Welcome back to Proactive. I'm joined on the line now by Jonathan Satchell, the Chief Executive of Learning Technologies Group. Jonathan, great to have you back on. You've just released a trading update for 2022, in which you describe the year as transformational. Can you tell us a bit about it? Yes, indeed. Thanks. Morning, Tom. Good to speak to you. I think it can be an overused word, but frankly, I think it's absolutely appropriate to description of last year. Many viewers of this will know that we acquired GP Strategies, a very large American-based training and talent development firm in October 2021. Last year was the full representation of it, of the first year. It was the full year with us. We were going on a journey, a commercial transformation journey with that business, where we were aiming to effectively double its profitability on an absolute basis during last year and further margin improvements thereafter. I think people found that rather sort of spectacular or sensationalist to suggest that we might be able to achieve that, and we jolly well did. I'm very proud of the team. They did an exceptional job. I have to say that I think we planned it well. We could identify where that margin improvement was coming from. Often when you do these things, there can be unintended consequences. One of the issues that we were concerned about is that we might in some way impinge upon the exceptional customer service and relationships that they'd enjoyed for decades. We might see organic growth deteriorate. Well, frankly, we'll give the full number when we announce our results, but organic growth was exceptional. We were very, very pleased with it indeed, and you can see that in the numbers that we described in the trading update of the overall pro forma growth rate of 5%, where GP was a majority contributor to that, and therefore running at about above the 5% rate. We're very happy with that. Organic growth continued, and we delivered on the margin improvement, and we exited at the sort of run rate margin we were expecting to, and we expect a modest increase in that margin this year. The changes you've been making at, with following that GP acquisition, is there much further to go with that process, or is it already in shape? I'd say that, you know, the majority of the changes are well and truly in the rear view mirror now and they're embedded, and the culture of the commerciality that we approach things with is very much inculcated in the business. There are further things that we can do. There are, of course, long-term contracts that we're rolling off that we'll negotiate or not take on again. We expect a few more percentage points of EBIT margin improvement over the coming year. The analysts are well aware of that modeling and that's in their forecasts. It's important, of course, also not to forget, although GP Strategies is a very large part of the group, $500 million-ish revenue business, the group itself is still a very important part of what we're doing. We have a number of software businesses in the other side of LTG. Many of those performed well. We still have the decline in our PeopleFluent business, but that is in line with expectations. It's not accelerating, which is very reassuring. The only slight disappointment is that our Breezy business, which is in the fastest-growing software business that we own, it is involved in the small to medium-sized business sector, mostly in the U.S., and it saw a slowdown in its revenue in the second half of the year due to, quite frankly, the economy slowing and companies, smaller companies not recruiting as much. We do expect that to turn around very quickly. It was a very early indicator of distress at the time that Covid arrived in 2020, and it recovered within sort of five or six months of that. As the economy improves and as small and medium-sized businesses get back on the recruiting to scale again, I think we'll see that bounce back quickly. That's really the only thing to mention. Understood. Well, it was a tough market at the back end of 2022. How have you been getting on with your debt reduction strategy? That was a very important part of what we do. We've done it many times. When we make these audacious, you know, far-reaching acquisitions, we finance them both with some equity and with debt. I'm very mindful of that the environment now for debt, both in terms of interest costs and also just the investors' appetite for leveraged balance sheets is different. I respect and understand that. We came into the beginning of 2022 with a plan, we made that very clear to investors that we intended to go from circa 1.8x leverage down to 1.0 by the end of last year. The dollar at that time was at 1.35, and on the basis that we have $260 million worth of debt, that all felt very achievable. As the year progressed, from really April onwards, the dollar of course strengthened massively, and that became a concern for us because it was a headwind when we translate our dollar debt into sterling. That sterling amount was going up quite dramatically. I'm therefore very proud to say that even with the closing dollar rate at the end of last year of 1.21, we still ended up on a round about a circa 1x net debt to EBITDA ratio. That shows the power of the cash generation of the business and of course the profitability. That's a highlight for me. I think that's a really good achievement. Thanks, Jonathan. Looking ahead now to 2023, we're obviously already 1 month into it. Is there something that you think investors need to understand better about the company as we move into the future? Well, I, we spend a lot of time trying to re-emphasize that although, we moved the proportion of our services revenue quite dramatically through the acquisition of GP, that did not mean this was single project, one-off services revenue. Two-thirds of GP's contracts are very long-term. In fact, they're longer term, the SaaS contracts we have in our software businesses. We have really good, reliable, and long-term visibility of revenue. What we've done is adjusted the margin so that we can achieve better profitability from that long-term revenue. At the moment, we're seeing good stability, including in our U.S. business. We're seeing a bit of softness in the U.K., we'll, you know, the U.K. is 12% of our overall business, and to be expected, I suppose. When I say softness, it's just, you know, people aren't making decisions. I think the U.K. is in that malaise at the moment. I'm sure we'll come out of it at some point. I'm sure we will. It's just one final question from me, Jonathan. How happy are you personally with how the business is performing at the moment? With that question, I'm disposed to being a positive fellow and I normally find ways of seeing the optimistic side of things. I can tell you that all of the fundamentals and the important transformation which absolutely had to be done is done and in place and running well and beginning to serve itself now and not have to be tended to all the time. GP is now very much embedded. We've got some further integration of the back end of our two businesses to do this year, which will be, you know, a challenge and interesting, and yield further benefits and cost synergies. From my perspective, I am very happy, both with the absolute performance of the overall group, but also with the way that we've welcomed 4,000 colleagues from GP into the group, and they've integrated with their LTG colleagues extremely well. We've made a number of changes to the way that we go about things, bringing the best of both bits of businesses to the fore. I feel very confident about the way ahead. We've launched a new go-to-market strategy. Customers are responding to it very well. Even though I think we have got naturally some economically challenging times ahead of us, I think the need to develop, retain, and make talent feel needed in an organization alongside the backdrop of the rapid change in the skills requirement of employers, is forefront of mind for our customers and enables us to enjoy a very good backdrop to what we're doing. Great. Well, very best of luck to you for this year. Chief Executive of Learning Technologies Group, Jonathan Satchell, thanks for joining me today on Proactive. Good to see you. Thanks, Tom.