Good afternoon, and welcome to the ActiveOps PLC results for the year ended thirty-first of March, 2023 investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged, and can be submitted at any time by the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Simply press Q&A, scroll to the bottom, type in your question, and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question received during the meeting itself, but the company will review all questions submitted, and we'll publish responses where appropriate to do so. Before we begin, we'd like to submit the following poll. I'd now like to hand you over to Richard Jeffery, CEO. Good afternoon, sir.
Good afternoon, thank you very much, and welcome to everyone on this call. It's a pleasure to present our results, and interestingly, this is also the first presentation we've done directly to a more retail audience for our shares. In that sense, I'm also particularly excited. Alongside me, I have my colleague, Ken Smith, who's our recently joined finance director, and he's got the benefit of only recently joining us, but he's got the blessing of now coming in with a slightly new perspective. I look forward to bringing some of that to life as we go through this presentation. As we are new to this process, and for many of you who may not have heard of ActiveOps, I thought I'd kick off with a little bit of overview of the company.
We're an enterprise SaaS-based software company, so that means we sell our software to large blue chip enterprises, primarily in the sort of banking and finance-related industries, where they have a lot of people doing, let's call it, administrative-type work. It's SaaS, that means it's a recurrent software license. If you look at our figures, which we'll talk more about, over 90% of our revenue comes from our SaaS revenue, so that's booked month on month. Also in there, a key statistic for you, is that if you look at our Net Revenue Retention, which is the amount each of those customers grows in every year, like last year, 10%, we had 110% Net Revenue Retention.
In other words, that 90% of our revenue is growing itself by 10% before we add in any new customers. It's a very well structured business. We also do some training and implementation work, which also is high margin and is related to the amount of sort of support work or installation work we do. We have some other sort of great stats in that sense. The business model means it's annual in advance, so we also accumulate cash. We've been running the business since our IPO, pretty much on a sort of marginal level. In other words, we haven't prioritized EBIT. We've just run ourselves to grow as much as possible. We've turned that kind of dial up a little in the last year, and I'll talk more about that.
The business is definitely running profitable, but the key point is, we don't have any debt, and we've never borrowed any money. We actually have a business which is growing cash year- on- year, and we've consistently done that. We operate across three structurally, three regions around the world: North America, EMEA, and Asia Pacific. Although there's differences in every region, I think the key message that you'll hear here is that each of the regions, in their own way, is responding to the market in a similar way, and we're achieving some sort of good, great results across the world. Just to sort of give you some context for the solution of ActiveOps, the world of work is not getting any simpler.
I'm sure your papers and my papers are reporting on concerns CEOs have over managing productivity of their people when they're not working in the offices anymore. We have a whole lot of stuff like, for example, you imagine if you were working in Silicon Valley Bank recently, where suddenly the finance of the business implode, but the people actually running those offices, operating those consumer products and the products they offered, suddenly their parent company is in terrible shape, and the operational risk associated with that. That introduces for regulatory environment, for all our sort of target customers, huge sense of they have to be able to demonstrate they're in control, which is absolutely about what we do. Skills development is another key concern we've talked about.
We hear a lot about well-being, people having to learn from home, and that is a real issue for these specialist type organizations, where you need to run your operations well, but nurture talent and capability. Again, the more in control you are, the better you respond to that market. ActiveOps' product is absolutely in the sweet spot of helping organizations, if you like, do more with what they have and to respond to in an agile fashion, to the challenges, let's say, of the increasing amount of XYZ product or the reduction in mortgages being sold and so on. We're all about organizations being able to control their operation better.
The context for it, the business environment which ActiveOps is operating, is that, you know, I think you could describe it as febrile, which is great for us because it means we sort of number three or four on the top 10 list, rather than perhaps further down, others further down the list. In terms of our publicity, what we put out to market is things like the Ops Index, which is. We have colossal data across the on activities in this kind of sector across the world.
What we do with ActiveOps is publish that for our customers, to provide them with a unique set of benchmarking data around how their particular performance or indeed their suppliers, if they're an outsourcer, perform against market industry standards, of which we're the standard-setting for. We have some fairly unique features about our product, which you can't get if you effectively solve the problem of planning, say, locally, using an individual spreadsheet. That's a huge advantage for customers having that. In terms of our customer base, as I mentioned, we solve a problem which they have myriad of systems of work.
They have their workflow tools, they have their case management systems, and they also, on the, on the other side of the equation, they have their things that measure what time and the people, their human capital management systems like Workday. ActiveOps' solution is to synthesize all those different pieces of information so that you and I, as operational leaders, have a kind of perspective which is consistent, independent of what type of work we're doing. That I may be in underwriting, someone else could be in claims, but the language of how busy I am and what help I need from you and your team is actually a common one. That's a real issue, because most of these organizations frequently talk about the problems of silos and the inefficiencies of scale rather than the efficiencies of scale.
ActiveOps' solution is to overlay that, bring a common frame of managing work and capacity, which unlocks that capacity, which, particularly in current environments where you have issues of productivity and pressure on cost, is just a huge opport- a huge need. This is the way we articulate some of the value we add. Customers using our software get more from their capacity, from their teams, and they use that in a lot of different ways. In many cases, it's a cost reduction. Just as many times, it's about using that time for better value.
We had a fantastic case, which is on the screen, one of those on the screen, where a customer improved their Net Promoter Score from a rather desperate 8% to over 80% on the back of the time they were able to release to focus on customer service queries. It can just as much be a value in terms of the internal working environment. Some of it can be very stressful when you're working to deadlines and pressures. ActiveOps brings that control to an environment, which means hugely improved sense of well-being and stability for the teams within organizations. It's just like any truism. You know, the more in control, the safer I feel, the better able I am to perform. ActiveOps is absolutely in that space. Our customer base, there's some names of brand names there. We operate globally.
We're pretty much dominant in the Australian market. We have lots of customers in the US and in the UK. As you can see from the brand names, these are all organizations with large cost base under a lot of pressure, both regulatory, efficiency, but also service level, to adapt and respond to the challenges of the evolving market. It's a really interesting workplace. The other facet to be aware of is our solution is essentially generic. It doesn't really matter what type of work it is. You can see on the left there some processes that we cover, but the point is, it's just as relevant for any type of work. Could just as easily be in government departments in the UK, like the Passport Agency or the DVLA, where people are doing admin work.
We're not operating there, but the solution itself is entirely applicable to that. We have three core products. We provide a planning system called ControliQ. We have a CaseworkiQ, which is an expansion of the functionality for where more knowledge-intensive work is being used. It's a particular problem for many banks. They have case management systems where individual types of work flow through your company, but on lots of different systems. ActiveOps provides an overlay to that, so that at an aggregate level or an individual team level, you know what work you've got, you know what you've got to do, and more importantly, you can tell anybody else who needs to know about it, what it is. We also have a desktop intelligence package, which is widely used in the U.S.
We have one customer with 21,000 desktops, which is effectively giving visibility over the use of applications, how people are spending their time, how long they're at work. Great case study recently where we used it and to show actually a problem with the technology, because some of their employees are having to get up at 4:00 A.M. to sort of free their desktop, to sign into the VPN to get access to start work at 9:00 A.M. These are things like that, which makes it have incredible power when it comes to understanding their use of technology in companies. Let's move on then. This is a results for the presentation about our year. There's really two parts to this.
Firstly, there's the headline financials, which we'll come to, and the second is really what we've done under the bonnet to make the business, if you like, looking forward, even better. In terms of the business year, we've had a really very strong year against an interesting context. I think that's seen in that critical SaaS-based revenue growth. You can see there, we've had enjoyed a 13% growth in that recurrent revenue. That 90% of our revenue is just getting more, it's increasing all the time. That's great. I think just as significantly, a business that's always been very sort of cash generative, but run for sort of just marginal profitability, we have deliberately started to demonstrate the ability to throw off and generate EBITDA.
In terms of our profitability, we've moved from, if you're at a reporting level, -0.3 last year, we've actually joined reporting a GBP 700,000 profit this year. I think the important thing, and Ken can speak to this, is if you look at the half year, the ability now to turn new sales into bottom line profit is there. Reflecting the cash generation, which I touched on, year-on-year, our cash also grew by GBP 1.6 million, which, you know, the business has got no debt. We have the cash to do what we want to do, and we can expand, you know, expand our capabilities, you know, reflecting that.
That's a nice position to be in from the point of view of, you know, at the end of the day, against the current share price, you know, the cash actually in the bank represents about 25% of the enterprise value of the company. That's a very strong and safe position from the point of view of the investor. Under the bonnet, though, I think this is the exciting bit. What we've really done alongside the business growth, which I've really touched on already, is we've worked over the last 3-4 years of completely replatforming our technology to maximize our capability to respond to what's, you know, the exciting opportunities through machine learning and AI.
We call it Management Process Automation, which is actually nothing more than, if you like, bringing a really new level of decision intelligence to how operational leaders can manage teams. That means about how many people they need, but it's also how people are performing. It's how giving people in the business, how they are performing, you know, so we're all working from the same data. The impact of that is going to be huge, because what it means is I am more able to know what's going to happen next week, which means I can interact with my colleagues as leaders around the company. We can articulate, we can be more confident of getting the yield from our new investments in workflow technologies and other things that these companies are doing.
I think our performance and our building on our platform for growth for next year, we've got some great things to talk about in there. More generally, in terms of us coming to the public markets, developing some relationships with key players, that side of the business is also getting very strong. We've entered date. We have enjoyed a very strong relationship with Microsoft. We're a key supplier for the key people buy a lot of Azure consumption through us, which gives us some high, you know, level of visibility with their sales teams. Just as importantly, they support us in the boardrooms of our major banks and customers to what an enterprise-grade provider we are.
Also, importantly, in terms of our revenue opportunity looking forward, we've undertaken a quite a substantial pricing review to layer in so that we can maximize the revenue from our new product set and our go-to market. For those of you who track us, you'll see quite a step change in the sort of messaging and the way that we effectively articulate what ActiveOps is to some very niche providers in the coming months. There's an awful lot, I think, to be sort of quite excited about. Before we sort of go into more of the strategy, I think I'll hand over to Ken to talk a little bit about the finances of the business.
Yeah, good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I've only been with the company about 12 or 13 weeks now, so it's been an interesting journey. My career has spanned over 30 years. I'm a chartered accountant by origin, and I've been in a lot of different businesses, private and public, but nearly all of them in technology. I've seen different models for raising revenues, and, you know, it's very nice to know that ActiveOps is a SaaS business. That's to say, customers are billed in advance, typically, a year in advance. That gives you the comfort of knowing that this month's revenue is largely last month's revenue, plus a little bit extra, so you don't have all that concern as to killing what you have to eat every month.
It also means that the cash flow is very positive and predictable. The business is a very predictable business. Most of the revenue, that's almost 90%, is this SaaS model, which is a great place to be in the modern world. The four kind of key messages in this slide, just showing how this all works. The two kind of key measures that SaaS companies are measured by are ARR, Annual Recurring Revenue, and NRR, or Net Revenue Retention. Both of those are very positive in the year. 22.6% ARR at company's year end, that's grown by just under 13%, slightly helped by currency, but always a double-digit growth.
NRR, which is a measure of the stickiness of customers, is up to 110%. Again, that's a very positive movement across the year. I guess the key highlight of the year, though, is the EBITDA position. Company has moved into an EBITDA positive situation, and that, especially when you look at the first half, second half split, was very firmly in the positive territory in the second half. We enter the new financial year, this year, with a very strong profit springboard to move forward with. As Richard's mentioned, with the SaaS model, as it is, our profits tend to turn into cash flow, so we ended up with a very healthy cash balance at the year end of over GBP 50 million.
That tends to be second half loaded, so, we expect that to grow further later on this year. In terms of the detail, again, it shows the benefits of the split of the revenues. The SaaS revenue, GBP 22 million is the SaaS, is the current revenue we've just described. The other source of revenue is T&I, training and implementation. That's where we help customers install and support the product, train the trainer, or, more important now, is digital training solutions. Both of those sources of revenue are very profitable, especially in the SaaS side of things.
The margin held up very well, grew slightly, and that's partly a product mix thing, but again, 81 to 82% gross margin is a very nice place to be from a technology business point of view. OpEx, slightly up on last year, but this is kind of the way the model is starting to work. If we can get more than double-digit revenue growth and single digit OpEx growth, then you don't need to be a mathematical genius to work out that that becomes a very profitable business going forward, which should get us into very interesting bottom-line territory in the years to come. Otherwise, we did capitalize on labor, as all software companies are now required to do. We don't have any choice in that.
That's kind of the rules, if you're accounting standard board. We, we try and keep that to a limited extent, so we did capitalize about GBP 0.9 million, which was up in the previous year. As Richard will describe shortly, some of the things that that's gone into are extremely exciting bits of technology that will benefit future year profitability. The EBITDA bridge just described, starting last year, negative territory and ending up, in the blue section on the right, very positive territory. GBP 1 million overall, growth across the year. One of the things that is interesting is if we look at the customer support side of the business, which we've invested a bit more money on, that probably is one key reason why the NRR has grown across the year.
We've got some very, very happy customers that are very sticky. Cash flow bridge, again, describes the cash journey, so this is the movement across the year, but the key factor there is very positive cash flow from operations. Also the 1 million of investment into new product, which just described. As a very new person on the block here, I can look at the business with a very positive feel. It's got a very healthy balance sheet, GBP 50 million of cash sitting there. This is a very strong position to underpin the business and no debts, as described. Very predictable, growing recurrent revenue, so that's a very safe place to live as well. As we'll see across the coming years, strongly cash generative, so we expect that cash flow to grow further.
The business is positioned across the globe. Each part of the globe has grown across the year, so that de-risks the recession and risks across the world as well. That's a nice, safe metric. Our exit run rate, our EBITDA run rate, really takes us into an exciting place going forward. I'll hand it back to Richard.
Thank you, Ken. Looking, if you like, a bit more forward now, I want to go talk us through some of the activities, if you like, we think are gonna make a potential shift in our sort of run rate. I think I've touched on some of this already, but you've got a situation where. You know, given the complexities I've touched on, our software will be able to both see things, in other words, diagnostic AI, where you actually have a visibility over things that you wouldn't otherwise have appreciated. Predictive, the ability to give information to our customers about what is likely to happen and therefore, inform the choices they're able to make.
This critical bit of prescriptive AI, and this is where our software will not only help you know something's about to happen, but give you choices and select suggestions about how to respond. From an operational level, that might be things about there's an opportunity to move resources or work between teams. It might be about how you manage your people. Even some of our predictive AI now around the actual likelihood of a member of staff wanting to change jobs or looking for new roles, and so on. The potential in this area
is incredibly powerful.
What that adds up to in terms of our business model is through those different products, whether it's the ControliQ expansion, which is the planning tool into, for example, our American healthcare, WorkiQ base, there's a huge need there for, if you like, improved agility and control. That's one upsell opportunity. Equally, we have plenty of examples where customers are using our ControliQ product, but a lot of their work, which is to do with, for example, Anti-Money Laundering activities and/or complex claims investigations, there's an awful lot of work which they need much better visibility over, and similarly, CaseworkiQ, in that sense, is a big upsell opportunity. Just to complete the triangle there, you've got customers who've been long-standing.
I mean, many of our customers have been with us for going on 20 years using our planning software, but this desktop intelligence product I've mentioned, WorkiQ, has huge application across a base where, if you like, the visibility of where people are, the need. I mean, just in the Australian market, for example, there's a huge amount of regulatory reporting requirements to be able to, you know, under duty of care, evidence the fact that you're protecting your employees from extended working hours, from working home, and so on.
We see around GBP 90 million of across and upsell opportunities within our existing customer base. That's to be absolutely clear, the extendable market of addressing software on top of or extending to customers with whom we already have a contract, we already have a commercial contract, which I think is, again, part of the reason we're exciting, partly because we have the products that meet specific needs. As an example of that, we launched last year, the CaseworkiQ. That's already up to GBP 1 million of ARR. Probably, though, more importantly, in terms of the growth trajectory, however, most of our customers are now at some stage of trying it.
Specifically, seven out of our top ten customers are now in active involvement with CaseworkiQ in, at various levels of scale. That creates a sort of solid opportunity for full year 2024. I think, you know, one of the things we were concerned about is the extent to which any one of our products start to overlap in terms of, you know, revenue cannibalization. The great news and from our experience with one case study here, if you look at TD Bank, who are well known as one of our signature customers in the U.S. and Canada, they found using all three products entirely complementary.
Whether it's a ControliQ, which gives them the planning, whether it's the WorkiQ on the desktop activity, or indeed, the casework, which is about that complex overview of lots of activities, all of those things are inherently valuable, but importantly, add together to give the greater visibility. I think acting in tandem, they've all added value, but there's still that growth opportunity as the casework use becomes wider. You know, again, it's just an early adopter stage of our product set, but it's a great and also advocate to communicate to other customers about.
I think this is our development, specifically for next year, we're bringing out Smart Planning, which is leveraging some of the AI facilities that we've touched on to improve the precision, if you like, of what our software will help you with. We see it. You know, what we've seen through our beta testing, just as a for example, is a 4% improvement in productivity of teams that are deploying Smart Planning. If you've got, let's say, one of our bigger customers might have 8,000 people on the software, you know, 4% of 8,000 is a big number, huge value, direct return on investment, very easy upsell.
Similarly, Smart Skills, this is the ability to eliminate all the paperwork and the judgment attached to trying to maintain an appreciation of the skills across big numbers of people. Our software will be able to determine, does determine, if you like, what people are good at, learning curves, people who are varying from the learning curve, trajectory, and people who are perhaps peaking and then need to be rotated or might have other needs for cross-drilling. All that kind of the analysis side of things, which relied on individual local experience to really call it, suddenly, we can build that into the software. Hugely valuable, hugely impactful at scale, and of course, critically, not something you're ever going to solve using your own little spreadsheet. We're starting to be able to have more and more reasons why this is an enterprise adoption tool.
It's worth noting, also, one of the things we did last year was we commissioned quite a detailed investigation or a study of our pricing model, which is something we've lived with as a single product company since pretty much I founded the business back in 2005. What that came back with was hugely reassuring. Firstly, that our customers think we offer very good value for what we already do. What they also said was, "You can now strata your products into this series, so that some of the features I've been talking about are worth more money, and you can package them to exploit that." Over the course of what will effectively be a 3-year project, given the level of recurrent revenue we've already got customers with, we see this as a big revenue uplift.
The ability to package those products into new series of software, which adds incremental value to our customers and therefore greater revenue-generating opportunity. That's 'cause it's all very well building these products, but clearly, we need to be on top of monetizing it, and that was part of the logic behind that story. In terms of the actual looking forward, the priorities of the year, now, this is something which I guess anyone who's been tracking us for a while would look at and say, that's the important thing is this is all about execution. There's nothing in our priorities for the current year other than, let's do what we've already said, and we've got a pretty good track record of doing that.
There's no pivot, there's no sort of random acts of chance in here. What we're doing is driving through the marketing activity, which we've invested in, the pricing strategy we've invested in, the new product set we've invested in, the new technology we've invested in, so that we can drive up the revenue drivers, and we can turn what is effectively, let's say, six new customers a year. We, you know, we sell to big customers. They take time to sell, and we sell most new business to existing customers. Clearly, you need that pipeline of new customers coming in, even if they are large enterprises, and they take a long time. We need to we're really focusing on accelerating that sort of new customer acquisition.
We're looking at getting the value out of the investments we've already made, and really alongside that, keep our customers loyal, because our NRR, at the end of the day, is the thing that is the engine room of growth. If we can drive what is still a good result, 110%, better than most software companies, I think, if we can get that up and up north of here, 'cause I consider 110% just the baseline, the opportunities for really changing the revenue and profitability of the company is pretty large. I'll finish the formal presentation with a quick sort of specific update. I mean, the Q1 of the year is now past, essentially we're in line with expectations.
We've sold a couple of new accounts as well, but more importantly, what we're seeing is that take-up of our new product set. I think we are well on track for our current activity. All, you know, you can tell, I think there's so many of the elements of the journey we've been on over the last three or four years, which are effectively coming into place now, that we do think it's quite an exciting time for the business. That's the formal side of this. However, one of the real values of this presentation and the platform, is the ability to take questions. What I think I'll do is open the floor.
Fantastic. Richard Kim, thanks indeed for the presentation. Ladies and gentlemen, as Richard said, please do continue to submit your questions using the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Just while the team take a few moments to review those questions submitted today, I'd like to remind you that a recording of the presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A, can be accessed via your investor dashboard. Richard Kim, you haven't had a great deal of time to look at them, but if I could ask you just to click on that Q&A tab, and where appropriate to do so, just read out the question and give your response, and I'll pick up from you at the end.
Okay. Well, there's some good questions in there, and thank you, and do keep them coming. I think if I pick up specifically on one of the interest rate question, I see one of the questions is: The cash flow bridge shows 0% interest earned. I hope you are now earning a better rate than that. The short answer is we are, but of course, reporting on last year's results with t
he sort of money rates, essentially it was not a. It didn't figure greatly in last year's results, but as the interest rates have come up, it will in the future.
It's also worth noting, we have quite a complicated business because our operating units are in Australia, in South Africa, India, Northern Ireland, in the U.K., and in Canada and the U.S. From a just cashflow management perspective, that makes our treasury quite a sophisticated function. We are pretty adept at that, and the team are obviously onto spot rates and overnight rates. To be honest, as we all know, for the last 10 years, that's barely been a wrinkle in the system, so I think that might change. You know, we are, and we're on it, but I think it'll make a marginal difference to the, to the, to the, really, to the figures.
Perhaps the bigger question there is, in when, at what stage do we expect to deliver a substantial profit and cash flow, assuming new wins from here is mainly profit? We are in that lovely stage where, in effect, subject to anything else we choose to pull the lever of, you know, if we sell a GBP 4 million ARR, then GBP 3 million of it drops through to the bottom line. I think the message for us is, when we came to the market, we see massive growth and opportunity, and shame on us if we don't take it. The market context in the last 2 or 3 years has been to ensure, if you like, that may be true, but let's make sure we deliver profit. We're still on that game.
Effectively, we see the process over the next two or three years converting more and more, if you like, of that operating leverage to bottom line growth. That said, we'd still be in a position to say, you know, if the growth's there, we should take it. I'm also I don't think we'll ever run the business for, if you like, a, you know, borrow money to leverage up. That's just not the game we're in. If the marketing means the prospects and opportunities are there for us to really accelerate, you know, six new logos into 12, into 20, into, who knows, 40 in a couple years' time, then clearly, we would take that opportunity. Importantly, we have the funds to do it.
At the moment, we're not calling, if you like, our cash versus policy per se, but that, the sentiment of this company is still a sort of in the method, in a sort of Rule of 40, I'd have a 30% growth and 10% profitability company, if we can create that sort of momentum in the company. Looking at other questions here: How much of your cash is actually available for acquisition or support growth? Mostly looks advanced payment. Mostly looks like advanced payments from customers for next year's services. It sort of is, but that's the dynamic of this business. I mean, effectively, you are taking an advance on, but you've also got 87% gross margin.
It's not like we're storing up a lot of cost base that then has to be delivered. If it's 87% gross margin, that gives us the discretion to use that money to invest in the business in a variety of forms, and the actual delivery cost of it is fairly nominal. You've got to be careful with that and make sure that's sort of carried in lots of ways, but it does give us the opportunity, let's say, to drive the growth in different areas. I mean, in terms of our actual sort of metrics, we track pipeline, we track growth, and, you know, as you'd expect, we have all sort of, you know, interesting data on that.
What is interesting, I think, it's, kind of, the question is: How much view do we have on future pipeline conversion rates? Historically, ActiveOps's fastest growing phase was in 2008 to 2011, that was the last financial crisis. There's no doubt there's something about, if you like, that need, when companies feel the squeeze to do more with what they already have, is one that plays to our type of environment. We're seeing a little bit of that already, and we've seen some good uptake this year.
I think that in conjunction with some exciting products, that sounds like they could be real silver bullets to a lot of big institutional problems, start to create the interest. You know, we, you keep the interest, you need to sustain it to sit in the, in the sales cycle. I think we're quite optimistic, the metrics in the pipeline are all to do with the expansion in different product sets. It's probably never looked, you know, never looked as healthy as it does now, just because of those different opportunities. There's the velocity through the pipeline, which is actually a far more important thing. I mean, I'd still contrast it between a fast tortoise and a slow tortoise.
you know, we are talking about selling to large enterprises, but ActiveOps has SOC 2 compliance, which is a major hurdle, a lot of bridge for a lot of software companies. You know, We have the credentials of having sold over many years to some of the biggest companies in the world, and we're just in a good place. It doesn't make it easy, it doesn't make it happen quickly, but we're in a very good place compared with a lot of our competitors. I think there's some interesting stuff there. Question here is, It says, "So when your kit seems such a no-brainer, why isn't your sales growth higher?" It's interesting. One of these ...
One of the conundrums we've always found in our stuff is that it's one of those things which, at a senior management level, they sort of assume it's done well already. COVID's done us a lot of favors because what that crystallized at was the fact that, firstly, some of the ways that people had control, in terms of the stuff we're talking about, just didn't work when people were working from home. That's brought an awful lot sharper focus on why better ops management, if you like, is so fundamental to almost every aspect of a business proposition. I think generally, that sort of efficiency, sort of cut tone at the moment, doing more, is also something sort of sharpening people's sensitivity to it.
I think one of the areas I'm most excited about for the coming year is the impact that our new marketing strategy is having. We recruited a CMO last year for the first time. We've already had a marketing activity, but we brought in somebody with a lot of experience around SaaS-based marketing of B2B products. You'll see a lot of that in terms of our messaging coming out, which is very much more around the value story, and hopefully, you know, that... Well, I do know that will have a big effect in conjunction with the kind of technology which is genuinely innovative. What do I see as a normal level of share option remuneration going forward?
Is this not really something that should be in the adjusted profits? I think one of the things that we've got to be mindful of is the kind of trade-off between public and private equity here. We lost our recent finance director, who had been with me for a long time, because in the private sector, he was able to move to a firm which was able to offer him very, you know, generous terms, which he couldn't possibly have earned through our sort of scheme. The first principle in ActiveOps, I think, is one of transparency and disclosure. The whole idea of this is that anything in there has to make sense to any eyes.
I personally, as a heavily invested shareholder, founder, I've got to be careful because I assume everybody's already motivated in the way I am. Realistically, part of the options, you know, part of the important facets for anybody and giving the business gear, is to have the right option scheme in place. That said, I think ActiveOps, fortunately, is blessed with a proposition that actually many people feel pretty motivated to be part of, without getting too evangelical about it. You know, we have a lot of people in our company who came because they were part of. They received it as customers and then wanted to join.
That's always affected our remuneration and, in all sorts of other sort of elements of the company, in terms of our retention and our sort of sense of loyalty, which I think we've got a lot to be grateful for. I haven't got a specific answer on the, on the option plan. I just, as a point of principle, I just think it's important to be completely upfront about it. Also, I don't believe that, if you like, options are, if you like, a fundamental driver to get people to perform. I think it's the environment you give them, the belief and the passion that's in the product they own, and that ultimately drives our success. Just reading the other questions here.
What level of ARR growth do you think the company is capable of?" Well, there's a 64,000 dollar question. I mean, I think what I'm trying to paint here is an awful lot of elements that are possibly, you know, I think an awful lot of elements of the context could achieve a shift change. That's a, that's a call, and I have every reason to believe, you know, to believe my smoke in that sense. I think, I think there is huge opportunity in this market. There isn't really much solution, you know, a competitive solution in a general sense that we've got. We have some unique features about our data, our IP structure around the solution, and our user base.
I think there's a lot of opportunity here. It's down to us now to execute against that strategy. One of the questions here is again an interesting one: "As well as Microsoft, could you have other partnerships with other large players which could help sales?" I think the key point here, and we found in the past, it's having the level of market sensitivity to our product. We have some really excellent relationships with a number of the leading partnerships with the consultancy advisors, as well as other technologies. We're on the Blue Prism Exchange, as well as with SS&C. They're a supplier as well as a customer, which is exciting, as well as Microsoft.
I think, having gone down and you know, support a lot of partnering activities, what we observe is, it's when the market is really vibrant for a particular product, is when you see those kind of supporting teams spring up in the consultancies and SIs. I think we will get there, but it's a question of when, you know? Not now, but when. "Are large and efficient government departments a potential target?" Oh, God, I wish. I mean, absolutely, and I mean, and genuinely, and when you look at the sort of various things in the recent history around this, it's not just about, you know, sort of bringing some, you know, sweating the assets or anything ghastly like that.
It's about bringing transparency so that hardworking people, in any form of work, have the means to show and tell how hard they are working. You know, it's a two-way bet here, and I think that's part of my frustration with that kind of world, is it too often it becomes a kind of binary, sort of, rather ill-informed, data-free argument, rather than, you know, if we could give Rhys Moore visibility, that he knew people at DVLA were working comfortably and working hard, that would be a good thing, and vice versa. There is an accountability to the public that says better data supporting it would be a good thing. I think there's massive opportunity there.
I think with that, Richard, again, you've covered off every single question that's come through. Of course, there are any further questions that do come through, the team will be able to review those. We'll publish responses, where appropriate to do so on the Investor Meet Company platform. Richard, just before redirecting investors to provide you with their feedback, which I know is particularly important to you and the team, can I just ask you just for a few closing comments, please?
Very much. I hope that's given you a reasonable picture of ActiveOps. We're very excited about where we are, as a business, which has got steady revenues, good growth from our existing customer base, and lots of opportunity. Thank you again for making the time to watch this webinar.
That's fantastic. Richard Jeffery, thanks indeed for updating investors today. Can I please ask investors not to close this session? Should be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order the team can better understand your views and expectations. This will only take a few moments to complete, and it's greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of ActiveOps PLC, I'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation. That concludes today's session. Good afternoon to you all.