Item 1. Business
ITEM 1. BUSINESS.
OVERVIEW
Huron is a global professional services firm that partners with clients to develop growth strategies, optimize operations and accelerate digital transformation, including using an enterprise portfolio of technology, data and analytics solutions, to empower clients to own their future. By collaborating with clients, embracing diverse perspectives, encouraging new ideas and challenging the status quo, we create sustainable results for the organizations we serve.
We are headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, with additional locations in the United States and abroad in Canada, India, Singapore and Switzerland.
OUR STRATEGY
The combination of our deep industry expertise and breadth of our offerings is the foundation of our growth strategy and why our clients choose Huron as their trusted advisor. Key focus areas of our growth strategy include:
• Accelerating Growth in Healthcare and Education: Huron has leading market positions in healthcare and education, providing comprehensive offerings to the largest health systems, academic medical centers, colleges and universities, and research institutes in the United States.
• Growing Presence in Commercial Industries: Huron’s commercial industry focus has increased the diversification of the Company’s portfolio and end markets while expanding the range of capabilities it can deliver to clients, providing new avenues for growth and an important balance to its healthcare and education focus.
• Rapidly Growing Global Digital Capability: Huron’s ability to provide a broad portfolio of digital offerings that support the strategic and operational needs of its clients is at the foundation of the Company’s strategy. Huron will continue to advance its integrated digital platform to support its strong growth trajectory.
• Solid Foundation for Margin Expansion: The Company is well-positioned to achieve consistent margin expansion as well as strong annual adjusted diluted earnings per share growth. We are committed to operating income margin expansion by growing the areas of the business that provide the most attractive returns, improving the operational efficiency of our delivery for clients, and scaling our selling, general, and administrative expenses as we grow.
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• Strong Balance Sheet and Cash Flows: Strong free cash flows have and will continue to be a hallmark of Huron’s financial strength and business model. The Company is committed to deploying capital in a strategic and balanced way, including returning capital to shareholders and executing strategic, tuck-in acquisitions.
OUR SERVICES AND PRODUCTS
We provide our services and products and manage our business under three operating segments: Healthcare, Education, and Commercial, which align our business by industry. The Commercial segment includes all industries outside of healthcare and education, including, but not limited to, financial services and energy and utilities. We also provide revenue reporting across two principal capabilities: i) Consulting and Managed Services and ii) Digital, which are methods by which we deliver our services and products.
Operating Industries
For the year ended December 31, 2023, we derived 49%, 32% and 19% of our consolidated revenues from our Healthcare, Education and Commercial operating segments, respectively.
• Healthcare
Our Healthcare segment serves acute care providers, including national and regional health systems; academic health systems; community health systems; the federal health system; and public, children’s and critical access hospitals, and non-acute care providers, including physician practices and medical groups; payors; and long-term care or post-acute providers. Our healthcare-focused services and products include financial and operational performance improvement consulting, which spans revenue cycle, cost and care delivery transformation; digital offerings, spanning technology and analytic-related services, including enterprise health record (“EHR”), enterprise resource planning (“ERP”) and enterprise performance management (“EPM”), customer relationship management (“CRM”), data management and technology managed services, and a portfolio of software products; organizational transformation; revenue cycle managed services and outsourcing; financial and capital advisory consulting; and strategy and innovation consulting.
To best serve our clients, we continue to diversify our portfolio of offerings. For example, we have broadened our capabilities beyond our leading profit and loss-focused offerings (e.g., revenue cycle, cost transformation) into offerings dedicated to optimizing our clients' financial positions through financial advisory and transaction-related services; transforming care delivery models through virtual health, health equity and social determinants of health models; and evolving organizations by supporting change management and developing the next generation of leaders by applying our best practices (e.g., revenue cycle leadership).
• Education
Our Education segment serves public and private colleges and universities, research institutes and other education-related organizations. Our education and research-focused services and products include our digital offerings, spanning technology and analytic-related services, including student information systems, ERP and EPM, CRM, data management and technology managed services and our Huron Research Suite product suite (the leading software suite designed to facilitate and improve research administration service delivery and compliance); our research-focused consulting and managed services; and our strategy and operations consulting services, which span finance and accounting and operations to organization and talent strategy and student and academic strategy. We continue to broaden our offerings into new areas. Most recently, we expanded our research managed services, advancement, campus health and well-being, and athletics offerings.
• Commercial
Our Commercial segment is focused on serving industries and organizations facing significant disruption and regulatory change by helping them adapt to rapidly changing environments and accelerate business transformation. Our Commercial professionals work primarily with six primary buyers: the chief executive officer, the chief financial officer, the chief strategy officer, the chief human resources officer, the chief operating officer, and organizational advisors, including lenders and law firms. We have a deep focus on serving organizations in the financial services, energy and utilities, industrials and manufacturing industries and the public sector while opportunistically serving commercial industries more broadly, including professional and business services, life sciences, consumer products, and nonprofit. Our Commercial professionals use their deep industry, functional and technical expertise to deliver our digital services and software products, financial advisory (special situation advisory and corporate finance advisory) services, and strategy and innovation consulting services.
Capabilities
Within each of our operating segments, we provide our offerings under two principal capabilities: i) Consulting and Managed Services and ii) Digital.
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• Consulting and Managed Services
Our Consulting and Managed Services capabilities represent our management consulting services, managed services (excluding technology-related managed services) and outsourcing services delivered across industries. Our Consulting and Managed Services experts help our clients address a variety of strategic, operational, financial, people and organizational-related challenges. These services are often combined with technology, analytic and data-driven solutions powered by our Digital capability to support long-term relationships with our clients and drive lasting impact. Examples include the areas of revenue cycle management and research administration managed services and outsourcing at our healthcare and education and research-focused clients, where our projects are often coupled with our digital services and product offerings and management consulting services to sustain improved performance.
• Digital
Our Digital capabilities represent our technology and analytics services, including technology-related managed services and software products delivered across industries. Our Digital experts help clients address a variety of business challenges, including, but not limited to, designing and implementing technologies to accelerate transformation, facilitate data-driven decision making and improve customer and employee experiences. We have invested organically and inorganically to expand our Digital offerings, which now span beyond traditional ERP implementations into a broader set of administrative systems, industry-specific systems of record and systems of engagement that act as the “digital front door” to an organization. We also have grown our data, analytics and automation offerings to deliver a unified and actionable technology ecosystem for our clients.
We have expanded our ecosystem to work with more than 25 technology partners. We are a Leading Modern Oracle Network Partner; a Summit-level consulting partner with Salesforce.com and a Premium Partner with Salesforce.org; a Workday Services, Preferred Channel, Extend, and Application Management Services Partner; an Amazon Web Services consulting partner; an Informatica Platinum Partner; an SAP Concur implementation partner; and a Boomi Elite Partner.
We have also grown our proprietary software product portfolio to address our clients' challenges with solutions that expand our base of recurring revenue and further differentiate our consulting, digital and managed services offerings. Our product portfolio bundles our deep industry expertise and unique intellectual property together to serve our clients outside of our traditional consulting offerings. Our product portfolio includes, among others: Huron Research Suite, the leading software suite designed to facilitate and improve research administration service delivery and compliance; Huron Intelligence™ Rounding, the #1 ranked Digital Rounding solution in the 2023 Best in KLAS® report; and Huron Intelligence™ Analytic Suite in Healthcare, a predictive analytics suite to improve care delivery while lowering costs.
OUR CLIENTS AND INDUSTRIES
We provide services to both financially sound organizations and organizations in transition across industries, including healthcare, education, financial services, energy and utilities, industrials and manufacturing, public sector and other commercial industries. Our clients span hospitals, health systems and academic medical centers; colleges, universities and research institutes; banks, asset managers, insurance companies and private equity firms; oil and gas and utilities companies; manufacturing organizations; and the federal government. In 2023, we served nearly 2,000 clients and our 10 largest clients accounted for approximately 19% of our consolidated revenues.
HUMAN CAPITAL RESOURCES AND MANAGEMENT
Our people are at the center of Huron’s strategy, and we are committed to providing a workplace where our talented and diverse team can thrive both personally and professionally. Success hinges on our ability to attract, engage, develop, reward, and retain highly skilled professionals. The cornerstone of our human capital strategy lies in both our mission-driven approach and an enduring belief that great leaders and engaged coaches cultivate a work environment where team members feel valued, create deep connections, and see their future with Huron. Our unwavering focus extends across every aspect of the employee journey, from the recruitment phase to post-employment or retirement. We strive to craft a personalized experience for our employees, empowering them to have a meaningful impact on our clients, communities, and each other.
This commitment has consistently earned Huron external recognition, including being named a “Best Place to Work” by Glassdoor in January 2024; being named a Best Firm to Work For by Consulting magazine in 2023 for the 13th consecutive year; a decade of perfect scores on the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) Foundation Corporate Equality Index (CEI); and receiving two companywide awards from Consulting magazine for diversity, equity and inclusion and retaining female talent in 2023. In addition to external recognitions, we monitor human capital-related internal metrics. Our leading measure is our quarterly employee engagement score. In addition, we regularly review voluntary turnover across a number of key variables including business unit, individual performance, geography, and demographics in order to assess the effectiveness of our employee development and total rewards programs.
Additional information on our people and programs follows.
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Our People: As of December 31, 2023, our workforce was comprised of approximately 6,480 full-time professionals.
• Our nearly 240 managing directors and principals actively play a pivotal role in serving our clients, acting as strategic business advisors, coaches, and industry experts and collaborating with organizations and their leaders to tackle complex business challenges. Managing directors and principals lead our revenue-generating sales and client service efforts, innovation and the development of our intellectual capital, foster the growth of our people, and act as stewards of our organizational culture. Together, our managing directors and principals contribute significantly to our market reputation, addressing clients' challenges and ensuring the highest quality delivery of our engagements. In addition to the responsibilities listed above, our managing directors' primary focus is on propelling our business growth by selling our portfolio of offerings to generate revenue streams from both new and existing clients.
• Senior directors, directors, and managers are primarily focused on managing day-to-day client relationships and our engagement teams while overseeing the delivery and quality of our work as well as developing our people and nurturing our collaborative culture.
• Associates and analysts focus on ensuring client commitments are met by gathering and organizing data, conducting detailed analyses, crafting materials that synthesize information to support our recommendations, and implement financial, operational, and technology and analytic solutions to execute on the recommendations we provide to clients.
• Our functional professionals, who are led by our executives and corporate vice presidents, comprise Huron’s enterprise functional teams, including corporate development, facilities, finance and accounting, human resources, information technology, legal, and marketing. These professionals offer strategic guidance and execute on initiatives on behalf of the enterprise to support our client-facing objectives and the achievement of our growth strategy.
In addition to our full-time employees, we engage temporary workers on an as-needed basis, primarily seeking specialized skills and/or experience to augment our capacity for delivering client engagements or internal initiatives.
Development: We know the ability to advance one’s career, growing both personally and professionally, is critical to employee retention and engagement. To facilitate this advancement, we offer a diverse array of learning and development opportunities and experiences that can be tailored to personal needs and applied to individual context. We are committed to creating learning pathways that reflect the unique needs of our diverse population, engage them in a future at Huron, and enhance our culture of belonging. We continue to:
• Facilitate an interactive two-day orientation curriculum for newly hired employees to ensure a smooth induction into the organization.
• Offer just-in-time, personal coaching and training opportunities that inform and prepare leaders and coaches to excel in moments that matter for our employees.
• Strive to develop world class leaders, guided by our values and leadership principles, by delivering programs and opportunities, such as our Senior Director Cohort, Milestone schools and Sponsorship program, that achieve this goal by focusing on key leadership behaviors.
• Provide access to a variety of learning opportunities that are offered through multiple modalities to further develop employees’ skills, including technical knowledge, EQ capabilities, team dynamics, and a proficiency in coaching and developing others.
• Encourage employees to enhance their professional capabilities through external learning opportunities that certify and validate industry, functional and technical skills.
• Match employees with internal onboarding stewards, performance coaches, mentors, and, in some cases, sponsors to facilitate their growth and expand their network of support.
Total Rewards: Our market-competitive total rewards package is a core element of our employee value proposition to attract, motivate, and retain top talent. Our philosophy is designed to pay for performance, rewarding and retaining our highest performing employees and paying competitively versus peer companies. To accomplish this, we offer employees a competitive base salary, short- and long-term variable pay incentives, and market-competitive and equitable benefits.
Engagement: We gauge our employee engagement success through various metrics, including:
• Employee engagement and pulse scores, which was 81 in 2023 and surpassed the Glint Employee Engagement global benchmark of 76;
• Coach quality score, which was 83.5 in 2023 and above the Glint Coach Quality global benchmark of 81; and
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• Volunteer hours in our communities, which was nearly 12,000 hours in 2023.
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion: Huron strives to reflect the rich diversity of the clients we serve and the communities in which we live. Our commitment to inclusion has been embedded in the organization since our founding and is fostered in our day-to-day work environment. In 2020, we renewed our commitment to holding ourselves accountable by developing a five-year diversity, equity, and inclusion action plan to help build a more equitable society. Through our achievements and actions in 2023, we continued to cultivate an inclusive culture, advance diverse representation across all levels of the organization, expand our community outreach and support, and remain committed to our pay equity strategy with on-going analysis and studies. In 2023, we:
• Deepened the relationships of our senior leadership team by designating them as executive sponsors for each of our nine employee resource groups (iMatter teams) to focus on connection, awareness, advice, action, advocacy, and amplification of these communities.
• Created Dinner and Dialogue series for our C-Suite to engage with, and learn directly from, small groups from our diverse communities represented by our iMatter teams as a way to enhance our Heritage month activities.
• Hosted Women in Leadership summits in North America and India.
• Revamped our sponsorship program, a key talent accelerator program, offering dedicated leadership coaching and C-suite exposure with sponsorship program participants focused on development and personal interests.
• Launched the Women in India and Women of Color subcommunities to create spaces that specifically address the unique experiences and perspectives of women from diverse backgrounds.
To learn more about how we continue to execute and expand on our diversity, equity, and inclusion action plan, please refer to our annual Corporate Social Responsibility report, which is available on our investor relations website located at ir.huronconsultinggroup.com.
CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY
As a mission-driven company, we recognize it is our collective responsibility to actively contribute to a sustainable and brighter future, benefiting our clients, employees, communities, and shareholders. We continue to publish an annual report highlighting the actions we have taken globally to strengthen our clients, our communities, our people and the environment. Our Corporate Social Responsibility report reflects our efforts in support of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (“SDGs”), particularly the five goals that are integrally aligned with our values-driven culture and the work we do for our clients: good health and well-being, quality education, gender equality, decent work and economic growth, and climate action. We have and will continue to pursue these goals through our Huron Helping Hands program, employee resource groups, sustainability efforts, and corporate partnerships. As an addendum to our Corporate Social Responsibility report, we publish a Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (“SASB”) index in line with SASB’s Professional & Commercial Services standards. Our SASB index provides further quantitative and qualitative information regarding our data security programs, practices and policies, workforce diversity and engagement metrics, and our approach to promoting professional integrity and ethical behavior among our workforce, commensurate with best practices for professional services organizations.
For additional information on Huron’s commitment to a more sustainable future, refer to our annual Corporate Social Responsibility report, which includes our SASB index, and is available on our investor relations website located at ir.huronconsultinggroup.com.
BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT AND MARKETING
Our business development and marketing activities are aimed at cultivating relationships, generating leads, and building a strong brand reputation with offices of the C-suite and senior level influencers and decision makers of organizations within our core industries. We believe excellent service delivery to clients is critical to building and maintaining relationships and sustaining and strengthening our brand reputation, and we emphasize the importance of high-quality client service to all of our employees.
Currently, we generate new business opportunities through the combination of relationships our managing directors and principals have with individuals working at our prospective clients and with our technology partners and marketing activities. We also view market-based collaboration between our employees as a key component in building our business. Often, the client relationship of an employee in one area of our business leads to opportunities in another area, enhancing the opportunity to increase wallet share at a specific client. All of our managing directors and principals understand their roles in ongoing relationship and business development, which is reinforced through our compensation and incentive programs. We actively seek to identify new business opportunities and frequently receive referrals and repeat business from past and current clients. In addition, to complement the business development efforts of our managing directors, we have dedicated business development professionals who are focused exclusively on developing client relationships and generating new business.
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COMPETITION
The professional services industry is extremely competitive, highly fragmented, and constantly evolving. The industry includes a large number of participants with a variety of skills and industry expertise, including other strategy, business operations, technology, and financial advisory consulting firms; general management consulting firms; the consulting practices of major accounting firms; technical and economic advisory firms; regional and specialty consulting firms; consulting divisions of our technology partners; and the internal professional resources of organizations. We compete with a large number of service and technology providers in all of our segments. Our competitors vary, depending on the particular industry and expertise area, and we expect to continue to face competition from new market entrants.
We believe the principal competitive factors in our market include reputation, the ability to attract and retain top talent, the capacity to manage engagements effectively to drive high value to clients, and the ability to deliver measurable and sustainable results. There is also competition on price, although to a lesser extent due to the criticality of the issues that many of our services and products address. Some competitors have a greater geographic footprint, including a broader international presence, and more resources than we do, but we believe our reputation, industry and capability expertise, and ability to deliver high-value, quality service and measurable results to our clients across a balanced portfolio of offerings and to attract and retain employees with broad capabilities and deep industry expertise enable us to compete favorably in the professional services marketplace.
AVAILABLE INFORMATION
We file annual, quarterly and current reports, proxy statements, and other information with the Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC”). These filings are available on the SEC’s website at http://www.sec.gov.
Our website is located at www.huronconsultinggroup.com, and our investor relations website is located at ir.huronconsultinggroup.com. We make our annual reports on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, current reports on Form 8-K, and any amendments to those reports filed or furnished pursuant to Section 13(a) or 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 available through our website, free of charge, as soon as reasonably practicable after we electronically file such material with, or furnish it to, the SEC.
We provide information about our business and financial performance, including our corporate profile, on the Investor Relations page of our website. Additionally, we webcast our earnings calls and certain events we participate in with members of the investment community on the Investor Relations page of our website. Further corporate governance information, including our code of ethics, code of business conduct, corporate governance guidelines, and board committee charters, is also available on the Investor Relations page of our website. The content of our websites is not incorporated by reference into this Annual Report on Form 10-K or in any other report or document we file with the SEC, and any references to our websites are intended to be inactive textual references only.