Huron at Small-Cap Virtual Conference: Strategic Growth and Industry Focus

On Thursday, 18 September 2025, Huron Consulting Group (NASDAQ:HURN) presented at the Small-Cap Virtual Conference, outlining its strategic direction amidst industry challenges. While Huron faces pressures in healthcare and education, it is experiencing record pipeline growth, driven by demand for its advisory services. The company plans to double its adjusted EPS by 2029 through a balanced strategy of organic growth and strategic acquisitions.

Key Takeaways

• Huron aims to double its adjusted EPS between 2024 and 2029.
• Healthcare and education industries made up over 80% of 2024 revenue.
• The company plans to allocate capital equally between share buybacks and strategic M&A.
• Huron targets a utilization rate in the upper 70% range.
• The firm boasts a 90% client retention rate year over year.

Financial Results

• 2024 revenue grew by 9% year-over-year.
• Margin improvement was noted at 120 basis points for 2024.
• Adjusted EPS saw a 32% growth in 2024.
• Digital services experienced a 7% growth in 2024.
• Huron maintains a free cash flow conversion rate of 75-80% of adjusted EBITDA.

Operational Updates

• Healthcare: Experienced strong double-digit growth with a record pipeline due to financial pressures.
• Education: Also saw strong double-digit growth, with comprehensive university coverage as a key differentiator.
• Commercial: Slower growth in 2024 due to project delays, but anticipated to be the fastest-growing segment in 2025.
• Recent acquisitions include Eclipse Insights, Trilogy, and Wilson Perumal & Company, enhancing capabilities in various consulting areas.

Future Outlook

• Huron expects to achieve low double-digit percentage annual growth over the next five years.
• Strategic tuck-in acquisitions are projected to contribute 2-4% to growth annually.
• Organic growth is expected to be in the mid to upper single-digit range.
• The company aims to increase margins to 15-17% over the next five years.

Q&A Highlights

• Huron’s acquisition pipeline is robust, offering acquired businesses a leadership platform.
• The company targets utilization rates in the upper 70% range.
• Huron is viewed as an attractive employer, with strong interest from potential talent.

For more detailed insights, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Small-Cap Virtual Conference:

Mark Riddick, Senior Analyst, Sidoti & Company: Hey everyone, good morning. It’s now 11:30 A.M. here on the East Coast, and we’re ready to begin. My name is Mark Riddick. I’m a Senior Analyst with Sidoti & Company, and I thank you for joining us for Day Two of the Sidoti September Small Cap Virtual Conference. Now, our next company is Huron Consulting Group, the ticker is HURN. Joining us today is John Kelly, Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer. Before we begin, just a reminder that we will have time for questions and answers following prepared remarks. If you’d like to ask a question, feel free to submit those at any time during the presentation. There’s no need to wait until the end. You can just click on your Q&A prompt at the bottom of the screen. With that, we can turn the call over to Huron. John, good morning and thank you for joining us.

John Kelly, Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer, Huron Consulting Group: Morning, Mark. Thank you for having us at the conference. My name is John Kelly. I’m the Chief Financial Officer at Huron. I’ve been with Huron for over 18 years now, and I’ve been the CFO for going on the past nine years. Pleasure to be here with everyone today, and thank you for taking some time to talk about Huron with us this morning. Let’s go through some of these background slides. I’ll start here, and I’m going to start with just an overview of Huron and who we are and the clients that we serve. As you can see towards the top of this picture, obviously there’s a detailed description of all the things that we do.

I might simplify it by saying that we are a key and trusted partner and advisor to clients, really in the areas of their strategy, in the areas of their operations, in the areas of their digital transformation, as well as other important areas, whether it’s financial advisory. We have managed services offerings, but we’re industry focused. You can see that in the picture below, and I’ll talk a little bit more about that. We take our industry expertise across multiple industries and deploy that in those areas to really help our clients with what are their most pressing issues. We’re in an environment right now where our clients are going through significant change, significant disruption in certain cases, and our position as that trusted advisor creates a lot of opportunities for us to help our clients.

If you look on the left-hand part of the slide, just speaking to that industry expertise and being industry-led, you can see that over 50% of our revenue in 2024 came from the healthcare industry. Approximately 32% of our revenue came from the education industry, with the remainder 17% coming from what we describe as the commercial industries. What do those industries mean from a healthcare perspective? It’s largely not-for-profit, large, and regional healthcare providers. Think of hospitals and healthcare systems. When we talk about education, what do we mean? We’re talking about higher education, so universities and colleges. Typically, our client base are the top 200 research universities in the United States. Commercial, you know, that word kind of sounds like a catch-all, and it is. It’s everything that’s not healthcare and education. Within there, we do have growing industry specialization there as well.

That includes financial services, industrials and manufacturing, energy and utilities, even the federal government space are all areas that we have beachheads within that segment that we’ll talk about a little bit more, but that we expect to be able to grow over time. If you go towards the right-hand part of the slide, a little bit of a summary of our 2024 performance, which was obviously the last full year of performance for the company. You can see we were able to drive 9% year-over-year revenue growth, 120 basis points of margin improvement, which when you combine those things and you compound them, you end up, along with our capital allocation strategy, with 32% growth in adjusted EPS. Where that growth came from, it was strong double-digit growth both in healthcare as well as education.

Our commercial segment did have a more difficult year in 2024, and that was really driven by our digital business within the commercial segment, where we did see a lot of clients due to just a lot of uncertainty around the economy, around the election, around emerging technology. Last year in 2024, it really caused some projects within commercial to slow down. The good news is it’s flipped for us, and this year, from a 2025 perspective, the commercial industry has gotten back on the growth track and is actually expected to be our fastest growing segment during 2025. Our digital story overall across all industries was also a good story last year with 7% overall digital growth. I think on this slide, it’s a good opportunity to take a second and talk about what’s the question that many of our investors have had as the year has gone on.

When you look at the industry revenue mix there, with 50% coming from healthcare and 30% coming from higher education, the natural question has been, those have been industries that have been in the news a lot this year. There’s been a lot of pressure within both of those industries with the changing regulatory environment, some of the recent legislation that’s been passed, including the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and some of the implications there on potential Medicaid funding going forward. A question that we’ll often get is it feels like it’s an environment where there’s some strain on clients within those industries right now. How does that flow through to Huron Consulting Group’s business? The reality is we’re seeing a record pipeline right now within those industries.

The way to think about it is a lot of these financial pressures and strain that we’re seeing within those industries feed right into our key offerings in those areas. We’re very strong in performance improvement in both of those industries. If you have clients who are concerned about their current financial performance or concerned about pressures that will be coming into the system over the course of the next year, we’re really the trusted advisor within these industries to help clients out in that situation. We’re seeing it in terms of record pipeline, in terms of accelerating conversion from that pipeline into hard backlog, and in terms of revenue growth during the year. We raised our guidance on our last call, particularly citing our healthcare business based on these factors and some of the demand that that’s creating with our clients.

We’re excited about our outlook for the remainder of the year and our ability to help clients in this environment. A lot of the pressures that we’re seeing, we believe there’s a long runway on that. This isn’t a quarter issue or a two-quarter issue. This is going to be something that continues well beyond 2025, which is great for our team because it puts us in a good position to help our clients. That’s the overview of Huron. What’s Huron’s strategy? Obviously, that’s important to understand the company. The top line here obviously corresponds to what I just talked about. We have leading positions in two critical industries: U.S. healthcare and higher education. You can see the growth that we’ve been able to achieve in these industries since 2021.

I think that digging a little bit deeper in terms of what’s our differentiation there, I’d say within healthcare, our performance improvement business is a very well-credentialed leader within the industry in terms of the outcomes that we’ve been able to drive for clients. Very specific, tangible ROI for our clients in terms of clients that maybe have a budget gap that they need to fill, and us having offerings, whether it’s in revenue cycle, expense management, improvement to clinical operations, you name it, across the board, fundraising. We’ve got those capabilities to really help clients who have that budget gap solve the budget gap on a sustainable basis. That offering for us is a great core to have within healthcare because it’s a natural lead-in to strategy-led projects, Office of the CFO projects, digital projects, managed services offerings.

The ability that we have with our performance improvement business to demonstrate that we’re able to drive impact in the most critical areas and that we really understand how to drive that ROI within the industry opens the door for us for many of our offerings across healthcare. When you pivot towards education, we’re one of the very few consultants that have positioning across the entire university, whether that’s the research administration function, the Office of the Provost, the Office of the CFO, athletics, fundraising, and advancement, and then critically technology too, an industry where many of our clients feel like they’re behind right now and need to make investments in their technology in order to be able to move their businesses forward, both from a security perspective, but also from an operational improvement perspective.

We’re unique in our positioning across the entire university, and as some of the pressures that I referred to earlier continue to mount within that industry, we believe that holistic coverage that we have is a differentiator for us within the industry. Moving beyond those key industries, we think our commercial segment is a great platform for future growth. A couple of different things there. The playbook that we’ve developed in healthcare and education with industry-led advisory flowing through to our digital offerings, we believe that we’ve got the talent within those industries to build out that same playbook in some of the industries that I mentioned earlier: financial services, industrials and manufacturing, energy, and utilities. We believe that these are all places where we’ll be able to drive some of that same impact. You know we’re unique in terms of being a.

Dann davon profitieren zu können, das ist natürlich dann auch besonders fein.

Okay. Capabilities that we have based on our presence in healthcare and education and being able to take those capabilities and drive them to clients in a unique way where we’re pretty nimble at our size to be able to bring those different offerings together for our clients in commercial in a way that sometimes feels different than some of our competitors. We have a growing digital capability. You can see the growth rate we’ve had from 2021 to 2024 there. Incredibly important. The challenges of our clients these days are increasingly digital in nature or have a digital component. Everybody knows about some of the emerging technologies that are out there.

We feel like we’ve got a great head start with 40% of our business already coming from the digital components of our business and our ability to really work with our clients to implement some of those advancing technologies to help them actually drive the impact and the ROI that they’re looking to get out of them. We’ve had a great story from a margin perspective. Our margins have increased by 320 basis points since 2020. We believe, and I’ll go through this in a little more detail, that we’ve got continuing levers there to drive further margin expansion within the business. That really, if we achieved all of those different levers that we think are achievable, we’d actually outpace the goals that we gave at our investor day. Of course, we’ll be balancing that with continued investments within our business. We are a strong free cash flow business.

We have got a good solid leverage profile. We’ve got balance sheet capacity, and every year our EBITDA converts to free cash flow typically at about a 75-80% of adjusted EBITDA converts to free cash flow basis, which gives us capital to allocate, whether that’s in terms of shareholder returns or in terms of strategic tuck-in M&A. You can see to the right of this slide some of the objectives that we put out there at our investor day back in March. We’re expecting to be a low double-digit % annual grower over the next five years. We gave a little more color around that, that we expect annually 2 to 4% of that growth to come from strategic tuck-in size acquisitions, which if you do the math on that, that would mean we expect the organic growth rate to be in the mid to upper single-digit range.

We expect to be able to take our margins, which we’re guiding this year towards margins in the 14 to 14.5% range. We’re expecting to be able to drive that up to the 15% to 17% range over that five-year time horizon. I just talked about our free cash flow conversion rate. If we then take that cash flow and whether it’s share buybacks, return to shareholder, that approach, or strategic tuck-in M&A, we think that the compounding effect of the growth, the margins, and then the capital deployment can lead us to double our adjusted EPS between now and 2029. We were able to triple our earnings per share between 2020 and 2024. We think we’ve got a good track record of doing it and should be able to continue to do so moving forward. This is just really a summary of that financial algorithm, if you will, there.

To us, it’s really about compounding. If we’re able to achieve those growth rates that we expect, if we’re then able to expand our margins, and this is all consistent with what we’ve been doing, it’s not a big step up. It’s really maintaining what we’ve been able to do as a business. We’re able to convert that EBITDA to free cash flow, reduce our share base, add tuck-in strategic acquisitions. The compounding impact of that we think will be really powerful. If you look at the way it’s played out since 2022, our revenue top line CAGR has been in the low to mid-teen %. Our adjusted EBITDA dollar CAGR has been in the 20% range, and our adjusted EPS CAGR over that period of time has been in the 30% range.

You can see that compounding in the historical results, and our financial model is for that to continue over the next five years. I think this slide is really important to understand about our business. Healthcare and education, as we’ve described them, are two really large critical industries going through significant regulatory change, financial strain, strain or disruption coming from the advancement of technology, and they’re industries where, because of budgetary pressures compounding over years, oftentimes they’re very thin in terms of their internal resources to navigate these changes. They’ve been forced into that by budget pressures over time. It’s a great area as a consultant to be able to help those clients. A question that we’ve received in the past, for example, in healthcare is, if I think about the strength of Huron’s performance improvement business, how many hospitals are there?

If you do performance improvement at a hospital, does that mean they’re gone forever? You’re not going to be back to do more work? We have 90% client retention year over year in terms of clients that we’ve executed on revenue or projects for before repeating in terms of revenue in the next year. That rate speaks to the breadth of our portfolio and the different ways that we can serve our clients within these industries. Even if you take one offering like performance improvement, the fact that we’ve done a project there before doesn’t preclude us from there being future opportunities even with that offering at the clients at a future date. The reality is things change. You have M&A activity, you have emerging technology, you have new rules in terms of reimbursement, for example, within healthcare, you have escalating costs. The reality is it’s a dynamic environment.

It’s an environment that changes, and we believe the offerings we have are flexible enough to help a client in one year that maybe we’ll, after that, support them in their digital initiatives or in other strategic areas. There might be a point in the future when, because of evolving circumstances, they need additional performance improvement services, and that becomes an opportunity for us. When we look at the dollar size of these markets in healthcare and education, as well as within the commercial industries and some of those markets, we feel like those are real numbers in terms of what the opportunity is for us. As Mark Hussey, our CEO, will often say, in some of these industries, our growth is only contained by our own investments in growing of our people within these industries because the opportunities from a market perspective are broad and are clearly there.

This picture is intended just to show a little bit of the mix of our offerings across industry and from a consolidated perspective between contracyclical and procyclical. That’s a question that’s often been asked, and it goes back to my earlier comments about, hey, when there’s pressure within the industries, is that good or bad for your business? We wanted to provide a little bit of color around if you really look at some of our core offerings like performance improvement in healthcare, which would fall into the contracyclical bucket, or our restructuring and turnaround business in commercial that, again, falls into the contracyclical bucket, as well as then our digital offerings or our strategy offerings, which typically fall more into the procyclical bucket. We’ve got good balance across our industries, and we’ve got good balance as a company. This isn’t meant to be very rigid either.

What we’re seeing right now, for example, in education is something that you might typically think of as procyclical investments in digital infrastructure. We actually see our clients more aggressively pursuing digital projects within education right now because that’s the only way they are going to be able to achieve some of the margin gains that they hope to in order to deal with financial pressures. A lot of these offerings are relevant really in both an up environment and a down environment, but we feel like we’re really well balanced from that perspective. One of the sell-side analysts for Huron has recently put us on one. It’s a tough bite course for sure if you’re competing.

Mark Riddick, Senior Analyst, Sidoti & Company: Environment within these industries or whether it’s a better environment where there is more discretionary cash, we’re able to grow in both of those scenarios because of the breadth of our offerings. Margin, you know, I touched on that, and our model is to get to the 15% to 17%. Just to quickly walk through, where will that come from? There’s a few different levers. From a delivery excellence perspective, we see with some of the emerging technology that’s out there, the opportunity to automate within our own business and to deliver more efficiently for our clients. We also have a global employee base, which allows us to serve our clients from a variety of different geographies, which can provide efficiencies in terms of how we deliver for us. We think that remains an opportunity. From a utilization perspective, it was a great quarter last quarter.

We’re off to a good start this year, but the reality is across the business for a full year to have that utilization in the upper 70% range or even a little bit higher than that, depending on what’s going on in individual markets. I think that remains a very tangible margin opportunity for us. Pricing realization. What does that mean? It really isn’t about increasing our bill rates or increasing the pricing that we’re charging the clients. It’s more about our discipline in terms of delivering. We do a lot of fixed fee type work, and within fixed fee type projects, making sure that we’ve got discipline around how we deliver, using the full leverage of our pyramid staffing model, make sure that we’re doing a good job of managing our expectations and scope with our clients.

Those are all the things that feed into pricing realization where we see very tangible opportunities to continue increasing our margins there. We’ve made significant investments over the past few years in our corporate infrastructure, whether that’s our tools that we use to run the business or whether that’s the addition of different geographies that help support the business in an efficient way. We’ve made those investments, and the reality is we think we’ve got a corporate infrastructure that can support a bigger business. The reality is, as we continue to grow, we think more of that operating income at the segment level can flow through to the bottom line based on the corporate infrastructure that we built. Finally, the reasons margins won’t, in our mind, go even higher than 17% are we do, we’re a people business.

We do need to continue to invest in our people, keep adding talent in new areas, keep adding digital capabilities as time goes on. That’s all the type of stuff that’s on our mind over time that we’ll be taking some of that operating income improvements from these other levers and turning around and reinvesting that to keep the organic growth of the company going. From a capital deployment perspective, we’ve got a couple of North Stars. We want to end every year around two times of leverage, two times our trailing 12 months adjusted EBITDA per our bank definition. We feel very comfortable in our ability to do that. At that level, we feel like we’re appropriately utilizing our balance sheet, but at the same time, have a lot of flexibility if we’re at that level. That’s where we want to be at the end of the year.

As I referred to earlier, we’ve got really nice cash flow conversion of our EBITDA. If you have those two parameters of strong free cash flow every year and wanting to land the balance sheet around two times leverage at the end of each year, that means we’re going to have significant capital to deploy over the course of a year. We’re expecting to have a balanced framework over the next five years. We expect roughly 50% of that to go through our share buybacks and return to shareholders. We’d expect another 50% probably to go to strategic tuck-in M&A to the extent that we’re able to find those opportunities that will help bring talent into the business and, in the long run, promote further organic growth. That’s pretty much everything that I wanted to cover.

We hope that what you take away from it is that we’re a preeminent global consultancy that’s got focus in core industries where there’s a lot of need for consultants right now, that we’ve got some great opportunity to continue to expand that industry expertise within our commercial business and a great platform to add new capabilities that will be needed within healthcare, within education, in the growing commercial industries, and that we’re really confident in our trajectory from a margin perspective as well as a strong free cash flow business that will give us the capital to keep both providing return to shareholders and investing in the business. With that, Mark, I’ll land it there and take any questions that might be out there. Great. Thank you very much, John.

As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, just click on the Q&A button, the prompt at the bottom of your screen. Actually, one of the things I wanted to start with, John, since your most recent earnings report, and you’ve made mention on a couple of occasions during your prepared remarks around tuck-in acquisitions, one of which was just actually announced a couple of weeks ago. You also announced one on your most recent earnings. Maybe you could just sort of touch a little bit on the more recent acquisitions as well as the acquisition pipeline and the valuations that you’re seeing out there.

John Kelly, Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer, Huron Consulting Group: Yeah, we’re really excited about, I’ll focus on three acquisitions that we’ve done since right when we announced last quarter through even the beginning of this month. Eclipse Insights is a middle revenue cycle business that fits right into our performance improvement business within healthcare. By middle revenue cycle, that’s really getting into some of the coding for charges as well as then some of the interfacing with the payers that the providers go through in order to get paid for the services that they provide and dealing with denials and working through that process with the payers. The great thing about that business is it’s a team that we’ve worked with a lot over time. We have a great relationship with them. They’re very much culturally aligned. There are some people that were part of the team that had worked at Huron years ago.

We really felt like it was just a great add to our revenue cycle business and gave us an even more comprehensive set of offerings in this environment that we’re in right now where our clients are really focused on trying to capture those margin points wherever they can get them. Trilogy, which we announced in July, is a financial services industry advisor. They’re more on the consulting side within the commercial segment and specifically within financial services. They help banking institutions with risk management, compliance, fraud detection. We really believe that the relationships and the credibility they have from an advisory perspective paired with our digital expertise, particularly in the banking market, is going to create a really great opportunity for us to serve our clients within that industry.

Wilson Perumal & Company, which we just announced at the beginning of this month, couldn’t be more excited about that acquisition. They’re going to largely fit within our commercial segment and be paired with our Innosight team and our commercial strategy consulting. What they really add is a performance improvement aspect to that strategic consulting. They’re also very strategically oriented, but their IP is really focused on reducing complexity and driving performance from that. We think that that paired with kind of the longer-term strategic future-backed orientation of our Innosight consultants is going to have a really compelling offering for our clients in the commercial industry. In terms of just general philosophy, we see a lot of good opportunities right now. The pipeline has been robust for us. I think we’re an exciting platform that businesses are excited to join.

I think one thing that’s differentiating about Huron is from a strategic buyer perspective, and this is true for just about every acquisition that we’ve done, it’s an opportunity to join our platform and then to become the leaders within our organization in those areas. For example, we did the Axia Consulting acquisition in the fourth quarter last year, digital supply chain expertise. They’re now leading for Huron digital supply chain. It’s a great opportunity for the people and the talent that’s joining us. Given all the dynamics we’ve talked about, we feel like we’re a really great platform for growth.

Mark Riddick, Senior Analyst, Sidoti & Company: Excellent. We do have a few questions that are in. Can you, you touched on this a little bit in the prepared remarks, but maybe you could talk a little bit about the utilization rates and maybe what a reasonable, what’s the reasonable run rate that can be targeted there, as well as what influences that you have on those rates.

John Kelly, Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer, Huron Consulting Group: Mark, I’ll be quick with them, just managing time. Upper 70%, 78, 79%. For us, that’s checking the box of efficient in terms of our operations, but still having enough capacity to continue to grow and to continue to have the depth of the team you need as new bigger projects come through the pipeline. I’d say that would be the range for that.

Mark Riddick, Senior Analyst, Sidoti & Company: Okay. Another question that came in around the overall bigger picture labor market, the potential deterioration in there, and maybe what the broad economic pressures that affect.

John Kelly, Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer, Huron Consulting Group: It’s hard to say, hey, this guy’s really good at this. We shouldn’t leave him here. We should have him do this for an extended period of time. I think a lot of guys would accept that because being instructors is a great time. I mean, I think by the time, was I teaching FTX when you came through or was I teaching unexploded ordnance? Yeah, we just won, I think we’re number two on the list of top consulting firms from Consulting Magazine in terms of large consultants. We’re really proud of those designations. For us, we’re finding right now in this labor market that we’re an attractive platform and we have a lot of people that are eager to join us and be part of the team.

Mark Riddick, Senior Analyst, Sidoti & Company: Excellent. We’re pretty much at the end of our time together, so maybe we’ll just turn it back over to you for some closing remarks.

John Kelly, Chief Financial Officer and Treasurer, Huron Consulting Group: Yeah, thank you, Mark. Always appreciate the opportunity to present to this group at Sidoti. Always appreciate your engagement, Mark. A lot of what’s going on in the environment right now that are challenges, particularly within our core industries, the flow through to that for Huron is increased demand for the things that we can do to help our clients. We’re seeing that right now, and we’re increasingly confident in the visibility that gives us into the business moving forward.

Mark Riddick, Senior Analyst, Sidoti & Company: That makes perfect sense. Thank you so much for joining us today and your time, as well as thanking all our participants for joining us for this wonderful presentation. Thank you, everyone. Everybody have a wonderful and productive remainder of the day. Thanks so much, John.

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