Elixirr International PLC

LSE:ELIX

Q2-2025 Earnings Call

[Operator]

Good afternoon, and welcome to the Elixirr International plc Investor Presentation. [Operator Instructions]. The company may not be in a position to answer every question received during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it's appropriate to do so. Before I begin, I would like to submit the following poll.

I'd now like to hand you over to Stephen Newton, CEO. Good afternoon, sir.

[Stephen Newton, executive]

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for taking the time to listen to our presentation today. I think you probably have seen at the beginning of the week, we had some very exciting results and an announcement around an acquisition. And this is off the back of, obviously, our move to main market, which was 1st of July, so it's been a very exciting half for us. We've been pretty busy with all of those things. And it's all been coming together very nicely. So if you look at what we plan to take you through today is a little bit of an introduction from me. Then I'm going to hand over to Nick, who will cover our financials for you in a bit more detail. And then Graham and then will sort of bounce between the business review, and then I'll come back to me, and I'll talk to you all about how we see the future and how bullish we are about our positioning in that marketplace.

So let's talk about the introduction. As I said, we've had a fantastic half. Our results are brilliant. We managed to move to the main market. And now we've also announced the TRC acquisition. We've got all our -- main levers are working really well. We've got the organic growth happening, we've got the inorganic growth happening, and we've got the performance in the market and our profitability happening, too. So we're very encouraged. We're getting more diversification in the business, which is making us more resilient. If you look at our business as we were in -- at the start of our IPO journey on to AIM versus now, we've got so much more resilience in this business. We've got so much industry diversification, capability diversification and also geography diversification.

We've got obviously 4 -- I think all 5 of our last acquisitions have been in the U.S., so this has meant we've got a very strong positioning in the U.S., so our geography diversification is working really well. And the team are simply performing, simply brilliantly. The entrepreneurial packages we have for our partners and then embracing those packages as well as the flow-down we have for that into the employee pool is really meaning that our people turn up as real owners, and it makes a difference when you're doing a silver service or a white glove service like we do at the top end of the market in consulting. So our clients love the way our people turn up every day. They're very ambitious, motivated people who like to deliver real value to their customers. And I think it's showing in the marketplace, and hence, we are gaining market share.

Looking at some of the numbers, you can see that our revenue is up 35% and what's particularly pleasing, obviously, is organic growth revenue there of 17%. As I've said many times, we like to have organic and inorganic growth working together, if you like, to kind of deliver on an overall growth objective of around 30% year-on-year, which we've achieved since actually 2012, but since IPO as well. So the reason we think the range of 10% to 20% on organic is a good range -- is that if you think about a business which is growing and say, the top end of that range, 20%, plus you've got a natural attrition in consulting of somewhere between 10% and 15%, you actually have to hire 35% of your workforce every year if you go beyond the 20% organic growth number. And in doing so, you will be changing the quality standards, the cultural integration standards, and it's actually almost too much to swallow. So the natural growth rate of a consulting firm that's doing really well organically is somewhere between the 10% to 20% range. And we've been doing that consistently. So very proud of that.

And then you couple it with Graham's inorganic strategy, which he can talk to you about the TRC acquisition in a little bit more detail. If you couple that 10% to 20% that we would look to buy in the same model, you get the averaging out at 30% to 35%. And of course, we've been consistent with that, and we will continue with that as it's proving a very, very successful strategy for us, let's say. And what's also particularly important here is you can see that we've gone from -- I think the number there is 31 new gold clients or gold clients this year, up from 22 last year, which means that the depth of our relationships with our clients is expanding. And it goes alongside the acquisition strategy. As we get more capabilities, we can sell more capabilities to our clients and that means that we have deeper relationships, touching more buying centers, making more impact, delivering more value. So this is all very good. And in addition, we're obviously acquiring a whole bunch of new clients. And we had a fantastic quarter, as I said, we had 5 of those months were record months.

If you look at other angles to this, obviously, our brand is being developed. It's -- I think in the U.K. now, we're known by everybody in the industry. There wouldn't be a player in the U.K. industry who wouldn't have heard of us by now. Not quite the case in the U.S., but it's getting much, much better. We've got some fantastic awards, Forbes' giving us the best consultancy award there and actually for our U.S. business, they gave us the best AI consultancy, too. So we're getting some fantastic recognition, and that's helping build our brand, and we're starting to see inbound client requests as a result, which is fantastic.

And then the other two things I touched on the TRC acquisition that we've just done. Graham will go into that in a bit more detail for you, but it's a really, really exciting top of the house company that is considered by their clients as a Mini-Bain and believe they are better than the MBBs of the world, so this really rounds out our strategic capability. It's almost the end of their projects that they do with their clients is almost the starting brief for our execution opportunity and this is exactly what TRC have seen with their ambition and interest to join our group.

We're getting six fantastic partners, all of whom have worked together at Marathon, all of them are a really well-formed team, and we had them along our partner quarterly, and they were certainly almost felt like they had been with us for years and years. So it was a fantastic thing to see. And I'll touch on this now, but Insigniam, who we acquired in October of 2023, sort of the culture and of strategic change. And their relationships are all top of the house. And in this half, we sold GBP 10 million of Elixirr Consulting services into their relationships, which we would never have had access to if we hadn't bought Insigniam. And the thing about TRC is that they're almost -- well, they are exactly in the same situation. They have top-of-house relationships and most of them American head office businesses that allow us to really start growing our other consulting services into these businesses.

And to give the Insigniam comment some perspective, Insigniam’s own revenue is [$9 million]. So what we've taken is we've taken a single relationship and essentially across the board doubled the value of the relationship to our business and our shareholders, which we believe is at the heart of our strategy, and it's just coming to life and the TRC acquisition is yet another fantastic opportunity for us to do this. I think it's probably going to be our biggest opportunity in the space.

So really excited about that acquisition. And then I'll just round off by talking about our talent. Clearly, on the organic side to grow organically, we have to promote and hire partners. And we've brought in a number of partners, promoted three, brought in two and I'll just touch on one because I'll just [indiscernible] a little bit later, she talks about AI.

We brought in Conrad Troy from Deloitte, who ran the global SAP business there. And Conrad is particularly excited about joining us because he was so stifled in Deloitte being unable to essentially use the AI-type technologies to really transform the way SAP is handled by clients. And he's frustrated by that, but he [Audio Gap] CEO and most of the leadership team that was so excited about the potential of working with a disruptive consultancy like ourselves to really disrupt what is a massive revenue earner for the big firms, and they have almost no motivation to go after those kinds of opportunities because they are [indiscernible] is ready for Christmas in that instance. So fantastic opportunity there, diversifying our capabilities also not only through acquisitions, but through strategic hires like that and we're looking for team hires in a similar context. And then finally, just to say, to see the participation of our employees in our employee share purchase scheme, they turn up every day as owners, and it makes such a real difference to the way they turn up on our clients. And I think you see that the performance is flowing through to our financials, which is the ultimate measure of performance in this context.

Just a couple of things on the market I'd like to make a comment on just before I hand over to Nick, who will continue with the finance side of the business, the financials in a bit more detail. This industry is a growing industry. I've been in it for over 35 years, a couple of start-ups in between and then obviously, this business. In every year, the industry has grown and will show you later that AI is growing fastest by a long way. But in every sector, you'll see growth, and it's been like that for 30 years through dot-com bubble bursting through 2009 recession, you name it, the consulting industry is just the juggernaut that keeps on growing. And it's quite obvious when you stand back and think about it because business is getting more and more complicated, not less and less complicated with the introduction of things like AI. And if you make things more complicated, people need more advice, and they need expertise in areas where they don't have expertise.

So the things you see in the FTEs with 2,000 people being laid off for Accenture or KPMG or McKinsey or you name it, these are these brands just using -- never wasting a good crisis, right? They're using the banner of market turbulence for their customers as a way to prune and eradicate the underperformance in their business. It's almost certain if you go look at Accenture's figures, their profit is not going down. If you go look at -- I mean they've got a different challenge actually because of the whole AI challenge around technology, but the consulting businesses are still growing continuously. And the KPMGs and PwCs, they don't pay their partners any less, they keep paying them more. So it's an industry that keeps on growing, and we're excited to be able to present an opportunity to shareholders to invest in this industry because if you take these comparators, none of them are actually directly comparable to us, even though we outperform all of them, none of them are directly comparable to us.

Only one that's perhaps the closest is Booz Allen and Booz is listed in Chicago. But the difference between Booz and ourselves, they're almost exclusively. I think it's about 85%, 90% government sector, and we're exclusively private. We refuse to work in government because it's a race to the bottom on price and that's the real difference. So there's no real public sector strategic consulting firm that's out there. Accenture, FRP, IBM are completely different businesses really. Accenture is SI outsourcing -- systems integration and outsourcing, IBM is product and outsourcing, and FRP is [indiscernible] in services in the different services around restructuring and things like that, which is not true for consulting. So [indiscernible] is consulting, but it's not the type of consulting we do, so it's not directly comparable. So we're very proud of our performance vis-a-vis others, very proud of our performance vis-a-vis our team's performance, our own individual acquisition performance, but also we're in an industry that is getting more and more exciting.

I mean, I was around when I did a dot-com start-up around 2000, and the [indiscernible] was almost like you see it around AI. It's actually laughable to see the same thing I'm holding and people making the same mistakes that the high speed is going to be dead, right? We're not -- that no one's going to buy anything through a physical channel anymore. Everyone is going to buy through digital. The truth is things are brought through digital, but it's just a different way of buying, you have to complement the relationship between the physical presence and an online presence. And today, we're still teaching people how to use digital to make their businesses more efficient and to get more revenue through that channel. And AI is just that gift that's going to [indiscernible] on giving -- that is the opportunity, and Emiko can go into this for you in a little bit more detail. I've spoken enough. I will hand over now to my friend, Nick who will take you through the finances.

[Nicholas Willott, executive]

Thanks, Stephen. Good afternoon, everyone. Actually, it's a real pleasure to be able to present such a strong set of financial results for the half, the half 1 '25. So all our key metrics, you can see are up significantly. So revenue for the half was GBP 71.4 million. That's up 35%, of which 17% is organic growth. Gross Profit up 40%; Adjusted EBITDA up 42%, and that's delivered at a 30% margin, so right on target for where we want to be. Adjusted Profit Before Tax of GBP 21.1 million, up 38%, slightly low increase than the increase in EBITDA because the interest cost is obviously factored into that and then Adjusted Diluted EPS up 35% with the impact of [indiscernible] higher tax charge. So all those key P&L metrics are up significantly.

Cash as well, good cash performance, Free Cash Flow up 12% on the prior year at GBP 7.9 million. Just a reminder, we have a lot of seasonality in our cash flow because we pay our annual bonuses in half 1, so our Free Cash Flow in the first half is not referencing [indiscernible] we would expect for the full year. And we closed the year with modest Net Debt of GBP 6.8 million. And I'll go through the bridge to [indiscernible] those movements in a moment. But I think given our results, of course, I'm pleased with where the results were for the half. But if you put that into context of our track record, that's even more important that what we've set out to do since IPO is every year deliver significant growth in revenue matched by growth in EBITDA. And this half is no different to the track record you see there for the last 5 years on the slide. And we've done that pretty consistently following the same successful strategy that works for us.

We stretch our partners. We increased revenue per partner for the half year from GBP 2.1 million in half 1 '24 to GBP 2.3 million in half 1 '25. As we mentioned, we promote partners, we hire partners from outside and then we acquire businesses. Obviously, the half numbers don't include any impact from TRC. The full year numbers will include a 3-month contribution from TRC. [indiscernible] wants to give you the same transparency we always give in terms of how [indiscernible] the building blocks of our revenue growth period-on-period. So this is our building blocks from half 1 '24 when we had GBP 53 million of revenue to half 1 '25 to GBP 71.4 million of revenue. The 3 blocks on the left-hand side of this are our organic blocks which netted off a net 17% organic growth in the period right in the top end of that range of 10% to 20% that Stephen was talking about before that we target every year.

And that's comprised of what we call end of program clients. We [indiscernible] call these end of life where projects and the whole program of work came to an end. But we renamed end of program because the reality we see is that clients might finish and we have no revenue from them in a particular period. They often come back in the subsequent year as there's new work to be done with the client. So the end of program number was larger than we would normally have in the period because a number of programs came to an end. But that was more than offset by our growth in existing clients, GBP 9.7 million and new clients, GBP 9.4 million.

We like to see that blend of both penetration deeper into clients and having more old clients in the period but also making sure we're getting into new clients, which is the engine for growth in future periods. And I think the fact that we had such a large number [indiscernible] program while still delivering extremely strong organic growth overall shows the resilience of our model and how we're never dependent on particular projects finishing. We're always able to keep delivering growth irrespective of the particular mix of where we are in the program lifecycle. And then if you add on to those organic levers, the GBP 9.6 million contribution from Hypothesis that we acquired in quarter 4 last year, that takes you to the overall 35% growth we had for the period.

In terms of cash generation, this continues to be an extremely cash-generative business, the most cash generative business that I've worked in my career. The building blocks there on the chart you see how we moved from GBP 7.5 million of net cash in December last year to GBP 6.8 million of net debt at June '25. Operating cash flow was GBP 8.8 million. We spent GBP 4.8 million on acquisitions. This was deferred consideration payments for previous acquisitions, the acquisitions iOLAP, Insigniam and Responsum. There was a net cash outflow for the EBT share purchases and shareholder loans of GBP 13.9 million.

Of that GBP 12 million of that was net share purchases for the EBT. That is, I guess, an abnormally high number more than I would expect for a period. And two reasons for that. Firstly, we had restricted share awards associated with Board changes that we would not expect to have on a frequent basis. And secondly, we're right in the middle of exercising our pre-IPO options. Those are the most dilutive options and that GBP 12 million of purchases contributed towards us -- we've now bought enough shares to cover about 2/3 of those dilutive options. And once we get past those options, the options are very much less dilutive because the vast majority of them have been granted to a share price of [GBP 5] or above.

Just while I'm on the subject of cash, if I try to touch on where we are from a net debt perspective post the period because we -- as you have seen, we drew down GBP 30 million from our extended debt facilities to fund the acquisition of TRC. This will still -- with TRC, our pro forma EBITDA CAGR is now around GBP 50 million or slightly in excess of GBP 50 million per annum. So with a net debt number at the end of the year, probably around about GBP 30 million or so, we're only at 0.6x leverage from an EBITDA to debt perspective. And even next year, next year when we pay the earnout amount for FY '25, we would still expect that to be much more than about 1x leverage from an EBITDA perspective. So our debt is very cheap. It's roughly 6%. So that's all tax deductible, so roughly 4.5% net cost to the company. And from my point of view, with such a cash [indiscernible] business, these are very relatively modest and manageable debt levels.

From a balance sheet perspective, I mean, the balance sheet continues to be very, very straightforward. And if I just pick a couple of points on the chart, there was an increase in trade and other receivables to almost GBP 23 million in the period. This is really associated with the growth in the business. We had very good debt collection at December. It was still good at June, but we have [indiscernible] quite growth -- low growth in the business. June is a much bigger revenue month than December usually [indiscernible] about 45 days outstanding, so right where we expect them to be. We have 0 bad debt issues, so we're absolutely comfortable with that.

From a contingent consideration perspective, there's still about -- only about GBP 4.5 million on the half 1 balance sheet. Obviously, that's pre-TRC. That's all the contingent consideration we have left from previous deals. And net assets [indiscernible] a small decrease in net assets to GBP 120 million in the period. That's really a result of the GBP 12 million of EBT share purchases, which obviously is very capital with net assets and the fact that just the timing of our dividend declarations, both dividends, both the interim and the full year were actually charged in half 1. But overall, we're very -- as I say, I'm very happy with where we are from leverage perspective and very happy with the balance sheet and how the business is performing financially. Now I'll hand over to Graham, who's going to start on the business review.

[Graham Busby, executive]

Thank you, Nick, and hello, everyone. I'm Graham Busby. Just to give you a view of some of the big things that have happened in the half, indeed since as well. First of all, as Steve mentioned, the move to the main. We did obviously all of that work going on in the background in the half, but we didn't actually move until July 1, but that went extremely well. It was -- we see it as a natural progression for us getting into the next stage of our growth. AIM is fantastic for the size we were and where we were in that kind of trajectory, if you like mand we now see the main market as being the ideal place to continue that momentum.

[indiscernible] sort of world-class brand as a market, which is helpful in my acquisition conversations, just to name one place where it is helpful. Before there was a fair bit of education around AIM and what that was and what it meant about liquidity, et cetera. But obviously, everyone has the main market, and that is very helpful, not least because it has deeper pools of capital, and we're already seeing more conversations with international investors, which bodes well for our cap table going forward. And the move to Main was positive for the share price. It went up 9.5% in the month following and indeed it's gone up since. I think we're about 20% up from when we moved. So things are going in the right direction from that perspective.

From a client point of view, Steve mentioned our gold clients at 31, that's in the trailing 12 months at the end of the half and that's up from 22 looking at the same period the year before. And indeed, TRC will give us more gold clients on top of that as well. And we're looking forward to broadening our relationships between our 2 sets of clients. We have 35 new clients, which you saw in that kind of new revenue bucket that Nick went through just now and the cross-sell is working extremely well. Steve mentioned the cross-sell that we got from Insigniam in the half. And if you add in all the other brands and capabilities we have selling into each other's client bases with capabilities that we couldn't sell into before, that's nearly GBP 15 million for the period, which is up from GBP 8.3 million last year.

When you look at the cross-sell total since IPO when we really started to acquire businesses, we're over GBP 60 million [indiscernible] of new revenue. And when you look at the EBITDA of that revenue [indiscernible] multiple there's a lot of enterprise value being created here. And that is really behind our acquisition strategy rather than looking for cost savings synergies in the back office, et cetera. Of course, we go after that if it's low hanging fruit, but really the focus is on the market and it's on expanding -- bringing in more capability that our client partners can then sell to their clients, and we can get the revenue on the back of that. And that was really behind the TRC move. Steve mentioned [indiscernible] they are already at the top table in the C-suite. They give that strategic advice to the Chief Executive and the Board.

It's our biggest acquisition to date. It's a [8 in total], since this IPO and again, fifth in a row in the U.S. It’s quite nice because they have a Chicago hub that kind of completes our coverage of the U.S. We have the East Coast, West Coast and Dallas, Texas and this really gives us that kind of hole in the middle to the north that we have, so we have fantastic coverage now. And really what they do is they focus on kind of growth strategies, commercial effectiveness, value acceleration. And I'll come back to it [indiscernible] through some of our AI and client work. I'll give you more detail on TRC [indiscernible].

And just to add a couple of points to Steve's points earlier about people and culture. We have 14,000 applicants last year for roles and that's 100 applicants per role that we took on. So we really are able to bring in the best of the best, and that is why our client satisfaction is so high and why our growth continues at the rate it does particularly from an organic point of view. We had great participation in our share purchase plan in the consulting group, it was over 70% and up from the previous year. So we have investors, I think that's a great indication of what people with the knowledge of the business, the day-to-day knowledge and kind of behind the vision and the ambition if they're participating in the schemes, I think that's a great kind of leading indicator, if you like, of where they think we're going.

And we've had partner promotes 3 in the period. We've actually did 2 more since then at our last [indiscernible] and what I like about the 2 most recent ones they have come from 2 acquisitions as well. So it's -- we're not just promoting partners from our consulting principal base, if you like. We are really a true meritocracy and anyone in the business if they deserve to be a partner, then we make them a partner. We have the external partner hires, Conrad in particular, [Stuart] also. [Stuart] was next client, which is fantastic to bring in and we're looking forward to continue building out kind of entrepreneurial culture with the team that we have. I'll hand to Em to take you through a bit of client work and particularly double-clicking on artificial intelligence, and then I'll come back to you with TRC.

[Emiko Smith, executive]

Thank you very much, Graham. So the half has been another fantastic year with our clients and we've expanded our capabilities that we can offer to clients, particularly with the acquisition of TRC and we've deepened the work that we’re doing within industry, but also continue to diversify across different industry. And we've been delivering some real outcomes to clients in the work that we see engaged to help them with. So what do we do with quick recap. Obviously, we are deep in the capabilities of Board-level strategy and transformation. With the addition of TRC, we can specifically get more granular into growth strategy, commercial transformation and pricing. But also into resource productivity. So our organizations really [indiscernible] the leaders they need in terms of the way they're deploying their resources to get return on investment.

We continue to work with clients in research and insights. So from the acquisition of Hypothesis, we have very strong consumer insight capability to understand what customers of our businesses that we work with really want and need for future propositions. And we continue to help clients in the digital transformation, not just a change from one technology to another, but also the way that they are using digital marketing to grow their revenue.

We continue to work with clients in the round of operational excellence, so helping them think about their operating models, and how they can become more efficient in their processes, and the way they deliver their client products and services. We not only look at the data and technology strategy of our clients, but we can also help them design and build for the future by using our technology engineering capability.

We're doing this across a range of industries and as you can see there, some of the clients that we work with, these are market-leading in their fields, so banks such as HSBC and Bank of America, luxury brands and retailers such as LVMH and Farfetch. And in terms of the outcomes we're delivering for them, I just picked 3 specific examples that really demonstrates the value and the outcome-led approach we take to client work. For leading insurance MGA, we have built them a real-time and customer data lookup engine, which is enabling 100 quotes per second to optimize the pricing, they can offer to their clients.

The average response time per lookup in this new engine has reduced to 5 milliseconds. And because they can therefore do more business more quickly, we've seen an increase in their premium revenue by 8%. For a global leader in the electrification and automation space, or a tech company, we have defined a future operating model for them and supported a sorting process for their IT hosting infrastructure. This has resulted in the identification of $71 million of savings, which represents a 57% saving of their cost base over a 5-year period.

And then finally, for a global financial services business, we've delivered for them a digital transformation program, where we have immersed and trained 250 of their leaders in our design thinking methodology to make them more agile and innovative as an organization, and we've launched new products. This has resulted in $100 million of financial benefits that have been identified across a number of their business lines, and also within that operating team through [indiscernible] and through processing, and automation and also [indiscernible] and recognition, which enables data ingestion in a far quick way.

The really exciting thing for us in the half has been seeing our AI business come to life and the consulting work that we've been doing in that business. Steve alluded to at the beginning of this presentation, we've been doing some research into the way that this market is growing, and it's phenomenal that it's been a 27% growth rate in 2025. So the AI consulting market is set to grow by 2025.

And this compares with sort of high single-digit growth that we see in other areas of the consulting market. And this says 2 things to us. It says that AI consulting is a real area that we need to be focusing on and building our capabilities in order to deliver to clients, but it's also showing us that we are winning market share from our competitors as well as growing organically in line with the growth rates we see in the other areas of the consulting market.

Returning to AI, 99% of executives are expecting that generative AI adoption happens across both internal and external use cases to their businesses by 2027. And there was a spend of USD 250 billion in 2024. The generative AI proportion of this is set to increase to USD 100 billion by 2028. So these numbers are just staggering, shows a phenomenal work space that we can be growing into in terms of our growth in the AI consulting market. And how are we doing this? Well, we're pulling very intentionally 4 levers in the way that we're using AI within our organization and how we're going to market in supporting our clients with their AI challenges.

The first way is we are looking at protecting and delivering superior margins by using AI to become more operationally efficient within our own organization. We have so far transformed 45 different internal use cases, which is producing 25% faster results in the way our teams can work. And this is protecting our margins and also helping us drive superior margins across our business. The second lever that we're pulling is around differentiation. So it's really important to us that when we show up in the market, we're doing so in a way that is very use case and industry-specific. So we're applying our industry, our deep industry expertise and strategy consulting experience to identify those use cases that are really going to deliver value for our clients, and I'll talk about that a little bit more in a minute.

This has meant that we've managed to contract revenues of GBP 10 million since beginning of 2024 for AI-specific use case work. We're also intentionally pulling the lever to accelerate revenue growth through AI. So by using AI tools in the delivery of our work, we are able to increase the speed to value for our clients. So say we were working on a Phase 1 project, and it doesn't matter whether that's in the realm of AI or not, but using our own AI tools, we're able to accelerate the delivery of that value, that outcome to the client which very quickly then take them to Phase 2 of the work to define.

And so in doing so, you can see how we're accelerating our own path to revenue and building our clients accounts. And potentially, this is what's driving this increase in gold accounts that we're seeing from 23% to 31% at the end of the half. We also have another 80 client opportunities in the pipeline, as well as the 10 client accounts that we started to expand in this way. And then the finally [indiscernible] intentionally in the rounds of AI to differentiate ourselves is, to me, the most exciting and strategic. We are future proofing the way that we do consulting and essentially for opening a market-leading CAGR for how the industry will start to work. We have reinvented 12 of our consulting methodologies using AI, and we are using an AI-led consulting process in certain areas of our work. But we're also seeing that clients are prepared to pay for the value that those consulting methodologies are bringing.

So just because we're not using people, our clients are still willing to pay us the same high premium revenues that we -- premium fees that we are charging for them for the valuable outcomes we can drive with AI. And if anything, they are more pleased because we're able to deliver that value quicker. So what are we actually doing with clients in the AI space? Well, invariably, when they come to us, it's because the Board has mandated someone needs to do something about AI. So we always start with education because we found a number of our clients jumped into using AI, maybe a set of tools that's available to them very freely through potentially Microsoft or another provider, but they don't really know what they're doing. And so they're seeing a little bit of wasted investment in full staff.

So we take them on a journey and we look at the maturity level of their organization from a data and technology perspective before we recommend to them where they need to start. So at the base of that journey where there are lower levels of maturity, we are helping clients with entry-level pilots and foundations. So for [indiscernible], we've created for them a data platform that enables scale and also enables them to start building use cases because without getting their data in the right place, they're unable to leverage the power of AI.

And for [indiscernible], on the other hand, the data was in a place where we could start to use it. So we look at the most immediately value-creating players that we could create with them. And we have worked on fixed so far to deliver real value quickly. At the next level of investment where companies are starting to scale. Houston Airport, for example, we created for them a customer app. So if you're shopping through Houston Airport, you were able to use the fact to use AI to interrogate where you can get a seat, or find a coffee, or what time your flight is, or whether they're early delays. [indiscernible] built a repository and helped them to interrogate that repository of over [70,000] research papers and are helping them use AI to interrogate those research papers more quickly, and more deeply for their own research internally.

And at the very strategic end of the scale, we're helping companies purchase iRobot to create an AI enabling data platforms that enable AI analysis of the way that customers are using their devices. So iRobot manufacturers and vacuum cleaners, robotic vacuum cleaners that run around our houses and also mops and other cleaning equipment. This data platform enables iRobot to look at the way that their devices are being used and serve up the client experience in a very different way to ensure that they continue to get quality from the products that they buy over their lifecycle for example, giving them an alert when batteries need replacing before they run after to get you.

So those are some examples of the way that we're working and intentionally pulling those levers in AI to differentiate ourselves against competitors, you may be looking at things at a far more strong AI engineering level, we're trying to deliver real value to our clients using our industry experience.

I'm now going to hand as over to Graham, who's going to tell you a bit more about our exciting TRC Advisory acquisition.

[Graham Busby, executive]

Thank you Em. So the TRC was founded in 2014. I actually reached out to them in August last year, and we first met in October last year, physically met in January this year and have spent the time in between getting the deal in place. We're really excited because it deepens that U.S. presence that we have at Elixirr, but also they -- whilst they do expand multiple industries and certainly their experience spans many, many industries that sweet spot is in industrial and manufacturing sectors. And we do have clients in that space and revenue in that space, but now we can go much deeper and we can start bringing the capabilities we have as the group into their client set and vice versa.

The playbook that they leave behind, they do a lot of strategy, go-to-market models, pricing discipline, resource productivity. And what they leave behind is essentially our project brief. We can pick that up and work out, okay, so now what digital tech, AI, cultural transformation, all of the capabilities we have, how can we wrap all those together to be able to execute on the recommendations that come out of TRC's playbook, if you like.

In terms of size, roughly about 50 people and very strong margins, and I'll go on the next slide, there's $16 million to $17 million expected on an adjusted basis in FY '25 from their earnings. And you can see the client is [indiscernible] full set of blue-chip clients, and we've already actually started talking to them not least a big part of our due diligence on all of our acquisitions is talking to their clients beforehand to see what the clients actually think. And we spoke to roughly 30 of TRC's clients. And what I love about them is that they are such -- the right of senior [indiscernible] around about 25 were chief executives and the others were Board members or C level. And they've got the best results we've had to date since we've started doing this on potential acquisitions.

And you can see there they were rated 8.9 out of 10, which was 35% better than the competition, which were classed as McKinsey, Bain and Boston by their clients. So their clients [indiscernible] TRC of 35% better on average. You know that the MBB’s [indiscernible] well, and that fits in perfectly with our quality bar as well. The type of work just in a couple of examples that they work with -- you can see the kind of public companies above, but also they work with the portfolio companies of private equity. And that's an example there with 1 feedback manufacturer where they looked at the strategy of the pricing and how they executed. And the CEO said directly that there was TRC's impact that enabled revenue to grow by 33% over 2 years and EBITDA grew 166% in that same period.

Another example, another CEO attributing this to TRC was a client where because of what TRC did, they increased the cash conversion from negative to over 100%, and they managed to double the operating income as well. So they make really significant impact based on what they advised them, another way to think of that is we're very good at taking a P&L and the balance sheet and breaking it down into the component parts, finding where the value levers are and then matching that across the business challenge, and the business problem, and coming up with recommendations out of it, and we see huge potential for Elixirr's broader capabilities to help execute those.

Having a better look at the numbers, their revenue tripled from FY '22 to what they expect at the end of this year. They're expecting roughly $35 million to $37 million. They've always been profitable. And when you adjust it for some of the compensation changes that the partners are coming in on our Elixirr partner packages, plus we put some cost charges into the P&L for some of the infrastructure that we'll be providing to take all that into account. There is a 46% Adjusted Elixirr EBITDA basis, but we're running at about 30%. So yes, it's going to be great to have that in our numbers going forward. And like I said, $16 million to $17 million is what they're expecting in terms of the adjusted EBITDA at the end of this year.

And how did we look at the deal? It's the multiple ranges from a day 1 multiple of 4.2% rising to 7.8% to say and everything. The maximum purchase price of $125 million, $57 million of that went out at the weekend, $16 million of that was shares in the Elixirr [indiscernible] cash. They have targets to achieve above [indiscernible] if they hit the targets that we've agreed for FY '25, then that releases another $32 million to them, $24 million of that is cash and $8 million in shares and that would be paid out in April next year, after we've had the audit.

And then for FY '26, '27 and '28, there's another $36 million available, that's $12 million in this year and that is based on EBITDA growth targets. So we expect some targets of growing EBITDA of 10% to 25% over those periods. And then if they do that on a sliding scale starting at 40% and then 100% of the $12 million, they will achieve that. And we have full discussion as to using cash flow shares to settle that.

One thing we have put in the deal shape is once we get to 12.5% growth, we have an agreement in place that can start counting EBITDA of Elixirr projects that are being sold into their client base. So over and above the organic EBITDA, if you like, they can then start bringing in some of that cross-sell EBITDA against the targets. And again, that just aligns all of it out to maximize the shareholders the impact that TRC can have in totality for [indiscernible].

And also to this half of FY '25 EBITDA, early market price [indiscernible] $4 million of that will be allocated imminently. And then the remainder threat ends up to be another $4 million or $5 million. That will be released in line with -- over the 3 years. So again, we want to make sure that everyone that is part of Elixirr has that some of equity opportunity, and we also will allow them to enter into our equity schemes [indiscernible] earlier. So everyone is building out a really nice position in the next year to help us all achieve the great targets that we have.

So I think all in all, really exciting acquisition. Culturally, perfect, as Steve mentions, the partners fit in a couple of weeks ago when they came over as if they have been with us forever. They have strong financial track record, they have consistent revenue growth, great margins, so immediately earnings enhancing deal. And yes, we're looking forward to add to about GBP 15 million of cross-sell from H1 through looking at each other's respective client sets. I’ll just touch a reminder on our broader acquisition strategy. So we're not changing it. It is working. It has worked for 6 or so years since we started. We're looking to do 1 or 2 deals a year and looking to bring in 10% to 20% of EBITDA across those 1 or 2 deals. That's better than doing lots and lots of small deals and it's better than doing one gigantic deal, and we will continue to do that alongside our organic growth. And we'll be looking at capabilities that we don't have to add.

So an example is fiber. I mentioned that last time we're still looking for the right fitting fiber firm [indiscernible] as a whole bunch of capabilities that we can give to our clients. And also looking at industry in the last 2 or 3 acquisitions have really opened up new industry for us or at least deepened relatively small presence we have in those industries, looking at Insigniam. They were very strong in health care, pharma biotech. Now that's a big industry for us doing all the [indiscernible] consulting we do in those spaces with them.

That's better than do lots and lots of small deals, and it's better to do one gigantic deal, and we will continue to do that alongside our organic growth. And we'll be looking at capabilities that we don't have to add. So an example is cyber. I mentioned that last time, we're still looking for the right fitting cyber firm because that again gives a whole bunch of capabilities that we can give to our clients and also looking at industry, the last 2 or 3 acquisitions have really opened up new industries for us or at least deepened relatively small presence we have in those industries.

Looking at Insigniam in back end of 2023, they were very strong in healthcare, pharma, biotech. Now that's a big industry for us, doing all the other consulting that we do in those spaces with them. Looking at Hypothesis last year, very strong in media, tech and entertainment. They work with 5 [indiscernible] 7 amongst other household names, again, opening up that industry for us. And then TRC in industrials manufacturing, again, an exciting space for us to explore with them.

And geographically additive. So obviously, the U.S. and the U.S. is twice as big a market as the U.K. and Europe and 4x bigger than Europe. So over time and actually we're not far off in the Asian part. But when you think to the mix of our U.S. and Europe/U.K. revenue, it does actually reflects where that spend is. That said, we are still looking in other places, particularly on the continent. The DACH region and the Nordic region, these are huge consulting markets with international well-renowned brand and we have a pipeline of firms that we're talking to.

But whoever we're talking to, it has to be extremely high-quality service. That is an absolute must. We're not going to dilute the service that we give to our clients. And everything is aligned from a deal structure point of view. We want to make sure as I just described the share component on the previous page, we want to make sure that the founders are aligned with us and with you guys as investors so that we're always making the right decision for shareholders.

And we have the firepower to go forward. Nick spoke about how cash generative we are. That's not going to stop. Obviously, we'll be repaying down the debt. We've got the equity now on the main market. The debt facility, particularly the RCF is still there. So there's plenty of firepower that's kind of giving us the support we need, if you like, to have interesting conversations to continue this strategy for the foreseeable future. And you can see some of the sort of numbers that's just since IPO on the right-hand side there in terms of a pipeline and forward-looking that sort of top of funnel conversations through to quite advanced conversations is as it always has been. We don't take our eye off the pipeline while we're doing we run both of those simultaneously.

And I'll hand over to Nick now to talk through how all of this growth translates into growth and dilution.

[Nicholas Willott, executive]

Thanks, Graham. Those of you have been on this call before will have seen a similar slide to this, this is an update of our model where we look at making sure that we're measuring any dilution compared to the value that it's creating in growth. And just a reminder, since IPO, we -- well, at the half year, we diluted 7% over the 5 years since IPO, and that's 10% today, including the shares for the acquisition of TRC. But all of that 10% is through acquisition. We haven't [Audio Gap] options. So even though we do grant [Audio Gap] we've made sure that we've actually had no dilution to date, we've used our cash to buy shares.

And that was the point I mentioned buying shares during the period to satisfy our pre-IPO options. So over those 5 years since IPO, our market cap has roughly quadrupled over that period with 10% dilution for acquisition and no dilution for employees. Looking forward, this model demonstrates if we continue to grow, this is taking a 20% growth rate. So just looking at the organic side of growth, but keeping all the metrics the same EBITDA to free cash flow generation, keeping the multiple the same and looking at the employee incentives we have in place today, the employee and partner options, additional options for partner hires or the employee -- the growth in the employee base to grow in line with revenue, the employee share purchase plan that we mentioned that we have very high take-up that an option scheme for employees and replacement options for partners once their existing options mature to ensure they remain incentivized.

Even when you put all those metrics together, it only results in 19% dilution by 2030. So in a world where we continue growing organically at 20% a year and the GBP 400 million roughly market cap we have today grows to 1.2 billion by 2030, all that dilution is only 19%. So the shareholders today who are diluted would still have GBP 1 billion of that GBP 1.2 billion. So still a 2.5x return on money. And that's -- and this is a model where we don't use cash. Clearly, we have the opportunity to reduce this further if we use cash to buy shares rather than diluting, which is the strategy we've followed so far.

And just for those of you just to remind you, the reason this dilution is much less than you might expect when you look at the number of options disclosed in our results that we actually have granted, options are all at market price. There's no free of 0 price options. These are options where there's only value if the partner employee contributes to the share price growing and the share price grows above the exercise price of the grant, which is the market price of their grant. And all of the options have performance conditions and employees have to be in our top 2 performance categories, partners have to hit their revenue and profitability targets. So there are stretching targets for the options to vest.

And all of our options have 4 or 5-year first exercise date. So if an employee leaves within 4 years or a partner leaves within 5 years, all of those options are forfeit. So in reality, only about 1/3 of the options we grant will actually vest as a combination of those, the performance criteria and the attrition assumptions. And that's why from our point of view, and clearly, everybody on this call, all of us representing our shareholders ourselves, we think the dilution of this model that we have in place is very modest compared to the growth that it's going to generate. And that's exactly what we've seen so far. And now I'll hand over to Stephen, who's going to close with the outlook.

[Stephen Newton, executive]

Thank you, Nick. Yes, I think I'll do the outlook. There's a couple of questions we can quickly see if we can address those 2. But let me just say the thing that we think investors should consider when looking at our business because it's the way we look at our business. We see our businesses in short, medium and long term. We're all actually long-term investors. If you sign up for a partner position in Elixirr, you're actually taking a 5-year position and in actual fact, most of us after those 5 years, see it as a 10-, 15-year position. So we're not that concerned about intraday movements or intraday movements. We're more concerned about the long-term growth trajectory of the organization, and we turn up every day and see the right things going in place.

And so we set ourselves objectives. And our immediate short-term objective is to hit the [indiscernible], which we hope to do within 6 to 12 months, which we think starts to change the liquidity profile of our stock. So we're very keen to do that as soon as possible, and we think we're on the right trajectory to get that to happen. We've done the calculations is around [$515 million] market cap. We're currently at around [$400] million, so we're not far off some organic growth next year, maybe an acquisition or 2, and we're flying straight into the [$250 million], which is a short-term objective. Then the medium-term objective is that we think we want to build a unicorn, so $1 billion would be pretty nice after that, and we want to do that if you compound the business at 20% to 30% to somewhere between 3 and 5 years, we will be a $1 billion market cap company.

And then our long-term ambition is to be a FTSE 100, which is somewhere around $4.5 billion, I believe, is the entry point to the FTSE 100 position. So those are our short, medium and long-term goals. And we're all holding our shares with a view of building out to those ambitions, and it's certainly very achievable. If I look at the -- there's a question here from John, I think, who asked how do we differentiate Elixirr from the larger consultancies? I hope through this presentation, John, you said that early on, but you can see some of that answer. But just to make -- to give you a way of thinking about it, if you think this is a $1 trillion industry growing at somewhere between 5% and 10% a year, depending in which area you're looking, half of that $1 trillion is actually in the hands of boutique firms, brands none of you will actually know.

They're just individual partners or groups of partners who put together a capability, a skill, a talent, a service offering, and they beat the big firms every day because no one ever got fired for hiring IBM or McKinsey or Accenture. And the other half of the $1 trillion is those big branded names. Now what we're doing really is we're providing a platform for those boutique firms to scale and fight with the big boys in a way that they can't because those boutique firms, they never lose on quality, and they never lose on relationships. But what is the problem for the boutique firms is that they don't have the same access to market as the big firms do.

So what we're doing is we're providing them that access and that's what our cross-sell revenue is demonstrating. We're just showing that if we can give our consulting capability access into Insigniam, we get GBP 10 million worth of additional revenue. And that's the real value here. And you platform it on the entrepreneurial equity ownership model rather than cash model. It creates such a different behavior pattern in the organization. I've worked in McKinsey, IBM and Accenture and I've never worked in a partner group as dynamic, entrepreneurial and teamwork-oriented as this group of partners I have here. It's unbelievable how the compensation model and the culture has aligned itself so well. And you couple that with the boutique story I was talking about. So we are very, very bullish about the future.

There was another question here that I could just address someone asked what if we can't find any quality consulting outlets to buy -- acquisition pipeline goes up. I think, Graham, I'm not even going to pass that to you because I think you've already really answered that. The pipeline is so full. There's so much opportunity. There's so much space to grow into that we will continue to pursue brilliant acquisitions. And as our platform becomes more robust, if you talk about Tim, who's the CEO of TRC, his idea, just one simple example of what he can't do that we can provide because we've got the platform. His business is about the size we were at the AIM IPO, not dissimilar in size that we were when we were doing the AIM IPO.

And just a simple example of what we've been able to build and therefore can deliver value to him immediately. We get over 12,000 applicants a year from Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, Oxford, Cambridge, the best universities in the world. We managed to build a brand where the youngsters love our challenger positioning. If they're going into consulting, we get tons of applicants. Now TRC get none. Now there's -- we don't hire 1,200 applicants a year. So 12,000, sorry, people who apply to us a year. So there's so much opportunity for us in that simple space, for example, to provide value to the people we acquire. And then obviously, the cross-sell. So there's such a big differentiation around that, that it's really starting to pay off. A few other questions. Nick, do you want to answer these questions from quality around some of the EBITDA and net debt numbers? I don't know if you want to just quickly touch on those.

[Nicholas Willott, executive]

Yes, sure. Thanks. So Alejandro, net debt to EBITDA at the end of the year, currently think that's going to be around about 0.6 and next year, probably at a similar level, maybe falling to 0.5. Obviously, it's very dependent on what we do in terms of future acquisitions. The reason it didn't necessarily fall significantly next year is that we have the top-up payment that we're going to pay for TRC based on FY '25 EBITDA once we validated the FY '25 EBITDA through the audit. You also asked about employee share purchases is that because it's to help increasing shares outstanding. That's exactly right. We -- as I said when I was talking about the dilution model, we haven't diluted at all for the employee options that we've granted and that's because we bought shares, and we've been buying shares this year to satisfy our pre-IPO options, which are the ones that are most dilutive.

And for us, we see that's much more valuable to shareholders, and we like to avoid diluting shareholders unless it's really essential. Free cash flow, you asked about was GBP 28 million last year. Last year was particularly strong. There is a bit of volatility in working capital at year-end. Obviously, we have some big clients and just depending whether they pay their debtors their invoices the week before year-end or the week after can make a bit of a swing. You can really think in terms of free cash flow, whatever our EBITDA number is, take 25% for tax and roughly on average 75% to free cash flow. Some years, it might be a bit higher, some years a bit lower just depending on the working capital swings, but that's the long-term trend.

I'm just looking if any more financial questions and then there was a question from Mark earlier on. [indiscernible] I think we covered this, but the impact of TRC on the full year results. I think we put on slide in sterling terms. I think full year revenue of TRC is about GBP 27 million, EBITDA about GBP 12 million. You can expect roughly 1/4 of that in this financial year and obviously a full year impact next year. I guess -- and maybe actually just one other point to think about it on TRC, of course, with the earnout structure, they have to grow EBITDA by 25% a year to get all of their earnout. So if you think about it over the 3 years, a 3-year earnout the [indiscernible] they've got roughly double EBITDA from there, that GBP 12 million for we're saying that the starting.

[Stephen Newton, executive]

Look I think we've covered most of the key questions. There's one final one here from Alejandro relating to the U.S. listing potential. With business people and we like to sell our assets at fair value. So we're all shareholders and we do believe that the current valuation is undervalued by a significant number. Therefore, I always find it quite amusing when people say there's no liquidity in the stock. Will there be liquidity in the stock if the price is right because there are lots of holders of the stock that are not prepared to sell and I speak for almost all my partners. When they see a valuation as it stands today because they feel that they work in this business every day. They see how it's growing. They see the performance with our clients. They see the potential of the market, so there'll be sellers when the price is right.

So that liquidity point is a bit of an interesting one to me. But the other one that I'd like to refer to is if there are markets that would value us better, then we'd be looking to go to those markets. This is the reason we moved from AIM to the main market. So it's just a natural progression. We see it as a natural progression. I believe that at some point, we will be listed in the U.S. where it's a dual listing. It's inconceivable to me that we will be -- add the E to MBB and make it EMBB if we're not a global business with global scale, and that makes a lot of sense in that context to be, you could be listed in both locations. So the long-term journey for us is to find the market that rewards us for our performance in the market. And we'll go where the capital pools understand that and reward us according.

So, I think it’s slightly overtime here. I hope we let it run a little bit longer because we thought we answered some of these questions here, but thanks very much for your time. Very bullish about the future. The business is growing. We have less expectations of our business going forward as we've done, delivered in the past. We just need to look at our historic performance and I think you can safely say we expect to be delivering those kind of going forward for all the reasons we've been discussing on this presentation. So thank you for your time. Thank you for your interest and really hope that you jump on board with us on our journey to become a FTSE 100 company in the long term and unicorn in the medium and a 250 in a short. So thanks very much, everyone.

[Operator]

That's great. Thank you all for updating investors today. Can I please ask investors not to close this session as you'll now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order that the management team can better understand your views and expectations. This only take a few moments to complete, and I'm sure will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of Elixirr International plc, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good afternoon to you all.