Carlos A. Rodriguez
Analyst · Evercore
It probably depends on who you ask. So Jan is over here smiling, thinking, yes, it does and I'm over here saying, no, it doesn't. And I think the truth is somewhere in between. Clearly, this business is performing better than it was sometime back from a margin standpoint. Some of that, in all fairness, is that we've -- our organic growth strategy, I think, has helped a little bit in the sense that we were relatively acquisitive in Employer Services over the years and that generally added margin pressure to us year-to-year. And eventually, those acquisitions helped with scale and should have been helping to drive margin, but it's just hard with a lot of M&A activity and a lot of noise in the system and a lot of platforms to drive good margin improvements. So I think that we haven't necessarily made huge progress, with the exception of EasyPay and a few other places on the migration front, but we certainly slowed the proliferation and the increase of, which I think creates a better backdrop for Employer Services to drive margin improvement. I think the second thing like I did with the PEO or with Brazil or with GlobalView, you've got to give credit to the people running those businesses. So there's really, really good execution on the ground as well. So having said all that, I really appreciate the question because it's important for people to get the tone from us, and I think Jan and I are on the same page, which is that you should not expect this kind of margin improvement in the future because we like -- or I, like many of my predecessors, are incredibly sensitive to making sure that we manage this business for the long term. And the long term doesn't mean like the next quarter; it means 3, 5, 10, 20 years down the road. And if you extrapolate 125 basis point margin improvement over 20 years, it becomes very, very difficult to believe. And so we are very, very committed to reinvesting in our business and that would make me nervous about pushing too hard on the margin front. So I guess the best way to answer this is that we're very, very comfortable with the guidance that we gave in March, which I believe was 50 to 75 basis point margin improvement over multiple years, and we're also very comfortable with the guidance that we've given for this year and we would not encourage you to focus on 1 quarter.