Advantage Solutions Inc. Q4 2025 earnings call

Thanks, operator. Good morning, everyone. Thank Thank you for joining us. I want to thank our teammates across the organization for their ongoing commitment, successfully serving our clients as they navigate the market uncertainty and volatility, helping them adapt and succeed. Before turning to our results, I'd like to highlight several strategic actions we've taken over the past few months to strengthen our foundation for shareholders, employees, and customers, and to position the company to drive sustained performance in 2026 and beyond. First, we moved towards refinancing our debt later this month. We had over 99% acceptance of a new debt package from our lender group, extending maturities to 2030. This refinancing is intended to provide operating flexibility and enhance our liquidity profile while helping us achieve our long-term leverage target of 3.5x or less.

This provides us with greater financial flexibility and ensures we have the capital necessary to continue investing in our core capabilities while delivering exceptional service to our clients. This planned refinancing includes a paydown of approximately $90 million of our debt. Second, we further sharpen our portfolio through the divestiture of three non-core businesses. These transactions streamline our focus and allow us to redeploy capital into higher return opportunities aligned with our long-term strategy. As a result of these actions and our strong cash flow performance, we ended the year with $241 million in cash and a strengthened balance sheet, positioning us in a place of greater stability and optionality as we enter 2026. Finally, our upcoming reverse stock split supports broader institutional accessibility as we enter our next phase of growth.

Taken together, these initiatives increase our strategic flexibility, enhance operational focus, and allow us to move from defense to offense. Turning to fourth quarter results, net revenues of $785 million were up approximately 3% year-over-year, reflecting an improving trajectory in Experiential Services while Branded Services continue to face cyclical headwinds and Retailer Services face slowing spend and some revenue timing shifts. Combined, our overall company delivered Adjusted EBITDA of $88 million, which reflects the ongoing mix shifts toward more labor-intensive, lower margin businesses. Our cash flow generation was strong, and in the second half of 2025, we generated $174 million in unlevered free cash flow, a significant increase from $50 million in the first half and representing over 100% unlevered free cash flow conversion, excluding the payroll timing of factor.

One reason for this was our successful SAP implementation earlier this year. Net free cash flow of $74 million in the second half exceeded our target of 30% of Adjusted EBITDA, excluding payroll timing. As I discussed earlier, our cash position strengthened materially. We believe our liquidity position provides ample flexibility to serve our clients effectively, invest selectively, and further improve the balance sheet. As I mentioned earlier, we further streamlined our portfolio in recent months, including in early 2026, with several small divestitures of non-core businesses resulting in approximately $55 million in proceeds, further bolstering our cash position. Before discussing our strategy going forward, I want to briefly reflect on how we arrived at this point, both from an external and internal perspective. Externally, consumers continue to be cautious, value-seeking, and selective.

This is affecting overall shopping behavior, spending at retail with lower-end consumers buying more on promotion at lower price points. While higher-end consumers are shifting purchasing habits away from expandable consumption categories to healthier options. These two dynamics affect our business in three ways. one, we can see overall lower commission revenue where we manage sales for CPGs or private label manufacturers. Two, we see CPG and retailer P&Ls challenge leading to some lower spending on merchandising projects, resets, and remodels. Three, we are seeing overall pullback in traditional marketing as retailers demand more investment in their retail media networks. These pressures are real, and many are cyclical in nature. Despite them, we made meaningful progress adapting our business to these conditions to compete more effectively for the long term. Internally, we have been proactively investing in a multi-year IT transformation that concludes this year.

These investments required upfront spending but are already driving efficiencies across the business. We expect our capital spending to decline in 2027, reflective of ongoing support rather than transformation investments. We continue to rationalize applications to reduce complexity and support efficiency in our IT platform. We also experienced some client losses in certain areas, particularly where clients became more price sensitive or chose to bring work in-house. At the same time, overall retention remains high, and we continue to execute against our pipeline of new clients, reinforcing the fact that there is continued demand for our services when we compete on the full value of our offering. With that context, let me turn to what we are doing to structurally improve performance and strengthen the balance sheet. First, we are improving productivity across the organization with our centralized labor model serving as a core driver.

This model is strengthening our high-volume labor businesses by improving utilization, execution, consistency, and cost efficiency. Throughout 2025, we advanced the rollout of this model in Experiential Services, and it is already delivering tangible results, including reduced reliance on third-party labor, improved execution rates, and better profitability per labor hour. Expanding this rollout remains a key priority for 2026. Technology will continue to be another critical driver of our productivity while also differentiating our ability to better serve our clients and customers. Given our investments in new systems, we are able to rationalize many of our legacy applications and systems to provide a more efficient IT backbone. Our enterprise transformation, including our new SAP and Oracle systems, in addition to our Workday implementation later this year, creates a strong and modern platform to provide insight-driven services to our clients and customers.

Our new technology platforms are enabling efficiency gains, better workforce optimization, faster data integration, and sharper visibility into performance, positioning us to operate as a truly insight-driven organization, which we believe will propel us to a leading position in the industry. In parallel, and in conjunction with our materially upgraded systems, we are integrating AI where it drives the most impact. One example is AI-enabled staffing and scheduling, which is already making us more effective and efficient, reducing manual work while improving speed, predictability, and labor utilization. Second, we are focused on driving growth that deepens client relationships, expands our addressable market, and leverages the capabilities we have built. Our partnership with Instacart is a good example as it continues to progress, combining their in-store audit capabilities and consumer insights with our retail execution network to help CPG brands improve on-shelf and overall in-store performance.

We remain focused on pursuing new partnerships with retailers outside the grocery sector, which would significantly expand our addressable market. Our efforts are focused on retail segments where our capabilities translate well. We will share more as these opportunities progress. We are leveraging our industry-leading data investments through our alert-based sales system called Pulse. This is an AI-enabled decision engine that integrates proprietary retail data with real-time capabilities to help clients anticipate demand and drive growth while more quickly identifying opportunities. Pulse will help our key account managers either remediate underperformance in an account or accelerate growth by more quickly providing the causal analysis and recommended actions. This was enabled by our migration to the cloud and creation of our data lake, which is helping us ingest and analyze more data than ever before.

Turning to our segments, Experiential Services delivered strong Q4 results and stands as the clearest proof point of our progress in 2025. Accelerating demand, improved hiring velocity, higher labor readiness, and more consistent execution drove increased event volumes, stronger execution rates, and better predictability, positioning us well entering 2026. Branded Services remained under pressure, consistent with prior guidance. Softer CPG spending, tighter procurement, and client insourcing continued to weigh on performance. While we are not expecting a near-term inflection, we believe many of these pressures are cyclical. In 2026, our priorities are stabilizing the revenue base and converting new business even faster. Our pipeline of new opportunities has expanded, and we expect to provide more visibility into conversion and win rates as the year progresses.

We are also managing costs and continuing targeted investments in data and analytics and partnerships to drive measurable client ROI. Retailer Services results were affected by channel mix shifts, project timing, and cautious retail spending, particularly in grocery. Some activity shifted into early 2026, creating a timing mismatch as costs were incurred in 2025. Overall, while performance varied by segment, the underlying theme is clear. Execution discipline and operating consistency are improving, particularly in Experiential Services, which gives us confidence looking ahead. Turning to our outlook, we are approaching 2026 with cautious optimism as we shift from heavy investment to enhanced execution. 2026 is the final year of our elevated IT spending, and we expect to begin seeing the operating benefits of these investments flow through our results.

While the industry faces continued macro headwinds, we expect revenue to be flat to up low single digits, excluding divestitures, driven by continued momentum in Experiential Services, a more stable trajectory in Retailer Services, and a move towards stabilization in Branded Services over the course of the year. We expect Adjusted EBITDA to be flat to down mid-single digits excluding divestitures. I want to be direct about why. This reflects ongoing macro uncertainty and mix shifts toward more labor-intensive, lower-margin services while some higher-margin businesses remain challenged. That said, execution discipline, labor productivity initiatives, and technology investments should drive an improving margin profile as the year progresses. Cash flow remains a core strength and priority.

Thank you, Dave. Welcome everyone to our call today. I will review our fourth quarter and full year 2025 performance by segment, discuss our strong cash flow results and improved capital position, and expand on Dave's guidance commentary. Starting with Branded Services. In the fourth quarter, we generated approximately $259 million in revenues and $39 million Adjusted EBITDA, down 9% and 29% year-over-year respectively. For the full year 2025, Branded Services generated $1 billion in revenues and $143 million in Adjusted EBITDA, down 9% and 21% year-over-year respectively. Performance reflected sustained softness in CPG spending throughout the year, which continued to pressure results in the fourth quarter, along with challenges in the sales brokerage and omnicommerce marketing businesses.

Insourcing remains a headwind, but we believe this is cyclical in nature, and we are focused on converting our large and expanded pipeline of new business to counteract this trend. We continue to manage costs tightly while prioritizing execution and positioning the business for recovery as client spending improves. In Experiential Services, fourth quarter performance once again exceeded our expectations. We generated approximately $280 million in revenues and $28 million Adjusted EBITDA, up 19% and 115% year-over-year respectively. Results reflected higher event volume, up 15% in the quarter, and faster and more responsive hiring with execution rates exceeding 93%. The EBITDA margin was once again in the double digits as the incremental margin in the quarter reached over 30% despite elevated labor-related costs, including workers' compensation and medical benefits.

For the full year 2025, Experiential Services delivered $1 billion in revenues and $101 million Adjusted EBITDA, up 8% and 34% year-over-year respectively. This segment experienced a strong second-half finish to the year supported by our hiring initiatives, strong execution, and robust demand supporting momentum as we move into 2026. In Retailer Services, fourth quarter revenues were $246 million with Adjusted EBITDA of $20 million, up 1% and down 22% year-over-year respectively. As Dave mentioned, performance was impacted by delayed projects leading to costs being incurred ahead of revenue being recognized and ongoing pressure in advisory and agency work due to channel mix. A portion of planned project activity shifted out of the quarter and into early 2026 while associated labor onboarding and training costs were already incurred.

We also saw higher workers' compensation and medical benefit costs in this segment as well. For the full year 2025, Retailer Services generated $944 million in revenue and $87 million Adjusted EBITDA, down 2% and 12% from the prior year respectively. Looking forward, we believe this business is positioned to grow in 2026 in a more normalized environment for retail project work, expanding our retail partners beyond the grocery segment and an exciting suite of new value-added services we are developing. For the year, shared services and IT costs increased as systems move fully from build to live operations, which is in line with our expectations. We see shared service costs rising modestly in 2026, inclusive of higher IT spending as we near the end of our transformational IT investments.

We do expect the growth in these costs to moderate after 2026, allowing us to capitalize on the efficiencies created through our shared service infrastructure. Moving to the balance sheet and cash flow. We ended the quarter with $241 million in cash, up roughly $40 million sequentially. The strong cash performance was driven by improved working capital performance, proceeds from recent divestitures, as well as the partial settlement on the Take 5 litigation. Specifically, we sold our minority interest in Acxion Foodservice in September for approximately $20 million, and we sold SmallTalk, our small marketing-oriented business, in December for approximately $20 million. In January, we divested part of our stake in Advantage Smollan for $27 million, and we also received the final $27.5 million cash payment in early 2026 from the sale of Jun Group.

We did not repurchase debt or shares during the quarter. Our net leverage ratio was approximately 4.4x Adjusted EBITDA at quarter end, in line with the third quarter, but above our long-term target of 3.5x. We're executing against a clear plan to reduce. Given our strong cash position, we expect to apply approximately $90 million to debt paydown as part of our refinancing. Over the course of 2026, we expect our strong cash flows to contribute to continued debt paydown. With cash on hand, expectations for improved cash generation in the year and approximately $440 million available under a revolver, we believe our liquidity position supports our needs amidst a still volatile macro environment.

Turning to cash generation, DSOs improved during the fourth quarter to approximately 57 days, the lowest level in our history, reflecting improved working capital management and intense focus on collections and normalization following earlier system-related disruptions in the year. Optimizing DSO has been a priority for the organization, and we will continue to make progress in reducing DSOs as we move through 2026, which will contribute to additional cash flow generation. CapEx was approximately $24 million in the fourth quarter due to heavier IT-related spending against our transformation plan. For the full year 2025, CapEx totaled $53 million. Turning to cash flow, we generated approximately $75 million of adjusted unlevered free cash flow in the fourth quarter, and the conversion rate was nearly 130%, excluding the payroll timing shift.

Cash flow performance exceeded our expectations, driven primarily by strong working capital execution, including improved DSOs. For the full year 2025, Adjusted unlevered free cash flow achieved an approximately 80% conversion rate, excluding payroll timing, reflecting a materially stronger second half performance. As Dave mentioned, the planned extension of our debt maturities from 2027 and 2028-2030 provides meaningful financial flexibility for the business while improving the balance sheet over time. We believe this outcome will be favorable for all stakeholders and will allow us to execute our strategy and remain focused on delivering, improving operating and financial results. The strategies we have in place are the right ones to achieve that goal. Turning to our outlook for 2026, our guidance reflects a measured and prudent view of the macroeconomic environment, coupled with confidence in our cash flow generation.

Excluding divestitures, which contributed approximately $20 million to revenues in 2025, we expect revenue growth to be flat to up low single digits with continued strength in Experiential Services, a more stable performance in Retailer Services as project timing normalizes, and a gradual recovery profile in Branded Services over the course of the year. Excluding divestitures, which contributed over $10 million to Adjusted EBITDA in 2025, we expect Adjusted EBITDA growth to be flat to down mid-single digits year-over-year, reflecting continued macroeconomic headwinds, the last year of our major IT investments and mix shifts toward lower margin, labor-intensive businesses, particularly within Experiential Services, but also within Branded Services. We expect execution and profitability to improve through the year, our guidance assumes a conservative margin profile early in the year and does not rely on a near-term inflection in Branded Services.

Cash flow remains a core focus in our outlook. We expect unlevered free cash flow of $250 million-$275 million for the year, with net free cash flow conversion of approximately 25% of Adjusted EBITDA, excluding any incremental debt refinancing costs. This outlook is supported by improved DSO performance and disciplined working capital management and a steady CapEx profile. We expect CapEx to be approximately $50 million-$60 million in 2026, consistent with 2025 levels. This represents our final year of elevated CapEx levels before we start to see a meaningful reduction in future years. While we do not provide quarterly guidance, we do expect a widening of the first half, second half Adjusted EBITDA breakdown, with the second half representing approximately 60% of EBITDA.

Importantly, this guidance reflects our current assumptions around consumer spending, the labor environment, and timing of known project activity. As always, we aim to plan our business prudently and responsibly. Thank you for your time. I will now turn it back over to Dave.

Thanks, Chris. Our expertise and range of services position us well to navigate through 2026 with resilience and agility. We continue to execute with discipline and advance our productivity and growth initiatives. We are making measurable progress in our transformation and see proof points across the business. Finally, our focus on long-term shareholder value creation is unwavering. Operator, we are now ready to take questions.