Item 1. Business
Item 1.
BUSINESS
OUR COMPANY
TrueBlue, Inc. (the “company,” “TrueBlue,” “we,” “us” and “our”) is a leading provider of specialized workforce solutions that help clients achieve business growth and improve productivity. We began operations in 1989 and are headquartered in Tacoma, Washington.
BUSINESS OVERVIEW
In 2020, we connected approximately 490,000 people with work and served approximately 99,000 clients. Our operations are managed as three business segments: PeopleReady, PeopleManagement and PeopleScout.
• PeopleReady offers on-demand, industrial and skilled trade staffing throughout the United States (“U.S.”), Canada and Puerto Rico.
• PeopleManagement offers contingent, on-site industrial staffing and commercial driver services throughout the U.S., Canada and Puerto Rico.
• PeopleScout offers recruitment process outsourcing (“RPO”) and managed service provider (“MSP”) solutions to a wide variety of industries and geographies, primarily in the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia.
PeopleReady provides access to qualified associates through a wide range of staffing solutions for on-demand contingent general and skilled labor. PeopleReady connects people with work in a broad range of industries that include construction, manufacturing and logistics, warehousing and distribution, waste and recycling, energy, retail, and hospitality.
PeopleReady helped approximately 98,000 clients in fiscal 2020 be flexible and more productive by providing easy access to dependable, blue-collar contingent labor. Through our PeopleReady service line, we connected approximately 221,000 people with work in fiscal 2020. We have a network of 629 branches across all 50 states, Canada and Puerto Rico. Complementing our branch network is our industry-leading mobile app, JobStack TM , which connects people with work 24/7. This creates a virtual exchange between our associates and clients, and allows our branch resources to expand their recruiting, sales and service delivery efforts. JobStack is competitively differentiating our services, expanding our reach into new demographics, and improving our service delivery and work order fill rates, as we embrace a digital future.
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PeopleManagement provides recruitment and on-site management of a facility’s contingent industrial workforce. In comparison with PeopleReady, services are larger in scale and longer in duration, and dedicated service teams are located at the client’s facility. We provide scalable solutions to meet the volume requirements of labor-intensive manufacturing, distribution and fulfillment facilities. Our dedicated service teams work closely with on-site management as an integral part of the production and logistics process, managing all or a subset of the contingent labor for a facility or operational function. Our on-site staffing solutions provide large-scale sourcing, screening, recruiting and management of the contingent workforce at a client’s facility in order to achieve faster hiring, lower total workforce cost, increase safety and compliance, improve retention, create greater volume flexibility, and enhance strategic decision-making through robust reporting and analytics. Our On-Site business includes our Staff Management | SMX (“Staff Management”) and SIMOS Insourcing Solutions (“SIMOS”) branded service offerings, which provide hourly and productivity-based (cost per unit) pricing options for industrial staffing solutions. Client contracts are generally multi-year in duration. The productivity-based pricing leverages a strategically engineered on-site solution to incentivize performance improvements in cost, quality and on-time delivery using a fixed price-per-unit approach. Both hourly and productivity-based pricing are impacted by factors such as geography, volume, job type, and degree of recruiting difficulty.
PeopleManagement also provides dedicated and contingent commercial truck drivers to the transportation and distribution industries through our Centerline Drivers (“Centerline”) brand. Centerline delivers drivers specifically matched to each client’s needs, allowing them to improve productivity, control costs, ensure compliance, and deliver improved service.
PeopleScout provides RPO services that manage talent solutions spanning the global economy and talent advisory capabilities supporting total workforce needs. We are recognized as an industry leader for RPO services. Our solution is highly scalable and flexible, which allows for outsourcing of all or a subset of skill categories across a series of recruitment, hiring and onboarding steps. Our solution delivers improved talent quality and candidate experience, faster hiring, increased scalability, lower cost of recruitment, greater flexibility and increased compliance. Our clients outsource the recruitment process to PeopleScout in all major industries and jobs. We leverage our proprietary technology platform (Affinix TM ) for sourcing, screening and delivering a permanent workforce, along with dedicated service delivery teams to work as an integrated partner with our clients. Client contracts are generally multi-year in duration and pricing is typically composed of a fee for each hire and talent consulting fees. Pricing is impacted by factors such as geography, volume, job type, degree of recruiting difficulty, and the scope of outsourced recruitment and employer branding services included.
PeopleScout also includes our MSP business, which manages our clients’ contingent labor programs including vendor selection, performance management, compliance monitoring and risk management. As the client’s exclusive MSP, we have dedicated service delivery teams which work as an integrated partner with our clients to increase the productivity of their contingent workforce program.
INDUSTRY AND MARKET DYNAMICS
The staffing industry, which includes our PeopleReady and PeopleManagement services, supplies contingent workforce solutions to minimize the cost and effort of hiring and managing permanent employees. This allows for rapid response to changes in business conditions through the ability to replace absent employees, fill new positions, and convert fixed or permanent labor costs to variable costs. Staffing companies act as intermediaries to match available associates with employer work assignments. Work assignments vary widely in duration, skill level and required experience. The staffing industry is large and highly fragmented with many competing companies. No single company has a dominant share of the industry. Staffing companies compete both to recruit and retain a supply of associates, and to attract and retain clients who will employ these associates. Client demand for contingent staffing services is dependent on the overall strength of the economy and workforce flexibility trends. This creates volatility for the staffing industry based on overall economic conditions. Historically, in periods of economic growth, the number of companies providing contingent workforce solutions has increased due to low barriers to entry whereas, during recessionary periods, the number of companies has decreased through consolidation, bankruptcies or other events. PeopleReady and PeopleManagement are leaders in industrial staffing services.
The human resource outsourcing industry, which includes our PeopleScout services, involves transitioning various functions handled by internal human resources and labor procurement to outside service providers on a permanent or project basis. Human resource departments are faced with increasingly complex operational and regulatory requirements, increased candidate
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expectations, an expanding talent technology landscape, and pressure to achieve efficiencies, which increase the need to migrate non-core functions to outsourced providers. The human resource outsourcing industry includes RPO and MSP solutions which allow clients to more effectively find and engage high-quality talent, leverage talent acquisition technology, and scale their talent acquisition function to keep pace with changing business needs. PeopleScout is a leader in RPO and MSP services.
Our workforce solutions address the following key industry and market trends contributing to anticipated growth:
• Workforce flexibility and scalability: The staffing industry continues to experience increased demand in relation to total job growth as demand for a flexible workforce continues to grow with competitive and economic pressures to reduce costs, meet dynamic seasonal demands and respond to rapidly changing market conditions. Providers in the human resource outsourcing industry can add significant scalability to a company’s recruiting and hiring efforts, including accommodating seasonal, project or peak hiring needs without sacrificing quality. These providers also help clients increase efficiency and drive lower overhead costs by standardizing processes, reducing time to fill, and onboarding the best fit talent into a client’s organization.
• Workforce productivity : Companies are under increasing competitive pressures to improve productivity through workforce solutions that improve performance, and enable clients to focus on their core business.
• Leveraging technology to access talent: Automation, artificial intelligence and machine learning are transforming talent acquisition. The fragmented talent technology ecosystem is becoming more crowded, with significant investments flowing in and new technology coming online rapidly. Associates are demanding more flexibility in how, when and where they work, as well as access to contingent work opportunities through mobile technology. Available associates are in high demand and have more power to find the employment situation they desire. As competition for qualified candidates increases, clients are relying on service providers to elevate the employer brand, build talent communities, create a world-class candidate experience, leverage innovative talent technology, and facilitate effective recruitment marketing and candidate communication strategies.
BUSINESS STRATEGY
Our clients have a variety of challenges in running their businesses, each of which are unique to the competitive pressures of their industry. We are industry leaders dedicated to staffing solutions tailored to our clients’ needs and the industries in which they operate. We ensure our differentiated solutions keep pace with the changing needs of our clients through the following:
• We continue to evaluate opportunities to expand our market presence for specialized blue-collar staffing services, expand our geographical reach, provide a broad range of blue-collar staffing services, and dispatch our associates to areas without a physical location. Continued investment in specialized sales, recruiting and service expertise will create a more seamless experience for our clients to access all our services with more comprehensive solutions to enhance their performance and our growth. Our business segments offer complementary workforce solutions with unique value propositions to meet our clients’ demands for talent.
• We continue to invest in technology that increases our ability to attract more clients, employees and associates as well as reduce the cost of delivering our services. We are committed to leveraging technology to improve the experience of our associates, clients and permanent employees. Our technological innovations make it easier for our clients to do business with us, and easier to connect associates with work opportunities and candidates to permanent employment opportunities. We are making significant investments in online and mobile apps to improve the access, speed and ease of connecting our clients with high-quality contingent and permanent employee workforce solutions.
◦ Complementing our PeopleReady branch network is our JobStack platform which connects our associates and clients through a real-time 24/7 digital exchange with an easy-to-use mobile app. JobStack enables our branches to expand their recruiting, sales and service delivery efforts. JobStack is helping to competitively differentiate our services, expand our reach into new demographics, and improve both service delivery and work order fill rates as we embrace a digital future. Currently 90% of PeopleReady’s associates use JobStack to find on-demand work. During 2020, we introduced new digital onboarding features that cut application time in half, increasing the percentage of applicants put to work. We introduced JobStack to our clients in 2018 and by the end of 2020 over 26,000 of our clients were using JobStack to place orders for associates, rate their performance, and approve their time worked, an increase of 23%, compared to the prior year. During fiscal 2020, PeopleReady dispatched approximately 2.9 million shifts via JobStack and achieved a digital fill rate of 53%, compared to approximately 3.7 million shifts and a digital fill rate of 48% in the prior year. We are focused on driving growth in the number of heavy client users of JobStack. A heavy client user is a client who has 50 or more touches on JobStack per month. Heavy client users have consistently posted better year-over-year growth rates compared to all other PeopleReady clients. We more than doubled our heavy client user mix
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from 11% in 2019 to 24% in 2020. We continue to expand functionality to further leverage this technology to transform our business and enhance our client and associate retention.
◦ Complementing our PeopleManagement dedicated on-site contingent workforce management is StaffTrack TM . StaffTrack is a proprietary technology platform that enables us to recruit and connect the best candidates with on-site assignments. StaffTrack has robust, real-time analytics that drive dynamic supply chain and workforce strategies, which allow clients faster, more precise hiring and help drive operational improvements and efficiencies. The recently launched StaffTrack associate mobile app provides associates the ability to search for a job, view their schedules, pick-up shifts, and receive real-time notifications. We continue to expand functionality within StaffTrack to further enhance our client and associate experience.
◦ Complementing our PeopleScout dedicated service delivery teams is our technology platform, Affinix, used for sourcing, screening and delivering a permanent workforce. Affinix creates a consumer-like candidate experience and streamlines the sourcing process. Affinix delivers speed and scalability while leveraging recruitment marketing, machine learning, predictive analytics and other emerging technology to make the end-to-end process seamless for the candidate. We will continue to invest in Affinix to further improve our ability to quickly and efficiently source the most attractive talent at the best price.
• Our RPO services leverage innovative technology for high-volume sourcing and dedicated client service teams for connecting people to opportunities. We have a track record of helping our clients reduce the cost of hiring, add significant scalability to recruiting and hiring, and access numerous sources to quickly find the best talent, thereby delivering a better outcome for the client.
• Our MSP business is focused primarily on managing the contingent labor programs of domestic, middle-market companies with a growing dependence on contingent labor. This enables our clients to efficiently source, engage, fulfill, measure and manage all categories of contingent and externally-sourced labor. We are uniquely positioned to manage the full range of our clients’ labor needs.
CLIENTS
Our clients range from small and medium-sized businesses to Fortune 100 companies.
During fiscal 2020, we served approximately 99,000 clients in industries including construction, energy, manufacturing, warehousing and distribution, waste and recycling, energy, transportation, retail, hospitality, and general labor. Our ten largest clients accounted for 19.0% of total revenue for fiscal 2020, 16.5% for fiscal 2019 and 16.1% for fiscal 2018. Our single largest client for fiscal 2020 accounted for 3.2% of total company revenue.
No single client represented more than 10.0% of total company revenue for fiscal 2020, 2019 or 2018.
HUMAN CAPITAL RESOURCES
We believe our success depends on our ability to attract, develop and retain talented employees. The skills, experience and industry knowledge of our employees significantly benefit our operations and performance. As of December 27, 2020, we employed approximately 5,200 full-time equivalent employees. Our employees are in eight countries with approximately 81% located in the U.S. None of our permanent employees are represented by a labor union. We have not experienced work stoppages and believe that our employee relations are in good standing, as evidenced by our employee engagement survey results. Our Compensation Committee of the Board of Directors (the “Board”) regularly receives reports regarding the progress on our key human capital initiatives. These reports inform discussions regarding the development, retention, and engagement of our employees. Some of our key human capital management initiatives are discussed below.
Culture and engagement
We believe a strong corporate culture and employee engagement is key to attracting and retaining talented employees. To assess and improve our culture, we routinely utilize an independent third party to measure how favorably our employees view our organizational culture and engagement. These surveys include corporate culture assessments, as well as real-time feedback on employee engagement and employee-managment relations. The results of these surveys are reported and distributed throughout management and the Board, and are used to create actionable plans to improve employee engagement and retention. Our September 2020 survey returned an engagement score of 74, which exceeds the benchmark set by the independent survey provider of 67, and is an improvement of 1 point from our pre-COVID-19 survey completed in February 2020.
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Developing our people
In order to continually attract and retain talented employees, we focus on personal development and career growth through our full performance program. Our full performance strategy for employees incorporates career planning and development, continuous learning, and creating internal career opportunities. We provide a range of training courses to our employees to enable more effective onboarding, work performance, compliance and advancing corporate initiatives. This strategy supports our intent to foster a culture that enables all employees to realize their full professional potential and cultivates a qualified bench of future leaders.
Employees create individual development plans, identify specific skill gaps and development goals, and chart a path for career growth. We aim to strengthen skills that transfer across roles, business segments and functions. Managers meet regularly with employees to discuss their plans, and yearly assessments provide a formal process for tracking progress. This standardized process also ensures employees in similar positions are similarly evaluated.
Health, safety and wellness
We provide our employees and their families with flexible health and wellness programs, including competitive benefits. Our benefits include health, dental and vision insurance, health savings and flexible spending accounts, paid time off, family leave, and family care resources.
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we implemented significant changes to ensure the health and safety of our employees. These changes included an investment in the technology necessary to allow the majority of our support center employees to work from home and a reimbursement for certain expenses associated with moving to home-based work. Through the distribution and provision of necessary personal protective equipment, the continuing use of education and awareness, and changes to our operating processes, we are working to ensure our offices remain open and a safe place for our employees.
Diversity, equity and inclusion
We are dedicated to fostering, recognizing, and embracing diversity at every level of the organization. In January 2021, we hired a Vice President of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion who reports directly to the Chief Executive Officer. We have assembled a diverse internal employee workforce, and are committed to making further improvements. For example, today, women hold nearly 50% of positions at the director level and above.
We have a Diversity & Inclusion Council (the “Council”) which designs and launches initiatives that advance acceptance and inclusion. The Council reports regularly to executive leadership, who brief our Board periodically through the year. The Council also sponsors training to build diversity and inclusion awareness, and supports Employee Resource Groups (“ERGs”), which are employee-led groups that create opportunities for employees to collaborate based on shared characteristics or life experiences to support each other for enhanced career and personal development. We have ERGs that include the African American Resource Connection, Be Proud (LGBTQ+), Hispanic Opportunity and Latinx Awareness, Women in Leadership, Europe, Middle East, and Africa Developing Female Talent Team, and Veteran Employee Talent Society. Through these experiences, we learn how our differences build stronger teams and how our histories reveal similarities.
Associates
Associates are the people we put to work for our clients. We attract our pool of associates through our proprietary mobile apps, online resources, extensive internal databases, advertising, job fairs, community-based organizations and various other methods. We identify the skills, knowledge, abilities and personal characteristics of our associates and match their competencies and capabilities to our client’s requirements. This enables our clients to obtain immediate value by placing a highly productive employee on the job site. We use a variety of proprietary programs and methods for identifying and assessing the skill level of our associates when selecting a particular individual for a specific assignment and retaining those associates for future assignments. We believe that our programs and methods enable us to offer a higher quality of service by increasing productivity, decreasing turnover, reducing absenteeism and improving associate safety.
Associates come to us because of the flexibility we offer to fill a short-term financial need and/or provide longer-term contingent flexible labor opportunities. Associates may be assigned to different jobs and job sites, and their assignments could last for a few hours or extend for several weeks or months. We provide our associates meaningful work and the opportunity to improve their skills. We provide a bridge to permanent, full-time employment for thousands of associates each year. We are considered the legal employer of our associates, and laws regulating the employment relationship are applicable to our operations. We consider our relationships with our associates to be good.
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We remain focused and committed to associate safety. We have developed an integrated risk management program that focuses on loss analysis, education, and safety improvement programs to reduce the safety risks that may be encountered by our associates. We continuously monitor injuries to our associates at our customer job sites and report throughout management on our internally developed Worker Safety Ratio score in order to monitor injuries across regions, industries, and brands. We regularly analyze this Worker Safety Ratio to identify trends that allow us to focus our safety resources on the types of jobs that may lead to more injuries. We distribute educational materials to our clients and associates, and perform client site visits to address specific safety risks unique to their industry or job site. In this unprecedented environment due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we have provided masks for all our associates, distributed infrared thermometers for branches and job sites, established a resource center for staff, and implemented drive-in job fairs.
COMPETITION
Contingent staffing services
The staffing industry is large and highly fragmented with large publicly-held companies as well as privately-owned companies on a national, regional and local level. No single company has a dominant share of the industry. We compete primarily with local and regional companies. We also experience competition from internet-based companies providing a variety of flexible workforce solutions. The strongest staffing services competitor in a particular market is a company with established relationships and a track record of meeting the clients’ needs.
Competition exists in attracting clients as well as qualified associates. Competitive forces have historically limited our ability to raise our prices to immediately and fully offset the increased costs of doing business, some of which include increased associate wages, workers’ compensation costs, unemployment insurance and health care.
The most significant competitive factors are price, ability to promptly fill client orders, success in meeting clients’ expectations of recruiting associates, and appropriately addressing client service issues. We believe we derive a competitive advantage from our service history, our specialized approach in serving the industries of our clients, and our mobile apps, which connect associates with jobs and create virtual exchanges between our associates and clients. Our PeopleReady JobStack and PeopleManagement StaffTrack mobile apps are helping to competitively differentiate our services, expand our reach into new demographics, and improve our recruiting, sales and service delivery. Our national presence, industry specialization, investment in technology, and proprietary systems and processes, together with specialized programs focused on worker safety, risk management, and legal and regulatory compliance are key differentiators from many of our competitors.
Human resource outsourcing
Our strongest competitors are companies who specialize in RPO services, as well as companies who offer broader human resource outsourcing solutions, which include RPO services. No single provider dominates the market. Competition also includes internal human resource departments that have not or are not considering outsourcing. The most significant competitive factors for RPO services are the ability to attract top talent, reduce cost per hire, improve retention, deploy best in breed technology solutions, and improve employment branding. Important factors for success in RPO services include the ability to add significant scalability to a client’s recruiting and hiring efforts, including accommodating seasonal and irregular hiring; the ability to increase efficiency by standardizing processes and facilitating transitions for candidates and employees; and the ability to source the most attractive talent at the best price. Our tailored solutions, client partnerships, proprietary technologies and service delivery are key differentiators from many of our competitors.
TRADEMARKS
We own several trademarks that are registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the European Union Community Trademark Office and numerous individual country trademark offices.
CYCLICAL AND SEASONAL NATURE OF OUR BUSINESS
The workforce solutions business has historically been cyclical, often acting as an indicator of both economic downturns and upswings. Clients tend to use a contingent workforce to supplement their existing workforce and generally hire permanent employees when long-term demand is expected to increase. As a consequence, our revenue from services tends to increase quickly when the economy begins to grow. Conversely, our revenue from services decreases quickly when the economy begins to weaken and contingent staff positions are eliminated, permanent hiring is frozen and turnover replacement diminishes.
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Our business experiences seasonal fluctuations for contingent staffing services. Demand is lower during the first and second quarters, due in part to limitations to outside work during the winter months and slowdown in manufacturing and logistics after the holiday season. Demand for contingent labor peaks during the third quarter for outdoor work and the fourth quarter for manufacturing, assembly, warehousing, distribution and logistics for the holiday season. Our working capital requirements are primarily driven by our associate payroll and client accounts receivable. Since receipts from clients lag payroll to associates, working capital requirements increase substantially in periods of growth.
REGULATION
Our services are subject to a variety of complex federal and state laws and regulations. We continuously monitor legislation and regulatory changes for their potential effect on our business. We invest in technology and process improvements to implement required changes while minimizing the impact on our operating efficiency and effectiveness. Regulatory cost increases are passed through to our clients to the fullest extent possible.
FINANCIAL INFORMATION ABOUT GEOGRAPHIC AREAS
For information regarding revenue from operations and long-lived assets by domestic and foreign operations, please refer to the information presented in Note 15: Segment Information , to our consolidated financial statements found in Part II, Item 8 of this Annual Report on Form 10-K.
AVAILABLE INFORMATION
Our Annual Report on Form 10-K, along with all other reports and amendments filed with or furnished to the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”), are publicly available, free of charge, on our website at www.trueblue.com as soon as reasonably practicable after such reports are filed with, or furnished to, the SEC. The SEC also maintains a website that contains reports, proxy and information statements, and other information regarding issuers that file electronically with the SEC at www.sec.gov. Our Corporate Governance Guidelines, Code of Business Conduct and Ethics and Board Committee Charters are also posted to our website. The information on our website is not part of this or any other report we file with, or furnish to, the SEC.
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