Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Andrew Fones - UBS.
Andrew Fones - UBS
Yes, thank you, and Steve I’m very sorry to hear the personal news. If I could start, I was wondering if you could just talk a little bit about typical seasonal trends. November through February and the typical pick up that you would see in the new year, whether the comments you’ve made about stabilization, January to February looking at the trends year over year, i.e. You’ve seen an actual pick up in the number of confirmations in February or whether this was an actual stabilization in terms of number of confirmations in February from January --?
Gary Burnison
Well, this is not a typical seasonal period. We clearly suffered worse during November, December and January than has been the case in past years and the stabilization that we saw towards the beginning of this new quarter is difficult to extrapolate to the rest of the quarter.
Normally, our fourth quarter is extraordinarily strong and so you would expect in a normal environment that there would be certainly stability, if not strong growth through the fourth fiscal quarter of the year, but I think that’s pretty difficult to predict at this juncture of the economies.
We saw a level of decline in November into the end of the calendar year that was steeper and quicker than probably any time in the company’s history, and I think if you parse some of the information that’s out there on our primary public competitor and then other private companies in this sector, it’s clear that the entire industry is under siege and that clients are broadly pulling their horns in very rapidly.
So, we are optimistic about the long term prospects for the business, but we are cautious about the near term and as we said Andrew, we are trying to do our best to maintain cash flow neutrality or better in this very rapidly evolving environment , but it’s tough out there right now.
Andrew Fones - UBS
Yes, to kind of clarify that point. Was this stabilization in the actual number of confirmations in February in that year-over-year trending confirmation? It sounds like it’s in the number of confirmations?
Gary Burnison
Yes, that’s a fair assessment.
Andrew Fones - UBS
Could you tell us based on, if you hit the guidance number in Q4 what you would expect to pay out in bonuses at the end of the year?
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