Good afternoon and welcome, everybody. Thank you for coming along to our capital markets day today. I'm Jonathan Satchell, Chief Executive of Learning Technologies Group, and it's great to welcome you here. When you think about this, it's quite astonishing that it's four years ago, almost to the day, when we last did one of these. Doesn't the pandemic seem to have warped time somewhat? It seems to have gone very quickly. Something else that's happened over the last four years is that, frankly, LTG is unrecognizable from the company that we described to you then, both in terms of our size and our range of capability. During that phenomenal period of change for LTG, I've often heard the feedback that we've become more complex and difficult to understand. Our goal, very simply for today, is that you'll gain real insights into what our customers need and why LTG is designed to meet those needs. We felt the best mechanism for giving you that understanding is for you first to gain a detailed appreciation of the challenges that our customers, mostly large multinationals and governments, face every day. What better way of doing that than hearing from a highly revered learning leader within our industry? I'm delighted that Dr. Karie Willyerd, who was until a few months ago, the Chief Learning Officer of Visa, decided to join LTG as our Chief Customer Strategy Officer only a few months ago. She brings decades of experience of the challenges facing our customers and will bring to life for you today why LTG with GP has become perfectly positioned to provide integrated solutions to these challenges. What's coming up today? Well, firstly, you're going to experience the breadth of leadership talent we have in the group, and I'll leave you to learn more about them from their bios in the handout. Firstly, Piers Lea, our Chief Strategy Officer, Adam Stedham, the leader of GP, and Russ Becker, our Chief Revenue Officer, will share our new go-to-market strategy and how we plan to bring that to life. After a short break, you'll be gaining some detailed insight into four of our technology solutions. Why Rustici and Watershed are so well positioned to own the measurement space in our industry, which I believe is key to unlocking future efficiency and effectiveness of learning. This is a top five concern for all CLOs. You'll also hear how we are addressing the growing and open mid-market in learning and talent with our Bridge platform, which is evolving rapidly, and how we're future-proofing the whole business using the incredible work in XR. That's extended reality technologies like virtual reality and augmented reality with PRELOADED, our business that specializes in those technologies. This is deliberately not a comprehensive view of all our technology offerings. We simply don't have time today to do that, but it will give you a good overview of some of our key technology capabilities that are exciting both now and for the future. There'll be two opportunities for Q&A, one at the end of each section. Those in the room will be invited to ask questions live. Those joining us virtually will be able to type them into their system. Finally, we'd be delighted for you to join us afterwards for refreshments when we'll give you a further opportunity to speak to the members of the team. Before I hand over to Carrie, it would be remiss of me not to mention the new strategic targets we announced this morning. Suffice to say that despite the rather challenging environment out there, we remain as ambitious as ever. These targets have been comprehensively modeled, taking into consideration all factors, and I look forward to Cath explaining them in more detail later. Let's get sharing with you why LTG is so well positioned to meet the market need. Karie, over to you. Welcome, and thanks for coming in today, and I look forward to chatting with some of you at the breaks. As Jonathan mentioned, I'm Karie Willyerd, and I've been a chief learning officer or chief talent officer for over 30 years. Before I became that level, worked even longer. I've worked with GP for, I think we counted 35 years, so, and with LTG over the last four years across a number of projects. As I thought about where do I go next and what do I wanna do, it feels like this is a fantastic inflection point in the industry. These coming together made so much sense to me as a CLO. He didn't admit it, but I actually called up LTG and said, "I think I wanna be part of this." Fortunately, he welcomed me into the organization. As Jonathan's already just gone over the agenda for you, in this little section before we get to break, I'll first talk a little bit about the challenges that CLOs are facing and what life looks like to us every day. Piers is gonna talk about how our go-to-market strategy is set up to help address those challenges. Russ and Adam are gonna talk about how we're able to cross-sell across this huge set of installed base that they have and the consulting solutions and managed learning services that they offer. I think that's gonna be very exciting times. We have lots to talk about at the break. What is it that organizations are looking at, and what are the challenges they have? Really interestingly, when I first saw this slide, I thought, "Oh, yeah, those look very familiar." In fact, that's what Adam Stedham and Piers Lea and Russ Becker, as they were out talking to customers, there was a lot of similarity between organizations and the kinds of things that they're facing. Whether it's, everybody in the room has faced business disruption because there's nobody in the room that wasn't around for the last few years of a global pandemic. As part of that global pandemic, employees are rethinking their relationship with work. I imagine every single person in this room has thought about, "How do I wanna work going forward, and what's my relationship to my employer?" Of course, that changes the power dynamic because then organizations aren't necessarily the ones then that can make all of the decisions about how work is gonna happen. Employees have a very powerful voice now in terms of doing that. You know, at the same time, there's some generational shifts happening. Baby boomers are exiting the workforce in huge numbers, and the skills that they had are going out the door, so they have to be replaced. That's gonna mean a lot of along with employee attrition, that's gonna mean a lot of new hires. There's a lot of new technologies coming in. For example, cars are almost software on wheels now. With 100 million lines of code, at least. When you think about that, car companies are having to, and we do a lot of work with the auto manufacturers, are having to think through how do we have software engineers, designers, and so on in things like machine learning, artificial intelligence. Even if we have this wonderful opportunity to help them on doing learning in those spaces and custom designing learning, or if they're trying to fund that from other areas, helping them reduce their costs of administrative things and so on. This is only gonna get worse. An MIT study said in machine learning, the change over is nearly 250% a year in number of patents filed. No matter what happens with our economy, technology is moving forward. It's not stopping as a result of the major economic forces. I think that's really interesting. One more point I wanna make on this is on when we have employee attrition, one of the important things to do is to be able to offer new employees an experience that will get them up to speed really quickly. One small example of work that I did with GP was an augmented reality new hire graphic novel. We'd send it to their home, and they could learn about what does Visa's technology do. People might think of Visa as a credit card company. It's actually a fintech. It's just a very big fintech. We sent this to their homes. The employees that took that training and got the little augmented reality piece and so on were 32% more likely to post on social media before they came to work their first day. You're creating a really interesting employee experience from the very beginning, and you know GP was able to help us do that beginning to end, which I think is really interesting. I don't want you to just hear it from my side of the story. I have four friends I'd like to introduce you to. Brandon is head of employee learning and leadership at Walmart. He has 2 million employees in 25 countries. Just imagine that you have to feed the hiring of keeping a workforce of 2 million people, 10% turnover or more in retail. That's a lot of people to hire every year. Jenny Dearborn was the Chief Talent Officer at SAP and is in between roles after just being a Chief People Officer. Art Muro heads up Customer Learning for Google. Gordon Trujillo heads up learning for DaVita, which are the kidney dialysis centers. Let's hear a little bit from them. We were surveying the general public and our customers and potential employees about Walmart's brand attraction. Historically, the number one component about in the survey, it always landed at number one. Along the line of why would I wanna come work at Walmart, it would be around wages. Last year, what crept up to number one, and this is a sizable population in this study, was preparing me for the future of work. What that's telling us is we have a demographic, a pretty significant demographic in this country that are worried about having the skills needed as work evolves. The number one thing that candidates are looking for, especially candidates that are in very, very high demand, like in technical skills, they wanna know what the company is gonna do to invest in them through learning and development opportunities. There's a war on talent now in the cloud space. We are estimated to need 40 million skilled people in cloud in the coming years in order to complete this transition. Because there's a severe talent shortage, we've got a huge crisis among our customers, among all cloud customers, who are fighting over a small pool. You may only have 90 days to retain a worker in this day and age. How can you get them confidently productive and on their way to their next opportunity? This means, you know, the longer you take to get someone productive, happy, and ideally on their way to flourishing, the higher likelihood you have to lose them and possibly to your competitors. Now, for me, it's been a pain point since about 2001, right? It It was actually easier then to orchestrate a learning solution because the marketplace was simpler. The explosion of all these edtech capabilities, as we move from on-prem systems to cloud-based systems, creates a plethora of options or shiny objects, as I like to say. It makes selection and useful orchestration honestly paralyzing. I think an important takeaway from the four videos, if I were to just kind of summarize something that people are seeing, is that where I go to work matters, and what I'm going to be looking for in where I go to work is how are you gonna develop me? 'Cause people are worried about skills changing so quickly. It's a pressure that employers are feeling. An interesting thing that was not on the slide of the bubbles, but originally was the challenges of getting budget. CLOs told us, this was my own experience as well, the challenge was not getting budget. It hasn't been for a couple of years. The challenge was getting everything done. Looking for, you know, you might not have enough staff trained up. You know, I was running typically with dozens of openings, so and why I turned to GP so often. CLOs are not feeling the pressure of budget, and they told us to take that off the slide, which I think is really interesting. The second thing is, once they get in the door, if you don't develop them, they're gonna leave. McKinsey's recent study said they asked, what are the top three reasons why people are leaving? Number one on the list for, again, very much like Brandon's story, is if I don't have career development and advancement, I'm out of here. That's number one, and number two is the compensation. I think we hear a lot of stories of, oh, my God, they doubled their salary. When you actually ask the people who left, this is at least what McKinsey's findings are. That tells me that it's going to continue to be really important to CEOs going forward, and that the overall pie is getting larger as we're moving through some of these uncertain economic times. I think another important thing to look at is that skills are changing so rapidly that even if everything else were steady state, the changes in technology and so on are leaving Gartner to say that we're gonna have to reprioritize what we're teaching and what we're giving people skills on. The World Economic Forum says it's gonna take more training. An example of this would be the onboarding process that I had in India was 6 weeks long compared to the onboarding process for an engineer in the U.S. of two weeks. As we hire more from developing economies and so on, it's gonna increase the need for more hours of training. Then finally, executives are getting this one number, 82%. CFOs are listing it as the number one concern they have, is do they have the talent they need and the skills they need to fuel their growth. I think it's a really interesting opportunity in front of us. What is it that my colleagues are looking for in terms of ways to address this challenge? First off, probably the most important two words on this first bullet list are at scale. You just have to deliver across the globe to many people and very rapidly. There's no longer this kind of leisurely, I can roll out a leadership program over four years. It's usually, how do I train everybody in the next 12 months? You need to do that through both technology and assistance in services. I need those things to be, you know, to come together, hopefully in one stop with one contract. It would be very common. Like, one of the programs that I had, onboarding new salespeople, and they would learn about the products of Visa. We used LEO Learning, we used Watershed, we used Rustici, we used GP. Then another four platforms in one program. One of the things that we also learned because of the Watershed data was that people who went through that program prior, compared to the people who'd gone through it before, had a 432% increase in cross-selling. People didn't come in and just learn one thing. They started to sell, what we would say in the US is everything on the back of the truck. We just got a great solution out of that. It's been, you know, CFOs ask CLOs all the time, "What have you done for me lately?" There's no such thing as just incremental to last year. It's always zero-sum game. You've gotta persuade them that you've got a plan that's gonna deliver value, and they are sure gonna ask if you have delivered that value. You're gonna see as we go through the day, really well-positioned to address that. With that, I would like to turn it over to Piers so he can talk about how we're gonna go. This is gonna be an interesting challenge, Piers. How are we gonna go to market to really make a difference here? Thanks, Karie. Good afternoon, everyone. It's great to see you all here. We believe our response is spot on to what the market is looking for, and it is consistent with our strategy from the outset. We've always said that the market needs an organizational partner that has this balance between services and technology. Why? Because organizations have spent a great deal of money on learning and talent technology and actually not derived the commensurate value from that over the years. As the kind of pressure that Karie's talking about comes into play, with organizations, our customers are really gonna have to get better at this. It's a big and growing market that we're going into. This is showing the market there. The global market as being nearly $400 billion. It's worth noting that the North American market and the scale of the North American market compared to the whole, that's why we're so heavily invested in, as LTG, into the U.S. market. I would note the fact that we are currently 70% dollar in our revenues. If you look at the pink segment here's that whole market, and the pink segment here is the external. The training and the services that are brought externally, that's worth $107 billion. That's our directly addressable market. If you look here as well into the internal training, this is also partly addressable by us through managed learning services. As organizations decide to take on more managed learning services, we can address that part of the market. That in itself is growing at 5.6%. I would note that this is an area which has historically done well in recessionary times. The arrival of GP into the group enables us to bring together our entire group capability, and made up of organizations that have quite literally defined the standards in our industry. We can bring that now into one market proposition. We are actually thrilled today to announce our new go-to-market, which has been extensively tested internally with analysts, with prospects, with customers, all of whom are welcoming the breadth of the capability that we can bring. The name we're gonna go to market with is GP Strategies. Our research has told us that this is a hugely well-respected brand and has got really good recall from customers, and also the website has a hugely high volume of traffic. I would say at this point that each of the software and platforms brands will go direct to market, obviously to their market, but also via the GP Strategies brand, the go-to-market brand integrated into comprehensive set of offerings. As part of our integrated story, we're doing a brand refresh of GP, and we're simplifying our brand portfolio to maximize market impact, make sure we're completely customer-focused, and that we have no competing offers. For example, LEO and PDT, names of businesses that you will recognize, are both becoming part of GP Strategies, creating the world's largest and most creative custom content design capability when joined with the capability in GP Strategies and with PDT, their expertise in DE&I, diversity, equity, and inclusion, joining up with the offer from GP in their leadership area where they have an offer there as well. Creating a new combined force in diversity, equity, and inclusion, which I would note is now the top subject in terms of spend from organizations. Leadership and DE&I compete with each other in terms of spend. We're focusing on one single statement. We help organizations transform through their people. We have a perfect set of complementary services and products to go for this. We're looking at it from the point of view of these three areas, the consulting, the thinking, all the learning services, and the technologies, and all of that focused on attracting, developing, engaging, and retaining talent, enabling transformation through people. I would just say that we have the perfect set of complementary products and services, and Adam's gonna come back to this slide, so you don't have to take the whole thing in all at once. All of these products and services are available through a single managed learning services contract. I just want to emphasize the point Carrie brought up, that this is so important in today's procurement world. It's so. Our customers love being able to come to one place for a multiplicity of solutions. Actually, it is incredibly important because each element and each part of any of these deliveries right now does require a multiplicity of technology of different kinds of services in any one answer. We can pull in the right expertise for that. It's the route also to solving the problem that you heard from Gordon Trujillo earlier. We're well regarded by industry analysts. You may have seen this chart from Fosway before. We've actually held this top right position in the digital learning grid for the last six years. With the arrival of GP, you'll see that we've actually gone as far right as you can possibly go and top in terms of performance and potential. We have a new study which came from Nelson Hall earlier this year, and you can see here that the LTG and GP combination is put top right on two counts, ability to deliver immediate benefit and ability to meet future client requirements. This is what the go-to-market looks like from a brand structure point of view. On the left, we have GP Strategies containing all of the services, and on the right, we have the software and platforms brand that go direct to market, as I've said, and via the GP brand. With LTG then underpinning the whole with shared services such as finance, legal, HR, IT, and M&A. The power of the combination and the sheer reach is important to any customer, but are key to global organizations. This is an area where our competition really thins out. It's organizations that we compete with are the organizations like IBM, Conduent, NIIT, and Vertex, which used to be Raytheon. These are the organizations that are able to compete at this level, and there aren't that many of them, as you saw from the previous chart. We deliver learning content to 200 million people annually. We have 6,000 customers. If you think about that from the point of view of the opportunity for cross-sell and with GP Strategies on board, we'll be able to realize that far more effectively now. We deliver in-person learning to 1 million people annually. This is important because actually we know from learning research that actually, digital and in-person learning, that combination is the way to really get most effective learning, out fast, the kind of speeds that Karie was talking about. Just to say that when we talk about in-person learning, we're talking about virtual and classroom-based, so it's the mixture of those two. We've got really deep expertise in making sure that that virtual delivery is really engaging and effective. Our software platforms reach 50 million people globally, and if you add to that the partner technologies, that number just increases. We have 5,000 people in 35 countries in order to enable the entire process. GP. The GP Strategies channel to market is a huge step forward for us. Adam Stedham and Russ Becker will now tell you a little bit more about that. Thank you. Thank you, Piers. Nice to see all of you. Look forward to hopefully meeting some of you on the break. My goal is to help you understand a little bit more about GP Strategies and what is our client engagement model. The important thing to realize, we solve real business challenges and real business contribution is what we provide to our clients. Karie talked about the meaningful change in cross-selling that occurred with Visa through that interaction. If you look at the company and you try to figure out the company from the lens of a client engagement model, our top 15 clients make up about 50% of our revenue. Now, what's important about that is we have an average tenure with those clients of 16 years. We work with them for a long time through many different business cycles, solving many different business challenges. The way we grow is through cross-selling services with those clients. 93% of those clients engage us with multiple services. What's critical about that, we've never had a technology platform or a number of technology products that we could introduce into that client engagement model. We've always been just services. That's a critical factor that's impacted us in the future or in the past and what we're excited about in the future. If we go past the top 15, if you look at the top 50, that represents about 75% of our revenue. 60% of those clients engage us for multiple services. Then beyond that, we do have new logo acquisition, new customer acquisition. Right now we have five clients, five new clients that will move into the top 50 next year. Our goal is obviously to cross-sell multiple services as well as technologies into those clients. Now, to help you understand this, let me give you three specific examples of client history with us, and then Russ is gonna talk a little bit about what's our actual tactical method of engaging these clients and growing. One example, you have an American industrial automation company that they sell a lot of products. They have 25,000 employees. In 2007, they realized there's a lot of training happening on their products, and they're not engaging in that market. That's revenue potentially they're missing out on. They engaged us in a consulting engagement to help them put together a business plan to go to market in training, to actually have a training services market and to capture some of that revenue. We did that. We put that business plan together. On the end of that process, they took part of the work, we took part of the work. We've been working with them since then. We do about $8 million a year with them. We've worked with them since 2007. That's an example of a consulting engagement that then branches into other services. We do delivery for them. We do administration. We do management. We do learner enrollment, several different aspects of this business. Let me tell you about another example of how consulting leads to follow-on services and has a very, very long tail. You have the world's largest aerospace company. They have about 140,000 employees. In 2017, they wanted to redefine the value proposition of learning to the enterprise. How does the learning organization help the broader enterprise achieve maximum success? How do they deliver talented people who can do the right job at the right time? We came in, large consulting engagement, many months, many people, and we defined 11 specific strategies that they could deploy to make sure they got maximum benefit from learning to the broader enterprise. On the back end of that consulting engagement to implement those 11 strategies, there were multiple RFPs that went out. Vendors had to be hired. They had different partners they brought in. We were hired. We do design, development, administration, delivery. We've worked with them ever since. We do about $10 million a year with that client, and that will continue on as well. Lastly, we have a company in Germany, and this is an example. They're a large industrial manufacturer, 300,000 employees. This is an example of one specific service line, not a consulting engagement, and the ability to grow geographically and then grow across service lines. This particular company in Germany, they hired us simply for training administration in 2018. Relatively small service line. We did less than $1 million with them. The next year, we expanded that geographically. In 2019, we did just under $2 million with them. In 2020, we did about GBP two and a half million. In addition to that geographic expansion, they were looking for someone who could help them with other areas, other business solutions. At that point, we expanded our service line. Now we do consultancy, we do vendor management, we do content development, we do leadership development, we do delivery. Notice I didn't say technology anywhere in there, right? Because that wasn't a product offering that we had to deliver to them. That two and a half million ramped up to GBP 8 million the next year. This year we'll do about GBP 12 million with them. Next year, we expect to be around GBP 16 million-plus with them. Those are normal client experiences. The one thing I would point out, notice all of these things, I focus heavily on the left. The large consulting organization project we did with the aerospace company covered almost every single area of consulting. At the end of that, we weren't able to offer them technologies that could address the technology challenges. We will continue to be agnostic. We'll never offer a client something that's not ideal for them and isn't the best fit. In many situations, Learning Technologies' incumbent products would be an ideal solution for it. Karie already mentioned, there's no company out there that shouldn't use Watershed. We now have those in-house technology products to offer. The real question is how do we engage these clients? How do we get that growth? How would we introduce those technologies? I'll hand it over to Russ, and he's gonna talk about the specific tactics for it. Yeah. Thank you, Adam. Again, Russ Becker. I'm the Chief Revenue Officer of GP Strategies. What I wanted to do is just dive deep into, first, how do we make this happen? If you think back just a couple of slides, Adam showed you the depth and the size of the relationships that we have with our largest customers. That 16-year relationship, the number of clients that are purchasing multiple solutions from the company. I wanted to talk first, before I talk about our strategy and looking forward, how do we make this happen? How are we able to get this growth and maintain these long-term relationships? Really, the secret of this is a job family or a job within the company that we call the client services leader. These people within our organization are very experienced and very senior people. They've often worked within large organizations, working in training or in talent development, and they really become the overall owner of our relationship and become trusted advisors to our customers. These people, one of the things I would say is they're different from the account managers that you often see in organizations. Why I say that is they aren't focused on a specific solution. They aren't focused on a specific capability or offering within GP Strategies. They're focused on the overall client relationship and what it is that they're trying to get accomplished. You see on this graphic here a couple of key things that drive their focus. The first is building deep relationships at very senior levels in organizations. With the size and scope of the work that we do, we very often are touching people across multiple continents, across different departments. Really it is how do we escalate up to the most senior people within our clients? The next thing is getting really deep understanding of what are the client's challenges, what are the problems they're facing, what are their ambitions, and how do we kind of get understanding of that so that we can then contextualize our solutions. They're really the orchestrators. They bring in the subject matter experts, the different talent and capabilities from the organization to really meet those challenges, to meet those ambitions of those clients. They help to provide overall oversight. They sit in our corporate office, they coordinate all of the people behind the scenes to architect that experience. Who's that single person that they can go to? The single back to pat or throat to choke. I prefer the back pat. But to really help them kind of guide that overall relationship. Interestingly, what they also do is they provide us insights into, because of those deep relationships and understanding what clients are doing, they help us build solutions for new customers, new solutions and new offerings because of that depth of insight. That's part of the magic of how we're able to do this. Now I wanna talk a little bit about kind of how does that form the foundation of our strategy as we go forward. The first thing, you see five pillars of what we see as the pillars of growth or the foundation of how we're going to drive growth into the future. Really, the first of these is. It should be no surprise. It is the continued growth of the top customers of GP Strategies. That really comes in kind of two flavors. The first is, as Adam illustrated in his different examples, we have really major growth that continues to exist in our top customers. One additional example is one of our five largest customers, one of the largest software companies in the world, last year in 2021, did just over $17 million of business with GP. With all of the changes and transition and what's going on in that market, we expect this year that it will be north of $24 million. The interesting thing about that is that's only with GP Strategies products or GP Strategies services. There's absolutely no technology in that relationship. That's the first piece of it. The second piece is now taking the LTG solutions and products into that relationship. On the next page, I'm gonna talk to you about some of the results we're already seeing. We're very excited, and our client services leaders are starting to see great kind of desire to bring some of those technologies into those customers. That's the first element. The second is growing the LTG customers. This model of CSLs, we've had this in place inside of GP for a number of years and demonstrated track records of growing our top customers. We're now applying this to LTG. Taking that same approach, that same model, and really taking it to those customers. One of the things that I find interesting, last year, 2013 of our 6,000 customers bought from more than one of our companies, okay? We've already have a huge pipeline of opportunities where we know that number will grow. It's applying this approach to that model. The second piece is geographic expansion. Piers mentioned we have a population in 35 different countries. It's using that to springboard the LTG or services businesses into those new markets. Leveraging our contextual capabilities to really drive the growth of those products in new geographies. The second or the fourth piece is new offerings. I'm not gonna go into a tremendous amount of detail on this today because my colleagues in the second half of the day are gonna walk through some of the new to world capabilities that we're launching that are built on a unique combination of our services and LTG technologies, where we're taking things that don't exist today that are being embraced by customers. I'll let them tell those stories as we go through the rest of the day. Finally, fifth is focused new client acquisition. As Kerry said, organizations are all facing these issues, and no matter what's happening with the economy, there is always a need for training. There's always a need to improve the performance of people. What I would say is there's no company in the world we can't make better. It's really focused on how do we take that out to the marketplace. Finally, just wanted to share a few of the results that we're seeing. Already, we have closed more than $10 million of new cross-selling opportunities. Why I think this is really a great result is we've only really been doing this for 6 months. As Piers Lea outlined, we went through a tremendous amount of research to test this, to look at this, and we've already secured more than $10 million of new business for the company. With that, though. That's we think that's a great foundation that's really kind of proving out what we're doing. The incredible thing is that today we have a pipeline of 21 additional opportunities that represent $34 million of new incremental business. The fun thing about this is it's really, in some cases, business that there's no way GP or LTG could have won in the past. For example, we're bidding on a piece of work with one of the largest German automakers. You pick which one we're talking about. We're producing or putting together a solution that brings one of the PeopleFluent technologies together with our services. This is a substantial project. Again, neither of these companies could have done this together or separately. We're really excited about what this can mean to the company. With that, I think Jonathan's gonna take us into Q&A. Thank you very much for that, all presenters. Now we're gonna take some questions. We've got a little bit longer for questions than we thought we might have. It will run up to 2:00 P.M. if we need to, and if people have got some questions. Let's take some from the room first. Kai? Thank you, gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen, for the presentation. It's Scott from Canaccord. The first one was around Adam. I believe you know GP Strategies has known their business for a very long time, and LTG's plan is to roughly triple the operating margins of the business. I'm just curious from your perspective, and that's sort of question we get quite frequently from investors, how much of it is sort of relatively low-hanging fruit, and is there a risk that we cut into the muscle rather than the fat? I guess this is one of the questions. If you had maybe some examples about the margin improvements, that'd be super useful. The second question was just around the macro risk. I think GP Strategies during COVID was obviously an unprecedented shock. I think there were some revenue declines. There's some, I guess, macro sensitivity. You know, as the world economy heads into a recession, most likely, how do you think about your potential resilience on that front? Thank you. First question. Margin improvement. Actually, obviously there's some low-hanging fruit whenever you have two public companies coming together and there's public company cost that goes away. But in a business like ours, a people business, where you get the margin is you get the margin from getting better utilization, and better bill rates, more billable time for your people. What we've seen is there are tools, systems, processes in place inside of LTG that give you better capacity planning than what we had before. It gives you better labor utilization. It gives you basically more revenue off the same cost base because they have more billable hours out to clients. Really what we've been able to do is become significantly more efficient. We have not seen a significant drop off. We haven't seen any, actually any measure drop off in client satisfaction. If you look at our organic growth for the year, we're pleased with the organic growth. We haven't disrupted our organic growth. We're pleased with that. We haven't disrupted our client satisfaction, and yet we've been able to get margin improvement primarily through driving efficiencies in the business. Obviously there are some elimination of redundancies with public companies and everything. That's the first question. The second question, it's important to realize the impact of COVID and where we sit now versus where we sat before. Historically speaking, our business in a normal recessionary cycle wasn't impacted the way COVID impacted us. About one third of our revenue was instructor-led, live, face-to-face contact with clients going into COVID. That one third of our business went away almost overnight, right? We have our largest customer who many years ago filed bankruptcy, and our relationship with them was so good that even though they had a government, the US government helped them out, through that, none of our AR went through bankruptcy. We had a wonderful relationship, extremely strong. We've never experienced a downturn in a recession with that customer. During COVID, on the other hand, they couldn't have our people going into their business. Those business solutions we talked about, we couldn't go there. We did see a significant revenue drop with that customer, which was unprecedented. Now, we've moved that to different modalities. We work with people virtually. We work with people through Teams, through Zoom, through those types of modalities, as well as face-to-face. If COVID, God help us, but if there was some other pandemic that happened that would cause face-to-face connection to stop again, it wouldn't impact us in the same way 'cause we've moved to different modalities. I think it would be inaccurate to assume that the COVID pattern is representative of a recession. It's more representative of the specific revenue mix we had at the time, which is not the revenue mix we have now. We actually feel fairly resilient going into what would be a normal, inflation-driven recession if that happens. Gareth. Hi, Gareth Davies from Numis. A couple from me. The first one, can you talk a little bit around key man risk in relation to client service leaders? 'Cause it sounds like they're sort of pretty key in that relationship management side of things. And then also their capacity in terms of going out and winning new customers. And then second, maybe for Karie Willyerd, I think you referenced you were using eight providers, four of which were kind of GP plus LTG. Who were the other four and what aren't they doing that they could be doing? Let me try again. Related to the key person risk of attrition of those client services leaders, we've been very fortunate that those people are tied to the business. In many cases, some of those people have been with us 10, 15, 20 years. We've been very, very fortunate that they have been very stable with us. We feel pretty confident that their tenure will continue. When it comes to capacity, one of the things that we do is we constantly are looking at each customer and the amount of time that it takes from those individuals to say how much capacity do they have to continue to take on additional customers. In some cases, we've absolutely brought in new customers into each existing client services leader. We as well are expanding the size of the team, and one of the opportunities we have is to bring in some of the talent and capabilities from the LTG companies. People have the depth of experience and capabilities that have came from the technology side and essentially bring them into our practices and processes to help bring them along. I think, you know, one is we'll make sure we hang on to those people that maintain the relationships. 2 is we will of course carefully with you know consideration to what's going on in the macroeconomic environment expand that team or leverage populations within LTG at really no incremental cost but hopefully to get them involved in running the processes we had in place with GP. All right. To be clear, the example I gave was for one course. For my function alone, we had 42 different learning technologies and 150 vendors. The largest vendor was GP, and they represented about 7% of total budget. I think. On slide 15, I just wanna make something come alive for you. Piers showed that there's this internal marketplace that we can go sell to. I think this is gonna be particularly relevant coming up because CFOs want you to. If you're gonna need to make an investment in learning, perhaps there's a more compelling reason to invest in learning, but they want to do it on a variable cost method rather than hiring people. That's where, you know, I would go out, I would just turn over to GP and say, "What can we put together that'll take 3-6 months to do and can be kinda guaranteed what the cost is gonna be?" I think it will be there. You asked as well, what else was out there? Who else were we using? For content development, if it was custom content development, GP was doing 95% of our work. You go buy specialized learning content that's already built that you can configure. Machine learning, data science, cybersecurity, we would go buy more custom content. In the platform arena, large scale enterprise LMS is always a part of it. Learning delivery systems are a part of it. They really look very much like a slide that Jonathan is gonna share later. I think I'll let him. He'll be able to tell you exactly what other kinds of things we were using later. Thank you, Gary. Tom. Yeah. Thank you. Tom Singlehurst from Citi. First question is about the competitive landscape. I can understand that at a sort of micro level, all of your technologies, all of your services have competitors. But in terms of the go-to-market strategy, this positioning as a sort of GP Strategies umbrella, providing that sort of entire managed offering, how unique is that? And is there anyone in your mind that's doing something similar that you're trying to sort of aspire to compete with or competing with already? That's the first question I wouldn't mind understanding. And then the second question is on you talked about concentration by sort of number of clients, top 50, top five. I'm interested in the industry exposure that you have and whether there's a particular skew. You know, are we naturally more geared to financial services and autos than other sectors? That then leads on to the third question is, when we think about the M&A, which I guess from the strategic targets is coming, and this might be dealt with in the second half, but is that balancing sector exposure and client concentration the big task, or is it more about adding on extra capabilities? We'll deal with that third one probably this afternoon or in the second section, Tom. Should we go to the first question? Russ and Piers, I think you probably Yeah. In relationship to the competitive marketplace, you know, obviously in each of these, the individual solution areas, if you look at that go-to-market slide, if you look at the individual services, there definitely are a number of people that could perform any one of those services. The key thing that I would say is there's very few and possibly no one that has the breadth of capability. The other piece that I would say that really becomes important to large multinational or global organizations is that geographic footprint. The ability to do these types of programs at scale in a global basis when it's distribution and execution in multiple languages in multiple parts of the world, that list definitely gets much smaller. The interesting thing, Piers mentioned this rigorous process we use to kind of test the messaging that we gave you some pieces of today. We have the opportunity through our client services leaders to go out and say, "Can we get your fingerprints on this? Would you listen to us tell you the story and give us feedback? Tell us what you think about what this message is." I think a couple things they said, "Well, let me tell you why I love working with you." It was kind of a great model to be able to get some of their feedback and dive into the satisfaction they have with us. In several of those conversations, they said, "You know what? This other customer or this other competitor we're working with, they do some pieces here. I... You know, I'm really interested in being able to do this. Now, some of those were easy types of transitions because they were for measurements and Watershed. One of our largest automotive companies said. We really, really need that. We need to prove the value out of these offerings. They were using other people to meet some of those needs. I think our customers have been telling us that they don't see, you know, a customer or a competitor that's really doing the range of services. As we've been kind of telling the story, the reception we're getting from, you know, those top customers. By the way, Piers mentioned as well, we took it out to some people that were more prospective customers or people we knew in the industry, and that's actually also resulted in pipeline for us, of people saying, "That's a good story." I mean, honestly, I think that, you know, from my viewpoint, I don't know if there's anybody that really can compete holistically with us. Anything to add on that, Piers? No, I think that's fine. Okay. Adam, do you want to talk to the second question Tom asked about the diversification of the customer? Right. Like, there's two ways to look at it. I'll speak from a GP and then maybe Jonathan can add from a broader LTG because the industry concentration is different if you look across the entire LTG family rather than just GP. Primarily inside of GP, there's four industries that we have a strong concentration, which we feel pretty good about. One is automotive. If you look inside of automotive and the electrification and the complete changeover of the automotive industry, in effect, the employees that work in automotive now don't have the skill sets or the knowledge that they need to work in automotive in the future. We're a major part of the transformation of the skills, knowledge, and abilities of that workforce. That's one industry. By the way, the electrification of vehicles won't stop if we go into a recession. That trend is already going and needs to be supported. That's one. Second industry is high-tech, which continually disrupts itself, right, and continually has a talent development challenge, right? Visa very much is a high-tech company more than a bank company, right? That's what made our offering so compelling to them. The third industry would be banking and finance, which banking and finance in some ways is subject to somewhat of a recession, right? If we look at a white-collar recession that we're talking about. On the other hand, with fintech, with global financial regulation, there's tremendous change happening in banking and finance. Change is good for us because when change happens, people need to be trained on that change. We Our fourth, which is actually good, is somewhat of a recessionary hedge, defense and aerospace. One of our fastest-growing industries right now is defense and aerospace, and we're actually seeing a significant ramp-up in spending in defense and aerospace going into budgeting for next year. That's the legacy GP industry concentration, but it shifts a little bit when you look at LTG. I'll turn that over to you, Jonathan. Yeah. Only a small amount to add, Adam. We usefully actually diluted the quite higher proportion of automotive that exists within GP, when we put in the context of the entire group. We actually have five sectors. The fifth is education and healthcare. They amass about 75% of LTG's total revenue base, and they all range between about 13% and 16% each. We feel appropriately diversified and that gives us some reassurance and comfort in terms of the current macro environment. I'm mindful that we haven't yet taken a question from our online audience. Are we able to pick one up from FTI, please? Yes. We've got three on the webcast we'll talk to now and some a bit later. One from R Meadows at Saxbury: Do you, LTG, have the breadth and depth of talent to support the realization of your ambitions? Okay. Who'd like to take that on that panel? Piers. I think that one of the things that we found in the last year or so when we've been working together and looking across this entire business is the sheer depth of talent that is there. It's quite extraordinary. You know, experience in different industries, experience with technologies, and we have a number of organizations which I think you'll see this afternoon, which it's not like we're generalists across these. We have deep specialists in these areas, whether that's talking about talent mobility and talent mobility systems, learning and performance systems joined together for the mid-market. We have so much expertise, and we are mobilizing that now. Part of the thing that we've been doing is actually making sure that we are organized so that we can bring together particularly the consulting teams from across the group and making sure that we're then actually going in because what organizations need is that cross-expertise. It isn't like a particular area. It's actually bringing in different kinds of brains and thinking about that. One of the reasons why we've been careful about how we come to market and really thinking hard about it is to make sure that we can mobilize that talent for our customers and making sure that it's customer-focused. Thank you. Another online? Barney Sherwood and a question to GP and LTG more generally too. Do you price at all on a per head basis? And to what degree is revenue enhanced by customer recruitment activity? And is there any revenue garnered by clients' redundancy activities? Sure. We will talk a little bit to this later, but the very quick answer is yes. Some of that not at all really in the GP pricing model, although size of organization and size of assignments obviously has a factor in pricing, but particularly in some of our SaaS products, mostly our larger enterprise solutions, there is a per user license cost type mechanism. The average tenure of those contracts is about 2.5 years. When they come up for renewal, that's the time where we would resize them up, down, sideways. In our modeling for our new strategic targets, we have actually factored in a very modest downsizing of some contracts that might renew in the next 12-18 months, just in anticipation that we see. A downsizing of the workforce that we're really not sure we're gonna see given you know the tight labor market as it persists at the moment would have to really reverse quite dramatically to see that. Of course it's always possible depending on the severity of the downturn we're facing. We've got time for one more and then we'll break. Cool. One more from the webcast then. This is from Miguel at ArmaNext. It seems you work extremely close with your other customers. Are you restricted from working for other companies in the same industry? Ooh, that's not one I'd like to take myself, so Adam. Actually, no. We do have very deliberate systems that date back long ago when there was a time where if you worked for one of the big three in automotive, it was very difficult to work for the other. Fortunately, we've been in that business so long that we set up these firewalls between teams. We have systems and processes in place to ensure that we can work effectively. In general, across the marketplace, we've seen less of a concern about that now than we ever have in the past. Great. Thank you very much. Thank you to all our panelists. I invite you to take a short break. Loos at the back. We're not doing tea and coffee now. You can't bring it in, I'm afraid, but there is water. We will come back at 2:15 P.M. if indeed you leave the room. Back at 2:15 P.M., please. Thank you very much. So far you've seen a little bit about our go-to market and what we're doing there. Now kind of for the rest of the afternoon, we'd like to tell you about some of our solutions, not all of them. This will give you a sense of where does our go-to market and the capabilities of LTG kind of collide on the ground with clients. What have we got that is very sticky in our products that is foundational to the industry. Going then from there all the way to what are we doing to future-proof ourselves. How are we getting ready to future-proof. After that, Cath and Jonathan will be back for a moment. The... As I've mentioned, the learning environment is really complex. In a single compliance course, for example, you might have content from half a dozen libraries. You piece together little videos that might only be a clip long. If the standards sitting behind that aren't agreeing with each other, one little video clip can break the whole program. Imagine if you took a compliance course on anti-bribery, and you finished it on your phone, you're done. It's probably not something you wake up in the morning and think, "I wanna take my anti-bribery course." When you're done with it, you wanna be done with it. Imagine if the record of you've completed it gets broken along the way, CLOs do not like those phone calls. Without Rustici, those kinds of things can happen. With Watershed, which is able to. I think Russ beat me to my punch line, which is I'm convinced every learning organization in the world should have Watershed. And it's not as well-known as it needs to be, and that's gonna be a really fun part of my job, is to letting the world know more about Watershed. But without Watershed, you can't show what value you're delivering to customers like that 432% increase in cross-selling. With that, to start off with kind of our foundational elements and to show you how sticky we are in organizations, I'd like to introduce you to Tammy Rutherford. All right. Thank you, Karie. Is this on? Can you hear me? Yep. Okay, great. Whoa. There it is. Thanks, Carrie. Yes, as Carrie mentioned, I'm Tammy Rutherford. I'm the Managing Director at Rustici. Piers mentioned earlier that LPG is a collection of companies that are both generalists and specialists. I think it's fair to say that we qualify in the latter category as we are the global experts in the technical standards that govern the learning industry. We consider ourselves the nerds of LPG. We are the plumbers that ensure that when a learner presses play in a course, that course just plays and that the data is tracked. As Carrie mentioned, this is all very detail-oriented, under the surface kind of work that we do, but it's highly important. If it breaks, bad things happen later on. We are the plumbers that make sure that systems and content just work together. Before I get too far into what we do, just to give you an idea of what a technical standard is, because some people in the room may not understand. I talk about this all day long, but again, we're in the weeds. Think about the MP3 music file that if you listen to music on your phone, an iPod, or even Spotify, MP3 is that standard format that lets you listen to a song on any given device. That's a technical standard in the real world, and in the learning industry, the same is true when it enables content and systems to play well together. These learning standards have been around since 1999. Rustici Software was founded in 2002, so we just celebrated our 20-year anniversary and have been around as long as the standards themselves, almost. We develop integrated software solutions that allow to solve the problem for integrating technical standards and products. This is not exciting work. Nobody else wants to do this work. They gladly come to us and say, "Our options here are to build it ourselves, use in-house developers, take a couple of years to get to market to have this critical functionality, or we can license Rustici's software products and be done with it. We're going to market faster, we're able to put our developers to use in our products and enhancing our products, and we offload the ongoing burdens of support and maintenance along the way." We play a crucial role, and again, we've been doing it for 20 years. When I joined Rustici in 2011, we had about 200 customers that used our software. Fast-forward to today, and that footprint looks a lot larger. We have 2,000 clients across 35 different countries, and it comprises 75% of the learning tech market. That's everything from learning systems that deliver and track training, to authoring tools that are used to create content, to the content publishers themselves. As Karie mentioned, anti-bribery. I'm sure everyone in this room has taken a course that sounds something like that, or an annual regulatory course, or even professional development. If you've taken any online training of any sort, the chances are likely that Rustici Software was running under the hood somewhere in that transaction. We've seen a lot of growth along the way. As the industry grows, we grow as well. Our licenses are scaled based on the utilization of our software within a customer's product. Since 2020, we've seen escalations in not only additional products coming into the market, but the utilization of digital learning. Since joining LTG in 2016, we have seen a six-year revenue CAGR of 24%. That's a little bit about Rustici and what we do, but I really wanna bring it back to the next set of the conversation, which is what is this all about? Why do technical standards matter, and what does it do? Where does it play in the bigger conversation around learning analytics and the measurement of learning? You heard from Carrie talking about the complexity of the systems and the programs that she was developing as a CLO. I think it was 45 vendors, 150 contracts. All of these pieces and parts need to work together. Gordon from DaVita expressed some concerns about the challenges of managing all of these components. That's really the beauty of what the standards do. They enable that interoperability for products created by different providers to work well together and to enable the consistency of the data that they're capturing. That ultimately leads to the next step, which is to measure that data. These standards give CLOs and other organizations around the world the ability to be agile and adapt to whatever is happening in the world and create scalable learning programs. There's a huge value that we see in these standards, and the demand is coming. It's on every RFP. I think Peter and I were just talking about an RFP that came across for Bridge not long ago that had the demand for this standard. We are the people that you come to. If somebody checks that box, you're coming to us. If somebody doesn't check that box, they're probably coming to us also to figure out what do we do to compete in the market. We'll hear more from David Ells in a bit, just about learning analytics, but before I turn it over to him, he will be joining us via video. I do wanna let you know about another product that we offer that's bridging the gap from where we are today with our heavily weighted learning technology vendor customers to the more enterprise and government-focused customers. We have a strong foothold in government today, but we've introduced one of our fastest-growing products that's called Content Controller that allows for the distribution or broadcast of content across multiple systems. When we originally introduced this product, it was to serve the content publisher audience who had a need to protect their intellectual property when distributing their courseware across products, and to control the access to that content, so that they could manage licenses and subscriptions across all of their customers. We've also seen an emerging use case for Content Controller in the enterprise market, specifically large multinational enterprise customers that have the same need to distribute their courses across their internal enterprise organizations, whether that's their internal employee base or their extended enterprise and channel partners. That's a huge opportunity that we have with GP Strategies, who is helping open doors to those multinational enterprise customers that frankly, Rustici Software as a small tech shop in Franklin, Tennessee, doesn't see very often. We're excited to have them bring us to market in that way. I've. I've wrapped up on the technical side of things to kind of give you an idea of what happens under the hood. Now I'm going to transition to David Ells, who is the Managing Director for Watershed. He's gonna share more about what they're doing when they're taking this data. We've helped collect and track that data, and Watershed takes it to the next step, which is the measurement of that data and the impact learning has on organizations. We'll hear from David now. Watershed's fundamental value is providing our customers with insights into their learning systems and programs through a platform that we've purpose-built for learning analytics. We collect, aggregate, and deliver data for our customers about their entire learning ecosystem. Our customers use our platform to drive studies in everything from cost savings and investment opportunity by looking at low traffic or high traffic content, all the way through to program-level metrics like studying and driving the adoption of a new learning initiative, for instance, or even understanding the implied skill set of the learners that are going through that program. It's on this latter note that we wanted to highlight a PwC story today, which is exactly that. They deployed Watershed on day one with a major global digital credentialing program that they deployed to their 300,000+ employees across the organization, in order to, A, drive the adoption of that program, across that body of learners, but also to understand the accumulated demonstrable skill set, that their learners were accumulating by going through that program. One of the big topics of conversation around L&D and around HR these days is skills. You know, we should all be looking at skills and of our people and making sure we have the right skills to do whatever work it is that we need to do. As we get closer and closer to being a really skill-focused world, then the badge program will really help us understand exactly what skills we have in our people, and therefore the kind of work that we can do for our clients. We wanted to bring together the learning data that we already had with the badging data so that we could run reports, and we could do some analysis. We are very well-placed now to be able to do those higher-level investigations. We have all the fundamental data and when you start asking business questions around, you know, we would really want to focus on this skill, where are we now and where we want to be? What progress are we making to get there? What other things are potentially impacting our progress? Knowing that we've got, at least from a learning perspective, we've got, you know, leading measures that will tell us if we're on the road to our goals. A lot of that can come together with broader business data to be able to give a really big picture of what's working, what's not working, whether we need to change course, and so on. Excellent. What I really loved what we just heard from Alex there from PwC was that making use of the data and those badging the badging that they're doing at PwC that allows them to look across their organization and say, "What skills do I have?" And probably more importantly, "What skills don't I have? What do I need to go out and develop with my staff or go out and recruit for?" That visibility into what do you have in-house, what are the skills that you have, is critical, and the learning analytics that Watershed provides and the badging services that they're using really enable that to happen. There's another story that that wasn't on camera, but that's worth sharing with PwC and how they're using Watershed in their learning analytics is Watershed enables them to have visibility into what are people querying for? Think about it as a Google search across their application to say, "I wanna learn about XYZ." In early 2020, they were able to use Watershed to see that consultants from, in particular, China and Italy, early 2020, started asking questions of the LMS, of the learning platform, "How do I work remotely?" They were starting to realize that they needed information and tools to make this massive shift that we were all rapidly heading towards. PwC had that insight to realize that people in their teams all across the world were going to have the same question, and they didn't have an answer. They didn't have the content ready. They were able to leverage that insight, those early warning indicators, to build the content that was ready, so when this wave and this demand spread across the world and hit Europe and then ultimately the US, that training was ready for the larger populations that were gonna ask the very same question. This became very compelling to PwC. They actually realized the value of what their learning analytics platform provided to them, and the learning team was reporting to the executive board on a weekly basis to let them know early stages, how are we doing in these areas? What are our gaps? What can we do to fill them? That's just a real-world example, and a really cool one, I think, of how can you take learning analytics and bring it into the business in a more impactful way. I'm next going to introduce you to Bonnie Beresford from GP Strategies. Bonnie has been working with GP for a very long time on measurement and really focusing on the consulting and the strategy component of it. There's really these pieces all come together. There's the technology, there's the technical piece that Rustici solves, there's the tooling that Watershed provides, and then coupling that with the strategy piece that Bonnie will tell you about. It's a really powerful combination when we put all of these three things together. I'm Bonnie Beresford, Director of Performance and Learning Analytics at GP Strategies. I've spent the past 20 years in the learning analytics space, and I am so glad that learning leaders are finally starting to truly embrace measurement. This embrace often is more talk than action. What we're hearing is that they do want to measure, but they don't know what to measure, and they don't know how. At GP, we built a virtual measurement academy to upskill client teams in measurement to be able to actualize those visions of being able to measure the impact of their learning. We've also developed a structured approach to building out a measurement strategy to help organizations develop their long and short-term plans around measurement. Now, both of those offerings stop short of getting into the data, the merging the data, the cleansing the data, the storing the data, the mining the data, the visualizing the stories and the insights that are coming out of that data. By joining the LTG family, we're now working with Watershed to integrate their analytics platform right into the academy. This will give learners hands-on practice using data to answer business questions. It will also expose them to this great platform on a trial basis, ideally leading to future sales of Watershed products. Further, we're partnering with Watershed to support our measurement strategy work. A common outcome of building out a measurement strategy is the need for a data warehouse, a place to store and collect and report all the learning data that you're collecting. Up until now, we've not been able to really make any recommendations in this space. Now we have a ready partner who can help us and help our clients put their measurement strategies into action. This blending of consulting and the technology and the tools is truly a win-win proposition. It's a win for LTG and absolutely a win for our clients. All right. Thank you very much, Tammy. Now I'd like to make a little bit of a shift to thinking about content and how we deliver content. You are consuming content every day, and probably during the last couple of years, you've consumed a little bit more streaming content than you thought you would have to. Think about how Netflix has evolved over those last couple of years. When you turn on Netflix, it looks different to you than it does to me. You can personalize your experience. You can go after the pieces that make sense to you. Well, just because you go to work in a mid-market company doesn't mean you don't want the same experience that a large company could have. I'm pleased to introduce Peter Broussard to talk to you a little bit about Bridge and the products that we're developing there for the mid-market that look very much like the kind of modern, lovely, beautiful experience that people come to expect from large companies or their Netflix experience. Peter Broussard, over to you. Thank you very much, Carrie. My name is Peter Brussard. I'm the managing director for Bridge. I've been with Bridge for about four years, and I'm very excited to talk to you all about our offering. As you heard from Carrie and others today, there has been a sea change in the recognition of the value of people and how companies have changed their behavior to address the global market shifts triggered organically by the pandemic and then the rise of remote work. Companies that were not providing an environment for their employees to thrive and grow are the ones that suffered the worst impacts of the great resignation. Companies discovered the loss of many people in a short period of time to be absolutely devastating. Not only is there a loss of knowledge which affects morale and disrupts operations, but how the time and cost of recruiting, replacing, and retraining employees is handled has an enormous impact on the success or failure of any commercial endeavor. How is that problem addressed? Large companies, you know, with large budgets, long-term planning horizons, they've all been relatively aware of this problem for a long time. They try to build teams, they try to connect them to each other, they try to make sure that there are really clear goal alignments. They try to make sure employees have career paths, right? That's now something that's front and center for smaller and medium-sized businesses. Big software companies have responded to the needs of these large companies, and you see some very large, and I would say cumbersome, technology solutions that attempt to remediate this problem. I mean, if you're trying to run a learning management program and you need 35 LMSs to do it, you're not operating in an environment of simplicity. A lot of those big tech solutions, while they are dynamic and do a lot of things, they're often very unpleasant to use. As a result, they struggle to fulfill their mission because they lack any kind of organic adoption and usage. Bridge has always focused on two things, first, our mission, which is connection, alignment, and growth, and second, usability, which is making the software delightful, so that the success of any training, learning, and development program, et cetera, is fueled by the usability of the software and not thwarted by it. First, I'd like to introduce you to a couple of our customers, and share some of their stories about how Bridge and our philosophy of people matter most, and our quest to make delightful software has helped them grow their business. We'll be hearing from two mid-market customers, Spectrum Automotive, and Southern Glazers Wine and Spirits, our friends at NBCUniversal's L&D division, and Paychex, with whom we partner to deliver Bridge solutions at scale to the entire Paychex customer user base. People matter most aligns exactly with our mission and values. Bridge provides us with a tool that allows us to develop, reward, and retain our greatest asset, our employees. The world has changed, and in order to kind of maintain employees, you have to show more of an interest in the whole person. To our team, people matter most means providing the best learning experience for our employees, and Bridge helps us do that. When we do that, we will deliver results, and revenue and retention and everything will come after that. Bridge has been a tool that has helped us progress our company culture. It's allowed us to shift our focus toward creating a culture of learning and engagement and improved communication. Bridge is an LMS platform that makes learning easy for your employees. The reporting, tracking. Customization with courses Bridge is a very user-centric platform. I think that is one of the differentiators for the product and one that why Paychex chose to partner with Bridge. It is very simple to use. The UI is gorgeous. I would say it's a very modern-looking learning management system that helps organizations and admins especially because it's such a beautiful and easy interface. We have created a really unique relationship from a partnership perspective that has allowed us to scale, learn, and deliver the right solutions for our mutual customers. We see our retention rates go way up. For example, the last 90 days, we had over 250,000 enrollments. Bridge has helped our organization change the culture of learning. Since we implemented it 2 years ago, we've had 50,000 courses taken and have changed the way people think about learning. Awesome. You've heard from a couple of our customers, right? That training, upskilling, growing organizational capacity, this is a problem that can be solved with good tools and good software. Honestly, that is what was the genesis of Bridge in the first place. We were originally built as a corporate LMS, but we rapidly expanded into a tool designed to help employees connect to one another, give them clear career paths, align them to organizational goals, manage their performance, measure engagement, all the things an HR team might need to do. When we were acquired by LTG in 2021, was already a large and successful company. Under LTG, what we've done is grown into a unified next-generation talent management solution. I'll get into some of the details momentarily, but what we have seen is that mid-market companies have an incredibly strong appetite for a broad set of functionality that is easy to use and feature-rich. You heard from Tammy. The first thing we did is build the Rustici engine right into the DNA of our application. This gives us ability to do all sorts of content portability as well as cool features like being able to do your anti-bribery course on your phone on the train if you'd like, 'cause it doesn't have to connect to the internet to do that. We've also taken the technology built on Instilled, used that to create Bridge Advanced Video. This allows easy sharing of videos at a corporate level, automatic subtitling that automatically translates into local languages. Just really phenomenal functionality there. With Gomo, we've built in a set of professional content development tools. Whether you wanna whip together a quick course that just describes a meeting agenda or you wanna put together a high-stakes course that talks about a specific industry or compliance issue, we have tools for that. They're built right into Bridge now natively. We're currently working with the Pathear team to build out an entire talent marketplace and using that to drive AI recommendations for content associated with a person's skill profile. We're in the midst of taking some of the best pieces of Reflektive, largely how they do 360-degree reviews, special goal setting and recognition, and building that into the Bridge platform natively, and that should launch in 2024. Just after that, we'll be using the technology in Breezy so that we can have recruiting and pre-onboarding as part of Bridge as well. One of the most important things, and probably the most interesting to me, is the collaboration that we've started doing with GP Strategies. If you think about it, good software is, you know, part of the larger picture. We wanna give every company the tools that they need to succeed, but we also wanna help provide them with the expertise that they need. The reality is a typical mid-market company, you know, somewhere between 500 and 5,000 employees, they have an HR team that struggles to keep up with the needs of the organization. There's usually a very talented and overworked leader, maybe a leadership team, and then a group of much, much less experienced folks wearing many hats trying to get everything done. They're trying to do training. They're trying to do compliance. They're trying to do an L&D program. Oh, annual reviews are due. Oh, now we've got to do our performance management cycle. Wait, what about our engagement surveys? Has anyone onboarded these new employees? The list of things that an HR team has to do is somewhat overwhelming. The reality is a lot of those teams aren't staffed well to solve the problem. We can give them the solution. With Bridge technology and GP Strategies know-how, we envision a future where companies will be able to use our software and then subscribe to consulting and learning services that can help them with these complex problems with easy-to-use software, but hard-to-find expertise. GP and Bridge can run an L&D organization inside a mid-market company better and for less money than they could do if they had to do it themselves. That's very exciting to me, and it's one of our biggest growth areas. Thank you so much for your time. Carrie. Thank you, Peter. I think that's such an. I love the phrase that they love to build beautiful software because it's so beautiful that it's the kind of experience that I would've loved at Visa. I think it's quite capable, too, in any environment. It was so pretty. Now, let's look a little bit into the future and how we're future-proofing to be ready for what's coming up in the learning industry. What's important. I think it's particularly relevant given some of the Meta announcements over the last few days and their quest to go into the enterprise. Whether it's the metaverse, wearables or other extended forms of virtual reality, we're getting ready for that. Customers have to be able to deliver this consumer-grade in learning as well. Sometimes they even call it edutainment, and nowadays that you're having to do a little bit of both, wherever you're at. Get ready to leap a little bit into the future in this section as Phil takes us through what we're doing with PRELOADED. Thank you very much, Kerry. In this presentation, I wanna give you a brief glimpse of some of the new possibilities that are being enabled by emerging technologies and how they're relevant for a really broad range of sectors, and how as a group we're really well placed to be able to capitalize on those. As Kerry says, my name is Phil Stuart. I'm the Executive Creative Director of PRELOADED, and PRELOADED is a BAFTA-winning immersive game studio, really operating at the forefront of emerging technologies. We're part of the GP family, and we use games and play and games-based technologies to create experiences which offer transformation for organizations, customers, and their employees, and we call this Play with Purpose. Now, the incredible power and potential of play and technology means we get to work with a really, really broad range of clients, both for enterprise audiences and also in the direct-to-consumer space, and you can see some of this work just to my right. This dual focus on the consumer market and enterprise markets is an incredibly powerful combination for us. In the consumer market, we get to experiment with cutting-edge hardware and learn the edges of technology, like the edges and the affordances of that technology. In the enterprise market, we get to apply this knowledge to solutions which are robust and scalable. We've been doing this for almost 23 years now, which sounds like a long time now I say it out loud. We started right back in 2000, working in the early web. We then worked through Web 2.0 and how that really changed the way audiences interacted with web technology generally. We navigated the introduction of the iPhone, which totally changed the way people interacted in the digital landscape generally. Most recently, we've been leaning into XR and the huge opportunity that presents our clients. When I say XR, Jonathan did a good kind of summary earlier. We're talking about this umbrella term that includes VR and AR. VR, as you guys know, I'm sure you know, is this kind of encapsulating technology that allows you to create incredibly immersive experiences, taking you places you can't go or into dangerous situations. A fantastic way of delivering really engaging, immersive learning. We have AR, which sits within this as well, which is the placing of digital content into our real world. That placing of digital content into our real world provides huge opportunities for learning in context. It's what Meta's getting super excited about. They call it MR now. Now, to constantly respond to new technology and to the needs of the market generally, we need to be incredibly forward-facing and agile, and making sure that we're always relevant for not just the technology, but also making sure we're relevant for the market. As an example for this, eight years ago, we didn't make any XR. Eight years later, it's almost 90% of our revenue, and the demand just keeps growing. Today, I would describe our work as sitting at the intersection of our digital and physical worlds. This concept of the blurring of our digital and physical worlds is something you'll hear a lot of people talk about when they're talking about emerging technologies. Now, our role within the group is to help our clients navigate the business and audience possibilities that are enabled by this emerging technology, and this requires a commitment to an ongoing program of innovation and R&D. We call this program the New Play Space. It's a possibility space which maps the shifting sands of emerging technology across three core areas. The first is computation. This includes things like computation. Computation is focused on really the device's ability to be able to understand our world. It focuses on things like machine learning, which you may have heard of. It focuses on AI, artificial intelligence, which I'm sure you guys have heard of. It also focuses on things like computer vision, and computer vision is not necessarily a new field, but one that's radically developed in the last four or five years and is really focused on the ability for devices to understand what they're looking at through the camera that's mounted to them. The second area is infrastructure, and this is really referring to the new services and infrastructure which is enabling the new types of experiences we want to create in this immersive world. It includes things like 5G networks, so like the ultra-fast data networks that have rolled out across many countries the last couple of years. It also includes things like location services or what I would describe as the geospatial infrastructure, which is allowing new types of experiences to be experienced outside. The final one is hardware. This is kind of like the obvious one. It's the stuff you're kind of wearing on your head. It's the VR headsets. It's the devices you're holding in your hand. It's also the stuff that hasn't been invented yet, the stuff that we want to be invented. Now, these three areas are the spaces which are enabling the future possibilities for businesses large and small, and it's the areas of technological convergence where we see huge possibilities for innovation and disruption and market growth. Now, our leadership in this space means we get to work with some of the largest and most technologically progressive organizations in the world and exploring and helping them realize the future possibilities of this technology. I wanted to give you a couple of examples of the types of partnerships I'm talking about. I can't always show you every one I wanted to show you, but I'm showing you a couple that I have permission to show you because it's already announced. The first one is our partnership with Magic Leap. Magic Leap is an organization which has pivoted from the consumer space into the enterprise space under the amazing leadership of Peggy Johnson. Let me set the scene for this one. Imagine what life would be like if your mobile phone was instead a pair of glasses that you wore all the time and which would overlay contextual content into your world seamlessly. Imagine how that would transform how you work and how you live your life. Now, this is the vision for AR glasses or AR eyewear as it's beginning to be called, and this is the future form factor that everyone is talking about. It's what Magic Leap are talking about. It's what Apple are talking about. It's what Meta talked about on Tuesday. It's what Qualcomm are talking about. HP. Everyone is focused on this, and it's gonna be an innovation as disruptive as the mobile phone was or the iPhone, I should say, back in 2008. It's gonna transform how digital is used in every single sector. Now, our partnership with Magic Leap explored how this future will reshape the way humans interact with each other, whether that be at work or on the move or at home. This is not a distant future. I mean, this, the Magic Leap 2 headset's available right now. On Tuesday, Meta announced at Meta Connect their new headset, the Quest Pro, which is a pass-through headset, half the price of that one, and clearly targeting the enterprise market. As we know, Apple are gonna be releasing their headset almost certainly next year. This is a future that is happening right now in a very close future. The second partnership I wanted to talk to you about was Niantic, and this is focused on that geospatial infrastructure I talked about earlier. Now, for the past years, we've been working with Niantic, and if you don't know who Niantic is, Niantic make Pokémon GO, and if you don't know what Pokémon GO is, it's the largest AR game on the planet. We've been working with those guys really closely for the last two years, building out what they call the real world metaverse. Now, this real world metaverse is an indoor location-specific layer of digital content which serves every sector from services and amenities through to way-finding and education. This infrastructure will be absolutely critical to the realization of the AR glasses vision. What's this gonna mean for global talent transformation? Well, it's gonna change how and where employees learn, and ultimately how employees, in fact, you know, everyone, the whole world will interact in our world, how they will interact in our world forever. Now, this type of R&D with Magic Leap and Niantic and also other partners behind me means we understand the opportunity for the group today and in the future, and the future is so exciting. I've never had a more exciting job than what I do right now, and I can tell you the enterprise market is absolutely ready for this. In the past eight years of being part of LTG, we have seen immersive technology projects move from being proof of concepts funded by large innovation budgets to being strategically led, fully integrated learning products. Organizations no longer see XR as something to experiment with, but something which offers new paradigms for learning. Indeed, XR presents new form factors and new opportunities to genuinely improve how we deliver talent transformation in organizations. What gets me so excited is the scale of the opportunity we have. As we've mentioned today, GP is one of the largest custom learning content creators in the world, and we have the clients and the reach to do this at incredible scale. Now, I'm a little bit short on time today, and I've been told I can only show a couple of examples. I wanna show you two examples of innovation we've done recently with clients that we can talk about. The first is in the energy sector. GP already creates a large amount of highly realistic training products for many clients. This example is for Anglo American, and it's to train miners on health and safety below ground. This is one of my favorites. I mean, I chose it, of course, because it allowed us to deliver the kind of production values which we really reserve for our consumer grade clients like Disney or BBC. The intent was to create something which was visceral and scary, recreating the cramped and hot and damp darkness of the mines in South Africa. Because the realer the training is, the better the training is, and that might sound like an obvious statement, but there's lots and lots of scope to make more realistic training in this world. I'm just gonna show you a short video just to give you a sense of the experience. Hopefully you're a little bit scared by that. It's designed to make you scared. We actually went down the mines, and we took loads of research, and that was possibly one of the scariest things I've ever done. Didn't necessarily sign up for that when we started the project. Couple of things to say. It utilizes hand tracking. I don't know if you guys have used hand tracking with VR. If you haven't and you've used controllers, let me tell you, hand tracking is a really good thing. It lowers the barrier for engagement with VR. One of the biggest challenges we have when we're making emerging technology projects is how you make that barrier for engagement as low as possible, and with hand tracking, you can interact with things in the way you interact in the real world, and that's a really powerful thing. I also just wanna underline that this product is fully integrated into the employee's learning pathway and provides rich data to support further learning and compliance. Uses Rustici for that. The second example I wanted to show you was one in the healthcare sector. We've created an FDA-approved VR therapy program for Penumbra to tackle, which is part of REAL System, to tackle neurodegenerative disorders, helping therapists to transform the health of patients better and quicker. Now, for me, this is true innovation. It's inventing a totally new form of treatment and therapy process which will transform this sector. Unimaginable before the advent of VR or body tracking. For me, it's a great example of why commitment to innovation is a critical component to any business that wants to be market relevant in, let's say, like five years' time. I'm really happy to say LTG really walks the talk, increasing investment in PRELOADED's innovation program year on year. I'm sure Jonathan won't mind me just reminding him that as we go into budgeting in the next couple of weeks. These projects aren't experimental, but well-funded, strategic, fully integrated products designed to deliver profound and, in some cases, urgent transformation for their audiences. These projects are made possible by the technology of today, but new possibilities become available every single day, and these possibilities will radically change the way training and talent transformation is delivered in the future. PRELOADED's market-leading consultancy, R&D, and production capabilities allows the group to capitalize on today's and future's technological possibilities in the service of our clients and their needs. Now under GP, and with the new go-to-market strategy, we can do this at an incredible scale. Thank you very much for your time. Thanks, Phil. I think you can see why he's recognized as one of the 100 top influential digital leaders in the UK. Honestly, there is not a CLO conference that I go to that every CLO leader isn't talking about what we are gonna be doing in the virtual reality space. Customers who are coming to them and saying, "Can't we use" without even knowing what it'll do, but just seems kinda cool. I think it's gonna be a really developing space. To just kind of wrap us into the next section, Russ mentioned earlier, not only the $10 million of closed opportunity we've already had, but what's sitting in the pipeline. I think this new go-to-market is a really powerful way that we've already demonstrated can work, and shows that we're only started. In fact, there were a couple of deals recently that, Preloaded was critical to being able to get these large contracts 'cause we brought in kind of this new approach to a, an investment bank and to a global consumer goods bank. I think those are, just really good proof points that there's something there there. For the next section, I'm going to turn it over to Cath and Jonathan to talk about how does all this play out in terms of financial potential and, how we're gonna go after that addressable market. Cath and Jonathan. Thank you, Karie. We've already talked about macro considerations, and I don't think Jonathan and I have actually been to a meeting where we haven't talked about resilience over the last few months. Naturally, we are concerned about the macro backdrop and how that might affect our businesses. We've carefully studied the revenue and sales pipeline for both evidence of vulnerability and resilience. 71% of our revenue is in long-term services or SaaS contracts, and this gives us much reassurance and shows little sign of vulnerability, except modest headcount downsizing on some SaaS contract renewals. Bear in mind, on average, these only renew every two and a half years. In previous recessions, GP has seen increased demand for managed learning services, and we've heard both, I've forgotten the name. Karie, sorry. Talk about cost-effective. Companies looking for cost-effective alternatives to internal provision in recessionary environments. Our 29% of project-based revenue is predominantly in what we consider to be must-have areas, such as compliance and product launches. However, there is about 5% of our revenue, which is more discretionary, and we expect some vulnerability to be sustained in this area if we have a sustained downturn. Remember, project revenue is delivered by people, and we do have the option to adjust our workforce, our contractor workforce, to reduce costs. We also don't suffer the negative operational leverage that we see in SaaS services when revenue declines. Let's not forget, we also have a diversified footprint, both from industry verticals, which we heard about earlier, and from a geographic footprint. While we feel depressed in the U.K., looking at the front pages of the newspapers, I think you've heard from the team that they're not quite feeling the same way from the U.S. perspective. We've announced this morning, and we've talked a little bit already about our strategic targets for 2025, and I wanted to give you a little bit further insight into how we came to these numbers. We look at the model assumptions, and we've considered the dynamics of each of the businesses and modeled appropriate revenue and margin profiles for each year. We've taken into consideration the macro backdrop and attenuated that a little bit for 2023. Ultimately, we have circa 5% organic revenue growth broadly in line with our medium-term targets, and the margin is reaching 20% by the end of 2025 as expected. We then overlay potential acquisition revenues, and assuming funding is through a combination of internally generated cash and disciplined year-end net debt to EBITDA ratios of circa 1x. This gives us firepower of about GBP 220 million. All else being equal, a moderate increase in the net debt to EBITDA ratio to 1.25x would give an additional circa GBP 60 million to invest in M&A. In these current volatile and uncertain times, we've made an assumption on interest rates. We hope these are at the upper end, and we've modeled 7% in 2023, declining to 5% in 2025. Tax is assumed at 27% across all years. We've also estimated cable, although if anyone can estimate that, please come and talk to me afterwards, 2022. We've estimated at 1.22 and held this flat across all years. If we take a little bit of a closer look at revenue, and we look at the left-hand chart, we can see that the portfolio mix has rebalanced towards software and platforms. This is through a combination of the SaaS businesses growing at a faster rate and also our M&A strategy is focused towards SaaS acquisitions. If we look at the right-hand chart, we see an expected increase in the long-term visibility through a combination of the organic growth in GP Strategies and SaaS businesses and incremental revenue from SaaS acquisitions. Finally, I wanted to finish on this chart in terms of strong earnings per share growth. Here you can see the adjusted diluted EPS since LTG's entry to the AIM market in 2013, with a 38% CAGR from 2013 to 2022 consensus. This moderates to the mid-30% range if we look forward to 2025. This has been supported and is expected to be supported in the future by stretching but ambitious goal targets underpinned by normal expected organic revenue growth and acquisition opportunities available in the market. With that, I'd like to hand over to Jonathan, who will talk a little bit more about the strategic opportunities. Cath, thank you. As Cath outlined, in creating our new strategic growth target, we were very mindful of the current economic challenges, but maintained the ambitious approach that you've seen from us in the last nine years to develop LTG into what we believe can be a genuine world leader. The credibility of these targets is really important to me, and I'm reassured and grateful for the rigor Cath brings to our strategic deliberations. That includes lots of challenge on not allowing me to be too enthusiastic. This is our fifth strategic target in nine years of being a public company, and I'm proud all previous targets have been achieved ahead of schedule. I won't promise we'll achieve it ahead of schedule, but I'm darned if we don't achieve it at all. We will definitely deliver on this one as well. You've heard that we've excluded all large acquisitions that require equity funding from these targets. I think that was a jolly sensible thing to do in this climate. I'm rather thrilled that our mission to consolidate this fragmented market is still very much alive and well. To have some GBP 200 million plus of firepower over these next three years gives us plenty of opportunity. Please be assured, we will also be highly discerning. Sorry. During the last year, we've been focused on the commercial transformation of GP, and we've used that freed up time of not pursuing acquisitions to conduct a very thorough analysis of the competitive landscape, particularly in the learning and talent software space, where we want to focus our acquisition activity. This is a fast-moving sector and our research has eliminated some really interesting target companies. Furthermore, while private company valuations are still out of touch with the reality of public market ratings, they are beginning to abate, and I fully expect there will be a flurry of sensibly valued deals next year. For obvious reasons, I'm not going to get specific about our desired targets, but suffice to say there is plenty of white space for us still to attack. Adaptive learning, workforce assessment, spaced practice are just some of the areas we're keen on. We're also actively considering how technology can assist the remote worker maintain their informal learning. The lack of in-person interaction in an office is really beginning to show up in the lack of informal knowledge transfer. Learning by osmosis is not easy when you don't sit beside each other. I remain very excited by the continued aggressive growth opportunity that we have ahead of us. In drawing today's CMD to a close, let's just have a think about what we've seen and what we've learned from the many talented colleagues that you've heard from today. The most compelling aspect for me has been the journey that Karie and her many CLO colleagues have taken us on. I said to you before that I wanted to make sure you had a real understanding of the challenges within the learning profession. I trust that you've gained that understanding of the problems large corporates and governments suffer from with that multiplicity of disconnected components of a learning and talent ecosystem, and that you now have a sense of the opportunity that we have ahead of us. Most importantly, I really hope we finally convinced you why LTG is actually a well-thought-through combination of software and service capabilities, not that disparate bag of bits that a few of you thought we might have been. We've only had time to focus on four technology solutions today, but don't forget, when you saw the Bridge presentation, we incorporate many of our other products such as Reflektive, Gomo, Instilled, et cetera, into Bridge. Therefore, the only products that you really haven't heard about today are Breezy and PeopleFluent, and our most regular followers already know a lot about those. You've also heard that we're operating a large and well-established global market with plenty of opportunity for growth. In the three decades that I've been in the corporate learning space, I've never seen senior leadership in corporates care more about talent development than in the last couple of years, and I'm sure the pandemic was a big factor in that. We no longer have to justify the why at all. We don't evangelize for that. We just have to explain the how and the what. That we're only doing circa $700 million of revenue in a market in excess of $100 billion suggests there's a little bit of scope to expand our share. To that point, please do not underestimate the power of GP's selling, cross-selling a major account development capability. It's proven, it's phenomenal, and LTG is already benefiting from copying us and adopting it. The world continues to change in advance and it's an astonishing pace, causing an even greater need to upskill people. Add in the ever-present challenge of hybrid remote working, and you can easily see why talent development is more crucial to the C-suite now than it's ever been. We're not complacent about the macro backdrop, but the serious challenges our customers face in developing and retaining their talent will truly endure through any economic difficulties. Given the strategic relationships we enjoy, our diversified geographic exposure, and the embedded fiscal discipline within the group, I am confident we will successfully navigate any form of downturn. I'm thrilled we've developed LTG to be of a scale and array of expertise where we can meaningfully solve these challenges, and be assured we're taking full advantage of this opportunity. I'm very proud of the wide range of talented people who work tirelessly to deliver exceptional results for our customers across 35 countries. I'd also like to celebrate with you the highly capable leaders we have across the group, some of whom you've had the opportunity to see and hear today. It's not easy to create a leadership team, mostly derived from 17 acquisitions, that genuinely has a shared common purpose, but we've jolly well done it. Our leaders are aligned with the goal of ultimately creating the global leader in our industry. They're making outstanding progress towards that goal, and I look forward to updating you further in January. Thank you very much for listening and watching. We'll go to Q&A now. Can I ask for the panel to come back up? Okay, who'd like to kick off questions for Carrie, Tammy, Peter, and Phil, or Cath and I on financials if you wish? We'd love it not to be financials. We'd love it to be more directed to what we do than the numbers, but whatever you'd like to do. Hi, Jessica. Hi. Thank you, everyone. It's Park from Peel Hunt. I've just got 2, please. The first is, Jonathan, how do we think about R&D across the group now? 'Cause there's obviously many entities. Should we be thinking about, you know, when you think about innovation, you're thinking about the M&A piece or, you know, how much R&D are you doing in-house? The second one is just about across the portfolio there's many products and, you know, it's all about cross-selling now. What have you done over the past year to ensure within GP, the client services leaders, for example, are all up to speed on all the products that you now offer? I'll go to Russ on that second question in a moment. If we can get a mic to Russ, please, that'd be great. Kath, if you pick up on the financial aspects in a second. R&D is variable. It's very much situation dependent. All of our product companies, of course, have R&D spend. We expect it to average out across the group at about a third of our total engineering spend is genuine R&D and innovation, i.e., producing new features and capabilities. The emphasis changes between different products depending on commercial need and the maturity of the product. It's also fair to say that you ask about whether we would acquire R&D or innovation as it were. I think in some cases we are definitely keen to do that. For instance, are we going to reinvent AI from the very beginning or is it better to acquire that? We acquired some of it in Pathear, but not as much as we need. We're always interested. We've failed a couple of times actually to make those acquisitions, and we will continue to pursue them. There's a completely mixed approach. You wanted me to take the piece related to the enablement? Can we just take? Oh, yeah. Is this on? Yeah. Yeah. Just on capitalization and CapEx. At the moment we spend about 2% of revenue on CapEx. Notwithstanding the fact that we're about to go into budget, everybody, we are not expecting, you know, that we will drastically change that. You know, that's where we're expecting it to be. You know, if something happened, or somebody came up with an idea that we wanted to invest more in, then we would, you know, obviously reguide, if there was anything different in there. From an acquisitions perspective, clearly, if there was something that was an acquisition that required additional investment, then we would talk about that at the time. At the moment, we're sort of saying, you know, we are as we are at the moment and expecting to continue on that trajectory. Russ, how'd you get on with the second question? Yeah. Related to the education, the internal education, the first thing I would say is we do have a long history with the client services leader role of ongoing enablement, so a regular rhythm and cadence of providing new education for them. Our goal is really to have the smartest team in the industry, and so that's something that's been a part of what we do. Now, obviously, the number of things that they need to be smarter about, of course, has amplified here in the last year. But we have been very thoughtful about the queue and the order of the solutions we've brought to them, where we think there is the most potential. We've identified some synergy areas where we've kind of intensified that training and learning, but we're exposing that to them during live sessions and virtual live sessions, to help bring them up to speed. The other thing I would say is, in addition to that group of client services leaders, we've been as well, building on something that Piers started in doing kind of broader knowledge shares for all of the customer-facing positions. The sales and customer service professionals within the organization, to make them aware of the solutions, the types of problems we solve, but as well to build those connections to people that can help them. Third is because we're starting to see these solutions be cross-sold, how do we make sure we can deliver to the customers? The education, the overall program, and process management to ensure we're going to continue to delight the customers. Thank you, Russ. Next question, Kai. Thanks again. Sounds like it's on. I had a couple questions around the announcement this morning. I think it specifically said that going forward, the M&A targets would most likely be in software and SaaS, which I think is a sort of a bit of a return to the pre-GP Strategies policy or mantra. I'm just wondering what caused you to kind of make the statement and I guess call out, you know, software and SaaS as being the main target group. Then secondly, within that, if we look at your software acquisition history, there's been some really good deals like Breezy, Rustici and others. I think PeopleFluent was perhaps less successful. I'm just wondering, you know, how do you think about... How do you make sure going forward that you buy assets that, you know, grow after you buy them? The other question is around the base case funding mix, and I interpreted what you said in the release this morning as you essentially excluding raising further equity. It just sounded like the comment you just made sounded like you're sort of leaving the door open if there was a large opportunity to share equity. I'm just wondering how we should think about that, those two comments. Thank you. Let me do that one. The last question first. I think that's quite easy. I think it would be inappropriate for us to be saying that any strategic target involves equity placing at the moment. Can you imagine taking on the double headwinds of diluting at this sort of share price? Oh, we normally go shopping in America, let's go and buy a company and convert sterling into 1.10 to the dollar, you know? I don't think it's gonna happen. It feels off the table for us at the moment, but three years is a long time. I sincerely hope we might be in a situation where that traditional funding mechanism, where the market has been very supportive to us five times previously, and we've been able to make very audacious, ambitious, larger acquisitions, will become available to us again. It would be a shame if it didn't, but I think we just have to, you know, steady as she goes and see what happens. That's why. If you like, if you inferred I left the door open, then the target does not have that door open at all, just to be absolutely explicit. This is an internally financed, no equity placing target, but of course we would like to exceed that target if we get the opportunity to, if everything aligns. That's the first question. Sorry, the Third question. Your first question was just remind me in which order it was. Targeting software. Yeah. I could almost have placed that question. It's really helpful. Thank you. The simple answer is, we started as a services business when we came to market 9 years ago. We bought three services company. You saw that one of the greatest acquisitions we ever made, Preloaded, arrived as our second acquisition in 2014. We did that 'cause we wanted to create a little foundation stone, so it was sizable enough to then go out and do further things. Our first software company acquisition was Rustici, and we made many more after that. Yes, we got to a point where our SaaS revenue was 80% of group revenues, prior to us getting into the situation where we bought GP. Would we have chosen to buy such a large services business? Possibly not. When you all of a sudden have the opportunity in front of you that you find astonishingly, a market leader of such scale and capability is affordable, then it was a no-brainer decision for the board to say, "Let's reach for this and do it." We knew we were going to create this disproportionality of services revenue. We hoped we would be able to convince the market about the fact that although it was services revenue, it's absolutely not single project related. You know, 65%-70% of that, of GP's customers only are on long-term services contracts between three and seven years. I feel perhaps I haven't done a good enough job of conveying that message because I'm not sure that visibility of revenue is really understood. There was only one challenge with GP Strategies, and that was it was making a lower EBIT margin than we thought was acceptable and indeed achievable. I'm not gonna comment on margins today, it's not about margins, but I think you can see the absolute direction and trajectory on that, and the GP team has done a fantastic job to achieve that and will continue to. We ended up buying a very large $500 million revenue services business, which has propelled us into this 35-country footprint and capability where we can deliver very serious solutions to large multinationals. That doesn't change the purpose of the group. It's just lurched our proportionality towards services temporarily. Yes, you will see that our purpose is to ensure that we have a balanced approach. But really it's not we're just gonna buy software companies for SaaS revenue's sake. We're gonna buy software companies because that's where we've got the gaps. GP is so comprehensive, we don't have gaps in services really at all. We might buy little bolt-ons to add to particular niche capabilities, but it's not a main purpose of what we're going to do. Our main purpose is to build out our product and software and technology portfolio to ensure that we can continue to meet the demands of what is an ever-moving forward and changing and advancing market. Yes, that's why we were specific, and you should expect that path to be followed over the coming three years. Finally, on software companies. It's almost like I did plant these questions just to help us get some messages across. Yes. Well, we have always, you can characterize us as not being scared of different types of acquisition. The easy ones, candidly, are the founder-led software businesses where the founder comes along and says, "I think I'm probably getting the wrong value for my business today, but I want the power that LTG can provide to improve our growth and all the services," and what we call the mothership, you know, the arms that we can wrap around them. Therefore, what I'd like to do is become part of the group, but please can I have future value for my business as well as we grow? Of course, we go, "Bring it on. Absolutely fine." That's why our earn-out design is always revenue growth related, and it's very generous because we're very happy to imbue the founders with real rewards for continuing to grow their business or accelerating that growth. They've been the most enjoyable deals we've done without question because they are so fulfilling and easy. We get a different type of reward when we've said, "Hold on a second. We need to upscale the capability in the group." PeopleFluent was a prime example of that. We were not a grown-up software business. We had some very advanced smaller businesses like Rustici in the group. In 2018, we really weren't a grown-up software business at all. PeopleFluent brought very mature enterprise software capabilities, much of which sits as the spine and the backbone of our software division today. Much of that benefit is underestimated in the overall situation of PeopleFluent. The other thing is just to get really detailed, it was declining at 7%, $100 million of revenue when we bought it. We paid $150 million for it. We broke away $30 million of revenue in something called VectorVMS and Affirmity, that were declining. They're now growing. In aggregate, they're worth about $35 million today. So they're turned around. It's not part of the PeopleFluent decline story. The remaining $70 million of revenue will probably be 59 or 60 this year. So there is decline, and we expect and predict further decline. If you look at the profitability of the business, it will probably in aggregate have repaid its purchase price by the end of this year, four years later. From our perspective on an economic scale, it's been an absolutely fabulous deal. I would just remind you that enterprise software still has real value in complex use cases. What we're suffering from, and many other software companies are suffering from the same thing, is that in the 2010s, the previous owner did a jolly good job of selling PeopleFluent solutions to customers that weren't going to ever use the deep functionality. Those are the customers that churn from it because they can go to Either they go to the easy option of the Workday solution if they've got that as their ERP, or they go to nicer-looking solutions, some perhaps Bridge or one of Bridge's competitors, because that's a more appropriate solution for these customers that are not using the deep functionality. Believe you me, if you use the complex functionality in PeopleFluent, you are sticky as anything. I'm thankful for the opportunity to just give you that little bit of extra color that perhaps some people hadn't heard from us before. I would do that PeopleFluent deal today knowing everything I know from four years ago, from the four years we've had it. Okay. Right. Hi there. Victoria, sorry, I couldn't see you on the lights. Am I on now? Yeah. Yes, it is. Yes, it is. Thanks. Hi, Jonathan. Hi there. Thanks so much for that, those presentations. Really fascinating stuff. My question's kind of tied to everything we've just been talking about. You've obviously set out new, ambitious, and welcome targets, and you've explained very clearly the methodology and the assumptions behind them. I'm just quite interested by the split of capital allocation between organic versus acquisitive growth. You know, you've just ably outlined all of the opportunity, the wealth of opportunity that's available to the existing businesses within the group, not least of which is the technology cross-sell within GP Strategies. You obviously already bit off quite a big chunk with that. It feels to me perhaps like the ambition is kind of more on the M&A side than necessarily on that 5% organic target. Notwithstanding the obvious macro uncertainties and challenges, I just wondered if you could give a bit more color about the board's attitude to capital allocation decisions around those two sides of the strategy and the attendant risk profiles of it? Understood. Mindful of what my CFO will let me say. Look, we're proud of our track record of always delivering on the numbers that are in consensus. We also happen to have always delivered on our strategic targets, although of course, when you're looking three years out, they never quite deliver the way you think they're going to be. There is a deliberate buffer that's built into those. Actually, funnily enough, when Cath and I sat down, and I promise you, Cath describes, we sat there, and we did revenue growth per year, per unit, margin adjustments, et cetera, et cetera, revenue decline in PeopleFluent. We modeled the whole thing, no goal-seeking whatsoever, and when the number came out, the blended number, growth number came out, we said, "Heavens above, that's about 5%." You know, that seems very strange to us in that we didn't seek for it, but that's what we've guided in the 4%-7% across content and services and software and platforms. That's not got all of the cross-selling baked into it. You know, you hear what Adam and Russ are saying about the potential for cross-selling. If we're successful in cross-selling, there potentially is some upside, but we're not prepared in any way to commit to it now. Certainly sticking out a headline set of numbers for a strategic target that some people will scoff at anyway in today's environment would have been foolish to do. I think if you're asking the question from a sort of capital allocation perspective, please be assured we're not starving the organic growth side of the business. I've had quite a lot of conversations with people recently, and that I'm probably not, as a leader, the most appropriate to take lots and lots of uncosted risk on organic growth because, frankly, I've never really found huge success with it. You can end up getting the wrong side of things, certainly margin-wise, if you do that. We are where we can see a genuine case for investment, and we can see a swift indication of the return on that investment. Not necessarily financial, but for instance, Peter and I were chatting only a couple of days ago about what we're doing. He's been experimenting on some new marketing initiatives with Bridge, and we've thrown dollar a few hundred thousand at that, and we are seeing top-of-funnel opportunities improve. We are prepared to invest in organic growth, and we've already talked to you at the R&D point, which I suppose is the other driver for organic growth. There is no doubt that we want to continue to be acquisitive so that we can build out the capabilities of the group. Will we get the balance right? Who knows? Have we got the balance right over the last nine years? I don't know. When I sit today and look at the array of talent and capabilities that the group has got, it feels to me like acquisitions have served us well. Thank you. Tom. Thank you. Yeah. Tom Singlehurst from Citi. I wanted to come back to competition. You told me to wait for your chart, which is indeed a really good one with the capabilities and target capabilities. One of the things that occasionally investors say to me is that they're slightly concerned that, for example, full service HCM operators like Workday or others might just sort of add on some of, you know, L&D-type capabilities or talent management and at either low, marginal or even zero cost. Firstly, can I get a sense of whether you think that is something that we should worry about? I suppose link to your targets. I know it's a lot less sexy, but I mean, are areas like payroll or sort of HCM-type areas at all of interest? No. No, absolutely not. I suppose the final question on that, Ben, is about partnership with some of these organizations, because actually the right solution probably would be something a little bit more complementary. I'd love to get your insights on that. Thank you. Carrie alluded to some partnerships earlier. I don't know if you wanted to expand on that. Four years before I was at Visa, I sold my software company to SAP and SuccessFactors, so I know that environment really well, and I can assure you there's no worry that they're gonna be entering this space in terms of development in the R&D space to enter this market. They've got integration with other things, and if you look at Workday, they're trying to develop a full ERP, so they're not headed that direction. Oracle's not gonna invest dollars in this space. Those are the three big ones. I don't think we have to worry about them coming into the Bridge space, for example, at all. It's just not gonna be on their investment profile. In terms of ERP partnerships, I think there is some room for that. I think there... The reason I sold my company to SuccessFactors was to go in and say, "Let's partner together." I don't see any reason. Rustici is one of the areas that we don't have a relationship with SAP, and I think Affirmity is a really interesting partnership that could be expanded upon and potentially Watershed. I think there's some big ERP partnerships that we should look at. Okay, thank you. Shall we take a question from the virtual audience? We got one. Everyone's probably seen the news from Meta that they're moving to focus on enterprise. What does this mean for LTG? Bill, I think that feels. Shall I take this one? I'm not sure who saw it. It's thrilling to me that we're talking about a conference that I watched, and I like the idea that everyone else is also watching it as well. What happened on Tuesday was the Meta Connect. I guess what's different about the Meta Connect this year to previous was a big shift from consumer to enterprise. You had Mark up on stage alongside Accenture and Microsoft talking about multi-year long partnerships. I guess I mean, I can talk from PRELOADED's perspective. It's a new headset that's been announced, and it's a kind of increment along the line of making things that are better than previous. We've got huge experience of working with mixed reality headsets. All our work with Magic Leap, so we understand the affordances of these platforms. The way you make content for the Meta headset is via the Presence Platform, which we know. That's very closely coupled to our core tech, which is Unity, so we understand how to make for that. You know, I need to be a little bit careful about what I say here, but we, you know, we're very familiar with Meta's roadmap and hardware profile, and we know what's coming and, you know. What I can say is, you know, Meta phoned me yesterday morning saying, "Can we meet next week?" There's like, we're very close to those guys and what they're doing and yeah, look forward to opening up that relationship to all of the customers at GP as well. Yeah, it's gonna be an exciting time the next few months. Perfect. Another one. This is from Barney Sherwood. Sorry. We're gonna. No. How has Rustici's client reach and revenue been enhanced since becoming part of LTG? Secondly, how has Rustici's product evolved since becoming part of LTG to meet this integrated client need? A question for Rustici. I wasn't expecting one directly to us. As far as our revenue increase since joining the group in 2016, we have seen large increases in revenue. Coming into LTG, I think a lot of that revenue increase and growth came from, quite honestly, structure and discipline. We didn't have a lot of defined targets before the acquisition, and so just even having that rigor and that guidance from LTG has helped us focus on that revenue growth. As it relates to why are you chuckling over there? As it relates to doors opening for us and our expanded reach because of being part of the LTG group, I think we've really started to see great gains in bringing our products to, not the vendor audience. We have 75% of that market share today, and we'll continue to grow within those vendors' relationships, but it's that enterprise space that we're able to grow into as a part of LTG. As I mentioned, enterprise selling is just not in our wheelhouse. We are definitely a technology sales company that's used to a different type of sales channel. Being able to leverage the LTG group, starting with Leo and now into GP Strategies, we're able to take specifically that Content Controller product, that enterprise use case, out to the enterprise market and leverage those sales channels to do that for us. I will just augment what Tammy said there, just to say that, she's very modest. Rustici have done all the growth themselves. We merely act as a provocateur, if you like, because we could just see this enormous potential in this business. It was a $6 million revenue business in 2015, leading up to the acquisition in January 2016, and we just showed them the art of the possible, and they did it themselves. It's been a marvelous success story. This year, it'll be $26 million of revenue. I just wanted to add one thing, which is the R&D part of that question, which is that actually Content Controller did exist. You just started into that. But we LTG thoroughly back that, and it is now the fastest-growing product in Rustici. That's a great R&D story inside LTG. Yeah. That was risk-based R&D. There's no question. Yeah. Maybe one more on the Q&A before going back to the room. As a management team, how are you organized as to spot early signs and then deal decisively with headwinds globally and locally, given your business is increasingly global? I think that's really interesting. Perhaps we don't think of it in that context, but the first thing to describe is that our executive board, the team that runs the business day-to-day, is made up of the senior leaders of GP. We have the benefit of Adam and Russ on the executive board, so we feel a lot of the insights around America, and sit there jealously when they're telling us it's not that bad over there compared to here. We have all of the various discipline leads in our exec team. We're getting a lot of feedback. Cath and I spend lots of time with all of the leaders of these businesses, so we hear directly from them what's going on. Only last week, I was hearing from the leader of our content business that in the U.K., the sales pipeline has slowed down a bit, whereas in the U.S., we're not seeing any slowdown at all. You know, we're getting those information inputs. We normally get them about the middle of the month before we then meet with the board. We feel we're pretty comprehensive. I'm sure something will take a bit of a while to filter through, but the jungle drums are pretty good at beating in the organization. Maybe that's not the answer you want, but we're very interconnected. We talk to each other a lot. Maybe one from the room, perhaps. Yeah. Let's go back to the room. Gareth. Just relating to the organic investment question earlier, but just from a talent perspective, I mean, it seems like the business units are excited about the potential new business coming out of GP. Yeah. Just in terms of you going out and sourcing talent and being able to get that in quickly, find it. I mean, it sounds like, given the nature of what they're doing, it's quite specific what you need. Can you do that? And how kind of preemptive do you have to be in terms of the resource at Rustici and PRELOADED. Sure. Look, there's no question that we've had open hires for longer this year than we've had in the past. I mean, you know, the labor market is incredibly tight, but we've got a large internal team, and we've really seen actually an acceleration in their success over the past few months. Now, that may be because the labor market is becoming a bit easier, but I think it's also because they're approaching things in a different way. Adam and I talk. Adam has the largest number of open hires, naturally running the 4,000-person business in the group. I don't know whether you've got anything to add to how we go about recruiting for them, Adam, how secure you feel about that. I would agree with everything you said. One benefit that we have is if you want to be in our space, although a 5,000-person company is not the largest company in the world, it is a very, very sizable company in our space. I believe we're the premium brand, we're the premium place to invent an intriguing, exciting career. Without a doubt, the labor market is challenging, but we do have kind of a preferred employer positioning, which is quite helpful for us, and it mitigates the risk of some of the complications of the labor market right now. Thank you. Can't see any other. Yeah, me for Lana, Goldman Sachs. Thanks for Hiya. Thank you for the helpful presentation, guys. Maybe starting with GP, obviously that business gave you a much broader geographic footprint. As you start to near the end of that kind of utilization opportunity and the improving margin cycle, can you talk about how you're executing on that kind of broader geographic footprint? Secondly, could you maybe talk about the swing factors that you see around the outlook that you've presented today? Is it just an easing of the labor market tightness that would make you more concerned to the downside? Kinda what are the other than more successful cross-sell, are there any kind of key swing factors to the upside that you're monitoring? And then thirdly and finally, you laid out a pretty constructive growth outlook in terms of the 7% organic growth on a software and platforms basis. What would that be, when you start to strip out the impact from PeopleFluent declines, which you expect to persist, I imagine? Thank you. Okay. The geographic footprint one's an interesting one. We are in considerations. I would say that we haven't really done very much with that wonderful geographic infrastructure that GP's brought. We should be fair to say that not every one of those 35 countries is suitable for us to pump other things through, but there are many territories that are. We've taken a very considered and careful approach to, if you like, that feels more like integration to me than commercial transformation. What we said was, first of all, we're very respectful of the fact we bought a business 4x our size in people terms, and that what we wanted to do was understand each other much better. Therefore, we went about doing commercial transformation first, so that can be in the rear view mirror. You know, we're all optimized in terms of the way that we go about commercial, and fiscal discipline, if you like. We're aligned with that. Therefore it can be much easier to bring the businesses together. Integration really starts in earnest towards the end of this year and into and through next year. I see us identifying territories where we're going to say, "Let's go and take a PRELOADED offering to APAC or whatever," as being something that we will seriously consider then. It's being thought about now because we're going into budgeting, but that's at a nascent stage. Okay, that's from a geography perspective. I hate people asking three questions in a row. I haven't brought a pen up before. What was your next question? Swing factors. Swing factors. Yeah. Okay. Swing factors. Look, of course, if we see a loosening of the labor market, that's going to be quite interesting in a number of ways. First of all, it will hopefully have an influence over inflation, so we might actually see the economic backdrop improve. Also from our perspective, we've talked about how we've assessed resilience and vulnerabilities earlier. Cath's in quite a lot of detail and other colleagues referred to it. We genuinely don't believe that we're gonna see such a loosening of the labor market that we're going to have a situation where people don't want to do programs that need to retain their talent. I don't think we're gonna have a C-suite saying, "Oh, we're actually actively trying to shift a load of people out of this organization, and therefore, let's not develop them anymore." I'd also say to you that there's another factor here, and I think it's really interesting. It would be, I believe, to be seen to be so cynical, when you think of the noise and the investment that's been genuinely made and celebrated by organizations post-pandemic about, "We really care about you. We're investing more in you. We want to retain you. This is how we're doing it. We're engaging with you," with their workforce. If they were to curtail those programs, obviously, and clearly that means, you know, significant reduction in the investment in them, I think that would go down very badly indeed, and would be worse than the lesser investment price of the pandemic. I think we have a number of good hygiene factors there. I'd look. We are constantly monitoring. It's fair to say that territory by territory is very different. The U.K. feels more stuttery at the moment, but only in our project-based business. Actually, funny enough, Phil's business Preloaded is absolutely flying, you know, because innovation and technology almost ignores the macro. You know, there are things that need to be done, and these new emerging technologies aren't going to wait for a recession to pass before they get going. There are reasons to be particularly hopeful, and we are beautifully diversified, both in terms of geography and the types of capability that we have, and a lot of embedded software on subscription in our customers. Final one? Oh, final one is just on. Yes. Easy answers. Last quarter, we came out with a 6.5% blended organic growth rate, constant currency for software and platforms, and we said quite clearly it would have been 16% without the drag of PeopleFluent. Now, I think that's you shouldn't model for that. I think that's a little high, but we're certainly into the low teens without PeopleFluent. Okay, we've got a few more minutes. Actually, we're almost exactly on time. Should we have one more? Another online question. Okay. Yeah. We got one more online. You still look to acquire other companies to broaden your offering, but do you ever worry you might be a target yourself? I wondered whether this question would come up. Look, I don't think it's our place to comment on. I mean, presumably that's driven by the valuation that the company has at the moment. We've built an interesting group. I do think it's a challenge to try and think where we would sit well in a trade buyer because we're so multifaceted, you know, many different aspects to what we do. That's deliberate. We're trying to build this multifaceted business that's capable of doing many things. If there is someone who does some of what we do, why would they want us? 'Cause there'd be lots of duplication. I don't know. We run the business to deliver on the numbers that we can, and anything else just has to be dealt with as it comes along, if indeed it does. Is that it? Are we done? Well, I'd love you to join me in thanking what I think is an incredibly talented group of people who I hope have given you a very enticing and insightful set of presentations today, and I'm delighted that they're my colleagues and I'm working with them. Thank you very much indeed.