Pathos Communications (LSE:NEWS) — Investor Presentation

0:00 Good afternoon, and welcome to the PATHOS COMMUNICATIONS 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 using the Q and A tab situated on the right hand corner of your screen. Simply type in your questions and press send. Before we begin, I would like to submit the following poll. And I would now like to hand you over to CEO Omar Hamdi. Good afternoon to you. Thanks, Alex. Really good to be doing our first investor presentation on investor meet company. I think I'm gonna jump straight in. I'll do some introductions in a minute. But first of all, just on this cover page, the mission of PATHOS, connecting the world's SMEs to global press through through technology. And it's it's easy to forget that, you know, PR, it's not a new industry. The media is not really a new industry. The news is not a new industry.

0:59 But But no one's really cracked the code on how PR can work for the majority of businesses. SMEs are the majority of businesses. So it's a it's a big mission, and it's something we're we're very about. And we're the technology's there in 2025, 2026 for this to be possible, and it wasn't there just a few years ago. So we've got this this this this window of opportunity. Now a little bit about me. PATHOS really came out of two parts of my life. It was founded by me and and really bootstrapped and and self funded up until our IPO, which was just sort of six, seven weeks ago.

1:48 Two parts of my life that fueled the business, always been passionate about the media and worked in the media for almost a decade. My last job was as a TV presenter on BBC One Wales, a BAFTA winning consumer affairs show, and did lots of different things in the media before that. Just as passionate as I am about the media, I'm also passionate about technology, and it's important for all investors, you know, existing and potential to know that I've been into AI since before it was fashionable. So almost two decades ago, graduated in cognitive science and did a lot of AI at Leeds Uni. You put those two things together and you've got a a genuinely AI driven PR firm. I'm joined today by our wonderful CFO, Adam Hurst, who I work very, very closely with.

2:37 Adam? Yes. So I joined OMOL only back in July last year as the plans for the IPO took started to take shape. My background, big four trains. Worked my way through a number of different businesses, both private and public, large and small. Most recently, and the most relevant for for PATHOS, really, spent two and a half, three years at at Yale in in digital marketing, And I was I I had a year as a an interim CFO to aimless in cybersecurity business. So delighted to be on board and very excited by what we've done so far and what we are planning to do over the coming years. Thanks, Adam. And we're very keen on making sure we have, you know, the strongest management at every level of the business from the sort of day to day team leaders who are not in this presentation up to the board, and and very proud to have a very hands on, very, very experienced board.

3:38 We've got a chair, Mark Elliott, who's also chair at Jurney or PLC, and then our our two NEWS, Linda Marston Weston, who's a former senior partner at and Tunji Ekintoken, who's a senior director at LinkedIn. And, of course, you know, the the SME world sort of lives on LinkedIn. So very, very, very relevant experience there across the board. Executive summary, just some some key points just to get everyone sort of familiar with the business, rapidly scaling, tech enabled, human led PR company, and we use that technology and we use our processes to go to really every SME in the world, 400,000,000 of them, and say, what you're doing could be news, which is something that typically they haven't heard before. So this really a new type of business and a new opportunity.

4:36 This isn't a PR agency. Some of the some of the key financial highlights, very, very strong revenue growth, a good track record of being cash generative and profitable, and the quality of of that cash and that revenue continues to improve. So last year, 2025, just approaching half of the cash we received was from repeat customers, repeat business. So this is this is sticky. Once once an SME gets a taste of being in the media, they usually like to continue. And more on 2025 in our trading update, which we'll talk about later, but it's $13,200,000 of revenue and adjusted EBITDA just under 3,000,000, 2,900,000.

5:23 A sense of the operations, really, really diversified. I think a lot of the time when businesses don't do as well as they aspire to do, it it it comes down to customer concentration, especially in the agency world. You know, you have sort of, you know, one or two or three big customers. We don't have that problem. So over 6,000 clients in more than 80 countries. So we're not even, you know, completely exposed to a particular geography or a particular economy and certainly not a particular industry. I'd encourage anyone who has time to to go to our website, pay on resultspr.com, hear from our clients because, actually, what they say is is is in a lot of ways more important than anything me or Adam are gonna say today.

6:09 We've got over 900 video testimonials. These have happened completely organically. We record our Zoom meetings, and when someone says something positive, we ask them if they can use if we can use it, and usually they say yes. That's a really, really powerful asset for us as we continue to grow the business. We've also got another very powerful asset, which is our over 370,000 leads or or really community members. These are people who are in our ecosystem. These are people we've had conversations with, and it might have not been the right time or it might have not been the right news hook or the right opportunity. To have, you know, marching towards half a million people in that community without us really needing to do any sort of cold marketing or advertising.

6:57 Very proud of some of our differentiators. We've got a pay on results model, which is really, really key, and this is this is something that our customers love that we we we we charge them after we've done the work, not monthly. And we've talked about this already, completely bootstrapped, No funding from any external sources up to our IPO, which I think talks about the strength of the business and and the size of the opportunity and the momentum that we've had and continue to have very, very diversified revenue. You know, I I don't stay up at night worrying about a downturn in a particular industry, or what if a particular customer decides they don't love us anymore? We've really derisked it very, very nicely there. We've got great publisher relationships, which are growing, especially post IPO. It was one of the rationales for the IPO.

7:50 And we've got our AI to a good state, and we'll talk about that later. Just the overview, talked about the rationale. I think, really, we've got three core constituencies in our business day to day in no particular order. We've got clients. Publishers, so the publications that we work with to publish news items about our clients, and we've got employees. And I've already seen just in the first few weeks of 2026, all three of those relationships have been transformed. I can see, you know, renewed energy and enthusiasm from our existing team members. The quality of person coming into the business is higher than, you know, anything we've seen before. You know, I I talked to new starters on their first day, and, you know, they they know how much we raised and on what date the IPO was, and they're very, very excited to be part of a public company that's that's growing.

8:48 And similarly with publishers and clients, it's it's it's really, really helping. And, of course, the use of proceeds, the £5,000,000 is quite handy. And so we we are gonna continue our sort of global expansion investing in in staff in general, but also down at the bottom there in more specific investments around client retention. Our repeat business team has almost doubled in headcount and in its actual productivity in in the last couple of months. The the big one is the technology, and our technology, as we'll see later, it's at a good state now where it's a really, really valuable internal tool. But there's a long road for us to go on to get that state to to get that technology to the stage where it's some people call it production grade, some people say general availability, where we can put it in the hands of clients and prospects. And everyone watching this presentation, we can say, here here's our technology.

9:50 Play around with it. Have a virtual publicist. And that that's the thing that can be really, really transformational. Some more detail now about the business. The pay on results model we've talked about, very, very important for our customers. Access to established news publications. These are real publications, and there's a a representative sample of some of the publications we work with in the top right corner. Technology really enables everything we do, which means that we don't have the people risk that PR agencies have. We're we're we're really a completely different type of business. You know, if you're ambitious and hardworking, you you can be a member of our team because the technology, the processes, the tools are there to to allow you to do what a traditional publicist or a traditional PR firm would do, but in a very, very sort of frictionless way in a very attractive business model for our customers.

10:53 Strong sustainable commercial relationships with publishers. These are commercial relationships. It's not a relationship in the old fashioned, meaning where it's, you know, someone Omar used to, you know, play lacrosse with, now runs a newspaper. These are scalable, sustainable relationships, which, again, is is is really, really important to us. And we've got a very, very robust marketing machine. We've got a massive market that we need to get in front of, and we're we're very good at getting in front of that market quite efficiently. Some of our daily KPIs, and these are KPIs that we generally hit. These are not aspirational KPIs. More than 500 leads generated, so these are people putting their hand up saying, I might be interested in a nice story being written about my business. Over a 150 meetings booked and over $5,000 in revenue.

11:49 All of this has led to a a a relatively full trophy cabinet, fastest growing advertising and marketing firm in The UK, and the thirty third fastest growing company of any type in Europe. Those are both according to the Financial Times f t 1,000, and their latest ranking will be released in early March. So watch this space. I can't say anymore at this stage. Deloitte very kindly ranked us as as the sixth fastest growing tech business in The UK. That was late last year. And private equity as well has recognized us, the LDC, as the the most ambitious business leader. So all all of that is there to show that, you know, this is a business with a real track record.

12:36 We're we're not asking investors to take a punt. It it it's really more of the same and just taking the brakes off. Just something from our clients, the most important voice in all of this before I I hand over to to Adam to hear about our business model and and and some of the some of the the financials that drive the business. This is quite an important slide because we are not asking SMEs to invest in media coverage out of vanity or gut instinct. Everything we do is focused on a business case on achieving ROI for our customers. And that's why last year, almost half of the cash coming into the business was from repeat business. And if you look at these different applications of what we do, you that should give you a sense of actually how diverse our customer universe is and how diverse it it can become as we continue to grow.

13:38 Some very sort of traditional things, you know, like driving sales, I don't think any salesperson would not like to be able to say, did you see this nice article written about our product? Please sign up. But then new use cases are emerging all the time. So brand visibility and discoverability, people sometimes think of PR as this very sort of stale dated industry, but look at LLMs. Look at ChatGPT. Where are they pulling their references from? They're pulling their references from trusted sources, which quite often that's media coverage. And you can see just one of our clients there saying that, wow. You know? ChatGPT is now saying exactly what I wanted it to say about me because what I want it to say about me is in the news. So this is this is something that's developing and and and growing all the time.

14:34 And now over to Adam. Thank you, Omar. So just a little bit about the markets and competitive landscape, and I'll talk a little bit about our that business model in a bit more detail. So just to start with, you know, the global SME market is huge, and and it's you know, you can see the numbers here. It it just which means we feel we there's an absolutely huge opportunity for us in a in an area that really hasn't been addressed yet by the PR world. And the beauty of this market is it's it's self self replenishing. So, you know, obviously, our business is dropping out and but business is coming in all the time. So huge opportunity, and and it's growing.

15:22 From a competitive perspective, again, taking one step back as as we've talked about already, the traditional PR model, obviously, is is the retainer based model. It's estimates that they're around about a 145,000 agencies globally. The vast majority, you know, potentially one or two person organizations, but all pretty much all charging a a retainer upfront, which as we as we as we say, is kind of gongs out most most SMEs and and micro SMEs. We we believe that there are, you know, less less than 1% of US SMEs have currently had access to external PR or marketing. And what we've tried to do on the right hand side here is just and I won't go through it in detail, but just set out some of the the areas where we differentiate ourselves from that that traditional model. And to date, we really haven't come across anybody that is that is established in the way that we have using the tech, the way that we have doing this PATHOS results model at scale successfully.

16:23 So we we we do believe we're we're we're in in a great position where we are at the moment and obviously continuing to build build on that. And Omar will talk more about the tech shortly. Just if I just spend a couple of moments confirming or explaining a little bit in a little bit more detail how the business actually works. Our contract our our in intro contract price is is a flat fee of $5,000 per published article. As we've called out at the top of the slide, our customers will only pay us, we only invoice them, when they have agreed the article and they've agreed the publication, and and that's all done on a on a Zoom call. Once that's happened, we publish the article, and then we take payments.

17:14 That's that is our main intro point for the market. Once we've established a relationship with the clients and they've they've done one, maybe two or three articles with us, we have our PATHOS priority offering where for an upfront annual fee of just under $1,000, we give clients access to a reduced headline fee for publication for getting published of $3,500 per article. And that's a product that we introduced probably a year or eighteen months ago, and that's that's kind of growing nicely. From a lead time perspective, our customers will sign a contract with us after they've been through the sales process. And then it's it's usually between two to four, maybe six weeks working with our content team and our customer success team on ensuring that the article that we're generating is one that they're happy with and also confirming that they are comfortable with that publication.

18:15 And it's as I say, it's after that publication that we we then invoice. And from an accounting perspective, on publication of the article, we recognize the revenue. It's it's not when when the contract is signed. And when when you look at the numbers, when I explain the p and l shortly, our main cost is our fee to the publishers, and our fee is amounts that we pay them for their admin services. So we are not advertising content. We are we we contribute, and we are paying them an admin fee for the work. That's that's very important. I think with that, Omar, back to you to just go through a case study.

19:01 Yeah. Thank you, Adam. So just just to paint a picture here, it was quite difficult to select a sort of typical PATHOS customer because it is a big universe. But I think this is a a pretty typical customer. This is head to toe health care. It's a husband and wife business in Tucson, Arizona. It's called head to toe health care because doctor Alan Chi, who's the CEO, is the is a podiatrist, is a foot doctor, and his his wife is a neurologist. So head to toe health care. Lead generated through telemarketing. February 2023 came on as a first time customer, and now we've got additional $60,000 in business, and and and that relationship is ongoing.

19:52 And there's a nice testimonial there from from doctor Sheehan. You know, there are so many businesses like this in the world that are genuinely newsworthy. I mean, look at some of the screenshots on the right. I mean, any PR or any publicist would be very, very proud of of getting some of these logos and some of this coverage. Let's talk about our sales cycle because it's important to be clear. We've we've got a relatively mature sales and marketing machine, and we've we've done the hard work of trial and error and, teething problems and sort of developing our processes. And and and we've done that hard work in private, literally, before coming to market recently. And we've got a good sort of flywheel.

20:38 So if we start at at 12:00 there, phase one, you generate the lead. You identify that this business seems to be newsworthy. They're doing some interesting things. There are some news hooks, some news stories, or some news themes that they could hook onto. And it doesn't look if you put the company name into Google News, it doesn't look like they're they're doing much with that at the moment. You generate the lead, qualify that, nurture that through telemarketing, have the initial sales meeting with one of our PR consultants, get them signed up. Then stage four, very, very important, and it's one of the more recent additions to this flywheel, but so so important as we grow further and further. Quality control with you. So we've got a really, really helpful and simple color coded system, red, amber, green, depending on the risk that we see around that client, whether it's risk around the client's expectations, whether it's risk around the client's ability to pay, etcetera. And and and we only proceed once we can get that to a a place that everyone is comfortable with.

21:52 Once we proceed, we're then agreeing content, creating that content, getting it approved by the client, and then getting them published invoicing. Then phase seven, the return on investment call, which I I think we have a whole slide on this. Very, important that we then spend time with the customer saying, right. You know, you've you've just had your toe dip. You've just had your, in many cases, in most cases, your first ever piece of media coverage. So what? What are you gonna do with it? How are we gonna make this pay for itself? And we're very, very proud to have an ROI team, which is really a team of marketing consultants, really, that help our clients realize the values with every drop of value from the work that we do. And then the client retention team or or the repeat business team, we call them internally, who are then driving as many of those clients as possible into PATHOS priority.

22:50 So it's it's a relatively well old machine. Of course, if we're aiming or aspiring or dreaming of going from $13,000,000 in revenue to a $100,000,000 in revenue, then at some point, various things are gonna break and need to be rebuilt just as over the last several years, things have broken and needed to be rebuilt, and we embrace that. All of this is tied together through our CRM system and making sure that we capture all of the data on all of our customers so that we can continue to grow those relationships. The scale of our customer acquisition channels. So okay. You've got a great machine, PATHOS. What's the fuel for the machine? Are we relying on one of fuel that might that that that might disappear overnight?

23:42 The answer is is no. We we aim to limit ourselves to no more than 30% of our sales meetings coming from a particular lead source or a particular channel, and you'll see there along the left very, very nicely diversified and also not correlated. So if something changes in the world of Facebook ads, that's unlikely to affect telemarketing. If something happens in telemarketing, it's unlikely to affect our strategic partnerships. So it it's all about just derisking and making sure that we're ready to just keep growing over time, and we're we're we're very happy with this. And and and and this applies to our our cold audiences, so the first time we're having a conversation with someone, as well as that very significant warm audience, those 370,000 people.

24:36 And here's here's an interesting fact for everyone. Most of our sales come through repeated conversations. So it's it that ecosystem is is really fueling the business on its own right in its own right. So the tech enabled process, we're gonna get into detail on the technology in a minute. But just to give you the vision of how we designed the business with technology being the lubricant that drives everything through through this. So the lead is generated through telemarketing. PATHOS MIND, our AI agent stack, will be assessing that lead. And as soon as that telemarketer gets on the phone to quite often just introduce the idea of PR to that SME, that that telemarketer will have on the screen in front of them an analysis of news hooks, some draft articles, some conversation points.

25:39 If they will also know if that person has posted anything particularly newsworthy on LinkedIn in the last several weeks. So it's it's the kind of thing that it would take a PR agency a couple of months to do, and I'm not exaggerating. It would take them a couple of months to do that, and the customer would probably be on their third monthly retainer until they get this. We have on the first phone call before someone has even thought about signing up as a client. The introductory client meeting, we have Priscilla, the virtual publicist, who joins our Zoom meetings, and she takes notes the same way as probably most of the people watching this have have seen sort of AI notetakers. The difference with Priscilla is she actually does something useful with the notes. So immediately after the call, she'll email article ideas and draft articles to each participant based on what they said in that meeting. So if we just take a step back, that is like having a full time publicist. That's exactly what a full time publicist would do. He or she would follow around the CEO of a company and be in all of their meetings and take notes and do things with those notes.

26:50 The article is is, of course, generated through PATHOS MIND. Stage four, that's when the humans get involved. I'm a big fan of humans, and we we talk about being, you know, AI fed, human led. Seems to be the formula that works best for us. And it's very, very important now and for the foreseeable future that humans stay involved for quality control and and and and and also just for sort of humanizing the the whole process from a customer's perspective. And then, of course, the final stage there, stage five, is is is publication. So now we're gonna talk about PATHOS MIND and Prosella, the two AI tools that we've built already.

27:38 PATHOS MIND is is our AI agent stack. It really allows us to to be very, very productive. It allows us to have staff that have really the same skills as world class publicists even if our staff might not have twenty years of experience in PR and media. The give first client approach, I think this is really important. If you just think of it from a prospect's perspective or a client's perspective, there are people in our office today calling prospects, saying, I've I've got got an article written about you. Can we go through it together just to do a quick fact check? And then we can get it to publishing.

28:24 So they will do in fifteen minutes what a what a PR agency will do in a month. I mean, that's that's really not an exaggeration from my experience of of seeing both models in action. PATHOS MIND monitors more than 50,000 news sources every day, And, of course, it has a perfect memory, so it's it's better than human in that respect. Identifies news hoax, drafts, articles in real time. Now once we've developed this technology and, you know, we plan to be we wanna get a move on with this. So we would hope that, you know, late this year, we can begin to to roll this out. For PATHOS MIND, we see this as being a a tool for internal and external PR teams.

29:11 So we see ourselves going to remember when Adam mentioned the 145,000 PR firms in the world? Most of them are one man, one woman bands or or relatively small organizations. We wanna go to those 145,000 PR firms and say, let us be your cloud kitchen. Let us be your support. Here is a great tool for you. And then, of course, that can bring revenue once we see what they're working on, and we say, well, we see that you did a really interesting article using PATHOS MIND. Can we support you in getting that published? Can we do anything else for that client? So really, really excited to see what PATHOS MIND can do. Now we have Prosella. And these are real screenshots, by the way.

29:56 We are using these tools every day internally. So this is one of our PR consultants, Danny, and you can see that he's speaking to a prospect, and Prosella is there on the call supporting Danny, helping him prepare for the call, and then with follow ups and sharing content. And we really see Priscilla as a virtual employee in the same way that a a business might use a a virtual assistant offshore somewhere. You know, Priscilla is a member of the team, and you can chat to her through through WhatsApp, iMessage, SMS. We're gonna work on on getting her socials set up. And I think the the vision for Priscilla is is once she's well well trained enough, and just like human employees, she needs training, retraining, feedback. She's just like a human employee, once she's trained enough, this is gonna be very, very exciting. And this is the stuff I really dream about at night is is is saying to those 370,000 prospects and customers that are in our ecosystem saying, we believe every SME deserves a full time publicist.

31:06 We know you're not gonna pay a $100 a year to employ one. Have Prosella. And then Prosella all of the Prosellas in the world will be really our virtual Salesforce. So very, very excited about what we can do there, and we're already getting great results with her internally. The repeat business strategy, we've we've we've touched on this, but this is really, really important because this is what takes us from a a sort of one time transaction to an ongoing relationship with our clients, and we're really quite successful at that. So we've got a dedicated ROI team, and they will they they will ask the clients, what were you hoping that this would really achieve for you? And then they will share best practice. And I think that's the great thing about having over 6,000 clients. We don't believe that anyone has as much data on SME PR campaigns in the round as we do. So we we can share best practice. We can show them examples.

32:09 Once they've understood the ROI and they've really got a plan for squeezing every bit of value from the media coverage, that's when they then move into repeat business, which is you know, it's it's a relatively new part of the business. It was it was late twenty twenty four, but it's it's it's scaling very, very nicely. And and sometimes as teams scale, you you you worry about sort of dilution of standards. That isn't happening. The the the the value of that team is is is is increasing in line with the headcount, which is always nice. So they they follow-up with clients. They obviously make a lot of use of of PATHOS MIND and Prosella, and and clients seem to really love that that 3,500 price point that being in priority gives them access to.

32:59 And now it's time for some financials. Adam. Exciting stuff. Right. So this these these are just the historics. We'll talk about the FY '25 initial unaudited numbers a little later. But you can see that very, very rapid growth once the business really started to scale up in in f y twenty two. And over those two years, we were up to 83% CAGR. What you will see in in '24 from a revenue perspective is that that growth was was somewhat less less great. It was still double digit growth. But in f y twenty four, there were two major things that were happening. Number one, and again, we'll talk about it in a moment, you'll see further down that we we started experiencing quite a lot of a significant level of bad debt experience.

33:51 As the business was growing rapidly, I think it's fair to say that the process didn't quite keep up with the the sales growth. That was addressed in the first quarter of f y twenty five where we started to do a lot more work on quality control in terms of the customers that we were onboarding. So that that was partially responsible for a bit of a slowing in in the growth. And also, obviously, the amount of time and effort of the management team during 2025 with the IPO held held everything back a little bit. But that both those points are now out the way, so we're we're hoping to obviously now now move on in the future. Gross margins, very strong gross margins. As you can see, the the vast majority of the costs that go into our cost of sales are the amounts of that we pay the publishers.

34:43 We also allocate some of our sales team in there. Admin costs, a lot of that is headcount, and that's obviously been growing as we've been ramping up the business. In 2024, we also put a lot more money behind marketing costs and outbound marketing than we had previously, and that that's at the level now that we believe will will sustain going forward. I've mentioned that that bad debt write off. As I say, it was a it was a legacy issue that by the time I joined in the middle of last year, the the underlying factors have been resolved. It was really an issue that was identified towards the back end of twenty twenty four and then into early twenty five, and Omar and the team put a lot of work into completely revamping the onboarding procedures and also the the cash collection processes as well.

35:37 And and since that's happened from the April 1, the the the numbers are are very, very materially improved. Moving down, it looks like the odd that amortization and depreciation only start in 2024. That has to do with accounting for leases for those of you that like accounting. In previous years, as the business was when it started up, we were just paying an annual an annual rent. But in 2024, at the start of 2024, we signed a a five year lease. And at that point, we the accounting treatment is is very different, and we have to put the lease on the balance sheet and depreciate it. But that that was also what the finance expense is that relates to the the lease.

36:25 And then finally, these these are these numbers are adjusted. Historically, there were there was a lot of distortion through the the directors and the founders draw drawings from the business. What we've done in the adjusted line is we have assumed in the admin expenses the the level of salary for Omar that he is now on going forward so that you've got a a smooth and a sensible underlying position. There there were a couple of other adjustments that went through in 2024 that were were one off in nature, but the majority of it was the alignment with the founder's drawings. And then tax tax charge is is low due to the structure of the group. Our our operational hub is is is in Dubai.

37:13 We we that that that structure means that we have a a very low tax charge. That's the historic p and l. The balance sheet's not a huge amount to to to to talk about here. You can see the that lease coming onto the balance sheet in 2024, And, you know, we exited 2024 with about $200,000 of cash. Really nothing more significant to to talk about there. We we as I said before, we we put some very significant provisions into the the balance sheet for the historic receivables. So the net announced the balance sheet was was pretty low. And then finally, cash flow. Again, not a huge amount to talk about here.

38:01 You can see the depreciation coming through, and it's really just the adjusting items that that in 2024 that resulted in a a net outflow in the year. And, obviously, there was an outflow in 2023 because of because of dividends paid. So, again, nothing hugely exciting here for the the history. And onto the '25 updates. What I may do Omar, can I suggest you maybe start off with just an overview of where we've ended up, and I can I can talk about the numbers in a bit more detail if if you'd like me to? I think that's a great suggestion. Thanks, Adam. It was a good trading update. So revenue ahead, adjusted EBITDA ahead, PBT cash ahead, everything ahead ahead ahead, which is exactly what we would expect from ourselves.

38:59 I think it was really, really positive to to to to secure that that upgrade, you know, just just weeks after the IPO. We are committed as a business to, you know, under promising and over delivering and and doing that over and over again, and that's very much the approach that that I had and and we as a team had through the the the IPO process. Quite an unusual situation that because the company was was completely bootstrapped before the IPO, there there were no external investors who, you know, were married to a a particular valuation, and there was there was absolutely no pressure on being, you know, overly optimistic. So, you know, we we really hold ourselves to a high standard where we we we expect to to to perform very, very well.

39:54 Why did we perform well? Strong volumes, client success team getting a lot more effective, making great use of of PATHOS MIND in particular, but also Prosella. The collections strong collections have continued. This is the new normal. Adam earlier described the the the bad debt situation as a legacy issue. And if anyone was in any doubt, I mean, hopefully, this is more than enough evidence, you know, to see. And just speaking from memory now, I think in the trading update, we get into some detail there on I think it's 94% of h two. Their invoices are either collected or not yet due. So we're on a very strong footing.

40:43 And the AI is is is is is is making it stronger and stronger. I think for some financials to the left, Adam, do you wanna come in? Yeah. I've yeah. I think pretty much you've you've covered most of it, Omar. I mean, especially particularly the revenue. That EBITDA number is, you know, for those of you that would've you know, we we we had, you know, our our house broker forecasts, we were nicely ahead for both the revenue and the EBITDA level, you know, and on the on the on those legacy receivables, you know, we we we we've been pretty prudent going forward given the history in terms of our assumptions around future kind of bad debt experience, but we are already coming in better than the numbers that we had had planned when we put all our bottles together in the lead up to the IPO. So and, yes, 2026, we've we've had a we've had a very good January, probably our best January since the business started, which one would expect, but also it's it's great to see it.

41:50 And with as Omar said before, there's a lot of excitement in the business now that we're we're a public company. It really it's really given the the teams a boost, and it it really helps them on their on on their even down to the sales calls when, you know, the credibility of being now a public company that's been through that level of scrutiny is is just very helpful for for the business to move to that next level. So a great start, and we hope to continue it into the future. So now let's talk about the growth strategy. If we start with the top left, just organic, it's it's important to say that that there's nothing wrong with just doing more of the same. Yeah. We've got 6,000 clients.

42:36 There are 33,000,000 SMEs just in The US where the majority of our customers are. We could become a very big business just by doing more of the same. And, you know, we've built a machine. Let's just that machine one step at a time. So that's that that's very sort of the the core or or at least the starting point of what we're doing. And, of course, the AI and the tech there always improving the customer experience and and helping us with with margins, of course. The technology in the bottom right, that's a really, really big point. Like I say, taking that proprietary technology that is currently good enough to be a really valuable internal tool, getting it to the point where it can actually operate at a much higher standard in the unforgiving space of general availability.

43:33 And that that's gonna be a very, very exciting email to send to our 370,000 opt ins or community members or people in our ecosystem saying, you could have Prosella now. You have a full time publicist. Another very exciting email to send to to PR agencies saying, PATHOS MIND can help you deliver for your customers. So we are we're getting on with that and very, very excited about that. Then then two slightly more tangential, but but still quite significant opportunities for growth. Geography. So continue to drive growth in The US, but we are quite enthusiastic about building up our our testimonials and our presence in in really two markets, Mainland China Latin America. And, you know, these are big markets where a single language can open up a very large market, obviously, Mandarin and and and Spanish.

44:39 We are open to micro acquisitions, and we've got a track record of doing them pretty well. In 2024, we acquired a a great small PR firm based, I think, in Brighton thought leadership PR, and and we got ROI of 2000% in contracted revenue within four months. And that was from partnering with the founder of that PR agency for that founder to then remarket to to her current and lapsed clients, saying, wouldn't it be great if if you paid only after you were published? Well, we are now part of PATHOS, so we are we are very, very open to that. And, you know, just in the in in the several weeks since we went public, there have already been, you know, strategic partners and suppliers of ours who are who are saying, oh my, you know, I'd I'd love to be part of a a London listed business, wink wink. So there there will be opportunities there, and and you know, we'll update you as soon as we have any news on that.

45:44 So in conclusion, rapidly scaling tech enabled PR platform, big, big opportunity for us, very, very diversified broad market that really sort of derisks things and creates a really, really big opportunity. We've got a strong track record, you know, to get as far as we got up to the 12/16/2025 completely bootstrapped. It's something most businesses don't achieve, and that tells you something about the business, about the culture, about the team, about the technology. And that self replenishing big market with diversified acquisition channels, And the building blocks are in place to to really make this a genuine AI business.

46:34 And that's that's that's very, very exciting for us. And and, you know, hopefully, as you've seen so far, we we are, you know, very, very serious about delivering, about building that track record in the market, about underpromising and and over delivering, we we we plan to continue to do that. We also plan to be as open as we can be with with the investor community. So I think it's time for some questions. That's correct. Fantastic. Adam, if I may just jump back in there and 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 of your screen.

47:22 While the company take a few moments to view those questions submitted today, I would like to remind you that recording of this presentation along with a copy of the slides on the published Q and A can be accessed via our investor dashboard. Omar, at this point, if I may now hand back to you to chair the Q and A session, and I'll pick up from you at the end. Thank you. Okay. So we've got a really interesting question from Daniel. How do you expect automation to impact margins over the next two to three years? Right. I'll tell you how I look at this, Daniel. There is the quick win that I've personally seen some listed companies, some very prominent, very large listed companies tech, which is we think AI will increase our margins by x.

48:10 And I can understand that approach because the hope is that, you know, it'll just get an immediate upgrade, immediate uptick in the share price. And there was one very notable company that I think about a year ago that the CEO went out and said, we will never hire again. And a few months later, he corrected himself and said, no. We're still gonna hire people. So what I'm saying is I'm sure it will help our margins, but the much more exciting thing is how it can actually just transform how we acquire and retain business. So rather than saying, right. We've got 10 people in this team. With AI, we can lay off two people.

48:56 Great. 20 reduction in in payroll. Isn't it much more exciting to say, well, the AI can help these 10 people sign up twice as many customers? Because every call now opens with the perfect news hook, the perfect first draft of an article, the perfect analysis of what they could be saying in the media hooked to something they posted on LinkedIn ten minutes ago. I get much more excited about the growth opportunity rather than, well, we might be able to to to, let's lay off Bob. We don't need Bob anymore because of the AI. So that that's our approach very transparently, but we we do expect it to to to help margins. But we expect it to do a lot more than that. Adam, I don't know if you have any thoughts on that from a CFO's perspective.

49:48 No. I can't back echo what you said. You know, it's more about helping us drive the top line growth. And, you know, our our margins are you know, there's a lot of things there's other things impacting our margins as as as our cost with the with the publishers as well. But but, yeah, we we as as we said during the presentation, we're we're human led AI fed, if you like. So there's there's you know, it it can only help going forward, but it it's more of a top line help than maybe a a cost cost for us. And we've got another really good one from Daniel b. Thank you, Daniel. We should talk more. Have you seen any pricing pressure as AI enabled marketing tools become more widely available?

50:40 No. Because if you think about what our competitors are offering, you know, it it and I use the term competitor very loosely, sort of indirect competitors, their PR agencies say, give me $10 a month, and you need to sign up for a minimum of six months, and I promise to do my best. So, you know, compared to that, our business model, our pricing model, our process, it's it's so unique that that there isn't a comparable that someone can sort of price match us on. So we we we haven't seen that. However, similar to my last answer, it is very exciting to us to see that AI can enable us to deliver new products at new price points to allow the very price sensitive prospects who maybe a year or two ago, we would have said, look. You can't afford us.

51:44 There is an opportunity to launch new products at very, very healthy margins at new price points to open that door and allow them to sort of get onboarded and and and and hopefully continue their journey with us to to maybe some of our more traditional products. And and we're running experiments on that every day. And that that will show up as, you know, new revenue channel and with, you know, new product, which obviously helps the business. Any other questions? Should I jump into the question from Richard? Yeah. Sorry. Well done. So Yeah. This is definitely a CSR question.

52:30 I'll drink some water. Most of it. I might pass a bit of it back to you, Emma. So question is, can we break down average client spend, campaign duration, and contribution margin per engagement? That's the first part of the question. The answer is absolutely yes, and we do. I'm not sure there's any numbers that I I can share. I mean, obviously, you see the the contribution margin overall, and, you know, you can see how many clients we've got. But big picture sorry. The second part of the question is what does a successful client lifestyle look like in life cycle look like in terms of number of campaigns and lifetime value? I think where I'd start is that I think part of the question is coming from almost a traditional PR model because we don't we don't look at it as campaigns necessarily.

53:24 We look at bringing in clients and helping them get published and then retaining them and publishing more articles with them and and helping them build. So and at the moment, you know, our our pricing model is, which I explained during the presentation, is is is is pretty straightforward. And and, yes, we are monitoring by by overall where our where our margins are or by client. In terms of campaign duration, they're individual articles. We'll obviously once a client has got onto our PATHOS priority product, we'll work with them a little bit more carefully on timing of when articles go out over a period of time. And from a life cycle perspective, that's we're still learning is the honest answer because, you know, we we're we're still building up our experience of the PATHOS priority product.

54:17 But as you know, we were obviously already seeing the benefits of renewing renewing, coming back for article after article, given the repeat business numbers that we were talking about earlier. And we have and and we had, I think, that that helpful example from head to toe health care Yeah. When it was, you know, speaking from memory now, February 23 initial 5 k project and then another 60 k since then. I think that's a good example, Richard, of a a sort of naturally growing customer relationship, which is which is ongoing. Perfect. That's great, Omar. Adam, I believe you have addressed all the questions from investors today, so thank you very much for that. And, And, Omar, before we direct investors to provide you with their feedback, which one is very important to you and the company, could I please just ask you for a few closing comments to wrap up with?

55:16 Yeah. Thank you, Alex. I'm really happy to be here with Adam being open and and and direct to investors, which is is very much our style. And, you know, it's an exciting time for the business. You know, very happy with our with our trading update last week or no earlier this week. Yeah. And it's been a long week. So stay tuned. Stay tuned for more. We we hold ourselves to a high standard. The conversations we have internally, you know, we we we compare ourselves to the the big AIM success stories. And and that's that's why a founder who, up until two months ago, had 100% of a pretty valuable business would with IPO.

56:11 So look forward to more of these sessions and and more of these conversations. And if anyone has any follow ups, I think me and Adam are both, you know, very open and very responsive to to to any questions that anyone has. Fantastic. Omar, Adam, thank you once again for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close this session as you know, I'll be automatically redirected to provide your feedback, which will help the company better understand your views and expectations. On behalf of the management team, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good afternoon to you all.