Gateley (Holdings) Plc (GTLY) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, and welcome. My name is Rod Waldie. I'm CEO of Gateley Group, and I'm joined today by Neil Smith, our Chief Finance Officer; and Nick Smith, our Acquisitions Director, to present to you our FY '25 results. So without further ado, just going straight to the FY '25 outcomes slide. And this is a solid set of results, and it's from a period during which the macro wasn't always easy to navigate. We're pleased to deliver an increase in revenue, and that's partly generated by returns from our patient investment alongside an increase in fee earnings utilization. As always, I'm very grateful to all our staff across the whole of Gateley Group for their hard work and commitment during the financial year. At the last year-end, we said that we anticipated that margin would remain a challenge for us in FY '25 due to sudden inflation and recent investment in platforms, systems and people for medium- to longer-term return. So in the circumstances, we were pleased to maintain our underlying operating profit margin at 11.7%. Now there were both positive and negative inputs in terms of margin contribution, and we're not going to shy away from that. We will highlight those in this presentation. June saw us celebrate our 10th anniversary on AIM. The listing gave us the ability to create a uniquely diverse professional services business, from which you'll see on the slide, consultancy services now contribute 29% of our revenue. Our balance sheet remains strong. The key shifting characteristic here being a net debt report, which is reflective of our capital allocation policy in action during the year, as I'll outline as we go through this presentation. So I think our track record should give our stakeholders confidence that we will remain forward-looking and disciplined in progressing our strategy, and that includes continuing to apply the right balance of capital allocation from period to period and continuing to instill operational discipline for margin improvement, and that is our key priority. Margin improvement is our key priority. In the meantime, we're pleased to be able to propose a final dividend of 6.2p, thus maintaining total dividends for FY '25 at 9.5p. In outlook, well, we're carrying good momentum into FY '26 and current trading is in line with market expectations. Therefore, whilst we are conscious of macro volatility, we're optimistic in outlook for FY '26 and beyond. Moving on to the next slide. I'm not going to dwell on this slide, but we do like to retain it in the presentation. Firstly, it's a reminder of our unbroken track record of revenue growth. And secondly, it's an illustration of our enhanced growth since listing in 2015 when we began disciplined investments in our increasingly resilient professional services business. We remain absolutely consistent in application of strategy to continue to differentiate Gateley by growing our unique professional services business to offer more to our clients and to give us deeper reach into our chosen markets. Moving on to the next slide. I'm going to dwell on this slide for a while. There are 2 themes that underpinned both our performance and also our strategic actions in FY '25. Firstly, targeted investment in line with our capital allocation policy. And we did that, as I said earlier, whilst maintaining underlying operating profit margin for the period at 11.7%. Secondly, in the context of things that underpinned our performance, active management for both organic growth and efficiencies. Now these themes are both pointed at margin improvement as we grow, which, as I've already said, is our key objective. So picking up investment first. In previous presentations, we've outlined our capital allocation policy as pointing at 4 main areas for long-term returns and 3 of those areas were active during FY '25. Firstly, we continue to invest in both existing and new platform services, particularly in specialist areas and deep sector expertise areas where we can price accordingly. So in period, we were delighted to see strong returns from our 2023 investment in specialist complex international dispute resolution services. That team delivered almost 50% revenue growth in FY '25, and I think that's a great example of patient investment returning for us. The recruitment of 4 partners into our legal services Housebuilder team in FY '25 and actually, a further 2 partners to that team since we began FY '26 is indicative of further investment bias in deep sector expertise, which whilst margin contribution erosive in the short term, will unwind positively for us given our market-leading credentials in this sector, allied to what we believe are genuine tailwinds in government housing policy. We take a similar view in relation to our Q4 FY '25 investment in a team of laterally hired corporate lawyers to our Dubai office, where building on our existing foundation, we see near- and long-term profit-enhancing growth opportunity. So secondly, in the context of buckets of capital allocation policy, we necessarily continue to invest in systems for both service delivery and internal efficiencies. This is exampled by in-period additions to our in-house AI development team. Whilst the carrying cost is a drag on margin in the short term, we're confident that outputs will crystallize a positive contribution to our margin bridge. We currently have 4 internally developed apps in use alongside more generalist procured product. Thirdly, in the context of capital allocation, investment in people. While the details on this slide show a growing group in which we necessarily match remuneration and wider benefits to market. However, our model enables us to reward our people with equity earlier in their career than will be the case in the competing tightly held partnership structure. So we remain proud of the fact that 70% of our people are either shareholders or in share schemes. You'll recall that in FY '24, we ring-fenced our restricted share award plan as our only share plan for partners and partner equivalents. And we recognize the value of the plan as a key differentiator in attracting and retaining senior talent by making it a defined component of our capital allocation policy. In October, we announced that our EBT had been funded to acquire a warehouse approximately 2 million shares, mainly from staff who were partners at IPO. This is in line with our previously announced strategy to facilitate internal recirculation of shares whilst minimizing dilution in use of our share plan. I think that the equity journey for our senior people is powerfully different, transparent and meaningful. And then whilst not active in FY '25, as a reminder of the fourth key component of our capital allocation policy, it's M&A for our platforms, mainly for continuation of our diversification strategy, and Nick will pick this up a little later in this presentation. Turning now to active management for profitable growth. In the context of service offering and market positioning, this is really about ensuring that our platform investments, both old and new, are actively supported to maximize their potential, including in the context of cross-selling opportunities. In year, we laid the foundations for a reorganization of the way that we manage each of our platforms. The new management structure is now in place, and it's designed to bring related businesses closer together to drive growth. Each platform now operates through a Board with each segment reporting to a chairperson responsible for the platform's strategic, operational and financial outturn. This new structure enables better connectivity and returns, including driving pricing, WIP conversion and cost management. In these areas, we believe that there is headroom, which will contribute to margin improvement, and Neil will pick this up in more detail later in this presentation. Moving on to the next slide. As a lead-in to a brief review of each of our platforms, the positives and negatives to take from this slide are that Business Services, Corporate and Property all delivered revenue growth in FY '25, actually 6% in aggregate. Business Services, Corporate and People all delivered margin growth. Despite improving its margin, we saw revenue decline from the people platform due mainly to deliberate management of churn in our Legal Services private client team. And in relation to the Property platform, margin decline here is reflective of difficult market conditions for some segments, which have or are being rationalized, aligned to strategic investment in strongly performing services, as exampled by the previously mentioned in-year lateral hire recruitment to our Housebuilder team. Moving on to the next slide. Business Services. Well, over 85% of services on this platform are countercyclical or economically agnostic in nature. We're pleased to report approximately 14% revenue growth and stable contribution margin despite our ongoing investment in specialist services, both legal and consulting. In Legal Services, as previously mentioned, we are particularly pleased to see the 2023 investment made by us in complex international dispute resolution returning positively in period and carrying good momentum into the current financial year. In Consultancy Services, we continue to benefit from the resilient, steady recurring and growing revenues generated by our patent and trademark attorney businesses, in which we remain keen to invest for more critical mass. In the meantime, consultancy services are now well established on this platform at almost 24% of total platform revenue. Moving on to the Corporate platform. We're pleased to be able to point at both revenue growth and strong margin contribution from this platform. Actually, all 5 segments performed well in FY '25, during which we saw strong transactional services activity and increasingly busy work streams for our restructuring advisory team, which grew its revenue by 7.5%. This, I think, is a good example of resilience in the mix of services in corporate as clients navigate macro volatility. The lateral hires referred to on this slide do include into our restructuring advisory team. We're looking forward to reporting progress from our very recently enhanced corporate services team in Dubai, which we absolutely expect to be both revenue and margin enhancing. While small in overall terms, our only consultancy business on the platform had a stellar year. Gateley Global grew its revenue by over 250% as it benefited from its appointment by the West Midlands Combined Authority to support its high-growth accelerator program, which is secured due to being able to offer the group's wider services. Moving on to the People Platform slide. As previously mentioned, revenue decline from this platform was mainly due to deliberate management of churn in our Legal Services private client team, where we've now narrowed our focus to high net worth client services, and the team is stabilizing as we move into FY '26. Despite what I've just said, contribution margin from this platform slightly increased. Our employment and pensions teams performed well, including 11.7% revenue growth from our mixed legal and consultancy pensions teams who have fairly predictable and resilient work streams. Whilst consultancy revenue was slightly down in a market where leadership assessment, development and cultural change projects are perhaps slightly lower priority for businesses, the team continues to perform really well with its large corporate client base and product offer. As you can see, consultancy services remains a significant contributor to this platform's overall revenue. Moving on to the next slide. Property. This remains our largest and most diverse platform. Against a backdrop of challenging market conditions in the U.K. property sector, we are pleased to report revenue growth of almost 4% from this platform, which I think is testament to the resilience in the mix of services on the platform. We continue to make targeted investment in headcount, as already exampled by me. Consultancy services contributed 40% of revenue with strong revenue growth by Gateley Smithers Purslow and Gateley RJA. Gateley Capitus had a more challenging year, which is really reflective of difficult market conditions in commercial real estate. Structural shifts in the telecoms market caused by the merger between Vodafone and Three was a significant drag on Gateley Hamer, which we did do some restructuring work with in Q4 of FY '25. In outlook, we expect the platform to benefit from government policy in relation to planning, legislation and housing strategy and government directives in relation to building safety and Building Safety Act matters. I've deliberately highlighted hope for tailwinds applicable to our housing and construction teams because a cause of contraction in this platform's margin contribution in the period was the investment that we made in headcount in those teams, which we're confident will deliver near-term returns. On that note, over to you, Neil, in relation to the financials.

Thank you, Rod. Thanks for that comprehensive run-through of each platform's outturn for the year. So my section today contains further details on the specific areas and drivers behind cost and margin side of our performance. I'd like to take you through the following highlights around our increased activity levels, progress on our journey towards progressive operating profit margin improvement, year-on-year cost movements and the continued strength of our dividend returns. So let's get into the detail next slide. So our activity level is, as I've indicated before, our best indicator of client demand and whether we have appropriate staffing levels to meet that demand. We carefully manage staffing levels and target 85% as a normal performance on average for our diversified group. I find it much more helpful to look at this on a rolling 12-month basis. Last year, we performed at 87%, 4% higher than the previous year. And whilst the graph looks dramatic, especially around the time of the pre-autumn budget in FY '25, it is, in fact, simply indicating an acceleration of an upward trending curve for the whole of that year. The trend was a good catalyst for H2 activity levels, especially in our transactional teams. And this is evident in the activity level increase of 6% on our corporate platform. Activity across all 4 platforms increased in the year, most notably in our people platform, where our employment and pensions teams once again had a very busy year. The pensions team work is an ever growing -- on an ever-growing client base of recurring revenue and our employment team have transitioned away from lower margin, larger contract work to support more contentious work streams in a constantly evolving employment landscape. Our Property group activity levels were in part a little bit more subdued than in previous years due to challenging market conditions in some sectors. Rod indicated where that was. But in the case of housebuilding and construction, our activity levels were annually around or just above 100%. And in 3 of our other consultancy businesses, they're extremely busy throughout the financial year. Business services activity is much more robust these days as mandates for new long-term work continues to land off the back of the strategy deployed by the team and continual sourcing of work from overseas. We have some significant mandates keeping staff very busy into FY '26 in that team. Whilst not all activity growth in period turns into fees in the same period, the overall trend of the FY '25 activity line is a positive one and expected to continue to trend in the upward direction into FY '26. This is in direct contrast to the trend of the FY '24 red line that was trending down as we exited the previous year. Next slide, please. So the next slide highlights the key financial movements in our income statement, predominantly on an underlying basis. Underlying operating profit moved up by GBP 0.6 million, and its margin percentage held in line with the previous year at 11.7%. And we remain confident this is the bottom of the margin curve. Within non-underlying expenses is the release cost of acquisition consideration linked to vendors continued employment within the group. You'll notice that this has accelerated beyond prior year levels in -- as good levers emerge post acquisition following the successful handover of ongoing operations in this particular year in respect of GSP and RJA from certain original vendors. And this, of course, means much lower future charges on that line and beyond. We've also incurred further exceptional costs in the year through the rationalization of staff in dealing with various performance or strategic cost efficiency measures. This is an ongoing focus for management and one we don't shake away from. So overall, whilst there's a paper decline in reported profit, mainly caused by the acceleration of the accounting treatment on acquisition consideration in the income statement. If I take you back to our underlying profit performance, I'm expecting trading performance to continue its improving trend as we exit the bottom of our current margin performance. And obviously, as always, we are also pleased to maintain and have a dividend of 9.5p. Next slide, please. So this is the first of a couple of margin bridge slides. It's often the case that to grow new revenue streams, invest in new locations or ideas like AI, as Rod mentioned, has an initial cost outlay before returns arrive. Obviously, the 4% growth in revenue through increased activity and pricing initiatives started to bear fruit in year and is balanced off the growth that we allowed in our personnel costs. Personnel costs around 62% to 63% is a normal sort of position for the group nowadays. Our key cost is our staff cost. After a quieter start to recruitment in FY '25, as indicated by the average staff numbers in the RNS, we certainly built momentum as activity levels improved, and we ended H2 with some significant recruits. Rod mentioned the team in Dubai, for instance. So key areas given additional resource in legal services during FY '25 were our housebuilding team, our construction team and specifically our corporate team. And in consultancy, we increased capacity in GSP and RJA to meet ongoing demand. A lot of these recruits, especially in corporate, and as I say, particularly in Dubai, were onboarded in Q3 and Q4. Therefore, full year costs will feed through into FY '26 and help support our growth. We've also bolstered our support services in year in our risk team with the appointment of a Chief Risk Officer and also our IT headcount, particularly on the AI and project management side of that team. So looking forward to FY '26, we welcome in September '26, a Chief People Officer to work alongside our HRD and COO, together with an experienced change director in our IT team. We also expect to add revenue management and debt management specialists to our finance team. So moving on to operating overheads and behind the movements shown on the screen are increases in overheads, which can be broken down into the following areas. As I mentioned, there's been an increase in recruitment spend, Dubai reinvestment being the majority of that increase. Increased IT project and AI spend, increased marketing and business development costs aimed at cross-selling and increased costs in third-party professional fees to support projects we act jointly on. And the full year additional costs following the acquisition of RJA in FY '24 is when that acquisition took place. The above have been offset in the year by anticipated decreases in energy costs and one-off savings on property management. So overall, we're pleased with the fact that our operating overheads are very much similar to the previous year as a percentage of revenue. Next slide, please. Wage inflation seems to have steadied at around 5%. We obviously have the increased employers' national insurance, but the absolute laser focus currently remains on pricing and profitability and conversion of WIP into fees alongside the collection of our debts. Our group has diversified significantly. Of course, we know how to price work, and we're absolutely determined to maintain our very highly regarded client service delivery performance. We have been highly praised for service delivery to clients by our clients in the past, but we need to evolve a little further now. This is where the training of wider techniques and current base science and thinking behind pricing comes in. We are bolting on to our finance system, a market-leading budgeting and alerting system that will take us much deeper into the governance of project management for clients. This should be fully operational by the end of H1. We have put all of our senior leaders for an intensive workshop and are continuing to work with each team and our Board in evolving a cohesive but focused approach to all aspects of how we scope, price, manage and learn from the work we do. We've also conducted some benchmarking last year, which revealed we have plenty of opportunity here. I'm excited about the results this bold new approach will deliver. Next slide. My final slide, of course, our focus remains on the sensible deployment of our cash and our ability to generate cash in order to maintain our balance sheet strength and our dividend. We will, of course, maintain our relentless focus on cash collection. I've been pleased to see debtor days reduce in period, and this follows specific focus on our collection process during the previous year. That focus has enabled us to reduce both WIP and debtor days in year and the new systems and the approach we're taking there will help improve that even further in FY '26. We have plenty of headroom in our RCF, but we have renewed for a further 3 years at a much higher value, increasing from GBP 30 million to an initial GBP 80 million. This is partly to support our equity recirculation strategy, but primarily to support our growth strategy through acquisition. This is a perfect segue into Nick and progress on our M&A activity.

Thanks, Neil. In terms of M&A update, it remains the case that the last acquisition we made was Richard Julian and Associates, which we completed in July 2023. That's not to say that we've halted or slowed down on M&A. It is only as a result of the unpredictable nature of M&A. Our deal pipeline today is strong with opportunities currently visible on 3 of our 4 platforms. When I last presented to you, I mentioned that there were then 1 or 2 very strong opportunities, which we were working on and which we were hopeful of landing. I did clarify that nothing is certain in M&A until it actually completes. And disappointingly, in the end, neither of those deals got across the line. In one case, we came second to private equity. Private equity run a different investment model and thesis to a trade buyer such as ourselves. And that means, in some cases, private equity are prepared to bid at higher levels than we would be. They also suggest to sellers remaining with the business post completion that they will retain more independence than they will enjoy after joining a group such as ourselves. In this case, we came second for those reasons. Private equity have become increasingly active in the market for professional services businesses. I'm sure you'll be aware of what's happening in accountancy, but also in legal and actually in a number of areas of appeal for ourselves. But I don't want you to think that we're always likely to lose to private equity. There are well-understood features of their model, which don't work for some businesses and some sellers, such as the inevitability of another sale in a few years' time and minimum required post-completion growth driving PE required IRRs. So we will lose some, but we will win some, too. And so on this slide, I'm really inviting you to look at our M&A output over the longer period since IPO. From this, I'd hope you can see not just the depth and breadth of additional service lines and businesses added, but also our unique proposition. We've created a multitude of links between legal and consultancy, differentiating ourselves from the competition and positioning ourselves for a significantly greater share of our clients' overall professional services spend. Next slide, please. You can see here the year-on-year progress we've been making in growing our consultancy operations. From 0 in 2015, total consultancy revenues now stand at GBP 52 million, generated by a team of over 300 non-legal professionals. In this presentation, we've been keen to highlight the strong returns which recent investments have contributed to the FY '25 result overall. The acquisition of RJA would certainly be an example of that. It grew its revenue by 28% in period. But Gateley Smithers Purslow, our patent and trademark attorney business, Adamson Jones and Symbiosis and Gateley Global, our new market entry specialists, also delivered well this year. In selecting businesses to acquire, we're looking not just for adjacency to existing operations, but critically, we're also looking for quality established operations with strong management teams and their own intrinsic growth potential, which we can help them accelerate off our existing fully funded infrastructure platform. Our fleet of consultancy businesses have delivered strongly in organic revenue terms in recent years, supplementing growth in Legal. As of today, the deal pipeline remains good with constructive and advanced discussions ongoing in a number of areas. I have to repeat again that nothing is done in M&A until it is done. But I would be disappointed if there were nothing concrete to announce soon. Rod?

Nick, thanks for that. So just moving on to our people slide. Of course, our people remain our most valuable asset. And as always, I'm really grateful to them for their hard work and commitment. We continue to adopt a measured approach to resource while seeking to attract the best possible talent. And you can see here on this slide some headline people data, including headcount increase and reference to the in-period recruitment of 15 partner or partner equivalent lateral hires. As I previously mentioned, our employee offer remains differentiated than most of the wider professional services market, most obviously by the ability for all of our people to participate in share ownership. I take you again to the 70% stat on this slide. This slide also references the in-period appointment of Edward Knapp as our Chairman and more recently, Martin Pike as a Non-Executive Director. Their backgrounds and credentials are perfect for Gateley, and they've hit the ground running, and we're really enjoying working with them. Finally, we're delighted to be able to report that during FY '25, we were shortlisted for more than 100 awards, and we won 25, which is an absolutely fantastic return for our hard work and effort with clients and markets. Moving on to the next slide. Responsible business. Well, as I've said before, like all of our clients, we absolutely recognize that business is an important catalyst for change. And therefore, being a responsible business is a deliberate component of our purpose statement, which you can see here highlighted in yellow on the slide. Our responsible business strategy is developed to positively impact the well-being of our employees and to help unlock potential in the communities in which we are based. I'm really proud, I really am, of the progress that we've made since launching our responsible business strategy in October 2021. That progress is measured and detailed in our fifth annual responsible business report, which will be released in early August and which I'd absolutely encourage you to read. There are some highlights on the slide that you'll see featuring that report. The positives on this slide don't mean that we're complacent. We're not. Maintaining momentum is important, and we're certain that we can continue to enhance our community impact and make more meaningful progress in relation to objectives to help our environment. So moving on to summary and outlook very briefly. So in summary, we're pleased that our FY '25 outturn maintains our unbroken record of revenue growth. As I hope you've gathered from the presentation, we continue to invest for long-term profitable growth, and we did so in FY '25 whilst maintaining underlying operating profit margin. We firmly believe that strong outcomes will continue to be gained from our measured period-on-period balanced investment in and between our platforms, systems and critically people. And that's including those investments that we made in FY '25. Nick indicated and we fully anticipate that M&A will once again feature for us in FY '26. And in all of this, our underlying objective is for growth with long-term margin improvement, which is where our strategic and operational focus absolutely lies. We're carrying good momentum into FY '26 and current trading is in line with market expectations. Therefore, as I mentioned earlier, whilst we do remain conscious of potential macro volatility, we're optimistic and outlook for this year and beyond. Thank you for listening.