Elixirr International plc (ELIX) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, and welcome to the Elixirr International plc Annual Results Investor Presentation. [Operator Instructions] Before we begin, I would like to submit the following poll. And I would now like to hand you over to CEO, Stephen Newton. Good afternoon to you.

Thank you. Good afternoon to everyone who's in this presentation. Thank you for taking the time to hear our presentation to you today. We're obviously very excited about our results this year. We've had a fantastic year once again. Since IPO, we've obviously had -- we've never missed a number. We've always -- we've done 8 upgrades. So we're really proud of the performance of our company through the period. And we've also made a very big announcement. Obviously, as with our results is that we're going to be moving to the main market, and I can talk to you a little bit about that in detail. Just so you know, I am Stephen Newton, the founder and CEO of the company. I founded the company with Graham. My team will introduce themselves as we -- as they pick up the sections of the presentation. We don't want to do a little thing upfront. We'll each introduce ourselves at the start of our little sections of the presentation we each will be delivering. But let me just comment a little bit about the industry and why we think consulting is such a good investment for investors. It is an industry which is typically isolated or at least restricted to private companies. And if you look at all the big brands, the KPMGs, the PwCs, the Big 4, the MBBs, these are largely private companies. And there's a reason they're private, is they make a lot of money, and they're good industries. And I've been in this industry for 30 years now, and in all 30 years, the consulting industry has grown 6% to 10% a year. And in those 30 years, we've had multiple recessions. We had the dotcom bust. We had the 2009 financial crisis. And through all of those incidents, the consulting industry continues to grow. And the reason this is the case is, let me give you my perspectives on this, business is getting more and more complex over time, not less and less complex. And as with this complexity, there comes a need for more and more expertise that you can't carry internally to companies. And so they turn to the consulting world to provide them that expertise. And examples of these are things like artificial intelligence is the latest one, but you could talk about the dotcom bubble and the Internet. I mean I did a dotcom start-up in 2000, but it's almost 25 years later, and you're still seeing -- I mean we're still doing a lot of business helping clients how to use the Internet and digital technologies to be able to capture more market share, make themselves more efficient, et cetera, et cetera. So artificial intelligence is just another one of those technology disruptions that will last for 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years. Those of you who are around back in the dotcom days, you will have heard loads of rumors or speculations about the death of the high speed. That never happened. And the same is going to happen with AI. People are saying jobs are dead. It's just morphing of jobs. You need to use those technologies to do different things in business and be more efficient and make yourselves, well, efficiency but also to provide better service and create revenue for your clients. So those big macro disruption events outweigh the short-term economic cycles that we see, even the Trump tariffs thing. Graham can address that when he talks to the section of our presentation, but we don't believe that will affect our business terribly. In fact, very minimally and -- if at all. And so just in context, the other things that I've talked to is things is like regulation. Regulation is completely increasing. When regulation enters the market, businesses need to turn to consultants to help them fix those problems. And these things are just continuous trends that overlay over the top of market cyclical events. And so this is why consulting is almost a countercyclical bet to -- for shareholders. And currently, there's not many options. There's only really 3 consulting firms which you could kind of refer to as similar-ish to Elixirr. This is why we kind of build this company. And even the 2 that I'm going to quote are quite different in some respects. Accenture and IBM are obviously listed companies, but I've worked in both those companies. And Accenture is an outsourcer/system integrator, not a strategy firm. They did 98% of their business in outsourcing and systems integration and a small piece in the actual strategic change consulting element. They use that as the lever to go after outsourcing and systems integration. Then you talk about IBM. It's a product company masquerading as a services business, in my view. It's predominantly products, and it actually sells its services in a product set. So it doesn't tailor its services to its customers. And then the third option is Booz Allen, which is listed on the Chicago Stock Exchange. In terms of the type of work they do, they do very similar work to us. But the problem with them is that they're very public sector. We're 0 public sector. And if you look at the DOGE events of the recent weeks with Mr. Trump, they are going to be suffering under that. And you will see later when we talk through our diversification strategy why we think the multiple industry, multiple geography and multiple capability is the way to protect a strategy business like ours from those events within geographies or within industries. In any case, I thought I'd just give you that context because this is why we are all shareholders of this business, because we believe it is an industry that is underrepresented in the public space. We want to build a public company that shareholders can invest in. It's a fantastic industry to invest in. We work in the industry every day, and we see the opportunity and the growth potential. And it's borne out by our results, and this year is no different. So we believe that results we're delivering is not unusual, and we'll talk through those in a little bit more detail now. So just to revise our specific '24 highlights, our revenue is up 30%. 30% of that is organic. Just a comment on that. We believe that, well, we have done 30% compound growth rate since IPO. And in fact, we've done probably higher than that since 2014. So we've been consistent growing at this rate. And people may say, this is an aggressive growth rate, and how sustainable is it? Let me just give you a bit of an observation on that. We believe somewhere between 10% and 20% organic growth is a sustainable organic growth rate because in a people business like ours, you have to hire people into the business. And if you hire any more than that, you start dropping standards and you don't start delivering the same output and performance that you should be delivering. And that's the other point I'd like to make, is if there's a pyramid of quality in the consulting world, if you're at the top end of the quality pyramid, if consulting is going to be cut by executives, it's the bottom end of that consulting firm that's cut, not the top end. If you're dealing with the Chief Executive, they don't tend to cut consulting projects when it's their project where they're trying to engage or at least change their business model. So you've got to try to stay at the top end, and that's what we do. We're a high-performance business. We expect high performance from our people. We will reward them very well with equity. So we make them owners. We always make this -- we've got this belief that if you rent a house, you don't care about it nearly as much as if you own it. And so all our employees are owners, and all our partners are owners. And we stand side by side with any financial investor in that ownership mindset. So we operate as if we own the business, which we do. And we hold all our partners to account to their individual P&Ls right down to the EBITDA that adds up to the EBITDA we report to you today. Inorganic growth is the other side of the equation. So if we're growing 10% to 20% a year, we want to be growing another 10% to 20%. Graham will talk to this in a little bit more detail around our acquisition strategy. And if you sum those 2 things together, you're going to get somewhere between 25% and 30% a year if you're acquiring 1 or 2 businesses with 10% to 20% EBITDA/revenue/EV uplift. And likewise, if you do the same on organic, you're going to get the 2 of them turning out at around 30% on average -- 35% to 30% on average over time. The one company we did acquire this year, Hypothesis, fantastic company. Graham will talk to you a little bit more about that, gives us fantastic capability but also gives us a whole entry to the tech space. We weren't in tech in a big way. This company does work for 5 of the Magnificent Seven. So these are all household names, gives us a great opportunity to cross-sell, which is a very big opportunity in our acquisition strategy. And again, I think it's Graham or 1 of the 2 or maybe even Nick who will be talking about our cross-sell and how much we've done since we've been able to acquire the 6 companies we have post-IPO. Our brand is building. We're getting fantastic awards, but more importantly, we're starting to invest in our brand. We've got about GBP 7 million of revenue in our revenue reported this year of GBP 110.3 million that comes from direct inbound queries as a result of people finding us on the Internet, seeing our brand on LinkedIn. We put GBP 1 million into that, and we're seeing a GBP 7 million return in revenue terms, EBITDA times 30% or 28% against that. I place that bet every day. So we're going to continue to invest in the brand and make sure that we can get inbound opportunities that come at us that we would never have got if weren't building our brand recognition. Clearly, the clients are super important. In fact, they are the business. And we're so proud of things like 75% repeat rate. That means our clients are very happy with the business that we do for them. If they weren't, they wouldn't buy us back. Likewise, we've gone up 27 -- to 27 gold clients with 40 new clients in the year. We've secured a revolving credit facility of GBP 45 million for acquisitions and other cash events. We used this to buy Hypothesis, but this was all repaid by year-end. This is a very cash-generative business, and that's the fantastic thing about it. So we use this -- it's another thing that Nick will talk to you about, is we use our cash, obviously, to minimize dilution in our business. We've quadrupled the size of the company in revenue terms, multiplied by 3 in market cap terms, which represents the undervaluation, candidly, but multiplied by 3 in market cap terms with a 6% dilution because we managed our equity awards and our acquisition strategy with equity through using our cash to purchase equity. So we're very mindful of making sure we manage dilution. And you can see here for pre-IPO employees, they've had a 14x return. So we've got very sticky, loyal, entrepreneurial, ownership mentality people. And it makes a real difference in the performance that we deliver with our clients. And super proud of this number, 80%. This is our people using their own salaries, sacrificing their salary, buying into the business because they believe every day they walk in the door and they see how good the business is. So they are almost like your spies, your eyes and ears on the ground telling you, listen, we're buying into this business. It's a good business. So 80% of them buy into the business through the share purchase scheme. I'm very proud of that statistic. Just with regards to Elixirr's market positioning, I'll hand over to Grant, who will add some more color to my opening comments.

Thank you, Steve. Hello, everyone. Graham Busby, I'm Deputy CEO and also co-founder, as Steve mentioned. So started Elixirr with him in 2009 and looking forward to going through today with you. Yes, just to build on Steve's comments about the market positioning and the consulting industry. It's a $1 trillion market. There's always clients who are spending on consulting. In fact, it's a bit of a fallacy that consulting is one of the first things to go in downtimes in terms of macroeconomic scenarios. I'll get to it a bit later, but if you have a diversified business through capability, geography and industry, it means that you can change what you're talking to your clients about depending on what their big needs are and what's happening in the marketplace. So in good markets, in growth markets, there's often talk about revenue, new markets, product innovation. But in slower markets, you might start talking about efficiencies and operating models and supply chain and sourcing. And we're brilliantly positioned to have all of those conversations. Hence, when Nick gets to show you our growth rate over previous years, you can see we've been growing 25% to 30% to 35% a year in a market that's growing 6% or 7% a year. So we're gaining market share every single year from our competitors. Who are those competitors? We -- they fall in 3 buckets. Steve mentioned the first, the listed consultancies. That's about 10% of the market. So 10% of the $1 trillion. You can -- if you look at how we've performed as a company on the stock market in that time, we've created 250% or more returns for our shareholders, which we're very proud of. And I'll show you in a second that outperforms the other listed businesses. The rest of the market is established firms and challenger firms. So 90%, roughly half and half. So 45% are established firms. They are companies like McKinsey, Bain and Boston, so MBBs of this world, the Big 4, Deloitte, PwC, et cetera, and Oliver Wyman. So all names that I'm sure you all have heard of, and they have a big chunk of the marketplace. However, again, I'll show in a second how we've been outperforming them since we've been listed from a growth perspective. The rest are in the challenger space. So there are hundreds of thousands of companies which range from 2 to 3 people all the way up to Elixirr and past into $1 billion revenues. This is a massive opportunity for Elixirr. We are selectively choosing the best of the businesses in this category to bring into Elixirr. I can talk to you about how we've done that and what we look for. But one number we're particularly proud of is since we started this inorganic strategy at IPO, we've created GBP 44 million of cross-sell revenue, which is revenue that none of the businesses who joined us or ourselves would have access to were it not for combining our capabilities and having our partners being able to talk to their clients about more things that we do in different ways and creating that value. Obviously, GBP 44 million of revenue, if you take a 30% EBITDA of that and then you kind of multiply that through, there's a lot of enterprise value. So this is a strategy that works, and it's one that we're going to continue to do. Just to give you a bit of a comparison against those buckets. On the left here is Elixirr's revenue growth from 2019 to 2023. You can see we're the top line there. And then you can see the combination of the different buckets and how we have significantly outperformed them. It's no surprise that the challenger firms are second in that list, their growth and they're getting market share because they are fantastic in what they do. They wouldn't exist if they weren't brilliant in what they did because of the big names in the marketplace. So you can see that, that opportunity, that gap between us and the established and listed lines and also the challenger line and that gap is where we can really create some shareholder value in the coming years, and we already have done. Looking at the listed firms on the right-hand side. Again, this is since IPO and how the various stocks and trackers have performed. Again, you can see how we've outperformed not just the other listed businesses that Steve mentioned but also some of the indexes such as the top 100 businesses on AIM, the FTSE 250, et cetera. So we are very pleased with how the market has reacted to Elixirr. We have diversified significantly, and I will come back to that later. But just to talk through a couple of points. Steve mentioned a couple, 8 earnings upgrades since IPO. We're very proud of putting out numbers and then either hitting them or beating them. We enjoyed doing that. Since IPO, we've quadrupled our revenue. We've quadrupled our EBITDA, and we've quadrupled the number of clients that we work with. So the kind of momentum is certainly there. We've done 6 acquisitions, which I can talk to a bit later. That's produced that GBP 44 million of cross-sell opportunity. And you can see in terms of the revenue growth, we want to keep producing industry-leading numbers in that space alongside the industry-leading profitability that the business produces. That said, I'm going to pass back to Steve, who can talk a little bit about how we believe there's a value gap that we can fill and how the main market plays into that.

Yes. So this is an interesting chart that we pulled together. You can see along the x-axis here is the average revenue CAGR that we produced and our chosen competitors here that we can get this information for and average EBITDA margin for the past 3 years. And you can see that the x-axis where we sit on an average basis is over 50%. No one sits there. And then the EBITDA multiple is represented on the y-axis here. And you can see that candidly, we are an undervalued company, and this represents an opportunity. And it's part of the reason we're using the move to the main markets. There's a few things about that I'll cover in the next chart, but just to flag that for you now. We think this is an incredible opportunity for a re-rating. But also, if we continue with this, which we plan to do, as I said, we'd be comfortable with the target of somewhere between 25% and 30% revenue CAGR around our multiple organic and inorganic strategy. And we plan to maintain our EV EBITDA -- sorry, our EBITDA margin in the 30%-ish range, 25% to 30% range. So Nick will talk to you a little bit more about that. We've had a market-leading performance, obviously. You can see that on the right. And we're trading at a significant discount to our peers with our average target price from our institute -- sorry, from our brokers saying that we should be trading around GBP 10.37. We happen to agree with this. I would say just a little bit about the market's understanding of what we are. There are very few companies who do what we do in the listed space. So if you want to look at companies that are similar to us, you look at someone like a Booz, but they do entirely public sector. If you wanted to look at another company that could be comparable that doesn't represent MBB, you could look at someone like Oliver Wyman. Interestingly, Oliver Wyman is a company that was exactly the same size as us 20 years ago. They got bought by Mercer, and they probably do about 3 billion to 4 billion -- 4 billion to 5 billion. It's a bit opaque because obviously, they're within a group. So it's a bit difficult. But that company is probably worth -- if you do the multipliers on the EBITDA as a subsidiary, it's probably worth something like 10 billion or something. So in 20 years, that's easily an opportunity for us to replicate in the public domain setting, and that's what we're going after. Just talking about the move to the main market. Clearly, the AIM market has been a fantastic platform for us. I mean it really starts to prove our model out. We wouldn't -- it's allowed us to do the multiple organic, inorganic. It's allowed us to do the ownership mentality. It's allowed us to give our employees that ownership mentality. So it's kind of a hell of a lot of good for us. But we candidly feel like we've a little bit outgrown it. The market is -- it's seen as a small/mid-cap U.K. platform, if it's seen at all by the international players. So the simple truth is we are not a U.K. company. We happen to be headquartered in the U.K., but we do 75% of our revenue outside the U.K. And so we believe there are shareholders on the main market who will understand that. The difficulty we also have with being on AIM is as we accelerate our inorganic growth strategy, Graham always has a difficulty explaining to target acquisitions what shares on the AIM market mean. They're not 100% certain what that market means, and in particular, U.S. investors. But they would understand paper on the FTSE main board. So that's a really big important thing for us to do. There are some things that have been removed, regulatory hurdles that made it a little bit problematic for us to be on AIM, particularly around acquisitions but also around reporting frequency. Those things are being relaxed and actually align themselves pretty much with what we do on AIM. So we believe the regulatory burden will be minimal increase. And there are other opportunities here that we think are super important, things like index inclusion. If we get into the 250 tracker -- 250 index, we obviously get into the tracker funds, which increases liquidity, which is good for all shareholders. We think -- we're aiming at 12 to 18 months away, we want to be in the FTSE 250 inclusion. So that's the plan and ambition. Whether it's earlier or later, it's going to happen. It's just a question of us getting in there so that we could start improving the liquidity. We think there's greater investor confidence as well as, obviously, the investor base. So very excited by this move. Our employees are buzzing. They see this as a big step forward for us, and there's a very good atmosphere in the company right now. Nick, if I can hand to you on the financial performance.

Yes. Thanks, Steve. Hello, everyone. I'm Nick Willott. I'm the CFO. I've been in the business for about 5 years, so just before the IPO back in 2020. And I want to start before I go to the detail of the FY '24 numbers. This slide just puts those FY '24 numbers in perspective of how we performed since 2019, the year before IPO. And we mentioned before the revenue CAGR of 38% since 2020, 2024; the EBITDA CAGR, 34% from 2020 to 2024; and an average EBITDA margin at close to 30% through that time. And last year, we're very pleased that EBITDA last year was more than our revenue had been back in 2019. And this year, EBITDA in '24 is higher than revenue was back in 2020. So this year's results are excellent. But they're also -- they are not unusual. They are the continuation of what we've been doing every year since IPO, and we have every intention of continuing to do. Turning to the highlights for 2024. Total revenue was up 30%. Gross profit was up 22%. Adjusted EBITDA was up 23% to GBP 31.2 million, and that's at a 28.0% EBITDA margin. That's slightly lower than the 29.6% EBITDA margin last year, which is a combination of the dilutive impact of Hypotheses and some additional investments we made to grow business in areas like marketing and business development. Our adjusted profit before tax was up 22%, in line with the increase in EBITDA. And adjusted diluted EPS was up 16%. That's slightly less than the increase in adjusted profit before tax for 2 reasons. The adjusted profit after tax was up by 19%, so slightly less than profit before tax. And that's a result of the higher tax rate we had in the U.K. impacting -- which went up in 2023. So the full year impact of that and a slightly higher share count from shares issued for the acquisition of Responsum, Insigniam and Hypothesis. But I'll come back to issuing shares when we get to the dilution slide because the share issues we've done really have been very modest. We are pleased to announce with our results on Monday the final dividend for this year of 11.5p that will be paid in August. That takes our total dividend per share to 17.8p for the year. That's 20% higher than last year. And from a cash cost perspective, that's a 23% increase, in line with the increase in EBITDA. And we intend to continue to grow our dividend in line with increase in EBITDA. Free cash flow, we'll have a slide on that in a minute. But free cash flow performance was very, very strong in '24, GBP 28.1 million of free cash flow, an excellent working capital performance. And you see this is a business very much where the EBITDA less corporation tax turns to cash. To give you our usual transparency on revenue growth. This slide shows the progression from GBP 85.9 million in '23 to GBP 111 million in '24. The 3 blocks on the left-hand side are the components of organic growth, which is a net 13% organic growth. As Stephen said, we aim for that 10% to 20% level each year. And the 3 blocks, there is always some end-of-life projects in our portfolio, but that's very much offset by growth in existing clients of GBP 9.7 million and new clients of GBP 11.4 million. And we try to balance both of those areas so that we're both expanding the range of services we offer in existing clients as well as bringing new clients into our portfolio. And then the growth from acquisition, a contribution of GBP 14.3 million in the right-hand block, that contribution was from 11 months of Insigniam that we acquired in December '23 and 2.5 months of Hypotheses that we acquired in October '24. In terms of revenue per partner, we're very pleased that the revenue per partner has carried on, continued to grow in '24 as it has done every year since IPO. So it's increased by 6% from GBP 3.9 million in '23 to GBP 4.1 million in '24. And that metric is now about 30% higher than it was back in 2020. And very much the growth that you've seen in 2024 as, in fact, all of those years since IPO that we -- I've shown on my first slide, that's our 4-pillar growth strategy in action. So our organic pillars are stretching, getting more -- stretching our partners, getting more from them as we give our partners a larger range of services to sell, particularly through the acquisition capabilities that we've acquired; promoting partners who are always very successful in our firm given the fact that they know our ways of working, they know our culture, they know what it needs -- what's required to be successful here, and we have a very high success rate with our promotes; and hiring partners from the outside market with particular skill set, capabilities and client relationships, and we made 3 hires in 2024 that are all shaping up to be very successful additions to our partner team; and then, of course, the fourth pillar, which is our inorganic pillar of acquisitions. This is probably my favorite slide of the pack. It's our cash generation slide, which shows how our cash progressed in '24 from GBP 18 million in 2023 to GBP 7.5 million in '24. And that decreased to about GBP 11 million, but that's after having spent GBP 21.2 million on acquisitions. So our operating cash flow, GBP 29.4 million actually this year with a very strong working capital performance was higher than EBITDA less corporation tax. And then we use that operating cash flow to pay for the initial consideration for the acquisition of Hypothesis of GBP 21 million and some very small amounts in relation to earn-outs. We had a net outflow for EBT and shareholder loan transactions of GBP 8.9 million. As we said before, it's important for us to not dilute through the issuance of equity, and we use our cash to ensure that we don't do so any more than we absolutely have to. We paid a dividend last year into installments with a cash cost of GBP 6.9 million, and there was GBP 3 million of other outflows in relation to leases, CapEx and debt repayment, including some debt that we acquired with the acquisition of Hypothesis. But we closed the year with GBP 7.5 million of cash with all of the debt that we drew under that, the RCF facility that we have taken with NatWest repaid by year-end. So that puts us in a very strong position going forward in terms of firepower for future acquisitions. In terms of balance sheet, I'll just pick up with a couple of main points. Obviously, the intangible assets have increased from GBP 101 million to GBP 130 million with the goodwill and other intangible assets associated with the acquisition of Hypothesis. I mentioned very strong working capital performance. And you see that really with our -- the position of trade and other receivables. It was only up GBP 1.5 million year-on-year, and that's despite the business having grown much faster than that. For those of you, the question I sometimes get asked, how much contingent consideration do we still have on the balance sheet? There's only GBP 8.5 million, and you'll see that that's a similar level to last year. A large element of that is actually payable in the current year '25 and so will be off the balance sheet by next year-end. I'll now hand back over to Graham, who's going to cover the business review.

Thanks, Nick. So just to bring the major highlights that have happened in 2024. I'll just give a brief summary here because we do dip into the detail in the following slides between myself and Nick and Em. One thing that we continue to do was diversifying what we do, where we do it and in what industries we do it in. And that is something that we'll continue to do. I'll go through the numbers in a second. But it's a real driver for our inorganic growth strategy. The more capabilities we can buy into the business in different industries, parts of different industries, parts of different geographies, that just makes us a far more sustainable business as we grow. Hypothesis ticked all 3 of those boxes actually, capability, geography and industry. I'll go through a little bit in terms of what they do. But on the top level, they are an insight strategy and design consultancy. And they have a fantastic client set, 5 of the Magnificent Seven. If you look at the rest of their client roster, if you like, you would have heard of all of them. And we're very excited at the traction we're getting in terms of cross-sell both ways into our respective client sets. And we're growing our service offerings. So I mentioned earlier being able to be relevant in the bull market and the bear market when it's good and bad. And we've also -- and we'll go into it further. We've been using AI not just with our clients through the acquisition of Responsum 18 months ago, but we've also really started to build out internally certain uses of AI, which are really making us more -- not just efficient but more effective, more importantly. And then we'll touch on that. Steve mentioned kind of client growth. We've increased our number of active clients by 21% from 200 to 241. The gold clients who deliver more than GBP 1 million of revenue have gone from 19 to 27. And really, that's reflective of the trust and the value in the delivery that we provide to our clients. And that all flows through to that 70...

Is it just me? Or is Graham frozen?

So I just wanted to touch into the diversification point in more detail. On this slide, you can see our revenue going across the top. So GBP 30 million was the year of IPO, 2020. And then last year, it was GBP 111 million, which was obviously FY '24. Looking into the 3 buckets that we think about, capability, geography and vertical. So at IPO, we were 97% consulting. That number as of 2024 we're diversified to 57%. And that's through both growing digital but also buying in data with the iOLAP acquisition and really expanding that. I think it's important to note that whilst the percentage has gone down, the actual pound numbers certainly haven't. So doing the quick math, 97% of GBP 30 million is GBP 29 million of consulting, whereas 57% of GBP 111 million is GBP 63 million. So going from GBP 29 million to GBP 63 million is more than doubling consulting, albeit we're far less reliant on that from a group perspective. Same can be said in geography. At IPO, we were 21% U.S. But what we did tell investors was that the U.S. market is a very important market for consulting. For every GBP 1 spent on consulting in Asia, GBP 2 is spent in Europe and U.K. and GBP 4 is spent in the U.S. And over time, if you're a global player, you would expect your revenue profile to match that. And you can see on the right-hand side that we are certainly on that journey. Just a couple of things to note. That has been extremely helpful from a tariff perspective, which I'm sure is going to be some questions from yourselves. Just to tell you, we are not directly impacted by tariffs. We're a services business and services are not caught up in that. However, even if services were, we have a U.S. business that employs U.S. people that works with U.S. clients. So they're in country. And again, we are protected. You might ask, how many of our clients are impacted and is that going to impact us from a revenue and profit perspective? We have looked into how much of our revenue are in the affected industries. So particularly U.S. CPG, also manufacturing, et cetera. On an annual basis, our forecast, 7% of our revenue was in those clients. From where we are now to the end of the year, that's 5%. So in an Armageddon scenario where all of our clients in those industries took all of our revenue down to 0, which isn't going to happen, but that's just a 5% exposure. In fact, what we have seen is some new conversations cropping up where we're being asked to help our clients with dealing with tariffs, so especially looking in the supply chain. So we feel very good about where Elixirr is from a tariff perspective. And again, the law of percentages and growing numbers, if I just took the U.K., 33% number at IPO, that's a GBP 10 million revenue from U.K. And if we take the 27% last year, that's actually GBP 30 million. So whilst the percentage has come down, we've tripled the U.K. Again, very happy with that. Looking at an industry perspective. We were 80% financial services and insurance at IPO. Last year, that was around 40%. I think interestingly, you can start to see our inorganic strategy come to life here. That top bar heath care, a lot of that revenue came through Insigniam. And we're looking to -- and we are actively growing that with cross-sell. And when we look at this graph next year, you'll see a big kind of tech, media and entertainment line, which has come primarily from Hypothesis. So that is another way that we are diversifying from an industry point of view. Talking about Hypothesis. It's a highly strategic acquisition. I mentioned geography. They are U.S., especially in the West Coast, which is nice from our U.S. coverage as we have the East Coast and kind of the mid states covered. This gives us great West Coast coverage. Industry, like I said, tech, media, entertainment and fantastic clients. And from a capability point of view, they focus on research and insights. And why we like that is at the back of that needs a strategy and then execution. So it's a perfect plug-in to our client conversations to really open up broader work for Elixirr. And the cross-sell is really starting to happen. Now looking at our client set. One thing that we were really enamored by was the client feedback when we did due diligence before we actually signed the paperwork. We spoke to all of these clients. You can see some of the bottom left numbers there, the response from the clients and what they said about them in terms of quality, the people, return on investments, ability to deliver was exceptional. And that is, again, a really important thing for Elixirr when we buy a business because that quality bar needs to be as good, if not better than us. So I'd like to now hand back to Em to talk to you a bit more about what we do and then give you some client examples and how it really comes to life.

Thank you, Graham. My name is Em Caerlewy Smith. I'm one of the client-facing partners at Elixirr. And I thought it might be nice to try to bring to life a little bit how we interact with our clients, the capabilities that we bring to them and give you some case studies about how we're operating in our markets. Elixirr was really founded on strong foundations of strategy and transformation consulting and operational excellence consulting. So these are the core management consulting projects where we're working at the top of the house with C-suite to define the agenda of where they want to take their businesses to and then help them execute on that vision through change management, through looking at their business and operating models. But over the course of the last few years, Graham's acquisition program has added capabilities to what's in our kit bags to talk to clients with. So the acquisition of Insigniam, for example, has brought us an ability to talk to C-suite about the cultural side of breakthrough leadership and how they can align behind the visions for the future of their businesses. The acquisition of Hypothesis has brought us these research and consumer insights capabilities where we can go and research empirically what consumers are looking for in the market and feed that into the strategic objectives of our clients. We acquired a couple of digital marketing agencies along the way, Coast and Den, which are now rebranded as Elixirr Digital. And they provide full-service brand design and brand strategy work as well as user experience and digital application build skills to our market. And then finally, we've acquired iOLAP and Responsum, 2 technology businesses that specialize in data and in AI, laterally AI with the acquisition of Responsum. And they give us real data engineering, technology engineering and AI skills where we can start to build solutions for our clients and help them to plumb their data into the technologies that they need to be using as they take their businesses into the future. And having all of these diverse capabilities is now enabling us as client partners to be building bigger client account relationship. So our top 10 clients, each of them now generating for us over GBP 2 million of revenue a year and now diversified across 7 industries. And we're able to build these clients into plus GBP 2 million revenue clients because we have all of these capabilities to bring to them, either in one project or across multiple buying centers. We're also really proud that our number of gold clients, that's clients generating in excess of GBP 1 million a year of revenue, has increased from 19 to 27 from FY '23 to '24. And that's an increase of 42%. But whilst we've been growing the number of big clients we have in the firm, we've also been growing the number of overall clients we have in the firm. And that's really important because it's reduced our client concentration in our top 10. So previously, in FY '20, when we IPO-ed, 80% of our revenues were coming from our top 10 clients. But now in FY '24, 43% of our revenues come from those top 10 clients. And as Graham mentioned earlier, we're also really, really happy to see that 75% of our clients from FY '23 were repeat clients in FY '24, really evidencing the quality of our service offering. And just a couple of client case studies to call out here for you. The first is Frontier. I noticed someone in the questions has asked how we're interacting with clients in AI and how we see that offering evolves. Well, recently for Frontier, we built them an AI-powered sales dashboard and a chatbot to help increase and enhance their prospecting and lead generation and qualification. And we saw an increase in sales prospecting productivity through that tool of 93%. But it was only possible to create that because of the data and technology capabilities we have to build a 360-degree customer view using their data and extensively mapping that data. And then one other case study I'll pick out on here in the interest of time is our leading reinsurance provider. This is a reinsurance broker, where we've worked with them for the last couple of years from strategy all the way through to the digital design and prototyping of a workflow tool in order to uncover the value of the data in their organization. And actually, after going out to our innovation network to try to procure the technology to create that tool, we realized that reinsurance was so specific that we needed to help them build it. So we used our data and technology teams in order to build this workflow tool, which is now live in the market and is being used by over 500 reinsurance brokers. We're really proud of the quotes on the right-hand side of this slide. Not only do our clients rate us simply lightyears ahead of some of these big name consultancy firms, McKinsey, Bain, et cetera, et cetera. They also talk about how they feel important. So we make them feel important and how their success is a big deal to us. And that's very true. And the reason that that's true is because we are owners of this business and we are all completely invested in making this business go to market in the most excellent way that it can and delighting our clients. And so our EVP, our employee value proposition, really is a strategic asset that's delighting our clients. So first of all, we're growing our brand reputation as the challenger consultancy. We put money into our marketing to do that. The brand is starting to have resonance not only with our clients but also with the talent that we attract. So 14,000 applications in FY '24, and that's over 100 applicants per role. We're also enhancing our own operations with leading-edge tools. So people want to work with us because they understand that they would have the leading-edge AI-powered tools at their fingertips to help us generate speed to value for both our clients and for ourselves. So we're building a knowledge management agent that will help us do our consulting work. We're trying to streamline our statement of work generation, our contracting process as well as how we create proposals and take those to the market. So we're quicker to get into the market. And then Graham's team is also using AI tooling for M&A scouting. And then lastly, our equity schemes. These really are the cornerstone of why we have built this culture of ownership. And we have 2 different equity schemes in the fund, one for partners, one for our employees. And Nick's going to talk to you about the value that they are creating for the 80% and more of our teams who are enrolled in them.

Thanks, Em. So I mean, our equity rewards, the way we use our equity to reward everyone in our firm from the most senior partner to the most junior employee, I think, is really unique in the market. We haven't seen anyone else doing this. And I think when we talk about the really high-performance culture we have, that -- one of the factors contributing to that high performance is not just expectations of everybody here. But it's also the way in which our partners and employees get to share in the value that they create and that they have their interest 100% aligned with external shareholders because their interests are in growing the value of their equity, growing the share price for -- which rewards everybody, internal shareholders and external shareholders. And they do that by driving business performance, by having great client relationships, all of those factors. This slide shows, on the left-hand side, the value creation opportunity for partners. And so our partners just typically in cash terms get paid less than they will in the market. So in a competitor company, they might get paid GBP 1 million in cash terms, but it's a short-term partnership-type model where there's no building entity value for long term. So if they were earning GBP 1 million per year over a 5-year period in cash terms, they might earn GBP 5 million. Our partners over that 5-year period could earn potentially GBP 2 million in cash. So GBP 200,000 a year in their salary, GBP 200,000 a year in bonus, 100% bonus. If they -- that's if they hit all of their targets, both around revenue and profitability. By far the bigger component of their overall remuneration is their equity package. So each partner gets GBP 3 million of market price options. Importantly, these are market price options. So yes, no discount on the exercise prices at the current share price at the day they joined the firm or either as an external hire or promoted to partner as an internal promotion to partner. As well as the GBP 3 million of market price options, they also get GBP 0.5 million of shares that they purchased with a loan from the company. And it's important that they're buying shares because that gives them downside exposure to share price. Options are only upside. And we want them to have -- partners to have the same exposure to downside share price that external shareholders have. And if you take that GBP 3.5 million exposure to equity through options and shares, well, given the share price performance, we've delivered -- from IPO to the end of 2024, that GBP 3.5 million exposure to equity gives about GBP 8.1 million gain. And then when you add the cash component, they get to -- of GBP 2 million, they're at GBP 10.1 million overall. So roughly double what they would have earned in a cash-based remuneration system. But also importantly, they're big holders of equity for the longer term to continue driving growth beyond that 5-year period. And that's certainly what we've seen as our first tranche of the IPO options became exercisable. On the right-hand side, it's the same, similar numbers for the employees in terms of how this works. And again, every employee in our firm, from the senior principal down to the personal reception, receives options. And again, given the share price, the share price growth we've had since IPO to the end of last year, an analyst has a GBP 29,000 gain all the way up to a principal in our firm with a GBP 1.2 million gains. So these are meaningful amounts of money even for junior employees. It's a way for them to actually build some capital and build some wealth in a way that it's very hard for them to do if they're purely earning a cash salary that's being taxed. So we're very proud of this, the way we've set this up. And I think it's certainly a massive contributor to the performance -- the high-performance culture we have within the firm. And just turning to the other side of that, I guess, from a shareholder perspective and external shareholder perspective and dilution. It's important to say that we've had no dilution from these employee incentives. All of the employee incentives, we had the first tranche last year from IPO that we exercised. And we exercised those using cash by existing shares with 0 dilution. So our total dilution in the 5 years since IPO has only been 6% at the time where the share price has more than tripled, and the business has quadrupled, and that's all due to acquisitions. What we set out in the model here really was to project forward on how that dilution might progress if we don't use cash to offset it in the future. And you see there that we -- in a model where we grow the business at 20%, of course, as we talked about before, we've actually grown the business with CAGRs north of 30%. Assuming a 20% growth rate and similar proportions today where 70% to 75% of our EBITDA turns to free cash flow, even without any multiple arbitrage, we reached GBP 1 billion equity value, GBP 1 billion market cap by 2029. And that's only with 16% dilution. So that's a further tripling of market cap from where it is today for only 16% dilution. So very modest from a shareholder perspective compared to the share -- the market cap and share price value that's been created. And really -- and this model reflects all of the dilutive instruments that we use. So all of the existing employee and partner options that we have in place, the grant of new options to partners and employees using our current kind of metrics as we've grown the number of partners and employees in line with revenue and our employee share purchase plan that Em was talking about and not that we decided to do this but as a conservative option to allow for replacement options once existing options mature. And the reason that the dilution is really so modest, it's really 3 factors. It's because we're using market price options. So there's no discount, only the growth in the share price that creates the dilution. It's because we have very high performance standards and both partners for their revenue and profitability targets and employees for their high -- get 1 of the 2 top performance ratings, only a proportion of these options will invest, and attrition. The options all have 4 or 5-year first exercise date. And if somebody leaves within that period, then all of their equity is forfeited. So it's only the people who stay for the long term and build value over the medium to long term that benefit from this. And it's those 3 factors together that make the dilution here really quite modest. And from our point of view, where all of us presenting were major shareholders, this is not a concern to us given the value creation that's involved over the time frame. Now I'll pass back to Graham. I think he's going to cover our M&A.

Thanks, Nick. So I mentioned earlier inorganic is a big part of our strategy. It's the fourth growth pillar that we have. Just to remind you here on the left. I'll remind you of the strategy we have in place. In the middle, I'll show you some of the numbers. And on the right, really, it's about the opportunity. Suffice to say, we take it very seriously. I've got a full-time team working on this. In fact, we've moved one of our partners into the M&A team to really help turbocharge this. So we do see this as very important and very successful to date and even more so going forward. So on the left, we are doing what we call a programmatic approach to inorganic. That's where we're looking at 1 or 2 deals a year. That will essentially increase enterprise value by 10% or 20%. So simplistically, we're looking to buy 10% to 20% of EBITDA each year. That's proven to be a very successful M&A strategy, better than buying lots of small deals and far less risky than doing an absolutely massive deal. And that's what we've been doing to date. I mentioned the fact that we are looking at industry geography and capability. Just taking capability first. Research and insights was the latest add. There are other things that we're looking at. I think cyber for us is a big opportunity. We are growing organically in that space. We've made some senior hires, and we are doing some great work with our clients. I do think an acquisition in that space could be very additive. From a geography point of view, the U.S. will always be a focus. The last 4 U.S. -- the last 4 acquisitions have been U.S. That's no accident, and there will be more going forward for sure. But we know that given that revenue profile I said earlier, we do want to get further into Europe. So we are looking at -- actively looking at the Nordics. We've looked at DACH, and that is a strong pipeline we have there. And thinking about industry, yes, we've added industries. Like I said earlier, there are other industries that we think we should be adding who use consultants a lot. Energy, oil and gas is an obvious one. Again, we have some great clients. We could add more. Defense, that obviously, from a European point of view, particularly could be an interesting add as well. And I think the other 2 points to make on this is it has to be high-quality services, high-quality businesses and also the aligned deal structures. We do use equity in the deal structures deliberately so that the people coming in care about the business as much as we do and as much as you do if you are an investor already. The pipeline in the middle. You can see the team have been working hard. We have had a lot of meetings and essentially come through to the 7 deals that we've completed, 6 since IPO. And thinking about the opportunity going forward, we've mentioned the GBP 45 million revolving credit facility. That's fully available given that we've repaid it all at the end of last year. Add that to the free cash flow that Nick was talking about of GBP 28.1 million in FY '24, add that to the equity we have and particularly adding that now to the main market attractiveness, I think we're in a really exciting place. So looking forward in the future to talking you through future acquisitions. Steve, maybe I'll, in the interest of time, hand back to you.

Thanks, Graham. Just timing there on my mic, but got it done. So hopefully, everybody, that gives you a good view of how the business has performed, our strategy.

There's a few other questions in here. I'll try and pick up some of them as I close out with regards to our outlook. I mean we -- I think you probably get from the gist of this presentation we're very confident in our position. Because we're going to the main board, we cannot actually give you guidance for this year in either revenue or EBITDA terms. But what I can do is give you some anecdotal observations of our performance so far into 2025, which gives us a lot of confidence. So for example, I can say to you that Q1, which we just finished, is a record quarter. So we continue our growth momentum, which is fantastic. In actual fact, the month just gone, we are on the 1st of May -- sorry, April is another record month. So you could still see our momentum building through that. And then one final piece of anecdotal evidence I can give you that the momentum is sustainable and continues is that if you look at the amount of contracted revenue we have for the half 1 of 2025, so what we've already contracted to date with May and June still to go is greater than the half 2 of 2024, all the revenue we actually delivered in half 2 of 2024. So this business is in a very strong position. We've got strategies in place. Our employees are incredibly motivated. Our partner team is incredibly motivated. They're all owners of the business, and they all see the opportunity, and they turn up every day to make their equity worth something. And that's a really important cultural dimension to our strategy. You've heard Nick talk about the way we manage dilution. And even if we didn't use our cash, we still believe it's a fantastic model because it doesn't dilute more than it creates, which is exactly the simple truth for what we're trying to do. We're trying to get 3x under market cap with what I think the maximum dilution Nick was pointing to was 15%, if I recall. I can't remember. But I think it was in that region in any case. And -- but despite that, we've only had 6% dilution with 3x over market capitalization increase since IPO. So we've got a proven track record of doing this. We believe that the market is massive. Graham pointed to the $1 trillion market cap. Someone said to me, what's your end game with Elixirr? One of the questions here. Well, McKinsey is a pretty big business. We've got a long way to go to get there. But -- plus in probably 20, 30 years' time, we could probably say we're in that lead. But if we grow at this rate, it's definitely achievable. And what I'm looking for is to disrupt the consulting market. The consulting market needs a truly accountable -- publicly accountable consulting firm that is in the strategy space. And that's what we're trying to build. And none of the firms that are existing today will ever be able to achieve that. They just cannot move themselves into a public setting. And I think that the consulting industry needs something like this because it will hold accounting -- the consulting industry into account because the public nature of our relationship with you guys as shareholders is that we need to be delivering great quality work. Otherwise, our share price is what suffers. And we -- that accountability is something that the rest of the industry doesn't have. Some of the rest of the industry can actually make serious errors. And if those of you are interested, you can just go look at a bit of a mess in South Africa. It was one of the big, branded consultants, which I won't mention, but it's very public. You can go and have a look at it. They suffered no consequences. So I think the accountability in the industry is not quite as good as it should be. And I think building a firm like this will put us -- it will build trust in the industry. It will build trust in us as being people who stand and face into that accountability. And our clients love it. And when we've got partners who are 100% aligned, I think we'll see that come through, too, and employees. I mean the employees are incredibly motivated as well. And just quickly -- I'm cautious about 1 minute over, but let me quickly run through any other questions. I think most of them we've -- just a question on ramping up our partners. Promoted partners, there's no ramp-up issue. New partners, it takes -- it's very quick. All other partners work with them to get them onboard. So that's something that I can -- rest assured it's pretty good. What do we spend 1 million on brand promotion? All sorts of things, LinkedIn activity, training our partners to use LinkedIn, writing LinkedIn posts, all of those kind of good things, also putting out -- hosting client events, that kind of stuff. I think Graham has mentioned that he went through that detail in capability, industry and geography, where our emphasis are. Just to close out because I know that it's really quite important that I leave you with a vision here of what we're trying to achieve. We want to be the tech-enabled strategy and change consultancy because technology is the big theme of change. And the one thing that the big firms struggle with is they're big pyramids like this. And so when Em was talking about actually using AI to make ourselves more efficient and effective, the big firms really struggle with that because they've got a whole ton of people at the base of the pyramid that they can't fire. This is their model. This is their [indiscernible]. They're operated like just 200 years. To change that model is very difficult for them. We're a tube. We don't have that same anxiety around disrupting ourselves, and our clients love that because we actually step into the breach and go with them on this journey of how do you actually use this technology like AI or digital or cyber security or whatever it is to really change the -- we need to own medicine. Let's call it that way. In any case, I could carry on and on and on. And I'm already 3 minutes over time. So any more questions? Or how do we close this down?

Stephen, thank you, and to the rest of the team for updating investors today and addressing those questions today. I was going to ask you, Stephen, for a few closing comments, but I believe you have just given this. So if I could please ask investors not to close this session as you will now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order that the Board can better understand your views and expectations. This will only take a few moments to complete and I'm sure will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management of Elixirr International plc, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good afternoon to you all.

Thank you for listening.