Public Policy Holding Company, Inc. (PPHC) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Welcome, everyone, to our Capital Markets Day. It's the first one we've had since we've been public. All of you know, I think, since you accepted the invitation that we are PPHC which, if you parse those letters answer Public Policy Holding Company. I have one piece of the business, I have to take care of before we start. First off, many of you've seen this before, Here's the disclaimer. Please read every line of it, commit it to memory. There will be a quiz at the end and also e-mail my General Counsel and tell him that I took care of my obligation. Thank you. It's interesting, I saw this statement the other day, and I guess it's always kind of been burned in our memories. But when I looked at it and I realized that it was pointed out to me that this was actually in some of our listing documents and materials when we went public 3 years ago. And I ask you to pay attention to it because it really does summarize where we are today, especially after the acquisition announcement that we made Monday. And that was our goal from the inception 10 years ago, roughly a little over 10 years ago. Now, it was to be the preeminent strategic communications, government relations provider by uniting a diverse group of leading specialists around the world for collective success of our clients, employees and shareholders. What does that really mean in translation? It means that we've had from the beginning, the vision that we were not just going to be a consolidator of government relations services worldwide capabilities, geographies and talents, but also that we understood the interplay with corporates that it wasn't just a political audience they need to address. They needed to, in a cohesive fashion, address the corporate communications audience, which concentrated on the public image and the branding and most importantly, the reputation of companies, meaning crisis, et cetera. And that these 2 worlds were colliding in a digital universe and needed to be brought together. And you'll see a lot of this as we go through this today as to how -- as we run our company, we actually try to put together complementary pieces rather than be a typical holding company, which just adds duplicative assets and keeps them with a separate name. So again, we'll show you a lot about the construction. My main presenters that are with me today and also 3 of our fabulous CEOs, plus our newest Chairman of firm are with us today. I'll let them introduce themselves when they have the panel discussion later. But I'm Stewart Hall. I'm the CEO. I'm joined by my abled CFO, Roel Smits, and my equally able Strategy Officer, Thomas Gensemer. We're the oddest collection of people you will ever see. And we're all from different places, different backgrounds that it's amazing what we've done together, and I rely on these guys a lot. We all had a common WPP background. Some of you will have different opinions on that place, but we took the good from there, and we thought we took some of the bad that we learned and tried to correct this time around in building this. So very instructive experiences as we shared. So quickly, just the things I want you to take away from this today if you can. The first thing is that as a company that operates in a communication space to a large degree, even when we deal with policymakers directly, we're really communicators that we're not interested in selling soup. We're not interested in products and consumer. We are looking at the high-end human-centric advisory space, which can offer strategic comms, lobbying and public affairs. So the first thing is when you look at our margins, there's a reason for that because we're not going to get outside of our swim lane and chase low margin volume work because we don't think that's a winning strategy. Second, PPHC combines the profitability and retention of a trusted client-focused advisory with the growth market that we have. And one of the things we're going to talk about is the stickiness of our client relations. Roel has some excellent slides that he's going to show you that talk about the fact that we have an absurd renewal rate with our clients and relationship matrix with them that last year after year through issue after issue and they do not generally leave us. And that creates a lot of inherent advantages when you're in a growth business. Finally, a couple of other points to emphasize. We have a total addressable market we thought through a lot of research that Thomas put together over a period of time that we think at least in public affairs, lobbying/the communications, data assets that support our core work that we started in which was government relations. We think that addressable market worldwide is at least $20 billion, is what corporates and nonprofits are spending on that right now. We think that our move into strategic communications with the exciting acquisition of TrailRunner that was announced Monday, which is a pure-play strategic communications, litigation support, crisis communications and financial communications firms moves us into a massive, massive of opportunity in additional market that we can now go and conquer in a comprehensive fashion. PPHC's model is a consolidation model. But again, you have to understand that we're not chasing a low-margin businesses, and we're working for complementary businesses to work together. So again, I know that this is a holding company, but it is not a holding company in that true sense of the word. Public Company model with a high degree of employee ownership, that's important. We'll talk a little bit about talent. In our business, talent base is clients. Clients like the talent that interfaces with them. So how do you keep your talent around, both from a skill set standpoint, an issue depth knowledge standpoint and a client satisfaction standpoint. Employee ownership is critical. Being public is critical to us because of that employee ownership opportunity to buying people in the company in a different way rather than simply worrying about your salary and your bonus every year. Finally, the company is highly profitable, generates great cash flow, again, which Roel will talk to you about. And then we have an interim goal, a medium-term goal to reach $500 million of revenue in the coming years through a combination of organic and again, complementary acquisitive growth. Just quickly, just to emphasize a couple of those points, again, complementary portfolio. You will not see a lot of duplication in terms of capabilities or geography in our portfolio of companies. [ Ergo ] they have an incentive and an ability to work together that's different than, again, a lot of holding company models. We're headquartered in Washington, D.C. We're now throughout the globe. We, I think, have achieved almost near no sunset on ourselves after Monday. We're headquartered in Washington, which was our original center of gravity, but now we operate all the way from Northern California to Shanghai. So we are truly building a global network to address the challenges in our client space. We serviced around 1,200 clients today when TrailRunner is officially in the group, that's probably go over 1,300. And if you look at the quality of the labels, again, which we'll show you and who those clients are, you'll see that these are major, major corporate players, again, major trade associations, industry associations and again, leading nonprofits in the world that are easily recognizable. We have about 400 specialists today people that range the gamut from certain areas of policy expertise to certain communication skill sets that support our work for our clients. And then we have 85 employee owners today. Again, in April, that will change, but we have 85 that own recognized instruments out of that 400. They're actually tradable market assets, securities. And then we will -- we have another roughly almost 100 more or 80-plus more within the company employee base now of around 400 that has actual various forms of equity incentives. So again, you can see how deep and how important that is for us. Just again, just to get back to that point. Who are we? The intersection is PPHC. We are the hub, so to speak, although that's a shopworn term. But when you look at all of the capabilities, you'll see here, none of them are really the same. You could probably say CRS and Alpine here, look a lot like as federal lobbying firms, but there's a lot of headroom in that space. There's 2,200 registered lobbying firms in Washington, D.C. Having 3 of the top 20 is not a problem for us. But when you're get beyond that, you begin to see our strategic and corporate communications affairs, corporate affairs, communications. We've got 7-letter LPA, Concordant, TrailRunner, et cetera, that are all comms assets that will play varying roles in support of, again, what we call person to policymaker decision-making. I think the right-hand side is extremely interesting in the context of the United States and our constitutional makeup and the way policy is made, getting into the states was very critical to us. There's been a trend. Again, Thomas has a very illustrative chart that began probably about a little over a decade ago, where issues began leading the so-called beltway and they became much more acted on in state. So being able to reach in all 50 U.S. state jurisdictions, especially places like California, which is as active as any country in the world would be and knowing also now that we have great need to have global reach because the issues as we always say in Sacramento, seem to pop up in Brussels and London, sometimes and fly right over Washington. So again, all -- there you go, there's a standard dots on the map. But you can see again, from our humble beginnings in Washington that we've obviously come a long way. Just this chart, and I always love this one because I think, again, it illustrates the stickiness of our client relationships and high renewal rates. The revenue build speaks for itself. The organic is in red and the acquisitive is in blue, light blue. But the interesting thing is when we take -- a lot of times, people have a really good growth year and organic growth year like we did in 2021, a couple of factors. Roel talked about played into that. But when we -- when you have a year like that, a lot of times, especially in PR and communications on the commercial side, you have a big ramp up, but then all the projects go away the next year and you go back down. Because of the nature of our deep relationships with our clients, the retainer-based nature of those client relationships, when we take ground, we don't give it back. So we will start a year where commercial PR firm/advertising firm will start a year with maybe 70% of their revenue unidentified. When Roel starts his budget process with his team, we have 80% of ours identified. So again, when you see this chart, if we ever go backwards from one of these bars, I would be extremely surprised and you should be, too, and you should be asking questions because it just typically does not work the way in the high-end advisory space we work in. So take territory, keep territory. Quickly, why are we listed. There's a lot of reasons we thought would provide us more flexibility than to have growth -- to get growth capital and not have the yoke of a private equity fund around our neck with a very short-term thinking horizon, so it allows us to think more long term. And also, again, it's been very useful for us, again, in times of driving our employee ownership, which drives retention and recruitment. So that is why we are public. Quickly, again, we started from what we knew. Here where we did. We started with lobbying DC-based assets that were federally focused on federal policy influence. As we move post IPO today, what have we done? We've expanded into the states in a significant way. We have increased our communications offerings that support the old traditional person to policymaker or direct advocacy or commonly called lobbying in the United States activities. And then we've also added a number of research assets and data. Your communications are only as good as your ability to know what people are thinking, know what groups are thinking what and then figuring how to reach them. So again, as we move forward into the future, we're going to deepen our research capabilities even beyond where we are now, because with the advances in data, obviously, AI and other instruments, we certainly know that our ability to get cheaper and better data sets to service our clients provides a great opportunity, and we want to maintain the quality of our work in that space. And then we will look at, again, geographies. And then finally, obviously, I just mentioned the ambition that we would love to get the $500 million, and we think we've got a pathway to do it. With that, I'll hand it over to Thomas, and you won't hear from me again until the end unless you have a question. So thank you.

You will hear from him again, and you will have questions. So what do we do? I'm going to address the elephant in the room. When we started softening the market here, so to speak, and getting people lined up for our IPO, I remember a call with a journalist. And she said, I'll even name us, but she said 5 minutes into the conversation she having with Stewart and I, Oh, you actually call yourselves lobbyists. That's -- so back up to deal with the nomenclature involved in the business. In D.C. and across 34 of the 50 states, lobbying is a very carefully defined and highly regulated industry. Every quarter, every dollar, every name. is reported to the federal government or the state governments in Cassandra's case. That means that people know very clearly client exposure, lobbyist exposure aligned on a quarterly basis. If you can remember about 15 years ago, an organization called Politico started. So now every day at about 5:30, we get the influence newsletter, which shows which lobbyist was hired, which firm was fired, which case -- I mean, it is a very active media market that looks at this market. So therefore, as you get from lobbying into public affairs, which you all call the lobbying or I'm a lobbyist, I'm not. Public affairs in the United States and across the state markets is that which is not across the line of direct access, direct contact with legislative authorities, elected officials staffs, et cetera. It is this communication surround sound. It is the targeted media. It is the grassroots campaigning that ES is in companion with that lobbyist, that direct access. As he mentioned, the sort of the digital disruption that has happened in this space is such that you can't get -- you can't shake a hand with a senator and get what you need until you convince that senator that her or his constituency is aligned, understands the consequences of the legislation, understands the prioritization. That's been a 20-year evolution, both by media and an ever sort of politically charged environment. So as we speak of, we're not afraid of the term lobbyists. It is Stewart's dare I say, dream job or at least dream assignment to come over here and work with your government and build a proper disclosure regime. We also see that as a very big tailwind for us as more and more geographies, Germany, France, the EU has gone through 3 rounds, are tightening this definition and expecting more transparency out of this ecosystem. We've added, since you would have seen this perhaps at our IPO, of course, based on both our organic growth and our recent acquisition, the broader strategic comms world, I would argue is more of a private equity-driven title, right? It's not PR, it's not whatever, it's strategic comms. That said, this red thread that really goes through the top issues, concerns, crises of a corporate is affecting all of these boxes. Constituencies across the top, yes, if you speak to politicians, their staff or regulators, of which there are thousands and thousands and thousands in Washington and state capitals, that's disclosed. You know who you spoke to and on what issue. As you move down the sort of ecosystem of audiences all the way to sort of elite and investor audiences, you see how this sort of bifurcation of our portfolio works against things like interface, direct access, agenda setting, new market entry growth, issues, management crisis and of course, sort of the thought leadership reputation building. You can imagine now, and I'll address another elephant in the room, a lot of this is happening in Washington right now because something just happened in November that has us all wondering what comes next. So who do we do it for? Nearly 1,300 clients. This is but a subset. That said, against the sort of different types of work that we do, the middle being more of the integrated solutions, which we're gearing all of our clients towards. These are names you know, some you love, you all respect. These are big, big, major players. Half of the Fortune 100 are in the portfolio, trade associations, major nonprofits. This is an active work that everyone does, respecting their interface with both federal state and increasingly international governments. Market sizing, I will say this was a very onerous task, especially when it needed to be verified for IPO, because these transparency registrars, the definitions all vary. You can say PR globally is about a $32 billion market cap, right? There's different things. So as we look at it across the segments that I've just described, this is well over a $20 billion TAM. That said, you need to sort of look at the subsets of it. Stewart mentioned this piece particularly. This has been a dramatic change. States are growing now faster than the federal lobbying. That is just given the political ecosystem that Stewart just mentioned. This is our bread and butter. Stewart started the business after our shared WPP experiences of saying, how do we look at this incredibly sticky, very profitable client need and begin to build the services that support that advocacy across the portfolio. So here we are 10 years later. We still remain the biggest player in town from this lobbying anchor. In town, I mean, Washington, D.C., the U.S. federal government. You'll see 3 of our shops, as he mentioned, are in the top 20 of more than 2,500 registered firms, not just individuals, but firms in Washington. This is a pretty dare I say, static list, right? You see lots and lots of others that will come with a new administration or a new sort of partisan flavor. Ours are thoroughly bipartisan organizations, Republicans working beside Democrats, issue experts, beside policy experts. As we move into this growth strategy, this is the area of heavy in private equity, as you all know. Some are legacy brands. You look at an Edelman, a Brunswick, et cetera. They've gone through capital raises in different. They have moved -- they are aiming to move more into our space, not just in lobbying per se, but more in the sort of strat comms, high issue management, policy expertise. We have started at this incredibly rich base foundation and grown the other way. We have obviously, the different model versus the only one public here is FTI. The others have all basically taken their private equity in different forms. Our employees, we are only as good as the people that walk through the doors every day or show up on the Zoom conference calls now that we're in the modern era. As we see, we get through this. This is the biggest one. This is the differentiator. We are both an employee-owned organization largely, 75% in the hands. And therefore, the collaboration that people in our rival platforms would like to see across their groups, well, what's in it for me, right? In this case, you have a shared vernacular, a shared currency and quite frankly, a very closed family of people that understand what we're doing and how it's different from either where they worked before or what they see in the market. 165 folks. We'll add more to it when they formally come on board on April 1. That half of the employee population, I'll stack those numbers against others from a differentiated employee proposition any day. So first time, debut here in London and around the world, I'm going to invite 3 of my beloved colleagues representing ends of the 10-year trajectory that we've been at this to come up and join me for a bit of a panel discussion. Can I have Mat, Cassandra and Oli Foster, please join me on stage. So this is the first time we've unveiled your beautiful faces to our investors because we like to keep you busily serving and pleasing our clients. But I'm happy to have you here sharing the stage with us. I just want to get a quick -- a couple of minutes from each of you on your personal backgrounds and then by extension, the firms that you all respectfully lead. If I could start with my friend, Cassandra, please.

I was going to say good morning because I think it's 7:00 in Sacramento. [indiscernible]. So good afternoon. It's nice to be here. I'm not nervous, but this is a first for me. I've always worked for privately held companies. So this is kind of fun. Am I up there?

You are up there.

Okay. My background really quickly is pretty simple. I've spent about 10 years as a lobbyist for the supermarket industry, both in D.C. and in Sacramento. Moved on to do political work. I ran all the political programs for the largest business association in the state of California, The California Chamber of Commerce. And then a quirky little thing called the recall happened, where our governor was recalled and Arnold Schwarzenegger, a name that you might know, was elected governor. And I worked on the transition team and then the transition staff and then actually went inside and served as Deputy Chief of Staff to the Governor for about 2 years, the longest 2 years of my life. And then had an opportunity to work for a Global Consultancy and wound up in a partnership with a wonderful woman and colleague who actually worked with me and served to be in the governor's office, Donna Lucas, who is founder of LPA. Donna and I like to say these things about LPA that we sort of operate at that nexus between politics, policy and communications. We work on all of the issues of the day that are important to California from energy, new and traditional to higher ed and even K-12 infrastructure to insurance, which is now obviously very important. We've got a great team of practitioners that literally run just about every generation, we get -- we've got a couple of 60-something, 50-somethings to 20-somethings. That part is very exciting to us. We also both like to say that our day is typically a lot like days in the governor's office where you don't know what problem you're going to have to solve, but you've got to draw on resources from a variety of places to resolve them. And that's why I think I enjoy the work so much, and I'm so excited about this opportunity because it gives us a chance to draw on resources from a lot of places. So excited to be here and looking forward to your questions.

Well, thank you so much. Mathew?

Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Mat Lapinski. I've been a lobbyist my entire adult life quite literally. Completely misspent use, I found an internship in a lobbying firm when I was 19 years old as a [indiscernible] at Georgetown University and never looked back. I worked for a financial services trade association for about 4 years. Then I spent 9 years in the D.C. Government Affairs office of a law firm that's now known as Denton's. It was called Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal when I joined, but over the course of a decade, became Dentons. I helped run their multipractice group response to the financial crisis in 2008, helped respond to the passage of the Affordable Care Act there. And then after I grew a little too big for a law firm, I decided to hook back up with Stewart, who I actually had met when I was 19. I think he realized what I was when I was 35. Yes. So -- but came up to Crossroads in 2013, and I'm really proud of what we've been able to build since then. When I joined the firm, we had about 6 practitioners and did about $4 million a year in revenue. And if you look at what we're doing now, we're a 30-person firm that's basically split down the middle between Republicans and Democrats doing about $25 million in revenue. We've done that in 2 ways. One, we've recruited really good people from the public sector, taking people from the federal government, be it Congress, be it the administration, finding lateral recruits into the firm, either from other firms or from corporate offices or trade association offices where we felt they would complement our approach. And the third thing is just doing some strategic M&A, finding 1- and 2-person groups or smaller lobbying firms and bringing them under the Crossroads umbrella. When I think about Crossroads and when our clients think about Crossroads, I think there are 3 things that really stand out. One, it's the totality of the approach that we take. When you hire the firm, you get all of our practitioners. A lot of us work for law firms. They can silo people into very small teams, how they compensate their people is really terrible. It doesn't encourage collaboration. It doesn't encourage shared teamwork. We blew that model up. And when you hire the firm, you get everybody. Two, responsiveness. We know that people are -- we know we're in a very competitive market and people have a lot of choices. Stewart referenced 2,200 registered lobbying firms in D.C. They're trying to get all of our clients all the time, and we're trying to get all of theirs all the time. So we know that if we're not responding to our clients, they're going to look elsewhere. And then three is proactivity. Gone are the -- strategic thinking in proactivity. -- there are 2 pieces there. Gone are the days when you can pick up the phone and call a friend and they'll do you a favor, and that will get the result that you need from government. Transparency has made that impossible. The velocity of change of public opinion has made that impossible. So coming up in consultation with our clients, with strategic plans to deal with a diverse and often changing set of audiences and developing the correct messengers to deliver those messages are really key and just as important as the relationships that we have with policymakers. So it's a really great and exciting firm. We've been a great firm for the last 15 years, and I feel like we've got a team in place now that has us positioned to continue to be great for another 15 years.

Also after we go through here, if there are questions, particularly for my colleagues before we get into a little macro questions at the end, wave your hand, I want to take advantage of their time and answer all the sort of nitty-gritty questions you have. Over to you, Mr. Foster.

Yes. Well, I'm not supposed to be here, really. I started my career, training to be a barrister. Quit halfway through and realize law wasn't for me, but I was quite interested in politics. I then rejected an offer to work at Buckingham Palace for the late Queen and fell into this industry. I started working for various trade associations, the RICS and SMMT, some of which you'll be familiar with the car industry and property industry and then for various PLCs like ITV, and that's where I met Mark Gallagher, who was my boss at ITV in 2006, 2007. And we hit it off. In fact, we kind of bonded over his portrait of Margaret Thatcher on his desk, which was signed. And we were interested in political discussion at that point, even though we were sort of different ends of the political spectrum. And we hired lots of agencies, as you'd expect, in companies and organizations like that. And we never felt we had an agency on our side who truly understood what it was like to be the client. They were very good. very polished, very impressive individuals, very educated. And the work was good. They were never fired, but we never felt they truly understood what it was like to have the pressure in-house as a client does. And so we were determined to set something up that was different to that back in 2010 and wanted to populate the agency not just with slick suited and booted lobbyists, a word that I'm very proud to use and I'm on a single man mission to make it an attractive word here in the U.K. We'll come back to that later in the discussion. And to have a blend of people, different experiences, different walks of life, diversity of thought as well as other types of diversity. And that was back in 2010, and we built the firm over the last 14 years, 15 years into one that is truly cross-party bipartisan, which is the term that I've learned to use with my American brothers and sisters. And that has set us up brilliantly, obviously, for the change in government that has come in the last year in the U.K. The -- all I'd say in addition to what's on the slide here about Pagefield is I'd like to think of what we do now since -- particularly since the acquisition last year as a beautiful bespoke dining table with 4 legs. And those legs are our core pillars of what we do: corporate reputation, policy and public affairs, lobbying, digital marketing and campaigning. So those outcome-oriented campaigns, for example, I think it's on the screen. We're currently working for the repatriation -- the campaign for the repatriation of the Elgin marbles. That takes in all of those 4 pillars, which we won't be successful without operating for our clients with knowledge of corporate reputation, knowledge of digital and social media and knowledge of policy and public affairs.

Thank you all and timing right on. I'm going to go back to your pretty pictures. So I mentioned the elephant in the room. Mat, what's going on in Washington these days? Let's address also there was a tragic plane crash in Washington last night. And so I don't want to be too flip geographically. So apologies for that. But the Trump phenomenon and where you see the noise of 300 executive actions and Senate hearings and such. Just give us a read from your expertise on where the prioritization will shake out, particularly in legislative side, will there be breaks? Will there be accelerants? Just we're in uncharted territory from my perspective.

I mean we're in uncharted territory, but it rhymes with previous history because President Trump this time around is basically behaving the same way President Trump behaved last time around. And I think -- having watched 4 years of the Trump administration and now having watched 4 years of Trump not in the White House and now seeing where he is and how he's acting again, I think there's a few things that are common threads that run through everything. President Trump likes to go into any negotiation he has and he views everything as a negotiation with the maximum possible leverage. And that's what we're seeing right now. And I think where it's played out most clearly to me thus far is tariffs. The Monday before American Thanksgiving, which was last Thursday, November, late at night, he tweeted that he was going to impose across the board 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada. This came out of the blue from nowhere. And since then, we have seen Canadians and Mexicans do what they can to get back into President Trump's good graces. And I think what we saw this past weekend in Colombia is another example of it. And I think we're going to continue to see it. Even the last sort of 36 hours of sort of activity around this federal government funding freeze is really designed to set the President up in a position where he can have conversations around federal government spending, the nature of the federal workforce, the nature of the civil service in a way that gives him the most possible leverage to act the way he wants. I'd also say President Trump and the people around him know what they're doing this time around as opposed to the last time. And I think they're trying to make meaningful long-lasting change to how the federal government interacts with business in the United States, how the United States interacts with foreign partners, how the American people view the federal government in a way that's going to last beyond this presidency. I think the challenges are twofold. One, the system can only take so much input, and he's trying to overload the system now. We'll see how successful he is in the long run in his ability to continue to do that. And two is that there are still 3 coequal branches of government in Washington. You've got the judiciary, the legislature and the executive. The President is going to be dependent on Congress to do a lot this year. And to get a lot of his agenda enacted, he's going to have to work with Capitol Hill. Republicans swept control of both the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate in November, but by really tiny margins. And if any of you have watched sort of American governance over the last 2 years, the Republican "majority" in the House has been a very dysfunctional majority. It's actually shrunk from where it was 2 years ago. So his ability to enact any major legislation is going to be a challenge. I think where the rubber is really going to hit the road is the big ticket item that Congress has to do in 2025 is pass the tax bill. At the end of this year, if Congress chooses not to act or doesn't act, American businesses and individuals will see $5 trillion in tax increases. I guarantee President Trump's legacy is not going to be increasing taxes on the American people by $5 trillion. So we're going to have some very ugly sausage making over the next 9 months to get an outcome in and around tax policy. While we have this swirl of tariffs and immigration and border security and government spending, et cetera. It's just -- it is going to be a lot. We're going to have to stay tuned to whatever his whims are on any given day because that's what's going to drive the policy conversation.

I don't know that I'm relieved by that true line, but I'll leave it at that for now. I mentioned our origin of the Acela Corridor as we call it, the sort of DC trio of businesses, very DC-centric in the early days. We knew post-IPO, we PPHC, knew that California needed to be our first move. And that is very much a play on not only is California the sixth, sometimes the fifth largest economy in the world, but it is the potential backstop here. It is leading edge by way of progressive policies. You sell cars in the United States, you sell 1 out of 4 of them in California or in New York, you're going to deal with limits on emissions and such. It's just that kind of scale of some of the more progressive size. I say that also now we have 2. We are -- in our minds, and I think we're the largest player in California now given that we've added -- we have KP Public Affairs that came in immediately after IPO a few months thereafter and then adding Cassandra and Donna's operation as well. Cassandra, I say that all in getting to you. There was a lot of talk of California as the opposition. There is a lot of talk of California opposition. That is still the play. And then we have a dramatic tragedy in Los Angeles, which changes the calculus a little bit vis-a-vis everything from insurance needs to federal reconstruction. Give us the read on how the opposition is doing and your read on both what Mat said on Washington and then how it plays out with Gavin Newsom and the quite progressive legislature of California?

Well, I'm a Star Wars fan. So welcome to the land of the resistance is what I like to say. Shortly after the tweet on Thanksgiving, our Governor, Gavin Newsom, made it clear that he was going to call a special session of the legislature to allocate about $25 million to spend on lawsuits and other things to fight all things Trump, be it around immigration, regulation, spending a little bit of everything. And things were marching along, if you will, to stick with the Star Wars theme. Things were marching along quite frankly, until I'd say 2 or 3 things. One, the reality of the election set in because as blue as California is, and it is deeply blue, there are shades of blue in that Democratic caucus. And I'd say some Democrats walked away from that election understanding that it was a little bit about the land of opportunity and all the wonderful things that California has to offer, but a lot about how expensive it is. everything from gas to utilities, just housing, just living in California is very expensive and that bore itself out in exit poles and obviously, in a lot of what we saw in terms of results in the national election. So resistance, yes, but tempered by at least some of us understanding that we've got to deal with some of the policy challenges that have led to the state being so expensive. So that's a piece of it. And then unfortunately, along came the fires. And I don't know how many people travel to L.A. or know L.A. very, very well. We're talking scads of properties and not just the Palisades where lots of well-known Hollywood types live, but entire communities have lost first and second and third generation wealth. I mean it's not just tragic, but it's going to have long-term impacts. And so resistance, yes, but we've got some big things, big ticket things, big important things that we're going to have to deal with over the coming months. And I think some of that's going to overshadow the resistance. I don't know if you caught it, but I was also mildly impressed, I'll say, with the way the governor engaged the President when he visited the Southern California region right after the fires. And both of them talked about the fact that they were going to work together to try to resolve what is going to be a pretty...

Let's talk about the showmanship there a bit just because all things come to style, and it is at a remarkable, the media sets the equation. And so if I recall, the White House didn't even coordinate with the governor's office on arrival. And regardless of partisanship, it is if Air Force 1 is flying into your state, your governor is there to greet. And that was not the case, right? There was no...

He was not invited or informed. And so what the governor did -- and again, I give them a little credit for the showmanship, would show up. And he was on the tarmac and he greeted the plane, and down came the President and the first lady. And not only does the governor greet the President, but he held his hand for a very long time.

Wearing very rugged jeans.

We let it go and gave him a grow pad, and it was just such theater, which I enjoyed. But I think the press gaggle afterwards for me said a lot in that they both said, in spite of all the things they've said about each other on Twitter, they both said in front of the press what people were hurting in that community needed to hear. And so I think we know this -- some of this is theater, a lot of this is going to still take place behind the scenes and get things done because this is -- L.A. is a huge part of the California economy.

I want to get to Oli. Sorry, Mat, I'm going to just -- because we are in another country, and so if Donald Trump is calling Canada the 51st state, Greenland, the 52nd, well, at least culturally, we can assume his love of the U.K. means that you are all definitely invited. You just had a really interesting election cycle here. You have a well, I'll let you editorialize what the state of the current government is. Not only what the impact on a Trump election is vis-a-vis populism and everything else, but give what does that election that happened back home for us mean for your politics and certainly Keir Starmer's sort of future vis-a-vis his government?

Yes. I mean I'll come to that, but I would just say upfront that A-level students of politics in future years will be studying the last 6 to 9 months of what this labor government here has done and how to squander the most huge majority that they have secured. Despite the popular vote not giving them such a mandate, they had the opportunity to unite through the policies, and they have sanded that, and they have got such record low ratings of a government 6 to 9 months in power. We may come back to that. But that does link to the question about Trump because you find yourself -- we find ourselves in the U.K. with a government that doesn't quite know which direction it needs to head, trying to spend the last week convincing us that it has a plan for growth and that expanding airports in the next 30 years is going to deliver that growth, even though most of us know that Heathrow will never get built because it's been tried for 50 years. And alongside that, you've got them having issued a budget in October last year, a week or 2 after which, I think the tweet was sent by Trump. And they realized we didn't quite factor that into our spending and taxation plans. So there are a lot of headless chickens running around the U.K. government right now at all levels, desperately trying to find solutions, which is an opportunity. And now more than ever before, as lots of people in this audience, I'm sure, will appreciate, we are living in the U.K. in a multiparty state. And we have been used to it going between the 2 major parties in terms of the power. We had a period of coalition, which was broadly a happy coalition and did deliver more than anyone expected. We now have reform that are in the opinion polls at least, beating the 2 major parties, conservative party unchartered territory with a leader and a very, very low number of NPs with some local elections coming up. The reason I say that is because we in the U.K., even though it is slightly different from the presidential system, we are now experiencing extremes of politics. And whilst we may have a labor government in play here at the moment on a very centrist or center left agenda, the extremes of the left and the extremes of the right in reform are rearming and ready to take on the Tories and Labor at the locals and at the next general election. And where that's relevant to us is the point I wanted to make upfront in my introduction is that we have always wanted to be that cross-party agency. And we are at the moment, even though some clients may raise an eyebrow wanting in our discussions with them to raise the fact that they shouldn't be forgetting about reform. And if there are areas we need to discuss with government, there are policy agendas they have, we have 1 or 2 members of our team who a few years ago were not particularly popular members of the team, but now are quite popular members of the team because they know how reform works. They are made with Nigel Farage, they are made with the people around the reform leadership. And personally, I hope that reform don't have the resurgence that everyone is predicting. But we have to work on the basis that the current forecast of the opinion poll are going to have a serious impact on the political makeup of the government in the future.

Thank you for that. I want to give you a bit of the soapbox that I promised you because as I acknowledged early on, we're not shy of the term lobbying. I was very curious once we actually found our match here or our first firm to join the family, you sold to a U.S. lobbyist group. I believe the FT headline was Pagefield sells to American lobbyist giant. Any other time you see the term lobbyist in the FT, it's a slander. So it's framed. It's a very happy sort of turn of phrase. But what the market reaction to that from a very competitive London PR town? And then by extension, sort of what is happening here by way of transparency or lack of transparency and this sort of word soup of what we all do because you're afraid of the term lobbying? I just want to give a sense from a trade perspective, how that works competitively and then more?

Yes, this really bugs me because the term lobbying, lobby, lobbyists, there's debate about exactly where it came from. But I'm pretty confident that the mother of parliaments here in London. And the central lobby is where that term came from, and there are still lobby journalists and central lobby is still the place that people go to, to nobble their MP and it's the central point between the House of Commons and House of Lords. It has historical recognition, yet we in our industry, apart from me and a few others, are reluctant to use the term because in recent years, there have been lobbying scandals. If you look at where those lobbying scandals originated, it's not through firms like ours or indeed our competitors. It is the politicians themselves. And Thomas and I have spoken at length and Stewart as well. And as we were dating as part of this process last year, and I started to understand more from Mat and his colleagues and others, quite how regulated the U.S. system was despite the appearance over here that actually all it matters in the U.S. if you've got money, you can buy influence. No sense of -- in the media representation here that it's heavily regulated, a sense over here, a classic sort of British approach that we know best and therefore, we're fine. It is a wild west. And there is no level playing field in the lobbying system here in the U.K. There is an official government register, but you only have to register on that if you have been in direct contact with a permanent secretary or a government minister. Well, I'm sure all of you know, even though you may not be experts in lobbying, that lobbying is more than that and public affairs is much more than that. So the official register doesn't work. The Cameron -- David Cameron compromise with Lib Dems and the industry self-regulation doesn't work because lots of our competitors don't sign up to it. They continue to employ MPs and/or peers on their books. And we are there, the good guys, not able to do that. So I would fully support the idea of Stewart coming over here on a one-arm-mission, make it a two-man-mission to bring some sort of order to the regulation of our industry to make sure that it's a fair...

Yes, please. Apologies. We're going to get you a mic because we're on video. I want to make sure that we start again. You're not going to hear it here. You're just going to hear on tape.

Okay. So a serious question for PPHC, I think, is will the U.K. and the EU, and the EU obviously is a giant economy. What proportion of PPHC's revenues could that be on a kind of 10-year view? And I think Oliver, in the U.K., obviously, I mean, you guys will be shocked. I mean we have extraordinarily conflicted politicians, who -- there's no standards compared to, say, in the financial services industry. I mean we saw a minister recently had to resign because of extraordinary political connection, which we would have to declare, say, in our industry, and you would have to declare in the U.S. but doesn't have to be declared here. Is there any sort of momentum? I mean parliament doesn't even have an HR. Is there any kind of momentum actually to regulate and formulate -- formalize the lobbying industry? Because if there was you guys could -- as part of the bigger group could be at the forefront of that. So is the U.K. and EU are kind of nice to have or do you actually believe that the lobbying industry will become more regulated, more formalized, and therefore, something that we could sort of project significant revenues from in the context of the group...

I'll start, and then I'll go to the other end to get a more local perspective. When we do the market sizing, yes, the U.S. bar on that chart is significantly larger. But if you look at a proxy, I mentioned political earlier, the political business across Europe is about 1/3 of the size of the DC business. And it's much more in -- it's a 10-year business versus a 15-, 20-year business. But that proportion feels about right when you look across member countries as proportion of the corporate spend. And so -- and we have a chart later that it might be in the appendix, now to be honest, that is what is disclosable like on either Brussels equivalent register or, as I mentioned, France, Germany, other member countries have sort of stepped up the expectations. Germany has done 3 rounds of -- at all levels of government and their lobbying register has gone from 2,000 individuals to 12,000 in the course of 2 years. So there is a tightening. That's a media scrutiny reality if you need it tightened and the fact that these corporates are more and more spending against global policy issues. And so 1 thing, whether it be a U.S. domiciled business or an Italian domiciled business, there is a sort of a link that's going on that you need to have a safe pair of hands and be covering the math at the same time. The patchwork of solution isn't working in the interconnected world we live in and the media scrutiny that is new found. But I'll go to you for a view on Europe as you see it.

Yes. It reminds me 25 years ago when I worked in Brussels, I was paid in brown envelopes because -- and that was symptomatic of the system, I don't know it's changed. It's changed since, but that was because MEPs were able to get away with pocketing a full amount of stipend and passing some cash to [ stagiers ] like me to keep me sweet and that is a very crude example of where I think the EU has got a lot of time to catch up on the levels of regulation in the U.S., where it's clear that you are streets ahead of how lobbying generally is regulated here. I don't know specific individual EU countries, what they're up to. I can only speak to the U.K. and to your original question. I think if the government hadn't started so badly, they genuinely might have looked at this, but it's not going to be a priority, I can't imagine for them. And don't forget that they are in the pocket of the trade unions and the trade unions are quite happy with the status quo because the trade unions manage to circumnavigate -- circumvent the way that lobbying is currently registered. I think there is a role for the industry to play. So the PRCA, which is the self-regulatory body of the industry here has announced a review of its own code, something that we welcome, but it requires our competitors to sign up to it. So fine for PRCA to update its code and make it more fit for purpose. But if half of our competitors don't sign up, we're kind of still in the same position until government actually regulates from a legislative point of view.

Yes. I'm mindful of our time. So I'm going to take your question. I'm going to do 1 closure and then this is like the dot, dot, dot, ellipsis so these folks will be adding cocktails with you later on. So we'll be teed up lots of conversation.

My name is Dan Ekstein, I work at Greenlane Investment Management. I'm interested in the perspectives of Mat, Cassandra and Oliver, on life outside the PPHC Group prior to acquisition and life within it. And I'm sure you'll all say it's fantastic. So I'll ask you to focus on 2 specifics. One is, does it enable you to operate at lower cost or with a greater degree of efficiency? And secondly, does it enable you to grow faster?

I'm going to add on to this, which was my final question and do the sort of why PPHC. And it's a slightly modified version for Mat because he came in, as he mentioned, he's been a careerist with us. So it wasn't an acquisition and as much as, but certainly on his bookends, recent acquisitions that were crowded processes, right? They had lots of bidders in a very hot market right now. And so starting with Cassandra responding to his question but adding that layer of us versus, say, other suitors that you could be sitting here with today.

Happy to answer that question, I'd say yes and yes. Yes, more efficient. Yes, really pleased with outcome so far on a couple of fronts. And it did really -- we said this more than once to each other. It did really feel last year like we were the prettiest girls at the dance because we heard from little bit of everybody, including the PPHC Group. But seriously, I would say a few things for us. One, efficiencies but also opportunity to really leverage talent, contacts, intel, resources, particularly with respect to the polling in the research, almost immediately, are 2 very specific examples from this week. Mat talked about the emergency around federal funding. I had 3 clients call and say, what gives -- what can you tell us? And so we were able to literally get on the line with and then get scheduled for conversations with a couple of folks in the network who would know or at least no more than we knew. And so instantly, we're able to not just do that, but talk about that value with clients. I also referenced the fact that we're going to take a look at messaging and how we influence that democratic caucus in California around this issue of affordability, which we think still is important and certainly going to be more important after the fires. We are collectively with some of our colleagues in the network, but also with a handful of clients going to field the poll using our 7-letter partners, probably less expensively than if we've chosen partners in California, but to immediately leverage information that will be proprietary to us that we can share with clients. And it's going to help us both with messaging but also help individual clients with some of the data points they need to do their work. So those are 2 resources that we can use probably less expensively, quite frankly, than if we did so in market and then we've got access to really, really smart people in D.C. and now thankfully in other capitals to share intel and which for us is premium. I mean there is a value to that. So the short answer is thrilled. They also happen to be really nice people, which is important to Californians.

I mean we're -- the efficiency is incredible just in terms of the amount of time I don't have to spend and senior members of our team, don't have to spend dealing with HR and billing and legal. I mean the fact that there is somewhere that we can spend time either going out and chasing clients, getting client work or recruiting new people into the firm rather than dealing with administrative tasks is incredibly helpful to me. And on growth, I think from 2 perspectives, growth is really good. One, our ability to co-market other branded companies within PPHC services along with ours is great. It's a differentiator in terms of how we're able to pitch clients and offer services that they can't get if you go to another firm that looks like ours. And I think most importantly to me, it's how we can recruit talent. The fact that we can pay people in a way that other lobbying firms can pay people in terms of cash and equity, both incentivizes people to come into the firm and actually holds the team together over the long run. I think if you look at a lot of the deals that have happened over the last 20 years in D.C., they're either PE deals or bigger public affairs firm buys someone. And so if you're in a deal, you get some cash at the front, you have benchmarks, you have to hit over a period of time. You get a completion payment, then you're done. There's nothing to either incentivize people who join a firm to work really hard because they're not going to get paid out on that deal. And there's nothing to keep that talent together once the final completion payment is over. By equitizing larger and larger and larger parts of our workforce and our professionals over a rolling period of time, we're going to be able to keep teams together over a longer period of time. And at the end of the day, we're human capital businesses. And if we're able to hold our human capital together, we're going to keep clients longer and get more.

But before going to Oli, who will close, I'll say that when I reconnected with Stewart 5 or 6 years ago, we had both sold businesses into WPP. And we're on the cap table, founders, kid's college education is just fine. The reality was that we shared, despite being in the comm, I was a comms digital, he was always a lobbyist. We said, gosh, it's a shame they didn't retain any of the employees that were sort of under us. There was no way of keeping the firm's whole. It was aggregate revenue. And the second was that there was no -- other than at the time, making [ Martin Sorell ] happy, which was important, there was no real reason to do work with your partner agencies because there was no incentive program in place. And to Stewart's great credit before my time, 10% of a referred contract that goes from Cassandra to Mat or vice versa, goes to the referrer for the life of the contract. That's not a project fee. That's the life of a contract because these retainers renew at 80% to 90%. So why should she not in the case of the referral be continued? Thanks for that. That money goes right to her bottom line and to her bonus pool. So not only do we build the vernacular of understanding what everyone does and put dots on the map that makes it really important for the client to punch above their weight. So over to you, though, because you're the first international outpost. We've added some more with TrailRunner but Pagefield is a U.K. brand, and so the challenge and opportunity of that as you see it so far.

Yes. I don't know often in rooms like this, you hear the people like me talk about the importance of culture and emotional intelligence, right? But that was really important to us when we were selling last year. And when I met these guys, it was clear they had it in droves. And it's not just important for me and my team to know that we were getting into bed with people who passed the long train journey test but that -- our clients would like them and our clients would see us in them because to flip -- to pivot to the questions that were asked, this -- the attractiveness of this group was the culture, was the emotional intelligence. More importantly or as importantly, it was the fact that it is a house of brands, which I think Jim Wilkinson said yesterday when I first met him. And there's no plan to homogenize. And increasingly, our clients here in the U.K., and I hear from my new brothers and sisters across the pond that clients want to know they've got the experts on the ground. They don't want the spotty teenager who is in a sub office of one of the big global companies. They want an expert firm. It doesn't matter how big or small they are. They want the people that they meet in the pitch to deliver on the work, and that's the promise that we've always had. It's clear -- it's the promise that the PPHC companies who I met through the process also have. So on efficiencies, it's -- we're obviously only 6 months in, but we can already see exactly the same points that Mat and Cassandra have been talking about. And on growth, the 10% referral arrangement was a big selling point and very unique to PPHC and incentivizes quite different behaviors within our team, and I'm sure within your teams. It's -- there is none of this and that happens a lot in the WPPs of this world. There is open arms, very open arms. And already, Mat and I are talking one of our clients in the defense sector, a very exciting British company that's going places and there is -- we I think, are on the cost of a really big contract for CRS. But as Thomas said, is through the lifetime of that agreement. So it is a win-win from the perspective of the question you asked.

I've both really enjoyed having the 3 of you here in London. I hope it was enjoyable to put a little color context to what we -- Stewart, Roel and I have been talking about for a couple of years. I appreciate the journey and the time. Thank you so much.

All right. After all these communication experts, it is my role now, as the CFO, to really bring it down to a couple of numbers. Yes, on Monday, we released actually our -- the headline numbers of our 2024 performance. And I'm sure most of you have already studied that. I'm going to take you through that and add a little bit of color, perhaps. So this chart, you guys know it has been growing over the years. And indeed, we were very happy to add another growth bar to it, we are now at $150 million. Indeed, you know that the blue part that sits on top represents the growth that we accomplished via acquisitions and the red is organic. Now the blue part in 2024 was indeed due to us bringing in Lucas Public Affairs, Pagefield, and we also still had 2 months of MultiState revenues sitting in there. Because basically, the way we organize our organic growth calculation is a company as of its 13th month in our group, it adds to organic growth. First 12 months is acquired growth. Now you see, okay, we acquired $11 million of business in 2024. That means there's $4 million of organic growth sitting in there. That is, in any case, a bit better than in '23, but still, it's a little bit sort of below what we know we're capable of because if you look at the percentages at the top bar and you see that basically we quite often have reached the double digits. So I want to really dig down a little bit into the organic growth over the past 2 years. Before I do so, I really want to first remind you of how our business breaks down by segments. You'll see that, of course, GR that's lobbying, government relations, 69%, DS that stands for diversified services is 7%. And DS came in actually when we acquired MultiState because they -- as part of their portfolio, they're also offering compliance services. So really, with all that regulations, our clients need to stay compliant, and we help them staying compliance. It's a good old [ Levi ] strategy. And they also have issue tracking. And because it didn't neatly fit into either lobbying or in Public Affairs communications. We created the diversified services segment. That's growing head over heels. And the good thing of lobbying advocacy and diversified services is both highly retained business. It's very profitable, and it's really -- indeed a high retention rate. Public affairs and strategic communications on the other hand, has a huge growth potential -- but okay, there's a little bit more volatility in there, and that has to do with factors -- project work sitting in there. And -- but we love it because it's really very often connected to the work that we're doing in lobbying and diversified services. So that was a reminder. Now let's go back to the revenues and the organic growth. So on the left, you see the 2% and the 2.7% as I said I was going to dive into. And you will immediately see here the reason why those numbers were a bit subdued. GR, we had no complaints about 4% steady, both years. DS actually didn't even fit on the chart, 23%. You only see 1 year growth there, by the way, because indeed, as I said, we came into our business in 2023. But PA, that is where we saw negative growth. And that down cycle really reflected both on project work, which was down and also some contraction in retailers. Now our analysis of why this is down is actually, there's 2 reasons for that, but I'm first going to show you how this looks by half year before you guys all have a heart attack. Because of course, this is -- this looks very scary and what's going to happen in the next year, if this is the growth trend in PA. Well, if you look at this by half year, you'll see actually that really what we've experienced is about a dip at the end of '23 and the beginning of '24. And luckily, in H2, we saw recovery to a level of 4%, which actually pleased us because it was still preelections. Now the main reason of the dip as we've analyzed in '23 and early '24 was in '23, there were still very much concerns in the U.S. about the direction of the economy, plus there were clearly a lot of geographical geopolitical issues around the world, Gaza War, et cetera, people uncertain about how they would spread across regions. We think that actually early '24, some of these concerns tapered off about the economy and about geopolitical risks, but then that was replaced by the upcoming preelection. And in communication land, elections mean a lot. Actually, clients are not spending that much in ahead of an election because, a, the first one want to know the outcome of the election before they know what to communicate about. And b, the air waves are very expensive because so much political messaging going on, which we're absolutely not involved in, but that is too expensive to really communicate. But luckily, elections are now behind us. Everybody knows what agenda they need to drive. And that's why in the lead up of that, we already saw public affairs pick up again in H2. And we know that we're standing well for 2025, which I'm going to come back to. But first, I want to give you a little bit of a further view of some metrics about our clients, which really underpin I'd say, the solidity and quality of the underlying business. The first very simple chart. Our number of clients has been growing up. Growing organically as well as via acquisitions. And when you have 1,226 clients, you can't handle them with just few important client service people. There are lots of client service people working on these clients, and that's actually a good factor of stability for us as well. Clients don't handle a few people. We have hundreds of farmers and hunters in our business. Now another client factor is our client dependency. Luckily, that has been further declining to the point that we're really not dependent on single clients that indicates our stability. And that's actually in a professional services company, quite rare because even large companies like the name has been mentioned, WPP, but you can also talk about Omnicom to [ Neo ]. They often have the core of clients that represent at least 30% of their business. We don't have that, and we're feeling very good about that. Another fact, a KPI that we've been tracking all along is actually the number of clients that spend more than $100,000 with us. Those are really our fuller clients. And you see how that number has been gradually increasing to 503 right now. That's plus 15%. And interestingly, those 503 clients, although that's really only 40% of our clients represent almost 83% of our revenues. So they really represent the core of our collective member of companies. Now actually, somebody said to us actually just this week, like, hey, why are we still reporting clients over $100,000 because really, that's not even that high a bar. So I think as of March, when we're publishing our full numbers, then we will also talk about a number of clients over $250,000 or so. And I've already seen, of course, the data, the line is going up the same way, only slightly lower number. Another client fact is categories where are clients active. And you can see from this chart that were really represented in all sectors. We're not particularly overweight in 1 sector or another. And really, I think if I look at this list, it pretty much represents the value of the economy in the U.S. and now to a large extent, also in the U.K. with the largest ones obviously being in pharma, health care, finance, energy and tech. But this is a very nice cross representation. And as I said, we're not overweight in one or the other category. And then the final client fact that I wanted to bring back to you is our retention, client retention. So we've done this cohort analysis and client cohort analysis, some of you might be familiar with it. You basically check when did a client enter the client roster and then you track it along to see how that client develops year-on-year. So this is everything together consolidated for PPHC, we have it, of course, for each of our operating companies. And you see how these cohorts, although they taper off slightly, they're really still very important, even clients that started us prior to 2018, saw a lot of them are still active in 2024. And that's good. So 1 way to quantify that is with that percentage bar that you see at the bottom, the dollar client retention, which has hovered between 80% and 85%. And this is the average of GR on the one hand and communications on the other hand. GR, typically retention is sort of low 90s and public Affairs, has a bit more project work and is then you're talking more about high 70s, low 80s. So this is the average. You see that perhaps in '24, actually, it tapered up to 80% and that's directly attributable to public affairs being down in 2024. But I expect there's not a projection, but I wouldn't be surprised if in '25, that number is up again. So now let's go back to -- after all the top line analysis. Let's go to the bottom line. And actually, 1 thing that I forgot to say, of course, at the beginning of these areas the trading update. These are not audited numbers yet. Audit is currently in full flow and mid-March we'll present all the numbers with all the footnotes that you like. But here's our profit. And the profit picture, as you know from us, we really track underlying EBITDA. That's a very good proxy of cash because the only thing that we further pay from that is some interest on debt and tax, but our investments in working capital are de minimis and CapEx is de minimis. So you see the trend. And you see especially a steep growth curve between 2018 and 2021. '21 was really a peak year for us for 2 reasons. It was the first year after presidential election. That's typically a very strong year. Plus it was post-COVID with all the COVID money flowing through the market, there was a lot of project work in that year. The good thing is that in '22, we saw the revenue still held up very well. But you see the profit came down a little bit in '22, and that was our first year as a public company. We had made only necessary investments as a public company and also made some investments in the holding company. And we started really growing again from there. Then in '24, you see that we recorded $36.1 million of EBITDA, which represents a margin of 24%. Now as I wrote in the RNS, that number is a bit colored by about $3 million of incremental one-off costs that I had to highlight. Normally, we're really of the type to say, all right, EBITDA is EBITDA, we throw everything in. We're not going to talk about [indiscernible]. But here, I am going to take the opportunity to have one [indiscernible], and that's a $3 million incremental one-off costs. What are they? About $2 million of that was attributable to M&A-related costs. We did our first international acquisition, which required us to really invest quite a bit in advisory -- on infrastructure and advisory on the transaction itself. Plus under U.S. GAAP, we have to take all the other transaction costs through it. So that means all the acquisition of debt costs. We have to take through the P&L, the stamp duty here in the U.K. we take through the P&L, FX conversion we take through the P&L. So all of that sort of accumulated in '24. It's not going to mean that we'll never have that again, but not to the same extent going forward. And the other part of our $3 million was Concordant. That's this internal start-up that we had which we knew that the first year was not going to be profitable. So that's now on a track to basically be neutral or profitable at any case in '25, but in '24, it weighed a bit on our results. So if I -- but for those $3 million, then our profit would have been $39 million, and that's a margin of 26%, right in our sort of sweet spot band that we've always communicated about that we expect our margins to be between 25% or 30%. So now I promised 1 final good news chart about '25, which I really want to take you through now. We're excited about this. We had a summit with a lot of our leaders at the beginning of this year. And the energy was really going through the room in an incredible way. Actually, many people couldn't really even attend because there was so much new business flowing in. So we're really having a lot of momentum right now and much more than what we had the same time in '24 and of course, the outcome of U.S elections plays into that. Many people have to reset their agendas and policy communication. Further, number two, we'll have even more focus on internal collaboration. And we know that, that's a good driver of value and growth. And last week, we announced the appointment of John Green as our Chief Client Officer, and one of his key brief is to further foster collaboration between our companies. Then there is the reduction in these one-off costs that I talked about, we won't have as many anymore in '25 as we will have in '24. And finally, the acquisitions that we did last year and now, of course, with TrailRunner, we will start to feed their results also into our overall results. So therefore, we have a lot of reasons to feel good about '25. And now I'd like to hand it over to Thomas, who's going to talk about the growth agenda.

Sorry, sorry. No, no, no. I'm sorry for overstaying my welcome on stage. Two things, just clarity because some of you hadn't met us before what -- he mentioned Concordant in the start-up phase. This is the first time we launched the brand. And it wasn't launching a brand to sort of -- it was about that collaboration, but also a bit of a conflict mitigation as well as sort of having a stack of talent and advisers that sort of pitched in a quite different outside Washington Beltway. How do you take the talent and the depth we have and begin to offer new services through a slightly different brand. So Concordant, which is the time together of knots, obviously, is a good example of that and is well worth that investment within the first year. Key client programs and the new Chief Client Officer is not a net new person, is a long-time business partner of Stewart. So someone that knows the vernacular, knows the game and knows where all the bodies are buried across the group, and he is raring and going. He started and he's been with Stewart for, what, 30 years. Okay. I'll leave it at that. Right. So John Green, if you continue to follow our story, you'll probably see them pop up somewhere, he's eager to come here to the U.K. again and dig in with Oli. I'll also say you might have noticed that Oli just slipped away with his coat, he's not leaving in protest. An example of this cross-selling is that today, right now, or in about 15 minutes, Mat's team at CRS and Oli's team at Pagefield are putting -- have a webinar essentially that is -- last I checked about 110 folks coming to it that is talking about foreign direct investment opportunities, research that was done here, sort of digging into sort of that area and presenting it to the state. So that is an example, in this case, thought leadership, but direct to clients and prospective clients on how Pagefield in this example, can really tap and take advantage of the D.C. connectivities and really try to expose both the new geographies and new faces of experts. So the cross-selling is really important. I mentioned the 10% referral. It's not just people wanting to [ lace ] their bonus pool, right? That's the end result and very helpful. But this keeps organizations like Cassandra's and like the Pagefield, Oli's group, of -- clients were saying, can you do more online advertising or can you get into research, can you get into -- and it's really -- for a subscale public affairs or any organization, it's hard to do the and, and, and, without diluting the margin significantly or having sort of a one-off researcher or a one-off digital strategist. So we can begin to look at these sort of horizontal applications. Clients need us in places, but it may not be -- we want to focus on expertise. We want to have the best policy person for energy, the best crypto expertise, et cetera. Meanwhile, the things that really require scale, both from a talent and execution perspective are things that on the horizontal, be it white label through 1 of the 10 brands or just as a PPHC function. She mentioned research, research a great way of opening doors. There's a lot of bad research in the market though. So how do you ensure, as a, dare I say, small or medium-sized Sacramento business, you really are bringing the best to your clients because otherwise, it's going to be a losing game. The number of organizations is the -- great and perhaps a little bit sassy, but when you go into a GBP 5 million agency or firm, and you say, "Wow, you got 18 specializations. You got 18, so if we do this, this, this, you've got 24 people. So how do you end up accomplishing all of that expertise with so few people?" And it's just we're going deep in the swim lane that we know and taking advantage of where there is opportunities for scale on the horizontal. We mentioned the summit. It's not just about one summit, but really, we are small enough still that people need to know names. People need to know the Cassandras, who you call in Sacramento, right? And it's not just about encouraging, but it's about putting her with all of these. So I'll tell you, I mean, you met -- we had 75 people of our leaders in Miami, it is well worth every dollar we spent on that summit. Not only getting people out of their organizations, but encouraging them to say like, forget about your brands for just a minute. Even forget about your existing portfolios. What do you need to pull growth? What in this room, how do we repackage, how do we look at shared talent investments, shared geographic, all of this, so Employee Summit is just part of the ongoing sort of connecting the dots for what is a very talented organization. You'll all ask it, so I throw it in here. It's early days on AI. We do not feel like the lobbying and high stakes communications work is going to get eaten quite the way that our friends in, call it, more consumer or commoditized services will. But there's a hell of a lot of interesting stuff that we can be doing from test -- congressional hearings and monitoring things, and AI empowering it is going to be. Though we're not taking bets on saying, here is our 1 AI solution. This has -- let 1,000 flowers bloom and figure out where then you need to come back and put the fertilizer on it. It's really an interesting time for all the individuals. And so one of the few outputs from the Employee Summit is really understanding the select things that we can bring to bear within the organization, what partners can we bring to scale and really start establishing best practices for the use of. The other way of this is AI as a policy opportunity and challenge, what's happening here versus in California versus Brussels versus will it be conceived at a D.C. level as to how these things will be regulated or enhanced. This is major opportunities for all of our clients wondering what that next thing looks like. Strategic pricing and sourcing initiatives, that's probably the least interesting for me as the Strategic Officer, but nonetheless, there is benefits of scale here from a U.S. perspective, just taking health care and the shared opportunities, like taking some things off of Jim Wilkinson's plate here, who has 80 employees and wants to be client facing, those sort of synergies, both on the pricing and then again, sort of within the initiatives that we can build from the scale of the organization at large, it doesn't take a [ una ] brand to do this. It takes a collective consensus around what the strategy is and an understanding that all boats will rise. Where is the operational leverage here? I think this will be at this point of the presentation, getting into a bit of a recap. But we do have a unique position. We go back to that list of lobbying shops. 2,500 long, 2,400, I think is the actual number. Having 3 of the top 20, that's been top the market for 5 years, that's our moat. That is the depth of policy expertise, that 90-odd percent retention rate that is unrivaled. We're very proud of that. That said, we always need to watch our home teams and ensure that we are staying well ahead as well as within the transparency regime. We really believe by extension of that in our multiple brands. We have Cassandra and Donna and their team in Sacramento. There is no reason to fly a PPHC flag or a Crossroads strategy flag there because people know LPA. And so yes, LPA powered by PPHC. Is that sort of wink and a nod of how you get to scale while also ensuring that you have the benefit. Early on, again, in Stewart's origination is this brand, this sort of family of brand would be most impactful in mitigating conflicts because when you put every dollar and every person and every conversation on the federal registrar, there's a degree of which Coke and Pepsi doesn't play together, or Boeing and Airbus doesn't play together. So how do you sort of conflict swap in order to capture the biggest market. As we've grown both from that specialization and just sort of realized the potential of what we're underway with, you retain employees a lot better in small organizations. You have culture specific to the wonderful women that run Lucas. You have a Crossroads strategy that's different -- you have a Crossroads culture that is different from an Alpine culture. We retain employees roughly at twice as much as our rivals. So if you say the average PR employee floats through at 25% to 30% sort of churn rate on the employee basis, we're less than half that across the disciplines. And that's important in order to keep your perch with that CEO, with that issue expert. You can't be calling folks and saying, "Got a new great client lead for you, don't worry, it's going to be fine." I've made many of those calls in my day. I'm happy we don't make many of them these days. At the same time that we believe in the brands, we are not just adding brands so that you can see more logos. This is very important to note. We are not just stacking revenue we're saying these are the swim lanes that we are in, keeping to our knitting and understanding how things can play together to avoid that duplication while offering some of the shared services that we spoke about. And then again, we are more and more focused on this upskilling. We don't believe that we're going to be replaced by bots. But at the same time, you've got to keep your talent fresh, you got to keep your tech partnerships fresh, you got to keep your infrastructure fresh such that you're ahead of the game. Obvious tailwinds here, anyone talking about trade and tariffs these days? It's a big one. It's going to be a big, big and global business driver for us at all levels of the business. Global energy transition and expansion, it was a careful note by one of our colleagues on the expansion because is the energy transition still happening? It is, but perhaps the windmill is not the best graphics to be presenting here. AI revolution, I've mentioned about. And then finally, and this is where the federal state and international chessboard works together. If you are sitting in the C-suite of a global Fortune 100 business, you have fires everywhere. And you can either go to a una brand that has folks everywhere but may not be connected or you go to the best people in the market. And we want to be the latter and we want to ensure that those best people have the access to the scale that PPHC can provide. So the M&A hunt is on both against specializations and geography. Again, to the point here, and this is getting a little into the financial leverage that we had, as Roel described. There is a compounding value here as the client portfolio grows and the expertise grows. We are deeply embedded. We have strong, sticky scopes. There is an attractive return on capital for each dollar we spend and incredibly low CapEx. We are people in office space and the latter of which is not nearly as important as it was 5 years ago. We do -- everyone is -- every deal is a new challenge and opportunity, but the acquisition playbook from everything from pipeline development, right through to getting them in Washington to meet all their new colleagues, we're building a playbook here. And everyone is a special snowflake, there's no question about it. But at the same time, the market out there is ripe for consolidation. Not only against the 2,200, 2,300, 2,400 lobbyists, but more so as we see every day, there's a new deal in strategic communications, happy that we were the one in the headlines this week, but there'll be another next week I assure you. So as we get more and more word out there, 4 years ago, no one heard of PPHC. We're still deliberately under the radar. Our brands and our people are at the front of the page. But at the same time, as we speak to private equity, as we speak to entrepreneurs, as I work my way around London, Chicago, California, et cetera, et cetera, they're beginning to see, right, you're the ones who, you're the ones who, isn't -- and that's a very important milestone that I would say maybe a year ago, we just started feeling that feedback loop on, oh, right, I remember, you are the ones that are listed in London. And then, of course, here, the capital discipline with the investments, these are EPS accretive things. And here we have a very strong balance sheet that you'll see, and we are ripe for enhanced growth. Quickly here, and I'm going to focus mostly because you've met some of these folks and you can read the numbers, some of this. The ones that are most recent, obviously, have not been a full year with us. So therefore, we don't have a full set of data. I want to focus on this, and this is both back to my story of how Stewart and I connected and really began to grapple with this. We not just ask, but we insist that all of our founding or cap-tabled present entrepreneurs, say, "Okay, I get it. You want to be with us forever." Wink and a nod. "Who's your next? Who's the ones that are going to carry it forward?" That just hit the bus scenario, but how do we really build succession planning into these small and medium-sized businesses that have been principally founder-led, reputationally driven. So from KP with 6 of -- KP probably has 25, 26 employees?

35.