First Advantage Corporation Common Stock Citi’s 2026 Global TMT Conference

Well, it's hard to pick one. Those are all probably pretty good events that have all happened over the last 12 months or so. I think the consistency of the business results is probably number one, right? I think you came out of the last number of years, and there's been wild swings in what's either perceived or actually happening in the macro. Obviously, we have an acquisition and leverage moved around, and then a lot of other just noise in the system, whether that be from the markets themselves, whether that be big IPOs, big other events going on, AI, the storylines that came out earlier this year. I think the consistency of the First Advantage results, certainly over the last three or four quarters, where, to your point, base growth at the end of last year was effectively flat. Now it's turned positive. Our upsell, cross-sell, and new logos, our go-to-market momentum really powering growth. 17% new logo upsell, cross-sell last year in Q4.

Double digits consistently in Q1 and Q2 this year. Very consistent for a number of years. Our retention level is at 96% plus. The fact that we have been able to perform that consistency through the noise, and then you have all of those other compounding effects of getting the synergy values flowing through our EBITDA and profitability. Getting cash flow now rebalanced after the acquisition and getting leverage marched down. I think that just that consistency of the results through the noise, and then you are starting to see, I think, the markets reflect a little bit of that. Obviously, the S&P inclusion back in June was a nice little milestone event to cap that off.

I just think that overall consistency, despite everything that everyone is sensing and hearing and on the reliability of BLS data and all this other noise.

Our ability to perform very consistently and positively through all that has been the number one driving factor.

Yeah. I think, look, we have been talking about this for a number of quarters, and over the last couple of years, there has always been a couple really good verticals in our set, and there has been a couple laggards, and that has balanced out to this slightly negative number that we have had the last number of years. I think a couple of big changes has been the good guys have gotten stronger, and the laggards have started to just stabilize down. When you have got really good demand, and we were talking about this earlier upstairs, from your blue-collar verticals, like for us, that would be retail, transportation, which is a lot of home delivery and logistics. Our industrials vertical has been doing phenomenally well. Joel reminded me how great our staffing was doing earlier today as well. When you have your core base doing really well, and there is fewer laggards.

International has been growing for eight quarters in a row. You get to what compounds to really good. If you break down our numbers, that 7% number that we posted on base growth in Q2, roughly 50% is related to those kind of customer-specific initiatives. That also means that you got roughly 3.5% growth coming from core base, which is a great number in long-term scheme.

Correct. That is like when you get all those verticals stabilizing and growing all at the same time, and you get some good runway out of that. I think it is being a diversified vertical base, having diversified geographies. We talked about upstairs, an enterprise customer focus on these large enterprises that have much more stability. SMB wavers a lot more quarter to quarter and month to month. These large enterprises have much more strategic long-term mindset. Add up both of those kind of concepts, and you get to good, diversified, stable growth. To your point, those customer initiatives, hard to underwrite them being long term.

Certainly, we don't know if base will be full 3% for the rest of the year, but we certainly feel better about where base is today than we did six months ago when we put out our original guidance for the year.