Morning, everybody. You're gonna see Five Boroughs later on in JFK, but if I can just welcome everybody. Thank you to those of us who were with us last night. Thank you for coming back. It was a great night, actually, and hopefully, the objectives that we had as we kicked it off, which was to give everyone a sense for the food credentials and culinary features and credentials of SSP, to meet the wider network of partners, clients that we're with, and just to get a sense for the kind of culture, capability, personalities of SSP America and SSP Group. Hopefully, that came through in a nice, fun, and informal event. The focus for our event today is sustainable long-term growth. We are convinced that our business is poised to be able to drive forward post this COVID reset in a very strong and very exciting way in terms of how we deliver for all stakeholders, but in this context, particularly for shareholders in the five-year period from 2024 through to 2029 on to 2030. We're gonna talk about that today. Jonathan and I will top and tail it with a group overview of our strategy and a overview of how our economic model and investment thesis comes together, respectively. But the centerpiece of our time together, which is why we're here in New York, is a profile and deep dive into all elements or many elements of our U.S. business. In fact, Jimmy Rollins said to me today he had no idea how we could spend three hours talking about America. He clearly hasn't spent three hours with our U.S. leadership team. You could spend three hours just talking to Pat Murray, right? You don't. I think this is an event, if I could say so, that is not without operational risk. Michael will touch on that a little bit later in terms of some of the things we're gonna try to do to bring the business to life in the showcases of the different capability areas, particularly around kitchens and cooking that you're gonna see. Hopefully, you will learn a lot, but I think you'll have fun with us as well, between now and 12, and then you'll see it all come to life in what is our biggest single airport client, which Jeffrey leads day-to-day, which is the Terminal 4 business in JFK. This, for me, you heard me mention it last night. The simplest way to put this is all roads to value creation and growth for SSP lead through North America. We are. This is my seventh visit in 15 months to the U.S., with the exception of going back and forth to the U.K., it is the country that I've visited by far the most since I joined the business. That's because understanding what we do here, and trying to make sure that we're capturing the potential of that in our strategy is so important. Sustainable long-term growth, showcasing North America, they knit together perfectly, and hopefully, you'll get to see that over the course of today. What we're gonna do, over the course of, between now and, in particular, between now and 12 o'clock, is, I'm gonna briefly touch on the trading statement that we've released today. Just to be clear, we are advised and almost required to issue a trading statement in advance of spending this amount of time with a group of equity analysts and shareholders. There is not a huge amount in it that's any way new, there are some nuances that I'll touch on in a second. I'm gonna provide an overview. For some of you, elements of it will be, will reinforce what you'll have heard us talk about over the course of the last year, on what's happening at the group level. It'll be relatively brief because the centerpiece, as I say, of the event, is trying to understand what we're doing in North America, I'll hand over to Michael and Pat to lead that through. Importantly, Jonathan will join this up in terms of what all this means for our economic model. We'll then take some Q&A, we'll then try and get out here sharp at 12:00, so you get to see all this come to life in JFK. Some brief highlights from the trading statement that we released this morning. As I say, it's only 4 weeks since we last updated the market. If there was anything profoundly different or new, it would be a surprise. Actually, if you look at the underlying trading momentum, it's a modest improvement on the 111% that we reported for the first 6 weeks of the second half back in May. It's disguised a little bit by currency movements relative to 2019, and Sarah and Sarah can explain that to you, but the underlying trading momentum in the business continues to be very good. On this theme of momentum, the momentum in net gains also continues to be very good in the first 10 weeks of the year. You've heard us talk quite explicitly about how that's coming together as we go forward, and we have certainly sustained that momentum and net gains through the first 10 weeks of the second half. We announced back in early May the acquisition of Midfield Concessions. We anticipated that that would complete through the summer, and we're pleased to confirm that in 6 of the 7 airports in which we have, which we required stakeholder support and to execute and complete the transaction, that's now done. We are largely complete with Midfield Concessions, and we're on track to close the last airport later this summer. There's quite a bit of information about our medium/term financial framework, which Jonathan will describe later on this morning. That's the current trading bit. If we move on now to the kind of drivers of growth and returns for the business going forward, let me just start by saying that there are many people here. will understand and know the SSP of the pre-COVID era much better than me. Obviously, many of those work for SSP, but also, you know, there's a group of people who have been researching SSP and invested in SSP, who go back well before COVID. The business had a very, very strong track record of growth, and in particular, delivery for shareholders in that five-year period from IPO up to the early stages of COVID. We then had the existential shock of COVID, which was absolutely brutal in terms of its impact on the economic model of the business, but it was, frankly, brutal on the people who worked for us, and the clients that we worked with, and many of the partners that we worked with as well. The business responded by effectively protecting ourselves and putting the business into hibernation, and since the, you know, early 2022, we have been emerging from that in terms of how we recover. I think it is worth me just pausing for one second to acknowledge the enormous skill and commitment of many of our U.S. team and Group team who managed that very difficult set of circumstances. There's something about the... at least for me anyway, there's something about the human psyche, where you forget about these problems and move on quite quickly. It's, you know, I thought when we were in COVID, we'd never talk about anything else for decades to come, but it's almost gone in our memory now. It's worth recognizing just how important it was, in terms of how the SSP team managed through that, and frankly, that couldn't have been done without the support of our shareholders, many of you are here, in giving us the resources to get through the business, to sort of get through the shock, but also to come out of the COVID period as a stronger business, which we have a real conviction we are now doing. I do want to acknowledge, I joined the business in March of 2022. I feel like I'm getting a good feel for the business in my time here. Part of how I do that is to get out and understand the business and meet, clients, teams, partners of different kinds across the world. I'm heading towards having visited 30 of the 38 countries we're now in, and having met our stakeholders in those, in those different places, and I, at least, am starting, if I haven't quite finished, to get a kind of deeper understanding as to what the essence of SSP is. What I would say is that it's important to acknowledge that in some economic terms, we're not finished the recovery phase from COVID yet, right? We gave a set of quite specific... We didn't quite call it guidance back last December, but in substance, it was, around how we would perform in a revenue and EBITDA basis for 2023, and again for 2024. It is worth noting that some of the other elements that sit below EBITDA in our business will still take through much of 2024 to fully recover. By that, I mean, you know, getting our refinancing done, reestablishing the provision and payment of some level of dividend, you know, resetting some of the capital allocation and catch-up post the hibernation phase of COVID, and getting our EPS into a place in 2024, from which we can then have the sustainable growth that we're gonna talk about for the rest of the session, and which Jonathan will then knit together in terms of what our forward-looking economic model looks like. In other words, we're, in many elements, we are fully recovered already from COVID, but not all, but we will complete that journey in the next 9-12 months, and then that gives us the platform from which we will have the sorts of economic returns that Jonathan will outline insofar as we can a little bit later on. To achieve sustainable growth, it has to build on a real sense of purpose and clarity of mission or vision in terms of what we're trying to do. We have pulled together as a leadership team and brought to life actually something that was somewhat nascent in SSP before, which is this sense of aligning on purpose across our group, which we call Being Best Part of the Journey. Each word in that is important in describing what our business is and what we aspire to be. The notion of being best is very important. This is a competitive bunch of people who have an aspiration to create a great business and to win in the marketplace in which we deliver, and to provide a quality of proposition, service, and excitement to all of our stakeholders. We want to set the standard for food-travel expertise across the world. The notion of being part of something also matters, because we sit in a complex aviation ecosystem. You'll have heard some elements of that in the aviation expert panel last evening. The simplest way to put this is we can only deliver if the system delivers, and so being part of a system and understanding how to actually perform within a system is very important. Obviously, the notion of journey resonates for us on several levels. It's a journey, in other words, travel, which is core to what we are, but it's also about a journey in terms of the relationships that we're building, the careers that we're providing to people, the evolution of our business. We don't think about the business in a static way. We think about it as being in a dynamic way, so those come together in this purpose of being best part of the journey. Our vision is quite simple. You know, we are. We love food, we love travel, and we want to be the best at it. It's that fusion of those two things, food and travel, and the notion of winning, that really comes through from that. We're fulfilling that vision and living that purpose by actually delivering long-term, sustainable growth. What we mean by that, I mean relative to the historic investment proposition for SSP, is that we will be a faster growing business than before. We'll be faster because of where we choose to compete. Simply put, we will do more in air relative to rail, and we'll do more in North America and rest of world relative to the U.K. and Continental Europe. We are being choiceful about that, in terms of where we're putting resources, to drive and support that growth. One of the fortunate features of this industry and this business model, this isn't common across all businesses and all business models, is that it so happens that the fastest growing parts of the world are also the highest returning parts of the world. It makes it even more important to be choiceful and clear around where we're putting incremental capital and where we're where we're building the business. In terms of how we compete to get after that, it's about strengthening the capability platform that we have to convert growth into profit and returns, and to convert that profit into cash so we can reward shareholders, but so also we can self-fund the growth and create this sort of virtuous circle of returns, investment, more returns, more investment that enables us to progress. We have to do that by balancing how we allocate capital across what we do to drive like-for-like performance in existing units, how we thoughtfully get after net gains or opportunities in the marketplace, and where it makes sense to add to that with infill M&A, and Jonathan will describe how those knit together a little bit later on. A reminder, just to go back to some kind of macro stats that sort of illustrate how we're thinking about growth going forward. You know, we operate in, and indeed, we're increasing our exposure to the faster-growing parts of the global aviation market. We choose to be in travel. We like the travel market, and we think actually, if you do a stand back from global consumer markets, global F&B markets, travel is a very attractive place to be because of some of the dynamics and the complexity of it, but also because of the structural growth that is attached to it. Just let me, for a second, bring you, and bring us back to our customer. Probably a good place to spend a little bit of time in a consumer-facing business, who are the global or a local traveler. In the early parts of this financial year, we went out to market, and we constructed and ran what we called a Food Travel Insight Survey. We spoke to 18,000 travelers across every market in which we operate. We wanted to understand is, what are the preferences, behaviors, what's the relationship of travelers with food as we're emerging from COVID and into a what we think is becoming a different set of travel missions in terms of waiting than before? We could go into lots of elements of this, but I think kind of three key themes that are important, which run through how we're thinking about the business. First of all, Michael's going to talk about the notion of revenge travel a little bit later on, and there may be a near-term bump in travel because of that. If you do a stand back from that and cut through that, it is unequivocal when you speak to consumers right now, that they do anticipate spending and allocating more of their discretionary spend against travel, in other words, against travel experiences than against physical products, as you look at anticipated future spend, going forward. Second thing, which is very important in a inflationary world, is consumers are less price sensitive when traveling than they are in living their day-to-day lives. That does not mean, to use a colloquial expression, that we can take the piss in that respect. We have to provide compelling propositions to customers. If we have to recover pricing, consumers are with us in that because they expect food to be somewhat more expensive in a travel environment, and provided we deliver the quality and service proposition and address some of the sources of stress that you can sometimes find in a travel environment, then pricing is not the number one concern. Thirdly, and consumers anticipate spending more money and having more, consuming more food in airports going forward. You would have heard the kind of aviation panel last night describe some of the rationale for that and the implications in terms of how space is being allocated in airports going forward. Last summer, we set about as a leadership team and as a board to do a sort of stand back on what our forward-looking strategy as a business should be. I should emphasize that we did that with a conviction that we had some very strong foundations on which to build in terms of the historic capability, and insights that the business had across the market, and some very strong beliefs, for example, in the need to be local, entrepreneurial and decentralized in terms of how you get after that opportunity. None of that has changed. We did come out of that process with a conviction to be a bit more choiceful around where we wanted to grow, particularly in terms of geography, and with a sense of some of the capability platforms and near-term areas of strategic focus, in particular, the opportunity to get after a like-for-like performance of our existing units as we reopened them post-COVID. Those elements in terms of where we choose to compete and how we are getting after competing in those markets are pretty important, and we've been quite consistent in how we've been running the business for the last 12 months in that respect. We are increasingly confident that those areas of focus are actually delivering returns and are the right strategic choices that we're making as a business. Each element of this strategy actually is reflected in the different regions in which we compete. I'm not gonna say any more about North America right now, 'cause we're gonna spend the rest of the day in that respect. You know, we do see significant growth opportunities and returns opportunities in selected, put a lot of importance in the term selected. There are selected markets in Asia, in the Asia Pacific region and in the Middle East. Our business in India is a great example of that. Indeed, it's like since I've joined the business, I've already spent 2 full weeks in India, Jonathan will know where I'm going on this, but in addition to that, I've probably had 10 or 12 face-to-face meetings with our Indian joint venture partner, even as recently as last night, I've had a sort of 3 WhatsApp exchange with Sunil Kapoor around various aspects of what we're doing there. The positive piece of that, behind that, is that joint venture we have there has fabulous growth potential, very, very deep client relationships in a fast-growing aviation market, a number of concepts, particularly in relation to shared user lounges, which are world-leading, not just in an Indian context, but more broadly across the business. If I step to Continental Europe for a second, you know, we actually are growing in interesting ways in Continental Europe. Two that I would cite, one is geographically, in that we will, this year, enter Iceland and Italy as two new markets for SSP. We've already done Iceland, we will soon open in Italy. And secondly, we're capitalizing on some interesting consumer trends. For example, you know, the Southern Mediterranean airport sector is just absolutely on fire in terms of growth, as consumers are taking short-haul holidays. Some of them are for kind of annual holidays, but also, kind of, weekends away and so forth. You see very, very strong growth across the Balearic Islands, southern Spain, the Greek islands, Cyprus, Athens, Thessaloniki, all that part of our business is growing very strongly, and we're putting incremental resources into that. In the U.K., actually, we're making some very nice progress in what is, and always will be, our flagship market. We feel very good about the path that we're on in the air channel in the U.K. We've got some cool new brands that we're bringing into the air environment there. In fact, as a group executive committee last week, we were, you know, we were out with another brand that we think we'll bring to Heathrow over the course of the next, the next 8, you know, 24 months. There is a lot of very, very positive momentum around pro- proposition, brand access, client relationship, and net gains momentum and renewal momentum across U.K. air. It's really, really cool, actually, in terms of what we're doing, and very important. Rail is a little slower. It's slower because consumers are coming back to rail a little bit more slowly. It's been compounded by the uncertainty associated with industrial action. We are making progress there, too. I think the combination of those two things is going to give SSP a very, very strong-performing presence with some very, very good examples of best practice in our flagship market, which will be very, very important. Let me. Sorry, this is the economic model that you will have heard me and Jonathan talk about quite a bit before. I'm just gonna touch briefly on numbers one and two here, which is, you know, what are we doing in terms of our like-for-like growth focus, and how is business development activity coming together? Jonathan will pick up on profit conversion and cashflow generation after we've done the US deep dive. I mean, this might be a statement of the blindingly obvious, strong like-for-like performance is absolutely compelling in terms of economic returns for our business, where we have the invested capital, where we have the client relationships, where we have a working brand. If we can drive those units harder, the rewards for that, for all sorts of stakeholders, are very, very strong. I think we really latched on to that as we transitioned out of COVID last summer from this in, you know, big focus on opening units, closing units, reopening, closing some of them, reopening again. There was a lot of uncertainty through all of that, a lot of change through our on the on-the-ground, in-airport, in-rail-station teams. The ability to actually stand back from that and in an orchestrated way, really put focus on driving like-for-like performance, particularly in our biggest units, that's gonna be a theme when Michael will pick up a little bit later on. One of the universal features of the SSP model across the 38 countries in which we're in, is we have a very, very disproportionate weighting of economic contribution from a relatively small number of units in each country. If you get those units really, really firing, it lifts everything in terms of the economic contribution in the business, and that's about being excellent in terms of like for like. A lot of that has to come from proposition. You're gonna see that today in when you go to the Palm in JFK for lunch, and you can see it behind me on if anyone's gone through LaGuardia, this is Mulberry Street there, or Hunt & Fish. Big casual dining units that, when we really get them firing, make a very, very strong difference. You can also see it in the proposition. I know some people here are gonna actually see Juniper in Gatwick tomorrow morning. It's, it's a pretty impressive level of commitment to us, actually, by the way, that you'd come out here and then get on a flight, fly to Gatwick, and go straight to see a bar tomorrow morning on arrival. It is, but actually, it's an example of us getting a premium bar really working. Point being, getting the proposition right is essential to actually delivering unit-level performance, and I think we've got a nice and increasing focus on that. Of course, in terms of like for like, the ability to price and to defend your position in the value chain in an, in an inflationary environment, very, very important, and again, I think we're doing that, we're doing that very nicely, and we touched on that a lot in our interim results last month. The second element then is business development, and I guess in simple terms, and it goes to some of the points I made around our kind of culture and vision earlier, which is, we've gone on the offensive as we've come out of COVID in terms of business development. We think there is an opportunity in the market for us to secure very valuable space at very compelling returns. We've done that, though, using the capital discipline that you would expect from SSP, and it's been a, you know, it's been a wonder for me actually to observe that firsthand since I've come into the business, both the processes that we use to allocate capital and the culture and knowledge that we have behind that. In aggregate, we're growing in terms of net gains at about twice the rate in sterling terms that we were pre-COVID. Lends itself to a simple question: Why is that, right? It's a combination of different circumstances. It's partly about the market. As the industry has come out from hibernation, you're starting to see more and more space being tendered. I think it's also about SSP. I think our financial resources, very helpful. The way in which we built our reputation and enhanced it through COVID, very helpful. The types of propositions and brand access that we're putting together, the types of partnerships we're assembling around the world, very helpful. That is resonating with clients. When I talk to clients, when clients talk to our wider team, you get a real sense of enthusiasm and goodwill towards partnering and working with SSP. That doesn't mean we get a free pass in terms of economics. The returns still have to be good. There's a sentiment of wanting to do more with us that's very tangible when you actually get and talk to clients about that. I think that sits, at least for the moment, in contrast to some of what's happening across the competitive set, where either at the smaller end of the market, you have people who, for whom the seductive appeal of travel didn't turn out to be anything like as appealing as they expected through the COVID experience. You're seeing less small downtown businesses wanting to participate in tenders across the world. It's different country on country. I think also we're finding that some of the traditional SSP competitive set are consumed with some very understandable internal issues or focus right now, which again, I think is giving us an opportunity to be more externally focused relative to them as we're pushing the business forward. Let me just briefly now talk about where we're winning in terms of net gains. It's one of the reasons why we're here, right? If you take the period from COVID to today, half of all the net gains that we've got are in North America. A sort of reasonably simple way to think about that is in terms of the what's happening to the mix of our business geographically, is about a quarter of our business is currently in North America, but today, but half of our growth. It's actually a bit more than half of our growth, actually, because the like-for-like momentum is also a bit stronger here. You are seeing the natural flow through of that will change the revenue mix by geography, as we go forward. I would say this chart is already out of date, in that it uses a particularly understandable but odd allocation methodology, which it effectively freezes business development at the end of March and assumes that no subsequent development of any kind, anywhere, happens after that, which is obviously a somewhat unrealistic assumption. If you do roll all that through, you know, you'd end up with where the business is in 2026, but almost certainly you can take it that actually the contribution of North America in 2026 will be a lot more than 24%, by virtue of even only the continuation of the sort of net gains weighting that you see on the left-hand side of the chart. Just to be specific, in the 2 months since the we actually assembled this data, we've continued to deliver net gains momentum of this sort of quantum on a monthly basis and with this sort of weighting. As I say, it's already a little out of date, the middle part of that chart. M&A can play an important piece here. It's important to say that this is not a business that needs to do any M&A at all. It really doesn't. Like, we have an economic model that's actually working very well. We've got lots of organic growth, both like for like and net gains, that are available to us. We do think there will be some instances where M&A can fit with our strategy and where we can execute it with financial discipline, and Midfield is a very good example of that, right? It's focused on the U.S., it's focused on the air channel, it's centered on a desire to extend airport access in a way that gets us into airports earlier than we otherwise would be able to do so, and in some cases, into airports than we may ever be able to do so. If you look at the 7 airports that Midfield operate in, 4 are brand new to SSP, and 1, which is Newark, we were in, but in a very, very modest way before, and it gets us back into Newark, which, in the context of what we're doing and the totality of New York, is gonna be very, very good for us. As I say, we're delighted to confirm today that the transaction is now largely complete, by which I mean 6 of the 7 airports are now in SSP ownership, and the seventh, which is Denver, we anticipate will close over the course of the next month or 2, and we'll have all of it fully on board and in our business as we finish out this year and into next year. Brief word on partnerships. I touched on this a little bit last night. You know, the way in which we're accessing the geographic growth opportunity that I've described, uses a business model that works very collaboratively and extensively with local expertise and local partners. There are two broad models that we operate. It's a continuum, really, but there are two broad ones. One is the level of in-country partnerships, so that's people like, you know, the Travel Food Services business in India, Regent in the Philippines, the Minor Food Group in Thailand, where, in effect, we have a single partner for a single geography. A pretty traditional country-level joint venture agreement. Here in North America, the typical unit of partnership is the airport, all right? You can see that's, I think Midfield behind me, some of you will have met Sarah Levy or the, you know, Robert, Brad, and Martin from Cielo last evening, who would be founding partners for us in the joint venture that's opened up this opportunity in Chicago and hopefully open up other opportunities in Chicago. The common features of all of this, though, are, yes, there is a level of joint financial contribution. We are very demanding and pretty inflexible on that, which is, if you come into a partnership with us, we're not lending you money. You have to pay your share in proportion to your equity participation with us, in the growth of the business, and everyone understands that. Beyond that, we are looking for people who add value, add value in terms of brand access, local community engagement, you know, airport relationships, stakeholder engagements within the wider community, and that matters a lot. It's two-way. They bring value, we bring value, and obviously, a notion of trust and an ability to work together over long periods of time, are very important in terms of how we do that. The third element here is around profit conversion, and Jonathan's going to pick this up in more detail a little bit later on. Just to say, you know, this goes to the processes by which we run the business. It goes to many of the tools, and routines that we have across the business, but mindset is important on this, too. This is a business that's populated with a lot of people who know how to trade, people who understand the value of a pound, and treat the resources in the business as if they are their own, in the sense that we're not... You know, we're quite frugal in terms of how we allocate resources, spend money. I'll give you a good example, a tiny example this morning. My assistant, Nicholas, some of you may know her. Nathan Clements, who is our CPO, his assistant is leaving the business the end of this week. She felt the need to email me this morning to say, would it be okay for her to buy one round of drinks for at this leaving event this evening on her on my corporate credit card? I went back and said, "Yeah, one round is fine." It goes a little bit to how we think about spending money, and that's important in a business that is always going to have to fight for its margin, and it's an important element. That's the kind of group-level summary. You know, it starts with a unifying purpose across our business, which is about being the best, being part of an ecosystem that wins, and focused on the journey in all sorts of ways. When we get this right, we think we can deliver accelerated growth, we think we can deliver profit conversion. We can convert that profit into cash in a way that rewards all stakeholders and self-funds the growth and returns from here. That's gonna give us interesting and important options for capital allocation that Jonathan will talk about earlier. Michael's now gonna jump in and actually illustrate all of this in the context of what we're doing in North America. It's a pleasure for me to introduce Michael. It's also, sparing his blushes, it's been a privilege for me to work with Michael, and to learn from him about this industry and about this business, but also about kind of leadership and people leadership, in particular, over the course of the last 15 months. Please join me in welcoming Michael to the stage. Hey, you look at my shoes, right? I have my trainers on today, 'cause of my recent holiday. I cut my right-side toe, I tell you, it's the most painful thing ever. For the Americans, trainers is sneakers, and holiday is vacation, just to make sure you all get that. I just wanted to point that out, I'm wearing these today. We are doing a lot of walking, I just wanted to point that out, 'cause, very specific. Last thing is I would've had my black belt on to match my black sneakers, I didn't know I was wearing sneakers today. More importantly, North America, thank you for that introduction, Patrick. It's been a pleasure working with you as well so far. A little bit of the agenda, aviation industry, kind of talk a little bit high level about North American aviation industry and overview on SSP America. The economic model, we'll get in a little more detail and talk about what you're gonna see in the showcases. To Patrick's point, I'm really excited about the showcases. You're gonna get to really touch and feel what we do in the business, and there is definitely some operational challenges. We actually have a full kitchen in there, where we're gonna cook and serve some great meals in 5-7 minutes. Not that easy trying to pull that off in a hotel, but I'm confident the team will do it, 'cause of the great operational excellence that they definitely prove to me every day. Pat will come up and talk about business development. Just North America travel, domestic, and business travel, 93% of the travel, which is big. Slide, I'll come up, talk about leisure travel and how that's changing. 30% of the world's busiest airports sit in North America, then 45% of the world's aviation sales, massive market, which I know you've heard multiple times from Patrick and Jonathan over the last couple of years. I think this is the big one. It's forward-looking. It's the structural growth and the investment that's going into the North America market. You heard Sammy last night talk about it, about, you know, you saw in Asia-Pac in different countries where they kept investing in their airports to be the best of the best. North America is a little behind. They are now catching up, and there's huge investment. We were talking this morning just about the investment. You see $9 billion in just JFK alone, with additional 23 gates, which is a huge investment in the business. For me, you know, the top bullet there, air pax level, North America anticipated to be 30% higher than pre-COVID by 2030. It just continues to grow and grow. Look at United, right? 200 planes, $43 billion of supporting growth. The major airlines are ordering planes. They know the growth is coming. We're ready for that growth, and you heard a lot today what we're doing in our economic model to get there. U.S. government continues to invest in the, in development project as well. Again, it's good for us as that growth continues. Very, very important. What's happening? The trends, very high domestic travels, we talked about. Working remotely increases leisure travel. This has been very interesting to us, and I really like to give an example of my 30-year-old daughter. She works for Publicis in the advertising business, oversees Jimmy John's and Buffalo Wild Wings, and she works three days a week in the office. Her teams work three days a week in the office. Thursday evening, she lives in Atlanta, she heads to the Atlanta Airport. She takes off, she flies somewhere in the United States. She goes to the West Coast a lot, has some friends there. Literally works virtually there that morning. She's already in the West Coast and extends her weekend earlier because she's there, because she knows she can work there remotely, Teams, Zoom, everything else. She does the same exact thing on Monday. It's absolutely amazing. Blows me away. I said, "What do you mean you're working?" She goes, "Well, I go to the airport, I go in the lounge, I get on my laptop, I do some calls, set up Teams things. I then get on the Wi-Fi, and I catch up on my email on my flight home. I land, I go back to my house, I do the same thing again." That new travel is bringing that new business travel to us and is really making our Sundays and Mondays stronger than they've done in the past. It's same with our Thursdays, because, again, it's just a different person out there. One of the key things we need to learn, too, that leisure travel tends to be a little younger, and we need to understand them very well, what we do from a menu perspective, and you'll hear that from the group coming up. The revenge travel, plenty of articles out there about it if you haven't heard about it. There's the demand, even though we had it last year, even a bigger demand for people to go on holiday, go on vacation, and really experience, you know, that travel they've been missing that's been pent up over the last two and a half years. We expect a good summer this year, and we continue to focus on that as well. F&B, you heard it again from Ed and Sammy last night, it keeps growing as a bigger and bigger focus, and that overall high-quality experience is, again, a big, big focus of the consumer that's coming through every day in our airports, which gets us excited because, you know, you saw last night, we're real focused on creating this great food experience, high-quality experience. You'll see again today, as I mentioned, how we do that efficiently, how we do that to really drive profit conversion, which is super important to all of us in this room. Ownership. It's kind of interesting. Pat will talk about this a little bit more as it relates to our joint venture partners in ACDBE. In the United States, all airports are owned by a city, county, state, port authority, or regional authority. That's why Pat and I wear ties all the time. We're dealing with public officials. It's public entities that wear their ties. We have to be in the same environment as them. In Canada, different. It's owned by Transport Canada. They lease out all the airports to privately-owned companies. It's a privately-owned business that's been run up there. The actual real estate, the land it's on in the airport, is owned by Canada. Again, you'll see a little bit of that in the United States. As you know, outside of the United States, that's much bigger. These cities and counties and states and local governments see this as a big asset to them, and to Patrick's point, really tied to the community and how important that is. We play a big part in that with our joint venture partners. Great slide. You heard it again. As you see, the overall percentage of sales continues to grow for F&B in North America. Every year, it just keeps ticking up. You see 2014, 2018, and 2022. Expect that to continue to happen. Specialty retail is kind of going away. Convenience is still strong, as well as F&B and duty-free, but that specialty retail is really being filled in by F&B going forward. Little bit about now SSP America, so my executive team. You can see the years of experience in the food and beverage industry, very strong. You see the years of experience within SSP America. Great experience with mergers and acquisitions, everybody on the team. It's kind of interesting, right now, Robert, Bob, Cherie, and George have all worked for me in the past, so it's great to have them on my team again. I have great experience with the Compass Group and then you see Pat with HMSHost, as well as Copeland's. I think one of the stats that I really love, every one of us started somewhere back as an hourly team member in the food and beverage industry. We all started in the grassroots at a young age. I mean, I started in my dad's bakery when I was 12 years old. We have a very strong heritage of food and beverage, and we really know what it takes to drive a business, more importantly, connect with our hourly team members to make sure we're successful, because they're one of our key part of our strategy. Our foundation. Patrick talked about our values and our mission and vision. One of the things we have here in North America is what we call our passion principles, then, of course, there's our pitch. When we're asked: "What do you do here in North America?" It's, "I'm a food travel expert from SSP America. We're passionate about bringing cool, authentic airport restaurants to airports that reflect the Taste the Place." That's what they want. That's what our clients are asking for, the airports are asking for us every day, to bring those cool, authentic, local restaurants in that reflect that Taste the Place. I always say we're restaurateurs. There's nothing worse than at a conference, and we're called concessionaires. No, we're restaurateurs. We are restaurant people. You look at the background of our team, look at the background of our operation teams, we're true restaurant people that know how to run great casual dining bars, QSRs, coffee and bakery, with a huge vast of experience. The Passion principles, we use them how we operate a business. Passion for every detail. We're talking about a couple of the analysts out there this morning, they say, "Every detail counts." We agree. All of these top 2 things were created over an 18-month period with our hourly team members, middle management, and senior management. Wasn't done in an executive boardroom. We actually went out, did focus groups, talked to our people, and said: "Who are we as an organization here in North America, and what are the key principles we have to run our business in?" It's super important. A, for authentic experiences. Think about it. We have over 360 odd restaurants. We have about 250 brands because of the local bring aboard. We have to create that authentic experience. Our brand partners expect that of us because when we do a partnership with them, we have to drive the same experience or better than they do street side. Service from the heart, that's not only the service to our customers every day, but how we treat one another and having that high mindset of great service, and then sincerity every step of the way. It's about being sincere with one another and also sincere with our customers because the worst thing you can do is not be your real self and make sure that your hourly team members, your management team, know that you care about them, which is super important in the hospitality business. Innovation every day. You'll see innovation today in the showcases, and you can't be innovative if you're not open to new ideas. You have to consistently be open to new ideas. I always talk about noble at all times. I always say I was passionate and with an H, is you gotta be humble. We're a growing company. We're moving fast. We have competitors, and I always tell my team we just need to stay grounded and humble because they'll figure it out. They'll try to catch up to us, and if we ever get caught up in our own press, then they're gonna pass us, and that humility is super important as you're a leader. Decade of growth, you can see the colored dots, pre-2013, where we were at, then what we opened from 2013 to 2019, what we opened after 2019, which is another seven airports, which is fantastic, a lot of new growth. Then, of course, the new Midfield airports that are on there. What I'm most excited about, we expected to open Midfield potentially in July and August. We opened it June 6th. What I read out of all that. You think about it. We had to get consent from the seven airports. We had to get consent from all the brands. We had to get consent from all the joint venture partners. We did that in about 3 weeks. That's a lot of conversations, a lot of legal documents, that showed me the confidence all of them had in SSP America and the fact that they wanted to get SSP America quickly into their business and quickly as new partners and quickly as running their brands, which I think says volumes about my team, Pat Murray, who did the agreement, Jag Singh, my general counsel, George Mboya, my CFO, and then my operations team under Amanda's leadership, that were out there interacting with these people, that immediately signed up and said, "I want to be part of SSP America." It happened very quickly. Strong track record. You've seen this slide before. I think the big thing is sharp rise in profitability in 2022. You already know the strong revenue, first half of fiscal year '23, 127% over 2019, as we continue to grow here in North America. I think this is interesting, the mix of formats. You'll see we're heavily weighted towards casual dining and bar. As you take a look at the rest of the group, heavier towards coffee, bakery, kind of grab and go, and retail. What that does for us in North America, our average unit sales, $2.5 million. Rest of the world, about $1 million. Going back to what Patrick said, we have a lot of large units that if we focus on them exceptionally well, we can make an incredible impact to driving like-for-like sales as well as profit conversion. It's really great for the mixture in. It's a key focus that we have as we go after new business. Another one, unique brand proposition. You'll see again, rest of the Group, heavy towards national brands. Again, us towards local, 'cause that's what the consumer's looking for, as well as that our clients are looking for, then you'll see a good mix of our proprietary brands. This to me is very exciting because you'll see it actually at JFK T4. We have Camden food co. there. We have Boulevard Bistro. We have the Five Borough Food Hall. We got LGC there as well, and PizzaVino, all our brands. What we really do with our proprietary brands is we say: "How do they fit into the local community? How do we make them feel like a local brand and use this as our key part of our strategy to grow as well? Our approach, you know, it's interesting to me, and we talk about this all the time in our annual conference here, it's about leadership and not management. It's super important to me. We have a great leadership program that is coming out of Group, which is fantastic to develop future leaders of the business, and it's really about leading and motivating people and making sure they'll climb that wall for you, instead of being a manager and telling them what to do. The leadership programs and training we have do make a huge difference to our company to do that and really having a people-first mindset. I'm asked all the time, "What business are you in?" I say, "I'm in the people business." If you think about it's about that three-foot experience. It's about, it's about the server, the bartender, the host, our management team that really drives the profitability of business. Yes, I'm in charge of the culture. Yes, I travel around the business. Ultimately, that's where it happens. We have what we call in Ashburn, Virginia, our support center. It's not called Ashburn, not the corporate office. It's our support center 'cause we support the field. I always tell them, "That's where we count the money and put it in the bank. It's made out in the field, so we need to support them to make sure they generate that, and we need to be a big partner to them." Having that people-first mindset is critical. Of course, there's the customer experience platform. You'll see today, as you travel around the business, our management team and all of our hourly team members have what they call an FTX card on them. We do shift huddles every day, and a key thing we focus on is the PASSION principles are on there. At the top, leading back to what Patrick said, there's a service message we call. It's called, "The best part of the journey begins with me." It's a personal message that we train all of our entire hourly team members on is, when that passenger, our customers, coming through the airport, stressed by TSA, their gate could have changed, all those different things, when they come in our restaurant, the best part of their journey begins with me. You need to have that mindset and make sure that their journey, the best part's gonna be their experience in our restaurant. It has on there the, as I said, our service styles and, at the same time, how we upsell in the business. We have a standard shift huddle that goes out to every one of our airports every week, that's mailed out, where we hit a certain service message. It's one of the PASSION principles and what we expect in that week, we have a small section that they then fill in on the local things that are going on in their business. That's critical to have a consistent customer service base. If you think about it, you have people that are engaged, like working for you. Of course, they're gonna bring a great customer experience. When Amanda Busby came on, operated at, what, Red Robin 19 years, Amanda? Chose to come with us, which is a great deal for us. Ran 450 restaurants. She's brought great success routines, which is how we operate the business day to day, which drives operational excellence, and then you'll hear from Pat Banducci and their team about what do we do with all that commercially, and how do we drive profitability out of the business and maintain quality? I'm a firm believer, we've got great leadership, people that like working for the organization, who are driving a great customer experience, and we're doing it with operational excellence and efficient commercially, we retain our clients. We're driving great revenue, they're getting great rents. We have great people that are working for us, which is very focused, and ultimately, it helps with new business growth because we have great references, and we have an incredible business development team. Sustainability, critical to us. Huge platform coming out of Group, but at the same time, the community involvement we have with our joint venture partners and how we're engaged in the community, and you heard Ed Midgley talk about it last night, which you'll hear Jeffrey talk about what we do from a sustainability at T4, is a huge feat that we've accomplished there. Talking about people, I think this is just awesome. Approximately, there's a lot of stats we pulled out before. We had 2,000 members we hired in the last 12 months. It's interesting to hear Ed talk a little bit about our difficulties with hiring people. Actually, we do quite well here at T4. We have great success with hiring people. We have a few pockets across the business. It happens to be kind of in the Midwest. Indianapolis is a perfect example, and then higher up in the Midwest, and it's pretty common why. UPS, Federal Express, and Amazon all kind of get in the center of the country, and they do that because, again, they're flying all over the place, and it's great for them to have distribution centers in the middle of the country, so we compete against them. Outside of the middle of the country, we're doing quite well with hiring people. We've taken a huge new focus on targeted advertising, including geo-targeting and social media. We've really increased our social media presence on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. Right now, we know we're filling about 45% of our positions because of that. It's really helped us because of how well you can target certain individuals doing that. A colleague engagement, again, we have an 83% participation rate, which to me is fantastic, that you have that many employees that are willing to fill out the survey. Positivity score of 84%. We have a lot to do with that, a lot of work to do it. What I'm excited about, we actually have an action plan specific to every airport, about their issues or opportunities that we have there, and then we have one for each support center department. We roll that up, have an overall plan for SSP America that we communicate on a quarterly basis, and we give updates exactly what we're doing with the survey responses they gave us. I always tell my team, "The worst thing we can do is survey our people and do nothing with it." The best thing you can do is actually communicate exactly what you're gonna do with what the feedback they gave you, and that, again, reduces turnover, and at the same time, gets people engaged. We want to create a great experience for our consumers. Kind of interesting, we have our Passion Awards. We have our Passion Summit. Every year, we celebrate. You see, we gave out 2,400 awards in 2022. We had 5,000 employees in 2022, that's 50% of our people that were recognized. People wanna be recognized. They wanna be thanked you, which I think was a very impressive feat. Career development. We have one program called Cooking Up Experts. To me, this is a big focus of what I'm really passionate about, as well as my executive team, is this takes hourly team members and shows them the path of how they can get up to management. How do they become an hourly supervisor, assistant restaurant manager, general manager, operations manager, and potentially director of operations one day? What it does is, how does the manager or director of operations become a regional vice president like Jeffrey Lynch, that you'll see later today? To me, this is critical because people who've worked for us as an hourly team member that know our systems and processes, and we can move them to management. That's huge value for us because they're gonna know how to execute the SSP America way, which is super critical. I have a video I wanna show of a small example, and you actually will see. Oh, you would have met Amado last night. He's one of our regional chefs. I'll go to the video. To be honest, I didn't know what I wanted when I started with this company. Signed me up as a dishwasher, and two months into that, I became the headline cook. I was an alcoholic. I ended up in the hospital, ended up flatlining, then just woke up, and the doctor gave me two choices. He said, "Amado, you can either go back to drinking and be dead in six months, or you can go make something of yourself." I took option B, and I went to go make something of myself. My boss, my coworkers, and everybody, when I went back to work that first day, they all had my back. They definitely gave me the confidence. They seen something in me that I didn't see. Since then, I've done multiple openings at different airports throughout the U.S. I've networked throughout the company, put a name for myself out there. Don't give up. If you want to continue to grow with the company, this is definitely the company to grow with. I'm a walking example. I started as a dishwasher, and now I'm an executive chef, salaried manager. I mean, we're a family. SSP is a family, no matter what. Much longer version of that. Amado now, as I said, is a regional chef, works out on the West Coast, living in San Diego, makes a huge difference in our organization. If you go on the SSP America website under employee testimonials, we have about 15 of those, and how we really have done, I think, exceptionally well, moving people up in the business. The last stat I give you, which I think is fantastic, 45% of our management positions this year was filled by hourly team members because of the big focus on it. The economic model, you know it well. We live and breathe it here every day. It's a big part of our culture and what we do. I won't get into it too much on this slide. I'll talk about it next, but I think the big one I want to talk about is the customer insights. You know, we've taken what's come out of group and combined it. We use a local company here called Culinary Tides, the both of them together is really a big focus of ours, because really understanding the consumer insights before you do anything in our business is absolutely critical. First, I wanna talk about like-for-like sales. Interesting. You'll see digital in one of the showcases today. Todd Kaufman, our VP of IT Systems, as well as Pat Banducci, Head of Commercial, and they'll talk about how it's driving ATV, and they'll talk about how it's increasing the speed of service in our business. As you look at format and brands, you'll talk... we'll talk about some of the food halls, which you'll see at JFK T4. menu and ranging, you have Robert Maluso, our VP of Culinary, and then Josh Barone, our VP of Commercial. They're gonna talk about how we look at our menus, how we optimize them to drive like-for-like sales, which is super critical to our business. Of course, pricing. You'll hear Josh Barone, our VP of Commercial, talk about pricing and our pricing strategy to mitigate inflation, which is super important to us, but at the same time, drives like-for-like sales. Service, the seating initiatives. You'll hear Chris Gainey, who is our VP of Design and Construction, talk about how important it is to add additional seating and what our seating strategy is. Again, the more seats we have drive like-for-like sales. Then, more importantly, you'll see the new kitchen design we have, which is really driving speed of service. Again, you're gonna cook meals, some of you, in 5-7 minutes, great-tasting food, because, again, speed of service and turning tables is really critical, because that's how you drive like-for-like sales. Profit conversion, again, it's the same things, you know, right? Unit design and seating, because, again, the more seats we have, same amount of servers, we're driving labor efficiencies with that, along with OAT, order at the table, which you'll see and how that works, as you've probably seen it out there over the last years. Again, helps us be more efficient, but at the same time, if you think about it, with the digital ordering and the additional seating, you're putting a load on the kitchen. How you do your menu optimization, how you design your kitchen to make sure you can handle that extra load is critical, and I feel like we've mastered it, and I think it's a huge difference in what we're doing in the business. Of course, gross margins, again, you'll see in the menu optimization how we do cross-product utilization, which is very, very important, and also hear from procurement on how we continue to rationalize our products, but at the same time, make really cool menus, because it's really important to do that, and you can leverage that volume. Labor efficiency, I already hit on with OAT, as well as the kitchen. You'll see the kitchen design, how it makes us more efficient. It's almost a Six Sigma process using a triangle, which is really critical. I tell you to do it at home. My wife, every kitchen we've designed, we've built 10 houses together, she always gets out and does the triangle because she wants to be efficient. Cracks me up when she does it. Business development, Pat will talk about it more, but greater share of the 34 sites that we're in, of the top 80, is our key focus. Further penetration in the top 80, then the new smaller airport models. We are looking at that. We've added additional business development people to go after these smaller airports that are in the top 150. The great news is the convenience retail opportunity there as well. Some of the times it gets combined, we have definitely the capability to do that. We do it in 2 small airports right now in North America. We don't talk about it much, but I feel we have the expertise to do that. Adding the additional BD resources definitely help us get after it. If you look at the stats all from 2019, again, you know, approximately we're 10% of a $6 billion market, which is huge opportunity, and it's a market, as you saw earlier, that's continuing to grow, which I think puts us in a good position for further growth. Efficient management of cost inflation. Kind of amazing, we all talk about costs went up as it relates to labor, over the last couple of years due to COVID. We've all read it, but you can see it kind of flatlined, and we've done a great job maintaining it. It's everything you're gonna see today, from kitchen design, additional seating, the rollout of digital that's helped us do that and really increase our sales per man-hour. You'll see our cost of sales, even with inflation, same thing. We've done a fantastic job between procurement, culinary, commercial, and the operations team working together on what we call Phoenix 2.0, which again, you'll hear about and what Phoenix 2.0 was, basically, everything you're gonna see today, and I've talked about, we focused on those top 50 to 60 restaurants the last couple of years to make sure we drove every aspect of that in our business, and now we're getting to the next 60, the next 60, the next 60, and driving it through the business. Won't go through this too much, you've probably seen this before, but we do have a rigorous investment process. Everything goes through Group, but at the same time, we follow that same exact process here before we even go to Group. It's really important that where we're investing our money, we get a strong return. The process that Jonathan has put into place in the 10 years I've been here is fantastic. It gives a lot of different perspectives from the right people to make sure we're making good decisions. If you look at my business development team, Pat will talk about their years of experience, that alone helps us do a very, very good job of making sure we're putting our money where it really can get the returns. I'll now pass it on to Pat Murray, our Deputy CEO and Executive Vice President of Business Development. Pat? Thank you, Patrick. Thank you, Michael. I just wanna start out, I know there are a few folks who weren't here last night, so I'll just say first, thanks for giving me the microphone again, guys. I also just wanted to cover a few housekeeping things. Sarah did take the keys at 9:30, but then the group wisely moved on to other places, but she hung around and eventually scurried us all off. For those that weren't here last night, you know, that's part of our pitch, and Sarah, thanks for going along with that. Events like last night are something that we do maybe 20 times a year, that's the first step in a sales tool. If you think about that actual room, if you go in there on your way out, when you're checking out of the hotel, that's gonna look an awful lot like it's just solid concrete floor. It looks like an airport before we move into it. Being able to convert that into a space and then cook food that we do all over the country and serve drinks, that is sort of showing what we are. We're in the hospitality business. We should be good at that. While there was a few people there who work at the hotel, almost all those folks actually work for us somewhere around the country, and you get to hear and see the real stories. That's preconditioning about what SSP is actually all about. I'm gonna touch on a couple of elements that Patrick and Michael talked about, which, you know, really has to do with what's it look like coming out of COVID? Why do we feel so good about this? I can imagine, regardless of what we were doing as a business, somebody's gonna stand up and say, "Hey, we have strong client relationships," right? What does that really mean? Embedded within the team that manage both development and the company, we have 4 people who were clients, 2 airport directors, one of whom was an airport director for over 20 years at 3 major U.S. airports. We have 2 people who were senior staff members of other major airports, and today comprise a lot of the thinking of that. In our industry in North America, we have five trade associations that oversee various elements of the aviation business, whether it's training, how to actually operate an airport, or lobby functions or minority elements, and so on. In every case, the past chair of one of those associations works for us. The committee chairs work within our organization. We're embedded within the aviation industry at every level. We have seven individuals who work on the team who've been in the aviation business for over 40 years. I know you're thinking I don't look old enough for that, right? I'm not. I've only been doing this for 20 years, but the seven folks that have been doing it for 40 years, we live on some of that experience around the world. Last night, you got to meet several of our joint venture partners. I'll come back to that, but, you know, they're real, living people. You get the sense that are municipally engaged and business people in our, in our world. Our local proposition is big. You know, I didn't pay the guys who were on the panel last night, but every one of them, at some level, reminded everybody that airports here in the United States focus on their local communities. They want to reflect those communities, and having a proposition, which is really the restaurants that we operate that are local, is a key selling tool to all of this. Last, you know, we can't really look forward and say, "Hey," We can't go sell things if we actually don't know how to deliver it. Having the operating model that Michael just dissected there, you know, is pretty critical to us being able to go sell it. I'm gonna touch on... There's probably a lot of these terms, you know, depending on how long you've been looking at aviation, that, you know, would make sense in terms of how an airport is leasing business. Really, what I wanna touch on is the notion that this is, in the U.S., specifically, a business-to-government operation. That business to government, you know, that's to some folks, it presents barriers that say, "Gosh, why do we gotta focus on these things? We wanna make this a completely commercial conversation." There's other elements, I'll call it. Some of them are ESG components that are rounding out the business itself. If you look at it that way, you can look at it in a pretty short-sighted sense. Other ways are to say the business itself has embedded within it other things that we're gonna sell that aren't strictly financially related. When we're having conversations, governments are not motivated for the same reasons that individuals are. There's no U.S. airport that makes money. They don't make money. They actually have an independent business enterprise. The federal government actually restricts money going from an airport to a city. What does that mean in simple terms? If we pay more rent, that rent doesn't go to pay for a city's kids' schools' lunches. That money can't transfer back. The FAA provides base infrastructure funds every year. Among the other things, about $10 billion of U.S. money comes out of the general fund that goes into the development of U.S. airports. Because of that, the federal government doesn't allow airports to support cities. It's important to think about it that way because the business is just going to be different. You're motivated for different reasons to actually transact and operate business. It's the biggest difference in the U.S. between what happens in the high street and what happens within an airport, how we go about winning that business. I had a few questions last night. I'll just say to everybody, people ask, "Well, why is that?" Probably like a lot of things, aviation, actually, modern aviation evolved after World War II. In the U.S., this is all about civil defense. In the end, you're not gonna see major privatization in the United States soon. You'll see elements. Sammy and Steve talked about it on the panel last night, where you see portions of capital coming into airports, but actual control, generally, is gonna reside within that local city and county government, and those people are real decision makers. When we go through, I'm gonna talk here about processes in a second, but when you go through actual pitching business to people, the end of that always results in having some legislative body actually vote and opine on how they feel that the airport staff did with whatever their evaluation was. A fair amount of the time, that legislative body doesn't have anything to do with what the staff says. You actually got to win all the time in each one of those veins. When we think about growing the business, RFPs, commonly referred to around the world as tenders, we sort of have a vocabulary thing Michael listed on the wall of English and American terms, but generally, we call them RFPs. RFPs is the most common way for us to grow business. I also had a few questions last night, and people say: "So what does that look like?" They're sort of, the questions kind of start out because this audience knows more than maybe people that might meet me at a cocktail party might know about the business. They're saying, "Well, what is the difference between, you know, one company or another?" I'll go back to that selling to a government element, right? The first selling tool is the company itself. It's everything you got to see last night. You have to, as the salesperson, predicate your selling on the notion that the delivery of what you saw last night is not gonna be the same by just anybody. It takes skills to be able to do that, and you have to gain recognition from the person you're selling, that you have the skills to deliver those things. It's not as simple as what's the brand over the front door. For one, in the RFP process, 50% of the bids that we respond to either don't have any financial component to it, meaning rent. We're not actually bidding on the rent, or it's capped, and there's no more, you know, top-end rent that you can bid on. Generally speaking, that's because the airports aren't really looking for that. They're looking for all the other things that come into it. You heard Ed Midgley last night talk about that. He's in JFK. He's talking about actually Queens, not even New York City. He's talking about the out the front door, local. Well, I think the airports are looking for that. They're looking for how the brands themselves represent the local community. And actually, somewhere down the line, you get into this conversation that says: "Well, what about the commercial element? Where does the actual passenger, what are they doing?" Well, the passengers are a part of the sell, but again, if you go back to the city of Chicago, the city of Houston, city of Los Angeles, to them, this is the welcome mat to the city. This is, you know, their opportunity to present things to the city. It's a different shape, and over time, of course, we've embraced that and done well with it. There are other elements, too, to growing the business that are critical and are also have the same selling tools. You have to have a relationship with people to do this. Most U.S. aviation directors came up somewhere in the aviation world. They're all known to us. If we pull out the list and look at, hey, who are the top 100 airports being run by? We can go through every single one of them to tell you where they've been in their career and what they've done. A lot of these things end up being things that you additionally negotiate for. We'll use that word, but it's really discuss how do, how do we find a win-win in this for both the airport, the city, and ourselves. You know, one of the... I was gonna bring it up last night, but I thought maybe it made more sense to weave it in here. One of the places when Robert Maluso was talking about the various restaurants that were represented, right? Where they had the scallops last night, those came from Harry & Izzy's in Indianapolis, one of the first restaurants we've actually built. I think to Patrick's, I'll call it Big Rocks. It's a big rock. It's a relatively small airport that has a very high volume restaurant. Actually, I'm gonna call it a destination restaurant and airport, because the actual real estate itself it's not grade A, it's probably B-minus real estate, but its volume overwhelms itself. It also is very unique, because it's had a 15-year now lease. We just renewed that for 15 new years, I will tell you, I was trying to think about how many, but let's say I've been to 150 airports in the world. I'm not sure, an awful lot of them. I spent most of the time since last night trying to think of another restaurant that's actually been there for 15 years, that's gonna be there for another 15 years. Generally, places that stay there that long are there by accident. In this case, we just had a press conference with the mayor of Indianapolis, the city council, the airport manager, et cetera, and it's all about the excitement that from Harry & Izzy's, and that's because that brand is emblematic of the folks who are from Indy. I think Patrick attempted, because he talked a little bit more about this and about the acquisition, and maybe left me a little less room here. I'm gonna say, for us, you know, we're super excited. Buying companies wasn't something we did for most of our evolution, the opportunity to look at some other airports that might be more challenged or might take more time to get into, is a fantastic opportunity for the company. There's no way to say this, but when you look at the profit of the business, we're talking about big restaurants like Harry & Izzy's. Big airports are the same kind of thing. They pour cash into the bottom of the business and allow us to do an awful lot of things. In this transaction, you're moving into four airports in particular. We did have a very small business in Newark, so we're already there, but adding Newark, Philadelphia, Denver, and Detroit is just simply put, massive. It's a great opportunity for the team to have something that we can work on. It puts us in a place to talk to those airports on a daily basis. The other ones, you know, we're already in Minneapolis, so it kind of builds on the business there, and same in San Francisco. Cleveland, actually, in the acquisition, is a relatively small business, but again, it's a runway to what we can do in the future. Because we just simply have to interact with the airport in order to get everything done on the transaction, it creates this opportunity. It furthers the relationship, and, I think, at least in my mind, from a business terminology standpoint, this is what infill acquisition is. It's perfect for what we needed. When you think about what is, you know, Michael's statement earlier and the tagline for the company of Taste the Place, you know, this is the bottom line of the selling tool for the entire business, as I said. What, what was, last night all about, right? If anyone in the room ever gets an email from someone here at SSP America, you realize that we ran the risk 15 years ago of having people misspell it occasionally, but the email addresses we all have are food travel experts. We put it right out there on our forehead and say, "This is what the business is," and we're making it about that. I thought a lot of the questions we got last night were sort of like, you know, we're looking for the trick. What is the trick? Is there one thing that's the business? Michael referenced, "People are gonna catch up with you." There's no actual trick. It's running restaurants and being able to articulate that well to the audience and making them to believe that we understand we're operating in a public setting. There are a lot of other things. I may have dumbed it down by calling it ESG. All of those selling components are part of what we do to advance the business overall. We talked about, and we wanted to personalize, for everybody, the joint venture partners. As you, If you had a conversation with one of them, I'm sure that you could tell there's a lot of commonality between the audience and them. There's, I would use a release, an in-kind relationship because they are also investors in the business. They're just investors in specific businesses. They're also noteworthy individuals in their communities, and when you unpack what they do for a living, at some level, you're gonna find that they're committed to their local community in a governance manner. They're involved municipally in some capacity. That's not, like, a business model we just invented. In the late eighties, the federal government passed parts of the Federal Aviation Code that required ACDB participation. ACDB participation is something that's determined by every airport and every community. They establish a disparity study that says, you know, in the community itself, how disparate are the businesses being run by what is federally determined to be a minority business? Generally speaking, airports make those goals somewhere between 15% and 35% or 40%, depending on the municipality itself. What that does is give us an opportunity to put something else on our selling list that says, "Hey, this is who we are." You could tell that our partners that were here last night were as curious to meet you as you were to meet them, because it's all a big family, and it's how we sell ourselves together that's a part of it. They themselves, you might imagine, feel like they've done fairly well in the, in the business with us, and much like our relationship with TFS in India, they have the same kind of relationships in major U.S. cities. They also help along the way with how we are introduced into a municipality. When I was suggesting the business, the government piece of this, you just got to remember what that means. We do have to sell people at the airport on why our business is gonna help them. We also have to sell somebody in downtown. If you spend any time watching sitcoms or movies, you know, just try to think back to whatever one you got that envisions the Chicago City Council and what that chaotic environment looks like. When you have to meet those 50 councilmen and the mayor and the staff, you want to have somebody who's your friend helping to introduce you to that and say, "Hey, this is the selling tool, and this is a good company, and this is why it's a good company." All of those things help us get to where we wanna go. You could sit here and think, you know, gosh, the world is perfect, and it's not. There's no challenges out here. The challenges are big. We responded to a bid in Atlanta, I think, about 6 weeks ago now, and as a part of our business, there's an awful lot of FOIAs, Freedom of Information Act requests. In that case, they gave The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, not the actual responses, but who the bidders were. There were 13, to give you an idea. When you think of that, and you say, "Gosh, there's an awful lot of stuff to work your way through," the business is racing, and there are a lot of serious competitors. I had a lot of questions last night about how you differentiate those competitors. Actually, you know, from the inside of it looking out, I don't think any of the companies even look remotely alike. We're similar in the sense that we sell food in airports. That's about where it ends, and as you start to pull the companies apart, you start to realize the fabrics of them just look different, and those are the very selling tools we use to win our business.... When you think about the structural, and I'll go back to that word, because I'm kind of floating back and forth between emotion and fact here, and this is an important thing. One of the differences going back to 2014, we didn't have something like this then. The company's now big enough so that we have the scale to actually attack all the markets. The pipeline of business for us has now grown to about 150 U.S. airports, and in Canada, about 25. The, the reason for that is because we have the scale to both pursue it and develop it, eventually build it, because you've got to construct things in all these places, and then operate it. You have to have that in order to be able to make the business work, because otherwise we'd be bidding on things without really knowing whether we could financially deliver them, and that's not really going to do anybody any good. We're just going to come back around. As you think about that, I think we're kind of layering in things in a short fashion to what's important. One thing I really would want to express to everybody, that I think you got some of it last night, you'll get some of it the rest of the day. Certainly, the work the guys have next door will reflect all that. There are a lot of folks in this room and that work for the company, have an awful lot of experience of this business. Most of them didn't get the experience here, actually. They came up in the business somewhere else. SSP America is a first-generation business. There are a lot of businesses around the world, and when you think about it, what some of the challenges are, the actual people running it today are not emotionally connected with what the original mission was. Here, when you go unpack everybody, you're going to find the energy, the passion, the drive. It's all palpable. You can saw them in half, and there's a similarity to that. That's a part of what drives the business and makes us think that we're building something that's great. Really appreciate everyone for coming today. Thank you so much, guys. Michael? Got one last slide before we go into the showcases. It's funny, I see ambition to accelerate growth. For me, is in our country, in North America and Canada, there's a passion for it. You go back to that slide, pre-COVID, you know, our CAGR was 20%. Asked multiple times, "Can you keep doing that?" Pat says it, we have the infrastructure for that. We're well positioned for it. We're in a growing market. You know, just to remind you know, M&A, you know, Midfield, our first acquisition, very successful with it. Again, we did that very quickly because of the confidence people had in us. We're 10% of a $6 billion market, which is exciting. 34 of the top 80 airports. We've expanded our reach to go after 150, so the growth opportunity is there. As you heard, Patrick said he's been here seven times, so I have a new best friend in Patrick. It's great. It's a great relationship, but the strategy is aligned, and we talk about the strategy all the time. It's very clear in our group exec meetings. It's very clear in my exec team meetings. It's very clear in Patrick's and ours, one-on-one, of what the goal is. The structural growth there, again, the strong track record of performance. I think the big one is that third check, is that experienced executive team, business development team is critical to that success, and we have that, with people of great experiences on bringing on new business and winning new business, which is really, really important. You know, the unique local customer proposition. Are our competitors trying to do that? Absolutely. They kind of relate to the party. We're ahead of them, we're true restaurateurs. We're not concessionaires, I think that's critical to our growth strategy. You saw the strong partnerships last night. We have very strong partnerships with our brands as well, it just really positions us well. Very excited about that. Again, I hopefully you enjoyed this part of the day, I want to talk a little bit about the showcases. First of all, you all have a name badge with you, correct? At the bottom of the name badge, it tells you what showcase group you're in. Very critical. I am in number 2. If you do not have a badge, please raise your hand. Okay, just pick a group. There's only 2 people. That's fantastic. All right. In the back, you'll see people who have numbers that match the showcase number. I want you to head with them, we'll go through the three different groups. You'll see there's one, driving performance through menu optimization. We'll also talk about pricing. Digital solutions focused on the passenger experience, as I mentioned before, driving like-for-like sales, as well as profit conversion, driving sales through kitchen design and seating innovation. Each 20 minutes, with five minutes Q&A. I try to tell them to get it down to about 17 minutes. They got a lot of passion and energy. Hopefully, they can get it down to 17, five Q&A. We do come back to this room, where Jonathan's going to speak, we'll have some Q&A, write your questions if you don't get them in on the showcases, we can deal with it then. If you can all stand up and then see the people in the back and follow your group number on your tag, I'd greatly appreciate it. Thank you. Please welcome to the stage Deputy CEO and CFO, SSP Group, Jonathan Davies. Right. Good morning, everybody. Before I kick off, let me just add my own welcome to everyone and say thank you for joining us, particularly those of you, and there's quite a number, who've traveled some distance, and I hope you're having a good day so far. I hope you enjoyed the last few sessions. I'm afraid the excitement's over now. You've got me, only for sort of 15 or 20 minutes, I'll try to keep this fairly swift. The good news is that actually one of the topics I want to talk about is driving efficiencies across the business. Some of the stuff you've just seen has done a fair bit of the work for me, hopefully, and illustrated the way we go about things. Patrick has already spoken about how we plan to accelerate our sales growth by focusing on North America, the Asia-Pacific region, both of which will provide higher levels of structural growth, both in like-for-like sales and the opportunity for new business. My job now is really to build on this and talk a little bit about our economic model, how we think about profit and cash conversion, and then think about our financial strategy, really, as we look beyond 2024. To help illustrate how the economic model works, I'm going to start by looking briefly at our historical performance. Again, no apologies for this, because I think it's the best way to illustrate the economic model in the business. As most of you know, we had a very, very strong track record of financial performance prior to COVID and from our IPO in 2014. We delivered, as you can see from the chart here, a 2.7% EBITDA margin improvement, with improvements right across the cost base, albeit I'm going to come back to concessions in a moment. This chart you can see shows the P&L broken down, both on a reported basis, but also on an underlying basis. Underlying here means adjusted for channel mix. Now, why do we do that? Well, the air business has structurally higher gross profit margins than rail, but that's offset by higher rents and to some degree, higher labor and overhead costs as well. But it's principally about the gross profit margin and the rent. That's what we've adjusted for here. The column to look at really is the right-hand one in terms of understanding the sort of real cost behavior in the P&L. What were the drivers of the margin enhancement? Well, there's two drivers really here. The first is operating leverage on the back of the fact that over this period of time, we saw about 3% like-for-like sales growth, and that's mainly on the labor line, and I'm going to come back to that in a moment. The second area is clearly our program of efficiency initiatives, and you can see here that the biggest driver there was on the gross profit line, where we delivered a 3.6% improvement over that period of time. That was mainly driven by a lot of work on things like price and promotional elasticities, things like range and menu engineering and of course, procurement, scale and efficiency. You know, all of these are things that we continue to do, but the important message here is there's a muscle here that we've built over many years, and I'll come back to where we're going next. It's important to take away the fact that there are savings right across the P&L, and it's a long, long list of initiatives which delivered these results. Concession fees. It's important to remember that the backdrop here is, and it has been the case for many years, rising concession fees. Typically, when you renew a contract, you are going to pay slightly higher rents. That's because sales have risen, it's because the business has become more efficient. It's also, of course, a reflection of the very competitive nature of the markets we operate in, as indeed you've heard earlier. Importantly, we expect this trend to continue. Therefore, we need to think about that when we stare at the economics of the P&L. Picking up these areas in turn, first of all, a word on operating leverage. This slide is a reminder of both the shape of the P&L, also what's included in the various categories of costs, also importantly, how they tend to vary with like-for-like sales and net contract gains. The real message from this slide, I'm not going to drain the whole slide, is that it's largely about the labor ratios. We think that, currently, if we look across the globe, the labor costs are broadly one third fixed and about two-thirds variable. That is sort of a fundamental driver of the economics and the way operating leverage with sales growth flows through into the P&L. The rest of the P&L is fairly variable in nature. Important to remember, we're talking in broad generalizations here because the ratios and the operating leverage can be very, very different depending on which market you're in. Principally, because you've got parts of the world where you've got very low labor costs, notably Asia Pacific, India. You've got other markets, Western Europe and the U.S., where you've got higher labor costs, of course. The other thing I want to comment on here is the impact of net contract gains. That really is all about the new unit opening. These bring pre-opening costs, which as I think many of you know, we flow straight through the P&L in the year that they arise. The scale of new openings is very much an important driver of the margin on a year-to-year basis. These, of course, are mainly labor costs. It's really things like recruitment, training, and of course, these are really, you know, about the scale of new openings, and they will come with both brand-new business, but also they'll come with renewals. Again, they vary widely depending on the type of new business we're talking about. Clearly, lower when you add a single unit to an existing big site. When you're entering brand-new locations, brand-new airports, or you're entering brand-new countries, those pre-opening costs can be very material. The second part of the economic model is our efficiency program. Coming out of COVID, we've revitalized our efficiency program, much of which was really put on hold during COVID, where we took more drastic action, frankly. This is a slide that we talked about at the interim, I'm not going to cover it in detail today. Suffice to say, there's a long list of projects, as there always was back in history. Helpfully, you've just seen some fantastic examples from the North American team of the sort of work we do, so I'm hoping that that's brought it to life for you, rather better than seeing words on a chart, which we tend to present to our City audience. I want to stress that this is very much part of the DNA of the business right across the globe. Clearly, you know, in this current climate of high inflation, it's increasingly important that we're, you know, on this efficiency agenda, and certain aspects are becoming super important. You've heard about some of this today, notably being all over pricing and monitoring cost inflation, as well as things like digital technology, which is clearly playing a role in helping us manage our labor costs down, you know, against a backdrop of, you know, recruitment issues in some parts of the world and rising labor costs. Final point on this, as you saw in our interims, I presented it a month ago, if you look at the P&L to date, you look at the first half results, you look at last year's results, you will have seen that we've been doing a decent job in mitigating all of these cost inflation pressures through the margin, and particularly if you look at the gross margin line, where we were still seeing a small improvement year-on-year. I'm going to move on to cash now, and again, I'm going to illustrate the economic model with a brief look at history. You all know we have a cash-generative business model, and we've got a track record of funding our growth from free cash flow. On the left-hand chart, you can see the pre-COVID period, again from the IPO in 2014, and you can see the operating cash flow relative to the CapEx. Again, statement of the obvious, we funded the growth even as we accelerated the pace of growth and net new gains from our operating cash flow. More relevant really is the right-hand box, which looks at 2017-2019, when we were growing through around 5%-6% of net new gains annually, therefore, you know, investing more heavily in the business. You can see again, if you look at the numbers there, during this period, we were seeing sales growth of about 8% per annum, as I say, with 5%-6% of new gains. All of that was funded from free cash flow, where we invested about GBP 450 million in organic growth in CapEx, a further GBP 80 million in acquisitions, and still were able to return GBP 250 million to shareholders through a special dividend, and held our leverage at 1.5 x. At the bottom of our range in terms of really how we saw the balance sheet. The message here really is that, this is important, we demonstrated historically the capacity within our balance sheet to drive, frankly, more rapid growth if the opportunities have arisen. Clearly, this financial model only works if we deliver good returns on investment in each individual project. That's a very important part of the way we run the business. Again, here, the fundamentals are unchanged. We still think we can accelerate growth and drive high returns on investment. You know, Michael talked earlier on about the way we run the business, in North America, the disciplines around the investment committee, the role that the local teams play, the group teams play, but that is replicated right across the group. It's a very important part of what we do. You know, we think that the strength of our capital appraisal processes will help us continue to deliver these returns. As we've also said, we think that as we come out of COVID, we are arguably better positioned competitively to win new business. Albeit, I think we do anticipate that in time, the historical levels of competition will, to some degree, be resumed. Looking at the CapEx, expectations themselves now, and this is a recap on the interims. We set out expectation for CapEx through to 2025, with about GBP 160 million of CapEx involved in mobilizing the secured pipeline that Patrick talked about earlier on. That's the GBP 625 million over the next three years, and about another GBP 120 million, which is really about the catch-up of renewal and maintenance CapEx, which really is the recovery of the deferrals from the COVID period. To the right of the chart, if we look to 2025 and further on, we would expect the contract renewal and maintenance CapEx to run at about 4% of sales, which is in line really with our historical levels of depreciation. Importantly, that assumes that we maintain renewal rates at the historical run rate, something like 80% of contracts which are expiring. On top of this, there of course, will be expansionary CapEx. Clearly, that is to some degree unknown as we look into the future, albeit we set out the opportunity. Our long-standing financial model, we think, is very much intact. Broadly speaking, that's 2-3 GBP of sales per GBP of CapEx, with delivering a site-level EBITDA in the mid-teens by the 2nd year of operation. That really translates into the sort of 3-4-year discounted post-tax paybacks, which you've heard me talk about in the past. Illustratively, and this is just an illustration, that would be a steady state run rate of about GBP 250 million per annum if we were to be running with about 4%-6% net gains, for which read, remember, when you do the maths, that's really 6%-8% of gross gains, because we're co-covering circa 2% that would be lost at expiry. Hopefully that gives you a flavor of how we see capital returns, what the expectations are around capital. Just to wrap it up really, our capital allocation model remains absolutely unchanged. Organic growth, still our number one priority. Regarding M&A, we believe that opportunities will arise. We've talked about it earlier on, as ever, we will remain disciplined in this regard, and our medium-term leverage target remains between 1.5 x and 2x net debt to EBITDA. Clearly, any surplus that we see looking forward, we will return to shareholders. To try and wrap up, firstly, a look at our near-term planning assumptions. At the interims, we indicated that expectations for this year will be towards the top end of the range of guides we've previously given, around GBP 3 billion of sales and about GBP 280 million of EBITDA. That would imply a margin just over 9% for the year. Importantly, it is bang on track, really, for the trajectory of the recovery in margin that we've been talking to you about as we've come through COVID, going back to the point where we were hitting breakeven. We're on the right path, back towards what I would regard as normal margins. Again, many of you've heard us talk about this before. Looking to 2024, clearly the momentum in the business that we've talked about already, Patrick's talked about, together with actually the completion of the large part of the Midfield deal, also gives us confidence as we look to 2024, albeit I think, slightly early to be giving any adjusted guidance. Finally, looking forward beyond 2024, this is really how we see the financial model. Higher top line growth, as we've said, and sustainable margin enhancement contributing to the delivery of stronger operating growth. EPS will follow this, noting that there will be an increasing minority interest share, which reflects the growth we anticipate in the parts of the world, including North America, where we have these joint venture partners, and hopefully you've got a sense of the importance of those from last night and today. As I showed you earlier, the cash generative nature of the business, it will be underpinned by strong returns on incremental CapEx. Just to finalize the picture, if we then look at the balance sheet, the pace of delevering that we see under normal circumstances, clearly is dependent on the scale of investment in new business. We will continue to maintain an efficient balance sheet by returning surplus cash to shareholders as that opportunity arises. That's all from me. I'm now going to pass back to Patrick to wrap up. Michael and Jonathan are going to join me, and then I'll do a very quick wrap up at the end. Thank you for listening to us and for engaging with our wider team, so comprehensively. I'm not sure who, on the, who was keeping score on the buy side versus sell side cook-off. Anybody know? Of course. Of course. Anyway, thank you for participating. What we wanted to do now is to give 15, 20 minutes max, opportunity for questions of the of the three of us, and then I'll give a very, very brief, sort of wrap up at the end, and hand over to Michael to segue us for JFK tour. Can I say something real quick? Yeah, of course. Passion for every detail is a reminder, just in case you weren't listening last night? Do you have your passport and/or ID with you that you gave to SSP Group? Because I want to make sure we can get through security, and if you make sure you have your luggage with you, if you are leaving once the tour is, you're not coming back here. Thank you. Good. Actually, for a change, Dara, question. Thank you. It was alluded to yesterday in the Q&A session that North American airports have seen a lower amount of investment versus the rest of the world, and that this is starting to change. What has been the catalyst for this change, and do you see this continuing to accelerate? Michael? It's basically the growth of the airlines and the growth of the traveler, at the same time, as we go around from airport to airport, you heard Pat earlier, the money that they're driving has to go back into the airport. They're driving more revenue because more passengers are flying, which is fantastic, because they're just putting it right back into the infrastructure, as he said, well said, it can't go to the school systems, it can't go anywhere else. It goes back into it. With the growth, brings more money into them, helps them get bonds much each year. Therefore, they can expand their airports, and, you know, if it's the governor, city council, the mayor, to them, it is the entryway to their city. and or state, they want an incredible experience. You know, they want to compete with the Asia- PAC market and everybody else, they want to create an incredible experience. It's really that simple. There is some, you know, PPP, not much, as Pat said, as well, and that's basically what's driving it. Jamie? Thanks. Just a couple of connected questions on margins. You've given us some great examples of North America efficiencies, et cetera, and your first half margins were about 2 points above the first half of 2019 in North America. Can that continue to grow from there? Secondly, at the group level, you reminded us, Jonathan, you were 11.7% in 2019, you're mid-10s next year. You've given the reasons why. Any reason why you shouldn't get back to the mid-11s or more at some point in the future? Do you want to pick that, Jonathan? Let me pick the second point up first. The answer in a nutshell is no. As you say, Jamie, correctly, we've set out the impact of the scaling up of new business. You can see the amount we are investing, and that's the reason for it, which brings those pre-opening costs I've talked about. We've talked about the impact of high inflation, which we broadly mitigated in cash terms. From then on, we think, you know, there should be consistent delivery of margin expansion over the coming years, once the business is fundamentally back to normal, which is, you know, not necessarily at the same rate as we have delivered in the past, but we see no reason why there's any ceiling on margin. Michael, do you want to talk about the evolution of margins and the drivers of that as you see it in North America? It is budget season, so no. Yeah, just for everyone else's purpose, Yesterday morning, we did our kind of draft multi-year financial plan for North America. It was a tale of absolute woe in terms of passenger numbers. everything was- There's a thing here. an apocalypse. There's a thing here, which is for Pat, for Michael, every day, 365 days a year, is budget day. All of Pat's guests last night, and indeed, the presentation today, is making it very difficult for Michael to hold the line on his expectations for a fair budget. No, I'll get a fair one. In all seriousness, I was raised with seven siblings, so I do have a sense of humor. I like to have a little fun. I think it's important, and we enjoy each other's company, which is even more important. I think you saw it today, right? Everything that we're working on, I think it answers the question within itself, Jamie. There was a lot of great questions of how many airports, I mean, sorry, how many restaurants have you done this in? On every one of the things we've done, we're not fully implemented everywhere, so the opportunity is there. Yeah. I want to just sort of join that back, Jamie, to the kind of strategic overview at the beginning, right? Which is, you know, if you remember, I made the point that the markets which we believe have the greatest opportunity for market share gain and structural growth, both of those drivers, actually, also happen to be the markets in which our margin performance and margin trajectory is strongest, right? Which makes this, without trying to be too superficial on strategy, makes it relatively straightforward as to where we should be putting our incremental capital. You see that in the composition of where the allocation of capital in the net gain, in the net gain slide was earlier. I think, frankly, you know, without, you know, embarrassing Michael and the team too much, you know, when you recognize the level of inflationary pressure on the system since 2019, on both cost of goods and on labor, plus all of the disruption and restarting and relearning coming out of COVID, to actually have a business which is running at a higher margin now than it was in 2019 and is stronger, on both cost of goods and on labor, than it was in 2019, is actually pretty remarkable and a testament to the skill and execution of the team, as well as some of the attractive market dynamics. Yeah. Just so you know, it's also raise time this time of the year. Jason. Sorry, go on. Yeah, thank you. A couple of, well, actually, 3 questions, if you don't mind. Just in terms of the North America business, and you alluded to margins and where you can see that developing, can you maybe just put into context how the margin profile looks on some of the new business wins that you're bringing in? How the margin profile of Midfield and the impact that will have on the Group? Second question is around M&A and the pipeline, what sort of visibility do you see around future M&A opportunities, both in North America and maybe elsewhere? The final question, back into the U.K. market, do you see opportunities to expand into some of the alternative channels in the U.K. market, whether that's motor, motorway or out-of-town opportunities? Thanks. Mike, do you want to deal with the first one. Sure. Will pick up the second and third. On, as we mentioned earlier in my presentation, there's a rigorous, as you all know, who follow SSP, a rigorous investment process. Any new business that we're going to bring in meets those guidelines, which is super important to us to make sure we're getting the returns on the capital that you all have given us. So that's that one. As it relates to Midfield, same thing. We wouldn't have done the deal if it didn't meet our guide margin guidelines. Of course, there's synergies within Midfield that we'll go after. That's any part of any acquisition that we feel comfortable with. As it relates to M&A, I'll pass it over to you, Patrick. Yeah. Let me deal with the third question first and then come to the second one, right, which was. It's specific to the U.K., but I think Jason, you can extend it beyond the U.K., right? Which is, we're pretty clear on our channel and geographic priorities, right? We like the rail business, and I'll come back to in what context and why in a second, but the driver of growth from here for SSP is gonna be the air channel. If you find us in the U.K. messing around in motorway service stations or out-of-town shopping centers, please remember that I made this statement. We just won't be doing that, all right? Jonathan on my left, has a particular aversion to out-of-town shopping centers. With the greatest respect to everything that the business has done historically, you know, you can pretty much take almost every example of us entering the motorway service channel, motorway service station channel against a economic problem, outcome. That is not to say we don't have 1 or 2 instances of that at the moment. We have an interesting business model of motorway service stations in Germany, but it has a very different level of feature around who contributes the capital between us and the landlord, and has somewhat different economic model. It is something, though, that we're looking at hard as to whether even with those features, it makes sense strategically for us to be there. We will look in some of these emerging markets where we have tremendous in-market capability around opportunity and motorway service stations, but again, it'll be at the periphery of what we're doing relative to air in those markets. What we're trying to do on capital allocation is to combine being really clear on our strategic priorities in terms of channel and geography, with being really disciplined on financial allocation. We're looking for both, which is an appropriate segue, actually, to the question on M&A opportunities. The you should take from this seminar, both by the fact that you're physically here, and also by all of the things that we've said, that we have a very, very high level of ambition for the kind of business we can have in North America, and the kind of contribution that North America can make to the SSP Group overall. As I've said earlier, the momentum that we have in terms of like-for-like performance, and net gains, and the fact that 50% of the net gains for the group in revenue terms are coming in North America already, means we don't have to do any M&A at all. We have very, very nice, and very attractive economic momentum on like-for-like, and net gains. We do think there will be opportunities for us to do infill M&A, like Midfield, and other things potentially like that, on the assumption that they deliver a strategic benefit and the returns criteria are such that we can, first of all, defend them to each other, and also defend them to our stakeholders. If you know, read through all of that, we would like to try to find ways to complement the organic momentum of our North American business with things that enable us to step up our share and get access to airports more quickly. The timing, nature, frequency, and scale of that, very hard to predict. You know, we'll combine our group processes with our North American expertise in terms of how we do that. We also signaled some other areas of strategic growth opportunity for us as a business, right? You know, India, Malaysia, Thailand, some markets with features somewhat like that we're currently in, that we'd be interested in trying to find a way into. We're very interested in building the scale of our business in the Middle East. And we've got some interesting momentum in some places there, too. They're the sort of broad geographic priorities, air as the channel overlay across that, and then being disciplined and clear on the financial criteria of that. If I could just add one last thing, right? You know, if you take anything from, you know, the day and a half that you've spent with us, it should also be the importance of local expertise, on-the-ground capability, real presence and influence within the travel network. We would be mad to try to inject businesses into markets where we don't have confidence in that kind of infrastructure and team. It matters. The third criteria, really, alongside strategic fit and financial discipline, is do we have the integration capability, leadership capability in market, to be able to integrate, absorb, and drive on anything that we do, whether it's organic, frankly, accelerated organic or infill M&A. Sorry, Ali. Thank you. Yeah, thank you for the session today. You've talked a lot about the initiatives in the U.S., maybe some of those you're applying to other parts of the world. How much of those are built into the guidance that you've currently set out? What is the scale of improvement that you could build to the margin once they're fully deployed? That feels like a very natural cfo question there, Jonathan. Well, you'll note, Ali, that we didn't actually put a number on the efficiency opportunity, merely pointed out that it had been an important driver of historical performance. You know, I think the objective of today, frankly, was to, both in Michael's presentation, but importantly in the workshops, start to give you a little bit of a flavor of the sort of stuff that is happening throughout the business. You've heard me say many times, there's a long, long list of this stuff. One of the things that I think is a strength of the business is our ability to relentlessly keep on top of a long list of stuff, and make sure that we deliver on our ambition, and we monitor performance. We are doing it across the globe. I happen to think these guys do this stuff very, very well, and to some degree, probably originate more of their own programs of efficiency locally. And you heard Michael say it before, there's a sort of, you know, there is a very, very important dynamic in the business whereby good ideas, wherever they originate, get shared at our executive committee, and we look at deploying them as quickly as we can, where appropriate, elsewhere. This sort, you know, we could take you to other parts of the world, and they would be able to put on a similar sort of set of presentations. Again, you know, what does all that all add up to? Well, you know, hard to say, particularly at this point in time, where we're still in the recovery phase. Got it. Just to follow up, from speaking to some of the panelists, from yesterday's session, it sounded like the concession environment, concession rate environment isn't gonna be as aggressive as you're perhaps suggesting for the overall market. What is the delta? Well, so rather, what are you expecting in terms of the recovery and concession rates? Is it back to pre-2019 levels? That's a really good question. Again, somewhat unknowable, and I think what we've definitely benefited from is a slightly more benign, competitive environment over the last 12 or 18 months, as we've really re-engaged in the sort of competitive process, both to pull new business and to extend businesses. You know, we haven't seen the same level of competition. Again, Patrick's pointed to some of that earlier on, and I think we've seen many of our competitors, big and small, bidding more conservatively. You know, that's been helpful for us, albeit in many cases, we've not been extending contracts for the full term. We have been getting, you know, nice extensions with limited capital, and at some point in time, over the coming years, those will come back to market. I think we're at the... We're sort of at a cusp here. I think that, you know, people have got short memories, and I think if I look at the clients and possibly the competitors, they're sort of feeling that COVID's well in the rearview mirror, and we're starting to see, to some degree, a resumption of the normal levels of competitive activity. I don't think we're quite back there yet, but I wouldn't sort of hold out and say it's never gonna return. I think certainly in a year's time we'll be back there. I think you may wanna- No, I think that's. Yeah. Leo, come to you next. Sorry, Leo. Thank you. Maybe Patrick or Michael, I'm sort of intrigued by the comments about some of your sites having sort of compelling unit economics just by the size of them in a specific area. Is that strategic in that you've tried to structure these opportunities like that, or is it just luck in terms of the ones you've been successful at winning? Then just 2nd question, maybe for Jonathan, from the trading update this morning, can you just give a bit more color under the organic trends underneath the revenue progression from the 6-week to the 10-week period? Just, I guess it's splitting out the effects. To answer your first question, yes, it's strategic. Again, somewhat unknowable, I think what we've definitely benefited from is a slightly more benign competitive environment over the last 12 or 18 months, as we've really re-engaged in the sort of competitive process, both to pull new business and to extend businesses. You know, we haven't seen the same level of competition. Again, Patrick's pointed to some of that earlier on, I think we've seen many of our competitors, big and small, bidding more conservatively. You know, that's been helpful for us, albeit in many cases, we've not been extending contracts for the full term. We have been getting, you know, nice extensions with limited capital, at some point in time, over the coming years, those will come back to market. I think we're at the... We're sort of at a cusp here. I think that, you know, people have got short memories, and I think if I look at the clients and possibly the competitors, they're sort of feeling that COVID's well in the rearview mirror, and we're starting to see, to some degree, a resumption of the normal levels of competitive activity. I don't think we're quite back there yet, but I wouldn't sort of hold out and say it's never gonna return. I think certainly in a year's time we'll be back there. I think you may want to- No, I think that's... Yeah. Leo, come to you next. Sorry, Leo. Thank you. Maybe Patrick or Michael, I was sort of intrigued by the comments about the, some of your sites having sort of compelling unit economics just by the, by the size of them in a specific area. Is that strategic in, in that you've tried to structure these opportunities like that, or is it just luck in terms of the ones you've been successful at winning? Just second question, maybe for Jonathan, but on the, from the trading update this morning, can you just give a bit more color on the, under the organic trends underneath the revenue progression from the 6-week to the 10-week period? Just, I guess it's splitting out the effects. To answer your first question, yes, it's strategic. Again, somewhat unknowable, and I think what we've definitely benefited from is a slightly more benign competitive environment over the last 12 or 18 months, as we've really re-engaged in the sort of competitive process, both to pull new business and to extend businesses. You know, we haven't seen the same level of competition. Again, Patrick's pointed to some of that earlier on, and I think we've seen many of our competitors, big and small, bidding more conservatively. You know, that's been helpful for us, albeit in many cases, we've not been extending contracts for the full term. We have been getting, you know, nice extensions with limited capital, and at some point in time, over the coming years, those will come back to market. I think we're at the... We're sort of at a cusp here. I think that, you know, people have got short memories, and I think if I look at the clients and possibly the competitors, they're sort of feeling that COVID's well in the rearview mirror, and we're starting to see, to some degree, a resumption of the normal levels of competitive activity. I don't think we're quite back there yet, but I wouldn't sort of hold out and say it's never gonna return. I think certainly in a year's time we'll be back there. I think you may want to- No, I think that's. Yeah. Leo, come to you next. Sorry, Leo. Thank you. Maybe Patrick or Michael, I was sort of intrigued by the comments about the, some of your sites having sort of compelling unit economics just by the, by the size of them in a specific area. Is that strategic in, in that you've tried to structure these opportunities like that, or is it just luck in terms of the ones you've been successful at winning? Just second question, maybe for Jonathan, but on the, from the trading update this morning, can you just give a bit more color on the, under the organic trends underneath the revenue progression from the 6-week to the 10-week period? Just, I guess it's splitting out the effects. That's a really good question. Again, somewhat unknowable, and I think what we've definitely benefited from is a slightly more benign competitive environment over the last 12 or 18 months, as we've really re-engaged in the sort of competitive process, both to pull new business and to extend businesses. You know, we haven't seen the same level of competition. Again, Patrick's pointed to some of that earlier on, and I think we've seen, many of our competitors, big and small, bidding more conservatively. You know, that's been helpful for us, albeit in many cases, we've not been extending contracts for the full term. We have been getting, you know, nice extensions with limited capital, and at some point in time, over the coming years, those will come back to market. I think we're at the... We're sort of at a cusp here. I think that, you know, people have got short memories, and I think if I look at the clients and possibly the competitors, they're sort of feeling that COVID's well in the rearview mirror. We're starting to see, to some degree, a resumption of the normal levels of competitive activity. I don't think we're quite back there yet, I wouldn't sort of hold out and say it's never gonna return. I think certainly in a year's time we'll be back there. I think you may want to. No, I think that's. Yeah. Tim. Thanks. All right, just firstly, I wanted to understand, to check I understood right on concession fees. You were saying that although they're above pre-COVID levels as a percentage, the environment is slightly more benign. It sounds like you're very pragmatic about that line item remaining tricky. Presumably, it shouldn't be as bad as the 50 basis points per annum that you had post-IPO. Yeah, good question, Tim. I think if you look at the concession fees in absolute terms as a percentage of sales, of course, we're still not fully recovered from COVID, there are still sites, parts of the world where you've got, you're still in minimum guarantees and so forth. You can't really read the absolute numbers that you saw, particularly in the first half, because remember, there's a big shift between first half and second half as well under normal circumstances. You can't really draw anything from that at this stage. You can really only start to draw out that as you look forward another year or two. In terms of the second part, the pace of concession fee increase, I would hope that for all the reasons I mentioned in response to the points Ali raised, I think we'd hope that they are not going to increase at the same level as we saw in the pre-period. Again, there's an important point here in the way we manage the business. We don't manage it for short-term margin, first up. We will always look for cash, you know, returning projects. To some degree, if we can afford, through the economics of each deal, to pay more rent, we'll do it, and you'll see the concession fee rise over the, you know, over the medium term. You know, I think that's always been a hallmark of the way we've run the business. The net of that has been, of course, that we've always, you know, we've been able to fund an increase in concession fee, some of that supported by the increased productivity and efficiency of the business. The answer is, it's unknowable, but I wouldn't assume it's going to revert to that sort of level. I would assume something lower. Good. I'm going to take this is going to be the last question, actually, so just got a microphone. Hi, business development question. In the U.S., you know, just given the massive volume of RFPs over the next couple of years, do you feel that you have the business development team and the number of opportunities that meet your underwriting criteria and the win rate sort of necessary to consume your capital, growth capital budget? Or is there more you can do building out your development team, modifying your approach to the market to do more and win more of that? As it relates to the development team, we're in a good spot. You know, we just hired Paul Brown, great individual, was an airport director, who had concessions background as well, to our team recently. Maria Martinez from one of our competitors. Again, great business development experience. Jen Jewell, another recent hire, again, great experience from one of our competitors. Dawn Hunter, who was actually charged with the commercial program at Seattle Airport, prior to that at L.A., overseeing the concessions program, so understands our business well. Four key strategic hires, done recently in the last six months. They're up, they're ready. Pat's orientated them, got them ready to go, and so it positions us, and that's maintaining the current team that we've had, because we knew, again, things were put on hold during COVID, that there would be a push. We've done the same thing with our proposal team, put the right resources in there, so we have the bandwidth to respond to the RFPs as well, which is, you know, kind of a hefty lifting because the proposals are quite large. Feel very comfortable with that. You know, one of the questions is, I'll digress a little bit, and I mentioned in my menu optimization plan as well, we've done the same thing with our culinary team, because it was very important to reinvest on the possibility of getting those kitchens up, executed because of the return is there. The same thing as keeping the menu optimization program going on, because we know a couple bodies can reduce that 2-month time period to do menu optimization down to 1, you're going to get the return in seconds. We're constantly investing in the business, but being prudent about it and very smart about it. Just to make sure we're ready. Absolutely. If I just build on that, we'll finish with this. If you know, Michael shared the historic growth trajectory of our North American business, compounded growth of about 20% to 2019, right? You know, jump in your mind to the slide I showed on net gains, right, which has the $625 million, 50% of which is, you know, North America, so, you know, call it $315 million or something of that sort of order, plus the, you know, growth we've even had in the last couple of months. The truth is, we've got close to $500 million of net gains that are rolling in in North America, and the business is becoming much bigger, right? Delightfully so, right? We're, it's really cool that that's happening. The level of opportunity is still there and still very, very large. The task of continuing to secure and onboard and generate returns at a maintenance of a 20% growth business that has become close to a billion-dollar business versus a five hundred million dollar business of five years ago, is pretty material, and it needs more resource. As you know, Michael talks about, we're putting into, you know, it's got some really, really strong anchor points in terms of leadership capability and relationships within the aviation ecosystem here. If I could just make a small internal joke for a second. Mark Rainbow comes up to me last night and goes, "Which one of those three people do you think Pat's going to hire this time?" Our last experience of Pat moderating a panel of aviation experts, it turned into a recruitment exercise for SSP. We will continue to strengthen and evolve our team, but I think we will be doing that off just really, really strong foundation points that we have here in North America. Listen, I'm going to bring the Q&A to an end, just so I can just thank Michael and Jonathan for their comments in the Q&A and for your comments this morning. Thank you. Thank you. Just before I do a very, very quick wrap up, there's one question that at least four people in the room have asked me individually, so I'm just gonna be explicit on the answer I gave them to everybody else, which is: What do we think about the review of U.K. Rail Catering that was announced last Thursday evening? What I would say is three points. First of all, for us, just to give it a kind of an emotional reaction, it's gonna be a bit irritating, right? It's gonna consume resource with our U.K. team, it's gonna consume resource with our legal team in terms of making that submission, all right? I think that's gonna be some resource that it's gonna consume for, frankly, some time, and we've already ramped up to prepare our response for that. Second thing I would say, is that the essence of what that review is seeking is something that we're enormously supportive of, right? Which is trying to find a way to get more variety, stronger, and more innovative food propositions into the U.K. rail environment. There are all sorts of contextual factors around how the system works, which makes that difficult, even as we have been trying to do it ourselves as one of the bigger players within the space. We're fully aligned with the stated objective of that review, right? Which is to try to have stronger, better, more innovative, better quality, food propositions. The kind of food propositions, frankly, that you will see in some other parts of the rail system, like HS1 and St. Pancras, for example, in the U.K., insofar as any of you, have a picture of the, you know, of the food and beverage environment there. Then the third thing to say is that while it is going to be, you know, a process for us to weigh into, this is not an unusual process for the ORR to roll out. Actually, there's been about five such processes of other aspects, commercial and operational aspects of U.K. Rail, that have been initiated within the last 12 months, right? You know, we are responding to a relatively normal process, in a way that will consume some of our resource, the objective of which actually is not really misaligned with what we're trying to do in U.K. Rail at all. I could go down a much kind of longer initial view on the nature of the risk that is associated with that, but the sort of risks that have been bounced at us feel to us to fall into the category of highly unlikely, as we assess what some of the mitigants may be that may be sought on that. Just to say, that's. You know, it was new news to the system, it was new news to us last Thursday evening. We're fully engaged in it, and, you know, as we know more, you know, we'll share that with you, as we need to. Did just want to say that. Right. Let me jump back to key takeaways from this event, and I'm including last night and today. First thing to note is, and just to say, thank you for spending the time with us, right? Everyone is busy. People have... In many cases, people have traveled across the Atlantic to be here. Even the people who've come from within North America to be with us as our guests, we really appreciate you spending the time with us and hopefully learning more about the business and helping us to, by virtue of how you've engaged with us, to understand and make our business better as well. I'm also conscious that we are pivoting for many of us to go to Terminal 4. Jeffrey and Michael will pick that up in a second, but not all of us. For those of you who are finishing up with us now, thank you again for spending the time with us. Hopefully you've got to learn about the business. I did want to thank a group of people. Actually, came up just there in that last question. First of all, you know, the clients who joined us last night, our joint venture partners who joined us last night, but in particular, I wanted to thank Michael and his team, Lana Cramer in particular, for putting on all of this. Just to give one example, it's not for the faint-hearted to establish a kitchen next door. Like, you know, I walked down yesterday to see the dress rehearsal, the fire alarm was blaring, right? You know, there was an element of fingers crossed as to whether or not we could actually operate a kitchen the way that we did in the time that we did. It goes a little bit to the point Pat made, right? Which is the, "This is what we do." You know, we're restaurateurs, there's a bit of theater, there's a bit of flair to how it goes, and that is part of the hospitality experience. I think, for those of you who may not have seen that aspect of the SSP culture in other parts of the world and in other events like this before, hopefully that's kind of resonated pretty strongly for you here. To my U.S. team colleagues, in every sense, who've put this together, really thank you very much. I also just wanted to acknowledge our investor relations team, who were the other side of all of that. Sarah John, Sarah Roff, Adam, who's here, Miles, who, you know, works with them in all sorts of ways for, you know, for helping, put this together and making sure that it met the kind of capital market side and kind of investor side of the event as well. There are the thank yous. Just in content terms, hopefully what you've got from spending the last day and a bit with us is that our business continues to trade well, right? That's the sort of bedrock or foundation for all the other things that we're talking about, right? We are... You know, you have seen me earlier talk about the different stages of our business as we're transitioning from pre-COVID, through COVID, to recovering, and then setting up the business post-recovery to have strong, sustainable growth from 2024 on. We're doing that with real alignment across our leadership team and our board. Hopefully you've got a sense from, even from the kind of banter between Michael and I, and Pat and Jonathan, and the way in which we're working. We're very aligned in terms of what we're trying to do with the Group. We're very aligned in terms of how that cascades into the different parts of our business, in terms of the purpose, the vision, the strategic priorities of the business, and we are executing those elements in all parts of our Group. As I said this morning, the somewhat simplistic way of putting it, all roads to value creation for SSP go straight through North America, all right? That's why we're here, that's why we're allocating the capital that we are. It's why we're building the capability here. This is just about our highest sales country. It is already comfortably our most profitable country, it's going to get bigger and more profitable than every other part of the group at an accelerated way, all right? That is the nature of the business that we are becoming, we are delighted to become that on the back of the capability and platform and relationships that we have here. We have, you know, Jonathan has just such an extraordinary level of corporate memory, all right? I get to see it on a virtual daily basis when we do the group investment committees that he spoke about. Some of you have heard me say this before, you know, we do about 20 investment committees a week, times 50 weeks, 1,000 in a year, times 20 years for Jonathan, that's 20,000. He can pretty much remember every one of those investment committees in terms of the corporate memory and institutional recognition about what to think about this airport or that unit or that. As a result, it flows very strongly into the economic model that he and our wider team share. I would ask you to note that the last slide that Jonathan spoke to does describe a different economic model from what SSP was before. It is not the same. By coincidence, fortunately, it's likely to deliver the same sort of earnings progression, but it will do so in different ways, all right? The essence of those different ways are, our top line will grow faster, and the nature of where that growth is coming from should be very attractive for us in terms of margin and returns, but will be delivered with a greater weighting of partner participation than would have been the case historically. As you flow all that through, that's very, very nice in terms of the earnings outcome that it should deliver, but it is driven by a somewhat different set of dynamics. Just I wanted to make that point in terms of the model going forward. That really is our path to value creation. If I join that back to finally, to the kind of guidance we've given, you know, clearly, we've expressed a lot of confidence that we're on track for this year, and we've given as specific a set of guidance as we can for that, with, you know, three and a half, you know, hard trading months still to go. We do feel nicely set up for next year, and we recognize that some of the other elements that I referenced earlier around, you know, interest, minorities, resetting our earnings, but, bases and so forth for next year, that's still the final stages of the, what I'm characterizing as the economic recovery post-COVID. That gives us a platform where when you layer on top, from that platform, all of the elements we've spoken about in terms of strategy and illustrate it, hopefully, very, very transparently, by our business in North America, we think sets us up for just tremendous excitement. I can say just tremendous fun as a business, as we crack on from 2024 into 2025 and build a path of sustainable returns out to 2030. Thank you for spending the time with us. I think, Geoffrey, am I handing over to you next? Great. Thank you. Mic's not on, but... Oh, there you go. Awesome. You know, super tough day to conclude. I only have 4 slides, so I'll try not to mess it up. My name is Geoffrey Lentz. I'm a Regional Vice President of the Northeast for SSP America. You know, I'm a Cleveland, Ohio boy, of very humble beginnings that took a big leap of faith about 12 years ago and left to go to Houston, Texas, to join SSP America. Through the growth and the opportunities that the company's provided, I've managed to work my way up to a Regional Vice President position. I'm a nurse by schooling, who'd have thought that? Absolutely. I'm gonna tell you a little bit about Terminal 4 real quick. Just a couple of housekeeping items, and then we're gonna take a tour over to Terminal 4. Really proud of what Terminal 4 is. I'll weave in some of the different things that we talked about today, and through the tour, each of you will be paired with a tour guide, with systemic knowledge of the operation in Terminal 4. Should be able to answer a lot of the questions that might come up in some of the things that I might talk about today. As we may or may not know, JFK, right, gateway to America, Terminal 4, is the largest of JFK's terminals. It services, you know, nearly 60,000 passengers a day coming in and out, operated by 34 major airlines. Curious enough, when we are touring JFK, today's enplanement totals are north of 35,000. When we're in the terminal, it's gonna be teeming with passengers, and what you're really gonna witness is sort of a symphony of the integration of the menu enhancements and optimization, right? The digital platforms and solutions, the seating efficiencies, and the kitchen efficiencies, all woven together by the operations team there in Terminal 4. We'll meet them, we'll see them, they're gonna rock it out. We, SSP America, operate 34 restaurants in Terminal 4, operated by 650, north of 650 team members. Same story for them as it was for me. Many of them joined SSP America 5, 10, 15, some even 20 years ago in Terminal 4 as cashiers, as cooks, as dishwashers, and have climbed the ranks to be our restaurant general managers, our assistant restaurant managers, even our terminal operations managers that are operating nice chunks of business in JFK, all have worked through the company, coming from the same beginnings that many of us have. A map of Terminal 4. As I mentioned, 34 units, all across the terminal from one end to the other. You're not more than likely gonna see every one of them today, just due to the brevity of the tour and announcement maneuvering over there. What you will see is what I highlighted, right? Great operation, the integrated platforms that we've discussed and seen the team perform very well today, and a group of people that are just working in hospitality and care. I, and I always sort of think of a quote, for me, that's very important in leadership, and I think when you've heard every person speak on this stage, in the hallways, at dinner last night, et cetera, what you heard is a group of individuals that have extreme care for humanity, for what we do, for hospitality. There's a quote that I often use from Teddy Roosevelt that says: "No one cares how much you know, until they know how much you care." Safety, right? As many of us either know or can intuitively guess, right, airports are really safe and secure environments for obvious reasons. No different in Terminal 4. You'll see that obviously, there has many life safety systems in Terminal 4. Should and if anything come up, right, please go to your tour guide. They will be knowledgeable of anything that we would need to do in the event of an emergency, God forbid. The second piece that I would talk about is while we're on the tour, right? In order to be afforded the privilege of taking a group like this across the security threshold, we coordinated with the Transportation Security Administration and the JFK security team. Really extensive planning and meetings, why we all had to provide our passports and identifications, okay? It's gonna be imperative that we stay with our tour escorts, okay? We'll talk about how to find those people in a minute, but those people have been tasked and charged with keeping you within a reasonable distance. Please try not to stray from them. If in the event someone has to use the restroom, let them know. They will know what to do. We cannot deviate from those protocols. There are serious civil and professional penalties that we would have to endure. I don't envision any of that, just have to remind everyone. We're going to tour over to JFK, as I mentioned. I just wanna talk about a couple of really brief housekeeping points. At the bottom of your badge. I don't have my badge, it's over there, but if I did, there'd be a number at the bottom of it, right? That number is gonna correspond to a tour guide that you have that's waiting outside those doors to meet you. They all have a sign with the corresponding number, okay? You're gonna walk out after we conclude, you're gonna find that person, and we're gonna walk over to the AirTrain to take us to Terminal 4. Might be a 5-7-minute walk to get to the AirTrain. The AirTrain schedules run 2-4 minutes, somewhere in there, and they'll take us over to Terminal 4. We're gonna grab our luggage. Sorry, I went ahead too fast. We're gonna grab our luggage that's at the top of the steps. It's in alphabetical order from front to back. Depending on your last name, that's where it'll be located. You're gonna take that with us. We're gonna walk over, get on the AirTrain. We're gonna get off the AirTrain. Your tour guide is gonna take you to a predesignated room in Terminal 4, where your luggage will remain while we go on tour. It will be safe and secure and monitored by someone who will not leave that room until we convene again and conclude the session. Three things that I also wanna highlight. Michael already mentioned one of them. Please make sure you have the I.D. that you provided. Super critical. It's gonna match a gate pass that you're gonna get, that you must also keep with you. In the event, TSA, really diligent about security, as we can imagine, they might even check on us, right? You know, just to make sure that we're doing what we need to do, so you'll need to have those two things, okay? The second thing is, we're gonna have to traverse the security checkpoint. It's gonna be an abbreviated method. We're all gonna have to go through the body image scanners, and we're gonna have to divest ourselves of wallets, cell phones, et cetera. If you don't need it, I would ask or request, leave it with your luggage, okay? Your luggage will be safe and secure. The less that we all have to sort of divest ourselves of, the quicker that we'll make it through the line and get to the third thing, which is gonna be lunch. We will feed you again. The team in the Palm Restaurant is really excited. Our regional chef team has prepared for you dishes that are represented by all of our New York restaurants. Not all of them, some of them, but they're all featured in New York restaurants. We'll go forward. Really excited about the tour. You know, there was a question that came up that Michael highlighted about anchor restaurants, right, in the broader context of developing, right, airports. JFK, actually, you'll see the operation there, but behind the scenes in JFK serves as an anchor for all of our operations in New York and produces, procures, makes, and ships to the other terminals that we operate in. Almost 10,000 units a day are sent to our other terminals in New York. All that's gonna be going on while we go see the operation. I appreciate the time. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to speak to you. We're gonna walk outside. Again, predicated on the number that's on the bottom of your badge, you're gonna find your tour guide. Off we go. Stay close. I'll lead first, and then we're gonna walk across. Thank you.