Next 15 Group plc (NFG) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Thank you all for coming along today to our Capital Markets Day. Where's the clicker? That's the important thing, that's the essential piece. We have 3 aims for today. The first is to showcase the power of our decentralized model -- when you compete with the caterers, it's never good. The second is to really just talk about AI, how it's impacting our business, how we are using it to drive growth within the organization. And the third is really to try and talk a bit more about the ambition we have, which is to double the revenues in 5 years and also the profitability. In terms of how that shapes out as an agenda, first, you get me, I'm afraid, which is to sort of talk to you about who we are and why we win, capture a bit more about the ambition. Then you actually get the real people, the people who actually do the work within our company who talk to real customers and actually deliver real revenue. They don't just come and talk to investors, which is clearly not a real job. Then you get Peter, who's going to recap the trading update and talk a little bit about the outlook, and then we'll go into Q&A. And for those of you who need a drink after that, you can stay and have a drink. So in terms of who we are and why we win. There -- firstly, we need to kind of get you to understand the business that we are and how we're structured. We're basically broken down into these 4 different areas. And this chart is sort of not just a chart to show you that, but it's also to sort of introduce you to the people you're going to meet later. Firstly, we have delivery. That's 2 businesses for us. One is lead-gen, demand-gen; the other is connected commerce. Connected commerce is a huge, rapidly growing market. Sam Knights, who runs our SMG business, sitting over here, is going to come and really talk you through that business and how that's developing for us and what you can expect from us in that respect. But it's really a very data-centric part of our business. It's one of those where we use a tremendous amount of data to drive customer interactions, essentially. And second, another hugely data-dependent part of our business, is insights. And that's really, in our case, 2 different businesses. One is a business that's built around a CDP, or customer data platform. And the other is really what you would have called a market research business. Increasingly, we're calling it data business. It's probably our closest analog to YouGov. Roger Perowne is going to be talking you through Savanta, which is the biggest part of that, again. Thirdly, you have transform. This is -- they would hate me to use the word consulting, and in fact, I'm sure David Charpie, who's going to be presenting on behalf of Mach49, will come and nobble me later for that. But it's the side of our business that really helps people maximize the value of their organization. In some cases, for Mach49, that's building new products, building new companies, creating new ventures. Through our transform business, it is literally redesigning really knotty problems within organizations, but it also, in our sort of financial businesses in that space, it can be helping them go through IPOs and figuring out how to position them in correct way. And the last area is engage. This is probably the area that we were best known for. Certainly 10 years ago, this was all we were. This is the part of our business that was sort of a traditional public relations business, morphed into a more digital marketing business and has continued to morph into areas like e-commerce and very specialized areas of communications. And in that area, you'll get Stacey Bernstein, she's going to be joining us via video. She's in California at the moment, and she runs our M Booth Health business which is actually based out of New York. How does our model work? Why do we continue to actually do relatively well compared to the rest of the market? At the center of what we do is we help companies solve complete -- very complex problems, and we do it relatively quickly. Most of our customers come to us with something that is not easy to do, that they need a specialist to solve and they need it done yesterday. We talk about the speed of the Internet, actually increasingly now, we're talking about the speed of AI. But wrapped around that are a bunch of different ways that we enable success. Firstly, it is that we have very specialized businesses. They aren't just something that does everything. We're not a department store that sells a little bit of everything and have salespeople that sort of wander around, and one minute are selling shampoo, and another minute are selling shirts. These are people who understand very detailed vertical markets, who understand very specific product categories. So they can get up to speed on problems very quickly and they can help their clients solve the problem very quickly. And they also build products specifically to do that. And secondly, we don't engage with customers just for the sake of it. In other words, we don't take on a customer if we don't think we can actually be successful for them. In other words, we don't just go for checkbooks. We could boost our revenues if that was how we would do it, but it will be short term. We want customers who are going to be very sticky, who are going to stay with us for a very long term, long time. And if you look at our top 20 customers, what you see is this remarkable list of people who've been with us forever. They don't sort of hire you for 3 months and then disappear. They hire you usually actually in a relatively small capacity. And then we just are annoying and we stick around and we grow and we grow and we grow. And then henceforth, we've worked with the likes of Microsoft, the likes of Amazon, the likes of IBM, American Express, all of these kinds of companies for decades. It's not that we've worked with them for 2 minutes. And the next aspect is incentivizing our teams. We are a very decentralized business, as I've already said, and the incentives are very decentralized, too. Which means that they can run their business the way that they think is right for their customer, which also though means that if for some reason, the other part of Next 15 isn't doing too well, their incentives still work. They can still go off and deliver really good success, which means they don't just give up because they're thinking, well, my share scheme isn't going to pay out, my bonus isn't going to pay out, whatever it might be. They still push for that finish line, which is why you see our margins still stay very healthy. Because even if one of our businesses is maybe not having such a good time, the rest is still pushing as hard as they can. We incentivize teams -- sorry, I've already talked about that. We do think more like a product business. So we used to be very service-organized in the sense of we thought about it in terms of time and materials. Literally, that was the way we priced everything. Increasingly, it is outcome-based, because actually, that's really what the customer is buying. They are saying to us, "This is the outcome that we're looking for." The pricing is then judged on that. And then really as far as we're concerned, it's a question of how efficiently can we create a product so that it will actually deliver that outcome? And what we're finding is customers don't care. All they do care about is did I get to that outcome as quickly as I could possibly get to it? And we embed data and technology, that's no big surprise. I think that any marketing or consulting business that's not doing that these days is essentially on a death spiral. There's just no way out if you're not doing that. And the last thing, which I think is -- it seems like a small thing, but actually it's a pretty big thing, is we do have these very localized incentives. And every now and again, there are things that get in the way of that, which is that something like AI comes along, and we'll say, "Right, you should invest heavily in that." The incentives don't necessarily work for that because it might say, "All right, okay, you need to invest x." And they're going, "Well, actually that's going to impact my P&L. So how do we manage that?" We always have this saying internally, which is don't let the incentive get in the way of doing the right thing. And that applies for something like AI. It applies for something like opening a business in a new market or literally a new vertical market. So in other words, we constantly in the center are looking at these things and just saying, "Are we making sure that the business is doing the right thing for the long term?" And that therefore, if we need to rejig the incentive to make sure that, that is the case, we will do that. And that, as I say, it may seem like a small thing, but actually, it's an incredibly powerful way of making sure that you stay sort of focused on the North Star. Next 15 is a platform. We basically support a whole bunch of different businesses. I'm not going to read through all of these things. But effectively, it breaks down into these 3 different areas. There is thought leadership, growth support and what we call a connected opportunity. So -- and a good example of that is, effectively, we are coaches and mentors to the CEOs of the different businesses. So we spend quite a lot of time, these guys will testify to it, where it feels a bit like a therapist's couch where we're just trying to make sure that they really have their arms around the problem that they're really trying to solve, that they have got the resources that they need. If this is a journey that they've not been on before, and many of them haven't, if they're going to launch into a new market like the U.S. or something, that we can really help them think through what is going to be involved in that so that they're actually very well prepared for it. On growth support. No surprise, when we acquired quite a lot of companies, build companies, that can create a tremendous amount of inefficiency. And so not surprisingly, in the center, we spend a tremendous amount of time just trying to pick away at finding, okay, is there some cleverer way to do this so that we can take cost out without it reducing the experience for the organization? And just that has to be one of those continual exercises because things change, organizations change, there is a new way of doing something, and we just have to move constantly through that curve. On the connected opportunity, we see tremendous opportunity to collaborate across the group. We're very picky about how we do that. I would say that this is still an area where we could do more. We've seen some really good examples. The BBC this year has been a great example for us in that respect where we brought the businesses together. And we are increasingly finding ourselves pitching as Next 15 in a bunch of different situations. And certainly in some of the government situations, we're finding ourselves pitching that way. It gives us scale. And from a client perspective, that gives them a comfort factor. We're a 4,000-plus person organization, which is not huge, but it's big enough for most customers. From their perspective, yes, it ticks a huge box. But what it's also doing is enabling us to connect together some really clever ways of solving a customer problem which they themselves would really struggle to do. So we can package it up for them. It feels very seamless. And our guys are getting very good at actually making that work. AI, I am actually not going to talk to this slide, you'd be pleased to know, and I'm going to let the businesses talk to that. But effectively, it is really efficiency, effectiveness and innovation. Those are the 3 things that we are focused on. In terms of our ambition. We stated this at the interim. We are ambitious. We want to take our connected commerce business from being sort of roughly GBP 110 million to GBP 300 million. In other words, we're pretty close to tripling the size of that part of the business in that time frame. We wanted to take our data business from GBP 60 million to GBP 200 million. Again, a pretty huge jump. The other 2 look less ambitious. I think that's partly because when we were running the math, we realized, okay, we're going to massively overshoot if we're not careful here. We're going to deliver -- we're going to be giving you a promise that's there's no way of delivering it. But actually, the opportunity in those spaces is no less great. And in this slide, hopefully, you'll start to understand why. So on the left, the sort of vertical axis, what we call the mega markets. These are the markets that we want to do business in. So technology, health care, professional and financial services, public sector and consumer passions. Those to us are, if we can just really be successful in those vertical markets, we know we can build a huge business. And then there are these 4 really, what you would call product areas that come across those. So customer experience, data-driven decisions, sales engagement and digital transformation. The black dots on here represent the revenue that we're currently generating. The gray dot represent really the market opportunity. And what you see in here is, in technology, which is what I think a lot of people know us for, we do have a reasonable representation in a space like customer experience, but we still have a lot of growth opportunity there. And then you go across technology and you see even greater opportunity in areas like data-driven decisions and digital transformation. If you look at health care. Health care, we are a relatively small player, a tiny player. It is a massive market and we have a huge opportunity literally right across the board within the company. In professional financial services, it's a space where we are doing a lot in digital transformation, and we are increasingly starting to do quite a bit of that work in government. But again, the market opportunity for us is massive. You'll see a blank spot on sales engagement in public sector, and that's because at this point we do nothing in that space, and we haven't yet really figured out what the opportunity is. We know it's not 0, but we're not 100% sure how big it is. And in public sector, digital transformation, as I mentioned, it is already a hugely growing part of our business. What we are realizing through the Engine acquisition, which sort of took us into this space, is the scope for us to get into bigger and bigger -- I forgot the name of the word, what do we use for this. Rost? Well, not Rost. But anyway. The government puts out these -- essentially these, a bit like a tender things, and they're scaled dependent on the kind of agencies or consultancies that they want to work on these things. some of these things are in the tens, hundreds of millions. We have been on, because of the size of transform, some relatively small tenders in the sort of GBP 5 million. What we are seeing is the opportunity as Next 15 to go into some of the much, much larger assignments. So we believe there's actually some huge growth potential there. Lastly, on this slide, consumer passions, sales engagement. Our SMG business is doing a phenomenal job in that space, but their growth opportunity, as you'll probably see from Sam's presentation, is really quite stunning. At that point, I get to hand over to Sam.

No pressure. Nice to meet you all. My name is Sam. I'm the CEO of SMG, and I've got the delight to introduce our business to you today. My background is from Procter & Gamble. So I was there for maybe a decade, worked across the marketing streams for some of the brands like Gillette and Pampers and Fairy in the U.K. before moving Geneva and running the marketing for Gillette in Western Europe. And then and after that, I joined 2 founders 11 years ago to start this, SMG. And we're 3 years into our journey with Next 15. And today, I'm going to tell you a little bit about us, who we are, what we do, a little bit about the market that we exist in and what's happening there. I'm going to try and bring it to life because I know these things can be quite theoretical. So we're going to show you a real case study that we're working on at the moment. And then Tim and the guys have asked me to be a little bit honest with you about what it's like to be part of Next 15, so I'll talk to you a little bit about what that's been like over the last 3 years before finishing with a little bit about our ambitions for the future. But first, let's set the context of the market that we work in. So SMG are specialists in an area of advertising called retail media. And retail media is any media that targets people whilst they're shopping, offering at the point of purchase. And this has been around forever, okay? When I was doing Gillette advertising, it was a really important part of what we did as marketeers to make sure that when you walked into a Boots or when you walked into a Tesco, you couldn't miss the Gillette Fusion launch, okay? So this is not something new. But over the last 2 or 3 years, this area of advertising has really accelerated because the things that we can do with it are much more sophisticated, and there are 3 key drivers to that. The first is that consumer behavior has changed. So I don't know about you, but if you think about what you used to do a decade ago, you used to go into a Tesco and do a big shop. You had a shopping list, you'd buy everything you needed, and then you top up during the week in places like a Co-op, for example. And then you might pop into John Lewis and research and buy a telly or go into Currys. But these are occasions, okay, that happened. And you'd switch from what we'd call a consumer mindset where you're kind of considering, to a purchase mindset where you're actually a shopper. And brands set themselves up like that. You had brand marketeers who do the amazing TV advertising that would make you consider. And then you had shopper teams that would actually think about how you communicate to shoppers at the point of purchase. That world no longer exists, okay? Just today, I've bought 2 things on Amazon. I've surfed something on Instagram that I can buy immediately. I've already been into Co-op, and I'm probably likely to go into Tesco later on. I am shopping all of the time. And all of the advertising that I can see and that I'm served is shoppable. I can literally click a link and buy today. So consumer behavior has changed, which means that this part of marketing, retail media, is much more important. The other thing that's changed is the growing importance of data from retail loyalty schemes. These are not new either. Tesco Club Card has been around over 20 years. I'm sure a lot of the room in here are members of that. Things like Boots Advantage Card has over 16 million members, has been around a long time. But what's changed is what we can do with that data. And so over COVID, these retailers have seen a huge amount of data come through their e-commerce sites, which shows browsing behavior, which shows purchase behavior. And they've then enhanced the loyalty card data through things like membership pricing. So if you go into Tesco now, you have to get club card to get the deals that through. So that data has increased exponentially, the amount that those -- the retailers have. And on the other side, what's happening is that brands are becoming more thirsty for the data because of something called the deprecation of the cookie, which I know a lot of you will know about. But essentially, the way that brands target their digital advertising is through something called a cookie. So when you go on to different websites, you drop a cookie crumb. That's picked up. And then that allows us to say, right, they're interested in these types of things, therefore I'm going to target them with my advertising. At the end of the next year, that will no longer exist. Apple have already stopped doing it. And so the brands are faced with a challenge where they're saying, "How do I target my advertising more effectively? I need big sources of data." And the retailers are saying, "We've got that sources of data, and we've got opt-ins and we've got the requirements from a privacy perspective to use that data to serve advertising to brands as well." And so the loyalty scheme data are becoming the way that brands can target their digital advertising more effectively. So as a Gillette advertiser, I can say, "I want to see 18- to 24-year-olds who are interested in X, Y, Z." And I can target them through the Boots Advantage Card data, not just through boots.com, not just in Boots stores, but anywhere you can see a digital advert. Whether that be Meta, whether that be Spotify, YouTube, we can link it all the way up the horizon now. And then finally, the third most exciting thing is the technology that allows us to measure it. Because we're using retail data to target these customers, we can track what they do afterwards. And so not only can we target efficient audiences, we can then see whether they go on to buy. And so from a brand point of view, this is the Holy Grail. This is about really efficiently targeting people and knowing the impacts of that advertising. And so they want to invest more in this area, and the retailers are very happy for them to invest more in this area because it's high-margin media activation for them, too. And as a result, retail media is in exponential growth. It is the fastest-growing part of the advertising mix. Boston Consultants Group have forecasted it would reach over $100 billion in the U.S. market alone by 2027, and many projections indicate that it will exceed TV revenue, and that includes connected TV a year later. So that will represent about 15% of total advertising spend. Huge exponential growth. And SMG are really well positioned to win in this environment. Hopefully, you'll see today, we've got an established model, we've been working in this area for over a decade, and we service all parts of the retail media ecosystem: Brands, retailers and agencies. We have an amazing piece of technology called Plan-Apps and brilliant capabilities in our centers of excellence. And we also have a proven track record of delivery for clients and partners, too. So who are SMG? So we are a group of 3 specialist retail media agencies. Easier way to think about it. We have a sell-side business, which is called Threefold. And they set up mini media agencies within retailers to create the environment for those brands to utilize that data, to utilize that media opportunity to run campaigns in their environments. And they work with the likes of Boots, Co-op, The Very Group, Morrisons, amongst others, and new ones coming on all the time. Then you have our buy-side part of the business, which is almost the flip of that model. And they work with people like pladis, like Diageo, like McCain, to help them to plan, execute, evaluate and manage campaigns across all retail. So they will run campaigns across Tesco as the Sainsbury's all together in a holistic way and sit as part of their marketing teams to execute. And then the third is our technology business called Plan-Apps. All of the activity that's run by Threefold, that's run by Capture, all of the results that go into the measurement sit within one platform that we've developed in-house which allows brands to optimize their spend in flight and manage their campaigns as well. And there are certain brands, people like Unilever, people like Coca-Cola, people like PepsiCo, who just want a subscription to this software because they've got people in-house that can do a lot of this work, and we gladly offer that to them, too. And so people are subscribing to this software, and we're getting SaaS fees as a result of the data. And obviously, as the Threefold business grows, as the Capture grows -- the Capture side of the business grows, so does Plan-Apps and so does the data and the cleverness of that system growth as well. And to give you some example of the scale of our business now. We're by far the large in this space in the U.K. We trade over GBP 1 million every day of retail media. We've evaluated over GBP 1.2 billion of retail media channels. That data sits within Plan-Apps and nobody else has it. We have a large company footprint in the U.K. We're projecting by the end of next year, we'll be over 40% of the retail media share of grocery in the U.K. And thanks to the work we've done with Next 15, we've just opened an office in the U.S. and we're in the very early stages of growing that business with our first client onboard. We have over 830 different advertisers, 281 employees. And we're really, really proud that we're actually one of the top 100 best large companies to work for by The Best Companies this year, too. So that's all good in theory. What does that actually mean? So one of the clients that we've just started working with is Boots. And over the last 2 years, we have built something called the Boots Media Group, BMG. And Boots Media Group is an internal media agency that uses Boots Advantage Card data to harness the scale, reach, data and connectivity to achieve high-performing connected campaigns for those brands. We've built a team of 41 people that are all Threefold employees, SMG employees, that actually sit within Boots themselves. And they run 5,000 campaigns for over 500 brands. We build technology for Boots. We've built something called [ A360 ], which is a first-party data engine, which connects that Advantage Card data into other channels. And we've done deals with people like ITV and Global and Spotify and Meta to be able to use that data through the pipes. It sounds easy, is quite complicated. We've launched 20 new media products over the time, and all of the campaigns that we run, that data is going into Plan-Apps and is being evaluated in Plan-Apps, okay? I give you an example of what one of those campaigns might look like. I'm sure you all are very familiar with Fenty, which is the makeup brand by Rihanna. Earlier this year, they wanted to launch their new faces of Fenty, and they chose Boots as a partner to find those faces for their advertising campaigns. They used the Advantage Card data to identify high-propensity users, consumers, that might be interested. We used eCRM and social and Meta to invite those customers into store to experience the Fenty experience, match their colors, match their foundations with their skin type and then buy the product. This was also supported by proximity above the line, things like digital out-of-home, also Spotify and Instagram as well and also brought online into the e-commerce website as well. This campaign alone delivered over 50 million impressions, grew Fenty's market share and delivered a really positive return on investment and obviously showed a great return for the investment that they put into Boots, too. And even Rihanna commented that it was a good campaign, one of the highlights of the year. So it's good for the brands, but also it's great for Boots as well because the better these campaigns perform, the more advertising they're seeing go into their channels as well. and they've seen a 60% advertising investment year-on-year since we've started working together that was 20% over what they were targeting and delivered a 40% retail media network profit growth year-on-year. And you can imagine for retailers in retail, as you all know, it's a very tight-margin business, this is high-margin activity. And so it has a really, really important part to play in the overall P&L. But not only that, it also delivers some extra benefits in the way that they work with their brands. Rather than it becoming a trading relationship, this becomes a joint business planning relationship. You can imagine the different conversation that Fenty are having with Boots versus the one that they were having before as a result of these capabilities. And you can see some of the quotes on the right-hand side from the CMO and the CCO in terms of the difference it's made for them as well. So that's SMG. What's it been like being part of Next 15? Where you'd expect me to tell you it's been brilliant. But it really has. We're into our third year in the journey. We've already doubled the size of our business. We've invested ahead of the curve. We've gone from just over 100 employees to 280 today, and that's as a result of a number of different factors. Firstly, the financial incentives and the investment to scale has given us confidence to do things that we just wouldn't have done with our own money. Biggest part of that is investing in the U.S. as well. Having the structure and the capability to allow us to set up a team and an office out there is a huge undertaking that would have been impossible for us to do on our own, but we could do very simply with the support of Tim and Peter and JP and the guys around. But on top of that, probably some of the more subtle things that's changed is the provision of expert shared services, things like legal and data protection, that as a smaller business we weren't credible in, but the fact that we're part of Next 15 has allowed us to win clients like Boots, like Morrisons, like the clients that we'll announce over the coming year because we're far more credible in that space with the shared services. But finally and most importantly, I think when we were acquired by Next 15, we had the choice of being part of this group or being part of another media network. And the biggest change was that being part Next 15 allowed us to stay us, allowed us to keep our leadership in place, allowed us to keep our culture, allowed us to keep what made SMG, SMG. And that's been a really important part of our growth over the last 3 years. The train did not come off the rails. It just accelerated down it. And so as we look forward, we do so with great ambition and loads of excitement. In just 3 years, we want to become the global leader in this space with a strong international presence, significant market share, a really reputable brand and a mission to positively disrupt the industry. The 5 strategic drivers to that are obviously rapid expansion into North America, continuing to do what we're doing in the U.K. and protecting and growing that market share. This is a nascent industry that we need to grow, so we're positively disrupting that industry with unique capabilities, with deals and technology and becoming the go-to authority with a highly recognized brand. And obviously and most importantly, continuing to invest in our people and our company culture. And a big part of that growth comes into what we're doing with our technology as well. And that's where AI has a huge part to play. We have the most amount of data in this space in our industry, and AI has a really important part to play in allowing us to access that data in ways that makes it effective for brands to use. So things like provision of post-campaign, analytics commentary, smart predictive media planning, audience building, dynamic media pricing, optimal media allocation technology, all become available with AI. And we've already invested in a stand-alone team which is working on this and the development of our Plan-Apps technology over the coming years to keep it ahead of the market. So in summary, we're working in a really exciting part of the advertising mix. Retail media is significant growth, and we're well placed to succeed. We've got a really diversified model with both buy side, sell side and [ tap as ] offering, which provides us a really stable foundation for growth. We have opportunities both in the U.K., but increasingly in North America as well. And being part of the Next 15 group has enabled our ability to scale up and capitalize on those market opportunities. So that's our business. Thanks very much for your time.

Slight change of style and a change of topic. So my name is Roger Perowne. I'm one of the co-founders and the CEO of Savanta. Savanta is an international market research business. It was formed from the bringing-together of a number of elite agencies almost 5 years ago. And it's got a very clear aim to really offer the scale of the big competitors but with a much more sort of boutique and expert feel from those smaller sort of specialists that we've acquired over time. We've also used -- we're a little different from our competitors in the sense that we've used these acquisitions to fund our own data platform, as Tim alluded to earlier. We -- and this is different because most providers in the market are either software-led, they're expert-led or they are respondent-led. So they tend to sit in one part of the market. But almost all projects need all aspects of that skill set. So we've been really busy buying and building our software and buying companies along the way. And it's incredibly effective and profitable strategy because you remove all of the cost of sales along the way. Most market research firms are pretty low margin because all of their money is being spent with the software firms, the power providers and so on. When you remove all of these costs, not only are you more nimble and can offer actually what clients want, which is real-time data after dinner, or new tools, new dashboards, et cetera, but it also allows us to really help these other companies perform to a much greater degree. And in fact, just -- we've just literally completed our latest acquisition last night in Canada. But going back a bit, we joined Next 15 in 2014. And in partnership with Tim and the Next 15 Board, we've managed to use that strategy to -- in a relatively low-growth market to go from a GBP 1 million business and now up to a GBP 50 million business 9 years -- less than 9 years later. And that growth has been funded. Around about half of it's organic and about half of it has been acquired, fully funded through Next 15 making that capital available to us. And over this time, we've also expanded the footprint of the business. Starting in the U.K., we now have a GBP 20 million business or just shy of in the U.S. and North America. We've recently moved into Asia. And just in the last 6 months, opened an office in Europe as well. Again, hugely helped by Next 15 support from a legal, offices and expertise on TAM. And one last thing on Next 15 while I'm on it is we also now supply most of the agencies internally, which makes it quite an effective sales channel as well. So we appreciate that. It's always good to get new clients. But finally, on this slide, we're also incredibly proud that over the last 2 or 3 years, we've had a very successful graduate recruitment program and have now trained 100 new grads into this industry in the last few years, sort of generating the next tier of research. In fact, we've just completed our last one on Friday. My God, they're clever. It is astonishing how smart the next generation is. They are -- AI runs through them already. We are all in trouble. So until I lose my job, I'll keep talking. So what are the main trends that we are facing? Clearly, artificial intelligence covers everything. But we believe, because of this investment, I feel like 9 years of investing heavily in this platform is finally coming through. The number of times I had to defend it to my colleagues in the pub after hours, well, are we investing in our own technology? Finally, AI has saved me and makes us look really ahead of the curve. Because what fundamentally is AI? Well, first of all, is automation. And to be -- to allow automation to happen, you have to have to be simpler, you have to actually be able to offer an end-to-end clear process where data travels through a platform rather than be forever trying to hook together different systems. Then from there, you can be faster and then finally better. Well, again, for us, AI is actually a great thing. It allows to do lots and lots of very menial and dull task much, much faster, whether that's coding, open-end respondence, et cetera. But it also provides the opportunity for a whole lot of new tools which I'll come on to shortly. It's speeding up this convergence. I said respondent or software or expertise. Well, it's convergence around through AI, but also in the marketplace, puts us in a very good place because we already are a unified offer. We didn't need to protect our multiple and stay a software company or vice versa. We actually get the advantage of all aspects from the beginning. LLMs, they are hungry for information, and we provide enormous amounts it, whether it's our daily brand tracking around the world or work for our clients. So it's great to be able to have a new opportunity to go to the market. And then finally, research is -- it's critical that we take it up into the C-suite. And one of the things I will talk about shortly is how we are doing that, how we are growing our activation and consulting offer to ensure that research is embedded at the highest level and not just within an inside team. So fundamentally, our strategy is to harness the power of AI to innovate, connect, which I'll talk about in a moment, and consult. So what do I mean by innovate? Well, as I said, we've been lucky to invest in this platform for a long time. Market research is incredibly fiddly. It's a bit like creating a car factory. There are lots of bits of it that -- it's not just a big bit of metal. Occasionally, you have to do more clever things and put in the little headlights and so on. Well, market research is the same. There are lots and lots of ways of getting it wrong, I suppose, along that user journey, whether it's identifying clear client needs, exactly what the problem is, ensuring that you have the highest quality respondents, ensuring your programming and scripting is perfect -- is perfected and there are no issues there. Ensuring it's all cleaned and weighted according to exactly what the market is, and thus provides the highest-quality outputs, whether it's in dashboards or reports and so forth. Well, we are -- because we have been set up to have that absolute soup-to-nuts approach, it means that AI is perfect to put through that platform, through that system, and really get some of the benefits from it. And a good example of that and what we've been investing more heavily in recent times is our own panel. We've been a little bit late to market. I'd like to think of us a bit like Apple, that we're going to get it better than everyone else. We only launched our own panel 2 months ago. I was asked this question in one of these sessions about 4 years ago, why aren't you doing your own panel? And I scoffed at it, saying it's so cheap, it's not necessary. But there are problems with the industry. The panels out there. The quality is quite -- is a bit flaky, and AI makes you more vulnerable where you've got very smart robots, in essence, taking surveys and it can be hard to catch them out. So what we did is we launched our own panel and it has been a huge success. Not only is it absolutely industry-leading in terms of quality, we've only had literally under 2% in terms of rejection versus about 15% for the marketplace as a whole. But it also allows us to innovate. So all of the new question types, the automated video capture, voice capture questionnaires that you can do when you have complete control of end-to-end. And indeed the respondent experience, because it's done on our smartphone, and you know exactly how it is being done, it allows for a quality information and also it is incredibly profitable. I've forgotten just how profitable panels are when you run them effectively. So we will be investing very heavily in this product going forward. In addition, we've launched a number of new other products. One, we've added an AI layer to BrandVue, our always-on daily tracker. It's a competitor to YouGov's BrandIndex, and it's performing incredibly well. We've just launched it in the States as well. So we -- as well as the EU 5, so we hope to grow that substantially. We now then offer with [ TrendVue ], another layer on top of some of these products, where you've got our trend-scanning products giving you an always-on view of what the big issues are that marketers need to know in their industry. And then finally, in recent times, we've launched [ Insight Fountain ] just last week, which gives clients a chatbot access to all of the research they've ever run with us. So it actually digests all of their research and allow them to go and question it. And one of the things about a lot of clients is that they run the same studies over and over again not realizing that it's already actually sitting within their business, much of the ideas. But it also leaves them contacting us to do the blind spots that they don't have and serving them to a greater degree. So innovation is at its heart. Perhaps one of the most exciting and it sort of reminds me a little bit of SMG in a different way is the connect side of the business. So as I said earlier, we believe the panel that we have launched and are growing fast, alongside the Vue platform, is a huge opportunity to not only launch -- to deliver the highest quality of data, but ensure that it's in the format that our clients want on an on-demand basis. And increasingly, that will be their own chatbots and their own word-based discovery processes and not just reading charts. We aim to really try and become the sort of AWS of the industry. At the moment, there are a lot of these providers, whether software panels and so forth. They are, in a sense, quite rent-seeking a lot of their behavior. And what we think is we can offer the entire industry a high-quality panel and service, whether that's media agencies, brands and indeed market research firms, actually the competitors of our core business, absolutely fine. As long as it's all on our system and platform, then we should be able to offer enterprise solutions to these insight teams all around the world. And a nice example of that at the moment is we're now delivering several global research programs for a major international bank, both brand and advertising programs, always on, delivered entirely through the Vue platform with multiple self-service deliverables for the clients. It is more of a [ tap-as ] solution. We do have people involved as well. But from their point of view, they can access this information all around the world whenever they want it. And it's pretty advanced at deliverables. It's quadrupled the size of the account this year and we think we can go much further. So I've talked about innovate, talked about the connect side of the business. And then finally, the consulting side. Well, the final aspect of our growth plan is to better penetrate the C-suite. We are well on the way to developing an activation consulting unit, and we'll likely bolster this with some bolt-on acquisitions in due course. This not only helps to embed our research at the highest levels, but it also provides a layer on top of the brand customer and market information that we're already providing to clients, whether that's to help them grow their brand or enhance their customer experiences or improve their employee proposition. And that we believe that makes us more vital and sticky in the industry. So to sum up. Well, I've been here 9 years. I'm hoping they'll keep me a little longer before those grads take my job. I think it's a hugely exciting time. I think Savanta is really ideally placed. My strategy, as I set out all those years ago, finally is coming to an apex and we can really leverage AI and hopefully continue that journey beyond GBP 50 million onwards to whatever number was on that chart earlier. Just have to keep going. And that's everything. So thank you.

Good afternoon. My name is David Charpie. I'm Co-CEO and member of the Board of Mach49. Before Mach49, I helped lead 7 startups. 3 were venture-backed or self-funded and 4 were built inside of Fortune 500 companies, including SAP Software and Dunn & Bradstreet. Now in that world, we built Mach49. Mach49, let me tell you a little bit about them. Let me also tell you what value we deliver to our clients and most importantly why we are positioned to win in this marketplace. So who are we? Well, for the world's largest companies, growth is not only essential, it's existential. Mach49 helps leaders unlock disruptive new growth through venture building and venture investing at speed and at scale. What does that mean? It means we are in the business of survival. A recent PwC survey of 4,400 CEOs, 40% said they would no longer be economically viable in the next 10 years without new growth or disruptive growth. That is the value Mach49 delivers. And we do that by answering 3 questions with our clients. First, how can a large company grow and thrive in an adapt-or-die environment? Business is undergoing momentous shifts. AI is changing all the rules. Small companies are eating large companies' lunches. What is a company to do in this environment? How does a large corporation create new growth and returns outside of its quarterly EBITDA-driven core? We need a radical change. Traditional M&A, new market entry, even thinking about digital transformation, it doesn't cut it anymore. And what about how can ambitious talent inside of a large firm be activated to build value? Most Fortune 500 CEOs are shocked to find out how much entrepreneurial talent exists within their companies. In fact, when I work with CEOs, the Fortune 500, it is almost inevitably during one time, they reach over to me and say, "What did you do to my team? That's not the one I sent you." It's really important that we can find the environment, the processes, the governance that is going to release these people and make them successful. In short, how and where do we find new growth for large organizations? Venture-driven growth is Mach49's answer. It consists of 2 components. Firstly, it consists of venture building; and secondly, venture investing. It's hard. This is really hard work. And it's not only difficult once, you have to do it repeatedly. You have to build a portfolio and pipeline of new ventures, in essence, giving an engine of growth to these large organizations over time so they can be reborn again and again and again. So what is venture building? Venture building is starting a new company inside of a large organization, everything from idea through to revenue and on into scale. Venture investing is the deploying of capital to create growth opportunities, doing things like creating investment funds, looking at strategic partnerships and targeted M&A opportunities. Now -- yes, Tim, we are not management consultants. We are emphatically not management consultants. We build and operate businesses. We do not write strategic documents. We love to compete against management consultants because they cannot keep up with us on our differentiators. A few of those. We pioneered and lead this area of venture-driven growth and have done so for 10 years. Secondly, we only do one thing, and we do it exceptionally well. Thirdly, we are 100% focused on execution. We work side-by-side and shoulder-to-shoulder with our client teams. We help them build new businesses, and we transfer the skills to them to let them do that again on their own without us. We build capability, not dependency. Also, we literally wrote the book, Unicorn Within, which in this last month reached Harvard Business Review's all-time impact list, along with this books like The Innovators Dilemma. These are books that have changed the face of business and how leaders work, and this is ours. But most importantly, it's our people. What is the Mach49-er? Well, a typical Mach49-er has founded 6 businesses. Together, we have raised $6.4 billion to keep those businesses going. 145 of those have already had successful exits. 563 are still in the market operating. But we're not just startup people. We also worked in large organizations. And Mach49, we have been in 292 of the Fortune 500, and we've done it in senior roles, almost 10 years average experience in CXO. That is Mach49. Now we've done that globally because our clients are global. And they're in every industry you can possibly imagine. The only thing that makes them consistent is their ambition for growth. And what we do is give them the levers of growth and the courage to go on those journeys. Here's one example, Rich Kramer, the CEO of Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company. We have worked with Rich and his team for over 4 years. We built ventures with him. We have helped him build his investment side. But most importantly, everything we've done has been focused on one thing that Rich wants to accomplish: To move the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company in -- out of tire and rubber into mobility. Now -- and our clients all look like Rich and Goodyear. They are the Board of Directors and C-suites of the Global 1000, the largest companies in the world. They're in industry's undergoing tectonic shifts, and they all want to have a portfolio of growth opportunities to allow them to move into the future and continue their path of growth as an organization. Now let me talk about another one of our clients, Schneider Electric. Schneider is the most sustainable firm in the Global 100 list. We worked for over 5 years with Schneider, all of it on sustainability. We built 4 ventures with them around sustainability. We have created a EUR 500 million fund for investments in sustainability. The 4 ventures we've built, Clipsal Solar, the #1 solar as a service provider in Australia. Dash Energy, connecting energy brokers and suppliers to sell services to businesses. eIQ mobility, providing one-stop electrification solutions for commercial fleets. And Mavix Solutions, the first-to-market service managing a company's on-premise power and cooling assets sustainably. And that EUR 500 million fund has had 34 investments to date, all of them on the biggest energy management problems facing the world. By the way, the fact that the people of Mach49 are our key is recognized by our clients, too, as you can see in this quote by [ Greg Wahler ]. "Entrepreneurship is a business where people matter and Mach49 is the top of the art." So where do we go from here? Our strategy consists of 3 pieces. First, lead: Framing and claiming the venture-driven growth area as our own. Differentiating finally, hopefully, all of that from the management consulting firms. And ultimately, making venture-driven growth a board-level imperative. Secondly, disrupting. Disrupting ourselves by continuing to leverage AI in our service-driven pieces of the business and in software to allow us to help our clients become more effective, to have better outcomes and to more efficiently address the marketplace. And to grow, to expand our footprint geographically, most recently, the Middle East and North Africa; by going down-market, so we have cohorts now of middle-market organizations working together who are noncompetitive to allow them to get synergies of cost to be able to work with us; shift software as a way to actually change what we do from a service perspective into a subscription perspective; and brand ventures. This is an example of us getting deeper into a specific industry, in this case, consumer markets. And so why does this strategy and our assets put us in a place where we can win? Well, first and foremost, it creates moats, moats against any of the competitors who want to come chase us. A 10-year leadership position. The most experienced team by far in the industry. A 90% client retention rate. And we work with clients all the way from idea through to scale. This is a multiyear journey, and we can expand and work with them through that entire effort. Secondly, looking at the mid-market, expanding our opportunities. Shift, which you just saw on the previous slide, is an AI-powered on-demand growth platform. We've been developing this for more than 2 years. It's based in large part on the book The Unicorn Within. And so it uses our methodology and approach that no one else has. And it leverages AI in many different ways, synthetic customer personas. It does AI in terms of interview outreach. It uses AI for synthesis of research being done online and many more ways. All of this, as I just mentioned, as a way to take the service business we do and move it into software so we can actually be more effective and efficient for new groups of people in the mid-market. And consumer brands. I just mentioned about brand ventures on the previous slide, that's unlocking brand value through new venture building. What that really means is using a company's brand as a core asset on which to build a new venture. So to give you an example. What if you could imagine Jameson opening and operating a fleet of Irish pubs around the world based solely on their name? Now another advantage we have is Next 15 and all the things we can do with them, and there are many. I'm going to focus on 2 that just touch on the 2 points I just covered. First and foremost, having a meaningful opportunity to mutually expand our revenue and footprint, particularly in the consumer side. With Brand ventures, we are now moving as Mach49 into a core area of strength for Next 15 and its entire portfolio. Now together, we can build product. We can penetrate customers. We can find sales opportunities as a unit, not as individual companies. And also leveraging the AI expertise of Next 15 and all the other portfolio companies. You've already heard from a couple of the other folks. Market research and customer insight AI permeates all of us. We are going to take advantage of that to get the efficiencies of cost as well as the effectiveness of world-class operations around these particular areas. So what does it all mean? Well, Mach49 is a successful high-margin, growing business. We deliver high-value strategic services more successfully than any company in our space. Hopefully, you've also seen this is a -- we have a strong customer need for our venture-driven growth, and growing addressable market in the mid-market and geographically. We are confident about our future as we disrupt our own business model through new technologies. We are not waiting for someone else to disrupt us. And lastly, we have a lot of runway to leverage and support Next 15's ecosystem. So in short, Mach49. What are we about? Survival. We help the largest companies in the world survive, the brands we all know. And in creating new businesses where they can actually address the problems of the world, we're making life and society better at the same time. Thank you for your time.

Hey, Stacey.

How's it going? I apologize that I'm not there in person, but I'm in California to pitch a piece of business, which I'm sure this audience would love to hear. So anyway, I'm Stacey Bernstein, I am the CEO of M Booth Health. I've spent most of -- pretty much my entire career at 2 of the largest agencies -- communications agencies in the world. And I came to M Booth Health about 2 years ago because I saw an opportunity through Next 15 to really do something different and deliver a different solution in the marketplace, and I want to tell you about that today. So who are we? We are an integrated health communications agency. We only work within health care. We're about 68 people covering everything from research and insights to digital and social media to earned media, crisis management. But most importantly, we're a really seasoned and tenured team. About 25% of our staff hold advanced degrees in health, an average of 10 years of experience across each of our team members, and that really speaks to the fact that if you work it and both health, it's because you've dedicated your career to improving health outcomes around the world, and that is what we exist to do. About a year ago, we rebranded the agency under this promise of we choose to challenge. And the idea here is that we exist to challenge norms, to define the status quo of health communications all in service of effectively improving the health and lives of those who need it most. And that challenge mentality has truly never been more important. We are in a world now where health exists in the most rapid state of change that we've ever seen. And so when we think about what that means for our clients, all of our clients essentially want 3 things, they want to improve reputation. They want to drive loyalty and they want to drive sales or funding, whether they're private or public sector. But in today's environment, all of those things are threatened by the changes that we're seeing. We have a world where in post-COVID, every brand is a health care brand. So our clients aren't just competing with other health care companies to tell their story, they're competing with Apple and Samsung and some of the best marketers in the world, and that changes the way that they have to communicate. Certainly, in the U.S., a tumultuous landscape that tilts both in our clients' favor and certainly against that and changes on an ongoing basis and navigating that to keep their business stable is incredibly important. The industry as a whole, health care was always seen as a vertical. It has gone horizontal. And so we have clients that are struggling with, okay, we're a health communications team, and we have to figure out how to compete with Amazon now, and that's a totally different dynamic. Obviously, technology upending traditional business models in pharma and biotech alone, just the case of innovation from clinical trial to getting a drug to market has been rapidly accelerated. Again, certainly in the U.S., but arguably around the world, the entire field of science is now under attack. So things that we used to just take for granted that people would believe and understand we now have to fight harder to get that information into our audiences minds and convince them. And then probably, most importantly for us, and I'm going to come back to this is a changing definition of the American patient. When we think about demographic shifts in the U.S., what the patient here looks like is fundamentally changing and will continue to do so over the next 5 to 10 years. So in this environment, our point of view is that value is everything. In communications, it was always like you do a big stunt with a celebrity and you'd raise a bunch of awareness and somewhere down the line, that would lead to talking about the value that you bring to the world. You can't communicate that way in this environment. In this environment, you have to lead with value. You have to lead with your inherent value to the world and that will be rewarded with awareness. So for us, our approach is all about science and rigor to identify what is our clients' unique value to the world in today's landscape, which is often different than what they might think it is. We then reorient their story to translate that audience that value to new audiences because the audiences that we're communicating with have fundamentally changed. We're in a world now where everyone is educated and steeped in health care. You have consumers reading clinical trials in medical journals. So how do we translate that value to those new audiences. And then how do we entrench that value in the fabric of health, both now and in the future. For us, we do this across 3 sectors. So marketing communications is really our pharma biotech device business. We obviously work for some of the large players and established brands, but also some up and comers, some really interesting smaller biotechs and medical device companies that are emerging as leaders. Public affairs, which is really the legacy of this agency. That's our issues-oriented work with government, NGOs, health systems, et cetera. And then social impact very closely tied to public affairs, but this is our purpose-driven work that really has a lot of meaning behind it and gets our name on the map when we're working with the UNICEFs and the IAS' of the world. Across all of these clients, we have capabilities built to drive results. So deep sector expertise that I just mentioned, functional excellence across every discipline you could possibly imagine within communications. So everything from scientific communications to health equity, internal comms, corporate communications, and the bold activation capabilities. Basically, for us, we have the capabilities of a large agency, but with the senior attention and nimbleness of a small one, everything that we do designed to drive measurable impact. And we've seen that impact through some of our really meaningful work at the forefront of health. I'm going to show you 2 quick examples of some of the recent work that we've done. The first is actually a partnership with Savanta. We work very closely with Savanta across a number of our clients. And this was for UNICEF USA that came to us and said, "Look, we need a platform. We need to have something to say around climate change." And when we dug in and did the research, we did a global survey of youth around the world. And what we uncovered is that, everyone is talking about climate change, but youth are feeling anxious. Eco-anxiety is the thing, but they're also very optimistic. They feel like they're the generation that's going to solve this. And so there's an opportunity for UNICEF to drive a dialogue around this eco-optimism and eco-activism and how do they position themselves as the organization that is building a platform for the next generation to take action against climate change. So really shifting the dialogue and positioning UNICEF as a leader among the global youth. A very different case study would be in our pharma biotech work, and that is for Organon. Organon is a spin-off from Merck. They spun off about 2 years ago, I believe. We are their social media agency of record. So our initial ask was establish us as a women's health company. No one knows who we are, how do we break through and really resonate with women and OB/GYNs in particular. And so we took the strategy of really unmuting women's health. Women's health has been sanitized everywhere online. And Organon was going to come forward and be the company that would really facilitate an authentic dialogue. We then took that into their brands. And so for NEXPLANON, which is a long-acting birth control, really tapped into Gen Z trends. You see NEXPLANON chill on the right-hand side here. how do we break through in the feed and drive product awareness and intent to prescribe. And now we're doing that with their latest biosimilar, which is competing with HUMIRA. HUMIRA is possibly the biggest marketed drug in the world, certainly in the U.S.. How do we go up against the big guy in a nimble way on social and show people on HUMIRA that there is a lower cost option. When we look at our business overall and sort of what's next, we really feel like we are primed for growth. We're about $23 million right now. We've seen a 64% revenue increase in the last 3 years. And probably of most interest to this audience, an 82% profit increase. So really, that just shows that, yes, we are growing and we're hyper focused on growth, but we're also a responsible business that is spending our money wisely and really looking at what's next. When we think about how are we going to continue to propel our growth rooted in what I believe are unmatched client relationships. You see that in a 9-year average client tenure, great satisfaction scores. But really, our growth strategy moving forward is a few core areas. One, this idea of winning without competing, which as somebody who's in California to compete for a piece of business right now, I love, which is really just leveraging our relationships. When I got here about 2 years ago, I reimagined our leadership team, we're now able to tap into our previous client relationships. Get those projects that are just under the procurement threshold prove our worth and then be incredibly well positioned for the agency of record pitches, which is what we're doing here tomorrow. Brand differentiation, again, being able to deliver everything that a large agency can give you, but with the attention and nimbleness an unmatched expertise of a small one. We're very focused on talent and culture, proving that you can be at an agency and do great work, but also love where you work. And that proved out -- we ended last year with a 95% retention rate. From a sector growth perspective, we are hyper focused on pharma and biotech. This is the biggest opportunity from a revenue standpoint, obviously, incredible stability and growth potential. So we're really doubling down there. And then from a point of differentiation, I mentioned earlier the changing demographic of the American patient. Health Equity is a huge area of focus for us. And if you think about what's happening in the U.S. and you go to the next slide, as we look at demographic shifts in the United States alone, health and equities are really poised to become the greatest public health threat of our time. And so historically, we talk about health equity, companies look at it as a charity. You would make a donation to a few groups and sort of check a box. Now we live in a world where health and equity is -- are going to put everyone's business at risk because the audiences that you need to reach are the audiences that have historically been marginalized, that have had poor experiences with the health system. And so for us, really being at the center of where health meets equity, helping our clients understand that we can help them make their business equitable, but we can also make equity great business. And so we're starting to do that with some of our clients now in really meaningful ways, working with the American Society of Clinical Oncology on raising sort of a dialogue around racial disparities and cancer outcomes and how might we solve that. Working with a major insurer who -- we did some research for and uncovered that there is a massive amount of stigma amongst young black women when it comes to Medicaid. And so how do we tap into influencers to sort of lift the veil of what Medicaid really is and drive enrollment. And then with one of our larger biotech companies really drawing a line in the sand and having them take a leadership position that health and equities are the symptoms and racism is the disease, and they are here not just to cure the diseases that their drugs treat, but also to fix the systemic inequities that exist in our health care system. We're also doubling down on thought leadership in this area as well. Earlier this year, we released what we call Chosen Circles, which was research around how Black Americans navigate health decision-making. Agency thought leadership, it's always great to see media coverage and impressions, and we got all of that. But for us, this is an inroad with current and prospective clients. And so we did 12 different presentations to those prospects. We saw a 25% increase in organic growth opportunities as a result of this one report alone. And next year -- next week, sorry, we'll be releasing the second cut of this data, which will focus on the LGBTQ+ community. So with all of that, we have a very firm vision, and I think it's a great opportunity -- it is very supported by Next 15. I mentioned earlier, I spent 2 largest communication agencies in the world. And I will Next 15 enabling us to do what's right for our business [indiscernible] run our business to get in our way, but be there to support us to grow. Obviously, them being willing to make investments where investments are needed. For us, certainly as a U.S.-only agency right now, the global scale of Next 15 is critical. So being able to say that we do have a global footprint in all of the markets that matter and being able to tap into that footprint has been essential for our growth. And then lastly, expertise. Tim talked about some of the thinking and insights around artificial intelligence around data, being able to tap into that expertise for us has been immensely helpful as we look to future proof and continue to grow our business. So with that, I will say thank you and turn it over to Tim.

Thanks, Stacey. Good afternoon, everybody. [Presentation]

Good afternoon, everybody. As I'm sure you're aware, we issued a trading update this morning for the third quarter. And that showed an improvement in our organic growth to 2.5% compared to a modest decline in the first half. And that was really sort of boosted by SMG. Thank you, Sam, for a phenomenal sort of Q3, but also, I think we had definitely sort of improvement across the board. Broadly, the trends we saw in the first half sort of continued into Q3. We had growth in 3 of our segments and there's only ready engage where we saw some reasonably modest declines really based on some client delays. And I think that is part of our sort of frustration at the moment. There's a lot of money out there, but actually getting clients to commit, I think, is still a bit of a challenge in some places. That meant overall, our organic revenue was flat for the first 9 months. But overall, we were up 2.6% in total revenue, boosted by some acquisitions. And actually, I think currency was slightly negative in the first 9 months. To date, we bought around just under 2 million of our shares. I think I've been slightly surprised how slow it's been. I think there's been a struggle for to find sellers of our shares. But overall, we're committed to trying to buy 10 million this financial year by the end of January. And I think we're going to review at that stage the effect of this and whether actually it's a good thing to do going forward. In terms of finishing the year, we're sort of confident we're going to meet both our and street expectations. I think we are seeing a few green shoots. Some of there's definitely a lot more pitching out there. Again, whether we're going to win, whether the client is actually going to commit the money, where they'll spend before the end of the year, but we're definitely seeing a few green shoots in terms of pitching. Margins, which we're very proud of, and we work very hard to sort of protect that. I think we're going to be up a little bit. A lot of that, I think, is driven by the decentralized model Tim talked about, where we have very much focused their own performance. And they're reacting in real-time to changes in demand from the clients. So I think, again, that is really helping. And our balance sheet remains very strong. We talked about having modest net debt at the end of January. That's assuming some bolt-on acquisitions and Roger completed one this morning, and I think there's a few more in the hopper. So yes, I think we've got a lot of flexibility in our balance sheet. We're looking to complete a bank refinancing in the next week or so, which will increase our facilities from GBP 100 million to GBP 150 million, which will give us a bit more sort of power as we go forward. And in terms of the big question we have in terms of how are we going to get to that sort of doubling of revenue. I think it's ambitious target, but you would have heard from 4 of our brands today, which will represent roughly 1/3 of our revenue. So quite a good representation of our businesses. And I think they're all really growth oriented. I think our decentralized modeling creates that entrepreneurial culture where the brands really want to go for growth. And we're at the center of that to really help facilitate that. AI, I think, is going to be, in the short term, more about efficiency and effectiveness. And I think every one of our brands has an AI dedicated team looking at how to become more efficient. And maybe we had a meeting with MHP yesterday who are looking at ways where some parts of their value chain, they reckon they can take sort of 30% out of the time. So I think there's a lot of work being done in the short term, more about the table stakes of how do we make our business more efficient and effective. But going forward, there's a lot of developments which Jonathan Peachey, COO; is championing in terms of new product developments. And I think quite a few of our brands I've been talking about that today. In terms of M&A, I think, as you know, we've been very active. I think I've lost count of the number of acquisitions we've done for Savanta over the last 8 years, is probably somewhere above 12 years. But I think each of them have added value, and I'm absolutely convinced we're going to continue down that path. The big acquisition we did last year of Engine, which is -- we're in the sort of building, as you're probably aware, that cost us GBP 65 million cash, and this year will deliver about GBP 18 million of operating profit. So I think we've had a very good track record of being opportunistic in terms of buying really good strategic acquisitions. We're never the biggest payer. We're actually quite proud of that. And actually, what we tend to do when it comes to acquisitions, is use the sort of actually SMG will be SMG. And Sam and I have spent many times discussing as to why we won that particular situation. And it was all about love bombing the management team, absolutely convincing them that we're the right home, we'd invested them. We'd really keep them their special source. And I think that's such a big, big part of us. I think given that the current market, I think the uncertainty means that we have been more focused on bolt-ons. But hopefully, next year, once the market opens up a little bit, I'm convinced we're going to get back more onto the strategic acquisition front. On that note, go back to Tim.

Final thoughts. Peter has left me a note. I might use those. Hopefully, what you've got a real sense of today is the quality of the businesses that sit underneath the Next 15 umbrella. I think when we come to see you, you hear a lot about Next 15, but it's really just a lot about the numbers. And I hope what you've taken from today is actually, there are some stunning businesses within this portfolio. And these definitely aren't just the 4 that are the best. It was -- we just picked 4 because we wanted to have one from each of the different areas. We could equally have found another bunch that you would have equally been impressed with. The great news is they are all really embracing AI. We're not fighting that battle with them. They're all seeing huge opportunity from it. They're seeing ways to improve the product, improve the service, really drive efficiency out of it, as Peter mentioned. But if they continue to think like a product business, it won't be a threat to them. It will be this huge opportunity. Peter talked about the fact that we are sort of steady as we go for the rest of this year. It does feel like we are running into a very, very strong headwind. The economic headwind that has been running -- that we've been running into is definitely very, very different from the very strong tailwind we had in our last financial year. If the wind just stops, we are going to fly. I think that's certainly the feeling within the organization is we have a tremendous number of businesses who are actually making enormous progress in a really good shape. They're incredibly healthy businesses. They're not sort of the businesses that are sort of struggling with an overweight staff cost or an inefficient set of processes and all the rest of it. They are businesses that are really in a great place. We've very much said to people, we knew this year was going to be a tough economy in which to do things, but let's take advantage of that. Let's not say to ourselves, that's just hide, hunker down and do nothing. Let's use this as an opportunity to make our businesses better, to make our products better, to embrace AI and come out of this a better organization than we went in, which was a philosophy we very much embraced during COVID. This has been more challenging. I'm completely honest with you COVID. COVID turned out to be sort of 3 to 6 months of difficulty for us and no more. This has been a longer period for us to deal with that challenge. And our customers have found it harder. But -- and that was partly because the government basically stepped in and kind of funded everybody to carry on. The governments aren't clearly in a position to do that at this stage. But I am very, very confident that when we come through this cycle, and as Peter said, we are seeing green shoots. The technology part of our client base is very much stabilized, and we're seeing growth in certain areas. And -- by the middle of next year, we could see that, that growth should start to really kick in and start to return. At that point, I'm going to open up for questions. I'm going to try and welcome these guys onto the [ Val Doonican ] stores as we've been calling them for the younger ones in the audience, that's just a reference, you'll have to Google. Yes. It was lost on Stacey, and we just didn't explain it to her, because we're a mean like that.

I'll start the front and work around. Sorry. That's right. Yes, it's you. Okay. Steve?

I got the mic. So Steve Liechti from Numis. Can I do 3. One is, can you just give us a little bit more color on the green shoots. You talked about more pitching tech clients stabilize. What do you mean by stabilized? Are you actually seeing things move there? And you said growth in some areas. Where exactly? So that's the first question. And last -- the second 2 questions really to David on Mach49. One is just help us get our heads around the scalability of the business in the -- I guess we look at it as a lot of very experienced private equity VC guys who are super experienced, how can you scale that capability to make it a business that continues to grow in the way that it has? And then the second question within that is, just talk us through the sort of DX or digital transformation COVID hangover that we're seeing in a lot of the sort of more mainstream digital transformation businesses. Is that affecting your business? And following that through, does the end of free money mean anything to the whole concept of venture that you're focusing in on?

I'll buy David, a bit of time to unravel that. That wasn't question. I was going to say that, that wasn't 2 questions, but anyway. In terms of the green shoots, I think the green shoots have actually been there right across the organization. It's not just sort of particular to one particular part of the business. We're seeing new business activity has picked up pretty dramatically, in fact, in the third quarter right across the organization. We do typically see an uptick in new business in the third quarter. We usually have sort of the early part of the second quarter, end the third quarter of the period and the summer it just disappears completely. And then over the Christmas holidays, it not surprisingly also tends to vanish. But Q3 has been kind of bonkers to be perfectly honest. And it's been in consumer. It's been in tech. It's been in all of the different 4 segments in which we do business. Some of that we know is procurement going out and just simply looking to reprice certain things. So we know that always happens in tougher economies. So we have to be a little bit skeptical of some of that, and that's the point I made earlier about just make sure that this is a job we know we can do and delight a customer on. So if it is a customer coming to you with what looks like a budget that does not look realistic for the task, then you just have to walk away because you know what procurement is doing. And you just have to say, right, that's not an assignment that we can be successful at because essentially, really all they want is the job done as cheaply as is possible. And we're just not the right partner for a project like that. In terms of areas where you are seeing very specific growth, unsurprisingly, SMG, this is just a very, very hot market right now and looks like it's going to be that way for quite a long period of time. And as Sam alluded, as cookies essentially disappear as a form of targeting people that is only going to -- that's only going to carry on. But there are lots of other areas, areas within lead gen and demand gen, that just going to carry on being very effective. Anything where you can see a very direct correlation between the amount of money you spend and the result for the customer, that's where money is going to. Customers are just taking money from anything that's difficult to measure and putting it into things that it's easy to measure. And then it's really just a question of effectiveness. And they look at people like us. They look at the platforms, the technology that we've built, the data that we use, the ways that we, therefore, go around solving those problems, and they say, okay, at the very least your business has to have a really robust methodology. And then beyond that, it then has to translate into, do you have basically code? Is there a way that you could encode this activity so it becomes repeatable so that in some cases, it becomes self-service so that the customer is then essentially able to do a big piece of the job themselves. This -- I mentioned at the beginning, this piece about our customers come to us with difficult problems, things that are hard to solve. That does sit at the root of why they work with somebody like us. But equally, we recognize that sort of fast forward 5 to 10 years from now, that sort of dependency issue with technology is going to evolve. So we need to be quite happy to embrace that and evolve with it. So if we can create the platforms, if we can create the sources of data, then actually, if the client is doing it themselves, we don't really care because we still have a very good revenue stream. If anything, we have a more profitable, more lucrative revenue stream. I don't know if I bought David enough time, but hopefully, I have.

I definitely forgotten what the 3 questions were. No -- Yes. The -- let's start off with the scalability question. So the answer is we have actually been evolving and dealing with the scalability issue since the day we were born. The standard and the process of Mach49's creation was around developing a methodology that we could actually follow to allow our clients to be able to create these new growth engines, whether it be on the investment side or whether it be on the building side. Now that has one big advantage for us as we develop a methodology, we don't have to then keep using the same expensive resources to execute that methodology. We can start to use other resources to help support it. And that was the second phase of our growth in terms of becoming scalable. After that, we started to realize we could start to leverage other technologies to help support our people to make them more efficient in doing what they were doing. So for example, AI is a classic one. By having AI in place, we can do things like basic process and pattern recognition of what do we look at in terms of the kinds of business we should be building for this company? What are the ways in which it can be executed? How can we do that in a way that actually generates and guarantees us that we're addressing the right customer and the right niche in the market, et cetera. So that then became a way to get our people more efficient. So now I've gone from one very experienced person to a team of mixed, and now, in fact, that experienced person can be spread across multiples while I'm also mixing and now I'm even more efficient. So the model keeps evolving. With AI, we see even more. And you saw the references to go into the mid-market and starting to use and leverage some of the software and technologies and AI techniques to allow us to replace service with software almost entirely. So as we continue to evolve, we're well aware of that being a key factor that has to continue to grow with us. As I like to joke, we've always, from the beginning, started with a bunch of old guys sitting around drinking beer figuring out how the hell did we build these things together and what can we do to make them replicable? And we've just taken that and put it on steroids. Relative to the digital transformation piece, I guess, in some ways -- and maybe you'll need to restate the question for me, as I look at it, we have serviced almost entirely -- I shouldn't say entirely, that's strongest. We have serviced a large part very, what people consider traditional industrial manufacturing types of industries. That's where we have been. The folks where you would think would not be as sophisticated in terms of this kind of work. But in fact, what we've seen in terms of the process and evolution is that the digital -- digital investments they tried to make did not produce the results they were looking for. They were looking for these growth opportunities. And so when we came into the market, we started to find success immediately with people, as you saw on those boards, like the Stanley Black & Deckers of the world, these people who are heavy industrial folks. And our names got around. And we started penetrating more and more and more. And so I don't think we've seen digital transformation as a threat in any way or a slowing down of investment in us. In fact, it was probably the right grease to -- grease the skins for us to be able to do what we have done as a follow-on to that. And you had one more piece to that question.

Sorry, just to follow up on that. What I was really asking was did your business artificially accelerate through and post-COVID as people allocated more funds to digital, and now they're going more into cost-cutting mode and therefore, cutting back. So that's really the sort of short-term question.

So are they cutting back is your really question?

And then the longer term one is what does the end of free money mean to that whole sort of process?

Yes. So we'll start the second question first then. I mean the free money piece, is not really core to the business that we create because we're not looking for -- most of our clients are not building businesses to be spun out and invested in, right? They're building businesses to change their own growth trajectories in the business that they will become in the future. So that really hasn't been a major factor for us. Now there are -- some of our clients do spin things out. And so yes, it's been harder to get some outside money with that. But that's been a very, very small piece of the business and very small impact in working with us. In terms of the digital piece and sort of the drop-off because of, I guess, cost, I guess, was really the question is people -- are people falling off. In fact, it's interesting, I would say to sort of echo what Tim said in the last year, we've seen a very consistent set of patterns among our clients, which is those who have worked with us any time in the past, continue and accelerate, in fact, their investments in doing this. And so our business continues to grow and grow very healthy because we continue to have these folks who keep coming back more for more and more and more and more in growing their investment in us. I would say that we've probably seen a little bit of either flattening, maybe a little bit of slowing down in terms of new labels who might be interested in coming and working with us in the last year. But I agree 100% with Tim. We're seeing that unwind already. So I think that time has passed in terms of what we experienced as any kind of a slowdown, and it didn't have a material impact on the business.

Ciaran Donnelly from Berenberg. 3 for myself also. Sam, maybe just to start with you. Could you just expand on the strategy with the North American expansion. Is there kind of clients you're currently working with are pulling you into North America or it's just starting from scratch?

It's a great question. So it's a mixture of both. Obviously, you'll have seen from our that there's some big retailers that have big presence in the U.S.. Also, we have engaged with a number of different retail partners already in the U.S. and started some consultancies, which should lead to managed service. In terms of the strategy, if you think about our 3 businesses, the three-fold side, the capture side and the Plan-Apps side, our strategy is to lead with threefold to gain a retail partner, which then enables us to build the connections with the CPG brands. That's what they call the FMCG brands over there, to enable us then to build the capture model out and to build the Plan-Apps model out. And so -- we've now got a small team based out in New York, which have already been fully funded by the fees that we've generated. And on top of that, we've agreed an investment plan with him in Next 15 to accelerate that growth over the next year.

Brilliant. Secondly, just on Insights. I think I believe you said half of the growth is organic previously and half of it was from M&A. I guess as we look out to medium-term targets, what's going to be the split of organic and M&A-driven growth for the medium-term targets?

I mean, I would expect it to be about the same. I don't see why anything should change. I think what normally happens through M&A is the first year we leave them alone. The second year, we reorganized them. And then the third year, they are a bit like the bog, they are brought within the stable and do everything that we want them to do. And you know what, that has worked. I think it's now 15, is the one we did yesterday. So we've sort of got a bit of a playbook. There is minimal cost savings directly from making redundancies. We try and do that organically or try and grow the business. And so -- and we always look after the entrepreneurs, which I think is critical. And when you set that up in that way, I think you -- it is basically about respect. I know it's old-fashioned, but I think that way they continue to grow. They normally grow through the earn-out, because obviously incentivized too. And then by the time we have assimilated them, and they're all speaking Klingon, then we've normally got global clients working with them and so on. So I think I would expect it to be the same. I think the difference now is that we probably have to buy bigger firms, otherwise, it doesn't make the material impact. And this was a year of actually not very many acquisitions. So at least just towards the end of the year, we have some. So I think that will be more challenging, but then we have a much more established platform and experience to pull it off. The very first major deal we did was the same again as what we were 40% to 80%, and that was very hard. but now buying a 40% business, with 50% business is relatively straightforward. So I think you learn over time.

Brilliant. And then just thirdly on Mach49. It's quite difficult to, I guess, quantify the value that you add to the customers you work with. So could you just give an insight into how you price the offering?

The price is set as a outcome-based project press. So we literally say we are building this business for you everywhere from idea through to however far they want to go. And here will be the price and the timing for delivery. And at that point in time, that's a promised outcome. And honestly, if they need us to do more because we haven't got the outcome, we keep going. So -- but the outcomes are pretty measurable, right? We're talking about them delivering on creation of business plans and quantified plans about how they're actually going to perform over time and then they get measured against that by what we would call a new venture board, that is an internal usually C-suite set of people who are responsible for managing and measuring that business. So we get measured on their success just as they get measured on their success, whether or not they reach those final results.