HireQuest Q1 2026 Earnings Call - Demand Stabilizes, M&A Pressure Builds

Operator: Note, this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to your host, John Nesbett of IMS Investor Relations. You may begin.

John Nesbett, Investor Relations, IMS Investor Relations: Thank you, operator. I would like to welcome everybody to the call. Hosting the call today are HireQuest CEO, Rick Hermanns, 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 A of the Securities Act of 1933 as amended, and Section 21 E 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 Hermanns.

Rick Hermanns, Chief Executive Officer, HireQuest: 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 sustain 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 and/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 or revenue and adjusted EPS from 2019 to 2025. This growth has also outpaced the broader market. Our total sales grew almost at 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 U.S. 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 two years. I’ve talked about tentative green shoots in demand over the past two 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.

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, HireQuest: 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. 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 system-wide 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 $118.4 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 & 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 and any non-recurring operating expenses, was $4.2 million. We’ve provided a table in the press release issued earlier this afternoon with a detailed reconciliation of core SG&A to 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 $0.13 per diluted share in the same period last year. Adjusted EBITDA for the first quarter of 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 and 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 2. 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 Hermanns for some closing comments.

Rick Hermanns, Chief Executive Officer, HireQuest: 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 TrueBlue. Our new offer is $105 million cash for the on-demand portion of TrueBlue’s PeopleReady segment. As previously disclosed, HireQuest made multiple offers to TrueBlue in 2025. Last year, we were prepared to initiate a tender offer directly to the TrueBlue shareholders and incurred substantial costs in its preparation. We postponed that process in hopes of engaging with the TrueBlue board of directors directly on a friendly basis. 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 TrueBlue’s PeopleReady segment is very complementary to our HireQuest Direct division, and as such, made an attractive all-cash offer earlier today to TrueBlue’s board of directors. This part of TrueBlue’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 TrueBlue’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. 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, Analyst, Barrington Research: 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. You know, you talked about the second half becoming more consistent, and that continuing to the second quarter with even some improvement. Maybe just a little more color on the trends as the quarter progressed and as you’ve moved here into the second quarter.

Rick Hermanns, Chief Executive Officer, HireQuest: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Kevin. Yes, what you said is absolutely and what other people have observed. The beginning, basically until mid-February, the results were impacted significantly by sort of the placement of New Year’s Day. The holiday was just set at a really pretty much. It became basically a 20-day, 20 business day month, January was. February is always traditionally bad because it’s a short month. 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. What we noticed was starting around mid-February, our results became perceptibly better, particularly compared to the year-over-year comparison.

As, you know, towards the end of the quarter, it continued to get better. If you look at the numbers that David had stated, for example, 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 have, you know, our comparisons have become even more favorable. So, you know, in absence of some, you know, some black swan out there, we’re feeling really good about our demand right now.

Kevin Steinke, Analyst, Barrington Research: Okay. Yeah, that’s helpful. You mentioned the year-over-year comparisons becoming more favorable as we enter the second quarter. I had noticed as well that excluding MRI, the system-wide sales were flat year-over-year in the first quarter. Should we kinda 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 Hermanns, Chief Executive Officer, HireQuest: Yeah. I mean, I would say, look, from your lips to God’s ears, I mean, yes, I do feel much more optimistic now than I have in the last, certainly the last 2 years. Because, you know, we have some really solid momentum right now. Now, again, and it’s been more sustained. You know, you and I have had these conversations, you know, in this forum over the last, you know, 5, 6 quarters, It’s always, "Yeah, we’ve had a few good weeks. Gee, it seems like it’s getting a little bit better," Then frequently it would fall off. For the last I mean, we’ve really, for the last even 8, 9 weeks, we’ve really had pretty consistently, you know, consistently decent results compared to the year-over-year period.

Kevin Steinke, Analyst, Barrington Research: All right. Yeah, you mentioned maybe a couple of factors helping you out there, reduced undocumented immigration and also your national accounts program. Maybe just kinda touch on how you believe those things have benefited the results recently here.

Rick Hermanns, Chief Executive Officer, HireQuest: 2, you know, 2 things in particular. 1, obviously between 2021 and early 2024, you know, depending on who you know, whatever source you believe in, you know, that probably at least 10 million people came into the country illegally or legally. That’s about 3 times the size of the staffing industry. 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 are traditionally in hospitality, you know, jobs that frequently are filled in particularly our segments of the staffing industry. We, you know, it really has had an impact.

Now, you know, net immigration is much lower, 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 growth in the U.S. in 2025 was one of the lowest in recorded history. You know, again, we’re starting to see more normal patterns. It’s, like, it was always a hard thing for me to understand, I mused about it on these calls even at different points. How in the world can we have declining staffing demand with, you know, a 3.7% or a 3.9% unemployment rate?

It never, you know, it never computed. In the 35 years I’ve been in this industry, that was just never the experience. Now we’re actually starting to see where the staffing industry is tracking much more with, you know, true increases or decreases in unemployment. For us, that’s a good, you know, that’s a good thing because we are still in a relatively low unemployment environment. 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. The other part is, we briefly touched on it back at towards the end of last year, but we made some pretty good-sized investments in our national accounts department.

We’re definitely getting some pretty significant wins in, you know, from that investment. We’re also seeing, you know, organic growth that’s just related to our efforts, not necessarily due to the macroeconomic trends.

Kevin Steinke, Analyst, Barrington Research: All right, great. Maybe just touch on the TrueBlue offer, the offer for the on-demand segment, the PeopleReady. 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 Hermanns, Chief Executive Officer, HireQuest: Unfortunately, I’m not at liberty to speak of anything beyond what’s been released. Your questions are valid, they’ll just probably have to be for a different point.

Kevin Steinke, Analyst, Barrington Research: No, yeah, 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 Hermanns, Chief Executive Officer, HireQuest: Commercial is where it’s at right now, I have to say. Our on-demand is doing okay. By when I say okay, it’s, let’s say it’s flat. It’s doing reasonably well, given, you know, just given the overall macro environment. The commercial side has really been strong. Not geographically limited either. One of the things, this is, like, this is part of what draws it back even to the immigration issue. There are a lot of different, you know, maybe it’s related to reshoring, maybe it’s just more an application of, you know, of robotics, et cetera, to, you know, to our industrial economy. 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. That’s what I’m saying.

We’re starting to get a lot of wins on things like that and, you know, which again, is more of a return to traditionally what staffing, you know, is really, you know, a very good product for. Again, we’re very encouraged with it. Again, broad-based.

Kevin Steinke, Analyst, Barrington Research: Okay, sounds good. Appreciate the comments. I’ll turn it back over.

Rick Hermanns, Chief Executive Officer, HireQuest: Thanks.

Operator: Once again, if you have a question or a comment, please press star 1. The next question comes from Keegan Cox with D.A. Davidson. Please proceed.

Keegan Cox, Analyst, D.A. Davidson: 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 kinda, is that just all weather-related? You kinda talked about it, but walk me through it again, I guess.

Rick Hermanns, Chief Executive Officer, HireQuest: Well, I guess it depends on, as far as my expectations, it would’ve been depending on what time in 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 gonna have a terrible quarter. Simply and of course, because I can’t control the weather and I can’t control what day New Year’s falls on. I would say the second half was, particularly given the results of the first quarter were, you know, ended up balancing it out. 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 good about the second quarter and, you know, and again, the rest of the year. We are obviously tied to macroeconomic circumstances that are way beyond our control.

Keegan Cox, Analyst, D.A. Davidson: Got it. 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 Hermanns, Chief Executive Officer, HireQuest: you know, construction isn’t what it was, let’s say, a year and a half ago. 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. Really the, the real action for us is just, it really is in the industrial and manufacturing side. It’s definitely improved.

Keegan Cox, Analyst, D.A. Davidson: Got it. Just my final one. We follow a few, you know, indicators. If I mean, if I look at TrueBlue 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 Hermanns, Chief Executive Officer, HireQuest: Well, they are. That’s the thing. In fact, I think it was today, maybe it was yesterday, Staffing Industry Analysts pulls out the BLS, the BLS, you know, job report, and it showed a really, you know, It was like a 7% gain. Don’t quote me on that part, but like a 7% gain last week in temporary staffing jobs. It’s, you know, that’s very consistent with what we’re seeing.

Keegan Cox, Analyst, D.A. Davidson: Got it. That’s helpful. Thank you.

Rick Hermanns, Chief Executive Officer, HireQuest: Temporary staffing jobs actually rose in March, April, and appear to be accelerating into May, which, you know, is, you know, for 2 months in a row for actual growth has been, you know, is a, is a big deal for the staffing industry compared to the last 3 years. As we pointed out even in our prepared remarks, I mean, the staffing industry is down 3% overall since 2019. Like I said, it’s, it seems like that trend is finally, you know, starting to break.

Keegan Cox, Analyst, D.A. Davidson: 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 Hermanns, Chief Executive Officer, HireQuest: Again, I wanna 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. Of course, we remain hopeful that our bid for the on-demand portion of TrueBlue’s PeopleReady segment will be taken seriously and will lead to greater opportunities for everybody. Again, thank you for joining us, and we will look forward to speaking with you again in August. Thank you.

Operator: This concludes today’s conference, and you may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.