by the way, I should have written: 'I THINK it went down for this reason"
fwiw, ACA was a HUGE tailwind for these guys (again, PAYC might be small enough where it doesn’t matter; we will know soon enough)…from the ADP call:
So, I think what we’ve had is, we had – and I think been – every quarter, I think, very, very clear. We haven’t been pretending that it was either sustainable or that we had done something magical to all of a sudden create such a huge increase in productivity in our sales. I wish we had. Clearly, we got help from, and lift from ACA sales. We had two years of 13% and 12% new business bookings growth, fiscal years. I don’t know the last time that we had ever done that. Clearly, maybe we didn’t emphasize enough how much help we were getting and certainly now it’s difficult to go back to the sales force and remind them that we had help and now the help isn’t there any more. We’ve got to now focus on fundamentals. We’ve got to go back to selling new clients and the old-fashioned approach of ADP of having a reasonable mix of headcount growth and productivity growth and I think when I look through the numbers and try to normalize for ACA, we feel pretty good about where we are in terms of headcount and also sales force productivity.
adp is a big Bubba company too - 12 to 13% was stunning…