Hi Sam. Looking at your results, what number stood out for you?
There’s two if I may – I’ll be greedy.
We’ve tipped over £2bn for the first time, so that’s something for us to be proud of.
But then the other stat is the GP growth of 12%, which continues the track record of double-digit gross profit growth now for over a decade.
If you’d allow me a third, it’s the dividend. We’ve improved the distribution to 40-50% of the group’s post-tax profits – which is up from the 40% in 2023 and 2024. We’re an organisation that is serving up the right levels of dividend for our shareholders.
By our calculations, your top-line growth accelerated from 14% to 16% half on half. Why is that?
We have a range of areas that the business revs up around in the second half. The security renewal season tends to be in the late Autumn and Winter period. You also come into the Microsoft H1 end at the end of December, so we’ve got a lot of anniversary periods at that point, and then you step into January and February, which are the public sector’s final months. And then of course you’ve got our year end, so our sellers are highly motivated to close the business and maximise their commissions.
Your headcount growth of 17.8% is much faster than your peers. Why is that?
We’re conscious that some of our peers have taken different strategies, but for us it’s been a year of continued investment in headcount across a range of different team areas.
It’s important that we keep putting quota-bearing heads into the business – both junior and some experience. But we’ve also been increasing our specialist and technical capability in the business. That’s highly relevant when we talk about Microsoft incentives and other vendors where we want to go much more beyond the transaction to support the customer’s value-added experience.
We’ve also stood up business areas like the security operations centre, which required new headcount – so it’s been both sales and technical.
Will headcount growth slow in your fiscal 2026?
We’re still investing. We try and align towards the GP growth, so it would probably be back down to 10 to 12%.
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