Good morning all, and welcome to the Marlowe plc half year results call. My name is Adam, and I'll be your operator today. I will now hand you over to Alex Dacre, Chief Executive of Marlowe to begin. Alex, please go ahead when you are ready. Good morning, and welcome to the Marlowe plc FY 2022 half year results presentation. I'm Alex Dacre, Chief Executive. I'm here with Adam Councell, our CFO, who we're delighted to have joined the group earlier this year. I'll kick off this morning with a summary of our strong first half performance before Adam talks us through the numbers, and then I'll run through the major progress we've made on our growth strategy and explain why we're so excited for the future before opening up to some Q&A. You'll hear this morning that we've delivered on each of the four key strands of our strategy in the first half, with strong organic growth and 12 acquisitions, deepening and broadening our compliance platform while strengthening our operations via effective integration and expanding our margins. You'll hear of the major progress delivering our digitalized strategy to become the market leader in compliance software. Marlowe is a leader in business-critical services and software which assure regulatory compliance. Our two divisions, Governance, Risk and Compliance, and Testing, Inspection, and Certification, help companies to stay compliant with the constantly evolving regulatory issues that they face. As a result of the regulations that drive our model, such as the Health and Safety at Work Act, Fire Safety Regs, or the Employment Rights Act, over 85% of our revenues are recurring, delivered as a recurring contract or a subscription. It's in the context of our sharply focused strategy to deepen, broaden, strengthen, and digitalize our compliance activities that we are very pleased to have delivered such strong financial, operational and strategic progress. The highlights of which you can see on slide four, which I'll talk you through now before Adam goes through the financials in more detail. Group revenue grew 61% to GBP 134.5 million. We now have current annualized run rate revenue of over GBP 335 million. We really have become a platform of scale. The benefits of that scale, operational and technological improvements, and the success of our integration programs can be clearly seen in the strong margin accretion we've delivered in the first half. Divisional adjusted EBITDA grew 300 basis points to 17.8%, and our current run rate is now 19%. Adjusted EPS grew 50% to 16 pence thanks to strong organic growth and significant acquisition-led growth. Organic revenue growth was 15%, and we estimate that underlying organic growth when adjusted to COVID was 8%, which is a continued acceleration reflecting strong levels of new business and cross-sale success, higher standards of service and compliance KPIs, reducing attrition and the positive structural drivers that are supporting growth across our markets, such as increasing corporate and societal focus on ESG. We've made major progress building our software scale and delivering our digital strategy. We've now achieved our target of 10% of group revenue being generated from SaaS. We now generate over GBP 35 million of software annual recurring revenue and approximately 20% of group profit is now driven by software. We've become a major compliance software force in the market. What this all means is that we enter the second half in the strong position, and we recently announced we expect to exceed market expectations for the full year. We also expect to materially overachieve our 2024 target of GBP 100 million EBITDA. I now want to talk you through progress against our three-year strategy. We have a clear growth strategy which we set out at our CMD in February of this year. This slide shows how we're delivering strongly on what we've set out. The Marlowe strategic vision is to deliver a one-stop approach to our clients regulatory compliance needs. The four strands of our growth strategy are digital, deepen, broaden, and strengthen. Digitalizing our proposition to help customers monitor, analyze, and enhance their organization's compliance, their governance, and their performance. Deepening our presence in our markets, both organically and through further M&A to build on our leading positions. Broadening our capabilities and coverage across the compliance and business critical service and software landscape. Of course, strengthening our group by driving organic growth, driving cross-selling, expanding our margins through effective integration programs and operational improvements. We said in doing this, we would double group revenues to GBP 500 million and almost triple group adjusted EBITDA to GBP 100 million, leading us to achieve a 20% adjusted EBITDA margin while delivering in excess of 90% cash conversion. We were targeting a software ARR of at least 10% of overall group revenue. In the 10 months since the Capital Markets Day, we've made significant progress on each of these fronts, achieving our cash and SaaS ARR targets and making major progress towards our 2024 financial targets. Our digital strategy has been our principal focus. It's been significantly advanced by the acquisition of some key GRC software platforms, including Barbour, CoreStream, VinciWorks, and EssentialSkillz. Individually, these products are leading, but when taken together, they span regulatory data and information, enterprise risk management, compliance e-learning and governance audit and workflow tools. I'll go into detail about these specifically later in the presentation, but software is now over 10% of our revenue, generating GBP 35 million of ARR. Our software businesses are fast growing at 20%+ each year, and we see software acquisitions as a core part of our future growth strategy too. We've also used our scale to invest in creating our own products and the recent developments and launch of ProSure 360 marks a significant achievement for the group by bringing a new supply chain assurance software product to market. Supply chain compliance is a key risk area, and we design and build a product to help our clients qualify their suppliers via tech and verification with the ProSure accreditation. Key highlights of our Deepen and Broaden strategy include the acquisition of Healthwork in occupational health, which has given us a platform of scale and infrastructure to absorb our existing occupational health activities in a market which offers very attractive returns and is seeing increased demand from clients focused on their employee well-being. We continue to be active in our core TIC markets of fire safety and water compliance too, adding scale and deepening our market share. Significant deals include the in-period ACL Fire Safety, which added about GBP 10 million of revenue and the post-period GBP 30 million acquisition of Hydro-X, which added a further GBP 20 million of revenue. While we execute our deepen, broaden and digitalize strategy at pace, our focus is always on ensuring that the whole is so much more than the sum of the parts. This is our strengthen strategy. Our integration playbooks and management expertise continue to unlock operational improvements and efficiencies post-acquisition, clearly seen in our 300 basis point margin enhancement driven by effective integration programs, service delivery efficiency gains, increased revenue per day per fee earner, and the high margin nature of our GRC and software activities. A key integration milestone has been achieved with the launch of the WorkNest brand, consolidating all our legacy employment law and HR brands. We entered the market a few years ago, and we built a business from around GBP 5 million of revenue to over GBP 35 million today via acquisition and effective integration. Our autonomous divisional structure with real strength and depth across our management team, supported by large dedicated integration teams, allows us to undertake multiple integrations concurrently. It helps us to maintain the pace of our acquisition strategy, and it sets us up well for continued acquisition-led growth in the future. I'll now hand over to Adam to take you through the financials. Thanks, Alex. I'm going to take you through a few slides covering the key financial highlights from the first half of the financial year. Starting with the financial summary, revenue is up 61% on the prior year to GBP 134.5 million. The increase in revenue has been driven by a combination of organic growth and the impact of acquisitions made in both the current and prior year. Organic growth in the first half was 15%. However, this does include a normalization following the COVID-19 site access related issues that impacted the prior year in our group-based businesses, which sit in our TIC division. We estimate that once this is removed, underlying organic growth was still a strong 8%. At a profit level, we've seen operational margin improvement complement earnings accretive acquisitions, which have driven up adjusted EBITDA, operating profit and adjusted PBT by 90%, 122%, and 127% respectively. Divisional EBITDA margins increased by 300 basis points to 17.8%. Towards the end of the last financial year, we completed a GBP 100 million equity placing to fund future acquisitions, which we've been successful in deploying through the first half of this financial year. Despite the fully dilutive effect of the equity placing on the first half, the adjusted earnings per share has still increased by 50%. Lastly, net bank debt. That is, debt excluding our IFRS 16 leases has increased to GBP 42.3 million, which left us with headroom to deploy capital in the second half of the financial year, which I will come back to later on. In terms of divisional performance, our GRC division, which includes our employment law, HR, health and safety, occupational health, and e-learning businesses, has seen significant step forward in terms of scale. The attractive organic growth rate of 11% has been augmented with the successful execution of our acquisition strategy and resulted in the division tripling its revenues to GBP 34.4 million. EBITDA and operating profit have grown by 173% and 157% respectively. The margin movement reflects the change of business mix in this division as it has grown in scale. The net result is a step change in the scale of our GRC division that has resulted in it contributing over half of the group divisional adjusted operating profit in the first six months. Our TIC division, which is primarily made up of WCS Group, our water and air business, and our Marlowe Fire & Security business, performed well. The division did see a limited revenue impact in the prior year as a result of COVID restricting our ability to gain access to our customers' sites. The overall organic growth of 16% for this division does therefore include an element of normalization against the prior year. Total revenues in TIC increased by 39% to just over GBP 100 million. Adjusted EBITDA and operating profit increased by 56% and 92% respectively. One of the key factors in this increase was the EBITDA margin improvement of 150 basis points, which has been driven by operational improvement and the ongoing integration of the acquired businesses. In terms of cash generation, the group consists of businesses that have strong underlying cash metrics. This is borne out by the 96% cash conversion of operating cash flow to adjusted operating profit over the last 18 months. The 18-month period is the clearest representation of our cash generation as it eliminates much of the COVID-related timing differences around deferred payments to HMRC from working capital movements that originated in the prior year and unwound in the first half of this year. The attractive working capital characteristics of our business are clear through the net working capital percentage of revenue, which currently stands at 4%. This reflects the negative working capital characteristics of our GRC division, blended with a positive model seen in the TIC division. In terms of the balance sheet, this remains strong as we continue to grow. Net assets have almost doubled in the last 12 months to GBP 266 million. Net debt at the half year, excluding our IFRS 16 leases, was GBP 42.3 million. I'm just going to finish up with a short update on our current position. Overall performance in the first half was strong, with acquisitions continuing at pace and operational performance that highlights the continued integration, organic growth, and margin improvement agenda. I'm pleased that this momentum has continued into the second half. Since the first half, we've successfully deployed GBP 96 million on earnings accretive acquisitions. This has been facilitated by the execution of GBP 50 million equity placing in October 2021. In addition, we have also extended our debt facilities to GBP 130 million in October 2021. This has been achieved through the continued support of our existing lending syndicate. In terms of our current leverage, we estimate that following these events, group pro forma leverage is approximately 1.6x on a run rate basis, excluding IFRS 16 leases. This position gives us further scope for capital deployment during the rest of the financial year. Our strong trading has meant that we have increased guidance for the current year, and we're now well ahead of the current run rate needed to achieve our medium-term targets. This has been driven by the pace at which we have reached our current run rate revenues of GBP 335 million and adjusted EBITDA of GBP 60 million. On that note, I'll hand back to Alex. Thanks, Adam. Before talking to our M&A integration achievements and why we're at the forefront of ESG, I wanted to focus on the success of our governance risk and compliance division. We've transformed this business to become a one-stop shop for customers, and we're very well placed to go after this 5 billion+ addressable market. Over the last three years, we've built GRC into a leader in the U.K., and it now accounts for over half of our group operating profits. GRC encompasses our consulting and software solutions across governance, risk, and compliance software, EHS software, health and safety, employment law and HR, occupational health, and compliance e-learning. Our software platforms are used by clients to implement governance frameworks and to manage and monitor, audit, and control risk, compliance, and performance throughout their businesses. We provide a range of business critical services from health and safety support, advice, risk assessments, governance advice on employment law, HR or occupational health issues, enhancing the well-being of our clients' employees, and we train their people in relevant regulatory compliance standards via e-learning. Our services are delivered under three or five-year contracts with subscription-based revenues. We now have run rate revenue of around GBP 90 million and our strong organic revenue growth of 11%, which is supported by strong structural tailwinds for the type of services and software that we provide. In compliance e-learning, the increasing regulatory burden is resulting in organizations allocating large compliance budgets towards improving the compliance of their workforce in areas such as health and safety, diversity and inclusion, anti-money laundering, DAC6, bribery and corruption, and cybersecurity. In compliance software, we're seeing major demand from customers who are responding to drivers such as ESG reporting and governance requirements or the threat of fines from regulators for non-compliance. We deliver regulatory EHS data, which helps customers to understand the rules and how to implement their compliance regimes. We offer software tools for managing enterprise risk and policy management. We monitor and report on health and safety risks and incidents across premises and supply chains, and we can manage confidential employment law cases and HR compliance processes via our HR platform. Our employment law and safety offering provides specialist employment law and health and safety advice to U.K. companies. It benefits from strong structural drivers, resulting in increased employment law legislation and employee protections and corporate health and safety legislation, all leading to an increased need for compliance. WorkNest and William Martin are our leading platforms in the provision of these services, and service and software is usually sold as a bundled solution, creating a really sticky and effective solution. We significantly reduce risk for organizations. A non-WorkNest client has a 91% chance of losing at an employment tribunal, receiving average costs of GBP 15,000. A WorkNest client has only a 12% chance of losing. This saves our clients money, it reduces their risk, and it creates a more compliant, productive, and successful workplace. Another core part of our GRC division is our occupational health offering, which is growing very quickly. We identified the market as attractive and complementary to our health and safety and employment law consulting business and our broader GRC activities. The decision maker usually responsible for procuring occupational health is often also responsible for employment law in HR. Having identified the significant potential this market offered, the substantial synergy with our strategy, and the really attractive investment characteristics, we took the decision to build a business of scale. We've delivered on this objective over the past couple of years, and the increased focus on employee mental health and well-being continues to drive really strong demand in this core market. Our digital plan and software operations are front and center and crucial to our future strategy. We're creating a holistic software solution for compliance, from regulation tracking to the monitoring of compliance and governance actions, workflows, and data. Our software is developed in collaboration with our consultancy businesses such that it benefits from huge subject matter expertise from leading industry practitioners. There are three key software products which help to illustrate Marlowe's transformation in digital as we build a leader in compliance software. The acquisition of CoreStream, the leading governance risk and compliance platform, enables us to offer clients a complete GRC risk management solution. It strengthens our ability to support clients with their ESG objectives and supports large organizations with their corporate compliance and risk management needs. The business has recorded continued strong growth in the period since acquisition, with software as a service ARR currently 25% higher than the prior period. Barbour joined the group in July following the GBP 32 million carve-out from Informa plc. It's the U.K.'s market-leading EHS intelligence software platform. The deal significantly progressed our digital ambitions and broadened our capabilities such that we can now deliver access to regulatory compliance data, advice, and insights to our customers on a subscription basis to ensure that they remain fully abreast of regulatory developments. For instance, a health and safety professional working for a large industrial firm who wants to access the latest environmental regulations would use the platform to access relevant data, advice, practical guidance, and legal registers. Barbour's trading ahead of pre-deal expectations and has recorded its record sales month in the period since acquisition. The post-period end acquisition of VinciWorks for an initial consideration of GBP 39 million and the GBP 25 million acquisition of EssentialSkillz represent further major progress. A key focus of our digital strategy has been to develop scale and capabilities in the group's e-learning offering as clients' compliance training requirements become ever more complex in response to new legislation and workplace standards. The combination of VinciWorks, EssentialSkillz, and the previous acquisitions of DeltaNet and Silex make us a leader in this highly attractive, fast-growth software market. A key part of Marlowe's growth strategy is M&A. In the half year, we completed acquisitions across both TIC and GRC and across both software and services. We have a strong record of both executing and integrating acquisitions, and over the next two slides, I'll outline our approach to both aspects and why we're confident we're well-placed to consolidate our markets and continue to deliver superior returns for our shareholders. 16 acquisitions have been completed so far this financial year, with 12 completed during the first half for an initial consideration of GBP 76.5 million, adding approximately GBP 11.4 million of adjusted EBITDA. We expect these acquisitions to achieve a return on invested capital of at least 15% within a year. We completed three software acquisitions during the half, which helped take our SaaS revenues to over GBP 35 million ARR. We completed nine service acquisitions during the first half, in line with our deepen and broaden strategy to build leading positions and broaden our compliance activities. We've completed a further four acquisitions so far in the second half, deploying a further GBP 95.5 million. Looking forward, our M&A pipeline is strong. We have some 50 or so active conversations ongoing. Most of the deals we do are off market, and our seven strong M&A team are constantly reviewing new opportunities. We've developed a reputation as a very attractive acquirer in our markets, and potential acquisitions are attracted to the significant strategic value they can generate from joining our group. For instance, a fast-growth software business can accelerate growth further via access to our group-wide sales and marketing capability and our client list of around 50,000 customers. Key to our strengthening strategy is effective integration of acquired businesses. Our management teams are proficient in this field, and we're set up with six autonomous management teams and six well-invested and scalable back-office hubs that are designed to effectively absorb further scale. Our integration playbook is well developed. Our management team, supported by dedicated integration teams, transition acquired businesses into our operating model. We remove duplicated overhead, we install common IT platforms, we consolidate properties, we implement our operating processes and merge service deliveries, generate productivity and efficiency improvements and route density, leading to improved growth margins and enhanced standards of compliance for our customers. With software businesses, we integrate compliance data via APIs. We share features across our platforms. We enhance development processes, improve the user interface, benefit from DevOps synergies, and ensure close collaboration between our product and software directors. A really clear example of our integration success is illustrated with the recently launched brand of WorkNest, which makes up about half of our GRC activities. This follows the Ellis Whittam acquisition, which we completed in November 2020, and the subsequent integration of seven other businesses to form this operation. The integrated and rebranded business delivers a one-stop-shop solution of subscription-based employment law, HR, and safety consultancy and software. Ellis Whittam employed less than 100 people upon acquisition. WorkNest now employs more than 400. The business benefits from one integrated back office, one leadership team, one finance team and one sales and marketing engine, which consists of 60 people. A really well-developed marketing engine covering content, SEO, campaigns, and telemarketing to sell the entire range of WorkNest services. Our current integration programs across the board are very much on track, and we have the resources, the bandwidth, and the operating structure to do more. Marlowe is aligned with key ESG objectives. Our business model benefits from increasingly stringent regulations and increased ESG requirements on businesses. Much of what we do is non-discretionary as a result of the business-critical requirement for our services and the regulation that underpins what we do. Increasing corporate and societal focus on ESG, public expectations around safety, around compliance and well-being, and corporate brand and reputational concerns drive the need for our services. Our markets continue to grow at attractive rates because of heightened focus on the environmental, the social and governance issues inherent in business. The risks of non-compliance significantly outweigh the costs of implementing compliance. We help to ensure the safety of people, to improve governance, to protect assets, and to optimize client operating costs. Our services and software products are highly valued. In short, the areas that we address are becoming more and more important. ESG is crucially aligned with the vast bulk of our client offerings. Marlowe delivers software products and services which assure clients' compliance, enhance corporate governance standards, test and improve water and air quality to meet environmental standards, improve and protect employee health, well-being, and mental health, train people via e-learning in areas such as diversity and inclusion, anti-money laundering or bribery and corruption, manage workplace risk through regular audits and risk assessments, protect life and property from risks such as fire and safeguard employee legal rights. How we're implementing ESG internally matters too, and we've been making good progress. Building on extensive existing ESG initiatives and policies within each of our divisions, Marlowe's group-wide ESG committee has now been formally established with group-wide representation to ensure a standardized approach to data tracking and target setting. A group gap assessment has been completed and the results of this delivered. Now we're in the process of formalizing a KPI tracking system and improving our disclosure. We look forward to reporting our ESG progress in our full year's annual report. We're entering the second half in a strong position with a comprehensive compliance offering driven by very attractive market forces, particularly ESG tailwinds. We have scale with GBP 335 million of revenue. EPS has grown by 50% in the first half. We've surpassed our software as a service target already, GBP 35 million of ARR. We're benefiting from our disciplined compliance focus and our common channel to market by maximizing cross-selling and organic growth across the group now at over 8%. We're committed to executing against our compliance strategy and broadening our activities into complementary compliance markets where we can apply the same Marlowe growth model. Our integration playbook has allowed us to grow by M&A quickly, while also ensuring strong foundations and realizing synergies and enhanced margin by 300 basis points. Current margin is running at 19%. The effect of all this is that we recently upgraded our full year expectations and expect to materially overachieve against our 2024 EBITDA target of GBP 100 million. I would like to thank you for listening this morning, and we'll now have a short pause as the operator opens the line for the analyst Q&A session, which should begin imminently if you could be patient for a few moments. Thanks very much. If you would like to ask a question via the phone lines, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad now. When preparing to ask a question, please ensure your headset is fully plugged in and unmuted locally. That's star one on the phone lines to ask a question. Our first question today comes from Calum Battersby of Berenberg. Calum, please go ahead. Your line is open. Morning, guys. Thanks for the presentation this morning. I just have three questions all on the software disclosure. Firstly, would you mind giving us more of an idea of the split of the software earnings? There's clearly kind of quite a few different businesses within this. Is there any way you can break down the ARR between the different segments that you see within this? I don't know, e-learning, compliance management platforms, et cetera. Secondly, just to make sure I understood this correctly, Alex stated that these businesses are growing at 20%. Just to check, is that organic revenue growth, and do you believe that this can continue at that level? Then lastly, the software profits, as you say, are now more than 20% of the group run rate. Given higher growth than the rest of the group, this proportion should be growing over time. Obviously, if you continue to deploy more capital in this area, that will be higher still. I just wondered if you could give any update on strategic ambition for how much of the business you now want or expect the software earnings to reach. Thank you. Thanks, Calum. I'll say that. It's Alex here. In terms of the split of the software revenues and profits, well, we announced this morning that over 10% of group revenue now comes from software ARR. That translates into about GBP 35 million of ARR and about 20% of overall group profits now arising from software. That translates to about GBP 12 million-GBP 13 million. The four main segments to our software are compliance e-learning, GRC software, health and safety, and performance management software, the Elogbooks business that we acquired a couple of years ago. We don't disclose exact splits of the software, but in very rough terms, I think about 25%-30% of the profit comes from e-learning. About 30% comes from the combination of Meridian and CoreStream. And the balance comes from Omnitrack and the Elogbooks performance management systems. In terms of organic growth of software, yes, we're achieving in excess of 20% organic growth from selling additional software subscriptions. That will range from about sort of high double digits, so 15%, 20% up to 25% within VinciWorks and CoreStream. We're pretty confident that we'll be able to maintain that pace of growth going forward. There should potentially be opportunities to accelerate that pace of organic growth. Do remember we've got 50,000 customers across the group. The channel to market across our business lines is very similar to the decision maker making decisions about health and safety services. It's often the same decision-maker about who makes decisions about health and safety software. Likewise, we've got numerous risk and compliance officers who are making decisions about GRC software and also fire safety services. The ability to accelerate and turbocharge organic growth through cross-sell is one of the key strategic value adds that we can bring to software businesses that join the group. I think your last question was on what percentage do we expect software to be going forward, given that we've already achieved our medium-term 2024 target. Well, we're at about GBP 35 million now. We wanna get to GBP 50 million by 2024. As you've identified, we seem to be significantly overachieving again against that target. From a corporate development and growth perspective, I think it's fair to say we are allocating significant resource and energy into building our scale and what we see as a really, really attractive growth opportunity. Can we get that to 15% of overall revenues during that timeframe? We're not changing our target, but I think it could be a fair assumption that you will see the proportion of our technology revenues growing as a percentage of overall revenues in the coming months and years. The financial characteristics are highly attractive. We add additional users with a relatively limited incremental cost, and the strategic value that we can add to our group, but also to our customers in terms of enhancing their compliance standards is very significant. We find customers that are using both consultancy services and software have significantly higher standards of compliance. As a tool to achieve our overall group objective, which is to assure business-critical regulatory compliance for our customers, we see software as a major competitive advantage and a major tool that we can use to achieve that mission. Super clear. Thanks, Alex. Our next question is from Sam Dindol of Stifel. Sam, your line is open. Morning, guys. Thanks for the presentation. Three questions from me. First on the margin improvement piece. Obviously, very good progress in the first half, driven by M&A, but also the underlying improvement. Given you're already at 19% divisionally, EBITDA margin run rate, is there a sense that that 20% target could be quite easily overachieved going forward? Second, on wage inflation, are you seeing any impacts there, particularly tech division, and is it easy to pass those on? And then finally, on the GBP 100 million EBITDA target and materially overachieving that, should we read that as how early do you think you could achieve that target, in essence? I appreciate it's dependent on M&A, but could that be, you know, early 2024 rather than the end of 2024? Thanks, Sam. As you've identified, our run rate margin is currently just shy of our medium-term target. On a run rate basis, adjusted EBITDA margin is 19%. We said earlier in February this year that we wanted to achieve 20% by the end of financial year 2024. I think it is fair to make the assumption that we will significantly overachieve against that target. That improvement has been driven by a number of factors. It's been driven by improved productivity, efficiency, and utilization across the board, but particularly within our tech businesses. We've seen a 1.5 percentage-point improvement in margin largely as a result of higher revenue per day per fee earners. There's still significantly more to go at there. We also are now benefiting from the extremely well-invested back office infrastructure we've got. If you think of our strengthening strategy, which is all about driving forward effective integration and ensuring that our platforms are scalable and can support further growth, we're now starting to see attractive organic drop through as a result of that investment that we've made. There's no structural reason why we can't get to 25%. Look, we're not changing our targets today. Once we've got to the 20%, we will give the market guidance as to where we think is possible within an acceptable timeframe thereafter. In short, to answer your question, yes, we will look to significantly overachieve against that 20% target once we've met it. From a wage inflation perspective, we have seen some limited wage inflation, particularly in the route-based side of our business, the TIC side of our business. We saw when the economy opened up in sort of July, August, September that field-based service operatives were moving around to competitors a bit more than they had been historically. That led to a limited amount of wage inflation in the market. We've been very successful with passing that increased cost onto our customers via increased prices. No material impact on margin. Actually, towards the end of September, October, that short-term tightening significantly loosened and we're sort of getting back to steady-state normal situations. I don't think it'll be a long-term issue. We're not seeing any wage inflation in the GRC side of our business, and we're not seeing any in the software side of our business either. In terms of the GBP 100 million target, I think 10 months in, we're about 38% of the way towards that target. We have had a particularly busy period from an M&A perspective. We expect to continue deploying capital effectively into earnings enhancing acquisitions in the months ahead. I'm reluctant to give a specific date, but we announced this morning and last week that we do expect to materially overachieve against that target. Clearly, our focus, as a business is on identifying really attractive complementary businesses that will deepen our presence across existing markets, broaden our capabilities into, adjacent business-critical compliance sectors, and continue to digitalize, our offering to become the market leader in compliance software. Brilliant. Thank you very much. The next question is from Peter Renton of Cavendish. Peter, your line is open. Please go ahead. Hi, guys, thanks for the presentation. Just a quick question, again, on the software side of things. As you said, you've made a series of pretty exciting acquisitions in that space recently. How much organic investment is now going into software and digital development? Is there any other functionality that you'd like to obtain either through acquisition or organic development? Thanks, Peter. I'll take that one as well. We announced this morning the launch of a new product, ProSure 360. That's been about a year in the making, and significant organic investment has gone into that product. It's one that the Meridian and Elogbooks team have been working on in close collaboration. It's a new software platform which will assure the compliance of our customers' supply chain. If you take, I don't know, a large property manager where we look after all their health and safety, we will then also deploy our ProSure platform to vet and verify the compliance of all of the suppliers that are delivering services and turning up to their premises. A significant organic development. We now have about 100 software developers across the group, and they will be covering a whole range of technology areas. That's an area that we continue to invest in. I suspect we've seen headcount organically higher than we were from the businesses that we've acquired. We're thinking of these businesses in the long term. There are significant opportunities, some of which we've delivered, some of which we're working on to further the integration of our separate software platforms. Building API links between the different platforms to share client compliance data, so that if you're a user of one of our e-learning platforms, and you also use Meridian, our health and safety platform, and you also use YouManage, our HR software platform, you will have a seamless experience and you will have a very similar UX and user interfaces. The data related to your employees' e-learning will be in the HR system and it'll be in the health and safety system as well. There's major opportunities, and we've made major progress and we expect to continue investing significantly in that objective. Our next question is from Christopher Bamberry, from Peel Hunt. Christopher, please go ahead. Morning, gents. Three questions. With regard to GRC division, in the past you've talked about kind of around about 30% margin. With SaaS expected to grow as a proportion of revenue and a high drop-through, what should we now be thinking about as a margin for that division? Secondly, in order to achieve your 15% return on invested capital target on this year's acquisitions, what are the kind of major areas of uplift, you know, you need? I mean, you mentioned, I think in the statement that Hydro-X is gonna have 30% uplift in profits. That's about GBP 1 million. What other ones are there? Finally, with regards to competitive landscape, obviously you saw a number of large acquisitions last year. You know, competitors like KKR and Citation, SKFR and API. Just, you know, any changes in the behavior, what's happening in the market on that front? Thanks. Great. Thanks for that, Chris. Why don't I start and Adam, you might want to add some thoughts. So the GRC divisional margin is currently around 30%. That's actually come down slightly compared to the prior period. That's as a result of the mix of business. The occupational health business has grown significantly. We've made a significant number of acquisitions. We think there is margin expansion opportunity available within GRC, particularly from the software side of the business. I think we would be expecting to report positive progress in terms of expanding margins through effective integration and the benefits of further scale and operational gearing that we enjoy. I think a sort of medium term target is probably around the 35% level for GRC. In respect of return on invested capital and achieving that 15% target that we're confident we will reach. I mean, it's a whole number of areas, Chris. We've acquired, I think, 16 businesses over the last period. A large number of them have been smaller bolt-ons. We now have a really well-developed integration playbook. We've got management teams supported by large dedicated integration teams, who when we acquire these businesses, will integrate them fairly quickly into one of our six platform businesses. We'll close down unnecessary properties. We will move acquired businesses onto our IT platforms. We'll take advantage of opportunities to remove duplicated overhead. We'll integrate service delivery to benefit from utilization, efficiency and productivity improvements. Hydro-X obviously is a major opportunity. The post-period end deal. Hydro-X was one of the largest independent businesses in the market. Revenues of about GBP 20 million and profits of about three and a half. Because we have a very large well-invested infrastructure within water and air already, in the coming months, there will be opportunities to take advantage of that duplication to integrate Hydro-X into our model. As you've said, there should be at least a million of synergies to be extracted there, probably more. To achieve the target, we need to continue delivering the organic growth that we expect to. We need to drive forward synergies, and we need to make sure that we're taking the cost out of the businesses in line with the pre-acquisition plan. In the presentation, we've alluded to the fact that we're very much on track with each of those items. From a competitive landscape perspective, look, these are attractive sectors. There's really attractive growth drivers, structural growth drivers. The attractiveness of the sectors is probably increasing. There are competitors for acquisitions, particularly at the larger end of the scale. As you've alluded to, KKR acquired Citation. Citation is one of our key competitors within GRC, and I think they paid 18x EBITDA for that business. They've got pretty deep pockets. We are very good at acquisition. We've got a seven strong team in our M&A function in the head office. Most of the deals we do are off-market. We're seen as a very attractive home for businesses because firstly, we've got a good track record of delivery. Secondly, we're a strategic buyer with a huge amount of strategic value that we can add to acquired businesses. We find that management teams are very attracted to our proposition. They're attracted to our large customer base. They're attracted to our ruthless focus on compliance. They're attracted to, I suppose, the momentum and the pace and the ambition within our group. We do find that we are perceived as a very credible and attractive home for businesses. Of course, the synergies that we're able to add to acquired businesses gives us a useful tool in terms of valuation and ensuring that we continue to maintain that 15% return on invested capital that we're looking to. Some competitive buyers will not have the synergies that we have available. That's a long-winded way of saying the competitive dynamic is broadly similar. For larger businesses, there is competition. For smaller businesses, we tend to be in exclusive discussions, and we're pretty confident that we can continue delivering M&A at similar returns to the ones that you're used to. Okay. Thanks, Alex. Sorry, Chris. I think my views on margin and GRC is there's a bit. I think Alex is right. I think there's a bit of a question of mix there. Obviously if we continue to acquire in the software space, then 35% is readily achievable. It does depend a bit on the mix. I think the only other thing in terms of 15% return on capital. I think there is a point there about scale. The bigger scale we get, the more the opportunities there, both in terms of cost, but also revenue synergies. As we get more scale and breadth, then the sort of cross-selling and revenue synergies are greater as well. Obviously, I think as we get bigger, that becomes easier to achieve. Okay, great. Sorry, one quick follow-up question. Bosch obviously acquired Protec recently. Any insight into the valuations on that transaction? Yeah. I mean, we were part of that process in the early days. We took a very close look at the business and we decided it wasn't one for us because of its focus more on the projects and installation side of the market. We believe it went for about 17x full year EBITDA. I mean, we wouldn't have paid anything like that for it. It goes to show some of the valuations being achieved in these sectors. Thank you very much. Our final question today comes from James Tetley of Singer Capital Markets. Jim, please go ahead. Morning, Alex, and Adam, hi. Morning. I'm not really Jim, but I've got one question. It's just on the targets again, on the GBP 100 million and the outperformance. It's obviously quite early in the day to be signaling already that you're you know materially outperforming potentially those targets. I just wondered sort of what's the main driver of that? Is it that you were able to get the funding maybe more quickly than you thought you would? Is it that some of the larger acquisitions became available earlier, and you managed to convert those maybe earlier than originally envisaged? Was it just that actually when you set the target, these were your aspirations anyway, but it was a big enough target at the start of this year, given where the group was, to be realistic? Just that really. Has something changed to accelerate your plans over the last 10 months or so? Yeah. Thanks, James. We always like to underpromise and overdeliver, and I think the original 2024 target was conservative. Our focus is on taking advantage of the major opportunity that we see in compliance service and software markets. There's about a GBP 7 billion addressable market in the U.K. alone. Our shareholders are very supportive of our strategy. Access to capital is very good to us as a group. We've had a record of raising money over a number of years, and we tend to be heavily oversubscribed. Our shareholders understand our strategy and support our strategy. The pace of growth will be very much dependent on the pace of identifying attractive opportunities that meet our criteria and that we are confident we can effectively integrate into our model. So, there hasn't been a particular factor that's encouraged us to go faster other than the fact that we think we can create significant shareholder value by deploying the Marlowe model in highly attractive regulated software and service sectors. Great. Thanks. This concludes today's Q&A session. I'll hand back to Alex for any closing remarks. Thanks. I wanna leave you just with a quick summary of today's key points. We've made significant strategic, financial, and operational progress in the period across, as I say, our highly attractive compliance service and software markets. Operating profits are up 122%. Following strong performance in the first half, we've continued momentum into the second half, resulting in the recent upgrade of market expectations for the full year. We've completed 16 acquisitions so far this financial year, with 12 during the first half, adding approximately GBP 11.5 million of adjusted EBITDA. Our acquisitions are expected to achieve a return on invested capital of at least 15% within 12 months of acquisition. We've made major integration progress across each division, the highlight of which is the launch of the WorkNest brand, making up about half of our GRC business. Software revenue is now over 10% of overall revenue and over 20% of our profits. We've got a strong pipeline of earnings-enhancing deals to add further scale and breadth to our platform for growth. That progress underpins the confidence that we have in materially overachieving against the financial targets we set back in February of this year, of GBP 500 million revenue and GBP 100 million of adjusted EBITDA by the end of FY 2024. Thank you very much to everyone for coming on the call this morning. Thank you for your attendance. You may now disconnect your lines.