Good morning. Thank you for joining us. Welcome to our interim results presentation for the 24 weeks, ending 2nd of October 2022. I'll do a brief introduction. I'll hand over to Gregor, who's going to talk through the financials. I'll then talk through a bit more about the operational and strategic side of the business. I'll hand over to Alex, who's going to talk about Brightside a bit and close for us. If I could ask, can we just keep questions to the end? That'd be helpful just 'cause we're recording for the website. Looking at the highlights, let me first say we're really pleased with how the business has performed in the first half of the year. We continue to massively outperform the market with consistently strong trading. We're announcing +17% like-for-likes on a three-year basis for the first 24 weeks. That remains about 15% ahead of the Peach Tracker, 15% ahead of the rest of the market, and we've consistently been ahead of the rest of the market by that gap for the last 18 months. What's interesting, the sales uplift, it reflects both volume and price. I think that's in quite stark contrast to other operators. The fact that we're still increasing volumes despite all the kind of worries about the consumer and that the balance has shifted. We'll come and talk about it a bit more in terms of the degree of price we've taken. As I said, I think the fact that we're increasing volumes in this market is impressive. We remain well positioned in a recessionary environment through our balance of margin protection and value for money price points. Gregor will cover this in more detail, but it's something that we focus on an awful lot. Getting that balance right in terms of how can we mitigate the cost pressures, how do we protect the bottom line, but then also how do we make sure we remain excellent value for money? We have a fifth build team up and running now, and the new site openings continue to perform well. This morning at 9:00 A.M., we opened our 16th site of the year, Carlo Lounge in East Grinstead, where we'll be going later this evening for the kind of opening do. As I said, the new sites are performing above average from a sales and EBITDA perspective. We're also introducing our roadside brand, Brightside, which Alex will come on and talk about a bit later. Current trading remains strong. The last eight weeks we've seen a slight uptick in our like-for-like sales performance, and we're approaching Christmas with optimism. Christmas is the one time of the year where we get a bit of visibility through bookings on the catering side, we're confident as we look ahead to Christmas. With that, I'll hand over to Gregor. Thank you, Nick. Good morning, everybody. I'll take you through the numbers, if I may. The slides I will share with you are hopefully reasonably familiar in terms of format. We'll start off with a couple of highlight slides, take a deeper dive into like-for-like sales performance. We'll look at margins, current inflationary pressures, and then wrap up with a look at cash flow, CapEx, and net debt. I've got two highlight slides today. One, the first one here is looking back on a three-year basis. They're comparing the first half of FY23 for the first half of FY 2020, and then I'll move on and show the year-on-year performance. Starting with this slide, which I think is a more sensible one in that it compares two periods, which are unimpacted by COVID in any way. There's no negativity from lockdowns, for example, and no positive influence from government support measures. I guess the highlights from this slide, revenue of GBP 122.3 million, that's up just over 53%, and it reflects the addition of 50 new sites over that three-year period. Taking the estate from 156 to 206 sites, and it also reflects a really strong three-year like-for-like sales performance, and we'll look at that in a little more detail in couple of minutes. In terms of gross profit, GBP 47.9 million. That's up just over 44% over the three-year period. A gross profit margin of 39.2%. Just as a reminder, that's gross profit is struck after cost of goods sold, plus our site labor costs. When we look at that 230 basis points weakening in the margin over the three-year period, that's wholly driven by labor. As I say, we'll look at that in a little more detail coming up. Adjusted EBITDA IAS 17, so after a full rents charge of GBP 13.5 million, that's up 32% over the three years and 11% margin, which shows 180 basis points of weakening. The weakening at the gross profit margin line alleviated a little bit as you go further down the P&L and you see the benefit of our leveraging our fixed cost base. Finally, profit before tax of GBP 2.8 million in the first half. It's worth noting, just as a reminder, the first half here is a 24-week period. With that 24 weeks, 28-week split and a bit of seasonality in the business, typically, you'd expect to do about 43% of your sales in the first half, 57% in the second half. Moving on and just looking at the year-on-year performance, I think as it's been very well flagged, what you see in that year-on-year performance is the positive benefit in the previous financial year, in FY 2022 of government support measures. In particular, the VAT reduction, which was worth GBP 9.5 million to us in FY 2022. Also business rate support, which is worth about GBP 2.5 million. You see that reflected in the prior year margin there, IFRS 16 EBITDA margin of 26.5%, reducing without those benefits to 15.8% this year. If you take those two effects out, the year-on-year margin decline at that level is about 1.3%. In terms of like for like sales performance, we reported a three-year like for like of +17% for the first half over 24 weeks. No COVID distortion in that number. If you then roll that forward, adding in the next eight weeks up to the close of business last Sunday. That three-year like for like improves to 17.4%. Effectively, you're seeing about 18.5% of like for like sales growth over the last eight weeks. Strengthening in that already strong performance. On a one-year basis, and as we flagged at the interims back in July, a much more subdued number. One year like for like of +1.5% in the first 20 weeks. Just to add a little bit of complexity, that's a 20-week period because the first four weeks of the previous year, we were external trading only. But again, when you roll that 20 weeks into the 28-week number, you see a significant improvement to 3.2%. So on a one-year basis, the last 8 weeks, we've been about +7.5. This slide just breaks down that three-year like for like sales performance into discrete chunks of 12 weeks each, with the one exception of the bar on the very far right-hand side, which is just the last eight weeks. I guess two key points coming out of this. Firstly, if you exclude our trading exactly a year ago when we had Omicron impacting the business, since we reopened in May 2021, that three-year like for like has been remarkably consistent, hovering around the 18%, 19% mark. Then I think the second key point is when you look at the last eight weeks, +18.5%, that's our strongest performance in a discrete period since that very first three-month period post reopening back in May/June, July 2021. An old favorite, on slide eight here. What this slide does is show that 17.4% three-year like for like for the last 32 weeks and show how the different age cohorts of sites contribute to that performance. As we've seen previously, it's remarkably consistent performance across the estate. It ranges from 12.6% in our FY 2016 cohort, up to 21.2% in one of the oldest cohorts, the FY 2014 cohort. I think most importantly, when you look at that, the 29 sites that we've had in the estate since FY 2013 and earlier, contributing just under 15% to that like for like sales total. Moving on to our margin performance, the chart on slide nine compares our FY 2023 margin, adjusted EBITDA on an IAS 17 basis of 11% to our 12.8% margin three years previously. As I touched on earlier, the big element of decline there is in the cost of sales line, 230 basis points negative. Splitting that out, you'll see that cost of goods sold, in spite of the inflationary pressures, is still 60 basis points positive. Albeit, when you split that down, you'll see there's a negative on food and a positive on drink, and that's reflected in the higher rates of inflation we've seen in terms of food inbound costs. The real pain is on the labor line, where over a three-year period, 290 basis points negative in respect of labor. When we were back here in July time, on a two-year basis, we were about 130 basis points negative. That's continuing the labor challenge with the introduction of the National Living Wage back in April of this year, with an increase of just under 10%. Variable costs are negative 20 basis points, with utilities accounting for 30 basis points of negative. We see 90 basis points of positive in respect of rent and rates and fixed costs, then 20 basis points negative in terms of our central costs. That's, again, continued investment to support the growth of the business. Looking at individual lines, you'll see a little bit of pain in respect to print costs and insurance costs. In terms of the inflationary pressures that the business is facing at the moment, this is an update to the table that we shared in July. Back in July, very early in the financial year, I think, we were clearly aware that, whilst we had our crystal ball out, there were a fair few unknowns there. This is looking to update those expectations to where we are today. In terms of selling price over the course of the year, we'd look to take about 7% in total. We've just taken another 4% with our October menu launch. In terms of cost of goods sold on food, where we were at 6% to 9%, we're probably now sort of 9% to 10%. We're seeing a little bit more challenge in respect of oil, the winter produce, and then dairy costs. The dairy basket will go up by 11.2% as of tomorrow. In terms of drink from 4% to 5% and moving to 5% to 7%, still quite a bit of work to be done there in respect of our draft contracts and increases there. Those are just being negotiated as we speak. In terms of rate of pay and labor, you know, week in, week out, typically, we're seeing our rate of pay increasing year-on-year by between 8% and 9%. On utilities, as we start to see more new sites come into the estate, and how ill-prepared our landlords have typically been at hedging their electricity costs and their willingness to pass those on to ourselves, we're seeing about 10% run rate inflation at the moment on utilities. Two initiatives that we've talked about in the past in terms of consolidated distribution and our food and drink supply contracts, those are very much first half of calendar year 2023 projects, and we're making good progress there. That should give us an opportunity to enhance our cost of goods sold margin through FY 2024 and FY 2025. Final bullet down there is just a little reminder, National Living Wage, April 2023. You're looking at an increase of just under 10% for the 23-year-olds and over, and a little bit over 10% for the 21 and 22-year-olds. Clearly a lot of focus within the business on driving our top line, growing share, growing volume, but equally, there's a lot of focus on the business in terms of cost reduction initiatives and what we can do to protect ourselves from that inflationary environment. It's fair to say there's no sort of single action, no silver bullet, but there are, within the business, many opportunities, you know, both to cut waste, to improve efficiency, and to deliver savings. Many of these initiatives are actually about changing, you know, reasonably long-ingrained working practices. Some of the examples, and I won't, I won't talk to every one, but, you know, looking at things like minimizing energy consumption. I mean, that's really just monitoring consumption on a daily basis in the business. It's identifying really early those sites who aren't switching off the air conditioning at night. Those sites where fridge doors are being left open. It's spotting the peaks and attacking those. Fryer oil is a really interesting one. I mean, our cost of oil is up 44% year-on-year, and the majority of our sites will quite blindly change their oil twice a week. Really important to have quality oil for the, the food quality aspects. By getting our sites to test their oil, to filter the oil, again, big opportunities for savings. I mean, none of these, as I say, are silver bullets. There are opportunities which might be worth GBP 200,000, GBP 300,000 in a full year, so really worthwhile doing. Couple of areas, though, that we're absolutely not touching, and one of those is ingredient quality and portion sizes. You know, we talk a lot in the business about value for money, and that's not just about the price point, it's also about the quality of the food on the plate and the size of the portion. Secondly, a key element of driving that like-for-like sales performance is clearly the service and hospitality that we offer. Whilst we focus really hard on accurately forecasting our sales day by day, week by week, and making sure that we have the right rota in place to deliver that service and hospitality, you know, we're not interested in a blanket cut in labor hours in the business. Finally, on to cash flow, CapEx and net debt to wrap up. First half is pretty unusual in this business relative to the full year. What we see in looking at our cash flow, whilst we've got adjusted EBITDA on an IAS 17 base of GBP 13.5 million, in the first half, you see a working capital outflow. This business typically, and historically with its new site openings and positive like-for-like sales performance, you see a working capital inflow, and for the full year, that's exactly what we'd expect. In the half year, when you're comparing a 2nd of October year end with a half year end with a mid-April full year end, you see that working capital outflow. As I say, that'll reverse in the full year. Importantly though, below cash generated from operations of GBP 7.3 million, you see a GBP 3.4 million spend on maintenance CapEx. Under free cash flow of GBP 3.3 million, you'll see we've got new site CapEx of GBP 10.3 million. Unusually for us, we have both the freehold acquisition in the half year and the leasehold premium, GBP 1.3 million spent there. Closing the period with GBP 23 million of cash. A little bit more in terms of that CapEx spend. Net new site CapEx of GBP 11.2 million in the half. That includes GBP 9.7 million in respect of opening 11 sites, eight Lounges and three Cosy Clubs. Those eight Lounges average GBP 750K, so a modest tick up from the GBP 735 that we reported for the FY 2022 year. We've got maintenance CapEx of GBP 1.6 million, so pretty consistent as a percentage of revenue with the previous periods. P&L maintenance spend at the same time of 1.7%. Again, consistent level of spend in terms of maintenance CapEx and revenue spend. The kitchen reset program, which was a big part of the business pre-COVID, that's restarted with gusto, with 22 resets completed in the first half. Final element of replacing our furniture in sites, returning it to all our sites, fully refurbished after taking it out for COVID, that's at GBP 0.6 million of spend in the half. Those freehold and leasehold premiums that I touched on earlier, our Cosy Club Canterbury site, which you'll see pictures of later on in the deck, that was a deal which we had agreed with the landlord, where we were gonna get a landlord contribution of GBP 400,000. The landlord then changed their mind, decided they could do with the cash themselves, and offered us the opportunity to buy the freehold for GBP 850,000. A really good opportunity for us. We've taken advantage of the strength of our balance sheet to do that, and in due course, we'll probably look to unwind that with the same leaseback, but no time pressure involved there. Finally, in terms of non-property net debt, I think the important bit to look at here is the movement from the first half of H1 on the right-hand side of the chart where we have underlying net debt of GBP 17.5 million, through to this half year performance where we have underlying net debt of GBP 9.5 million. That's an GBP 8 million improvement in our net debt position over a 12-month period in which we've seen CapEx cash outflows of just over GBP 31 million. The final unwinding, if you like, of those deferred COVID-19 liabilities, GBP 5.6 million to settle those deferred liabilities. Closing the first half with net debt of nine and a half million GBP, a strong balance sheet, and a great funding position. On that, I'll pass back to Nick, if I may. Thank you, Gregor. The next few slides, I will endeavor to just provide some insights, I guess, into how the business has moved on over the last 6 months and some of the factors that are driving that like-for-like sales growth. This first slide just talks about food and how we've never been so good and that really is the case. I think if you look at the journey we've been on over the last couple of years, coming out of COVID, we were reducing menus, trying to make it easier, and then we very quickly got back up in terms of dish volume, but not necessarily dish quality. I think the strength and depth of our development teams now and the quality of the food that we're putting on our menus, it's never been better. I can genuinely say that. Just looking at the dishes on the screen here, just to give you a bit of insight. Top in the middle there is the Lounge business, certainly, is the Lounge breakfast, which is our best-selling dish. We sell around 30,000 of those a week. Beneath that, you can see one of our burgers. I think that's the chicken katsu burger, actually. We sell around 40,000 burgers a week in the Lounge business. One half of food development is about, there are some things that we won't take off the menu. We're always gonna sell the Lounge breakfast. We're always gonna sell burgers in the Lounge business. When we think about food development is how can we make it better? What can we do to either improve the margin, make it easier in the kitchen for our teams, or make it better for the customer on the plate? When you're selling 30,000 of something like the Lounge Breakfast at the top there, how much you pay for the butter which is spread on the slice of toast, and it's really important that it goes from end to end, and it's not just in the middle. Those sorts of details, they start to have a meaningful impact on our gross profit margin. The other side of menu development is introducing new dishes to the menu. Looking at that, going around, on the top left there is our Miami brunch dish, which is sweet corn fritters with a kind of tomato and bean salsa, some feta cheese, and a poached egg. It's truly delicious. We sell around 3,500 of those a week. Put it into perspective alongside the Lounge breakfast. Beneath that is the vegetarian biryani bowl. Again, we sell around 2,500 to 3,000 of those a week. Bottom right is the Lounge flatbread, where I think we're about 4,500 to 5,000. On the top right there is Cosy Club dish. Actually, it's our burrata and squash salad, which is really magnificent. Those four dishes have all come onto the menu in the last couple of months. Yes, the volumes that we sell of those dishes are lower, but it that's where a lot of the food development happens. I think if you think about both businesses in Lounge and Cosy Club, we have really high frequency of visits. People coming two, three, four, five times a week. For them, the fact that the menu changes two or three times a year and that we're constantly introducing new stuff is really, really important. As I said, they were balancing the priorities within that development process, thinking about customer experience, value for money versus gross margin, and as I said, really importantly, kitchen simplicity. Looking at the next slide, just talking a little bit about design, it's not something we focus on that much when we talk to the kind of, to the investment community, but it's clearly, it's a really fundamental part of our business. If you look at our TripAdvisor scores and our feedback scores, we score well on most things. Where we score really outstandingly highly is from a design and an atmosphere perspective. We've invested significantly in the last three or four years in our in-house design teams, and they're constantly looking to introduce new elements into site design. Just picking on a few of these, and get the second bullet there. We say each site being different and giving a nod to the local community is fundamental to our success. That's really, really important. We, as of today, have 211 sites, and for people who aren't familiar with our business, it's very easy to imagine some sort of cookie-cutter model where we've got a team of people, and they're just out there opening a new site every two weeks, and they all look identical. That is so far from the truth. Looking at the middle picture there at the top, that's the Liberto Lounge in Egham, which opened earlier this financial year. The back bar, you can see the back bar there. Each back bar in the lounges is individually designed and gives a nod to that local community. That's an image from the Magna Carta 'cause the Magna Carta was signed in Runnymede, which is near Egham, I think. Top left there, you can see a picture of Moro Lounge in Richmond. Lots of people got excited when we said we're opening a lounge in Richmond. It's Richmond, North Yorkshire, not Richmond, West London. It was a former bank. It's a beautiful banking hall, and we love period property. You can just see there some of the features in the ceiling and the cornicing and stuff. I think we work really well with those period properties. In the bottom right there, last one, you can see Prospero Lounge in Stratford-upon-Avon. I think it's a character from The Tempest. Each lounge has its own name. Again, and this is something we don't focus on that much. We try and relate the name. They all have to end in O. We try and relate it to the local area, that local community. Again, that font, that signage is very new for us. You know, we're always trying to kind of move on, adapt, change, try something different. That gives you a sense of, you know, how we're kind of changing that look and feel across the sites. If you look at that bottom middle image, you can see what we call a cluster of our Mary Poppins shades, and that's one of our kind of signature looks, I guess. Not that we talk about it like that. It's one of the things where people will walk into Lounges, and they'll see those shades, and they'll go, "Oh, this is a Lounge. I know that 'cause I've seen this elsewhere." We've got eight sites programmed in for splashes and dashes in FY 2023 and FY 2024. We don't get asked as much about this. I think when we first floated, we got asked a lot about maintenance, CapEx, and what's our refurb cycle, and do you have to kind of spend a quarter of a million on the sites every three or four years? I hope we talked passionately about how that wasn't the case, how the estate remains very, very well-maintained. The way we think about splash and dash or additional investment in the sites is looking at them, thinking, "We can do something better." It's, you know, it's not about maintenance. The sites are, as I said, are really well-maintained, and we've got a great program of decorating and making sure everything looks tip-top. It's very much a case of us going and thinking, "Actually, this wall, we did something in Richmond, North Yorkshire that we could do down here, and we could make it look better." Just touch on Christmas because, well, it is Christmas coming up. The emphasis on Christmas is quite different across the two businesses. We have 13 four-week accounting periods. In our period nine, which is the Christmas period, that accounts for 8% of sales in the Lounge business, which is just slightly above average. There's quite limited seasonality in the Lounge business, which is a really real positive, we think, a real strong point. The next two, three weeks' sales will be important in Lounge, but they won't be excessively important. On the Cosy Club side, the next four weeks will be 12% of sales. That's much more important. We have over 80,000 pre-booked customers dining with us over the next three weeks in particular. We'll be dealing with lots of parties ranging from 10 people up to 60 or 70 people. How we look after those people, A, gives us an opportunity to impress people who, customers who might not have been to our venues. Equally, the more efficient we are in terms of upselling, in terms of increasing average spend, the more efficient we are getting food out of our kitchen and turning those tables, that will have a positive impact on our like-for-like performance over the Christmas period. Just in terms of evolution, we've introduced a new booking system in the Lounges for groups of 8 or more. In the Lounges, we don't take bookings. If you phoned up and said, "Can I have a table for two at 8:00 P.M. on Saturday night?" We'd say, "No." We don't typically take bookings unless you're a large party. For most of the year, bookings aren't really a thing in the Lounge business. That's less true at Christmas, where we do get more inquiries, and we are happy to take bookings in the quieter times, for groups of eight or more. By introducing a website where people can book, I think that'll probably have a positive impact on our sales over the next three or four weeks in Lounge. On the Cosy Club side, also using dynamic pricing. We started this last year. Obviously, Omicron kind of got in the way of Christmas trading last year. This is its second year. The first time, we're giving it a full run out, whereby on the peak days, the days where we know the bookings are gonna go first, where those days will reach capacity earliest, we're charging more for the two or three course booking. What we've seen as we've introduced that is that the peak days are still booked out the earliest, which would suggest that our customers are happy with that dynamic pricing model, and we would expect that to have a positive impact on our like-for-like sales as we go through the Christmas period. As I said earlier, I think our bookings would suggest we're well-placed in respect of Christmas trading. This slide just looks at insights data, and it's one of the ways the business has really shifted over the last three or four years, is we just have so much intelligence now in terms of people letting us know how we're doing. People are very quick to, you know, if you give them a tool, they're very quick to tell you what they think is good and what they think is bad. We're receiving over 15,000 pieces of individual feedback each month. That's predominantly coming from either people who are purchasing through the app in the Lounges, which represents about 40% of our sales, and through Cosy Club reservations. If you book a table in the Cosy Clubs, we'll then go back to you and ask you how you found it and give you a chance for feedback. In addition to that, during the summer, we had a more in-depth customer survey where, so we asked 35,000 of our customers, or 35,000 of our customers completed a quite lengthy survey, which gave us great intelligence in terms of, A, telling us who our customer is, and B, what they like and dislike about our business. We did this piece of work 'cause we wanted to see how it had shifted versus 2016. So we carried out a very similar exercise in 2016. This allowed us to understand, well, has our customer changed? You can see the bottom right chart there. That was just one snippet of information that came out from the survey in terms of the age profile of our customer. I'm not going to go into it in depth, but I think the broad headline is our customer hasn't changed. That broad demographic that we serve, that very much continues to be the case. Dish-specific feedback drives menu evolution. This is, it's so great this now. You can see in that top right chart there, you can see we can amalgamate all the customer ratings of dishes. We can look at all the individual pieces of feedback. That then gives our food development teams in both Lounge and Cosy Club loads of insight into what we can do better, what dishes customer like. Great example was the one of our pancakes dishes, which we have with maple syrup, became really apparent. Everyone was just saying, "We want more maple syrup." We give them more maple syrup, and the dish score goes higher, and we've got happier customers. Equally, it tells us if we put something on the menu, it becomes more apparent if we've got it wrong. If we've just put a dish on the menu and actually our customers saying, "We don't really like this." That's not a bad thing, I think. Both brands, we have the benefit of being able to change our menus really quickly. We're not wedded to any specific cuisine. We don't just sell noodles or steak or anything else. We can put whatever we want on, and we can take it off. Despite the fact that the business has increased in scale, we're still pretty fleet of foot when it comes to menus, menu changes. Site-specific feedback and data really helps determine operational focus. I just included a little chart there in the, in the middle saying hot drink and food ticket wait times. That was for last week. I can't remember which part of the business it was actually for. But it looks at, okay, how many instances of hot drinks taking more than 15 minutes were there? How many instances of food taking more than 40 minutes were there? That's intelligence that we get through our kitchen management system, which we introduced through the kitchen resets. Again, we get this three times a day. If we're getting it wrong somewhere, we can immediately see it. If we're looking at longer term trends, if we're looking at the performance of certain sites, certain area managers, et cetera, we can look at all that data, and we can really make sure that training and any additional resource is focused on the right sites and the right people. As you would expect, all that builds up into brand level feedback, which gives us a great steer on how we're doing and where we can get better. NPS is, to some extent, I don't like it's something that everyone uses, but it is quite useful. As you see that fluctuating week on week, it does tell you, it's one way of telling you how you're doing. Value for money is a significant driver of our volume growth. We talk about this a lot, I thought it'd be useful just to kind of set out the how we compare to others. This goes back to Prospero Lounge in Stratford-upon-Avon. What we've done here is we've looked at some of the price of some of our headline products in Prospero Lounge, and we've compared them to national competitors elsewhere in Stratford-upon-Avon. Prospero Lounge is in band A, we introduced our price banding, gosh, about 12 months ago now. That's it, looking at Greg. This is our most expensive band of sites. You can see there, we're GBP 3.30 for a latte, GBP 4.80 for a pint of Amstel, et cetera. I guess looking at coffee first, our latte at GBP 3.30 against Costa GBP 3.35. Boston Tea Party, who you might not be familiar with, they're a multi-site operator in the Southwest Midlands. They're actually cheaper than us, Starbucks, GBP 3.45. You know, we actually intentionally look to be cheaper than the national operators, as we are there, just 5 pence cheaper than Costa and 15 pence cheaper than Starbucks in our top price band. It's important, value for money is not just that price point. I think one of the things that we've talked about before is the fact, yes, it's cheaper, you also will drink a better quality coffee served in a better atmosphere by more hospitable people. One of the things that really stood out to me when we did this exercise was looking at the burger pricing. Our entry-level burger with fries is GBP 10.95. If you look around that chart there, say, looking at The Encore, which is an M&B pub, GBP 17.95, entry-level burger and fries. All Bar One, GBP 12.95, Miller & Carter, GBP 15.50, The Greene King Pub, GBP 14.95. Looking at the degree of inflation that we've seen in the sector, over the past 12, 18 months, as everyone's been dealing with the inbound cost pressures, particularly from a food point of view. I think this really helps highlight it. Loungers looks really good value for money. When we talk about, A, what's driving our really strong performance over the last 12, 18 months, but also why we look ahead and with optimism. I think that we look to our pricing, that gives us real confidence. I think broadly speaking, there's a lot of red on that chart, yeah. There'll be instances where other operators are cheaper than us, by and large, we represent really good value. I included Wetherspoon at the bottom there just 'cause we get asked about Wetherspoon a lot. As you'd expect, they're a lot cheaper than us on everything. Again, it's, you know, Wetherspoon's targeting a different kind of demographic. Our customers don't really cross over. Now a couple of case studies, which I'll go through quite quickly because we've done these before. I just think it's really helpful in trying to get across an understanding of our business looking at specific sites. This is Romano Lounge in Colchester, which opened just over a year ago. Map of the town center there of Colchester. You can see it's. Population 200,000, it's a big location for a Lounge. Looking at the retail and leisure line up, they're all names that you'd be familiar with, but it's a more competitive landscape than that which a Lounge would normally trade in. Our pitch here is quite interesting, where you can see us at the bottom right there, Romano Lounge. The most of the casual dining and leisure operators are up on the high street or where the high street intersects with that other street. Indeed, when we were looking at sites before we opened Romano, we looked at a lot of opportunities up there. Where we are down there, you can't actually see it from that map. We're right in the heart of the retail pitch. It's a great looking site. It's got real prominence, got return frontage on both sides, lots of glazing. We were really excited about the site, despite the fact it wasn't as obvious, I think. looking at the kind of, I guess, the financials and how that site performs, it's, as I said, it opened a year ago, 15-year lease, rent at GBP 75K, so a little bit above average. Landlord package of 36 months, which, you know, two, three, four years ago, that was closer to 24 months. We're seeing much more in terms of capital contribution, rent-free periods, 36 months, much more the norm now. Average weekly sales of GBP twenty-nine and a half thousand and net CapEx of GBP 704 thousand. return on capital of 32%. That's pretty much bang in line for a Lounge, yeah. It's about average. what we will see is this is after one year. As this business matures, as it has, you know, single digit like-for-like volume-driven growth, we'll see that return on capital just improve and improve. Looking at the chart in the bottom left there, they're generating sales right across the day, nine in the morning, three to 11, 12 o'clock at night. A little bit quieter in the evening than average, I think I'd look to the pitch there and the fact that it's not that close to the other leisure. It means we probably have to work a little bit harder for our evening sales. You can see that in the top right chart there as well. Monday to Thursday, a bit quieter, and that'll take time to grow, but there's opportunity there. That's one of the things which will continue to drive the like-for-like sales growth. The sales mix, just over 50% food, 50% drink, and a really broad category mix. The second one, looking at a Cosy Club, and I think it's really good to look at a Cosy Club because this highlights the degree to which it's very, very similar to the Lounge business and has lots of the same characteristics. Cosy Club Lincoln, we're down in the Corn Exchange there in the bottom right. It's a really smart development, actually. The landlord there has done a great job investing and bringing back to life a period building. There's a good lineup of operators there. The Botanist, Pho and Everyman Cinema. What's quite interesting in Lincoln is over on the left of the screen, you can see an area which is called Brayford Pool. There's a Wags there, a Spoons, an Ask and a Zizzi. I think we would love to open a Lounge there. It's whilst it is close to the Cosy Club, it's a different pitch. I think a Lounge would trade really well there. It wouldn't cannibalize any of the sales from the Cosy Club over on the other side. Looking at the metrics, looking at the financials, they just opened under five years ago. It's a 20-year lease, which is rare for us, and we don't have very many of those. Rent GBP 75K, package 24 months. As I said, that's something that we've seen improve over the last four or five years. Looking at the numbers, sales GBP 47,500 a week, EBITDA GBP 409,000 and CapEx GBP 1.1 million. Everything's just notched up a level. Looking at it from a return on capital perspective, very consistent with the Lounge business. Looking at average weekly sales by hour and the average weekly sales by day, real consistency with the Lounge business here. Cosy Club is a genuine all-day operator. It really benefits from that broad menu, very broad demographic and broad appeal, and generating sales right across the day and meaningful sales Monday to Thursday. I think it's one of the reasons why it really deserves to stand out and, when you look at it alongside other kind of leisure businesses. In the bottom right there, looking at the sales mix, you can see some differences there. Brunch is a smaller part of the sales. Alcohol is more important in the Cosy Club. It is slightly more occasion-driven. The last couple of slides from me. I mentioned we're opening sites. Here are some examples. We talked about Cosy Club Canterbury. That was the one where we bought the freehold. It's beautiful building. We trade over four floors here. We've got the bar on the ground floor and the restaurant on the 1st, then smaller trading areas in the basement on the 2nd floor. We opened in August. It's trading really well. That's not just from a honeymoon point of view. It's started well, and it's consistently remained at that level. As Gregor said, we saw an opportunity, I think, where the appreciation in value from buying the freehold off was more than outweighed the potential benefit of taking the capital contribution from the landlord. So it's not something that we plan on doing an awful lot in the future, but it was opportunity-driven, and it will greatly enhance our return on capital there. Top left, I mentioned Richmond, North Yorkshire. That's Morro Lounge in the former HSBC. It's a very steady performer. So opens, doing 29, just under GBP 30,000 sales on a low rent of GBP 50,000. It's great that we're starting to get more of a presence in the North and in the Northeast, and we see lots more opportunity there. I've used Prospero Lounge a couple of times, but there it is in the bottom left again. We only opened there 5 weeks ago. It's gone off really strongly. It's trading at a very, very high level. There'll be a degree of honeymoon in those numbers. We'll expect that to come off. Whether it will end up closer to GBP 30,000, GBP 35,000 or GBP 40,000 in its mature state will remain to be seen. I think if we think about one of the ways our property model's shifted over the last few years is that we've got more confidence taking rents around GBP 100,000 in the Lounge business because we know that we're gonna do the sales there. We know that we'll generate high levels of EBITDA and high returns on capital. We continue to invest in our team. People remains the most challenging aspect of our business. As I said, we've opened 16 sites so far this year. We've created over 400 jobs, and we are filling those jobs. We're working very, very hard. Guy Youll, our Chief People Officer, started in the business four or five weeks ago. Feels like he's been an awfully long time coming, but he had a six-month notice period. We've been excited about him joining for a very long time, but he is now working with us. I won't go through all the details. I think it's a really exciting time on the people side of the business. There's an opportunity for us to just materially improve over the next couple of years, but really become an employer of choice whilst making sure that we retain everything that's special about the culture within the business. We have a new role of marketing director. Kate joined us, again, about 10 weeks ago. We really think there's a significant opportunity in both brands. It's worth it, but this is a new role. We've never had a marketing director before, feels incredibly grown up. We think about marketing, I think, in two different ways. On the Lounge business, we have a community team, so all our focus in Lounge is on community, and it's very much focused on sharing best practice and knowledge and making sure that each site feels equipped with resources and knowledge and experience to go out into that high street, that community, and kind of earn their place there and make sure the locals feel they can use it. Whereas the Cosy Clubs are a brand at the end of the day. They're much more of a brand than the Lounge business. I think having Kate in the business will benefit from expanding the marketing team and using a lot of the data we have better to drive our sales. That's it for me. I'm gonna hand over to Alex, who's gonna talk about Brightside. Thank you. What is Brightside? I think what we've had an itch to do for a while is to take what we do operationally, very well in terms of our understanding of how we trade all day and put that into a roadside location. We have been, I guess, debating this for, what, seven years or so. Then I think when we had a bit of time to navel gaze a bit during the various lockdowns we had, we talked about this more seriously, and I think we sort of felt that it was something that we really wanted to explore. What we're opening is gonna be full-service restaurants. What they are not is drive-through. They're not take-out, they're not QSR. We are basically anticipating that people will want to stop and have a break and have a plated meal in an environment which we will be creating that will have a degree of nostalgia about it. The obvious undeniable comparison is to Little Chef. We welcome, we're not gonna be Little Chef in terms of a reincarnation of Little Chef. We're very much more a 21st century interpretation of what we think motorists will be looking for increasingly, particularly with the advent of the need to stop to charge electric cars, et cetera. We believe that the reason that people stop where they stop currently, and which is all very convenience and QSR driven, is purely based out of the fact there's no other offer. There's no one really doing this on the road. There are a few isolated examples, and we've looked at those, I think, with some encouragement and seen how well they've traded. But we think there's a, you know, there's a real place for this on the side of the U.K. road network. At present, we're targeting A-road locations. We're looking for locations that are alongside a petrol forecourt. What we're seeing with a lot of petrol forecourts now is that they're putting a lot of EV charging in. Clearly, you know, the petrol forecourt owners are realizing that, you know, the fossil fuels' days are relatively numbered. There will be this need for people to stop, and when you look at some of the EV charging points that have been put in, and then the attempt that people have made to sort of make it a sort of environment where people will want to stop, it's quite depressing. You know, you're gonna be sitting on a picnic bench with a sandwich you've probably bought from the, from the shop in the petrol forecourt. We think there's a real role for this brand to play, not just from the point of view of how habits will be forced to change, but we think there is a genuine. This is missing currently in the U.K. We've, you know, that's an opportunity we want to explore. I think one of the other things that we are encouraged by is the possibility and not that we've necessarily gone looking for this, but there are some opportunities we've looked at where it's relatively close to a town that might be just a bit too small to open a Lounge. We see this as an opportunity of being able to tap into that population. 'Cause one of the things we've discovered in terms of engaging with existing operators on the side of roads, and we'll come and talk a bit more about that in detail in the next slide, but is that actually it's surprising how many people locally use some of these roadside locations. The first four, and they're sort of split into, well, a group of three, and a single site which we've exchanged contracts on. We're acquiring an existing roadside business, called Route Restaurants. It's an American-themed diner business. They are operating currently out of, or were operating, out of three former Little Chef units. Think actually one was a very contentious copycat Little Chef, which there was lots of legal wrangles over in the '80s. They're basically that kind of building. One of which is opposite Exeter Racecourse, we are on site as of Monday. It's a straightforward refurbishment. That, I think, was actually built as a Happy Eater. Happy Eater's built bigger restaurants than Little Chef, we actually don't need to do any sort of extension or major remodeling work to the building. That'll be a straightforward refurbishment and we're anticipating opening that site just ahead of the February half term. We've got a site just outside Honiton on the A303 and then a site outside Saltash on the A38. Both of those sites need quite a lot of work. They need to be extended and remodeled, therefore we're anticipating hopefully that we'll get one of those open ahead of Easter, with a fair wind, maybe both, but I think more realistically, the third will probably follow on in May. I think looking at those locations, we're never likely to open a Lounge in Saltash. We probably would, in truth, open a Lounge in Honiton. We're not likely to open a Lounge in Chard, which is quite close. Speaking to the Route Restaurant operators, you know, as I said, a lot of their trade is actually people that live locally who use it as a destination restaurant. Actually, alcohol sales were quite surprising at 16%, which isn't massive, but you'd think in that kind of location that there would be very little alcohol. Which I think is a sign of not people necessarily getting in their cars and razzing it down to Cornwall and having a few drinks on the way. It's more of a case of people using it locally, as a destination restaurant. I think the sales that those businesses generate are surprising. I think, you know, In sort of talking to these kind of operators, you realize that there's a sort of fairly quiet subset of operators who operate in lots of these former Little Chef and Happy Eater units who have got very nice little tidy businesses. You know, there is people already stopping, and I think we believe that our operational capability and what we can do in terms of interiors will put us in good stead to obviously exceed the trading levels that the businesses that we've acquired down in the southwest. The fourth site is in Rutland, so it's a redevelopment of somewhere called The Ram Jam, which was an old, big old pub which lots of people have heard of, it would appear. They're redeveloping that site, and that's a really good example, I think, of where we look at the local catchment there. Oakham, I think is too small for a Lounge. Rutland clearly is a very good county. Oakham is a good town, probably not quite big enough. I think we look at that, we look at the tourist route that you get, that we'll benefit from with regards to Rutland Water, and we have a lot of optimism that actually a significant proportion of our custom there will potentially be local. Also the A1 is an incredibly busy road to boot. That feels as if we're hitting, you know, a really good sweet spot. In terms of looking at, you know, how we're, how we're thinking about this as an investment case, I think we, you know, we feel that the sales will probably sit somewhere between a Lounge and a Cosy. We're obviously not going in blind necessarily, but it is a little bit finger in the air, and we think CapEx will probably also similarly sit between the two, and therefore we should expect very similar levels of return on capital that we get from the Lounge and Cosy brands. What do we see as the future for Brightside? Well, we're very excited about this opportunity because I think we have a lot of confidence in our ability to be able to trade from these locations. It's obviously quite different. We quite like that. I think there's a lot of, you know, whereas you might walk into a Cosy Club and feel and sense some similarities to a Lounge, I think you will walk into a Brightside and you will not get that sense of there being any kind of connection. Our design and build team have been having, you know, a lot of fun designing something from scratch. We've never designed anything like this in so much detail, it's quite exciting. I think, you know, we feel that, you know, we're sort of onto something. Certainly the feedback I've had back from other operators has been a bit sort of like, "Why hasn't anyone else thought of that?" Which is sort of... A lot of people said about the Lounge brand when we first set it up. You know, we've got a lot of confidence and we're excited to get, you know, get cracking. In terms of new openings, it's not gonna change the number of new openings that we're forecasting at the moment. You know, we're anticipating, you know, that we'll open 30 in this financial year, which one of those will be a Brightside. As Michael has already said, 32 to 34 sites in next financial year, which two of those will be Brightside. We don't think the Rutland site is likely to be an FY 2024 opening. We just know from experience that developers often tell you dates that are very, very optimistic. Obviously, if that comes along, then we'll probably slot that in somewhere. In terms of the potential scale of the business, it's obviously, at the moment, we just wanna wrap our arms around the first three, four sites that we'll have. Obviously, there's a lot of learning for us to undergo in terms of understanding how well we trade, how differently trading patterns are. I think, you know, clearly, you know, Little Chef as, at its prime, had 439 restaurants. We're not sitting here saying we think we can open 439 restaurants, but I think we're fairly confident we can open quite a lot in the U.K. It will be, as things stand at the moment, it's gonna be quite opportunity led. It, it's, it's very different looking for opportunities on the side of a road than it is a high street. You know, generally, we go to a town where we want to open a Lounge, we go and look at a couple of properties, we agree a deal, jobs are good, and it's relatively straightforward. This is actually a very competitive space. The QSR guys are going for it like crazy at the moment. you know, drive-throughs, you know, from, you know, the, the established brands like McDonald's, KFC, Costa, you've also got new entrants. There is a degree of competition. I think what we found since we've announced this and since landlords are getting comfortable with the idea of it, they see something that's very different, and they're very keen to have something like this in their scheme. If they're looking at, EV opportunities, they see that this is a much more logical play than having a, somewhere that you effectively get a coffee and sit in your car. I think we're, you know, we're, we're gonna, you know, really understand how it works. You know, spend, you know, whatever time we need to do, really understanding the sort of, the intricacies of operating on the side of a road, and see how it goes, you know. We'll obviously, keep you posted as things evolve. Just final thoughts really which is just a summary of what we talked about. I think, you know, as Nick particularly dwelled on, you know, we're obsessively focused on this need for value for money. You know, when we sat here in July, we talked about the recognition that we had that we felt a recession was coming, and how we've been planning for that. I think, you know, we know how important value for money is in a recession. If people don't necessarily stop spending money, they just they think more carefully about where they actually spend it. I think if you, if you offer a value for money experience, you're much better placed than others in the market who have probably taken too much price and will probably need to desperately try and re-engineer their pricing to try and hold on to market share. Clearly nobody knows what's gonna happen next year. Anyone, I think, in this room, or anywhere that tells you that they do is a liar. I think one thing that we've learned in the last few years is everything is uncertain. I think, you know, we sat here probably in July thinking that September, October, November were gonna be tough months. It just sort of felt as if that's where everyone was gonna start to run out a bit of puff. We, we haven't seen any of that. You know, there's nothing in our numbers to suggest that the consumer is changing. Hopefully that will continue for forevermore. We are, you know, we are really what we're really looking. We know what to look for and, you know, it's a very much a focus of where we spend a lot of our time on a Monday morning when we pore over numbers and look to see if we can see any sign of trends. Obviously, we've got inflationary pressures like everybody else. I think, you know, clearly, our hedge on energy has meant that our inflationary pressures are significantly lighter than lots of businesses, but we still have a lot of costs coming through. Managing that is tricky. You know, we need to balance between margin preservation and value for money proposition, and I think we're never gonna apologize for probably being more focused on the latter. I think it's really important that, you know, we maintain and grow our market share vis-à-vis stagnate and potentially but protect margin. I think, you know, it is a balancing act, and clearly we're working really hard on both. Our investment in people, I think as Nick talked about, we've had some really, you know, super people join the business in the last few months. It's really exciting. You know, Guy and Kate, I think are, you know. They're brand new positions. You know what I mean? It's remarkable to think that we're a business of our size that's never had a marketing director. I think we've always wondered what we did. I think we've discovered fairly quickly that they're quite useful people to have. I think it will be great to see what kind of work she does, and I think, you know, Guy is already getting his arms around the people side of the business. There's lots of good stuff for us to do, and I think we're really excited by those two hires particularly. You know, it feels like the team is really growing up a bit at the moment, which is great. Clearly the site pipeline is still very, very strong. We've opened some really great sites. If anything, we see opportunities in property are improving. I think we're beginning to see the signs of the woes that other businesses might potentially be dealing with. We're very excited about Brightside and its potential growth. I think, you know, we've always talked about at some stage launching a third brand. We've never really been in the game of looking to acquire, I think primarily because there are very few acquisitions that I've seen where you point to them and go, "That was a really good acquisition that really worked out." I think you invariably will get a culture clash through acquisition. I think we're much more focused on being able to develop our own brands. We're a very, very operationally talented team, and I think that, as a consequence, means we can launch brands with confidence, and we've got the team of people to do it. That's us. I imagine we'll throw the floor out to questions. Questions, yeah. Yeah. You have to use the microphone if that's right. Not because we can't hear in this room, but for the for the recording. Yeah, wherever. Good morning. Owen Shirley from Berenberg. Three questions if I may, please. The first was, you mentioned you've got the supply contracts coming up for kind of renewal, in the first half of next year. Perhaps, could you just give us a reminder on how many sites you had, when that was last done, and if you'd be hopeful to, you know, get some, you know, better deals on the back of that? The second one was I can remember in the past, you talking about 200 sites being the kind of critical mass at which point it potentially made sense to have your own distribution center or something like that. Is that right, and is that something you're looking at, and what could that do? Then a third one on Brightside. You know, the proposition looks great. I suppose, how do you communicate to customers that are, let's say, you know, they're driving by, they may not be taking that journey frequently, but there's something new and different that they should sort of stop in? Do you think it will take kind of a couple of years for people to build those businesses up once they're out there? Thanks. Okay. Greg, would you wanna take the first? I'll do one and two. One and two? Yeah. When we last negotiated food and drink contracts, Well, we had 150 sites in the estate, basically. Clearly, we were selling them the opportunity over two to three years, that 150 would move to 225 or so. Today, we're now negotiating with them with 225 saying, "Look, we're gonna be 300 plus." I think, yeah, it's gonna be an interesting time to have these negotiations, and in the early tentative stages, we're already seeing it because we're in a period of, you know, a degree of uncertainty further up the supply chain. Clearly that's a big selling point for us, though, that, you know, we are one of the few people out there who are really growing at a substantial rate, 300 plus sites. It's a very material piece of business. We would certainly be optimistic that, you know, second half of next year, and then through into FY 2025, we'll see that benefiting our food and drink margins. In terms of consolidated distribution, you're absolutely right. I mean, 200 sites was typically given as the level at which it would start to become a possibility. I think we've always been pretty clear that the sort of, the consolidation distribution, project has, if you like, a number of stages within it. At one end of the spectrum, you've got your Premier Inn and the like, who will have a single delivery once a week in the middle of the night sort of thing. We'd be some way away from that. We are, at our current size, you know, very much in the ballpark for the first stages in a sort of hybrid consolidated model. Bringing together maybe our consumables with our dry goods, that sort of thing. That's a project, as we say, for the first half of next year. Again, anything we can do to, you know, reduce the number of deliveries, take wheels off the road, deliver efficiencies that way will help our margins. Alex, do you wanna add more to that? Yes. I mean, it's a great question. I mean, it's a very different challenge for us as a business because obviously, I think on high streets, people see something's happening, and actually, particularly with Lounges, they generally advertise themselves because people see a bank or a retail unit being turned into a Lounge, and there's this instant curiosity, and people find out about what we do. I suspect our new marketing director is going to earn his stripes with regards to Brightside because we need to think very differently about how we get the message out because, you know, to your point, it's a very valuable one. People are going to be driving at speed. They're going to see something that they don't recognize. We've got to catch their eye, clearly, not to the point where they drive off the road. Yeah, it's gonna be, I think, a campaign we're going to have to think about in terms of how we look at targeting people locally and then actually understanding our sort of broader markets in terms of where we want to be putting targeted marketing spend into, you know, sort of advertising to people in London about the fact there's one on the A303, and when they're charging down to Devon and Cornwall, it's a great place to stop for breakfast. It's, you know, it's not lost on us. It's going to be quite a big challenge. Clearly, we're starting with one going to three fairly quickly, which I think really helps. There's been a lot of interest at national level about this because I think it's just something that people realize is a bit different. We're gonna continue banging the drum about that. You know, but it is gonna be a different kind of challenge for us. We quite like that. You know, I think the benefit of having more than one brand and more than one obsession is that actually you really learn different disciplines, and I think that invariably will help you with some of the other brands. I think we see the journey we're gonna go on with Brightside as being something that will be really enhancing for the whole business. Morning. It's Alex Chatterton from Panmure Gordon. I've got three questions, if that's okay. The first is on the Christmas trading. What percentage of your state will be significantly impacted by rail strikes? I assume it quite small. My second question is on pricing. Presumably, you have to put through further pricing increases to offset the increased inflation. How confident are you that there'll be no adverse consumer impact? Thirdly, just following up from Owen's question on Brightside, is that communication the biggest challenge for you for that? Thanks. Shall I do Christmas first? I've written down the question and not quite understand. Read what I've written. Rail strikes. That's exactly what it says. Rail strikes. I mean, I do feel very, I mean, for the London operators, they're horrific. The timing of the ones coming up, it couldn't be much worse. It doesn't affect our business greatly. It doesn't affect the Lounge business at all, and there are a handful of the Cosy Clubs which, where we will suffer a little bit as a result of the rail strikes, but it's not a big factor. On that, it worked for the football as well, and we don't have any screens in our venues. You know, when we saw the Friday match just gone at 7 o'clock, you know, we went, "Oh, God, this is gonna have a negative impact." We actually had one-year like-for-like growth last Friday. Indeed last night, we were pretty flat on a one year basis, which is great. I think it really demonstrates the, how strongly the business is trading. In terms of pricing, and what we'll do next year, I mean, the next opportunity will come in kind of April, May for us, for us to move our prices, and against the backdrop of National Living Wage. We are really, really sensitive about it, and we haven't kind of made any decisions about what we'll do. We will look at it in the round. I, Going back to that slide, looking at Stratford-upon-Avon, that's what gives us confidence. I think we look at it. You know, we imagine it from our customer's point of view, and, you know, banded pricing has. You know, that gave us another kind of lever which we can use to tweak pricing in different areas and kind of consider the impact on different customers. You know, I think as. You know, we've traded as we've talked about. We're trading consistently strongly. We've seen no adverse reaction, no change in the way that our customer is behaving. Yes, we're likely to have to take a bit more price come April when we do our next menu changes. I. It doesn't worry me that when we take that price, our customer's gonna behave any differently. Over to you, Brightside. Yeah. Yes is the simple answer. I mean, it's, you know, I think obviously building the sites, developing a new concept, that's, you know, that's relatively straightforward for us. Interestingly, we've two paid across the teams from the three sites we've acquired, which is good 'cause we've obviously got an army of people that we can deploy operating these sites. I think most importantly, we'll gather intelligence from them because clearly training passes in these kind of locations are gonna vary quite wildly, and they're gonna be very different to high streets. I think us understanding when those peaks and troughs actually are, is gonna be really important. Communication is absolutely the key thing, getting the message out about what we are. You know, we talk about needing to pass the kids in the backseat sort of mom and dad test. You know, mom and dad, "Look, there's a Brightside." That kind of, you know, impact. We've gotta get that sort of brand out across the people in a way that they see our sunny bee, as we call it, and they instantly recognize that they're coming up on a Brightside. It's gonna be fascinating, but it is gonna be challenging. I think we're well up for that. Hi. Hi. Alex, just on Brightside, how does the EV economics work? Are you independent of that? That was the first one. Second one, in terms of freeholds, how much do you think you'll be spending on them this year, and what's the sort of timeline in terms of perhaps selling and leasing those back in the future? In terms of the pricing, have you seen any impact on volumes from regional pricing over the last year? Just the final question, central distribution. What do you think the full timeline is to fully moving to central distribution? Shall I answer the EV point? Yeah. EV is going to be interesting. We've got the three sites that we're opening in the Southwest, one has got a couple of charging points already. One has got the possibility of us adding a couple in, rather handily, the Shell garage next door has just put six charging points in, and it's actually on the side that abuts our demise. The one that's sitting next to Racecourse is a lease where we don't have any. We've got basically a right to use the car park, but we can't actually develop any of the car park, and that currently doesn't have any EV charging. I think one of the really interesting things that people probably don't appreciate is, getting EV charging points into the side of a road is really expensive and really complicated because these locations are invariably at full capacity in terms of the, you know, what they're pulling from the grid, and therefore need to bring in substation upgrades. Obviously, the substations for these don't tend to be very close. We're actually looking at an opportunity on the road going down to Torbay, which is a great location. The landlord there was keen to, if they're gonna bring in an energy upgrader to provide us with enough power, they're very keen to bring in enough to put EV charging in. You know, they had a quote of 0.5 million quid to do it, clearly decided not to. It's gonna be a big challenge, and I don't think, you know, I think there's a lot of people that go, "Oh, it's brilliant. You get those banks of EV chargers in, and it's gonna be happy days." It's not as easy as just putting an EV charger in the ground and plugging it in. When I actually saw an EV charger the other day that was being powered by a diesel fuel generator, it's, you know, clearly, slightly defeats the point. That is gonna be quite challenging, and I think we're gonna have to manage people's expectations around, you know, why you just can't put EV chargers in willy-nilly. I don't know whether the government will need to, you know, consider how they support that in terms of, you know, there being a, a financial encouragement for, you know, operators to potentially, install them. We, you know, we're looking at, you know, we're sort of, you know, we're exploring solar power as a, as a sort of possibility for the, for the three roadside locations that we've got. You know, we're looking at ways in which we can mitigate the need, you know, our energy consumption. Clearly, there's a P&L benefit if we can, if we can reduce our energy consumption, but also just to, you know, put a bit, you know, have a bit more power potentially to deploy for EV. It's, they're very embryonic sort of days at the moment. Gregory, do you want to talk about freeholds and sale and leaseback timing? Yes. I think the important point about freeholds is there's no great change in policy within the business. I think the reality of both the couple of freeholds that we're buying with Brightside and Cosy Club Canterbury, were that all of those deals have the option originally to take on leases, pay a rent, in the case of Canterbury, to get a landlord contribution. Given the strength of our balance sheet, our cash position, our funding position, when there was an alternative option which involved picking up the freeholds, it made much more economic sense to do that. And then I guess in the short to medium term, we will look to sale and leaseback those sites. There's little point in having a business with, you know, 225 leases and three freeholds. I think, you know, putting them onto a sensible, you know, rent-to-revenue ratio, we will achieve very good value for those sites. That'll be, as I say, our sort of medium-term in-intention. Shall I do the next one as well, which was Yeah impact of volumes from because the interesting. I mean, as Nick said, we introduced price banding, when we reopened back in mid-2021. I guess one of the benefits of introducing that price banding was the flexibility it gave us, you know, going forwards and the ability to play some different tunes. I guess, you know, what's really interesting there is that, you know, we saw no negative impact of introducing price banding in the first place. Probably more importantly, back in October, we actually made our first step in moving a few sites between bands. Again, we saw no negative impact of that either. I think that's really positive on all counts. I think you got it. It's quite. I think you put GBP 0.10 on a cappuccino, you're not gonna see any shift. It's really hard. It's quite nuanced, but it's 'cause it happens over time. You know, people won't decide they're gonna stop coming one day because the cappuccino's gone GBP 0.10 up. Also, our teams are really good at dealing with it. 'Cause if you come in, if you're a regular and you do the same thing every day and the price goes up, it annoys you. And, you know, our team, they're all instructed, if someone makes a comment on a price increase, they give them that thing for free, and they'll say, "You know, just have it on the house," you know? That makes up for the next 36 coffees that they have in terms of price increase. It's a lovely gesture that they weren't expecting. You do need to be careful because, yeah, you put a price up and look at the sales for the next two weeks, you wouldn't expect to see any change. It's about change in behavior over time, I think. Then in terms of centralized, consolidated distribution and I think in timing, I don't think we know exactly what the end goal looks like at the moment. There are so many different models out there, from the kind of Pret model, where they've got someone in the office directly buying avocados from South America. You know, there are lots of different issues. I don't think we know what it looks like yet. I think over the next two to three years, we'll go on a journey. That journey, there's lots of different factors including how our teams need to react in terms of ordering, storage, et cetera, and the impact it has on our labor model. You know, we'll take it Gradually, I think it'll be fair to say, won't it? Absolutely. I mean, I guess that the concept of being a single distributor at any one time is probably quite hard to imagine when you're, you know, mixing kegs, for example, with other suppliers is always difficult, but. Thanks very much. It's Anna Barnfather from Liberum. I have two questions. Firstly, on the rollout, you're accelerating your rollout and your pace of rollout, which is understandable given the opportunities. Can you talk about how that CapEx intensity, maybe of the new fit outs is moving? Also if you're seeing any change in planning delays or delays in getting parts, or if there's anything that might get in the way of you delivering on this raised expectations for ads? Then just on labor inflation, could you comment on maybe staff turnover directionally, how that's faring and how you're doing in terms of the cultural aspect of holding on to people and career development? Thank you. Yeah. Shall I do those two? acceleration the rollout, I mean, it's quite a gentle acceleration, I think it's worth noting. You know, we've been opening at 25, 26, 27 sites a year, we're moving that up to 30, 32, 34. It's not a massive leap. The CapEx side of the business is something we're very close to. We've seen inflationary pressure on that side of the business over the last 12 to 18 months. I think what we have seen more recently is that that's easing, one of the things that we're doing at the moment is making sure that we're holding our subcontractors and our suppliers to account and making sure that that's being reflected in the prices that we're paying. It's interesting. We've done a lot of work over the last 18 months. I think we will continue to work on the structure of that side of the business and how we're constantly challenging what we're spending on the CapEx side. I think we've seen the average lounge has gone up from GBP 735,000 CapEx to around GBP 750,000. There has been a degree of inflation. I'm hoping, and I expect that to come back, albeit if, you know, in terms of technical innovation and, thinking about kitchen equipment, there might be decisions that we take where we believe we can add to that investment, which will make our site, our team's lives easier. It's gonna be interesting. What's one of the great things about having Brightside actually is that, you know, we're introducing some new, you know, looking at systems or technology. You know, one of the things we're looking at Brightside is bean-to-cup technology on coffee, or looking at our compliance systems and having them all online rather than in kind of physical books. It's a lot easier introducing change into a one or a two-site business than it is into 211 sites. I think it's one of the ways that we'll really benefit from understanding what happens in Brightside. If it works, then there might be things that we can learn from Brightside and replicate in Lounge and Cosy Club. From a planning or a licensing perspective, no delays whatsoever. I mean, that world has, you know. I mean, planning's obviously got a little bit easier, certainly in England, as a result of the change to the planning rules that happened during COVID. We continue to, you know, work very hard in the pipeline and finding 30, 32 sites a year versus finding 25 sites a year isn't a big uptick. It's part of the business that we've invested in from a people point of view as well. Staff turnover is coming down. We're about average for the industry, and we don't really like being average. We're not average at many things, so we want to get better. I think there's an element to staff turnover which is healthy. 40% of our workforce is under the age of 21. We employ a lot of young people who work front of house in our sites. They bring a lot of personality to our business. They're not with us for a very long time, and we're pretty comfortable with that, actually. When we think about staff turnover, it's much more focused on the leaders in, at a site level in the business or those who we want to progress to become leaders. That's where all our emphasis is, and again, as I said, it's improving. It's a part of the business that I think Guy joining will have a really positive impact on. Thank you, gents. Bradley Hughes, Shore Capital. Just a little bit more on the sites and the property market. How do you kinda see the split in H2 in terms of the remaining kind of 15 sites, so that's Q3 versus Q4? Direction of travel on rent, has it? Do you kind of sense it's bottomed out potentially? In terms of split first, so we've opened 16 sites as of today, including three Cosy Club. I think we'll probably have one or two, maybe, Cosy Club in the second half, and there'll obviously be a Brightside unit within that and the balance will be lounges. The second question was? Rent. Rent. Our rents revenue ratio, as Gregor mentioned, we're sub 5% now, 4.7%. That's been improving. I think the one thing I'd say is that when we're looking at property, you know, we haven't seen massive increases in rent. Equally, we haven't seen massive decreases in rent. You know, we've always been very good at going to locations and saying, "We want this site. That's the number one site in this location." Stratford-upon-Avon, which we were looking at earlier, is a really good example. We've been visiting there for the last seven or eight years. We've probably seen 12 opportunities where we haven't been happy with them. What's shifted, I think, over the last three or four years in particular, that unit that we're in now, we wouldn't have had a look in on that unit three or four years ago. It would have gone to a retailer paying 30%, 40%, 50% more rent than we're paying now. I think in those competitive high streets, that prime retail pitch, that's become more affordable for us as a result of the kind of the CVAs that we've seen in the retail sector. That's been happening over the last three or four years. Equally, there'll be some locations where- Well, you know, it's still very competitive, and it is. You know, we do compete with retailers on majority of sites. It's not like we've got a completely free ride because we are looking at the best possible locations, best possible pitches in those locations, and as a result of that we'll come up against other operators. Sorry, just a couple of things please. Mark Irvine- Fortescue from Stifel. One on margins, one on the funding structure. I think on your preferred metric, EBIT, margins down 180 basis points on the half. Is that a reasonable sort of guide do you think for the full year given what you said about cost headwinds? Then for next financial year, low visibility at the moment, are you budgeting to be able to hold margins do you think on this year? Second question was just any initial thoughts about the term loan, given the cash on balance sheet, your unused RCF. Is it economic to start paying some of that down early or just any initial thoughts about funding structure? Thank you. Those both sound like for me, I'll take it. I think in terms of margin, that first half 180 basis points down, we would expect that to improve slightly in the second half. As much as anything because we took that little bit of extra price in October and then you'll have less labor inflation in the second half of the year. We'll see that gap close a little bit. Then I think when we look forward, and it is, it is a little bit crystal ball, but I think we certainly see less pressure, FY 2024 in terms of, in terms of cost of goods sold inflation, not least because of that opportunity to renegotiate contracts. Clearly you've got that labor inflation there. We would be thinking and guiding towards consistent margins, EBITDA margins in FY 2024 versus FY 2023. I think in terms of funding, I really need to pull my finger out because I did say in July that I was gonna crack on with this and I still have a pretty inefficient balance sheet. Yes. I mean, the intention would be to repay an element of term loan, extend our RCFs, so keep our total facilities as they are but just be more efficient. That's something I need to get done in the opening weeks of the second half really. The fixed debt doesn't have interest rates whatsoever at the moment? No, no, absolutely. Yeah. At the moment we're benefiting from deploying our excess cash and earning interest on that, but we're suffering the margin. Brilliant. Thank you. That's it. Thank you. Thanks very much indeed.