Northcoders Group (LSE:CODE) — Final Results for the year ended 31 December 2024

0:00 Good afternoon, and welcome to the NORTHCODERS GROUP PLC investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged, and they can be submitted at any time by the Q and A tab situated in the right hand corner of your screen. Just simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives in the meeting itself. However, the company can review all the questions submitted today and publish responses where it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to make the following poll. I'd now like to hand you over to CEO, Chris Hill. Good afternoon to you, sir.

0:31 Hi. Good afternoon. Thank you. K. Hi, everyone. Yeah. My name is Chris Hill. I'm the founder and CEO of NORTHCODERS. I started the business almost ten years ago now, and I've been with the company since the early days of, you know, training around 10 software engineers a quarter all the way to around a 100 people a month, which we we trained last year. Hi, everyone. My name is Charlotte Prior. I am the CFO at NORTHCODERS. I've been with the company for around seven years now, and I am a fellow of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants. Also, I've got three other board members, who was a very early stage investor in the company and is still with business today, concentrates on partnerships both with government funding authorities and with businesses more directly.

1:21 And we have two non executive directors, Nick Parker and Angela Williams, who's our chairperson. Results out this morning, we have pleased to report revenue growth at 24% to 8,800,000. Gross profit has grown to 5,900,000 at a margin of 67%. Our adjusted EBITDA adjusted only for share based payment expense is at 1,000,000, which is back to expected levels after a drop in 2023. And 2023, we invested we continue to invest into our platform and into into our courses at a time when the tech industry was quite unstable and that there was a couple of economic difficulties for us as a business.

2:09 We continue to invest anyway so that we're now seeing the fruits of that labor. We ended the period with cash of 1,200,000 and net assets of 5.3. Some operational highlights, we grew our hiring partner network to 510, and we also grew student numbers to just under 4,000 ever taught. We taught around 1,100 in the period, and although on par with 2023, we really increased that revenue per seat and increased that value per student, which has enabled us to grow revenue overall as a company.

2:53 Business overview. So we founded in 2015. Our vision is to deliver life changing opportunities for people from all walks of life. That has always been our mission, and that is what we continue to do whilst also providing the tech UK tech industry with the skills that it needs. We work with a lot of corporate partners. We work with big big corporations and also small companies. There's kind of no such company that that can take on a NORTHCODERS. We even place the student into an egg farm. We have seven different courses. We have full time software development in JavaScript, part time software development in JavaScript, full time in Java, full time c sharp, full time data engineering, full time cloud engineering, and our newest course, which is our full time data engineering with AI and machine learning, which we'll go on to explain further in the presentation.

3:58 Demand is higher than ever. We had application numbers in 2024 of just over 17,000. That is continuing, to grow. We have, a rigorous kind of entry challenge and an entry process into our course to ensure that quality is kept high, and that's still very important to us today as it has ever been. We're managing to retain our reputation in the industry as being a quality boot camp, and that is the the strategy that we want to continue with.

4:30 K. I'll just talk to the the business model. So we have two divisions within the company. We have our training boot camps, then we have our consulting division, which is branded as COUNTA. So the our heritage is training and our reputation built on the excellence of the technical training that we've done and the impact the individuals that have been to our frameworks have made on the organizations that they've gone on to thrive in. So the training boot camps are relatively simple. We have marketing and customer traction efforts to build pools of people who are interested in joining one of our frameworks, a lot of recommendations because of the quality, which we're with our number one emphasis is always to be the top quality provider and have the best outcomes for the individuals. So we have a a a significant pool of, you know, around about, let's say, a thousand learners for each cohort in our pool who join the framework. And we then give people some pre assessment. So we make sure that everyone's gonna be able to keep up with the pace of the course and that they're going to get themselves, you know, they've got a good chance of getting themselves to the level they need to be to secure a great outcome both for themselves and for us as an organization.

5:39 So we do that basically through we call it an entry challenge, but ultimately, it's an exam, which is also has a one to one with one of our tutors to make sure that the people do really understand the basics of what they're doing while we'll go on to talking about how we can empower ourselves in technology by using AI. At the very beginning of our courses, really is about understanding, you know, how everything works under the hood. So we need people to make sure that they can explain that to us and that, you know, that that they are gonna be able to grasp the concepts required to build upon the foundations. You then go into one of the boot camps that Charlotte's mentioned on the previous slide. So we have now both full time and part time options to these courses, but we'll talk a little bit more about diversification efforts in a couple of slides time. You complete your boot camp in your chosen subject.

6:26 At the end of the boot camp, you will put together a portfolio piece project, you'll be able to go on to showcase your skills to either your current or you're looking for your new employer. And at that point, the once you graduate the boot camp, you will join our career and recruitment pool where we support you for a number of months to get a great outcome based on the training you've received. Within our consultancy division with encounter, which we'll talk more about in much more detail in in in a couple of slides time as well, we also have an organization called Tech Returns, is all about getting people who have had career breaks in technology back upskilling to the current trends and back into businesses. So we, through COUNTA, offer blended teams to organizations where we're tech led at all times by a tech leader as part of the team, then you can have some of the graduates from the North Coast programs and also from tech returners, and we'll talk again more about exactly how that works soon.

7:27 I think one of the one of the areas of business, our training is significantly underpinned by government funding, and, obviously, there's been a change in the UK government. So on the page I've interviewed, there's some of the initiatives on the areas that we are work within to secure and keep working with the government to fund these much really in demand skills. So one of the things that is apparent is that through the labor government, they're preferring to go quite regionalized on these skills from this. So they're actually giving like devolved authorities more power to allocate their own skills budget. And I'd say I kind of agree with that because I do think that the skills so London just announced their 27,000,000 boot camp fund. Greater Manchester surely is is not far behind this as well, but I do think that each authority being able to pinpoint exactly what type of training, what type of skills they need in their region because it is different between, you know, Manchester, Great Manchester, probably slightly more kind of creative and, you know, agency app agency development, for example, whereas, yeah, London is more your kind of your your high-tech, your AI, and so on. So I do think that, yeah, in the longer term, it will lead to better outcomes for individuals and the size of the funding that we're seeing come through for the bids with, like, service twenty nine.

8:43 Current live opportunities where you literally just heard good news on the first one yesterday because the new the new funding out has now been allocated within the new budget post April. So we got our first bit of good news on that one yesterday, so plenty more to come in that area. And there is also the opportunity of skills England. It's a big initiative from the government where they're looking to reform the apprenticeship levy to allow businesses to use it for more, like, shorter, sharper training courses, I'm sure we'll have more news on the opportunities that presents later in the year. So we've now introduced our AI engineering boot camp. Now this boot camp is for private paying customers only at this point. In the future, there will be opportunities for us to modularize our training to apply, like, different modules and different courses to the various needs of those local authorities to the the the government funding. On this initial course that we've launched, we are just this is for individuals who want to privately pay for their training. It's our flagship course.

9:45 And this is all about, like, the engineering behind AI, not kind of using AI to, you know, do your job as a software developer or or anything like that. This is about actually, you know, implementing what is behind the large language models that people have really started to use and and how to actually engineer those things from the ground up. So that's what we've what we've introduced, and that's going live in June.

10:12 So for this kind of like other revenue diversifications within the training division is that we have also introduced part time part time methods for our courses where people can obviously still continue in their job or whatever else they're they're doing with their busy lives as well as learning, you know, taking part in one of the NORTHCODERS courses in on a part time mechanism. And, again, that is just for people or businesses to pay for privately. We're not have we don't have funding or are seeking any funding to for for those courses. So it's just bringing in more diverse case of revenue, feels much more accessible that people should be able to continue to do their jobs while learning to code. And as well as that for some of our courses like the AI, which we said was the private payers only.

10:58 We have lots of different funding mechanisms and even like where people can come on to our course and they don't have student loan style, whether they have to pay NORTHCODERS back until they have to get into a job. We have raised some extra finance to make sure that we've got plenty of capital to support that at the beginning of the year, which we'll come on to again. Okay. So I'll talk a bit more about Counter now. I'll also talk about the business model. We we we were talking about that. So COUNTA is a challenger brand to the kind of consultancy and the higher trained deploy market. We have great network of individuals that we are training and a fantastic network of people who wanna return to tech through tech returners. So rather than having, like, a pool of people that we recruit to train directly, and then we ultimately deploy onto contracts with businesses, we're actually much more tailored and much more working with organizations to build them successful teams of people who wanna be with them for the long term, really well supported throughout the initial engagement.

12:00 And we're also able to operate very, very quickly and turn, like, new contracts and opportunities around in short spaces of time with businesses rather than having to pre hire people and train them. And one of the best things about COUNTRY is that because of none of the sunken costs that you often have within consultancy or hire train deploy, we're able to price this up like near shore pricing. There was a huge emphasis on businesses to bring like services and engineering, especially with like the reforms to R and D tax credits back to being onshore in The UK. And that's where we operate. So that's a big opportunity for us and something that people really like about the business. So in terms of the progress we've made so far with Counter, if you're following our newsfeed through the London Stock Exchange, we did announce on the April 1 some new contracts. Skits and Building Society are super happy with all the work we've done with them, and we so we have started a new contract with them. Since then, we have also won more business. We've expanded some of our current clients as well as winning new ones, which gives us now over 1,000,000 of revenue contracted for this year. And we currently have a pipeline of potential contracts that we're buying around about about 2,000,000. So we should be able to see those numbers increase significantly. It's a big drive for most of the business to to really get counter what it needs to go to market and win win the business.

13:31 Let's bring me on to the strategy. We really have built this up from our reputation, like our heritage as a training provider, which most of that's been within the North. Although now, we actually, for the first time ever, have do have more students on our training frameworks in London than we we we do in the North, which also presents itself with some great future opportunities for for COUNTA. And we will now we have a product that's ready to go to market. We've got we're building out testimonials and case studies for public sector frameworks with the organizations that we've worked with. We have recently just expanded the business development efforts by hiring a couple of new people, and we look to continue the investment into into that now. We know we've got a fantastic proposition that's ready to go to market and the clients are actively choosing to grow grow the representation of an organization from COUNTA as and taking out some some of the other more traditional providers.

14:29 So, yeah, there's just some companies there that we've worked with. Obviously, things are going great. We've skipped some buildings build building society, Manchester Airport Group. We've also just expanded that client base as well, and we are looking in the future to do more larger public sector contracts. So they're probably likely to be partnerships with other consulting organizations that can do the like, the much more sort of like the high level strategy and security and all of those kind of infrastructure projects for large public sector clients, whereas actually delivering the engineering and doing the work that's required, you know, counter is a far better value and better long term proposition for organizations. So through the frameworks that we are currently on and that we're also joining should open up some some significant opportunities for for countering partnerships with some of the the the companies we that we partner with.

15:23 In terms of competitive landscape, the the results have been quite a lot more through, like, the the especially through, like, the funding and other training providers going into running boot camps. But the way that we feel about the institute really is quality of the council. We're always looking to keep ourselves at the very forefront of technological advances, making sure that we're keeping up with the the demand from our hiring partners and listening to that feedback, and making sure that we just keep striving every day to deliver those outcomes for individuals so that we remain top of the market for training within our training boot camps. And within COUNTA business solutions, we do have a much more refreshing, challenging proposal, which we are beginning to see within some of the clients that we work with that we they're actively growing the counter teams that we have engaged, and they're actually taking out more traditional like consultancy work because it just doesn't offer the same long term value as counter where we can deliver and we can go in, can look after the projects we need to look after, but then there's that real long term longevity of those individuals being part of the business for the for the long term. We're able to be much more agile on contract length as well as rates because we don't have silicon costs unlike many of our competitors in the higher train deploy or consulting business.

16:46 So on this slide, we just have some recent articles regarding market conditions. News still states that we do have a wide skills gap technical technical skills gap in The UK. There's no surprise there, but we are increasingly seeing the need for skills in data and AI, And we will always track what is we will always track market conditions. We will always look out for what is needed at the bleeding edge of tech skills, and we are able to be agile. We're able to spin up courses and react to the market. Okay. So we'll dive through financials. And the two graphs on the page just show kind of how revenue has grown over the years and also how EBITDA has, has grown this year, taken took a dip in 2023.

17:39 And, again, that was a, an investment year on the back of some, unfavorable market conditions, we chose to continue to invest, we now forecast that EBITDA to keep increasing. P and L wise, we 8,800,000 revenue, 5.9 gross profit, which is a 67% margin. As I said before, adjusted EBITDA is only adjusted for share based payments this year, and that came in at just under 1,000,000. Within that kind of EBITDA to operating profit, we have depreciation of around a 130,000, amortization of 265, and share based payment expense, below that of 138,000.

18:32 We had a tax liability of £9 for the year, which is obviously reduced because of carried forward losses and r and d tax credits, which gives a profit after tax of 388,000, basic EPS of 4.58 and adjusted EPS of 6.58. Moving on to cash flow. So we had cash flow from operating activities of 978,000. We had a decrease in trade receivables and largely down to, payables being money and being significantly, on more favorable payment terms,

19:19 mostly within the DFA. We may see a change to that. We we will see, obviously, a much more diverse revenue mix with more diverse payment terms, but we are well placed with cash for that looking forwards. We have 819,000 net cash used in investing activities that is made up of 571,000 of its intangible assets spent in the year. We continue to invest into our end core platform. There was add ons that we, needed to do for that platform, which will further push efficiencies in the future, and so we chose to do that. That will decrease significantly in 2020, '5.

20:05 There was 38,000 of tangible assets and 240,000 of deferred consideration in there from the tech returners acquisition that we obviously won't see this year. We also had no proceeds from issues of shares, no new bank loans, borrowings. We repaid our bank loan borrowings to the tune of 292,000. We continue to pay our lease obligations. We had a 10,000 square foot office in Manchester, which we're now out of the lease for that. We signed that lease just before COVID around five years ago, and it's it's now way too big for our current model. So we're pleased that we're now out of that lease, and we're not going to be carrying that cost forward, not cash outlay forward as well.

20:54 And then we've got interest paid from the bank loans, which brings us to a cash balance of just under 1,200,000 at the end of the year. Balance sheet wise, we've got noncurrent assets of just over 3,700,000. This is made up of 1,300,000 of goodwill, 2,000,000 of intangible assets, naught point 2,000,000 of tangible assets, and naught point one of deferred tax assets.

21:24 Current assets include one point the 1,200,000 of cash, and our borrowing is at the end of the period were 474,000. Next slide, please. Yep. So just some nonfinancial results as well. It took, on average, seventy two days for our students to find work. We have trained around 30% of women into tech during the year, which is something that we, we focus on. We are passionate about, bringing diversity to the tech industry. Our drop off rate was, 8%. Really pleased with the drop off rate of 8%. Obviously, people not paying for the course and not as motivated to stick to the course as people that are paying and as a large proportion of our students were government funded. And it just kind of shows the quality of the course for to have such a low drop off rate.

22:23 Average starting salary was just over 28,000. 39% non university educated students and sixty seven percent of our students went into jobs within six months after the course. This is a drop on previous years, and it's not something that we are used to, but we when we've analyzed this, there are people going there there are a higher percentage of people going into work for the six months, it's it's largely a result of people not paying for the

22:57 course, having all their intentions after the course. So we do expect to increase that number in 2025 as the revenue mix changes. Outlook. So coming into 2025, we have seen a positive shift in the tech jobs market. The first quarter of the year has been really successful for people moving into work. We've got over 1,000,000 of counter revenue already secured under a really healthy looking pipeline. We took a £1,500,000 loan from NatWest in March this year. So NatWest brought out a new a new loan where, basically, you can borrow money against your internally generated IP.

23:48 So as we as I spoke about before, the IP on our balance sheet is valued at around 2,000,000. It was valued by an external an external company at around 5,000,000, and so NatWest have borrowed us 1,500,000 on much lower interest rates than we had our existing existing loans. So 500,000 was refined was to refinance those, and then we are going to use the other million to allow us to expand our payment mechanisms onto the course. It will allow us to offer more, student loans and income sharing agreements, and it will also allow us to comfortably, continue to invest in COUNTA. Just a couple more things on there.

24:37 The 4,100,000 of contract contracted revenue as of April. So although we do have lower contracted revenue than we've seen in previous years, it is a timing issue of the Department for Education contract. In the past, we've received the Department for Education contract at around this time and have been able to come out and say that we have, for example, 97% contracted revenue. Because it wasn't a yearly contract, it was an eighteen month contract that the timing's changed, and we're not in that position this year. But we're still very pleased with 4,100,000, and we expect that to, obviously grow in the near future. And then as Chris said before, contracts for regional funding are being released. We we've received the good news on one yesterday, and we expect to continue for that to continue over the next couple of months.

25:28 Now we are finished. Sorry for skipping in front. Okay. Cool. So we've got some questions here, which we'll read out and then answer. Are there any plans to expand into other emerging tech areas like cyber or cloud infrastructure? So we are currently within Counter working with Amazon Web Services on being able to partner with them to go into organizations and have teams that work directly on cloud infrastructure. So cloud is something we do have a cloud engineering course. And we mentioned earlier that we're starting to look at chopping our courses up into being more modular offerings where we can for example, if there was demand for a certain command authority or certain business for cloud skills, whether that's for their employees or for learners, then we would be able to offer that and be a bit more agile with the different courses that we offer rather than being just a kind of long sort of three months boot camps at the moment. So so yes is the answer to that question.

26:24 Next question is how scalable is your current delivery model with encore? What's the maximum students tutor ratio you're comfortable with while maintaining quality? So, yeah, encore has improved the student to to ratio significantly. So the way that cohorts work, just to answer this, is let's use, you know, a cohort of 60 would then be broken further down into seminar groups so that you obviously have your kind of cohort leader who runs the lectures, does the live content, and that's sort of delivered to everybody. Then within your seminars, you break out into smaller groups where you can ask more direct questions, and about 30 people is about perfect number for that seminar group. And then within there, we also have mentors, so the people can be assigned to their seminal lead or to their mentor. And, yeah, if we were to have, you know, around 10 students to each, like, active delivery staff member, that's a really highly profitable ratio as well as one that we're certainly comfortable with. The quality of the course now that it's backed up by, you know, all the systems and all of the things we have in play, we are also starting to feed our own sort of AI data lake models to see about, you know, the questions that we can, like, things that we can bring help us learn what we can bring into our kind of preplanned content for the bits where people always get stuck on the courses and so on. But for now, yeah, we're pretty comfortable with that with that level.

27:53 So what are your key priorities for growth, geographic expansion, new course development, or consultancy services? Yeah. Of course. So our key priority for growth right now is the consultancy services. We know that that's the best way to kind of scale the business. And, obviously, a consultancy contract is worth, say, 300,000, whereas a student is a lot lot lower revenue. But we recognize that obviously the teaching is quality revenue. It's at a higher gross profit margin. So the strategy is to grow consultancy services whilst really keeping the quality and the the profit margins high, with training.

28:39 We know that you've kind of you have kind of answered the question with all with all three. And we know that the best way to to keep quality within the training division is to diversify the outcomes for the students, and that involves diversifying the the the jobs that the students go into and also diversifying the the geographic regions that they come from and just to ensure that the jobs are there even in a top jobs market. And so all three are important, but consultancy is, for us, is the main growth area of revenue. Yeah. So the next question is with gross margin expanded to 67%, how sustainable are these margin levels given the investment into new courses?

29:25 So the investment into new courses doesn't affect gross profit margin straight away really anymore. The this that there's kind of a stepped approach to gross profit margin within the courses. So a new course at a low level is actually really profitable because, obviously, we don't need as many tutors to to run the course. A seminar group of, say, 30 if that was just if if we only took 30 onto the course at first whilst it was at low level, we would only need one seven hour group, etcetera. So it's not the courses that are going to shift the gross profit margin counter as the consultancy area of the business does become a more prominent revenue stream within the mix, that is done at around a 50% gross profit margin. So the strategy is to increase the profit margin on training up to around 72%, but then that will be pulled back down by counter.

30:29 So around 65% is is should should be where it ends up. Okay. Thanks, Charlotte. I'll take this one here. I note that there's an increase in hiring partners. What's retention rate among these partners, and how do you measure the lifetime value So I repeat business from the relationships you've gained via partners. So hiring partners is a hiring hiring from NORTHCODERS is a free service that we offer, we we do see partners coming back time and time again. Of course, it's been due to, you know, size. We have had a two person startup who's been a hiring partner, but then we've also had, you know, Barclays Bank, for example, as as as one of our hiring partners. And, you know, there's no kind of just like with with business, it seems a typical North Dakota people come from all walks of life, it's the same with hiring partners, you know, we've had really high-tech kind of businesses, and then we have, you know, your your financial services, and then we we had an egg farm once, which was a bit bit of an out there example.

31:25 The biggest opportunity with hiring partners is to offer further training to people who they have hired or obviously for them to have a look what NORTHCODERS does and get a relatively easy way to start to work with us, interview some of our graduates, see the quality, and then the what we can offer to really help you with that kind of framework of bringing in engine level technologies and returners. There's always an opportunity for for for COUNTA once people know that, you know, our the heritage of our training can really kind of power our consulting offering. Are you looking to expand internationally? So we we're taking in terms of like marketing for the NORTHCODERS brand. So people have heard of us. We are making efforts and we do our budgets in place to sort of get our brand out there before we try and directly sort of like sell consumer courses and so on.

32:20 We are building a genuinely scalable model within counter. So that in terms of the attraction of people who become counter consultants or, you know, returning counter consultants, we are thinking of ways that we would be able to do that internationally without necessarily having such training presence as well. So it's not a focus. Right now, we definitely are we've really grown our kind of model from being based solely in the North to being here in London. And I think we said before, there's now more people on the training frameworks in London than there is in the North. And that is a huge opportunity for COUNTA, but we're just really putting together the case studies and really seeing we need to deliver excellence and just be a little bit different to, you know, competitors that just sell, sell, sell, grab a contract and then, you know, deploy whoever you've got on the bench. Whereas, you know, we are looking to keep COUNTA as something that people always say, you know, it's different and we can, you know, uproot those those consultancies because people are looking for a a fresher approach. It's getting rather stale, the the the offering.

33:31 Don't know, John. Alyssa? Yeah. Can in 2024, what percentage of students were supported by government funding versus students paying directly? So 2024 was a large proportion. It was around 90% of students being funded by the government versus student paying directly. The main reason for that was the fact that we we took a £10,000,000 contract from the government. Our mission has always been to increase diversity within the tech industry, and the government funded provided us with the opportunity to offer our course to people from all walks of life, and we jumped at that. We recognize that it isn't ideal to have that large for concentration with one, organization, and that's why last year last year and in 2023, we have been starting efforts to, diversify the the funding streams, and that was the reason for taking the NatWest funding as well.

34:37 Students paying directly last year was was mostly people that wasn't eligible for d f e funding. So there is some eligibility criteria on that scholarship, and not everyone qualifies. So, obviously, those students still chose to come to us and still chose to pay. Okay. Thanks, Shark. I've got the last question here. So thanks for presentation. Two questions, please. You have 17,000 accounts versus 1,300 enrollments. This is a large filtering exercise. And how does this happen? Is it AI, human, or a bit of both? And also love your gross margin, but is it at a premium for training and consultancy? So I think Charlotte has gone through the gross to question previously went through the gross profit margins, you know, we're super confident in really keeping those if not increasing them within training.

35:26 Obviously, counter growth margin is lower, but each contract value is is higher. In terms of the filtering process, it's kind of, yeah, a bit of both. It's a nail on the head, really. So we have all our own part and course, all of our own systems for absolute beginners to start to work in the way that you would at NORTHCODERS to consume some content, apply those skills, and get ready for what we call our entry challenge. We filter out a lot of those applicants before allowing them to kind of book time on an entry challenge because, again, that is automated and done through a platform. But there is a short interview at the end to ensure that people who do the entry challenge have done it. And we have got other ways now of catching people who are just getting through all the pre course material by just asking AI. AI is quite good at NORTHCODERSENT challenge, you'll be surprised to hear. But we do just wanna make sure that people understand the concepts of it. Using AI to help you learn things, understand things is fine, but you do need to understand some of what's going on. And, you know, this is quite sort of simple basic kind of algorithm programming algorithms that we really do need people to understand to have any chance of of of landing a role through through through NORTHCODERS. So we do we do make sure that we just double check that through a a human. That's probably the one thing that humans are better at than AI.

36:40 So so there we go. And and yeah. That's it then. Look. Thank you for taking the time and and and joining us. I think I'll just wrap up by just saying, you know, we're we're super happy with these results we've delivered on for last year, and we've had a great start to this year also. You know, we're ahead of our expectations, we're really, really happy with that. You know, Sharpe touched on the kind of revenue visibility, but we are still confident in what we're looking to deliver this year. And we're confident in the the current government supporting us, possibly even making that better, you know, creating better opportunities than the previous contract for both individuals and for NORTHCODERS as a business and council's getting off to a great start. And we are really building something with amazing product market fit, doing it in the right way, you know, not trying to run before we can walk.

37:29 But, you know, that could be, you know, sort of hyper scalable when the time is right and we know exactly what we need to do to get the right people in the right places and, you know, the right kind of marketing exercises and so on to to literally win more business in in a way that doesn't have a huge cost base, massive amounts of investment, you know, we can just win contracts, deliver excellence and keep focused on that and take it from there. So, yeah, thanks again for joining us. And that's up. Goodbye from us. Thank you. Perfect. Chris, Charlotte, thank you very much for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close the session? As you know, we automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order that the management team can better understand your views and expectations. It's It only takes a few moments to complete, but some should be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of NORTHCODERS GROUP PLC, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good afternoon to you all.