On Wednesday, ASGN (NYSE:ASGN) discussed first-quarter financial results during its earnings call. The full transcript is provided below.
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Summary
ASGN Inc reported Q1 2026 revenues of $968.3 million, consistent with the prior year and within guidance.
The company is transitioning to operate as Everforth, aligning with its integrated operating model and next wave growth strategy.
Commercial segment revenues grew slightly, driven by demand in AI, data, cloud, and infrastructure, though the adjusted EBITDA margin of 8.6% was below expectations.
New leadership appointments and the acquisition of Quinox are aimed at enhancing solution capabilities and supporting strategic priorities.
Guidance for Q2 2026 includes revenues of $970 million to $1 billion and an adjusted EBITDA margin of 8.8% to 9.5%.
Full Transcript
OPERATOR
Greetings and welcome to the ASGN Inc first quarter 2026 earnings 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 operating assistance, please press 0 on your telephone keypad. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Kim Esterkin, Vice President of Investor Relations. Thank you.
Kim Esterkin (Vice President of Investor Relations)
Good afternoon. Thank you for joining us today for ASGN's first quarter 2026 conference call. With me are Ted Hanson, Chief Executive Officer, Shiv Iyer, President and Marie Perry, Chief Financial Officer. Before we get started, I would like to remind everyone that our commentary contains forward looking statements. Although we believe these statements are reasonable, they are subject to risks and uncertainties and as such our actual results could differ materially from those statements. Certain of these risks and uncertainties are described in today's press release and in our SEC filings. We do not assume any obligation to update statements made on this call. For your convenience, our prepared remarks and supplemental materials can be found in the Investor Relations section of our [email protected] Please also note that on this call we will be referencing certain non GAAP measures such as adjusted EBITDA, Adjusted Net Income and free Cash Flow. These non GAAP measures are intended to supplement the comparable GAAP measures. Reconciliations between GAAP and non GAAP measures are included in today's press release. I will now turn the call over to Ted Hanson, Chief Executive Officer.
Ted Hanson (Chief Executive Officer)
Thank you Kim and thank you for joining our first quarter 2026 earnings call. Today marks an important milestone for our company. This will be our final earnings call under the ASGN name and on Friday we will officially begin operating as Everforth and trading under our new stock ticker EFORE. This transition reflects the continued transformation of our business, bringing our capabilities together under the Everforth brand to support a more integrated operating model focused on higher value solutions and deeper client relationships. By pursuing this path we will unlock further scale and increase our cross selling opportunities. As part of this evolution, we are also updating our commercial segment reporting to more clearly reflect how we are evolving the business which is by industry rather than mode of delivery. This change is intentional and aligns with our next wave growth strategy and industry led approach which we previewed at our Investor Day this past November. Ultimately, the delivery structure of our engagements is much less meaningful than the outcomes we drive and the strong value we create for our clients. We will therefore provide color through the lenses that matter most to how we compete in the commercial space. Our five industries and our six solution capabilities. In addition to help track demand for our higher value work and our ability to win in the marketplace, we will disclose our commercial consulting book to Bill consistent with what we've shared in prior quarters. With that as background, let's discuss our first quarter results. Revenues for the first quarter were $968.3 million in line with the prior year and our guidance, Commercial segment revenues were driven by demand in AI and data, cloud infrastructure and application engineering and modernization. Our AI and data and cloud and infrastructure pipelines continue to build reinforcing momentum in these areas of our business. Commercial consulting book to bill was 1.1 times on a trailing twelve month basis. Federal segment new contract awards totaled 151.3 million or a book to bill of 0.7 times on a trailing twelve month basis. Federal contract backlog was approximately 2.8 billion at quarter end or a coverage ratio of 2.4 times the segment's trailing twelve month revenues. Similar to the commercial segment, AI and data work was a solid contributor to revenues, bookings and pipeline within our federal business. Cybersecurity contracts also nicely contributed to revenue and bookings in a quarter. We are beginning to see award activity at many government agencies pick up following the passage of the federal budget in early February. That said, we experienced some funding delays at the Department of Homeland Security which is navigating both a shutdown and a leadership transition. Importantly, we have not seen any disruption to award funding related to the conflict in Iran. Instead, we are seeing evolving requirements of partner collaboration particularly around cyber threat analysis and data management and analytics as agencies seek to strengthen decision making expertise. While our revenues were within guidance, adjusted EBITDA margin of 8.6% was below our expectations for the quarter. This miss was driven largely by business mix related to lower than expected contribution of some of our higher margin solutions within the commercial segment. Nevertheless, we continue to closely manage our expenses. As discussed during our investor day, we are making strategic pivots in our business that will position us well for the long term. Those changes are being shaped by how our clients themselves are evolving and and the expectations they have for partners that can support them through that change. Our clients are navigating a very volatile macro environment with continued uncertainty around how technologies such as AI and enterprise software will ultimately impact the technology landscape influence their IT spending. While this dynamic can create some near term variability, we are focused on strengthening our foundation by building a more unified brand, enhancing our go to market approach and maintaining disciplined expense management and capital allocation. These actions give us conviction that we are building a stronger, more resilient platform aligned with client demand and positioned to drive top line growth and margin expansion. Against this backdrop, I want to step back and revisit our next wave growth strategy. We continue to make progress executing our long term initiatives and during the first quarter we took several important actions that reinforced our strategic priorities. First, we announced key leadership appointments across both our commercial and federal government segments to support our next phase of growth. We welcome Ashish Jandial as President of Commercial North America, Sanjita Singh as President of Indian International and Donnie Scott as President of our Federal government segment. Each leader brings deep experience scaling global services organizations, driving AI enabled digital transformations and building delivery platforms designed for long term value creation. Collectively, this team enhances our ability to execute our strategy while building on the solid foundation already in place. We also successfully closed the acquisition of Quinox, marking another important milestone in advancing our strategy toward enhancing our solutions capabilities and margins. Quinox meaningfully expands our ability to deliver technical end to end application engineering and modernization solutions for our commercial clients while establishing a strong foundation for our offshore delivery platform in India. Although still early integration is progressing well and we are already co selling their services. Ultimately these actions enhance our ability to support growing client demand for AI led transformation, scalable delivery and outcomes based solutions across industries. We remain focused on executing with discipline and building a higher value more integrated everforth. With that, I'll turn the call over to Shiv.
Shiv Iyer (President)
Thanks Ted and good afternoon everyone. As TED noted, we go to market through a combination of industry and solutions expertise. We believe industry is the most meaningful lens for understanding where client demand is emerging and how our customers are prioritizing their IT investments. With that in mind, I will begin with our industry performance for the first quarter within our commercial segment, we delivered year on year growth in the healthcare, consumer and industrial and TMT industry reflecting broad based demand for AI and data, cloud and infrastructure, application engineering and modernization and enterprise platforms. Healthcare grew at a high single digit rate driven by increased engagement from healthcare peers. While the consumer and industrial and TMT industry achieved mid single digit growth supported by software, utilities and industrial customers, leveraging our capabilities across AI and data cloud experience in cybersecurity. Though the financial services industry, one of the biggest spenders in it, declined mid single digits year over year, we saw high single digit growth amongst insurance customers where application, engineering and AI engagements continued to gain traction. Consistent with the typical first quarter seasonality in which certain projects conclude at year end, most industries softened sequentially with TMT relatively flat. That said, we saw pockets of strength within several industries in consumer and industrial. For example, utilities delivered low single digit growth supported by demand in application engineering, cloud and infrastructure, and AI and data. Turning to our federal segment, we track our federal revenues across four customer types including defense and Intelligence, national Security, civilian and other clients. Defense, intelligence and national security customers continue to comprise approximately 70% of our total federal revenues, the remaining balance coming from civilian agencies, government sponsored entities, state and local agencies and select commercial customers. National security customers delivered the strongest growth for the segment both year over year and sequentially. This was primarily driven by cybersecurity work supporting the Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation or CDM Service program within dhs. We also saw mid single digit growth in our other clients year over year led by the USPS where we deployed a purpose built AI application designed to significantly reduce undeliverable mail and improve operational efficiency. Building on the industry discussion, I'd like to transition to our solutions performance which provides a clear view of where the client demand is strongest today and how it is evolving. AI and data remain a significant driver of demand across our portfolio. Our clients are increasingly focused on modernizing data foundations to support analytics, AI enabled decision making and operational agility. Let me provide a few examples. In the consumer industry, we partnered with a leading global athletic apparel and footwear company to design and deploy a unified analytics platform powered by Databricks genie, an agentic AI interface that enables secure access to governed data. By consolidating product assortment, planning, demand bookings and sales into a single governed experience, our client improved product creation, decisioning and speed to market while also establishing a reusable foundation to scale across broader demand planning and supply chain use cases. Databricks is one of our core strategic partners and during the quarter our commercial business was recognized as a Databricks Silver Tier partner. Leveraging that partnership, our industrial team supported a Fortune 100 energy and utilities company in migrating from legacy architectures to a databricks based integration. This effort aligned the client to its enterprise data strategy while also reducing long term risk and strengthening governance. Following the success of this project, our client is engaging our teams to support legacy migrations into databricks across other areas of the organization. We're also helping customers unlock the full value of modern hyperscaler AI services in the cloud. In the TMT vertical. For example, our AI and cloud teams partnered with AWS to support a Fortune 50 media company in building a digital twin of its streaming platform. This solution combines advanced cloud engineering with AI powered simulations to help our client proactively identify performance risks ahead of some of the largest global streaming sporting events that commonly draw over 100 million viewers. A successful project, we now have a repeatable use case that can be extended across TNT clients with similar streaming and gaming environments. As AI adoption and data volumes accelerate, cybersecurity has become an increasingly integral component of nearly every client engagement in the healthcare industry. We secured an extension with a large national insurance pair to modernize their identity governance using SailPoint. This work established a central identity framework that supports regulatory compliance while safeguarding sensitive patient and member data. Alongside this modernization work, we continue to provide ongoing SailPoint platform support, reinforcing our long term client relationship in the federal market. We're supporting the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA through the aforementioned CDM program by delivering security information and event management as a service. This capability standardizes security data collection across federal agencies and enables real time threat detection and rapid response. We also delivered a first of its kind ATO accredited development environment for the US Navy, a secure government approved workspace where teams can safely build, test and manage software and data. By combining our Dev Labs and software factory with Elastics cloud infrastructure and AI enabled automation, we created a development environment that aligns with the DoD's zero trust requirements. Enterprise platforms also remain central to our clients digital transformation, particularly as organizations look to embed AI into their systems of record. We continue to advance co selling and co development efforts across our partner ecosystem with a focus on accelerating time to value through automation, data readiness and agent enabled workflows. In our commercial business, we're helping clients embed agentic capabilities across core data platforms, hyperscaler cloud environments and enterprise systems of record. During the quarter we became a Snowflakes Cortex code preferred partner, working closely with Snowflake to build hands on labs, develop AI readiness case studies and create customer facing applications leveraging Cortex Snowflake's native agentic engineering capability. Similarly with aws, we're partnering to build a workday data learning agent that combines AWS's Agentic technology with Topblocks proprietary smart loader tools. With Salesforce, we're investing in Agentforce to enable AI driven digital work that supports faster delivery cycles and improved testing outcomes. And with ServiceNow, we were one of the top 10 global partners selected for the launch of Employee Works, a new offering that integrates AI assistance with workflow automation. Although we're seeing progress in our enterprise platforms work, we're operating in a more deliberate buying environment. Decision cycles have lengthened as customers take a more measured approach to large long term initiatives. While they assess how AI fits into their broader technology roadmaps. The enterprise software market is also undergoing change from evolving go to market models focused on consumption rather than per seat to organizational realignments with changes in sales and executive leadership. That said, we view this as a moment in time. While customers are being more deliberate about how, when and where they invest, we do not see them stepping away from enterprise platforms, nor do we see AI displacing these systems of record. In fact, AI is increasing their relevance. Enterprise platforms remain where data, workflows and governance reside, and without that foundation, AI lacks context and scale. Our role is to help clients modernize, integrate and optimize these platforms while enabling practical AI applications that drive measurable business outcomes. As spending normalizes and ID programs move forward, we're well positioned to support our clients across this ecosystem. With that, I'll turn the call over to our CFO Marie Perry to discuss our first quarter, 2026 performance and second quarter guidance.
Marie Perry (Chief Financial Officer)
Thanks, Shiv. For the first quarter, revenues totaled 968.3 million within our guidance range and consistent with the prior year period. Given the timing of the acquisition close, Kinox contributed less than one month to the quarterly results. Revenues from our commercial segment were 675.5 million, an increase of 0.5% compared to the prior year. Revenues from our federal government segment were 292.8 million, a decrease of 1.1% year over year. Turning to margins, gross margins for 1Q26 were 27.5%, a decrease of 90 basis points from the prior year. Commercial segment gross margins totaled 31%, a decrease of 140 basis points year over year. Gross margins for the federal government segment were 19.6%, an increase of 10 basis points year over year, but slightly lower than our expectations due to a higher than anticipated contribution of cost plus revenues in the quarter. As TED mentioned, this decline in margin was primarily driven by business mix related to a lower than expected contribution from some of our higher margin solutions within the commercial segment. We also experienced headwinds from changes in our foreign exchange rate related to our delivery center in Mexico. SG&A for the quarter was 224.4 million compared to 214.5 million in the first quarter of 2025. SG&A expenses included 12.8 million in acquisition, integration and strategic planning expenses that were not included in our previously announced guidance estimates. Excluding these expenses, SG&A expenses were relatively consistent with prior year. For the first quarter, net income was 5.5 million. Adjusted EBITDA was 83.6 million and adjusted EBITDA margin was 8.6%. Adjusted EBITDA margin was below our guidance range due to the lower gross margin just discussed. In addition, our estimates assume an effective tax rate of 28%. For the quarter, the effective tax rate was 48.1% reflecting the one time discrete items not included in our guidance. As previously noted, in March we completed our acquisition of Kinox for $290 million. We also deployed 39 million in cash to repurchase 0.8 million shares at an average share price of $47.69. At quarter end we had approximately 934 million remaining under our 1 billion share repurchase authorization. Cash and cash equivalents were 143.6 million. At quarter end we had approximately 160 million available on our 500 million senior secured revolver. Our net leverage ratio was 3.1 times at the end of the quarter. We are committed to reducing our debt over time in order to bring our net leverage ratio closer to 2.5 times target. We will continue to opportunistically balance capital deployment with organic investment in share repurchase and have remained active in buying back our shares. In the second quarter, free cash flow was 9.1 million. While free cash flow is generally seasonally softer in the fourth quarter it was lower than we typically see in past quarters, primarily due to an increase in DSO. Turning to guidance, our financial estimates for the second quarter of 2026 are set forth in our Earnings Release and Supplemental Materials. These estimates are based on current market conditions and assume no further deterioration in the markets that we serve. As we execute against our strategic plan, we expect some continued upfront investments. Our second quarter estimates include 8 million to 10 million in strategic planning expenses related to the execution of our next wave growth strategy, which we expect will decline over the coming quarters. Alongside these investments, as we highlighted at Investor Day, we are implementing targeted initiatives that will generate meaningful structural cost savings through for the business. These efforts are progressing as planned as that is background for the second quarter of 2026 we are estimating revenues of 970 million to 1 billion, net income of 8 million to 13.7 million, adjusted EBITDA of 85 million to 95 million and adjusted EBITDA margin of 8.8% to 9.5%. Thank you. I'll now turn the call back over to Ted.
Ted Hanson (Chief Executive Officer)
Thanks Marie. As we step back from the quarter, the most important takeaway is the consistency between our strategy and our actions. The projects ship walked through today illustrate how our industry depth and solution capabilities are translating into meaningful outcomes for clients navigating increasingly complex environments. The acquisition of Quinox strengthens our ability to deliver end to end application engineering and modernization scale, while the leadership additions we made earlier this year further align our company to execute our next wave growth strategy. These are deliberate actions focused on building a higher value, more unified company positioned for durable long term growth and expanded margins. This long term orientation is a central theme in our annual shareholder letter which will be released later this week. This letter discusses the evolution of enterprise technology and how those shifts are shaping our strategic priorities. As AI moves from experimentation towards broader enterprise adoption, it is driving greater integration and modernization across IT environments and increasing the need for sophisticated services to support that transition. Solution providers that can modernize data and infrastructure and embed AI into real life business processes and workflows are best positioned to succeed and these are the areas where we have a clear position and right to win. Our diversified client base, differentiated delivery models, deep industry relationships and portfolio of in demand solutions collectively create structural advantages in an AI driven world before we open the call for questions, I want to thank our employees for their dedication this past quarter. Your adaptability and commitment to our clients is the foundation of our progress and our future. As I noted at the start of today's discussion, this call marks an important transition as we prepare to operate and report as ever for I look forward to continuing the conversation with you next quarter under our new name. With that, let's open the call to questions.
OPERATOR
Thank you. We will now 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 to remove yourself from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up the handset before pressing the star keys. One moment please. While we poll for questions, our first question comes from the line of Jeff Silber with BMO Capital Markets. Please proceed with your question.
Ted Hanson (Chief Executive Officer)
Thank you so much. A couple times in your prepared comments you talked about lower than expected contribution from some higher margin commercial solutions. Can we get a little bit more color on that? And I'm just curious because typically have really good visibility. I'm just wondering what happened here. Thanks Jeff. Yeah, I think, look, coming out of the fourth quarter you naturally have certain projects come to their conclusion and you have a startup of new work during the first quarter. Excuse me. And I think in this quarter what we found was, while that's always the thing. The ramp up of higher margin solutions, especially in our enterprise software areas, was slower and later into the quarter than what our expectation was when we set the guidance. So you know, really what we're seeing here in terms of the EBITDA margin, this is a gross margin issue, it's not an expense issue. We were kind of on an adjusted basis below our expectations on the cash SGA side. But on the commercial side within our consulting business, we did see a larger change than normal of the profile of the margin of the projects that contributed during the quarter. Second piece of that, Jeff was in our federal business we over performed the revenue expectation. The meat of that was in the cost plus area. You've heard us say before that cost plus contracts come at a lower gross margin. You know, typically we run 20 to 20 and a half percent gross margins overall. You know, those cost plus contracts can be high single digit to low double digit kind of gross margins. And so that was certainly an influence. And so while we did a good job on the revenue on the federal side, you know, the gross margin came in lower than what our expectations were at the forecast. And then as Marie said, we had a little bit of contribution of negative impact from fx. So it's really the sum of those three things, if you will.
Jeff Silber (Equity Analyst)
Okay, that's helpful. Let me play devil's advocate here. You mentioned in your prepared remarks or excuse me, in answering this past question about, you know, some softness in the enterprise software area. And I know the stock market, you know, there seems to be a lot of AI disruption risk there. How do we know that that's not an issue? It's more of a structural issue than anything else.
Ted Hanson (Chief Executive Officer)
Well, look, I think our customers, I mean, we came out of the fourth quarter with really what I would call record bookings, especially in the workday area and solid bookings in ServiceNow and our Salesforce practice, which was our three primary enterprise software practices. And we just didn't see the conversion to revenue at historical rates. So those are our highest margin solution areas. And the delta between what we expected through the quarter and what actually happened was that ramp up of those was a lot slower from the bookings that came out of the fourth quarter. I do think that customers are watching, you know, very closely the AI story and making sure that they're, if they're doing a new implementation or a significant upgrade or taking on new SKUs, that that's money well invested. I think what we saw at the end of the quarter kind of exiting, if you will, the quarter and into the first part of April is a little bit more normal patterns in terms of both getting bookings and beginning to see the conversion of that. And so I think it was temporary, Jeff, because there was a lot of negative commentary and obviously a lot of negative play on those enterprise software stocks. And I think the customers kind of reacted accordingly. But we're looking for better contribution here. The first few weeks of the quarter here in April are telling us that'll be the case. I don't think it's going to be a rubber band, but I think it'll build and we'll see a better margin profile. Obviously we gave you a better margin profile in our Q2 guidance, which is solely on the back of improving gross margins in both commercial consulting and federal consulting in the second quarter. All right, appreciate the caller.
Jeff Silber (Equity Analyst)
Thanks so much.
OPERATOR
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Maggie Nolan with William Blair. Please proceed with your question.
Maggie Nolan (Equity Analyst)
Hi. Thank you. What should we read into the financial services year over year decline as it relates to maybe the balance of the year and have you seen any change in the first couple of weeks of the second quarter here and then just given that that's, you know, a segment with typically large spend on it. Any read throughs to the other segments?
Shiv Iyer (President)
Yeah, Maggie, look, as we mentioned in the remarks, what we're seeing is just continued tight management of expenditure in the largest piece of financial services, particularly the big banks. So if you think about it,
Ted Hanson (Chief Executive Officer)
they have stabilized, but there is really not an increase in spending that we're seeing at any measurable rate in that segment. That being said, we are seeing some green shoots in insurance and also some green shoots in diversified financials which we expect will turn into revenue optics for us in the second quarter. But the continued compression or rather lack of optic we see in the big banks is why we see the continued decline because they are the largest spender in the financial services industry. And I think, Maggie, if you look at the sequential growth and the supplemental for that industry, it's kind of negative three and a half Q4 to Q1. We always have a kind of 3 to 5% decline coming out of Q4 to Q1 for all the seasonal reasons that we talk about all the time. So I'd say shifts right on. There's a lot of, a lot of caution there, I think, on behalf of those customers. But also, you know, it's kind of in line with what we would see seasonally. So I think the real message is you're not seeing a Surge or a pickup there, it's less about a sequential decline.
Maggie Nolan (Equity Analyst)
Okay, great, thank you. And then on the commercial IT book to Bill of 1.1 I thought was encouraging. Can you give a little bit more color on that? Maybe the quality and duration of recent wins. Are you seeing shorter cycle projects versus what mixes, kind of longer term solution LED work and then just how that translates into your visibility for the remainder of the year.
Shiv Iyer (President)
So Maggie, I think if you think about the strength that we're seeing from a bookings perspective, it's relatively broad based across several areas. Other than sort of some of the enterprise platform dynamic that Ted alluded to, we're seeing a pretty big uptick in some of our cloud and infrastructure type work in the technology verticals, especially around the services we provide to our software companies. Those are generally longer term bookings. So that's healthy. From a mixed perspective. We're also seeing longer term bookings in cyber security and a little bit of more strength in our continued strength, I should say, in our application modernization and application engineering capabilities, so to speak. I don't believe the durations on those have materially shifted, but overall durations are shifting rightwards and long ring lengthening because of some of the cloud and infrastructure work. The volumes we see associated with that with our software providers.
Maggie Nolan (Equity Analyst)
Thank you.
OPERATOR
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Kevin McVeigh with UBS. Please proceed with your question.
Kevin McVeigh (Equity Analyst)
Great, thanks so much. Hey, I think you alluded to some unanticipated expenses in the quarter in Q4. Can you help us dimensionalize that a little bit? And then you know, the Q1 and you know, just coming out of Investor day, I don't remember them being referenced. Is that something new or is that, you know, maybe I missed it at Investor day.
Marie Perry (Chief Financial Officer)
Right. So I'm Kevin. Hi, this is Marie. So the 12.8, the 12.8 million that we referenced, those are add backs to EBITDA. And so when we talked about the 80 million of savings that we are going to achieve over the three year period, those dollars that we provided on the call for Q1 relate to the implementation of those. So when you think about the 12.8, there's a component that's Quinox. So there's cost associated with the Quinox transaction. Also our go to market, our back office outsourcing and then our ERP. So we gave in our guide for Q2 a range of 8 to 10 million dollars. And those costs will come down right throughout 26.
Ted Hanson (Chief Executive Officer)
So typically Kevin, those strategic integration Acquisition expenses are immaterial since they're a little higher now for a few quarters and because we have better visibility, they're more known. Marie's just been able to call them out and also give you a range for the guide for the next quarter.
Kevin McVeigh (Equity Analyst)
Okay. And then I guess just. Marie, can you remind us how much did Quinox contribute to the Q2 guidance on the Revenue and EBITDA?
Marie Perry (Chief Financial Officer)
We only had them for a couple few weeks. So just a few million? No, no, for the next quarter. Ted. Oh, for the next quarter, Marie. Yeah, similar to how we treated top block Kevin, we gave the full year revenue contribution. So For Quinox it's 100 million with growth of mid low to mid teens and then EBITDA margin of low 20%. Yeah. So 25 just add or just under 100 million and we're expecting low double digit growth rate in 26
Kevin McVeigh (Equity Analyst)
figure 25 million in Q2. Is that fair?
Marie Perry (Chief Financial Officer)
That's about the math.
Kevin McVeigh (Equity Analyst)
Thank you. Thank you.
OPERATOR
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Toby Sommer with Truist Securities. Please proceed with your question.
Toby Sommer (Equity Analyst)
Thanks. I was wondering if you could give us some color on the assignment business and get a sense for the trends there. Yeah, I'll just start with that. Thank you.
Ted Hanson (Chief Executive Officer)
Yeah. So Toby, just kind of Q4 to Q1. I would say sequentially it performed about like we expected. It was down kind of mid single digits, low to mid single digits, quarter to quarter. That's seasonally about what we see every year. So no surprises there. Pay to bill, margins pretty steady and contribution of perm pretty flat. So I don't think any, no surprises, if you will, on the, on the assignment side. On the government consulting side with the presidential budget request, what are the implications for the business? If you could and I maybe think about from a defense and intel and then also a civil perspective where there are some agencies with cuts. Thanks. Yes, I think we're pretty, I mean we feel like we're pretty well positioned here with where the budget money is flowing. Obviously there's a watch item for us with dhs, although all our contracts are being supported. But I don't think there's going to be a net increase, if you will, there commensurate, commensurate with what's going on in defense. But on the defense side, obviously there's a big, big new chunk coming there. It's definitely got AI is going to be a big part of that. Data is going to be a big part of that. Cybersecurity is going to continue to be a big part of that. And so I think in those areas where we play, we're pretty well positioned, I would say. The money has been slow to roll out. I think in the, in the first quarter, for at least the first two months of the quarter, there was not a lot of activity because it really didn't happen until the middle of the quarter. Not a lot happened in the second half of the quarter as we, you know, because there was plenty of other things the government was focused on. But I think now you're seeing a better release. We're seeing the cycle on new award activity to get out on the street, pick up with volume. And so I think, you know, we're expecting, at least in our, you know, projected pipeline of bookings, a better second quarter than first quarter, for sure in that area.
Toby Sommer (Equity Analyst)
Last question, if I could on your the transition towards consulting more broadly throughout the organization. You've had several executive hires announced recently and I'm wondering if how's the sales force absorbing that? Are there any changes that you're making internally to, I don't know, better align incentives and compensation to drive that change throughout the organization going forward?
Ted Hanson (Chief Executive Officer)
Yeah, look, I think we've got a normal amount of change going on. I mean, certainly we are bringing more to bear for all these accounts. So the sales team is having to kind of, if you will, kind of adapt to that. You know, we're doing a lot more than just bringing IT staffing to bear to these big clients. So, you know, our sales teams are getting used to kind of, you know, bringing, bringing everything that's in the toolbox. Incentives change every year based on what we're trying to attack to a large degree. You know, how we, how we allocate bonuses to certain objectives, what commission schemes may be, you know, how we resource against account opportunities. If you have certain industry or industries that have really good growth prospects, then you're feeding resources into that. If you have other industries that look like, you know, it's somewhere you want to be for the long haul but not working as well right now, you may subtract resources from that equation. So I think at the beginning of the year that activity is always going on. So, you know, you would talk to people and they say they see the normal ebb and flow of all of that.
Toby Sommer (Equity Analyst)
Okay, but nothing like stark where you're, you know, in assignment typically. I think the producers are getting a paid on weekly GP dollars. Nothing more like fundamental in terms of changes.
Shiv Iyer (President)
No, no, no. As Ted said, you're always looking to make tweaks and adjustments to incent the right sets of behaviors and the right sets of things you want aligned to your strategy. But a core tenet of that plan hasn't shifted.
Toby Sommer (Equity Analyst)
Thank you.
OPERATOR
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Jason Haas with Wells Fargo. Please proceed with your question.
Jason Haas (Equity Analyst)
Great. Thanks for taking my question. We've seen the non farm payrolls index for temporary help is bounced off the bottom a little bit in 1Q. I'm curious if you're seeing any green shoots in your business. Thank you.
Ted Hanson (Chief Executive Officer)
You said. One more time, you said the temporary. Yeah, we track, I don't know, I don't know how helpful it is, but we track this non farm payrolls index for temporary help and it's been in decline for a number of honestly years now and it's bounced back a bit in 1Q. I don't know if it's something that you look at as an indicator, but curious if you've seen any signs of demand increasing, this would be on the assignment side. Yeah, honestly, my experience is the IT really tracks IT spending. Right. So if our clients are spending on, you know, their tech stack, then that's a driver of our business. If they're more muted, then that's a tougher environment. If you, what you've seen go on broadly in staffing, if you went down to the lower end like commercial, you would see that that's been resilient, I would say through all this. But on the white collar piece and especially on the IT piece, it hasn't followed the same trend.
Jason Haas (Equity Analyst)
Okay, got it, that's helpful. And then as a follow up, you mentioned earlier that some of the sales of these like higher margin solutions were slower and later in the quarter. Does any of that like push into, into 2Q here?
Shiv Iyer (President)
Yeah, I think just to clarify, what we said was we had record bookings in Q4 and our guide for Q1 assumed historical conversion of those things. So there are two dynamics in Q1. Right. And you know, you can, you can see this pattern where the ramp up time for those projects was slower than anticipated. So how quickly those sales turned into revenue wasn't exactly at the rate we expected, which is what you saw in Q1. That being said, from a sales perspective in Q1 again, similar dynamic coming out where clients, I would say sales cycles are getting slightly longer, as in clients are deliberating longer before they pull the trigger on projects. We're not seeing a material impact and some of that has been factored into the guide for Q2. But we see the recovery happening throughout the year. So as Ted said, it's not a rubber band because, you know, there's still a lot of uncertainty around some of the topics we talked about in the macros. And that's what we're seeing both in buying cycles and conversion cycles. Got it. That makes sense.
Jason Haas (Equity Analyst)
Very helpful. Thank you.
OPERATOR
Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Mark Marson with Baird. Please proceed with your question.
Mark Marson (Equity Analyst)
Good afternoon and thanks for taking my question. Just following up on the last point. Shiv or Ted, you know, you mentioned the gross margins are down. Seems like on the consulting side we clearly had a decline acceleration and you know, financial services was a weak spot. But coming off of these high bookings, I'm just wondering, aside from is there any way to disaggregate the gross margin compression and EBITDA margin compression that we saw on the commercial side between pure mix versus was there any change with regards to the bill rates or how profitable the actual contracts that were actually executed against? Are you seeing any sort of pricing pressure from that perspective? And how do you expect that to flow as these clients become more deliberative?
Shiv Iyer (President)
How do you think that's going to shape up as the year unfolds? Look, Mark, I think if you just to give you more color, let me start by saying we're not seeing a material compression in pricing. The most important thing that drove the gross margins down for us was really timing in many cases. And as some of our higher margin pieces of the business didn't ramp up at the same rate, you notice that from a timing perspective, the solutions mix that drives our consulting revenue was different than what we thought it would be. So short answer is we're not seeing a material compression. That being said, there is volume in a lot of as you would expect as a normal ebb and flow, we have higher margin solutions, lower margin solutions. So when the mix gets off kilter on some of the higher margin pieces, it drives this down.
Mark Marson (Equity Analyst)
Okay. But if we're taking a look at like whether it's glide fast, you know, or your workday, you know, practice in terms of your actual pricing for those, in terms of the projects that are actually taking place, those are not changing.
Shiv Iyer (President)
No, they're not. And which is why we said we will see the recovery in margin gradually throughout the year, it won't rubber band it, but you know, the unit pricing and pricing on those things, we're not seeing any deterioration. Okay, and then can you explain a
Mark Marson (Equity Analyst)
little bit about what's going on with the DSO and Marie how should we think about, you know, the free cash flow conversion relative to EBITDA over the course of this year?
Marie Perry (Chief Financial Officer)
So, Mark, I think still a good rule of thumb is 60% of our adjusted EBITDA converting. If you think about last year, Q1 of 25, our free cash flow was actually slightly lower than what we're reporting this quarter. So there is absolutely a seasonality around free cash flow and DSO. And as we ended the year of 25, we actually ended the full year, I think it was, at 68% conversion. So it's not 60% every quarter. And so it just kind of gradually gets there for the full year.
Mark Marson (Equity Analyst)
Okay, so the DSO is just a normal seasonal thing, not. You're not seeing any change in behavior with regards to how quickly the clients are paying?
Marie Perry (Chief Financial Officer)
No change in behavior, no increase in bad debt? That's correct.
Mark Marson (Equity Analyst)
Okay, great. Thank you.
OPERATOR
Thank you. And we have reached the end of the question and answer session. I would like to turn the floor back over to CEO Ted Hansen for closing remarks.
Ted Hanson (Chief Executive Officer)
Great. Well, I want to thank everyone for being here with us today and for your questions, and we look forward to speaking to you. Next quarter is ever fourth for our second quarter earnings release. Have a great evening and thank you.
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