Northcoders Group (LSE:CODE) — Investor Presentation

0:01 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 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 received during the meeting itself. Have the company will review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it is appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll.

0:28 And I'd now like to hand you over to Chris Hill, CEO. Good afternoon to you, sir. Hi. Good afternoon. Thank you very much. So hi, everyone. Yeah. I'm Chris. I'm the founder and CEO of NORTHCODERS GROUP, and I'd like to introduce yourself, Charlotte. Hi, everyone. My name is Charlotte Prior, and I am the CFO at NORTHCODERS GROUP. We also have three other members of the board who are not here with us doing this presentation today. We have Amel Batra,

0:56 who's our chief operating officer. We're actually also a very early stage senior investor, in in the company. And we have two nonexecutive directors, Angela Williams, as our chair and, Nick Parker, as well. Cool. Fab, so we are delighted to have, reported our interim results this morning. I'll just go through, some highlights from those. So really happy to report that revenue has more than doubled in the period if we compare it to h one twenty twenty one. A majority of this increase has been from our training revenues where we've seen a record level of demand. We are happy with our gross profit margin of 70%, so we've been able to keep the gross profit margin up in a time and in a period where we have experienced, a real surge in tech salaries.

1:52 So one of the, the main attractiveness of our course and our product is that the tech industry is thriving, and there is so much demand for jobs, which is pushing up salaries. We also experienced that, but we have created efficiencies within the business, and we're able to remain around a 70% gross profit margin. We've reported a significant increase to our underlying adjusted EBITDA, so this is adjusted for share based payments expense.

2:23 We reported £420,000, which is right where we want we want to be, right on target for our full year, figures, our targets for the full year. And we're always because we are growing a growing business, we're always kind of second half weighted when it comes to EBITDA, but, we've been able to remain profitable and keep that EBITDA up whilst also investing into new products and post IPO. Our net assets, have increased to 2,440,000. We're in a really strong balance sheet position with a cash balance of just over 1,000,000. Some operational highlights from the period as well. So we, experienced 3,494, applications in the period.

3:12 So this compared to the full year in 2021. We did nearly we have nearly as many applications as the full year. We've also had, a further 1,700 since the end of the period as well, So absolutely not slowing down. We are seeing lots in the in the, news at the minute regarding the, the tech sector and the the demand, so we are happy to see that this is translating onto our course. In the period as well, we have, expanded our business services division. So if you are familiar with the business, we used to call this corporate solutions. It's taken a slightly different name, but that is basically our corporate offering.

3:57 And we have created a new some new products, with one of them being developer incubator. We've done that product with Rolls Royce and EMAC now, and we've had really, really positive feedback. We've had repeat business, so we're in a good position to really launch that fully. I'm happy to, have made partnerships with some really, well known corporates during the period and expand that that corporate partnership further. Our employee headcount has over doubled as we, gear up for some more high growth years, and we are also happy to report that we now have a new, training discipline, which is data engineering.

4:45 So we have, developed the curriculum on that one in the period. We have trialed that, and we are ready to get going with our first course in October. Thanks, Charlotte. So let's go over the an overview of the the the business. So, yeah, I founded NORTHCODERS in 2015. The main reason being that I was working in technology as a career change myself as a software developer, and the demand was just ludicrous. There just wasn't enough solutions for companies to get the skilled people that they needed to go to to fulfill their their technical road maps. Coding boot camps were gaining some good traction in The United States. And and in London, there was one doing pretty well too. So it seemed to be a good way to combine the need with some of the things that I was seeing within the industry myself.

5:33 So our mission is, you know, we've we've worked with over 1,200, people that have graduated our course to date, and support them into roles of over 400, business partnerships. Our mission is to close the digital skills gap for industry while creating life changing opportunities for individuals and also making that as accessible as possible to people for from all walks of life. There really genuinely is no such thing as a as a typical NORTHCODOR. We have people very varied in terms of age, very varied in terms of career history, and, you know, we we are definitely doing everything we can to reduce the the barrier to entry for as many people as possible. Our model is is hybrid, so we have the efficiency of delivering most of our training online, but we also have our in person hubs, which are now in Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham, Newcastle, so we can still keep a sense of community and people being able to come in and get the support that they need in person when they need to. So that really differentiates us from sort of an online training provider, which will generally be at a much sort of lower price point than what NORTHCODERS offers.

6:40 So we categorize our revenue into into two streams. We have our training boot camps, and we have our business services, which is how we how we report on our on our income.

6:54 In terms of the training boot camps, our training boot camps are done in software development and in data engineering as far as technical services are concerned. More about that later. But our boot camps are thirteen weeks into intensive courses. We do have a ninety four percent completion rate in terms of people coming off our course and going into employment within a job as a as a technologist. So that's what we gauge ourselves against, which in terms of looking at university outcomes, it's actually an Oxbridge Oxbridge beating outcome because they measure their their employability in terms of people graduating and being employed in any job, in any sector within within six months, and our statistic is is higher than that.

7:39 So we've got multiple different ways of funding that are boot camp courses. We have private finance buyers such as NORMA who will do interest free loans for people who want to pay for the course themselves. We have the likes of EdAid and StepX who offer more sort of progressive income sharing agreement finance.

7:57 So, ultimately, you kind of pay if you succeed. So that's not another reason why it's super important for us to continue on succeeding to get our, you know, incredibly high outcomes because some people are are going to have only pay for their course when they succeed. We're also fully licensed and have a direct contact with education skills from the agency for the creative apprenticeships. So we're able to offer companies to hire people, give them a salary, and train them up, which creates even more accessibility in terms of diversity and inclusion. It's a really, really good one that for companies to be able to to to encourage people more walks of life that maybe can't afford to just quit their job, pay for themselves for three, four months. There's the apprentices available for that. And then we also have the skills for life, which is the it's part of education funding for skills boot camps, which is a relatively new sort of education funding mechanism.

8:47 We've been through three lots now, and the last bid that we won was for funding for £4,000,000. And the this is the end of the pilot scheme for the department for education, but we do already have an invitation to the longer term framework, which is aiming to be a six year program for lots of skills boot camp funding to be given to providers like, like NORTHCODERS who have succeeded through the through the pilots, and we can safely say that, the education skills from the agency of Department of Education, sorry, have been incredibly happy with with with our outcomes. So, yeah, we have the course in software development and in now in data engineering. The way the course works is relatively straightforward. You apply for the course if you've coincident joining NORTHCODERS.

9:33 We have an onboarding process, which makes sure that people are super ready to hit the ground running on day one of the course. That's when we talk about the applications that Charlotte discussed earlier. And then we have an entry test for people to make sure that they are going to be the right person for the course so that we know that we're gonna be able to keep reporting statistics like 94% successful employment outcomes. You come on to our three month training boot camp, and we then have a partnerships team who will help you into your first role as a in in technology. In terms of the business services, these these model this this used to very much be, like, say, Charlotte would change the name from corporate solutions to business services. That's because we have now sort of categorized and launched actual products rather than our corporate solutions division was very much consultative.

10:19 When Cummins came and said, right. Great. I've hired some NORTHCODERS from you. What's So next?

10:22 You know? How do I how do I support them further? How how do I continue to, to help them grow into our business and be even more, you know, even better than they are now? So we now have a a suite of products which are available to businesses, and we've worked with some huge brands as well as some small companies within corporate solutions. We have got within we have our our launch product, which is just literally for a company that can come along, and they can hire someone from our talent pool completely free of charge and take them into their business. We have some follow on follow on programs, which we call in hand, which are to get people learning things that aren't necessarily specifically software development that they've learned to through the NORTHCODERS course. We might go to learn, for example, more DevOps, which has to do with how do you maintain and how do you secure web applications. This is just help people get to that senior level as quickly as possible.

11:13 And then we have our our consultative products, which are our accelerator, which is where we will do some further, you know, company specific training. For example, with EMAC, that was a different programming language, which was c sharp that we trained people in before they actually did their first day within, EMAC's team. And this is done on a consulted basis where it's a twelve to eighteen month contract. The the corporate pays a day rate to NORTHCODERS. We employ the the trainee, put them through the training, and then and then keep them on with the with with the company that way. Then our incubator has even more support staff. So whilst Accelerator has kind of arm's length support from our from our core team, our incubator is dedicated support where we actually also put in, like, senior mentors and software developers with the team of juniors, and that program is one we're running with Rolls Royce's data division, and it's due to renew, which is great news for a larger program in the new year.

12:11 We also have academies, which, you know, usually, we're running NHS' graduate technology graduate academy academy at the moment. We're the training provider for those. We have also done this for On the Beach. We've done this for Arab as well to retrain engineers into being able to to to write code and make their jobs more efficient. That's more of our kind of, like, off the shelf academy offer, which, yeah, is usually used as, like, graduate programs by businesses. And then we do also have bespoke training services. For example, Domatic are a company that they deploy they deploy code onto onto, like, rote robotic automation platforms, which are basically for warehouses, for logistics, and they have their own programming languages. So that was a a piece of curriculum that we specifically wrote and developed platform for them to be able to train people that that start as entry level engineers in within their company.

13:02 In terms of competition, it's a rather fragmented market. There's quite a lot of small providers. You'll see that there's obviously, the universities will be someone that you think was like you're competing with universities in terms of, you know, people can learn to code and become a software developer or technologist through university as well. The one thing that's different about NORTHCODERS is we are very agile, and we turn we turn around curriculum changes very, very in a very, very short space of time. So whilst the university might spend one or two years with a big shift in their in their large curriculum, you know, we can really keep on the bleeding edge which employees want to see, from from us, and that's why we're one of the one of the the best choices. We do we are going into new areas such as cybersecurity and also different geographical regions. So there is the potential as well within a fragmented market for us to pick up small acquisitions, but more to do with acquisitions that fit our road map as a company as opposed to, like, an earnings enhancing acquisition. We we think that's the the most likely, and maybe some of those in the future.

14:05 There's a humongous market for what we do as a business. The technology sector is incredibly attractive to people deciding what to do with with their careers because the salary is around 60% higher on average than the national average salary. And, you know, we're just hearing from companies all the time about them needing, you know, hundreds of people with these skills. So we see, you know, no no reason to think that this that this market will will slow down at all for in the coming years. No chance whatsoever.

14:36 Okay. Charlotte? Fab. So, we've just got a slide here to kind of demonstrate one of our core, values. Diversity and inclusion is at the heart of everything we do here at NORTHCODERS. Not only is it really important to us, but also to all of our staff members. We have committees within the business that are dedicated to recognizing what is needed in the market and what changes are needed to be made. We speak to our tech partners all the time that and, the the the thing we're getting back is that, the industry is screaming out for diversity, and so we feel that we are in a great position to be able to create that. We do this with accessibility for our all of our courses, and we do this by making NORTHCODERS a great place to come and learn.

15:32 Cool. Thank you, Charlotte. Okay. And then, yeah, Charlotte will go over some of the financial points from our interim results in in in some more detail. Yep. So, just as I'm popping through these, financial statements, it's kind of maybe worth pointing out that the comparative with the 06/30/2021 was actually a month before we did the IPO. So we IPO ed in July 21. But if you can see as you can see, we've over doubled revenue since then. We did the IPO to set out on a growth journey, so that is obviously expected. But we have done 600,000 than we did in the full full year, less than what we did in the full year last year. So really promising for the full year this year.

16:19 We as we were saying before, we are super happy with that 70% gross profit margin, although it is slightly lower than in previous periods. We have just gone through a period of rising salaries, and we we was locked in to quite a few of our contracts with regards to price per seat. We just recontracted with the DFE, and we've we have increased that price per seat. And we've also created efficiencies, and we will continue to create efficiencies within the business, which means that we shouldn't fall too much to these rises in salaries. As you can also see, the adjusted EBITDA margin has increased.

17:05 It's not increased as a comparative to the six months ended June 2021. But as we were saying that we have invested a lot of money into marketing, into headcount, since that period after the IPO, but we are starting to climb from the position that we was in at the end of the full year last year.

17:27 We are confident with our, adjusted EBITDA that we, are on track for the full year. We we forecast a slight increase in the second half of the year when it comes to EBITDA.

17:45 And then if we go on to the cash flow, so I'll just kind of pick a few bits off here. So there has been an increase in trade and other receivables. This is due to, the growing revenue and also the fact that we, we get apprenticeship revenue and DFE revenue slightly on slightly longer term than we would, obviously, a student just paying up front to set the course. With the DFE, we get a chunk when they they've been on the course for a week, and then we get the other half when they have kind have graduated. So this does cause a bit of a, receivable at the end of the period. And compared to our cash balance, it's not that's not an issue for us carrying that sort of receivable, and we have no we've had have had no bad debt in the period, and it it does come in quite quickly.

18:37 Trade payables, a slight increase, but nothing as as not expected just due to the growing business. And then if we move down to cash from investing activities, you can see that we've had no new bank loans in the period. We are continuing to pay off our existing loans, and we have a low amount of interest on there as well. We ended the period with just over 1,000,000 in the bank.

19:09 We'll move on to the, statement of financial position. So as you can see, if we look at the end of the year last year on noncurrent assets to now, they have increased slightly. So we are investing into intangible assets. So we, we have a core team of software engineers, and all of our tutors are also software engineers. So we like to rotate them onto corporate projects and onto internal projects as well.

19:37 We are building out our onboarding process to make that better for our applicants and so that we know where people are struggling with that application process, where people are falling off, which will in turn mean that we can convert some more of them, applicants into students whilst also keeping the standards really high. We are also building out our delivery platform, which will enable us to deliver our course with less staff. And then it may be worth noting on here as well that we have about 600,000 of borrowings, so that brings our net cash figure to around 400,000.

20:22 And, obviously, if anyone has any more questions on the financials, pop them in the chat, and I can answer at the end. Cool. Okay. So what's the plan for the future? Northcoders, we, are we will roll out, when the time is right. We will open more Northcoders hubs at the moment. We're just really making sure that we utilize those ones that we've got and properly measure exactly what a hub should look like. There's a few different things we've done in in terms of our of our regional hubs. We are looking at doing, other technical services. So we are only just launching data engineering on a small scale after having tested the curriculum and the demand and everything else. So we will be investing in in in the growth within data engineering over the coming years. Then there is also DevOps and cloud services. There's a huge demand for cloud transformation, sort of cloud migration experts in in, you know, digital transformation projects within the industry. So that's we feel is our next is our next protocol. Then, yeah, you know, not many days go by without you without hearing about a sort of cybersecurity attacks.

21:30 That's obviously a cybersecurity consultant. It's also another huge market that we haven't even touched yet. And then alongside this, these are, like, very heavily technical areas. So these are sort of, like, what will be suitable for the same type of people who kind of apply to NORTHCODERS and enroll in our programs on our software development programs. We also believe that there's opportunity for people who maybe these really highly technical topics are not quite right for, such as project support, Salesforce engineering, business analysts, and design, like UX and UI design and so on. There's a huge demand for all of these roles, and that's something else that we're not fulfilling. So it is also on our road map to to invest in and launch those technical services over the coming next sort of twenty four months.

22:17 Cool. Yeah. So I think we have covered most on this slide. Obviously, demand is at an all time high. We are growing the teaching team well. We we acquire most of our teachers straight off the boot camp, so we have no issues there with, employing teaching team to grow. We we've we've seen 30% of our students taught, that were nonuniversity educated. We do, genuinely believe that this is an alternative to university and that, people don't need to be getting as in debt as what a university course, causes. And then the average starting salary is also increasing. We are reporting an average starting salary of around 27,000, but this is this is due to go up in the next couple of months. And we've got consultancies out there paying £45,000 for a junior software engineer.

23:17 And then we will keep expanding our funding options, and we will keep making sure that our course is as accessible as possible for everyone. And Outlook, so all the applications are continuing. We have contracted bookings for the full year '22 of around 5,500,000. We have some contracts that are waiting to be signed, but because they're not signed on the dotted line, cannot be included in that figure. But we also have a 2,500,000 already contracted for next year as well. Really happy to see this revenue visibility, something that wasn't wasn't a thing for us a couple of years ago. As we're starting to to sign these bigger contracts, this is something that we will we will see more and more of, especially as we move and we grow the corporate side of the business.

24:09 The corporate contracts are usually around twelve to eighteen months long, so these will provide us with a lot of visibility. And then we just got a bit on here, regarding the Crown Commercial. So we've just, been a we've just been awarded, like, approved supplier on the, Crown Commercial, which is the government's procurement system. So we're going to explore what options and what that will bring us. It's just another nice procurement system to be, included on. And then as we said before, we have a growth plan, and we have a plan for these different tech disciplines. We have plans for new hubs, and we will continue to grow organically, but we will also keep an eye out for any potential acquisitions that would make strategic sense.

25:01 Cool. Mhmm. That's it. Skips as well, Charlotte. There we go. Okay. Cool. Yeah. We've got a few questions. I think if I start with the top few, Charlotte, because they're mostly stuff that I would usually answer. So that one's first one's on Crown Crown Commercial. So, yeah, thanks for the questions. We'll go through them. So in terms of the Crown Commercial, the the opportunity that that offer in terms of so we have recently packaged we moved away from the corporate solutions description to the business services where we, yeah, we package our products. And, for example, let's use the accelerator. Our accelerator is a day rate consultant that you have. So you say, right. I want a junior developer. I want to learn this specific programming language and this specific framework, and then I'll sign a contract with you for twelve months so that you look after them for twelve months. And then in twelve months time, they belong.

25:55 They too pay over to the company. So in terms of Crown Commercial, the way that these opportunities are graded, there's like a scale for them that you that that that you grade your skill set. So a normal sunken out of North Coast would normally be like a a assist level. So if we are on Crown Commercial and we see a company requires, like, a government organization, DVLA, for example, requires eight assist level data engineers on this date for this length of time on this rate, we would be able to just fulfill that requirement because we've had all the, like, the procurement and the due diligence has been done on our company. So we could just say, right. We've got those people. You can have them. There's also a big opportunity that comes out of Crown Commercial, which is more strategic for us, which is if the government awards a huge contract to one of the big players, like someone like Accenture would be an example of a company that would win.

26:46 I do believe that there was a few quid spent on a on a track and trace COVID app, for example. We probably all heard about the amount of money there. But it's usually, in the contracts that, one of the one of these huge firms must spend some of the the amount of the contract in their supply chain must be an SME. So whereby if NORTHCODERS can fulfill, you know, that that those that criteria as well so that we can contract to, obviously, a subcontractor of someone who's doing a humongous government contract, that's a good opportunity from that that that comes as being now that we've passed being on Crown Commercial Service. So so that's what percentage of the market share do you do you currently have? So we are the the we are the biggest coding coding boot camp. We are the biggest in terms of out of the coding boot camps that we consider to be the premium price point whereby you've got sort of got MACE Academy in London. You've CODE PLAN in Scotland. There is a few others operating in and around London as well that are literally that sort of immersive experience. It's around about 8,000 revenue per per learner. We are the largest of those. In terms of market share, when you consider universities, apprenticeships, corporate academy programs, you know, absolutely all the the different solutions that a company could turn to, elearning, whatever you might wanna might wanna count in that, then, yeah, the the opportunity is is humongous because it would be a very tiny very tiny percentage. But in terms of, CODE MOOC counts

28:17 here, we are the the the biggest provider in terms of, students and graduates. And the secret source or USP, which is the next question, which falls on to say, is that we've had that 94% statistic of people being accepted by employers. You know, out of those 400 parts that we built up, so many of those people are coming back, you know, for more and more, people from us. And well, what really sets us apart is making sure that we are we are the company that we take a vast amount of applications from people, and we make sure that we only offer off offer places to people who this is gonna be the right thing for as opposed to there's lots of me too as out there. There's lots of our you can go online now and say, oh, do a coding boot camp for a thousand pounds from a, you know, a a broad provider, and that's all well and good. But we believe in our outcomes, and that's how we we we would measure because we also our accelerators and incubators, our business services, all rely on having having the best graduates coming out of our coming out of our boot camp.

29:26 There's a question about hubs here, Charlotte. Yeah. So how many more hubs are you planning to roll out across the next few years? Per hub, can you outline your aims around number of cohorts per year, number of students per cohort, and price per student? So the first part of this question, we the aim was to, by next year, have done Newcastle, Birmingham, which we've already done, and then Liverpool and Sheffield as well, and that was kind of the plan that was to our IPO. Now at IPO stage, we didn't actually realize how easy it would be to kind of penetrate these areas without having act actually having a hub there. We have currently got lots of students studying from London, and we don't have a hub in London.

30:15 So that's kind of made us sit back slightly and kind of assess whether we do need a physical presence in these locations. And if we do, what what are we looking to invest? How much are we looking to spend on this? And taking into account that we're already getting the learners there anyway. And the conclusion that we came to was that having a small kind of WeWork hub gives us, the presence in that region to be able to really connect with businesses. It also gives us, a place for students to be able to pop in if they need to or for us to hold events, but it definitely does not need to be as big, as what we we kind of originally planned. And so we're looking at a cost of around 300 to £400 a month, to run one of these hubs, which is is obviously it's it's nothing.

31:12 So we are planning on doing Sheffield and Newcastle Sheffield and Liverpool, sorry, in the next kind of twelve months, and then we're gonna reassess it again after that. We really feel like right now, it's the growing the product range that is going to generate, more return than the actual hubs. And then with regards to per hub, can we outline the aims around the number of cohorts per year? It it does work slightly differently. So our cohorts are done kind of on a top line basis. So say we had a cohort of a 100 people, that 100 people can be studying from anywhere. So we could have someone studying in France. We could have a group of 20 people in Leeds, 20 people in Manchester, and 30 people from at home.

32:03 It really doesn't matter where the person is studying from. All of our lectures are streamed out onto our platform online. All of our lectures are live. So just because it's online, people are not seeing a recording. It is all live. And then we have a help desk system, which means that no matter where you are studying from, you can jump onto our help desk, and a tutor can be on your screen within a couple of minutes. Cool. Thanks, Sean. So question here about when you're winning, like, new business in the corporate business services. You know, what's the kinda, like, sales cycle? What's contract size. And so we have recently packaged these products into being more of a to to reduce the sales cycle because it was consultative and, yeah, it was time consuming.

32:50 It took a long time. You'd sit down with the business and ask them, know, what do you need? What could we do for you? How do we solve your problems? And each one would end up more tailored, more bespoke. Now that's fully packaged, some of those sales cycles will come down will will come down dramatically when we just say to a company, you know, you need this product. In terms of the the size of contacts, so the contacts depends on the the again, depends on the size of the team, but we roughly a accelerator accelerator developer is about 60,000 revenue for NORTHCODERS over over a twelve month period. And, obviously, an incubator will be multiple will be multiple accelerated developers with, you know, the the kind you kind of you really senior mentors and technologists are sort of can be 20,000 a month per per individual depending on what their contract, is with that, what what the needs of that business are.

33:44 So the in terms of the all given demands at an all time high and regular price increases planned over the next few years, so we did increase, yeah, the price, and we have increased the price again. We've also not only increased the price, of the course. Obviously, we've gotta do this with, you know, a little bit of, making sure that we're still gonna attract people. But in terms of the funded route for the course, we, yeah, we were successful in increasing that price due to, our costs going up. And we also for our data engineering, when we applied some funding to to get people on to doing data engineering, we increased the price further. We weren't having any problems with with with any push backs of, you know, the kind of education system saying, oh, you know, you need to start assessing your costs rather than concentrating on providing excellence, which is which is hope hopefully the way that it will stay.

34:31 We've just got one here. In terms of the different business segments, e g, hopes, business services, etcetera, what what proportion of sales do they contribute towards, and which is the most profitable? And so next year, we're forecasting that business services will be around 10% of total revenue. And we are and then we're we are looking to grow that that number. Training is more profitable than business services. The business services model, especially when it's when we are contracting out a consultant, is obviously it's it it contributes less to gross profit. But we do gen we do believe that this is a is a lot easier to grow.

35:16 This will be a more rapid growth area for the business. And also a lot of those people that go into the business services products used to just get given to companies for free. So whether it's highly higher profitability in terms of gross profit margin or not, we that we just give them give them to companies for for free. Right? So two questions in one about the how difficult it is to recruit teachers and also what our retention is like. So we we have a highly motivated core tech team, which is, for example, are now developing the data engineering curriculum, and we brought in an industry expert data engineer to assist in making sure that we're hitting up, know, getting it right in terms of what companies need and what people need to know to be able to succeed in data engineering. So we'll have to always bring in someone like that, like an expert in their field to work in our core in our core tech team. But, you know, we have a highly motivated team that do most of the development, the grit, and the delivery. We've got a great share options program, and we always make sure that we are on top. Obviously, salaries are. There's no doubt about it. They are increasing in in in technology sector. They that they've gone up a lot, but we always keep up with that. And we've done very well with retention for for that group of really sort of hard to hard to kind of find, hard to retain type type type of employee.

36:34 In terms of, actually, the numbers that require, like the ratios of the amount of survey time we have 10 students, we need a we need a mentor. People stay on as a North Coney resident from our boot camp. So they stay on. They repeat the course again, and then they stay on. They begin to have a group of people that are there. So it's the first port of call for. So there's a lot of people coming through the CODE boot camps, and we obviously have early access to hire both not only the best people, but all the people that that that that we need. So that's never been a problem for us, the amount of teachers that we've that we've required. Learning numbers. So Charlotte's question here about h one. Many How many learners enrolled in h one twenty two and forecast number of enrollments for 22 in its entirety, and then the forecast enrollments for 23.

37:25 And so in h one twenty two, we enrolled, onto we we accepted onto programs around 500 learners. And we expect this to, be the same again in h two, so around a thousand learners for 2022, which is obviously a huge, huge growth in our numbers. It's really, really hard to predict the sales mix at NORTHCODERS. So we we obviously have a capacity. We have a capacity of of teachers, and we are growing that all the time. But we and we do forecast a sales slip. But, if a pro if if something comes in and it would make sense more sense to do a corporate academy rather than have an extra 20 people on the boot camp, or it would make sense to, to do a corporate product, then we we are quite, we will pivot, and we will we'll move around to what makes more sense profitability wise and for what makes more sense to the business.

38:31 And in terms of the ratio of applicants accepted to boot campers, well, so we had about 500 people come on, coming coming on coming on the course, and we had 3,005 in applications. So it's about one in seven in the first half year. This fluctuates slightly, but, yeah, it's about 20% of people who successfully onboard. We are looking at what we can do that's not the for the people who NORTHCODERS is right for, but maybe just the subject and the actual extreme, you know, technicality of it is not is not quite right for them, you know, looking at some of those tech adjacent subjects so we can expand not only to to those people being able to become part of NORTHCODERS and and and, you know, a great career, but also for us to to expand on those numbers that Charles discussed because we will introduce new new technical services next year, which we, you know, we don't have any plan to kind of quadruple the amount of software develops we produce, and we'd rather remain excellent and remain remain the best and get as many of those people as possible into our into our follow on, you know, our follow on revenue streams than and and start to grow the numbers in terms of doing different different disciplines.

39:39 Thank you very much. I think that's it. That are. Did we do the the churn amongst teachers? Yes. We covered that same time as, you know, the recruitment that, you know, the churn doesn't matter if it's if mentoring is not quite right for someone after after a couple of cohorts, you know, off they go that. And but the the really core hard to find technical team that we have, we, yeah, we we do well at retaining those. And in terms of people from the education from the education sector that we have that we bring on, like, we might have, like, returning teachers that maybe quit becoming a teacher to take a career break, then they'll come back in and work, like, because we have apprenticeships as well. We have to do a bit more formal education around you know, we're we're we're quite an appealing organization to work for compared to compared to working in a school. We do we we do a lot for for our employees to make sure that that that that they're happy.

40:29 And whilst in technology, you know, you might some people might say, oh, if there's no hammocks at NORTHCODERS, it is at Facebook, but I don't think they generally had hammocks in in the high school and others field that I went to for the teachers either. So they're they're not too difficult to to retain, and the salaries are generally higher at North Coast than they are in in in in in education as is the caseload a bit more bearable. Yeah. Yeah. We we genuine generally see a low staff turnover across the board. We work a four point five day week. We have really good, benefit packages for employees, and then we have the share options as well. So that helps. So we just got another quick question there so I can answer. So, yes, anything due for the 8% of applicants who we currently reject. Yeah. There's probably around about, around about, let's say, 20 another 20% again, so 25% of the 80% that would be a good candidate for some of these different areas, project support, Salesforce, business analysts and design, UI, UX, so on and so forth. Software testing is another one that's not seen on here, but it should definitely, that we would want to expand our technical services into, and that would be they would probably it probably is more the the technical element of of the process, which they were not right for. Two of the people who just don't really feel like North Coast is right for them, you know, you've really got to apply yourself, then, you know, there's obviously not a lot that we can that we that that we can do for people like that. We do sometimes have companies that that are in areas that don't really we don't really have a graduate output, so they might want to hire someone who might be of a slower learner

41:59 as an apprentice. But, you know, obviously, we sell ourselves on kind of that short, sharp, cutting edge graduate. So that's also not not always something that seems that seems a large suitable for a large proportion of people. Okay. Cool. I think that is everyone. Yeah. Chris, Charlotte, thank you for that. I think you actually managed to address every question from investors. And, of course, the company will review all those questions submitted today, and we'll publish search responses on the InvestMe company platform. But just before redirecting investors to provide you with their feedback, which I know is particularly important to you both Thank you, Chris, could I just ask you for a few closing comments? Yeah. I suppose. Just yeah. Thank you very much for giving us your time and joining us. We we love telling the story, and, you know, we're very proud of what we do as business, both, like, financially and those numbers that we produce, but also just, yeah, that that those opportunities we're creating for individuals and and the kind you know, it's a great business to to run. And thank you very much. And, yeah, as just asked, you know, there's there's a feedback form coming. It'd be fantastic to to to get your opinions, and thanks for all the questions. And and we'll see you again in a in a few months.

43:06 Thank you. Chris, Charlotte, thanks once again for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close the session as you'll now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order that the management team could better understand your views and expectations. This will only take a few moments to complete, but I'm sure it'll 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.