was a little bit of drag that came from that.

We also saw some softness in Canada in Q2, Q2 tends to be a quarter for us where we should have seen some storm activity in Canada, which usually gives us a margin lift. We didn’t see that. If anything, we actually saw a slowdown in Canada. So those were probably the biggest factors. I don’t know, Bruce, if you want to add anything to that?

[Bruce Swain, Chief Financial Officer]

No, I think you covered that. I think that’s right.

[Rohit Verma, Chief Executive Officer]

But we’re not worried about the margin. I mean, this was – there were some one time things as well, but that probably created a drag a little bit in Q2.

[Kevin Steinke, Barrington Research]

Okay, thanks. That’s helpful. Maybe speak to contractor connection, it sounded like you had some further momentum there maybe just how that business is developing. I think you recently added some new client wins maybe how that could kind of ramp up for that business going forward.

[Rohit Verma, Chief Executive Officer]

Yes. We continue to feel good about the contractor connection business. That is one business as a matter of fact just referring back to Mark’s question before, that does have a positive – gets a positive impact from inflation, because the size of the project has a direct correlation to our revenue there. So we feel that that business is in good shape. Yes, we’ve added a new client or we’ve added several new clients and we’ll continue to do that.

As you know, in contractor connection, particularly with our larger clients, the change management on the large client side is time consuming. So it takes time for us to hit the run rate, but our goal has been to onboard clients and then have a very strong account management structure in place that helps pull through more assignments for those clients. So again, we feel very good about it and we feel that the trajectory is solid.

[Kevin Steinke, Barrington Research]

Okay. Great. This – lastly on Medical Management, you referenced some new business there as well as post-pandemic stability. Just in terms of where you were versus prior – where you are prior to the pandemic, is that kind of – just to kind of [indiscernible]

[Rohit Verma, Chief Executive Officer]

Yes, we’re getting there. We’re still below – if we look at our 2019 Q1 and Q2 as sort of a pre-pandemic, we’re probably still somewhere between 3% to 5% below that level from where we were in 2019, but certainly much better from where we were in Q2 of 2020, 2021, 2022. So we’ve seen a sequential improvement in our Medical Management business, but we’re still not at that pre-pandemic level. But because of what we’ve seen in the prior quarters, we feel the trajectory continues to be on the up and we should pretty soon either get to or eclipse what was there pre-pandemic.

[Kevin Steinke, Barrington Research]

Okay, great. Thank you for taking the questions.

[Rohit Verma, Chief Executive Officer]

Thank you, Kevin.

[Bruce Swain, Chief Financial Officer]

Thanks, Kevin.

[Operator]

Thank you, gentlemen. There are no further questions at this time. I will turn the conference back to Mr. Verma for closing remarks.

[Rohit Verma, Chief Executive Officer]

Thank you, Ennis, and thank you to all our employees, clients, and shareholders for your continued commitment to Crawford & Company. We look forward to building on a strong second quarter as we move into the second half of 2023. And as always, we wish you well and look forward to taking you along on this journey with us. Thank you and God bless.

[Operator]

Thank you for participating in today’s Crawford & Company conference call. This call will be available for replay beginning at 11:30 AM EST today through 11:59 PM EST on September 4, 2023. The conference ID number for the replay is 233038#. The number to dial for the replay is (877)-674-7070 or (416)-764-8692. Thank you. You may now disconnect.