Elixirr International plc (ELIX) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Elixirr International plc Annual Results Investor Presentation. [Operator Instructions] The company may not be in a position to answer every question received during the meeting itself. However the company will review all questions submitted today, and we'll publish those responses where it's appropriate to do so. [Operator Instructions] It gives me great pleasure to hand over to CEO, Stephen Newton. Good afternoon.

Good afternoon, everybody, and thanks for taking the time to listen to our presentation today. Hopefully, this will be some good news for all of you who are holders. And for those of you who aren't holders, hopefully, we'll encourage you to become one. We've obviously had a very, very good year with strong revenue growth and profit. We continue to develop our 4-pillar growth strategy, which I'll go into a little bit detail later which has delivered some great results for us. And that's all 4 of those pillars are working very nicely together. So that's really the emphasis for today is to say, look, we've had a fantastic year and we also expect that to continue into 2023, which I'll tell you a little bit about towards the end of the presentation or in fact, I'll touch on that a little bit later here, too. So let's go to the next slide. So here's the -- what has happened to us since we IPO-ed in March of 2020. That was in the middle of pandemic. We've had 53% revenue CAGR since we IPO-ed. We've got 122% U.S. revenue CAGR since we IPO-ed, which is very, very important because the U.S. market is twice the size in consulting terms than the European market. So it represents a very important part of our strategy to be a global consulting firm positioning itself as the challenger consultancy. We definitely need to be very, very strong in the U.S. So it's great to see that U.S. growth. We've done 3 acquisitions that Graham will tell you about a little bit later. We've done 8 earnings upgrades since IPO, which we're very proud of. And we've had a large increase in the number of clients since IPO with 200 active clients. So that should give you some sense of the level of diversification of our revenue lines just there. We've got -- had 135% share price increase since IPO, listing at GBP 2.17. I haven't seen it as of late, but it was just over GBP 5 again today. Candidly, we're a little bit disappointed with that. If you look at the EV EBITDA multiplier, it's 8.1x. We believe we're pretty undervalued relative to even at our IPO, we were 10x. So we think we're pretty undervalued at this point. And hopefully, these results will be some -- encourage the right sort of EV multiplier to return. The one point I haven't touched on this slide is this estimated dilution. A few shareholders have commented that our remuneration structure, which is highly incentivizing our people around equity, creates a dilution for our investors. I'm still the largest shareholder in the company. So I'm very careful about diluting. We'd only dilute if we think we're adding value. And in this case, Nick will take you through a model that shows you how this has been calculated. But if we produce a $1 billion market cap company of -- sorry, GBP 1 billion market cap company in 6 years, we'll get a 4x enterprise value multiplier from where we are today with a 2020 -- 22% estimated reduction -- dilution to the shareholder pool. So as a shareholder, I'll definitely take that all day long. And as you'll see, when we describe this to you in more detail, people are only going to be earning those options and equity positions if the company grows at a CAGR of around 25%. And as you can see, our group CAGR since IPO has been 53%. So revenue CAGR at least. So assuming we can keep the profitability and that we -- our EV EBITDA multiplier remains constant, then we can see a market cap growing in linear step with revenue. Unfortunately, that hasn't been the case of late, but that's probably because of general market conditions. Let me give you some highlights of the financial year 2022. And I'll touch on very briefly on the forward look, which I'll go into a little bit more detail later on. Clearly, we've had a wonderful year this year. We've got 40% revenue growth. Underlying organic growth is 18%. The rest is, as you can see from an acquisition of iOLAP, which is a data, technology and analytics consultancy. This was a very strategic buy for us in around March, April time, and Graham will take you through some of the value we're getting from that business already. But suffice to say, there's a lot of cross synergies between our businesses. And I will also talk a little bit about this when I talk about how our revenue per partner is increasing. And the reason that's happening is we're providing more services to our partners to take to their customers and where they have very good relationships that obviously leads to more revenue per partner. So that's very good. Clearly, we love getting awards and accolades, we do a lot of that. And also, as I've mentioned, we've got 200-plus clients right now. And what's most pleasing about this is, there's a 21% increase in our gold accounts. And again, a little bit later, Caroline will talk to you about our portfolio of clients and the sort of portfolio risk, if you like, in relation to our clients. So we've done a lot of work in terms of improving that. And obviously, I've mentioned revenue per partner. I'll go into a little bit more detail of this, but we've seen an increase in revenue per partner primarily because we have this opportunity to sell other services beyond just our core consulting services. And looking forward, we're looking very optimistically at financial year 2023. I've just finished -- last week, we had a 2-day partner offsite, where we go through each partner, goes through line by line, their sales pipeline, their project pipeline. And as a result of that, we were able to increase guidance. It was GBP 85 million to GBP 87 million. We think it's more likely to be GBP 85 million to GBP 90 million and obviously, maintaining our excellent EBITDA margin of 28% to 30% in that range. One last thing I'd point out, would like to make on this chart is I've been running this business with Graham since 2009. We have a very experienced management team, and I'll talk you through that a little bit later, that are very familiar with scaling consulting businesses like this. And clearly, I've had -- myself had 3 tours of duty in sort of the top 10 consulting businesses, let's say. I've done a tour of duty in 3 of them of about 5 years each. So I have a lot of respect for those businesses, but we're obviously trying to challenge them and take them down a peg or 2, let's say. So that is the CEO highlights. I'll hand to Graham, who will briefly introduce himself and then take you through the financial highlights.

Thank you, Steve, and hello, everyone. Graham Busby, I'm Co-Founder, as Steve mentioned, and the CFO and also look after our inorganic strategy. So I can talk to you about how I and we think about acquisitions. But just starting off with the numbers, the financial highlights of 2022. So from a revenue perspective, revenue is up 40% from GBP 50.6 million to GBP 70.7 million. Our partners are performing very well within this. The revenue per client facing partner has increased again this year. And Steve is going to talk a bit more about that shortly. The underlying organic revenue increased by 18%. The rest of the growth, the rest of that 40% is through inorganic and was through the acquisition of iOLAP, which we did in March last year. And we're very pleased with how that has fitted into the business and the work that we're doing. And again, I'll talk about that in a bit. Our pipeline is strong. We've currently contracted a healthy percentage of 2023's budget versus where we are in the year. And as Steve mentioned, we've upgraded the revenue guidance today and are very confident about that. So we've just spent 3 days together as a Board and partnership team last week, and that gave us the confidence behind those numbers. We've just had 3 record months in a row, which obviously equals a record quarter. So we've had a great start to the year. Going into gross profit. We delivered GBP 23.2 million, which is 31% up on 2021. The actual GP percentage was slightly down on '21 as travel and business development activities returned to normal following COVID but we do continue to be meticulous over the pricing and management of projects, especially utilization to ensure that our profits remain at those levels. Adjusted EBITDA, we delivered GBP 20.5 million for the 2022 year at a 29% margin. This was a 30% increase from the year before. If you looked at the annual reports this morning or this afternoon, you'll see there were roughly GBP 3.6 million of adjustments between adjusted EBITDA and operating profit. Just to quickly step through those, roughly GBP 1 million was depreciation of which most of the real cash cost for the capitalized offices. Roughly GBP 2 million is amortization of intangible assets, which is an increase from last year because of the iOLAP acquisition. This is a combination of trademarks, customer relationships and customer order book, which is noncash and will decrease over time. There's a GBP 600,000 of credit for M&A-related items. That's made up of an GBP 800,000 debit for iOLAP, offset by GBP 1.4 million credit for the waiving of the return deferred consideration given the restructure that we did, which Steve will touch on shortly. The remainder is GBP 1.16 million of share-based payments, and this is the internal partner and employee options plus the iOLAP options from the deals. Clearly, this is a noncash item and is at a similar level to last year. So that flows through to bottom left, profit before tax, GBP 15.7 million, which was a 29% rise. Looking at EPS, so adjusted diluted EPS of 30.5p. This is an increase of 26% to 2021 and reflects a 12% effective dilution for the impact of unvested options, our employee share purchase plan and the iOLAP deferred consideration. Next, I'm going to cover our longer-term forecast for the impact of dilution in quite some detail a bit later as well, which hopefully you'll -- give you good insight on that. And given such a strong year in terms of cash generation with GBP 14.6 million, a 7% increase, we're also pleased to announce a dividend payment of 10.8p per share, which is 163% increase from the prior year. And this is planned to be paid in August after approval at our AGM. If we step through now to financial performance, I just wanted to give you an idea of a track record for those who haven't seen it. So first of all, there are 4 ways to grow our business, which are our 4 pillars to our strategy, which Steve will step through just now. They are stretching our existing partners, i.e., getting them to sell and do more. They're promoting partners from within the firm from principal to partner, hiring new partners, Elixirr partners with [ black ] books and clients who can bring them into the firm. And then what I'm looking at, which is acquiring businesses and obviously bringing them into the group. If you look at the chart on the bottom right, you can see we've had strong growth. We've had 39% revenue CAGR over the period shown here. That scales the market that's grown at 8% CAGR over that period. So clearly the difference of that is that we've been gaining market share in every year. And you can see that the EBITDA has risen very nicely along with the revenue as we've kept our EBITDA percentages in the high 20s and 30s, low 30s as well. So very good performance. And like I said, we're confident that this will keep going outward since '23 and beyond. I'm going to hand back to Steve now to talk through a couple of different views of our own revenue and the difference between 2021 and 2022. Hopefully, this will give a bit of transparency of how management make decisions and the impact that that has on the performance of the business. Over to you.

Thanks, Graham. Yes. So what we're trying to do here is to give you some transparency as to the puts and takes, if you like, in our revenue growth model. What you can see here is 2021's revenue from GBP 50.6 million. And obviously, what we've announced today is GBP 70.7 million and then the puts and takes between that. The first thing that you can see there is a Retearn restructure. This was an acquisition we did back in 2021. We did 3 things with this business. We changed the leadership. We felt that there were a few things that we needed to improve on running this business. So we've changed the leadership. We've improved the propositions by merging the procurement proposition with the strategic sourcing proposition that we already have in Elixirr, and that has improved that business immeasurably. But what we also did was we exited the certain contracts and certain client relationships where we were frankly unhappy with the profitability of those relationships. So all of those things were decisions made by leadership being, I guess, me. And that was deliberately in line with the strategy that we are trying to release more profitable clients but not as much profitability, if you like, and also improve the performance of our acquired businesses. That business is now flying. It's doing fantastically well. We've also done a very similar thing with Elixirr Digital, not quite the same. What we had -- we had a pre-IPO acquisition called Den, which was -- Graham will tell you a little bit more about that, and another business called Coast. What we've done is we've brought those 2 businesses together. So now we have an integrated Elixirr Digital proposition and we've appointed a single leader of that business. And also, we've exited some marginal profit clients that we didn't feel of the ilk that we wanted to be continuing with. Then we had some -- so unforeseen events, things like an acquisition by another -- a client being acquired by another business, for example. There was a large bank, for example, in the U.S. -- sorry, midsized bank that got acquired by another midsized bank, it was market consolidation exercise. And usually, what happens in those situations is the acquired business doesn't get to choose their preferred consulting relationships. So we unfortunately lose -- sometimes lose business that way. And you'll see an GBP 11.6 million reduction of end-of-life projects. This is normal behavior, although I would say this GBP 11.6 million is unusually large in this year because we had one, an usually large project that we were working on come to an end in the early parts of the year. Interestingly, if we had had iOLAP at that time, we would have probably been able to continue with this. It was far more technical and data driven for the second or third phases of this project, and we actually lost this business to another organization that had the iOLAP type of skill. Now if we'd have that business, if iOLAP had been with us at that time, we would have probably had a better chance of keeping this business. If you take that unusual event out, our actual organic growth is around 29%. But if you add that back in, it's around 18%. So we feel very good about our base organic growth. Obviously, we face some of these negative -- or not negative, but downward pressures on revenue, too, let's put it that way. So hopefully, that gives you a good understanding. Obviously, there's an acquisition that obviously comes in, which adds another GBP 15-or-so million to position we have there. This is another version of the same truth, and I think we had a question here about partner remuneration, which I'll touch on a little bit later. I thought it was about revenue. But this is about partner, revenue per partner, okay? So Graham mentioned we have a 4-pillar growth strategy, and we cover all 4 of those pillars here. And you might say, well, there's 5 blocks you're building up between the 2. Well, that's true because it's not a growth strategy, but we do exit partners. And what I want to point out here is, obviously, we exit partners who do not meet our performance for us. So an average of GBP 1.53 million revenue attainment is not good enough for an Elixirr partner. So we have to take those decisions to exit. And as a high-performing culture, we have to do both sides through reward performance, but we also take action on underperformance, and this is what we have to do here. What is really nice overall though is if you look at revenue per partner in -- sorry, in 2021 year -- is that 2022? 2021, sorry, 2021 year is GBP 50.6 million and average revenue per partner is GBP 3.15 million. Obviously, it's gone up nicely to GBP 3.57 million per partner at GBP 70.7 million. The positive actions to the partner average, you can see after the exited position, established partners are contributing for just over GBP 4 million per partner, which is really nice because what that means is that they're being able to sell the wider services that we have now with things like the digital propositions and our data and analytics capability. Clearly, we've made some promotions, which -- and the promoted partners bring in -- or look after the revenue for us, so that's very important, and probably our most valued way of bringing partners through the firm. And then obviously, we've made some hires. You -- the average revenue per hired here is fairly low because they happened towards the back end of the year. So they're still getting up to speed, and we should see they've all landed very well actually, in fact. And you should see those numbers going up. And then clearly, our acquisitions add to the situation here, and that gives us the growth in revenue per partner overall. So all in the 13% from GBP 3.15 million to GBP 3.57 million is made up in that way through those 4 levers and plus, obviously, the negative effect of exits. I'm now going to hand over to Nick who's going to talk you through a similar view for cash.

Thank you, Steven. Nick Willott, I'm Finance Director and Company Secretary. So from a cash perspective, our business model has continued to perform very strongly. We can continue to see high conversion of our EBITDA less corporation tax to operating cash flow. So operating cash flow in the year was GBP 15.7 million, an increase of GBP 1.4 million or 7% on FY '21. This was slightly less than the proportionate increase in EBITDA as a result of having less creditors at year-end, about GBP 1 million less like-for-like and paying higher cash tax in the year, GBP 1.3 million higher as most of our subsidiary companies now -- are now large enough to pay tax on a quarterly basis rather than paying annually in [ arrears ] as they did in previous years. We spent GBP 19.4 million on acquisitions. Most of this was for the acquisition of iOLAP, plus small amount of deferred consideration for the acquisition of Coast. We've satisfied all of the iOLAP initial consideration from cash, rather than issuing shares for -- to the sellers of iOLAP, we paid the consideration all in cash, and they purchased shares from our EBT. And this is a mechanism we are using to ensure that we can complete acquisitions with minimal or no dilution to shareholders. And in this case, there was no dilution at all for the acquisition of iOLAP. There was a net EBT transactions and -- EBT and shareholder loan transactions of cash outflow of GBP 4.9 million. Most of this was the purchase of shares for our EBT, and our balance of shares held in our EBT increased from GBP 2 million at December '21 to GBP 7 million at December '22. So you can think of those shares really as being equivalent to cash as we can use them for acquisition. And in fact, we used most of that balance of shares to settle 50% of the iOLAP first consideration in early FY '23, again, without any dilution to shareholders because we paid cash and by cash and that's accompanied through the purchase of shares from EBT by the -- our former shareholders of iOLAP. We closed FY '22 with GBP 20.4 million of cash and no debt. So -- but again, a very strong financial position, giving us plenty of cash resources for both our increased dividend of GBP 5 million that we'll be paying in August and also to cover potential future acquisitions. If I now move on to the balance sheet. Net assets increased by GBP 10 million from GBP 86 million in December '21 to GBP 96 million in December '22. If I just pull out the major change in our balance sheet. Intangible assets increased by GBP 27 million this is the goodwill and customer intangible assets recognized on the acquisition of iOLAP, net of GBP 2 million charge for the amortization of customer intangibles. Trade and other receivables increased by GBP 4.2 million. This was a combination of revenue growth. The December '22 was about 50% higher in revenue than December '21 and a couple of clients paying us in the first week or 2 of January rather than last week of December, but we have no issues with our debtors. We have a blue-chip client base. We monitor our debtors every week and have no issues from a recoverability perspective. We've been moving cash on the previous slide, and then trade and other liabilities increased by GBP 11.7 million. This is the accrual of the iOLAP to first consideration, where we accrued the maximum on acquisition because we expected strong performance in that business. In fact, we saw that in FY '22 when they achieved their earn-out. I'll now move on to the next slide, which is our dilution model. So we've had some questions from shareholders around dilution. Clearly, the equity incentives that we give to our employee team are very important in motivating that team and aligning them with external shareholders. And we've always been very comfortable that this structure creates far more value than it does in terms of the value cost to existing channels in terms of dilution. And we want to set out for you our assumptions on this just to make it very clear. So we modeled a 25% organic growth in the business, compounding, maintaining our EBITDA margin of 29%, which is where we closed last year, which we believe is sustainable. Some modest increase in multiple to 13x EBITDA multiple in the latter years, and that gets us to a GBP 1 billion unicorn in 6 years by 2028. We have modeled all of the existing option pool that the current partner team and employee team have and the options that we'd grant to future employees, both new partners, 4 in the short -- in the new years growing to 13 partners per year and the after-years, and new employees as we grow the business and the employee base by 25% per year in line with revenue. And then if you model the impact of those options for the ones existing today and the options being granted to new employees, we're assuming 65% vesting, and it's important that all of our options -- not all our options do not vest unless you perform. So 65% is the historic average and -- which we've modeled, and a very conservative 10% attrition rate. Although we have very good attrition rates for our industry, our unmanaged attrition is actually higher than that. So it's very conservative assumptions. This gets us to a 22% dilution in 6 years. So 4x the enterprise value, the 22% dilution. And that's both because employees have to perform to get their options and our options were granted at market price. So these are not nil cost options that some companies use. The employee or partner only gets the benefit of growth in the share price because the option starts at market price. And that limits dilution, but also completely aligns their incentives with those of our external shareholders. So we think this is a very compelling argument for the way we've structured our employee incentive schemes. Now I'll hand back to over to Caroline and she is going to talk about business development.

Thank you, Nick. So I'm just going to talk a little bit more about how we've actually been able to maintain these exceptional levels of growth and profitability as well. So the profitability side really comes down to the approach that we take with clients. We position ourselves as the MBBs, and that's actually how our clients rate us as well in an external survey we did a couple of years back. Our clients actually named us to be and mostly related to the life of McKinsey, Bain and Boston and in the consulting market. So we're positioned very much as a strategy boardroom level, which means that we have relationships with the C-suite executives. And it also means that we've maintained those relationships throughout growth markets and potentially difficult markets as well. We're able to address the multiple challenges and now even more so through our acquisitions. So where typically before, we were very much at the strategy level, we're now able to execute on that strategy as well, which is highly valuable for clients. So with the likes of iOLAP, our digital businesses and also the procurement expertise of return, we're now offer to -- able to offer both ends of that spectrum. And that's only saving our clients adding to the longevity of our projects, and obviously, then creating the growth that you're seeing today. We obviously focus massively on retaining clients. So we've got 72% of repeat clients in 2022, which is clearly very, very strong. As Steve mentioned earlier, we're focused on scaling those accounts as well. So we saw a 21% increase in our gold-clients, which accounts worth GBP 1 million and above, and also obviously bringing in new logos as well. So those 3 things are all helping to obviously sustain the growth that we've been seeing, and we expect that too going forward as well. As Nick touched on, and the reason that we're able to operate in this way and add the value to clients is very much our people. We're hiring from top universities. We've got an array of skill sets now in the business from strategy consultants through to designers, digital engineers, and also with the data expertise that iOLAP brought in March. And as I said before, all of this is adding to the value that we can actually ultimately deliver to clients at the end of the day, which is making all of these pillars work really well, and it's helping to retain the clients and bring in new clients as well. Looking a little bit more closely at 2022 on the left-hand side there, you can see our top 10 clients. And really, this is showcasing not only do we have low levels of client concentration, and that's been improving year-on-year since our IPO. For example, at IPO, our #1 client contributed 25% of the business, and now it's only 8% or just under 8% for 2022. So that's improving every single year. But the other important point on this slide is if you look on the left-hand column, and also at the third column as well, you can see we're working in an array of industries and array of geographies as well. So we're very, very diversified in the market, which is making us exceptionally resilient, particularly to the current market conditions. We're not relying on 1 industry, and we have multiple capabilities to offer to clients so that we can increase those certain capabilities, maybe in down trending markets and increase other capabilities when clients are after maybe more innovation and growth as well. So this is making us -- it's actually resilient and again, why you're seeing the performance that you're seeing today. Just looking a little bit more at our teams, as I mentioned earlier. We have a team of around 500 employees. Some of the teams are based -- well, they are all based across the globe. We have team locations. But based on the fact that we operate under 1 P&L, we're able to place people on the right project. We're very, very flexible with that approach. So it means that we -- our clients are getting the best value from our people as well, which makes it incredibly -- increased our ability to scale, which is fantastic. On the right-hand side, as Nick mentioned, we offer all of our employees, no matter what their role, no matter where they're based, they all offer equity, but they have to perform to get that equity. So you can see on the right-hand side the 64%. Those are the people that performed and that they actually got their options to 2022. So we're very fastidious on actually handing out those options. People know that there's a very high bar that they continue we have to meet. And that's crucial as we scale, obviously, to retain that quality and to retain our market positioning, which is why we're able to, again, hold those levels of profitability. So I'm going to hand over to Graham now to talk a little bit more about each of our acquisitions to date and how they've landed.

Thank you, Caroline. So we have done 4 acquisitions to date. One of them was pre-IPO in 2017, which is Den as you can see on the left there. And then we've done 1 each year since then with Coast, Retearn and iOLAP. I think it's important to say that every acquisition we do is earnings enhancing. You can see in the middle row there how EBITDA has increased quite rapidly. And for us, it's about market integration. It's about getting each other and to each other's clients and breaking 1 plus 1 equals 3. And It's not about back office synergies or integration, which is probably more of a private equity model. We actually want to do different things with our clients, new things, and be able to give them the value for that. And in return, we get new clients asking us for the latest and greatest. To show you Den, they are a creative and digital agency and then Coast at the other end of the spectrum, digital marketing. Together, we treat them as a kind of digital capability, if you like, at Elixirr Digital and I'll give you a couple of examples as to how we've gone to market together there. Retearn, focus on procurement, transformation, supply chain and cost and in a bearish market, obviously, that has come in to Elixirr recently. And then iOLAP last year, which was our biggest acquisition to date in the U.S., that is data and technology. And again, we've shown great success amongst our client sets working together there. Just to give you a couple of examples, starting with Elixirr Digital, so Den and Coast. One U.K. insurance company, we were working with a consulting hat on, if you like, was a relatively good-sized project. We were doing a sprint with them. But then that evolved into actually designing and building the outcomes of that sprint. And it actually turned into a GBP 1 million plus client. On the EDX side, the Elixirr Digital side, they had a client, which was a U.K. national standards body, where they were doing some digital marketing with them, things like pay-per-click and search engine optimization. Again, relatively small to start with. But then they brought in the consulting team, and we actually transformed their full digital experience, and that again became a multimillion pound client. So really good synergies between the 2. Looking at Retearn, 1 consulting client we had was a Jersey subsidiary of a national bank, 1 that everyone here would have heard of. And we did a small piece of work with them around business continuity planning. But then we brought in Retearn alongside us to then look at a lot of their big third-party contracts, which gave us several months' worth of work. On the flip of that, Retearn had a U.K. media company where they were looking at third-party spend again, but more of the tactical lens. And then they brought to the consulting team to look at the operating model with a far more strategic view. And together, we saved them more than GBP 20 million. Likewise, doing the same with iOLAP, we had -- or we have an African bank that we've worked with for many years, and we've worked all the way across the bank never in data. And with iOLAP joining Elixirr, we were able to help them with their data strategy and then actually execute the road map on the back of it. And on the flip side of that one, iOLAP worked with the U.S. regional bank and still work with them and brought in Elixirr to really talk to the Board and to the leadership team about their overall strategy, not just data and that helps us both get into new parts of the bank together. So big joint projects that we're working together on and it's really proving out the strategy very nicely. Thinking about going forward, if we go to the next page, in terms of growth prospects. You can see on the left there, some of the pipeline figures that we have. I've got a dedicated team working on this with me. And since IPO, we've screened over 3,000 boutique consultancies. I personally engaged with nearly 400 of them and had introductory meetings with 130. And you can see how those numbers flow through the pipeline. You can see that we've got to due diligence with 8, and we've done 4 deals in total, 3 since IPO. I think importantly, the difference between those 2 is that we could have done 8, but we pull out some due diligence if we don't like what we see, and it doesn't align to what we are as a business. What does that mean? Well, some of the things we look at on the right-hand side there, and I touched on this in our last presentation. So if you did hear it then, now you will have heard some of it. But hopefully, those who haven't heard, it will be useful to know. We have a programmatic way of looking at acquisitions. So what that means is looking at 1 or 2 deals a year, where together, it makes up 20% to 30% of our market cap. So that's different to doing multiple small deals, and it's different to doing 1 massive deal, and it's actually proving that to be the best-performing M&A strategy when looking across the most successfully acquisitive companies around the world. And for us, that's been underpinning our strategy to date, and it will do as well going forward. What we look at is from a capability point of view, is boardroom issues. So we want the best boutique businesses who deal with boardroom issues that either we do parts of or that we don't do yet at all. So for example, one that we might do part of is data with iOLAP. That takes a big tick across the data spectrum, but there are elements that iOLAP don't work in, and we would love to add to their overall capability, either through bringing them in to do that piece or even there could be a geography angle, the data behind it makes sense to do. Other areas to look at could be competitive intelligence. Digital, we've looked at innovation ESG, cyber security. These are the types of issues that the majority of our clients are grappling with day-to-day. And the strategy is to get the best of the best boutiques in each of those boxes and then stitch them together and work together to create the most shareholder value. But importantly, actually the most client value so that we get those long-term large clients for years going forward. The service quality needs to be excellent, quite frankly. That's what is behind our brand and has been since day 1. We have pulled out of due diligence amongst some of the companies we've met with because the quality of the work hasn't been there. But obviously, also quality of earnings, and we've shown you how strong our P&L and balance sheet are. And what we don't want to do is erode that if we don't see sites of kind of bringing them up to the levels we're in. I mentioned geography from a data perspective, but it can be -- it can get us into new geographies or it can actually go behind investments we've already made. U.S. is a big investment geography for us. We've made no secret of that fact. It's a large part of our revenue for last year. And we are actively looking at further U.S. acquisitions. Likewise, U.K. and EU and South Africa is where the rest -- most of the rest of our revenue is. And it will make sense to make acquisitions in those areas as well. One thing we don't think as a consultancy business is invest in a geography first and kind of cross your fingers and hope that clients are going to follow. We've done that through client demand. But another way we can go to a new geography is through an acquisition where there are clients, there are people and the demand is there already, and that's a key part as well. And then finally, aligning the deal structures. The way that we structure the deals is based on an EBITDA valuation. So getting an adjusted EBITDA number, agreeing what multiple should be applied to that based on historical growth rates, client concentration, quality of earnings, et cetera, and then getting to a consideration number, which we then look to divide 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 or third cash, 1/3 Elixirr shares day 1 to get them hopefully, major shareholders coming in and, therefore, highly aligned to our partner team. And then they can earn the final third by achieving targets over the next 3 years our post deal. So what's nice about all of that is it really does align to our whole partner team and is very much part of the entrepreneurial nature that's given us the success today. So with that, I'll hand back to Steve to give you a view of the outlook going forward.

Thank you, Graham. Yes. The first thing I'd like to look at is when looking at the summary and outlook, I just want to touch on the quality of the team that leads this company. Just focus your eyes on the middle row, if you like, there for a second. These are -- this is essentially my leadership team. Clare Filby, I've known for years and years, but she used to be the COO of Accenture and she's now our COO, and she's been with Elixirr for 9 years. So Clare clearly understands our business and she also knows how to scale consulting businesses because she was a strategic leader in the Accenture organization as it scaled here in the U.K. And everybody can look to see how that business has seriously scaled and delivered value to its shareholders. Graham, I won't touch on. He's in the room, he's my co-founder. But Brandon is another name I should pick out here. He's also been with us for 9 years or so -- 8 years or so now. And he basically runs our sales and marketing activity. And he's done a fantastic job since IPO, as you can tell from the GBP 30 million that we told you -- roughly GBP 30 million we IPO-ed with to the GBP 70-odd million that we're trading at now. He's done a super job. His background is PwC and Infosys. He was 1 of the first people to join Infosys when they were trying to build a consulting business. And in 5 years, they've built up to 5,000 people globally. So that's a pretty good track record in terms of scaling our consulting business from nothing. Ian Ferguson is my co-founder; Ian was with Magic Circle law firm for 30 years. He was with Allen & Overy. He was the partner leading their corporate law practice. So we pretty much have probably 1 of the city's best lawyers as our General Counsel. And so we're pretty water-tight in the legal space. And Eric Rich is another name I should point out. He was -- he's also been with us for quite some years now 7 years in Elixirr. And he was actually appointed into Infosys and ran the Infosys business when Brandon was there at the same time and ended up running it for 5 or so years after that, after Brandon left, and also had PwC in his background. And Nick, who you all have heard from earlier, Nick has -- used to be a client of ours. Actually, he was an FD of 1 of our clients and liked the business so much. He joined us. So thanks for doing that, Nick. And then Caroline has been with the firm 5 years. So it's a fantastic leadership team, and I'm very proud to say that this team is very, very capable and obviously very able to scale businesses like this and have been there and done that. They've worn the T-shirt a few times, let's say, in doing that. I also want to touch on the rest of the partner team just quickly. There's been a few questions here about attracting partners and the incentivization model for partners. So I'll just pick that up on this chart here. All of these people below the central line there can actually go into the marketplace and earn a partnership income out of what I say, the big top 10 firms. And just quickly about that industry, I have a question here about the industry and how you see ourselves. I'll just quickly touch on that as well. The industry is basically broken down into 2 halves, if you like. The first half is the top 10 consulting firms account for about 50% of the global consulting spend out there. And the top 10 firms are the usual suspects: McKinsey, Bain, Boston, KPMG, Accenture, IBM, PwC and if I've forgotten one, I've forgotten 1 or 2. It doesn't really matter. I think you know the names in there, they're almost household names. The bottom 50% of the market or the other 50% of the consulting market is accounted for by about 100,000 boutique consulting firms. And the difference between these 2 groups of consultants is actually quite stark. The boutique firms have to be far more scrappy, far more entrepreneurial and actually better in certain instances than the big 10 firms because otherwise they wouldn't win the business. They don't have the brand power. So you often find in those boutique firms a very competitive, a very capable and very skilled set of individuals. And these are the sorts of people I'm looking to attract here at Elixirr with the equity incentive model. And that's the big difference with a person sitting in a top 10 firm. They largely -- so 1 or 2 exceptions in the top 10. There's only 3 list of firms in that top 10 group. The rest are all partnerships. So they're turning up for in-year cash remuneration. And they're not turning up for a 5-year equity story. Whereas most people who starts companies, AKA the boutique consulting firms as an example, all starting those companies to create equity value for the long term. That's how they see themselves generating the wealth they'd like to generate. This is true for 90% of all of the people on this page, for example. But just to give you a sense of what that looks like any 1 of these people can go and get an average part of salary pay. And I use the one that's got the lowest average pay. By the way, you could get this information of companies [ out from the ] website. KPMG, PwC, Deloitte, all the LLPs that are registered in the U.K. has to publish their accounts and company's house. They have to show the average partner pay and they have to show their CEO pay. So the average partner pay for -- the lowest 1 is KPMG at about GBP 1 million. So each partner in KPMG on the average would be getting GBP 1 million. What's the maximum my partners can get? GBP 360,000 , yes, GBP 360,000 is the maximum they can get. And that's if they hit all of their targets. So that's not average. That's your top of the house, you get your GBP 360,000. So all of these people could go and get 700 -- give or take GBP 640,000 more out of KPMG, which is the lowest paying of all the partnerships, okay? What do they get for that? They get shares in our firm. They get options market price options, which is what Nick was talking about, so that they get the growth in the share price. They don't get an existing grant, if you like. They get a GBP 3 million option at market price. Why? Because over 5 years, that's what they've given up with KPMG, let's say. In KPMG, they make GBP 5 million over 5 years if they were on the average. So they're getting with us GBP 1.8 million, they've given up GBP 3.2 million. We give them a GBP 3 million option at market price. If they double the firm, they get GBP 3 million. If they triple the firm with us, they get GBP 6 million. So the motivation for them is very aligned with growing the business and the equity value of this company. They can outperform an opportunity in KPMG over 5 years. If we get this company to GBP 1 billion, the opportunity for them is somewhere between GBP 9 million and GBP 12 million when you add it all together, as opposed to say, a GBP 5 million opportunity in KPMG. But they have to sacrifice before they do that. They have to sacrifice the fact that they could go and get the GBP 1 million in cash as opposed to the GBP 360,000 that they get from us at a maximum. Okay, so they have to be in that mindset. So what you're seeing here is a group of people who are very entrepreneurial, people who are very hungry and very aligned with the interest of any investor community that participates in our share price growth. So we think that is a highly motivational tool and I see it every day. This is the best group of partners I've worked at. I've been in this industry off and on because I did a few start-ups for about 30 years doing tours of duty in IBM, KPMG, Accenture. So I've seen it from partnership side, corporate side, systems integration, you name it. And I've never seen such a talented group of people working with single purpose, improving the share price and the teamwork is phenomenal. We've extended that down into the organization. There was a question here about pay of our people, are we facing pressure. The equity model is very differentiated. We wanted to push the entrepreneurial story and entrepreneurial risk story into our people. The difference here is we don't pay our people less. We ask them to sacrifice the salary to participate in an equity scheme, okay? So where we tell our partners they won't get the GBP 1 million on average, they have to start straddle the gates with almost 1/3. With our people, we give them the option to opt in and that way we determine how many people have the right kind of mindset as well. We do grant them options for performance, as Caroline said. But that's how we use all of these levers to work together to drive the performance of our company and all linked to share price and all 100% aligned with any investor community. I think I've knocked off a number of those questions there, I hope. Let's look at the outlook. We are very bullish about our business. As Graham mentioned, I think I might have touched on it, too, we had our team together last week. And we did a bottom-up revenue build and hence, we did the revenue upgrade that we've forecast today, GBP 85 million to GBP 90 million. We still believe we're going to be in our EBITDA range. And as I think Graham mentioned, we've done 3 record revenue months at the start of this year. So each month was a record. And that means that Q1 was a record, and we see that momentum continuing. We've done 52% absolute growth in the first quarter and 19% underlying organic. So we're very bullish about what's in our pipeline and what's coming down the line. I think the fact that we deliver such high-quality differentiated services to our clients, because our people are so motivated to deliver for the long term. The one thing I perhaps didn't mention about that sort of the 2 halves of the consulting market being the top 10 and the boutique firms, if a big brand fails publicly or screws up on a project or something like that, it doesn't really affect them. Whereas a boutique brand, if they do that, they can go out of business. So the focus and the emphasis on quality in the boutique world is super important because you can't sustain a position if you don't deliver to your clients because the big firms will just take it. No one ever got fight for hiring a big firm, right? So it's much, much harder to win work. It's much, much harder to continuously outperform them and it therefore makes you very hungry and very agile. And when you've got an equity model that plays towards your success, that's why we're putting ourselves right in the middle of that debate to try to push-pull as many of the talented individuals we see in the boutique space into a model where we can really start taking a real challenge to the top 10 firms rather than dividing our concrete through 100,000 different firms. So we have market-leading in growth, both organic and inorganic. We're very resilient to recession. Perhaps I should just quickly touch on that why we think that should be true. In growth markets, you're focusing on revenue enhancement, innovation, new products, new markets, new geographies, M&A. In contracting markets, you're focusing on operational efficiency, cost reduction, procurement, sourcing, blah, blah, blah. And if you can cover both sides of that equation, you actually find -- if you look at the consulting industry over 15, 20 years, it's grown consistently on average for 15 years at 15% CAGR. The last few years, it's actually grown faster, but now more recently, it's forecast to be a little bit lower sort of in the 8% range, as Graham mentioned, since 2017. But it's still a growing industry. And the reason it grows through recessionary periods, regardless at this point is there's cost reduction and there's also revenue enhancement or there's profit maximization activity, which is just as important as revenue enhancement activity. And we're fortunate enough or experienced enough to know that we've got to build capabilities on both sides of this. And hence, we see the resilience in our business. I've made the point about our team or as investors, there's all of our institutional and private investors. And the summary that Caroline was putting out is we believe we have the quality of MBB with the agility and entrepreneurialism, let's call it, of the boutique consulting firms. And essentially, what we're trying to do with that acquisition strategy is bring more and more of those people to the table, participating in the equity play that is 100% aligned with anyone who's invested on this call and anyone who chooses to invest on this call. So very, very bullish. And I think what I'll do is now look at some of these questions and see...

That's great, Stephen, let me just jump in and just give you a small break between the Q&A. But thank you, Graham, Nick, Caroline, also for your update and presentation this afternoon. [Operator Instructions] Stephen, as you can see, you've received a number of questions from investors today. So thank you to everybody for your engagement. And I know you have touched on several of them throughout your presentation. But I wondered if I may, Stephen, just ask you to read any out there where you thought it's appropriate to do so, and then I'll pick up from you at the end.

Yes. So happy to do so. Thank you. I have touched on quite a few of these, but I'll pick 1 or 2 out that I think -- and then ask some of my colleagues to answer in the case if I think they're more appropriate to answer than me. The first one, amazing track record since IPO from Chris. Why does the market not value the opportunity? Good question. Would you consider buying stock back on any weakness? I would love to buy. Unfortunately, Graham and I are in a constant party, which means that if we make -- if we buy 1 share, we may have to make an offer for the whole firm. I'm not ready to do that just yet. But I think that it does present a very big opportunity. Do you want to add anything to that?

Yes, definitely from a personal point of view. From a company point of view, we are buying through the EBT that we have. And what that allows us to do is produce those -- so buying from the market and then using those shares as a currency for acquisitions and new partners. So that's -- as the share price is low, that's obviously a good thing to do.

And Graham, while we have the mic, can you talk a little bit about your expansion -- from James, plans in the U.S.? iOLAP sounds like a good deal. Where do you go from here?

Yes. So like I said earlier, iOLAP is the biggest acquisition that is in the U.S. It does data analytics and tech brilliantly. There is plenty of space in the U.S. to buy something else. The U.S. consulting market is 2 or 3x bigger than the European market, which gives you a sense of the scale there. When you look at the revenues we have there now at 44% of our global revenues it will, at some point, inevitably tip over the 50%. And that will be a combination of organic and buying other probably nondata companies, but I've got several conversations on the go. So yes, absolutely.

There's a question here about how is the labor market for Elixirr. I think we've touched on that a little bit, but maybe I should just elaborate a little bit. And what about wage inflation? Essentially, if we -- what we look to do throughout the business, and this is an industry-wide thing, if we do increase wages, which we have done this year, and we do pass that on in rate hikes to our clients. So we look to recover that from clients. But also what I would add into that, that's slightly different in our case is, we do have a more entrepreneurial type of employee, who is investing their own money in our shares, which we match and also, obviously, the option -- performance option grants that they get which creates a level of stickiness. So I don't think people are as short term in our business as they are in typical organizations. They're far more strategic about what they're trying to achieve and looking at things over a sort of an equity term period, which could be 3 to 5 years, let's say. So I think that's quite interesting. I think I've covered some -- I've covered the partner pay example quite specifically. That's a question that's been asked here. Well, management look, yes, I think you've touched on that, Graham.

Yes, I can deal with that. So the question pre-submitted, iOLAP has performed better than expected. I would say, as expected, as that's where we set it and that's what we saw. Will management look for further large acquisitions despite the company getting worse? I think I answered that, yes. Would you consider to fund this with debt, especially since that has now become expensive? The answer is yes. Obviously, we have equity to use as we see fit with what's in EBT. We've also got great cash reserves that we can give as cash or as cash for them to buy shares. But I think the beauty is that we combined our very large shareholders of Elixirr, so we will always choose whatever the right shareholder answer is. And that will be a combination of cash and equity currently, and no doubt will be debt for the future, especially if we're looking for bigger and bigger acquisitions.

So I think we covered -- there's a question here on dilution. I think we covered that appropriately in your...

Yes. Just to reinforce the point, there's a question from Katie. Would all these options dilute the overall number of shares in issue? And on the dilution slide that we had in the presentation, I mean, the answer is yes, but only in a very limited fashion. I mean, that -- those projections showed 22% dilution for a set of assumptions, which had us growing the share price and enterprise value by fourfold to becoming a GBP 1 billion market cap company. So the dilution will be significant here. It is marginally relative to the value creation.

Do you want to -- there's a question here from David, what is the most common type of project that companies highly...

Yes. So typically, I probably said it earlier, it's what is being discussed at the executive level or the board level. Importantly, it's the strategy side of that issue. But I think what really differentiates us versus other strategy consultants, if you like, is we can actually then do the execution. And that's where we get long-term trusted adviser status with our clients.

Katie's asked a question here. Are you thinking of a U.S. listing? As I said at the start, I think that it's inconceivable that we do not have a sizable U.S. business. And if it becomes appropriate that we have a listing there then that would be a consideration at the time. So the market, in terms of consulting dollar spend, is literally double the European market. So if our U.S. business is twice as big as our European business, because we follow the market almost precisely. Let's say that's -- the eventual outcome, it would be -- it would make logical sense for us to have some form of U.S. listing. What form that will take, we'll wait and see. But it's something we would consider at the time. As I said, our U.S. business is growing fantastically and doing very, very well. So I think we're out of time. We've covered most of the questions, some of them I have covered -- I think most of them have been covered. So thank you very much for your time and your questions. It's been a great opportunity to present and talk to you and hope all of you will become -- if you're not holders already, hopefully, you will become holders soon.

That's great, Stephen, Graham, Nick and Caroline, thank you very much indeed for your update and presentation and for taking your time to go through those questions. Could I please ask investors not to close this session as we're now automatically redirect you for the opportunity to provide your feedback in order for that management team can 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 your time this afternoon and for attending today's presentation. Good afternoon to you all.