Brave Bison Group plc (RT70.F) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary
September 15, 2025
Earnings Call Speaker Segments
Operator
OperatorGood morning, and welcome to the Brave Bison Group plc Investor Presentation. [Operator Instructions] Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll. I'd now like to hand you over to Oliver Green, Executive Chairman. Good morning, sir.
Oliver Green
ExecutivesGood morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our Investor Meet Company presentation today. On the call is my brother and Chief Growth Officer, Theo Green; and Philippa Norridge, our CFO. Our presentation today will last around 35 minutes, and we'll definitely have some questions at the end. So for any new shareholders or shareholders looking to refresh their memory, Brave Bison is a marketing and technology company that works with global businesses, global companies. And we sell a combination of services, technology and training to some of these businesses. Existing clients for us today are the likes of New Balance, Specsavers, Aviva and Primark. But we're also really, really proud of our work that we do with some of the major social media platforms. So LinkedIn, Pinterest, TikTok, YouTube are current customers of Brave Bison, and that's really exciting and something that we like to champion because it really gives our partners and other clients a flavor for the credibility and the expertise that sits inside Brave Bison today.
Theodore Green
ExecutivesSo we'll kick off with a review of the interim results, which cover the 6-month period to the 30th of June 2025. I would say this period marks good progress in our original goals. We were pleased to show an increase in both top and bottom line. We did, however, spend a significant amount of time and capital making acquisitions in the period. We've actually announced 5 acquisitions this year and those are being worked on during that period, 4 were announced in the period and one was announced after the period end. That is the main reason for the net cash reduction. We bought some businesses that were in different positions, some of which were going really well, some of which will be integrated, and we'll go into that later on in the presentation.
Philippa Norridge
ExecutivesSo 2025 saw Brave Bison drive topline growth and increased net revenue from GBP 10.1 million to GBP 12 million, which is an increase of 19%. This was driven both by the 3 acquisitions that were made during the period and strong trading within performance marketing and across our media network. Our adjusted EBITDA also increased on the prior year by 6% to GBP 2.3 million. This represented a slightly reduced adjusted EBITDA margin of 19% compared to 21% in the prior year. This was due to the fact that both ENGAGE, which we bought at the start of the period and The Fifth which we acquired in May, were loss-making at the point of acquisition. We have already brought both businesses into our offices and onto our operating platform and enacted cost savings, which should result in these contributing positively over the next 12 months. On the next slide, you can see the adjusting items within the P&L. Unsurprisingly, given the acquisitions in the period, the majority of the adjusting items relate to either acquisition costs or restructuring and integration costs. We had GBP 1 million of acquisition costs in the first half. These related not only to the acquisitions which completed in the period, but also professional fees associated with the due diligence and acquisition of the MiniMBA in July and the acquisition of MTM, which we announced last week. The restructuring cost of GBP 0.5 million also largely related to the acquisition. There were some unused property costs associated with the Builtvisible acquisition as well as some duplicate IT costs where contracts would not be immediately terminated. Though some termination costs relating to staff where the integration of the acquisitions resulted in some restructuring, particularly in the areas where this was required to deliver profitability. As well as these exceptional costs, we also adjusted our equity settled share-based payments. This includes charges relating to our employee share option scheme, which is used to incentivize key employees as well as charges in relation to directed long-term incentive plans. Finally, we adjusted the amortization of acquired intangibles. This relates to the amortization of the customer relationships and brands acquired over the last 5 years. The recent acquisitions are still to undergo a full purchase price allocation exercise to split the intangible assets between goodwill and other intangibles. So there is likely to be an adjustment to this number in the second half once this exercise is complete. Moving on to look at our cash flow. Our cash balance did reduce by GBP 3.5 million over the period. This is obviously heavily impacted by the exceptional costs already discussed around the acquisition and restructuring costs. In addition, we saw cash outflows as a result of working capital changes. This was driven primarily by the unwinding of the acquisition balance sheet, in particular, Engage where there were significant overdue liabilities at the point of acquisition. We made acquisition payments of GBP 1.9 million during the period for the businesses or GBP 1.3 million net of the cash brought in upon acquisition. We also paid out GBP 0.3 million in relation to our major dividend payments during the period. Other cash flows were minimal with capital expenditure of GBP 0.1 million and no tax payments in the period due to our poor forward tax losses. Then taking a look at our balance sheet, you can see that the biggest movement on the balance sheet has been a significant increase in the intangible assets. That all relates to the acquisitions completed during the period. All of the intangible assets which are not fully amortized relate to acquisitions from the last 5 years. The deferred tax asset on our balance sheet mainly consists of a conservative estimate of the value of the tax losses across the group. There are then a number of balances on the balance sheet, which relate to the leases on our main London and Manchester offices. There was a right-of-use asset with GBP 1.3 million with intangible assets relating to this as well as the lease liabilities. There are no unused leases associated with the acquisitions, which is reflected on the balance sheet. The Builtvisible lease terminates before the end of the year and is all reflected in the P&L, and there are no other leases which were involved in the acquisitions. Trade and other payables has increased fairly significantly because of the acquisition balance sheet. There is also included in this number, GBP 0.9 million of deferred guaranteed consideration in relation to the Builtvisible acquisition. The contingent acquisition liabilities represent the fair value of the expected future cash payments in relation to the recent acquisitions where these are dependent on performance metrics. These contingent payments should be self-funding, so any increase in these amounts will be matched by improved trading.
Theodore Green
ExecutivesSo in terms of where that leaves us, Philippa's balance sheet obviously now looks radically different. Not only have we made a sizable acquisition that is included in those numbers in the form of MiniMBA, but we've also completed an equity issuance and increased our debt levels. So I think it is important that investors look at the 6 months ahead in addition to the balance sheet that we've presented to you today. In terms of how we feel about things, I think it's fair to say that business at the moment is rather good. There are two parts of our business that are doing particularly well, and that has meant we feel comfortable upgrading the full year expectations for the business. Previously, the company was looking like it would make just shy of GBP 6 million of adjusted EBITDA for the full year. Now we believe that the number will be higher than that as a result of strong trading in our performance business, where we have won a number of new clients and in our media business, where we run channels on behalf of third parties. We've seen very strong performance in sports, particularly the U.S. Open. And this year, we also have the benefit of the Ryder Cup, which is another channel that we run. So it does look like that business will be ahead of its budget and ahead of the prior year. The other thing that will contribute positively to this financial year is the acquisition of MTM, which was completed in September. So those numbers will be consolidated for the final quarter. MTM made approximately GBP 1.3 million last year. So the contribution will be not insignificant to the current financial year. So I really cannot emphasize enough how excited we are as a management team to own the MiniMBA. The MiniMBA is a totally unique asset if we look at sort of other marketing media groups, and we own it. And the guy that runs it is a large shareholder, a very significant shareholder in Brave Bison. So in short, the MiniMBA is a marketing, training and skills platform that our organizations use to develop skills or level up or become more expert in the subject of marketing. So global organizations buy it on behalf of their teams with a view to ultimately having more skilled and better trained people within their organizations. And we think that's a really exciting sort of trend that we can really jump on because in a world where AI and machine learning is doing more and more of the heavy lifting, we believe that marketing teams need to be that much better skilled and that much more trained to really understand and leverage these very sophisticated technology platforms. So the business sells to about sort of 6,000 people every year, which actually really isn't a huge amount of people and something that we're looking to really grow and develop over the next 6, 12 and 18 months. But ultimately, this business will form a brand-new division inside Brave Bison. It will be our skills and learning division and will sit alongside our other sort of marketing and consultancy practices. I think also it's worth saying that Mark Ritson, who leads the business alongside CEO, Tim Fleming, is very much a sort of industry heavyweight. Mark has a column in the drum, which is a very large marketing publication. He also has a weekly column in ADWEEK. And Mark's network is really sort of global, and it's very, very senior. He rubs shoulders with all kinds of very senior marketing leaders, marketing professionals. And we think that, that there'll be a network effect of us working alongside Mark and Mark being such a big shareholder inside Brave Bison. So this is a unique business. It's a high-margin business. It's a business that we think we can grow quickly over the next 12 to 18 months. And really, we don't have to do very much the sort of underlying platform. It's already very well set up in that the customer feedback, the NPS scores are incredibly high. People love going on the course. They love hearing from Mark. All we need to do is grow this business by getting more people to buy it. We don't need to invest a huge amount in the underlying platform. And we think that's really exciting as we move into next year and beyond. So Oli has given you a good example of where we make an acquisition and establish a new division and the MiniMBA will hopefully be the first of a number of acquisitions in that space over the next few years. MTM is more of a bolt-on acquisition. It adds to our existing business. It adds to our existing client setup. And we're equally excited to own MTM and to be in business with the three founders, James, Caroline and Rich, all of whom will be staying with business for a 5-year earnout. Now MTM is a consultancy business, first and foremost. A lot of what we do in our performance business and our social business involves us delivering for clients. We drive sales, we drive conversion, we create content, we run campaigns. It's delivery focused. Whereas what we're doing at MTM is much more consultative and much more strategy focused. Often what we deliver to the client is a set of research and a set of insights that informs decision-making. MTM has real pedigree in media and tech. The business has been working with some of the biggest technology and streaming and entertainment companies in the world for some years. They were part of the original team that launched Sky Glass. They now work with Google. They work with Figma, Samsung, Spotify. They're also very active in the sports rights holder industry. They help people value their rights and decide how and when to launch direct-to-consumer propositions. Insight and data is a huge string to the bow of MTM. All of the work that they do is underpinned by very, very rigorous analysis, and that often involves collecting first-party research in the form of quantitative or qualitative analysis. One of the most amazing parts of MTM is actually an owned proprietary forecasting model. So MTM owns a model called Three Reasons, which is really a totally essential tool for people and streamers active in the U.K. It's a model that is bought by all the major streamers, all the major PBSs and the regulator themselves. So it's sort of essential reading. When that gets presented over at PBSs, hundreds of customers will join that and hundreds of people from the industry will join that. So Three Reasons is a really important part of the business. And it's an example of how the team are always ahead of the game on bringing together vital data with research and consultancy. Another area where MTM is very strong and particularly when it comes to working with customers like Google and Figma is around a very niche area called developer consultancy and developer research. A lot of the products that are in the market from Google are customer-facing. Why do you use Gemini? Why do you use search? Why do you use certain advertising propositions? And that's really important because it's either B2C or B2B marketing focused. But actually, one of the things that tech companies do the most is design and sell products to the developer community, the community who will ultimately be the ones integrating bits of software, connecting with certain APIs and making sure that developer tools are easy to use or presented in a way that makes sense. And MTM is a market leader in surveying and collecting data from that community. And the community is obviously not that large, but having surveyed over 6,000 people in the last few years really does mean if you are launching a product for mobile, for cloud or for machine learning and AI, one of the people that you would like to speak to or that you think could get you the highest quality market feedback would be MTM. And that's why we work with customers like Google and actually Amazon. So a really interesting business. In terms of how the model is set up, we're paying an initial consideration and then a share consideration and an earn-out consideration. So we really do expect to be in business with the founding team at MTM for the foreseeable future. Brave Bison has had a pretty transformational year when it comes to underlying growth and acquisitions. The business has grown almost 11x since its original revenues in 2020 when myself, Oli and Philippa took over. It's also grown almost double on a pro forma basis between 2024 and the 2025 pro forma, which is effectively the 2026 numbers. The business has definitely been acquisitive, and we have definitely issued equity. We've done three fundraisings over the years, but we've always been very, very focused on earnings per share, which we have seen as a fundamental metric for the growth and the valuation of the business. Underlying earnings per share has grown by a compound annual growth rate of 23% since 2021. We choose that point because 2020, the business was still in losses. At an EPS level, the adjusted EBITDA was about flat. But at an EPS level, it was quite heavily negative. So we are very, very focused on not only scaling the top line of the business and the EBITDA numbers to improve our scale and market position, but we're always very, very focused on underlying EPS, which we believe is the main component driving shareholder value. Oli, you're on mute.
Oliver Green
ExecutivesSo we think and talk a lot as a management team about how our business is structured and how we evolve our sort of operating platform in order to cope with the growth that we have seen both organically and inorganically. And as things stand, we have these three business divisions, ENGAGE, SocialChain and Brave Bison. And ENGAGE is more focused on sports rights holders and selling in strategy and content production. SocialChain is focused primarily in the sort of B2C space, working with a combination of retailers, FMCG companies, tech companies to ultimately help them navigate the increasingly complex world of social media and run campaigns using creators and influencers and navigate different sort of cultural pockets inside these different social media platforms. And then Brave Bison, which is our organic and paid media practice. And ultimately, supporting all three divisions is now MTM, which we think is being much more consultative, much more strategic. It typically works with more senior stakeholders and the ultimate output is typically some kind of report or sort of consultancy framework that looks at opportunities that looks at problems and then proposes recommendations. And where we're moving to now is an organization that is executional across Engage, SocialChain and Brave Bison, where we can run campaigns and actually deliver marketing for our clients. But then there's another layer, which is much more consultative, much more insights-driven where we're thinking about problems and thinking about opportunities as well as a training layer that helps our clients to actually build muscle internally. And we think that this structure, this framework is future-facing, is modern, and it allows us to work with customers in a number of different levels and a number of different ways. We can deliver, we can consult and advise, we can train, we can sell technology, we can sell media. And it's a very sort of integrated and joined up offering. And as you would imagine, that sort of structure is reflected in how we organize our executive team, which three of us are on the call today. But then we also have our divisional CEOs, a lot of which are founders, some of which we recruited into the business. But you can see a very eclectic, I hope, group of individuals that have been with the business for some time and combined have a very, very strong experience in media, in marketing, in consultancy, in technology, in the sport and entertainment world. And together, this is who is growing the business and is responsible for driving the business forward.
Theodore Green
ExecutivesSo one of the things that has been driving the business forward is how we have been using artificial intelligence to maximize the output for our clients. And one of the important things about Brave Bison and one of the ways that we go to market is to help our clients capitalize on complexity. And initially, that was borne out of the fact that the ecosystems in which our clients operate, how they advertise in a digital world was so fragmented and so confusing that it was very difficult for clients to have a clear purpose. With AI, that's become 1,000 times more complicated because the tooling available and the software available and the services available has become more and more difficult. So we see it really as our role to help our clients do the best with the tooling that's available and where relevant, build our own tooling to allow us to go to market faster. Our flagship AI tool and the thing that we are seeing most client interest in at the moment is called AudienceGPT. We have spoken about this a little bit in the past, but we're quite pleased that at the Campaign Tech Awards this year, which is a big industry award ceremony, AudienceGPT was actually awarded the best operational use of AI. It was as voted by a set of judges, the tool that clients felt they could use the most when it came to actually delivering actionable results. And we actually beat the internal tool that Unilever has been developing and a number of tools developed by specific AI development companies whose entire purpose is building AI. And we really put that down to the feedback loop, right? The people that are developing our tooling are not only developing it for our clients, they're also developing it for our own internal use. And that's how we're able to make sure that we are building the right products at the right time. Why is AudienceGPT so successful? It's effectively a focus group that you can conduct in a matter of minutes as opposed to a matter of weeks or months using something called silicon audiences. So effectively, we are taking audience data. We are training a large language model that would be provided to us by Google through Gemini or OpenAI, ChatGPT. And we would then start to have a conversational interface with that fake customer. So we have a silicon customer and we start to talk to it about different types of research, different types of advertising. And what that allows us to do is get a level of insight that customers are very interested in because of the speed of delivery. At MTM, we might be doing a 6-month or 3-month program of research and insight. With AudienceGPT, we're condensing that into a matter of days, and we're using it to very quickly in four media strategies. And it's true that the audience insight that we're collecting is totally generated by AI. It's not real. But for the level of depth and speed that we're going into, it works really well for things like quick buy media strategies for creative planning around where to buy media, something really important around creative. We show advertising copy and advertising creative to the model, and we ask it, what did you think of this? What do you think about it? Would you click on this? We have some explainer videos that will be available afterwards to people. But this is something that certainly we feel has put us ahead of the pack and is one of the reasons our performance business is doing so well at the moment. Another thing that's been incredibly successful for us is something called AdStudio. This is where we use AI to create multiple different versions of the same advertising for use on social media. Those of you that do use social media will notice that you're often served exactly the same advert multiple times. And that often causes you to become frustrated and they make you upset and they make you dislike that brand, but continuously showing you the same advert even if you were interested in them in the beginning. That's called ad fatigue, and it's something that really does plague the industry and stops clients from spending even when there are successful audiences. So what we do is create multiple versions of the same ad using AdStudio and AI is a very important part of that. And we then run that advertising to fantastic results. Two clients here, one in the e-commerce space Seasalt and one in the travel space, Trafalgar, both showing fantastic uplift in return on advertising spend.
Philippa Norridge
ExecutivesSo this slide is just showing a little bit about our integration strategy and what we do when we first bring in an acquisition. One of the first things that we do is focus on financing the operations and we do that pretty much from day 1, getting people to line up with our group forecasting approach and also getting people onto our systems. So the forecasting pretty much happens straight away. And we look to move people on to our financial systems and align with our financial reporting within the first 3 months.
Theodore Green
ExecutivesSorry, Philippa you can go in.
Philippa Norridge
ExecutivesNo, go on.
Theodore Green
ExecutivesSo the way we think about integration really is in three buckets. We have integration proper, which is a really tight integration where we bring a business very close. There's integration light where we bring a business very close, but we look to preserve certain parts of the business. And then there's a new division where we will be running the back office, as Philippa says, but that business will have its own front-end approach of winning customers because either it runs in a different way or it's marketed in a different way. As Philippa has touched on, financial operations is a really important part of integration, and we integrate our financial operations in every instance. The same is true very much for HR and people. That's both the administrative side of things and the systems side of things. So we have one central system for all of our HR information, but also when it comes to social well-being, recruitment and career development. That's something that we like to normalize across the business. So you certainly don't have people in one part of our business with very different benefits to another part of our business. Those are all normalized once the business is integrated. When it comes to growth and marketing, we definitely do integrate very closely in the first column, that will often involve losing a trade brand. So everything gets integrated into already what we're doing. Builtvisible has become Brave Bison's performance. The Fifth will become SocialChain. But that's not true for someone like MTM who will retain their brand identity or SocialChain who's retained its brand identity. And that's because it has a very specific customer that it's talking to or it's very well known in its industry. MTM is famous for what it does and SocialChain is certainly very famous for what it does. And we don't feel that doing away with a trade brand is a good idea. We do, however, work really hard to normalize and integrate our content marketing, our new business activity, our events and our ability to cross-sell. That wouldn't, however, extend to the division case study for someone like MiniMBA. MiniMBA markets in a very different way to either MTM or The Fifth, and that means they need to retain their own noncentralized marketing function. And that doesn't mean that we don't oversee it, but it does mean that they have a dedicated resource inside the business as opposed to that sitting centrally. Resource management is similar, and this involves us integrating all of the client and delivery information across our business. We're very, very focused on resource control. We have a single professional services automation platform which is a single system where everyone inputs their time every week, and that allows us to see exactly how much work we have built versus the amount of resource we have available. When we integrate closely, those come together, that allows us to share resource. So if we have a designer in Bangalore and a designer in Manchester, a team in London who's looking for a designer can see that resource instead of hiring a freelancer. That's not always the case for things like integration light because ultimately, what happens is we have individuals who don't have huge amounts of crossover. So sometimes, the resource management, whilst it may be integrated from a systems perspective, doesn't actually result in a huge margin gain. Finally, we have IT and systems. And this is very important. We have a single operating system throughout the business. We use Microsoft. We use the Google suite for certain customers who insist on communicating in that way. But generally speaking, we're a Microsoft outfit. What that does mean is that everyone is on the same system when it comes to SharePoint and tooling. It means that we're able to maintain particularly across the business, levels of cybersecurity to ensure that we're protected where needed. It also means that we can roll out new technology in ways that are much quicker. So when we launch new tooling, either developed internally or off the shelf. So our main AI tools at the moment are ChatGPT, Gemini, MidJourney and Firefly, we're able to do that across the business in a singular way. So to give everyone a sense, as I said before, good case studies, Builtvisible, The Fifth, they will be totally integrated. MTM, SocialChain and Engage, they're versions of Integration Light and MiniMBA is a version of a new division within our business.
Oliver Green
ExecutivesSo we thought it might be helpful just to summarize what we think are the top 5 most compelling reasons to become a shareholder in Brave Bison. The first is very much our track record as a management team and business in making accretive acquisitions. I think that the market is fragmented and there are definitely lots of opportunities out there, but we have really sort of mastered an approach that sees earnings per share grow in value as well as just revenue and profit. I think the second reason to be excited about Brave Bison is that we exist in a very exciting and high-growth ecosystem. The worlds of social media, digital media, digital marketing, e-learning, influencer marketing, those markets are growing at double digits. and we are very much in a sweet spot, and we absolutely are planning to capitalize on that as we grow and develop our business. Our balance sheet is strong. Our balance sheet has evolved over the past 6 months given all of the acquisitions, but we do still have some room. Net debt is below 1x EBITDA. Some businesses that are similar to us might have 2x or 3x net debt to EBITDA, whereas we're actually below 1, which we think is pretty healthy and allows us to use our cash in strategic ways. There's a massive shift in the market when it comes to AI. We're seeing such opportunity to help shape client briefs, work with new, much larger organizations, and we absolutely intend on being one of the winners when it comes to AI's transformational impact on marketing. And then lastly, we really do feel as though the exec team, the management team at Brave Bison is categorically aligned with shareholders. If Theo and I are the second largest shareholders in Brave Bison. Mark Ritson is now a very significant, I think, top 5 shareholder in Brave Bison. So you have a number of people inside the business that are focused on growing the business and running the business in an efficient way, in a sustainable way, and we feel very aligned with shareholders such that we only make money when our shareholders make money. And that was it in terms of our presentation. I think we'll now open up for some questions.
Operator
OperatorOliver, Philippa, Theo, thank you very much for your presentation. [Operator Instructions] Just while the company take a few moments to review those questions submitted today, 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 by our investor dashboard. As you can see, we received a number of questions throughout today's presentation. Oliver, if I could please hand back to you to read out the questions and give responses where appropriate to do so, and I'll pick up from you at the end.
Oliver Green
ExecutivesSure. So there's a question about our larger vision and which areas of the market do we really want to dominate and what kind of scale are we aiming for. I think that the larger vision is really to build the ultimate marketing and technology partner to global brands. I think that we look at businesses of all shapes and sizes, and they have a whole host of problems. They have a whole host of opportunities in front of them. And we want to be the partner that can really sit next to them, advise them, help them, train their teams. The market -- the ecosystem is very big, right? There are so many different channels that customers can use to ultimately build out their own audiences and drive their own businesses. And we want to be a partner that can sit alongside CEOs, Chief Marketing Officers, Chief Financial Officers and really unpick where our clients have weaknesses, where they're looking for some help, and we want to be providing those solutions. So it's to become this technology-enabled consultative marketing and tech partner that is working with your global businesses. It's very much more of the same rather than a complete sort of radical departure versus where we are today.
Philippa Norridge
ExecutivesSo there was a question about with the number of acquisitions we've done recently, how are we managing integration and cost synergies? And when should we start to see margin improvements showing through? So I think as we said when we went through the integration slide, we've moved quite quickly when it comes to integration. Certainly, with acquisitions like Engage, which was done towards the start of the year, we should have realized a lot of those cost synergies already. What I think has been quite good is we actually had a while before doing these recent acquisitions where we didn't have acquisitions, and we used that time to really upskill our operations team to make sure that we have the people in place to carry this out efficiently and effectively and identify all of those synergies pretty quickly. So in terms of margin improvements and when they should show through, I think what we're really talking is you've got the quick wins, which we would expect to see after about 3 to 6 months. And then there is a sort of long tail of IT contracts that go on for a year after acquisition that you're tied into. In some instances, there might be leases. But I would say, generally, we would like to see those margin improvements between 6 to 12 months.
Oliver Green
ExecutivesThere's a question about a few of our major shareholders, Mark Ritson and/or Michael Ashcroft. You can find the exact percentages that our major shareholders have on our website. I believe Mark has a few percent. I think he has 3%. But Mark is committed to invest GBP 4 million into Brave Bison. So he's already invested GBP 2 million. And the second tranche of GBP 2 million, he has to subscribe to within 24 months from the completion of the mini MBA deal, although I suspect he will become a larger shareholder much more quickly than that.
Theodore Green
ExecutivesThere's a question here about competition and the competition in our markets. Our markets are very competitive. They're very big, and they're very profitable. And that means that people are very much coming after these individual markets. I think that at the moment, the old school businesses, the network businesses, the WPPs that used to have this incredible competitive advantage by virtue of that scale are really kind of seeing that come under huge pressure. And as a smaller business, a more nimble business, we're actually able to do more. We're able to pivot more quickly. We're able to launch our AI products much more quickly. If you compare WPPs open, which is a business-wide AI tool versus some of the stuff that we've been doing, it takes them months to cascade that out into their organization. In terms of our team and incentivization, we focus a lot on how our senior leadership are incentivized. We have, I think, probably now 75 to 80 shareholders within the business. So that's people who've either joined the business as an acquisition and received shares or it's people that have been part of our share option plan. Some of those people will have been issued options at some of the earlier placing prices, 1.35p, 2.4p. And that's great to see because it means that they're sitting on sizable gains that may not, in each case, have vested. Our share option plans always vest over 3 years for the team. So not all of it gets set at once. And those options are always granted at market price. So we don't do nil paid options. We haven't done since 2021.
Oliver Green
ExecutivesThere's a question about cross-selling opportunities. So cross-selling is definitely a big initiative for us at Brave Bison. I think what really helps now with MTM is that moving forward, we really want all of our major client relationships to be with, a, senior stakeholders, but b, have a sort of a very important strategy dynamic to them. So I think we don't want to be in a position where we're just delivering for a client. We want to be in a position where we really understand what their business plan is, what their priorities are as a company and how we might be able to impact them. And it's only when you're in those sorts of conversations and in those sorts of boardrooms, frankly, that you can really begin to cross-sell and upsell because you really understand the pain points of a client. So I think that cross-selling is very important to us. We do, do it successfully. But I think moving forward, we can do it even more successfully by virtue of us having this growth and strategy lens to what we do. And frankly, because we have more customers inside of our business, it's worth putting more people solely focused on it and creating new incentive programs that really focus on it for next year. So it's front and center as we plan 2026. And there's definitely lots of value that is not quite forecasted that could be caught from better cross-selling, better upselling into our bigger, more comprehensive relationships.
Theodore Green
ExecutivesPerfect. So if there are no more questions to be submitted, I think that's all for today. Thank you very much, everyone, for dialing in.
Oliver Green
ExecutivesThank you all.
Operator
OperatorOliver, Philippa, Theo, thank you for updating investors today. Can I please ask investors not to close this session as you'll now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order that the management team to better understand your views and expectations. This will only take a few moments to complete, and I'm sure will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of Brave Bison Group plc, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good morning to you.
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