ActiveOps Plc (AOM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, and welcome to the ActiveOps Plc results for the year ended 31st of March '23 Investor Presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, [Operator Instructions] Before we begin, we'd like to submit the following poll. I'd now like to hand you over to Richard Jeffery here.

Good afternoon, and thank you very much, and welcome to everyone on this call. It's a pleasure to present our results. And interestingly, this is also the first presentation we've done directly to a more retail audience for our shares. So in that sense, I'm also particularly excited. And alongside me, I have my colleague, Ken Smith, who's recently joined Finance Director, and he's got the benefit of only recently joining us, but he's got the blessing of now coming in with a slightly new perspective. So I look forward to bringing some of that to life as we go through this presentation. Now as we are new to this process and for many of you who may not have heard of ActiveOps, I thought I'd kick off with a little bit of overview of the company. We're an enterprise SaaS-based software company. So that means we sell our software to large blue-chip enterprises, primarily in the sort of banking and finance related industries where they have a lot of people doing, let's call it, administrative-type work. It's SaaS, that means it's a recurrent software license. And if you look at our figures, which we'll talk more about, over 90% of our revenue comes from our SaaS revenue. So that's booked month-on-month and also in there key statistic for you is that if you look at our net revenue retention, which is the amount each of those customers grow in every year, like last year, we had 110% net revenue retention. So in other words, that 90% of our revenue is growing itself by 10% before we add in any new customers. So it's a very well structured business. We also do some training and implementation work, which also is high margin and is related to the amount of sort of support work or installation work we do. We have some other sort of great stats in that sense that the business model means it's annual in advance. So we also accumulate cash. We've been running the business since our IPO pretty much on a sort of marginal level. In other words, we haven't prioritized EBIT. We've just run ourselves to grow as much as possible. We've turned that kind of dial up a little in the last year, and I'll talk more about that. So the business is definitely running profitable. But the key point is we don't have any debt and we've never borrowed any money. We actually have a business which is growing cash year-on-year. We've consistently done that. We operate across 3 right -- structurally 3 regions around the world, North America, EMEA and Asia Pacific. And although there's differences in every region, I think the key message that you'll hear here is that each of the regions in their own way is responding to the market in a similar way, and we are achieving some sort of good, great results across the world. So just to sort of give you some context for the solution of ActiveOps. The world of work is not getting any simpler. I'm sure your papers and my papers are the same are reporting on concerns to CEOs have the managing productivity of people when they're not working in the offices anymore. But we have a whole lot of stuff like, for example, you imagine if you were working in Silicon Valley Bank recently, where suddenly they finance of the business imploded but the people actually running those offices operate in those consumer products and the products they offered, suddenly, their parent company is in terrible shape and the operational risk associated with that. That introduces for regulation -- for regulatory environment for all our sort of target customers, huge sense of they have to be able to demonstrate they're in control, which is absolutely about what we do. Skills development is not a key concern. We've talked about -- we hear a lot about well-being, people having to learn from home. And that is a real issue because these specialist type organizations where you need to run your operations well, but nurture talent and capability. And again, the more in control you are, the better you respond to that market. And so ActiveOps product is absolutely in the sweet spot healthy organizations, if you like, do more with what they have and to respond to in an agile fashion to the challenges, let's say, of the increasing amount of XYZ product or the reduction in mortgages being sold and so on. We're all about organizations to be able to control their operation better. And the context of it, the business environment which ActiveOps is operating is that I think you could describe it as [ free trial ] which is great for us because it means we sort of #3 or #4 on the top 10 list, but then perhaps further down -- further down the list. In terms of our publicity, what we put out to market is things like the ops Index, which is a -- we have colossal data across the -- on activities in this kind of sector across the world. And what we do with ActiveOps is publish that for our customers to provide them with a unique set of benchmarking data around how their particular performance or indeed their suppliers, if they're an outsourcer perform against market industry standards of which we're the standard setting for. So we have some fairly unique features about our product, which you can't get if you effectively solve the problem of planning, say, locally using an individual spreadsheet. That's a huge advantage for customers having that. Now in terms of our customer base, as I mentioned, we solved a problem which they have myriad of systems of work. They have their workflow tools. They have their case management systems. And they also, on the other side of the equation, out there, that measure what our time and people, their human capital management systems like Workday. ActiveOps' solution is to synthesize all those different pieces of information so that you and I as operational leaders have a kind of perspective, which is consistent, independent of what type of work we're doing. So that I may be in underwriting, someone else could be in claims, but the language of how busy I am and what help I need from you and your team is actually a common one. And that's a real issue because most of these organizations have frequently talk about the problems of silos and the inefficiencies of scale, rather than the efficiencies of scale. And ActiveOps' solution is to overlay that, bring a common frame of managing work and capacity, which unlocks that capacity which particularly in current environments where you have issues of productivity and pressure on cost, it's just a huge, huge need. This is the way we articulate some of the value we add. So customers using our software get more from their capacity and their teams, and they use that in a lot of different ways. In many cases, it's a cost reduction. But just as many times, it's about using that time for better value. We had fantastic case, which is on the screen, one of those on screen where a customer improve their Net Promoter Score from a rather desperate 8% to over 80% on the back of the time they were able to release to focus on customer service queries. It can just as much be a value in terms of the internal working environment. Some of it can be very stressful when you're working to deadlines and pressures. And ActiveOps brings that control to an environment, which means a hugely improved sense of well-being and stability for the teams within organizations. It's just like any [ truism ] the more in control, the safer I feel, the better able I am to perform. And ActiveOps is absolutely in that space. Our customer base, there's some names, the brand names there. We operate globally. We are pretty much dominant in the Australian market. We have lots of customers in the U.S. and in EMEA in the U.K. And as you can see from the brand names, these are all organizations with large cost base under a lot of pressure, both regulatory efficiency, but also service level to adapt and respond to the challenges of the evolving market. So it's a really interesting workplace. The other facet to be aware of is our solution is essentially generic. It doesn't really matter what type of work it is. You can see on the left, there are some processes that we cover, but the point is it's just as relevant for any type of work, it could just easily be in government departments in the U.K. like the passport agency or the DVLA, where people are doing admin work. We're not operating there, but the solution itself is entirely applicable to that. We have 3 core products. We provide a planning system ControliQ. We have a CaseworkiQ, which is an expansion of the functionality for where more knowledge-intensive work is being used. It's a particular problem for many banks. They have case management systems where individual types of work flows through your company, but on lots of different systems. ActiveOps provides an overlay to that so that at an aggregate level or an individual team level, you know what work you've got, you know your point you got to do. And more importantly, you can tell anybody else who needs to know about it, what it is. We also have a desktop intelligence package, which is widely used in the U.S. We have 1 customer with 21,000 desktops, which is effect to be giving visibility over the use of applications, how people are spending their time, how long they work, great case study recently where we used it and to show actually a problem with the technology because some of the employees are having to get up at 4 a.m. to sort of free their desktop to sign into the VPN to get access to start work at 9:00. Things like that, which makes it have incredible power when it comes to understanding their use of technology and companies. So let's move on then. This is the results of the presentation about our year. And there's really 2 parts to this. Firstly, there's the headline financials, which we'll come to. And the second is really what we've done under the bonnet to make the business, if you like, looking forward, even better. Now in terms of the business year, we've had a really very strong year, again some interesting context. And I think that's seen in that critical SaaS-based revenue growth. You can see there, we had enjoyed a 13% growth in that recurrent revenues. So that 90% of our revenue is just getting more, it's increasing all the time. And that's great. But I think just as significantly, and a business that's always been very sort of cash generative but run for some sort of just marginal profitability, we have deliberately started to demonstrate the ability to throw off and generate EBITDA. So in terms of our profitability, we've moved from EBITDA at a reporting level, minus 0.3% last year, we've actually joined reporting a GBP 700,000 profit this year. But I think the important thing and Ken can speak to this, is if you look at the half year, the ability now to turn new sales into bottom-line profit is there. Reflecting the cash generation, which I touched on year-on-year, our cash also grew by GBP 1.6 million, which -- the business has got no debt. So we have the cash to do what we want to do, and we can expand and expand -- expand our capabilities reflecting that. And that's a nice position to be in from the point of view of -- at the end of the day, against the current share price, the cash actually in the bank represents about 25% of the enterprise value of the company. So that's a very strong and safe position from the point of view of the investor. So under the bonnet, though, I think this is the exciting bit. What we've really done alongside the business growth, which I've really touched on already is we've worked over the last 3 or 4 years, completely replatforming our technology to maximize our capability to respond to what's the exciting opportunities through machine learning and AI. We call it management process automation, which is actually nothing more than, if you like, bringing a really new level of decision intelligence to how operational leaders can manage teams. That means about how many people they need, but it's also how people are performing. It's how keeping people in the business, how they are performing. So we're all working for the same data. And the impact of that is going to be huge because what it means is I am more able to know what's going to happen next week, which means I can interact with my colleagues. leaders around the company. We can articulate our -- we can be more confident of getting the yield from our new investments in workflow technologies and other things that these companies are doing. So I think our performance and our -- building on our platform for growth for next year, we've got some great things to talk about in there. And also more generally, in terms of us coming to the public markets, developing some good relationships with key players. That side of the business is also getting very strong. And to date, we have enjoyed a very strong relationship with Microsoft. We are a key supplier -- people buy a lot of as your consumption through us, which gives us some high level of visibility with our sales teams. But just as importantly, they support us in the boardrooms of our major banks and customers to what an enterprise-grade provider we are. And then also importantly, in terms of our revenue opportunity looking forward, we've undertaken quite a substantial pricing review to layer in so that we can maximize the revenue from our new product set and our go to market. For those of you who track us, you'll see quite a step change in the sort of messaging and the way that we effectively articulate what active officers, some very niche providers in the coming months. So there's an awful lot, I think, to be sort of quite excited about. But before we sort of go into more of the strategy, I'm going to hand over to Ken to talk a little bit about the finances of the business.

Yes. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. So I've only been with the company about 12 or 13 weeks now. So it's been an interesting journey. My career has spanned over 30 years. I'm a chartered accountant by origin. And I've been in a lot of different businesses, private and public, but nearly all of them in technology. So I've seen different models, they are rising revenues. And it's very nice to know that ActiveOps is a SaaS business, that's to say customers are built in advance, typically a year in advance gives you the comfort of knowing that this month's revenue is largely last month's revenue plus a little bit extra. So you don't have all that concern as to killing what you have to reach every month. It also means that the cash flow is very positive -- predictable. So the business is a very predictable business. Most of the revenue, that's almost 90% is this SaaS model, which is a great place to be in the modern world. The all kind of key messages in this slide, just showing this all work, the 2 kind of key measures that SaaS companies are measured by our ARR, annual recurring revenue and NRR or net revenue retention. And so both of those are very positive in the year, 22.6% ARR at company year-end, that's grown by just under 13%, slightly helped by currency, but almost a double-digit growth. NRR, which is a measure of the stickiness of customers is up to 110%. And again, that's a very positive movement across the year. I guess the key highlight of the year, though, is the EBITDA position. Company has moved into an EBITDA positive situation. And that, especially when you look at the first half, second half split was very firmly in positive territory in the second half. So we entered the new financial year this year with a very strong profit screen board to move forward with. And as Richard mentioned, the SaaS model as it is, our profits tend to turn into cash flow. So we ended up with a very healthy cash balance at the year-end of over GBP 15 million. And that tends to be second half loaded. So we should expect that to grow further later on this year. In terms of the detail, again, the -- it shows the benefits of this split of revenue and the SaaS revenue, GBP 22 million is the -- SaaS is the current revenue you've just described. The other sort of revenue is T&I training and implementation that's where we help customers install and support the product doing cleaner or more important that is digital training solutions. Both of those sources of revenue are very profitable and especially on the SaaS side of things. The margin held up very well, grew slightly, and that's partly a product mix thing. But again, 81%, 82% gross margin is a really nice place to be from a technology business point of view. OpEx slightly up on last year, but this is kind of the way the model is starting to work, but we can get more than double-digit revenue growth and single-digit OpEx growth then -- you don't need to be a mathematics to work out that, that becomes a very profitable business going forward, which should get us interesting bottom line territory in the years to come. Otherwise, we did capitalize them later as all software companies are now required to do. So we don't have any choice in that. That's kind of the rules [indiscernible] standard for. So we try and keep that to a limited extent. So we did capitalize about GBP 0.9 million which was up on the previous year. As Rich already described shortly some of the things that, that's gone into an extremely exciting bit of technology that will benefit future year profitability. The EBITDA bridge just describes starting last year, negative territory and ending up in the new section on the right, very positive territory, so GBP 1 million overall growth across the year. One of the things that is interesting is if we look at the customer support side of the business, which we've invested a bit more money on that, only the 1 key reason why the NRR has grown across the year. And so we've got some very, very happy customers that are very sticky. Cash flow bridge, again, described the cash journey -- the movement across the year, but the key factor there has been positive cash flow from operations. And on to the GBP 1 million of investment into new products, which we described. There's a very new person on the block here. I can look at the business with a very positive feel. It's got a very healthy balance sheet, GBP 50 million of cash sitting there. This is a very strong position to underpin the business and no debt as we described, very predictable growing the current revenue. So that's a safe place to live as well. As we'll see across the coming years, strongly cash generated too, we expect our cash power to grow further. The business is positioned across the globe. Each part of the globe has grown across the year. So that derisks the recession and risk across the world as well. So that's a nice safe metric. And our exit run rate or EBITDA run rate really takes us into an exciting place going forward. I'll hand it back to Richard.

Thank you again. So looking, if you like, a bit more forward now, I want to come -- go talk through some of the activities, if you like, we think are going to make a potential shift in our sort of run rate. I think I've touched on some of this already, but you've got a situation where given the complexities I touched on, our software will be able to both see things, in other words, diagnostic AI, where you actually have a visibility of the things that you wouldn't otherwise have appreciated. Predictive, the ability to give information to our customers about what is likely to happen and therefore, informed choices they're able to make and then this critical bit of prescriptive AI. And this is where our software will not only help you know something that's about to happen but give you choices and suggestions about how to respond. So from an operational level, that might be things about there's an opportunity to move resources or work between teams. It might be about how you manage your people, even some of our predictive AI now around the actual likelihood of a number of staff wants to change jobs or looking for new roles and so on. I think the potential in this area is incredibly powerful. And what that adds up to in terms of our business model is through those different products, whether it's the CaseworkiQ expansion, which is the planning tool into, for example, our American Healthcare WorkiQ base. There's a huge need there for, if you like, improved agility and control. That's 1 upsell opportunity. Equally, we have plenty of examples where customers are using our ControliQ product, but a lot of their work which is to do with, for example, anti-money laundering activities and/or complex claims investigations. There's an awful lot of work, which they need much better visibility over. And similarly, CaseworkiQ in that sense is a big upsell opportunity. And just to complete the triangle there, you've got customers who have been longstanding. I mean, many of our customers have been with us for going on 20 years used in our planning software, but this Desktop Intelligence product I mentioned, WorkiQ has huge application across a base where, if you like, the visibility of where people are, the need, I mean, just in the Australian market, for example, there's a huge amount of regulatory reporting requirements to be able to -- and the duty of care evidence the fact that you're protecting your employees from extended working hours and working home and so on. So we see around GBP 90 million of cross and upsell opportunities within our existing customer base. That's to be absolutely clear, the extendable market of addressing software on top of or extending to customers with whom we already have a contract -- we already have a commercial contract, which I think has been, again, part of the reason we are exciting partly because we have the products that meet specific needs. And as an example of that, that we launched last year and the CaseworkiQ, that's already up to GBP 1 million of ARR, probably more importantly, in terms of the growth trajectory. However, most of our customers are now at some stage of trying it, specifically, 7 out of our top 10 customers are now in active involvement with CaseworkiQ in various levels of scale, and that creates a sort of solid opportunity for full year '24. I think one of the things we were concerned about is the extent to which any one of our products start to overlap in terms of revenue cannibalization. The great news from our experience just one case study here. If you look at TD Bank, who are well known as one of our distinguished customers in the U.S. and Canada. They found using all 3 products entirely complementary. So whether it's the ControliQ, which gives them the planning, whether it's the WorkiQ and the desktop activity or indeed the CaseworkiQ, which is about that complex overview of lots of activities. All of those things are inherently valuable, but importantly, add together to give the greater visibility. So I think acting in tandem, they've all added value, but there's still that growth opportunity is the case where it becomes wider. Again, it's just an early adopter stage of our product set, but it's a great and also advocate to communicate to other customers about. So I think this is our development, specifically for next year. We're bringing out smart planning, which is leveraging some of the AI facilities that we've touched on to improve the precision, if you like, of what our software will help you with. And we see -- what we've seen through our beta testing just as a for example, is a 4% improvement in productivity of teams that are deploying Smart Planning. Now if you've got, let's say, one of our bigger customers might have 8,000 people on the software, 8%, 4% of 8,000 is a big number, huge value, direct return on investment very easy upsell. Similarly, smart skills. This is the ability to eliminate all the paperwork and the judgment attached to trying to maintain an appreciation of the skills across big numbers of people. Our software will be able to determine, does determine if you like what people are good at. learning curves, people are varying from the learning curve, trajectory and people who are perhaps peaking and then need to be rotated or might have other needs for cross drilling. All that kind of the analysis side of things, which relied on individual local experience, we recall it, suddenly we can build that into the software. Hugely bankable, hugely impactful at scale. And of course, critically not something you're never going to solve using your own little spreadsheet. So we're starting to be able to have more and more reasons why this is an enterprise adoption tool. It's worth noting also one of the things we did last year was we commissioned quite a detailed investigation or a study of our pricing model, which is something we've lived with as a single product company since pretty much I founded the business back in 2005. What that came back with was hugely reassuring firstly, that our customers think we offer very good value what we already do. But what I also said was, you can now start your products into this series so that some of the features I've been talking about are worth more money and you can package them to exploit that. So over the course of what will effect to be a 3-year project given the level of recurrent revenue we've already got customers with, we see this as a big revenue uplift. The ability to package those products into a new series of software, which add incremental value to our customers and, therefore, greater revenue-generating opportunity. So that's -- because it's -- we are very well building these products, but clearly, we need to be on top of monetizing it, and that's part of the logic behind that story. So in terms of the actual -- looking forward, the priorities of the year, now this is something which, I guess, anyone who's been tracking us for a while would look at it and say that's -- the important thing is this is all about execution. There's nothing in our priorities for the current year other than let's do what we've already said, and we've got a pretty good track record of doing that. There's no pivot. There's no sort of random acts of chance in here. What we're doing is driving through the marketing activity, which we've invested in, the pricing strategy we've invested in, and the new product set we've invested in, the new technology we've invested in, so that we can drive up the revenue drivers. And we can turn what is effectively, let's say, 6 new customers a year. We sell to big customers. They take time to sell, and we sell most new business to existing customers. But clearly, you need that pipeline of new customers coming in, even if they are large enterprises, and they take a long time. So we need to -- we're really focusing on accelerating that sort of new customer acquisition. We're looking to getting the value out of the investments we've already made. And really, alongside that, keep our customers loyal because our NRR, at the end of the day is the thing that is the engine room of growth. And if we can drive what is still a good result, 110 better than most software companies, I think, if we can get that up north of here because I consider 110 just the baseline, the opportunities for really changing the revenue and profitability of the company is pretty large. I'll finish the formal presentation with a quick sort of specific update on -- I mean the first quarter of the year has now passed. And essentially, we're in line with expectations. We've sold a couple of new accounts as well. But more importantly, what we're seeing is that take up of our new product set. So I think we're well on track for our current activity. And all -- you can tell. I think there's so many elements of the journey we've been on over the last 3 or 4 years, which effectively coming into place now, but we do think it's quite an exciting time for the business. So that's the formal side of this. However, one of the real values of this presentation and the platform is the ability to take questions. So what I think I'll do is open the floor.

Fantastic. Richard, Ken, thanks indeed for the presentation. [Operator Instructions] A few moments to review those questions submitted today. I'd like to remind you that a recording the presentation along with a copy of the slides and the public Q&A can be accessed via your investor dashboard. Richard, Ken, you have to take a great deal of time to look at them. But if I could ask you just to click on that Q&A tab and where appropriate to do so. just read out the question and give your response and I will pick up from you at the end.

Okay. Well, there are some good questions, [ Nir ] and thank you and keep it coming. I think if I pick up specifically on one of the interest rate question. I see one of the questions is the cash flow bridge shows 0% interest earned. I hope you are now earning a better rate than that. And the short answer is we are. But of course, reporting on last year's results with the sort of money rates, essentially, it was not a -- it didn't figure greatly in last year's results, but as the interest rates have come up, it will in the future. But it's also worth noting, we have quite a complicated business because our operating units are in Australia, in South Africa, India, in Ireland, in the U.K. and in Canada and the U.S. So from just a cash flow management perspective, that makes our treasury quite a sophisticated function. So we are pretty adept at that. And the team are obviously on to spot rates and overnight rates. But to be honest, as we all know, for the last 10 years, that's barely been a wrinkle in the system. So I think that might change. But we are and we're on it, but I think it will make a marginal difference to the -- really to the figures. Perhaps the bigger question there is, at what stage should we expect to deliver a substantial profit and cash flow, assuming you win from here is mainly profit. Well, we are in that lovely stage where, in effect, subject to anything else we choose to pull lever off. If we sell the GBP 4 million ARR, then GBP 3 million of it dropped through to the bottom line. And I think the message for us is when we came to the market, we see massive growth opportunity and shame on us if we don't take it. Market context in the last 2 or 3 years has been to ensure if you like, that may be true, but let's make sure we deliver profit. So we're still on that game. Effectively, we see the process over the next 2 or 3 years converting more and more, if you like, of that operating leverage to bottom line growth. But that said, we'd still be in a position to say if the growth is there, we should take it. And I don't think we'll ever run the business for, if you like, borrow money to leverage up. That's just not the game we're in. But if the marketing means prospects and opportunities are there for us to really accelerate 6 new logos into 12 into 20 into who knows 14 in a couple years' time, then clearly, we would take that opportunity. And importantly, we have the funds to do it. So at the moment, we're not calling, if you like, our cash versus policy per se, but that the sentiment of this company is still sort of -- in a sort of rule of 40, I'd have a 30% growth and 10% profitability company if we can create that sort of momentum in the company. Looking at other questions here, how much of your cash is actually available for acquisition or support growth. Most of it looks at advanced payments. Well, the nature -- most of it looks like advanced payments from customers for next year's services. Well, it sort of is, but the holdback of the dynamic of this business. I mean, effectively, you are taking an advance on, but you've also got 87% gross margin. So it's not like we're storing up a lot of cost base that then has to be delivered. If it's 87% gross margin, that gives us the discretion to use that money to invest in the business in a variety of forms. And the actual delivery cost of it is fairly nominal. You got to be careful with that and make sure that's sort of carried in lots of ways, but it does give us the opportunity, let's say, to drive the growth in different areas. I mean in terms of our actual sort of metrics, we track our pipeline and we track growth. And as you'd expect, we have all sort of interesting data on that. What is interesting, I think in terms of question is how much view do we have on future pipeline conversion rates? Current -- historically, ActiveOps' fastest-growing phase was in 2008 to 2011, that was the last financial crisis. And there's no doubt there's something about, if you like, that need when companies feel the squeeze to do more with what they already have is one that plays to our type of environment. So we're seeing a little bit of that already, and we've seen some good uptake this year. And I think that in conjunction with some exciting products that sounds like they could be real silver bullet to a lot of big institutional problems start to create the -- you keep the interest and then you need to sustain it to sit in the sales cycle. So I think we're quite optimistic in the metrics in the pipeline are all to do with the expansion in different product sets, so it's probably never looking and never looked as healthy as it does now just because of those different opportunities. But then there's the velocity through the pipeline, which is actually a far more important thing. And I mean, I still contrast it between a fast tortoise and slow tortoise. We are talking about selling to large enterprises, but ActiveOps has SOC 2 compliance, which is a major hurdle, a lot of bridge for a lot of software companies. We have the credentials of having sold over many years to some of the biggest companies in the world, and we're just in a good place. It doesn't make it easy. It doesn't make it happen quick clearly, but we're in a very good place compared with one of our competitors. So I think that's an interesting stuff there. The question here is -- so when you -- so when you're seeing such a no-brainer wise and your sales growth higher. It's interesting one of these -- one of the conundrums we've always found in our stock is that it's one of those things which is a senior management level. They sort of assume it's done well already. But COVID done us a lot of favors because what that crystallized out was the fact that, firstly, some of the ways that people had control in terms of the stuff we're talking about just didn't work when people were working from home. So that's brought an awful lot sharper focus on why better ops management, if you like, is so fundamental to almost every aspect of the business proposition. And I think generally, that sort of efficiency sort of cuts on the moment doing more is also something sort of sharpening people's sensitivity to it. I think one of the areas I'm most excited about for the coming year is the impact that our new marketing strategy is happening. We recruited a CMO last year for the first time. We would have had a marketing activity, but we brought in somebody with a lot of experience around SaaS-based marketing of B2B products. And you'll see a lot of that in terms of our messaging coming out, which is very much more around the value story. And hopefully, that -- what I do know that will have a big effect in conjunction with the kind of technology, which is generally innovative. What is a normal level of share option remuneration going forward? Is this not really something that should be in the adjusted profits? I think one of the things that we've got to be mindful of is the kind of trade-off between public and private equity here. I lost the -- we lost our recent finance director, who had been with me for a long time because private sector, he was able to move to a firm which was able to offer him very generous terms, which you couldn't possibly have earned through our sort of scheme. So the first principle in ActiveOps, I think, is one of transparency and disclosure. So the whole idea of this is that anything in there has to make sense to any eyes. I'm personally, as a heavily invested shareholder founder, I've got to be careful because I assume everybody is already motivated in the way I am. But realistically, part of the options -- part of the important facets for anybody and giving the business gear is to have the right option scheme in place. That said, I think ActiveOps fortunately, is blessed with a proposition that actually many people feel pretty motivated to be part of without getting too evangelical about it. And we have a lot of people in our company who came because they are part of -- they received it as customers and then wanted to join. And that's always affected our remuneration and in all sorts of other sort of elements of the company in terms of our retention and our sort of sense of loyalty, which I think we've got a lot to be grateful for. So I haven't got a specific answer on the option plan. My stand is point of principle I just think it's important to be completely upfront about it. And also, I don't believe that if you like, options or if you like, a fundamental driver to get people to perform, I think it's the environment you give them, the belief and the passion in the product they own, and that ultimately drives our success. Just reading the other questions here. What level of ARR growth do you think the company is capable of? Well, there's a $64,000 question. I mean I think what I'm trying to paint here, it's an awful lot of elements that are possibly -- I think of awful lot of the elements of the context could achieve a shift change. Now that's a call, and I have every reason to believe my [indiscernible] in that sense. But I think there is a huge opportunity in this market. There isn't really much a solution -- a competitive solution in a general sense that we've got. We have some unique features about our data, our IP structure around the solution and our sort of our user base. So I think there's a lot of opportunity here. It's down to us now to execute against that strategy. One of the questions here is, again, an interesting one. As well as Microsoft, could you have a lot of partnerships with other large players, which could help sales? I think the key point here, and we found in the past, it's having the level of market sensitivity to our product, we have some really excellent relationships with a number of the leading partnerships and the consultancy advisers as well as other technologies. We're on the Blue Prism Exchange as well as SS&C. They're a supplier as well as a customer, which is exciting as well as Microsoft. I think what we're having gone down and support a lot of partnering activities, what we observe is, it's when the market is really vibrant for a particular product is when you see those kind of supporting teams spring up in the consultancies and SIs. And I think we will get there, but it's a question of when, not now, but when. Our large and efficient government department as a potential target -- Oh God! I wish, I think that absolutely. And then genuinely, and when you look at the sort of various things and recent history around this. It's not just about those sort of bringing some -- sort of sweating the assets or anything to ask like that. It's about bringing transparency so the hard-working people in any form of work have the means to show and tell how hard they are working. It's a 2-way bet here. And I think that's part of my frustration with that kind of world. Is it too often, it becomes a kind of binary sort of rather ill-informed data-free argument rather than if we could give reasonable visibility that he knew people and [ BLA ] were working comfortably, and working hard. That will be a good thing. And vice versa, there is an accountability of the public that says better data supporting it will be a good thing. So I think there's massive opportunity there.

I think with that, Richard and Ken, you've covered off every single question that's come through. And of course, if there are any further questions that do come through, the team will be able to review those and we publish responses where appropriate to do so on the Investor Meet Company platform. Richard, just before redirecting investors to provide you with their feedback, which is particularly important to you and the team. I just ask you just for a few closing comments, please?

Very much. I hope that's given you a reasonable picture of ActiveOps. We're very excited about where we are as a business, which has got steady revenues, good growth from our existing customer base and lots of opportunity. But thank you again for making the time to watch this webinar.

That's fantastic. Rich and Ken, thanks indeed for updating investors today. Please ask investors not to close the session, you should be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order the team can better understand your views and expectations. It will only really take a few moments to complete and is greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of ActiveOps plc, I'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation. That concludes today's session, and good afternoon to you all.