Operator: Good morning. Welcome to the TPXimpact Holdings PLC investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions encouraged can be submitted at any time using the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Please simply type in your questions and press send. Before we begin, I would like to make the following poll, and I would like to hand you over to Bjorn Conway, CEO. Good morning, sir.
Björn Conway: Good morning. Thank you very much, Charlie. Good morning, everybody. Thank you very much for attending this presentation this morning. What we will do is we will take you through a short set of slides, probably take about 20 minutes or so, and then we will be very happy to answer any questions that you have. Just really to provide a bit of an overall highlight to this, I am Bjorn Conway, Chief Executive of TPXimpact. I have been the chief executive for 4 years now, and sort of taking the business on a journey, a transformation journey. We really saw the sort of newly created business, if you like, start to really perform and come together in H2 of last year. I think, as you will see today, we have seen that continued momentum into this year, which I think bodes very well for the balance of this year and future years.
Björn Conway: So, we can go on to the first slide. Really to do the key bits of data here, but we are really pleased with these results. I think I am really pleased for a couple of reasons. One is, obviously, the numbers are very, very strong, and we will go through those in a moment. But also, the organization has proved that the way it is set up, it was designed to be expandable in a growth-based business, and it is really performing in that way. So, we have managed to deliver these results whilst keeping our clients delighted with the services that we are providing. So, key highlights, revenue 60% up on the same period prior year, and slightly higher than we updated a couple of 2 or 3 weeks ago. EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA. So, one of the things we have been really focused on is conversion of revenue through to EBITDA.
Björn Conway: We are up at GBP 8 million for the first half. That is 152% up on the same period in the prior year. We have delivered all of that whilst maintaining our values and our core and our culture, exemplified in our B Corp certification. The reason that is important is it enables us to attract really, really good people, and it is the sort of people that work really well in a public sector environment, a lot of empathy with our clients, and a really high-performing team. It is really important to us. In terms of our full-year guidance, Noel will talk a little bit more to this later. We have maintained and restated our guidance for the year, so we expect to be GBP 105 million in revenue at 14 million EBITDA, which is a very significant progress on the prior year as well.
Björn Conway: What underpins our confidence for the business generally through the balance of this year and into the future is the new business that we have been recording. I will talk through a little bit some of the specifics there, but a lot of them are multi-year, quite significant deals, which provides that really good visibility and underpinning. But GBP 86 million in new business in H1 2027, and that compares with GBP 31 million in H1 of last year. Then something that we have been working very hard at for the last 3 and a half, 4 years is to pay down our debt, so make sure that we are generating the cash to pay down our debt, and we are now debt-free for the first time since 2019.
Björn Conway: Very pleased with the performance in this H1, but also very pleased with how it sets us up to grow the business over the next few years. If we can go on to the next slide. I have got a couple of slides now just really just to remind, as a bit of a reminder as to who we are and for people new to TPXimpact, just to provide you a little bit of an overview. We are framed as a technology consultancy, but what makes us different is that we have got reasonable scale now. You can see we are expecting to be over GBP 100 million this year. We have got good access to frameworks, which is how government buys. We have built and established a very strong track record, and particularly of being able to deliver these very large, multi-year, multi-million pound client programs.
Björn Conway: As I said, that provides us with really good visibility internally, allows us to run the business really well. Our differentiator is that we differentiate against other people who provide technology solutions because our solutions are very much focused on the user, and we have user-centered design that runs through everything that we do. So, it really means that we can provide a lot more empathy, a lot more understanding with how people actually use services, which means the services that are delivered are fit for purpose and take-up is good, and you will see that in some of our examples. The reason I mentioned culture earlier, really important to preserve the culture, because our clients want to feel that they are the most important, and they are the most important people we are dealing with, but we want to bring that full breadth of capability of a systems integrator.
Björn Conway: Noel's going to go through some of the headcount growth figures that we had in the H1 of the year, but it's been really encouraging to see lots of nice new people coming into the business. We've also maintained our female representation and ethnic diversity, which is very important to us, that we're representative of our broader communities. In terms of the business itself, we're essentially quite a simple, straightforward business. We have market access through frameworks. That provides a bit of a moat for us because you've got to bid to get onto the frameworks. We've become experts at bidding for public sector procurements, and we've been very good at selecting which competitions to go for. The relationships and the track record we've built over multi-year engagements gives us that good visibility over our revenue and helps us plan.
Björn Conway: It actually all works together to give us a nice predictable business. We don't want to hire niche skills, so we do have a flexible contractor base, and I'll talk in a minute where we ramped up really quickly. We leaned into that contractor base because the priority is to maintain quality of delivery for our clients, and over time, we can then substitute in more of our permanent people. In terms of the cash flows in the business themselves, most of our work tends to be time and material, so it's quite predictable in terms of what we're going to get paid for the work we deliver, and our clients are pretty prompt payers, being in the public sector, so generally around 30 days. Nice, simple, straightforward business.
Björn Conway: In the last couple of these updates we've done, I've talked a little bit more about AI and how it's pervading everything that we do. Equally, we're also finding it's reinforcing our differentiation of being really focused on users and really focused on helping our clients use technology and use data in service of those users. We've got some examples here that Noel and I have pulled together just to give you ideas of how we're using AI in the business. On the left-hand side, in terms of improving the user experience for service users. This can be AI tools and guidance for people who are actually to learn specific prompts to get to data.
Björn Conway: Things that we talked about, I think, in the last update we did around HMPPS, His Majesty's Prison and Probation Service, where AI was used to help people use facial recognition so they could join and they could communicate with parole officers on different technology in a safe and assured way. That's how we're using AI to improve user experience. We also use it to help ourselves be more effective, so deliver more value for clients. Obvious area that often gets talked about, agentic software tools. Software development has had a lot of investment, particularly from Anthropic and Claude. That whole area has really improved and moved forward. We also use it in our broader business. For example, to enrich data we get from user research, to help us analyze that data and to also help do analysis of services.
Björn Conway: You can see at the bottom there, we have analysis of 600 local healthcare services. The ability to be able to do that analysis, process that data has really come a long way in the last year, 18 months. And then finally, what is a bit of a differentiator for us and very important in the public sector is that AI can provide lots of opportunities, but it needs to be implemented in a safe way. So you can see there, we are talking about penetration testing of large language models. This is really about the themes about understanding how those large language models are deployed, how the data is kept safe to make sure the right sort of standards are being met. Also, a bit further down there, providing assurance and secure deployment for new AI tooling.
Björn Conway: Again, making sure that the AI tooling is going to be used in a way that is appropriate in a government environment and that the system data is kept safe and secure. We can go on to the next slides. So, I would like to give you a couple of examples of our client work, but before we do that, talk a little bit about our new business performance. As I said at the beginning, GBP 86 million of new contract wins in the H1 of FY27. But actually, the numbers in the H1 are also heavily influenced by the contracts we won in the H2 of last year. So you can see at the top of the table, we have NHS England, which I will come and talk about in a moment, and DEFRA.
Björn Conway: Two very large clients which have really mobilized during the early part of this year. So we have brought on teams, we have stood people up, we have started really delivering for clients, and that has also helped us with the revenue growth in the H1. But you can see then there is a healthy mix of engagements where we have had long-term relationships and we have established really good delivery, and those have been uplifted and extended. So, HMPPS, His Majesty's Prison and Probation Service, and Land Registry are really good examples of that. And we have also got new clients on there. So the Ministry of Justice, that is a new area for us, a GBP 16 million, two-year piece of work there. Also in the British Library, which is a very large client for our Manifesto business. We also have about GBP 20, 21 million worth of new business wins, which are smaller ones.
Björn Conway: As Noel uses the phrase, they are the acorns from which the larger accounts grow in the future. So just to give you a couple of client examples of some of our work. Vaccine services. This is something that is really popular with our teams within TPX because actually what we are trying to do is we are helping with the whole preventative campaign in the NHS. About 40% of their funding can be deployed more effectively if we can prevent illnesses from occurring in the first place. Also, this is a really vulnerable cohort. So it is maternity, neonatal, and then younger children. The history is that there were very, very fragmented ways of keeping records, which is difficult for end users, the people giving the vaccinations, to work out who has had it, who has not, when they are due.
Björn Conway: We are helping develop a service, a care pathway to enable better tracking of vaccination, simplify the whole process, make it a lot easier for end users. You can see on the left there, we are starting to see some really good results there. As you can see, 52% of winter COVID vaccinations being through this system. It just means that there is better quality data and it is far easier for users to deal with. Second example is our DEFRA engagement. For those of you who were on our last market update, you will have heard me say that we had to scale this up to 170 people within 2 months, which is a huge thing to have to do. I am really pleased to say that we have done that and we are delivering at a high level, really high quality. Our clients are finding our work valuable.
Björn Conway: More importantly for us, actually, our people are really enjoying the work as well because they are able to deliver really impactful work right across the DEFRA environment. You can see a client quote on the left there. That is the sort of thing we hear from our clients because our people turn up, they are actually practical in terms of what they bring. They take the time to really understand the client's situation, which means that what we deliver is more appropriate and it works and it delivers what the clients expect. If we can go on to the next slide, Noel. This is a really interesting example for me. ZSL, you probably know it better as London Zoo, long-term client for our Manifesto business. I was really pleased. This is very, very recent, just in the last couple of weeks. Long-term relationship, really interesting client.
Björn Conway: We just renewed with them again for a long-term period. The thing that is nice about this is that this, again, is how do you engage with users, in this case, people who are donors or visit museums and attractions, and it is all about making your information accessible. So you can see the 98 accessibility score, making sure people become more engaged, they stay longer, they read more, they get more involved with the charity, and then that ultimately turns into levels of donations and levels of revisits. It is just a nice little contrast to some of those really, really large public sector, multi-year public sector engagements that we do.
Noel Douglas: Everyone for joining today. For those who have not met or haven't joined these calls before, I am Noel Douglas, the CFO of TPXimpact. I have been here since February 2025, and my background is the last few roles in professional services, so it is an industry and an area that I know really well. I am going to take maybe 8 or 10 minutes just to run through our headline financial operating metrics, and our guidance for the full year 2027, and give some context around that before I hand back to Bjorn for the closing. Just talking to our financial results for a minute. It has been a fantastic start to FY27, with really strong revenue growth in our first 6 months of trading after the successful completion of our 3-year turnaround at the end of last financial year. As Bjorn says, we are really pleased with the progress of the group.
Noel Douglas: Teams are really energized at the moment and really excited with the new client challenges that we are facing into. It has been nice to bring lots more people into our teams as well, as we have been scaling up our teams in areas to meet ongoing client demand. Talking through the numbers on the slide here, you can see revenue was up to GBP 57.9 million, a 60% increase from GBP 36.2 million in the prior year. Gross margin for the half was 30.0%, a small decrease from 31.0% for the same period last year, driven by a heavier reliance on contractors to support new accounts that have scaled up quickly to larger volumes than previously envisaged, and some changes in our client mix.
Noel Douglas: Adjusted EBITDA was GBP 8.0 million, which is more than double the GBP 3.2 million we recorded in the same period last year, driven by revenue growth flowing through and improved operating leverage as we start to see the benefit of our semi-fixed central cost functions that do not scale linearly with revenue. That in turn has led to adjusted EBITDA margin of 13.9%, which is just over a 5% increase on 8.8% in the prior year. Adjusted diluted earnings per share of 5.6p, compared to 1.7p in the prior year, as a result of the revenue and EBITDA growth dropping down to adjusted earnings.
Noel Douglas: Looking at the pink box on the top right corner, we are really pleased to say our objective on net debt, which we initially guided to reduce to nil by the end of this financial year, which will be 31 March 2027, we have actually achieved six months early as we eliminated all of our debt in full and have moved to a net cash position of GBP 1 million at the half year. That is the first time, as Bjorn has mentioned earlier on, since 2019 that we have been in a net cash position as a group. So, a really nice milestone.
Noel Douglas: Talking to the pie charts at the bottom of this slide, you can see in the bottom left corner that 70% of our revenue continues to come from central government, and a slight increase in the amount of revenue we are generating from health, as seen in some expansion of that part of the pie chart. In the bottom right side, you can see that of our central government revenue, we have got a nice even spread of some of our largest areas and departments that we are supporting. So, we now have 38% of our central government revenue coming from projects linked to place and infrastructure, 34% coming from projects linked to the environment, and 19% coming from justice, and then a balancing 9% from projects in energy and trade and other areas.
Noel Douglas: Our strong relationships across various government departments, combined with our reputation for delivery, is reflected in the quite healthy average tenure we are seeing, with around 70% of revenue coming from clients who we have been working with for at least three years. This next slide I am going to talk to just talks about client diversification a little. We have had a very intentional and strategic aim to grow more large tentpoles supporting our business. Historically, we may have had one or occasionally two clients running at the GBP 10 million per annum spend level. This year, we have four accounts at that kind of scale and size. The bar chart on the right-hand side just reflects that, with an increase in the blue bars showing the increase in average spending of our top five clients.
Noel Douglas: This is a continuation, and we will see a continuation of this graph as we go forward. We will keep looking at small accounts that we think are a good target for us. We will grow those small accounts with opportunities to do discovery work and small pieces of alpha work as they show up. If we demonstrate a good track record of delivery in those accounts, that is how we will grow those into larger accounts over time. I really hope that the red bars for clients 6 to 10 will also start to grow as we look at this chart over the next couple of years. Just moving on then to our non-financial metrics. We ended the H1 with total headcount of 806 staff, including associates, and 580 of those were permanent TPXimpact employees.
Noel Douglas: Our recruitment and technical teams have been really busy hiring over the last six months. We have added a gross of over 100 people and a net increase of just under 100, as you can see here after some churn. We have also, given the strong client demand that we have been seeing, been leaning on the contractor market as well, so that we can scale up some of those larger engagements. We will continue to hire and welcome more people to TPX over the next six and 12 months as we gradually adjust back to more permanent staff over time. Our female representation remains healthy at 50%, and our ethnic minority representation broadly stable at 21%. That ties into the kind of organization we want to be, the attractiveness we want to maintain for people joining our organization, and us reflecting the clients that we work for.
Noel Douglas: Our carbon emissions for the H1 were 790 tons, and our carbon intensity was significantly reduced compared to the same period last year as a result of the revenue increase that we have been seeing. Finally, our employee retention remains pretty healthy and stable at 86%. This chart just sort of summarizes the journey that we have been on over the last few years in terms of both reducing debt and increasing profitability. It is really nice to see on the left-hand side the debt entirely reduced to nil at the half year, six months ahead of schedule, compared to the guidance we originally gave to reduce our debt to nil at the end of this financial year.
Noel Douglas: On the right-hand side, you can see the profitability that has been gradually increasing as a result of really tight cost control in our central areas, and increasingly in the last year and a half, seeing the impact that we get of operating leverage as revenue scale up, but our overhead functions do not scale up to the same extent to support that revenue increase. Also, just touching on cash flow, we generated a very healthy GBP 6.2 million of cash from operations off GBP 8 million of EBITDA in the period. That is a fairly decent cash conversion rate and in the same kind of range as we would typically expect going forward. Just to finalize my section and before I hand back to Bjorn, I am going to talk through our guidance, which is unchanged from the 15 October trading update.
Noel Douglas: Maybe if I just start again as a quick reminder, we initially guided this year back in June to EBITDA of not less than GBP 12 million for FY27. We guided to healthy double-digit revenue growth, and we guided to elimination of net debt by the end of the financial year. Then three weeks ago, on our 15 October trading update, we upgraded this guidance to at least GBP 14 million of EBITDA in FY27, revenue of at least GBP 105 million, which would be 35% year-on-year growth, and called out that we had already eliminated debt and moved across to a small net cash balance and have shown contracts signed compared to GBP 31 million for the same period last year. October trading has continued strongly in line with the first half.
Noel Douglas: With all this in mind, we are reiterating our FY27 guidance, and we confidently reaffirm our expectations for the financial year, which is for revenue of at least GBP 105 million, being 35% year-on-year growth, and adjusted EBITDA of at least GBP 14 million, which would be at least 63% year-on-year growth. We will, of course, keep this guidance under review as we continue trading through the second half. That covers our formal guidance for FY27, and I will hand back to Bjorn to close out with our medium-term plan and investment opportunity.
Björn Conway: Thank you very much, Noel. As you can see, we have got really good momentum. The market for our services is significant. It is not just the big government departments, it is also what are called arm's-length bodies, so somewhere like Land Registry counts as an arm's-length body. It is also commercial businesses and charities that all jointly provide government services. They all use the same sort of base of data. We have a very large market opportunity. There is a lot to do. We are very much building on a strong platform. We have got excellent reputation in place in infrastructure and housing, transforming government, which is the more general sort of digital transformation across departments and in health. You can see how we are building the footprint in those areas.
Björn Conway: Noel also showed a slide that showed our progress in building more larger accounts. The reason why that is important is it enables us to understand our clients better, to develop multiple revenue streams in that. You see that in the Ministry of Justice now. We have got revenue streams in His Majesty's Prison and Probation Service, and also in the Ministry of Justice itself, so all within the same area. That is really good for our long-term predictability, and it also provides additional value to clients because our people get to know that department and that area better and can deliver more value. I touched on earlier around AI-native delivery. Hopefully, you can see that we are making the best use of the tools within the public sector environment.
Björn Conway: We also use it ourselves, and we are also leading our own development and experimentation, both within the public sector and outside. Our overall objective, I see lots of potential in this business. I see lots of opportunities for growth. I want us to be seen as a strategic supplier to government. That means getting a bit bigger over the next few years, becoming a bit more essential to our clients, but we are well on the path to do that. Excuse me. In terms of our investment opportunity, just really as a reminder, we have got a large and growing addressable market. Obviously, the market is doing well at the moment. We think we are actually doing slightly better than perhaps the average in the market, and that is because we are providing a service that is very much in demand.
Björn Conway: As a business model itself, we run the business very, very keenly. We think a lot about revenue to cash conversion to generation of EBITDA. It is a good model, it is a simple model, it is a great business. We get good visibility of revenue because we have got these multi-year engagements, so it means we do not have to run a big bench of people. We can match supply with demand, and we also use our access to a really trusted associate network to help balance that. As the business grows, obviously some of those central costs will not grow as fast, so we would expect that operating leverage to continue to improve. In terms of the business itself, I think we have got a good moat around our public sector work because of the frameworks we are on and because of the insights we have.
Björn Conway: We have also got We are in the right place and we are providing the right sort of services for AI to be an augmentor of our work rather than something that potentially threatens that. We are really pleased with what we are doing, how our clients are embracing it, and particularly how they are looking to us to help them. The final point, obviously, we are in a position now where the business is really performing. We have got hopefully a really strong H2 ahead of us, and next year is looking pretty good as well. We are starting to build that underpinning of backlog for future years. We are also thinking a little bit about how do we develop and grow the business. This is really a growth business. The market has got a lot of opportunity.
Björn Conway: As we get bigger, we can address more of that market and address it in a more interesting way. The team here is really focused about how do we make TPXimpact an even better, more impactful, and larger business as we go forward. That is the end of our presentation. I hope that served both to remind you a little bit about some of the core tenets that have underpinned our journey over the last three or four years, because they have been consistent. It has been against the plan of trying to get to where we are today, and hopefully you can also see the continued momentum from the H2 of last year into the H1 of this year. You can see particularly my confidence in terms of that momentum continuing through the balance of this year and into next. Thank you very much.
Björn Conway: I am really happy to take some questions now.
Operator: Perfect. Thank you, guys, for updating investors today. Could you please remind investors to submit your questions just by using the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen? For your reference, a recording of today's presentation will be available on the Investor Meet Company platform shortly after the meeting has ended. Guys, as you can see, we have received a number of questions during today's presentation. At this point, if I could just hand back to you to read out the questions and give responses where appropriate to do so, and I will pick up from you at the end.
Noel Douglas: Thanks, Charlie. Should I publish these, or can everyone see them as I go through them?
Björn Conway: I think you read them out, Charlie.
Operator: I'll remove them as you go through them, guys.
Noel Douglas: Okay, super. The first one was, "Have we been gaining or losing market share in the past year? How's the momentum for the coming year?
Björn Conway: This was a pre-submitted question, so hopefully, some of that has been answered as we've gone through. We're not particularly large in the market, and it's a large market, so it's quite difficult to know whether we've been, to fundamentally, we've been gaining market share. What we do know is that several of our peers have also grown in the H1 of this year by 30%, 40%. By the fact that we've grown by 60%, it probably infers that we're taking some market share. I certainly know that our clients are very happy with the services we deliver, and there is lots of opportunity. So, we're very confident that that momentum is going to be sustained into next year, which is kind of the second half of that question.
Noel Douglas: The second question is probably best for you, Bjorn, is, "Do you plan to significantly expand your revenue outside of the public sector? If so, what's your competitive edge?
Björn Conway: In the presentation, I sort of touched on, if we think that our real area of expertise and the bit that we're known for is delivery of services in a public sector environment, those services are actually delivered by a combination of central government departments, arm's-length bodies, commercial businesses, and charities. They are all essentially using the same sort of data sets because people are flowing through that whole service delivery path. That is the very natural area for us to progress and move into. Clients in financial services and in the utilities areas, there is no reason why we wouldn't continue to support those. In terms of our competitive edge, it really is that understanding of users, how they want to receive information, what their needs are, and how best to design and develop services around that and provide that end-to-end.
Björn Conway: That's really what we do best.
Noel Douglas: Great. Thanks. Maybe I'll pick up this next one. Brian asked, "In each of the last three financial years, H2 has delivered higher revenue and adjusted EBITDA than H1. However, the current guidance appears to imply a reversal of that pattern despite strong October trading. Could we explain the factors behind that?" Simply put, we're seeing a lot of momentum going into the second half. Our guidance is that we will do at least GBP 105 million revenue and at least GBP 14 million EBITDA. We hope to be comfortably above those. It's a prudent guidance, but there's nothing at the moment in what we're seeing with clients that implies a deceleration in the second half.
Björn Conway: Yep.
Noel Douglas: Picking up on the next question from Gary, "What do we expect the gross margin to be in H2? Will it be over 30%, and if so, why? Is the GM reducing due to quoting cheaper prices on larger contracts?" I mean, my quick response is, I would expect the gross margin to be broadly similar in the H2 to the first. It will move around by 1% or 2% year to year. That is driven by the combination of our staffing mix between permanent contractors, but also our client mix. Sometimes we are lucky enough to get directly awarded bits of work with clients who have an urgent need, and that can be a bit less price sensitive. But we also are often winning work in a much more competitive fashion in open procurement tenders, and that tends to be at more competitive rates.
Noel Douglas: The blend of our different client engagements will vary little, but in this range is where we would hope and expect to be over the next couple of years. We are quite careful in terms of how we bid, so we do not bid stuff really low, and in a fashion that would be heavily dilutive to gross margin or mean that we would struggle to make money on account.
Björn Conway: Yep.
Noel Douglas: Another question from Gary, "What is the revised cash forecast for the year end? It has not been covered, but I feel it should be and is very important." So fair question. We have guided to net debt historically. We have not guided to net cash because we are now no longer in a position where leverage is an issue. But the broad rule of thumb, Gary, you may want to look at is, between 60% and 70% of EBITDA would convert to cash over any period. That is kind of what we have seen in the H1 in the last couple of years, and that is a good proxy for cash going forward.
Björn Conway: Shall I take the next one? I mean, I do not-
Noel Douglas: Yeah, yeah.
Björn Conway: We've got a question on here that says, "How do you explain today's large fall in the share price?" I think, look, it's very seductive to look at the share price every minute and see it go up and down. I think we will take stock over a few days and see where it is. I think, our share price is broadly 370% to 400% up on the year. So, it has increased quite a lot over the last 12 months. There are people who take positions and then take profits, so there's a little bit of volatility in the share price. Our job is to keep producing good numbers, producing consistent numbers, and serve our clients really well, and make sure that we're winning work, delivering good revenues, and converting that through.
Björn Conway: We think long term, that will be reflected in all aspects of our business in terms of how it's looked at and how investors look at it. I'm not really focused particularly on the share price hour by hour. I'm more interested in, let's make this a really good business, a really good, resilient, sustainable business, doing something that's differentiated for our clients, because longer term, that's going to really drive shareholder value.
Noel Douglas: Yeah, absolutely. The next question is from George, saying his thanks for the question, George, asking around, "Do we have capacity to increase utilization in the H2? Is there any upward pressure on contractor costs?" I think is what you're getting at, given that many companies in UK public sector are doing well in this area. Are they harder to find? Are they more expensive? At the moment, my view is no, we don't think the contractor market is tightening. We're not seeing reflected in the rates we're having to offer to bring contractors on that that's a difficult or tight market, and therefore we're not being bid up on prices and making weaker margin than we have historically. So that field was fairly stable. The other part of your question, George, around capacity to increase utilization in the H2.
Noel Douglas: We've been running at a fairly healthy and strong utilization for the last 18 months. So, realistically, there's a limit to how far that can go, but we're always looking at small tweaks that we can make to improve it. But I expect it to be fairly stable in the H2 compared to how it's been for the last 12 months. Anything to add on that, Bill?
Björn Conway: No. No, we're still recruiting hard. We're still finding it. We're attracting people because it's a really positive environment, that business is growing well, lots of opportunities. We're also finding that, for us, for associates and contractors, some of those we've got very long-term relationships with, and they enjoy working with TPXimpact, and we're not finding particular pricing pressure in terms of attracting really good people to work on their engagements.
Noel Douglas: Yeah. So, I'll just pick up Gary's next question. "New contract wins is good, but needs to be balanced with contracts that have ended to give us a net turnover win. What was this for H1?" We don't disclose it, but you can look through bidstats and other public forums to find the notional end dates of larger contracts that get publicly announced. But I mean, our general aim is to make sure that we're gradually adding to our account base all the time, and there will naturally be cliff edges of certain contracts, but the more that we're growing and adding to our accounts, the less impactful any of those particular roll-offs become.
Björn Conway: Yeah. And for us, it's about building backlog and building that multi-year backlog, which we can then use to underpin. So I think at the start of this year, we had good coverage.
Noel Douglas: Yeah
Björn Conway: into this year. I think we said we Was it 80% that we said we had contract coverage? If we had 80% coming into the year, you have seen the new wins in the H1. Those obviously close that gap to our full-year revenues, but also help us put backlog in place for next year and beyond. Ultimately, you will see it come through in the revenue numbers, in terms of how those come through. Probably one other point to make, which might be helpful, is quite often with the contracts, they can actually be slightly larger than the published numbers.
Björn Conway: For example, with the NHSE vaccines example that I used on the slide, that contract award was GBP 22 million, but they had internal approval and external approval for an GBP 11 million uplift, which we have not received yet, but that was all part of the initial win. So those contracts' values can go up over time, particularly if clients are getting good value, which is why the delivery is really important.
Noel Douglas: Yeah.
Björn Conway: Right. So, a question around net cash.
Noel Douglas: Yeah. Now that we have moved into net cash, what will be first call on the cash business generates from here? I guess this goes to capital allocation, does not it, Bill?
Björn Conway: Yeah, I think so.
Noel Douglas: We will continue to talk as a board around it. Our preference will be to drive shareholder value by growing the business, and we think that's the best way we can drive shareholder value. There are some organic investments we can make, but we are already doing so in terms of getting the right account management and sales team in place to really drive organic growth. Then, any excess cash beyond that, we will probably start to look at small inorganic opportunities that could be very different natures. Do you want to expand on that a bit, Bill?
Björn Conway: Yeah. Look, this is a conversation that the board is now in a position to start having, because we are in the place where we are generating cash, and we are not paying down debt in the same way that we were previously. The options will be around, this is a growth business. There is certainly opportunity to invest in this business and to grow it faster. Then obviously, there are also opportunities to return cash to shareholders, but that is something that the board is only just discussing and has made no decisions on, because I can see there is a question further down the list. It is stuff that we will continue to consider. We are only just into net cash, so we probably want to trade a little bit further on before we do anything dramatic. But it is great to be in that positive cash territory.
Björn Conway: So yeah, that's probably all we can say at the moment.
Noel Douglas: I think so, and I think that maybe covers Andy and Gary's subsequent questions as well around dividends versus acquisitions.
Björn Conway: Yeah.
Noel Douglas: Just picking up, Brian, your question here on congrats on a strong start to our three-year growth strategy. I do not know if it is just limited to three years. I hope it is longer than that. Based on what we have seen so far, is there anything we would do differently or put more emphasis on in the next couple of years?
Björn Conway: I think, look, what underpins that strategy essentially is maintain delivery, maintain delivery quality, which is what we have really focused on, because our reputation and our work with our clients is our best recommendation and advert for our business. We are really investing in account management, and what we mean by that is getting a better understanding of our clients, so getting closer to those clients, understanding what their needs are, which enables us then to build multi-pronged relationships. We do not just have one contract with them, we have several contracts, because that helps with our resilience, and it also means that we can deliver even more value for them and deliver in a better way for them. What we are also doing is we built an organization and we built a structure that was really scalable, and we have tested that and demonstrated that the first half of this year.
Björn Conway: Revenue growth of 60% is quite outstanding for any business, really. For the next couple of years, it is just reinforce that sort of account focus, that client focus. That breeds involving more of our capability areas more directly in understanding and serving our clients better in accounts. That, in turn, should help us build. As Noel said earlier, we have gone from one to two GBP 10 million plus accounts to now having four. As we move forward, hopefully we can increase that number and sustain those long-term relationships. That is really. It is more of a, I would not do anything differently necessarily, but it is more on building on what we have already done and just naturally progressing and improving the business as we go forward.
Björn Conway: I think that is all of the questions there, because I think we had a couple on the end around acquisition or dividend payment or something similar in terms of cash, which I think we have addressed. I mean, that is a live board conversation, but probably not something we can or we do not have anything to update you on in this environment. Is there any other questions? Please post them. Do you monitor unsold hours? So we have got a question that has just come in. Do you monitor unsold hours and use it to help you go forward? So, it is a bit of a yes and no on that question. As an organization, we do not run a large bench, so we do not have lots and lots of people sat there waiting for a client to come along.
Björn Conway: That is why we really sort of manage this mix between our own permanent teams and associates who we can bring in very, very quickly if a new engagement launches or something like that. So we do not have a lot of unsold hours, but we do monitor it. I mean, we have Certinia is the name of our PSA, Project Services Automation system. We use that to allocate people to engagements. We use it to track time. We use it to track gross margin, both as engagement level and individual level. So we have got lots of data about the business, and we can use that data to refine, to give us demand signals for recruitment or to understand where an area perhaps is not as utilized as we would like, and then sort of redeploy those people or ultimately ask the growth teams to accelerate opportunities in those areas.
Björn Conway: So we have got a lot of data with all the systems that we can manage that stuff. But fundamentally, we do not have a huge number of unsold hours because generally our people are. The system we run keeps people very, very busy and very client-facing.
Noel Douglas: Yeah.
Björn Conway: So that feels like the last of the questions. Thank you very much for those questions. It is really good to hear them because it helps us in many ways. One, we can explain a little bit more about what you would like to hear about, but also it helps us for presentations going forward and understanding what things you want to know about and you want to hear about. Just to kind of recap, obviously we are absolutely delighted with the results that we have been able to share, both in terms of the revenue, EBITDA that we have been able to generate. Obviously, the cash that has resulted from that, getting us to a net cash position from a debt position, but also the new business wins as well. So, the new business wins are far in excess of the rate at which we are burning engagements.
Björn Conway: That means we are contributing to backlog, which is really good for us over the balance of this year and into future years. As I said, I think the organization is set up well. The team is enthusiastic. We are performing well for clients, and the market opportunity over the medium to long term is very, very large in public sector and all of those other bits that contribute to the delivery of services. It feels like we are in a good market at a good time with a business that is now well set up to serve our clients and make the most of that opportunity. We will end the presentation there, but we look forward to coming back and talking to you as the year progresses.
Björn Conway: As Noel says, we have got a lot of confidence around this year and the direction we are heading in, the momentum we have got, and so we look forward to bringing you more positive updates as we move forward. For the moment, thank you very much for your time. Thank you, Charlie, for hosting us, and we hope that you found that interesting and you have a good, positive rest of your day. Thank you very much.
Operator: Perfect, guys. Thank you to you both for your presentation this morning. Could I please ask investors not to close this session, as you will now be automatically redirected.
