Thank you and hello everyone. Good afternoon.

Really appreciate you guys joining the call today, and we're looking forward to taking you through another set of record results that we're very proud of. Maybe very quickly we'll do some introductions.

Stephen Newton sends his apologies. He's actually got a planned medical procedure today so he won't be on.

You are in very capable hands with myself, Graham Busby. I'm a co-founder with Stephen and the Deputy CEO.

Nick Willott, CFO, and nice to speak to you all.

Emiko Caerlewy-Smith, client-facing partner and Head of Investor Relations.

Okay. Just as a a bit of an overview, like I said, we're very happy with with the results that we launched this this week.

It shows our diversification strategy is working. We've had revenues increase 25% and adjusted EBITDA increasing 29%.

I think that really shows kind of the focus on the quality of growth that we put into the business and the value of our new work, and that kind of flows through to the EBITDA margins of of 31% as well. We are seeing more artificial intelligence demand.

I think that is obviously a prevalent theme in global theme, actually. I think if you think about previous tech cycles like mobile in the 2000s, it's always the infrastructure players that get the value first and then that flows through into the services companies, and and that is what we're seeing now with artificial intelligence.

There's been studies recently that Gartner Gartner have pushed through that shows that agentic AI is going to give a $200 billion market opportunity to technology services in the next 5 years, and we're looking forward to to getting as much of that as as we can, quite frankly. AI revenue for ourselves is 185% up, period-on-period, H1 versus H1 last year.

It is a a rapidly growing part of our business. I think we're also seeing the market moving towards senior advice alongside hands-on tech delivery.

There's been announcements in the market. You probably saw Accenture and Google having a a a partnership with 1,000 engineering specialists to to that degree working alongside the consultants, and I like the fact that we're already there.

We have a senior model by design, and I'll talk about that in a second. We've also built up, strategy, data, AI, tech, execution.

All of those things means that we can do more and more things with our clients and and add more and more value. Em's actually going to take us through a few case studies in a bit, which where you can see that value come to life and get a good feel for the work we're doing, both AI and non-AI, by the way, because obviously we have a large part of the business that that does not necessarily do the AI-type work.

In terms of broader capabilities, we've got deeper client relationships. We'll talk about how cross-sell's working.

We'll take you through kind of where we are with with gold clients and really just showing the high value of the work that we've we've been doing. Thinking about some of the the highlights then, from a H1 26 point of view, it's a record half.

I love the fact, again, we're in the the rule of 50, which is the combination of revenue growth and EBITDA margin. I think we've been in that since IPO and even being in in the rule of 60 at at times.

Just to reemphasize those numbers, 25% revenue, 29% EBITDA growth, and 31% margin. Nick will go into some of the underlying financials underneath that.

Our client relationships, a gold client is what we consider as £1 million of fees or more. We have on a trailing 12-month basis, we've had 35 in the period, which is 13% up year-on-year.

Actually, if you think about £2 million trailing 12 months, we've had 24 in the period, which which is up 50%. It's really showing we're going deeper and having more breadth with our clients.

They're trusting us with more complex mandates, and, we are they're engaging us on more capabilities than ever before. On the bottom left, before I go to the right-hand side of the page, on the bottom left, we've been expanding our capabilities and our global footprint.

Cross-sell's gone up 27%. That is a great indicator that the inorganic strategy is working.

That is £19 million of revenue on top of 15 from the previous period. Actually, if you look at it from a post-IPO perspective, we've now created over £100 million of cross-sell revenue, which we're very proud of.

January this year, we we bought in Quadrent. They, to remind you, a a Nordic-based business focusing on kind of real consulting strategy, if you like.

They they do a lot of commercial transformation, go-to-market excellence, transaction services with private equity. They've landed really well, especially when working alongside TRC, because they have very mutually agreeable skill sets.

In the middle, to to just bring some of the AI to life, which Em will go into more detail, we've really spent the period combining AI, technology, and and operational expertise. AI revenue is was £8 million in the period, which was up 185%.

Like I said, there's a huge market that that we want to get into even further. We're getting more global recognition as a market leader.

Just three here, two of them from Forbes, one being Best Management Consulting Firm in Americas and another World's Best Consulting Firm. Then the FT, again, put us in as one of the UK's leading management consultants.

Why we put a spotlight on these three is these are from independent feedback from clients and its industry peers. This isn't a a pay-to-play, which a lot of them are.

This is really what the industry and our clients think of us, which makes it definitely a lot more special. We've been strengthening our leadership.

Bill Michael's come on to the board as an independent non-exec, and we've got four new group partners during the period. One of those was Thomas, who was the is the founder and CEO of of Quadrent.

Then we have three hires bolstering up our skills in in AI tech and also going deeper into industry. Record financial performance, we've deeper client relationships, we've got stronger capabilities, we had a continued investment in our platform, and really that's positioned us really nicely for growth.

We're also aware of a a value gap, and we're doing our our part to to close that. We just wanted to show here just couple of comparators and and a couple of things that we're doing proactively.

We've had sustained market outperformance. If you look at the graph, we just wanted to show the dark purple line is Elixirr revenue growth.

The lighter purple line is share price activity. Then if you go to the more bluer color, the dark blue is actually the FTSE 100.

We chose the FTSE because that was the best performing of all the indices over the period, as shown by the the lighter blue line. Obviously, you can see the average revenue growth of the FTSE 100 compared to to what we've done, and then the returns that each that company versus indices have returned.

Our revenue growth is is more than 5 times. Yet, I think unfortunately this week is is probably below this number now, but 8% versus 51%.

We are, we have a strategy that remains the same in terms of four-pillar growth strategy. It's working really well.

We continue to do organic growth. We will continue to deepen our client relationships.

We will continue to do selective, programmatic M&A, and we're looking to sustain our our premium margins. We're also, a few other things of some targeted action.

Bottom right, we bought Canaccord Genuity on as a second broker, and a selection of us have already, for example, been to the US to to meet new US investors, because I do think, especially with our US footprint, we're a very attractive proposition for US investors wanting to invest into the UK, and we're we are pushing that as well. We strongly believe in the sustained revenue performance, our premium profitability, the differentiated platform.

It gives us that strong foundation for long-term value creation. That is something that is strengthened by artificial intelligence.

I know there is a a narrative that I'm sure you've all read into or heard around AI potentially eating away at consulting. For us, it's the opposite.

It's it actually structurally improves our competitive model. We are senior-led by design.

If you think where does AI where can it disrupt consulting, if you think about the pyramid model of of resource, we have what is probably more of a pillar, whereas the big big names out there have more of a a pyramid. If you pick one of those, they will have, call it, 15,000 analysts at the bottom doing, research and insights and kind of working on their methodologies, producing PowerPoints.

That is where AI can eat away at. Those companies have spent billions over the years to create that asset, that really fires gives gives the firepower for the senior partners to be talking to the clients and add adding the value they do.

AI for us levels the playing field. We don't have to spend billions and years building up that 15,000 kind of person power and capability.

It's available to us with AI. Our all of our team now have access to what, they were churning out previously.

That and that is a good thing for us, especially when you look at how we think about our internal talent. We've we've we've promoted two principals to partner.

We've, like I said, we've hired three external partners. 30% of our employees are principals or above.

We are definitely senior-led by design, and it is helping us. It's also, when I think about how we use it, it is powering our delivery.

Em's going to talk through this in in a second, but we have launched our AI operating system, and that is showing some brilliant results. Rather than talk about them here, I'll let Em pick them up.

It is also from a I I touched about our clients and our gold clients, thinking about allowing us to do more, add more value, offer a greater breadth, especially when you combine with some of the capabilities we've bought in inorganically, and you kind of lay layer AI, either on top of that or weave it in between. It is fueling a lot of that kind of stickiness, if you like, with our with our clients, which which, translates into some of the numbers you see there and that I spoke about just now.

Execution edge, that that's another capability that is entirely relevant to artificial intelligence, but also far more broadly in terms of executing the executive agenda. It's the human systems that make that ultimately a success or fail.

That really is a a great capability now that we're putting into as many of our consulting engagements as we can. This is a platform that really compounds capability.

We are we are deliberately and definitely looking at, what capabilities can we add to our business that's going to allow us to do even better things, bigger bigger and greater. That is a, one of the key drivers of of the acquisition strategy, but also our hiring strategy, and and making sure we're finding the right talent in the marketplace that can come in and help us help us either build new capability or come with previous capability that we can then leverage.

We've had success that it's working. Cross-sell, more than £100 million since IPO, 19 million in the period.

TRC did is doing exceptionally well. They got 100% of the 2025 earn-out.

We are positioned and and have a platform that we're going to continue to build on. We have a strategy to, like I say, look to close that valuation gap that that I went through previously.

That's probably a good time to hand over to Nick to go into some of the details of the finances. Nick.

Thank you, Graham. In a minute, I will go into some detail on revenue, cash, and the balance sheet, but just to start, just the headline numbers for the H1 26 period.

Revenue £89.0 million, up 25%, gross profit up 26%, adjusted EBITDA of £27.6 million, up 29%, and an EBITDA margin of 31.0%, up 1 percentage point on the prior comparable period, reflecting that our focus on high-margin work in the period. Adjusted profit before tax increased by 25% to £25.1 million.

That increase was slightly less proportionally than the increase in EBITDA as we now have the interest costs associated with the debt services that have funded our recent acquisitions. Adjusted diluted EPS increased by 18%, again, following that increase in adjusted profit after tax within the impact of the shares that were issued for the acquisitions of TRC and Quadrent.

We've continued not to dilute for any of the partner and employee incentives, all that increased share count was associated with those two most recent acquisitions. Free cash flow was £1.8 million in the period.

It is always seasonal, but there were also some abnormal factors in the period, and I'll come onto that in a moment on the cash slide. We closed the period with £56.5 million of net debt, principally as a result of the recent acquisitions, including, of course, TRC, which is the largest acquisition we've done to date.

Just moving forward and putting that into context, if there are any new investors or potential investors on the call, obviously those of you who have been following our story for a while will know this, but I wanted just to put into context the performance in the half. It's very much continuing the track record that we've had every year since our AIM IPO back in 2020.

We have always over that period, we've grown revenue, we've held EBITDA broadly proportionally to the increase in revenue. You see that green line on the chart, which is our EBITDA margin, which has fluctuated, give or take, at round about that 30% 30% level.

How have we done that? It's the same four-pillar strategy we've been following throughout those years, and we very much intend to continue this strategy.

The three organic pillars on the left-hand side, in the bar at the bottom: stretching our partners, getting increased revenue per partner, and, yeah, but partly by giving our partners more to sell. We over those 5 years, 6 years have doubled revenue per partner.

In this half, that number was fairly constant year-on-year, but this is a time when we've significantly invested in the partner team, our average number of client-facing partners in the half increased from 32 partners in H1 25 to 40 in H1 26. We've promoted principals in our business to the partnership, and we've hired external partners.

Very much our focus is on making sure we bring the right people into the team. We're always focused on performance, and we have asked partners to leave in this period, as we always do, if they're not meeting our performance bar.

Over time, the quality of the partner team is increasing significantly. Then acquiring businesses, we obviously have the most recent acquisitions of Quadrent in the period and TRC late last year.

For that acquisition strategy, again, is our inorganic pillar that we will be continuing with. Moving on to slide 11, just unpicking our revenue progression.

Revenue in the period increased from £71.4 million in the prior comparable period to £89.0 million. There was a £1.6 million FX headwind given the 4% weakening of the US dollar relative to the pound.

That was the £1.6 million bar you see on the first bar on the left. Then we have the three bars that make up the organic performance: end of program, net growth in existing clients, and new clients.

So £12.1 million negative from end of program. We've just had a particularly large number of large programs that completed during the period.

These are programs of work where we've successfully completed the work for clients. We are now in this period where there was zero revenue for those clients, but our clients often come back.

We keep the relationship, and very often those clients will come back in a subsequent period. Then net growth in existing clients, £7.6 million, and growth from new clients of £8 million.

The three bars together was 5% organic revenue in the period. Then the contribution from acquisitions, £15.7 million, which was the 5-month contribution from Quadrent and the impact of TRC that we acquired in September in the previous year.

From a cash perspective, we opened the period with £24 million, give or take, of net debt, and we closed with £56.5 million of net debt. Our operating cash flow, £2.8 million, was lower than is normal in the period.

Those of you who followed our story know that H1 is always a low operating cash flow and free cash flow period. We have a debtor swing and a creditor swing.

Our revenue in June is always higher than revenue in December. December is our lowest revenue month, debtors always increase.

We pay our annual bonuses in half one for the previous year, again, our accruals decrease, and there's a cash outflow for the previous year's annual bonus. Those two factors you always see in half one.

There were also those three additional factors that made the operating cash flow abnormally low. Really, I guess because it's always a low number given that seasonality I was just speaking about, it therefore becomes disproportionately impacted by the additional factors.

Those three additional factors were: TRC coming into the group with a number of debtors on 60 or 90-day terms. Our group standard is 30.

We do agree exceptions to that when we have to with large clients and for strategic reasons, but that is always our starting point for negotiation with a new client. That same discipline does apply to TRC for their new clients, but it will take us some time just to mitigate the impact of those clients that came in on 60 and 90-day terms.

Bonus payments, and there is a bigger swing in this half than there was in half one 25. It's not because we're accruing lower bonuses this year.

In fact, our bonus accrual is about £1 million higher than this time last year. The FY 25 bonus was about £5 million greater than FY 24, and so therefore the cash outflow when that was paid in half one 26 is a corresponding £5 million greater.

Then there was some timing of tax payments associated with the time when TRC came into the group and the flowing of their numbers into our estimated tax payments that we make. This from an operating cash flow perspective, this will look very different at year end.

The seasonality that we always see in our cash flow, you will see in H2, and we will end the year with a significantly lower leverage position than the £56.5 million you see here. Then how did we use the cash during the period?

Obviously, the largest outflow was the acquisitions, £23.5 million outflow, broadly £16 million for TRC's earn-out for FY 25 that they earned in full, and about £8 million for Quadrent. Then some usage of cash for shareholder loans associated with our partner incentive model and buying shares into our EBT.

As I've spoken about before, we have always offset our dilution from the partner and employee incentives by using our cash to offset dilution. Then we paid a £3.7 million interim dividend during half one, and then, of course, the larger dividend of £7.5 million, the final dividend, was paid recently in August.

From a balance sheet perspective, the major movements in the period, obviously intangible assets increased given the acquisition of Quadrent. Trade and other receivables increased.

I was just talking before about the extended terms that TRC had agreed with some of their clients before acquisition. It's important to point out, I think, that we have no concern from a credit risk perspective, so that the clients that have come into the group on longer credit terms are blue-chip clients where there is no credit risk concern.

It just means that we have to wait a little bit longer to collect that money. Out of that £36 million of trade and other receivables you see there at 30th of June, less than £5 million are still for collection today, and the vast majority of that will be collected in the next few weeks.

That isn't a concern to us, but we will obviously work to bring that down as we can. Contingent consideration now has fallen to about £25 million, all we have on the balance sheet from a contingent consideration perspective is the $36 million earn-out for TRC and about a £5 million earn-out for Quadrent, and we've got about 80% of that provisioned on the balance sheet, because under accounting standards, we have to accrue a probability-weighted best estimate rather than the maximum.

Then just an update of our dilution slide that we've given to you before. This is our model, obviously, that illustrates going forward what could happen without dilution.

In a world where we have a 20% growth rate in revenue, EBITDA, and share price, of course, given where the share price has been recently, that dilution does not eventuate without the share price growth, because our options are all granted at market price, and therefore, for our partners and employees, the value they accrue is only the same value in the way that it would accrue to you as external investors, which is by increases in the share price from the date that they join. Just to remind you, we've only experienced 11% actual dilution since 2020, all of that driven by M&A, not by our partner and employee incentives, where we've used cash.

This is just a roll forward, what could this look like? If we had that 20% compound growth rate, where the business is turning into broadly a £1 billion market cap business by 2031 with 18% dilution, that still means that the existing shareholders would own roughly £850 million of that business, and therefore 3 times the value that it is today for the existing shareholders.

Relatively modest dilution compared to the growth in value of the business. Obviously in the results announcement, you can see the headline numbers of options that we have granted, just to remind you that actually, given the fact that our partners and employees have to earn their options by high performance, by performance ratings and revenue and profit targets, and they generally can't be exercised for 4 to 5 years, given the performance requirements and attrition, only 30% to 40% of those options will ever vest, and the value for the partner or employee is only the growth in the share price.

The dilution is a lot lower than you need to look into the details of how those programs work rather than just the headline numbers. I'll finish there and hand over to Em for the business review.

Thank you, Nick. We thought it would be good to recap our intentionally built full span of capabilities and talk to you a little bit about some of the work that we've been doing with clients in H1 2026.

Over the years, we have been building an intentional stack of capabilities to be able to meet increasingly complex demands from our clients. These capabilities span from boardroom strategy all the way through to the execution of transformative initiatives.

We bring together strategy and transformation, research and insights, digital experience, operational excellence, AI, data, and technology, and now execution edge, which is about the activation of the human systems within organizations to ensure execution assurance and acceleration of the executive agenda. We do all of these pieces of work with clients like those on the right-hand side of this slide, and these are actual clients that we have worked with across the globe in H1 2026, clients that we've very recently been working with.

Our ability as client-facing partners to stitch together the capabilities on the left-hand side for these types of blue-chip clients is what is fueling our ability to deepen client relationships, to grow our gold client base that earns the firm a million of revenue a year by 13% year-on-year this half year, and also to grow those accounts that are generating more than 2 million a year of revenue by 50% year-on-year in H1 of this year. Some examples of what we mean by these capabilities: if we take strategy and transformation as an example, for one of these firms, we have built a growth strategy involving a lot of financial modeling, breaking down of the work that they do in their market, and rebuilding it to create a growth strategy playbook that would result in a 16% increase in their own sales forecast in the first year of being implemented.

For research and insights, we've been working with one of the major technology firms on this slide to create a research-led thought leadership platform that position them in their own target markets in order to grow demand generation. That demand generation performance grew as a result of our research and insights platform from $1.7 billion to $2.5 billion and improved their brand perception.

For digital experience, we've been working with one of the financial services firms on this slide to transform digital experience through a complete website redesign. That's involved the technological architecture, the UX, the UI, the reusable components used in their online presence, as well as making AI-enabled enhancements to increase conversion.

This has resulted in more than 12 times an increase in their conversion rate online as well as over 170% increase in their number of online forms submissions.

We've just had

May I have your attention, please? May I have your attention, please?

There has been a fire reported in the building. [unclear]

Okay. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm afraid that the guys have had a fire alarm incident at the venue, they are going to have to evacuate the room now.

However, I would recommend just holding on for 5 minutes in case it turns out to be a false alarm. Ladies and gentlemen, if you could just bear with us, just while we get confirmation from the company as to whether or not the presentation can continue.

Thank you for your patience, and we will be back with you momentarily. Do bear with us, ladies and gentlemen.

We are just awaiting confirmation from the company as to whether it is a false alarm or hopefully it is, but I will be back with you shortly. Thank you everybody for your patience.

I will keep you updated as soon as I hear, but for the meantime please do stay in the webinar room, and we will do our best to connect the company back as soon as we can. If it does look like it's going to be an unreasonable amount of time, I will come back in and inform you and then look to rearrange the session as soon as possible.

Or alternatively, we may even consider recording it when they're back and emailing that to you so you have that today. Either way, please do bear with us.

I will be back again shortly. Afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.

Thank you ever so much for your patience. I've just heard from the company that the fire alarm is real.

They have evacuated the building. To that end, they won't be rejoining today's webinar.

Many apologies for the inconvenience. If you do have any questions, what I would ask you to do is do put them in the Q&A tab now, at least that way I can present them to the company when things return to normal.

I'll enable them to have the ability to either do a prerecording and we will send that to all the attendees on today's call, or alternatively we will look to reschedule this meeting hopefully in the very near future. I can't commit to anything until I hear back from the company.

What I'll do is I'll obviously allow you all just to close your browsers now, or alternatively, if you have any questions, do put them in the Q&A tab, and I will present those to the company for their consideration as well. Many thanks again.

Apologies for any inconvenience. This is the first time in 5 years it's ever happened to us that a fire alarm that's real has gone off, apologies.

Thank you once again.