Elixirr International plc (ELIX) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, and welcome to the Elixirr International plc investor presentation. [Operator Instructions] The company may not be in a position to answer every question received in the meeting itself. However, the company will review all questions put today and will post the responses where it is appropriate to do so. [Operator Instructions] And I'd now like to hand you over to Stephen Newton, CEO. Good afternoon, to you, sir.

Thank you, Alexander. Good afternoon to everyone, and thanks for taking the time to attend and listen to our presentation about our business. And as Alexander says, if there are any questions, please type them in. And if we get the chance, we'll have a look at them and see if we can answer them either on the file or at the end. So yes, I'm going to introduce myself in a minute, but I thought it might be a good idea for Graham to introduce himself first and Caroline then next. And then what I will do is I will introduce myself and follow on with the introductory slides about the company.

Thanks, Steve. Graham Busby here, co-founder with Steve and CFO. Alongside the obvious financial responsibilities of being CFO, I lead out on our inorganic strategy. Steve and I have known each other more than 15 years now, and we worked together at Accenture. And I guess, during the latter part of that time, started talking about starting our own business, and that's what we're here to tell you about today. So looking forward to talking to you.

Hi, everyone. Caroline Pitt, Business Manager at Elixirr. Joined the firm just over 5 years ago now. Had a very interesting read through the firm. So I joined initially in the marketing team, went on to work closely with Stephen and joined the IPO team internally, then the M&A team. And now I continue to work with the leadership team on all strategic areas, such as Investor Relations and new M&A activity and anything else we're looking to do in the market.

Thanks, Caroline. Yes, just a little bit about myself. For those of you who didn't catch it in the first few lines I said at the start, I've got a South African accent. I came to London in 1995 for 2 years. It's been a long 2 years. I was with KPMG in South Africa, and I came to the U.K. with them. KPMG obviously owned a consulting firm. And then I did 4 or 5 years with them, resigned around the dot-com bubble to build a start-up with 600 people, which failed miserably and I learnt lots of good lessons, also spent a lot of money in trying to do that. And then went to IBM for another 3 -- 4 to 5 years, give or take, where I was back in the consulting industry in the city, traveling around the globe as well. And then tried another startup, which also failed and then again, returned to the consulting profession with Accenture, spent another 5 years with Accenture, and then finally decided I would do another startup, which is what you see in front of you, which is Elixirr. So I've always had this itch to try and build a business and in the end, decided to build a consulting business, having seen in 3 of the biggest brands, consulting brands in the world, what works, what doesn't work and why -- what the potential was to build something unique and challenge, as we are trying to be as Elixirr today. So that's a little bit of my background, maybe it gives you a sense of who I am. I could just say one other thing just about me as an individual. I stayed in London for 2 reasons, actually not going back to South Africa, two reasons. I use the analogy, once you've played in the Premium League, it's very hard to play in Division 3. And that's my business reason. And then personal reason I wanted to bring my kids up in a society that saw the world rather than saw -- looked inwardly at its own country. And I felt the U.K. was the best place for me to give my children in that worldly perspective. So those were the 2 reasons I've stayed. And I've thoroughly enjoyed here now and obviously had a good time try and building this business, and we continue to build it. Let me move on a little bit. There's often a lot of misunderstandings about what is consulting and what's the real value of consulting. So for those of you who are aware of some of the jokes about the consulting profession, I thought I'd use an analogy to give you the reason this profession exists and why it's such a big marketplace in the B2B space. One of my previous partners once said to me, he was actually a previous client, and we were discussing how he's got value from us as a consulting firm. And he this analogy for me. He said, Steve, it's a bit like I could be the best surgeon in the world. But if I'm involved in a car accident, the paramedics and the ambulance that arrive are far better at dealing with a circumstance than I could ever be as the best surgeon in the world. And the reason is because you're engrossed in the moment, you probably -- you're obviously emotional if it's an accident and often there's a lot of business decisions that are fairly emotional. There's critical events going on. And obviously, paramedics deal with these situations repeatedly and often 3 or 4 times a day. So the advantage of consultants is you have -- you're one step removed from the problem, you've dealt with it many times before, and you can bring in a level of understanding of the situation that delivers the right behaviors at the right times and is most appropriate for the circumstances. So we think that's a nice way to give you a sense of what is Elixirr trying to do, is trying to be that for business, be that independent voice of reason when everything is either going extremely well and you might be missing opportunities or things are going extremely bad in business and you're not sure what's the right path to take. So hopefully, that gives you a good sense of what consulting is about and how we view it and the possibility for us to make a difference. I think a lot of consultants get challenged because they fail to take this position of independent adviser and clarity of thinking in a crisis and guidance in a crisis, et cetera. And this is why I think there's such a great opportunity. I think a lot of the consulting firms of today or the historic ones have become almost encumbered by their success, their history is part of their problem. And what we're finding is that with a fresh approach and an adherence and a commitment to the principle of making a difference and being a challenger with an entrepreneurial mindset, we are finding a lot of traction in the market. So hopefully that gives you a good sense of what we believe to be the value of the consulting business. So what is the economic opportunity? I thought the best way to do it was to give you a sense of the scale of this marketplace. It is a very, very big marketplace worldwide. You can see on the right-hand side there, dominated by 10 of the largest consulting firms in the world. If you are familiar with this world, those names will be almost household names to you. But if you're not, these are very, very big names in the consulting profession. And you can see that the top 5 firms are -- top 6 firms are over $10 billion in revenue and the market size is about $234 billion of revenue. And it's -- on the left-hand side, you can see how that consulting marketplace is growing over time. So since 2011, and we were founded in 2009, but you can see since 2011, it's been an 8% market CAGR. In that same period, Elixirr has been growing at a rather 30% market CAGR. A few other points to note here is that if you look at our 30% growth into this marketplace since 2009, it's really taking market share from the big -- the top 10 firms. Caroline will talk to you a little bit later about how our competition see us vis-a-vis our -- sorry, how our clients see us vis-a-vis our competition. But largely, that 30% is actually taking market share off the top 10 names you see on this list. There is a new opportunity that the IPO has presented us, and Graham will talk to you about that in a little bit more detail. And that is the other firm's line of $97.5 billion or 42% of the market that you see there. That's a marketplace where we can actually gain market share through acquisition. And we've done 4 acquisitions since our IPO, and I think you'll find Graham's discussion with you around how we're going above that, a very interesting and exciting opportunity to leverage our growth. So that 30% growth is largely organic. And of course, since IPO, we can now add the inorganic opportunity to this. The other point I'd just like to make on this chart before I move to the next is that there's only 3 publicly listed companies here. And if we grow at our 30% CAGR that you see here, which is organic, it will take us 15 to 16 years to become a top 10 consulting firm in the world in revenue terms. And why I've presented to you in that way is to show you the longevity of opportunity if we continue to make a difference and gain market share. We can continually -- there's a lot of runway for us to grow into before we start capping out and not having enough market to be able to make a difference. So we believe that there is a very, very big opportunity. Our objective, you see McKinsey & Company there, 5th on the list, they are the biggest and probably most highly regarded strategy and change consulting firm out there. Our plan, as you will see later, is to take them on and do what Accenture has done, you see Accenture there to IBM. And that leads very nicely into then my next chart, which is a comparison of ourselves to Accenture since the IPO. So clearly, Accenture IPO-ed many years ago now, back in 1992 or something around there, maybe even '91, '93, somewhere in that range. And obviously, we IPO-ed in July of 2020. But what we've done is we baselined our IPO data as a date. And you can see Accenture's growth, which is the purple line over the first 12 months of their listing was essentially flat. They were slightly up, 2.2% up over the period; whereas Elixirr over the same 12 months, first 12-month period, we were up, as you can see there, over 150%, actually around 160% up. So we think we've outperformed them in the first year. And if you now look at what that looks like relative to this ambition of ours to overtake McKinsey, and how Accenture did this to IBM, the first point to note on this chart is that the first -- the little yellow box you see in the left-hand by the 2001 year is the first year. It's basically the chart I showed you on the previous page, which is that same time period. So what you can see -- you can see what's happened since. Clearly, Accenture was far less than IBM in market capitalization and no one thought they would ever take on IBM. What they have done is basically eaten IBM's lunch, and I believe Accenture's success story is one of the most underrated business successes over the last -- certainly in my time in business. It is a services' success story, second to none, and they have truly given their shareholders an unbelievable return, if the shareholders chose to stick with them during the period. Now of course, this is what we plan to do for -- against McKinsey. You might say that's very bold ambitions, but it certainly was Accenture's ambition. And if they didn't have it, they would not have achieved it. So we have the very same ambition, and we'll show you how we are going about doing and achieving that target in a few minutes' time, but I think this gives you a good sense of the scale, of the runway, the size of the opportunity, the massive market, the growing market and our opportunity to grow into that space and therefore, obviously deliver fantastic shareholder returns to all of those who wish to take equity participation in the journey. One other point is it's just a little point here. Accenture took almost until 2007 from its listing in 2001 to achieve its 150%. We did that in our first 8 months. But clearly, we're still actually greater than that now. All markets have taken a hit in the -- since the Ukraine crisis, of course, and we're proud to say we haven't taken as much of a beating as everyone else. But no fundamentals in our business have changed. Let me just put it that way. So we feel very, very fairly priced at this point. So if you look at our ambition, so let's put an economic number on our ambition. Let's say, in the next 3 to 5 years, I would like to be a services unicorn. What does services unicorn mean? It means being a $1 billion market cap company. As of today, we were a $291 million market cap. If we grow at 58% compound growth rates, which is actually the CAGR since we IPO-ed, and the reason our CAGR since IPO is greater than the pre-IPO CAGR of around 30% is, obviously, we've added now the inorganic opportunity into our mix, which if we continue that for the next 3 years, assuming our revenue, EBITDA remains the same and our multiplier remains the same, we should achieve our ambition of being a services unicorn in 3 years. If we grow at 30% compound annual growth rate, which is the growth rate we've had organically since pre-IPO, then we should do that in 5 years. If we take a very conservative view and assume that we're not going to get the same kind of growth in the recession, so it says 25%, we will do that in 6 years. We still believe at a very conservative end, a 3x opportunity on a pound investor today in 6 years is a pretty good opportunity. I think it's an even better opportunity at 3x return in 3 years, I still think that's very achievable. And you will see the reasons why we think that to be the case in the next few slides -- in the rest of this presentation, let's say. How have we done? We've given you a very bold objective. We've given you a very -- at least a view of the size of the marketplace. And you might say, well, okay, how have you done relatively, historically? And how -- and then perhaps the next question is what's your plans going forward? And how do those things look? So here's a view of how we've done historically. I said we launched in 2009. Graham and I, sitting in my back garden, around a table and then deciding to do this. And you can see our revenue growth there with 1 down year in our entire 12 years of existence now. So -- and that 1 down year was a very, very important year for us because we actually learned quite a few things. It was at a point in which we were getting to probably 5 or 6 big clients, and we had a little bit too much dependency on 1 or 2 of those. And when 1 or 2 of those were no longer there, we felt the pain of that, and that you can see in 2016. That made us even more determined to diversify our business across multiple sort of dimensions, let's say. So we've diversified across industry, across geography and also across capability. And I'll talk to you about that a little bit later. But that was a very important lesson in our history. But from then, you can see how we've accelerated and what's nice since our listing in July of 2020, you can see we've added -- in the gold there or yellow, we've added inorganic growth as an accelerator to our growth opportunity since IPO. The other thing I'd point out about our IPO. We see ourselves as a challenger. We believe we have the opportunity to steal market share from the big players because they are so incumbered by their history and are unable to behave and act in ways that clients want to see from entrepreneurial consulting leaders. And I think there's a very, very good example sitting on this page of us doing that. And that is the listing in July of 2020. Those of you who recall, we went into lockdown around March, April time. And literally, we decided to use that time to get our listing done. And we were probably one of the few listings in the year. In fact, we were the first since lockdown. And we -- it gives you an example of the sort of the mindset we have. We know the opportunity is there. We were -- we thought we'd grab the opportunity when the rest of the market was hesitant. We thought it was time to make a move, and I think it's paid back very well for us, and we will continue to do that. But it does give you a sense of the posture we have towards our clients and why we make a difference to our clients' opportunities. Here's a slide that gives you a sense of our nimbleness, but also the opportunity. We were founded just around the back end of the Great Recession. And that was very much of a bear market. And we were founded with a set of skills that Graham and I had initially and then we hired a bunch of people around us. Efficiency, strategic sourcing, supply chain, procurement. We've added procurement team, that's what you see on the right. It's a cost reduction and operational efficiency play. We've actually made an acquisition, which Graham will tell you a little bit more about Retearn, which leads -- positions us very nicely for an environment that is a recessionary environment where businesses need to save money. But equally, we've done very well on the revenue and growth side of the business. We're very big in innovation. We've done a lot of M&A advisory. We do it ourselves. And one thing we found exceptionally profitable for our business during the pandemic actually was the digital transformation story. And we still have quite a lot of business in that space, to be honest, but it is obviously something that is very growth-minded as opposed to cost reduction. It can be cost reduction, but it's more often seen in the growth mindset and clearly customer experience. And we've made our acquisitions to try and make sure we have both sides of these markets covered. So we feel like we're getting more and more resilience to the trends in the marketplace. So our business is becoming far more resilient, and I'll go into this in a little bit more detail when I talk about our strategy on the page. Why are we better then? So this is a gift my son gave me when we did the IPO. On the morning, we woke up to being listed. I was in a hotel in London and my son was actually doing an internship with the firm, and he came and knocked on my door, and he gave me this present as a gift to me for the achievement of IPO-ing Elixirr, but you can see our logo there, established in 2009. And I thought I'd use this watch just to give you a little bit of a history around the connection of my son to the company and how passionate we are about this business. But also the watch has got another analogy and another meaning. If the consulting profession is criticized for anything, it's criticized for things like this. People joke they'll say, when you hire a consultant, they'll take your watch from you to tell you the time, right? And this is a common sort of criticism laid at the consulting industry that middle managers will bring in consultants merely to say something that the senior management will only take from a consultant as opposed to from a line management person. And there is some merit in this. I mean there -- behind every joke, there's always a little bit of truth. And we're not afraid of facing into these criticisms. And that's actually what makes us the challenges, consultants you would want to be. If that is the perception of our industry in a lot of ways, we face into these things and deliberately try and address them with things like bringing entrepreneurs to the table, people who -- and part of the main value of doing the IPO actually is to allow all of our participants as partners to become business owners in the true sense and equity participants and therefore, to be able to stand alongside any investors that are actually financial investors and understand the risks and rewards of that position and therefore, make the right decisions to maximize that financial opportunity. So this is one of the examples how we try and overcome these limitations. But what I wanted to show you here was a video of our posture to the marketplace, and we're finding that a lot of our clients are really resonating with this message. [Presentation]

Okay. So what you see there is our latest -- we're not one of -- it is actually our latest ad campaign. But there's a lot of important messages in there, things like we don't copy and paste things off the shelf. We try and bespoke things for our clients. We do not take this kind of posture that is represented here. But we also show our clients we can actually -- we actually understand the weaknesses of our industry, and we face directly into them and wish to address them. So this refining is actually resonating really well with our clients and they really do like this, and in particular, in the U.S. The U.S. is very, very open to a challenger and entrepreneurial brand, and this is -- we're seeing this manifest itself very strongly in our U.S. marketplace. What I'd like to do now is just to give you a little bit more detail on our sort of strategy on the page, if you like. And a little bit -- this should give you a little bit of an understanding as to how we are diversifying and making our business more resilient. So what you can see on the left here is in the goal, you'll see all the core capabilities that we've literally grown with the last 12 years. If you know that we built these things up over the last 12 years, and you can see the geographies that we operate in there. And you can see some of the acquisitions we've made into those different areas. So we've got cost reduction, strategy innovation, digital, and all the industries we do that in there, so multi-industry, multi-capability, multi-geography, all brings diversification in our existing business, pre-financial year 2022. What have we been doing in 2022? As you will have noticed, as we mentioned, Graham will go into a bit more detail, but we have obviously bought iOLAP in the early part of this year. The middle of March, I think we finalized on that deal. And that's been a very big impact in the business. We've hired 2 partners into an area, risk and compliance, which is very countercyclical to downward industry model, a downward economic model, if you like. Obviously, ESG is a very big topic in this space, and we've done a team hire of a company called KIT Consulting, led by Em, who has now joined us as a partner, and we love running into this space. Clearly, we do M&A for ourselves, and we're turning that capability on doing M&A for our clients, which is very strategic for them and obviously positions us very well. And more recently, I just hired a new partner to get us into the pharmaceutical industry. So you can see the sort of diversification we're doing across capability, industry, geography. And then there's future potentials and all of these future potentials, whether it's cyber or Lean Six Sigma or cloud or whatever it is, we'll either organically -- not organically, we'll either hire. You can see that's hire to follow on these capabilities or we'll actually do an acquisition. And you'll see the 4 pillars of our strategy there of growing this business; Stretch, Promote, Hire and Acquire. The three on the left are all organic opportunities and the one on the right is really the inorganic. I'll leave Graham to talk to you a little bit more detail about that because it tees up the whole acquisition. And I see that Sam has asked a question about any further acquisitions. Graham will obviously address some of those for you, Sam, when we get to that section of the presentation. So we will also -- you made a point here. Let me address this point about the U.S. How important is the U.S. growth? U.S. is a very, very strategic part of our agenda right now. Just very quickly, just to explain that, the American market is twice the size of any other consulting market worldwide. The second biggest consulting market, you guessed it, is Europe. But America is twice the size of the European market, and then you get into Australia and the Asian markets. And of course, if you want to be a global player, you have to be in the States. So very clearly, we set up sites on growing into the U.S. And the U.S. is now about 50% of our turnover. So in about 2 or 3 years, with the acquisition of iOLAP, we have -- the U.S. is at about 50% of our turnover. And going into next year, 60, 60-so-percent we think will be in the U.S. So it's a very important part of our growth strategy, and I've got a fantastic U.S. leader out there, and our firm is growing very nicely out there. So hopefully that gives you, Sam, a little bit of an answer to your question. And before I go to this, let me just quickly -- this is a presentation, a video from one of my senior partners, who has been working with a client on operational efficiency and cost reduction. And it gives you a little bit of a sense of the broader team skills, but also the type of work we do at our clients. So let's play this video. [Presentation]

Okay. So that's Brandon talking a little bit about a client he's working with, an opportunity for us to work with client's transforming. What I think I'll do now is hand over to Caroline, who will give you a bit of an understanding about why we think we're better. And also talk a little bit about our branding and market positioning.

Thanks, Steve. So obviously, to be the best consulting firm in the world, that's our overarching ambition, we need to make sure the market believes that to be true, and our clients, at the moment, believe that to be true. So before our IPO, we conducted an external survey to ask them exactly what they thought of us, exactly what they thought of our work, and even who they compared us against in the market. So the first question was, who do you compare us against our competitors? This is an open question, but the overwhelming response was McKinsey, Bain, Boston, the MBBs of the consulting world. So we outperformed our competition in almost every area of the survey, so this covered the approach that we take to work, and it covered the quality of our teams, both junior and senior level teams, and the value that we added to the client at the end of the project. We did come on par or just below our competitors in a few areas, just at the bottom of the chart on the left there, so marketing, international capabilities, technical capabilities and company reputation. Now this is a few years ago, so it's pre our IPO, and we've actually worked to address all of these areas since the IPO, and the IPO actually fed into improving many of these just naturally as well. So obviously, we've invested further in acquisitions, which has contributed hugely to our technical capabilities improving over time, so all of the 2 digital businesses and iOLAP in March of this year. We've obviously expanded internationally as well, largely in the U.S. with iOLAP, but also geographically, we've accelerated in South Africa and across Europe as well in recent years. And marketing as well, just obviously, naturally, we've always invested in marketing, and I'm going to touch on that more in a couple of slides time. But naturally, our profile grew in the market upon our IPO. So those areas, we've heavily improved on in the last couple of years since the survey was taken. And obviously, we want to be absolutely top for quality. That's why our clients come to us, and actually make sure the value in our consulting advice rather than being seen as some of the themes that Stephen touched on earlier, which are typically the critique or is the critique of the consulting industry. Just on the right-hand side as well, the way that we hold ourselves to the highest quality bar, we also do so with our acquisitions. So as we're going through the typical due diligence process of acquisitions, a huge part of this is obviously commercial and how the clients see them. So each of the acquisitions today was put under the same level of client scrutiny or client survey and all of them came out -- the same quality barriers, all outperforming the competition with Coast. And obviously, we looked at digital companies and agencies and compared them like-for-like with different firms. They're not necessarily typically consulting firms, but each of them outperformed their competition, which is the key thing here. And Graham will touch on that when he talks about some of the people we're targeting further down and new targets as well. So just going on to the next slide. So another key differentiator for us in the market is the fact that our team are all owners of the firm to different degrees. So on the right-hand pie chart there, you can see the percentage of that. And that covers obviously from the most junior grades all the way through to our partner team, to the directors. And that's really, really important for us. It means that all of our team are committed for the long term, which our options plan really feeds into -- people's options vested between 4 and 5 years. So that naturally increases the long-term commitment that they have. And also, this is based on performance. So it's integral that our teams stay committed to that high bar of performance that we've always set as a firm, and this can become obviously more and more challenging as companies grow. So this options plan is a huge incentive for people to keep performing, to keep delivering for clients. The bottom left-hand box there just highlights our ESPP scheme. So this is a market-leading equity scheme, which we're going to show you a video in a second of one of our analysts actually talking through in a little bit more detail. This was introduced in FY '21, and we've already seen an increased uptake for 2022 of the scheme. So we're already starting to see how people are more and more engaged with the company, and they can see the benefits of themselves sacrificing some of their own salary to get benefits back in shares that we actually match as a firm, but also as the market changes and as the share price increases, they're starting to see the benefits of that as well. And that's very much our mentality as a firm. We want to be a firm of entrepreneurs, not a firm of employees. We want our team to fill the risk and the reward side of an entrepreneur. And again, that feeds into our culture. This is a huge differentiator for us in the consulting market. So now I'm just going to touch on this video with Alice, one of our analysts talking through particularly the ESPP scheme and actually what that means for each of our employees. [Presentation]

So yes, as Alice touched on there, the breakdown of the scheme, particularly -- they're really generous in the market, but they do instill that performance culture, and we do have a very high bar for people to particularly receive the options that they can achieve year-on-year in the firm. And to me, personally, I joined pre-our IPO. We've always had the same culture in terms of wanting the entrepreneurial type of person that really is accountable for what they do in the firm, and the IPO just basically gave us the tools to do this even more still across the firm, which is so crucial again as we grow and as we bring in acquisitions. And these schemes, there is still across the acquisitions as well, so that everyone is aligned to the same goals across companies right away through the group. And now I'm just going to touch on something that Stephen mentioned earlier, when we looked at the consulting campaign, which we introduced in September of this year, we launched in September of this year. As we position ourselves as the best consulting firm in the market with our clients and against our competitors, we really have to have the best brand as well. And everything that we do in terms of our brand identity and any of our marketing is very disruptive, it's very challenger, it sends the right way through our messaging. So from basically a Times Square takeover that you can see on the left-hand side there right away through to the kind of campaigns you saw earlier on, we really want to call out our industry. We really want to make ourselves known as a challenger brand, like you might have heard of the challenger banks. Our industry has been dominated by the big players for so, so long, and it's really time for people to look elsewhere and to take a chance on a smaller boutique company where they can get the better quality, better experience overall. And we've always invested in our brands since they adopt. But as I said, the IPO really accelerated the profile growth that we've seen. And in the last few years, we've really started to see our marketing as a real revenue stream. So in 2022, we've had over GBP 1 million worth of revenue through. And it's not just about the revenue, it's about the type of brands coming to us as well that you can see on the right-hand side there. We're getting some of the biggest brands come through -- directly through to our website from our brand, from our marketing, which is really, really great to see. That alongside our networks -- our incredibly strong network is a really, really powerful tool and will only help to accelerate our growth overall in the market, the ambition that Stephen touched on earlier on. So I'm just going to pass over to Graham now to touch on some of our recent financial performance.

Perfect. Thank you, Caroline. So just to give you an overview of where we stand today, from a P&L point of view, that we've mentioned, we've been growing 30% year-on-year CAGR between 2011 and 2021. Most of that has been organic, but also supported more recently by 3 successful acquisitions in that period, and then we've had iOLAP in 2022, which you'll see in this year's results. Our group revenues are well diversified. We've learned our lessons, to Steve's point earlier, when we weren't so diversified in our early years, and we've spent a lot of time and effort making sure that geographically and by capability, we have a very healthy client spread. And we've got a strong track record of healthy profitability with a group EBITDA margin of 31% for H1 '22. You can see there. And we achieved that through strong rate card, great client work and a fastidious control of utilization and costs. So we managed that very closely. From a cash point of view, a very healthy position, GBP 14.3 million FY '21 operating cash flow. And we've got a very strong conversion of EBITDA less tax to operating cash. And group net cash at the interim half year was GBP 11.1 million. That's after financing iOLAP, the initial consideration without dilution. So rather than printing new shares, we bought shares and gave them -- sorry, we gave them cash to buy shares from the EBT. And I think a very well-run consulting business should never have a cash problem, and ours has run very well indeed. From a balance point -- balance sheet point of view, again, very strong. We've got a robust and healthy balance sheet. At 30th of June, we had net assets of GBP 90 million with no debt aside from the IFRS 16 office lease capitalization. And from a working capital management point of view, we're efficient at 45 days debtor collection as at end of last year. So no bad debt either. We've got a blue-chip client base who pay their bills, which is always very helpful. And from an outlook point of view, you probably have seen this, but if not, we've reaffirmed to the market at our interims that we will be within the guidance range of GBP 70 million to GBP 75 million revenue. And we were happy to upgrade our EBITDA forecast at the interim to be at least GBP 20 million, which was above the previous market expectation. In terms of go forwards and our growth strategy, I just wanted to expand on the 4 pillars that Steve touched on. Anyone that says growing a consulting business is hard, perhaps don't understand that there's actually only 4 ways that you can do it hence, we have 4 pillars here. So 3 of them organic on the left and then inorganic on the right. If I take the inorganic (sic) [ organic ] first, so stretching our existing partners, essentially just mean getting more revenue out of your partner per person. And if you look back at our previous presentations or read the research notes, you'll see that we've been very successful in doing that over the past 4 years in getting our partner team to sell more, thinking bigger with their clients doing longer-term work. And we have actually more than doubled the revenue that each partner brings in per person over those 4 years. So it was around GBP 1.5 million in 2018. And if you take the H1 numbers annualized, we're at about GBP 3.1 million per partner. Promoting partners from within. We've always since day 1 embraced growing our own timber since the day that we founded. In fact, relatively recently, we had our first partner promote who has gone all the way through the firm from graduates, which is a very proud moment for us. And that is -- now we have enough people who have been here for long enough that will be happening more and more. And the great thing is these people are culturally integrated within our business. And with the right incentivization, they will help us succeed going forward. We have a team of highly performing principals, who will be our leaders of the future with the options, packages and the incentives that you heard from Caroline in place, we're in a really good position. The third pillar is hiring new partners. Steve mentioned some of the partner investments we've made previous years and in particular this year. We will continue to do that. If we can bring in more client networks and consulting industry expertise, then that's a key part of our growth strategy because we can then look to work with their relationships and their clients and hopefully make them our clients when they come over to us. And then the fourth pillar, the inorganic piece of the pie is buying new businesses, and this is the area that I drive. So I will give you some more detail of that in the following couple of pages. So what this shows here? Just to give a bit of context, I've had a dedicated team since the IPO working with me on our internal M&A. And you can see some of the pipeline stats on the left there. So to give you an idea, there are 380 companies that I've personally spoken to since IPO. We've closed 4 deals in total and got a really strong pipeline. We could have closed many more, but we're focused on bringing in the right firm, not just any firm, so we quickly discount any opportunity if we see anything we don't like. On the right there, you can see some of the kind of facets, if you like, of what the team and myself are doing in terms of an acquisition strategy. So we are taking what's known as a programmatic approach, which essentially means looking at 1 or 2 deals a year that make up, give or take, 20% to 30% of your market cap. There's been a ton of research recently done by McKinsey, in fact, which looked at hundreds of acquisitive companies and showing that this approach is the most successful for those in the market. So that is the approach that we have taken. It's better than buying a company that is too big and is equally better than buying lots and lots of small companies, and it's working well for us and we'll continue to do so. Boardroom issues. Again, we've heard of some of these, but we are targeting being able to buy the best boutique companies that specialize in those main boardroom issues. And we've touched on some like cyber, data, digital, et cetera. But I think even more powerful is as these businesses come into the group, we can start stitching together, for example, data with digital, with supply chain across our brands, and then we can wrap consulting around that to give a truly unique service for our clients around the world. The third is high-quality services. To Caroline's point, we have very high bar amongst Elixirr. We have an equal high bar amongst the companies we look at, which makes us very selective. And I could honestly do a deal a month if we didn't care about quality of earnings or quality of clients work, but that isn't us. We reject 10x more progressed opportunities than those that decide not to continue with us, and that's just because they don't reach that bar. Geographically additive. We've spoken about the U.S. It's a big investment geography for us, that will not change. But going forward, we can use acquisitions to open up new geographies for us. So we are not around -- as a company, we do not invest in a new geography with people and infrastructure and then hope that clients will come to us. We are only going to new geographies, either if one of our international clients takes us there or if a local client has asked us to come there all through an acquisition. So for us looking at other geographies, such as into Europe, into South Africa, for example, that's something that we are looking at the moment. And the last point there around aligned deal structures, I think this is critical. We've managed to align our people throughout the firm, as Caroline mentioned, through auctions and ESPP, and we want to align the owners and founders and leaders who come across into Elixirr through the acquisitions so that they have the same incentives and motivations as the rest of the partner team to help us grow this business going forward, which is why if you look at some of the deal shapes or all of the deal shapes we've done, since IPO, it is always a mix of cash shares and earning shares. So if they hit their targets over a 3-year period, then they can get that portion there. And what that does is it incentivizes everyone to cross-sell each other's services into other clients and it's working really well today. So from a pipeline and strategy point of view, really happy with progress. But to give you an idea of the businesses we have bought in with a few metrics. You can have a look at this slide. So you can see we brought in 4 businesses, one before IPO, which is down on the left and then one each year since IPO. Just quickly what do they do. Den is a design and creative agency. Coast, they're a digital marketing agency, but when you combine them with Den, that means we have a full-service digital offering with our clients. Retearn focuses on sourcing supply chain, cost transformation. It's kind of the right-hand side of that slide Steve went through earlier. And coming into a recession, we're already seeing an uptick in demand for these services. And then iOLAP for data and technology consultancy, headquartered in the U.S. with a significant data center of excellence in Croatia, which we are now using amongst all of our clients. So as shareholders, I wanted to give an idea of some of the value created, and you can see some of that on this slide. So Den in terms of multiples, it's not applicable. It's more of a merger into the business in 2017 when we were an LLP. We bought a founder in as a partner who bought his team and brand. But you can see since then, we have changed since they joined. So we've increased our revenues 10x since they joined, and we've created over GBP 8 million of new revenue for the group on digital projects with our clients. Coast came in at a total of 4.3x maximum multiple, and we've been trading anywhere between 12 and 16x over the period to period. So you can see immediately there's a lot of shareholder value there. Likewise Retearn, when we brought them into the business, they're excellent at finding value within their clients and our clients, and we found nearly GBP 4 million of cross-sell revenue with them in just over a year. And iOLAP biggest, acquisition to date. We're incredibly excited how quickly we're integrating them into our clients. Data is prevalent in every project that we do. So we've got no doubt that we'll break into new clients and markets, working closely together with them going forward. So if you add those up, overall there's more than GBP 15 million of new revenue into the group during this time that neither company would have by themselves. So it shows that it really does work. And then when you add in the revenue they have anyway from their client set and their organic growth to that new revenue, we are adding tens of millions of revenue into the group alongside the EBITDA and share price uplift that comes with that. So we're going to continue doing this. We're looking for bolder and better companies each time. And before I hand back to Steve, I thought it might be good to just give you a view of what do the founders of these businesses coming in I think once they have joined us. So I'll share a little video that I actually use when I talk to other founders of other companies around the benefits of this. So it is from that perspective. But I think it will give you a really good idea of the people coming in and the businesses. [Presentation]

So hopefully, everybody you've seen, that gives you a little bit of the story of our business. I'll just add one other thing to the acquisition story that I just want to reinforce. The reason we went down this acquisition path and wanted to IPO, one of the reasons, was that the best boutique consulting firms -- sorry, the best entrepreneurial consulting leaders are not sitting in the big top 10 firms I showed you earlier on. They're actually sitting in the boutique firms. And the reason those boutique firms exist is because they're actually better than the big firms because if they weren't, they wouldn't get the work. And so the idea with this whole strategy is -- I'm sorry, so what is it that all boutique firms struggle with? It's never really capability, and it's never really the entrepreneurial edge to deal with your clients in a different way. What it really is, is access to market. The benefit the top 10 firms have is that they've been around for so long, they have access to just about every client because their reputation and their brand is so pervasive, whereas the boutique firms always struggle with that access. So what we're trying to do here is build a platform where we all have ownership in the equity of the overarching body with outside investors participating too, that we can now have a united force to go and share each other's clients with one another and accelerate the growth of the business. And I think what you saw with Graham's presentation there, he mentioned the number of about GBP 15 million so far across our acquisitions so far, where the revenue would never exist with the company's in isolation. It's that ability for us to sell, say, iOLAP into our clients and for iOLAP to sell Coast into their clients, that is really the accelerating opportunity here and one we're really excited about. I'm standing on this page because I'm subconsciously sharing the brilliance of our firm with you. You can see we've had many, many awards since 2014 where we got named the best new consultancy way back then to many, many awards since. And it's -- we're very proud of what we've achieved. But perhaps the most important thing of all is the quality of our client base. And you can see there that we work with the world's best brands. I mean, Graham mentioned in his financial update that we don't have any cash collection issues because literally, we work with the world's top brands, and it's something that we're very proud of, and it's something that we've grown all the time.

Now I've answered 1 or 2 of your questions along the way. I'll have a quick look here. We just about topped an hour, but maybe there's something I can answer quickly. I've got Michael who is asking a question. How many clients represent more than GBP 1 million of your revenue? And what visibility do you have on them? Michael, it would be unsurprising to you to know that this is something that gets a hell of a lot of our attention. We call them gold clients. And we have many clients, actually. I think the last count was 16 or so. I think Graham is nodding to confirm for me there. It's about 16 clients over GBP 1 million. We have 1 or 2 clients sitting at GBP 7 million and others obviously topping out, what, coming out at around GBP 1 million. But these are obviously clients that we -- why we value these clients a lot is because if they like us to buy us for one project, and one project could be GBP 150,000. And if they're buying us repeatedly, that shows that we are -- we've really made a difference to their business and that they are valuing our interventions in their business and our relationships are really sound and strong. So we spend a lot of time. If we get a new client, it's our first and primary objective to be able to build the relationships so that they see us as that key adviser that they turn to when issues are difficult. So I think we've got quite a few more questions here, but what we will do is -- if you all don't mind is, we will have a look at these offline and reply to these in writing as I think we've now run out of time. But suffice to say thanks so much for your time. And hopefully, you will like us to see the opportunity. I can guarantee you that I have some of the world's best consultants in my business. They can work anywhere they'd like, in any consultancy they'd like, probably for, in cash terms -- 70% more in cash terms. And the reason they don't is because they believe in the equity opportunity here. And what does that mean for you as shareholders? It means that you have some of the best consulting minds and leaders in the industry, pursuing the very ambition that you as individual investors would be seeking yourself to maximize your return on equity. So I can't think of a better way to align interests. And as Caroline said, that goes all the way down to the lady that mans our reception in our London office. She's -- the front office of our business, our clients walk through our doors often. And she's incredibly motivated to give them the best Elixirr experience she can. And it all goes to add to the overall value, and she is an equity participant as a result. So thank you for your time, and I hope you can -- you choose to invest in us. Thanks a lot.

Stephen, Graham, Caroline, thank you very much for updating the investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close the session as you all will be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order for the management team to better understand your views and expectations. This only takes a few minutes to complete, but I'm sure it'll be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of Elixirr International plc, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good afternoon to you all.