Brave Bison Group plc (RT70.F) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, and welcome to the Brave Bison Group plc Investor Presentation. [Operator Instructions]. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it received during this meeting. However, the company will review all questions [indiscernible] appropriate to do so. [Operator Instructions]. I'd now like to hand over to Theo Green, Chief Growth Officer. Good morning, to you sir.

Good morning, everybody. My name is Theo Green. I'm the Chief Growth Officer at Brave Bison.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining. I'm Oliver Green, Executive Chairman of Brave Bison .

Good morning. I'm Philippa Norridge, CFO of Brave Bison.

So thank you. Thank you very much, everyone, for joining us today. We have a bit of a summary of the annual results that came out this morning. So 2022 was a very important year for Brave Bison. It was a very operational year for Brave Bison in which the majority of our time was spent executing a business plan that saw us acquire Greenlight in 2021. So that was the prior year. And no major acquisitions were made in the period. We did make a small bolt-on but no major acquisitions were made in 2022. We saw our gross profit net revenue more than doubled. Our profits up almost 90%. Our head count at the end of the year was about 160-odd people. And that actually rose to about 280 people in February 2023. So this year, once we completed the Social Chain acquisition. And finally, net cash of about GBP 6.2 million. We also have an undrawn credit facility for a further GBP 3 million. But no doubt this will give us some good flexibility as we continue throughout the year.

Thanks, Theo. As Theo said, 2022 was a year of excellent progress for Brave Bison as we've successfully completed the integration of the acquisitions of Greenlight and Best Response Media and delivered organic growth. Our statutory profit before tax more than tripled to GBP 1.5 million. And our revenue, gross profit and adjusted profit before tax, all showed strong growth and were ahead of market forecasts. Overall gross profit growth was 117%, and this included organic growth of around 12%. Our adjusted profit margin for the year calculated as adjusted profit before tax over gross profit was a healthy 15.4%. This does show a slight reduction on the previous year, but this is simply a reflection of the change in our revenue mix. Our gross profit from Digital Advertising and Technology Services almost tripled during the year and these revenue streams generally operate at slightly lower adjusted profit margins than the advertising revenues from our Media Network. Therefore, this growth than the overall margin reduced slightly. These profits have translated into an increased cash balance at the year-end, with net cash of GBP 6.2 million, which is an increase of GBP 1.5 million on the prior year despite payment of the Greenlight deferred consideration of GBP 0.8 million and the completion of the Best Response Media acquisition during the year. As Theo said, we also agreed to revolving credit facility about GBP 3 million with Barclays. This remained undrawn at the period end, but it gives us additional flexibility to make further acquisitions. It's also worth highlighting the tax credit of GBP 0.6 million during the year, which increased our profit after tax to over GBP 2 million. Most of this credit relates to R&D tax credit claims totaling GBP 0.5 million. We received GBP 0.2 million of this back as cash during 2022 and the remainder in the early months of 2023. The next slide shows these results in the context of our trading history of recent years and our expected results for FY '23. As you can see, we have shown consistent growth over the last 3 years across all metrics, and we expect this pattern to continue into 2023, driven both by organic growth and the acquisition of Social Chain, which we completed in February of this year. Now moving on to the next slide, I wanted to briefly talk through the exceptional costs and adjustments between our statutory profit before tax and our adjusted profit before tax of GBP 2.6 million. We had around GBP 60,000 of restructuring costs during the year. This primarily related to costs associated with setting up a new subsidiary in Bulgaria and transferring contractors over from a third party into this subsidiary to give us more stable and cost-effective nearshore development leases. There were also some small acquisition costs relating to the purchase of Best Response Media, which again bolstered up rate by some commerce offering with new capabilities and team in Egypt. There were also further adjustments for acquisition accounting related costs, namely impairment and amortization of acquired intangibles. The impairment charge of GBP 0.5 million is a result of the successful integration and rebranding of the Greenlight acquisition into Brave Bison. During 2022, we carried out a purchase price allocation exercise to identify the intangible assets acquired as part of the Greenlight acquisition. As part of this exercise, a value of GBP 0.5 million was assigned to the Greenlight brand name. This asset was therefore impaired when the brand name was retired after a successful rebranding. Similarly, as part of the purchase price allocation exercise, other intangible assets were identified as part of that acquisition, which are being amortized over 10 years, and this amortization has also been adjusted for. Such adjustments are likely to continue and become more significant in size as we complete and integrate further acquisitions. Finally, we adjust for equity total share-based payments. These include charges related to our employee share option scheme, which is used to incentivize key employees as well as charges in relation to Director's long-term incentive plans. Redemption of shares in relation to these plans is contingent on achievement of performance conditions and may only account between the third and sixth anniversaries of the adoption of the plan.

Thank you, Philippa. In our RNS this morning, alongside our numbers for 2022, we also made a comment about the integration of Social Chain, which we acquired in February of this year, as well as a more general statement about trading in the year ahead. So on Social Chain, first of all, it's worth saying, we really are pleased to own this business. Social Chain works with some huge global clients. It has some fantastic talent inside of it and its brand and reputation in our industry is incredibly strong. As has been the case with all of our acquisitions so far, we will be integrating Social Chain into the Brave Bison platform, and we've already made substantial progress with this. The original Brave Bison social and influencer team has been merged with a much bigger Social Chain team in Manchester, and we've already integrated support services like HR, IT and much of finance. We'll be launching a new look and feel for Social Chain in the second half of this year, and this will include a revised proposition and go-to-market strategy as well as a new website. New business opportunities across Brave Bison Social Chain are already being pitched to by a combined company team, and this is really exciting. We also have our first company-wide social event taking place this evening in London and Manchester. As far as the outlook for 2023 is concerned, the Board is confident of hitting full year guidance, but trading has definitely become a little bit more difficult if we compare it to this time last year. Clients are taking slightly longer to sign off budgets. And often, budgets are moving down the marketing funnel. And what this means is the campaigns that drive performance and clicks are often prioritized over campaigns that drive more brand awareness, brand love and brand affinity. From an acquisition perspective, our balance sheet is still healthy, and we are in a net cash position. We've made tactical bolt-on acquisitions in the past including The Hook in 2020 and Best Response Media last year. And we think we're in a really good position to take advantage of lower valuations moving forward. It's also worth saying that we're now seen as a really good acquirer within our industry. Our brand and reputation is strong. We work with some aspirational clients and our connected model is attractive to businesses and founders and CEOs that are looking to partner with a future-facing organization. We thought it might be helpful to remind shareholders and prospective investors of our hybrid business model. There are 2 parts to our business: our digital media network and our digital advertising and technology services. The Digital Advertising and Technology Services arm of Brave Bison is where we generate fee-based income. We work with blue-chip clients and large enterprises like New Balance, KFC, Primark, Muller and Pfizer. We carry out these services from 3 business units. Each led by a managing director and each Managing Director has a respective leadership team. We call these business units, Brave Bison Commerce, Brave Bison Performance and Social Chain.

This is an overview of a typical customer value chain at Brave Bison. And a good example would be a new product launch. So in this case, a consumer electronics product. Now in order to drive sales for that product, a digital advertising agency like Brave Bison performance would be appointed to plan and buy digital media based on target audiences. This will extend across search platforms like Google, social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram as well as display media. Now in order to effectively market the brand on social platforms, a social media advertising agency like Social Chain or previously Brave Bison Social & Influencer will be appointed to create content for these advertising campaigns. Some of this content will be created in-house and some will be created by professional creators or influencers who will then distribute that content to their audience as well. Now lots of these adverts will appear at the beginning or in the middle of video content. This would be video content on platforms like YouTube or TikTok or Snapchat or Facebook, and this will be on channels similar to the ones that we operate in our own digital media network. In fact, the advert that you see in front of you for the new Apple Watch was taken from one of our Snapchat channels. If a customer clicks on a digital advertisement, they will be sent to a landing page where they can actually buy the product. This is where Brave Bison Commerce comes in. We integrate the technology systems that enable a transactional website to function, and we maintain and upgrade these systems to ensure that they're best in class. Now our industry is very exciting and growth forecasts are still in the high single digits for the foreseeable future. Digital advertising as opposed to traditional now represents over half of the total ad spend. And this gradual rotation that accelerated during COVID and out of traditional media still provides a strong tailwind for our sector. Within digital advertising, we operate in some of the fastest-growing segments: social, which is partly driven by an explosion in influencer marketing and video are core parts to our business. and we see plenty of client interest in these areas.

Next slide, please. New Balance is a flagship customer of Brave Bison performance. So we've been working with New Balance for over 5 years now, and we are effectively their digital marketing partner for all of Europe. Now New Balance is -- has had a bit of a moment over the past couple of years. Growth has really been incredibly strong. And we have been responsible for helping them drive performance across a number of digital marketing channels. What this means is that we effectively manage spend across platforms like Google, YouTube, Facebook as well as some other sort of more niche marketplaces, and we are responsible for ultimately driving sales for our clients. Our relationship with New Balance is incredibly strong. And we're over in Amsterdam, which is where their European headquarters is based every few weeks. The team at Brave Bison is pretty much dedicated to New Balance. And we have a regular sort of dialogue with various different parts of our business to understand stock levels and priorities from a commercial point of view. And this is really a sort of good case study of where we've been able to increase fees year-on-year by quite a significant amount and really sort of develop and build our relationship that has gone from being 1 or 2 channels into actually more like 5 or 6 channels now. MKM Building Supplies is one of the largest construction and building supplies companies in the U.K. It does about GBP 1 billion in turnover, and we are responsible for building and now managing their e-commerce platform, which we launched last year on a platform called BigCommerce. Now whereas Brave Bison performance and our New Balance relationship is a little bit more data led, our relationship with MKM Building Supplies is much more technology-led and delivery led. We are effectively responsible for running the operating platform that allows MKM customers to transact online. The platform is very sophisticated because it integrates with a number of their back-office systems. There are various different technologies associated with different delivery times. And as you can imagine, there are thousands and thousands of SKUs, which really create a pretty complex platform. And we are effectively the technical and delivery partner to Brave Bison Commerce, which is again a fantastic case study for us. And if Brave Bison Performance, New Balance was probably more associated with data and MKM Building Supplies and Brave Bison Commerce was a little bit more tech and delivery-led. Our case study with Amazon is a lot more content and creative-led. We created a number of different influencer campaigns with Amazon Prime to promote a new series that they had launched, and we did so across lots of different platforms, including TikTok. And here, you can see, it's really our ability to tap into the right influencers, the right campaign, the right -- to meet the right audience goals and really we're responsible for finding influencers, managing the campaign, coming up with a creative story and really sort of understanding how to make a big noise across social platforms with regard to this new Amazon Prime series.

So Oli has talked about our digital advertising and technology services business. Separately, our digital media network is a really core part of Brave Bison. It represents approximately 1/3 of our revenues and a significant proportion of our profits. Now in this business, we are, in effect, a broadcaster, but for the digital age. So instead of owning a portfolio of TV channels and radio stations and magazines, we operate a network of 650 different channels across YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat. And we monetize these channels through advertising. And when you watch our channels, so a channel that we have on YouTube is the PGA Tour, you will see a short advertisement, usually at the beginning and possibly in the middle of the content that you watch. And the advert that you see will be based on what we understand about you and possibly your browsing history and anything else we can use to serve you the most relevant advertisement. And these adverts, all sold programmatically. So we don't actively speak to these advertisers it's purchased through Facebook or through Google. And what that does do is enable a much higher margin on this business because we don't have to employ salespeople to run around the country. Now one of our flagship channels is called The Hook. This is a brand that specializes in TV and celebrity culture. It has almost 10 million followers across all social platforms and because of its high reach and its high levels of engagement, studios typically invite us to film junkets for the promotion of their new movies. So here is a short show reel with some of our content. And if you could play that video, please. [Presentation]

Thank you, Theo. We had a question from a shareholder last year around operational leverage and to what extent it applied to our business model. And so we actually thought we'd cover it in a slide this year. In short, there really is significant operational leverage inside of our existing business, not everywhere, but in certain areas, particularly where it comes to the leadership teams of our business units. We actually believe that each business unit could probably take on between GBP 2 million and GBP 4 million of incremental gross profit or net revenue without really expanding the leadership team. We also believe that our efficiency is built into how we've structured our support services. We have 1 marketing team across all of our 4 business units, our people strategies are rolled out across teams, and we're also developing a very sophisticated way of resourcing, project management and timekeeping through a preferred -- a professional services automation platform called Financial Force. It's really in these sorts of initiatives that will drive margin uplift for the business in the medium term. And you can really see an old chart of sort of how our business is connected and how our business runs. You can see you've got the Brave Bison Board at the top, you've got the Exec Board, which is -- everyone in this is cool, plus Buster, our Chief Operating Officer. And then you then got the respective managing directors of each of the business units. And each Managing Director has a leadership team of between about 3 and 8 people and it's really within those teams that we think that there is the most operational leverage because those sort of key 8 people per business unit are able to take on and manage a much bigger portion of revenue, even if it means within the sort of delivery function, those teams do expand accordingly with the increased amount of revenue. We also thought it might be good to touch on sort of how we run our marketing programs, how we win our new business because ultimately, this has a big impact on organic growth. And around half of our new business comes from our network and half comes from what we call demand generation. And demand generation is basically where we generate awareness and demand for our services by expanding our audience by building authority for what we do and generating interest in our company and the different capabilities that we have. So we have a very sophisticated and experienced marketing and a new business team, that is now 8 people, and the marketing team actually reports to me directly. Roles are across sales, content creation, distribution and operations. And effectively, what we do is we create things like white papers. And white papers are sort of 10-page documents or guides on a particular topic and we'll promote those white papers on platforms like them. We'll put them in e-mail newsletters. And those guides will effectively talk through best practice, talk through case studies, talk through sort of innovation going on in the space. And what that does is it sort of connects us with ultimately potential clients that may not necessarily have a need to buy right now. But when they are in market, they will associate us as being leaders in the field and people that they should basically call up and put on a pitch list as probably one of 3, 4 or 5 companies that they're going to ask to basically pitch for a big piece of business. For those of you that follow us on LinkedIn, we're very noisy on LinkedIn. We're constantly talking about clients that we're working with, be it new clients or existing clients, contract renewals. We actually put together a little 1-minute videos that sort of take the audience through different types of content that we've been producing for our clients as well as sort of events that we attend. And it really gives you a flavor for basically what's happened within the month of Brave Bison. So please do follow us on LinkedIn and you'll get a flavor for what's happened in the last month. We're very good at writing up newsletters. So our newsletters go out to quite a significant audience every single month, and they detail, again, sort of case studies and what's gone live and sort of new business that we've won as well as sort of thought leadership around certain topics and those go out to a very significant audience. And Social Chain also has a really sort of exciting and growing podcast called Social Minds. And Social Minds is basically a podcast where we interview industry leaders around best practice and new platform updates and what's happening within their business and their organization. And this is a great way of us connecting with potential clients, but it's also a great way of us sort of demonstrating to the wider industry. So we are absolutely plugged into the cutting edge of all the sort of new developments that are happening as well as showing off all the expertise that happens and is inside our organization. Our own website is constantly being updated with new case studies. We're really proud of our website. And so please, if you ever are interested in the different capabilities that exist within site Brave Bison or you want to know more about some of the clients that we're working with and some of the projects that we're doing, please have a look at our website because a huge amount of effort goes into our website and lots of leads come through our website on a weekly basis, big global brands get in touch with us while on our website and say, "I've just seen a case study. I just read a piece of thought leadership on your site. Please, can we get in touch." We also run online events. So we call them webinars. We actually ran a sort of a roundtable discussion last Friday with one of the big enterprise technology platforms called BigCommerce as well as an existing client of ours, MKM Building Supplies. And we talked again through how we've helped them navigate the sort of complexities around a sort of a new way of working, which is sort of composable commerce, this idea of sort of integrating with a number of different technologies and basically running a platform in a very sort of modern and innovative way. And we'll also be running a live event in H2 for Social Chain. But again, that will be an in-person event with lots of different industry leaders, and we'll talk through sort of best practice and how we're working with clients and how we're helping clients really take advantage of certain platforms.

So Brave Bison is not a technology company and so far we do not sell software or a license. We're a services company. But what that means is that we're very interested in using technology to improve the way that we work for our customers and the way that we can deliver better margins for our shareholders. And what that means is that we have over the last sort of 18 to 24 months, built up an internal special projects team. And the role of this team is to license and develop and deploy software across the business and it's broadly collected into 2 main goals: the first is improving our own efficiency and improving our own internal processes. And the second is solving a particular customer problem that perhaps can't be solved without technology or would not be feasible if the technology was not available. So an example of the former would be something called Prism. Prism is a custom reporting tool that we've developed. It's not particularly -- it's not particularly sophisticated software. It's simply an aggregation of a bunch of different softwares altogether that allows us to track performance of campaigns across multiple platforms. Of course, when we work on Facebook and on Google, those 2 systems don't like talking to each other very much. So we usually have to build a bit of our own technology to bring them together. Another would be how we are using generative AI platforms, platforms like ChatGPT or Midjourney, to write and to create content for our own B2B marketing campaign. So a lot of the content that you'll see may well have been written by an AI that's been closely trained by someone in our business. And that massively increases the amount of content we're able to publish despite having a relatively small team. So an example of the latter, where we solve a particular customer problem would be something like Bison Bot. Bison Bot is a copywriting tool. So we developed Bison Bot to write content for specific product pages. And one of the reasons we did that is because a number of our customers are multi-brand retailers, and that means that they have tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of products available on 1 site. So a big customer -- a big customer of ours is Curry's. And as you can imagine, they have really sort of tens of thousands of products available. And what that means is that optimizing each of those pages to ensure that all of the copy and the product descriptions are correct, and that they can be correctly optimized for the purpose of search. It's actually very, very difficult to do manually. You probably would never attempt to do that. So we built a writing, an auditing tool, and that's based on GPT-3, which is the predecessor to GPT-4, which is used for ChatGPT to help automate that process. So the AI writes the copy, we then check the copy and deploy the copy. So these are just a couple of instances of where Brave Bison is very much moving towards being a technology-enabled services company. Another quite distinct thing about the way we operate is something that started during COVID but actually has become more and more prevalent in what we do. And I think it's telling of the way the business operates and the way that a lot of our clients operate. So we have a fully hybrid approach to working. We do have an HQ and we'll always have a heart, and that will be in London. But over 25% of our headcount don't report to any of our offices. And then we have a further 75% of our business that come into the office, I would say, somewhere between 1 and perhaps 3 times per week. We currently have staff in 11 countries. That number has actually increased as a consequence of Social Chain. But this sort of distributed approach really does give us a bit of an operational advantage. The first is just speed of hiring. So it's not necessarily about cost. And often, we hire people in locations where they're not necessarily cheaper than they might otherwise be. It's just the speed, there is more talent in 11 locations than there is just in one. The second is the protection against wage inflation. So obviously, when you work in resource hubs, particularly in Eastern Europe, some of the wage inflation, particularly in the last 12 months has been very, very high. And whereas we have hubs all over Europe. So we have people in Croatia. We have people in Bulgaria, Serbia. We also have a hub in North Africa and Egypt. People in Morocco. So we have a distributed approach there. It definitely helps on property costs. We will have a much smaller office compared to what we would have had pre-COVID. And it massively improves the diversity of our workforce, and it takes us away from being just a London-based business. We're really pleased to have operations in Manchester. We're really pleased to have operations in the U.S. and in London as well, of course. But we think that's important given that not all of our clients are based in London.

Brave Bison is committed to both assessing and looking to continually improve our environmental and social impact. Our sustainability strategy has 3 pillars: carbon emission, waste & recycling and consumables. We use an independent specialist consultant to measure and verify our Scope 1 and 2 carbon emissions each year and then offset at least the equivalent for a variety of offsetting programs to give us Scope 1 and 2 carbon neutrality at least. On waste & recycling, we encourage recycling with multiple recycling points around our offices. We operated largely paperless office with printers used to minimal amount and automatically set to double-sided and black and white. We assess our consumables purchasing regularly to minimize the environmental impact of our consumption, looking at reducing purchases of red meat and dairy products, using recycled paper and removing plastic bottled water from our offices. On the social front, we are committed to developing a diverse workforce and inclusive culture and the removal of barriers for underrepresented groups. We currently have a fairly [indiscernible] employees between male and female, although there is work to do at the senior leadership team level since this is still 70% male. 35% of our employees self-identified being from ethnic minority background, which we believe represents high levels of diversity for many companies in our sector. Our current initiatives in this area includes regular surveys, diversity and inclusion training, apprenticeships, paid volunteering days and unlimited online coaching for our employees.

So on this slide, you can see our long-term vision for the company. On the left-hand side, you have a combination of digital advertising and technology services that have a business model that is anchored in fee-based income. Some of these services we have currently and some we are looking to build organically or even acquire. When we look at acquisitions, we analyze things like client lists, territories, the management team and, of course, underlying capabilities. We're really keen to build out our suite of services, and we're excited to evolve our proposition in a connected way to our clients. On the right-hand side, you have a roster of media assets across various different social and digital platforms. Some of these media assets we have now and some we are looking to acquire in the future. The business model for the right-hand side is currently programmatic ad revenue, but in the future, we are keen to explore other revenue streams such as subscription and commerce. What we love about our hybrid business model is that we're creating a little bit of a flywheel for growth. The 2 sides feed one another. Clients buying digital advertising and tech services from us love the fact that we have our own media network. It really gives us the ultimate case study, and it sort of proves that we are very good at what we do because we actually do it for ourselves. We have our own channels, we have our own audiences that we are responsible for building and growing. I think that moving forward, we really do stand to benefit from what we're seeing is sort of reduced valuations across the board. It's fair to say that we've never been successful in a very competitive process. If we ever get a sort of lead on a business that is for sale, that is running a sort of fully comprehensive sort of acquisition process, we often are not the lead bidder and therefore don't end up buying the company. What we're seeing is that actually first and foremost, companies are coming to us and saying, actually, they're interested in our vision. They're interested in what we're doing. Everyone is very aware of the Social Chain brand and the sort of reputation that goes along with it and people are excited about being part of a business that owns Social Chain. They can also see the success that we've had in integrating businesses that we've bought in the past. And so again, that really gives us a little bit of a sort of a stronger footing to go and do deals in the medium term. I think we've touched on Social Chain during this presentation, but we really are excited to own the business. In terms of what we sort of think we bought 2 or 3 months in. We know that there is some incredible talent inside the business. The team is a very young team. They're social natives, brands really buy into their sort of innate understanding of platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and all the sort of new ones that are popping up every year. We work with some great clients and we're sort of thinking and talking and working very hard to understand where there might be cross and upsell opportunities for other Brave Bison capabilities. And the Social Chain brand, I would say, is probably stronger than we [ anticipated ]. It really is incredible to see the level of sort of new business opportunities that come in band through the Social Chain website. Social Chain is sort of one of about 3 or 4 agencies that is almost always included in RFP processes. And that's so good because it gives us the opportunity to impress. It gets us inside the room with the client. And then we use our talent, we use our story, we use our expertise to impress and hopefully win lots of new business over the coming months. Just to touch on Best Response Media, I think that this was probably as much an acqui-hire as it was anything else. I think that Best Response Media has a very specialized team in Egypt that delivers on a specific technology platform called the Adobe platform. And before we acquired Best Response Media, we didn't do any work on Adobe. We only did work on SAP, on sales force and on BigCommerce. And acquiring Best Response Media not only gave us a fantastic team of people that are very good developers and a very good technical talent, it also gave us an in with Adobe, a relationship with Adobe as well as some case studies that we can use to win hopefully some very big clients. I think now we'll move on to some questions.

Perfect. [Operator Instructions] I'd like to remind you that a recording of this presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A can be accessed via your investor dashboard. As you can see we received a number of questions throughout today's presentation. And if I could just ask you to read out those questions and give responses where it's appropriate to do so. I'll pick up with you at the end.

So there's a question here. When do you expect Social Chain to be fully integrated? And as a result, do you see opportunities to cross-sell? So Social Chain, it's very much in the process of being integrated. The back office is going to be substantially there. And we hope by the end H1, possibly by the end of Q3. So by that, we mean integrated teams across IT, HR, marketing and finance. From a looking-forward perspective, obviously, the Social Chain brand is going to remain. And actually, what's happened is the social and influencer -- the Brave Bison Social & Influencer team has moved into the Social Chain team. And that's really because of just the strength of that brand. We will be relaunching it because we feel it's been slightly underinvested in over the last sort of 12 to 18 months. And we think it's a really exciting name that everyone has heard of in the industry. So I think certainly by the end of this year, there will be a new look and feel, and we'll be able to market to all kinds of social and influencer customers. There's definitely opportunities on the table already from a cross-selling perspective. Brave Bison social influence did have its own operations. And we successfully sold in some work to New Balance at the back end of last year. So definitely, that's an ongoing process, and we expect that to continue.

There's a question -- there's a couple of questions in fact, about share consolidation, which is something that as a Board we have discussed from time to time. I think that there are arguments for and against, and we have discussed with our financial adviser in length the opportunity around potentially a share consolidation. I think that if we were to do something like that, it would probably be as part of a sort of another event, such as a big acquisition and a fundraising, something that we are -- have talked about are aware of. I think we're -- there are some cases in the past where it's been very effective, and it has driven shareholder value and there are other cases that it has not and actually being a penny stock has been helpful in some instances. And so we sort of have been quite careful around that point.

There's a question asking if Apple is a customer? Apple are notoriously secretive around who they do and who they don't work with. But we are allowed to say that we do work with Beats, which is the hi-fi audio arm of Apple.

There's a question around sort of how comfortable we are with this year's forecast, and I think what I would say is we've -- as a management team, we've always tried to be relatively conservative. We're very conscious of building reputation within the market, and we've always tried to under-promise and over-deliver. I think that we are aware of sort of certain macroeconomic trends that invariably have an impact on our business. I think that consumer demand is slow for lots of our clients, and this does have a knock-on effect to marketing spend. That said, we are very careful with our forecasting. We have various different levers within our business. I mentioned earlier around the different types of marketing. You have top-of-funnel marketing, which is more brand awareness. And you have bottom-of-funnel marketing, which is more about performance and driving clicks and brands are moving from the top to the bottom. Now whereas Social Chain is quite top of funnel, they're really about driving a message and driving attention. Brave Bison performance is obviously a very sort of sales-driven, clicks-driven, transaction-driven marketing outfit. And so there are various different levers that we have within our business to effectively hit those forecasts. But I think what we wanted to do as a management team is just say that versus when we were trading this time last year, where we were seeing enormous growth, clients doing nothing but increased spend. That's not the case this year, but that doesn't necessarily mean that we are not going to hit our forecast because we have an operation with many levers inside of that.

Philippa, do you want to comment on the dividend question?

Sorry, just finding that. No, we don't pay them on currently. I think at the moment, as we've discussed, we do have more of an acquisitive strategy. So I think for the moment, we feel like shareholders will see more growth by reinvesting those funds into the existing business and into those acquisitions.

There's a comment here about using ChatGPT. I think there's no question that these [indiscernible] forms of generative AI, I particularly would encourage if you look at something called Midjourney as well, is going to have a really big impact on our business. And I think that there will definitely be partners like us that embrace it. And that work with it and there may be some partners that don't. And I think that could be very, very dangerous to certain organizations. So we're definitely trying to get ahead of the trend there. We actually are doing a lot of work to educate our customers on these platforms. How can they use them? How can we use them together to provide a better service for you? And so again, if you follow some of the work that we do on LinkedIn, you'll see that an -- all of our marketing efforts are around that. And so far, that's been actually very good at generating [Audio Gap]. It's quite an exciting topic.

There's a question around, are there competitors who you continually come across in pitches? And do you have an idea of your win rate? So first of all, I would say that we're aiming for a win rate of between 40% and 50%. That's not always possible, and there are certain parts of our business where it's easier for us to hit that rate than others. I think that there are certain competitors that we come up against, time and time again. Those are typically competitors within each of our business units. So for example, Brave Bison performance competes with 2 very fast-growing private equity-backed competitors that have sort of managed to grow sort of pan-European as well as they've actually moved off across into the States and being very successful there. And so I think what we're doing is looking at a competitor set within each of our business units, but then also trying to develop a new competitor set that actually sees us pitch as 1 integrated business for a combination of work that spans performance, commerce and social media. And so I think that our competitor set will change over the next 12, 24 months as we go-to-market as a fully integrated, fully connected operation that sells to ultimately bigger clients with bigger engagements.

There's a question here asking about organic progress of the revenue line as opposed to the gross profit line. Obviously, we quoted the number of 12% organic growth in gross profit. The reason we talk about that rather than the revenue line is because the revenue line can be very easily distorted because of the different business models in our various business units. So to give you an example, within our media network, we have a couple of very large pages, which sit within our network, but which we're on a very small revenue share basis with. So any movement in those pages will have a very big impact on our top line revenue line, but not very much impact on the business overall and on our gross profit line, which is why we just don't really look at that top line organic growth and have really focused on the organic growth on the gross profit line, which we feel is the best way to measure that across the business.

There's a comment about EPS and EPS growth. I think it's definitely fair to say. We're very focused on EPS growth. I think as significant shareholders in the business, Oli and myself, but also Philippa through the options that she has into the shares that she's acquired. Earnings per share really is the sort of fundamental metric that we look at, particularly when we're looking at an acquisition. The acquisition of Greenlight was incredibly accretive on an earnings per share basis. And we certainly hope that over the next 18 to 24 months, we can achieve something similar with Social Chain.

There's a question about what future economic or industry trends give us concern. I think that Theo touched on this earlier, but artificial intelligence and machine learning are both a concern to us, but also give us a great deal of excitement. I think that where we can use AI to make ourselves more efficient and draw up deliver better outcomes for clients, that's really, really exciting, where clients can use AI to replace us over the next 5, 6, 7, 8 years, that's obviously worrying, although I think that we're a company that leans into future-facing innovative technologies and wants to use it to build our business as opposed to let it erode us. And so I think the AI is, to some extent, a threat as it is to many industries, but it is also a very big opportunity for a business like ours.

I think that's everything. Thank you very much, everyone.

Oliver, Theo, Philippa, thanks very much for that and I think you've addressed those questions that come from investors. And of course, the company will review all the questions submitted today and will publish those responses on the Investor Meet company platform. But just before redirect investors to provide with their feedback, which shows particularly important to the company. Oliver, could I just ask you for a few closing comments.

Yes. Thank you very much for dialing in, everyone. We look forward to updating the market with more progress over the coming months. Thank you very much.

Oliver, Theo, Philippa, thanks once again for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close the session as you now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order that the management team can better understand your views and expectations. It would only take a few moments to complete, something that will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of the Brave Bison Group plc, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good morning to you all.