Huron Consulting Group Inc. Small-Cap Virtual Conference

Thank you. Yes. Thank you, Mark.

Thanks for having us and inviting us to present, and thanks for the series of really good meetings we have been able to have today. Very much appreciated. Thanks to everyone else as well for joining to listen to the presentation. I will go through a few slides here, try to keep my remarks relatively brief so that we can have plenty of time for Q&A, but definitely will take the opportunity just to give a little bit of perspective on Huron and the markets that we are in. Moving forward, have the all-important safe harbor language here, flip through that, and then get to the introductory slide here. I will start a little bit with who we are. Huron, I will not read all the words here, but we are a global professional services firms.

The real punchline from that top section is we do help our clients solve some of their most complex challenges and achieve their most ambitious goals, as it says.

I think the key takeaway from that, from my perspective is, this is a topic that comes up in a lot of investor conversations, where if you are thinking of a scale, if you are thinking of at one end of the scale, projects that the client views to be discretionary or maybe interesting investments, if we have got the budget to be able to fund it on one end of the spectrum, versus projects that really are addressing what are the most pressing priorities of the leadership teams at our clients, the most strategic items on their agenda, the ones that quite frankly relate to existential risks in some cases to the degree that there is financial pressures or things of that nature. We are much more over on that end of the spectrum in terms of what we are doing for our clients.

Quite frankly, oftentimes, negative scenarios, disruption, financial pressure, regulatory pressure, things like that are actually what drive the demand for our needs. We will talk a little bit more about our industries, but we are in some industries where that is really prevalent. Speaking of those industries, if you look at the lower left-hand portion of the slide, you can see about 50% of our revenue comes from the healthcare industry, about 30% of our revenue comes from the education industry, about 20% of our revenue comes from commercial, which is really everything excluding healthcare and education. What do we mean when we say healthcare? Because that could potentially be something that is interpreted differently by different stakeholders. For us, healthcare are not for profit healthcare providers. So think hospitals, health systems, academic medical centers. Education, what do we mean by that? Another industry that is potentially broad.

For us, it is higher education, then further drilling down in that, it is really the top 200 research universities in the U.S. So not necessarily some of the smaller institutions, not institutions that maybe are more satellite campuses or regional campuses. We are typically dealing more with the larger flagship type universities, big state systems, some of the more prestigious private universities. That is really the sweet spot for our clients, I will talk more about the types of things that we do in those industries in a second. Then if you pivot over to the right-hand of the slide, we are getting towards the end of 2026 here, but this is the comparison of 2025 back to 2024, our last completed year, and we are really proud of the results that we had in 2025, 12% RBR growth, revenue before reimbursable expenses compared to 2024.

We were able to increase our margins by 80 basis points, our adjusted EBITDA margins. We increased our adjusted diluted earnings per share by 21%. Then equally encouraging when you look at the part of the table below is that that growth was broad-based across the different components of our business. We are now getting towards the end of 2026. If you look at the midpoint of our 2026 guidance, so on top of these results from 2025, we are expecting revenue to be up another 12% at the midpoint of our guidance this year versus 2025. We are expecting to expand our margins by another 50 basis points from 14.25% adjusted EBITDA margins in 2025 to 14.75% at the midpoint in 2026.

We expect our adjusted diluted earnings per share at the midpoint, all of these metrics have been at the midpoint, to be $9.20, which would be a 17.5% increase in adjusted EPS in 2026 versus 2025 on top of the 21% that we were able to deliver last year. Obviously, we are pleased with those results and the continued momentum in our business. That is who we are and a snapshot of our recent financial performance. I would like to talk a little bit more about our underlying strategy and how that translates into what are the midterm financial goals that we have provided at our most recent investor day at the beginning of last year. The number one element that I call to our strategy is really expanding our leading position in our two most prominent markets, healthcare and education. A few comments about those industries.

They share similar characteristics from the perspective that they are both going through significant financial strain right now. They are both highly regulated industries, so there is a lot of complexity that comes from that. They both, in many cases, have clients who have underinvested in their technology infrastructure over time and find themselves at a point where they need to pivot, and they need to be modernizing their tech stack, especially if their aspiration is to be able to take advantage of some of the more advanced technology that is out there, like AI. An important thing to just double underscore when we talk about this is that financial strain component, and sometimes for newer investors to the story, this can be something that is a little bit confusing on the surface when you hear, okay, there is a lot of financial pressure in not-for-profit healthcare.

There is a lot of financial pressure at the big universities. Those are your clients. Is that a bad thing for Huron? The reality is, it is that pressure that our clients are feeling that really drives a lot of demand for our services. A big part of what we do across healthcare and education, in particular in healthcare, at the heart of what we do, is performance improvement work. That is when you have clients who have found themselves in a position where their margins are below where they need them to be to be sustainable, in terms of being able to meet their cash obligations. Maybe it is in order to meet bondholder covenants or things of that nature.

Our offerings are very ROI, outcomes-based driven to go to those clients and find the path to be able to help them restore their margins and help them get to more solid footing so that they can do the things they want to do, which is invest in their mission. Other thing I would point out on this first one, just because it is so important, neither of these industries are hobbies to Huron. These are industries that have been focus areas of ours, education since the very beginning of the company, healthcare only a few years later. We have made the investments over time into the talent, the tools, the know-how to really be able to deliver for our clients on their most pressing priorities within these industries.

Our clients will tell us that's something different than other consulting firms that perhaps dabble in the industries or it's part of a broader group of not-for-profits or something like that. For us, this is our day job, focusing on these industries, and it shows in terms of the credentials that we've been able to establish there and the outcomes that we've been able to drive for our clients. Our viewpoint is that there's going to be continued spending over the next couple of years by our clients in these industries to stabilize themselves financially, to make investments in their technology infrastructure, and to deal with what, in many cases, are increasing complexity related to regulation, data security, patient safety, aspects like that that are core to their missions. We believe that our suite of offerings are best positioned to continue growing within those markets.