Good morning. Thank you for joining our financial year 2023 half year results presentation. I'm Alex Dacre, Group Chief Executive. This morning, I'll take you through our key financial highlights and the major strategic progress made in the first six months of the year, in a period in which EBITDA has grown by 80%, with strong organic growth, further margin expansion and successful M&A and integration. We'll use the call to remind you of Marlowe's highly resilient characteristics and the reasons why we're able to deliver a consistently strong financial performance. We'll take you through our approach to organic and inorganic growth and our resilient outlook across compliance markets, which continue to experience attractive structural growth. We're reporting a strong set of numbers today. Revenue was up 66%, driven by organic growth of 8% and a significant contribution from acquisitions. Adjusted EBITDA grew 80% to GBP 39.2 million. This substantial growth in profitability, along with prior year equity placings, is reflected in our adjusted basic EPS, which grew strongly by 39%. A key element of our strategy is to strengthen our operations, expand our margins, and improve our returns. In this context, we're pleased to report our divisional EBITDA margin has increased by a further 100 basis points to 19% in the first half, fast approaching our medium-term target of 20%. This is a product of effective integration programs, our investment in high-margin software businesses, and our improved operational efficiency. This margin accretion will continue to deliver further operational efficiencies and add scale. These metrics translate into a group which is delivering on its strategy to become the leader in compliance service and software. We're making pleasing progress towards our financial targets that we set in FY 2021 of GBP 500 million of revenue and GBP 100 million of EBITDA. Our current run rate is GBP 468 million and GBP 83 million respectively, and we continue to expect to exceed these targets materially ahead of the original end of FY 2024 goal. Our total addressable market in our compliance markets is very large at over GBP 8 billion, and we continue to take advantage of its fragmentation to deliver on our bolt-on acquisition strategy. We completed 10 acquisitions in the period for GBP 44 million at an average EBITDA multiple of 6.8x. We are the clear UK leader in compliance software and services. None of our competitors are able to serve their customers across the breadth of compliance markets that we can. We provide a true turnkey approach to compliance. Across the group, we employ 5,500 professionals, of which roughly 2/3 are customer-facing fee earners involved in compliance service delivery. Hundreds of health and safety consultants, HR consultants, employment lawyers, occupational health clinicians, doctors, compliance software developers, fire safety technicians, and water hygiene experts, delivering the full range of compliance and business-critical services to around 50,000 customers across the U.K. Our customer relationships are durable, with customer attrition running at around 7% per annum, and we're very well diversified. Our largest customer represents around 2% of group revenue. Our customers are spread across 50 different markets, spanning industry and the public sector, and our services are essential to their operations. Our capabilities across the compliance service and software landscape means a complementary service or product can easily be cross-sold to an existing customer, maybe a head of compliance, a health and safety director, or an owner-manager of a small business responsible for compliance in their organization. Everything we do helps our clients to navigate complex regulations. You can see from this slide some of the key ones which underpin demand from our customers, ranging from the Health and Safety at Work Act right through to the Employment Rights Act. It is this focus on regulation that supports such a resilient business model, which means we're well placed to produce a consistent financial performance through all macroeconomic environments. The resilience and the organic growth we've delivered over time shows that underlying demand for our products and services remains consistent. That resilience is demonstrated in our increasing margin, which reflects a well-controlled cost base, our drive for continuous operational improvement, and the pricing power, which gives us the ability to pass on any cost increases to our customers. Marlowe is a non-discretionary operational expense and a relatively small line item on our customers' P&Ls. Our services are essential to the legal, efficient, and compliant running of their businesses. We're deeply embedded in our customers' operations with high switching costs. Change presents a heightened risk of non-compliance. An enterprise risk management system, which is relied upon by a blue-chip organization to achieve compliance and stores vast amounts of essential data, is not easily switched away from. The more we cross-sell to our customers, the more our relationships with them strengthen. A typical customer might take a four-year subscription for HR compliance alongside e-learning to train their staff in compliance, HR software, retained health and safety support, and health and safety software too. It's by bundling these multiple capabilities that we accelerate our growth and embed ourselves ever more closely with our customers' operations. Around 40% of our customers use multiple Marlowe services. Our diverse client base supports our resilience. We serve every market sector across the U.K. economy, from food manufacturers to pharmaceuticals, from financial to legal, from hotels and leisure to education and healthcare. Similarly, we serve both larger customers and smaller customers. We tend to offer our HR and employment law to smaller businesses in the mid-market. Some of our software offerings are for enterprise-wide applications. We generate most of our occupational health revenue from larger clients. It's more of a blend in our health and safety business. In the SME customer base, the average customer head count is 70 employees. These are established businesses that understand the importance of risk management. The subscription and multi-year nature of our services and our software gives us excellent earnings visibility. Around 85% of our revenues are recurring, and our customer relationships are long and durable at over 12 years. I'll now hand over to Adam to take you through the financial highlights. Thanks, Alex. Revenue for the year increased by 66% to GBP 223 million. This primarily reflects the contribution from acquisitions. H owever, we have also delivered strong organic growth of 8%. The organic growth performance can be separated into three buckets: price, cross-sell and upsell, and net new business. In the first half, we've been successful in managing our pricing with a view to, as a minimum, maintaining our margins. Our largest cost line is staff costs, and these have increased by around 4%. We estimate that cross-selling and upselling continue to contribute between 1.5%-2% to organic growth. The remainder of our organic growth comes from new business, net of customer attrition. We have seen strong levels of new business across the group, especially within TIC, where organic growth has been steadily increased over the past three years as we benefit from our very broad capabilities and excellent geographic reach. Below revenue, adjusted EBITDA increased by 8% to GBP 39.2 million. This translates into a 100 basis point improvement in divisional EBITDA margin to 18.8%, which is a result of both the increased scale of our higher margin GRC division and a strong operational performance in the form of efficiencies and successful integration of bolt-on acquisitions. Net finance costs increased to GBP 4 million, reflecting not just increased interest rates, but also the successful execution of our growth strategy, which has driven higher levels of utilization of our debt facilities compared to the prior year. The net result of all this is that adjusted PBT increased by 74% to GBP 26.4 million, and adjusted EPS increased strongly by 39% to GBP 0.223. The latter incorporating the increased number of shares in issue following equity raise during the last 12 months. FY 2022 was a transformational year for our GRC division. Revenue increased 168% to GBP 92.3 million, driven in large part by FY 2022 acquisitions within occupational health and compliance software. Organic growth in H1 was 7%. Profits in our GRC division more than doubled on the same period last year, with adjusted EBITDA and operating profit increasing by 125% and 117% respectively. On a run rate basis, GRC now contributes over 60% of our overall group profitability. As expected, EBITDA margin reduced to 25.9%. The change from last year is driven by mix, as the margin of occupational health has diluted the overall division margin following the acquisition of Optima in the second half of the last financial year. If you exclude occupational health, GRC margins have increased by around 300 basis points. Over time, we will see ongoing integration of acquisitions and efficient deployment of operational resources delivering margin improvements. This financial year, we've completed six bolt-on acquisitions in GRC for GBP 36 million, which further deepen and broaden our activities in this area. Our tech division continued its excellent FY 2022 performance into the first half. Revenue grew 30% to GBP 130.6 million, and organic growth was 9%, reflecting particularly strong performance within our fire and security business. We deployed GBP 8 million on four bolt-on acquisitions in the half as we bolster our capabilities and improve route density. Adjusted EBITDA increased by 35%, with margins increasing by 50 basis points to 13.9%, driven by organic growth, operational efficiencies, and successful integration of bolt-on acquisitions. Adjusted operating profit for the half was GBP 12.8 million, an increase of 39%. We expect to see further increases in margin through operational improvements as the benefits of scale come through. Since its inception, Marlowe has used M&A as an important part of its growth strategy. Delivering a strong return on capital invested in acquisitions is therefore a key component of delivering value creation for shareholders. Over the life of Marlowe, we've invested GBP 595 million of consideration into 78 acquisitions. We see restructuring and acquisition costs as a part of the cost of investment equation. In addition to these costs, we've included deferred consideration when arriving at our GBP 675 million total capital invested. All of this has created a combined business with run rate profits of over GBP 89 million when excluding group head office costs. This implies a total pre-tax return on invested capital of 13%. You look at this by division, you can see the impact of the longer investment time frame for our TIC division, which we started building over six years ago. This is now returning 19%, and we are confident we can drive this even higher over time. Our GRC division is a more recent focus for investment, with a significant proportion of the GBP 320 million spent on deals in the previous financial year deployed into GRC. The returns are more nascent. The investment reflects higher initial valuations as we've been buying high margin, high growth businesses. We've also had less time to drive value and efficiency post-acquisition. We expect the returns in this division to accelerate as these markets are seeing strong structural growth, and we will create further value over and above the market growth. We expect the overall group returns to move towards 15% and beyond over time. Net cash generated from operations was GBP 22.6 million. The group experienced an increase in working capital driven through strong organic growth, the impact of POCTs acquisition working capital movements, and around GBP 10 million of timing differences. There are GBP 6 million of temporary movements due to billing cycles. When the change of operational systems in our water business have combined with some adverse timing on project billing in our fire business. There is a further GBP 3.8 million non-billing timing differences, the largest of which are annual prepayments of insurance. We have also seen post-acquisition working capital movements of GBP 3 million, which will not unwind, but are not part of underlying cash conversion. These include aligning VAT periods on acquired businesses. Excluding these factors, underlying free cash flow conversion for the business was 91% in line with our medium-term target. CapEx during the first half increased to GBP 8 million as a result of our increased scale and continued investment in the business, including enhanced levels of new product software development to support our roadmap. Net debt, excluding leases, was GBP 156 million at the half year. This reflects a pro forma net debt to EBITDA ratio of 2.1x within our preferred leverage range of 1.5x-2.5x. Given our strong cash generation, we have the ability to delever the business at pace should circumstances require it. We also have the ability to deliver bolt-on M&A through internally generated cash. In terms of financial roundup from me, we've seen a successful half year with strong organic growth of 8%, which we expect to continue into the second half, while we'll also benefit from further cash generation. We have successfully continued our bolt-on M&A strategy in the current financial year, deploying GBP 44 million over 10 acquisitions as we deepen our presence in our markets. Integration of these acquisitions and those made in the last year remains either on track or ahead of expectations. Our run rate revenue and adjusted EBITDA continue to increase, coming in GBP 468 million and GBP 83 million respectively. In October, the group exercised a proportion of the accordion facility. As a result, we have total committed debt facilities of GBP 233 million and remain well funded to meet the needs of the group and to fund our future strategy. In terms of guidance, we continue to successfully manage inflationary pressures due to our ability to pass on cost increases to our customers while maintaining margins. We expect finance costs to increase in the second half to reflect the increased base rate on our enlarged debt facilities. We now expect adjusted EBITDA for full year to be slightly above current market consensus. We have made a positive start the second half of the year. On that note, I'll hand back to Alex. Thank you, Adam. We're confident in our ability to continue growing organically in the high single digits because of three main factors. Our markets benefit from attractive structural growth drivers, which provides a setting for our growth. Regulations are constantly evolving, and our clients need up-to-date insights across their ever more complex regulatory landscapes. Stricter insurance requirements and regulatory fines associated with non-compliance are increasing. The average health and safety fine in the U.K. has increased 381% from 2018 to 2022. Likewise, the emerging legislative impact of ESG is currently adding momentum to our markets. It places the emphasis on employers to improve the well-being of staff, as well as enhance their impact on the environment and on governance processes. This solid backdrop results in market growth of between 3% and 5%. The second factor which gives us confidence is our success in bringing Marlowe together as a cohesive compliance platform. We drive additional organic revenue growth through cross-selling our services and our software. Our broad capabilities and cross-sales focus have recently resulted in six-figure multi-year e-learning contracts being awarded to a health and safety customer or a six-figure per annum contract cross-sold between health and safety and fire safety. We're a strong believer in the combination of software and consulting, and we pursued a digital strategy of using our consulting expertise to help us to develop compliance software products. An example of an organic product launch, which has gained really good traction with customers this financial year, is our supplier verification product, ProSure. It was conceived and incubated from within our health and safety business line. It's already generating a few hundred thousand GBP of revenue with a very strong pipeline of new business potential. Effectively integrating acquisitions, we can accelerate growth too. Often the smaller acquisitions that join the group don't have a sophisticated sales and marketing function. It's via our organic investments and strengths in this area that we're able to leverage our sales and marketing machine to improve their growth rates. The third factor in our growth is that we have a dedicated nine-person M&A team identifying new compliance markets, originating opportunities, and negotiating attractive deals in our markets. We have a huge total addressable market, which is growing every year. We use acquisition as a tool to expand our offering in both existing and also adjacent markets. Most deals we source are off-market, enabling us to negotiate attractive valuations and move efficiently. We have dedicated integration teams in each business who are very well-versed in bringing businesses onto our systems and aligning them with our processes. This value-adding M&A capability is what underpins our top-line reported growth of 66%. It's the combination of these three factors which will continue to play a key role in the years ahead. Attractive structural market growth, organic initiatives which allow us to outperform market growth, and our disciplined M&A capability, which gives us the step change in scale to be a market leader and to drive efficiencies. We thought it was worth highlighting a recent cross-sell example in action. This took place in our HR and employment law compliance business, WorkNest. WorkNest was first retained to help a large U.K. hospitality group with an employment tribunal case for approximately GBP 5,000. The litigation team did a brilliant job, We were then asked to provide subscription-based employment law advice for their in-house HR team on a retainer of about GBP 85,000. We were then able to cross-sell our retained health and safety consulting after a claim arose against the company for a failure to adhere to documented safety checks. That was a further GBP 120,000 retainer. Whilst one of our health and safety consultants was completing their annual risk assessment, it became apparent that the client's compliance training arrangements were not up to scratch, and we were able to upsell an additional digital e-learning course suite for a further GBP 85,000 per annum to roll out to all of their staff. A simple story, a really strong illustration of how our strong relationships, compliance capabilities, and shared customer channel can turn a GBP 5,000 annual retainer into a GBP 300,000 annual retainer through cross-sell and upsell. The three charts on this slide show how we're consistently improving the financial metrics of our business. Today, organic growth is running at 8%. As you can see, this is a significant acceleration from the 5% we were generating in financial year 2019. We undertake like-for-like analysis of revenue to calculate organic revenue growth. This is to give the clearest picture of growth. We do this by taking the current year's revenue, including revenue generated in the year by acquired businesses. We adjust prior year revenue to include revenue generated by these acquired businesses as if we'd owned them during that partial period too. We're really seeing a complete like-for-like comparison between current years and prior years, crucially, how businesses acquired during the period, as well as existing businesses, are performing organically. The picture is positive, delivering a steady improvement to reach the 8% figure in this half year. The current performance reflects both the attractive structural growth rates of the GRC and TIC markets that we operate in, also the organic improvements that we make, the enhanced service levels we achieve, and our focus on sales and marketing. In line with our strategy and targets, divisional EBITDA margin has improved 19% on a run rate basis. This is crucial and is perhaps the clearest indicator of our ability to integrate businesses and create value through unlocking synergies and operational efficiencies, such as merging back-office functions, integrating service delivery, rolling out our tech platforms into acquired businesses, and benefiting from economies of scale, such as route density. We're also benefiting from the higher margins and faster growth of our GRC activities. As these activities continue to scale, we expect to see a continued improvement in margin. Total group revenues have increased from GBP 129 million in FY 2019 to the current run rate of over GBP 460 million per annum. The momentum has increased significantly in the last 12 months, with over GBP 314 million of capital deployed last financial year and 10 smaller bolt-on acquisitions completed in this period. We are, as you can see, well on our way towards our FY 2024 target of GBP 500 million. The scale of the digital opportunity at Marlowe, particularly within GRC, is huge. Digital products are supplementing the group's compliance services as core tools our clients use to ensure, control, and promote compliance standards across their businesses. The deployment of software significantly improves their compliance standards and customer experience, it makes clients much stickier. Since our initial entry into the software market in 2018, we've built a rich suite of software compliance solutions through M&A and organic initiatives, with SaaS subscriptions now contributing around 9% of group revenue. In the last financial year, six software businesses joined the group, and we expect SaaS revenue as a proportion of our total revenue to continue to grow as we benefit from the fast growth in this market, our diversity of products, and the organic growth benefits created by our cross-sale strategy. One of our key strengths is how we combine our existing consulting and information capabilities with software. If you could offer a mix of information which provides the customer with the relevant regulations, then consultancy to help them to understand how to apply that legislation, and finally, software to help track their compliance against that legislation, then you are delivering a true turnkey compliance solution. As of today, we conservatively estimate our U.K. total addressable market to be around GBP 8.6 billion. As we've broadened our offerings into new compliance areas, the size of the market opportunity has increased. The largest of these markets is compliance software, which straddles multiple areas including environment, health and safety, audit, HR compliance and supply chain compliance. It's also international by its nature, and we're already selling our e-learning software into the U.S. market. The compliance software market is our fastest-growing market too. We're market leaders in three of our market segments, but we only account for a small percentage of any. They remain very fragmented, and we continue to be focused on executing bolt-on acquisitions, which competitors are not set up to do and which can be integrated efficiently. These markets are, of course, attractive to private equity, and we see competition for larger deals. At the smaller end of the M&A scale, we're able to transact mostly off-market and for attractive valuations, allowing us to grow our positions at very attractive multiples. We will look for opportunities to enter adjacent compliance markets over time, through acquisition. These potentially could include ISO certification, food safety, cyber risk, or supply chain compliance, all of which offer many synergies with our business today. Whilst we remain a U.K.-focused business, our GRC markets are, by their nature, international, and there are similar compliance regimes in certain international markets for health and safety, HR compliance, occupational health, as well as in particular in compliance software. These results reflect a resilient, well-positioned, and growing business, delivering service and software that is underpinned by strong customer demand throughout the economic cycle. The organic revenue growth of 8% that we've delivered is consistent with our high single-digit target. This strong organic growth is built on resilient markets, benefiting from long-term structural growth drivers, and we're compounding this growth through disciplined M&A and effective integration. Software has become a major part of our proposition. It's enhancing compliance standards for our clients and generating around 25% of our EBITDA. We're holding a deep dive into our software capabilities for analysts and investors on Wednesday, the 11th of January to highlight this part of our group. Our clear strategy is delivering very strong financial results, and we remain very confident of achieving GBP 100 million of adjusted EBITDA materially ahead of the end of FY 2024 target. That concludes today's presentation. Many thanks for your attendance this morning. There will now be a short pause as the operator opens the line to analyst Q&A session, which will begin in just a few moments. Thank you very much. Thank you. We will first take telephone line questions. If you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. When preparing to ask your question, please ensure that your phone is unmuted locally. As a reminder, that is star followed by one to ask a question. Our first question comes from Sam Dindol from Stifel. Sam, please go ahead. Morning, guys. Hope all is well. Three questions from me, please. Firstly, on CapEx, maybe slightly higher than anticipated. To be expected that to be sort of mid to high teens going forward, are you able to say what element of that is software-related and what you're working on there? Secondly, on sort of the M&A headroom, given the rising sort of debt costs, are you comfortable going to 2.5x leverage? How much do you think you have in terms of headroom? Is it GBP 10s of millions, how would you think about that? Finally on the international expansion in GRC, that sounds, you know, very interesting. Would that require a bigger platform type deal, or is that something you can build sort of incrementally through bolt-ons? Thank you. Thanks, Sam. I'll take those first two and leave Alex with the last one. On CapEx, yes, no, I think our CapEx will be in the high teens going forward, looking at what we spent in the first half year, which wasn't anything out of the ordinary. The rough split is probably half is internal software development and about half is what I call run-of-the-mill PPE-type CapEx, as in sort of non-software-related. In terms of the M&A headroom, I think. Look, we've been pretty conservative in setting our 1.5x-2.5x range if you consider the sort of 85% recurring revenues that we've got in the business. I think that's a fair window even in the current environment. If we did get up towards 2.5x, I think we're very confident we can delever very quickly at a sort of upwards of half turn per annum. That obviously in terms of suggested headroom, clearly if we're at 2.1x, there's 0.4 of headroom there. You multiply that by our run rate EBITDA of GBP 80 million, suggests a sort of GBP 30 million or GBP 40 million of firepower there. Obviously, it depends on the pipeline of acquisitions with regards to how quickly we would deploy that. The other thing that really needs to be considered obviously internally generated cash over the next year. There'll be internally generated cash to add to that sort of headroom. On the GRC piece, yes, we have begun thinking of medium-term international GRC opportunities. I think the first point to make is that the GRC market by its nature is international. We're already selling some of our software platforms in international geographies, particularly in the U.S. There's a major U.K. opportunity, so that's where most of our focus is channeled. In the medium term, particularly within software, we do see opportunity to spread our wings further. I think we would be looking for a platform type acquisition. Something with a bit of scale, with infrastructure and with a good team that we could then build upon and work with. We would then also use that platform, as really a bulkhead to sell a number of our existing software applications and GRC services. I think you should see that as a medium-term ambition. Thank you. Thank you. As a reminder to ask any further questions, please press star followed by one. Our next question comes from Peter Renton from Cenkos. Peter, please go ahead. Yeah. Morning, guys. Two questions from me. Firstly, what are you seeing in terms of pricing for acquisitions at the moment? Are these becoming more attractive nowadays? Secondly, what are your thoughts on when you might start paying a dividend? I know this has been a requirement for several institutions that have been looking at the business with interest, but obviously can't join the register until you do so. Thanks. Great. I'll take the first one and hand the second one to Adam. The landscape for acquisitions I don't think has changed significantly. I think it's becoming maybe slightly more favorable, particularly at the smaller end for bolt-on M&A. I think you've got to remember that these are very resilient markets. They're very attractive markets throughout the economic cycle. At the larger end of the scale, private equity are very interested in these markets. At the smaller end of the scale, and the sort of mid-range, mid-sized acquisitions, we probably have seen valuations come down by maybe half a ton. Historically, we've been paying about 7 x EBITDA before synergies. We don't expect that to change significantly. Similar competitive landscape. Just on the dividend point, obviously, if you look historically, it's been more a case of, is it sensible to issue cash out as dividend that we feel that we can generate strong returns for our shareholders by redeploying internally on M&A. I think that's the argument that still sort of retains at the moment, but obviously with a large structural EBITDA now, the case for making a dividend is getting stronger. It's something the board keeps under regular consideration, as and when we reach each set of results. Great. Thank you. Thank you. We have no further questions on the telephone line. I'll now hand you back over to the management team to take you through the webcast questions. We have a number of webcast questions submitted online. The first one of those is, what would you need to happen for you to believe you need to deleverage the business? Well, I think as I've already stated, I think our relative range of 1.5x to 2.5x is pretty conservative if you consider the high-quality earning streams we have in the business. I think given that we've got a conservative starting point, we're still pretty confident in working within that range. I mean, obviously, I could reel off some sort of nuclear scenarios that with withdrawal of credit, need to delever rapidly. I think the key point is that we can delever rapidly as and when we need to or should wish to, at a rate of kind of half turn per annum pretty comfortably. Christopher Bamberry at Peel Hunt has asked, please could you give us the data behind the ROIC calculations for TIC and GRC divisions? The calculations behind that are using six-month run rate profitability for each of those divisions, obviously adjusted for pro forma acquisition where that hasn't contributed a full six months. In terms of the cost of investment side of that equation, effectively it is all of the full consideration paid, plus the restructuring cost that's allocated to each division, which has been basically worked out on a by acquisition basis. That's a pretty thorough calculation behind that. Chris Bamberry at Peel Hunt has another question. How has staff retention and recruitment been during the half? It's at pretty much normal levels at the moment. If you go back six, 12 months, we did see a slight uptick in attrition, and we had a strong focus on retention and engagement strategies and recruitment. We're sort of back to normal levels now. We don't see recruitment as a barrier to be able to achieve our growth targets. Thank you. We have a question from James Rae of Charles Stanley, who's asking what would the EBITDA margin look like if you include central costs, and indeed, what is included in the central costs? Okay. The central costs are about GBP 6 million per annum. Obviously, if you just use simple math, that would take about just over 1% off our EBITDA margin from the divisional margin to the group margin. Those costs are rising at a lower speed than the EBITDA is rising through, obviously, the organic growth of the business. In terms of what those costs are, is the small head office we have here, including obviously then all of the costs of running a PLC, but there is no sort of what I would call divisional overheads in the group head office cost. It is purely group head office costs. All the costs within the divisions are within those divisional costs. Thank you. We have another question which I suspect will be yours, Adam, as well. What was the rationale for drawing down the accordion facility post balance sheet date? Are the costs of the accordion the same as for the main facility? I'll take the second part of the question first. The costs are exactly the same, so there's been no increase in cost on the overall facility or on the accordion. It's just common sense with a business like Marlowe, where M&A is a key part of our strategy that I maintain sufficient facility headroom to make sure we've got the cash ready to deploy should the opportunity be there. Obviously, that doesn't mean we'll actually necessarily deploy it. That will be based on the level of pipeline of acquisition opportunities and where we want to keep our leverage position, but it's just sensible to have those facilities there and the debt committed. Thank you very much. There's a further question coming from Alex Fane about acquisitions. How fast do you think you can grow without doing an equity placing, both organically and with acquisitions, given where your credit facilities are at the moment? I'll take that and Alex can pick up if he thinks I've missed anything. Obviously we've been pretty consistent in saying we expected to be able to deliver high single-digit organic growth rates. Even if we maintain margins, that would suggest we can deliver high single-digit earnings growth rates. Assuming we can deliver a bit of margin improvement, which if you look at the TIC business, we've been able to do that consistently now for a couple of years. You would expect to almost be able to get to almost double-digit earnings improvements pre-acquisition. The question is then, how much can we deploy in terms of M&A from internally generated cash while not increasing our debt position? Obviously, if you look at FY 2023 or FY 2024, we would be able to deploy kind of GBP 30 million or GBP 40 million per annum on M&A, which if we brought that on to sort of 6x or 7x multiples, could deliver over GBP 5 million of additional earnings each year over and above the organic improvements. Yeah. There's a corollary to that question is would you consider doing equity placings in the current market conditions? I mean, I think that sort of depends on the opportunities and the prevailing conditions at the time that those opportunities arise. We've always been very clear with investors that we had a very busy M&A year last year. We spent GBP 320 million on 20 deals. When we conducted the fundraising for the largest of those deals, the Optima deal back in January, we indicated that we expected the following six, 12 months to be a period of integration and consolidation, driving synergies, driving margin, whilst also conducting some bolt-on M&A activity from our balance sheet and from the cash that we were generating. The first half, we've done exactly that. We've completed 10 acquisitions. We've spent about GBP 45 million. We expect to continue with that bolt-on M&A strategy in H2, and beyond that, to the extent that we come across opportunities that fit very clearly with our strategy and create attractive returns for our shareholders, then we would make a decision as a board on how to fund those deals going forward. Thank you. We've got a question coming from Andrew Blane at Investec, which is a two-part question. The first part is, with a GBP 100 million run rate EBITDA target in sight, what would you see as the next milestone? Will EBITDA and ROIC continue to be key metrics? On the milestone one, you're right. We're not far off hitting those targets now. We're at about GBP 460 million of run rate revenue and about GBP 83 million of run rate EBITDA. With a bit of further organic growth and bolt-on M&A activity on top of that, we'd expect to achieve those targets comfortably ahead of the original ambition of the end of FY 2024. I'm not gonna give you a steer as to what the targets beyond that will be, because we made the decision that we want to achieve those targets before doing so. You can rest assured that we won't be stopping there. These are large addressable markets. We've got about GBP 8 billion of market to go after. We're sort of 5%-10% of our biggest market. We've got a huge amount of runway for further growth. Adam, do you wanna cover the points on ROIC and EBITDA? Yeah. I think EBITDA and ROIC are key metrics for the business. You can't sort of buy and build business with high levels of M&A and not be focused on ROIC. It's something we will continue to focus on going forward. EBITDA is a key metric 'cause she shows the cash profitability of the business. Thank you. The second part of the question is about customer attrition. Has there been any material movement in the 7% customer attrition rate, over the last couple of years? Yes, I mean, it, it's got better. I think sort of 10% is probably normal for our, for our market. Achieving about a 7% rate across the board with around about a 12- year average customer relationship, we're pleased with. We think there are opportunities to slightly improve on that as we continue to deliver additional services to the same customer, benefit from our cross-sale strategy. We deepen the relationship with our customer. As we continue to improve compliance standards, we, we improve customer service and the customer experience. As we deploy our software platforms across our customer base, the switching costs for our customers increase. They've got vast amounts of compliance data on these systems. They're very good systems. They improve compliance standards for our customers. I think there's opportunities to embed ourselves even more closely with our customers as we continue to scale and to deliver the strategy. Thank you very much, Alex. There's another question asking about our one-time acquisition costs. Do you see those coming down in the future? I think if the if the M&A continues, obviously they will remain in the business because they are very directly related to the cost of executing M&A. Obviously, if we stop doing M&A, then those costs would fall away. They are directly related to the cost of executing M&A. Obviously, if we stop doing M&A, then those costs would fall away within about 12 months. Thank you very much. There's one final online question at the moment, which is about the integration of Optima Health. You are progressing well towards your GBP 2 million of cost synergies from the Optima Health acquisition. Can you give a little bit of color from about where these savings are coming from and whether there is further opportunity beyond that? Yeah. Why don't I take that? I mean, you're right. That initial target of GBP 2 million is pretty much in the bag already now. We've delivered that via merging the management team, merging back-offices, moving on to a common and unified IT platform. We're now moving to a single brand. We're going with the Optima brand. The next opportunity is to merge service delivery and realize efficiency improvements and productivity improvements in the way in which we deliver services. To the extent there are synergies as a result of that, which we fully expect there to be, that will be upside on the original original target. Thank you very much. There's one last online question come through. You're fast approaching your EBITDA margin of 20%. Can this go higher? Yeah. Why don't I take that? I mean, the short answer is yes. As you say, we're 19% now. Our medium-term target was 20%. Once we achieve that target, we will be looking to go significantly further. There are various opportunities across the group on the TIC side of the business. Route density is one of the key opportunities. As we continue to scale the business, benefit from that scale, implement better scheduling technology, better management techniques, our fee earners spend less time traveling between our customer sites and more time delivering service, they generate more revenue per day per fee earner. That improves our gross profit. Because we've now got a well-invested, scalable back-office in place, we're finding that an increasing portion of that increased gross margin that comes from route density and organic growth is dropping through to profit. There's similar opportunities on the GRC side of the business. As we add additional customer subscriptions and additional software subscriptions, there's a lower incremental cost to manage each additional customer. That leads to margin improvements too, and we benefit from the same operational gearing that we enjoy on the TIC side of the business in GRC. Thank you very much. As you were speaking, Alex, we have one more online question come through. Which is, does it make sense to do acquisitions when your multiple is now around the same as the businesses that you're buying? I don't think our multiple is around the same as the business that we're buying. Really what we're looking to achieve here is attractive returns and that ROIC of 13%, which we'd expect to rise over time, particularly on the GRC side of the business, where we deployed a large amount of capital in recent months, we think is very attractive. We can buy businesses on around about 7x EBITDA. We tend to be able to drive synergies to bring that down to about 6x EBITDA. We're really focused on building market leading compliance businesses in highly attractive, resilient markets, with very high degrees of recurring revenues, high margins, which we can expand with operational improvements, and scale, and very attractive growth opportunities. Thank you very much, Alex. I confirm there are no more online questions. Great. Thank you very much to everyone for joining the call. We will be closing it now. This concludes today's call. Thank you for joining. You may now disconnect your line.