Tortilla Mexican Grill (LSE:MEX) — H1 FY26 Results

0:01 Good afternoon, and welcome to the TORTILLA MEXICAN GRILL 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 CFO, Richard Haley. Good afternoon. Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining us. So I'm Richard Hay. I'm group CFO at TORTILLA, and my colleague here is Brandon Stevens, the founder and group CEO of the business. We'll be taking you through the half one f y twenty six results, also the f y twenty five results as well, but focusing very much on this half and also touching on the quarter.

0:49 Brandon's also gonna update you on the strategy, and he'll start with a lead in to what we've been up to for the last eight months since he came back into the business as as the founder. So let's get stuck into it. This is us. Do want to Yeah. Quick introduction. So my name is Brandon Stevens. I'm the founder of TORTILLA. Started the business in 2007 in Islington, grew the business to 15 sites over seven years with five rounds of financing. Hired in a managing director, Richard Morris, who then successfully grew the business for the next decade or so up to a a sizable level. We IPO ed in 221, acquired our, one of our competitors, Chilango, and then acquired Fresh Burritos in France. And that brings us to our our present day now.

1:37 Yeah. I'm Richard, as I said, this is group CFO. My background is in a lot of other consumer businesses, retail, entertainment, and as well as hospitality. So let's get into what we've been up to the last eight months. Yeah. So for the for the last eight months, we've been we've been very busy. We've put in place a number of changes that I'm gonna just rattle through right here. One is, and and we'll talk about this first and foremost, is addressing our challenges in France. We've been... Put in place a robust set of pros... Processes, policies, personnel, and sorted out a number of the accounting issues that were reported in the media and as part of our results. Part of that has been going through a fairly ruthless program of closing our underperforming stores in France, including the five that were at...

2:25 That were unconverted and restructuring and restructuring the team there in order to reduce down the head office costs that we had there. We've also put in place a restructured Santander loan facility, which has been instrumental in seeing us through a a few challenges at the beginning of the year. We've launched Deliveroo, and you may have seen in our results that that has been hugely successful with our multi aggregator policy. Rolled out generative AI and agentic AI and actually a number of different tech initiatives, including the Oracle Epos program. Over the years, we've been, with a particular Epos pro... Platform that hasn't really provided the foundations for, the type of, technology stack that we wanna have that's now getting rolled out across the state.

3:12 Lot of the changes that we've made is around the head office, making sure that we have the right people in the right places. We've moved some folks into transformation roles. We've hired in certain gaps, and we're really pleased with the the team moving forward. We've exited a number of, underperforming UK stores, and we're gonna have a slide that we can show you later around the progress, particularly with a cohort in '22, '23 that we, that we, rolled out, which we're underperforming in its secondary and tertiary locations. We've been renewing our franchise relationships with SSP and Compass and, some outreach. We'll talk about that. And we put in a lot of cultural foundations. One of the challenges we had with France was that it was treated as a separate entity without the oversight that we needed from the UK team. So we now have a one TORTIL approach with the French team reporting into the UK team, and that has been very fruitful.

4:03 And importantly, we've put in place a multiyear value creation plan. So we have a strategy moving forward for the next couple of years across all part... All departments, and we'll talk through a few of those. And, of course, continue to do brand enhancements. We'll show you a couple pictures of our sites and leads, which are what the basis of the French stores are as well. Great. So let's get stuck into the financials. So from a group point of view, let me take you through these. So our last twelve months of system sales, that's total sales across our entire equity stores and our franchise stores, hit a 100,000,000. That's a a milestone for us, quite a significant number. Our overall revenues for the group were up 6% to 38.5%, including group group like for likes at 13.3%.

4:49 But I'll break this down by territory because I think it really is a story of two different countries at France and UK. And then further over to the right, I'm really pleased that our l t... Our last twelve months of average unit volumes, that's basically the average sales for a for a store hit over a million. That's just the progression of our, system wide sales across the various years and where... Or this year and where we... We're actually at a 103,000,000, so it continues to grow. This isn't a one off blip. But let's get stuck into The UK numbers. So here, UK makes up over 90% of the group's revenue, actually, first of all. In half one, we hit 13.9% like for likes, and I'll take you through the split of that between in store and delivery shortly.

5:39 Our total revenue was up to 35,400,000, 7% increase over last year. That's despite five stores to... Some being shut last year and two that we... Underperforming stores that we closed this year. So a smaller number of stores, but still we we grew the absolute value of of sales. Our gross margin in The UK is 75.5%, so it's still strong. It's dipped slightly from last year, mainly some headwinds on our food input prices. It's knocked about point 7% margin off. And then just the way that we treat discounts now is slightly different. It goes into gross margin, whereas previously, it was in reported administrative expenses. Again, that's about another point seven on the margin. Restaurant EBITDA has remained broadly flat despite some pretty tough headwinds on labor costs that I'll touch on a bit later, as well as some incremental costs on delivery, which actually we're addressing and and got some levers to to reduce down.

6:39 And, yeah, over on the far right hand... So UK continues to be profitable on the right hand side. We've got adjusted EBITDA that's up from 2,400,000 to 2,600,000, and average unit volumes of over a million per site. It's a pretty strong set of... Robust set of half one numbers there. Just moving on to what that looks like then in terms of our like for likes. It's always great to have a graph that goes from bottom left to top right. This is us against the CGA, so the the restaurant industry as a whole, and this is how the red line we have performed. So driven by a couple of things, really. One is moving to multiaggregator. So I'll split out delivery and in store on the next slide and touch on that. But the really great news is we've continued that growth through the first half and through the quarter three, which we've just finished to date, significantly outperforming the market.

7:34 On delivery versus in store then. So the red line is our in store. It looks relatively flat, but actually, we're growing at 10% in store, which is very healthy indeed. The teal line is our deliveries, and that's, since going multi aggregator, so we we basically brought Deliveroo on board. We were already with Just Eat and Uber. That's opened up a whole new cohort of customers, which we didn't really have access to on delivery before. It's not a lot of sales cannibalization from customers who are on Uber or Just Eat and Deliveroo. So that uptick from February has just meant that, we've been able to get more burritos out to more people on the delivery platform. And, actually, we think that's a pretty good way of marketing our brand and has helped to to drive the in store footfall where people have tried our burritos at home. They love them. And then next time they're walking past one of our sites, they might pop in rather than going somewhere else.

8:31 So, actually, we we see delivery... The continued strength and growth of delivery as being a real help for our installed sales. Our restaurant EBITDA margin generally has improved over the years from FY '23, '24 through '25 and and into 2026. It's flattened off a bit. I think everyone is feeling the effect of those above inflation labor costs, but we do have a number of margin enhancing initiatives in place, and we'll talk a bit later about our ambition to grow our our margin from where we are at the moment to hit a 20% EBITDA margin for our restaurants. And in France, which is the real topic, for the day, we've addressed the accounting issues. Richard has taken a forensic approach to making sure that we have the right people in place, that we've harmonized our platforms across The UK and France, that we have the right systems, to make sure that we have reviews taking place in The UK.

9:31 And the challenges that we had with the reporting previously have been, dealt with. F y twenty five is in the past, and we're moving forward. Importantly, as I mentioned before, we've had, we've rationalized the estate there. We have eight stores that remain, seven of which are converted into tortillas. One, we're taking a view on, but we hope to keep. But the LTM losses for those stores has reduced by 1.1... The LTM losses for those stores that have closed saves us 1,100,000 in losses. We've also restructured the head office, so we've reduced down the cost of the head office by 400,000 on an annualized basis, and we have the right, right team moving forward. Importantly, with the with the team reporting into The UK, and proper oversight. Systems alignment, we've put in place a a program called one TORTILLA, which means that we have, a similar pause system or identical pause system, same stage platform, and other, technology initiatives that we have. All the data from France coming into The UK data warehouse so that we're able to provide support over here of reporting and things like that. But we're aligning those systems so that we have, we have efficiencies and proper management.

10:37 Delivery has been a huge success over there. Great uplift in The UK, but over in The... In France, we've had an 88% increase in like for likes with a real focus on this. And as Richard mentioned, that gets, burritos into the hands of people that don't necessarily know the brand. And then when they walk past, hopefully, they'll come in. One of the challenges we had when we launched France was we took a UK approach, to our marketing. So we were using assets and communications that assume that the customer understood what a burrito was, what tacos are, what carnitas and some of our toppings are. We've now gone back to one point o, which is teaching them about what the product is, how it gets... What the sourcing is, how to eat it, and so forth. But one of the things we're most proud of is our... Is the food over there. There is no question that we have a great product. In fact, the quality of the ingredients for the... Between the meats and the veg...

11:26 And things like cheese are are actually really high quality in France. And so whenever we go over there, we we we actually think that we've got the best food in the estate in France. And importantly, we've hired in an individual in an operations director role who is French, but comes from The UK with extensive experience at, and he is leading the charge over there. His big focus is around labor costs and customer service, but we are now moving forward with a huge reset. And the entire head office team or exec team are are heading over to France in the coming weeks to do a reset with that team and and kind of relaunch the business, if you will. So let me take you through the financials then for France. And these are really healthy h one numbers. They're actually already out surpassed by what we've delivered in q three. But for h one, yeah, we did 18.2% like for like overall in in... Versus last year.

12:21 Our revenues actually fell slightly because of the stores that we've closed, but you can see the strength in the like for like numbers. Our gross margin in France, we've really got on top of that. So a couple of things in there is that we've got control of our... Better control over our supply chain there and sourcing. And also, we've adjust some of the prices to help get that margin. 65.5 at the half on average, but actually by the time we hit June and into quarter three, we've hit 70% gross margin for our stores there. Yes. The restaurant EBITDA margin is still negative. There is a lag in there because most of the loss making stores that we've shut were shut either at the end of the half or into quarter three. So we definitely expect that to pop above a positive in the not too distant future.

13:10 And similarly, adjusted EBITDA, there's a lag there from some of the issues that we've had in the past and the losses that, as Brandon said, shutting those stores is save us... Is gonna save 1,100,000 annualized, and the head office costs will be a further 500,000. And our LTM on average unit volumes in France is just over half a million. Again, that's probably quite out of date and where where we are for quarter three. But we definitely see the potential in France of getting that close to where we operate in The UK. Important to mention that we have two stores in France that are now in profitable territory. The adjusted EBITDA that you see there has been halved moving forward for q... For q two... For h two. And the $5.43 k for LTM annual AUV includes five stores that we've closed, which were the lowest performing stores. So we're feeling very good about the future of the existing state.

14:04 This is just then comparing The UK like for likes on a rolling eight week basis to to smooth out some peaks and troughs with France. And you can see the red line is UK. This is the sort of uptick from delivery. In France, this has been a much more sustained growth of when we started to take the take the action about growing sales, managing our marketing much more effectively, and also some switching on of delivery to get burritos into people's hands. The really good news is the the growth that we've seen in the first half has continued through into quarter three and where we are to date. So actually, France, you know, 24.4% like for like overall in quarter quarter three. That's outperformed The UK, and The UK is doing really, really well as you as you know. So if you think through the p and l, we have really got momentum on our sales, and that should continue. We have a number of levers and initiatives that we're putting in place. We have sorted out our gross margin, which is now above 70%, and we're now working through the cost lines to make sure that we have our unit economic model in a good shape because, ultimately, we're in the business of creating a model that works for franchisees for the rolling out of, of TORTIA across Europe.

15:16 Part of our business is obviously, is franchising. So our franchise sales over... Overall are about 27,000,000 per annum, about 16,000,000 of that comes from The UK alone. Also have 12. In The UK, we've got 10 sites with SSP, four with Compass, and then The Middle East. Ethos is our franchise partner where we've got a a dozen sites over there. They've clearly suffered a bit with the war in The Middle East. So this growth that we've seen over the years has dipped slightly in 2026, but it's starting to tick up again. We've had the benefit of six new sites opening in 2025, so we get the full year impact of that coming through in 2026. And we're just about to launch one more site with Compass on Adam Brooks Hospital in in Cambridge.

16:04 It looks fantastic. It goes live, I think, next week. So we're really excited about that launch. And we have some additional prospects that we will talk through in just a bit. On to free cash flow then. So although our free cash flow has improved by 1,600,000,000, half one last year compared to half 1 this year. As a result of that trading recovering, we've also made some targeted investment in growth. So in The UK, for example, we spent... Opened up two new stores. One is Leeds, which has got our new two TORTIA two point zero branding, and then a smaller, more compact unit in Wembley Boxpark. We're in Boxpark Croydon already, so we we already know what a smaller format site looks like.

16:52 We recognize our balance sheet is is is constrained by cash. So our total net debt was 12,400,000 at half against the total facility of 14,400,000. As we have taken radical action in France to reset the business, the costs or the cash costs of that will start to come down, including exceptional items. Adjusted EBITDA will start to go up. And The UK adjusted EBITDA continues to be strong. So we do see the business' ability to create positive free cash flows as coming much more quickly in the future. With a huge focus on deleveraging over the coming months and year. I'm gonna skip through the 2025 financials pretty quickly, just flash them up on that. These are really the full year items.

17:42 We we didn't do a full year presentation because of delay to the financial reporting. But these are very much sort of old numbers now, and they're just there really in the pack for people to take take away. I'm not proposing to go through them in detail. Instead, I wanna move on to some of the exciting stuff Brandon's gonna talk us through. One of the important things with the reset that we're doing with TORTILLA is putting in place a value creation plan, that's multiyear, multi department, and that starts with, a new board, which includes Duncan Garud, one of the few people in the country who have combination of franchise experience, PLC experience, CEO experience at this stage of business life cycle, and chair experience. Marta, a good friend who joins us, from Gales where she was managing director and then COO.

18:29 Gregor Grant, who is the CFO at Loungers, a publicly traded firm. And then we've introduced ourselves, but we've also added Mac Plumpton as UK chief chief executive officer. So Mac joins us from Leon where he was managing director. And importantly, Edson Diaz Fuentes. Edson was the the innovation chef at Oaxaca and then owns his own Mexican restaurant chain. He's a Mexican native, and he's bringing the flavor profiles and the authenticity to the to the food that we're doing, which we believe at the moment is the best we've ever had and will continue to get better. This shows that our ambitions, the next two slides. So we are currently trading or expecting to trade at 1,150,000 AUV per annum, for 2026, and our ambition is to get to 1,500,000.

19:19 We have a whole bunch of levers at our disposal to do that. We'll talk about those in the value creation plan, but a big focus is obviously around the product. Not just the quality of it, which is gonna improve. We'll talk a little bit about that, but actually the breadth of the offering. We see some huge, opportunities in day parts and use cases. Importantly, we also wanna develop our margin. And so you'll you'll have seen the 16.4% EBITDA margin. That's across the estate. But for our mature stores, we're we're at about 17.5%. And we have a number of levers that are at our disposal. One is obviously around gross margin and further improvements with that, and that will come with scale, especially with the increased franchise base. But also also around delivery ops metrics. The more that you improve your ops metrics, the lower the commission rate that you get.

20:07 And also with things like refunds, we think there's huge ability to improve upon that. If you go down the p and l, labor scheduling. One of the reasons that we wanna put in place a new pause system was so that we could layer on some of the tech stack that allows us to do more creative things. In this case, the ability to to use AI to correctly schedule your labor and optimize is is is there for us to take. And repairs and maintenance, something that we haven't invested well in in the past. We have not looked after our state as much as we should. We haven't been doing the renovations and the refreshes, and so it's a bit of a dated estate estate. We wanna do more preventative maintenance, which would bring down our r and m. So between all these, we believe that 20% EBITDA margin is in our grasp. We think it's really important because, ultimately, we're creating product for franchisees, and they wanna see those kind of levels in order to be profitable on their on their terms.

20:58 In terms of the top 10, 10 key objectives, I will rattle through these, and then we'll pick up a couple of these as we move forward with the slides. But they're focused on product first and foremost. We have a great product now. There's been a lot of investment in that over the next couple years, but there's further improvements to be done to reach parity with best in class globally, and that is our ambition. We wanna build more emotional connectivity with our consumers. That's gonna be on social media and other channels. Importantly, and I I come from a tech background in Silicon Valley, we are very focused on our tech stack. When a lot of people are saying they're embracing AI, we are really putting that at the heart of the technology stack, and layering on additional platforms. Franchise is the growth for the future. We have a number of different relationships that we're building right now. We are resetting our relationships with SSP and Compass in order to make them even more successful.

21:49 And that's... We'll talk about that in a in a little bit as well. The brand conversions in France are effectively done. We have seven converted. We have one remaining. We've shut down five. So France is, aside from the one site, converted over to the to the TORTILLA brand. And importantly, and and probably at the the most important thing aside from the building the stability of the business is creating a franchisable model for Western Europe because our clear ambitions are to roll this business out across Europe, and be, dare I say, the Chipotle of Europe. We have addressed the short tail of underperforming UK sites. We'll talk a little bit about that. We... We're very keen to modernize the estate. You'll see some pictures of the new TORTILLA leads. And, of course, we're discussing now the three year value creation plan and and all the initiatives we're putting in place.

22:35 And importantly, I think we we have to maybe speak to the elephant in the room, which is that we've missed all of the profit targets that we've set since we IPO'd. We need to be much more realistic about those targets. They need to be achievable, and the board is all very focused on ensuring that that happens moving forward. I'll skip through a couple of these slides at pace, but this one is an important one. We see a huge opportunity to increase AOV through enhanced desserts, better drinks, and we also see the ability to drive trade in the evenings through, larger portion platters that, can be shared by multiple people, also the desserts and the drinks, and other initiatives. We also think that there's some improvement that we can do in breakfast, probably secondary to the desserts, but driving eating trade is is a big one. We're also just gonna be improving the product itself. There's a whole bunch of initiatives, which we may or may not be able to talk about.

23:30 Our food director might get grumpy with us, but we will be improving our wraps. We'll be improving our salsas, and those are all works that are underway with some equipment that we're putting in across the estate. Also in the channels, corporate offering is a huge opportunity for us. We get orders for burritos, and we have to make 300 burritos that by the time they get to the offices, they're cold. And so packaging them up in a way that people can do make self self created tacos and things like that that are heated up on-site is gonna be a huge opportunity. And then stuff specifically for delivery. So family offerings, kids offerings, which would bring up AOV, and bringing up AOV actually has an additional improvement in reducing down the commissions that we pay to the delivery aggregators. On the tech on the tech side, as I mentioned, we have green lit Oracle. We have rolled that out across some of our state, and we're continuing to do that. That sets the foundation for being able to add to our tech stack. We will be introducing cameras in order to monitor our footfall and be better about our labor scheduling, and also around missing orders and items that might might be missing from our from our delivery. So there's a three year plan for all of this that's being put in place.

24:40 We've already done a huge amount of Agetic AI where we're tracking prices of our competitors, putting in place competitive dashboards and things like that. So we're looking forward to rolling that out, and we have a very busy tech director that is working on that now. Franchise is our big focus on expansion. We will continue to take some equity owned stores, but we see a huge opportunity to leverage what is a central production kitchen that's serving food throughout The UK, an existing franchise base with SSP and Compass that Richard was mentioning before. We've got a robust platform, and we now have three interested, potential franchisees that we're talking to about specific regions in The UK. In Europe, we are, starting to, have some converse... Early conversations with folks, but really you need the unit economic model to be in in good shape. But, again, our our belief is that the... Whenever we look around Europe and we see fast casual Mexican executed well, it works. And so the ability to, use our central production kitchen in Lille, which is 14,000 square feet, two and a half times the size of the one that we have in Tottenham Hale to service The Netherlands, France, Western Germany is enormous, and we're very excited that...

25:53 To exploit that opportunity. And that is that is the big long term goal there. I'll take this one. So, yeah, back in 2022, '23, we... As part of a rapid rollout program, we opened up 15 sites. They were mostly in tertiary or or secondary towns and launched at a time when our our food, let's be honest, wasn't the greatest and perhaps marketing around it was not that good. So they have continually underperformed the rest of the estate. So the gray line is these stores. The red ones are the rest of the estate. What's happened over time actually is that those two lines have converged or are converging. And the underperforming sites, we've managed to exit two of them earlier this year. That was Gummoor in Portsmouth and Canterbury is the other one.

26:40 But the initiatives that we put in place to focus on these underperforming stores and the growth of delivery has helped lift them up from loss making sites, which they were two, three, a couple of years back to actually mostly all profitable. 11 of those 13 that remain are now profitable, which is two that that aren't, one of which there's a break in the lease at the end of this year, so we we can exit that. But now they're tracking it above AUV of fifth... Of 18,000 a week. They are now profitable. So it's been a real testament to to the food and the effort that's put in to turn those stores around and bring them closer to the rest of the estate. When we lost these stores, I would say that our food was at a bit of a low. And nothing has changed in those stores operationally that much.

27:28 Certainly not with ambiance. They look the same as when we launched them. It was the first time that, we saw sales decrease once we launched them. Usually, we see a maturity curve and a growth that happens because people are being educated about the product and the brand. So this is the first time that happened. The real driver here was the product quality and and and, obviously, that is that has worked really well for us. So we're delighted that the long tail has gone to an incredibly short tail, and we've largely knocked this one on the head. And here's the brand refresh. And we have a video that we will, at some point, probably put on social media just showing all the different things that we're doing with a highlight around, leads. But this is our leads, site. You'll see the new branding, up top right of the signage along with a great treatment of the kiosk. We have a second assembly line here. We have video screens. We got a fourth video screen, which we're gonna be rolling out across the estate.

28:23 It looks great. It's very effective. We have dedicated customer journeys for digital and and in person ordering. And and this is this is gonna be the way forward and and something that we're very keen to roll out across the estate in due course as capital allows. So in summary, it's been a challenging couple of years, but we've got the product in good place. We are shoring up the challenges of France. We are the largest Mexican chain in Europe, and there's still huge huge white space across Europe that we can expand into. I've come back in. We brought in a great team, a great board. We've got Richard copiloting, and and we're excited to to how that's all gonna move forward. And we've got a great capital like growth model. You know, for for franchisees, they love the idea that they have food that comes in that's absolutely beyond tasty that they can regenerate, and serve to their customers without a huge amount of, hassle, and without a huge amount of cooking, which actually brings down their CapEx and improves the returns.

29:21 So a robust franchise, model that allows us to roll out not just in The UK but across Europe. And we've got financial momentum. The like for likes are great. We are exceeding the CGA tracker, and and we are looking to really focus on the conversion to the bottom line with this new reality of a of a of a higher sales level. And I think importantly, we're putting in place a a clear strategic plan. There there wasn't really a direct plan for all the different initiatives we would be doing across the different departments. We now have that in place. The team has bought into it. We have 250 initiatives that we're gonna be rolling out over the next couple of years, and just strong momentum at the at, at the moment. So we're delighted with how everything is going. That's great, guys. If I may just jump back in there, thank you very much indeed for your presentation.

30:12 Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions using the q and a tab situated in the top right corner of your screen. While the company take a few moments to review those questions submitted today, I would like to remind you that a recording of this presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q and A can be accessed via your investor dashboard. Brandon, Richard, if I may now hand back to you to take us through the Q and A session. Kindly ask you to read out the questions where appropriate to do so, and I'll pick up from you both at the end. Thank you. I'll take the first one, which is about France. Could you please speak more about the group's progress in France and what the group is learning about the French market from its operations over there? I think the biggest learning is when I started TORTIA in 2007, Mexican food wasn't very well regarded. If you remember back to the days of Chiquitos and places like that, it was kind of a bit of sloppy food and and a real focus on tequila.

31:08 That is where the market is in France as well. And so going back to the education and just kind of starting afresh and building back up and building that product knowledge and and and awareness and brand awareness has been the real has been the real challenge. But we are on top of it now and and using the right playbook. I think also there's obviously rigidity in the labor market as is... I think everybody knows about. And and so getting our costs under control while educating the market is is really the challenge. But the ability to expand MEXICANTOS. Across, France is unquestionable. We have... There... There's a competitor over their name called Nachos. It's actually founded by a former former TORTILLA TORTILLA MEXICANTOS. He's grown to 30 sites. We think we have an advantage over them on on product and brand, and we will continue to expand in France, though probably with a more of a franchise type approach.

31:58 Great. I'll take the next question. So it's how do you determine whether to invest further in underperforming stores versus close it, and what return thresholds are you applying? So actually, when I joined a year ago, we had quite a long... You saw that graph. We had quite a a list of sites that we thought we might close and thinking, actually, we need to exit those, and we did a couple of those, Gumwolf and Canterbury. But, actually, the shift with delivery growing and with in store growing has meant a number of those sites we talked about before have actually turned into positive territory. When we think about... So, actually, there's a balance to be had to say, do I want to... Do I get more value from those underperforming sites making them profitable versus investing more in the profitable sites?

32:45 If we look at something like Leeds, so that's a brand new store. It's... Our CapEx on that was just under 500,000. We look typically for a return on capital employed of about 35% on new sites. Leads is performing exceptionally well. It's at the early point of its its maturity curve. But I'd say at the moment, we we take a balanced approach between turning around those underperforming stores, and delivery has certainly helped sweat the assets a bit harder actually versus investing in new stores. But I guess our new... As Brandon alluded to, you know, our model really is looking more at a a sort of franchising rollout rather than a significant amount of cash going into equity stores. Given the success of the franchise model.

33:32 How should we think about... Do you mind if we just scroll back back in? How should we think about the impact of the shift towards delivery on margins given the higher aggregator commissions? That is something that we, have been debating on the board for for as long as I can I can remember? The... I I think the way to think about it is we have probably seen about a 1% impact on margin from the increased commission levels on... By going multi aggregator as opposed to exclusivity. At the same time, we've seen a 50% increase in our sales on delivery, makes up just over a third of sales. So it's a pretty easy trade off when it comes to actual EBITDA. This... The the sales increase way outweighs the the increased cost on on margin. And also, we're passing along a lot of that increased cost to the consumer who's willing to pay a little bit more or actually quite a bit more on delivery versus in store.

34:25 So it's... It it was a bit of an easy decision, and I think one of the challenges that we had in the past because we were multi aggregator and then went off of Deliveroo is that we saw a lessening of awareness in store. Our in store softened when we moved away from multi aggregator and actually going back onto multi aggregator has increased our in store. So not only does it not cannibalize, it's actually beneficial. So for for all these reasons, we think that the the multi aggregator approach is the right one. I'll take the next one. So how constrained are you by your debt facility? So, yeah, I said earlier that our net debt at the half year was 12,400,000 against the total facility of 14.4 UK and in France as well. We would always love a lot more cash to accelerate our value creation plan a bit faster.

35:15 Santander have been extremely supportive. We do have some headroom on our debt facility. That's... And our forecast show that we stay within that facility and that everything is is good on a look forward covenant basis. But, yeah, we... We're well aware that the last couple of years has been... We've consumed a great deal of cash in the business. I think the fast actions that we've taken in particularly in France will stem those cash losses very quickly. And what we're seeing in the top line growth and the plans we are for delivering greater margin as a restaurant level will see us actually create a bit more, bit more breathing space, let's say, on that debt facility. How many new opportunities are there still in The UK?

36:03 That's a great question. So one of the things that we initiated in about March was a white space report on The UK, through a company called HDI. And I'm not trying to be evasive on it. They have come back with an initial report and are doing some fine tuning on that, and we will report on that opportunity, in subsequent, presentations. But what I would say is that there... There's there's a slight challenge in that. There's certain stores that, there's a stratification here. So if there's a store doing $25 a week, we will probably end up doing 35 percent return on capital. But it's $20 a week. We're still doing 25% return on capital. And that that that return on capital is sufficient for for franchisees to be interested. And so we we... What we may be showing is kind of like a tier one versus a tier two. But what I would say is I I I think there are a couple 100 that, tortillas that could be possible in The UK depending on your return on capital profile or threshold.

37:01 Do want to take that? What are the key learnings so far from the implementation of the new value creation plan? I'll take a step back on that. One of the challenges over the last couple of years is when you're missing your profit targets, one of the things that, obviously happens is you need to trim costs. And so you trim personnel, you trim OpEx, you trim CapEx in order to hit the numbers and hit your debt targets and things like that. That's been a real challenge. We really need to have bitten the bullet and just said, we're gonna reset. We can't be beholden to profit targets, and we and need to think about the long term viability of the business and building sustainable growth. Sustainable growth is almost a cliche, but we have played out that that is really necessary. You can build a 100 sites, but you gotta you gotta shore up the foundations.

37:47 So as we're putting in place the value creation plan and being unrelenting about it and making sure that we have initiatives across all the different departments, what we've seen is success. The limited time offers that we put in place, the food improvements that we put in place are all bearing fruit. I I hope everybody will go and and try some of the latest products we have. We just did ghost chili chicken. We previously had a hibiscus lemonade, which became the third most popular drink on the menu after Coke and water. We've done the Caesar wrap, which was a huge success during the summer, especially in the hot weather. So it's working. A lot of the stuff, though, that we're doing now is very foundational, putting in place the benchmarks. I mentioned the HDI report. We we never... We didn't have a white space report on on opportunities. So getting all that stuff in place, getting the Oracle project in place will allow us to really see the fruition in the future as we layer on stuff that that actually has an impact on sales and and margin.

38:41 That's great. Well, look, guys. That's all the questions we have for today. So thank you, Brandon and Richard, for addressing them on the call. But, Brandon, before I redirect investors to provide you with their feedback, which is particularly important to yourself and the company, could I please just ask you for a few closing comments? Yes. Thank you very much. I think the the key thing that we'd like everybody to come away with is there have been some challenges in the past, and we are running to those fires, addressing them, tackling them head on, and resolving them. There are loose ends out there, that need to be addressed, and we're tightening all that stuff up. We have taken decisive action on France and actually decisive action on The UK as well. So there's there's a lot of shoring up that's that's taken place, for for stuff that's kind of been building up over the years. At the same time, we're looking at the current, and the present, and we're making sure that we're continuing to reap the rewards of this move to multi aggregator and the product improvements and everything like that.

39:39 So keeping things moving along while at the same time putting in place a robust plan for the future that is modelable and that we can present to everybody. We we haven't gone into a lot of the stuff around where we think this can get to over time with our... And and kind of, you know, the bridge chart that actually shows how we're gonna get to 20% and how we're gonna get to 1,500,000. But we have that in our own mind. And as we see that start to materialize, we'll start to share that along with the opportunity for white space in The UK and the white space opportunity in Europe, which we're also putting together. So we're we're working on the past, working on the present, working on the future. We've been very busy, but we're we're delighted with the trajectory now. Fantastic. Thank you, guys, once again for updating investors today. Could I please ask investors not to close this session as you now be redirected to provide your feedback, which help the company better understand your views and expectations.

40:31 On behalf of the management team, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good afternoon to you all.