Good morning. Hello, everybody.

My name's David Page, I'm the Chairman, and this is Nick Wong—

Morning.

—my colleague, FD. To kick off with the presentation, which I hope you all have in front of you, we bought into this company a year ago, and it currently has Wildwood, which is a 25-strong restaurant brand with Italian dishes, and it has dim t, which has three restaurants, Asian-inspired cuisine.

As I say, a year ago, we raised £10 million for expenses. I became Chairman and Chief Executive, and we embarked on a policy of turning the company around.

[coughs] Excuse me. A three-prong policy is we're investing in the estate, which we'll talk about in detail later, going through the whole estate, and we are closing and selling restaurants that we don't think are viable.

We're investing in new technology and EPOS systems, and more exciting is we're actually using this as a platform to acquire other restaurant brands, and use the buying capacity we have and the knowledge we have in rolling out restaurant brands in the UK. Trading stabilized and grew when we bought the company, and it's grown since, but we'll come onto that [coughs] excuse me, in a minute.

If we turn the slide, we come onto the interim results, which we published on Tuesday morning, and Nick will talk about them in detail.

Let me take you through the interim results for the 6 months to 28th of June, 2026. We reported like-for-like revenues, and that is excluding any restaurant closures that we've had last year and this year, and any refurbishment days that's been lost due to closure for refurbishment.

The like-for-like revenue was 5.6% positive against last year, same period. That really reflects the benefit of the management action that's been taking place over the last year, both from the investments in the estate as we're rolling through the refurbishment program, and also the investment in the people and the operational structure.

Once you add in the closures and the lost days, the reported revenue was down from £15.1 million to £14.4 million. The primary reason for that are the closures.

We had four restaurants that's been closed since our involvement back in September last year. That gap has flowed through to EBITDA and operating loss.

Our EBITDA was £0.5 million against £1.2 million the previous year, and our operating loss before highlighted items was £0.7 million against £0.2 million the previous year. We did benefit from a highlighted item credit from the fact that we disposed of a number of leases, and lease liabilities were extinguished at that point.

That amounted to £1 million. That compares to last year, where we had significant amount of impairment losses, where we wrote down assets following a full review of the estate, and the losses were £7 million last year.

Therefore, the loss after tax has narrowed significantly to £0.2 million for the first half against a loss of £7.5 million last year. As we mentioned, we had a number of refurbishments during these months, and in fact, we've completed nine to the end of June.

We spent capital expenditure of £0.9 million against a backdrop of very little CapEx, which is £0.1 million the previous year. Our net cash balance at the end of June, excluding property lease liabilities or IFRS 16, was £7.9 million, up from £2.4 million the previous year.

The reason for significant change is the fundraising that David talked about earlier. On the operational side, we saw really strong improvements in like-for-like performances, as mentioned before, where we have targeted the capital investments.

As I mentioned, nine has been refurbished so far. What was very encouraging was that previously underperforming locations were also returning to like-for-like growth following the refurbishments.

We introduced a new Wildwood menu in May 2026, fairly recently, with really positive customer feedback. This was a touch later than we had hoped.

We planned to put that in in April to align with the increase in living wage and various employment rights that's added cost to business. During the trial phase in some of our test locations, we found a few areas that could be improved, and therefore, we launched the revised menu in middle of May.

dim t, with three restaurants, has recently put in a new menu, and we will be focusing more attention into the dim t business over the next 9 months. I will also take you through a little bit more detail around the investment in technology and an update of where we've got to.

[clears throat]

Excuse me. As you can see from the map, we are widely spread in the UK from York to Plymouth and London Road to Canterbury.

The restaurants in fact surprisingly that are performing the best are the ones outside London where they had a storming summer. When we sat down after 3 months of looking at the company when we bought in, we realized there were 280 things we could improve in the company, and we've got down to just over 150 that are left, we've completed over 100.

We looked at the estate, we closed four four restaurants, and we've closed another one since the year-end, two since the year-end. We're looking to complete our refurbishment program, which Nick referred to, by spring next year.

We're just nearly halfway through the estate, and the stores of the refurbished stores are showing sales way in excess of the group average, as you can see on that slide. The first four we refurbished did 18.6% like-for-like sales increase in July and August.

Obviously, if we can get the whole estate up to that figure, we'll be doing what we hope to achieve. We've also introduced new incentive schemes for the employees.

We've put in share options because we're a public company, and we are putting in bonus schemes based on the month. We also have hired recently, in the last 3 months, a human resources director who came to us from Franco Manca, we know her very well.

She's putting in place lots of programs to increase the incentives for the staff and make sure they know what they're meant to be doing, and we know what they're meant to be doing. If you look at the pictures down on the next slide, [coughs] thanks, Nick.

You can see that the previous owners of the business spent quite a lot of money on these restaurants, but they didn't really concentrate on the signage and the outside. You can see in Telford that the signage was oblique, to say the least, and the outside looked a bit drab.

This is what we've done to Telford. Then at the bottom, you can see London Road.

The change is miraculous, really, and it is a real eye-stopping event. It's eye-swiveling, head-swiveling, whatever you call it, event in London Road High Street.

Sales immediately increase when we spend money on the stores. [coughs] Nick, technology.

Let me take you through the technology piece. It's maybe a little bit dry, but is a necessity for us.

The first part, dashboarding system. We introduced a new dashboarding system to the business to allow our operational team better visibility and understanding of the core KPIs and the various detail that historically would have been analyzed through spreadsheets and manual work.

They now have almost instantaneous visibility across the estate, whether it's sales mix or discounts or loyalty or customer base, they can see everything to do with their restaurants at the touch of a button. We're now rolling this out to the wider audience within the business.

We've reviewed and audited all our restaurants and identified that the estates just hasn't had much investment over the last 5 to 10 years, and therefore, the whole networking infrastructure needed investment. We're just upgrading.

We started the process, and we're hoping to complete the upgrades by Christmas this year. That will give our staff, and more importantly, our customers, better connectivity in our restaurants.

We have been undertaking a program of updating our EPOS system, and that starts going live in October this year and will hopefully complete by Christmas. That comes with it full integration with our booking platform, giving our staff in the restaurants and our managers much simpler, integrated processes to speed up the work and also to improve on customer experience and less mistakes.

With that, we're also consolidating our booking processes and how we take big party bookings to maximize efficiency and, more importantly, having the ability to upsell to some of our potential customers even before they step into the restaurants. More work will be undertaken after all these systems are live to integrate them to the single customer view that we have in the business.

That will, next year, allow us to design and launch a new loyalty program, which will offer us much better targeting of offers and loyalty incentives to our core customer base who are returning time and time again. Other areas that we're working on include energy monitoring, obviously very topical with the costs of energy going up consistently over the last couple of years.

We are introducing a time and attendance system that's fully automated to allow our managers better manage the time of our staff who turn up every day. The most important of this piece of work is working on the labor efficiency.

We have started trialing in two restaurants new smart scheduling systems and forecasting tools, and we are introducing additional AI tools to help our staff and our managers particularly to forecast better and to deploy our team members in the right places at the right times. That will help us streamline our labor costs.

Yes, the first two strategies were turning around the existing estate by selling stores and handing them back to the landlords if they're not working. That's still an ongoing process.

Refurbishing the stores we want to keep, boosting sales, that's the first platform for growth. Second platform is to increase the technology, which Nick has just talked about, which is making the business more efficient, and how we can understand the data.

The third and most exciting part of the growth strategy is to actually purchase other companies and expand them, and use this public company paper to help with that process. We're very attractive for big growth brands because we've got experience in rolling out businesses like this, letting the management control it whilst we give them advice, and we've done it many times before.

[coughs] We've both been involved in Gourmet Burger Kitchen, previously I was at PizzaExpress, and our most recent venture together was Franco Manca and The Real Greek, where we grew brands and then sold them. This, we're using Bow Street as this platform to buy businesses.

In the last year, we've looked at many businesses, but we've probably signed over 10 NDAs to look at these businesses in more detail. We're looking to buy between four or six of these businesses over the next 3 years.

We've got a top four at the moment which we are engaging with. These businesses, we're buying profit effectively, and then we're growing the businesses.

These businesses don't have to sell. They're making money, but they are reaching a stage, for whatever reason internally, that they need to move on and get some advice, maybe raise some money, or maybe a combination of a number of things.

We feel we can help them, and then we can invest in their business and help them grow. We've looked at almost every cuisine you can think of.

We've looked at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, three-daypart businesses. We've looked at couple of four or five businesses from the Far East Asia.

We've looked at pizza businesses again. We're really only interested in things that are making money.

We're going to buy the profit, and essentially, like we have done before, we are going to work with the management over 2 or 3 years. They will receive a payout dependent on the profit that they contribute to the company.

We give them, say, half the price for the business upfront. They carry on working for 2 years, and then we give them the second payment when they prove that they're contributing a certain amount of money, and we just give them a multiple of that.

Our ideal business that we would buy would be somewhere between 2 and 15 sites. They've got to be a sort of £10 to £30 a head.

We think that's much more defensive than £100 a head in the UK at the moment, [laughs] given the economy. We've got to be able to open 40, 50, 60 around the UK minimum.

We've got to work with the existing management team. We've got to work with them for a couple of years so that we can help them, they can build their knowledge, and we can maybe add some people from our past to help them as well.

We may be able to change some of our sites that aren't working to a new business that we buy. Of course, the buying power of them joining a bigger group is very helpful to their bottom line.

That's something else that would be attractive to them so they can make more EBITDA, which effectively then relates into what price we pay for their business. As we reported on Tuesday, the next slide, current trading and outlook, we had a good first half, and as you can see from the top slide, I think we disclosed just over a 5 between 5% and 6% for the first half, but then we did 8.5% like-for-like sales in the first 8 weeks of the new year in the summer.

The refurbish restaurants did 18.5% increase. We're still managing the estate.

As I said, we closed one further restaurant since the year-end, which was loss-making, so that'll add to profits next year. Currently, we trade out of 25 Wildwoods and 3 dim ts.

We had net cash of £7.5 million on the 13th of September. Although various governments have not been very helpful to this industry, we think this is a business that will thrive, and as you can see from the sales, even in dire times for the general economy, we've been managing to buck the trend.

I'd say the last point is we are very keen to do at least one acquisition in the next few months, maybe two, and that'll get us going with what the main platform of the business is, which is to provide help to growing brands, of which there are a few out there. Despite this economy being in not very good shape, there are some great businesses with queues out of the door, which is ones we're going for.

That is the end of the presentation. There are some appendices at the end for people to look at when they get the presentation.

I think there are some questions, I'm having trouble reading those.

Nick? From the Q&A, let me pick the first one.

There's a question on how much the like-for-likes was price-taken. Generally, we look at increasing the menu pricing around 2 to 3 percentage points in order to cover the labor cost increases that we see every year.

We are seeing the half, perhaps half, the benefits in the first half from pricing and half from footfall and increased customer numbers. It is important to note also that we had much stronger trading over the summer months, and a lot of that is down to during the refurbishments, we had extended some of our external areas.

Whereas previously, they were not so attractive for customers to sit in, following the refurbishment, we have been able to fill those outdoor terraces over the summer months, pretty packed. In

Lincoln, we doubled the number of seats outside and gave it an awning, so much more attractive to sit in, that's just one example.

It's given us a fantastic uplift over the summer. The second question, turning to David—

I can't read it, sorry. Can you blow up the font?

No.

How have you selected the outlets for refurbishment? Oh,

I see. Oh, right.

Yes, we've actually left the more profitable ones to the end of the refurb because they're working, they're flying. We started at the lower end, and we decided which we were going to sell and close and give back to the landlord and which we were going to spend some money on.

We worked our way through the estate into stores that we couldn't understand why they weren't taking so much money, and we thought, if we spend, say, £80 grand on them, that'll uplift the sales to both profitability and more, which is what we've been doing. After we've gone through half the estate, we're now going to concentrate on the restaurants [coughs] like Rushden Lakes, which is contributing well over £250,000.

We're going to spend quite a bit of money on it, and we would hope that in 2027, it'll contribute even more because of the money we're spending on it. We're putting in a bar, refurbishing the outside, rearranging the seating, new lighting, rearranging the kitchen, things like that.

The answer is we started at the lower end in terms of contribution, and then we're working our way up the estate. [coughs]

The next question, "It's been a year since the fundraising. It's good that the funds are not burning a hole in your pocket, but what is the reason for the delay in acquisition?"

I can talk about the sort of top four. As I said before, that these people don't have to sell.

They're profitable. They've got great businesses.

Their urgency is not quite the same as ours. We've got a top four out of the 10, but they're all different.

One of them unfortunately suffered a loss of one of the shareholders. Others have five or six different shareholders who all have slightly different agendas, we have to address them.

One of them, it's so profitable that the business owner, who owns 100 100% of the company, went away for 3 months this summer, which is not very helpful when you're trying to engage. Each situation is different, but we are as keen as all our shareholders to actually get one or two under our belt quite quickly.

[coughs]

I think the rest of the question really is around the acquisition targets. We can go through some of that again just in terms of the key criteria in when we're looking for acquisitions.

We've sort of covered it, but let's do it again, shall we?

It is very much about a brand with 2 to 15 sites, must be value-for-money offer, needs a really scalable footprint, and, as David mentioned, queues out the door is a very good indicator that they're successful and it's popular with the customers. We are quite flexible, whether it's counter-service or full-service.

Today, with the labor cost challenges, a quick-service or counter-service business will naturally thrive with lower labor costs and a smaller footprint. We are very much open to both.

Yes, it's a virtuous spiral, basically. If you look at a business like Farmer J's in London, their property costs are lower because their stores are smaller.

It's a QSR operation. It's got queues out of the door.

The pricing is lower because all their costs are lower than a full-service restaurant. That's not one of the people we're looking at, but that's one of the type of business we'd be looking at.

A question about management, what were we looking for in the management of an acquisition?

The management will have grown the business to a certain [coughs] scale and size. They should be enthusiastic, hard-working, honest goes without saying, and really driven to actually take the business from where it is at the moment to a different level, and then they may choose to exit in 3, 4 years' time or they may choose to carry on growing the business with us.

A typical example is Gourmet Burger Kitchen, where they had four or five sites. [coughs] This was two public companies ago.

We gave them half the money. We agreed a price, we thought the business was worth, given that it was meant to be making £2 million, they told us it was going to make £2 million in 2 years.

We said, "Okay, you can have half the money now. We give you two or three more sites, you work hard, we put in a parallel management team to learn how the business grows, and then we'll give you the rest of the money dependent on the performance of the business."

The three New Zealanders who founded it walked away with £10 million because the business was making well over £2 million at the end of the 2-year anniversary. We'd like to do that sort of arrangement.

We're making sure that we're buying the profits. We only give them, say, half the money straight away, and then half 2 years down the line.

[coughs]

The final question is one around deal structure, which I think using the Gourmet Burger Kitchen example shows roughly how

that works. That was one example.

That was just one example.

We can sort of play with it. That was all cash, wasn't it, Nick?

That was all cash.

That was all cash. What we quite like to do is if someone we're buying a business is they can take some cash now, which, once again, we've done in the past, and they then take some shares in the business so that they're aligned with us.

Then on the second payment, in 2 years' time, maybe the same thing happens, they take some cash, but they also take some shares in the business. Very, very long time ago, PizzaExpress, I had a private business, I had 14 of the franchises, and my partner took half cash and half shares, and I took all shares, and the shares went up 20 times.

He didn't regret taking half cash, but, in retrospect, he probably should have taken some more paper. Yes, more paper, yeah.

He took a million pound in paper.

Yeah. As I say, we got involved in this company 2 years ago.

We put in a lot of our own money, and we raised the money from people we knew. Some existing shareholders actually putting quite a lot more money to reboot the company.

It's been a pretty good ride so far. It's been just as we expected.

The slightly frustrating thing is we haven't bought anything yet, but these things take quite a long time, but we're looking to buy at least one or two things in the next 6 months. [coughs]