Hello, and welcome to the GEE Group Fiscal Fourth Quarter and Year End September 30, 2023 Earnings and our update for 2024 Webcast Conference Call. I'm Derek Dewan, the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of GEE Group, and will be hosting today's call. Joining me as a co-presenter is Kim Thorpe, our Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Thank you for joining us today. It is our pleasure to share with you GEE Group's results for the fiscal year and the fourth quarter ended September 30, 2023, and provide you with our outlook for the fiscal year 2024 and the foreseeable future. Some comments Kim and I will make may be considered forward-looking, including predictions, estimates, expectations and other statements about our future performance. These represent our current judgments of what the future holds and are subject to risks and uncertainties that actual results may differ materially from our forward-looking statements. These risks and uncertainties are described below under the caption, Forward-Looking Statements Safe Harbor and in Monday's earnings press release and our most recent Form 10-Q, Form 10-K and other SEC filings under the captions, Cautionary Statement Regarding Forward-Looking Statements and Forward-Looking Statements Safe Harbor. We assume no obligation to update statements made on today's call. During this presentation, we will also talk about some non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations and explanations of the non-GAAP financial measures that we address today are included in our earnings press release. Our presentation of financial amounts and related items, including growth rates, margins and trend metrics are rounded are based upon rounded amounts for purposes of this call and all amounts, percentages and related items presented are approximations accordingly. For your convenience, our prepared remarks for today's call are available in the Investor Center of our website, www.geegroup.com. Having turned in the…

Thank you, Derek, and good morning. As Derek mentioned, revenues for fiscal 2023 were $152.4 million, down 8% as compared with fiscal 2022 revenues of $165.1 million. Revenues for the fourth quarter of the fiscal year were $34.3 million, down approximately 18% as compared with the fourth quarter of fiscal 2022. The lower revenues in fiscal 2023 were primarily the result of the macroeconomic forces, including inflation, rising interest rates and the resulting negative impacts on the labor market and hiring environment, which impacted the entire staffing industry. Fiscal 2023 followed a period of recovery experienced in 2022, which was primarily due to a post COVID-19 bounce upward in employment. As Derek mentioned, the pull back in demand for direct hire placement services and in certain administrative, clerical and light industrial contract services in 2023 that contributed to the shortfall in 2023 results were primarily the result of these headwinds. While fiscal 2023 results were lower overall, the company once again was profitable and generated good positive cash flow from operations, as it has consistently done since completion of the significant deleveraging initiatives and a follow-on offering during the quarter ended June 30, 2021. We also believe our top line performance has been in line with our industry peers and above average in certain respects, including the performance our IT brands. Our lowest performing businesses continued to be those serving light industrial and administrative and office clerical markets. At this stage, we remain cautiously optimistic about our ability and timing to return to overall growth once again, which we expect to be led by our IT brands and our other professional services businesses, and with the anticipation that the uncertainties and unknowns about the economy and labor environments weighing on the businesses today begin to lessen during fiscal 2024. Professional…

Thank you, Kim. The fiscal 2023 fourth quarter marked our ninth consecutive quarter of strong operating performance since deleveraging the company. Having consistently achieved higher margins and free cash flow over the years, we continue to build a positive track record, as well as positive momentum for the future. As of September 30, 2023, company had no debt and approximately $22.5 million in cash with $11.3 million in availability under its bank ABL credit facility. GEE Group’s prospects today for future profitable growth continue to expand and improve. Despite macroeconomic headwinds, staffing industry specific challenges and unforeseen events, we will continue to work hard for the benefit of our shareholders and we expect to deliver solid results for the upcoming fiscal 2024 year and beyond and significantly increase shareholder value. Before we pause to take your questions, I want to again say a special thank you to all our wonderful people for their professionalism, hard work and dedication. Without them, we could not have accomplished all the good things that we have shared with you today. Now Kim and I would be happy to answer your questions. Please ask just one question and rejoin the queue with a follow-up as needed. If there’s time, we’ll come back to you for additional questions. So the question-and-answer period will now start.

And one of the first questions is regarding a stock buyback versus a potential for a dividend payout. We have engaged DC Advisory to explore all these strategic alternatives, including capital allocation strategies and the best use of our funds. So that will be included as part of the analysis. And we expect that information to be furnished to us in conclusion of the project, which will probably be somewhere in 45 days or so, possibly 60 on the outside. But they will do an extensive review of all the alternatives, including the potential for dividend or otherwise. The next question is, why didn't you start on time? To be honest, I held back the start time for the benefit of our shareholders who were logging-in in rapid numbers. And we can actually see when you log in, so I felt like I need to give all shareholders an opportunity for a couple of minutes, and we started approximately at 11:03. Company performance, in a nutshell, this was a tough year. Are we satisfied? Absolutely not. Did we do well under the circumstances? You know what, we did pretty well generating cash flow and profitability, but we're never satisfied. So complacency breeds poor performance or mediocrity, that's not in my vocabulary. So going forward, I can assure you that winning matters to us and as Vince Lombardi said, winning isn't everything, it's the only thing. And I believe that give us some time we will get to where you want us to be and where I want us to be. And I am a significant shareholder as is Kim. And we will continue to execute our largest shareholders on the Board of Directors and he has affirmed our strategy going forward and is totally supportive of where we're going upward.…

Happy to. Yes. We not only grew IT contract but we also grew our engineering contract services, which is a much smaller business, but it grew nonetheless. And we grew our accounting firm business, which also is small. The reason IT is important is because as is our strategy, it's our priority vertical and it is becoming larger and larger in proportion to our total business. When I joined the company, it was just under 40%, now it's almost 50%. And the significance of it is, is that it has much more resilience in economic cycles or tends to, although, there was a pullback in IT hiring, actually, I think that began in 2022 went into 2023. But we have a very good array of businesses. We're focused on cutting edge areas, such as AI and generative AI, cybersecurity and those. And I also -- Derek, if you don't mind, I'd like to comment on, there's been a couple of questions. Your stock is down, why should we buy your stock? I just want to point out a metric that maybe some of you haven't necessarily focused on. And that is, if I look at the stock price where it is right now $0.49 and I marked that down for a reasonable control premium, say, 30%, that gets me in the high 30%, mid to high $0.30 range. Our tangible book value, that is only our cash and AR minus our liabilities, is $0.36 a share. That means that there's zero value, zero, being given to the operating businesses. Even though we just went through an audit and we're able to support the value of nearly $70 million of intangible assets with conservative cash flow forecast. So all I can say is, I think that something is missing in the marketplace here that we're not getting any recognition for that. And for -- there was a comment in here that said something about the job market was hot the entire year, what are we talking about? I don't know that the entire staffing industry would agree with that, because I can tell you that staffing industry analysts published their industry update and economic update in September and their prediction is that the entire staffing industry, top line will be down 10% for 2023. So I just want to bring a few facts to the table to respond to some of this.

Let me amplify that, because the job market is kind of a misnomer. You have to bifurcate the term job market. Job market for what? Hospitality was up. Some lower level positions, hiring was up. IT was down. Look at the layoffs that occurred in IT and we succeeded despite that. We're picking up a lot of those IT people and putting them back to work on project works. And quite frankly, projects were put on hold, because of the higher interest environment, uncertainty, the macroeconomic environment, including things like Ukraine, things like Gaza, all those things weigh on CEOs in corporate America a bit. Now, I can say that it's an election year next year. Rates look like they're coming down, they probably have already. But we think that the Federal Reserve and that group will actually take appropriate action to stimulate the economy. Once people think things are more normalized, we'll tend to hire more contact labor, because they’re still a bit uncertain and when they feel really bullish, the perm business kicks in in high gear. We're hiring people now internally to grow our business, because we measure performance by per desk average. Our per desk average is good but we want more people at that per desk average to get revenue up. We have a huge sales program going on right now in IT that we're launching. There's a whole bunch of things we're doing to get that top line cranked. And on the other hand, you know, we're very cost conscious. So we're working on SG&A to keep that lower and in fact reduce it, particularly when your top line is down. So there's a lot we're doing. And I want to assure you that we're doing it aggressively and judiciously. Another question is please…