Acuity RM Group (LSE:ACRM) — Investor Update

0:01 Good morning, and welcome to the ACUITY RM GROUP PLC Investor Update. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged, and they can be submitted at any time using the Q and A tab situated on the right hand corner of your screen. Simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question received during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today and publish responses, which is appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I would like to submit the following poll.

0:32 And I would now like to hand you over to chairman, Angus Forrest. Good morning to you. Thank you very much, and thank you for watching this this recording. This is to reintroduce ACUITY RISP management and particularly this new chief executive, David Rajukovich, who joined us in mid

0:57 December and who has subsequently achieved an awful lot in a very short twelve week period, which he will tell you about, but particularly about the prospects of the business going forward. So with that, I'd like to hand over to, David. Thank you, Angus. My name is David Rajukovich. It's great to meet all of you, and I look forward to to hearing your questions. Before we dive fully into the presentation, I thought I would at least give a sense of what ACUITY risk management does so that we at least start from from that basis. So Stream is our flagship product here at ACUITY, and what Stream does is real time monitoring of cyber risks.

1:50 So there are a number of you can't go a day without reading about the various cyber attacks that happen, worldwide, and businesses are increasingly under greater pressure to to improve their their cyber defense. What Stream offers is the ability to monitor those risks in real time. The one of the the best things about Stream is it is configurable without doing a great deal of coding or without adding new features continuously. So for each client, that means that we provide a very customized experience to them in which they can do a gap analysis between, say, certifications that they'd like to achieve or compliance with various frameworks or regulations.

2:48 And we can set them up and get them off and running without a great deal of manual work or without a great without any, additional coding than what's already there. The other important thing that Stream does, which is becoming more and more important, is to manage third party risk. So the huge supply bases of the world's large organizations represent a source of risk for those organizations and and their data. Stream provides a a strong way of managing that third party risk. If we could go to the next slide, please.

3:35 Okay. And then we can move on to the third slide, so the the ACUITY RM GROUP board. So here you see the team here at ACUITY. We so we have Angus Forrest, who you've heard from. He who's our chairman. My name is David Rajukovich, the new CEO. We have Kate, who is our finance director, and we have two nonexec directors, John Wakefield and Nick Clark. Next slide, please. I'll just provide a little bit of background to myself. I've joined ACUITY as a nonexec director in November of last year. I was appointed chief executive in the middle of December of last year.

4:25 I have an extensive background of working with SaaS companies and helping them achieve high fast paced pass fast paced growth. Excuse me. So I've got my most relevant experience is having, grown an elearning business, a SaaS b to b business just like ACUITY to the point to to the point where we had two successful highly successful private equity exits. I started very early in that company, so we weren't yet profitable. We had a few 100,000 in revenue, and we went on to achieve close to €10,000,000 in revenue, by the time I had I had departed.

5:13 I was CEO of that business for the last, couple years. Also, of note is that I've served in the US Army as a US Army officer, which is relevant to ACUITY's customer base because our largest customer is the Ministry of Defense here in The UK, and we also have a number of customers who are, who are in the defense contracting and government, agency sector.

5:46 Next slide, please. I'd like to talk a little bit now about some of the developments since I've joined ACUITY. One of the most important items that we've completed is an acquisition of the Rizicon software tool and most importantly, their customer base. So we were not necessarily interested in Rizicon software as such because Stream already can do almost everything that Rizicon can do and much more. With any of the gaps, we're working through that as part of our as part of our product road map and as part of our journey with the customers, the former Rizicon customers.

6:35 The main reason for purchasing it was because because of the access to the customer base and the fact that we knew that we could upsell them, a large percentage of them onto Stream, and and achieve even greater revenue per customer than than what Rizicon were able to achieve. The other element the other important element of the Rizicon deal were potential partnerships with Leonardo and SIS Group. So Leonardo is known for building helicopters, but they also have a very strong cybersecurity, third party risk management practice. So we are in conversations with them about integrating into their consulting offering where we would we would be the software that powers their, their, consulting services around cybersecurity.

7:35 They have many clients in the defense contracting world that we are highly familiar with from our work at the Ministry of Defense and other government agencies. So the partnership makes a great deal of sense and could potentially be very extremely lucrative. They have, I think if I haven't mentioned, they have over 250 consultants out, doing third party risk management. SIS Group is another potential partner that, although somewhat smaller than Leonardo, also, are familiar with the space that we occupy because they they were, they used to be Crossword Consulting that used Rizicon heavily in their consulting practice.

8:25 So they're already familiar with with Rizicon, and, therefore, it's a natural extension to to begin to to sell Stream. We've also made some changes to management to reduce cost, increase efficiencies. We've within the first few weeks of me taking charge, we, developed a new website that has much improved, messaging. We will we we have more steps to take before that we go, before we go even further to make it a really truly world class experience, but we've taken a big step forward already. We've also undertaken an a tremendous amount of research to develop a a new go to market strategy.

9:19 We've brought in a team that is that has been highly successful in the past, and they've done an an incredible job with the amount of research they've done, over the last couple months. We've developed a strong strategy, and we're now beginning to execute on it. That should bear fruit in the coming months. And certainly in the second half of the year, we should be, we should be off and flying. We've already seen some significant sales opportunities arise. So we've got one that I can't talk too much amount about, but it's through a partner and delivering a large, governmental project in which this consulting partner has already won the project, and they've recognized Stream as the their as as having unique qualities that they couldn't find elsewhere in the market.

10:18 We'll be overhauling our partner program, so we haven't experienced a great deal of success. We haven't achieved our potential, I would say, in terms of partners over the past couple years. We've overhauled our approach, and we're now beginning to have substantive discussions with potential partners, such as Leonardo, such as CGI. And these are companies with a tremendous amount of reach where even if only one or two of them become successful, they can get us into a huge amount of blue chip organizations and really get us off the ground very quickly in a matter of months rather than rather than any any longer than that.

11:06 We've also revised our pricing. So now we have three pricing tiers that have made it simple. They've it made it more simple both internally and also from our customers' perspective. They also encourage the ability to upsell. So part of our strategy will be to get clients in the door quickly, get them up and running, experiencing value, and then be able to upsell them from from there, which we've proven to be able to do already in the past. We've made tremendous progress in terms of our new product developments. We have our next gen stream coming online in May and June of this year. I'll talk a bit more about that later, so I won't go into all the all the details here.

11:53 Then the last point I'll make is that we, the directors, so myself and Angus, have put our money where our mouth is essentially and invested in this business. And we both see a huge potential for growth in the in the months ahead, especially once our go to market strategy starts to bear fruit in the second half of this year.

12:21 Let's go to the next slide, please. So we've grown in the last year. There's what I would say, is there's a huge amount of potential in a growing sector. So some of the research has that we've done has uncovered the fact that in so we'll have a two pronged pronged approach to our strategy, which I'll go into more later. One such one branch of our strategy will be, the mid market of companies in more heavily regulated industries such as finance, pharma, the government. And in those in those instances, we have identified 350,000 plus mid market clients that are looking to achieve certifications such as ISO 27,001 and SOC two.

13:19 So those there's over 350,000 of them. Only 18% of those already have a cyber GRC tool. Therefore, there's there's a huge amount of green space available to us.

13:36 These are some of the numbers here. If there's questions, then we will we will take them at the end. Next slide. Next slide, please. So I mentioned the service addressable market, which is over 350,000 customers in The US, UK, and and Mainland Europe. It's becoming more and more important for them to be able to sell in in order for them to sell, they need to demonstrate the highest level of security. And a great way to do that is by achieving, I say, 27,001 or SOC two or other type or compliance with other types of certifications and frameworks.

14:24 So we are, and we are well positioned to take advantage of that growing market. I think I think I as I mentioned before, there's a huge amount of opportunity because of the fact that there are so many cybersecurity risks out there. Failure is becoming, more and more of a problem. So with ransomware, with data privacy, there's there's a number of different areas that are coming under attack from from both cybercriminals and state actors, etcetera, etcetera. Stream is able to offer protection both in terms of real time monitoring, also accreditation certification.

15:13 So all of that, means that there are some pretty strong tailwinds, based on our based on our sector as well as our actual product. Next slide, please. So what what are the focuses of the businesses, of the business this year? One of the biggest things is our go to market strategy. I think I've alluded to that already. I'll talk a little bit more about that. The in the past, we had a, I'd say, a wider approach to the market. So we are going after enterprise deals, which did not necessarily play to our strengths and meant that we are competing up against some of the some very large software vendors that were that were extremely well known.

16:05 What we're doing now is focusing on cybersecurity, which is where our strength lies. I mentioned the two pronged approach to our go to market strategy. One is for, mid market businesses, so approximately 500 employees or so. Only 18% have a GRC tool. They need certifications. They need real time monitoring of their risks, and that's where we fit in. We are also the other part of our strategy will be to go after the blue chip clients and large government agencies, and those will largely be through partners. So the light there's and there's three different types of partners that we've identified.

16:53 One is more of the consultants that helps, mid market companies achieve accreditation. Another will be larger consultancies that provide virtual CISO services and are essentially outsourced cybersecurity

17:15 yeah. So business process outsourcing. And to get those interested, we'll be going through partners, that have very large customer base. I meant I mentioned CGI. I mentioned Leonardo. There's companies like IBM and others that, that we have some level of contact with and we'll be exploring further. And and, basically, this is based on on an understanding of the buying cycle. So large corporates, they they are going to these larger consultancies to identify their needs, identify the frameworks that they need to adhere to in terms of their their cyber, positioning, and then they're doing a gap analysis.

18:04 They are implementing the measures that are recommended, and where we fit is in that ongoing monitoring phase. So think of it like a cybersecurity control tower where we are presenting CSOs with up to date information on exactly where their risks lie and exactly what actions that they need to take in order to reduce their risk. So the we are not only telling them what actions they take, but they're we're we're also quantifying that risk, saying if you invest, say, 1,000,000 in some of these countermeasures, you'll you'll prevent, say, 100,000,000 in annual expected losses.

18:54 So that's one where one area in which we're really strong is qualification of risk and understanding, residual risk. All I have to say is we have a strong go to market focus in which we will be able to have, mid market clients come on board quickly, get value quickly, and be onboarded without much manual work. So keeping costs low and acquiring customers becomes easier and easier. The the other part of our strategy, just just to summarize, is through partners to achieve that that,

19:34 to get into some blue chip clients, are large larger, more enterprise level deals. In terms of our sales, as we develop as our, new go to market strategy and content strategy where we are, we're feeding LLMs with with favorable information about what our company does and the great benefits we offer. As we start to build up that pipeline and, and and generate huge amounts of leads, we will be growing our own Salesforce. We'll also be taking steps to make sure that the the sales cycle, decreases.

20:14 In terms of the new product, that is a key part of our strategy, and one of the main reasons for that is because it will allow us to do product led growth. Meaning, in larger organizations, small teams can simply put down their credit card. They can start using Stream, getting value from it without much manual in intervention from us. Once they do that, the word can spread to other parts of the organization, different business units, different departments, different geographies, and that will that sort of word-of-mouth and the ability to for for the product to generate leads itself, means that we will be able to start experiencing massive growth.

21:04 The new product is much better placed to allow us to do that. The other thing to mention about the products are that we will have much easier integrations with other systems and data. So, for example, we'll have external threat data that's coming in that will be informing companies about their real time threats. So if if there's a new hacker group out there that is

21:32 targeting specific organizations with certain types of attacks, that information will automatically be fed into Stream to give CSOs a strong picture of what's actually happening in and and what they need to do about it in real time. So that's the the new product. It'll it'll even decrease our onboarding time, which is already very fast. It will decrease it even further and allow clients to get get get up and running and and achieving value very quickly. Next slide, please.

22:15 So I think I mentioned partners. The this will be a key part of our strategy. So there'll be partners that help us achieve certification or help clients achieve certification by using our tool. There'll be client there'll be partners that are getting us into blue chip organizations and large government, agencies, and that we will become an integrated part of their offering. So they're offering virtual CISO services. They're also offering so they're offering a a kind of outsourced cybersecurity service, and Stream will become the tool or the platform upon which that service is based.

23:03 The other the other potential partner that will take a bit longer to develop, but potentially could be extremely lucrative, is the individual software vendors. So whether it's large ERP providers, companies, data companies such as Splunk,

23:26 There's the opportunity for Stream to be white labeled to fit so so it fits within the partner's overall software ecosystem in which clients don't even necessarily know they are dealing directly with Stream. They're just simply using it because it's part of a larger package than an individual software provider is, is using. That could be a partnership and even a potential avenue for for acquisition in the future once we once we demonstrate all the great great value we can deliver. Some of the partners, I think I mentioned some of them, would add. Software Stereo is an important partner as well. So we have Leonardo, CGI, potentially IBM that are, that are excellent partners for us. And just we we did have a conversation with, with IBM.

24:26 One of the things that they mentioned, and this is coming from them and not from us, they said you are the only ones who is truly doing who are truly doing quantification of risk and a measurement of residual risk after controls have been applied. So that was heartening to hear from, from such a a world leading IT consultancy. Next slide, please. Objective and steps for twenty twenty five. So the objective is to be cash generative heading into quarter four.

25:07 As some of you may understand, in a SaaS business and almost without exception, clients pay upfront for at least a year, sometimes even more in certain cases, and then we recognize the revenue throughout the life of the contract. So we we will become cash generative generative, excuse me, before we become profitable. But the aim is to certainly be cash generative by heading into quarter four and then profitable trading by the end of the year. So we're talking in quarter four. The how are we gonna achieve that? This company is not going to shrink its way to greatness. That's that's for sure. We're going to have to grow the top line, which is aided by our go to market strategy, our improved sales productivity, and and numbers, and also product led growth through, through the Stream product.

26:12 Those things so the the new Stream will be will be launched in May, June, which will which will fuel growth even further in q three and especially in q four. We'll be developing our partners. And as I said, we're we're developing a number of different partners, some of which will work out and some some which of which won't, but we will be concentrating on those partners that actually are committed and and that will deliver value. And even if one or two of those customers or, excuse me, partners come in

26:49 and are committed and are are getting us into all their clients, that will represent a tremendous amount of growth in and of itself. We mentioned the expansion of the sales team, and we're we're developing a a huge library of content that will not only help in sales, but also help in lead generation. So, we'll be, yeah, targeting specific clients that have that have provided buying signals into the market. So we have a very clever way of detecting what's happening out there, and and we will have ways of feeding them content, more and more advanced content leading them down the buying funnel as they as they start viewing more and more of our content.

27:38 So that's a key part of our strategy as well. And, of course, I mentioned, partners to, to make sure that we're able to, without having a huge army of salespeople, that we have partners that are committed to us and that are out doing co marketing, and they're out selling for us so that we're essentially sitting back, not taking a huge

28:03 amount of risk, not investing large amounts of capital in in our own Salesforce, but we have, without a tremendous amount of risk, partners out there bringing us into into clients without a great deal of work from from us.

28:21 That's all I've got for now. Yeah. If we want, we can we can go into the q and a phase. Perfect. David, Angus, thank you very much indeed for your presentation. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions using the q and a tab situated on the top right corner of your screen. While the company take a few moments to read those questions submitted today, I would like to remind you that a recording of this presentation along with a copy of the slides and the published q and a can be accessed via investor dashboard. Angus, David, as you can see, we have received a number of questions throughout today's presentation. And, Angus, we may now hand back to you and kindly ask to read out the questions where appropriate to do so, and I'll pick up from you at the end. Thank you very much.

29:09 One of the questions is why did the company perform so badly in 2024? I might answer this question, although David will probably answer most of the questions, because I was there in 2024. It didn't really trade badly. It didn't fail to perform. What it did was it maintained and grew the revenues in 2024, mostly through upsell to existing customers. It's really important to keep your key customers rather than try and win a whole lot of new ones if that is the choice. While it was disappointing, we didn't win as many new customers as we had hoped, but we did secure our position with our larger and more, tectonic customers.

30:06 And so I think that we performed reasonably, but in some respects, we could have done better. But most small businesses progress steadily, and then there's a leap forward, and then they they carry on for a bit, and then there's another leap forward. And we were in the progressing steadily and slowly last year. And what we're looking for is significant growth this year. And you've heard from David the actions he's taken to drive that that forward. So I am confident that he will be leading the company to much faster growth in 2025.

30:55 Great. Yeah. I could there's there's a couple questions from Jordan that I can I can address? So it says, following the Rizicon acquisition last November, you stated that your in your trade update, all Rizicon subscriptions have been renewed and purchase price recovered, which is very good news and very promising for further compound revenues. Can you advise what percentage of the book has been converted to date? When when is the Rizicon client book expected to be fully converted and onboarded and contributing to ACUITY balance sheet, and what is the expected conversion rate will be at this end of the this exercise. So, yeah, to date, the the only clients that we've lost from Rizicon have been small clients with with little potential that we just simply were not interested in retaining.

31:48 So there's a few very small clients that Rizukan had that have gone away. We have converted a number of them already. Miller Insurance comes to mind. King's College will convert any day now. There's, yeah, there's there's a few others. Leonardo is an important one. So while they they've already paid for their subscription, they almost assured they will convert when it when the time comes, which is the largest client, and they're also potentially a a big partner for us. The yeah. So it's it's been a it's been a large percentage. If I I would say upwards of of 75 in terms of the plan. So over the course of the summer, as soon as NextGen Stream comes on board, so between, say, June of this year and September of this year, we'll be looking to convert all of those Rizicon clients back on the stream, which will save us it'll save us cost, and it will also present opportunities to upsell because we are generally upselling them at a higher rate than what they had paid for Rizicon.

33:11 The yeah. We expect quite a high conversion rate, which are essentially, they're they're really, like, new customers for us is I think about it because it's revenue that we didn't have before that we're just adding on top of the the renewals and upsells that that we already have. So should I just say one other thing, which I think is that we paid £15,000 for RizzyCon? I would be reasonably confident to say that we should achieve more than 10 times that in revenues this year, and it might be substantially greater than that.

34:01 So in terms of return on investment, fantastic. Yeah. What so I also have a question from Jordan. What courses of action are being taken to tightly manage costs during this transitional period while the new strategy is being implemented? Yeah. I mean, we are so, I mean, a large percentage of our costs are people costs. We've, you know, we've we've, I'd say, rightsized the workforce a bit. So we've, you know, we've lost some people that are low performers, which has helped to keep cost low. We're also looking at a tremendous cost savings from the new the new stream coming on board.

34:53 So our infrastructure cost will be lower. Same same again with phasing out Rizicon because our infrastructure cost there are higher than they than they will be when we when we fully implement the the new stream. Just looking through some of the other yeah. There's a tremendous amount of questions here. So how is the news James asked, how is the new sales process working with the lead generation process? What's the typical conversion rate on pipeline, and how visible are your future revenues? So we are looking at, so in terms of the lead generation process, we are investing a a great deal of time and not time, but I would say more effort in germ in in in generating a huge amount of content that that will certainly develop pipeline and also push people through the pipeline.

36:01 We're looking at conversion rate from very start to to finish. The the aim is to get to 20. That that would require an 80% conversion at each step in a in a, five step process. So we're that's something that we're tracking closely and and and, basically, we understand that currently, we have some drop off between the, well, after the proposal stage. And I think what what's causing that is we generally, in the past, had not targeted the right clients. And, therefore, when they've seen the demo and they've had a proposal after the demo, they've already kind of made up their mind that this is not the tool for them.

36:55 What we're now doing is targeting the right clients, the right prospects that that we know need our tool, so qualifying them out if they don't, and only going forward with the ones that we know we can win. And, therefore, our conversion rate should go up significantly over the over the coming months. Shall I take this one from David, which says, how close are you to having subscriptions revenue fully cover covering cost? The answer is two way. One is, are we gonna be cash generative trading wise? And the other is, are we going to be profitable? Because the way that we account for a subscription is we take all the money for the year upfront in cash, and then we have to spread it over the year.

37:55 So to answer your question, we would expect to be cash positive trading in q three, q four, and we would expect to be on a monthly basis profitable in some months in q four. If that answers your question. Exactly when is quite difficult to tell because we have two types of of contracts which you may have gathered. One is a relatively modest 30 to £100,000 contract. The other is a a much bigger contract, which David has been working on. You've heard a bit about some prospects. We've got two very large ones for this year. And if we won either of them, that would really push us forward much more quickly. So the answer is we're aiming for cash generative trading this year and also profitability month by month by the end of the year.

39:11 So there's an and it just seemed to go away. So, yeah, would you be able to share your pricing structure now that it has been revised? So, yeah, I could take that one. So, basically, there's a three tier pricing structure. So we have the what what we call internally entry, and that is so we're looking at again, these are all ranges because it it depends on the specific configuration for each client. But for entry level, we're looking at around £14,000 per year, and that that those are for clients that just want to get to a a particular certification.

40:04 What? So whether it's ISO 27,001 or SOC two, and they they have one use case. They have a very small team, and we just get them on board very quickly. Little there's little to no manual work, and then we look to upsell them from there. Then we have the core offering, which, again, just an internal name, not not necessarily client facing, where they want additional customization. So maybe they want some integrations with some of their other software. They have more users than the entry level, and they may want potentially multiple use cases.

40:49 And and what I mean by that is they could want so they they might want to understand what what their compliance situation is with multiple frameworks. So maybe they have their own custom framework in house, but they also want to comply with regulations. So they're a pharma company, they need to comply with HIPAA. And we're able to without, again, without doing any coding or or much manual work, we're able to set them up so that they can see the gaps between where they are now and also different, multiple different frameworks. That, we're looking at 45 to 50,000 per year, per client.

41:39 Then we have our elite packages, which are those those have things like single sign on and multiple integrations, many users across potentially different business units and different geographies where we have different levels of users. So we have the the system admin down to people that are entering assets into our system. And and those more complex They're, yeah, they're not complex onboarding, but complex configuration, shall we say. We're looking at at least ninety to a hundred thousand for those, and it could be, potentially much more depending on, really, client willingness to pay and also exactly what we're doing for them.

42:39 Should I take one from Jordan, David? I note a SaaS business would usually be valued at around five times revenues. Do you agree with this? Using this metric would mean that ACUITY is heavily undervalued and should be near a 14,000,000 cap on that basis. Jordan, I think the answer is slightly more complex as is quite often the case with with a with a question and an answer. So I agree with you that a SaaS business is often quoted at five or six times, but it could be easily much more than that, or it could be less than that. And the what we're trying to do is to eliminate the bits where we are below target, which includes cash generative and profitable trading.

43:37 And I think on that basis, plus the growth rate, we would be significantly ahead of five times revenues. I see for this company the drivers once we get get the revenues up a bit and see cash generative trading, it will be based around our products, which is unique in the market. It'll be about our client base, which we have some absolutely first class clients both in The UK, North America, and Germany. And I think the the relationship we have with the partners, which Dave has already talked about, And those those items will really drive a value, and it'll be more than five times. But today, we are massively undervalued.

44:33 Even if we even in our current status, we would get significantly more than the the company's market cap. Then I could take one on on how saturated is the GRC market, how confident are you that you're ahead of the competition, and do you have sustainable advantage? So I would say that there there are a number of players in the GRC market. The, one of the key areas of white space that we found are for mid market organizations, especially in The UK and Europe, that are looking to achieve certifications rapidly, and we're able to deliver that service as an off the shelf product even now and certainly even faster when we get when we have next gen stream onboard.

45:30 So there there there are a number of players in the GRC market. We are ahead of the competition in many ways, and I think it's sustainable. I'll talk about that in just a second. And one of the the key things is this real time monitoring of risks. So we have a real time risk engine is what we call it that is matching up specific threats and specific controls with specific assets. So we are able to say that these so let's let's take security patches on servers as a very simple example. So if you so we we have this complex mapping that then says we have very valuable data stored on server x, and we've got, control y that that should be applied to that.

46:26 That that control is, say, 75% implemented but not fully implemented. Therefore, we have some very valuable data that that, is coming under very specific threats, and these are the specific actions that you need to take to, in order to thwart those threats. That is unique in the market. The other bit that's unique is, first of all, our very fast setup. So we have the fastest onboarding in terms of configuring, somewhat complex for for somewhat complex situations, we can configure it faster than than anybody else. Also, from these, IT consultants that were that were potentially in partnership, they said you are the only ones that is doing true quantification of risk, which is becoming which is actually a trend in the industry.

47:22 It's becoming more and more going toward quantification of risk rather than the, you know, rate, the likelihood, and impact from from one to five, which is very subjective and very prone to error, shall we say. So quantification and measuring residual risk in a very transparent and provable way, that is something that we have a huge advantage of in. In terms of sustainability, we have two very strong experts who are working with us. So the two founders of the company are known in this space, and and and and they're truly world class experts. So I think their knowledge is to use the the term of of this the seven powers book is is a cornered resource.

48:18 So I think that is a sustainable competitive advantage because we'll we'll be able to continually adapt to the the new environment. And with NextGen Stream coming on board and us being able to be able to monitor risk in real time, I think that is that is a huge advantage that companies are gonna struggle to to catch up with. K. Jordan, you've asked three questions. What would be medium term goal for ACUITY? And I think you mean are we talking about about market cap? I think just going back to your previous question, I think we'd be looking to get to the sort of levels that you were suggesting for a reasonable market cap during the next twelve months.

49:16 Would you hope to grow the business via bolt ons? Yes. If we can find appropriate ones, which will be what what do they offer us? Do they offer us products? Do they offer us customers? Do they offer us partners? What where's the value for us? And provided they're not too expensive, we would be looking to get fairly fast returns from any bolt on. And then would you be open to an acquisition of ACUITY by, I assume, a third party? I imagine that in due course, we will do a deal with a a a buyer. This company's had more approaches than any other company I've ever had.

50:05 In fact, it's had more approaches than the the entire portfolio of my career when it come comes to it. So we've had 40 plus approaches, but we've gotta get the business to the best saleable condition in order to sell it because this is a one off opportunity as all of them are. But once you've sold it, you've sold it. So you've gotta get it firing on all the fronts that we've been talking about today. I hope that answers your question. So Charles asked, this is a fairly straightforward one. So do all clients pay 12 months upfront?

50:54 And the answer is yes. Almost almost without exception, clients pay at least twelve months upfront. In some cases, they are paying a few years up front. So yes. Jordan asked about a product called STORM. Have you managed to sell this to any clients so far? Storm was developed in conjunction with one of our existing customers, and the expectation was that there would be legislation passed which would drive demand for this product. And that legislation is still in the offing.

51:42 Both the conservatives and the current government wanna pass it. It's about the Manchester Bombings and and anti terrorism. Storm provides the venues and the venue organizers event organizers with cover, which they will have to have, but we haven't got the legislation. So the market is in its infancy at the moment, and we haven't sold any yet. So Yeah. So, yeah, Jordan also asked, you mentioned in the last trading statement, your focus on lead generation.

52:27 What specific activities are being done to improve sales productivity, including conversion rates and time to conversion. Yep. That's a good question. So I think one of the the at the very basis of our lead generation efforts is a overwhelming amount of content that we'll be releasing on social media, website, and other channels, and also directly directly to clients in certain cases that will, a, clarify our message to the market with the focus on on cyber, with the focus on our advantages. So we've done a great deal of work to narrow down what that messaging should be, and we're now developing content that will, that will help clients deliver that.

53:22 So we are now much more focused on, so our lead generation is more focused on customers that have signaled buying intent. So we have ways of scraping the web for, for buying intent signals, and we're reaching out directly to those people rather than a what could be described as a spray and pray approach, which is just reaching out to anyone in our target market, which is less much less effective. But also ways of targeting people. So, for example, when they first see let's say, they they see a fifteen second video on LinkedIn about us.

54:09 So for those people that watch, say, at least ten seconds of it or watch the whole thing, the next time they see a video, it will be a bit longer. And then the third time, they'll see potentially a white paper about, all the great stuff that that Stream does. And then the next time, they might see a two and a half minute video explaining in more depth what what it is Stream does. So that's that's one way that our content is is developing. It will be generating much more leads. We're also exploring ways of putting communities together. So one of the ways that CSOs and and and the people directly below CSOs, what they how they want want to learn and network is peer to peer rather than hearing marketing messaging from us.

55:06 So we are developing ways of developing communities that will allow people to come together, stream clients together with prospects and potential stream clients to say we're using stream like this and others are using Stream in a different way. And through that exchange of ideas, there will be a natural curiosity for for those that are not using Stream in certain ways to add to how they're getting value from it, add to their usage of of Stream. So those are things that we're gonna be doing. There's we're we're, being creative in terms of offering, say, a free half day workshop with with Richard Mayo, who's who's one of our, world class subject matter experts.

56:01 And, generally, over a coffee, he's able to get people interested in Stream just naturally because of all his all the knowledge that he has, and and is able to convey. And and, basically, the way of explaining it so clients can get started without a huge amount of data or without having a huge level of maturity already. So those those are some of the things that we're we're doing. It's, yeah, it's a completely new approach to generating leads overall. K. There's a question here, which is do you plan to present the opportunity of ACUITY to institutional investors, HNWs, which I think is high net worths, and family offices?

56:49 The answer is yes. We do, and we have already started doing it in a small way, but we are relatively small ourselves. And therefore, the institutional investor is there aren't many who will invest in companies of our size. As we grow, we will become more interesting to institutional investors. But we are very careful with our money and how we spend it. And so I don't think that we're gonna be raising enormous sums going forward. This company was started in 2005. It it didn't really raise any money from outside sources until '2 till the year 2000 sorry, 2020.

57:43 And we don't want to dilute investors. We want shareholders to really get maximum gain out of this company. So there is a trade off between what we're going to achieve and and how much we raise. But we are well aware that it's that there is importance to making sure we spend our money wisely or the company's money wisely. But we do want to attract these these type of investors, and all investors are very valuable to us, and we wanna give them a very good return for their investments in ACUITY and its team. So is that is that probably all for today?

58:31 That's great, Angus. David, you have addressed most of all the questions for investors today. And, of course, the company can review all questions submitted today, and we'll publish those responses on the investment company platform. But before we direct investors to provide you with a feedback, which is particularly important to the company, Angus, could I please ask you for a few closing comments? I think that talking to you as potential investors or existing investors is important, and we wanna get your feedback. But this company, as the board sees it, is a company with real opportunity to become substantial both in its own market.

59:18 There are about a 100 players, and we could be probably in the top 10, I suspect. It's a fantastic market to be in. There's real demand. You've seen the slide about about the number of attacks. You've seen the slide. That same slide also covers the cost which companies bear or organizations bear, the the length of time it takes to identify that they've been attacked, and Stream can solve that problem for them. I mean, it's just fantastic. So we think that we've got a great product.

1:00:04 We're we're putting together a great team under David, and we will execute. So thank you very much. Fantastic, Angus. David, thank you once again for updating investors today. Can I please ask investors not to close this session as you will now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order that the board can better understand your views and expectations? This will only take a few moments to complete, and I'm sure will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of ACUITY RM GROUP PLC, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good afternoon to you all.