Welcome to the Hostmore full year 2022 results webinar. All attendees are in listen-only mode. At the end of the presentation, there will be the opportunity to ask questions. This webinar is being recorded. I now hand over to Stephen Welker, Chairman Designate. Stephen, over to you. Hi, good morning, everybody. My name is Stephen Welker. I'm the Chairman Designate of Hostmore. With me today are Alan Clark, our Chief Financial Officer, and Julie McEwan, who you'll have seen this morning, was announced as our permanent Chief Executive Officer. I want to be the first to congratulate each of you. Thank you. This morning we'll be taking you through a presentation which can be found on the Hostmore website, and at the end, there'll be some time for Q&A. After the webinar, the entire video will be posted to the Hostmore website so you can review it at your leisure. Before starting, I just want to acknowledge the efforts of everyone at Hostmore, to the rapidly changing environment, both from external factors that everyone's well aware of, such as inflation and consumer patterns changing, but also to internal factors such as change in leadership, a revised focus on profitability over expansion, and from our recent bank negotiations. I think the changes that we're going to be announcing today are a direct result of everyone in the firm, from the servers in our stores to the executives and to my board colleagues, all focused on the same path to put Hostmore on the right trajectory for future success. With that, we hope that that will benefit everyone involved with Hostmore, all stakeholders, including creditors, ultimately shareholders. If we go to page two, I just wanted, before we get into the presentation, I think we just need to be mindful of the disclaimers of what we're discussing today. Now on page three, looking at the agenda, on what we'll be taking you through is Julie will be introducing herself. Alan will take you through a review of the 2022 financials. I'll take you through a review of the business. Julie will take you through many of the growth initiatives that she's working on, and then I'll wrap up at the end with some items on corporate governance and current trading. With that, I'll turn it over to Julie. Thanks, Stephen. Good morning, everyone. A little bit about myself. I joined Hostmore as Chief Operating Officer in March 2022. Previous to that, I had five very successful years at Las Iguanas, which was a Latin American chain as brand director before being asked to join TGI Fridays. I'd like to share with you some insight in how the business is moving forward, especially over the last nine months. It's been a rocky nine months. It was clear from the get-go that the implementation of business strategies was essential in optimizing operational capabilities, and powerful and driven teams were needed to support the future growth for 2023. Changes had to be made operationally, and they needed to be made quickly, and we did just that. We realigned the field-based operational teams. We brought in further proven top talent externally, ensuring focus and prioritization to each of our businesses. It's worth mentioning our superstars. We also remapped and reinvigorated career paths for our general manager and also our manager population, ensuring high-performing individuals were recognized and they in turn moved to our biggest EBITDA restaurants to aid further growth. This is proving really successful. Our teams are the key to unlocking our success, and we've introduced talent mapping and development programs to retain and motivate our employees, such as the GM Aspire program, which was a leadership cohort for high-performing general managers, three of which have since been promoted, I'm very pleased to say. Since appointment as interim CEO in January 2023, I've taken time to understand the business and what's needed to deliver underlying sales and covers growth while also developing a more efficient and effective organization. A sales-savvy growth mindset is being addressed and gradually being adopted by our restaurant leadership teams, but not just within the restaurants, but also our support center teams too, and that's through further training programs while retaining the fun Fridays culture. Capturing consumer spend will remain challenging as guests keep an eye on cost and continue to expect more for their money, as well as navigating through the central and operational cost headwinds effectively. We remain focused on building a leaner and faster and more focused organization. In terms of opportunities, leveraging our sources competitive advantage, we're going to be going back to our heritage, but making it relevant for today. We are the original American cocktail bar and restaurant famous for celebrations, but actually, we've lost our way a little bit, and we need to reclaim that back and own that U.K. space once again. We know guests are looking for more experiential occasions as well as personalization, and we believe we are now well positioned to deliver on these occasions. From a people perspective, we've restructured our field-based and support center teams, enabling us to be more agile and react more swiftly in a fast-changing market. We have an experienced and now fully aligned exec team empowered to drive the success of our organization. We also have a clear strategy in place to leverage our core proposition, underpinned by quality, relevance, and simplicity, driving sustained improvements, investing in our teams, while building guest loyalty by harnessing digital and data as a key enabler across all of our customer-facing channels. This is part of our 2023 digital transformation. Aligning our whole organization is key to our vision, and this is underway with our virtual roadshow reset in May. We believe this will unlock further potential to deliver improved team, guest, and investor performances for 2023 and beyond. I'm now going to pass over to Alan to take you through the financials. Thank you, Julie. With reference to the table on the right-hand side, I'm going to sort of just run through the bullet points on the left-hand side and sort of elaborate on a couple of them. The most significant thing obviously is the increase in revenues, sort of not unexpected. Coming out of the pandemic period of FY 21, we see the benefit of improved revenues coming through demand. That has grown by 23%. On a like-for-like basis, growth was equally similar in terms of 22% improvement on the FY 21 period. The EBITDA, slightly down on FY 21, benefited from a number of factors. I've made reference here to the adaptable supplier relationships. What's most significant here is that we've been very fortunate to have some very long-lasting supplier relationships with our core of suppliers. This allowed us also to enter into longer-term commitments with them. That has had a material impact in terms of how we've managed inflationary inputs into the business. Our inflation input in terms of food and beverage is circa 9% relative to sort of the greater 20% which has been referenced in the public domain more recently. The second significant impact is hedging of utilities. A lot of our competitors have been materially affected by this over the past two years. We were fortunate that in September 2020, we'd entered into long-term hedges. In particular, gas, we'd hedged through until the end of December last year. Equally, during the peak period when prices of utilities were at their highest through August of last year, we actually stayed out of the market, and it's only now that we've then decided to re-enter the market, and we'll be starting to hedge our utilities as we move forward. Pricing as a comparative now is below GBP 1 per unit, whereas at the height in August last year, it was above GBP 6 per unit. Stephen will also sort of make some reference to that in a later slide. In terms of landlord concessions, a bit of a reminder, we've been very successful in terms of our discussions with the landlords, we've sort of agreed with the various landlords' population, they entered in the region of GBP 10 million over FY 2021 and 2022, of which 2.3 million is reflected in the current year accounts. Some negative impacts I should state, I've made reference to the inflation on food. Obviously, there is also the challenges in terms of national minimum wage going up, that we are seeking to mitigate through a change in working methodologies and also the introduction of some additional technology, which hopefully will improve efficiency. The second aspect, obviously FY 2022 includes the full year of us being a PLC company for the first time. The second item, which is highlighted, is the trading of new stores. A new store obviously takes some time to ramp up, and it was also affected in its first year or the year of opening by various pre-opening costs. There is an adjustment or an accounting recognition in FY 2022 of just approximately GBP 1 million worth of pre-opening costs, which are obviously non-recurring. Most importantly, you can see that on the right-hand side of the table, the group loss after tax has changed materially between FY 2021 and 2022. This is down to some technical audits and assessments that are done on a half-yearly and full-year basis. This includes the two areas which are highlighted there. The most significant of which is goodwill. Just to highlight that the property one of 31 million, so both of these are non-cash, which is obviously very important. The first item, property, we would expect as the forecasts change and trading improves, that this is potentially a reversing item as well. The goodwill is non-reversing, so that will be a charge which will be permanent in the accounts, but it is non-cash. Finally, there has been an increase in net debt. It's very clear in terms of the rationale behind it. As you can see there, we set out, once again, the significance of the settlement of prior year accruals. You'll appreciate that in November 2021, we became a listed company, but the actual substantial element of the bills were only paid in FY 2022 to the equivalent of GBP 6.8 million. The new store openings is a combination of the CapEx for those stores of approximately six and a half million pounds, the pre-opening costs of about GBP 1 million, and the balance is the trading in the first period as these stores ramp up. We expect the stores to become profitable as time goes by. In terms of the cash flow, you can see once again, with reference to the table on the right-hand side, cash flows from operating activities has not materially changed between FY 2021 and 2022, but you can see that there is a significant movement of working capital. This is for the reasons which I'd highlighted in the previous slide. The most significant of which is both the listing costs, GBP 6.8 million, and the settlement of the landlord arrears at the time that we executed various landlord concession agreements. That is by nature non-recurring as we move forward. In terms of the investment in the business, you can see that we opened 5 new stores, I've listed them there, for the equivalent of GBP 6.5 million. The balance of the cash has actually been invested in maintenance CapEx, and this is obviously very important for us in order to make sure that the guest experience is maintained. At the bottom, I've sort of highlighted some elements in terms of what is the drivers of the net cash used in financing activity, which you can see is obviously a significant value as presented within the cash flow. We've continued to meet all our banking obligations, and there is a slide a little bit later which I'll touch upon that. The most significant cost, obviously, is the lease liabilities, as the business model that we operate on is one that doesn't include freehold assets. Net debt. In terms of the most significant thing to highlight on this page is if you look over the past four years, once again, Stephen will touch upon this again in a later slide, there's a significant reduction in the gross bank debt. That has had some impact offset in terms of the cash holdings. What we have tried to do is to utilize and become wiser in terms of how we're going to take in our treasury management. On the left-hand side, in terms of the bullets, you can see that we have continued to meet all our obligations under our banking facility agreements. Most importantly, through utilization of cash and operating the bank balance in a much leaner manner and utilizing the revolving credit facility for those peak times when we need them, we've offset the increases in terms of the interest rates, which have moved from a quarter percentage point of December 2021, 3.5% at the end of the year, and more recently, almost 4.5%. Significantly also, we funded all our investments from new store openings from our cash. What we have done in terms of the lease liabilities, you can see a small decrease. What's most significant here is we have exited a couple of leases which were unprofitable. They had come to the end of their term and reference is made to Guildford there, and equally, there's Covent Garden, which we had declared previously in previous presentations. What we have done equally is where there are profitable leases that are stores which have a material impact and contribute significantly to us or, a wider estate, we've extended these leases, and Meadowhall is mentioned as an example. We've also looked at a couple of existing leases to look for ways to actually reduce these costs as we move forward, and we successfully renegotiated one of our leases, which executed this month. Lastly, to highlight the revolving credit facility, we had a GBP 30 million facility at the beginning of the year. At the reporting date, it was drawn to a level of seven and a half million pounds. What I would flag is that this will fluctuate in terms of the seasonality and also the quarter ends when the largest proportion of cash leaves the business for VAT and landlord payments. To highlight that we have, just this past Friday, successfully renegotiated our banking facilities with our two core lending banks. These have been extended. The banking term has been extended through to the first of January 2025. Are most appreciated to the banks for their vote of confidence in us. In terms of the content of these various agreements which have been entered into, the most significant thing is that we have recognized the current trading period, so there have been changes to the covenant tests and the suite of tests for the period through to the end of 2023, at which time we will revert to the more normalized test ratios which people will be more familiar with. We've been compliant with all terms of the facility, which is obviously something which we are very pleased to be able to confirm. In terms of the revolving credit facility, you can see that this has been reduced for 30 million- 21.5 million. There's two reasons for this. One is that there's an element of unutilized capacity. With the change in terms of capital allocation, which Stephen will go into in greater detail, there's no longer a need for us to have such a significant facility. Equally, there was also a requirement under our previous banking facilities for a substantial minimum liquidity level, which prevents us from actually accessing the full facility. Therefore, we've reduced this as a means to actually reduce the cost associated with the facility. Finally, just to highlight, in terms of the refinancing, we will be seeking to go to market to refinance the business towards the second half of this year. The ambition is for this to be completed in quarter one 2024 in time for our next set of annual financial statements. Just on this next section on business review, as many of you know, I just joined the board of Hostmore in August. What I've been doing over the past six or eight months is really looking into the business and digging into it to understand it a bit better. Coming in from the outside, there were some misconceptions that I had and I think might be widely shared by other shareholders in the market. What I would like to do in this section is to address some of them. Then related to this, talk about the remedies and other plans that we have to address them and to make the business a bit better. I think the first question that's probably of primary importance is are we still relevant? Is TGI Fridays still relevant? When you hear people talk about it, often what you'll hear is, "Well, it's a vestige of the 1980s," or, "Only Gen Xers went there, and it's no longer relevant to young people." You know, I think from the outside that this is a legitimate question. When you look at the data, though, I think it presents the brand in a different light. Everything that we see says that TGI Fridays is still a desired destination for what we call occasions. Whether it's a date night or a birthday or just a night out on the town, customers still want to come to TGI Fridays to do their celebration. It won't be surprising that various surveys give an indication of consumers' awareness of TGI Fridays the brand. Just one survey that I've looked at was a YouGov survey done a few months ago. Julie or our marketing team could provide others. On this particular one, what it showed is that 94% of consumers were aware of the TGI brand, which I think is a very high awareness. What it shows is that we were 4th among casual dining brands. Interestingly, the three that were ahead of us were pizza places. Among sort of traditional casual dining brands, we were largely the best. I think that's an important benchmark. I think the other thing that's sort of surprising, at least to me it was, is the positive view that all consumers have of our brand. And in the same YouGov survey, it showed that 40% of the overall population had a positive view of TGI Fridays. 40% of itself may not sound very high, but the highest on the survey was 60% for another brand. It's pretty high up there. More interesting to me, and perhaps to others, is on this point about whether it's still relevant for younger people. It's interesting to see that millennials had a higher positivity rate for the brand than the overall population, and actually had higher than Gen X. What this really leads to is that the brand is still very relevant. Interestingly, the consumers that we want to go after, sort of the meat of the market, still want to come. Now it's up to us to give people a reason to come to the store and spend money in the location. I think a second question that I had from the outside was when you look at the like-for-like sales, and particularly when you compare them first half versus the second half. We had talked about in September when we announced that the second half sales were sort of trending down 12%, 13%, 14%. That was down from the 10% the first half. One concern was, well, it's just a perpetual decline. What's interesting is what the chart on the right shows is that really a tale of two halves, but both the halves are sort of similar in a different way. This is all versus 2019, by the way. The second half was lower versus 2019 than the first half, but each of the halves was broadly flat for the entire period. The red dotted line in the middle of the page is the middle of the year, something happened. I think that's when the inflation really started to kick in and affect consumer demand. I think people got back from their holiday and decided not to go out in their local towns. I think what's important to us is that it wasn't a perpetual slide during the second half. It just reset at a lower level and plateaued. From our perspective, what that means is, that's a new base from which we can grow. As you'll have seen in our announcement, the results for the first 16 or so weeks of this year have shown that the sales have maintained, and we're starting to see some growth, the initiatives that we're undertaking. Another question that one might have from the outside is our ability to generate cash. The change in cash that we reported for 2022 was a cash decline 23 million. On the surface, that's a fairly large negative number. I think it's important to understand what's underlying that. If you look at the right-hand chart, what we've done is we've broken it into various bits. In round numbers, what you'll see is that we utilized about 10 million of cash for, I'll call financing activities. We used about 10 million of cash for new store openings. We used a further 10 million of cash for non-recurring items. This equates to 30 million of explainable items that we use our cash for. The 20 million outflow of cash would become a 10 million positive of underlying cash flow generation business. I think that's a very important point. What this GBP 10 million of cash generation does is it's a base from which we can work and hopefully grow from. What the conclusion is that because we're cash flow positive, we have sufficient cash to provide all of the maintenance capital expenditures that we need to maintain the business appropriately. We can also meet all of our financing obligations. Again, the task for us now is to take this GBP 10 million of cash flow generation and build on that. Another question from the outside is concerns of what I'll call over-leverage position. As you'll know from our announcement, we had about GBP 28 million of net debt at the end of 2022. If you look at the chart on the right, I think it's helpful to understand how this factors in a historical context, which I think sometimes gets lost, that over the 4 years prior to 2022, both before and during the pandemic, we reduced our net debt by about 80%, GBP 50 million- GBP 10 million. Pretty consistent each year. If you look at the chart for 2022, the bar there, and what you'll see is that part of it is outlined in red dashes. What that represents is the GBP 20 million that we spent in 2022 on new store openings and non-recurring costs. If you hadn't done those, by the end of the year, we would have been left with approximately GBP 8 million of net debt, which interestingly, would have continued the progression of reducing net debt that we had had historically. I think not only does it show what the pro forma opportunity is, what it illustrates is the debt reduction power of the business, which we'll take you through in a minute. Just before you move on, I think one other point is that's all on an absolute basis. On a relative basis, I think it's interesting to look at who's quite likely our most significant industry peer that's public is Restaurant Group. If you look at what Restaurant Group reported for their end of 2022 net debt to EBITDA ratio, they did about 2.2. We were at about 2.5. Broadly in line. I think the difference is that The Restaurant Group is generally thought to be adequately capitalized. I think that there had been an impression that Hostmore was over-leveraged, which I think is not the case. You'll see in the sub-bullet there about an equivalent pro forma multiple. What that is that takes into effect all of the cost reduction actions that we've undertaken in the last several months. Not only on a relative basis are we looking okay, but if you were to factor in all the things that we've worked on this year, our ending leverage from last year would have been quite a bit better. Recognizing these observations and the outcomes thereof, what do you do about it? We've taken a look at it, and I think we've come to the decision that we need to revise our capital allocation policy. Simply put, what we're planning to do for the foreseeable future is prioritize debt reduction and shareholder returns over new store growth. What that means is that we anticipate no new store openings until 2025, and we're very appreciative to our U.S. franchisor that they've agreed to defer all of our new store openings for the next two years. The reason this is important is that in broad terms, this will save Hostmore approximately GBP 13 million of cash in the next 24 months that can be used to directly reduce our indebtedness. The second thing is that we're going to focus on managing the cost base more proactively and efficiently, and I'll take you through what that means in a minute. I think the other thing which is a bit more nuanced is our organic growth initiatives. What we're saying is that they're high ROI initiatives. What that means is these are low capital investment, internally generated initiatives that Julie will take you through in a minute, a few of the examples. I think the important characteristics of them are that we're able to trial them before rolling them out broadly. There's a diversified approach to these initiatives. What I mean by that is we're not beholden to one thing working out on a moonshot. Because these initiatives are relatively low capital investment, they have very attractive cash conversion. Then once they're proven to work in the trial stores, we can roll them out to the entire estate. Once we have this free cash flow, we're going to dedicate all of our free cash flow towards the full repayment of borrowings. I think just to be clear, historically, we and other competitors have net debt target ratios or ranges. What our ratio and range target is zero. We don't want to have any debt any longer, we're planning on doing that from internally generated cash flow over the next couple of years. I'll take you through an illustration of that shortly that it's not implausible that we'd be able to do this. Once we have done that, all of the free cash flow of the business will become fully available to shareholders. What we'd like to do is start evaluating distributions to shareholders after the borrowings have been repaid. I think we'll, recognizing the preferences in the U.K., we'll prioritize dividend, but if the share price isn't responding, we'll do buybacks as appropriate. We'll look to start reviewing our options for that with the fiscal 2024 results. This is just on the cost reductions that have been announced. If you go down the list of the priorities for the capital allocation, we talked about new store openings, which is pretty straightforward. The cost reductions is the second item. As Alan mentioned earlier, significant expense had been added to the business essentially during the pandemic with the idea that we were going to have a multi-brand platform facilitate a new store rollout. We also had added expense from becoming a PLC. I think just sort of as a matter of practice, because we were focused on expansion, efficient operations were somewhat deprioritized. As you'll see in the announcements from Friday and today, we've announced a total aggregate expense reduction of about GBP 5.9 million. You can see on the chart there that the broad buckets is where they are located and the effect on 2023. I think just two things to note from this. I think the numbers are generally self-explanatory. Of the cost reduction, about 70% of it is fixed. The reason that's important is it's immediate accretion to the bottom line rather than waiting on volumes to come through. I think the second thing is that in particular on the staff reductions, we're very focused on ensuring that the guest experience is not diminished. Essentially all of the staff reductions were what I'll call corporate cost reductions, not in-store reductions. This isn't reducing servers in stores, this is reducing executives in the management team. It costs a little bit to implement these, but I think it's well worth it. I think the other thing to mention is that oftentimes management teams have ambitions about doing cost reductions over numerous years. I think it's very important to note that these cost reductions have been completed. The people that have been let go are now out of the business. The contracts with vendors that we're no longer entering into have been terminated. These are all completed cost reductions, not something that are aspirational for the future, and they're already starting to accrue and should benefit this year by about GBP 4 million. We're also looking at further cost reductions. We're not in a position today to say what that number is because they're not finished. Once they are finished and we do have a number, we'll make a further announcement to the market. I wouldn't say it'd be in the next few weeks, but we will when we're ready. I think the other thing is that we're also looking at store rationalization. Like any company, we have stores that are loss-making. Some of them come to their natural end of their lease, and we just don't renew the lease. Some of them, we're looking at options to either exit them or to improve them. The two stores recently have been closed that were loss-making simply because they came to the end of their natural life. That's another cost saving which we can talk about. I've talked a lot about high level observations and some of the actions that we're taking back with them. Now I'm going to turn it over to Julie so she can take you through some of the an illustration of some of the growth initiatives that she's undertaking as a tangible effort to build on what we already have. Thanks, Stephen. This is a really compelling slide that you can see from the end of 2021. I'll go into the detail behind these numbers, but our Net Promoter Score was 18, and currently it sits at 46. Our Guest Opinion Score was 68, and currently it sits at 78. Our TripAdvisor rating was 3.6, and currently it sits at 4.4. I have to say, the guest experience is driven through our brilliant in-store teams. Guests are telling us what we're doing well and also what we're not doing well, and both of which are pivotal for our continuous improvement. We've got so much intelligence across the customer experience platform, but we've never really utilized it. We've never drilled in daily around regional performances. We've never drilled in previously at store level, dish satisfaction and occasion metrics. That all changed as we came into 2022. The feedback dashboard has great insights, and as I said, it wasn't really used or fully utilized or understood amongst our GM population, and also basically to effectively drive positive team behavior and business performance. The improvements in H2 2022 have been driven through real-time guest engagement, developing our teams to exceed every guest expectation by making each visit memorable. We're now using the data for venue in innovation, evolution, and procurement purposes to support key decision making across the business. I have to say an example of that would be bottomless brunch. We kept it to minimal time slots, our guests were absolutely shouting and saying, "We want to come on different days at different times." Actually we could do that, so we opened it up, our bottomless brunch sales have actually quadrupled since we've done so. Daily focus by our teams is also a game changer for 2023 as we continue to improve call management and frontline hospitality skills, as well as back of house and kitchen teams connect with food quality and speed of service scores. A really pleasing slide. In 2020, the brand was renamed Fridays, adopting a refresh to help appeal to a new younger audience. This meant we had lower awareness. As you can see to the right of the slide, Google search identified that Fridays had lower awareness. 92% of guests still use TGI Fridays. Actually, guests thought Fridays was a similar brand to TGI Fridays. A bit of research in one of our new store openings, we was outside and basically we said, "Are you coming into Fridays?" And they said, "What's that?" They didn't realize it was a TGI Fridays brand. This slide gives an update on some positive changes we've made to the brand to support one of our three key marketing growth objectives, which is to grow positive brand consideration. We've used the CGA brand tracking and Google search. We've identified that the move to Fridays from TGI Fridays in 2020 lost us both brand awareness and recognition. At that point as well during lockdown, the brand became dark and didn't use or leverage its awareness. We've therefore decided to transition back to TGI Fridays, our heritage brand name, which we're most well known for. This supports our broader strategy to go back to our roots and rebuild what we are best at, and that's the original American cocktail bar and restaurant famous for celebrations. The iconic TGI Fridays brand name will support increase in our brand awareness and also brand recognition. Out of all of the growth initiatives, I have to say this is the most exciting of all. One of our strategic growth objectives for 2023 is going back to our heritage and being famous for cocktails. It will secure new guests and repeat visits. Our brand was known and once famous for its cocktails, but drinks as a share of revenue declined from circa 26% in FY19 to 14% in 2022. Vertical drinking was banned, and we became predominantly known as a restaurant, sometimes very transactional. The fun and flair was minimized, and we need to get that back. Our competitors at present have the edge. Repositioning our bars will attract new guests and support the recovery of sales revenue, especially post 8:00 P.M., and become part of the bedrock of our proposition. This in turn will improve our value proposition. Our drinks platform was underutilized. The drinks revenue is highly attractive as it encourages guests to stay longer and spend more, which is high profit margin whilst being less labor intensive than food revenue. We've introduced 2-for-1 cocktails, which is neutral to our margins due to a combination of pricing and also menu engineering. Two-for-one pricing was trialed in 6 stores in the early part of 2023. The trial stores comprised 25% of revenues versus 14% at our non-trial stores. We've since rolled out to the full estate. That was from week 7, with results similar to the trial stores. The opportunity for circa GBP 2.8 million of incremental revenue to be delivered per annum. We're also introducing further bar-focused revenue opportunities, so experiential master classes, American themed with fun and flair, very Tom Cruise style. bottomless brunch offers as well to attract further footfall in 2023. Our CRM and loyalty strategy is essential to our growth. Currently TGI Fridays has 700,000 app sign-ups. TGI Fridays captures 13% of year-to-date sales on the app versus 9% year-on-year, so +4% versus last year, which is a significant improvement. In 2023, we want to further grow our rewards members and increase loyalty with existing members. A rewards member average spend per booking is 66 GBP versus a non-user of 54 GBP. We're also driving acquisition to the app with key offers, for example, a free dessert or a glass of prosecco for Mother's Day, and we also drive retention with a 20% bounce back for members. The bar chart to the right shows average spend per rewards member per year. Our strategy to recruit to our rewards app is the right one. These guests are more valuable as they visit more often and spend considerably more to earn their stripes and claim their rewards. In terms of digital marketing, our growth plan implemented through a reallocation of resource within the marketing budget. At one time it was a one size fits all. It's no longer that. We're using our segmentation data and key time slot analysis as a call to action to drive more targeted audiences and digital channels to deliver more online bookings. We're looking at new revenue streams to help close the gap, including UNiDAYS, and we'll start working with Awin from the end of May, including Blue Light Card, who are the fastest growing affiliate marketing platform to reach new guests. Using Wi-Fi technology, we can track visits to store of guests who we're targeting with our digital media advertising. The chart here shows our total visits to store exceed the volume of bookings, suggesting we are driving traffic to store over and above what we have captured as an online booking. I'll hand over to Stephen. Great. Thank you. Just going to wrap up with a few slides here, some for housekeeping and some for bringing things together. On the corporate governance, I think we pretty well covered that Julie was announced as permanent CEO. We undertook a pretty wide-ranging process that allowed us to see many high qualified candidates. We think Julie stacked up very well against them, so we're glad that she agreed to join us permanently. On the board composition, currently we have five directors, and five will remain following the AGM. As previously announced, Gavin Manson's announced his retirement at the AGM to take on an executive role, and then Julie will join the board at the conclusion of the AGM. We're expecting to add two new independent non-executive directors near term because following the AGM only two non-executives will be independent. If you look at the skill set on the board today or following the AGM, the non-executive directors, the three of us will all be accounting and finance backgrounds. Our objective with the new non-executives is to add new skills like marketing or HR and hospitality and leisure more generally. That search process is well underway. Met with many qualified candidates that we're pretty advanced with, so we're hoping to announce at least one of them by the AGM, and then the second one will come shortly thereafter. Turning to trading, results for the first 16 weeks of this year have been encouraging. What we're seeing is that gross revenues are up 2% on last year if you're adjusting for the VAT differential, and like-for-like revenue is flat. Referring back to the slides earlier showing the plateau, I think that phenomenon has continued, and now we're starting to see some growth coming through from the initiatives and others that Julie has just took you through. On the inflation front, you know, we're not immune to the industry issues, but I think that it's fair to say that we're seeing the inflation moderated. If you look at utilities, for instance, I think it's encouraging for us that when we were doing our budgeting in December, we were forecasting that utilities would be 11 million higher in 2023 than 2022. Looking at current spot prices, it's looking to be more like GBP 6 million. It's, you know, quite a big differential that's in our favor. Also we're going to be looking at hedging our exposure at these lower levels so that we're, have some certainty going forward. As Alan mentioned earlier, our food and drinks pricing cost is up about 9%. While that's unhelpful, it actually compares favorably to the 24% that we're seeing across the industry. As Alan mentioned, we're doing our best to mitigate those price increases by working with our suppliers. The national minimum wage is adding about 5 million of expense to our labor cost this year. What we're doing on that front is we're being more creative and thoughtful about our staffing, particularly in the stores, but also helping in other places in the corporate side by doing cost reductions to mitigate it at the group level. I think this last point on net debt, this is really more expectation setting rather than anything else. What we're anticipating is that our first half ending net debt will be roughly similar to the GBP 32 million that we said it is presently as compared to the GBP 28 million at the end of the year. I think the reason to point this out is I think it's not fully appreciated. Certainly, I didn't appreciate it from the outside about the headwinds that every first half of the year faces. The first half of every year is the seasonably weaker half of the year, also because our fourth quarter is our strongest quarter when all the come due, they're paid in the first half of the following year. I think in this particular case, we also have some exceptional actions that we need to pay for this year. I think all of the 32 million or thereabout, it's not an exact figure for the end of the half, is broadly in line with what we're expecting to get to where we need to for the end of the year. We just don't want people to be surprised when they see that when the 30 and 32 numbers come out. I think the final two pages are really just a wrap-up summary. We've talked about a lot of things today. These next few slides are really just intended to bring them all together. I think going through this, I want to be clear that these are not forecasts or guidance for the firm. They're really meant to be a compilation to assist the market with understanding all the various movements that are going on in the business. Starting with EBITDA on the chart there, what you'll see is that if you start with our 11 million of EBITDA reported in 2022, if you add back the new store opening losses, as Alan mentioned, that usually happens for pre-opening costs and also from the fact that they're ramping up, those won't be recurring going forward. Also, as Alan mentioned, new stores typically tend to ramp up to about the steady-state basis, which would also add some additional EBITDA. If you add in our cost reductions that have been announced, that's about another GBP 6 million. If you're being fair about it, in 2022, we did benefit from about GBP 4 million of the decreased VAT the first quarter of last year. What that says is, if you take all the things that you know about, if we had been running a more efficient lean business last year, last year's EBITDA would have been around GBP 19 million. If you roll that forward to 2023, what does it look like? We've like many people, have put in price increases that would add about GBP 13 million. Against that, you have the inflation that we've talked about, food and utilities and labor. It would take last year's GBP 19 million and put it about GBP 14 million or GBP 15 million in EBITDA. Again, just to be clear, that's not a forecast. That's just a baseline of putting on the paper all the things that we know about today. The question is, what does it look like going forward? What we're hoping is that these growth initiatives are incremental to the pro forma EBITDA. In general terms, a change in revenue as it drops to the bottom line at about a 50% rate. Every GBP of revenue translates to about GBP 50 of EBITDA. Think of similarly, the thing that we're most focused on, getting back to one of the earlier slides, is getting new people in the stores. Those millennials that either haven't come or have lapsed coming. A 1% change in covers adds about GBP 1 million of EBITDA to the business. On the levels of EBITDA that we're talking about, that's a fairly material improvement. On the last point here, the 2023 bonus scheme for the executives only begins to accrue when EBITDA exceeds GBP 20 million. Again, while we're not providing a forecast, I think it's certainly an indication of where the board and the management thinks it should get to. In historical context, the business did GBP 25 million of EBITDA in 2019. It's not implausible that we can get back to that level. We're doing our best to get there. If you go to the next page, this is just tying in the debt reduction point. What this chart shows is this is just very simple arithmetic. This isn't a forecast, and it's not intended to be very specific. It's just meant to be illustrative. What it does is it takes the beginning net debt today of GBP 28 million. It adds in the pro forma EBITDA from the prior page. No adjustments to it otherwise, just simply take the prior page as EBITDA. Takes out the capital expenditures for maintenance. It takes out a related interest expense. I think it's important to note also the interest expense here is shown gross of tax, but at the present time, we're not paying any tax, so we don't have to put benefit from it. What it shows is that on a pro forma basis, you would have somewhere around GBP 20 million debt by the end of this year. You can roll that forward to subsequent years. At the end of 2024, you're getting pretty close in the single digits. We're down to not much net debt remaining. It's at that point that free cash flow of the business becomes available to shareholders. I think looking at it's not implausible that we could pay off all of our debt the next 24 months or so. Then after that, we can take a view on what to do with the cash that comes out of the business. Going to the final page, just as a summary wrap-up. We've talked about a lot of things, I think it's fair to say that we think TGI Fridays remains a relevant brand that resonates with consumers and is desirable for consumers. The business is cash flow positive and is able to meet all of its obligations for maintenance, growth, financing. The revised capital allocation policy is now, I think, pretty clear what our objective is to repay our debt in full and then look at distributions to shareholders. The inflation that the industry is experiencing, we think is moderating. Is being helped at Hostmore by some proactive responses. We'll announce further cost reductions or store rationalizations as and when they occur as opposed to prospectively. Then, it's really up to Julie and the team to deliver on the growth initiatives to build on the baseline that we've established for both profits and for cash flow. With that, I'll turn it over to the operator to open up the line for questions. We've got a few questions here. Thanks for all the wonderful announcements and for shooting down investor concerns. Two questions, please. Have you considered removing offers such as the 20% discount through your app to improve profitability further? Prices seem very fair without discounts. Given that you serve the same food and cocktails at all Fridays restaurants, what would you think explains the difference in ratings between the 4.5-star restaurants, such as Doncaster and Durham, and the 3-star restaurants, such as Stratford, O2, and Croydon? Have you considered replacing managers at the underperforming restaurants? That's from Simon Bergmann, who is a retail investor. Yes. If I can, go to the latter. It is work in progress. We're currently sat at 4.4, in terms of our Tripadvisor. We are moving general managers about. We are also educating general managers and supporting general managers and their teams to give a better guest experience. I think if we go back to my comments at first is we've got new general managers in the business as well. It is a whole education piece in utilizing the data. Actually, hospitality starts within. I think once we engage our teams, then we'll start to see those scores go up. A lot of the stores as well, to be fair, is when we've looked at the traffic of data that's come through with the TripAdvisor, it's been when we are at peak, and we've taken learnings from that as well. We've put more teams on, and we've also put reduced menus in store as well to satisfy those guests that are coming through and also to increase the Guest Scores also. Can I come? Yeah. Israel. Simon, if I could gather the other part of the question. What we find very important is to look at the lifetime... If you can still hear me, I'll carry on. What we also find the gap is they actually shop up. It's not as if we use any benefit. What we do find is they use that discount to actually acquire or purchase dessert or a more expensive dish on the menu as well. That tends to be very... Then finally, also, we operate a very low discount relative to our peer groups. So we do very close monitor performance or discounts that we run. Loyalty app, we find has been something that's very sticky because those customers dining with us over. Thank you. We'll go to Tim Barrett at Numis. The data you've given on price is very helpful. It looks like that GBP 13 million translates to about 6.5% like-for-like price increases. Is that the right kind of ballpark? Does that mean that volumes are currently still off, in the kinda mid-single-digit or covers still off in the kinda mid-single-digit range? A question on cash flow. Again, your guidance or your framework is really interesting. Can you say what level of non-recurring items you expect this year? I'm guessing the GBP 10 million underlying annual cash flow is before any of those. Just one last question. In the, in the statement, you seem to be alluding to an inflection point in second half like-for-likes. Is that the case? Thanks very much. Thanks very much. If I could touch on the price to start with. You're right in as much as we're looking at and we've modeled about a 6.5% price increase across the year. What we have found is that in certain instances, we're actually behind the market in terms of how our competitors have moved their pricing. More recently, we actually adjusted our pricing slightly more than what we'd originally anticipated. We will then view what our competitors do and how the market actually reacts. What I am very pleased to say is that there's very little negative feedback that's come back from customers in terms of the new menu that went in at the beginning of April. That does give us an opportunity as we move forward, possibly move prices slightly ahead of the 6.5%, but obviously taking cognizance of what our competitors do and what the customer says as well. In terms of coverage, you're absolutely right. In terms of centuries, we are slightly down. We've had the first 16 weeks of trading have been very good in some weeks, but we have had the odd week where that's been a little bit softer. I'd say the odd week is more aligned with sort of the middle of the month before the payday, and sort of outside the time to any major events such as Easter or Mother's Day or something like that. We are generally more comfortable today than we might have been four or five months ago in half year two last year. In terms of the cash and the non-recurring aspects, you're absolutely right. At this moment in time, we're not aware of any material value non-recurring items, apart from those small elements which Stephen may have mentioned, the costs associated with termination of a small group of staff as part of our staff cost reduction plan. Finally, in terms of the inflection, yes, there is a view that, and I guess this is guidance that we take from the market, which is and various other sort of financial institutions, we're aware that inflation is meant to be coming down. We're aware that interest rates are meant to be capped. We're aware that there's the possibility of utilities coming down. All of that should lead into a more positive consumer mindset. We are optimistic that as the year progresses, that there will be an improvement in volumes. We're not being overly aggressive in terms of that assumption at this stage. We've got another question from Simon Bergmann. Rebranding back to TGI Fridays seems like a great idea. Have you considered changing the name of Hostmore as well? I think the short answer is not at the moment. That's the end of questions. Do you have any closing remarks? Just thank you everyone for joining today. As we mentioned, this will be put onto the website of Hostmore shortly. We look forward to reporting back again the half year results in September, if not before. Thank you, everyone. Have a good day. Thank you. Many thanks, Stephen, Julie, and Alan, and to you all for joining. This is the end of the webinar.