Elixirr International plc (ELIX) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Elixirr International plc investor presentation. [Operator Instructions] Before we begin, we'd like to submit the following poll, and if you give that your kind attention, I'm sure the company will be most grateful. I'd now like to hand over in the first instance to CEO, Stephen Newton. Good afternoon.

Good afternoon, everybody, and thanks very much for attending this presentation. Hopefully, you'll find it enlightening. We're certainly very excited with our results and with our company's potential. So hopefully, we can portray that to you in this conversation as we go. And as we've said, if there are any questions, please submit them and we'll pick those up as we go, probably more towards the end because this is a fairly lengthy presentation and just see if we have enough time. But for those of you who don't know me, I'm Stephen Newton, Founder and CEO of this company, along with Graham, who will introduce himself shortly, South African accent there, you can tell, so been in the country since '95, qualified with KPMG as a CA, did an MBA with them as well. And then 5 years with them, consulting in the city and then start up [ around.com ]. Another 5 years with IBM, consulting, leading their financial services sector then another startup, which also failed and then 5 years with Accenture and during that time he did another startup, in the evenings, if you like, and that also didn't come to much. And then Graham and I decided in 2009 that the itch to start a company, I needed to scratch. He wanted to join me, and we started Elixirr in 2009, and we've been growing at roughly around 35% to 37% CAGR depending on where you peg the start position over that time, and we're very proud to say we've got a fantastic company here. I'll let him -- which he'll talk you through. I'll talk -- let Graham introduce himself little bit, and then Nick and then we'll dive into the detail.

Hello, everyone. Graham Busby, I'm the CFO. My background after Cambridge, I went to Accenture. So consulting, strategy consulting, technology consulting, ended up selling large outsourcing deals. That's where I met Steve. We worked together for probably 3 or 4 years at Accenture. And as Steve said, in 2009, decided to start Elixirr. What I look after, since IPO, is inorganic strategy. So all the M&A-related activity, and I'll be able to take you through that today. So nice to meet you. Nick?

Hello, everyone. I am Nick Willott, Finance Director and Company Secretary. I'm a Chartered Accountant by background, I trained with Deloitte. Before Elixirr, I spent 9 years at a FTSE 250 firm where actually my last FT role there, I worked with Elixirr as a client. And I came on board with Elixirr in 2020 for the IPO and a day-to-day responsibility for finance and company secretarial matters.

Thanks, Nick. So let's dive into the detail. You can see here, I'm going to give an intro, Graham will talk -- sorry, and then I'll talk you through our journey since IPO and what we've achieved in that time. Graham will talk through our strategy and Nick will go through our financial performance. And Graham will come back to you with a business review, and then I'll talk about the outlook and how we see the business in the future. So that's our agenda for the day. And let me just give you some opening comments. There is a quote share, but I wanted to talk about something in context. For those of you who may be a little bit unfamiliar with the consulting industry in general, it's a massive industry. It's over $1 trillion in revenue. It's kind of split 50-50 between the top 10 consulting firms, who you've probably all heard of, it's the McKinseys, Bains, Bostons, KPMGs, Deloittes, PWCs, IBMs, Accentures, et cetera. They take up half that marketplace. Almost 50% of that revenue goes to them. And then 50% of the rest of the marketplace is filled in with boutique firms. And boutique firms, like us, vary in size, but many, many, many of them are of a size where it's 1, 2 or 3 partners working together and outperforming the big firms, otherwise, they wouldn't have their market share. So that's a very interesting perspective on the boutique firms there. Obviously, former -- tend to be former big film partners who've gone into the market and serve clients in a boutique niche sense, in the sort of boutique space. But just to comment on our global ambition, if you like, macro ambition. If you look at the top 10 firms, there's only 3 listed consulting firms in that top 10. There's a couple of messages in that. The partnerships are so profitable that they don't really want to go public and share returns with shareholders. We feel that that's an interesting opportunity. Why? Because I think that the industry is -- unlike the accounting industry or unlike the legal industry, the consulting industry doesn't have any governing or regulation. I mean, the accounting profession is governed by its institute membership and obviously, the fact that they have to sign public accounts makes them a very publicly accountable industry, and therefore, they are regulated in that sense. The consulting and the legal profession, very similar. The consulting industry doesn't have that. And I feel that the listing of consulting firms will hold them publicly accountable to outside shareholders. And therefore, the vagueries of what some of the consulting firms get up to, in terms of accountability and regulation, if you like, is -- could be well managed. So there's that, but there's also the opportunity to ensure that the owners of the business which are the current leader partners are also sharing the ownership responsibility with shareholders and have a absolutely aligned interest. And we've built a model which we can talk you through that does that. But it's very important to have equity incentive at the heart of it. So our partners get 30% of their remuneration in cash and way more 70% and plus if the share price works in equity, whereas this is very different in the 7 top firms in the big -- in the top 10, if you like. There are only 3 listed, as I said, 2 of them, Accenture and IBM, are very, very different. They -- Accenture is about 80% outsourcing its systems integration. And IBM is that and about 50% more in terms of hardware and software sales. So very -- if you want to invest in consulting, it's -- investing in those 2 firms is a very -- it's a very -- well have been a consulting investment, whereas the only other firm is Boston -- sorry, Booz Allen and Booz Allen is listed in Chicago. But they do 80% of their services into public sector, whereas we're trying to focus entirely on private sector, which we think is a far more profitable marketplace. I can go into the vagueries of why, but I won't for the moment. I think I'll stick with that as -- at the moment. But suffice to say that our global ambition is if we can get into that top 10, eventually, we will have made all shareholders a ton of money, and we will have succeeded in disrupting the industry a bit with regards to how it's regulated, how it's governed, the rewards of the partners and therefore, alignment with both clients and shareholders, which makes up a really important part of our strategy. And we see that working exceptionally well in the marketplace with our business, and you'll see this in our results. So here, you can see just my highlights for the financial '23. Graham, Nick will go through this in a lot more detail with you. But just to say that we're up 20% revenue, 50% underlying organic. Inorganic growth prospects are very good. We bought 2 businesses. Graham is, as he said, focusing almost entirely on our M&A strategy at the moment, and he's doing a fantastic job. These are 2 great businesses that he'll tell you about that we acquired during that time, and we will continue to do. Just a point on organic, inorganic, if you think about what I described in the macro industry context, with 50% of the marketplace being boutique firms, those firms exist because they outperformed the big firms. As I said, they literally have to be better than the big firm because no one ever got fired for hiring IBM, McKinsey, Bain, whatever, whereas if you're higher a boutique, you have a far higher risk in political context in the corporate life. So you have to perform and you have to have almost a better service offering than the big firms would have. However, they struggle to scale because they don't have access to markets. So what we're doing with our proposition is providing a one equity model, and they're all entrepreneurial because they're startup firms, they're accountable to the marketplace. They understand the issues of selling services, paying your people, delivering profit and returns and being accountable to the market every day for that where in the big firms, that's far more shielded because they're more order takers than market makers, whereas a small firm, you have to be a market maker. So we are searching in that pool to buy businesses that complement our proposition, diversify our proposition. And I'll touch on that quite a lot when I give you the highlights since IPO because that's been a big strategy of ours to make our business very resilient. And I think we've done a fantastic job with that. But diversify our proposition, allow more services to be sold to our clients, give all our partners more access to market because it's very simple. If we have 500 clients and we buy a business with 50, we can now sell services to those 2 businesses. And I am pleased to hear a question there from Damian about cross-sell of services and Damian, we will answer that question as part of this presentation an example of how we've cross-sold this. Actually, to date, quite a lot of revenue has been sold that we would never have had access to, GBP 23 million worth of revenue, and Graham will give you a couple of examples of that as we go through this. But those inorganic prospects are hugely important to us. Obviously, our reputation is building, very important brand-building exercise we're doing. We're starting to get inbounds. You can see that 193% growth in inbound revenue from marketing, where previously, we used to -- well, almost always we got our revenue from networking and relationships that we have and clients recommending us and that kind of thing. But now we're starting to get people approaching us because we're putting a lot of effort into our brand as a challenger consultancy and standing out in the crowd in terms of how we incentivize our employees and our partners. So we have a fantastic employee proposition. I think this is the one thing that when we talk to other boutique firms, as Graham does all the time because he's looking to acquire, we see 2 things. I don't think Graham has found a single company, which is as profitable as ours. I think maybe 1 or 2 that's got an EBITDA margin of around 30%. And the other thing that he constantly sees is that these people struggle to employ top talent because they don't have a brand. Now we had 10,000 applications last year and 4,000 from the top universities, Cambridge, Oxford, Durham, Stanford, Berkeley, you name it. We get the very best candidates. They love our brand. That means you've got brilliant talent to choose from, that means we perform with our clients brilliantly because the underlying skills of our people are so good. So really very happy with the way everything is evolving. So super proud of all of the team's efforts in that regard. Let me now just talk a little bit about our growth since IPO. So you can see here our growth since IPO. And you can see that obviously, we had revenue of GBP 24.5 million in the financial year '19 prior to IPO, we're now sitting at GBP 85.9 million. So our IPO has been a stellar success, 37% CAGR during that period versus an industry CAGR of 9%. And just one thing on the industry, just to point out, for those of you who are worried about the consulting industry because you see all these headlines with McKinsey's laying off 1,400 people, et cetera, et cetera. This industry has grown for the last 25 years every year through 2 recessions. So whatever anyone tells you about this industry being a volatile industry because the people walk in the door or they made comments like that, it's actually simply not true. This industry is growing continuously. It's why? Because businesses are becoming more complicated and you need more expertise in the areas that businesses can't afford to carry in-house, so they're buying it from consulting firms. So if you build good consulting firms, this is a very, very good industry because it's a continuously growing industry. And the 7 partnerships, it just proves the top 10 -- in the top 10, the 7 partnerships is just proof as to why those partners want to keep all the profit for themselves, right? It's a very profitable business. When McKinsey lay off 1,500 people, it's because they've over hired and they're protecting their profits. So they're not actually shrinking. They're actually just probably pruning out the people that are underperforming and using the market conditions as a foil to make those sorts of announcements, right? But I don't see -- if you look at the company's house and grab any of the partnerships on company's house and to look at the average partner pay, it hardly ever goes down, okay? It's a continuous juggernaut of profitability for the partnership. So to invest in this industry as a shareholder, I think, is an interesting opportunity. EBITDA to -- to quote our EBITDA this year, GBP 25.4 million interesting stat, our EBITDA this year is more than our revenue was in financial year '19. So that just gives you a sense of how we've grown and how we've been able to manage our business. 30% -- we've kept our margins at EBITDA -- 30% since IPO. And only stat that we we're a little bit disappointed in is our market cap, but this represents an opportunity for investors because we're almost trading at a lower multiple than we were at IPO. And I can guarantee you when I show you what we've done in this business, this business is 3, 4x less risky than it was at IPO. We've made so much diversification into this business. We've built so much infrastructure in terms of the infrastructure to run the business, if you like, that it's just in such a stronger position than it was at IPO. I've been -- Graham will talk a little bit later in more detail about our 4 pillars, so I won't belabor these. But just to say that our increasing revenue per partner since IPO is almost doubled from 2.2 to 3.9. And a couple of reasons for that. People always ask how far can that go? Well, if you're in Accenture, that could be GBP 20 million a partner. Why? Because they're still outsourcing and there's still systems integration. If you're in McKinsey, it could be GBP 8 million. If you're in KPMG in tax, it could be $4 million. So it varies depending on the services that are being sold. And as we add services to our team or to our business, as Graham buys complementary service propositions in the marketplace and we build them organically, we will be able to get more revenue per partner. And the number is kind of moot, but it's just the point that we should be monitoring it and getting it to grow as much as possible. 7 principles promotes partner, all very, very successful. This is our most successful route to partners. 6 hires and this is actually the example of the point I was making about people in the top 10 firms. Partners in the top 10 firms are more order takers than market makers. If you look at the 6 we've -- have successfully hired since IPO, we've actually hired 12 and had to get rid of 6. The reason is, and this is typical, right? So since 2009, Graham and I've experienced this all through our building this company that when we hire in the market, we get about a 50% success rate. It's no better than tossing a coin, in fact. And the reason is because you can't tell from interviewing someone whether they actually make markets themselves or whether they actually sit there and rely on the brand to bring them business. So when you're in a big firm, the tendency to be somebody who takes orders as opposed to makes markets is extreme. Because no one gets disproportionately rewarded for making so much more revenue. So there's not actually an incentive to do that. So we find that if we get the wrong eggs into our business, we have to exit them pretty quickly because they don't make enough market for us and we need people to be far more out there on their front foot. So this goes to a point as to why the acquisition strategy is so important. Because these people are really successful making markets. Their business would not exist if they didn't make markets themselves because they don't have the brand equity that the top 10 firms have. And then you can see there, Graham will talk you through, the 5 acquisitions since IPO. So let me just -- I won't drain this slide, but you can see the detail here on all our acquisitions. The most important number for me on this chart which is the question Damian actually asked is, the GBP 26 million, the cumulative cross-sell revenue from acquisitions to date. So these 5 brands Coast, Retearn, iOLAP, Responsum, Insigniam and Elixirr have sold a total of GBP 26 million to each other's clients, and that is the real power of this strategy at play, right? We would never -- none of us would ever have had that access to that revenue. And that's just bringing this to light. And so when people think about our acquisition strategy, it's very definitely a market consolidation of market integration strategy as opposed to a back-office operational efficiency play. We're not buying companies to get leverage out of the back-office cost reduction opportunity and add 1 plus 1 equals 1.5 in some operational efficiency sense. We're looking at this as multiplying revenue. And that's where the real kicker happens for us in these opportunities and obviously adding skills. Graham can talk to you about the numbers and the skills that are added. I will just leave it at that for now because he's going to come back to that. In terms of diversification, I mentioned this point, what we see on the left here is our position at pre-IPO, 2019. So you can see revenue by geography there, 7.5% in the U.K., 4.2% in the U.S. and 12.8% the rest of the world. You can see that in the right-hand side is the position we are in today. And the U.S. is particularly -- I'm particularly proud of the U.S. When we did the IPO -- Graham and I did the IPO roadshow, many investors said to us, you want to go into the U.S., many end companies fail. This is the sword they die on. Well, we haven't died on that sword. We've got GBP 37.5 million of revenue in the U.S. It's our biggest geography. It is, by the way, when you look at the market at a macro level, it is twice -- so for every pound spent in Asia, there's GBP 2 spend in Europe and there is GBP 4 spent in the U.S. on consulting. And that's why it's such an important market. And we certainly get a really good presence there. We're spread all around the U.S. We've got -- we're in Dallas. We're in New York. We're in San Francisco and in Chicago. So we're spreading ourselves all around, and we've got clients all over the place, and it's really a growth business for us. Clients love our proposition there. The challenger status, the digital AI, data centricity that we have around change in the boardroom is so sweet -- is such a sweet spot for the U.S. market. The European market is catching up, but it's a lot more skeptical, a lot harder sell actually into the European markets. Asia will come, but it's not our priority right now. We need to get the U.S. and Europe set up and once we've got those 2 setup, we will be spending a lot more time on Asia. So essentially, what we've got here is, you can see in the second line down there, below the pictures -- sorry, below those -- the sort of geographic version of it, you can see the industry versions. And again, just to make a point, picking out one, manufacturing was GBP 100,000 in 2019, and we're now doing over GBP 10 million in manufacturing. And you can see that in all our industries. All this industry diversification is a crucial part to the resilience of our business. There are other consulting firms out there that specialize in industries, and that is risky because if that industry struggles, if it has any sort of headwinds itself, they will cut consulting costs. And then what happens is you've got a problem. But if you've got a multi-industry firm, which one industry is doing well, others are doing not so well. So for insurance, banking -- for example, banking in the U.K. is doing terribly at the moment. But our insurance business in Europe and in the U.S. is doing amazing, right? And that's just a testament to this strategy at work. And the same applies to geography. We had difficulty in January, February, March last year, actually, in the year we are talking about here, 2023 in the U.S. But Europe was pumping. So that was brilliant hedge for us. And now the U.S. is coming back very strong, even stronger than Europe right now. So this is why this diversification strategy that we've built into the business since IPO is so crucial. And candidly, it's a bit of a shock to us that we're undervalued relative to our IPO price because there's so less risk -- so much less risk in this business than there was at IPO. The final layer of capability -- sorry, of diversification that I wanted to build in here was the top horizontal that you see on this chart. The other 2 horizontals are there for your information. It's another view of what we showed you on the previous slide. That's the geography split. You can see, obviously, we've gone from 21% U.S. revenue to 44% U.S. revenue. And likewise, you can see the colors in the revenue, split by vertical, show you the diversification we have in industries now that we never had at IPO in the same way. But the final one is that top bar where you can see at IPO, we were 97% capability -- 97% consulting at IPO. Now we're only 57%, although consulting revenue has doubled. So our consulting business was around GBP 30-ish million, GBP 28 million, GBP 29 million. It's now GBP 60-ish million, and the rest is data and digital. And that's very, very important because if you think about our strategy as artificial intelligence, and data and AI -- sorry, AI data innovation. The reason AI -- if I just may touch on it and give you the reason why these services go so well together. If you think about AI, it's actually like the internet. For those of you who remember back to -- when internet emerged, is roughly in the mid-90s. And then we had the dot-com bubble around 2000, where everyone thought that the high streak would die and all sorts of things. I started a company around that time, trying to exploit that bubble and paid for it because the idea wasn't very good. But it was a learning experience in and of itself. But the interesting thing about the internet is, we're now -- we're almost 24 years later, and we're still helping companies with digital strategies, helping them understand how to engage their clients using the internet as a platform in which to address their marketplace. And this is the same for AI. AI is going to be exactly the same type of technology. We're going to see peaks and troughs in the deployment of AI. But it's not AI itself that matters, it's how AI is used and that's the same thing with the internet. It's not internet itself, it's how the internet is used. And that's where consultants have a field day, right? We are still advising, as I said, on digital and data strategies. And why is data so important to all of this? Because if you think about it, same as the internet, artificial intelligence is only as intelligent as its underlying data. And if you're using rubbish data, you're going to get rubbish output. The same as the internet. So the crucial thing here is to be able to help businesses understand that -- our clients' businesses understand that data is the cornerstone of anything that you put on top of it to be able to provide insights and drive your business journeys going forward. And that's where -- so if we could add value across that entire value chain, that makes us a very valuable proposition, and it's a very C-suite conversation with executives. So that's exactly where Elixirr wants to be positioned. So I think -- hopefully, I've given you the main points, key diversification strategy since IPO, fantastic growth since IPO. Ambitions, we are looking to be a GBP 1 billion market cap company in 3 to 5 years. And the very macro ambition is top 10 consulting firms in the world, hopefully disrupting around things like the challenger brand, the digital AI lens we look at things through the -- and essentially driving the boardroom agenda around those topics. So hopefully, that gives you a good overview. I'll hand to Graham to give you the strategic overview, and I'll speak to you again towards the end of the presentation.

Thank you, Steve. So just to give you a sense of how we position ourselves in the marketplace and how we're building a foundation to grow from, I thought I'd just take you through kind of how we look capability industry and geography wise. So what we are building is deep kind of capability in emerging technology. So Steve mentioned artificial intelligence, data, there's digital innovation. You can see in the center of that wheel on the right there. But there's also some greenfield, kind of white space that we can buy into or build into. And that's a lot of what me and my team are looking at is how do we get brilliant boutique businesses that can give us that extra capability such as cybersecurity, such as machine learning. And all of these things in the center there are actually defining the C-suite agenda today. All of our clients in the boardrooms and the executive rooms are dealing with these emerging technologies and need to understand how to use them to perform their day-to-day but also to beat their competition. So our strategy is to build out in those spaces so that we can create breakthrough performances with our clients, and that then influences all of the strategic advice that we give. So whether or not we're doing a corporate strategy, or market research or doing some M&A work with our clients, all of them have digital, data, need to leverage innovation and increasingly, and this is why we did an acquisition in this space, will need to use artificial intelligence if they're going to win against the competition. So that's from a capability point of view, how we're thinking about it. Around that, you can see the industries. Now we have a lot of clients and really good revenue streams in several industries. So we are an industry-agnostic firm. But as you saw from the previous slide, we are stronger in some industries revenue-wise than we are in others, but that -- therein lies the opportunity. We can either hire end partners who have black books in those industries that we're not that deep in who can then help open that up. Or we can make strategic acquisitions to open up new markets for us. And actually, Insigniam, who joined us in December of last year, is a great case in point in that they have very strong client sets in health care, pharmaceutical and biotechnology. We have done some work in those spaces previously, but now we have real access to the world's top 10 pharmas who they work with as an example. And we can now work together and put a lot of what we do into their clients to add more value and then a lot of what they do can come into our clients to add more values. So that's really where the cross-sell plays out and where that GBP 26 million you saw in the previous slide plays out as well. So that really is a 1 plus 1 equals 3 scenario. And then what's written, rather than showing illustratively here is the geography. So Steve mentioned GBP 1 of spend in Asia is GBP 2 of spend in Europe, and then there's GBP 4 of spend in the U.S. on consulting. Our revenue profile kind of matches that, albeit not too much in Asia at the moment, but certainly, our inorganic pipeline matches that. So it's no accident that our last 3 acquisitions have been U.S. headquartered firms. The reason being that is the biggest market. But also we have a very strong pipeline in Europe. And if you think about the DAC region, that's actually the second biggest geography behind the U.S. in of its own right. So that is an area where we have a strong pipeline, and we will be looking to see if we can actually get into that region through a strategic acquisition. And on the left, you can see why. AI, ML, by 2030 is predicted to be GBP 1.8 trillion of spend, GBP 0.75 trillion in data, nearly GBP 0.5 trillion in cybersecurity. We don't need very much of a decimal point of that spend to be doing very well. And obviously, if we can get good market share in these spaces, not -- and also the industries that I've mentioned and the geographies, that is how we're going to get our macro ambition of top 10 and the micro ambition quote, still a great ambition of getting a unicorn in the next 3 to 5 years. So that is how we're going to be playing that out. How we do that is across our 4 pillars. So just to remind you what the 4 pillars are, and then I'll give you some detail. There's 4 ways to grow consultancy. 3 of them are organic and then there's 1 that's inorganic. So the purple ones there are the organic levers or pillars, as we call them. The first one is stretch your existing partners. So you can increase the amount of revenue each partner can deliver. The second is hiring new partners. Steve mentioned the numbers game and the success rate that we've had there. But when they are successful, experience says they are incredibly successful. And of course, it's a lever that we're still going to be using. The third is promotion from within from our principal team, which is the one below our partner level. And then, obviously, there's acquisition, which is the inorganic. We are constantly looking at all of these pillars at all times, and we're doing what we can to maximize each pillar because that is where the growth has come from and will continue to. So stretching partners. Last year, we had GBP 3.9 million per partner. That's up from GBP 3.6 million the previous year, and up from, I think, GBP 2.2 million, as Steve said, at the time of IPO. So we've seen really good traction there. And if you think about it, as we build capability and buy capability, that actually gives our partners more things to talk to their clients about, more ways to add value by putting them together with what we do in other spaces. And therefore, the revenue follows out the back of that. So if we can still -- if we can keep buying brilliant boutique businesses that do stuff that we don't do today, that adds to what we do, do, and that adds to what we can deliver to our clients. And the other point to note in this space is, we have raised revenue targets as well. So we are constantly working with our partners to get them to increase that metric. Hiring partners, 50-50 success rate, but like I said, very successful when they are successful. We've onboarded one new partner already in 2024. We've got a brilliant pipeline of potential partners that we're talking through. And indeed, we've had another partner signed up who will be really bolstering up our financial services business, and they start in August 2024, which we're very excited about. Promotion, this -- we love this one because this is kind of promoting people who have been with us for a while. They understand our culture. They understand how we work, they understand how we -- the quality expectations, how we engage with clients. And because of that, they are very successful when they do get promoted, and we actually give them kind of 6- to 9-month runway, if you like, from telling them they're promoted to actually formally promoting them, where in that period, they are a partner in all but accountability, I guess, for revenue. There's still a partner accountable for that revenue, but they have to sit around the partner table and own those clients as if they were a partner. And that means when the day comes when they officially are, then they hit the ground running, which is something that we'll keep doing. And we're looking to promote 1 to 3 principles each year to feed this pillar, if you like. And the great news is that if you look at the tenure of the principal team, the average tenure with Elixirr or the companies that joined us if they're sitting within one of the acquisitions, is 4 years. And why this is quite important is, if you look at our current partner team and the promotions that are within the current partner tea,m, so who were principles before, they had about 3.7 to 4 years at principal as an average. So the fact that our entire principal team is at that kind of tenure that means we've got a very mature pipeline of principles to kind of feed into this pillar. And then acquisitions, I'll come to it again in a bit, but we're doing 1 or 2 acquisitions annually is the programmatic way of kind of approaching this that we do and we'll be aiming to increase enterprise value by 10% to 20%. So you could do tons of small deals in a year, but the problem with the small deal it takes about as much time as a medium to large deal and actually the impact on shareholder value might be suboptimal. So this is kind of renowned to be the most successful form of M&A strategy in the marketplace and one that we've adopted and has been very successful so far. And if we keep building on all these pillars, driving these pillars, growing these pillars, then we will increase the power and the value of the cross-sell. That will lead to more gold clients, which are over GBP 1 million of revenue as we think about them. They will lead to longer and stronger client relationships and allow us to get more of that market share that Steve was talking about. And ultimately, it will help us build on our vision of being the best digital data and AI consultants in the world, and that is how we're positioning it. Just to tell you a bit of the kind of foundations of how we're doing it, if you like, previously we've been building out a house of brands, but now we're thinking about it more as a branded house. And the reason we're doing that is our Elixirr is -- the name Elixirr in the marketplace, it's got a lot of brand equity now. And actually, as we're getting more boutique businesses come join us, if we think about having a team where we've got some data from iOLAP, we've got some AI from Responsum, and we've got some change from Insigniam, we've got some consulting from Elixirr, we don't want to be going as a 4 logo team, it would just confuse the client. So more and more now we are having the Elixirr brand lead. Such as Elixirr Digital, them and Coast joined forces 18 to 24 months ago, and that's been very successful. But we will do it on a case-by-case basis. So as businesses do come in, if they have a particular brand equity in what they do, then it makes sense that we would lead that brand name, then we will do that, but we will be looking at each on a case-by-case basis. How we think ourselves from a market positioning point of view of client positioning, we've actually run a trial where we've aligned ourselves vertically by industry. We trialed that in insurance, where we have one of our partners own the insurance vertical and treat it as a business within the guide rails of the budget that we set, but to make the decisions and to grow that industry as a business. And he and they have done amazingly well. This was a nearly GBP 6 million business at IPO, and it's tripled since then. It was GBP 18 million, give or take, last year. That has given us the confidence now to align ourselves more broadly. We have 4 of our best salespeople now owning 1 of our big, more mature industries, insurance, financial services, energy, manufacturing, and we've also doubled them with another less mature industry, if you like, or even 2, in some cases, so that we are growing all of our industries in that way. It may be, hopefully will be, a point where the revenues within those other industries, if you like, rather than the top 4 become such that they need someone owning that individually so then we can break out and do that. So we're thinking about the world in terms of an industry P&L with the secondary overlaying capability, so whether that be digital, data, artificial intelligence. But I think importantly, we're not thinking about it in terms of a geographic P&L. So the reason we don't want to do that is, in a lot of the big firms because I think about it from a geography P&L, a client gets the available local team who might not be the A-team from a global perspective. And we're very clear that we want to put our best talent in the right places regardless of geographic boundaries. So that is something that we'll continue to do. And then finally, in centralization is a big part of making this all work as well. We continue to use equity and options to incentivize our talent. The better they do, the better that they perform, the better they do from an options and shares point of view. And also the way that our structure, our acquisitions is also a mix of cash and equity. And the reason is we want the leaders and the families of the businesses joining us to be as hungry if you like, to grow enterprise value as we are by having a significant equity stake and that has been working very well since IPO as well. Thinking about how we've done against the market. Steve mentioned that the consulting industry grown -- has grown year-on-year, and that is a fact. Slightly more in some years, slightly less than others. You can see just since 2019 here, the orange line being the market and the line above that being Elixirr, every year, we have grown market share. So if I think about it in that period, we've grown 37%. If I go way back to 2012, we've grown 31% revenue CAGR. The market has done 12%. You can see last year, we were 20% versus the market at 6%. That percent from Elixirr point of view is often dependent on when an acquisition joins us. So 20% there reflects Insigniam, for example, joining us in December. So there was one month of Insigniam revenue there. Had they come in, in March, April, May, that 20% would be 30% or something larger. And we will see the other 11 months' worth of that revenue will come into FY '24. So that diversification is working, getting market share each year versus the market in the top that bottom right there. Steve mentioned that many big names are reducing headcount. We're growing. We're increasing headcount. Revenue has been growing at 6% last year, as an example. We've more than tripled that. Inorganic growth -- and less than half of firms said they're looking to do acquisitions proactively. We've made it very clear that's the central pillar of our growth And we will continue to do that in that programmatic way. And I will come back to that after Nick takes us through our financials.

Thanks, Graham. So it was a very strong set of financial results for FY '23. Revenue increased by 20% to GBP 85.9 million, gross profit was up 26%, adjusted EBITDA was up 24% and our adjusted EBITDA margin was 30%. And one of the reasons we were able to maintain our level of profitability and in fact, grow it slightly ahead of revenue growth, is that for the first time, we have now got -- we've got all of our subsidiary companies operating at the same level of profitability as the core consulting business. So Elixirr Digital, Elixirr Technology that we acquired in previous years with lower levels of EBITDA margin from the consulting business. Last year, those were now operating at the same level. Our profit before tax increased by 40%, and that includes the impact of a GBP 2 million net M&A credit for FY '23 deferred situation for iOLAP that we didn't pay. It's worth mentioning that we didn't pay it because they didn't meet base stretching target. iOLAP grew in revenue terms and grew in profitability, as I just mentioned. But we do have base stretching targets for deferred consideration to make sure we're getting value for our shareholders, and that's really our model is working, and that was a question that Damian asked. Our adjusted diluted EPS increased by 22%. We work hard to minimize dilution. We did in the early part of last year, pay the first tranche of the iOLAP deferred consideration. And we did that through a structure we use where we pay the sellers cash and they buy shares from our EBT for their deferred consideration rather than us issuing new shares. So whenever we're not in a closed period and we're able to use that EBT structure, we always try -- every time we are making the decision, we think about the impact of dilution on all shareholders, and we're working very hard to minimize that for the benefit of all shareholders. Free cash flow increased by 11% to GBP 16.1 million. I've got a slide to take you through that. And our dividend per share increased by 37% to 14.8p. We paid our interim dividend of 5.3p in February, and our final dividend of 9.5p will be payable in August. I think we had a question from Ben about dividend in future years, and we do expect that dividend to increase proportionally as revenue and EBITDA increases in future years. Just this slide really -- just to mention and put FY '23 in context, yes, we had very good revenue growth and maintenance and profitability, but that's really continuation of the trend we've had in every year since IPO. And that's what we wanted to draw out here, that the FY '23 results are not a one-off set of strong financial results. They are the continuation of the trends you see in that graph there at the bottom right of this slide, that we've had in each year since 2019. Moving on to the progression of our revenue. These 3 slides -- this one and the following slide gives you some transparency around how our revenue has grown year-on-year, and we've done this format in previous years. So revenue grew by 20% overall. Of that 15% was our underlying organic growth in revenue and organic revenue growth was really split very evenly between existing client growth of GBP 11.5 million and new client growth of GBP 10.4 million. And that really shows our model working where we have a concept of double count and single count partners. Some partners are focused on growing existing clients and increasing the range of services we sell to those clients. Other partners are focused on opening up new clients for the group. And that's what gives us that nice balance of growth between existing and new clients. That growth was partially offset by end-of-life projects, which is a negative GBP 11.5 million you see on the -- in the bridge there. And that line included the impact of one very large 5-year long change program successfully coming to an end. And then the impact from acquisitions of GBP 5.4 million growth, a relatively small contribution in FY '23. And as Graham said, we've got the 11-month benefit of Insigniam coming through in FY '24 because there's only one month in FY '23. This is the same view from a partner perspective. So how does our partner revenue grow? And we -- Steve touched on it earlier. I mean, we're pleased that the overall revenue per partner increased from GBP 3.6 million in FY '22 to GBP 3.9 million in FY '23. And then going from left to right, there's a reduction in revenue, 7.6% for partners that exited the firm and those exited partners were partners that were not performing at the level of revenue and other behaviors that we expect in our firm. Established partners increased from GBP 4.1 million revenue per partner to GBP 4.8 million revenue per partner in FY '23. We're very pleased with that 17% increase in the year. And that really -- and that does reflect the fact that our partners have a wider range of services to sell as we've built out our service offering, including through the additional capabilities from the acquisitions. Our promoted partners added GBP 7.2 million of revenue in the year. Our promotion partners performed very strongly, as we've said, and GBP 2.9 million revenue per partner in their first year as partners. And then we added GBP 4.1 million from our hired partners, GBP 1.4 million per partner, and it takes some time. That's not uncommon in the first year, and those partners will then get fully up to speed in the second year. And then the GBP 5.4 million in addition for acquisitions, as I mentioned on the previous slide. Moving on to cash. The business continues to be very highly cash generative. Unlike many other businesses, you see our EBITDA less corporation tax really does turn to cash. So we generated GBP 16.8 million of operating cash flow in the year which we deployed primarily on acquisitions, so GBP 15.8 million outflow of acquisitions, which was the initial consideration for Responsum and Insigniam. And then the FY '22 deferred consideration for iOLAP, which I just spoke about, we share consideration, but we did that through using cash and EBT shares to minimize any -- or avoid dilution. Relatively small impact from net EBT and shareholder loan transactions, net inflow of GBP 2.6 million and then we paid our cash dividend last year of GBP 4.9 million, and the cash number is GBP 7.0 million for [indiscernible] paying cash terms in FY '24. But we closed the year with GBP 18.1 million of net cash and no debt. So we continue to have a very strong cash position to deploy for both covering dividend -- the increased dividend but also future M&A. And from a balance sheet perspective, the balance sheet continues to be very strong. I'll just pull out a couple of the main movements in here. Intangible assets increased by GBP 17 million, which is the increase due to goodwill and intangibles and the acquisitions of Insigniam and Responsum. Noncurrent tangible assets increased by GBP 5 million, which are loans to new partners to acquire equity and deferred tax assets. And our trade and other receivables increased by GBP 5.5 million. We continue to have no issues with our trade debt collectability. We've collected all our 2023 debtors. We have a blue-chip client base. The number grew because of the acquisition of Insigniam, business growth and a couple of clients that -- where their debtors were collected in January rather than December. And we continue to have no issues with our debtors. And then with -- I think I saw a question I think from Damien about how much do we still have on the balance sheet for deferred consideration. So within the trade and other liabilities line there, there's GBP 7.4 million remaining for deferred consideration. And now I'll hand back to Graham for the business review.

Thank you, Nick. So to give you a quick overview of our clients. We had a 12% increase in gold clients. I said earlier, that's GBP 1 million plus, which we're very happy with. I think someone asked the question, I think we have 17 in total from last year. We got lots of great awards, which we're very proud about, and our marketing is really coming into its own now as well. We've invested in this actually since day one, and we're getting a real pull from the market now rather than a push uphill the whole time. We're actually getting big blue chip companies coming through the website and engaging us for work. You can see some of the brands that joined us from a client portfolio perspective on the left at the bottom. And on the right, I just wanted to give you a view of the diversification of clients. So they are our top 10 clients. On average, they used 3 or more capabilities from that wheel I showed you earlier. Our top 10 clients now span 7 industries, which is fantastic, just shows the agency-agnostic view that I mentioned. Location-wise, mix U.K., Europe, U.S. If we went further past #10, you'd add in South Africa as well. And you can see in the middle that we're doing different things with each of them. Length of relationship is a big one for me. You always want to see some high numbers in there because that shows that you've been working with them and adding value for a long time, but equally important is a couple of ones because that shows that you're adding big clients into your pipeline each year. To give you a quick view of the 2 acquisitions from last year. So Insigniam joined us in December, they really pioneered organizational transformation. So in a very simplistic way, if you think about a large transformation program, they work with the executive team to kind of build the hearts and minds and the kind of commitments to each other to make that transformation work. They also help come up with the road map for success. And off the back of the work they do, before joining Elixirr, a lot of that execution work would go to the Big 4 or to MBB to actually execute and carry out. The beauty now is that we can give them an end-to-end offering now and actually do a lot of that transformation alongside Insigniam doing what they do along the top. Brilliant partner team, there's a case study in the middle there just to show this was working with a new executive team in a leading global food company across 200 of their team underneath them as well where they wanted to make them more highly performing. And through the brilliant work they do, psychometric portraits, upskilling, empowerment of leadership, coaching. The CFO at the end said that the project generated a return on investment of $10 million to $20 million, which is great feedback. And just at the bottom there, just a couple of numbers. We bought Insigniam last -- with FY '23 revenues of GBP 11 million. As we sit here today, they've contracted, for FY '24, nearly GBP 10 million already. And to build on the EBITDA point, that Nick said, we bought them at 17% EBITDA. Year-to-date, they're already at 24%, which we're very proud of, and we'll continue to work with our acquisitions on that point. Responsum, there was a couple of questions. I think Peter asked about AI being a big topic. Absolutely. I saw you -- showed you the numbers involved earlier. I did go into a lot of detail in the last meeting about what Responsum do. But just to give you an idea of a recent project, one of the world's biggest insurers asked us if we could help their underwriting team basically cut out highly manual time-consuming tasks so that they can actually spend more on value. So we use Responsum, which is our AI capability and the services around that. We actually built a generative AI chatbot for them, which is available within the client's environment, which is an important aspect of Responsum. It allows plugging into enterprise data and not outside, if you like, into the open Internet of ChatGPT-4 or whatever it might be. So it can be very protected. And we achieved 80% plus accuracy in just 3 weeks of tuning and testing. So the underwriting team were raving about the tool and the results, and we actually reduced the number of manual time-consuming tasks by about 90%. So in terms of that GBP 1.8 trillion spend in 2030, we're hoping that the more of this we do, the more we scale, the more we build, the more of that market share we can actually get into the business. From an inorganic point of view, I've mentioned some of this, but just to remind you, the programmatic approach, the 1 to 2 a year, 10% to 20% for the EV. We want it to be geographically additive, industry additive and capability, so boardroom issues. That's the 3 lenses we look at. We have a very strong pipeline across those 3 lenses. It's got to be high-quality service. That's a massive thing for Elixirr and our clients, so we don't want them to dilute our quality bar. And the way that we structure these deals is such that they come in, like I said, with equity as well, which is good for all shareholders. And you can see some of the numbers, the pipeline on the right, since IPO. We've already got kind of 20 to 30 companies at various levels of discussion. That's important because the numbers in the pipeline gets smaller, the more progress you get. You can see -- I personally met nearly 200 companies, and we've got into due diligence with 11 of them, and we've done 6 deals. And I think just one final point that's important because -- we've put out due diligence after signing head of terms within 2 hours before. And we've also pulled out one day before signing the actual shareholder purchase agreement, which would have closed the deal. So we're not afraid to pull out indeed at any point when something happens or we find something that is not right for our shareholders, and we will continue to do that. But suffice to say, just in summary, very happy with the strategy as a whole, I'm very happy with the pipeline going forward. And I'll pass back to Steve.

Get on to the right slide. Okay. So just in summary then, these sort of 5 areas give you a sense of how we see the [indiscernible]. Well, okay -- these 5 areas sort of how we see the business in summary, 37% CAGR and fantastic margins. We've spoken about the partner team, very motivated, very incentivized revenue to produce revenue per partner. By the way, just on that, every partner has a P&L right the way down to EBITDA that you can reconcile to the published and audited financial statements. If you cross across that spreadsheet, it actually adds up. So each partner knows exactly their contribution to our actual EBITDA number in the published accounts and that's how they get rewarded. That's how they get the equity, and that's why it's 100% linked with shareholder value and shareholder returns. So very, very important part of our strategy. Obviously, our inorganic growth strategy is -- sorry, our organic growth strategy is important. Graham has spoken about the industry aligned partner -- industry alignment. That's another resilience building thing that we've put into the business. And obviously, Graham has mentioned his acquisitions and the GBP 26 million number of cross-sell. What you'll find is there's a -- I think there's a question here from -- I forget who it was, I think Joshua asked a question on how do we get newly company -- newly acquired companies to cross-sell existing clients that they don't know? The one thing that is fantastic about our model is, if you take Insigniam, we bring in the 3 or 4 partners that are part of that team. They come to our partner [indiscernible] and they see all our partners talking through their clients and their propositions and what's actually really good about all of that is, they know that we all have the same equity participation. And we all have built up our businesses, our own P&Ls to a point at which we wouldn't survive if we didn't have that P&L there. So there's a lot of trust and respect around the table. And people are very quick to introduce and cross share opportunities because they know it's value creating. And the confidence of the people around the table is exceptional. I worked in 3 consulting businesses, and none of them have the same collaboration and teamwork that we've got here. And I think it's got a lot to do with the reward structure we have in place. There's no dog-eat-dog culture. Everyone wants to help each other because it benefits everybody. The maximum return we can make is in the equity, and that's really important. And I'll come back to the equity because there is a question of what are we trying to do to get ourselves more fairly valued? And I'll come back to that, if I may. Just to close out on this, we're obviously very highly rated by our clients, but let me just talk about outlook because you're probably wondering, we've got a couple of minutes left. Actually, let me just go to the next slide and talk about outlook. So Q1 has been a fantastic quarter. We've had a 24% revenue growth in Q1. All 3 months were record revenue months and we are forecasting in the range of GBP 104 million to GBP 110 million. Which is -- an EBITDA in the range of 27% to 29%. Now the reason the EBITDA number slightly down is because we've acquired Insigniam and they were down at 17% when we acquired them, I think, and we're pulling them up to ours and by the time we get towards the end of the year, we hope to have them right up at the 30% margin. And -- but along the path, we'll have a little bit of a drag on our EBITDA, but it's nothing fundamental in the business to worry about. It's just a process of bringing acquired businesses up to speed. Just on the question here because I know we've got only a few minutes left. On the question of what are we doing? It's a tough market. We are great believers in -- we can control 3 things in our business. We control revenue, we control costs and therefore, profitability and we can provide -- we can control quality of service to our clients. And all 3 of those, we're smashing out of the park, right? What we can't control is market rating, right? And market rating is a combination of investor sentiment and capital flows that are really out of our control. What we will do is we will continue to deliver. We will grow this company at our stated -- in accordance with our stated objectives as we did when we came on to the public markets back in 2020. We've done exactly what we said we would do, we've never missed the number. We've always forecast the numbers and hit them. In fact, oftentimes, we upgrade them. So we will continue to do that. And when the market corrects, we will get the correction. I'm absolutely certain quality, money -- money flows to quality or quality attracts talent or money attracts talent is the same kind of principle and we follow that principle in our business throughout. So in my closing comments, because I now know we're one minute over is if you just think about our business at IPO, we raised GBP 20 million. We said we will grow our company between 25% and 30%. We've grown at 37%. We still have GBP 18 million, quarter to GBP 20 million in our bank, and we've made 3 acquisitions, and we've grown 35% CAGR or 37% CAGR, I forget the exact number. So we're a prudent management team, in each position in leadership, I've got an alternative. Graham is -- if something happens to me, Graham could easily step in. He's helped me run this company from the very beginning. In Nick's position, we've got 2 candidates. In my CEO's position, we've got 2 candidates. So this is a very resilient leadership team, and we've built in a ton of diversification. And candidly, it's a -- we think it's a very good investment proposition for investors. Thank you for your time. I know there's a few other questions I can't get to because the time is over.

No. Stephen, I was just going to say if there is anything, feel free just to take a couple of moments just in case there's anything there that you would like to -- and just to say, really, Stephen, if there are any questions that we don't get through, we can always add a response and publish these back post today's meeting. But just a quick scale through just if you may. And I'd just like to remind investors on today's call that a recording in today's presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A can be accessed via your Investor Meet company dashboard. Thank you to all you -- all for your presentation as well this afternoon. So if there is anything there, Stephen, feel free to just take your time, read those out. And if not, I will redirect investors [indiscernible]. You have [indiscernible] Yes. Lovely. Thank you very much again to you all. Ladies and gentleman, if I could ask you please not to close the session as we'll now automatically redirect you for the opportunity for you to provide your feedback in order that the company can better understand your views and expectations. This may take a few moments to complete, but I'm sure it'll be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of Elixirr International plc, I'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and wish you all a very good afternoon.