Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to Franchise Brands' second Capital Markets Day. Oh, the disclaimer, I've just got to read through that now, or shall I summarize by saying everything we tell you today is our responsibility, and our house and our brokers have nothing to do with it? So I'd like to start by introducing the presenters to you. My name is Stephen Hemsley. I am Executive Chairman and Co-founder, with my colleague here, Nigel Wray, of Franchise Brands. CFO Mark Fryer is with us today. He joined us in August, 25 years experienced with public companies in the city. Next up, Chris Stuckey, CEO of Pirtek. He joined us last year with the acquisition, had been with Pirtek for about 7 years, was MD of the UK division, and last summer, promoted to CEO of Pirtek Europe, which covers all of the countries. Next up, Peter Molloy, a veteran of the business. His youthful good looks remain with him. He joined us with Metro Rod, which we acquired in 2017. He's been with Metro Rod over 20 years as Sales Director, MD of Metro Rod, and then CEO of the newly renamed Water & Waste Division, and he'll explain that to you later. Next up, the even more youthful Jason Sayers, who has done a video for us. He founded Filta 27 years ago. He must have been a child when he did it, but nevertheless, he's now CEO of the Filta International Division. Next up, Tim Harris, MD of the B2C Division, another veteran of our business. He was with ChipsAway before Nigel and I acquired it, as Sales Director. He's now MD of the B2C Division. Next, Colin Rees, our CIO. He joined shortly after the acquisition of Metro Rod to lead the digital transformation of the group. We previously worked together at Domino's, where he led the successful digital transformation of Domino's, so we're hoping he does the same for us. Next up, Robin Auld, our Group Marketing Director. Also worked with him previously at Domino's, where he was Sales and Marketing Director, and as you will hear, Robin brings science to marketing. Finally, and by no means least, Julia Choudhury. Now, none of us would be here today, but for Julia and her husband, they actually introduced the acquisition of ChipsAway and Ovenclean all those years ago. She's now responsible for corporate development and indeed undertakes most of the acquisition activity almost single-handed. She will be introducing the Growth Summit to you later on. So just like to quickly run through the agenda. I'll be starting talking about unlocking the group's potential, the journey so far, and just introducing our medium-term targets, a teaser until Mark explains them in some detail. I will then hand over to the CEOs of each of the divisions, who will explain to you their business and how they use the Maximum Potential Model to get the best out of them. Julia will then finish that session, as I say, with describing the Growth Summit, too, which is one of the growth tools we use to grow our business. There will then be a short comfort break and the first Q&A session, so you don't forget all those interesting questions until the end. We'll then follow with Colin's presentation on our digital journey, then Robin on how we use marketing to support the Maximum Potential Model, and then I'll wrap up and invite you to consider our investment case. Who are we? We are a multi-brand international franchisor focused on B2B, van-based service, with a presence in 10 countries, in 7 brands. Pirtek, Metro Rod, and Metro Plumb provide essential services to B2B customers on a mostly reactive basis. By essential, what we mean is that people don't have a choice as to whether they buy the services we provide. If the drains are blocked, if the pipes are leaking, if the hydraulic hoses burst and needs replacing, they have to buy the service from someone. They don't necessarily have to buy it from us, and that's our job, to make sure that we're front of mind, first on the list, when those happy, at least for us, events occur. Filta is a slightly different business. It provides planned services to the hospitality sector, mainly in the U.S. But we say it's arguably not essential, but the reality is that it's such a cost-effective service that we never lose a customer. They get the service of the oil filtration and taking away the used oil almost for free because of the money we save them on the used oil recycling. We have three B2C brands. The two original ones are ChipsAway and Ovenclean, and Barking Mad. Most of the franchisees in that division are one man in one van, but this business, while it's quite difficult to grow, is highly cash generative. This makes the demand for our services pretty resilient. We're not recession-proof. When buildings don't get used, machinery doesn't get used, the equipment on them doesn't break so often, so they have less need for reactive service... but we do service a lot of sectors, such as healthcare, emergency services, education, social housing, waste management, and recycling, that are not particularly affected by the economic cycles. There are also some parts of our business that actually can benefit from economic slowdowns, because we find that particularly the FM companies who may have in-sourced some of the services we provide, when things get a bit tighter, they lay off the in-house staff and return to outsourcing those products, so we can pick up additional business during those circumstances. Our focus is on building market-leading businesses, primarily using a franchise model. We like market leaders. We don't do startups. We're prepared to take number two or three in the market and grow them to leadership, but we really like to start with a pretty substantial business with good market representation. We will use direct labour organizations, or DLOs, as we call them, where we think they will enhance a franchise channel, and Willow Pumps is an example of that. Our overriding strategy is to help our franchisees grow their business, because based on a royalty model, we believe that if they grow, we grow. Give you some idea of the scale of the business. System sales, which is the sales of all the franchisees and the DLOs, not our statutory sales, they totaled about GBP 350 million in 2023. Our brokers are forecasting profits Adjusted EBITDA for 2023 of around GBP 30 million. We have over 625 franchisees across 7 franchise brands, who employ over 3,000 people. We have 700 direct employees of our own, and in total, the group operates about 2,000 service vans. We use the Maximum Potential Model, which you're gonna hear an awful lot today, to guide us in the growth of this business. We use this to estimate the total size of market, and then use our growth tools to realize that potential in partnership with our franchisees. This also allows us to scale and leverage our central services to boost our operational gearing. This is an at-a-glance of the international footprint. So in North America, we have the Filta brand. In the UK and Ireland, we have nine brands, some of them franchise, some of them direct labor, and in continental Europe, the Pirtek and Filta brands, and you see the scale of them there. Still largely UK at the moment, but our ambition is eventually to generate our profits equally in North America, UK, and Europe. Some idea of the track record of the business for the last five years, system sales have grown at a compound rate of Adjusted EBITDA, compound rate of 55%. Earnings per share, a little slower as a result of the equity issue, particularly for the Filta and Pirtek deals, and indeed, the debt taken on to finance the Pirtek deal, but nevertheless, grown at a compound rate of 19%, and dividends a little ahead of that at 24%. Now, obviously, those numbers were significantly driven by the acquisition of Filta and Pirtek, which I will come on to talk about. I'd actually like to take you through the milestones, the history of the group. Nigel and I founded the group in 2008, with the acquisition of ChipsAway and Ovenclean out of administration. Nigel and I largely funded that acquisition of GBP 6 million, but actually some of the ex-employees of the previous companies, and Julia and her husband, partly financed it. In 2016, we IPO'd on AIM at a market capitalization of GBP 15.5 million at a price of 33p, and later that year, we acquired another small B2C business. Shortly after we IPO'd, we reconsidered our strategy and, and moved more towards B2B businesses, because we like the characteristic of the royalty, or as we call it in franchise land, a management service fee keeps the taxman happy, that gives us the ability to grow our income as the franchisees grow theirs. The royalty is based on their turnover, so if we can grow that, we can grow our business. That led us to the acquisition of Metro Rod, which was a somewhat neglected, underperforming business, which Peter will tell you about how he has turned that around rather successfully in the meantime. In 2019, we acquired Willow Pumps. One of the things we identified at Metro Rod was the range of services it offered its customers wasn't comprehensive. There were big gaps in it, and a lot of our customers wanted an end-to-end service without us handing off work to subcontractors, or indeed, sometimes refusing work because we weren't able to do it. One of the companies we subcontracted a lot of pump work to was Willow Pumps, so we bought Willow Pumps. What we're now doing is using that to train the Metro Rod franchisees how to deliver that service themselves. In 2021, we acquired Azura, a software company that provides software to about 30-odd franchise businesses. But the reason for the acquisition was that this was the company that we developed our works management system, Vision, with, and it was becoming such a core part of our business, and we saw the potential in it, in using it in other acquisitions, that we decided we had to own the IP. So we bought the company for just under GBP 1 million. In 2022, we acquired Filta. Now, I'd known Jason a number of years. Actually, we both floated on AIM in 2016, and we discussed what a good fit Filta was with Metro Rod a number of times. But it was only as he was coming out of the COVID recovery, I mean, their business was hit quite hard by COVID because hospitality premises just shut down. So he was coming out of COVID. We managed to make the numbers add up, and we merged with them in 2022 on an all-share deal. Quite dilutive for us. I wouldn't necessarily want to issue that much equity all-equity deal again, but nevertheless, that's what their shareholders wanted, so that's what we did. And as you'll see, it's proved to be an excellent acquisition. And then the really big one last year of Pirtek, which is an absolutely superb business, right in our sweet spot of van-based reactive service. So how have all these done? What we've tried to do here is show you how we organically grow businesses. It has been said that we pay quite a lot for acquisitions, but the reason that we pay quite a lot for them is we see the potential. And in Metro Rod, which we acquired on a multiple of 11.4, the brokers' forecast for their profits last year are such that the implied multiple now is just 3.7. Willow Pumps, slightly different story on that. We acquired it on an earn-out, and these numbers are based on what we eventually paid. So we acquired it on 3.9, now 3.6, but you've got to remember that the reason we acquired that business was to grow, Metro, and provide expertise in there. So Willow Pumps is not an end in itself, it's a means to an end to grow a franchise business. 2022, as I said, we bought Filta on 15.3x as they were coming out of or recovering from COVID, and they've done that in fine style so that the implied multiple now is just 6.9x. Pirtek, we paid 13.6x for, and I won't be telling you what we've done there because we haven't owned it for a full 12 months. So come back this time next year, and we'll tell you how well we're doing on that. A couple of other things on this. Willow Pumps and Metro Rod, the EBITDA we've generated since acquisition equals the purchase price. So we've got cash-on-cash payback, effectively, of those businesses in less than five years, which I think is a pretty reasonable, pretty reasonable deal. So just introducing to you the Maximum Potential Model, the first of 10 times, or second of 10 times, you'll be hearing about the Maximum Potential Model today. So what is it? Well, let me tell you where it came from. When Bain Capital acquired Domino's Pizza in the U.S. in 1998, 1999, they came round to see all the CEOs of all the master franchisees around the world and asked us how big we thought the business could grow in that market. I didn't give them a very good answer, and they weren't very impressed with that. So they told me about how they do it, which was to use the Maximum Potential Model, which is to look at the metrics delivered in every franchise territory and then look at what the whole market is or what it was populated with, and in home delivery food, it's households. So they multiplied out the best metrics they could find in any franchise territory and estimated the size of the market. At the time, Domino's was doing just $60 million a year in system sales, and they said that the potential was $1.5 billion, and that exceeded the size of the whole home delivery market in 1998, 1999. So I said, "You know, it's pretty ambitious, guys." And they said: "Don't worry about that. The market will grow to accommodate that." And I just checked yesterday, and it looks like Domino's will do $1.5 billion in 2023, so pretty amazing. When we acquired Metro Rod, I thought I wonder if the Maximum Potential Model will work for a drainage business. And of course, it does, because you know what the total potential market is. It's every commercial premises in the country. You know what the franchisee's penetration is in each of the franchise territory. You know what the average spend is per site. So if you multiply that out, you could estimate what the maximum potential was. You can then use that to go back to the franchisees and say to them: "Well, you know, Fred down the road has got penetration of 5%. You've only got 2%. What are you not doing that he's doing?" And then we help the franchisees develop their penetration. Same with average spend. Why do some franchisees have a higher average spend than others? One of the reasons is often that they don't provide such a full range of services as other franchisees. So if we can train them up and get them to supply a full range of services to franchisees, they can grow their average ticket. Now, the other dynamic about that is that as we add services, which in the case of, you know, introducing tankering, introducing pumps, grows the market that we can service. So actually, the Maximum Potential Model is pretty dynamic. I mean, the scope of that grows over time as well. What I will do is just tell you what the overall group looks like in terms of what the Maximum Potential Model has shown us. Now, this is not every business or every country in the group. Certainly, in the case of Pirtek, we're still working through some of the smaller countries, what the potential is there. And in the case of Metro Rod, we haven't included the plumbing market. But nevertheless, in total, at the moment, those businesses are doing GBP 332 million of system sales. And And the Maximum Potential Model tells us that the potential of just doing what we're doing at the moment, not expanding the range of services, just doing what we're doing at the moment, is GBP 1.8 billion. So 6 times what we've got at the moment. So pretty impressive potential growth there. We know how to do it, because as I say, we will then dive down into each of the territories to find out why the best of the best are doing what they are and why others are not doing as well, and that gives us then the plan to work with the franchisees to grow their, their territory. That leads us on to estimating what the medium-term potential is in terms of profitability. The acquisition of Pirtek, which was obviously a very big deal for us, and we issued a lot more equity, more particularly, a lot more debt. We've acquired Filta just the year before. We've now got to enter a period of consolidation. We've got to integrate those businesses, we've got to grow them organically, we've got to use the cash flow that's generated to repay the debt. So this has given us an opportunity to sort of pause and, and think about what the organic growth potential is as the portfolio we, we've now put together. And this is what we've come up with. It. In the year to December 2023, the brokers are forecasting just under GBP 30 million of profits. We think we can double that by 2027. Over the last three years, in this period of rapid acquisition, our organic growth rate has been 27% compound, and this forecast is anticipating 19% growth. So it's not doing anything that we haven't done before, and the tools we've used to, in the last three years, are exactly the same tools as we're going to be using in the next three years. So we think this is an ambitious forecast, but achievable. We have expanded the group quite rapidly over the last couple of years, doubled in size with Filta, doubled again with Pirtek, so it's now sort of time to catch up on the corporate governance. So what we've done is streamline the governance structure with a slimmed-down board comprising just two executive directors, myself and Mark, as the CFO, and three non-exec directors, two of which are independent. Pete here, please stand. Andy Brattesani, who's, I understand, watching us on video from some hot climes, and of course, my founding partner, Nigel Wray. You won't need to stand up. They know you. Reporting to the PLC Board will be a Management Board, which is comprised of all the divisional management, the heads of the central services, our commercial director, and our company secretary. The split will be that the Management Board executes the strategy that has been set by the PLC Board. So we think that gives us a good sort of reactive structure to go forward. The Management Board can focus on growing the business and leave the bigger strategic decisions, longer-term decisions, to the PLC Board, which is now in line with the corporate governance standards we need to meet. So in summary, the recent acquisitions have transformed the group into a sizable international business now, with 7 franchise brands across 10 countries. As I said, the focus for the next 3 years is integration, organic growth, and deleverage. The Maximum Potential Model demonstrates the significant opportunity that each business has and the small share of often fragmented markets that they have to go for. Profits will be driven by the underlying growth of the businesses and accelerated operational gearing, where the IT element will become really important to that. This allows us to make an ambitious forecast to double profits by the end of 2027. And finally, the cash flow generated from operations will be used to repay all the Pirtek debt, such that by the end of 2027, we expect to have net cash, and Mark will come on to talk about how we're going to do that. Good afternoon, everyone. We're the new kids on the block. The Pirtek concept was developed as a franchisable business around a mobile workshop that could replace hydraulic hoses at a customer's location using Pirelli technology. Pirtek Europe was founded in the UK in 1988 by acquiring the master license on a perpetual, royalty-free basis for the EEC, as it was then, from Peter Duncan, the founder of Pirtek in Australia. Pirtek's first physical location was in Park Royal. We had three vans, and this developed the market for rapid response, hydraulic hose replacement with a USP of one-hour ETA. You'll be asking, what are hydraulics and where are they? If you traveled here today by Tube, the brakes, doors, and other ancillary equipment on the Tube train are operated by hydraulics or their close associate, pneumatics. When you had your lunch, it was prepared, partially at least, and transported with the use of hydraulics, and the lift that you rode in up to this meeting is probably hydraulically operated. So in the modern world, hydraulics is pretty much everywhere, operating everything from manufacturing to transportation to waste. So the hydraulic hoses that transport the fluid to the point of use are critical in the operation of all hydraulic equipment. A failure of a hydraulic hose brings the operation to a halt. A A hydraulic hose failure on a construction site, on a bin lorry, or in an automotive plant, stops the activity and limits production. So normally, the failure doesn't just impact that occurrence. So with a bin lorry, you'll take it out of action, you'll stop collections, which potentially will lead to a fine from the local authority. On a construction site, you'll stop several pieces of equipment and potentially impact delivery deadlines, and in a factory, you'll stop production for a length of time. So with our customers halted, this costs them GBP hundreds, GBP thousands, potentially more, for each and every hour that they're not in operation. The ability to get the equipment back up and running quickly and efficiently has a significant value that can be provided to those individual customers. So Pirtek's initial offering was focused on the provision of a rapid emergency response hose replacement. This was a new concept in the industry that was based around people going to a self-service trade counter. Pirtek replaced this trade counter with a mobile workshop that could assemble the required hoses at the customer's location. A skilled technician could diagnose the fault, remove the failed hose, manufacture a replacement, and install the new hose without leaving the site. This allowed the equipment to return to service and reduced costly downtime. It was initially a small market of price and sensitive customers when it was first introduced in the late 1980s. However, increasing labor costs, downsizing of customer workforces, skill shortages, and productivity demands have steadily increased the size of this market, and service has predominantly replaced distributors. Pirtek has expanded its physical locations throughout the UK and into Europe to meet this increasing customer demand and to maintain response times. As our geographic coverage has increased, our network has attracted larger consumers who require consistent service on a local, regional, and national basis. Historically, our customers were split between local customers serviced by one single Pirtek center, regional customers who dealt with several Pirtek centers and would be managed by a single point of contact at one of the Pirtek locations, and then national accounts, which used many Pirtek centers and would be managed by the franchisor on behalf of the franchisee. The split historically had been 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 between these local, regional, and national customers. However, in recent times, we've focused aggressively on growing the larger national accounts. In the UK, where we've been doing this for longer, we're now up to 45% of our system sales in the UK based on these larger national accounts, and we've achieved this using growth tool methodology, which we'll talk about a bit later on. This growth tool methodology that we've used to successfully grow national accounts, we are now working with our franchisees in the UK to adopt this for local and regional accounts, and also working in our European countries to adopt this for all of their accounts. So over the last 30 years, Pirtek has built up its range of services to support the growing customer base. A robust supply chain has been assembled to support our activities, and this has enabled Pirtek's business to expand a complementary trade counter sales business. As relationships have deepened with our customers, we've been requested to provide additional services utilizing our skilled technicians. So this has expanded from emergency hose replacement to initially planned maintenance, and more recently to predictive maintenance. Total Hose Management, as we call our preventative maintenance program, has been rolled out with customers as diverse as Cunard Line, Porsche, and Yeo Valley yogurts. The ability to build these stronger relationships with customers like Cunard has also allowed us to extend the range of services provided to allow us to look at other areas around the hydraulic hose. In the hydraulic system, you have power packs, accumulators, hydraulic cylinders. All of these can now be serviced by Pirtek and their trusted partner network. This has given us a huge potential to entering the much larger hydraulic equipment market. Why do customers buy? Our business, as described before, is really about getting our customers moving again. Pirtek's ability to respond to the customer quickly at their geographic location, usually within one hour, is the start of our service. I was explaining to Tim earlier on, that if you're unfortunate enough to walk outside here today and be knocked down by a road sweeper, if the road sweeper operator contacted Andy Williams, our franchisee for the King's Cross area, at the same time as the reception called an ambulance for you, Andy Williams believes that he would have a Pirtek van there to repair the damaged road sweeper before the London ambulance arrived to pick you up. However, this is just the start of the service. So the Pirtek van is equipped with stock that's based upon the equipment that operates within that franchised area. So when we turn up on site to repair the damaged hose, we have the equipment available. So 97% of the time that we turn up on site, we can repair that specific breakdown without having to leave the site. In addition to that, our skilled and trained, highly trained technicians have the ability to repair the job safely, to remediate any spills, and to get the equipment back up and running. So it means that the customers can recommence their activity. We would normally expect within 2-3 hours of us receiving a call. This, for reference, would be about when our competitors would be thinking about turning up on site. Our ability to provide this level of service, one-hour response, first time fixed, safely and reliably, is a key differentiator in the market. This is very difficult to replicate and enormously expensive to build up the density of network to provide these services. The premium services provides value to the customer by significantly reducing the cost of their downtime, and the downtime savings achieved for the majority of customers outweigh the cost of the service that we provide. So Pirtek is the market leader in Europe for mobile hose replacement. We've built scale businesses in the UK and Republic of Ireland, Germany and Austria, Belgium and the Netherlands. Each of these countries is predominantly franchised, all on a royalty model basis. We have two newer businesses, France and Sweden, which are in their infancy. These are operated as direct labour organizations at the current time, and here we are focused on increasing the geographic reach and the range of services provided. Pirtek also has the ability to expand its operations into eight other European countries under its current master license. However, we're focused on expanding our existing businesses and services at the moment as we continue to deleverage the organization. We have a diverse customer base, with the largest customer representing less than 1% of our system sales, and the range of industry sectors served is broadly consistent across all of the countries, with the largest spenders being equipment rental, construction, waste management, and logistics. Recent efforts, though, have focused on growth opportunities in the food and beverage, pharmaceutical, and utilities spaces, allowing us to expand with these customers in their non-cyclical markets. So, as Stephen has already discussed, the Maximum Potential Model is now being used within Pirtek to replicate the success that it has delivered to the Franchise Brands businesses. Pirtek has been adopting this model to suit its slightly different business. Commercial kitchens and drainage customers tend not to move around very much, whereas unfortunately, Pirtek customers do. Pirtek Germany has been using a similar methodology to Max Potential for several years to model franchising territories and to identify opportunities for franchisees to increase their system sales by subdividing their existing territory and adding additional physical locations. The model utilizes the potential customer within any franchised area, looking at the SIC codes and the existing customer spend data. The activity level from these customers is underrepresents the total potential activity level, as the customers have a tendency to move around. Construction sites, logistical efforts, et cetera, are underrepresented. So in Germany, they've adapted the model to look at the population density in specific areas, and this population density, based on the best-performing centers, has been used to adjust the activity level to get the market potential correct. Pirtek Germany have successfully utilized this model to encourage our franchisees to add 25 additional centers and increase the mobile fleet by 70 technicians. In the UK, we've also adapted the model slightly to look at the opportunity for technical sales, i.e., the sale of non-hose hydraulic equipment. Here, we've analyzed the industry sectors where we've successfully initiated sales and then reviewed potential customers on this basis. This exercise will allow Pirtek centers to follow up on successful case studies with these new customers, and we believe that we can achieve scale in technical sales across the other countries. So we've completed the Maximum Potential Model for the three large countries: UK, Germany, and Benelux. The French and Swedish businesses are in their infancy, and so it's not yet appropriate to use this methodology. The results based on the current range of services show significant multiple of current system sales. So if you look, Germany, about 3.6x, Benelux, 4x, UK, 5x. The UK is higher, as it has greater penetration into the technical sales area, and this has obviously given us a much wider access to the larger hydraulic market. We believe the experience gained in the UK can be used in the other markets, and so we should, in the future, see an increase in the maximum potential. Completing the initial analysis and identifying the Max Potential is useful, but this on its own does not deliver any additional sales. I've already explained, Pirtek Germany's use of the model to look at opportunities to expand territories.... and to look for new customers. We've adapted this in our other countries to look for hotspots, i.e., where there is a significant amount of customer activity, that is, not fully exploited by our technicians, and not spots, areas where we don't have technicians, and there are potential customers. This will allow us to correctly place technicians into these areas to exploit these opportunities. Since joining Franchise Brands, Pirtek has also been working with the other businesses to understand how the Max Potential Model is being used, and as Stephen previously explained, looking at how we rank the individual franchisees. Each of the Pirtek countries is looking at the franchisees' performance on a territory basis, understanding the penetration that they have with their potential customer base, and the average sales that we achieve with each of those customers. When we look at the best practice that's achieved in each of the countries, it allows us to look at what the maximum potential could be based on the best of the best, and allows us to deliver these additional sales. So we're looking to work with each of the- with all the franchisees to build the best practice in each of the countries. In addition, in the UK, the industry sector analysis has allowed us to identify target customers based upon margin, spend, and penetration in those specific industry sectors. All of these potential customers can then be actually targeted through loading the customer details up onto our local CRM systems, and then putting them onto our standard call cycle with our outbound CRM teams. This will allow us to enrich the data, and also to build follow-up with sales calls, quotations, and emergency response with all of these customers. We'd hope to start delivering significant additional sales as we build up the customer database from the SIC codes. In summary, as Stephen said about the other Franchise Brands business, we're a responsive service that reacts to customers in distressed situations to repair their damaged equipment, and we add value to those customers by doing this quickly and efficiently to allow them to get their equipment up and running again and avoiding costly downtime. We're the market leader in European mobile hose replacement, and we have a strong track record growth of both system sales and EBITDA. We have an existing strong management team to manage growth in our European countries, and we have the operation to expand our newly formed French and Swedish businesses, and in the future, an opportunity for a further eight European countries. The Maximum Potential Model gives us the opportunity to identify existing and adjacent markets, allows us to quantify the potential for our franchisees, and to drive them using best practice to grow their system sales. Our expanding and extending customer relationships allow us to continue to drive system sales across our broad customer base. And finally, we have the opportunity to increase operational gearing through the adoption of common franchise brand systems. Thank you very much. Good afternoon. My name is Peter Molloy. I am the CEO of the Water & Waste Services division. why did we rename it? Very simply, to give it a little bit more clarity to explain exactly what we do and not create any confusion with what Pirtek do. Pirtek deal with B2B businesses, so do we. So it was just really to give us a bit of distinction. So at a glance, the Water & Waste division is made up of four businesses: Metro Rod, Metro Plumb, Willow Pumps, and Filta. Metro Rod is the longest established of those, essentially dealing in the drainage market, drain clearance, drain rehabilitation, tanker services, pump services, et cetera. I think it's important to explain that that business has evolved over time. What was a rodding business probably 7, 8, 9 years ago, now undertakes some really sophisticated drainage works. It's essentially a franchise model with 42 franchisees, and 74% of those franchisees now with sales in excess of GBP 1 million, and that's a really important number. When we were acquired in 2017, it was less than 35% of franchisees at GBP 1 million in sales. What that GBP 1 million allows them to do, it generates significant profit so they can invest in their own businesses. They can lay down an infrastructure that allows them to work on the business, as opposed to in the business. Back in 2017, we were helping franchisees with their investment, with our money. Today, the franchisees are investing their money to develop the business and expand the range of services. Metro Plumb, an emergency plumbing business. We do some gas boiler service work. It isn't national at the moment, but we're expanding that range of services. We do essentially commercial plumbing, Legionella rectification work, and we've got a specialist business, Kemac, who work in the utility sector. 19 dedicated Metro Plumb franchisees, supported by another 19 combined Metro Rod and Metro Plumb franchisees, with 91 NVQ Level 2 plumbers operating and delivering that service. Willow Pumps, as Stephen says, the strategy behind the acquisition was to help us develop the Metro Rod business, and I'll come on to how I think they've helped do that. Pump station supply and install, pump rehabilitation, above ground pumps, which is booster pumps to increase the water pressure in taller buildings, and more latterly, our special projects division, which we set up last year, which is looking at some M&E projects and broadening our scope of services still further. 41 direct employees, but they have helped us train 85 of the Metro Rod engineers to now be qualified pump engineers, so we can expand that range of services nationally, as opposed to just in the South East, where Willow are based. And Filta, operating in the commercial kitchen environment, doing a range of services, so grease removal units, installation and servicing. A very nice piece of our business is fridge seal replacement, which is effectively fabricating a fridge seal on-site to effect a first-time fix for commercial kitchens and supermarkets. And we do some pump rehabilitation work as well, which is complementary to the Metro Rod and Willow network. And clearly, we do the fryer management and oil recovery, not on the same scale by any means that Jason does. 25 franchisees, which I think is an increase of two on 2022, but interestingly, 75% of the available work now is carried out by the franchisees. As a direct correlation of that, we had a 50% reduction in the direct labor undertaking that work, and it's all part of our strategy to transition Filta UK to a franchise business. That's who we are. What did we do, or what does it look like we're gonna do? We're estimating about GBP 106 million in sales for 2023. As you can see, the lion's share of that is Metro Rod at GBP 64 million, and we've broken it down a little bit further this year to include our corporate franchisees as well. Over 307,000 jobs completed, which is an 8% increase. Our average order value increased by a modest 3%, and there's a couple of reasons for that. One of them is the slight change of strategy within Willow Pumps. Willow Pumps used to do some big supply and install and design pump stations, long gestation period. We changed our strategy slightly to do much smaller pump stations, shorter gestation period at better margins, and then the increase in jobs in Filta that we undertook without the equivalent increase in price. But that's part of what we need to do over the next year or so. Average order value, as I say, increased. Increase in engineers by 7%, and encouragingly, if you look at 18% increase in sales, only a 4% increase in the support center staff supporting those businesses. Where do we work? A wide range of sectors. A couple of things I want to point out on here is really insurance and the brackets of the movement year-over-year. So insurance, we describe insurance as what we would call stabilization insurance. It's effectively, you've got a problem, we send somebody out, we fix that problem very quickly, and then they bring in other contractors to execute further works. That's not attractive for us. It was useful for us as we were building parts of the business. So strategically, we want to reduce our exposure in terms of that market because we can't build out the value from it. If I look at facilities management, facilities management is obviously the biggest share of what we do, and importantly in that, if facilities management companies win contracts, providing we're delivering great service and have a good relationship with them, if they grow, we grow, and it also de-risks us a little bit in terms of the breadth of sectors they operate in. We also look at the public services sectors at 9%, a 1% increase. Again, that diverse range of customers that we operate in, so we're not exposed to any one particular market. So much like Chris, why do customers buy? Because it's important we understand that. You know, the speed of service is clearly important. With the stuff that we deal with, nobody wants to deal with it. If you've got a sewer somewhere, you want somebody out there quickly to do that. It's not just about that attendance on time, it's about who answers the phone quickly, who reacts quickly, who owns that job and takes that, that problem away in a distressed purchase situation. Value for money, clearly, everybody's looking for value for money, and that means lots of different things to different people. Does that mean that you can accept the job electronically, so the reduced cost in our customer's back office? It doesn't necessarily mean the lowest price, but it might mean the people that can execute jobs to the most efficient manner. Real-time updates. When I started at Metro Rod, a real-time update was sending a letter. Today, a real-time update, if you send me a job today, you want to know in 20 seconds that we've got it. You want to know the engineer's on the way. You want to know that the job's been completed. You want to know the value of the job, and all the way through that journey. Working closely with our IT, we've still got a bit of a way to go on this, but that's the journey we're on, and there'll be very few of our competitors that can do that to the level that we can do it to. Reduction in the supply chain, clearly, you know, it is advantageous to our suppliers if they can go to a single source. Expertise, again, we work on essentially a time and materials basis in the majority of contracts that we have. Our customers are looking for expert engineers that can diagnose the problem really quickly and fix the problem efficiently, and if we can do that, we will continue to retain our customers. Coverage, we worked in 90% of the UK postcodes last year, and I was horrified when I saw that, and I didn't understand why it wasn't 100%. But apparently, Jersey, Guernsey, Guernsey, Isle of Man are all included, so I'm gonna claim it's 100% of the areas that we worked in. Scope of services, I think Stephen's alluded to it in terms of the strategy of Metro Rod. When we were bought by Franchise Brands, we were a rodding business. The scope of services we now offer, from tankers to pumps to plumbing to all of the things we can do in commercial kitchens, is an attractive proposition to our customers. And safety, you look at the customers on the right-hand side of the screen. Safety is paramount to everything. Do we work in dangerous environments? I used to say about our customers, our job was to protect their brand. Actually, our job is to enhance their brand. It is to do such a great job that their customers have an environment that they will go back to time after time... Stephen said we've come a long way, and this only goes back to 2019, but what this is showing is effectively a strong track record in growth of system sales and profitability. What you can see is obviously the acquisition of the businesses in terms of Willow and Filta. But interestingly, each of those businesses has grown organically since we bought them as well. And if you look at the organic growth from Metro Rod, from, I think it was GBP 34 million when you bought us, through to about GBP 70 million plus. But importantly, again, increasing that margin as we go along and starting to drive our operational gearing, so from 7.7% to 10.6% over the period, and there's still more to do on that. And, you know, as we start to integrate, and particularly with our friends at Pirtek, and drive some of the efficiencies, I think there's more to come. I'm a really simple soul, and I'm fortunate enough to be surrounded by lots of accountants and people that do lots of numbers. But in my head, I look and say: How do I measure whether we're getting more efficient? And if I look at this, it's just a simple track record in terms of sales per indirect head, so the support center staff, not the engineers on the ground. So when we were acquired in 2017, we were getting about GBP 22,000 per head at Metro Rod. That went up to GBP 34,000 as some of the disciplines started to come in that, the Franchise Brands group could bring to us. And interestingly, then, when we bought Willow, we started to take a dip. But if you see the chart, we start to repeat some of the principles that we've got, start to implement the change, and then we start to recover again. We get to GBP 41,000. We bought Filta. That started to flatten out, and if you look, you know, we're looking at GBP 47,000 a head in terms of sales per employee, compared with GBP 22,000 back in 2017, and that's not just by accident. Some businesses do things they don't need to do, so stop... We stopped doing some of the things we didn't need to do. Some of the franchisees we were over-supporting, the franchisees now do some of the work that we were doing. They benefit from it. We clearly have deployed technology. I think 50% of the jobs we now get into Metro Rod are logged either fully or partially using a robot, which drives efficiencies. And interestingly, we talked about speed. That can be done in 2 or 3 seconds, as opposed to us taking maybe 30, 40 minutes on the phone. And then better quality people. One of the things that we set out with in the journey back in 2017 was to say, "Actually, we'll end up with less people, but we'll be paying them more, and they'll be better quality," and those better quality people certainly have made a difference to our business in the period. By the end of today, everybody will be well-versed in Maximum Potential Model s. Interestingly, well, as Stephen said, we did this back in 2018. I think we first did it in Metro Rod. So if I look at where we're at today and the methodology, as Stephen explained, we've excluded our B2B2C customers, and the reason is because it distorts the number. So if you imagine that we might be working for a housing association, so we've got a commercial relationship, but we're delivering the services into multiple domestic premises. We've excluded those customers and the numbers from this model to focus really on the size of the commercial market or the potential of the commercial market. So highest franchise penetration, 12.7% across our network, yielding about just under GBP 1,500 across 1.6 million commercial premises, so giving us GBP 293 million as maximum potential. Actually, the number from GBP 72 million to the 293 is actually better, because if I strip those customers out, the equivalent system sales at that point are about GBP 50 million. Now, that's really interesting, but it's only interesting. I have a habit of asking the "So what?" question. What is it telling us? And one of the things that this gets you to think about is most businesses think about a network of their... in franchising, who is the best, and they always say it's the biggest franchisee. So they go, "This guy's doing GBP 3 million or GBP 2 million," or whatever. Actually, this tells you a different story. Biggest isn't always the best, because they may be the best because they've got more availability in their territory, but they're not penetrating to the same rate that other people are. So it starts to rebalance how you measure the franchisees, and it's really interesting when you've got a franchisee in the mid-range who actually is outperforming some of the bigger ones. But what that manifests itself in then is the sharing of information. Franchisees all want to be at the top of the league table. They all want to be doing it better than everybody else, so it starts to permeate and starts to really drive that interaction between franchisees. It allows us to really analyze territories. Who's using those territories more than others? We have franchisees with multiple territories. They might have two or three territories, and we know that one is better than the other, and they never operate at the same level, but it allows us to drill down and understand that. It allows us to understand who are the people that are getting the best yield or the best penetration. Is that because they've got salespeople on the ground? Is that because they've got the full range of services? Are they doing something different? Are they a different life cycle in terms of some of the other franchisees that aren't performing to that level? What does their customer mix look like? But what it ultimately leads to is use it or lose it. Now, "use it or lose it" sounds like a really brutal phrase, and, to be fair, it is. The journey isn't for every franchisee. Having three territories, not for every franchisee. By doing that territory analysis, then you can say, "Right, what is your exit plan? Are we gonna exit you? Are you gonna exit yourself?" Or are you going to say, "I'm gonna give up a territory, give up some postcodes," to focus on what you do? So in isolation, the Maximum Potential Model is interesting, but doing something with it is really the key.... So where do we go? Multiple levers for growth. Every time I stand up in front of an audience like this, I just get excited about the opportunities that present themselves. We haven't really talked about cross-selling. You know, we've got the Pirtek business now, and I'm really excited about some of their customer base, and I think Chris is excited about some of our customer base. 90% of the customers in our division, yeah, only buy from a single source. That tells me I've got a huge opportunity. Encouragingly, last year, we had a further 50 customers that bought from more than one business in the Water & Waste division, so we're starting to make some traction, and we haven't really made any inroads into the Pirtek business yet, but we've set up a cross-selling committee. Effectively, it's a load of salespeople meeting, going out and seeing some customers, and seeing what we can do. It's really simple, and it's just getting on and doing it. Franchise delivery. Reduce dependency on direct labor. You can see the impact of that in Filta as we start to transition to a franchise model. We want a focused franchisee, so I touched on the fact that we've got 19 Metro Rod and Metro Plumb combined franchisees. We know that if they separate them, and we introduce a new franchisee, both of those businesses grow faster than they do under a combined management. Expanding our technical capability, I think we've done a great job over the last few years in doing that. There are still more opportunities. If I look in the plumbing market in terms of renewables, with air source and ground source heat pumps, the financial opportunity is huge. We've got to expand our technical capabilities to take advantage of that market. Technology, and Colin's gonna spend this afternoon talking a lot about what we're doing in technology. Unlike Stephen, I won't pinch all of his best lines, but what I will talk about is technology for the sake of it is just... I'll be polite, it's just flattery. Actually, enhancing the customer experience is where you're gonna get the real benefit, and it's pointing that in the direction they're selling. When I talk about customers, it's franchisees, it's engineers, and it's our end users. So deploying it really smartly is gonna be key to where we get to. Franchise sales and accelerated growth, what does that mean? What it means is that, as I said, the journey isn't for everybody. We will have franchisees, and I've got two or three now ongoing, that might leave the system in the next year. I'll give you two examples. I had two 20-year franchisees, so they've served 20 years. In the last two years, both of them have exited. The new franchisees... And those businesses were probably growing at about 15%-16%. The new franchisees coming in have grown in excess of 35% since they got that business, and there's a lot of reasons for that in terms of, yeah, they financially need to do it. They're in- they, they borrowed some money to do it. It's the enthusiasm. It's the energy. So that continual development of the franchisees and equally, the sale of our corporate-operated businesses. I mean, we've got North Scotland, Exeter, Kent, and Sussex, and our strategy was to divest ourselves of those. I'm pleased to say that the Kent and Sussex, we've only got about 25% of that left. The balance was sold back in end of December. North Scotland, North Scotland's been split into two, and touch wood, the 50% of that will transition to franchising in the next two weeks, and we're talking to a couple of people that are interested in Exeter. Why are we doing that? Because franchisees are better at running those businesses than we are. Yeah, and we've proved that over time, so clearly, one of the levers that we wanna pull. Further investment in sales. We're investing more in salespeople. I want to acquire new customers. I want to expand our range of services and tell our customers about it, and what we're doing also, and one of the beauties of a franchise business, is we now have two shared resources by three franchisees each. So they effectively fund a salesperson, so they're not paying the full dollar. That salesperson works regionally, but they get managed in the center and directed from the center, but are funded by the franchisees, and we'll be expanding that element of our business as well. And then investment in management. We are actively recruiting a new Metro Plumb managing director, and it's a bit disingenuous of me to suggest that franchisees should split their businesses if we're not gonna give a real focus, so splitting the Metro Rod and Metro Plumb. So getting a real focus on that, I think, will accelerate the growth of the Metro Plumb business. So to summarize, are we recession-proof? No, we're not. Are we recession-resistant? Absolutely, we are. I know there might be less drains blocking, but the drains don't understand the economy's poor. The drains are gonna block. Yeah? I think that if you look at the range of services and the breadth of customers and the breadth of sectors that we operate in, I think it demonstrates that we are pretty resilient in terms of where we're at. There are significant growth opportunities, and not just using the Max Potential Model, which clearly illustrates that. We've still got a small share of some very, very large markets. The breadth of services and the cross-selling opportunity that I've talked about. Franchisee engagement and investment. One of the keys to this business is absolutely having the franchisees trusting the franchisor, and I think we're there. And we have our moments. You know, clearly, we fall out on occasions, but as I talked earlier about franchisees investing, you know, they're investing their own money. We had a conference in June last year. On the day of the conference, GBP 3.5 million worth of business was done between our suppliers and our franchisees, with our franchisees' money, and that was all about expanding their fleet, buying tankers, buying vans, buying new equipment. So having that engagement and the franchisee investment is a key to our growth. Effective delivery of the strategy. I'm blessed by being surrounded by a huge amount of talent, talent not only in the support centers, in the sales team, in the franchise community, in our employees- ... and that was part of our strategy as well. We've got a really dedicated team, who are all facing in the same direction, that wanna drive the business forward. And then further operational efficiencies utilizing technology. And we've come a long, long way. You know, I can't... I think when Franchise Brands bought us, in our call center, I think there were 65 people. I think there's 30-something now. Now we're probably doing four times more jobs and still operating 24/7. But it's a good illustration in terms of where the deployment of that technology has been very useful for us in terms of driving our operational gearing. Hi, everybody. I'm pleased that my team and I are participating in the CMD, albeit virtually rather than in person, as we're busy executing on the expansion plans that we'll be telling you more about. I'm Jason Sayers, CEO of Filta International and co-founder of Filta back in the late 1990s in the UK I came up with the idea for FiltaFry as a cooking oil filtration and fryer management service. We franchised it throughout the UK, but the obvious market for us was the U.S. Lots of fryers everywhere, the most unhealthy place on the planet for cooking. It's been fantastic for us. In 2003, I moved out here with my business partner, Victor, and we set up Filta over here. Originally, we had a one-man-and-a-van model, like in the UK, but around 2011, we changed it to a multi-van model, where franchise owners start to build businesses of scale. In 2016, Filta listed on AIM itself, and we got to know the Franchise Brands guys very well, friendly with Stephen. In 2022, we merged with Franchise Brands. We were acquired by Franchise Brands, and we've grown the business together ever since. Since then, Peter Molloy has run Filta UK, part Water & Waste Services division, and has allowed us to concentrate over here on growing the US. Over that period, since 2003, we've grown from one van over here to over 500, servicing over 8,500 kitchens every single week. So I'd like to introduce my two co-presenters today, Tom Dunn, CEO of Filta US. Tom has years of experience in franchising and joined Filta almost 15 years ago. In 2016, Tom became CEO of Filta US and has been a significant reason for our growth to date. Jon Michaels was recently appointed Chief Operating Officer of Filta US. Jon's background was in financial commodities, and in 2019, 2 months before COVID, Jon bought a Filta franchise in the New Jersey region. Bear in mind, we service commercial kitchens. He started that 2 months before COVID, and in the next 4 years, he grew his business to the fourth largest in the Filta network. We have a medium-term target of $500 million in system sales. This is not one business doing $500 million. This is 100 franchise owners generating $5 million each in revenue. Jon had grown his Filta business quicker than anyone in our history, so last year, we approached him to join the corporate team and help coach the other franchise owners to build their businesses of scale. More from them both in a minute. I'd like to remind you of the strong track record of growth the business has in growing its system sales. This chart shows the franchise system sales. At the end of the day, our revenues come from this. The blue bars here show the network revenue. You can see it dipped during COVID, but recovered quickly, demonstrating the resilience of our business. Last year, system sales were a record $108 million, with a Q4 run rate reaching over $115 million, despite the price of waste oil dropping 25% from the prior year. In 2018, we had 134 franchise owners generating $42 million in revenue. That's the light blue line there. Last year, we had only 127 franchise owners generating GBP 108 million revenue. This shows the commitment to the model of helping our franchise owners grow. Lastly, let's pass you over to Jon Michaels, our newly appointed COO, to talk you through what it is we do and tell you about two new services that we recently introduced. Thank you, Jason. I'm extremely excited about coming aboard, as we have a tremendous opportunity to maximize our network value for all Filta stakeholders. Looking at the brand through the FiltaMax lens provided me with an ability to quantify what the opportunity actually was and to begin to build strategy for how to achieve it. The strategy begins with our industry-leading services, which we will now see in a short video. Our franchise owners have been profiting by providing a unique set of services to commercial kitchens and restaurants for over 20 years. Best known as the company that invented fryer and cooking oil management, Filta's customers include some of the top companies in the world, as well as many famous venues that you may recognize today. Our signature service is FiltaFry, which offers commercial kitchens a mobile cooking oil microfiltration service, fryer temperature calibration, and vacuum-based cleaning of their fryers. Using Filta's proprietary mobile filtration unit, the Filta technician extracts perfectly good cooking oil that would otherwise be discarded due to impurities in the oil, microfilters it, and returns that now-purified oil to be reused after a thorough cleaning of the fryer. Customers love the convenience of Filta because the service can extend the life of their cooking oil, improve food consistency, all while reducing kitchen accidents and insurance claims. Filta's service is generally performed multiple times per week, based on a preset schedule. Because of the frequency of service, Filta franchisees become an integral part of the kitchen. ... putting them in the enviable position of being able to offer profitable, additional services, not as an outside vendor, but as a trusted member of the kitchen team. When the oil finally does reach the end of its life, Filta technicians haul it back to our franchisees' warehouses, equipped with 6,000 gallons worth of storage, from where it is then sold to be recycled into biodiesel. Since our waste oil is devoid of water and contaminants, it is considered to be top quality and in very high demand. Filta also supplies customers with fresh oil through our service, FiltaGold. In certain key markets, oil is supplied to customers in environmentally friendly, reusable Eco-Jugs, which reduce traditional packaging clutter and on-site waste, while further boosting customer sustainability goals. Additionally, franchisees can now purchase fresh oil by the tanker load. The newly developed bulk oil system efficiently fills Eco-Jugs, which are then sold to customers. Last year, Filta introduced FiltaClean, an environmentally friendly, steam-based kitchen deep clean service. FiltaClean integrates very well into a customer's established cleaning practices, providing an immense opportunity to add the service to both new and existing customers. So to recap our services and to provide you with some additional perspective, last year, we serviced over 8,500 customers every single week and collected more than 47 million pounds of waste oil, which is over 1,100 full semi-truck tankers full of oil. We now also have 67 franchisees signed up to FiltaGold, which is our service to sell new oil, with 5 of those already having moved to the bulk oil system. And we have 33 franchisees actively providing FiltaClean services to new and existing customers, and that number is growing each day. Now let's take a look at a case study of our services in action at the Prudential Center, home of the New Jersey Devils, a team within the National Hockey League. Back in December, Jason and Stephen came out, visited the site with me to see Filta in action. For perspective, this 18,000-seat arena hosts not just hockey, but also collegiate basketball and concerts. It's approximately 50% larger than Wembley Arena. The site has 58 fryers, roughly 4,600 pounds of serviceable oil, which is spread across 15 concessions and kitchens. We provide the full suite of Filta services there, and we service the facility after every event. Last year alone, we saved the site $173,000 in oil. That does not include labor savings. Filta services made the arena greener, cleaner, and safer. We invoiced the site roughly $135,000 for our core FiltaFry service, which saved the arena a tremendous amount based on the oil alone. We invoiced an additional $40,000 in FiltaClean service fees, making the entire Filta spend essentially cost neutral. The arena is so pleased and confident in our abilities that additional service opportunities are simple conversations. An example of this is last week when the arena contacted us to perform a $5,000 deep clean of two concession floors. They know when they make the phone call, the job will be done and done well. The critical benefit for this account, the overall environmental impact, and the sustainability reports that go with it. It's a great account and a great Filta relationship. Now let's take a look at those environmental impact reports I just mentioned. The EIR, available for our cooking oil-based services, is a summary report that details oil savings generated through microfiltering and reusing cooking oil, as well as recycling used cooking oil into biodiesel. The reports, customized for each customer based on their requested date range, illustrate the positive environmental impact that Filta services have on water, land, fuel, and more. Our FiltaGold report will soon be out, and that will detail packaging savings generated through our reusable Eco-Jugs. Our customers greatly appreciate the quality, accuracy, and depth of the reports, and in turn, will use these reports to support their ESG initiatives. Now I'll pass you over to Tom Dunn, who will speak a little bit more about where we're taking the business. Thanks, Jon. Our business continues to grow, and one piece of our business that is a commodity and subject to market fluctuations is waste oil. Waste oil represents about 20% of system sales. Let me take you through the chart in front of you. First, let's look at the piece that we can control, volume. Represented by the green line, this is our franchisees collecting oil from the customers, so they no longer need that dirty, stinky, nasty bin out back of the facility. We built that volume from 21 million lbs in 2020 to 47 million lbs last year, so volume's growing quite nicely. Now, let's look at the price, the blue line. It's controlled by the market on the day of sale. Pricing is based on the Jacobsen Index, basically the stock market of used cooking oil. Price was steady at $0.22 a pound until COVID hit in 2020, but then jumped to $0.58 a pound, peaking in 2022. What drove record pricing in 2022 and the first few months of 2023 was government incentives on biodiesel and supply chain issues that could not keep up with demand. The price started to moderate in 2023, flattening out a bit due to increased supplies and imports. The dark blue column represents system sales of waste oil, and the light blue column shows Filta profit, which was 17% of total waste oil sales. System sales of waste oil and our profit dipped marginally last year due to pricing, but we continue to build strong volume.... Moving forward, we'll continue to grow the volumes, and our reliance on waste oil will decrease over time due to FiltaMax, which I'll discuss now. Our job is to focus on what makes a difference and what moves the needle. The Maximum Potential Model was introduced to us about a year ago by Franchise Brands. All it basically says is this: What would our total system sales be if all of our franchisees were performing as well as our best performers? As Jon told you, we currently service more than 8,500 sites in the U.S., with a total potential over 1 million sites. Right now, we service less than 1% of that potential market. Let's look at that further to see what the network revenue would be if each of our franchisees performed to their potential. Our best-performing franchisee in terms of market penetration currently services about 3.9% of its market. Our best-performing franchisee in terms of per-site customer revenue provides all the services and has an average revenue per site of around $22,000. We generally service a customer one to two times a week. If we perform to those levels in all of our markets, then the network revenue would currently be $925 million, including all territories sold and unsold. Last year, we set a target for the network to grow system sales to $500 million over the next several years. The Maximum Potential Model shows this is attainable, and our job is simply to execute on the plan. We've identified 55 key metro markets in the US that will drive the bulk of that growth. FiltaMax is about ensuring we have a growth-minded owner in each of those markets, and then investing in each to replicate the success and best practices of our fastest-growing franchisees. The Maximum Potential Model gives us market transparency to show us high-performing and underperforming markets, then lets us formulate a plan to address the underperformers. Let me give you a brief example of a large market we redeveloped using this data. In Pittsburgh, we had 2 underperforming franchisees who coincidentally had franchise renewals about a year apart. We worked with each to develop exit plans to put cash in their pocket while we identified a growth-minded owner for the territories. Those 2 individual businesses were acquired over about a 12-month period by a single neighboring franchisee, who unified the market and is growing the customer base, adding new services to existing customers, and driving per-site revenue. This is only one of the seven market realignments we did last year. As you can see, part of the FiltaMax strategy is vertically expanding our service offerings to drive the total revenue per customer, enhancing franchise profitability at every stop. Our current focus is expanding our FiltaGold and FiltaClean services across the network, as both of these services are new royalty-producing revenue streams for Filta in 2024. The final part of the plan is moving from a fixed-based royalty to a percentage-based system, so as the franchisees grow, we grow, and to put the right support team members in place, including the key hire of Jon Michaels as COO, to support the network as we scale system sales. Now I'll send it back to Jason. Thanks, Tom. To summarize, we've developed a business to system sales of $115 million annual run rate. We now have the opportunity of building a business of significant scale, with the whole network currently working towards the medium-term target of $500 million in system sales. We are doing this by executing the FiltaMax key levers for growth, including supporting the current franchise owners, while optimizing the number of franchisees in the Max Model, attracting new high-quality owners, and exiting some of the underperformers. As you can see from the Maximum Potential Model, we have a small share of a big market. Our business lends itself to high levels of operational gearing, demonstrated by the fact that we currently employ only 29 people in achieving over $100 million in sales. While we expect the number of employees to grow over time, we also expect to maintain and increase this operational gearing. All of this with a service and product range that boasts impressive ESG credentials. So I'd like to thank Tom and Jon for helping present Filta, our range of services, and the substantial growth opportunities we have, as well as all the staff and franchise owners who have helped us grow to where we are today. That was a brief overview of Filta in the U.S., and I hope you enjoyed meeting the leadership team of Tom and Jon. Afternoon, all. My name's Tim Harris. I'm the Managing Director of the B2C division, and I've learned over a number of years of doing these presentations, that the mind can only absorb what the seat can endure. So I'm gonna try and be brief. It's gonna be a little bit interactive. There's going to be some participation. I can already see the look of dread on a number of people's faces. Who we are and what we're about, I had hair when I started working for Stephen. That's all I'll say. People often say: "What's he like to work for?" He's as demanding as he is inspirational, and he's very inspirational. So B2C division. Look, let's make this interactive. You'll remember who we are and what we do. I just need one hand up if you've got a car. Okay, another hand up if you've got an oven, and wave at me if you've got a dog. Right. Okay, three market-leading brands. It's what Stephen says. That's what we buy, and build, and grow. In terms of the division, we are consumer-facing. We're looking for people like you, high-net-worth Waitrose shoppers that spend money to get a little bit of time back in their life. Is that... this crowd? Yeah. Right, they have money. Good to go. I will be running a capital markets day, 10% discount across all of our services. I'm going to focus on ChipsAway just to bring a bit of life to it, because it's 80% of our EBITDA, and it's the biggest contributor to the group. As a division, we are probably the purest form of franchising, in that we are 100% franchised, we're incredibly capital light, we have a high level of operational gearing, and we drive a lot of cash conversion, as Stephen alluded to. That comes through our process of managing franchisees and the markets we're in. ChipsAway is the innovator, really, the largest and longest established of a service called SMART Repair. Small to medium area repair around your cars. If you've got bumper scuffs, minor dents on your bumper, bumpers into wings, bumpers into quarters, I know you have, I've seen you drive, and down the side of your sills, we're the people you want to call. Why? Because we've got about 150-160 mobile operators that can come to your place of work or your home and put it right for less than the cost of your insurance excess. And in a world where we're all finding insurance challenging, to be polite, I won't ask how many Range Rover drivers have had a quote recently, but we're all picking higher and higher levels of excess to bring down the quotes, and that's where ChipsAway plays. It won't surprise you to know our average repair value last year was around GBP 300, which keeps it nicely under the excess. It's a very popular consumer service. We do about 60-65,000 repairs, because we're not traditionally regarded in the body shop sector, people. We fly under the radar. We're significantly more profitable than the traditional body shop model, and it yields a really good profit to our franchisees, and there is some upside growth in ChipsAway, and we're in the top 10 of repairers nationally by volume of repairs. Ovenclean does exactly what it says on the tin, okay? It's the second most hated chore in the household. Apparently, ironing is the first. So can't help you with that, but we can definitely help you with the job that most people hate. It's not only domestic ovens, it's barbecues, hobs, extractors, and we're slowly edging the franchisees into doing a few repairs. Most of our franchisees are blue-collar. They don't come into this for a management opportunity, and that's one of the challenges with the group. Then we've got Barking Mad, wonderful business to work with. For any of the dog owners, if you have a nervous pet, or you are indeed a nervous owner, that can't cope with kennels and you haven't got friends or family, you call Barking Mad. They have a range of hosts who have been sourced by the franchisees to make sure they can match your dog with the appropriate host, and the dog will have an absolutely phenomenal experience. It's a small business. The vast majority of what we do and where the potential is, comes out of ChipsAway. In terms of this particular slide, it underlines that most of the EBITDA comes from ChipsAway, but more importantly, it's about the quality of the income that we derive from our franchisees. We keep getting into trouble for this split between calling it royalty and MSF. Apparently, it's MSF, but it's royalty in the old money. We get over half of our income now on a regular, predictable basis from our network, because most of the ChipsAway franchisees pay us a de minimis amount, as do the Ovenclean, and Barking Mad is probably the only pure royalty model. But when you add it all together as a mix, divisionally, over half of what we get comes from royalty stroke MSF. The other column is really the pass-through of the National Advertising Fund, which Robin and the team wisely invest to drive consumer inquiries, product sales, and the return that we make on our IT. We are reducing our dependency on revenue from franchise recruitment, while we try and scale the business with... We've got about 30 ChipsAway franchisees that are looking to grow and develop into larger sites. In terms of the cash generation, very, very cash generative, incredibly so, because we're very capital light. We leverage the 19 people that we've got in supporting over 300 franchisees very well. We had a slight bit in 2022, when we had to make an investment decision and acquire some vans so that we could carry on selling franchises, because there was a shortage of vans. But we are a highly cash-generative business with fairly predictable turnover and revenues, and that's the value that we bring to the group. In terms of how we do this, a lot of what we do is through the platform of central services, and that is essentially the distillation of a couple of three decades now, of starting people in blue-collar franchising. We know how nerve-wracking it is for people when they start out, so we've wrapped a services and support package around our franchisees, such that when they come to us, we deal with them as individuals, because we know we have to grow the individual before we grow the business. And then we put all of the tools in place to make it easy for them to come into the franchise and to grow to the level that they're aiming for, for them and their families. So we have, and we're pioneers in Mental Health First Aid training. All of the team, all 19 people are trained in Mental Health First Aid, so we can make sure we've got counselors, that we can wrap the support, the emotional support around people as they come in to start in a business, which is one of the most nerve-wracking things that most of these blue-collar franchisees will ever do. We have the obvious initial support and setup. We train them in everything they're gonna need to do. There's the ongoing professional development, and we support with a lot of marketing initiatives. One of the early conversations I recall with Stephen and Robin was about changing the challenges in the business, and we shifted from the franchisees driving inquiries to Robin and his team taking the franchisee's budget and driving consumer inquiries to them. It's fair to say, in the first year that we told them we were going to do that, we were being burnt in effigy. But we went from 7.5 million, literally, from GBP 7.5 million worth of inquiries that they were driving in ChipsAway, to GBP 82 million last year. Nobody moans at us anymore, and they don't moan when I put the fees up, so Robin's got more money to spend. So we're very, very good at driving the all-important inquiries, 'cause when somebody's investing in a business, their biggest fear is: How am I gonna pay the mortgage? Will there be enough work? And that's what we can placate from day one, across most of our brands now. So we're there to do all the requisite health and safety advice. We're developing the IT with Colin and his team. I haven't heard AI mentioned yet. I mean, it's a buzzword, which we ought to throw it in there, but as of this week, we should be having our first AI program delivered that will actually price jobs independently of franchisees' involvement. It's still in tests. Nobody start putting an EBITDA number against that, please. In wrap-up, franchise recruitment and retention is a challenge. You know, we recruit predominantly male blue-collar people, and it's difficult in an environment of full employment, and also some get tempted back to their former occupations. However, as we look at the economic model and impending Labour government, increasing unemployment and redundancy tends to be good for franchising. We're a little bit countercyclical. We will, as the economy, if it were to dip, it's better for franchising. The division's highly cash generative. It's a simple business where we pour heart and soul into making sure we support these people on their journey to self-employment, and we do it well with 19 people. One of the biggest challenges we have is maintaining that recruitment. Retention's getting better, but we expect to maintain our track record of consistent profits and cash generation such that we can contribute to the group. That's really a quick canter through the B2C division. So I'm just gonna have a quick presentation today on the Growth Summit. So this was one of the mechanisms that we've used to action the, the growth tools to capitalize on the Max Model opportunities, and you've heard quite a lot about those today. So what was the Growth Summit? The Growth Summit was a gathering of 60 of the group's leadership team. We got together for two days last November in Amsterdam, and it was the first time we've ever really done anything like this. But we wanted to do it because we've grown very, very quickly over the last two years. We've gone from something like 290 people, just before we bought Filta, to over 700 people now with the, with the Filta and the Pirtek acquisition. And a lot of those people hadn't actually met each other, at least face-to-face. We're doing lots of things on Zooms and Teams, but, you know, you can't beat face-to-face contact. So we thought it'd be really good to get everyone together for a couple of days in Amsterdam. So we got everyone together, and I thought it's very difficult to explain, you know, exactly what happens at one of these two-day off-sites, so instead of which, I outsourced it to Emperor, who produced a lovely video. Good. So as you can see, it was really good fun, a huge success. As Peter mentioned, we've got a fantastic team, and it was really great to spend time with everyone, in that way and just see the way that everyone really engaged. And we did. We generated a huge amount of ideas. When I got all these sort of whiteboards back, I put them all over my study floor. We had absolutely heaps of ideas, and we tried to sort of categorize and prioritize all of those, and I'll just share a, a selection of those with you in a minute. We also brainstormed not just how we can grow sales and help our franchisees grow their businesses. We talked about technology, we talked about efficiencies, productivity. You've heard a lot today about operational gearing, and obviously, that's a big part of our success. Something that was, I think, very powerful, though, over the two days was just giving everyone the opportunity to connect with our guiding principles, how we do things. I mean, I've been with the group since its formation, and, you know, I absolutely believe that our culture has been a big part of our success. We demand integrity, we're entrepreneurial, we empower people, we challenge ourselves, and work as a team, and we really wanted to bring this growth mindset to life so that everyone could experience it firsthand. It was great having the leadership team up on the stage, who were discussing their experiences. Nigel was with us. It was great to hear some of your experiences, you know, since 2008. We've lots and lots of things have happened, but as so many people have joined the group, it's always just really hard to explain to people, you know, all the things that we take for granted. So I think that was a great thing to do. We also talked about, you know, some of the things that haven't worked. Not everything we've done has worked out. But we like, we like to do more of what works and less of what doesn't. You'll be hearing from Robin a little bit later with something we called Auld's Law, which is, "Do more of what works and less of what doesn't." And that's basically a lot of the foundations of the marketing department, so now immortalized. So the implementation, what have we done, the important follow-up, and I think for some people, implementation pretty much started on the plane going home. There was a lot of, a lot of energy, a lot of enthusiasm, and we just wanted to start to get on with actioning some of the things that we talked about. But one, I think, really interesting idea, quite an impactful idea, which we developed at the Growth Summit, was something called Just One. This actually had its origins in Filta, in Filta International. It's a really simple but very powerful idea, which is that we ask existing customers who are happy with the service for just one referral for a new potential customer, and it really struck a chord with everyone, I think, just because it's actually a very simple idea and quite implementable. So Jason and his team are now piloting this with some of the Filta franchisees in the States, and they're trying to develop the model, perfect it, and systemize it. We, we're looking at some referral technology. We just want to make this a fairly automatic process when we're, when we're talking to our customers, and we're trialing this across the other businesses as well. Actually, quite an interesting development, we haven't talked about it very much today at all, is that, you know, recruiting and retaining labor is actually one of our biggest challenges. If we don't have enough engineers and technicians to carry out the work for, for the customers, you know, it's actually going to be a little bit of a constraint on growth. So we thought we could try to see whether this would work for the recruitment of engineers. So there's a little, a bit of initiative going on now to say, could we ask our existing engineers, of which we've got quite a large pool, for just one referral for a friend to, to come and, you know, come and discuss working for us? And again, a bit of referral technology, some motivating incentives to see, to see how we can, you know, encourage people to, to come forward. So I think it'll be very interesting to see how that develops. Technology, we discussed that, I think, at length in Amsterdam. I guess the Amsterdam discussions very much helped shape some of the plans for 2023. Group CRM was a big theme, for example. I think, for me, one of my personal favorites from Amsterdam was the Growth Summits for franchisees, and the idea here is we use a very similar interactive, participating engagement forum to, you know, to get together with our franchisees, and this got quite a lot of traction. So the recent Metro Rod regional meetings that we've had, we've rolled out effectively Growth Summits for, for the Metro Rod franchisees. Jason, Tom, and Jon, and the team are getting together in Denver next month for their very own FiltaMax Growth Summit. Again, gonna be using the kind of blueprint for the Growth Summit. I think there's also some skiing involved in that one, so that sounds like a good, a good get-together. And, Chris, your upcoming Pirtek UK conference in Scotland is also gonna be following a kind of Growth Summit, growth mindset formula. And as a management team, we're doing quite a lot to oversee this as well. We have a Management Board meeting once a month. Stephen talked about the new Management Board when he was speaking about corporate governance. So we have a Growth Summit corner at the Management Board, where we kind of review everything, share feedback, and generate new ideas, and actually, we are, you know, generating a number of new ideas as we go along. Peter talked a little bit about the cross-selling initiative that he's got going with Adam at Pirtek and a number of the Water & Waste Services businesses, and that's starting to actually generate some real fruit now. We've got a lot of our salespeople all teed up now with materials so that when they're in front of the customer, they can actually sell the services as well, and we're also getting to say to our franchisees, "You know, you get together," and the Metro Rod and the Pirtek franchisees have all got some very important customer relationships in their franchise locations. So getting them together and seeing what they could do, I think that could be quite powerful. So just to wrap up, I mean, it was a, it was a really great couple of days. I think we, we really enjoyed being there, and it, it definitely caught, caught people's imagination. And as I think you can see from the... saw from the video, we're, we've booked our slots again, so we'll be back in Amsterdam in November with everyone to do it all over again, and I might update you on that next time. Good afternoon, and thanks for the opportunity to talk to you about how we use technology to drive operational gearing. Our approach is to understand the benefits that technology can bring to our stakeholders, who are our customers, the franchisees, the engineers, and our support center. We don't invest in technology for technology's sake. It's all about the value that it adds. It can improve customer service, it can help drive sales, and improve customer retention. It can help make our support centers, our franchisees, and our engineers more efficient, and critically, it can make everybody's job just that little bit more rewarding. You know, we think of technology as a key enabler of our growth and a key differentiator for us. Now, most of our competitors are relatively small, independent companies, and they simply can't deploy technology in the way that we can. So before I talk about our plans, I'm gonna talk a little bit more about our methodology, and it's based on the principles of continuous improvement. We'll develop and implement a system, we ensure it's secure and reliable, and then we'll use it for a period of time and gather feedback and understand the data that it gives us, and then we cycle around. We take those learnings, and we build them into version two, three, four, five, and so on. So when I talk about our technology journey, just bear in mind that this is never done. We're constantly measuring and adjusting and improving. I want to give you a little bit of an idea of the size and scale of the IT function. We have 17 people operating in 10 countries, and this will expand to 27 people over the year. All of our systems are cloud-based, and we process well over 1.2 million jobs every year as we provide systems and support to over 4,000 users at our support centers, in our DLOs, and for our franchisees. Currently, this is all managed locally, so we have 11 sets of systems, 11 works management systems, 6 finance systems, and so on. As I'll explain later on, our plan is to centralize all of that IT, so moving to a single IT team, a single global finance system, and a single works management system, but customized for each division. We expect to spend just over GBP 8 million this year on technology, but we'll see some savings as we consolidate, partially offset by investment in cybersecurity and new systems, particularly AI, which I'll talk a bit more about later. In the medium term, we anticipate IT spend reducing as a percentage of system sales. So let me tell you what we've been up to. Our journey started in 2017 when we acquired Metro Rod, and it's fair to say that we inherited a whole load of IT legacy. We created a new works management system that we've called Vision, and that was developed by a company called Azura, who are specialists in franchisee systems. We've worked really closely with them over the years and customized it for our needs. We also introduced a tool called Power BI, which is a data analytics tool and enables us to generate sophisticated reports and dashboards. In 2019, we acquired Azura, as Stephen mentioned earlier. That secured the ownership of the intellectual property, but it also brought that development team in-house, which gave us more control and has allowed us to accelerate the rollout of new features and functionality. During lockdown, we completed the rollout of Vision to all of our Metro Rod and Metro Plumb franchisees, and as soon as that was done, we've started improving it and rolling out new features. Let me give you a few examples. We introduced a new quotation system, which is part of Vision. Now, before we did this, in Macclesfield, in the Metro Rod business, we had a team of 14 people that were generating every quote by hand. Now, those same quotes are written largely by our franchisees, and the team in Macclesfield, which is now five people, focus all of their efforts on chasing those quotes and driving sales. We launched a customer portal that we call Vision Connect. It allows our customers to see a real-time status of their jobs. In fact, they can also download invoices, they can download before and after pictures, and much more. At launch, customers using this system contacted our contact center 66% less, and last year, Connect sent over 85,000 updates out to our customers. And we started looking... our journey on robotic automation. Now, when I use the word robot here, I'm talking about small computer programs that complete boring, repetitive tasks, such as responding to emails, logging jobs, or creating invoices. You know, we can develop robots very quickly because of the investment that we've made into Vision. Recently, the improvements have continued. Vision is now able to handle multiple brands. In fact, it can automatically route a job to the correct franchisee based on the skills needed to do that job, and that's really important as we start to roll Vision out across the other brands. We expect to move Filta onto Vision in the next few weeks, and we've started work already to move Pirtek in France and Germany over to the new system. Last year, we completed the rollout of a suite of advanced scheduling tools, which make it much easier for our franchisees to dispatch engineers to jobs in the best possible way, and I'm gonna talk a bit more about that shortly. I want to use this case study to talk a bit more about the impact some of these changes have had. I've talked about some of the features and functions that Vision has, but it does more than that. In 2017, the old legacy system that was in operation in Metro Rod really meant that things had to be done by the support center. And I have this recollection of sitting in that contact center, listening to an agent take a call from a customer, and the customer clearly asked a question, and the agent dialed the franchisee and asked the question to the franchisee. They then went back to the customer and passed on the answer, who then asked a follow-up question, and they went back to the franchisee again and asked a follow-up question, and so on. It was clearly ridiculous. With Vision and some of the other tools we've implemented, we've enabled the franchisees to self-serve some of these tasks. The benefit of that is really about customer experience. You know, it brings that customer closer to the experts, and that helps to develop much stronger relationships with those customers. The second example I'd like to talk about is automation, and that's these robots. There's clearly some obvious benefits of robots. They work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and they don't take any sick days off. There's no holidays, but it's not the whole impact. As you've heard, lots of the work that we do is really time-critical. So if we can pass that job to an engineer 5 or 10 minutes faster, it gives that engineer much more time to hit the customer's expectations in terms of service. Peter mentioned earlier, in some of our busier months now, robots are helping us log nearly 50% of all our national account work onto our systems. This is an area in particular where I think we're gonna see the real benefits of AI. That 50% at the moment is really constrained by our biggest national account customers. It's just not cost-effective currently to write robots for small customers who give us a small volume of jobs. But that's something I really think AI is gonna change, so it's gonna allow us to extend this automation to a much broader spread of our customers. And the most recent innovation that we've launched is our advanced scheduling system. And when we talk about scheduling, we're talking about this task of choosing which engineers to send to which jobs on which day, in which order. You're trying to create that most efficient route for him to go on, hit the customer's SLA, but still get back in time for his tea at the end of the day. Now, even if you've only got four or five engineers, this is a massively complicated problem. So the first thing that we did was we created a set of tools in Vision that makes it easier for a good scheduler to become a great one. It helps them understand what the travel time is between different jobs. It shows them any particular jobs that might be en route to other areas, and it helps them triage those jobs and understand where specialist equipment or specialist skills might be needed. We finished the rollout of this in 2023, and the best schedulers are now seeing some fantastic benefits, a saving of about 30 minutes per engineer per day, which in itself is huge. As we mentioned earlier, it's a tight labor market, so if we can create extra capacity to do more jobs without running our engineers ragged, it's gonna be a big advantage to us. And this capacity is with little or no incremental cost to our franchisees, so it's good for their profits. In fact, it's driven almost entirely from a reduction in travel time, which means less fuel, and that's good for the environment. And at the same time, we're also seeing a 2 percentage point improvement in our customers' SLA, so it's good for our customers, too. But this step is really only being fully exploited by our best schedulers. So the next phase in this is something that we call Plan My Day, and this is gonna take it to the next level. We've developed the system so that it will generate a franchisee's schedule for a whole day for all of their engineers with a click of a single button. Now, that development work is already done, and we'll be starting trials of the system in the next month or so. Now, let me move on and talk a bit about more of our plans for the future. The first thing I wanna talk about is... The first pillar, I guess, is maintain. Of course, we need to ensure that our systems and platforms are reliable, scalable, and secure. And we need to do this not just for the size we are today, but for the future. This area is becoming more and more important. As we grow, particularly as we grow internationally, we're becoming a bigger target for cybercriminals. But it's not just an increase in cost that we're gonna face. There are also some big opportunities here. If we centralize, then we have a bigger scale, and we have more buying power. And across the group, again, you've heard it, we do lots of similar things. Now, Chris, Peter, and Tim have all talked about van-based services, so it gives us an opportunity to share expensive IT resources. And finally, it gives us an opportunity to deliver technology to the developing and smaller parts of the group that perhaps otherwise couldn't afford it. So to do this, we're gonna focus on two key projects. We're investing more in our cybersecurity to ensure that our brands are well-protected. I should just mention, this is not just a pure cost. More and more of our customers are now demanding that we can demonstrate compliance with accreditations like ISO 27001 and Cyber Essentials Plus. Secondly, we're gonna centralize our IT function, bringing all of our services into one place, delivered with a single team. This is still early stages, but we're already seeing some signs of benefits from this. Right now, Microsoft are co-performing a complete audit of all of our technology for us, and they're doing it free of charge, and that's something that they will only do for their bigger customers. I've talked a lot about development already. You know, we think we've got some great technology. We just wanna leverage that across the group, driving that operational gearing in some of the other divisions. We also have some fantastic customers, and again, I think you saw some of the logos on the screens earlier. If we can harness those customers, bring that data together, it should better help us better understand those customers. And finally, we want to continue to improve not only our customer service, but our customer's experience of that service. To achieve this, we're gonna roll out Vision across the group, and again, I've talked about some of those benefits. I've already mentioned we're gonna move to a single finance system, which will give us better financial controls and better financial data for our MDs. But there's two projects I wanna talk a little bit more about. I think they're both really exciting. The first is real-time customer updates. We think we deliver best-in-class customer service, but we're not always the best at updating our customers. Typically, our customers measure us not just by how well we do a job, but by how well we update their systems. We've already done some work in this area, and in fact, we've got one customer now where we're keeping their system fully up to date and in sync with our system through the status of job through its entire life cycle. But we want to extend this much further, and working in partnership with some of our biggest customers, develop really tight integrations between our systems. It saves time and effort for both of us, it makes sure that our performance is measured accurately, and it makes that customer relationship really, really sticky. The second big initiative that we're gonna drive forward, and this came out of our growth summit, which Julia mentioned earlier, is a group CRM. You know, across the various divisions, we have a huge amount of data, but it's currently fragmented. It's in separate systems across the group. We bring that together and provide access to it with some really simple tools. It's gonna help us identify much more opportunities for cross-selling, upselling, identifying lapsed customers, and a whole load of other things. And lastly, but by no means least, innovation, and of course, AI is gonna play a big role here. We plan to deploy AI in a very focused and practical way, again, focusing on the benefits that it brings. We're already using AI in our contact centers to help us understand what skills are required for a specific task. And Jason, who you've heard from earlier, has recently launched an AI system to help him audit those Filta machines that you saw. I mean, that's pretty awesome. They take a few simple pictures of the device, and it automatically identifies the condition of the equipment, if it needs to be repaired, and it can even tell us what parts are needed to repair it. But I think, you know, the journey to, for AI for everybody is early days, so it really is just the start. But I think the potential is that AI is gonna enable us to automate pretty much everything except doing the job itself. We might be a long way off before it goes down the drain. So over the coming years, you can expect us to invest more in this area. So in summary, we've created a strong technology platform, which is working well, but we can leverage that platform much more across the group, and indeed, through Azura, we can also sell that platform to non-competing businesses. Our scale allows us to centralize our IT, which will reduce our costs as a percentage of system sales, but it will also allow us to increase our experience and expertise, particularly in areas such as AI. In short, we expect our digital transformation to continue to drive operational gearing across all of our businesses. Thank you very much. So, for the next 10 or 15 minutes, I will be taking you through marketing, and in particular, what I want to do is just talk to you a little bit about the approach we take, and it is very single-minded and very, very simple, but actually, we find it very, very effective in terms of focusing the teams across the world on really being the most benefit to the businesses they can be. We're also then gonna take a snapshot of the department and how that works across the board. We're then gonna take a very, very brief look at some of the activity we happened in 2023, and in particular, we're gonna look at where I think we're really strongest, which is using our monies as cost-effectively as possible to the benefit of the franchisees. In some cases, really, really small budgets, really effectively. And then finally, we'll take a little look at 2024 and some of the exciting things we've got planned this year. So our approach, and if you only remember one thing from my presentation, it's this one on the left here. We are a one KPI department. All we are interested in is driving new customer inquiries as cost effectively as possible. That's it. So if you see the word marketing, think pipeline or funnel. We're about making sure that our businesses and our franchisees have got the right sort of customer inquiries at the right time to help fuel and grow their business. And the way we do that, and Stephen already has suggested this, was we eliminate guesswork wherever possible. We firmly believe that marketing is a science and not an art, and by that, we mean that we can analyze what works, we can understand what our customers want from us, and we can continually improve that process. So on the left here, I've got what I call the kind of marketing strategy, and it's a circular philosophy, and you could start this at any one point in time. We are really fortunate to have a very supportive board, and indeed, chairman, that really encourages us to get out there aggressively, deploy marketing, and look and see if it works. We don't try and make it perfect before we launch it. We make it good, and then we launch it, and once we've launched it, we analyze it really, really closely. What's working and what isn't? How could it be more effective and more impressive going forward and have a bigger impact to our customers and, most importantly, to our franchisees? If we find things that work, and again, Julia mentioned this, then we repeat it. We find things that work, and we do more of it... If we don't, we withdraw it, and we test it again, and it's a continual process of evolution, trying to make our marketing as effective as possible for our franchisees. We pride ourselves in delivering really, really good value for money to our franchisees, and in fact, all of our franchisees, at any one point in time, can ask to see the books, can audit where and how we spend the money, and indeed, we encourage them to do so. It's really important they have a great deal of confidence in what we can deliver for our marketing. We have 9 brands across 10 different countries, but just one singular approach, and it doesn't matter what we're doing, in what market, with which brand, every single one of the marketeers is focused on delivering customer inquiries as cost-effectively as possible. One of the key things that we do is make sure that we focus on the end result, so we are very, very customer-focused. What do our customers want to hear from us? When? How can we engage with them? And in particular, as much as we can, we bring it in-house, we use freelancers, we make sure that we're saving money and investing on the output, not on strategy workshops and away days, and those sorts of things. It's about execution, getting marketing out there, and then evaluating the results. So let's have a quick look at the marketing department as a whole. We invest around GBP 3.8 million per year on behalf of both ourselves and our franchisees to grow our brand sustainably for the long term, and that's what we're all about, making sure that our franchisees really want that growth and can develop and grow with that. There's no point us trying to plug huge amounts of volume into them where they can't respond, or indeed, not help them when they're quietest. Of that 3.8 million, around 75% of it is funded by the franchisees, around GBP 2.8 million, and about GBP 1 million is the cost to the business, and that's where we look at things like franchise recruitment or some of our DLOs, where we invest ourselves to really help grow those inquiries into the business. A couple of stats for you. We sent out last year around 250 email campaigns. Sorry about that, but if you guys didn't open them, we wouldn't keep sending them. But it's the effectiveness and the analysis on that that's really, really important. So we can change the hierarchy communication, we can change what we do, what we say, and who we send it to, and continually look to improve those results. We had around 25 photo shoots, as you'll see in just a moment. We live in a really audiovisual world. People don't want to read anymore. What they want is images. They want really quick information that can help them make fast decisions, and actually, our businesses are pretty simple to explain. So we have very, very short text, powerful, a simple communication that really focuses on the benefits, not just the features. 100 million impressions, an utterly meaningless number, and I'll be honest, on a level with you, I haven't counted every single one of those impressions, but we reach a lot of people over the course of the year. It's well, well in excess of 100 million impressions. What we're actually really focused on is what those impressions do. What do they deliver in terms of leads into the business? That's actually what we're concerned about. We have 17 people working across the brands, across the group. Each one of them report directly into the decision-makers in the business. It's sometimes that can be the managing directors, the CEOs, sometimes the commercial directors. It's really important the marketeers are really integrated into the business, so they can understand and work closely with sales, with franchise support, with operations, to make sure that they're delivering the right message at the right time to really support that business. However, we do all, as a group, get together, often virtually. We will swap ideas, inspiration, challenges, so that each of the 17 people around the group feel they're connected to a bigger whole, where we can really help and support our, our individual marketeers as part of a family, because obviously, that's incredibly important for us going forward, that we feel that our marketeers feel that they're connected to a single bigger whole. So I'm just gonna now show you just a couple of the brief bits of activity we've done. We did, as I say, 25 photo shoots, thousands upon thousands of images, that came out of, of this year alone. This is just a few, everything from exhibitions to TV adverts. In fact, every single part of the, marketing mix we did, from TV campaigns to exhibitions, to, lots and lots and lots of digital marketing, to you name it, it literally is covered across the full marketing mix. And as I say, one of the things we're most proud of is taking our franchisees' money and making it work as effectively as possible. So one of the case studies I'd like to talk to you about just briefly is Metro Plumb, one of our smaller brands with one of our smaller marketing budgets. However, last year, in 2023, we launched a TV campaign for it, where we focused it on specific Sky channels. We had a total of 10 million impacts across Sky TV, another 4 million on YouTube, and what that enables us to do is target a message, increase the brand awareness for Metro Plumb, but interestingly and importantly, to really drive those inquiries and leads as well. The TV ad I'll show you in just a minute was revolved around a really simple insight, which I'm sure many of you can relate to, which is, if you've got a plumbing emergency or a leak or something happening, it causes you real anxiety. Who on earth am I gonna call? How can I trust the people that are gonna come round? And for many of us, plumbing is not our expert- our area of expertise. I speak from personal experience, so you need to have people you can trust with your plumbing inquiries. It was a really simple ad. We used the same idea that Airbnb or Lloyds Bank did, using just stills, so we could make the ad very, very cheaply, and it's not gonna win any creative awards, but it was very, very effective at getting into our target market. So I'll just show you briefly now. That feeling when you need a plumber, that's plumbxiety, brought on by sayings like, "Oh, this'll be costly," those that are self-taught, father and son biscuit barrel raiders, the tenuous recommendations that become even more tenuous recommendations. So don't just hope for the best, call Metro Plumb. Metro Plumb carefully select, train, and have incredibly courteous, competitively priced local plumbers all across England. Metro Plumb, the nation's local plumber. ... So that cost just a few thousand GBP to put together, and importantly, it was developed to run on TV as well as online as well. Actually, online, we can really measure the results and the impact of it. So on YouTube, you've probably seen when you watch those YouTube videos, there'll be a skip advert button, that you can skip the adverts before you move on to whatever it is you're watching. Typically, on average, around 20% of the adverts are watched right the way through to completion, 80% are skipped over. When Metro Plumb was played, over half, 51% of people actually watched the whole ad, so we know we're getting engagement across, we know we're getting the message across. And obviously, on YouTube, we can target it to people actually looking for plumbing or, or those kind of related industries or videos. It enables us to target really, really specifically. We have a lot of success using very, very small amounts of money really, really quickly. Let's just take a brief look at what we've got planned in 2024. And a huge range of things. We have over 300 brand-new email campaigns, again, very specifically targeted to decision-makers. Although we do some B2C, the vast majority of what we do is B2B, and it's about targeting those key decision-makers with the right message at the right time. A marketing presentation, as with an IT presentation, wouldn't be complete without the words AI in it. We use AI actually increasingly across marketing, whether it's writing press releases and blogs or actually creating videos and digital output. In Benelux, they've got an AI chatbot they're working on to help customer inquiries, and actually a video creator helping them create personalized videos to go out to franchisees. There's launch of a multilingual tracking app in Germany, and again, we're marketing out to customers as a way of really reassuring them that we can get to them, and they can track our engineers and technicians as they're coming to the job. Dynamic search advertising, we're just starting with Metro Rod, and again, very simply, that's a way that Google, you work with Google, it will read your website and develop adverts specifically targeted for people that have similar search terms, even if you don't have those adverts up and running. And then the new CRM system for Pirtek, HubSpot, is being introduced to give us some, some quality end-to-end tracking in terms of data. In all 10 countries, we've got brand-new video footage, lots and lots of new imagery, and lots and lots of new content, because it's really important that wherever customers are searching for our brands, they find us, and they find us in messages and ways that are really simple to understand and engage the customer. In summary, the marketing team is genuinely seen as a family. Although we work in different markets, on different brands, in different industries, the whole is more than the sum of the part. There's a lot of experience and a lot of different technical knowledge that we can put into the pot with our marketing team. We focus really tightly on content creation and what we call digital dominance. If people are trying to find us or they're interested in the category, it's really important that we're there, and whether that's through SEO or pay-per-click or whatever it might be, the focus on that and making sure customers can find us is really, really important. Because of that need to analyze and really understand where our customers are coming from and which are engaging, we like to really rapidly adopt new technologies. It's often really cost-effective in the case of AI, but also to really look at new marketing opportunities, to test things, to try things. It's more fun to work like that, to experiment, to try to create that energy and that, that momentum for, both the franchisees, but also, our customers. As I said at the beginning, marketing is a science, it's not an art, and we're really, really privileged that we are really free to try experimentation without fear of failure. If we do fail, we fail quickly, and we move on. And if we fail again, we move on. It's all about analyzing, understanding, and then getting that marketing out there to be as effective as possible. We are always, always conscious, and again, one of the reasons I started the presentation off with this is in 75% of cases, it's our franchisees' money we're spending. So we spend it incredibly cautiously. We make sure we can justify where and how we're spending it, because obviously, it benefits the franchisees, and we, we absolutely believe we can spend it far more effectively for them than they can spend it locally, and we've proved that time and time again. But obviously, if they grow, we grow, and there's a, there's a mutually beneficial relationship. And that final point is actually that we are a one-KPI business. And I started with this point, and I'll finish with the same point, that essentially, it's all about driving those new customer inquiries as effectively as possible and keeping that pipeline filled so that we are supporting that Maximum Potential Model and making sure that our franchisees are really growing sustainably, and they see and feel the opportunity. It de-risks it for them and enables them to have confidence that there'll be lots of new customers out there in future. So I'm here to talk you through the financial performance of the group historically, the financial targets through to 2027, the plan to deleverage completely by 2027, and the capital allocation plans thereon in. As Stephen said, I joined in August. This is my fifth public company over the last 25 years, some of whom you may know or have invested in. I see a few former fund manager investors around the room. In terms of the track record, there's been a 47% growth in the system sales over the last 5 years. That's been driven largely by the acquisition of Filta in June 2022 and then Pirtek in April 2023. Adjusted EBITDA, and the figure that we're using here, is the consensus analyst estimate, of which there are three analysts following the group, and that's for just under GBP 30 million of profit this year. And I think it's worth saying that, that over 90% of that comes from the franchise channel. The DLO channel is less than 10% of that. The earnings per share growth has been a bit slower at 19%, but that is impacted, as Stephen said, by the impact of the equity fundraise for Filta, which was all equity, the 50% equity fundraise for Pirtek, but it's also been impacted by this year, we've paid 8% interest rates, so that's impacted that EPS growth rate. The dividend per share growth rate, though, has been a more impressive 24%. So just moving forward then, the last four months we've been working on our strategic financial targets. Those have been produced bottom up by the individual businesses, so each one of the MDs that you've seen here has done their own, targets and setting and working out the plans, which has driven their presentations. In terms of what that means for the group, and I should stress here, this is the assumptions for 2025 to 2027, because the numbers we've used for 2024 are again, the analyst's estimates, and we've got overall group system sales growing by in excess of 11%. With B2C growing at a slightly lower rate than that, you can therefore get to the point that the three main growth businesses of Filta, Pirtek, and Water & Waste are growing at a higher rate than that. The gross margin that we have assumed is reducing marginally in the out period by 10 basis points a year as the mix of the franchise activity grows over that of the DLO channel. Overheads as a percentage of system sales, though, reduced by 40 basis points as a result of operational gearing. That is the leverage of our fixed overhead, typically in the center, and that's the IT, marketing, and finance functions. That's therefore resulting in an increase in the group EBITDA to system sales margin from the current level of about 8.5% to 10% in 2027. That's our target, and it's going up by 30 basis points a year. In our models, we are assuming an interest rate in 2025 of 6%, reducing to 5% in 2026 and thereafter. That is basically using a margin of 2% and SONIA of 4% in 2025, and 3% for 2026. We've assumed a progressive dividend policy, which would be covered 4 times, with an interim dividend payout of 45% and 55% as a final dividend. And finally, when you see these numbers, there's no assumed acquisitions or disposals in these. This is all organic. A few more assumptions that the accountants amongst you would like. We've assumed tax at 26.5% in the numbers that you will currently see, and we have working capital growing by 10%, compound annually. So in terms of what does this mean? By 2027, we're targeting to get to GBP 600 million of system sales from the current level of GBP 350 million for 2023, and GBP 430 million for 2024 being the analyst's estimate. Adjusted EBITDA that we're targeting, we're targeting a 19% growth from the GBP 38 million expectation for this current year, 2024, through to GBP 60 million in 2027. The PBT is a more impressive 29% compound growth rate from 2023 to 2027, and that is being driven by the reduced group leverage, the reduced SONIA, and the reduced margin on the debt. And then finally, the free cash flow generation. The group has got a very low level of working capital. The CapEx is around GBP 3 million annually, so very low. That's at about half the rate of the depreciation, and therefore, the free cash flow is very strong. So by 2027, we expect to generate GBP 40 million of free cash flow, and that definition, it's all the movements in the operating cash, so it is the PBT, less movement in working capital, less tax, and less CapEx, but it doesn't include IFRS 16 lease payments, nor does it include the debt repayments. In terms of what that means in EPS terms, we're targeting for a 24% growth in EPS going forward to 20p, just over 20p in 2027, and with the same growth rate in dividend. I think it's worthwhile pointing out that by 2027, the group return on capital employed, which for this year would be about 12%, grows to in excess of 21%. So the path to 10%, we have some headwinds, but we have a lot of management actions to generate additional benefit to leverage the overall system sales margin. First up, as you saw in Colin's slides, he's increasing his headcount. We've got that in upfront investment to boost Colin's team to deliver on the plans which he's presented. In our assumptions, we've got those costs being expensed, but in reality, we should be able to capitalize some of those or prepay, treat as a prepayment in the balance sheet, so that shouldn't be so much of a downside as you might think. And then we have built on our central overhead. You heard from Stephen earlier about the decision-making, the splitting of the board, the improving of the corporate governance, the adding of a senior independent director, so we've invested in that. One area of costs we've also seen an uptick in is the group audit costs. Because the group has obviously doubled in size during the year, our audit fee has also more than doubled. So we've borne those costs, and they're built into the model. The benefits that we've got is we've got that operational leverage that is on the fixed central overhead. Despite that, I say it's fixed, we're still growing our overhead by 8% per annum, but that's at a lower rate of growth than our growth in system sales and profit, so that's a positive. We've got the benefits from cross-selling synergies, which you have heard each one of the MDs talk about. Then you've just heard from Colin, the opportunities to allow customers to self-serve, to reduce our costs, to run more on robots, and actually reduce the amount of travel time that our engineers are taking to generate that extra GBP 8 million of system sales, and also help retain our engineers because spending less time in driving around and more time actually working, and help the recruitment of those engineers. So what does that all result in? It results in a lot less debt, and we are planning to be in a net cash position by 2027. The debt is in the 1-1.5 corridor in early 2025. Here you see the bars, I should probably have explained at the beginning. That's the difference between the peak and the trough of the debt in the year, but that also accords with what's the opening debt and what's the closing debt. In terms of our capital allocation, the short-term priorities for us, as you've heard, for the next 12-18 months, the strategic focus is very much on carrying through on the integration of Filta and Pirtek into the group, driving out the operational synergies between the businesses, the cross-selling opportunities, and repaying as much of the debt as we can, as quickly as we can. We're targeting the leverage to be in that 1-1.5 corridor in early 2025 and aiming to be cash positive in 2027. That's all achieved from organic growth. There's no assumed disposals in there. There's no assumed acquisitions. It's all organic. And on that, the board won't be considering further acquisitions of scale until we are in a position of being net cash positive. On the medium term, we would look at acquisitions of franchise businesses that add to our existing franchise channels or bolt on direct labour organizations that help drive the growth rate of the franchise channels. And any businesses, be it DLO or franchise, which we deem to be non-core, we would look to dispose of. We have historically, before this current financial year, 2024, used share buybacks to cover the dilution from share options. Share option is quite wide in the group. Of the group employees, there's in excess of 300 with share options, so there's a very wide interest amongst our employee base in the future success of the business. But going forward, we would use buying back shares in the market to avoid dilution. And then finally, the progressive dividend policy covered four times, as you saw, leading to a dividend payment in excess of GBP 0.05 in 2027. I'd like to show you a couple of the slides, which I think are pretty impressive and have a little dig at our private equity friends, so I don't see why they should have all the fun. Mark's explained to you that Adjusted EBITDA is going to grow by 60%, and there is a perception that we are highly geared. But the reason our private equity friends use gearing is to drive shareholder returns. This model here shows you that whilst our EBITDA is growing at a satisfactory 19%, actually, the de-gearing is driving EPS 4%. Now, I think by any standards, our gearing is not excessive, and we have the cash flow, particularly in a franchise model, which is capital light and highly cash generative, to de-gear quite quickly. But you can see here how it is accelerating shareholder returns. So that's my little dig at why the PE boys... I was one once. I mean, I was 10 years at 3i, so I know how this works, and I don't think public companies do enough of it, and I think maybe the market is not sufficiently receptive to the use of gearing, as I say, to drive shareholder returns. So anyway, on to the investment case. So Franchise Brands provides essential services with resilient underlying demand. Filta provides a highly cost-effective service that has very high customer retention rates and is near enough zero cost to the customer, so why wouldn't they? I mean, our biggest problem at Filta is that people just don't understand it. We have no competition, so our challenge is actually to get into customers and explain to them what we do and how it can be so beneficial to them. The B2C brands generate consistent cash flow. Tim does a marvelous job in managing those. I was gonna say in isolation. Not quite in isolation, are you? But very self-contained. 24 people running that business out of Kidderminster, so a very nice little business. As I said earlier, the businesses aren't recession-proof, but we work in a lot of sectors that are not particularly affected by the economic conditions at the time, and in some areas, we marginally benefit, so very resilient business. All our group companies have significant opportunities for growth. They have small shares of often highly fragmented markets, so we're not going up against 600-pound gorillas when we're competing in the market. These are often small, local, regional businesses, where our competitive advantage of all the things you've heard about today make taking business from them a lot easier. The markets we're in aren't growing particularly fast, and the key to growing our market share is really eating someone else's lunch. And as a lot of our customers reduce and consolidate their supply chain, using the IT and other tools we have, we have a particularly strong position to be able to capitalize on that. And it's, as you've heard, the Maximum Potential Model shows that 6 times the market we have at the moment. We have an experienced management team. You've heard about how long in the tooth some of us are and how long we've been doing this. I had a lovely quote earlier on. Someone said, "If you've read the book, you know the ending." Well, we've all read the book, and, and we know how to do this stuff, and, we've demonstrated it with the acquisitions we've done already, that actually the plans we have when we acquire a business, we integrate it into the group, we use the Maximum Potential Model. It sort of works, and I don't see there's any reason it should stop working in the future. Operational gearing is important, and Mark's explained it in detail now, how we can reduce the overheads as a percentage of system sales, system sales, not statutory sales, each year. Now, franchise businesses have natural operational gearings. Part of this is not rocket science. I mean, we don't need to grow our overhead as our franchisees' businesses grow. That's one level. But we try to turbocharge that with the use of technology. If there's things we can do with automation, we will invest in them. And you've heard from Colin, how we're doing that at every level of the business, whether it's for the benefit of franchisees and labor optimization, through to our internal processes. We're highly cash generative. Again, Mark's explained to you how little we spend on CapEx. That's the franchisee's job. They invest in the underlying equipment. We've got to invest in IT, most of which... well, all of which in the model here is all expense. Mark's thrown me a fig leaf now that he's going to capitalize some of it, so I'll take that. But basically, we look to write off all our IT spend each year, and that will allow us to get to net cash by 2027. We also have a progressive dividend policy, and I just want to add one more thing to this, which is about acquisition. So in coming up with these targets today, we have said no acquisitions in the forecast period, and I think that's probably going to be right. I think we've got enough to do over the next two or three years, integrating Filta and Pirtek, but we don't necessarily have to wait until we're net cash for the next acquisition. But one of the benefits it gives us if we get to that position is we can really go again for something of scale. What I don't want to do, you know, if we go in the window of 1 to 1.5 times gearing, we're constrained on the scale of the business we could acquire, and actually, the next one has got to move the dial. If we're approaching GBP 60 million of profit, there's no point making an acquisition that adds GBP 5 million to the bottom line. We've got to go for another business of scale. We're also now represented in 10 countries, so the opportunity which we have to look outside the UK are tremendous. To repeat the overall profit objective of the group, it is to grow our profits equally in North America, UK, and Europe. That diversification of geography and businesses, I think, will be great for shareholders. So that is the end of the presentation and my investment case to you. I hope you support that. Thank you very much for hearing us out today. It's been a long afternoon. Lots and lots of information. I'm sure your heads are ringing. Ours are. Thank you. Oh.