Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the PageGroup Capital Markets Event 2023. This afternoon, you'll be hearing from myself, our CFO, Kelvin Stagg, and members of the executive board here at PageGroup. This presentation will last around an hour, and then we'll have time for our Q&A. It's been 9 months now since I became CEO of PageGroup. As you can imagine, it's an incredible honor for me to run a company that I've worked in for well over half of my life. When I started working in our Leeds office in 1995, the company operated in just 6 countries and had only 600 employees. At the end of Q2 this year, we had just under 8,600 people operating across 37 markets. To have played my part in our success and to be standing here in front of you today is a very proud moment for me. We are here this afternoon to update you all on our new strategy and strategic goals. We will take you through the detail of the context that has shaped the strategy, the input we've had from our customers, our people, and our investors, as well as the demographic and technology trends that are shaping our industry. This new strategy will take Page through to 2030, and we have set ourselves three key strategic goals. A goal that targets the business on delivering operating profit for our shareholders and our people. A social impact goal that speaks to our people, our customers, and our investors. Finally, a goal that reflects our focus on customer centricity that sets us apart from many of our competitors and is key for our clients and our people. The three strategic goals we've set ourselves to achieve by 2030 are: to deliver an operating profit of GBP 400 million, to drive social impact by changing 1 million lives, and to offer best-in-class customer experience, reflected in a net promoter score worldwide of 60 and above. In order to deliver our goal of GBP 400 million of operating profit, we are targeting gross profit of just under GBP 2 billion, which would represent a total conversion rate for the group in excess of 20%. To deliver the strategy, there will be four pillars of growth: maximizing our core business, making it just under half of our operating profit in 2030. Accelerating the growth of our technology business to deliver GBP 350 million of gross profit. Expanding our Page Executive business to reach gross profit of GBP 200 million within a market that has untapped opportunities. Building out our capabilities for Strategic Customers and to grow this part of our business to over a quarter of our gross profit. In simple terms, the new strategy is about leveraging our existing global platform with a focus on targeted growth while maximizing profit, building on what we're famous for. They're the headlines of our new strategy. But before I expand further on this, let me take you through how we got there, while also reflecting on our previous strategy. When I stepped up to be CEO in January of this year, I took on responsibility for a company that had not only delivered two back-to-back record years, but had also delivered on the vision that we set out in 2012, namely GBP 1 billion of gross profit and GBP 200 million of operating profit. Our previous strategy focused on categorizing our geographic markets into three distinct groups: large high potential, large proven, and small and medium high margin. This categorization gave us a framework for our investment decisions, and the strategy paid off. Born out of the realization that prior to the Global Financial Crisis, only 15% of our gross profit had come from our large high-potential markets, this strategy looked to pivot the group's geographical footprint. Today, our large high-potential markets represent around 40% of the group, with 3,500 people, up from 900 in 2007. In addition, in 2007, 61% of our business was outside the U.K. In 2022, that figure was 86%. Whilst diversifying geographically, we've also diversified our service offering. In 2007, our disciplines outside of accounting and financial services represented 46% of the group. Last year, that figure was close to 70%. Also, as part of the strategy, we transformed our Global Business Solutions functions of finance, business technology, marketing, and HR from regional or country-led operations to global functions, largely based in shared service centers. Collectively, this has made our GBS functions more efficient, globally aligned, and flexible to react to changes in market conditions. Many of you saw the live demonstrations of our technology and data platforms back in June at our capital markets event. As you know, Customer Connect and Page Insights are fully rolled out and are in use every day in our businesses around the world. We've also continued to build on the unique culture we have here at Page. We remain committed to organic growth, offering our people a career in recruitment rather than just a job. We know our strength lies in a team culture based on profit share, and we are focused on our commitment to inclusion in the workplace. Alongside all of that, we've stayed true to our purpose of changing lives. Today is not about refreshing a ten-year-old strategy or replacing a strategy that has failed to deliver. In fact, it's quite the opposite. Today is about launching a new strategy, which will build on existing strengths by maximizing our core business and leveraging our global platform, having successfully delivered on the strategy we launched back in 2012. In devising our new strategy, it was important to take into account industry trends and competitive environment. Core shifts in generational demographics are driving structural changes that our new strategy must address, from talent shortages to underrepresentation, to agile working. Since the pandemic, the trend towards agile working has been supercharged. Candidates no longer need to live within a 45-minute daily commute of the office. This change benefits recruiters with national and international reach, rather than the boutiques who have tight specialisms and narrow catchment areas. LinkedIn research suggests that Generation Z are spending half the time in a company in comparison to Generation X, therefore positively impacting the size of our addressable market. Technology is reshaping employment post-pandemic. Virtual meetings, increasingly sophisticated onboarding, as well as training and performance management software that all make hybrid working a genuine reality for many organizations. The prospect of certain jobs being done from anywhere has become real. The nature of organizations, how they behave, where they are based, and what they mean to customers and colleagues, is evolving. The capacity for automation and AI to drive efficiencies into recruitment is becoming clearer by the day, and we're fully embracing that change, as we demonstrated at our recent capital markets event. Our long and successful track record of recruiting skilled experts and specialist positions, as well as management and leadership roles, tells us that the human interaction is vital in order to deliver the most successful recruitment outcomes for both clients and candidates. Our consultants provide valuable expertise, market knowledge, and insight to both sets of customers we work with, acting as a trusted partner, working with clients to shape their talent management strategies, and with candidates to help navigate their career journeys. We will continue to partner with Premium Technology Vendors and surround our consultants with the best tools to remove the heavy lifting and free up their time to engage with customers. To that end, we will build on our existing technology platforms, working closely with our global partners in Salesforce, Microsoft, and Google. We are clear that while automation of an administrative task may save time, it can also remove an important human touch point that allows our consultants to build stronger relationships and generate valuable market information. In summary, while recruitment, like many other industries, is being impacted by technology, in white-collar professional recruiting, we believe it remains vital for a human relationship to be at the heart of the process. Having worked my way up from trainee consultant to CEO, I've built a deep understanding of what makes Page the business that it is. A business that has grown organically since its formation nearly 50 years ago. A business that has built a reputation for quality and consistent delivery. A business that goes about what it does the right way and delivers on its promises. I work with an exceptional leadership team with an outstanding track record in the sector. They have extensive knowledge of what works, new trends, and potential threats. As a result, we have a clear and strong sense of where we want to take Page. But we also felt it was critical to road test our thinking as we formulated the new strategy with three key sets of stakeholders. These three groups are our customers, our people, and our investors. I will now address each of these in turn. The first group is our customers. We understand what Page means to our customers. We live in a world where change is constant, and the speed of change is ever-increasing. For candidates, in particular, the experience needs to be personalized and convenience is key. We need to be where they are, and the experience with Page needs to feel seamless, with data about the candidate and how they've interacted with us flowing freely across our platforms. Our clients range from small and medium-sized enterprises to large international businesses. These clients have differing needs and expectations of working with Page. SME clients still want to engage with a local expert, giving them access to candidate pools that they struggle to engage with, and where their employer brand is unlikely to attract direct applicants. Larger clients are facing different and more complex challenges, exacerbated by talent shortages. They engage with us because traditional channels are not resolving specific talent and DE&I shortfalls, and expert partnership is needed to guide in this area. In addition, some are looking to outsource recruitment to global partners to save money or to replace internal teams that lack the insight, resources, or market awareness to fill skill gaps and quickly scale up their teams. The second group is our people. We understand what Page means to our people. I talked earlier about our unique culture. It is one we're immensely proud of, and one we believe is a key factor in our success, both now and in the future. Our people are looking to us to deliver a compelling employee value proposition, an opportunity to have a career rather than a job in recruitment, with a clear link between performance and progression. They want a supportive environment to work in, where they can be their true selves, while also providing a connection to our purpose, values, and strategic goals. They want the opportunity to make a difference by using their skills to impact the societies within which they live and work. They want sector-leading resources and tools, such as Customer Connect and Page Insights, which give them competitive advantage in the market. Finally, the third group is our investors. We've met and heard from our investors and understand what Page means to them. We're clear that our strategy is to build on our existing strengths. Organic development remains central to our growth. We are predominantly a permanent recruiter with increased cyclicality versus peers as a result. That said, we are very good at what we do. We've been recognized two years in a row as the world's number one direct hire recruiter by Staffing Industry Analysts. Through the cycle, in a world of labor scarcity, we believe that permanent hiring is likely to see stronger demand than most forms of temporary hiring. In addition to our success in permanent recruitment, we will focus on high value, high volume IT contracting businesses, like the one we've built in Germany. We also need our strategy to address the conversion question. Since 2012, Page has delivered an average conversion rate of around 16%. The diversification and globalization that we undertook as part of the last strategy has come at a cost, as we adopted a land and expand policy in numerous new countries and cities, while also launching new business lines. We now plan to build on our successes and market know-how to increase conversion rates to sit consistently above 20%. Alongside that, we will continue to deliver growth and capital returns, building on the GBP 1.2 billion we've returned to shareholders since flotation. To achieve our goals, we will need to reshape our focus across different aspects of the business. First and foremost, we will drive conversion rates, making operating profit our primary financial strategic goal. To do this, we will increase our levels of focus and prioritization. We have built an incredibly powerful and diverse platform through the previous strategy. Now is the time to optimize that platform. As we've looked to build our geographic footprint, in many cases, we've been the first international recruiter of our type to enter the market. As a result, we've had to trial multiple disciplines and brands to understand the most appropriate offering for that country. We've spent the last nine months reviewing that offering city by city, country by country, and where relevant, we've stepped away from less successful business lines. This process will continue as we invest more in areas where we have strong market presence as well as scope for growth. In many cases, less is more, and we will continue to challenge ourselves to build on our strengths, such as to be the world's best direct hire recruiter, to replicate our IT contracting business in Germany in a small number of carefully selected markets, exploit gaps where we believe Page has the brand, platform, and existing expertise to outperform our peers, and to drive our business harder using our market-leading position in many of the world's highest potential economies. We want to create partnerships with our Strategic Customers, which in turn will increase volumes of repeat business. We will ensure our strategy places the human and relationships with customers at the center of our offering, supported by best-in-class technology and data. When it comes to delivery and the use of technology, we will continue to move Page upstream and further away from the threat of digital platforms and AI at the lower end of the market, where recruitment is often a volume or mass market play. We will lower costs further by exploring alternate operating models, in particular around delivery, optimizing the use of our existing shared service centers. And for our people, we will ensure that they understand how the new strategy will benefit them as we continue to grow in our organic model. So having taken all of these inputs, we've built a new strategy for Page that will take us through to 2030, with three key strategic goals. I'd now like to take a look at each of these goals in greater detail. Firstly, operating profit. Our target is to more than double our record operating profit of GBP 196 million delivered in 2022 to GBP 400 million in 2030. Being in a highly cyclical industry like ours makes modeling challenging. However, we believe that with our track record, consistent business model, and highly experienced leadership team, this figure represents an ambitious, stretching, and exciting target for Page. We'll deliver this by building on our existing strengths and leveraging our position in global markets. We'll focus on what we do best at a city and country level, and grow our business in the areas where we see the greatest potential for profitable growth. Alongside that, we will narrow our focus at a local level, stepping away from less profitable business. We will supplement that by building our capability in our agile delivery model to allow for a remote, cost-efficient service. Later on, Kelvin will walk you through our financial pathway in more detail, so you can better understand the mechanics around how we will achieve our operating profit target. Our second goal is focused on social impact. This is born out of our purpose and values. Since 2020, we've been committed to the goal of changing 1 million lives by 2030. By the end of 2022, we changed just over 375,000 lives. We are driven to have a positive impact in the communities in which we operate. Changing lives guides us in what we do, benefiting our customers and shaping that, the work that our people do every day. We will work to become an industry role model for ESG, and we will achieve this by consciously focusing on the area of social impact by capitalizing on our people expertise. Progress against our social impact measure is measured by the number of people whose lives we have changed by placing them into work, as well as the number of people who access our social impact programs and skill-sharing volunteering events. Finally, our third goal is focused on delivering a best-in-class customer experience with a client Net Promoter Score of 60 or above from a starting point of 52 at the end of last year. As a Cross-Industry Benchmark, this would cement our position as excellent. This is a critical measure of how we build deeper, repeat relationships with clients to ensure our long-term success. Customer centricity is a market differentiator for Page. It's a way for us to continue to stand out in our industry, and since I started in the company, it has always been a focus that we've worked incredibly hard to deliver against. We want to double down on our commitment to our customers, and delivery of this goal will further cement our position as a benchmark of service and quality in our industry. To achieve our goals, there will be four pillars of growth. They are: maximizing our core business, accelerating the growth of our technology business, expanding our Page Executive business, and building out our capabilities for Strategic Customers. We're going to be playing you videos for each of these areas, featuring the relevant executive board member from Page, who will give you a deep dive into these strategically critical areas. I'm fortunate to lead an incredibly strong executive team here at Page. Each board member you're going to hear from has over 25 years experience in multiple international markets. They form part of the top team that will execute this strategy. The first pillar of growth is our increased focus on how we manage and thereby maximize the value of our core business by building on existing strengths with a focus on improved conversion rates. We define the core business as our Michael Page and Page Personnel brands that cover all disciplines, with the exception of technology, which we will treat separately and discuss in more detail in a moment. Over the last 10 years, as we've grown by opening in new cities and new countries, the start-up in these markets has been both challenging and a drag on conversion. Our focus now is to build on this investment by strengthening our market-leading positions and in addition, no longer pursuing more marginal business lines in certain geographies. The core business will be absolutely central to our new strategy. Let's hear from Isabelle Bastide, who, alongside Nicolas Béchu, will be running our core business worldwide as Chief Operating Officers. I want to outline our approach to our core business, which effectively include our Michael Page and Page Personnel commercial operations, minus technology, which Nico will cover later. In 2022, our core business accounted for GBP 688 million of the just over GBP 1 billion group gross profit. Our goal for 2030 is to have a core business that deliver just under GBP 1 billion gross profit and just under half of our GBP 400 million operating profit goal. While we know this is an ambitious target for the business, we believe there will be excitement for our teams, knowing that it is realistic, based on the opportunity we can see. In order to deliver that, we must boost and extend the value of our core business. How? By building on existing strengths with a focus on improving conversion rates. What is the size and scale of the opportunity, and what does the competitive landscape look like? Last year, the Staffing Industry Analysts positioned PageGroup as number one recruiter in the direct hire market, with 1.8% global market share. They estimated the total market to be $58.2 billion in global revenue in 2022. This market now accounts for 9% of all staffing revenue and this continues to offer Page a considerable opportunity for growth, an opportunity we will seize. What will be the key factors driving the success of our core business? We want to explore the capabilities we have at hand, offering a long-term solution that we can continuously and consistently build on. We will leverage the technology platforms we have built to access how to find talent and bring them to market. We will take advantage of flexible working and video interviewing to optimize our property spend and also scale in large hubs, maximizing the efficiency of our management. We will leverage the delivery capabilities we have built through our agile delivery model to allow for a remote and more cost-efficient service. We will continue to bring innovation to the business, harnessing the opportunities technologies such as OpenAI offer us to allow our people to focus their time on our customers. We will extract the full potential of our data platform, Page Insights, to bring real-time data and insight to our customers. Two leaders will underpin our way of working and help us achieve our goals, addressing conversion rates and building our existing strengths. First, we will address conversion rates, implementing a framework for investment decisions and performance expectations, building a systematic way of explaining when and why to say no to marginal business. Second, we will build on our strength. In most of our markets, growth will be achieved in the core as a result of increased penetration of recruitment consultancies and growing economy. Each of our countries have very distinct opportunities for growth based on existing strengths, and we will build on this rather than offering everything everywhere. We will, of course, continue to prioritize markets with high potential. Our previous strategy achieved the difficult task of getting into and scaling some of the world's largest recruitment markets.... Thanks to the success of this strategy, we are well positioned in this market. We now need to leverage the opportunities that have been presented by focusing on high-margin businesses across our existing platform. It's worth noting that growth will be profit-driven, with no requirement for capital allocation from group. We will continue to transfer high-potential talent into the markets with the most scope, where they are necessary. What are the commercial goals for PageGroup's core business between now and 2030? Building on our strengths and focusing on being increasingly known for what we do best is going to help us expand our market-leading positions and achieve further growth as a world number one permanent recruiter. In addition, we will continue to deliver exceptional customer service. Ultimately, this will ensure we reach our goal of generating GBP 200 million operating profit from our core business. PageGroup has the people, the platform, the insights, and the technology to pursue and reach these goals, and we are truly excited about the opportunities ahead. I want to stress the continuing significance of our core business to the future success of Page. It is the cornerstone of our new strategy, allowing us to build on what we are famous for. I would now like to walk you through the three global platform opportunities that we will leverage: technology, which we see as a scale play, Page Executive as a market gap play, and finally, our focus on Strategic C ustomers we see as a partnership play. We see technology as a scale play for Page, enabling us to build high-volume, high-value businesses. To be clear, our technology consultants don't recruit exclusively into technology businesses. They recruit into all of the sectors we serve, allowing us to cross-pollinate with clients who we work with in other disciplines, such as finance, sales, or engineering. The technology sector will continue to evolve in the years to come. This will inevitably create ever-changing talent requirements and exacerbate existing talent shortages. Hyper-specialization will make the task of staying abreast of talent trends, as well as identifying and sourcing relevant candidates, increasingly challenging for generalist internal talent acquisition teams. This is where our global team of experienced, specialized technology recruiters step in to support our clients. Adding to the challenge for clients is the evolving nature of the talent pool in technology, where people are more mobile, more open to hybrid working, and could potentially be located anywhere. Our global reach and infrastructure, therefore, gives us a distinct advantage over smaller competitors. We'll now hear from Nicolas Béchu on both the opportunity and investment strategy in our technology business. I'm excited to tell you about our plans for the accelerated growth of our global technology business, our ambitions, and how we want to get there. Since 2014, PageGroup has grown its technology recruitment operations by around 20% per year, doubling its gross profit since 2019. 2022 saw a 32% year-on-year increase, and meant technology delivered GBP 150 million of gross profit. It is today our second-largest discipline and represents 14% of the group. Our strategic goal is to build a GBP 350 million gross profit business by 2030 by delivering sustained growth with a 20% conversion rate. Our global specialist recruitment team grew from 400 consultants in 2016 to around 1,000 today. These specialists place professionals in leadership roles, in highly technical positions, such as cybersecurity, as well as high-volume technical profiles, such as software developers. The success in recent years is due largely to a clearly defined focus in each country, and this is what we want to build on. What will be the key factors driving the success of our technology business? There are three ingredients on how we would achieve our goal: the depth of our expertise across 37 markets, a focused investment approach, and building out our operating platform. First, we operate as a collective of specialist teams with deep knowledge and experience who combine to provide a full service offering. Each of our consultants are technical specialists dedicated to building a community in their location for their technical specialism. Our expertise in permanent recruitment gives us competitive differentiation to many of our competitors in the technology space. Second, we have collected valuable learnings through our successful IT contracting business in Germany, where we started with 30 freelancers in 2015, growing to 200 in 2023, and are delivering record gross profit and conversion levels. We will take this model and focus our investment on 2 markets during the next 3 years, France and Japan. PageGroup France has a strong leadership team, a deep understanding of non-perm recruitment, and a strong market position across the business as a whole. PageGroup Japan already runs a successful technology business that represents 28% of its total gross profit. We will leverage this platform by investing strongly, as this market is the second-largest recruitment market in the world. All other countries will continue the development of their technology business as operating today, focusing on the more profitable parts of permanent recruitment markets within a clear set of specialisms. Non-perm operations will only run in markets that provide significant opportunity to create scale and return on investment. Third, the continued evolution of our delivery on operating platforms. We'll look at the effective use of delivery and sourcing centers, attracting the best recruitment talent on the market, as well as training and retaining our own talent, using our highly developed tools such as Page Insights and Customer Connect, as well as driving future capability through AI. Lastly, helping our clients create and implement recruitment processes that promote diversity and inclusion, so that businesses can attract and retain a wide range of talent. As a truly inclusive recruiter, Michael Page Technology understands that diverse, high-caliber teams deliver results. These are all areas where Page already excels. These three areas combined, our global reach and expertise, our market-focused investment approach, and our evolved operating model, will enable us to secure our clients' top talent at pace and help us deliver against our goals. What are the commercial goals of our technology business between now and 2030? Our ambition is clear: to be the market leader in permanent recruitment across a range of specialist, professional, and leadership job types, as well as growing our capability and market presence strategically across non-perm, where we can achieve scale and high level of productivity. Doing this will see us achieve our strategy goal to build a GBP 350 million gross profit business by 2030 by delivering sustained growth with a 20% conversion rate. Technology is a fantastic opportunity for PageGroup, and by capitalizing on our global presence, customer relationships, and know-how, we expect accelerated growth on a strong increase of both our gross profit and operating profit. Technology recruitment is a huge market, and a market we know well. It is already our second-largest discipline, and we will build on our existing strengths in this area while targeting key strategic investment opportunities. Our third pillar for growth is Page Executive. We will build out our capability in this area where we see a clear market gap. Over recent years, we've invested in this business and created a truly global offering. This has been well received by our clients, who are keen to look beyond geographic borders to identify the best leadership talent around the world. We've seen Page Executive growing quickly, but importantly, delivering that growth with high levels of conversion. We have around 300 consultants working in executive search today, and we intend to grow this to over 700 by 2030. Again, we will prioritize certain key markets. We'll now hear from Anthony Thompson, our CEO for Page Executive globally, who will explain how clients and candidates can benefit from a new perspective on executive search. Page Executive is a clear opportunity for us to accelerate growth in all markets and create a position of global leadership in executive search and senior leadership recruitment. Our business has expanded significantly since 2014, with gross profit growing at an annual average growth rate of 19% and conversion rates consistently above 30%. What is the size and scale of the opportunity, and what does the competitive landscape look like? According to Verified Market Research, the executive search market was valued at $17.5 billion in 2021 and is projected to reach $30 billion by 2030. There are a very small number of true global executive search firms focused on the C-suite level in terms of search and advisory services, and literally thousands of boutique companies focused on certain geographies and niche markets. To be clear, our objective is not to compete directly with the global executive search firms. Our aim is to further grow our reputation in the market that sits just above the Michael Page brand, through to the lower end of where the global executive search firms operate. While geographic variances exist, our target market is positions with a base salary in the region of GBP 100,000-GBP 300,000, while building a track record of success at true C-suite level when and where appropriate. This will be both permanent and interim roles. We believe we have a unique competitive advantage. Page Executive has the scope to succeed in what we know to be a sizable market gap, where our listed competitors are short of the capability to succeed and struggle to be recognized as an executive recruitment level brand. In addition, the pure play executive search firms have a lower incentive to operate in this gap, both due to their cost base and to avoid brand dilution. Page Executive is a growth opportunity and priority in all locations. However, there are certain markets that represent particularly high potential due to economic size, high salaries, and fee levels, and we will be looking to accelerate in these markets in particular. The U.S. and Japan are clear examples of this, as the two largest recruitment markets in the world, where we have a strong Michael Page presence, but Page Executive is still relatively underdeveloped. How does Page Executive meet the needs of our customers? The Page Executive service is everything you would expect from an offering to deliver senior executive search. Yes, it's tailored to deliver success on a regional or global basis. Yes, we have dedicated researchers meeting complex candidate sourcing needs, and we have premium tools and techniques around assessment, referencing, and psychometric testing. We also offer a range of consulting and advisory services from organizational design through to leadership, coaching, and compensation advice. Add in the power of Page's database and networks, our willingness to be flexible in process, and to deliver at speed, rather than following some of the long-established, rigid, and inefficient practices that exist in the current executive search market, we are confident we have a compelling, customer-oriented business model. Many of the candidates we interact with now through Page Executive have been candidates of Michael Page earlier in their careers, and a large proportion have also been or are clients. We will continue to nurture this long-term level of connection, understanding, and trust to grow sustainable partnerships in a manner that is unique to Page. What will be the key factors driving the success of Page Executive? The connection with the rest of PageGroup is a fundamental competitive advantage to be fostered and developed further. By building the reach and penetration of Page Executive, we make a compelling offer to both our clients and candidates across all the key stages of careers. Our team delivering this comprises Page Executive principals or partners with an average tenure of over 10 years, providing clients with a level of expertise, market knowledge, and confidence that they value. Our Page Executive teams have been built organically through the transfer of highly experienced Michael Page experts, augmented by the selective recruitment of senior executive search and recruitment specialists from other reputable companies. We see this as an ideal model to continue to develop, and the Page Executive brand and business continues to allow us to attract and retain talent we otherwise would not have been able to. The further growth of Page Executive provides an opportunity to generate higher fees and higher conversion, as well as identifying and originating business opportunities for the wider group. What are the commercial goals for Page Executive between now and 2030? Our goal by 2030 is for Page Executive to be a business that generates over GBP 200 million in gross profit annually with a high conversion rate well above the group average. We anticipate this will be a global team of approximately 700 specialist fee earners by this time. We are confident that Page Executive will become an increasingly significant brand and business around the world. Our objectives are achievable and sustainable, and we expect Page Executive to be a key contributor to the group's overall strategic growth objectives. As you just heard, we'll transform our executive search business from being regionally run to a new global operation, giving clients a fresh, contemporary approach that we believe we are uniquely placed to offer. There are two upsides that really stand out for me with Page Executive. Firstly, the opportunity to continue working with clients and candidates who we built successful relationships with in our Michael Page business, and to extend this into the later stages of their careers as they become senior leaders and decision-makers. In effect, delivering life cycle recruitment services. Secondly, by placing more candidates into the most senior roles, we create more Page advocates who trust our brand and want to work with us to recruit and reshape their businesses, generating work for Michael Page, Page Personnel, and Page Outsourcing. Our final pillar for growth is another global platform focused on creating business partnerships. We will build out capability and offering to Strategic Customers, creating long-term mutual value. These customers face increasingly complex talent requirements. Creating solutions, be that advisory services, flexible delivery models, or driving efficiency through our global teams, will enable us to be a key partner. Page Outsourcing will play a significant role in meeting this evolving demand. With a more comprehensive global footprint than our direct competitors, combined with our scale and our capability in delivery and insights, we believe we are best placed to deliver a client solutions business. Let's hear now from Patrick Hollard, our Chief Customer Officer, who will talk about the services, structure, and tools we have available to help our larger clients navigate the increasingly complex talent environment. In 2022, PageGroup had close to 375 customers, where we built over GBP 300,000 per year. Those Strategic Customers delivered GBP 229 million pounds of gross profit, representing 21% of our total. Still, looking at those customers, our revenue generated from them represent a fraction of their talent acquisition spend, and there is a massive opportunity to grow our business share. With our existing platform and using the success of Page Outsourcing brand, which has been growing at 44% year-on-year. We are targeting now GBP 500 million gross profit with our Strategic Customers by 2030. Of that, GBP 150 million will be through our Page Outsourcing operations. Similar to our core business, we will focus on a conversion rate of 20%. What is the size and the scale of the opportunity? The demand from larger and often international clients are increasingly sophisticated. They want long-term partnership with an à la carte advisory approach for their global challenges. These demands require a different approach from our traditional core business and different business lines offered, from global PSAs to augmented recruitment, RPOs or MSPs. Our existing brand, Page Outsourcing, already addresses this more sophisticated market with a dedicated team in multiple countries and with delivery model that are outside of Page existing core approach. These demands represent a sizable opportunity that most of our medium and smaller sized competitors will be unable to fulfill. We will, of course, need to be selective about the business that we target in this area, saying no to contract that are at odd with our models and strategy. Some contracts may look attractive on the surface, but we know that fulfillment can compromise conversion. What will be the key factors driving the success of our Strategic Customers? We will build on our existing strengths, growing our capability and delivering for our largest customers in a more efficient way. Three factors will be key to our success. One, building deeper, longer-term relationship. Two, leveraging our global scale, insights, platform, and technology. And three, providing advisory services. By building longer-term partnership with our larger customer, we will lower exposure to downturn through increases in contracted PSA agreements and deliver a wider range of flexible talent solutions. Our relationship with these customers will move from transactional to partnership as we work with them cross disciplines, cross brands, cross geographics, and cross service line. Global customers want to engage with global partners like us, rather than boutiques, because we can respond to their complex needs. By using our scale, platforms, global infrastructure, but mostly our existing expert team, we can exert a competitive advantage. Our technology platform will be a fundamental part of the customer value propositions as clients come to us to access tools and innovations that they do not want to invest in for themselves. Delivery centers will be essential alongside and embracing hybrid and home working, which other parts of Page will benefit from. Our best-in-class data and insight and delivery capability will allow us to solve our clients' talent acquisition challenges via RPOs, MSPs, consulting, HR advisory, and DE&I talent solutions. Clients are looking for on-demand services rather than fully replacing the entire recruitment process, which plays in our strengths as our global footprint allows us to show a high degree of agility and responsiveness. What are our goals with our Strategic Customers between now and 2030? The relationships we build with our Strategic Customers will increase our proportion of repeat business, lowering our cost of acquisitions, and therefore impacting productivity positively. In driving deeper, longer-term partnerships with our larger customers, we can meet their demands for hard-to-reach talent in sectors such as technology or working in executive level assignments, or delivering through our core business effectively and efficiently. As you've just heard, Page is a business that has reach and infrastructure to support our customers' needs all around the world. We believe that makes us an ideal partner for larger and often more international clients. To finish, I took on a very successful business when I became CEO at the turn of the year. While current market conditions are creating headwinds, I strongly believe that our new strategy will accelerate our trajectory to be even more successful in the future. In simple terms, the new strategy is about leveraging our existing global platform with a focus on targeted growth, while maximizing profit by building on what we're famous for. We will focus on our existing strengths at a discipline, brand, and country level, customer-led, people-powered, and insight-driven, and we will stay true to our purpose of changing lives all around the world. I'll now hand over to our CFO, Kelvin Stagg, who will talk to you in more detail about the financial modeling that underpins our strategic goals. Thank you. Come this way. Thank you, Nick, and Good Afternoon, everybody. I'm Kelvin Stagg, Chief Financial Officer, and I'll now present the financial summary of our new strategy, bringing together the presentations you've seen today to show what this will mean for future shareholder value. The key financial goal of our new strategy is clear: to deliver group operating profit by 2030 of GBP 400 million. This is more than double our previous record year of 2022, where we delivered just under GBP 200 million. This will be done by maximizing our core business, operating in a highly profitable manner by focusing on what we do best. We will also leverage our global platform to drive higher gross profit growth in our strategic areas of investment you have seen today, namely Technology, Page Executive, and Strategic Customers. I will now provide greater detail on the shape of the plan to deliver this new financial goal for the group. This slide sets out the strategic categories that we presented today. While it should be noticed that the baseline is 2022, and we've already seen a decline in 2023, meaning the growth rates required are higher, we still believe it's achievable. This does go, however, to show the impact that macroeconomic events can have on our performance, and how economic headwinds or tailwinds may impact the timing of the vision, either before or after 2030. Talking through each of the categories in turn, starting with the core business, we believe we can achieve a compound annual growth rate of around 4% for the period, which we have a proven track record of being able to deliver. The key focus for our core business will be the conversion rate, where we are targeting an overall conversion rate in excess of 20%. We will drive this improvement primarily through the various areas of focus that you've heard about today, but we've also implemented some cost-saving initiatives that I will talk you through later. As you can see, our areas of strategic investment have higher gross profit growth rates than the core, albeit from a lower base in 2022. Between the categories, there is a level of overlap. As for example, we could make a Page Executive placement within the technology discipline or to a Strategic Customer. Overall, this means that to deliver our 2030 gross profit goal of around GBP 2 billion, we would need to deliver compound annual growth of around 7% from our base year in 2022. Now, moving on to operating profit and the conversion rate. For technology and Strategic Customers, we are aspiring to deliver the same conversion rate that we are targeting within the core business, despite the higher growth rate. However, for Page Executive, we are targeting a higher conversion rate of around 35%, given this is already a highly profitable part of the business, with conversions significantly above the group's average. Overall, this gives a total operating profit for the group of GBP 400 million at an average conversion rate of just over 20%. Clearly, we could get to the GBP 400 million via a different path, for example, by a lower gross profit growth at a higher conversion rate or vice versa, but this is the scenario that we are targeting to deliver the GBP 400 million of operating profit. Now, move on to look at how the delivery of this profit goal will generate cash. A key element to the conversion of this profit to cash will be the mix between permanent and temporary recruitment. Temporary recruitment has a much higher working capital requirement due to us needing to pay the temp or contractor before we receive payment from our client. Given we pay the wages before then receiving the wages, plus our margin from the client, the working capital requirement for temp can be up to five times that of permanent recruitment, where there's no initial outflow and we just pay our bill. Overall, we don't expect that of the new vision to move our ratio of permanent to temporary recruitment materially. While the proportion of temp is higher in technology recruitment, it's much lower as you would expect in executive roles. Accordingly, I anticipate our perm to temp ratio will remain at roughly 77-23, and as such, we don't anticipate that the new strategy will drive a significant change in the ratio of working capital to gross profit. We'll continue to run a highly cash generative business model, and as I've just described, we don't anticipate the new strategy causing any significant increase in the ratio of working capital to gross profit in the group. In line with our current cash allocation policy, we'll continue to hedge liabilities under the group share plans to ensure our senior management population are retained and rewarded for delivering the new strategy. While we'll have to continue to invest in headcount, particularly in the areas of strategic investment, this will balance with a focus on the conversion rate. In recent years, we've invested in adapting our office footprint to align with new working habits after the pandemic. We've also taken opportunities to refine our lease portfolios as leases have come to an end. Much of this transition has already been made, and therefore, the new strategy is not expected to drive a significant increase in capital expenditure. Given these cash flow dynamics, we are targeting a pre-tax cash conversion rate at over 90%. With this highly cash generative business model, we anticipate being able to make continued high levels of shareholder returns. In particular, we'll seek to first deliver ordinary dividends, and then we will make supplementary returns using surplus cash, either via special dividends or share buybacks. In recent years, apart from the pandemic, we've grown the ordinary dividend at around 4.5% per year, in line with our stated policy to maintain the ordinary dividend in a downturn and increase it during more prosperous times. Going forward, we expect to continue growing the ordinary dividend on average between 4%-5% per year. Over the period to 2030, this would imply returning over GBP 500 million to shareholders by way of ordinary dividends. Beyond this, we'll continue our policy of making supplementary returns to shareholders.... Based on the profit goal you have seen today, the cash conversion target of 90% and the cash buffer of GBP 50 million, this would drive supplementary shareholder distributions in excess of GBP 1 billion by 2030. In the last nine years, excluding the pandemic year, after consultation with our largest shareholders, supplementary distributions have been made via special dividends. While previously, between 2002 and 2011, they were made through share buyback and cancellation. Going forward, we'll review this policy in consultation with the board and shareholders to ensure the capital allocation methodology remains the most appropriate for the group. As you may have seen in the RNS earlier today, to accelerate our drive to improving our conversion rate, we are taking some one-off costs in 2023. Through the process of putting together the new strategy, we looked to identify areas where we could strategically redefine our cost base, where it was not as efficient as it could be for the future shape of the group. From this review, various initiatives were identified, which will generate future cost savings. A number of these initiatives require a one-off cost in 2023 to generate future savings. In total, the initiatives identified will generate a one-off cost in 2023 of GBP 15 million. However, a number of these initiatives start to deliver cost savings during 2023, and as such, the net impact on our 2023 result is in the region of GBP 5 million. Going forward, in total, we anticipate these initiatives will generate around GBP 20 million of annualized savings from 2024 onwards. All of these initiatives were identified to help with driving our business towards our new financial goal of delivering operating profit of GBP 400 million by 2030. To summarize, we have a clear financial vision to deliver GBP 400 million of operating profit by 2030. Alongside this financial target, we continue to act in line with our purpose of changing lives, with the goal of changing a million lives by 2030, by placing candidates into work, as well as the number of people who access our social impact programs and skill-sharing volunteering events. Our third goal is focused on delivering best-in-class customer experience, where we are targeting a client Net Promoter Score of 60 or above. This is a critical measure of how we build deeper, repeat relationships and ensure our long-term business success. To achieve our goals, there will be four pillars of growth that you heard about today: maximizing our core, accelerating the growth of our technology business, expanding Page Executive, and building out our capabilities for Strategic Customers. You've heard today from our highly experienced leadership team on how they will deliver this new strategic vision for the group in each of these areas. Through delivery of this vision, alongside our continued highly cash-generative business model, we'll continue to deliver high levels of shareholder returns and are targeting a total shareholder distribution of over GBP 1.5 billion to the period up until 2030. Now, that concludes the formal part of the presentation this afternoon. So we'd now like to move on to Q&A, where Nick and I'd be happy to take any questions you may have. If you want to ask a question, please raise your hand and we'll get a microphone over to you. Please then ask your question into the microphone so the audience on the live stream are able to hear it. If you can start with your name and your company, that'd be very helpful. Thank you. Andy? Hi, it's Andy Grobler from BNP Paribas. Just a couple to start with. Just on the savings, can you talk a little bit about what you're actually doing to make those savings this year, and whether it's all gonna be complete by the end of this year? And from what you've said, I assume they're gonna be expensed through the accounts, was one. And then two, just on your Strategic Customers, I guess over the past several years, your proportion of large customers has gone backwards. They haven't needed you quite as much as maybe they did a while back. Why do you think that's gonna change? What is your real kind of value offering to those customers in a kind of changed technology market? Thank you. I'll talk to the first one. Yeah, the first one, I don't want to give you a vast amount of detail about it because some of it obviously involves making some changes within the organization. Some of it I can talk to. We always said in the H1 that we were holding some of the people in operational services roles, particularly in candidate acquisition, where actually you could see the Fiona headcount come down, and we hadn't come down in some of the non-Fiona holding roles. Given where the market has trended through the rest of the year, we, we've taken action on that, and you will see quite a sizable drop in that, non-Fiona, headcount as we go through, and certainly by the time that you see our Q3 results in a few weeks' time. There are a couple of other areas, that, we've taken action on. I mean, our biggest, cost for the group, 80% of it, is people. Some of it is property. There are opportunities in property, where we don't need as many, if any, interview rooms anymore, and therefore, that's an opportunity to, to make some savings in that area. And I think in other areas, we've just, after two years of records, gone back to have a look and maybe see whether there were things that we'd invested in or, areas that we'd got that perhaps we just didn't need in a, in a slightly different environment. Plus, where you've come out of the pandemic and, and the opportunities are different, and therefore, some of the things you need are more online or digital or something else and maybe not so binary. We... Yes, there's a GBP 15 million cost, there's a GBP 10 million, we think, benefit. Both of those are slight estimates because in certain cases, until we actually carry out the activity, we don't know quite what it is. My, my thought is that if anything, it will be slightly less than the 5. The five will be in the underlying profit, so we're not taking an exceptional. Once we get to the year end, we will have a very clear both for the prelims and in the IRA breakdown of what we've done, why we did it, and what the impact will be. I think as regards Strategic C ustomers, I think as I said earlier on in the presentation, post-pandemic, there's just been some significant shifts around trends in the market, whether that's hyper-specialization, so this step towards roles being even more defined than they ever were, shortages of candidates in all of our markets. And what that's meant is that if you have a TA team of, say, circa 20, 40, 100 people, and you're recruiting an accountant on a Monday, and then a software developer on a Wednesday, and a lawyer on a Friday, it is very, very difficult to maintain talent pools and have contacts and connections across multiple markets. So what we found is that organizations, the bigger organizations, are far more interested in talking to us now because they have issues around attracting this talent. Now, there's probably organizations right at the top of the employment world, the Amazons, et cetera, that we're not referring to here, but it is that next tier down that have issues that they didn't have. I think all issues, right—all businesses as well, rightly so, are a lot more focused, again, as we said in the presentation, around representation. And if you go back to the same talent pools, you'll get the same types of people. And if you're trying to drive some, focus around gender, or focus around ethnicity or disability, and you go back to the talent pool you used before, you get what you got before. So they work with us because we can access talent that they can't access to bring that representation into their organization. We talk to them a lot using Page Insights, as you came along, I mean, we showed it to you. You know, being able to show them how, you know, if they look at a sector and you look at, you know, the split of male to female, how they're trending versus that, what ways they could go about it, what job titles might offer more balance around gender, and then we can target those on their behalf. So we're either working with them from the perspective of making money through advisory services, or ideally, we get both. We get the advisory services followed by the recruitment. Yes, Good Afternoon. Hans Pluijgers with Kepler Cheuvreux. Three questions from my side. First of all, on your target, you have come with, let's say, a specific year, which in staffing is always a little bit difficult to really, let's say, to really forecast. So could you give maybe some feeling on how you see it? Let's say, I can understand with respect to the distribution of the capital, but more, let's say, on the profit target, how do you see it? Let's say, why haven't you come with a range of, let's say, 5-10 years, something like that. Secondly, on AI, you referred that in the lower end of the market, you see some disintermediation in AI, through AI. What is different than for the higher end of the market? What really, what can't AI, let's say, accomplish compared to what they can do for, let's say, the lower, category, job categories? Lastly, coming back on the customer, the large customers, the Strategic Customers. How will it work, let's say, in practice, when a customer, let's say, reaches a certain level, how did you, let's say, how do you, let's say, define or, let's say, move customers from your normal pool, your normal core business, to Strategic Customers? Especially, how does it work, let's say, with respect to remuneration for, let's say, the, yeah, account, account manager, which the few owners which, let's say, manage those, those key, those customers? Yeah, okay. I'll take the first one, and then Nick can warm up for the others. The answer is actually, we needed to give it some sort of a timeframe. Given how unpredictable the market has been over certainly the last five, going for 2030 seemed a fairly logical time to pick. Actually, we extrapolated out to get to a number that was trying to reflect the fact that in the past we talked about trying to get to GBP 1.2 billion-GBP 1.25 billion, so 20 to 25. We got to the GBP 1 billion. We sort of just about got to the 200, 219, I think, if you take it to the half year in 2022. But we always struggled with the conversion rate. Well, the main reason we struggled with the conversion rate was because we were also trying to do this expand strategy. Moving from 15% in large, high potential markets to 40% means that you're constantly putting new headcount into markets. You're constantly trying to try out different disciplines. You're constantly trying to take an office from zero to 50, and it's really difficult to get from zero to 50. You lose a couple of people, and you're tumbling back down to it being 28 again. But once you get to 50, it's much easier to go from 50 to 100 and 100 to 200 if the scale is there. So I think this time it was very much a matter of saying: Well, we need to be able to deliver business at a very good conversion rate. Now, a good conversion rate could be 20, it could be 25, and it will probably be different in different markets, but internally, the message to our people will change. So the message to our people over the last 10 years has been land, expand, large, high potential markets, go for it, we need to get scale. Actually, the same in terms of our technology offering over the last 5 years. The way to get promoted was to have more people or have more countries. And actually, that's achieved exactly what we wanted it to do, really, to go from 15 to 40. But what we want to do now is to take that platform that we've got-... Go deep. Therefore, actually, let's not keep opening businesses that actually drive down the conversion rate because it's a brand-new business, we don't have the depth of knowledge or the candidate pool. Let's not actually end up opening a new brand in a market if we've already got density in one of the other brands, and we think that that's the way to go. Actually, by bringing it in, we believe that we can very consistently deliver a 20% conversion rate. Is that ambitious or not? We'll know that probably in a couple of years' time. We then spun that out and said: Well, if you're gonna go from delivering 17% at 7%, 20% at 4%, it's not an exact science, but we wanted some areas that were absolutely about growth. 4% is not growth. 4% is largely about delivering profit. The other ones are between 10% and 15% growth, but actually still at good profitable basis. So we split the business into trying to look about all about conversion, about conversion and growth, joined that two together, and we had a model that came out at GBP 400 million. In reality, could it be 2028? Could it be 2032? Could it be 22%? We won't know until we're somewhere down the strategy. And as I say, having looked back for the last 5 years, it's very difficult to make too short a strategy, but we're pretty confident that we'll be able to get to GBP 400 million by 2030 with a 20% conversion rate. I think as we start to look at AI and technology, the reason I referred to it having more of an impact at the mass market end, at the kind of the staffing end of the market, is if we start to look at areas like the gig economy as a very good example, if I'm wanting you to work for me starting Monday and finish Friday, I've got a set rate, I know where I need you to be, I've got your basic skills, and frankly, you are going to be sat doing data input in a center, and that's the hourly rate. And then on Friday, you finish, and I put you into a new job the Monday after. We are moving to a point where technology does all of that, and AI, therefore, will do it in an even more efficient manner, and we'll be able to bring some certain personalization to it. Our experience in white-collar professional recruitment at the level we recruit at is that whilst it will be a great tool for us, for our consultants to use to remove the heavy lifting, our consultants—sorry, our candidates and our clients still very much value the human interaction. These moves that they make are still pretty significant in their life when you're looking at perm recruitment at senior levels. And very few people are comfortable enough to make that decision based on what they're told by a bot or by what they're told through a platform that might give them some information about the company. They want first-hand expertise. Have you met him? What's he like? Have you placed someone with him before? What was your experience of him? Have you been to their office? What are they all about? That's the role our consultants play, and at the level we recruit at and pushing that up with Page Executive, we just don't see that being challenged. AI sits in the hands of management and leadership. They're the ones that use it to drive efficiencies, and we place those people. As regards to your second question, it probably links slightly to what Kelvin said to me. It's not a perfect science. What we decided not to do with Strategic Customers was to identify 500 customers and say, "They're our Strategic Customers," and that's it, and it's fixed. Because as you'll probably know, with recruitment, is that one year, one of them will be really busy and will need our services, and then if we do our job properly, next year, they won't need our services at all, and the year after that, maybe a little bit. So it will be a relatively fluid pool. What we will do with these accounts, though, is that if I'm working with a client in the U.K., we need to have someone who's going into that business, who isn't a day-to-day recruiter, whose role is to go in and look at the share of wallet, not just what else are they doing in the U.K., but what are their strategic plans? Are they planning to open in Thailand? If so, we can help you. We've got a business there. Are they planning to open in Peru? If so, we've got a business there. But then when we get the business, we'll then channel it back through our local operations because they're buying that expertise. That's what they want, people who know candidates, who know the market that they don't have when they look to go internationally. So that's where we see our kind of opportunity to win, as it were. And just on that, I mean, I think it would be fair to say that with 21% of the group in Strategic Customers, it's not like we weren't doing this before, but actually, historically, Page was quite a regional business, and actually, we're very good in the country, we're pretty good in a region, but following a customer globally was not one of our big strengths. And I think that's something that by joining the core of the business together and not running it regional anymore, we can really drive growth out of that. And so it will be trying to move these customers into operating more than one region, as well as more than one discipline. Because, I mean, we have, unlike other competitors, we have a single data platform, so we can, using Page Insights, see all of their trends. We can see when they're spiking, when they're dropping, speak to them as to why, and use all of this rich data to actually go in and engage with them to find out where the opportunities are, and that's what the data tells us. So we don't have to go out and cold call. We know where the trends are, what's doing what, and we're able to speak to them, not only in the business we're getting, but also the advertising they're doing in the market. You'd be surprised that for some of the really big customers, we tell them how much they're spending with us because they don't actually know outside of the country or possibly the region. And so that sort of, that ability to give them information globally about what they're doing, what their competition are doing, is pretty invaluable. Very patient. Okay. You've been very patient. That's okay, no problem. Hi, it's Kean Marden from Jefferies. I've got two as well, please. You've mentioned potentially exiting some lower attractive- ... revenue streams. I'm just wondering if you can give us some examples of what you have in mind, please. And then in your bridge to circa GBP 2 billion of net fees by fiscal 2030, how much headwind have you assumed from exiting those areas? And then just secondly, I guess just taking a step back here and putting ourselves in the perspective of a consultant working at Page in a pod where my bonus is paid off on EBIT, post the overhead allocation. If I'm in the core, how does your change in strategy affect me? How does that model change, and do my incentives or the way that I'm looking to run the business change at all? Well, maybe I'll do question one, part A, and question two, and you can do question one, part B, around the GBP 2 billion and the headwinds. Exiting markets. I’ll probably just say to, you know, to what Kelvin said earlier is that, you know, I'll only talk about the things we've already done as opposed to maybe ongoing focuses. You know, as an example, we did a business review in the H1 of the year down in LATAM. I’d gone down to the market, I’d met all the managing directors, and they were all talking about the journey from start-up to where they were today. We probably told you before that from starting a business in a country to getting to 50 people is really tough. You send out a couple of people from another market, they're typically top billers or leaders. They land, they have to hire a team, they have to build a network, they have to start billing from scratch themselves. It is hard yards, and as we talked about in the presentation, when you land, you don't know which disciplines or which brands are gonna give you the grab, which are the ones that that market are gonna really want from you. You largely go in and do everything and see what it is that they're gonna buy. Once you get to about 50 people, 50 people plus, you start to recognize that. LATAM was a good example, as I was sat there, you know, talking to them with the old strategy in mind. LATAM was a high potential market, so they were targeting themselves very much on headcount growth, GP growth. They were talking about their success in Michael Page, how they'd driven a business up to about 25, 30 people in a certain country that I'm thinking of, and it had 25% conversion. It was going great. I was wondering why the overall country had a conversion rate that was a lot lower than that. Because what they'd done is gone out and got Page Personnel off the rank and started to go with that, and it wasn't grabbing. We had a very low conversion business, but a sense of wanting to offer all of our services locally. So as an individual example, that would be an area where, at the end of the business review, got the team together, and we made a decision that at 25 people in a country in Latin America, in Michael Page, you've still got plenty of scope for growth. You don't need another brand. You can move that resource across into Michael Page, and you can build out that brand very easily to 100 people in a very populous market without having to dilute it, doing Page Personnel. So it's that kind of country by country, city by city review that we did in the first nine months of this year with the regional heads. The final part or the second part for me was around core. I mean, I think the core part's very simple because if I'm running a team, I want my team to be as profitable as possible because I'm rewarded on a profit share model. So that's how we generate the bonuses that we award to our consultants on a quarterly basis. So the more profitable the team is, the bigger the pot is, the more the manager or the director has to hand out. So if I'm listening to this strategy as a consultant, I'm listening to it and saying: Well, you want to have a strategy that puts more money into the pot, which means if I do well, there'll be more money in my pocket. Yes, please. So I think that's very, very sellable. Yeah, I guess the question was really, in order to get to GBP 2 billion, how much of shutting stuff and focusing on other stuff has hindered that on the way? The reality is very, very little, actually. I think, as Nick described, in many cases, what we're doing is looking at the suite of services we're offering, focusing on the ones that we think we really want to double down on, and if we possibly can, move the people out of the other disciplines into those areas. I mean, what you're doing is just building a bigger revenue stream and switching off the other ones. I mean, the only country that we've decided to change our operating model with was Sweden, which happened in June, and we had the opportunity to exit the lease. So we have essentially stopped operating onshore in Sweden, and we've got a team working at a delivery center in Barcelona. We still have the company there, so we can still operate through that company and the bank account, but we're not located onshore. Why did we do that? Because in all honesty, we struggled to ever get that business more than about 35 people. It was never really quite big enough to therefore give a consistent conversion rate in excess of 20% and tended to hover around the low- to mid-teens%. That actually, we didn't really have much success in terms of trying to get local Swedish people up the management chain there. And therefore, it was always a business that tended to have an expensive expat in it. It tended not to be one that really played to our strengths, and so we just decided to exit. Some of the people that are still with us in other countries, most of the people, have now moved on to somewhere else. We're not intending to shut anywhere else at this point in time. So, we've got a few countries that you might say are in, maybe not quite intensive care, but they're certainly being looked at closely with plans to get them consistently into the 20% point. But you wouldn't miss the OP that came out of Sweden. So, no, I mean, genuinely, I don't think we're gonna have taken the approach that said, "You can always improve your conversion by shutting all the stuff that doesn't work very well." Well, actually, on a country-by-country basis, we're absolutely not doing that, and we're just trying to focus on the stuff that is a better quality business, if you like. ... Yeah, hi, my name is Christian Diebitsch. I probably should know this, but I don't. So it's great that you have given all these targets, and they're quite long-term, so I appreciate that. But am I wrong, but you report regionally, don't you? Yes. So how can we sort of reconcile the progress, shall we say? So we will continue to report regionally. We will, though, give you an update on progress against the strategic targets we've got out there, certainly six monthly. So we actually. We can't give you conversion on a quarterly basis because we don't have conversion and profit by the time that we do our quarterly, sorry, Q2 and Q4, when we come out on about the seventh or the eighth of the month, we haven't closed the books by then. So we've got gross profit, 'cause we have the revenue numbers, and we'll have the head count, but the same as we normally do. When we do the interims, and when we do the prelims, we'll break it out like this, so you can see where we're going. Good. Yeah. All right. I mean, your disclosure is very good. It's just, It's different to this. Yeah. Yeah, and to a certain extent, there's certainly an element of the fact that we do run regionally that has meant to us, the more global the business gets, the less alignment it feels like you've got. And by putting Isabelle and Nico to run half of the group each, but very tightly together, we think it'll drive much better alignment across the businesses, much better learning in terms of, we've got some great tech businesses, the one in Germany. We've got a statement of work business in Colombia that's brilliant. There isn't as much passing across the regions as there could be. Back to the point with Strategic Customers, we're really good within the regions. We're not as good across the regions or across the whole of the group, and I think for these businesses, PageExec will run as a global business. It's things where we can really leverage the power of our platform, including things like Customer Connect and Page Insights that has global information in it. So that's more the reason, but you're right, we'll do reporting in the meantime. Yeah. Maybe a follow-up question on Christian's question. So how does it work in managerial perspective? Who is, let's say, in the lead, or let's say, the two heads or the two people just presented, let's say, in the lead with respect to where to focus on, or are the local managers in the lead? How does it work managerial? So actually, in the level below what you've seen there, if you were the managing director of... I don't know, if you ran France, and you were reporting to Isabelle, in the new structure, you report to Isabelle. I mean, there's no change. Once you get much below the level that we've shown you today, then there isn't a huge amount of change. What we have done is we've lifted out Page Executive, so that now reports into a global structure. We've lifted out our key account management teams, and that reports into a global structure alongside Page Outsourcing. But at Michael Page and Page Personnel in a technology level, that still runs through the same structure we had before, where managing directors report up into a regional managing director, who then reports to an exec board member. No real change. The difference was that I suppose we had four of those sitting on the exec board. Anthony, who's gonna run Page Exec, was running Asia Pac. Patrick, who's going to run Global Customers, was running LATAM. And so those regions will now go into one of Nico and Isabelle, and that will make half the number of people running it. It makes it, it makes it manageable in terms of the size of the group and the operational size. They need to keep very aligned, but it also means that they can make sure that those regional people below them are very, very aligned on what we're doing. The focus is on operating profit, not on headcount aspirations, and it just makes it a little bit easier. Matthew Lloyd, HSBC. I've got a couple of questions. I'll start with the slightly more nervousy one. There've been a lot of staffing companies over the years who've said, "MSP and RPO is going to deliver us everything," only for us to discover their margins are consistently coming down. That's normally something to do with fill rate, i.e., they promise to fill lots of jobs, can't, and the margins. How do you protect against signing contracts in our RPO and MSP, where you just can't fill the vacancies, and it costs you a lot of money to not get any revenue? And then, a slightly more optimistic one, 'cause we're all looking down the barrel of, "Is there a recession? Is there not?" As we seem to have been done for about two years. You have core growing GP at 4%. Would you consider it possible that inflation alone would deliver that? I'll take the first one, and then leave inflation to you, Kelvin. Okay. I mean, you, you've kind of answered it as you would because you know the market pretty well in your question around MSP, RPO. I think if you look at the suite of jobs that an organization's trying to give you, and more than half are jobs that you cannot fill through your core business, and it's not what you normally do, then we would not be bidding. Now, other organizations, because they want the scale that it may offer, they want the GP it may offer, and they want probably to put some work into a team that they've built, may sign up to it. But our view will be that there's so much good project RPO work out there, so not necessarily contracts that you're signing for three years, all be it there may be some of that, too. But there's really good stuff out there that you can win, which are 1-year projects, where organizations are scaling within their white-collar professional market, and we're looking at that and thinking, "Yes, that's something we'd be interested in." And if there's 5% at the end that we don't do, then we'll look at a supply chain for 5%. We wouldn't do it the other way around. We wouldn't consider having a contract just for the- ... I suppose, upside on the GP to say that, well, we've got the 5% that's white-collar, and the 95% we need to manage a supply chain that are gonna do cleaners or gonna do hospitality roles that we don't do. So I think that's the big balance for us, is looking, when we look at these contracts, as to what we can self-supply, and if the ratio is high enough, then we're interested, clearly alongside margins and everything else, as you'd know. So that's kind of our key focus when we look at it. As Patrick said, there's a skill in saying no, and, you know, that for us, you know, having seen some of the contract wins that have been out there, because we've been offered to bid on some of them, and we've walked away, and we've slightly shook our heads because we don't know how they're profitable to the degree that they'd need to be if we're gonna come back with a conversion rate that we talked about earlier. The only thing I... And the other thing I'd add to that is that, we obviously hired Ollie Harris, from the competition, or actually not from the competition, at the point he approached us back in, 2020 in the pandemic. And, well, two points. One, I interviewed him on, Teams three times during that period of time, and every single one, the topic of conversation was: Can you really make 20% in conversion? And therefore, we did drill him on that. The reality is true. Now he's there. I mean, the only other thing I found from interviewing people on Teams is that you don't realize he's about six foot four, until you actually meet him. I think you need to have someone that knows what they're doing. The percentage of no bid versus bid is way bigger. I mean, we're bidding on something like about 30%, depending on which region you're in and how well they are. So it's pretty small numbers that you're going into, and you're just walking away from a very large amount, which Nick was right. And the other one was about inflation. Yes, possibly. I mean, we went through 10 years of almost zero wage inflation, and we had an average growth in that area of 7%, and we had a average conversion rate of maybe 17%. I mean, I don't think the wage inflation rates of sort of 20% we saw in the H1 of last year are particularly helpful, 'cause that brings us to where we are now, where everything's starting to slow down. But if we had consistent wage inflation of around, say, 4%, and we want to improve conversion, well, it does both. So actually, it would give you better conversion as well as driving your GP up. And therefore, arguably, yeah, I mean, you could be doing much more than four. But I probably don't want to come out and go, "Yep, we're gonna do 7% for the next however long, and wage inflation is gonna be 5%," and... But there are scenarios where that could happen. Thank you. Okay? Okay, well, if there's no more questions, firstly, thank you for all of us, or all of you that have joined us virtually today. For those of you in the room, thank you for coming along. If you'd like to join us for a drink, you're more than welcome. We have various members of the management team here that you can speak to, and we'll update you all again on Q3 during October. Thank you very much.