Welcome to the Brave Bison PLC investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged and can be submitted at any time via the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll, and then I'd like to hand you over to Oliver Green, Executive Chairman. Good morning, sir.
Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our Investor Meet Company presentation today. On the call is my brother and Chief Growth Officer, Theo Green, and Philippa Norridge, our CFO. Our presentation today will last around 35 minutes, and we'll definitely have some questions at the end. For any new shareholders or shareholders looking to refresh their memory, Brave Bison is a marketing and technology company that works with global businesses, global companies, and we sell a combination of services, technology, and training to some of these businesses. Existing clients for us today are the likes of New Balance, Specsavers, Aviva, and Primark. We're also really, really proud of our work that we do with some of the major social media platforms.
LinkedIn, Pinterest, TikTok, and YouTube are our current customers of Brave Bison, and that's really exciting and something that we like to champion because it really gives our partners and other clients a flavor for the credibility and the expertise that sits inside Brave Bison today. We'll kick off with a review of the interim results, which cover the six-month period to the 30th of June 2025. I would say this period marks good progress in our original goals. We were pleased to show an increase in both top and bottom line. We did, however, spend a significant amount of time and capital making acquisitions in the period. We've actually announced five acquisitions this year, and those were being worked on during that period. Four were announced in the period, and one was announced after the period end. That is the main reason for the net cash reduction.
We bought some businesses that were in different positions, some of which were going really well, some of which will be integrated, and we'll go into that later on in the presentation.
In 2025, Brave Bison drove top-line growth and increased net revenue from EUR 10.1 million- EUR 12 million, which is an increase of 19%. This was driven both by the three acquisitions that were made during the period and the strong trading within performance marketing and across our media network. Our adjusted EBITDA also increased on the prior year by 6% to EUR 2.3 million. This represented a slightly reduced adjusted EBITDA margin of 19% compared with 21% in the prior year. This was due to the fact that both Engage, which we bought at the start of the period, and The Fifth, which we acquired in May, were loss-making at the point of acquisition. We have already brought both businesses into our offices and onto our operating platform and actioned cost savings, which should result in these contributing positively over the next 12 months.
On the next slide, you can see the adjusting items within the P&L. Unsurprisingly, given the acquisitions in the period, the majority of the adjusting items relate to either acquisition costs or restructuring and integration costs. We had EUR 1 million of acquisition costs in the first half. These related not only to the acquisitions which were completed in the period, but also professional fees associated with the due diligence and acquisition of the mini-MBA in July and the acquisition of MTM, which we announced last week. The restructuring costs of EUR 0.5 million also largely related to the acquisitions. There were some unused property costs associated with the Built Visible acquisition, as well as some duplicate IT costs where contracts could not be immediately terminated.
There were also some termination costs relating to staff where the integration of the acquisitions resulted in some restructuring, particularly in the areas where this was required to deliver profitability. As well as these exceptional costs, we also adjust for equity-settled share-based payments. This includes charges relating to our employee share option scheme, which is used to incentivize key employees, as well as charges in relation to directors' long-term incentive plans. Finally, we adjust for the amortization of acquired intangibles. This relates to the amortization of the customer relationships and brands acquired over the last five years. The recent acquisitions are still to undergo a full purchase price allocation exercise to split the intangible assets between goodwill and other intangibles. There is likely to be an adjustment to this number in the second half once this exercise is complete.
Moving on to look at our cash flow, our cash balance did reduce by EUR 3.5 million over the period. This was obviously heavily impacted by the exceptional costs already discussed around the acquisition and restructuring costs. In addition, we saw cash outflows as a result of working capital changes. This was driven primarily by the unwinding of the acquisition balance sheets, in particular Engage, where there were significant overdue liabilities at the point of acquisition. We made acquisition payments of EUR 1.9 million during the period for the businesses, or EUR 1.3 million net of the cash brought in upon acquisition. We also paid out EUR 0.3 million in relation to our maiden dividend payment during the period. Other cash flows out were minimal, with capital expenditure of just EUR 0.1 million and no tax payments in the period due to our brought-forward tax losses.
Taking a look at our balance sheet, you can see that the biggest movement on the balance sheet has been a significant increase in the intangible assets. That all relates to the acquisitions completed during the period. All of the intangible assets which are not fully amortized relate to acquisitions from the last five years. The deferred tax asset on our balance sheet mainly consists of a conservative estimate of the value of the brought-forward tax losses across the group. There are then a number of balances on the balance sheet which relate to the leases on our main London and Manchester offices. There is a right-of-use asset worth EUR 1.3 million with intangible assets relating to this, as well as the lease liabilities. There are no unused leases associated with the acquisitions which are reflected on the balance sheet.
The Builtvisible lease terminates before the end of the year and is all reflected in the P&L, and there are no other leases which were involved in the acquisitions. Trade and other payables has increased fairly significantly because of the acquisition balance sheets. There is also included in this number EUR 0.9 million of deferred guaranteed consideration in relation to the Builtvisible acquisition. The contingent acquisition liabilities represent the fair value of the expected future cash payments in relation to the recent acquisitions, where these are dependent on performance metrics. These contingent payments should be self-funding, so any increase in these amounts will be matched by improved trading.
In terms of where that leaves us, Philippa's balance sheet obviously now looks radically different. Not only have we made a sizable acquisition that is included in those numbers in the form of mini-MBA, but we've also completed an equity issuance and increased our debt levels. I think it is important that investors look at the six months ahead in addition to the balance sheet that we've presented to you today. In terms of how we feel about things, I think it's fair to say that business at the moment is rather good. There are two parts of our business that are doing particularly well, and that has meant we feel comfortable upgrading the full-year expectations for the business. Previously, the company was looking like it would make just shy of EUR 6 million of adjusted EBITDA for the full year.
Now we believe that the number will be higher than that as a result of strong trading in our performance business, where we have won a number of new clients, and in our media business, where we run channels on behalf of third parties. We've seen very strong performance in sports, particularly the US Open, and this year we also have the benefit of the Ryder Cup, which is another channel that we run. It does look like that business will be ahead of its budget and ahead of the prior year. The other thing that will contribute positively to this financial year is the acquisition of MTM, which was completed in September. Those numbers will be consolidated for the final quarter. MTM made approximately EUR 1.3 million last year, so the contribution will be not insignificant to the current financial year.
I really cannot emphasize enough how excited we are as a management team to own the mini-MBA. The mini-MBA is a totally unique asset if we look at sort of other marketing media groups, and we own it, and the guy that runs it is a large shareholder, a very significant shareholder in Brave Bison. In short, the mini-MBA is a marketing training and skills platform that organizations use to develop skills or level up or become more expert in the subject of marketing. Global organizations buy it on behalf of their teams, with a view to ultimately having more skilled and better trained people within their organizations.
We think that that's a really exciting sort of trend that we can really jump on because in a world where AI and machine learning is doing more and more of the heavy lifting, we believe that marketing teams need to be that much better skilled and that much more trained to really understand and leverage these very sophisticated technology platforms. The business sells to about 6,000 people every year, which actually really isn't a huge amount of people and something that we're looking to really grow and develop over the next 6, 12, and 18 months. Ultimately, this business will form a brand new division inside Brave Bison. It will be our skills and learning division and will sit alongside our other sort of marketing and consultancy practices.
I think also it's worth saying that Mark Ritson, who leads the business alongside CEO Tim Fleming, is very much a sort of industry heavyweight. Mark has a column in The Drum, which is a very large marketing publication. He also has a weekly column in Adweek, and Mark's network is really sort of global, and it's very, very senior. He rubs shoulders with all kinds of very senior marketing leaders, marketing professionals, and we think that there'll be a network effect of us working alongside Mark and Mark being such a big shareholder inside Brave Bison. This is a unique business. It's a high-margin business. It's a business that we think we can grow quickly over the next 12- 18 months, and really, we don't have to do very much to sort of underline platform.
It's already very well set up in that the customer feedback, the NPS scores are incredibly high. People love going on the course. They love hearing from Mark. All we need to do is grow this business by getting more people to buy it. We don't need to invest a huge amount in the underlying platform, and we think that's really exciting as we move into next year and beyond.
Ollie's given you a good example of where we make an acquisition and establish a new division, and the mini-MBA will hopefully be the first of a number of acquisitions in that space over the next few years. MTM is more of a bolt-on acquisition. It adds to our existing business.
It adds to our existing client setup, and we're equally excited to own MTM and to be in business with the three founders, James, Caroline, and Rich, all of whom will be staying with the business for a five-year earnout. MTM is a consultancy business, first and foremost. A lot of what we do in our performance business and our social business involves us delivering for clients. We drive sales, we drive conversion, we create content, we run campaigns. It's delivery-focused, whereas what we're doing at MTM is much more consultative and much more strategy-focused. Often, what we deliver to the client is a set of research and a set of insights that informs decision-making. MTM has real pedigree in media and tech. The business has been working with some of the biggest technology and streaming and entertainment companies in the world for some years.
They were part of the original team that launched Sky Glass. They now work with Google. They work with Figma, Samsung, Spotify. They're also very active in the sports rights holder industry. They help people value their rights and decide how and when to launch direct-to-consumer propositions. Insight and data is a huge string to the bow of MTM. All of the work that they do is underpinned by very, very rigorous analysis, and that often involves collecting first-party research in the form of quantitative or qualitative analysis. One of the most amazing parts with MTM is actually an owned proprietary forecasting model. MTM owns a model called Three Reasons, which is really a totally essential tool for people and streamers active in the UK. It's a model that is bought by all the major streamers, all the major PBSs, and the regulator themselves. It's sort of essential reading.
When that gets presented over at PBSs, hundreds of customers will join that, and hundreds of people from the industry will join that. Three Reasons is a really important part of the business, and it's an example of how the team are always ahead of the game on bringing together vital data with research and consultancy. Another area where MTM is very strong, and particularly when it comes to working with customers like Google and Figma, is around a very niche area called developer consultancy and developer research. A lot of the products that are in the market from Google are customer-facing. Why do you use Gemini? Why do you use Search? Why do you use Search and advertiser propositions? That's really important because it's either B2C or B2B marketing-focused.
One of the things that tech companies do the most is design and sell products to the developer community, the community who will ultimately be the ones integrating bits of software, connecting with certain APIs, and making sure that developer tools are easy to use or presented in a way that makes sense. MTM is a market leader in surveying and collecting data from that community. The community is obviously not that large, but having surveyed over 6,000 people in the last few years really does mean if you are launching a product for mobile, for cloud, or for machine learning and AI, one of the people that you would like to speak to or that you think could get you the highest quality market feedback would be MTM. That is why we work with customers like Google and actually Amazon.
A really interesting business in terms of how the model is set up. We are paying an initial consideration and then a share consideration and an earnout consideration. We really do expect to be in business with the founding team at MTM for the foreseeable future. Brave Bison has had a pretty transformational year when it comes to underlying growth and acquisitions. The business has grown almost 11x since its original revenues in 2020, when myself, Ollie, and Philippa took over. It has also grown almost double on a pro forma basis between 2024 and the 2025 pro forma, which is effectively the 2026 numbers.
The business has definitely been acquisitive, and we have definitely issued equity. We have done three fundraisings over the years, but we have always been very, very focused on earnings per share, which we have seen as a fundamental metric for the growth and the valuation of the business. Underlying earnings per share has grown by a compound annual growth rate of 23% since 2021. We choose that point because in 2020, the business was still in losses at an EPS level. The adjusted EBITDA was about flat, but at an EPS level, it was quite heavily negative. We are very, very focused on not only scaling the top line of the business and the EBITDA numbers to improve our scale and market position, but we are always very, very focused on underlying EPS, which we believe is the main component driving shareholder value. Ollie, you are on mute.
We think and talk a lot as a management team about how our business is structured and how we evolve our sort of operating platform in order to cope with the growth that we have seen both organically and inorganically. As things stand, we have these three business divisions: Engage, Social Chain, and Brave Bison. Engage is more focused on sports rights holders and selling in strategy and content production. Social Chain is focused primarily in the sort of B2C space, working with a combination of retailers, FMCG companies, tech companies to ultimately help them navigate the increasingly complex world of social media and run campaigns using creators and influencers and navigate different sort of cultural pockets inside these different social media platforms. Brave Bison is our organic campaign media practice. Ultimately, supporting all three divisions is now MTM, which we think is being much more consultative, much more strategic.
It typically works with more senior stakeholders, and the ultimate output is typically some kind of report or sort of consultancy framework that looks at opportunities, that looks at problems, and then proposes recommendations. Where we're moving to now is an organization that is executional across Engage, Social Chain, and Brave Bison, where we can run campaigns and actually deliver marketing for our clients. There is another layer which is much more consultative, much more insights-driven, where we're thinking about problems and thinking about opportunities, as well as a training layer that helps our clients to actually build muscle internally. We think that this structure, this framework is future-facing, is modern, and it allows us to work with customers in a number of different levels and a number of different ways.
We can deliver, we can consult and advise, we can train, we can sell technology, we can sell media, and it's a very sort of integrated and joined-up offering. As you would imagine, that sort of structure is reflected in how we organize our executive team, which three of us are on the call today. We also have our divisional CEOs, a lot of which are founders, some of which we recruited into the business. You can see a very eclectic, I hope, group of individuals that have been with the business for some time and combined have a very, very strong experience in media, in marketing, in consultancy, in technology, in the sport and entertainment world. Together, this is who is growing the business and is responsible for driving the business forward.
One of the things that has been driving the business forward is how we have been using artificial intelligence to maximize the output for our clients. One of the important things about Brave Bison and one of the ways that we go to market is to help our clients capitalize on complexity. Initially, that was born out of the fact that the ecosystems in which our clients operate, how they advertise in a digital world, were so fragmented and so confusing that it was very difficult for clients to have a clear purpose. With AI, that's become a thousand times more complicated because the tooling available and the software available and the services available have become more and more difficult.
We see it really as our role to help our clients do the best with the tooling that's available and, where relevant, build our own tooling to allow us to go to market faster. Our flagship AI tool and the thing that we're seeing most client interest in at the moment is called Audience GPT. We have spoken about this a little bit in the past, but we're quite pleased that at the Campaign Tech Awards this year, which is a big industry awards ceremony, Audience GPT was actually awarded the best operational use of AI. It was, as voted by a set of judges, the tool that clients felt they could use the most when it came to actually delivering actionable results.
We actually beat the internal tool that Unilever had been developing and a number of tools developed by specific AI development companies whose entire purpose is building AI. We really put that down to the feedback loop, right? The people that are developing our tooling are not only developing it for our clients, they're also developing it for our own internal use. That's how we're able to make sure that we're building the right products at the right time. Why is Audience GPT so successful? It's effectively a focus group that you can conduct in a matter of minutes as opposed to a matter of weeks or months using something called silicon audiences.
Effectively, we are taking audience data, we are training a large language model that would be provided to us by Google through Gemini or OpenAI, ChatGPT, and we would then start to have a conversational interface with that fake customer. We have a silicon customer and we start to talk to it about different types of research, different types of advertising. What that allows us to do is get a level of insight that customers are very interested in because of the speed of delivery. At MTM, we might be doing a six-month or three-month program of research and insight. With Audience GPT, we're condensing that into a matter of days, and we're using it to very quickly inform media strategies. It's true that the audience insight that we're collecting is totally generated by AI. It's not real.
For the level of depth and speed that we're going into, it works really well for things like quick-fire media strategies, for creative planning around where to buy media, something really important around creative. We show advertising copy and advertising creative to the model and we ask it, "What did you think of this ad? What do you think about it? Would you click on this?" We have some explainer videos that will be available afterwards to people. This is something that certainly we feel has put us ahead of the pack and is one of the reasons our performance business is doing so well at the moment. Another thing that's been incredibly successful for us is something called Ad Studio. This is where we use AI to create multiple different versions of the same advertising for use on social media.
Those of you that do use social media will notice that you're often served exactly the same advert multiple times. That often causes you to become frustrated and may make you upset and may make you dislike that brand for continuously showing you the same adverts, even if you were interested in them in the beginning. That's called ad fatigue, and it's something that really does plague the industry and stops clients from spending even when there are successful audiences. What we do is create multiple versions of the same ad using Ad Studio, and AI is a very important part of that. We then run that advertising to fantastic results. Two clients here, one in the e-commerce space, Sea Salt, and one in the travel space, Trafalgar, both showing fantastic uplift in return on advertising spend.
This slide is just showing a little bit about our integration strategy and what we do when we first bring in an acquisition. One of the first things that we do is focus on finance and the operations, and we do that pretty much from day one, getting people to line up with our group forecasting approach and also getting people onto our systems. The forecasting pretty much happens straight away, and we look to move people onto our financial systems and align with our financial reporting within the first three months.
The way we think about integration really is in three buckets. We have integration proper, which is a really tight integration where we bring a business very close. There's integration light, where we bring a business very close, but we look to preserve certain parts of a business. Then there's a new division where we will be running the back office, as Philippa says, but that business will have its own front-end approach of winning customers because either it runs in a different way or it's marketed in a different way. As Philippa's touched on, financial operations is a really important part of integration, and we integrate our financial operations in every instance. The same is true very much for HR and people. That's both the administrative side of things and the system side of things.
We have one central system for all of our HR information, but also when it comes to social wellbeing, recruitment, and career development. That's something that we like to normalize across the business. You certainly don't have people in one part of our business with very different benefits to another part of our business. Those are all normalized once a business is integrated. When it comes to growth and marketing, we definitely do integrate very closely in the first column. That will often involve losing a trade brand, so everything gets integrated into already what we're doing. Builtvisible has become Brave Bison Performance. The Fifth will become Social Chain, but that's not true for someone like MTM, who will retain their brand identity, or Social Chain, who's retained its brand identity.
That's because it has a very specific customer that it's talking to, or it's very well known in its industry. MTM is famous for what it does, and Social Chain is certainly very famous for what it does. We don't feel that doing away with the trade brand is a good idea. We do, however, work really hard to normalize and integrate our content marketing, our new business activity, our events, and our ability to cross-sell. That wouldn't, however, extend to the division case study for someone like mini-MBA. Mini-MBA markets in a very different way to either MTM or The Fifth, and that means they need to retain their own non-centralized marketing function. That doesn't mean that we don't oversee it, but it does mean that they have a dedicated resource inside the business as opposed to that sitting centrally.
Resource management is similar, and this involves us integrating all of the client and delivery information across our business. We're very, very focused on resource control. We have a single professional services automation platform, which is a single system where everyone inputs their time every week, and that allows us to see exactly how much work we have billed versus the amount of resource we have available. When we integrate closely, those come together. That allows us to share resources. If we have a designer in Bangalore and a designer in Manchester, a team in London who's looking for a designer can see that resource instead of hiring a freelancer. That's not always the case for things like integration light because ultimately what happens is we have individuals who don't have huge amounts of crossover.
Sometimes the resource management, whilst it may be integrated from a systems perspective, doesn't actually result in a huge margin gain. Finally, we have IT and systems, and this is very important. We have a single operating system throughout the business. We use Microsoft. We use the Google suite for certain customers who insist on communicating in that way, but generally speaking, we're a Microsoft outfit. What that does mean is that everyone's on the same system when it comes to SharePoint and tooling. It means that we're able to maintain, particularly across the business, levels of cybersecurity to ensure that we're protected where needed. It also means that we can roll out new technology in ways that are much quicker. When we launch new tooling, either developed internally or off the shelf, our main AI tools at the moment are ChatGPT, Gemini, Midjourney, and Firefly.
We're able to do that across the business in a singular way. To give everyone a sense, as I said before, good case studies, Built Visible, The Fifth, they will be totally integrated. MTM, Social Chain, and Engage, they're versions of integration light, and mini-MBA is a version of a new division within others.
We thought it might be helpful just to summarize what we think are the top five most compelling reasons to become a shareholder in Brave Bison. The first is very much our track record as a management team and business in making accretive acquisitions. I think that the market is fragmented and there are definitely lots of opportunities out there, but we have really sort of mastered an approach that sees earnings per share grow in value as well as just revenue and profit.
I think the second reason to be excited about Brave Bison is that we exist in a very exciting and high-growth ecosystem. The worlds of social media, digital media, digital marketing, e-learning, influencer marketing, those markets are growing at double digits, and we are very much in a sweet spot, and we absolutely are planning to capitalize on that as we grow and develop our business. Our balance sheet is strong. Our balance sheet has evolved over the past six months given all of the acquisitions, but we do still have some room. Net debt is below one times EBITDA. Some businesses that are similar to us might have two or three times net debt to EBITDA, whereas we're actually below one, which we think is pretty healthy and allows us to use our cash in strategic ways. There's a massive shift in the market when it comes to AI.
We're seeing such opportunity to help shape client briefs, work with new, much larger organizations, and we absolutely intend on being one of the winners when it comes to AI's transformational impact on marketing. Lastly, we really do feel as though the exec team, the management team at Brave Bison, is categorically aligned with shareholders. Theo and I are the second largest shareholders in Brave Bison. Mark Ritson is now a very significant, I think, top five shareholder in Brave Bison. You have a number of people inside the business that are focused on growing the business and running the business in an efficient way, in a sustainable way, and we feel very aligned with shareholders such that we only make money when our shareholders make money. That was it in terms of our presentation. I think we'll now open up for some questions.
Oliver, Philippa, Theo, thank you very much for your presentation. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions just by using the Q&A tab situated on the top right-hand corner of your screen. While the company takes a few moments to review those questions submitted today, I'd like to remind you that the recording of this presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A, can be accessed by our investor dashboard. As you can see, we received a number of questions throughout today's presentation. Oliver, if I could please hand back to you to read out the questions and give responses where appropriate to do so, and I'll pick up from you at the end.
Sure. There's a question about our larger vision and which areas of the market do we really want to dominate and what kind of scale are we aiming for? I think that the larger vision is really to build the ultimate marketing and technology partner to global brands. I think that we look at businesses of all shapes and sizes, and they have a whole host of problems. They have a whole host of opportunities in front of them, and we want to be the partner that can really sit next to them, advise them, help them, train their teams. The ecosystem is very big, right? There are so many different channels that customers can use to ultimately build out their own audiences and drive their own businesses.
We want to be a partner that can sit alongside CEOs, Chief Marketing Officers, Chief Financial Officers, and really unpick where our clients have weaknesses, where they're looking for some help, and we want to be providing those solutions. It's to become this technology-enabled, consultative marketing and tech partner that is working with your global businesses. It's very much more of the same rather than a complete sort of radical departure versus where we are today.
There was a question about, with the number of acquisitions we've done recently, how are we managing integration and cost synergies, and when should we start to see margin improvements showing through? I think, as we said when we went through the integration slide, we've moved quite quickly when it comes to integration. Certainly, with acquisitions like Engage, which was done towards the start of the year, we should have realized a lot of those cost synergies already. What I think has been quite good is we actually had a while before doing these recent acquisitions where we didn't have acquisitions, and we used that time to really upskill our operations team to make sure that we had the people in place to carry this out efficiently and effectively and identify all of those synergies pretty quickly.
In terms of margin improvements and when they should show through, I think what we're really talking is, you've got the quick wins, which we would expect to see after about three to six months, and then there is a sort of long tail of IT contracts that go on for a year after acquisition that you're tied into. In some instances, there might be leases, but I would say generally we would like to see those margin improvements between 6 to 12 months.
There's a question about a few of our major shareholders, Mark Ritson and Lord Michael Ashcroft. You can find the exact percentages that our major shareholders have on our website. I believe Mark has a few %. I think he has 3%, but Mark is committed to invest EUR 4 million into Brave Bison. He's already invested EUR 2 million, and the second tranche of EUR 2 million, he has to subscribe to within 24 months from the completion of the mini-MBA deal, although I suspect he will become a larger shareholder much more quickly than that.
There's a question here about competition and the competition in our markets, and our markets are very competitive. They're very big, and they're very profitable, and that means that people are very much coming after these individual markets.
I think that at the moment, the old school businesses, the network businesses, the WPPs that used to have this incredible competitive advantage by virtue of their scale are really kind of seeing that come under huge pressure. As a smaller business, a more nimble business, we're actually able to do more. We're able to pivot more quickly. We're able to launch our AI products much more quickly. If you compare WPP's Open, which is a business-wide AI tool, vs some of the stuff that we've been doing, it takes them months to cascade that app into their organization. In terms of our team and incentivization, we focus a lot on how our Senior Leadership are incentivized. We have, I think, probably now 75- 80 shareholders within the business.
That's people who've either joined the business as an acquisition and received shares, or it's people that have been part of our share option plan. Some of those people will have been issued options at some of the earlier placing prices, EUR 0.0135, EUR 0.024, and that's great to see because it means that they're sitting on sizable gains that may not, in each case, have vested. Our share option plans always vest over three years for the team, so not all of it gets set at once, and those options are always granted at market price. We don't do nil paid options, and we haven't done since 2021.
There's a question about cross-selling opportunities. Cross-selling is definitely a big initiative for us at Brave Bison.
I think what really helps now with MTM is that moving forward, we really want all of our major client relationships to be with A, senior stakeholders, but B, have a sort of very important strategy dynamic to them. I think we don't want to be in a position where we're just delivering for a client. We want to be in a position where we really understand what their business plan is, what their priorities are as a company, and how we might be able to impact them. It's only when you're in those sorts of conversations and in those sorts of boardrooms, frankly, that you can really begin to cross-sell and upsell because you really understand the pain points of a client. I think that cross-selling is very important to us.
We do do it successfully, but I think moving forward, we can do it even more successfully by virtue of us having this growth and strategy lens to what we do. Frankly, because we have more customers inside of our business, it's worth putting more people solely focused on it and creating new incentive programs that really focus on it for next year. It's front and center as we plan 2026, and there's definitely lots of value that is not quite forecasted that could be got from better cross-selling, better upselling into our bigger, more comprehensive relationships.
Perfect. If there are no more questions to be submitted, I think that's all for today. Thank you very much, everyone, for dialing in.
Thank you all.
Oliver, Philippa, Theo, thank you for updating investors today. Now, please ask investors not to close this session as you'll now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order that the management team can better understand your views and expectations. This will only take a few moments to complete, and I'm sure it will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of Brave Bison Group PLC, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation and good morning to you.