XP Factory (LSE:XPF) — Capital Markets Day

0:00 Well, good afternoon, everybody, and thank you so much for joining us today. And certainly for us as, as XP, it's a real pleasure to have you here because for some of you who are already familiar with the story, you all have heard certainly perhaps from myself and from Graham, but very few of you will have met the the broader team. And one of the things that we're most excited about is the depth and breadth that we have within the team. So for your opportunities to meet them is really exciting for us. And, of course, for some of you in the room, actually, you won't be familiar with our story at all. So we're gonna be able to talk through some of the things that we think make the business special, some of the things that we think make the business exciting, and certainly all of the things that we believe set up this runway to really go after what we think becomes a really well scaled business. And I think what we have an opportunity to do today and certainly what we're trying to do today is go beyond the numbers.

0:49 So for you as I said, for those of you who are familiar with us, typically, it's myself and Graham talking about the numbers in quite a lot of detail. But, actually, that's not really what makes a business. The numbers are simply the manifestation of all the other good stuff we do. So today, we wanna get far more into the way that the brands have evolved, the way we think about games design, the way we think about site selection, really get you under the bonnet, so to speak, of XP FACTORY. And, hopefully, you'll leave, with a much better idea about what it is we do with a facility to then go and experience it and feel it at Oxford Street afterwards for those of you that can join. So as we step through forgive me. Oh, yeah. That's boring. As as as we step through today, you'll see, you'll see on the agenda that we, we're of splitting the work. I'm gonna touch very, very briefly on some industry trends and where we see ourselves being positioned.

1:44 But then excitingly, you get to meet the team. So you get to meet Dom, who's gonna talk about data. You get to meet Andrew and Sarah who are doing a double act on, brand experience, the evolution of that, and so on. Graham will come back, and we will touch on those financial targets, how that plays into our strategy, where it is that we see ourselves in three years. But then most excitingly, the q and a at the background, and I really mean this wholeheartedly. We want this to be an opportunity for you to ask anything that you're thinking about. You know, there's nothing that's off limits, so to speak. Please do ask. You've got the whole team. And when we then go on to Oxford Street afterwards, you'll have an even further opportunity to not only meet the broader team here, but meet the guys at a site level as well who are actually doing the work and serving the customers. So without further ado, I'm gonna kick us off, just with a very brief overview of XP FACTORY.

2:34 So I think for many of you already, you're familiar that we have our two businesses. We've got Escape Hunt and we've got Boom. And we're gonna get into a little bit more specifics about both of those businesses in a while. But I thought it would be interesting just for anybody that isn't quite so up to speed with the story to learn a little bit about the timelines and the history and how we're here. We started off back in 2017, with Escape Hunt, and Escape Hunt was an acquisition for us. And at the time, it was a tiny fledgling business, out of Thailand. And escape rooms weren't really a thing. People were very unaware of what they were. Certainly, was unlikely that you were gonna find somebody that had played an escape room. And indeed, at the time, the unprompted awareness of escape rooms was less than 5%. But in this early business in in escape hunts, that that have been based over in Thailand, you had a real early adopter, and you had a business that had already got just a little bit of data coming from the franchise businesses that were being sold.

3:32 So when we took a look at it, we saw this incredibly exciting opportunity because here was a thing that was broadly speaking unknown by customers on the street. Yet for that niche y customer at the time that was enjoying escape rooms, my goodness were they enjoying it. They were incredibly well reviewed. They were exciting. And and we felt this opportunity existed to really create something that would allow us to be the standout global leader in that sector, to be the business that brings escape rooms, this niche, out of town, underinvested entertainment format to the masses. Bring it prime and proper on the high street. Invest properly. Do IP deals. Bring content to life for brand owners. And indeed, that's what we've tried to do with Escape Hunt. So we'll talk about the specifics a little later.

4:18 Further into our journey came Boom, and we bought, again, another fledgling business in 2021, the back end of twenty twenty one. And really what Boom was at that time was couple of trading sites, an idea for competitive socializing, but a really exciting property portfolio. And we loved that because we were just coming out of COVID. And at that stage, we recognized that property had never been priced so attractively. Here were spaces like the one we're gonna go and see in a few minutes, on Oxford Street, which were all time lows. And so the idea that you could fill into these large spaces with a really exciting competitive socializing format that had a lot of customer overlap with the business that we already had, that clearly had a lot of management overlap for the skills that we had to run escape hunt, but also added a lot more too. It added higher volumes, more density.

5:10 It added another opportunity for runway. We felt that that was a really good thing to do. So, basically, we bought that, fledgling business in 2021. We've grown aggressively since then. And as we stand today, XP FACTORY has our two brands, Escape Hunt and Boom Battle Bar. So, again, for anybody that hasn't yet been to an escape hunt, as I say, we are now very much the global leader in escape the room experiences. And in an escape room, together, you bring your family, you bring your groups of friends, you bring your workers, and you come together into our world. We immerse you in our world, and together, you're gonna crudely find clues, solve puzzles to escape the room. Now the brand evolution there is really interesting. Sarah's gonna talk to that a little bit later, so I won't spoil any thunder. But in essence, it's a highly immersive, really exciting, fun place to be.

6:03 The business has grown quite significantly now, and so here we have 26 owned and operated sites today. Most of those are here in The UK. In fact, all our UK sites are owned and operated. We have three which are owned, elsewhere. So we own in Paris, in Brussels, and in Dubai as well. But then internationally, we have a franchise business of 21 additional units. Escape Hunt has evolved beyond the room. So whilst we started very much in the room, in the more traditional sense, Actually, now we have games that play out across cities. We have games that play at home. Excuse me. And we have digital games as well. So the evolution within that business has been really exciting. And, again, Sarah will talk a little bit more to that later. Really importantly, the catalog of games is developed in house. So we have, our games design team in house. In fact, Tom is here somewhere in the room. There'll be an opportunity to meet him later. Tom, one of our, key game designers, is part of that team. So having that IP created in house makes it unique to us, makes it special, and it coordinates really well with our builds such that we end up with these world class experiences.

7:09 And most importantly, the games now are repeatable and they're modular. So that is to say we're not going into units and building bespoke every time. Instead, these are modularly prepared games which come together, are built quickly, and in theory can move between sites, although we've not yet needed to do that. Most importantly as well, it remains the absolute highest and best reviewed business, anywhere in the sector. So 99%, customer satisfaction score very much sat at the top of the table. In terms of Boom, as I mentioned, we we acquired that fledgling business back at the end of twenty twenty one. And then in '22, we had this very, very aggressive year for Build where we opened 22 sites on the Boom side, actually a bunch of escape hunts as well, but a really, really big year for build for us. We're very much the market leader in that space, having as we do today 26 owned and operated sites here in The UK with five franchised.

8:07 You you'll see exactly what we do when we come to, go around the corner after this. But, essentially, the experience sees you have a variety of games on offer. So we'll have axe throwing, we'll have darts, some shuffleboards, pool, beer pong, lots of activities that span lots of genre of customer. But, of course, that's underpinned by cocktails, it's underpinned by street food, and the whole essence of BOOM is loud, it's vibey, it's fun, it's exciting, and, hopefully, you'll feel a little bit of that later today. I think, excitingly, it's a low CapEx model, certainly relative to very many of our competitors in the space. Typically, we'll have about a million pounds in a site, whereas a lot of others in the competitive socializing space will have many multiples of that $3.04, £5,000,000. So it's a really exciting business for us, and, obviously, that plays out in the return on capital, but we'll touch on that in a bit.

8:56 In terms of our learnings, of course, it's been a very aggressive, site rollout, but we've learned a lot about what works, what doesn't work, where we should go, and now feel that we're in a fairly well optimized position certainly as we go forward. And as we touch on the strategy later, we'll get into a little bit of detail about where we see that runway. And, again, very, very highly reviewed business, which is essential for us. So in terms of looking at each business side by side in terms of numbers, what you'll see here, first of all, in terms of space is that escape hunts are really small footprint relative to Boom. So, typically, an escape hunt is about three and a half thousand square feet. We do have some that are smaller. We have a few that are large, a little larger. But, typically, three and a half thousand square feet gets you six game rooms, maybe seven, and a little bit of reception space. And in that business, we don't need much more.

9:45 Boom is typically larger for the very obvious reasons that you've got much more game, and it's a higher participation business, more customers coming through per hour. In terms of the split of offer, BOOM is, very heavily, led by F and B, as you can imagine. So 50% drink, 5% food, but actually still 45% game, which is very high. And that's important in the mix because as you would imagine, game has no cost of goods associated with it directly or at least very, very low. So it becomes a much, much higher GP business than a conventional business in the hospitality space. On the escape hunt side, we do very little outside game. So we have a little bit of drink, absolutely no food. It's very difficult to do food well at low scale.

10:30 And because we're such a premium experience on the escape side, we we we would avoid doing anything at all rather than bring the brand value down. So it's 95% game. Obviously, that is a very high margin proposition, and you'll see that in the numbers shortly. But I think interestingly, both businesses, sit in and around that £25 per head. Now the makeup of that is very different. Typically, Boom customer is in sight for longer. You know, drinks extended over a period. Typically, the escape punk customer is there for their hour with fifteen minutes on either side. But nonetheless, you're at £25 ahead on both businesses. And I suppose you'll see that in the you'll see that in the numbers. I mentioned that Boom is a much higher dense business. Last year, we served around 2,000,000 customers, half million on the escape hunt side. So if you did the math there, you'd be in and around that £60,000,000 of sales that that you saw, in the accounts.

11:21 I think really excitingly, the demographics are very, very neatly split, male and female. And I think that's something that you really do want to have in hospitality and leisure businesses. You want to have offers which are particularly given corporate, preponderance are equally as attractive to male and female. So seeing the numbers split pretty close down the middle is interesting to us. And in terms of that corporate piece, the corporate revenues for Boom are about twice as much in the mix as for escape punt circa 15%, which is, for obvious reasons, just our capacity in Boom is much larger. We can host two, three, 400 people from a corporate in a boom, whereas, of course, you're kinda maxed out at about 40 in an escape hunt. And in terms of the typical site revenues, for us today, so an escape hunt site does circa 600,000.

12:11 It's the average is a little higher than that, whereas an average boom is around 2,000,000. But you'll see in terms of the the, EBITDA conversion, 40% on, on the escape hunt side and 20% on the boom side as well. Now we'll we'll get into more detail on those numbers further into the deck and kinda play that through, but hopefully, that gives you a flavor for the types of businesses that we have. I think really interestingly for us, what we have also is a business that for both brands has been spread really well geographically. And so you'll see here, you know, a fairly broad coverage around The UK, a couple of additional sites up there in Scotland. And the reason this is so important for us is because so many competitive socializing brands and leisure brands can operate really well in London or in Manchester or possibly Birmingham, but really don't have a runway stretch outside that, leaving an awful lot of The UK untapped.

13:04 So for us, it's been really important to be able to prove that you've got flexibility enough in the model that you can have a site working on Oxford Street alongside a site working in Canterbury alongside a site working in Edinburgh as well as something down in Exeter. Because if you can get that right, it opens up an extraordinary runway relative to some of the other brands in our sector. We thought it'd be interesting to touch on the industry per se and indeed where those macros are. And I I don't think I'm gonna tell you anything today that you haven't already read, but clearly, we are absolutely in the right space serving as we do experiences. You know, everybody the narrative for a long time has been that experience is displacing material goods. The, you know, people want to do things with their friends that they can remember, and actually doing that more and more regularly has very much displaced the material good.

13:56 And interestingly, in our industry specifically, you've seen this experience really displacing traditional f and b type hospitality, And the data is stark. If you look at experiential venture experiential venues like ours, and you can see that the market grew at 6% relative to more conventional bars declining, I think it actually makes the point that very much people are shifting towards our space. And, actually, whilst there is a lot of growth within competitive socializing per se, the loser is not competitive socializing. It's conventional hospitality and f and b businesses. But with that as given, I think it's really important that you are the big player within that sector. You want to be leading the charge.

14:41 And I think for both businesses, seeing that we are the standout player by scale here is exciting. Now on the boom side, we've touched on those numbers, but in a very short period of time, we've become the standout market leader by number of sites. And on the escape room side, exactly the same. And this is important for a whole bunch of reasons. It's important because the learnings that you get are significant. It's important that you can spread the essential back office costs that are needed to run good businesses, your financial marketing, your ops, whatever it might be, to spread them across sites. That allows you to remain focused on delivering quality in a way that smaller operators really struggle to do. With the best one in the world in our sector, you can have some great units that are operating, and they might even be making quite a lot of money at a unit level. But if they don't make enough to fund your central cost, you have a real problem, and that is becoming a little bit of a a market sector dynamic right now. So it's very, very exciting for us to be at the forefront of this growth.

15:41 But, of course, what it also does is gives you that brand awareness, and the more you grow, the more you become known. And escape punk would be a great example of this where the escape room industry has grown, you know, not as fast as us, but we become ever more present and ever more known. So when you hit the ground in a new location, you hit it harder, you hit it faster, your sales are higher from sooner. That's a really good thing. So having that scale is really important. But scale in and of itself, isn't enough. What you also have to do is make sure you deliver for the customer every single time. We have to sit at the top of the consumer ratings on an aggregated basis all the time. If we're sat in a market as we are at the moment where there is a little bit of pressure on consumer spending, it is essential that you are closer to the front of the consumer psyche. You must be the business that is best reviewed such that you people and customers come back to you again and again. And so what you'll see here for both of our businesses, we sat very much at the top of that tree, and this is something we're very proud about. This is the thing that drives the numbers. You focus on this and the numbers are a byproduct.

16:50 One of the things that perhaps some of you have read about and certainly it's been a bit of a common narrative is this consolidation within the experience and within the competitive socializing markets. And I think some people view this narrative a little bit negatively. Oh my goodness. Competitive socializing is consolidating a little bit. Is this a problem? And I think it's certainly true to say that for many in our sector, that is a problem. If you are subscale, that is a challenge. But we thought, therefore, it'd be really interesting to point to point to our experience that we've had in a consolidating market for escape hunt and use that as a good proxy for BOOM. So what you're seeing here in the journey for escape hunt is the net additions of indeed escape rooms, So the industry for escape rooms, net additions over the period from 2013 to '18. And what you're seeing there is a really accelerated growth in rooms as people started to become aware of escape rooms, started to become aware of just how exciting this was as a new form of leisure. And indeed, that growth was quite significant.

17:51 But then all of a sudden, even before COVID, it got a little bit harder. More entrants were in the market, and people weren't quite making the money that they thought they would make. And, typically, these were underinvested sites. Typically, they didn't have the cash to support the growth, to support the sort of runway. And, of course, you started to see this decline in numbers even ahead of COVID. And then, of course, through that period, you've seen this constant decline, of net additions within the escape room industry. Now that's obviously been very problematic for a number of operators who have gone out of business. But for us, it's been fantastic Because what our experience as the largest player, as the best review player in that sector has been is to see a business that has grown at extraordinary levels of like for like, you know, double digit like for likes over the last, sort of four, five years.

18:42 It's seen an ever increasing level of conversion to EBITDA. It's seen an ever increasing rate of return on capital where we're seeing sites trading harder, faster, sat against a lower capital base. So consolidation in this sector has been a wonderful thing for us, and to be that standout market leader has been the thing that we absolutely have benefited most from. And so I would make the same point. It's earlier days on Boom, but I would make the same point that having as we do the 30 sites that trade well, that make a lot of money, this is a very good place to be for us in a sector that is possibly a little weaker than it was. And, of course, all these things combined, that is sitting at the top of the tree in terms of site numbers, sitting at the top of tree in terms of customer review, and sitting at the top of the tree in terms of balance sheet and covenant strength, have led landlords to like our businesses more and more, and this is self fulfilling.

19:39 So what this chart here is showing you is what the level of landlord support to Escape Hunt has been over time. We use Escape Hunt because it's the older the businesses. We've got more history. Of course, Boom is younger. But over time, when we when we started off, we got next to nothing from landlords. When we went to landlords and said, look. We've this great idea. What we wanna do is lock some people up in a room and see if they can get out. Everybody looks at you in the most extraordinary, oh my goodness. We don't want that in our scheme. Wanna so you're slightly you have to take the sites you're given. Well, now everybody wants us. You know, it is a clean operator. It is well reviewed. It, you know, it is additive to schemes. It is growing. This is a really good place for landlords to be. So if you look at the change in scale of landlord incentive, born of all those things that we've determined, this, we think, is a really, really exciting place for us to play.

20:28 So the dynamics are very much in our favor. Again, we expect to see similar things, for Boom as well as we become better and better known, and, you know, we'll follow-up with more data as we have it. And just summarizing all of those things that we've talked about, I think is interesting when you look at the businesses side by side because for both businesses by scale where we we sit at number one, so in competitive socializing and in the escape room industry. We talked about the reviews already. We we we've touched on the revenues, EBITDA margins, but I think the bit that we haven't touched on yet is the costs that we have in these businesses. Because the measure that we assess ourselves against is our return on capital. This is the thing that internally we live and die by. And seeing two businesses that return their capital at 50% or ahead, we think is a really exciting place to play.

21:19 And even if you went further than that, and Graham will talk to sort of normalized cash flow with normalized, maintenance CapEx, etcetera, a little bit further into the deck, you will see a return on capital that is very, very high. And when you're doing that, geographically spread with the runway and white space opportunity that we have, we think this is a really exciting business to be in. In terms of our culture within both businesses, escape hunt and Boom, very much we are about this circle of continuous improvement. And so we thought we would just touch on some of our escape hunt experience that we've had and, again, use that as a proxy for boom. The only reason we talk about escape hunt here is because we've got the benefit of seven years of trading. But but if you if you kind of look at these areas in turn so we we have learned such a lot from trading a number of sites over this period. We've we got I mean, don't get me wrong.

22:12 We got so much stuff wrong when we opened up. We got layouts wrong. We got games wrong. We got operations wrong, but we got better. And over time, these marginal chips away have just improved us and improved us and garnered efficiency and so on and so forth. And we're not afraid to be wrong. We'd far rather try and test stuff, see what happens, and then restep if we need to. This constant circle of learning has been exciting, and it's taken us to create incremental revenue streams. You touched on those a little bit earlier for Escape Punt, you know, getting outside the room into cities, into digital. These are all incremental things that are great. In terms of efficiency, we put a massive investment into technology in Escape Punt, and we saw what was previously a one for one relationship between a game and a games master morph into one game, sorry, one games master for two games up to three, even at the margin up to four, all in the technology. Well, that's had a massive effect on the way that we can run our labor, how efficient we are as a business.

23:13 In terms of competitive advantage, this is really stark now. Competitor numbers are on the decline. Our numbers are on the way up, and Andrew will talk to the detail here in a little while. But, you know, we go into new site we go into new towns now. Competitors close very quickly. We take all the business and flourish and hit the ground running. So the market has moved for us. And, of course, this scale as we've talked about really in all aspects is the thing that allows us to keep investing in product, in design, in quality, in moving the dial. So all of those things together have actually manifested themselves in quite a stark increase in economics over a fairly short period of time. So if you look at the average performance in 2019 where a boxer's doing 490,000 pounds, you've seen that grow by 35% to 660 on average. These are based on the average numbers for last year.

24:04 We talked a little bit about where that labor saving is coming from. We talked about that efficiency through tech, through learning, etcetera, but you're seeing labor coming down from 37% to 30. In terms of the other costs, broadly speaking, the same, I e, you are entirely leveraging that fixed cost base with incremental sales. Great place to be. The manifestation of which is, site EBITDA, which has moved from, you know, just over a £100,000 per site, five years ago through to 270, which was the average last year. So seeing that margin improvement of 19 percentage points to a business that's now throwing off 41% EBITDA. So quite spectacular numbers, I would suggest. And whilst we're not that yet there in terms of the day in terms of the length of service for Boom, we, you know, we're still on that journey for Boom. It's a much younger business.

24:56 Already, we're starting to think about it in exactly the same way. We're starting to think about it through this analytics lens, through this hypothesis testing lens. You know, this would be, you know, an example, of where we start to learn where Dom, who's talking to us in a moment, has gone through and he's looked at every game that we have available to us in the site. And he's trying to understand what is the marginal additional benefit for every incremental incidents of a game. I e, if I've got three darts lanes and three axe lanes, am I better off putting in dart lane number four, five, or six, or am I better off putting in axe lane four, shuffleboard three, whatever it might be? So we've got into understanding where that marginal return per square foot is coming from. And this kind of learning allows us to rejig sites, move things around, expand games capacity, create capacity, and so on. We only use it as one example of many, but this whole culture of hypothesis testing, of learning, of growing is very much kind of what gets us out of bed every day.

25:58 So all of these things come together, I think, to to give us a very exciting business. Now already, we've seen this exponential growth over the last, sort of four or five years. Graham's gonna touch on that in his numbers. But I'm just gonna leave you with this idea here that we are absolutely on track to to deliver another very significant period of growth over the next three years. We went out quite publicly about six or seven weeks ago and said, by the end of twenty twenty eight, we'll be having a business that's doing £90,000,000 of sales at a 15% EBITDA, which will run rate a 100,000,000 at £15,000,000 of EBITDA. So significant growth from where we are. It's 50% on the top line and doubling EBITDA. But most excitingly, it's born of the learnings that we've had.

26:43 It's born of the runway opportunity in the white space that we see. It's born of a bank facility that allows us to get there whilst maintaining less than 1% net debt to EBITDA. And I think really excitingly, it's a very it's a very good thing to go after. So Graham's gonna touch on the strategy a little bit more in detail. I won't leave it. I'll I'll leave it there for now. But hopefully, that gives you enough of an overview of the business, and it's a pleasure to hand you over to Dom. Alright. Thank you, Richard. Okay. Moving on to section which is use of data and learnings. So my role here at XP is strategy and corporate finance director in a word that is essentially looking into the data and seeing how we can improve things, how we can make sure we get every incremental marginal return as Richard says, or simplistically data.

27:43 And, that's been quite a common theme of mine throughout my career. Started out as a pricing consultant, moved on to, be an investor for eight years or so. So I've sat on both sides of this, metaphorical line. And really, as an investor, what I found was the the best companies I always used to look at used to know everything about their business. So they do that by AB testing everything. And then once you really, really understand your business, that is when you can micro optimize everything and really get those little one percents that make all the difference. Loved being an investor, but really was super interested in wanting to help build something and be part of a growing exciting business in an industry that I'm passionate about. So reaching out to XP was actually a very targeted approach on my side.

28:37 Thankfully, Richard and Graham didn't throw the door back in my face much to their, later dismay. But, yeah, I've loved loved it ever since, and it's it's a super interesting job. So moving on to why I'm here. So as Richard says, we are the market leader, and that is a great thing for me because that means a huge amount of data to analyze and really kind of try and push the business forward. But more importantly, arguably at least, it's great for the business because, obviously, it means scale, means we can test and learn across a a huge number of sites. And these findings really have driven our our strategy going forward. So what have we learned so far? Obviously, we've we've got a a very large number of sites, which means we have quite a a good understanding, at least if I'm doing my job correctly, of what makes a good site. So there are a number of indicators that go into this.

29:33 And the those are kind of blurred out here deliberately for for commercially sensitive reasons. But the kind of things that go into this, as you'd imagine, catchments, affluence, demographics, and this provides quite a strong predictive power of how a site is gonna perform before we open it. So that's great, obviously, in terms of informing and on screening potential cities, but it's also very helpful for working out what kind of rents, what kind of cap cons we might be willing to accept in order to hit our returns criteria. So we'd love to dive into some specific details on on what works for both brands starting on the escape hunt side, and I like to think of this in in two brackets. So firstly, macro location. So what kind of town, what city does this work for?

30:24 And for escape hunt, we're we're actually incredibly fortunate that it's worked for a very broad selection of sites in different catchments in quite varying affluences, very varying competitive environments as well. And then when you zoom in on the micro location, so I where within the town or city it might work, We're we're quite a destination here. So we get customers that typically come from on average around 10 kilometers away. Most of it, this is pre booked. So we can be we don't necessarily have to be in the the Uber prominent locations. And finally, we are more flexible in terms of our orientation certainly versus traditional retail. So our sites can have quite differing size of rooms, which means, again, we can be quite selective on which types of sites we we get. And all of that is just to to to highlight that.

31:21 We can be very opportunistic on sites with quite attractive property deals, cap cons, rent free periods, and stuff like that. So what's the evidence for this? So just this chart on the left hand side shows our EBITDA margin by escape hunt sites. And what you can see here is is that it's remarkably consistent for a leisure and hospitality business. So our weakest performing sites around 20% EBITDA margins, all sites are very strongly profitable, and actually 18 of the 20 are above what we were originally targeting in terms of EBITDA margin. The remaining three immature sites, would be absolutely stunned if they aren't in this range and towards the top end because they've all start started quite well as well.

32:08 And what we're actually finding is, as Richard alluded to there, is that our speed to maturity, our mature return on capital employed has been improving with successive cohorts. So this chart shows net return on capital employed by cohort over time. And this really is the impact of learnings. So we we know how to open open a site now. We've got a phenomenal marketing team who have really honed it down, and and we can really hit hit the ground running. But also, it's it's operational learnings, build cost has come down, and profitability has improved. And like Richard said as well, obviously, landlord incentives have been going up, which which helps that side of the equation as well. So all a very encouraging, situation. And then diving in, I'd love to dive into a specific example of this. So Escape Hunt Worcester, I think, is a really good illustrative case study here.

33:02 It's a site we opened last year. In terms of macro location, it's relatively uninteresting, to be honest. It's it's pretty average, marginally below The UK average salary. Actually, our smallest catchment population within our estate. So so a 100,000 people. And and in terms of micro location, yes, it's centrally located in a in a great scheme, but it's on a 2nd Floor. Not it's recessed. It's not a a lot of naturally passing foot traffic, and it it would definitely be a very awkward shape for traditional retail. So it's a bit of an l shape, not your traditional kind of square box format, which you would need for, a traditional retail store. So as a result, the site was on let for the for the, prior to we the prior to when we took over for around seven or eight years since the scheme has been opened.

33:53 So because we've got our shrewd negotiator, mister Jacobs over there, we've attained it on pretty attractive terms. And we've also worked with the landlord to boost some of the natural limitations. So signage, which is is very important. Frontage is is it makes a big difference and that that has really helped there. So how is this performs? And again, I think our our content really is a step change from from competitors. So typically higher bills, maintenance budgets than everyone else. And that is reflected, I think, in in customer numbers. So this chart here shows, a very loose proxy for for customer numbers, which is is review frequency. So this is number of reviews per, per month, and we're averaging around six times our local four competitors combined and also in review score. So again, I switch to mentioned we are generally ahead of our competitors in in most markets.

34:52 Interestingly here, and this is indicative of a lot of locations where we open, our local competitors face quite significant challenges, particularly when we open. So one of these four locations has and our most centrally located, probably our our most direct competitor has closed since we opened. Another two are, to be honest, very small operators but operate very compressed hours. And the final one is in an out of town bowling center. Many of you may know which one that is. But again, not not really a direct competitor. So this is all to say, yes, we do gain a little bit of share, but in reality, we're we're generally creating a market when we open a new site. And you can see this in terms of our unit economics and our revenue.

35:41 So what I find quite encouraging here is that our revenue obviously is early days. We've been open six months or so. But since opening, the black line shows our average 2022, 2023, cohort in terms of revenue per week since opening. The orange line is Worcester. So you can see that they're pretty much, neck and neck, which is a great thing given, again, you'd you'd imagine that Worcester, given its natural limitations, aim with quite attractive property deals. So similar revenue would mean better better EBITDA, better return on capital, which is obviously very encouraging. So in summary on on Escape Hunt, we can be successful across a broad variety of sites.

36:29 So secondary and tertiary locations like Worcester, for example, as well as more premium locations like Og Street, which hopefully many of you will see later. And this means we can be incredibly opportunistic depending on what kind of rents and what what kind of Cap Cons we can get. So as a result, we strongly believe that that our runway is a lot longer than we originally expected. So we originally thought there'd be maybe slightly north of of 50 escape hunt sites long term in The UK. We now think that's north of of a 100 given what we've seen so far. And just as a few simple sense checks on this, so 100, towns and cities with a population of over a 100,000. So for reference, that's that's Worcester is a 100,000 people.

37:15 There's a 100 of those around around the country. Some of these, we think, can contain multiple escape punts. London's a very obvious one, but even in less affluent, smaller catchment cities like Norwich, for example, we were able to operate two very successful escape months there as well. And obviously, we've not explored anything below a 100,000, but I'd be very surprised if something below that level and an affluent catchment wouldn't work as well given what we've seen so far. So all of that gives us quite a lot of confidence in being able to achieve the the eight to 10 new sites per year that we've set out previously, and that would get us towards our our 30,000,000 of revenue come FY '28 as previously discussed. So looking at the same thing for for Boom, and again, thinking about the macro location.

38:04 So here, what really works best is these population dense urban areas. And zooming on on the micro location, here, prominence is much more important than it is for for escape hunt. So we get much more spontaneous bookings, more more walk ins, so you really need to be much more front and center. And so site visibility, naturally passing foot traffic, these are things that really drive our best sites. So these types of locations are the ones that we're gonna be targeting going forward. And again, why is this? So we've got, nine what we define as tier one locations. So very, front and center in large catchments. And these have all exhibited very strong unit economics. So, across the board, a very encouraging sign.

38:56 On average, they've they've, attained so far 450 k EBITDA. And you compare that again, looking mainly on return on capital, compare that to a net build cost of around $700. So we're looking at order of magnitude 60% ROCE, which, again, very encouraging. So the archetypal example of this is Oxford Street. Again, I'm sure many of you would have seen this site. Hopefully, those that that haven't will be able to see it later. But this is a site that is front and center, huge amount of inbound traffic, great transport links, obviously, a very large amount of corporate demand. It's also interesting actually at a basement location. So again, not optimal for traditional retail, which naturally means lower rent than otherwise it would be.

39:43 And we can see the evidence for this in our utilization through the week, significant pent up demand at peak times that we're that we're gradually trying to unlock. So always moving. We as Richard says, we don't typically get things right a 100% day one. So there's always improvement we can do, and that's the type of thing we're looking at doing. Richard gave the example of unlocking incremental lanes where where there is pent up demand. In Oxford Street, the that pays itself back incredibly quickly because this stuff gets booked up Thursday to Saturday every evening, and and all day Saturday pretty much. On top of this, there has been an element of of pent up demand on the F and B side as well. So, we can see that, our spend per head here is is possibly not as high as you might imagine and not as high as it should be. Again, we've been gradually unlocking that with operational learnings.

40:40 We've we've reoriented the the site somewhat to to free up a bit of that capacity. And, again, that that has really started to pay dividends. And and finally, I'll just mention corporate sales, which has grown incredibly strongly for, Oxford Street. So you put that all together and that that explains this chart here on the left hand side, which shows how Oxford Street's revenue has trended over time in a in a nice little bottom left to top right chart, which I think we can continue. There's we're definitely not optimized in terms of every single square foot. We haven't maximized our profitability. So we're we're constantly looking at ways that we can improve that, obviously without impinging on customer experience. So we don't want to just throw in a load of assets because they'll make more money. We need to make sure that we do this in a very sensible way whilst keeping experience very, very strong.

41:34 So want to briefly touch upon another example, though this will be mentioned in more detail later, just because I'm conscious that Oxford Street is somewhat of a unique case study. There are other case studies of this that we think work in other cities. So Cambridge is is a great example of a prime location in a kind of secondary city, and it really incorporates all of our learnings year to date. And, again, you put that together, and it's been our strongest opening performance, in the estate year to date. No prizes for for guessing which, number one was. So all of that put together kind of feeds into our our targets. So prioritizing these really high return, foot full prime locations, and we think we can do around two to four of these per year.

42:24 And that drive will drive us towards our our 2028 targets of around 60,000,000 of revenue. So that's a brief justification of our strategy. And to summarize this section up, we do have the market leadership, which gives us a phenomenal access to a large amount of data, hopefully doing a little bit to unlock some of that and and really make use of that. This is being used to drive decisions on a day to day basis, but also in terms of new site openings. And all of this has been brought together to to drive the strategy forward. So accelerating escape hunt given our strong returns pretty much across the board that we've seen there and prioritizing these really prime boom locations where the returns have been exceptionally strong.

43:13 So thank you all very much for your time. I'd love to pass on to Andrew and Sarah to talk through a lot of the fun stuff and how we really bring this, bring the brands to life. And it's super interesting stuff. Thank you. Want to, well, you've got your own. Good afternoon, everybody. Let's go forward to the next slide. I'm Andrew. This is Sarah. Brand experience evolution. Okay, so I'll give you a very quick introduction to me. I have been here since the very first day of this business. Before XP FACTORY, I started Giraffe restaurants for any of you that may remember that there's not a lot of that left outside the airport and went on full journey there selling it to Tesco in 2013.

44:06 So I have quite a lot of sort of history in this sector. Before that, obviously I was doing other things in the same sector. Hello everyone, I'm Sarah Lloyd Baker and I'm the Chief Content and Marketing Officer here at XP FACTORY. Basically that means I look after the marketing team, but also the the internal studio that we have that designs our games and looks after all our graphic design and things like that. I joined the business back in 2017, so almost the beginning but not quite. A few weeks? A few weeks, well it was a couple of months I think but yes, almost the beginning. Obviously I have this hospitality and leisure experience since I've been with XP, but I have multi industry experience. I've worked across various sectors, starting off in consumer products where I worked from Wreckitt on the grad scheme. I then moved into soft drinks. I had the great privilege of working on some fantastic soft drinks brands.

45:16 If anyone remembers Tango in its heyday, the ultimate challenger brand. I had a lot of fun working on that brand. I then moved into TV and media, Nickelodeon, the kids TV channel, and IPTV streaming at BT. And then finishing before coming here with NBCUniversal, looking after a lot of TV channels across EMEA. So I have quite a strong entertainment background as well, which is one of the things that excited me about this opportunity when I first met Richard. I tend to champion the customer brand and innovation due to the sort of mix of roles that I've held and I've worked very much across both B2B and B2C audiences, which is incredibly useful working in hospitality and leisure.

46:16 Andrew and I are going to do a bit of a double act. We're going to take you through our journey since 2017 on both of the brands, starting off with Escape Hunt. I'll try not to repeat too much of what Richard said as well. But this is Escape Hunt twenty thirteen. It's very humble beginnings in Bangkok as you can see, you know, it really is an idea at that point as a concept and it was a proven concept. It had great customer appeal and it was an emerging category that was very highly attractive. And when I first met Richard and we talked about this, I could really, really see the potential. I think he asked me to do a presentation and I got very carried away with all the opportunities that you could immediately see with this.

47:11 And what we did was we took that appeal and we basically created a brand new mainstream entertainment experience brand. I think that's at the critical point, the mainstream element. And when we first started operating in The UK, we very much followed the category norms, all the category rules, right? And we had locks and bad locks and where, you know, it was this whole idea of being locked in and, you know, you must escape the room. And that really sort of also plays a bit on peril and fear but not necessarily in the best way. And we quickly realised that actually that wasn't the opportunity and that the opportunity was a mainstream opportunity around a sort of positioning if you like of positivity and escapism.

48:06 And so we quickly moved from this idea of escaping from to the idea of escaping to And we replaced the locks and the padlocks and the being locked in with this idea of stepping into new worlds of colour instead of darkness, a sense of mission. So it wasn't about, you know, escaping the room. It was a much broader and much bigger idea than that. You can have a sense of any team missions basically, and really the sense of adventure. And so we have our customer line brand line there we invite our customers to live the adventure. And you can see this sort of evolution, if you like, our comms, in our fit out, in all aspects of the brand. Here are interiors on the left, you can see is very sort of heavyset, thick, traditional furniture with muted colors.

49:09 And we've moved to this lighter, brighter, much more contemporary and energetic aesthetic. You can see that in our comms, it's a bit challenging that language on the left, you versus time, who are you backing? It's not particularly inviting. Frontages too, that's Leeds and Bristol. On the left, you can see the padlocks, the darkness being blacked out and moving to frontages where we can, where it allows for there to be visibility and accessibility and much more welcoming. This is a bit of a sneak peek of Canterbury. You know, one of the key things about being an entertainment brand is that content is king and content is really important.

50:06 So we try to make as much of our content as possible on our frontages again, where it allows. So you can see here, there's a really good display of all of the different types of game themes that are on offer. And the other thing to note about this, we're on-site here at the moment I should have said, but the big orange portal you can see there is a really core and striking part of our identity as well. And that's very symbolic of, you know, stepping into new worlds and going through doorways to new adventures. And that brand really is very much rooted in our content strategy. I said, you know, for an entertainment brand, content is king. And I'm not going to go through all this, but I thought it'd be interesting for you to just have a bit of a look. These are the kinds of things that we think about when we are developing a new game theme. We don't just pluck them out of the air, we actually think about why, what are the criteria we need to consider to meet our audience's needs. So the ones I do want to pick out are the first one which is mainstream. I talked earlier about this being a mainstream opportunity and so the content that we create isn't niche, it's not abstract, it doesn't require these complicated sort of backstories for a customer to understand.

51:30 They're inclusive and accessible to the mainstream. And that brings me on to the next point, which is around them being instantly recognisable. So we leverage what we call known worlds and familiar themes. Something like pirates, everyone knows what kind of adventure they're going to be going on, right? If you think about the pirate world, And that really helps in terms of our marketing effectiveness and our customer acquisition. It removes a of barriers because people understand immediately the kind of thing they're going to get. And also out of copyright IP, so games like our Alice game as well, those obviously are really powerful to be able to tap into. And then finally, you know, our brand promise is one of adventure. So being adventurous is really important.

52:21 And to create the adrenaline and the excitement, clearly, need to set up a sense of jeopardy or thrill or peril, but it has to be a safe, a safe thrill. Call it we talk about being a safe thrill. And you'll see an example of that later with with Dracula, you know, we must may always remember that mainstream audience who we're appealing to. So we wouldn't do a really extreme horror game, for example. So these are our games essentially it's a brilliant catalogue that we have built up. This is our core escape room game catalogue and hopefully you can see with some of those themes there, that content strategy really being delivered against.

53:11 And those games really are executed with production values that are worthy of a big studio theme park. But yet you find us on the high street. We are in every day in inverted commas. So here's a bit of a sneak peek into some of our game rooms. These are our latest games in case you haven't had a chance to see them or this is all new to you. This is Eye of the Sun God, which is based on an Aztec theme in an Aztec world and really sort of rocks the Indiana Jones vibe, so to speak. Some of these photos are quite light and bright because just because of the photography but when you're actually in the room that you know you get the sense of much deeper immersion than this is showing necessarily.

54:04 Excalibur, you know, step into the world of King Arthur and who doesn't want to, you know, raise King Arthur's sword? And Dracula, this is the game I was talking about earlier in terms of this pushes us to the edge of content strategy. We had lots of discussion about this, but clearly this sort of taps into that idea of out copyright IP is very, very well known. Everyone's heard of Dracula, right? But we did not want to create a horror game. So this is very much a safe thrill. I think I've got a trailer to play up. Hopefully no one was too scared by that.

55:23 And the quality of those games is obviously borne out in our review scores. Richard's talked about them, Dom's talked about them, we're really proud of them. It's obviously not just the game though that gets us these scores, it's also brilliant hosting it and our Biocite teams too. So it's a combination of those factors that gives us this great scores. And so this is a pictogram of Sarah and I at the beginning of the business because as fantastic as those slides look now, it wasn't always so. I think when we started at the very beginning, had underestimated the cost and the complexity and the time actually to develop the games that you've just seen.

56:15 Over the last sort of seven years or so, what we've built up is both scale, with that scale comes a degree of IP, which I think is tremendous, but also real barriers to entry. And I think one of the other one point just to mention as well where you saw the pictures, the difference between the video and the pictures was it shows you if you saw in the video the degree of tech that is actually in these rooms and the lighting and the sound and the interactivity which obviously the pictures won't convey. So that know how and that sort of capability around our secret source was difficult in the beginning. But as Andrew said, is what we believe will create a high barrier for entry for others trying to do this at scale.

57:08 Back in 2017, I guess one of the first things we needed to do was create some games, right? And it wasn't as easy as it might seem. You know, you can't just go out there. Well, back in 2017, you couldn't anyway go out there and recruit an escape room games designer. Right? It was a new category. And the escape room designers that were out there would be independents and they would be owners of their own businesses and they would come up with their game and they would, you know, passionately craft and produce that game and they'd make, you know, one game. And obviously that wasn't what we needed. We needed to, you know, creating, but we needed creativity that was scalable.

58:01 You know, so we made some sort of mistakes, I guess, in the early days in terms of how we resource this. And then we quickly learned that we needed a melting pot of skills. And that's just some of them listed up there. And we built our internal studio with all this wonderful creativity. Some of those things we do internally, of them, you know, we have a network of specialists who we work with because it just doesn't warrant having that kind of expertise in house. But not only creativity is important in terms of the design process, you know, customer insight and operational insight fed back into that design process is also fundamental.

58:50 And, you know, I think the golden ticket for us really, has been finding talent from our site teams. We have uncovered some amazing talent in our site teams who have been attracted to come to work with us in Escape Pump because they love gaming and the things that we do and they've experienced our product. And they've been running sites or you know operating games and they happen they just happen to have like games design degrees or you know, amazing animation or illustration degrees too. And so we've run a couple of sort of his search for the next generation of games designers and we managed to find some brilliant talent there, which really makes sure we get this, constant loop of customer and operational insight fed into the design process.

59:43 So a little bit on how we got the games built and how we evolved. So this is a quick slide of a, we went through a number of game designers in the last, in the first sort of two or three years before we found a solution. Actually during COVID, we found a supplier who developed, a modular format for the games. This was also a huge step for a number of reasons. One, the games could be made off-site so you didn't have to have quite so many workmen on-site constructing the games. It made it faster, it made it easier to install and very importantly, it made them consistent. Along with the scale that we were aspiring to at that time, were able to deliver consistent games and very importantly we suddenly found ourselves with transportable games.

1:00:33 I think we should mention before, but it has an impact on the return on capital because it means if we were to exit a site as we have once or twice, or we want to change the games out, these things can be taken out. Whereas the first few games were a sudden cost. At the end of the lease they'd be part of the strip out. Let me talk to you a little bit about our learnings around the sites. These photos are sites that we did at the very beginning, where you can see the starting point is we were literally, we were a startup practically in this country. So we took what we could get. The first site was Birmingham. It's a retail frontage that goes up to a 1st Floor. That was the sort of shtick at the time for all of the escape room industry.

1:01:26 Not a particularly nice center, still trading. It's not the site that is generating 20% EBITDA. It's generating a lot more and it has done ever since. And we haven't changed any games. And interestingly, just in terms of the performance, this is a site that has only four games because there are two instances, two games that are doubled up. So we only actually have four different games in this, in terms of different actual games in this site is still performing six or seven years later fantastically. The second example just worth mentioning was Edinburgh, where we were testing and trialing these sites at this stage. Was all about learnings. We thought this was a site in the middle of Edinburgh which was a townhouse. We took the tall townhouse. The learning from this was we didn't have a frontage. We had a doorway. So this side actually struggled a little bit for a while and we got the opportunity to relocate into the boom, which I'll come to later.

1:02:24 So we gathered lots of learnings from the early sides and you won't be surprised to hear that the learnings were very simply if we had these four, basically four or five levers, if we dialed up these levers, the sites reach them mature business case faster And there's no, you know, a better frontage, better visibility, higher footfall and relevant adjacencies in terms of leisure, F and B, cinemas. The sites just got to where we wanted them to get to faster and there hasn't been a single case where that hasn't happened, not one of our sites. So that's not to say that those are the only sites that we do, but certainly as you saw in Dom's slide earlier, all the sites are making fantastic metrics.

1:03:12 Finally, course, we are able, as Richard mentioned as well earlier, because of scale, because of the performance, because of the desirability for leisure from landlords and a stronger covenant, are obviously able to get better sites. Just to talk you through this other slight dynamic of the business, which is quite interesting. We have something close to a dozen locations where both boom and escape and coexist. So there are, there are five examples. Think there are photographs of four of them. The fifth one being Edinburgh where boom and escape and actually exist in the same, like same building, same site. The second option is where what we refer to as proximity sites like Bournemouth, Watford, Glasgow is a good example where we had a very successful boom. We in a, in a shopping mall in Glasgow, we opened an escape hunt directly opposite both of them from day one are doing fantastically.

1:04:13 So we feel that's probably slightly preferable to coexisting because there is always that question of customer journey when a, as you'll see in Oxford Street, an escape hunt customer has to go through a boom to get to escape hunt. It's not ideal. I think having shared doors like Cambridge, for example, sorry, separate doors is far preferable, but each and every one of those sites does very well for both brands. So what we've got, as you see, Sarah showed the image at the top within escape, uncertainly, we've got a, proven regional, success rate where we can take this business anywhere in the country over a wide variety of schemes and types of property.

1:04:59 Also it's clearly a very versatile brand. It leads us to this opportunity with the better covenant and a much higher profile within the sort of property world that we're simply securing hopefully better and better sites. Again, reinforcing that speeds of maturity. The bottom site here is just Canary Wharf where we've made an offer on a site in Canary Wharf. That's as far as I can tell you now, but hopefully that will progress. But we don't sit still, as Richard alluded to earlier, we look for opportunities to also innovate beyond the room. And we have developed a range of secondary products. These are very much secondary, but they do play a role for our customers. So we have here things like City Hunts, which are games that you play out on the streets with an action pack, if you like. In this case, it's an Alice basket, you can see in the bottom right, which is full of props and a tablet.

1:06:07 You go out on a team mission, as we talked about earlier against the clock, and you interact with the environment and you discover the city. So it's basically an escape room on streets. And then we've got, you know, printed puzzle packs that people can buy in venue, corporate digital games, even an advent calendar. And these products allow both a deeper sort of brand engagement, which is obviously fantastic, but also a lower price point than our core escape room games, which is obviously allows customers to enter the brand at lower risk, if you like, and give us a try. And obviously we're always constantly looking at how can we create better and better games, but we also look at how do we level up the experience as a whole.

1:07:05 And in Cambridge, anyone gets the chance to go to Cambridge, that's obviously our most recent opening. And there's a couple of things that we've done there that we feel have been really moved us on yet again. The first one is these themed doors that we have brought in to much excitement amongst the site teams. No prizes for guessing which game this one is. But now as you walk down the corridor, you basically see all these themed doors which are symbolic of the worlds that sit behind them. Which means as customers explore our site, they also see other games that they might want to play and they get excited by them, particularly if you consider that the purchase journey is often done by one person. So one person goes through that online journey and sees the range of experiences that we have on offer.

1:08:03 Then the second point here is about sound. You know, we've been doing this now since 2017. So we've got seven years essentially, all those games of music IP. So music that we own, that features in our games, and we are playing this up the stairwell into the lounges. It's sort of pulse racing, very exciting music that drives a great sense of anticipation when you arrive at the site from the moment you sort of step through the door. If you think very much like being in a queue for a theme park ride, when they're playing that music and you're sort of standing there and you move it obviously it's not like they'd have to queue to get into a skate run but it's that same sort of sense of excitement that builds up.

1:08:52 And then also other senses we're currently exploring the role of smell and then we have recently developed and launched a range of themed cocktails, making the most of the bar capability we now have with BOOM. So themed cocktails that link to each of the room themes, which obviously offer a nice Instagram, opportunity, but also for a customer that really, really helps with making this experience fully memorable. So that is Escape Punt. I'm now going to talk to you about Boom Boom Battle Bar and the brand evolution there, which actually is not dissimilar in terms of the of the story in that it was very much a blank canvas in many respects. I think Richard alluded to this earlier as well. Was like very like escape fund, there was a concept with proven customer appeal.

1:10:01 Had a few sites, there were a few sites, customers were going along enjoying themselves. When we acquired the business, we thought, okay, well, this is a really great brand name. We really like the idea of modularity, the fact that there's not just one game that we're focusing on. And there was this strong property pipeline. So we thought, well, this is something that has real potential for us. However, when we started operating, obviously the category started getting lots and lots of competitors. And we quickly realised that, you know, it would be really, really important for us to build a very strong brand for defensibility of the business.

1:10:46 And we recognise that the early place we were playing, which was around this idea of battling and competing was not enough. We needed to add sort of an emotion to the brand. A strong a strong brand is ultimately a strong feeling, and we needed to bring that to the business. So we needed to add the boom to the battle. And so we went through this exercise of trying to work out what does this look like? And we realised that across the estate, were sort of pockets of best practice that were going on. There was stuff that was happening that was really, really working with customers. Customers found really exciting and really appealing and it was driving great customer satisfaction.

1:11:36 So we sought to understand what that was. And we worked very closely with our site teams and our ops teams to really get under the skin of that and to articulate it so that we could bottle it essentially and then we could share it, you know, amongst the rest of the network and deliver something consistently. And that is the boom. So you know what, what really is the boom or the boom is the feeling that we awaken in our customers that makes our brand really unforgettable. We talk about it being, you know, an undeniable feeling of winning at life. It's what happens when a moment catches fire and engulfs you and then it spreads out and engulfs all your friends and your colleagues and your family who you're with.

1:12:26 And you're sort of right here right now really present in the moment. And you've forgotten that it might have been daylight when you arrived. And these moments, we see them organically and naturally within gameplay, but also within the hospitality experience that we deliver. So we amplify that feeling as well. In game it might be as an example, when some clever clogs in your group manages to get a bull's eye, but equally, it might be when someone more like me just manages to get the dart on the board for the first time. So everyone's boom is different and it's expressed in different ways. But ultimately, it's united by that common feeling.

1:13:17 It's a bit of a video to play. Now. I feel alive. Feel alive. Keep coming alive. Keep alive. Keep coming alive. Keep doing right. Hopefully that gives you a bit of a taste of the vibe that the teams create in the venues. And so awkward to say aptly, our brand line for BOOM is 'Feel the Boom'.

1:14:12 So how do we deliver this? Well, it's obviously a very people centred centred positioning. So our people are essentially our BOOM. We are all boom makers, a whole team of us, no matter what department you work in, right, we come to work to master the unexpected experience and to really seek out those moments where we can find the sparks that light the fuse and really create create the boom. And our teams are really on board with this. And the reasons they're on board is because this is rooted in a business truth. This is something that was happening organically in the business in pockets of best practice.

1:15:00 And we sort it out and we articulated it so that we could all get behind and make sure we had a common vision to deliver it with consistency. And the teams are proudly experimenting and learning. We have a brilliantly busy, what we call workplace community chat group, if you like, where they're sharing all this all this stuff. But we do realise that, you know, this is a journey and we're not there yet, although our customer scores are still really great. So, you know, we know that we can build on this. So I've talked about, you know, really building brand defensibility through our thing that you know, our game around tangible assets, the emotional feelings of the brand.

1:15:49 But a distinctive brand experience really needs a distinctive visual identity as well. And so working on our intangible assets was really important. And on the right here, can see this is the brand that we acquired. It's inconsistent, obviously, this is a brand in its, you know, very early days, still finding itself experimenting a very, very young brand. But in order for us to scale quickly, we had to hone this identity. And with time and consistency and understanding what was working, that visual distinctiveness is growing. And obviously, that's really important in terms of differentiation with customers as well.

1:16:44 And obviously things, you know, continue to evolve, but where we have got to, you know, is allowing us to do some great things in terms of brand attribution, such that when we're communicating or we're advertising, we're making sure that that ad dollar is paying back to ours as BOOM and not just driving category growth. This is the launch campaign that we did for Cambridge And you can see boom there, you know, boom is big, it's bold, and it's very high energy. And that's actually we started rolling out a little bit on signage as well. So this is the O2. And, you know, that the work that we've done on the identity really did come together in the interiors of Cambridge, which you can see here. I think Andrew's going to talk a bit about.

1:17:39 If you can compare this for a moment to the pictures that Sarah had up before, it just shows you how cohesive the brand has become over the three or four years that we've had it. Which creates, I would just add about the trailer as well. Does happen. The activity that was displayed in the trailer is not just a promotional trailer. If any of you want to corner me and ask to see my phone and my WhatsApp videos that get sent to me on a Friday and a Saturday night, it just replicates exactly what you see in the trailer. So it happens all over the estate every Friday and Saturday night. So just some learnings again, it's not massively dissimilar to Escape Hunt, I won't go over, I won't repeat myself, but again, what we have learned is that these more flagship sites for BOOM, the larger sites, city centre sites in top cities, are where the immediate future for BOOM lies.

1:18:42 We opened think in Oxford, we opened Escape Pant in Oxford in 2018 and it was a fantastic success and on the back of that we felt we understood how Cambridge would behave in a similar way because the dynamics are very similar. We've been looking for a side for Escape Hunt and subsequently for BOOM in Cambridge for sort of six or seven years and we were very lucky to come across this. This site just to give you some context because it feeds into what I said earlier, this was an Allbar One which for those of you who know Allbar One is owned by Michel and Bartlett, one of the largest leisure companies in the country. They had the lease on it, they had the basement in the Ground Floor, They had sublet the 1st Floor and the 2nd Floor to Wagamama.

1:19:30 The reason I'm telling you this is it speaks to just how prime this location is. They'd had the lease for twenty five years. The landlord had decided not to renew it with them. The building was in quite a state. We were introduced to them. They had heard of BOOM, they'd heard of Escape and they liked the idea. They thought it was very appropriate to Cambridge. We had obviously arrived at a place where we had a covenant that was acceptable to such landlord and we managed to secure the site. So again, football, massively high football. I can't tell you how high it is. This is the Oxford Street of Cambridge, by the way, if any, I really recommend if any of you in the area, go and have a look. Is really fantastic. Visibility accordingly and it accommodates interestingly this is unique within the estate both brands but with separate entrances in the same building.

1:20:19 Quite unusual which is why I first came across the site. So in terms of accelerating growth, think honestly, I think there's a little bit more to do. I think escape pundits are pretty well baked product now and ready to just go, go, go. Boom is pretty ready to go. It might need a little bit more. We're still incorporating new learnings and going back through the existing estate to try and update. But one of the interesting things for Boom, particularly in comparison to some of our sector competitors are that we, as sort of dominant alluded as well, we can change the games out. We can dial up particular games if there's a pent up demand, things like that at really relatively low cost. It's different to escape rooms they're relatively expensive but if we want to add a dance lane or we want to add a shuffleboard we've been squeezing these things all around the estate over the last six nine months.

1:21:15 The unit performances are improving, the brand equity is building, we're becoming known obviously as again simply as a function of scale, reputation with the customers and I think it's clear to you from all of us that have spoken today so far that the senior management team has been around pretty much from the start. So we're all sort of six, seven years in, and a large number of the rest of the management team has also been around for a very long time. So I'll speak just quickly on-site selection. For both brands, there is a structure in place. It may or may not be interesting to you. Anybody that's bought a house will probably follow this quite easily. But we obviously Dom and I and Graham, we screen target cities. We have a long list of cities that we'd like to be in.

1:22:07 We then obviously speak to the agents. We don't have any dedicated agents. Work with, I think four key agents. So there's no, there's no, a single agent that works for us. We get a fair amount of input, which I'll describe on the next slide. I then go and visit with whoever else is available. If it's of interesting we have another visit with our project management team and other members of the SRT. We work up the financials assuming it works. It's quite a quick process now we make an offer from that point on it's either accepted or we walk away or we have a little negotiation detailed design agreed by the landlord. And the final point really is between, between starting on-site and opening doesn't really matter which brand it is between eight and fourteen or eight and fourteen weeks that's the process.

1:23:00 Then to give a little bit more color to the pipeline this is a slide that shows what's been going on since the January 1 this year. And it's really speaking to the idea that we're talking about eight to 10 sites a year for escape hunt and two to four for boom and to what extent that is achievable. So since the January 1, I've been presented with 23 sites that I think were worth considering. 17 of those I actually visited. So this shows you the sort of scale of the numbers that we're talking about. Over the seventeen ten, we got into active discussions or we are still in active discussions with and six of them we made, we've already made offers. Now remember, just for context, these are numbers for projections starting 04/01/2025.

1:23:53 So the predictions we're talking about we haven't even got to yet. So four of those six sites are actually in Legals so the offers have been accepted and although it said one site signed there actually signed, Graham signed papers today on the second site so we've actually got two sites in well one of them is Canterbury that we spoke about earlier. The second one is going to exchange, I hope this afternoon, but it's certainly been signed and we'll be starting on-site on Monday, assuming we exchange, which of course we will. So the point of this slide I think really is there's lots and lots of opportunity. We're in a great place in terms of landlords and the covenant and the offer that we're offering as part of a mix of the mix that landlords want now and I don't see any problem whatsoever in achieving the targets that have been presented earlier.

1:24:52 I'll say just one more thing before I hand over to Graham, I've been in this sector operating business like this for probably thirty years or so, more than thirty years. And as I described myself, I would describe myself as an owner operator for the vast majority of that time. So we're very invested in this business and I think it's quite a remarkable business. You see the metrics that we're talking about here. These are really rather special metrics across the business. We've got a fantastic team in place and we've got two products where we've got two great brands, fantastic metrics and a long runway that we feel we can achieve. The business I think is in rude health And thank you very much for coming. Thank you, Andrew and Sarah.

1:25:51 So you've seen the history, the hard work that it's taken to get to where we are today. And so I can tell you a little bit more about some of the strategy that Richard alluded to and how that sort of comes together. Hopefully, this has provided the foundation, which gives you that sort of confidence in the way that we are approaching things. Again, my background, probably a little boring, I won't dwell on that. But just suffice to say that I've been on both the advisory side, but also as an investor and got to know Richard and the team early on. So I have known this business from its start, and sort of bring a range of experience in both investments and also sort of operational type roles.

1:26:39 So all of this hard work, how's it actually turning out? And what's it doing? Well, if you look at the performance since, certainly since 2019, it has been a phenomenal pace of growth. And you can see that both through the turnover, which you can see here, obviously, with two years of COVID in the middle, we had a bit of a pause. There's been a tremendous exponential rate of growth, which has come from those rollout of new sites and just sort of organic as well as the acquisition of Boom. That's really translating itself into a positive cash flow on an EBITDA basis. That speaks to both the operational gearing, but also to Richard's point earlier, we have got to the scale where the estate and the economics from the estate now supports and covers the central costs. And we can now really start to leverage that. So we should see strong operational gearing benefits as the business continues to grow as we see more and more of that site level EBITDA dropping through to a group level.

1:27:43 So you can see that obviously, when I joined 2019, the business lost nearly 2,000,000 of EBITDA last year. On a twelve month basis, we would have done just over five. That's just an annualized basis, fifteen months annualized. And the forecast for the current twelve months out there is 6,400,000 of EBITDA. So very, very strong growth coming from that sort of early development phase into where we are today. I guess one of the questions people have is when you look at the bottom line is clearly when does the business actually start to produce positive EPS? One of the things which I would just reflect on that as a young business, the way the accounting standards have moved IFRS 16 being one in particular as a site, as a business which goes into different sites, we are penalized from that early on in leases where you have high charges. So last year, we reported a loss of £400,000 on a IFRS 16 basis. If you adjust back on the IFRS impact, There were some various sort of other IFRS adjustments which actually relate to it. I won't go into detail, a lease in Bournemouth.

1:29:03 But basically, you've got interest and you've got depreciation, which gets charged. When you're early on in a lease, this number is very high because obviously you capitalize the full value of the lease and you charge interest on that. That number last year, 2,400,000 and the depreciation obviously on the right of use asset. Interestingly, if I rolled all of these leases forward, on average we were about three years into a lease. If I just rolled them forward to three years from the end of the lease, this number would have fallen by nearly £2,000,000 for exactly the same operating performance. So we are penalized and particularly because we have a lot of leases at the beginning of their terms. But I'll just put this slide up as an illustration. If we accounted on UK GAAP basis, which is actually how we run our business, because we regard rent as an operating cost, not as a debt repayment, you can't pay down debt if it's can't you pay down a lease. You know, you can't go and raise money and just pay off the debt. You can't do that.

1:29:58 It's just a so we very much see it as an operating cost. If we accounted on a UK GAAP basis, we would have reported a profit of £800,000 last year. So I just wanted to sort of emphasize, we've seen the turnover growth coming through. You're seeing that leverage into EBITDA, which is really a proxy for the cash generation of the business, and I'll come on to that in the next slide, but actually the underlying business, even on a UK GAAP basis, we've got through that sort of tipping point into a profitable business. So that's how we sort of see things going forward. If I look at the real focus for me has always been about cash generation, Is does the business actually get when do we get to the point where we're generating cash that we can start to reinvest that? And the good news is we will pass that point. And that was demonstrated really aptly last year. If I look at the fifteen months, which is our reporting period, we reported on an IFRS 16 basis $9,900,000 EBITDA.

1:30:52 We don't look at that because rent is an operating cost. If I take those out, we reported $6,300,000 of EBITDA, that's a pretty good proxy for cash generation. There was some sort of working capital movement in there. The question I always get is, well, that's fine. But what about maintenance CapEx? How much do you have to spend on an estate to keep it going and to keep it fresh? So if you stop investing in new sites, what do we actually have to do now? It's a valid question. The reality is because our estate is new, we haven't yet got to the point where on most of those sites we are spending as much maintenance capex as I would expect to in future. We've done quite a lot of thinking about this and we've done quite a lot of analysis in Escape Hunt. We've surprised ourselves, I think, at how long the sites have lasted. And we haven't had to go and change rooms and so on.

1:31:43 But we think that across the two businesses, around 3% of sales is about the right number for a maintenance CapEx. Now within Escape Hunter, it's a little higher, it's closer to four. Within BOOM, it's a little lower, probably 2.5. And on a blended average, where we are currently, it comes out at about 3%. And that's the sort of guidance I've always given. So even if you look at last year, and you say we did 6,300,000 EBITDA and you take out the maintenance CapEx, I I should add that actually our operating cash flow was a bit more than that because we had a positive working capital benefit last year, but just ignore that for the moment. If we took out the sort of full maintenance CapEx, you can see that business would have generated, you know, 4,600,000 of what I would call sort of cash profit. That's a sort of after everything profit. So the business has very much got to that position, building on where we are, and we've come through that important tipping point.

1:32:35 So again, this was just putting it into a little bit more detail coming back in the other direction. So if we go back to adding back to depreciation and against the CapEx, you can see the same thing. So I talked about maintenance CapEx. I've covered that off now. I guess the other question which people come back with is, well, if your depreciation charge is so big, how can you justify lower maintenance CapEx? Again, the reality is that when you invest in a new site and you're putting in first of all, there's a whole lot of leasehold improvements that you're putting in which you do depreciate over the term of the lease. So bathrooms, air conditioning, fire systems, all of those sorts of things. True. If you terminate the lease at the end and you go and open a new site, you lose the benefit of those things. If you renew the lease, which I would expect to do in most sites, particularly where they're profitable and so on, you don't have to go and rebuild those. It's a question of maintaining them. So although you will have depreciated them, you certainly don't have to go and rebuild them.

1:33:37 In addition to the 3% of sales, on maintenance CapEx, which I expect to have to spend, We are spending at the moment on a mature site, it's a little bit less than this in our newer sites, but we're spending between 1.52% of sales on maintenance, which goes through the profit and loss account. So that's just your general sort of repairs and maintenance. So in aggregate, you're spending around 5%, in some cases, bit more 5% to 6% of sales just on maintaining the site. So hopefully that answers the question I think a lot of people have, which is why does your you're showing losses, I don't believe that this business is profitable. Well, I disagree. I think we are making true cash profits. The accounting standards slightly work against us because we are early on in our leases in particularly in IFRS.

1:34:25 If we accounted under UK GAAP, we would actually be showing profits. That just shows the mismatch between the cash accounting, which actually UK GAAP is a little bit closer to than IFRS, and that will wash its way through. So focus on the cash generation and the operating cash generation. To me, that's really the only real proxy for how well the business is doing. So again, this is just more on the cash generation. I have said previously, it is the proxy that we use. EBITDA is a good proxy for cash generation. We do have or we have had a very substantial net working capital benefits, you know, we are inherently a sort of negative working capital business.

1:35:13 Very simplistically, our customers pay us in advance when they book and we pay our suppliers in arrears, and we don't hold any stock. So fundamentally, we're a sort of negative working capital business. But as long as you're growing fast, you'll get a benefit of that. As the growth starts to slow, the net benefit will diminish. So even if you just regard us as a sort of neutral working capital business, that's probably a sort of good proxy. But this was just to show you how that those numbers sort of fed through last year as we reported our numbers. And again, just reiterate the point, we aren't spending this amount on maintenance CapEx yet. Okay, that is just a proxy when I think when we get there, that's what if you want to get a sort of normalized basis, that's how to look at it. We haven't been spending as much as that. So we've heard from Richard about the attractiveness of the industry and what's going on in the industry.

1:36:07 You've heard from Dom talking about how we really are using data to understand the business better. We think we know what works. We think we know where the best opportunities lie. And we think we have a plan to go after those things. We haven't got everything 100% right. We're still learning as we're going and we're improving constantly. And of course, the market continually changes. But I think we now have all the pieces in place to be able to deal with those changes. We're using the analytics that we get, and we're making those decisions along the way. But what that has meant is we now have confidence to go out and really go after this opportunity. And that's what sits behind the strategic plan. So we announced to people to the markets back in December, that we were targeting a 50% increase in revenue and to double our EBITDA over the course of the next as it was then three and a half years, but we sort of three years to go. And this is what we're setting out to do.

1:37:04 How do we do that? Clearly, the growth of the business comes largely from rolling out new sites. So whilst we do see organic growth in the sites after we've opened them, there's a maturity profile that we go through. Typically, are reaching that maturity profile for an escape hunt probably a bit quicker than we used to just because we open, you know, these sites sort of start much quicker than they did. We're in higher profile locations, etc. Boom, similarly, we tend to get to sort of first few months, you see rapid growth and then sort of flattens off, but we're still seeing some growth beyond that. But fundamentally, this growth comes from rolling out new sites. That obviously requires some capital. So how are we going to go about doing that? Well, the good news is that we now have the support of our bankers.

1:37:52 And with the cash generation profile of the business, coupled with the bank facility, we can leverage that and we believe that we can build the sites and the estate with that funding and we can achieve these targets. So clearly, the strategy is driven first and foremost by site expansion. Obviously, that's leveraging the site economics. We've talked about Escape Hunt, you've seen historically, Escape Hunt has been producing 42% EBITDA margins. We're just leveling that out saying it's a 40% business. That's where we'd like to be Fantastic business. The more sites you can open, the more that 40% just drops through to the bottom line, we can leverage our central costs on that. And similarly with BOOM, certainly the larger sites and the sort of prime sites are doing well in excess of 20% EBITDA margins.

1:38:42 But that's where we see the estate ultimately getting to as we improve the mix with the higher footfall sites, we should see those margins going up from where they've been historically. I think last year we generated about 16%, I think was the number, EBITDA margin for the boom estate across the piece. And all of that then should leverage our central head office costs. You've seen today, we've got some very, very talented people in the group, myself excluded, obviously. But we've built the infrastructure at head office to really build a much, much bigger business. Will head office costs go up more? Yes, they will. We've got some operational investment which will go which sort of scales with the size of the estate. We will add some further capability as the business grows.

1:39:28 But as a percentage of revenue, you will see central costs coming down quite significantly as a percentage of group revenue, and our longer term target is to get that down to about 10%. And we think all of this we can do within keeping modest debt ratios. So we've targeted share ratio of around about one times debt to EBITDA. Certainly, as we exit this period, I would expect the number to be probably a little bit lower than one times debt to EBITDA. Obviously, we have sort of cyclical cash movements and so on. So we might stray a little bit above and below, but essentially, that's where we should average out. So we've talked in terms of building those on those three pillars of our strategy. Site expansion on the escape hunt has become a little bit into focus over the last twelve months.

1:40:19 It's doing very, very well. And you can see why. Having gone through the barriers to entry that business has managed to develop, the repeatability of performance, The attractiveness to landlords means that we're getting more and more sites. The fact that it works in smaller locations like Worcester, as an example, just gives us much, much more runway for escape hunts. So we're accelerating that faster than what we have been doing in the past. It's also helped obviously by the fact that landlords are increasingly offering us cash to help improve that return on capital. So we're making 50% returns on capital. The last couple of sites we've opened with landlord contributions, I would expect to make well in excess of 50% return on capital on those sites. So it's not to say we have to get a landlord contribution, but we're being offered landlord contributions increasingly. And it does obviously help that metric very, very substantially.

1:41:12 So we're looking to do eight to 10 sites per year over the next three years. If we take it roughly to 50 sites, that's where we would want to be. With BOOM, our priority is really around the sort of premium locations where we're just seeing a stronger leverage on that sort of operating, I suppose on the scale of operating leverage, you get much better with the higher footfall locations. The more you know, if we can do more Cambridges, there are lots of sites in The UK where we see that sort of opportunity. We're not in Oxford, we're not in Nottingham, we're not in Newcastle, we're not in Bristol. These are big cities where there are fantastic opportunities. There's further opportunities in London, you know, there are other areas which we would love to be in. So there are plenty of those sort of prime locations which we would prioritize over doing sort of more smaller regional plays, which we inherited when we bought the business. There was a pipeline.

1:42:07 We've tested those, some of those work very well. Others are slightly harder to operate. And therefore the priority is let's go after these bigger locations. And let's really, really make it sing. I've spoken about the unit economics. I think one of the things which obviously people have asked about is the tax changes and what impact costs and so on. See a sort of inflationary environment, we see taxes going up, particularly employee taxes and so on. Well, actually, we obviously, of course, are impacted by that. So what are we doing about it? We are investing further in data and systems to improve our learnings that helping efficiencies. We are using technology where we can. The example earlier was was given was on Escape Hunt where by investing in technology, we were able to reduce the ratio of labor per game from one to one to one to two to one to three to one to four, which has significantly improved the margins in Escape Hunt.

1:43:02 There are further things like that which we can do, and we are investing in and taking those learnings. So I think there is more efficiency to come out through data and systems. Haven't even touched most of the data that Dom was talking about and our sort of analytics has been focused on operational type issues, which games to put in, which sites to go to. Where we haven't even really started to scratch the surface is how to optimize the customer. You know, how do you improve once you understand your customer better? There are all sorts of opportunities there too. So that's also on the radar as it sort of comes in. So there are ways in which we're using that and being the largest operator in our space, I think we have an advantage in taking that forward. So those are other areas where I think we can we can really start to drive some performance. We've spoken about game capacity and so on. And then I've spoken about head office costs and where we're looking to do that. Some of the areas which we're looking at at the moment, and actually we've just had a pilot Kest is here, I think it's live on our website, it was just a couple of days ago, where we're starting to use AI to reduce some of our cost to serve.

1:44:07 Where we've got, for example, our customer service team, a lot of the things that they would deal with the people phoning up saying, you know, I left my coat behind, where do I find it? Well, actually, you can use AI to solve all of those sort of problems. You can reduce your labor costs. And these are fairly sort of easy wins early on. And obviously, as we get better and better at that, we can drive more efficiency into the business. So that's the strategy site expansion, leverage those site economics, take advantage of the head office costs that we've gotten, we'll get the operational leverage, which will come through and drive performance. And when you can get 50% return on capital, the more money we can invest and we have access to, obviously, the faster we can drive shareholder value. So what does it look like? If we can do those sort of eight to 10 sites on escape hunt per annum, we think that gets us from in round numbers 15,000,000 of turnover today to 30,000,000 of turnover in three years time. At 40% margin, that would get us around about 12,000,000 of site level contribution from Escape Hunt.

1:45:15 We've spoken about CapEx. There has been some cost inflation. Overall, the cost of site bills for escape hunters come down quite significantly since those first 20 seventeen-twenty 18 sites. But in the last twelve-fifteen months, we have seen a little bit of inflation coming through across the piece. But with the landlord incentives, we see our our net investments per site has still come down. So that's really helping our return on capital around that. So you can do the maths. So if we're putting in sort of 400 to £500,000 per site, we're doing 8 to 10. We're talking about 4 to £5,000,000 of investment per year on new sites in Escape Hunt. And that should drive, you know, very significant future EBITDA growth on the back of that. Boom, we're talking about in round numbers, taking turnover from about 45,000,000 to 60,000,000 with the addition of those sort of prime sites, and at roughly 20% EBITDA, that would get us from where we are today, sort of 26 sites, there's actually 31 in the estate, which is including the few franchise sites that we've got. But if we can get to 35 to 40 sites, there's much more variability in the size of booms. So obviously, you know, Cambridge or an Oxford Street is a multiple of, you know, the equivalent even in a Chelmsford or one of the other sites like that. So it depends on the size of the sites. So it's really focusing on how do we grow the turnover, we want to add, get to about 60,000,000.

1:46:46 And if that's doing about 20% margin, that's also about a £12,000,000 contribution. So we should be relatively well balanced between the two brands, which I think gives us some resilience. It also just spreads our sort of interest across those two brands. We obviously have the overseas franchise business for Escape Hunt, relatively small, but making sort of 750,000 thereabouts. And we still have some franchise sites in the boom estate. So we would expect those to continue to contribute. So if we're talking about 1,500,000 to 2,000,000, and then on the back of that, we've got our head office costs, which if we are at 12.5% of sales at that point, you'll do the math and you'll see that that adds up to a bit more than $13,000,000 Not everything is going go right, but certainly I would hope to get there on average.

1:47:36 So you can see that the maths works. If you do the maths in terms of what is investment is required on each to get to each site, you'll see that the sums do add up. And that just to give you some reassurance on that, if we come out the other end doing 13,000,000 of EBITDA, what does that actually mean? Obviously, we'll have a bit of debt, so there'll be some interest that comes out. There's a bit of working capital movement, usually a positive working capital movement as the business is growing, which probably offset some of the interest costs, and so on, which gives us some free cash flow from operations. If we assume 3% of sales on 90,000,000 sales, what's our maintenance CapEx look like? You'll see that we should be coming out on a free cash flow after maintenance CapEx of somewhere around about 10,000,000.

1:48:24 And that's in three years time, based on where we are today. So you can decide on whether you would value that at a 10% free cash flow yield or even a 20% free cash flow yield that would give us a value of 50,000,000 or 100,000,000 compared to where we are today. So that's the prize. That's what we're going after. And we do think it is cash flow and it's cash generation, which creates the value. And we think that cash flow and cash generation is what drives valuation in future. So that's what we're trying to do. You can see from what the team has said earlier today, the opportunity is there, the capability is there. And I think we've generated a very, very strong brand in the space, which gives us a competitive advantage both in BOOM and also in Escape Hunt. And therefore, I think we are very well poised to take advantage of the market opportunity that's there.

1:49:17 So that's really all I was going say on the numbers. To hopefully that's given you a flavor of how we think about the business, why we are targeting what we're targeting. It's not just about numbers. It's all about the customer experience. It's all about the position that we've managed to create in the market. And it's about the opportunity which we can now go after really pursue this goal that we've set ourselves. So I think, I'm gonna hand back to Richard. Well, thanks thanks only to everybody for presenting and hopefully for everyone here that it's been useful to hear from others, meet others. And, and indeed, there are more in the room, actually. So whilst you've now heard from Graham, you've heard from Dom, you've heard from Andrew, you've heard from Sarah, we've got a bunch of guys, around the back. So we're we're represented here by members of our legal team, marketing, tech, ops, so please do feel free to talk to them. But in the here and now, we wondered, whether or not there might be some questions.

1:50:25 So, as I said before, nothing's off limits. Please do ask away. Yes. Ivor. Thank you very much. You you've talked about very high customer satisfaction scores. Why are they so high? Is it product or is it execution? What are you getting right? And and just the second one I wanted to ask was you got a business with one type of game per site. You got a business with multiple games on a site. What what why what is the correct mix? Could you operate a bowling alley? Could you operate a site that was darts only? Could you operate a site that was axes only? Thank you. I mean, maybe maybe if I take your questions in reverse and actually start there. So the question, could we operate a site that is axes only, darts only, etcetera? I think the answer to that is clearly yes.

1:51:12 In many respects, it is easier to operate a single format leisure experience than it is to operate a multi format. So I guess then the question becomes, would we want to? And I guess the quick answer to that as we're stood here today, certainly in the competitive socializing aspect, is no. We see huge value in having a multigame format, and we see huge value for a whole bunch of reasons. But I'll just hone in on one of them for now, and that one is the corporate customer. Because we have a broad spread of activity, in our Boom business, it means that there really is something for everybody to enjoy in that business. You know, it doesn't matter. We've already shown that the demographics are pretty much equally split male and female. But, actually, there is when you're booking the corporate socials, there is always somebody that loves axes but hating somebody else that hates them, somebody that loves darts and somebody that really hates them.

1:52:06 There's always a perception that something is quite alpha or something isn't. We feel we've got that mix really, really well. And, also, we feel that we're insulated against any changes in trend. Both Andrew Anne Graham spoke to the fact that we can change games in and out really quite inexpensively. So, you know, quite conceivably in ten years' time, axes are no longer the thing. Well, that's fine because we got £15,000 in the lane. We can change the map. There'll be something else. We move, we adapt, and we stay agile. So so could we operate? Yes. Do we want to operate? No. In terms of your other question, around what is it that drives the customer, I think it is more experience than game. I think it goes it has to go without saying that we do the very best we can by game.

1:52:51 If I talk about escape hunt, we have the most beautifully curated, games experiences. The rooms are without doubt a step change beyond anybody else in the market. The gameplay is there, and the investment is there. You know, we're we're investing on the escape hunt side probably five, six, seven x what most of our competitors would be. However, I don't think any of that matters if the service and that guest host relationship is not tip top. And I would use as a parallel restaurant experiences that you have. You know, you go and everybody here goes to a restaurant and has a wonderful time. And in six months time, no one remembers what they ate, but you do remember who you were with, and you remember the way that you were served. And these are the things that are really important. So you've gotta get it all right as much as you can, but absolutely obsessing on that guest host relationship is for me the thing that carries the customer server service.

1:53:47 Hi. The focus has been very much on your owned and operated sites. We've heard very little about the franchise operation. Do you get the same data from the franchise operators? How much of their time do you take? Are you looking if somebody came to you wanting to franchise a site, would you be now prepared to do that? Might you buy in some of the franchises? Yeah. Again, I'll take those questions actually slightly in reverse. So the quick answer is, yes. We would be prepared and have indeed bought in a lot of our franchise business. So on the boom side, particularly, that was more a franchise business than an o and o business initially, and we've had quite a lot of success in buying back a pretty significant proportion of those franchise businesses.

1:54:32 I'll come back to why we did that in just a moment, but on the escape hunt side, it's less obvious to us that buying back franchisees would make sense. And similarly, we wouldn't buy competitors. And the reason we wouldn't do that is because our games are are are at such a high quality and such a different step change level of investment as we just said. Actually, you'd end up ripping them out anyway to put your own games in. So what are you buying? So so so we wouldn't do it on the front on the escape hunt side, but we have done it very successfully on the boom side. And the reason we've done that is because, crudely, I think there are franchisees and there are franchisees. You you know, philosophically, we really like the idea of franchising the business, but I think to do it well is to find the franchise partner that is very well capitalized that actually can do 15 or 20 sites.

1:55:21 You know, having a sole site operator actually isn't very good for that individual, and it's not very good for us. So would we like to find at a point really grown up franchise operators that can take us at a scale that as yet we've not been able to unlock? Yeah. Of course. That's really interesting. But that brings us back to why we've bought back some of the ones that we have. We've done that in order to build a more consistent underlying platform and an underlying foundation. We've done that so that we get more consistency over our operating metrics, our customer reviews, our economics. And the reason that's so important is because at the point when we might like to go to larger franchise operators, demonstrably showing return on capital, consistency of economics, facility to grow, runway to move into, we think is really, really important. So it's almost like, you know, get your house clean first, then think about how you might potentially grow with a franchise partner further down the line.

1:56:17 There is one other very obvious point to make. If you're doing 50 to 60% return on capital, invest your own money. Yeah. Hi. Thanks. Is this on? Yeah. You mentioned developing customer data. What sorts of insights do you currently have on, you know, repeat customers? Obviously, you have the kind of gender split, just interested in that kind of repeat customer versus existing. Yeah. So, obviously, it's different for both brands. We have a bit of data on repeat customer. The reason it's not as clean as we might like it to be at the moment is because invariably if you come if you come and play with us in a group of four, six people, invariably, you've booked and you've brought your mates. So you've now become our reference point.

1:57:10 So if one of your six mates then books, but it's still the same group, we've kind of lost a little bit of that coherence at the moment. Now we are we've got some ideas about how we can close that gap somewhat, but we do a lot of work anecdotally. We I I I met our GMs will speak to customers. Obviously, where we see a lot of data on repeat is with corporates. So very, very commonly, you know, PLC will come and book. Now it might be another team coming to play the next time, but PLC, PLC because you get on their PSLs. You get on their preferred supplier lists. So we see a lot of repeat in corporate, albeit potentially with a different end customer, and we're getting better data on repeat customers as consumers. When we last looked at it, we were circa two and a half visits a year, which kinda puts you broadly in line with the bowling operators. My sense is it's probably more than that, and it gets lost in walk ins and so on and so forth.

1:58:00 And certainly, anecdotally, it's a lot higher than that for Boom particularly. Hi, Suhil. Hi. On sorry. Sorry. It is an international, which is was mentioned in passing, but you've got actually brought it at twenty twenty five overseas franchise outlets. Mean, why not being more aggressive with the international opportunities? So I guess I I guess there are probably two answers to that, but both of them involve money and I suppose a bit of risk profile. So do we think there is a huge international opportunity to go after? Absolutely right. I mean, I think it is obvious that there is a big old market to go after in The US.

1:58:46 You you you know, I I don't think that opportunity is lost on anybody. But we're also aware of where we are in our size right now, and we feel that to do The US properly, you truly have to be able to capitalize it. And so whether you went owned and operated or you went franchised, I still think your start position is probably the same. I you need to go out there, set up a business, own and operate at least the first five sites for each brand. Expect that it is more expensive to build, and it is at least twice as expensive to book US as it is here. You're gonna lose a lot of money up front by the time you've put a team in place to operate that, and you've gotta go through that lesson. Now do we all recognize that there is probably a very significant opportunity to do that? Yes.

1:59:31 Does it feel like the right thing to be doing right now given the softness in small cap, given the softness there, given our size right now, can we justify putting £10,000,000 to work in The US when the runway in The UK is so substantial? We feel that we can't. Would we like to do it at a point? Absolutely. But it doesn't feel like that point is today. Hi, Richard. Just referencing back to your part of the presentation where you gave some insights into where the industry's developing. What are you seeing on the co face vis a vis boom in the competitive socializing space in terms of how competitive is it getting? Are we seeing any discounting?

2:00:22 What are we seeing in terms of industry rationalization? And if that is if industry rationalization was to pick up in the next few years or so, would you partake in the consolidation process? Yeah. I think it's a really good question, and and I'm sure some of you would have read the the of course, been quite a number of articles, one actually only a couple of weeks ago in the Financial Times about the consolidation within competitive socializing. And I think we're in quite an interesting space. I I alluded to it. I I alluded of course. I alluded to it earlier. And I think we're in quite an interesting space because it's a space that is typified by a large number of very small operators with very small numbers of units. And that makes it exciting because it means that there are new customer concepts coming up all the time that are really good to come and try. So from a consumer perspective, that's great. From a business perspective, it's really hard because the the the dynamics within those businesses are all the same.

2:01:23 You are raising money to do every incremental site site by site. So if it goes even slightly wrong, you are really challenged. And and if, if you want to take on-site number two, it's difficult because you gotta raise independent. And it also means that you can't really afford on average, and you're seeing this very much in the sector, to invest in the caliber of team, in the depth and breadth of staff that you really need to be able to go after it. So you're always slightly on the back foot, and you're seeing that play out right now. You're seeing a lot of businesses in our space that have got to one or two sites, three sites, and are really struggling now and indeed are closing. So when we talk about the scale benefit that we have in having gone through that horribly difficult stage to become quite heavily cash generative, that feels like a really good place to play.

2:02:09 And so would we be a consolidator in the sector? Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, I think that was when we if I'm completely honest, when we initially took the view to be on aim in the first place, the idea was always to be much bigger than we are. And I think we've shown with the addition of Boom to escape hunt that we have the management team and the breadth to be able to do bring an, you know, an a brand in to create a very aggressive runway to roll it out very fast, to build from first principles, if I'm honest, a brand, hire a thousand people in 2022, open 30 sites whilst also maintaining our existing escape hunt business. I think we've shown that we can do that. So given that we were a lot smaller then than we are now, the idea that we could do it again seems very straightforward. So do I see it as an opportunity? Absolutely.

2:02:56 Do I feel that we're very, very well positioned relative to most in our sector in a downturn stroke consolidation market. Absolutely, I do. And I reference back to the escape hunt data. It's exactly what you're seeing there within the escape room sector, and we've come out of it flying. Thank you. Thanks. So just a question on the dual sites that you mentioned earlier in the presentation. You mentioned you rather have sort of sites in proximity rather than with the same door. Just wondering whether you have any comments or data around the the sort of customer behavior you're seeing when you have those dual sites and whether you're looking at bidding or, you know, opening up any more of those types of sites? Yeah. So Cambridge, as exactly as Andrew suggested, Cambridge is a great example of us where it's one unit but access two. And that is the best of all worlds because it's a separate customer.

2:03:45 They are different brands. Escape One is a different customer journey to Boom. Yes. There's a lot of overlap in customer, but they are different brands and they have different core audiences. So therefore, having their own brand entry and journey into those brands makes sense. However, the economics of having them both in the same building are fantastic. And and so that's the common thread. So even where we have sites, I'll give you an example. Some of you would have been to our Lakeside site. Now we have, we have an escape hunt in Lakeside, alongside a much, much larger boom. That's not the best customer journey. It's not our finest hour in terms of that, and we've moved on from there because you've gotta go through a very loud vivy boom in order to get upstairs to this escape hunt put over in the corner.

2:04:30 And so the net effect of that has been that the sales in that site are not, so they would be under indexed relative to our average. However, even where that is the case, the profitability is absolutely in line because you're getting such great leverage on the property cost. So is it the best customer experience? No. Would we try and avoid that and design differently now? Absolutely. Yes. But that key point of where you can be in the same space, you get great leverage on the economics. Oxford Street that you're gonna see in a minute is a fantastic example. It's not the best customer experience for escape hunt having to walk through Boom, particularly on a Friday night where it's very loud, DJs are going, it's rammed, and this poor little escape hunt stuck at the back. But the economics of it are unbelievable.

2:05:17 Thank you. Just a quick question. Was looking at sort of your inorganic growth, just expected growth alone, and it seems you can get to your 28 targets pretty very, very much just by growing your your your space, by new space growth. So I wonder if your assumptions on organic growth have changed for the rest of the business as your as your store base maturing, so therefore, organic growth is coming down in the next three years or staying relatively the same? Yeah. I guess, I guess there are two points at play there. Firstly, the numbers that we put out whilst clearly significant in terms of the growth. I mean, that would be a paradigm shift from where we are right now. Also have to have a degree of hedge in them clearly because exactly as Graham alluded, things won't go right for us. You know, we'll get a lot of stuff right, god willing, but there'll be things that go against us. So so there is a degree of hedge in that as well. But I think that, you know, what you've seen from us and what we've reported over the last three, maybe four years are some fairly extraordinary like for like numbers. I mean, if you look at Escape Hunt on the one side, you know, it's been kinda mid mid teens like for like, even on sites that are seven years old.

2:06:31 That can't continue indefinitely if for no other reason than you're capped out on space. So so that you can't continue to grow a mature business at 10% EBITDA. So you have to sorry. 10% like for like growth. So you have to bring your assumption down a little bit. And similarly on on the boom side, whilst we've seen these very, very aggressive like for likes as sites maturing and, you know, and that's obviously been a wonderful thing. It would just seem imprudent to suggest that like for likes that sits so far outside the sector can continue indefinitely. So we would rather take the view as we position something out there that actually, you know, if we hold at modest like for like levels and instead kinda create that inorganic, sort of piece around the side, that feels like a better hedge position to put out to the market.

2:07:25 Hey. You spoke a little bit earlier about the the weak economy and the weakening consumer market. Could you give us a little bit more detail about what you're seeing the impact of that is currently? And if the economy weakens further and the consumer weakens further Yeah. What impact and mitigation you might see there? Yeah. It's interesting. So so the the kind of the sort of the weakness in consumer comment obviously comes from a whole bunch of, you know, things that everybody is reading. And and and clearly clearly, there has been a nervousness around government legislation. Graham alluded to national living wage, etcetera. And whilst in technically, that is, of course, attacks on the employer, of course, the flow through, you would expect to hit the employee through redundancy, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. There are clearly and the sentiment has clearly been for quite a long time negative.

2:08:14 That said, I was at an event couple of weeks ago with PLC, and there are if you wanted to make a more bullish case, a lot of reasons to be a lot more optimistic. So consumer sentiment, whilst negative, has been negative since 2001, and it's a lot less negative now than it has been in the last sort of five or six years. Well, that's quite interesting. I mean, demonstrably disposable incomes in real terms are up. Now, of course, that there's a spread within that, and it's kinda biased towards bigger cities and so on and so forth. But that would be very good news for our business. You know, demonstrably, rates should be coming down, and that should be a good thing. So there are a lot of reasons that you could definitely take a more bullish view of the consumer. But that said, I think to plan for a little bit of weakness must be the prudent approach to take, and that's certainly where we are. And if we get upside, we're happy days. Now that said to your specific point about what we're seeing in the numbers, we're not seeing anything like the negativity that we might well have expected to.

2:09:16 We reported pretty recently our Christmas trading, and it was through the roof. I mean, we were exponentially up, relative to last year in absolute terms. Very high like for likes on both businesses. Spend is up. Participation is up. Volume is up. Everything is up. You know, obviously, I can't talk too much to to q one because, obviously, we're we're inside the trading period, but, you know, we're we're pleasantly surprised. I I think we'll you're sorry about that. That's fine. So As I say, to I've forgotten the train of thought, on that sort of consumer point, you know, obviously, we have also we've come through a very weak consumer environment, and we haven't got a long history.

2:10:03 So it's quite difficult to know, you know, are we actually in a weak consumer environment? And actually, if it improves, do we get an uplift? Or are we a bit more resilient to it? Actually, it comes out, when it turns up, it doesn't really have an impact. And and that's something which, again, data and so on will will will bring to us as we sort of go forward. But, you know, to to to Richard's point, the one I suppose if there was one observation that that I could make and just sort of looking at how things have progressed over the last year and also over more recent weeks and so on, we are seeing slightly higher highs and slightly lower lows. So the behavior of the consumer is definitely an impact. So So it's a bit quieter during the week, but actually then people go and sort of blow the, you know, the lids off on the weekends a bit more. And so it's just quite an interesting pattern, but it sort of averages, it seems to be averaging itself out. So is there an impact? Yes, you can definitely see a little bit of an impact in some of the sort of cyclicality and some of the sort of trends.

2:11:01 So we had a very strong Christmas. You know, I think we said in the end, we probably came into Christmas a little bit softer, but we came through Christmas very strong. So compared to previous, you're having slightly higher highs and slightly lower lows, but it seems to average itself out. So yes, we are seeing some consumer change, but on average, we seem to be coming through okay. A quick sort of related question, particularly to the light for lights in the long term. What's your experience on pricing, particularly on escape hunt where you've got a, I guess, a more homogenous product and particularly in the long term? Is there any press on pricing, or do you think you can get the margins up? So for both businesses, we've been extremely, extremely reserved on pricing. So we haven't really moved pricing in sort of three and a half years on either brand. We will be making some small price adjustments, coming into this financial year, obviously, as everybody is aware, National Living Way, supply pressures, etcetera.

2:12:04 But through the very significant periods of utilities, pricing growth, obviously, everything that came with our supply chain and so on and so forth, national living wage has gone up exponentially. I mean, that's what the points I didn't make when we talked about that growth dynamic on escape hunt. We showed a slide that said the, labor percentage has moved down from 37% to 30, and that is whilst having absorbed over an equivalent period at least 15% national living wage increase. And we yet, we've never moved pricing. We've held the pricing on that business. So I think it's really important to have value led propositions and giving the customer a little bit more than what they think they're paying for is essential. So I suppose long winded way of saying, have we had any price pushback on either business? Really, no. But we have been very, very concerted in our attempts to really hold price where it has been and, you know, make price make price very much a second few things. So when I talk about like, like for likes, just for anybody that isn't aware of this, when I talk about the like for likes or we talk about like for likes, they are volume driven like for likes. That is zero price, 100% volume.

2:13:20 Yeah. Hi. Thanks. So just just picking up on, one of Dom's slides actually around how you assess new site rollout, and the variety of factors that go into determining what you wanna progress with or not. How long has that model been employed, and how predictive has it been? Or perhaps asking the question a slightly different way, where has it fallen short of what you hoped it would deliver? Yeah. Well, I mean, I suppose the quick way to answer that is to say that, you know, for any model which is ostensibly a multiple regression based model, you have to have enough reference points. So it is irrelevant at the point when you've got five sites, and these models only go on to get better and better in terms of their predictability.

2:14:09 So the more units you have and and also I should make the point that you have to go outside your standardized parameters in order to build a truly predictive model. Otherwise, you'd never learn anything. So so, obviously, Dom's got a mega brain, far smarter than the rest of us, and he will, over time, be able to reinform and continue to learn through that model. But so far, you know, predictability is pretty good. We're not yet getting to a stage where we are gonna, you know, plus or minus 5%. A site's gonna do x thousand pounds a week and so on and so forth. We will hopefully get to that. But we as we learn more, the model gets gets more and more more and more important. But the key point is we've got a nucleus of sites enough now to be able to force learnings. I wish it go. How have landlord contributions changed in the last six months, twelve months in terms of rent free periods, capital capital contributions, and, obviously, your covenants improved?

2:15:06 What what's the dynamics there? Yeah. I think I think it's I think we're in a positive place on both businesses where Boom Boom has always had strong cash contributions to sites. Is that ever so slightly moving towards rent free? Probably. Albeit if it moves towards rent free, typically, you get a bigger deal, so to speak, in terms of number of years. And, actually, given that we're now not cash constrained as maybe we once were, that's arguably better for us. In terms of escape pump, we actually did put a slide up on that and to show the sort of the progression of cash. And now the business is better known and it's cleaner, we're getting more contribution in cash terms than we ever have before. I mean, I I think the other dynamic there is as we move to more and more prime locations, we are getting a bigger contribution than we would have done two years ago, but a smaller contribution that you might get in a very secondary site where a landlord's desperate to get you in. So there is a bit of a balance between going for the best sites and going for the biggest cash contribution.

2:16:12 And those two things will offset each other. So I can't promise you'll necessarily see the absolute number going up. But if you took it on a weighting of quality of sight versus contribution, you should see that we're in a better place. Hi. A fairly broad question in terms of why you're in the cities you're in. And I I appreciate you're a relatively young company. You can't do everything in the first five years, that kind of thing. So why haven't you been able to make cities like Newcastle work whereas you can into in smaller cities? Is it attractiveness of locations, you know, the the contributions from landlords, that kind of thing? It's certainly true to say that we'd love to be in Newcastle, so we expect Newcastle to work incredibly well. I think there are a couple of dynamics always. One, and it's it's important to remember that some of the early boom expansion particularly was based on sites a site pipeline that we bought.

2:17:10 So as I mentioned, we were buying more than anything a site pipeline with Boom such that we could roll into it. And then, of course, we've then added to that significantly. But the key thing is that site selection, as much as there is a good degree of science that sits behind what Dom does and the multiple regression, etcetera, There is unfortunately also the element of art and knowing that we should be in Newcastle is fantastic. But there's being in Newcastle, there's being in Newcastle. And on a site that is so on a city that should be so key for a business like ours, you can only go in once. Once you're there, you're there. You're not gonna relocate because it's expensive. So you wanna make absolutely sure that you're going on the right site. So Andrew used the example of Cambridge. You you know, the macros would tell you that we should be in Cambridge, and the macros told us six years ago that we should be in Cambridge.

2:17:59 But I think strongly, it was worth waiting for the site in Cambridge because that has been the second best performing unit that we've ever opened. And so will we get into Newcastle? Absolutely. Can we, with the debt facility that we now have, actually be a little bit more aggressive? And then we've never done this before, but would we potentially pay premiums to get into the best units? Well, that was never an option for us before, but that is an option to us now, would the economics of that stack a 100%. So so but long winded way of saying the key thing is being in the city is a lot less relevant than being in the right site. Good afternoon. I just wondered if you had, any particular sort of labor pinch points in the business like, recruiting and training managers to run such a complex operation or chefs or or or sales or other skills that you need in the business?

2:19:01 Yeah. I think I think the key answer the quick answer to that is no. So recruitment becomes a lot easier when you have scale and when you are growing and when you're quite exciting as a business because all all of a sudden, you cross that threshold where people just want to come and work for you. So that's quite a good place to play, and that was not always the case. You know, back in the early days, trying to persuade people that coming and working in a skate room would be a really fun thing to do, that was a hard sell because no one knew what it was. It was a bit quirky, and certainly no one had done it before. But as you get that reputation, you build it, and you're seen to be a pretty good employer, and you're quite a fun place to work, then that certainly helps you. Now the kind of the classic hospitality answer is it's incredibly difficult to recruit chefs. And absolutely, that is true, which is why we make absolutely sure that the food that we serve is much more how do I put this? Is much more plated in kitchens rather than cooked from first principles. You know, if you are if you are a restaurant truly cooking from first principles, the recruitment of chefs right now is absolutely disastrously hard. So we specifically don't do that. We have a lot of our food prep done, water bathed, off-site, comes in prepped. It is a much simpler operation exactly by design. We're not a food business, and therefore, we can avoid that challenge. But that would be the pinch point if we were trying to do things in a different way.

2:20:30 Hi. Hi. You gave a really good explanation of how Escape Hunt has been able to innovate and sort of outspend and push ahead of its competition. Is there a similar story for Boom in terms of confidence that there will be new games to keep things fresh? And I guess there's a question about the longevity of the product and outperforming competition. Yeah. I think I think the key thing to to recognize again on boomers that, of course, we're really early in our journey, and therefore, we're learning a lot in the data. And and when we talk about the innovation in escape hunt and particularly as it relates to games, I think the thing that's really important there is that, of course, it is content, and there has been an awful lot of new content and really exciting new innovative content. But, actually, the escape rooms are still the escape rooms. So so the format is still a wonderful thing that customers continue to like more and more, and the content there changes.

2:21:23 I think that's a little different to the games. But what we when we look at the data, we are, of course, numbers led. And while the games that we have in BOOM continue to perform, while like for likes continue to be strong, there's nothing yet pointing us to the need to change games. And what we're not gonna do is change for change sake. So we are you know, we're constantly looking at what's there. We're not necessarily gonna be the first principles innovator, of games. I don't think we need to be. But what we will be is eyes on the market, seeing interesting elsewhere, what can we then elevate to make fit for purpose for us and what we do. You know, that's something that we do do, but nothing in our data yet suggests that we need to be moving the games out per se. In fact, quite the opposite. It's more about adding additional incidences of games that we have as we talked about earlier. But you, you know, you will see us bring new stuff to market, but we don't need to be doing that yet.

2:22:19 We don't feel. Well, if that's it, thank you ever so much for bearing with us. I know that's been slightly longer, but for as much as, anybody is able, please do come and join us for a drink and some games in Oxford Street. Thank you.