Staffline Group PLC (OSU.F) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Staffline Group final results investor presentation. [Operator Instructions] Before we begin, we would like to submit the following poll. And as usual, I'm sure the company will join me in thanking you for your participation. And I'd now like to hand over to CEO, Albert Ellis. Good afternoon.

Good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to the Staffline Group plc's full year results. The first presentation and full year results, we're providing after equity raise and refinancing in the summer of last year. I've got with me my CFO, very capable, Daniel Quint. And our objective is to give you as much information this afternoon, it's as short as possible. We know your time is precious, and we really appreciate you giving us this time. We -- our objective for 2022 as it relates to investors is to really try and engage with our retail investors. The investors that actually have good strong opinions about what we're doing, what we should be doing, and we want to engage with you as much as possible. So without further ado, we're going to kick straight off. The first slide is just a reminder. If you are an investor and you do know Staffline well, which I can imagine there are many of you, you'll know that we're the market leader in blue collar recruitment. And the one thing about uncertainty is that our customers recognize and they tell us their scale and quality and reach is what they're looking for in times of uncertainty, particularly at the moment, when you've got the cost of living crisis, you have all the uncertainty, the news is such a depressing place at the moment. Our own customers are telling us that they want to work with solid, large organizations. So this slide is just to remind you, we're the largest in the U.K. and Ireland in terms of blue collar recruitment. And we're very much growing our white collar footprint as well. The next slide is just a summary, and I'm not going to go through the highlights. If you are following, you would have read them yesterday at any rate. But it's not often a CEO -- and I've been in public markets for 20 years now -- it's not often that you can say that there's really no wrinkles in the set of results. And in this one, there certainly isn't any wrinkle. Every KPI, every financial result is going in the right direction. And the most important result for me this year, the biggest achievement was really our organic growth. I mean we haven't built this growth and these profits through acquisitions. We've done it organically, and the business has delivered organic growth, which, as you know, is some of the best value growth. All 3 divisions growing profitability and gross profit, major achievements right across the board. So consistency there. And we'll talk about our new contracts and our strategy later on in the presentation. Over to you, Daniel.

Thanks, Albert. Good afternoon, everyone. Really great to be able to present to all of you again. I'm just going to run through the highlights of the full year results for 2021. So as you would have seen, revenue was up 1.6%, and that was also after us exiting one of our largest clients at the beginning of 2021. So although revenue is up 1.6%, actually, when you strip it out and we look at it on a normalized like-for-like in inverted-commerce basis, it would be closer to 6%. So we're really pleased with that achievement, especially during COVID. Really strong results on gross profit, which Albert and I really pride ourselves in driving forward, up 11% year-over-year, which allowed the margin to move up from 8% to 8.8% and a really strong performance in '21. And finally, something that we're really proud of and gives us a really good platform for 2022, more than doubling of underlying operating profit by 114%, 115%. Not just driven by the improvement in gross margin, but driven by the gross profit conversion improvement that went up from 6.4% to 12.1%. And that is the ability to convert from gross profit into operating profit and is a good signal about how we're controlling overhead costs. So something that we're really pleased to have performed in '21. As a result of both the deferred VAT that we held for much of last year, but also the equity raise that we did, finance costs have reduced by 41% to GBP 2.4 million. So excellent from an interest perspective there. And then our first profit after tax since 2017 after a very difficult early first year for us in 2020 when we really started working on the business, Albert and myself. And we turned into GBP 1.6 million profit after tax, again, a really good delivery for 2021. And finally, cash, the balance sheet has seen a real turnaround from -- we had GBP 8.8 million of net debt at the end of 2020 and now GBP 6.9 million at the end of 2021. So gone are the years of 2019 and even 2020 when we had high GBP 10 million worth of net debt, and really, again, consolidating the platform that we have to work with going into '22. The key drivers of that, the equity raise, of course, but very importantly, the important -- the improved trading cash flow, strong cash collections. There was circa GBP 10 million of timings. But even after all that, we have paid the majority of our deferred VAT off, and we have paid the final installment of GBP 5.8 million on the 31st of January 2022, leaving the business free of any deferred VAT liability or any other COVID loans whatsoever. So moving on to gross profit. And this just gives you an indication of where those margin increases have come across the group by division moving from the left, so Recruitment GB, significantly driven by the exit from low-margin contracts. One top 5 client that we exited at the beginning of 2021, but a few other smaller ones have contributed to that improvement. In Recruitment Ireland, a significant push in the direction of permanent recruitments, which has really enabled the margin to move up very healthily from 8.7% to 10.1%. And finally, in PeoplePlus, an increase of 1.1% to 25%, driven by our focus on delivering the operations of the PeoplePlus business in a really efficient manner at gross profit level. So that all aggregating to that 80 bps improving from 8.0% to 8.8% in gross profit margin, a really healthy outturn for last year. Now on to net debt -- you'll see the improvement of GBP 15.7 million in pre-IFRS 16 net debt from GBP 8.8 million debt to GBP 6.9 million net cash. The key drivers of that, and I would point you to the left-hand side of that waterfall graph. GBP 15.2 million of underlying EBITDA. Again, a really excellent deliverable there, some CapEx and the lower interest numbers taking us to the right-hand side. But another really key feature GBP 13.7 million of receivables inflow, that's showing the strong collection performance, the cash collection performance of last year and credit to my group finance team as well who enabled a GBP 5.8 million reclaim from HMRC in corporation tax in previous years. And then the other key elements to that, we brought on GBP 17.8 million of formally off balance sheet item onto the balance sheet, and then we repaid our VAT. But of course, on the far right-hand side, the equity rate is really delivering for us a really successful equity rate, again, allowing a really good platform for 2022. And finally, from me, just looking at the finance facilities that we have in our -- we had on our group at the end of December, which, of course, we still currently have. This is a journey, as you'll see from the left-hand side, during 2018, where the group had fixed term debt quite unwieldy and we've moved it all the way to the right-hand side where we have a fully receivables facility, which moves in line with trading in our business. And I suppose the key headline here at the end of 2021 is that we had banking headroom of GBP 78.4 million, which was a blend of GBP 48.6 million of unutilized element on our receivables facility and then GBP 29.8 million worth of cash. And you'll see on the right-hand side, a real attributes of our banking facility, which is a GBP 90 million facility, over 4.5 years and allowing us now to take advantage of a low margin rate of 2% plus SONIA. So really allowing us to move into '22 with a solid platform. And I'll hand back to Albert now to go through the operations.

Thank you, Daniel. And just a reminder, Daniel and I believe that cash is key. It's easy to forget that when times are good, but it's when times are starting to look a little bit more uncertain, that suddenly you look at your portfolio and companies with cash stand out, and they can take advantage of market opportunities. So on to the operational review, and I'm going to be quite brief because I think you've seen some of the group numbers, and they've been very impressive. But I'm just going to bring out 1 or 2 points on each division, starting with the recruitment business. As Daniel said, we actually grew underlying revenue, if you exclude the low-margin contract. And Daniel has talked about the gross margin, but I want to just focus on the labor shortage for a minute, and we've developed a really strong strategy, which I will go into in a little while about how we are facing into that labor shortage and taking advantage. Essentially, this business had a great year. Of course, last year wasn't too bad either because the recruitment business enjoyed a competitive advantage with its scale in the food, distribution, logistics and essential sectors. So now we're looking forward to times when travel and automotive and manufacturing start motoring. So really good year building on last year's strengths. And as you can see, operating profit as a conversion ratio from gross profit really now into mid-teens, double digits from 9% last year. And if you're acquainted with the sector, you'll see whether it's Page, Hays or Walters, 14% to 18% is very respectable. But obviously, we would want to push forward where we think there's more to go there. On to Ireland, a smaller business, and the first thing that will hit you is that revenue went backwards slightly. This is on purpose. Ireland is not a large blue collar market. It's more white collar, more public sector. And of course, the South in the South, you've got the -- that's the Eurozone, for example, and there's lots of tech and pharmaceuticals and banking. So much more white collar, very attractive market. And so we focused on gross profit. And as Daniel said, and he pointed out in his gross profit, gross margin slide, it's the first time we've hit double digits certainly since we've been associated with the company. So a full gross margin. That's a full fat margin of 10% and gross profit up. So ignore the revenue for a moment. And then look at the profit and the conversion ratio. This is all about cost control, strong pivot to permanent recruitment, white collar recruitment. And so that lifted profit by over 56%. And that is -- there's an interesting stat here, and that's the gross profit per fee earner. You'll see is only fractionally up at 2%. Productivity in Ireland right now is maxed out. And you can tell that by the conversion ratio of 22%. You saw 14% in GB, a long way to go. You're already at 22% here, well over the market. So what the signal here is we need to fill up the tank. We need to put more fee earners on the front line and grow the business, which is exactly what we're going to do. And finally, PeoplePlus, for those of you that have our long memory, you will hear that PeoplePlus has a rather checkered history some ups and downs. Well, I mean, these are some stunning results. If we were giving Oscars, PeoplePlus would certainly get an Oscar for this performance. Every single measure is up in double digits and operating profit coming -- albeit coming from a lower base, up 156%. And it's a full turnaround. So our strategy has changed. We're focusing on multiple contracts. We don't want to be reliant on a single contract or a single department or a single commissioner. And our management's total change, the Managing Director, is -- a new Managing Director, new FDs and the whole organization has been streamlined and the organizational design element being maximized to get maximum productivity. We took a radical approach to costs and in the last 12 months and indeed before that, we have continued to rationalize and align our cost base with revenue. One of the things that we have looked at is incentivization. And for the first time, the PeoplePlus management have been incentivized to be efficient to deliver and to deliver results, both for their customers but also for the group. So we've had some headwinds, and I won't be shy about telling you about skills. Our skill centers and training centers have actually been light on volumes. That's been offset -- more than offset by the employability and the jobs part of the business. But you've got to think of this as a yin and yang. If the jobs market is strong, people don't present themselves for training, they go and get jobs. And if the jobs market is weak and there's higher unemployment, of course, you get a lot more referrals for training. So there's a yin and yang. Nevertheless, we're focusing on transforming that skills division so that it's equally pulling its weight. And I'll talk about restart in a minute, but you can see, finally, the acid test of any good consulting business is productivity, and that's an 18% uplift from the prior year. Now I think we're actually on track here. I'm just checking, we're on Slide 14, and we've had 15 minutes. So we're on track for a minute slide. So I'm going to just canter through the market trends, and I find this the most fascinating part of the conversation. Look, it's -- these are the Office for National Statistics. That's the most reliable in terms of statistics. And I'll start off with a favorite slide, which is our payroll employees in the U.K. is at a record GBP 29.7 million. That's the size of our market. Our average pay in the U.K. is about GBP 27,000 per annum, and there's 30 million people employed in that market. And when people move, you've heard of The Great Resignation, you've heard of the jobs crisis in terms of there's no labor to fill the jobs. That's a good market for us. So these stats are all pointing in the right direction. Now I promised you I'd just, for a moment, talk about the labor shortage in the blue-collar market. There is not an unlimited amount of labor coming across the borders from the European Union any longer. In fact, COVID has actually changed the market for all countries in that migration and borders now have changed in terms of the flows and in terms of the ease of which labor can be employed from different countries and deployed into different areas. So what we're going to do is focus on what we call good work. And what does the worker want? Because in the shortage, the worker is king. They want good paying conditions. They want a steady income. They want a good, safe, warm environment in which to work, and they want cheap travel to work. They want to be close to work. Now what is the right employer look like? Well, this is a respected well-known brand with a positive culture purpose and further opportunities. So we would then naturally want to partner with good employers, give flexible solutions. We want to be paid fairly and that's what we're looking at right now, our commercials. We want the compliance and the respect for the worker to be paramount with our relationship with our customers. So it's a full cultural alignment. And this is what we call "Good Work". Now if you're offering "Good Work", you can attract workers. And if you're not, obviously, workers have a choice. Just a little stat that shows you how far up the value chain we've gone in 2 years in the bottom right-hand corner there, you'll see our average pay rate has risen by 17%. That's average in 2 years. That's how far up the value chain the entire [ super tank ] group of staff line GB has moved up the value chain. Now you've heard a lot about ESG. I'm sure, like me, you're getting lots of Internet newsletters from various journals touting themselves as experts. I want you to think of ESG, environmental, social and governance, as a competitive advantage with PeoplePlus and our -- look at our hallmark statistics, there are 15,000 learners into jobs, we're training prisoners. We're providing "Good Work" to 38,000 temps on a daily basis. 60% of our labor force, our temp labor force Europeans with settled status, we really are providing "Good Work" to those parts of the community that can sometimes be left behind. So this is our USP, and it's a competitive advantage because with the supply chain dynamics at the moment, our customers, which are FTSE100, they've all got lots of regulation coming down the pipeline in terms of the environmental impact, their social and their governance attributes, and they're passing that straight to us. And we're in front of the queue in terms of our social good. Now strategy is all very fine. But what is -- what about the action behind it? And how has it translated? Now I'll just remind you, we have 4 key pillars to our strategy: capitalizing on our market leadership in our contingent workforce; recruitment; broadening our portfolio into white collar and permanent; focusing on driving PeoplePlus growth; and finally, as I said, we've got too few fee-earner in a great market called Ireland, we need to bulk up and invest. First of all, we announced -- and if you look at the right-hand side of the slide there, a fantastic customer, which is the epitome of "Good Work". BMW pay well, they treat their employees extremely well. And actually, it is an environment which people want to work. we're providing and we're managing the labor force in Carly in the many operations and also in Goodwood in Rolls-Royce. So that is our flagship win. It's demonstrated that Staffline's back, and it's demonstrated that Staffline is able to win very large contracts really at the top of the market. In 2021, we already told you about HelloFresh and do and Finnebrogue and of course, Restart. But I just want to tell you, there's more to come from those. We didn't get a full annualized benefit in '21. So in '22, I've estimated, and this is not -- my CFO, this is my estimate, it's $120 million of new business. Now Daniel will come back in a year's time and tell you whether that number was right or not. But that's my calculation of the annualized new business benefit of the contract wins. All of this has been enabled by the contribution from the equity raise and the refinance. So I just want to deal with 2 little smaller points. Restart, as you remember, we've actually won that in our PeoplePlus business, GBP 90 million worth of potential revenues over 4 years in 3 contract areas. Actually, we haven't recognized a penny of profit yet, even though we've been invoicing and receiving cash, we're very conservative, and we're only going to recognize profit as and when we're certain. So that's Restart. It's a really secured opportunity that is now ready for the next 12 to 18 months for us to generate returns. And then VINCI, a company that wasn't acquainted with in my past life, one of the world's largest construction firms. We've actually got a 5-year extension. And one of the reasons they said we were top of the list for that extension was because we'd recapitalized, strengthened our balance sheet during tough times, we've put ourselves in a very good position because of our strong cash position to be able to be a good, strong partner for them. And of course, you'll know they're doing the Southampton to London pipeline, the Esso pipeline, and we're going to be helping in providing management and recruitment outsourcing services for them. So terrific capitalizing on our core market. On to expanding into white collar, moving up the value chain, here, you'll just see and you can read it for yourself. We've got a number of companies, Webhelp, Hermes and others, where we're starting to recruit call center operators. Now if you're in the blue collar sector and you're in a warehouse or you're in a laboring position, going into a call center is more money it's more guest-based. It's more white collar in that sense. It is more highly skilled. So this is a greater opportunity. And what we found was because of the 1 million people that we have in our database, we're able to ramp up this very, very quickly. So with Hermes, they asked us to find some call center people for them. I think in Leeds over December, and we found 100 people and placed them within a few weeks, a matter of weeks from our database. So we have a jewel there that we can move slightly left and right of our core market. It's even a surprise us at how successful this new initiative has been. And then finally, focusing on permanent. If you're a guru in the staffing sector, you'll know permanent, the holy grail of cash, higher margins and strong relationships with your customers because customers love hiring people onto their permanent staff. It's a much more strategic sell and it embeds you with the customer. And this is just an example with Ocado, and I'll leave you to read the detail. We pitched a strategic relationship with them. They're a good customer of ours. It wasn't the right time for them, but they did say to us they've got literally hundreds of vacancies, permanent vacancies. We put in a team, a dedicated team, and we placed 184 people at Ocado just in the final quarter of last year. So we're -- not only are we the market leader in temps, but we're able now quickly to turn the tap on in permanent hire, and there's a yin and yang between permanent and temp as well. And with that, I'll let Daniel conclude. Thank you.

Thanks, Albert. Just before we conclude and take some Q&A, just a reminder of the investment summary. We're a market leader. We've got an experienced management team now, turnaround completed, attractive portfolio of services and output, express that through the variety and the broadening of those -- of that portfolio. digital technologies. I've seen a question on that, and we'll come to that in the Q&A. Strong growth sectors, logistics and Albert just touched on a new one for us, contact centers, which, of course, is part of that new remote reality that a lot of us have got used to over the last couple of years, resilience in terms of lower cyclicality, very important. And finally, a cash-generative model. And just to finally cover the outlook as we see it going forward, momentum from '21 coming into 2022. We will hopefully get the tailwinds of the U.K. and Ireland's economic recovery, which we're all seeing, and we're in the city today, and we can see that business around the city, which is excellent to see. Strong pipeline, BMW, the latest manifestation of that. So really exciting new win to announce there, but not at the derailing of any organic growth, and we've shown you that how we've grown the business organically. And we as directors are confident that we've really got a good, sustainable growth in the future, and we're currently trading in line with expectations. And that concludes our presentation now. And we're happy to take some questions.

[Operator Instructions] I'd like to remind you that a recording of this presentation along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A can be accessed via your company dashboard once the Q&A has been transcribed and reviewed, we'll send that link to you for your review. Daniel, Albert, as you can see investors have submitted a number of questions throughout your presentation. I wondered if I may, if I could hand back to you to read out the questions and then give a response where it's appropriate to do so, and I'll pick up from you at the end.

Yes. Thank you, Mark. And really pleased that you're engaging and please ask lots of questions. We don't shy away from questions. You might not like the answer, but we'll always give you one. Great question from [ Mark ]. Congrats on results. And yes, we have referenced the BMW contract. It is strategically important. That's why we flagged it. What we find really important about this is, first of all, success follows success. So once you've actually secured a material contract $50 million plus in revenues, significant contracts in the U.K. with a top employer other employers and other tenders become slightly easier. And of course, it's in the auto manufacturing sector, where we've already got a strong footprint with Jaguar Land Rover and driver -- so there's a good crossover there. So that's why it's strategically important. We can cross-fertilize our expertise and our workforce in that sector and bring sort of the sector expertise to it. And then the other thing, which is less visible, but very, very -- we're very keen to capitalize on is once you have a lead into BMW or Jaguar Land Rover, you have -- you can then have referrals into the supply chain. So your expertise in the auto sector then go straight up the vertical supply chain, and that's where we expect to expand our market share. So it's why we're so excited about this win. It also validates the equity raise and refinancing. It shows that our balance sheet can cope with a contract of this size and scale. And indeed, we've run all the numbers, and we can actually swallow it. And in terms of uncertainty, a top employer like BMW will not want to place their valuable employees in the hands of a company that wasn't as transparent and as well run as Staffline. So that's why it's so important and I spent a bit of time on that. So I hope you don't mind. Next one is the digital transformation. I'm going to hand that one to Daniel. And Michael is asking how the digital transformation is progressing are we continue to see cost savings and operational benefits.

Yes. Thanks, Albert. And so it is progressing. We've decided to approach digital transformation, automation, as we call it, actually, as well in a progressive, incremental fashion rather than the big bang. And I've got one stat to illustrate the answer to the question, are we seeing cost savings and operational benefits to which the answer is yes, but one stat to illustrate this. In 2020, one of the key benefits we see is automated booking of interviews. So not human beings booking interviews, but automated booking of interviews through our offline chat bot. And in 2020, we saw single-digit thousands of interviews booked. And in 2021, we are seeing tens of thousands of interviews booked. A fantastic -- and I looked into this last week as I knew this question and have been monitoring it carefully. I wanted to get the latest statistics. But that for me is one of the biggest examples of how we're delivering on our automation and digital strategy, and we'll continue to drive that at the same time as not prejudicing the operations of the business but actually enhancing them as we go forward. So hopefully, that gives you some confidence there.

And if I can just add a sort of a slightly interesting perspective to this question, which is because we're one of the most prolific brands on the job sites, totaljobs, Indeed, et cetera. And because we've got this technology that is automating the harvesting of candidates who are looking at the job sites for opportunities, we have a unique scale and reach in the Internet area in the virtual world, where Staffline is a major force. And therefore, we can outcompete in terms of our spend, in terms of our quality, in terms of the number of jobs and the digital transformation helps us manage that volume. [ Simon ], you said great to see significant organic growth, what's your view on future M&A? I think I've answered this question before. In the short term or certainly if you look at the next 2 years, and I think 2 years at the moment is a long enough window. We've got so much organic growth opportunities, and we've got much more to go on the transformation. I mentioned the skills area of PeoplePlus. That's the '22 organic story where we will transform skills, and we will -- it will actually increase its margins. and we believe increases revenues. We've also got a ton of organic growth coming from existing customers. Samworth Brothers is a good example. They're growing. They provide so much of the sort of essential food stuffs in the supermarkets in the stores and shelves and the food to go in the country. And food to go has really been affected by COVID. With the opening now we're seeing lots more food to go in companies like Samworth are at the forefront of that. So we just feel there's a lot more to go organically. If you look at travel, we're starting to see ground services where we've traditionally been strong. So if you look at the aircraft and you look at the sort of catering that has to go into that, the clearing of those aircraft and refreshing and turnaround, we're providing labor in that area in a lot of the airports in the U.K. So we're starting to see activity there. So loads of organic growth to go for. M&A never fall from our strategy, but for the short to medium -- short to 24-month window, we'll be focusing on organic, which, as you know, if you've read anything about investing is one of the best ways to drive shareholder value. Now someone's asked me with $120 million is a further 10% uplift in turnover. I just wanted to caution maybe I'm being a bit too CEO and bullish about this. Remember, we do have customers that aren't -- whose trading isn't going well, sectors that have been more affected by COVID and sectors -- in fact, just individual companies where maybe their volumes are not growing at the same pace as Tesco, Sainsbury's, Ocada. So you get those. So we do have negative organic growth or declines. So it's the winning of new business, the $120 million is annualized new business and organic growth. But of course, we have a churn factor as well. And there are customers that we've exited, and we continue to exit customers where we feel they're not either being properly commercial. They don't understand the "Good Work" strategy or they found someone else, and that happens, obviously. [ Paul ], congratulations on the results. What impact is this situation in Ukraine? I'll just quickly talk about this. Look, Ukraine isn't in the European Union. So Ukranians need to -- and this is a very -- it's a very, very topical and a very, very painful subject to even think about the pain and the suffering that's going on so close to our own borders here. But they essentially are refugees and we've seen with the Afghanistan refugees is quite challenging in terms of work visas and the whole process. So what we've done is we've linked with the job centers, and we've linked with all the government infrastructure and the partners like there's a company called [ Mighty ], which is a public company. They manage the asylum system, the refugee system on behalf of the government. And we've got partners like [ Mighty ]. We've got strong relationships. We bid with them in certain contracts. So we're working with our partners, and we're working with the job centers to help. And of course, with the job -- with the candidate shortage, people who are skilled and people who want to work are welcome, and that's what we're doing. [ Paul's ] asked then, what about dividends? And this is a perennial question. And obviously, we were -- we refinanced last year, and we did an equity raise. So you wouldn't expect immediately for us to be looking at dividends because we were using the capital to gain advantages and to shore up our balance sheet and to reinvent ourselves. So in about 3 to 6 months, we're starting to be free of those restrictions on dividends, which would have been part of the refinancing. But at the moment, we really feel we've got a lot of the organic opportunities that we can put the funds to good use. And so we are not looking at dividends for the next 18 months minimum. We would rather give you returns. And we know that we've canvased a lot of our shareholders and many of them are interested in the capital returns. And so that is our view. We also feel that with times of uncertainty, as we've just gone through a fundraising, we should keep our -- conserve our cash, be cautious, keep our balance sheet strong and underpin the share price. So lots more to answer on that subject. But certainly for the next 12 months, we're not declaring a dividend. Michael has asked what KPIs are key to measure your performance? Daniel.

Yes. Thanks, Albert. So key KPIs would be gross profit. Revenue is an indicator of volume and scale, but gross profit is the best indicator of the fees that we are earning and how we're doing and getting fees out of our customers in an appropriate fashion. The next KPI would say is how successful we are in converting that from gross profit to operating profit, really important. And then a couple of other stats as well. We've commented in the presentation on gross profit per fee earner. So that's in the recruitment businesses. That's the 2 recruitment businesses, and that shows how effective our fee earners are being. And on the PeoplePlus side, that is at a revenue level because it's a consultancy contract business. And therefore, the best indicator of performance there is on revenue per employee and how successful we are winning contracts. So for me, those are the key measures. Of course, other important measures are net debt, net cash in our incidence at this year-end and very, very. We obviously monitor that daily, weekly and monthly. And those, for me, are the key measures that I would look at when I was seeing how successful the business was.

Thank you, Daniel. A quick question on investing in shares. Yes, Daniel and I have both made substantial private and personal investments in the company in the last 12 months. When the share price fell recently as a result of the announcement of war in Eastern Europe and all share prices fell dramatically, particularly those on the A market, we were constrained because we had the BMW contract in progress. We were in a closed period in a price-sensitive period and we were constrained from trading. So this is a difficult one when you see a share price that's well below what we believe its value is but we were constrained. So I'm sure you can understand if you've got a material contract, you're not able to do that. But I don't know if you've seen today that one of our directors who's stepped down after 3 years, he's done his turn, that's Richard Thompson, has actually acquired some more shares on the way up in -- as he retires from the Board, which is one of our largest shareholders. It's quite something he's never seen a nonexec buy shares on retirement. So there's a real confidence signal for you. And we -- Daniel and I will be acquiring shares shortly because just as part of our routine share save scheme. You've mentioned share save. We're all involved in the share save.

Yes. If I can just 1 comment to the specific question, how is the employee share scheme going? That was launched in October, November last year. That or last year's cycle a bit. And we actually had the biggest take-up since 2017. So very well received by the wider employee base in the group.

Good. And then finally, we always get this question. We always love -- I love to give a good answer about our strategy to defend the takeover. But yes, of course, every public company and every CEO and every Board of a public company has an obligation to protect value for their shareholders. Of course, bids fail, bids succeed, bids can come. I keep on reminding people we're actually a capitalist economy. So that means people can buy and sell assets in a free -- in a way that's free. And so these things can come and we're prepared for them. If it's in shareholders' interest, we will consider them. We will do our duty, but we will not sell cheap. We have 2 major shareholders, Spain and HRnet, who you know between them own more than 30% of the company. and they clearly were not in the business, investing and losing money. So there's some comfort and protection there that the company will never be sold cheap. But that's the best answer I can give is we're fully aware of these possibilities and we'll always ensure that we act in our shareholders' interest. [ Paul ] has asked the share price is struggling to reflect the true value. What are we doing to address this? I think that today is a typical example. We've been on invested now only for a few months. We love platform we want to engage with more of you. Listen, please register on our website so that you can get regular communication registered with InvestMe, we'll use InvestMe as a platform to put out all kinds of new information. We're starting to get used to it. We did a trading statement last month -- or sorry, a couple of months ago, and we did the InvestMe on the trading statement. We will use InvestMe more and more as we get to grips with it. And if we can use this platform, which is very interactive and gives high visibility, then I think that, that's part of it. Daniel?

Yes, just one thing to add to Albert's comments there, we engaged a new research company, Zeus in late '21, early '22. And their research is available on our investor website. You can just access it through research tree, but you can access it through the analyst notes section on our Investor page, which takes you through to research trees, so you can read note on that. And that's a direct answer to the question in that we are broadening and widening the amplification of the information and the news on the company and therefore, more people are exposed to what we're doing and hopefully, how successful we're able to drive the business forward.

Yes, we're retail investors, Daniel and I. We want information. So we think that you should have as much information as possible, at least as much information as everybody else gets. So please look at the Zeus notes. It's very comprehensive. We spent a lot of time with Zeus, and you've got the forecast and you got the numbers in the note in the detail.

Yes. Just one comment. I think the same person that was asking about the share price just commented in terms of social media in Twitter. That is on our radar now in the last couple of months. [ Relivening ], shall I say, those channels to the outside world. And so yes, very, very mindful of that, and we'll be taking that forward.

Good comment, good suggestion. Then we've got one about -- it doesn't see, I believe, the turnaround actions, which have been taken are in full force and effect or is that now? I will say this, the turnaround feels to me to be complete. In broad terms, you've got doubling of profit to double digits. You've got revenue growth, you've got new contract wins, you've got serious reduction in cost base and you've got cash on the balance sheet. And that to me is classic turnaround with management that we've brought in fresh management, and we've had a strengthening of the governance. But I still believe that companies in these uncertain times should be -- they should be running the business tight with full attention to costs and make sure that they do the -- they tweak the business or they trim the sales constantly and not treat any job as done. But constantly make sure that the housekeeping is done and the tweaking and the trimming of the sales is done properly so that we don't get into the situation that Staffline found itself before. That's one point. The second point is I believe we're in Phase 2 now of emerging from a turnaround and emerging into the sunlight as it were and actually those sunny uplands of growth are now very visible to us. We mentioned 2 large contracts, BMW and Restart, which we've yet to get any benefit from as a company and they all secured, they're in the bank. So that is the growth that we're looking at. That's the sort of thing that we need to do.

Yes. Just a final question. Are you doing any city presentations like this to find managers? The answer is yes. We are, of course, meeting current investors' fund managers and newer prospective ones as well. And that includes not just fund management, but I suppose more mid-tier wealth managers as well as your normal larger fund managers as well.

Yes. And by the way, it's the same presentation that gets delivered. Daniel's a stickler for the rules and a stickler for the culture and the substance of information, freedom of the information and equity and the information, and he has made sure you get the same presentation as the fund managers. And indeed, we're thinking and trying to plan for next time that we might do the Investor Meet presentation on the same day as our results. For whatever reason, the schedules fell in a different way this time. But yes, ideally, we would want to do it on the first day of our results so that everybody gets the same information on the same day.

That's great. Daniel, Albert, as you can see, you've answered every single question as usual. Thank you so much for being generous with your time, and thank you to all the investors for their engagement this afternoon. I'll shortly redirect investors to provide you with the thoughts and their expectations and their feedback, which I know is important to you both. But before doing so, I wondered if I may, Albert, just ask you for a few closing comments.

Thank you. And so just thank you to all of our loyal investors. I mean I see you guys, some of the probably on the message boards. You make me smile, but you're very smart. And we want to have a strong and close relationship with investors, particularly retail investors. It's been a growing market as we've seen right across the world. We feel that the company has been a bit distant in the past. We want to make sure we engage. And so the business is in a really good place. And of course, no company because it's a catalyst market, can perfectly predict the future, but we're doing everything we can to make sure that we get the most out of Staffline and its divisions and extract all the value that's there to be mined and to be delivered to the market. So thank you so much for attending. We know your time is precious, and we really appreciate you engaging with us this afternoon.

That's great. Albert, Daniel, thank you once again for updating the investors this afternoon. Could I please ask investors not to close this session as we'll now automatically redirect you for the opportunity to provide feedback in order that the management team can better understand your views and expectations. Just will only to take a few moments to complete and as usual, I'm sure will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of Staffline Group plc, I would like to thank you for attending today's presentation. That now concludes this afternoon's session. So once again, thank you again, and good afternoon to you all.