Xref Limited (XF1) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

My name is Lee-Martin Seymour. I'm the Founder and CEO of Xref. Our ticker code is XF1. You can find more information about us, if you go to xf1.com. Because we're using Zoom this morning, please keep yourselves on mute. Whilst I'm running through our results, please use chat. We've got James Solomons, our CFO, working Zoom in the background. So he's going to be looking at your chats or requests for questions. And then here, I invite you to ask your own question, or he'll ask it for you dependent on what you've asked for. Yesterday, 24 hours ago, we sent out a release, quite an intricate release around our year, and we've managed to get some results out to you, prior to the release of our annual report, which is fantastic. Well done, James, for helping us get that out. Hopefully, you've read the release, I'm going to speak to that this morning. If you haven't, please take time to. There's a lot of information in there. The agenda for this morning is: I'm going to walk you through our year, our goals that we started off with in 2023, 12 months ago; how we executed those goals throughout the year; the results, as we've drawn up through the release yesterday, the goals that we have for FY '24, and then we'll open the floor up for some Q&A. So without further ado, it's probably a good exercise for our investors to go back and read the release that we sent out on July 5, 2022. And it really did lay out what we wanted to do as a business in 2023. It also gave our results, including our free cash surplus that we generated in 2022 of $2.5 million. We made 3 goals 12 months ago. The first one was we wanted to increase our overall total addressable market. How are we going to do that? Well, we have been in the recruitment sector for now 13 years. And the recruitment part of any business is only ever 10% to 15% of their overall talent within their company. So if you think about a company with 1,000 staff, their attrition rate is probably 10% to 15%. So they're going to hire 10% to 15%, and they're going to have 10% to 15% of their 1,000 staff leave them during the course of the year. We've only ever been able to provide reference checking automation in that recruitment space, so 10% of the organization. So what we really wanted to do is pick up the technology that served us so well over that 13 years and rebuild products that can be used across the hire to retire of a candidate. So we set out to increase our addressable market by offering further value in terms of products to our clients. It was a bold decision 12 months ago to embark on a heavy product development strategy. But that was our first goal, increase our TAM. Our second goal was to migrate our business the best we could over the year to away from the original credit model that you all know and love, and the analysts amongst you have tried to model, and to move our credit model to that of a traditional SaaS subscription model. Now why would we want to do that? Well, as we extended our platform, it allowed us to move away from simply credits to allow to subscribing clients to access to further products and features in the platform. What it actually did for us and what it is doing for us is decoupling our revenue recognition away from recruitment. And we have gone through a pandemic. We have gone through a tough economic climate this year -- climate this year. And with those ebbs and flows of recruitment, because we recognize our revenue when references are taken, our revenue recognition follows the ebbs and flows of that market. So to decouple our revenue recognition by offering SaaS to our clients means that we can then recognize that revenue at 12 in every month irrespective of the changes in the market. We also wanted to target our growth of our ARR, and we did that by moving new clients into our enterprise, new enterprise platform, but also migrating our current clients across to the new platform. Our third goal was whilst we were investing, given the fact that we just generated $2.5 million worth of free cash a year ago that we had during the year a laser focus on cash. This year, you'll notice on the release yesterday, we announced that we will have a small operational cash surplus this year. But we set out during the year to invest into long-term growth and at the same time, balance our short-term cash. Another bold move, you'll agree, in what turned out to be a tough economic conditions. So 3 things: increase our TAM; migrate to SaaS; and have a laser focus on cash during the year whilst we invest in the long term. Now cast your minds back to last October. We released our new platform, the Xref Enterprise platform. In that platform, we included our Exit Surveys that we built a year prior. We rebuilt our automated referencing in there. We included a survey building and a whole host of features and benefits. It allowed us, therefore, to begin our journey in October into offering our clients, new clients and current, the SaaS subscriptions. Alongside of that, we reimagined our RapidID business that we bought in July 2019. And we reimagined that as Trust Marketplace, an area where clients of Xref and external clients could gain checks via an agnostic API marketplace. And that was launched in October. Along with that, we changed the narrative. So automated reference checks all of a sudden became recruit, retain, and remember. And so we changed the narrative of Xref from being preemployment reference checks to a suite of feedback-driven products across hire to retire. That was in no way a small thing to do. And in fact, we had a website generating a huge amount of leads around automated references. And if you've ever experienced a business change their narrative and their website, it's a huge task. We did that also in October. Luckily, it didn't miss a beat, and our marketing team did a tremendous job of that. In the first half of 2023 up until December, I was having conversations with the CEO of Voice Project to see how we could get involved in the employee engagement market. And in January 2023, we completed the acquisition of Voice Project. Now you all know it as Xref Engage as we've just launched. Now the reason we acquired Voice Project is because with our new platform being across hire to retire, yes, we were developing poll surveys. But our clients that do poll surveys already want to do more and more with employee engagement. You cannot enter the employment -- employee engagement market and go toe to toe with companies like Qualtrics and Culture Amp, which you will have all seen in the news recently, a very hot area in talent at the moment. You cannot go toe to toe with those companies unless you have credibility and a platform to compete. Voice Project was a fantastic acquisition that we made. Peter and I have a vision for that business, that's pretty incredible. The main reasons for that integrate -- for that acquisition was the pure fact that Voice Projects are 20 years old. They have fantastic credibility in the Asia Pac market. They have a data analytics and survey technology platforms that would have took us years to build. They have data that we don't have such as industry benchmarks around employee engagement. They have clients that we didn't have, and they were a profitable growth business with an amazing team, a brain trust of PhD and Master's organizational psych -- psychologists that hold clients' hands as they embark on the employee engagement surveys. So a remarkable acquisition and one that's gone so well in the last 6 months and has led to the launch of Xref Engage not -- a couple of weeks ago. So they immediately helped us craft our Pulse Survey platform. And we launched our Pulse Survey platform in May. And then by June, we launched our Xref Engage integration into Xref Enterprise and relaunched Voice Project as Xref Engage. If you haven't seen that, jump on to the website, go to the Engage page and have a fish around there. Now whatever has that left us? That is a huge amount of debt to do during the year. We've changed the narrative during that time. But as a client today of Xref and we do have an awful lot of happy clients, they are able today to, in Xref Enterprise, reference the candidate into their business. Pulse, what that person thinks about that company all the way through their engagement into that business, and then as they exit, conduct an exit survey. And that gives them one single record of how that talent has moved through their business hire to retire. If they want to do far, more deeper employee engagement surveys, then they can use the Xref Engage platform. And soon, in the short term, they will be able to access the Trust Marketplace checks from within Xref Enterprise to conduct checks along the way as well. So as I said, this year, we have certainly changed the narrative. We've made huge changes to our client offering. And we've started to migrate our clients across to the new platform and therefore, SaaS. We now have 1,000 users on the Enterprise platform. We've conducted 3,000 exit surveys this year. And in the 4 weeks since -- in June, since we launched Pulse Surveys, we did 50 successful Pulse Surveys. So right now, the most exciting part about this business. And as a founder with a founder's mentality, it is very exciting that we have clients around the world that have started in Enterprise using us across that journey. They have references in one list, Pulse Surveys in another and exits for the people that have exited their business. And that's happening already. Along with that, we now have a wonderful conversation to have with those companies about using Engage for deeper employee engagement. Now that's a huge task and not to be underestimated. We've made 27 major code deployments this year, and we've increased our code base by 64%. Our key platforms represent over 1 million lines of code. And then during that time, our uptime of our platforms across the group have been 99.999%. So no disruption to our clients. In fact, we've changed the game on our clients so much this year that we went out in May and we used the Xref Engage platform to conduct quite a mammoth of customer satisfaction surveys. So we went out to 9,000 of our clients. We asked them some killer questions in a survey, and they have come back. And we will, in the short term, release some granular figures that came out of that. But overall, our clients have come back and said they are -- in terms of client satisfaction, they are 92% satisfied with Xref. So an incredible result on a transformative year for us. Now we are busy. We are so busy, and we have -- a huge amount are going on. And this year, the business moved from 72 Xrefers to 114. And in with that, we had an acquisition. So in May, not only did we ask the customers how are we going, we also sent the very first engagement survey out to our business. Now our engagement has come back at 82%, which is a fantastic result. So very pleasing in a very tough year to have such a happy, engaged, hardworking team at Xref and such a happy client community. On top of that, we spent some time with partners this year. 30% of our reference revenue comes from integrated partners in ATSs. And then we have a host of partners that offer us checks through Trust Marketplace, a new one being certain that was released quite recently. That's currently being integrated into Trust Marketplace. So a big focus on partners as well this year. It's been really hard, and I wrote this in the release yesterday. It's been very difficult to compare a year of pandemic recovery in 2022 with that of economic pressure in '23. Two very, very different years. In fact, in '21, job vacancies out of COVID grew 180%. In '22, they grew 30%. And in '23, they actually retired it by 10%. So we've been dealing with -- bear in mind that most of our revenue comes from reference sales, particularly in Australia, we've been dealing with a decline in the market. And on top of that, we've actually grown our revenues 11%. And Australia has actually been far healthier than other regions that we work in around the world, including North America. So we've -- as I said, we've got a happy team. We've got clients that love us, and we've got an incredible product emerging that prevent -- presents us the opportunity to really focus on the clients we have and expand their use of Xref across the hire-to-retire journey. So in terms of the year ahead, massive opportunity, but let's disseminate it down into 3 key goals. And I spoke about where we were a year ago, and now this is where we're focused on during this year. Number one, why wouldn't it be? We have a focus on a pathway -- creative pathway to profit. Last year, when we did release in July 5, last year, we had actually performed 6 quarters of profitability. And we chose obviously a bold decision to invest in the long term in '23. But this year, we certainly do have the #1 focus to create a pathway to profit. How are we going to do that? Well, our revenue growth is obviously #1. And that would be via reaching out to not just the 2,000 clients that use us last year across our platforms, but the 1,200 key enterprise clients that use us globally that love us for our preemployment services and again, reaching out to those and increasing their share of wallet by getting them onto Xref Enterprise. We actually -- as that pathway to profit will focus on faster revenue recognition. So less ebb and flow geographically, seasonally and via the recruitment market, but deliver a more forecastable and the ability for you guys to model us via our ARR. So ARR is going to form quite a large part of our narrative back to shareholders this year. We're going to integrate -- we will shortly integrate Trust Marketplace into Enterprise giving us the ability to push our vendor services through to our client set globally. We are going to integrate Engage to our Xref clients globally. So we have a very aggressive go-to-market strategy for Engage into our Xref clients. And then as part of that pathway to profitability, continue to drive that cost efficiency. Our second goal is to develop at the feature and integration level. If you've watched what we've done, we've started at a platform level. We've delivered platforms. Underneath those platforms, we've delivered products. We are now at the feature level, which is creating far deeper feature sets for our clients. So we don't think -- guess what we're going to actually provide. We talk to our clients. And our client feedback comes through our customer success and sales teams. And so we are developing a richer feature list throughout those products to make sure that we can drive revenue at all levels. And that includes Trust into Enterprise, which we'll let you know about when it's live. We will -- a big milestone. It's been 13, 14 years in the making, but we will launch a pricing table this year. And we will also provide the ability for any client, enterprise or small business, to be able to self-create their account and subscribe. They can do it on Xref Lite. That's been a very good testbed for us. We know that they're going to do it. It's been an incredible lead gen opportunity for us since we launched Xref Lite in 2018, and we are going to create that this year. So a very exciting point. So development at the feature level and integration between those service is what you can expect this year. And thirdly, and as a founder, I'd like this to be #1, but this is our frontline focus. You will see us focus on more on our employees and partners and customers. And in fact, you'll see continuous Pulse Surveys happening to our customers, and our employees. And we will release it in next May, an update on how we're tracking with things like our NPS customer satisfaction and employee engagement. And then this year, we've actually restructured our sales team this year to focus on not just the 2,000 group clients, but the 1,200 key accounts across our business to increase that share of wallet to migrate on to SaaS and to add formal value to the clients that have used us for a long time. So now look, we'll move to a Q&A. Hopefully, that added some color. If you haven't read that release, please do so. We'll move to a Q&A. This year, about a month ago, we launched our Investor Hub. It gives you the ability to sign up to Xref releases, but also be able to ask private and public questions on that forum. I'm on the end of that forum. So if you have anything that doesn't get answered today, hit me up on there. But I'll open the floor up now for any questions, and James will either call them out or introduce you directly.

Thank you, Lee. [Operator Instructions] That's probably going to be the most efficient way. And that way, we won't have anyone talking over anyone else, but yes, feel free to ask away. No questions at the moment, Lee, from the floor.

Everyone's happy. Let's just check the chats. Can you see a chat there?

Deana has asked the question. Could we please get color on the SaaS growth, new clients versus transition of existing?

So 1,000 users are in that new platform. Our ARR grew -- since October, it grew 430% to $5.6 million as per the release yesterday. So let me just add some color to that. In October, we released a platform that you could subscribe to that had references and exits, but it didn't have the meat in the sandwich. It didn't have the Pulse Surveys or the Xref Engage in there. So for us to bring people across that new platform, we enticed preemployment clients that were using references to come across to that platform because there was a survey builder in there and a pretty damn hot one. So the initial migration was slow because people really wanted that Pulse product. But once we got past January and we've started to talk to our clients about when Pulse was going to be switched on, and our recent acquisition of Engagement and what we were going to do with that, it really did speed up. So very early in our journey, but ultimately, that percentage, and I think you see a graph within that release, that percentage of SaaS amongst the sort of the credit revenue that we recognize every year has grown substantially. And we have an aggressive target this year to further increase the ARR. And it's something -- you're actually going to get bored of me talking about ARR by the end of the year because it's one of our most significant goals. In fact, our sales team are now incentivized on growing quarter-on-quarter our MRR, our QRR and resulting ARR. So the whole business is centered on migrating that. I think you're going to be pretty happy with how we conduct ourselves in that migration space. In terms of our current clients and new clients, this year, we welcomed 160 new clients in. I think 87% of those moved on to subscription straight away, and that gives you an indication of the migration outside of that. Any other questions?

We've got a few coming through. What's the key focus of the now expanded development team in FY '24?

Well, as I said, we've sort of been at that platform level, and we've driven down to the product level. So at platform, Xref Enterprise, Trust Marketplace and Engage. At the product level, you have Exit, Pulse, Reference. And then underneath that, you have a whole host of features, features such as advanced SMS to handle fraud a little bit better. There's parts of the business that are looking at things around AI and GPT and how we can sort of consume unstructured data a little bit better to create further insight for our clients. And then obviously, bringing checks through. So we're still working on various checks to bring to the clients. So very much at the feature level and a very busy year ahead on dev.

We've got a few more chats going through, but Mark Wenzel has put his hand up to ask a question. Go ahead, Mark.

Good results.

Thanks. [indiscernible].

Just interested domain, I guess a couple of things, just to see how the university project was going with regards to the degrees. But also, I suppose, just to get a bit of a feel about some of the major customers that are using all of the services and what their feedback is about how it's all working for them and how much it's benefiting them.

Yes, sure. Well, it rings out on that 92% stat on customer satisfaction, and it's something that we're going to do more and more of as we deploy more platforms. In terms of the checks, we're excited about partnering up with Serchen to bring those global checks. Very difficult for us to bring regional players in when we want to offer a global service. So good to see Serchen join up with us. But in terms of the [ cochecks ], big delay was caused in academia as a result of COVID and the market. But I'm glad to say that the amount of data levels that Hess, the company that we work with, the amount of data that they've got from all of those universities has grown substantially. And so that we've actually just, only a couple of weeks ago, we sped up our development of the -- what would be called the Graduate Verification Service. And so a lot more activity in that space is happening, and that's one of our features that we'll be focused on in the next 6 months.

And do you see so much revenue from that? And I guess, also sort of extension of that, just the Coles partnership. Do you see more opportunities to partner with big organizations on the reference checking or the ID checking as well?

I -- sometimes, it drives me crazy that these groups don't communicate at the top. And we have to do that for them, right? So we have Coles using us for identity and rights of work. And we've got Bunnings using us for preemployment references. So wouldn't it be nice to be able to ask both of those parties to use all of our services. And that's just an opportunity for growth for us. But I'd say that the Coles for the Trust Marketplace, they actually consume an open API, and we service them with those rights to work across all of their staff, across their stores as well as identity. And that's been a fantastic contract because it really does bring the RapidID acquisition into the HR sector instead of that original business supplying the cryptocurrency sector. And we're really happy. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, right, Mark, but we're really happy that we never hitched our wagon to cryptocurrency. And we actually have -- during the pandemic, we've been able to transition that business into HR sector-driven identity business rather than get too excited with the original hire from crypto.

I've got a question, Lee, I'll combine it, too. What is the competitive advantage of Xref? How would you ensure that Xref maintains its competitive advantage? And are you seeing any significant competitors for the reference check services, i.e., the likes of [indiscernible]?

Okay. Well, we'll tackle that in a 2 parter. Yes, we are absolutely seeing competitors in the reference space. And I would encourage more because they do a lot of marketing for us, right? The competitors you want are regionally based competitors that compete with you on price, and that's true today. And however, that being said, the reference providers that we compete with are reference providers. And we've just accelerated away from that because now we can offer services across the whole hire-to-retire journey. So clients are looking for a platform they can use all the way through their talent journey. And so that allows us to compete harder in that automated reference space. And that's certainly true when you look at feedback on G2 or GetApp or Google or any of these feedback platforms. In terms of the engagement space, this is filled with an array of sort of unicorns such as Qualtrics and Culture Amp. And I think that this area is right for disruption. We've got some incredible technology at Xref. We're very versed on surveys, not just from point to point, but out again and back. And so what we tend to do is we act like a bit of an iceberg. We're very simple on the surface, and we are very complicated under the surface, which allows our clients to have a fantastic experience on the platform, but we do all the hard yakka under the [ bunting ]. So we do have a very different way of competing with engagement -- employee engagement providers because we can actually bring that talent in through preemployment and follow them out. And actually, there's a little secret weapon built into our platform. And that's when we subscribe to Enterprise, we are capped by the amount of talent coming in and out of our business. So we cap that subscription via profiles, the amount of people that you hire and the amount of people that you exit. However, Pulse Surveys in that subscription, Pulse Surveys for your current staff are uncapped, they're unlimited. So you can subscribe and use Pulse Surveys across your whole business. However, if you do that, you are going to want a far greater product to generate engagement statistics and therefore, we can then sell the engagement platform as part of that. So in terms of the competitive landscape, we're pretty excited about that. We -- in Trust Marketplace, we aggregate -- we're an aggregator. In Engage, we're the new kid on the block and we're the disruptor. And then with preemployment references, we're certainly the first to market and best in class. So we have all of those key parts of what makes up a great SaaS DNA. So we're very excited about the way we've positioned ourselves ready for when the market improves.

In terms of -- so I combined with a few questions here again. In terms of the revenue model, what does the revenue model of the core enterprise system versus inclusion of Engage look like? And how much of the SaaS ARR figure is a result of the Xref Engage product?

Okay. So the Xref Engage is a plus product. So what that means is to get to it, you have to have an Engage subscription. The Engage subscription covers your Refs, your Pulse and your Exits. There's unlimited Pulse. You would have to pay more for an Engage survey. Consider for a moment that a client will do 1 or 2 major employment engagement surveys a year, and then they will use Pulse to continually verify how they're improving or not during the year. So they will use Xref Enterprises to do all of those things. They will pay additional revenue to do 1 or 2 major surveys through Engage and have access to the Data Studio and Engage. And then the checks that they will soon consume through Enterprise, they will postpaid for those checks. And then subsequently, we'll drive a turnover model for those checks and receive those vendors after payments. So that -- our revenue model would be very easy to model going into '24. In terms of Engage, the opportunity is pretty clear. Last year, Engage provided or sent out about 170,000 surveys to respondents and to -- about 300 clients during the year. Whereas we're picking up Voice, changing it into Engage and inviting our current client community to look at Engage to do their employment. However, that community has -- minimum 6 million employees in it. So we're actually picking up an engagement product that services 170,000 and produces $4 million worth of profitable revenue. And we're introducing it into a market of 6 million employees. If we only surveyed 10% of the employees in our current clients, we'd quadruple the size of Voice Project. So a remarkable opportunity and one that we're focused on executing.

Lee, you've got a question around cash flow and investment. So what's the strategy for free cash flow growth moving forward, FY '24 and beyond? Or are we expecting to increase the investment in the short term?

Look, I think I'm going to leave that up to the market to answer. We have a very strict budget this year. We are keeping costs as low as we can. We don't know how much more time we have to endure a lower market. And I'll talk about that for a second. We've actually improved the number of clients that use us this year by a considerable amount. Those clients have used -- as a group and as an average per client used less references. But they're very happy with us. They're just not hiring at the levels they were coming out of the pandemic. And so at some stage in the future, those clients are going to [indiscernible] out of the pandemic, they're going to increase their hiring. And we are positioned really nicely to profit from that growth. I don't know. Much like the reserve bank doesn't know what's going to happen. And ultimately, we don't know what's going to happen in the U.S., et cetera. So I think we -- as we did in COVID, we have a survival instinct. We are very nimble on our costs. We can pivot and change very quickly. We're doing very smart things at the moment, like offshoring some of our dev to Pakistan. We've got a great team of people over there to allow us to code, obviously coming through the night, but to keep those costs relatively -- a bit lower than hiring all dev onshore here. So we're making very positive moves. In terms of marketing, we're pulling marketing back a little bit for the first half this year just to make sure that we can get that final piece of dev -- the major dev done. And I think that our focus on costs, our focus on revenue and executing on -- or [ prosecute ] on our opportunities is key this year. And I think that as the market changes and the year continues, we'll keep you abreast of where we are. We haven't been doing quarterlies because of our history of profit. But I think this year, it would be nice to keep our conversation going through the year.

And also, Lee, thinks like today we're not -- we're using Zoom. It's a cost that we already incur. We're not spending a lot of money on an AV platform to bring this to all of you today. We've got Chris Steptoe who's put his hand up. Go ahead, Chris.

So you're integrating Trust and Enterprise, and also you have Serchen on the Trust Marketplace. So does that mean that your existing -- what your SaaS clients now will be able to do their reference checking on your platform. That's what -- is that correct?

Okay. So today, you can do -- today, References Pulse...

Sorry, please checks, please checks.

So if you are -- let's think for a moment about a client that uses us on Xref Recruiter. We have some checks plugged into Xref Recruiter. CVCheck is one of those, right? So we have some of our police checks get consumed through CVCheck. I think 12,000 of those got taken through Xref Recruiter this year. We're actually integrating it in a whole different way so that it's far more scalable. And as we increase spenders, we can just switch them on and giving our clients the ability to consume them a lot easier through Xref Enterprise. So we have clients that are on Recruiter that take a lot of checks, that won't move to enterprise until we have a Trust Marketplace which started there. And then they'll move. So that's an opportunity for migrate to speed up migration is to get that switched on so that community of people can move across and make use of all the other features and benefits of products as well as checks.

What sort of revenue share is there with Serchen?

Well, I suppose the model for us is an opportunity because up until now we have been -- our clients have been consuming those checks and having an agreement with the vendor separately. So we received a thank you margin from that vendor. However, with Trust Marketplace, that agreement -- those tables turn, and we actually bill the client 100% of those checks, and receipt back to the vendor what we own them. So you can see that we have a turnover opportunity there. And in that, we can drive our margins an awful lot bigger. Now most of the checks that formulate that sort of $2.7 million on Trust Marketplace today, most of those are ID through the original RapidID opportunity. And we pay the DVS for those checks. So it's anywhere we have to pay every dollar $0.50 to $0.80 back to the Document Verification Service, i.e., the government. But with the expansion of checks like DVS, with the checks offered through Serchen, we can increase those margins and increase the use through Enterprise. So all of the above would better the margin, better the turnover, and we're building it in a way that we can scale it as more vendors come on to Trust Marketplace. But I think this year we focused on making sure that we get vendors. Serchen is only one. There's a whole host of vendors that we're bringing on to that platform. And having that aggregated agnostic model is just -- are going to prove a really nice move for us because one thing we don't want to be is a checking vendor, but what we do want to do is bring the cream of the global checks into the best platform on the planet.

Sorry. One more question. Then just on, I guess, the international. How you're thinking about international? You're talking about sort of dropping marketing revenue. This year, does that mean that your focus is going to be more Australia and New Zealand for '24 rather than the U.S., Canada?

No, far from it. I'm actually in the U.S. in a few weeks. We have a major focus over there. But as I've said before, clients in the U.S., if you -- you're going to die trying if you try and to provide a service to the U.S., you have to pick a state, you have to pick a channel, you have to pick a sector and be the best in that part. However, you can waste an awful lot of money on SEO or signs on buses or events in the U.S. You can also waste a lot of money flying around the U.S. meeting individual clients. So for us, it's about our digital marketing. And when I said before about launching a pricing table on our website and allowing clients to self-originate their platforms, that was really centered around that North American growth model. And without that, it's very hard to grow in that region. But the good thing is we've spent years on things like G2, making sure that our credibility in the U.S. is second to none. And we fit really nice in that G2 quadrant. So we're also opening up categories. We've only ever been able to perform in the reference space. Now we're performing in the Pulse and Exit and Engagement space. So our lives on G2 and GetApp and Capterra and all of these reference providers in the U.S. provides an amazing platform for our credibility. And so when we switch on things like pricing tables and self-serve and obviously, the whole of the U.S. wants to subscribe. They don't understand credit models. So it just fits with our strategy. And as we execute that, I'm sure this year, we'll see growth in that region.

A question that I know you like and I think Chris just sort of covered another question on how about geographical focus and emphasis for the next 12 months. Steve Shearman is asking a question, can you give some color to the network effect and how it works for it for reference checking? Referee is becoming customers. That's our viral marketing engine. So take that answer, Lee.

Yes, I love this one. Because 7 years ago when we listed, I talked to investors about the viral nature, and viral was a funny word then. But -- and it still is as a result of COVID, funny enough, but a tricky word, but a viral nature of what we do because with every candidate that's invited to do references, we get 2 referees who obviously have been managed in the past giving feedback. So we do market to those people. But let me twist this a little bit further at the moment. We just acquired Voice. We've turned it into Engage. We have 16,000 individual users that used us last year. We went out to 9,000 key users as part of our customer satisfaction survey. But we conducted the satisfaction survey on the Engage platform. So we're just about to go back out to that 9,000 -- those 9,000 users and say thanks for your feedback. These are the results in a nice infographic. And this is how we collected them. And here's a little call-to-action button that will take you into a data studio that will show you how you can carve up and disseminate that data and a little form for you to ask for more information about the Xref Engage product. So we are aggressively using our historic database, and I think we got about 3.5 million candidates in there and subsequently, twice the amount of referees to speak to. So we're in a really nice community, and it allows us to pull back a little bit on the net new marketing activities and costs that we've incurred and focus far more on the clients we have. And as I said before, our TAM has just increased by tenfold because now we can see across the business, not just in that 10% space. So a very busy year ahead.

Yes, indeed. We sort of answered this before, but [indiscernible] Stephen McPhail has asked, sounds like the sales focus is on existing clients rather than new, but I think you can give some clarity to that, Lee.

Yes. Look, funny enough. It will make [ no bonus ] about it. It's been a hard year in terms of new business sales. And we had half of our sales team going out to a frozen lake drilling a hole to capture emaciated fish. And we've got our account managers sitting over here in a warm pool of big fat salmon dealing with our clients that absolutely love us and will take anything that we build. And so we've actually pulled those 2 teams together, and those 2 teams have a list of clients to look after this year and to introduce Engage and Pulse and Exit and Trust Marketplace, and to go out there and fish in a very warm, friendly pool of happy clients. Look, I think you can die trying at the moment. Sales cycles -- sales cycles are longer. People are buying less upfront. Let's consider for a moment that our sales over the last 3 years have gone from 10 to 15 to 20. And we've stepped through that pretty well. Last year, our growth rate was fantastic because we were enjoying the pandemic recovery and what that meant in the employment sector. This year is actually -- it's the whole sectors retarded, but actually, we've put 2.6% of sales on top of last year's growth and 11% of revenue on top of last year's growth. So I think we've worked -- our sales team has worked tremendously hard this year to make sure that we not only retain our clients, but we grow them, and we put a few logos on the top. So I think if we work as hard in the [ employment ] market, we've got a lot to be excited about.

Another question, in regards to areas of potential value in the higher Engage Retain journey, are you intending to incorporate those potential value areas in your product vision?

I didn't get that, James. Can you repeat that?

Yes. I'll try to -- I'll actually do it verbatim. Are there any areas of potential value in the higher Engage Retain journey that you intend incorporating into your product vision?

Well, look, I'm a founder, I have a founder's mentality. So I'm not looking at this year. I'm looking at the next 10 years and where this market is going. And I think that Xref, as always, is very bold. We don't resell. We don't wholesale. We build product that hasn't been built before, and we back ourselves to change the habits of a sector that has existed for decades before us. We did it with Xref. We did it with Template Builder. We did it with Lite. We're just about -- we've just done it with Exits. We've just done it with Pulse. We built it in a whole new different way than the sector would commonly see it, and we're doing it again with Engage. So we don't make life easy on ourselves, but I can tell you, a business like ours that is data harvesting -- now think about that for a second. We're harvesting every single day from thousands of people in different languages around the world, information around the hire, the engagement of employees and the exiting employees and where that sort of neural network sits in the world. And with structured and unstructured data, it gives us an opportunity, maybe in the future, to go back to those millions of candidates and even offer value to them in one way, shape or form. But I can tell you that the employment sector is moving fast, and we're surrounded by providers of HR tech that are still providing the same tech that they had in 2019. They're still selling the same tech. And in fact, in 2019, it was already 5 years old. So now it's nearly 10 years old. So if there is a HR tech provider out there or any technology provider that hasn't sort of spend -- invested in sharpening their axe and reinventing their narratives since COVID, then they're going to have a big problem because HR people particularly out there are saying, well, we're in the new dawn, we're in a new environment, we're dealing with new pressures. And so we need technology to follow those desires. And I think we're ahead of that. I think we're a great thought leader. Make sure you follow us on LinkedIn. I know our sales and marketing and customer success teams are very busy on thought leadership webinars, et cetera. We get involved in an awful lot of that. But we are leading the narrative, and we're delivering product that we said we're going to deliver. And we deliver it in a way that is fresh and insightful.

Okay. I've got no more questions coming through. There have been a few questions around the specifics of numbers, which given they were detailed in that release yesterday, sort of can't give them out now, but they'll definitely be released in the IR a few more -- a bit more of a revenue segment and geographical split. So looking out for those. But at the moment, there's no more other questions coming through, Lee, and we're pretty much [ about an hour ].

We're on time.

Stephen actually just put his hand up.

Okay. One more.

I was just clapping here. Thanks.

Well, actually, that's right. I did see it was moving.

We'll take a clap. We'll take a clap. Okay. Look, we've done on the hour. Hopefully, that added a bit of color over yesterday's release. You'll get even more color when we finalize audited results in the IR. Get to the Investor Hub for Xref if you have any questions left over from today. I'm out and about if you need a one-on-one with me, just shout [email protected]. But thanks for joining us. Everybody that joined an hour ago is still with us, which is fantastic, a great range of questions, and I bid you all a wonderful day. Thank you very much.