Good morning and welcome to the Brave Bison Group PLC annual results investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen-only mode. Questions are encouraged, and they can be submitted at any time using the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Just simply type in your questions and press send. Before we begin, I would like to submit the following poll. I would now like to hand you over to Executive Chairman Oli Green. Good morning to you.
Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the Brave Bison Group PLC investor meet company presentation. I'm Oli Green, Executive Chairman. Our slides today will last around 40 minutes, and we'll have some time for questions at the end of our presentation. Joining me on the call today is my brother, Theo, our Chief Growth Officer, Philippa, our CFO, and we're also joined today by Tim, the CEO of MiniMBA, and Mark Ritson, Founder of MiniMBA, major shareholder in Brave Bison, and one of the marketing industry's preeminent thought leaders. For those shareholders that are new to the story or prospective investors, Brave Bison is a marketing and technology business that works with global brands.
We work with some of the largest advertisers on the planet, retailers like Primark and New Balance, technology companies like Google and LinkedIn, consumer groups like Nestlé and Carlsberg, and sports organizations like the PGA Tour and Formula 1. We sell these brands a combination of services, consultancy, training, and distribution across our media channels. Now, we operate across three different business units.
Sport & Entertainment is where we own and operate channels across digital platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Snapchat. We create, license, and distribute content across our channels, and the platforms pay us a revenue share on all advertising that flows across our network. We also work directly with rights holders like the PGA Tour, the ICC, US Open, and Real Madrid to help them leverage social and digital channels to grow their fandoms and drive revenue. Consultancy & Marketing Services is where we sell performance media, social media, and strategy consulting services to global businesses.
Our team of specialists works across the U.K., Europe, Australia, and India, and our mandates are almost always growth-orientated. Clients come to us with engagements that are aimed at growing revenue, building brand value, and launching in new markets or to new audiences. Marketing Skills & Capabilities is where we sell MBA-level training to marketers that want to develop their skills and be better at their jobs. I will let Mark and Tim give you a proper introduction to this business unit and our vision for the future later on in the presentation.
2025 was a really transformational year for Brave Bison. In addition to some strong financial results, we announced five acquisitions made during the period. We acquired Engage, a sports marketing company, at the beginning of the year. We acquired Builtvisible, a search engine optimization specialist that works with some large customers, particularly now on how they appear in large language models when people are searching through chatbots.
We acquired The Fifth, an influencer marketing company that was owned by News Corp, News UK. We acquired MTM, an insights and strategy consulting business, later on in the year. We acquired MiniMBA, a flagship brand for Brave Bison that the team will give you more information about. Another thing that's really exciting about the end of this year is that 54 employees inside Brave Bison are now share option holders.
That's out of a total of U.K. employees of around 250. We see this as being a major differentiator versus our competitors, and we're really pleased to see this number as high as it is. 2025 also marks the sixth year that myself, Oli, and Philippa have been at the helm of Brave Bison. Since 2020, net revenue has increased by over 12x . Adjusted EBITDA has grown from around 0%- 20%. Since 2021, we've managed to grow adjusted basic earnings per share at a compound annual growth rate of around 18%. The last six years have been tremendously exciting for us as a team, and we look forward to the years ahead.
We saw a real step change in our financial performance in 2025, driven by the five acquisitions that Theo has referenced, and also organic growth. From an organic growth perspective, Sport & Entertainment had a standout year, with strong performance from the channels we manage on behalf of sports federations and rights holders driving significant growth, particularly in the second half of the year. We also saw double-digit organic growth in performance marketing within our Consultancy & Marketing Services division, driven in part by strong demand for our new AI-enabled offerings.
There were, however, some reductions in revenue from social media marketing as a large client which had driven growth in 2024 moved more of a roster model, hence reducing our revenue share. Our margins dropped slightly to 20%. This was pulled down at the start of the year by some loss-making acquisitions in Engage and The Fifth, which took a few months to optimize as we moved them onto our platform and realized cost savings to shift them into profits.
Overall, we saw strong adjusted basic EPS growth at 14% on the prior year. The next slide outlines the adjusting items in the P&L and the reconciliation between our statutory profit before tax and adjusted EBITDA. The largest adjusting item at GBP 2.3 million is unsurprisingly acquisition costs. This includes fees related to our GBP 15.5 million fundraising in July alongside legal fees and due diligence costs. After this, we have amortization of acquired intangibles, which relates to the amortization of the customer relationships, brands, and online content generated as a result of the acquisitions.
We also had GBP 0.9 million of restructuring costs during the year. These relate to an unused office lease, some duplicate IT contracts, and staff termination costs associated with restructuring due to the acquisitions. Share-based payments relate to some non-cash charges relating to staff incentive plans. The largest cash inflow during the year came from share issuance following our oversubscribed fundraising ahead of the MiniMBA acquisition. The main cash outflows in the year were on the acquisition payments themselves and then the associated acquisition costs highlighted earlier.
We were also pleased to pay our maiden dividend during the year of GBP 0.3 million. Working capital was impacted by the differing profiles of the acquisitions. Engage in particular came with significant liabilities following cash flow problems. MiniMBA and The Fifth as carve-outs also had balance sheets at the point of acquisition, which didn't reflect the normal course of trading. This means that we are seeing a small negative change in working capital here, despite actually ending the year in a strong working capital position.
Q4 in particular saw strong operating cash flow off the back of the performance of the Sport & Entertainment division. This resulted in a year-end net cash position of GBP 4.3 million, which was significantly ahead of expectations. We had anticipated being in a slight net debt position at the year-end. Overall, our net assets increased from GBP 21.3 million- GBP 39.1 million. There was a significant increase in non-current assets driven by the intangible assets associated with the acquisitions.
Bank loans also increased during the year. We agreed a GBP 10 million revolving cash facility with Barclays at a margin of 1.75% over base rate, which we used to partially fund the MiniMBA and MTM acquisitions. At the year-end, we had GBP 6 million drawn down to this facility, but we do expect to repay this in full by the end of this year. Our lease liabilities increased slightly during the year as we took on additional office space near our main London headquarters to accommodate MTM. For the first time, we have recognized deferred consideration liabilities in relation to some of the acquisitions.
We expect these to total GBP 1.3 million to be paid out over the course of FY 2026, and then a further GBP 2.8 million which will be payable over the course of the next five years. These are based on the fair value of expected future payments for recent acquisitions, but GBP 2.7 million of these payments are contingent on the performance of the acquisition as well as continued employment.
In terms of where we feel the business is today, FY 2026 has started rather well. In particular, we have seen some quite substantial growth from MiniMBA, around 18% year-on-year for the first cohort that kicked off in April. That follows a significant amount of work that Tim and Mark and the team have done to MiniMBA since we acquired the business from Centaur. The other thing that's gone rather well has been continued success in our Sport & Entertainment division.
Last year, we ran a number of live-streamed events that had quite interesting and new monetization models. We weren't sure by the end of last year how reoccurring that revenue would be, but we've been really pleased to see a number of our big channels run live-streamed events in the first half of this year. I think that our acquisition of a strategic shareholding in System1 is also something that is very exciting about Brave Bison. We are working constructively with the board of System1 to maximize shareholder value, and we've been very pleased to hear that the business has been trading well.
The company has made an announcement to that effect, and we've recorded an unrealized gain of GBP 1.7 million on the investment that we made in March. The balance sheet is in good shape. As Philippa alluded to, we were in a net cash position at the year-end, but that included substantial accruals that we are expecting and have paid out to a number of our channel partners. We believe we will be in a real net cash position by the end of June 30th. In fact, we are at the moment. That's despite us investing approximately GBP 1.5 million in cash to acquire about a 6% stake in System1, in addition to the shares that we acquired for shares.
We were also really pleased to announce the appointment of Yvonne as Non-Executive Director and Chair of the Audit Committee. Yvonne is an incredibly experienced FTSE and AIM CFO. She was one of the longest-serving CFOs on the London Stock Exchange at the point of her retirement from JSG last year. It's important that we are showing to our investors and to the wider community how the Board of Brave Bison is evolving as the company is now substantially bigger than it was this time last year. I will now hand over to Mark Ritson, who will talk to you about the Mini MBA.
Thanks, Theo. Hello everyone, what a pleasure. I normally only get to talk to marketers, so it's lovely to broaden out for a brief moment and talk to a more diverse crew. Let me tell you a bit about myself. I'm the founder of MiniMBA, and to some degree, the main product, I guess. I was a Marketing Professor. I did a PhD in Marketing at Lancaster University, went off to America where I was a Professor at the University of Minnesota, visiting professor at MIT, then back to London Business School for about seven years as a professor there.
To Melbourne Business School, and all told, I almost did 25 years as a Marketing Professor before I packed it in. I was very well regarded globally as one of the top MBA teachers. I won the teaching prize at MIT, the teaching prize at London Business School, the teaching prize at Melbourne Business School, for my marketing and brand teaching. I'm an acknowledged writer. I've been writing a column on marketing for about 20 years. I'm seven times, I think that's a record, British Columnist of the Year, in the B2B sector, in the PPA awards.
I beat Jeremy Clarkson once. That was good. That writing has really propelled me to a much higher level of global recognition in marketing. Finally, I'm not an academic's academic, and I'm happy to say that. I was one of the more applied members of most of the faculties I worked in, and throughout my life as a Marketing Professor, I was working at a very high level with some of the world's biggest companies, McKinsey, Baxter. I spent 13 years in France consulting for LVMH at the C level with some of the world's biggest brands.
I've a very practical, experienced skill set as well, and a very good Rolodex connected to some of the most senior marketers around the world. That's really was my combination. The key moment that happened to me happened 10 years ago. I decided to stop being a Marketing Professor, and I decided to create this thing, the MiniMBA. Next slide. First of all, what the hell do we mean by a MiniMBA? Well, it's mini because it's only 12 weeks long. It's mini because we're only covering the marketing part of the MBA.
There are many more flavors, the bit I taught was marketing. You're getting the marketing part of the MBA, and in a nutshell, it's mini because it's 100% online and accessible anywhere. You don't have to travel to a campus. That's important to grasp what we've been doing. We're way ahead of the curve at MiniMBA and have been for a long time. Really, there are two extremes in management training. There are these rather terrible online courses taught by people that simply couldn't get away with it in a proper classroom, but they're very accessible, and they're low price.
At the other end of the extreme, they're spending two years in Cambridge or somewhere doing an MBA. It's brilliantly done. It's extremely prestigious, high level, but not everyone has two years and 100 grand to spend on training. In the middle, there's MiniMBA. We have all the kudos and delivery and skills and knowledge of a top-tier MBA training in marketing. That's what I used to do. We're very accessible, both in terms of doing the course, paying for it, and so on. We're in that sweet spot that really very few others can occupy, and we've built a very successful program over the last 10 years.
What makes the program unique, first of all, as you can see, is we're a global program. Yes, we pull heavily from the U.K. and Australia because they've been the two bases. The team are based in the U.K. I'm mostly based in Australia. What makes that fascinating is a typical class on MiniMBA might have 2,000 marketers on it. We'd easily and often pull from more than 40 countries. We have a ton of countries, big countries, where 1%, 2% of the class are coming from that country.
We have enormous potential to grow our footprint in these other markets, and frankly, it's something we've only just turned our attention to. We're also unusual because we're almost exactly 50% B2C in the sense we recruit an individual marketer who wants to train themselves, but at the same time, about half of our of our revenue comes from B2B companies putting a team of their marketers through the program. As you can see, our clients are a who's who of all the major marketing companies in the world.
We train the very best, and we keep getting them to come back and give us more. We're almost uniquely placed in the sense, and I'd love to pretend that this was part of our strategy, but we just got lucky here. We pull beautifully from a diverse set of sectors. We're not a specialty program. As you can maybe see from our pie chart there, we pull almost equally from FMCG, from pharma, from agencies, from finance, from telcos, from consulting, from banking. We do well across the board, and again, that places us in a really unique situation.
We're pulling from 40, 50 countries. We're pulling from all the major sectors. If you look at the seniority of the people on the program, it goes all the way from C-suite VP down to two, three years of experience. We really are beautifully positioned. next slide. The results speak for themselves. We've now trained more than 40,000 marketers, again, around the world. The secret of our success is really very simple. We're the best training in marketing in the world, and most people who complete our program will tell you the same thing.
Our Net Promoter Score, which is a very good metric of satisfaction, sits at an Apple-like threshold of +78. More importantly, when we survey our marketers when they complete the course, usually more than 90% tell us that it's made them immediately a better marketer. Around 95% tell us it's made them more confident. Generally, we get comments like, "This is the best thing I've ever done. Why didn't I do it 20 years ago?
This has been life-changing." It's a jewel of a program and one that's reputation has spread around the world. Next slide. It's important I give you the context about marketing so you understand the potential of what we're doing at MiniMBA. If we just look at the marketing sector, it's not like finance or accounting. We've just completed a big project with Ipsos, the research firm. One of the things we've learned is as you travel around U.K., Australia, Canada, U.S., only about 1/3 of marketers, these are people with marketing in their job title, actually have any formal training in marketing.
There's a huge opportunity for the 2/3 of marketers that aren't trained in the thing they do to get a 12-week training in it that's widely seen as being world-class. That's particularly important because our Ipsos research reveals if you actually get some training in marketing, what do you know? You become five, six times more likely to actually know about marketing and be able to pass a test in it. You get better at it. You get more confident.
You get better rewarded. What we're enjoying, I think, is a combination of two things. We're one of the strongest brands in this training space for marketing, and also this world of training in marketing is a very high-potential category. High potential 'cause most marketers haven't been formally trained yet, and high potential because the era of classrooms is coming to an end. When I was a young marketer, we would fly to Edinburgh or Paris for a three or four day training course in a hotel.
That's simply not tenable anymore for most organizations, and we are well-placed to enjoy that transition because we've been in this market already for the last 10 years, learning and developing a competence to deliver always on spectacular quality training at scale. Next slide. Another highlight other than joining the Brave Bison family, which has been a phenomenal catalyst for our business, has been having Tim Plyming on board. We have a team of almost 20 now based out of the U.K., and Tim has been our CEO driving growth and has made an enormous impact on the business. I'm gonna pass it over to Tim now, who's gonna explore and give you a little bit more detail about MiniMBA. Over to you, Tim.
Great. Thank you, Mark. I have the privilege of working alongside Mark and our team as CEO of MiniMBA. I've held several leadership roles at global institutions, including the BBC, the British Museum, mostly spearheading pioneering digital-led projects across media and education. Prior to MiniMBA, I launched a new commercial business out of the Open University focused on new approaches to executive education. I oversaw the acquisition of the business by Brave Bison in the summer of last year.
We couldn't be happier in our new home. Over the last eight months, we've successfully integrated central business operations and are benefiting massively from wider Brave Bison Group capability as we develop new products and services, particularly focused on the integration of AI tools and services. MiniMBA has delivered consistent revenue growth since the presentation of our first course in 2016, with an average CAGR of 46% to the end of 2025.
The business is really well positioned for global scalability with strong brand recognition, untapped markets, and a well-defined product development plan. We arrived at Brave Bison last summer with a clearly defined growth roadmap. I'm pleased to say that we've already made great progress on delivery. Let me highlight in a couple of minutes some elements of that growth plan. We're accelerating territory expansion. Today, as Mark said, the MiniMBA is dominant in the U.K. and Australia. They're our two biggest markets. They'll continue to grow. Around 1% of our enrollments come from each of 30 other countries, including Sweden, Germany, the U.S., India, South Africa, and Brazil.
It's a customer base that's already there, it's growing organically, and we're investing in marketing to grow these territories. To drive awareness of Mark Ritson and MiniMBA, we've identified new global publishing partnerships in the form of regular columns from Mark with additional thought leadership content. This mirrors the early growth of the business through our partnership with Marketing Week in the U.K. We've identified strategic global partnerships to support our reach. We've developed our enterprise go-to-market strategy, positioning the MiniMBA as a strategic capability partner, helping organizations to embed foundational marketing knowledge across teams as they navigate a rapidly changing marketing sector.
We're investing in our people, making key hires into our senior team, including a Commercial Director and an Enterprise Sales Lead. We're working with MTM, the Brave Bison-owned strategy and research consultancy, to develop a skill and capability assessment tool, allowing our enterprise customers to create tailored learning and development plans and align team capabilities with their business strategy. Finally, we're investing in our technology with the launch of a new website supported by Brave Bison Group expertise, as well as the development of an enhanced learner platform. I'm pleased to say we're already seeing the results.
We've recently started April presentation of our courses, trading well ahead of board expectations, delivering 18% growth year-on-year. There's been positive progress against our enterprise focus go-to-market strategy, with large enterprise deals being a significant driver of our growth. At the start of February this year, we announced that we'd secured our largest enterprise contract to date, a EUR 1.3 million agreement with a large FMCG group to deliver a bespoke version of our Mini MBA in Brand Management program to 1,700 of their employees across the Asia-Pacific region through 2026.
Yesterday, we announced a three-year enterprise partnership with Omnicom Oceania, one of the largest marketing communication groups in the Asia-Pacific region. The agreement covers 1,200 of their people across a MiniMBA in marketing, brand management, and management programs, with participants drawn both from Omnicom employees and clients. We're reaching more marketers globally through our new publishing partnerships, including ADWEEK in the U.S., The Drum in the U.K., Mumbrella in Australia, Resumé in Sweden, and Horizont in Germany.
Combined, these partnerships are delivering 10 times the weekly reach that we previously had through Marketing Week, with Mark's columns consistently occupying the number one read position. We partner well, and we're known for it. This year, we've launched strategic partnerships with The Marketing Society, connecting us to an influential global community of 3,000+ senior marketers, as well as with The Marketing Academy, a global community of over 1,500 marketers. I'll now hand back to Mark, who will outline some of our future growth plans for the business. Mark, over to you.
Thanks, Tim. We've got a really long roadmap, we're very good about coming up with lots of growth ideas but not embarking on them all at once. At the moment, there are three things that we are immediately interested in in terms of our growth, other than continued geographic expansion. The first one is elective portfolio. When you do a real MBA, it's normally two years. Year one is the core, year two is a series of electives. We effectively teach the core course of marketing. That's what I used to teach at business school. What we'll bring out in the next 12 months is an elective portfolio, I think at this stage, of always on more practical electives.
Slightly shorter courses that focus on all the challenges that marketers face, taught by extraordinarily well-respected marketers and academics, and by myself as well. The attraction here is obvious. We have 40,000 alumni. They love the program. They've stayed in touch with us. We can essentially cross-sell these courses. Also, it's a two-way street. We can attract people into these more practical, shorter courses then upstream into the Mini MBA as well.
We see that as a huge growth area, an obvious bolt on that we've been waiting to get right and we're currently in process. Obviously, we're interested in AI, not in a superficial way. We've been working on this twofor two years now. There are 2 places where we see AI having an impact immediately in our business. The first is in learner functionality. At the moment, I do a lot of Q&A work. We do a lot of digital sessions with our classes.
The opportunity to augment that with an AI created avatar who is permanently available to each of our marketers on the course and after they complete the course, trained on all of my hundreds of thousands of hours of material and thinking and papers, means essentially a really significant value add and something that fits beautifully into where Mini MBA sits. We will try to develop a distinctive AI learner capability in the next 12 months and add it to our offer. We see that as a really important caveat. We've also seen other organizations, if I'm honest with you, like the World Federation of Advertisers, asked me, and I certainly gave them permission, to create an avatar of me several years ago to give talks, and it was very popular.
We're gonna do it better and with more authenticity and monetize it. At the same time, we also see AI having an impact, obviously, in the world of marketing. We've been working now for almost two years with American Partners on a specific AI planning tool which bolts beautifully into the MiniMBA marketing system, and we see a real opportunity to offer marketers and alumni this AI planning tool partly designed by me and trained in by me, which gives marketers essentially a very advanced AI marketing planning toolkit that frankly produces marketing plans and strategies way beyond anything that human teams are capable of. We see that again as another huge area of growth.
Those three are exciting areas, and they're already underway. My bigger, if you, if you caught me, you know, after a couple of beers, my bigger long-term ambition for MiniMBA is that it becomes the blue book. What I mean by that is, older marketers like me, who were trained in the 20th century, were all trained through the blue book of Professor Philip Kotler. It was the default way that marketers learned their trade. The days of textbooks are clearly coming to an end, and if we got this right, we truly believe we could be the default training system for most good global marketers. We could replace the blue book. That's a huge aspiration, but I think we've proven that we do have the capability to reach that far.
If I can end with just a couple of other asides, we're a big part of Brave Bison, and there's probably two other things that I would share with shareholders or potential shareholders. The first is I'm 55 years old. That's the prime time for a business school ex-professor like me. It's like being a 24-year-old Premier League footballer. I've got the chops, I've got the reputation, I've got 250,000 followers on LinkedIn. I, you know, people know me, I've got the Rolodex. I, you know, I'm in my prime, and yet I still have the hunger and drive and ambition to really push forward. This MiniMBA of ours is really, has come along at the right time. The second thing is, I've put my own money here, and I would encourage you to do the same thing.
I've put about GBP 4 million into Brave Bison. And that's partly based on what I've seen. We were very impressed with Oli and Theo when we first talked to them as one of the potential buyers, and what we've seen since has only grown more impressive. Their vision for the business and also, frankly, how they manage and how they lead is exceptional. I'm a very difficult person to impress, and I think they are both young and exceptional, and those are things to bet on. I've put my own money into this, and I really think Brave Bison has a vision for the industry that I'm delighted to be part of. Anyway, enough of that. I'll hand it back now, I think, to Theo.
To Oli.
To Oli. I'm sorry.
Thank you, Mark. Thank you, Tim. The topic du jour is very much AI, the first thing I wanted to say is that for decades, the global marketing holdcos have had this structural advantage. They always could simply out-deliver everyone else through their scale of headcount, their offices, and their production capacity. That structural advantage is now gone. Delivery has been commoditized by AI. What used to require hundreds of people in multiple time zones can now be executed by a much smaller specialist team with the right AI tooling.
Speed, focus, and the ability to re-architect from the ground up now beats scale and legacy process, the former are exactly the attributes of a challenger business like Brave Bison. The advertising market is moving away from outputs and towards outcomes. Clients want revenue, and they want growth, and they'll pay a premium to the partners that can actually deliver it for them. Consequently, the value in partners is transferring away from execution and delivery and towards senior counsel, cultural intelligence, and creative excellence, all underpinned by the latest AI technology.
This is the sort of work that compounds for clients and commands premium economics. We like to categorize our AI work streams into three buckets. Efficiency is where we use our AI tooling and AI-enabled workflows to do things faster and cheaper. Effectiveness is where we use AI technology to improve the quality of our work. Things that simply weren't possible or economic to do a year ago can now be completed by a Brave Bison consultant emboldened with the right AI system. Evolution is where we're selling brand-new AI-related services.
Large global enterprises know they need to leverage AI technology, but their scale and complexity can make adoption and change management difficult. This is where we can support our clients with agent development alongside training and consultancy. BBX is our AI operating system. Some companies use AI as a set of tools, but we're going further. We're infusing AI into our underlying businesses processes so that work, tasks, and decisions all live, flow, and get completed in a single centralized AI system. AI won't be something our teams go to to get a task done.
AI will exist inside the workflow, and by the end of this year, AI will live inside Brave Bison's nervous system. We're currently in the process of documenting all of the tasks that we perform for our clients. SEO reports, media audits, budget optimization, audience insights, and we're turning these tasks into reusable automated AI skills that all of our teams can access at the click of a button. Every department and every function will have these AI skills and agents embedded in standardized workflows alongside our teams to dramatically increase productivity and effectiveness.
Now, our model will be one of augmentation. Humans will provide the thinking and the judgment, and AI will do the execution. Things like cultural intelligence, creative excellence, and senior counsel, I believe, will actually trade for a premium to today. Next slide, please. Clients will get more time with our best people, and seniority becomes the product. Execution becomes abundant. Brave Bison will also become an even more compelling place to work. The best talent wants to direct intelligent systems and shape outcomes, not just push pixels and update status decks.
AudienceGPT is a tool that we built ourselves over the last 18 months. It's based on OpenAI, it is an audience insights tool that uses synthetic audiences to come up with new media and creative strategies. AudienceGPT is our flagship product. It's the product that's taken us the furthest, we were really pleased to win a CampaignTech Award in 2025, being recognized by some of the biggest people in our industry. This is the kind of tooling that is front and center when it comes to how we work with our clients and one of the reasons they would use us over somebody else.
We also think about AI in terms of making our own jobs better. We do a lot of work with LinkedIn around influencer marketing and the impact influencer marketing campaigns are having across multiple different territories. As you can imagine, there's a huge amount of data involved in these kind of campaigns. Collecting, processing, synthesizing, and crucially reporting on that data is a very substantial task for our teams to do. We are using AI to make that process smoother, quicker, and far less of a problem for our teams to deliver on an always-on basis.
Another way that we're using AI is to actually understand more about how AI systems are changing the way our clients are working. This demo that we're showing you is for one of the largest insurers in the U.K., who are particularly focused on home and motor insurance products. When they came to us, they came with quite a specific problem, something that we've seen across most of the industry, particularly in retail and e-commerce.
Somewhere between 10% and 30% of some of our clients' website traffic no longer comes from a standard Google or web search. It comes from an LLM. It's the recommendation that a large language model gives to a user. I'm not sure about how much you guys are using the latest chatbots, but there is huge volumes of traffic now coming from Perplexity, from ChatGPT, from Claude, and from [Rashat]. One of the most important things for our customers is how they rank inside those models. How well does one insurer look against the other?
How effective is New Balance at marketing its new trainers versus Nike? This is effectively how we're using AI to report, score, and rank our clients inside other people's AI models. Finally, we think about combining a number of our different tools. This is a demo that we've been taking for a very large European travel company, showing you how we can create content at scale using our AdStudio product, and then use AudienceGPT to test and rank the creative impact of that product. This is only a simple example.
As you can imagine, this can be deployed across a number of different clients all at the same time. We're definitely seeing that our AdStudio product is, again, a reason why certain clients come to us. It's also quite important in terms of the workflow for our clients. As you'll see, them being able to approve content inside a single platform makes a big difference to how we work together. Again, removes layers of reporting and workflow.
Internally at Brave Bison, we feel that the next major financial target for us is taking the business from approximately GBP 10 million of EBITDA today to GBP 25 million of EBITDA over the medium term. We see that growth coming from three different angles. Firstly, we think there is a very compelling organic growth story for Brave Bison and the businesses that we've acquired over the last 12 months. We think that BBX fundamentally underpins a growth story for our Consultancy & Marketing Services business.
It allows us to compete more effectively against our competitors and deliver work at better margins, which in turn flows through to either stronger ability to compete on price or a much more effective outcome. We also see MiniMBA, which recorded about 18% growth year-on-year for the first half of this year, as being a major growth story for Brave Bison. Secondly, we think that bolt-on acquisitions are something that can have a real impact on our business. Last year, we made four bolt-on acquisitions.
We acquire businesses at between GBP 3 million and GBP 10 million of enterprise value. We integrate them into our operating platform that Philippa will talk to you about a little bit later. We take out significant amounts of cost within the first three months of trading, and we improve outcomes for customers within the first nine months of trading. Builtvisible, for example, was an excellent business that we acquired and have now integrated wholly into the Brave Bison performance proposition. We no longer go to market as Builtvisible, all of those clients and all of that know-how has been injected into our business.
Finally, we're very excited about platform acquisitions, acquiring new companies that still take from the CMO, from the marketing budget, but do so by selling a slightly different product, service, or software. Previously, we were in marketing delivery. We moved into selling media through our media network. Now we're selling marketing excellence through the Mini MBA. With our strategic investment in System1, we're now selling marketing effectiveness. These products all come together, and they're all bought by the CMO, but they sell services, software, data, and insight in different ways, often with different margin profiles. We see Brave Bison growing through platform acquisitions as well as bolt-ons.
Here you can see the key areas which we focus on when it comes to integrating our acquisitions, as well as how our approach varies between those bolt-ons which are incorporated into existing business units, platform acquisitions such as the MiniMBA, and one slightly in the middle where we have an integration-light approach, such as MTM, which has more mature existing processes. We have central teams dedicated to each of the areas here, and a clear playbook in terms of how we roll this out. Finance is obviously a key area of focus.
We implement immediate changes on acquisition around a two-week forecasting cadence, group reporting packs, deadlines, and such like. There's a medium-term piece as we centralize transactional finance, ensure best practice controls, and look at finance system migrations. HR is another area which we look to centralize in all cases, standardizing benefits and offering support to staff and around recruitment processes. We have a strong central function in growth and marketing, which immediately supports in relation to the bolt-ons.
For the integration-light approach, we still offer central support on elements such as event organization, thought leadership, and similar. This is less centralized for acquisitions like the MiniMBA, which has more specific marketing needs and its own team in place. Resource management is a really important one for us, particularly across our services businesses. Moving all acquisitions onto the same platform and the same resource management tool allows us to be more efficient and utilize staff from different areas of the business rather than bringing in freelancers.
It also enables us to take the right hiring decisions and drive margins up. IT and systems we look to integrate over the first few months following an acquisition, so we are all on the same operating system, all on the same Slack, and all comply with the same levels of cybersecurity. Some acquisitions, such as the MiniMBA, will keep elements in-house as they have specific IT requirements around the platform the course is offered on and the way payments are collected.
In March, we were delighted to become the largest shareholder in System1 Group PLC with a stake of just over 27%. System1 is a marketing effectiveness company that helps the world's biggest advertisers predict whether their advertising will actually work before they spend millions of dollars. Using tools like Test Your Ad and Test Your Innovation, System1 measures the emotional reactions consumers have to a piece of creative and translates that into a forecast of likely sales and brand impact. It's a creative effectiveness platform, selling brands the confidence that their advertising spend is backing winning ideas rather than duds. We are now a board observer and are working closely with the Board and the executive team to drive shareholder value.
For shareholders, existing and new, we think there are five key takeaways from this presentation and our results. The first is that FY 2025 was ahead of expectations and a year of transformational growth for Brave Bison. The second is that FY 2026 has been upgraded versus our prior forecast, and that is despite the fact that a number of projects have in fact been paused, delayed, or pushed as a result of disruption in the Middle East.
If that disruption were to abate or those projects were to come back, that would be incremental to our current forecasting. Thirdly, MiniMBA is absolutely flying. The business is growing at 18% year-on-year for the April cohort. It's probably above 20% if you compare it to the September cohort from last year. We're very pleased with this business performance and we hope to see that growth continue.
Fourth, Brave Bison has a very clear strategy on AI, not just how we work with our clients, but how we work with each other. We've made a number of senior hires and this is being thought about and pushed from the highest levels of our business. Finally, our investment in System1 is really exciting. The business is in a very exciting space. It's in a very exciting time in its journey and we are now working productively with the management team there to maximize value. With that, we will open up for questions.
That's great. Thank you all very much indeed for your presentation. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions using the Q&A tab situated on the top right corner of your screen. While the company take a few moments to review those questions submitted today, I would like to remind you that a recording of this presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A, can be accessed via our investor dashboard. Oliver, at this point, if I may hand over to you to chair the Q&A, and I'll pick up from you at the end. Thank you.
Thank you. There's a question here for Mark and Tim about to what extent is AI a threat to the MiniMBA and the sort of wider learning business?
Great. Mark, do you want to take that?
Yeah, you go first, Tim. It is more up your wheelhouse. I will follow you. Go.
Okay. All right. With the external environment in terms of AI, we really think this is a moment, a huge moment of opportunity for the business. What the trend we are seeing is that organizations are, as Oli was reflecting, are massively rethinking their model and restructuring. Undoubtedly, that will lead to less marketers working in the center. That's driven by AI handling much more of the functional capability of a marketing team. AI will undoubtedly take on a huge amount of the day-to-day tasks and functional activity of a marketing team. Therefore, those that remain in the marketing team will need to be on their A-game and absolutely brilliant strategically.
What we are starting to see with our enterprise customers happen pretty quickly is that they are now realizing that those who remain in the business will need to be strategically brilliant, and they're needing to do that at speed. Our program to be able to get those teams where they need to be in over a 10-week program, to do that alongside their jobs, is a moment of enormous opportunity for the MiniMBA program. The growth of interest we are seeing from large enterprise clients would point to that. They are rethinking how their teams work with the impact of AI, and it positions our product perfectly to be able to increase the capability of those teams at speed.
As Mark mentioned, AI also gives us enormous ability to transform our business, to be able to provide always-on tutor support in the way that Mark described, in the way out for us to be able to provide AI brand planning tools alongside the teaching. Take the teaching you learn on a Sunday, implement it as you pick up the day job on a Monday. Our ability to be able to transform the way we deliver the business through AI combined with the pressures that we're seeing in the external market, I think make it a real moment of opportunity.
Thank you, Tim. I would just add that, you know, AI is very, very good at rules-based execution, right? For that part of the market, the tools are fantastic. Where it's still yet to sort of really, really prove itself is across things like sort of human-level judgment and that direction setting, and that's where the principles of marketing come in so useful, and that's where they're ingrained in the current course of the MiniMBA. There's a question here about how influential was Mark in convincing John Kearon to swap his System1 shareholding for one in Brave Bison.
I think I can take that one, yeah. If you've never met J.K., what you will instantly become aware of is no one is very influential other than J.K. He is very much his own man. I'd like to think I said only positive things about Brave Bison. I told him how happy I was and how much I believed in the group. I have to tell you, though, I don't think I had any impact at all. I think, you know, what can I tell you? He's his own guy. He's a genius, and I think he arrived at the same conclusion as me but in a different way.
I think what I would say is that, Mark did introduce Brave Bison to System1. We'd followed the business for a number of years, but he put in a good word-
That's true.
...led to our initial introduction, which was very helpful.
That's true. Yeah.
There's a question here about accruals. Do you wanna answer that, Philippa?
Sure. The question was, "Accruals within current liabilities rose sharply to GBP 12.8 million at the year-end. What did the accruals relate to?" A part of that rise is obviously just because we were a larger group at the year end. That's just your standard operating accruals. Really the thing that made it rise particularly sharply was the outperformance in our Sport & Entertainment business in Q4.
The way the cash flows work in that part of the business is we collect the revenues in from the platforms, and then we pay out the to our channel partners, their share of the revenue, we tend to keep around 23%, 24%, about 45 days later. At the year end, we're accruing for that revenue share, for the, what was the strongest two months of the year. That is what drove a real spike in that at the year end, and that's why we do expect that working capital position to unwind slightly in the first half of FY 2026, as we make those payments out.
There's a question about whether or not we would want to raise or issue further equity to do more deals. I think this one, you know, we have obviously tapped the market for funding over the last few years. We've only done so for deals that are very accretive and drive earnings per share. I think our balance sheet today is in a good position.
We are in a net cash position, we have very supportive lenders that I'm sure if we would like would lend us more money. I think that we view deals on a case-by-case basis. Where there is very strong demand for our shares and where the deals are very accretive, we can look to issue equity, or we can also look to rely on our lenders to help us and support us as well. Theo, anything more on that?
No, I think that was very clear. There's a question here about what are the MiniMBA fees for an individual.
Yeah.
Do you wanna go for that, Mark?
Yeah. Yeah, well, we welcome anyone signing up. Although you have to wait now 'cause our cohort's just started. We're at the top end of almost GBP 2,000 in British currency, translates to obviously about $2,600, about AUD 3,500. We set that price, by the way, like proper marketers. I do a lot of research. We run conjoint, we run Van Westendorp analysis, we set price in a very careful way. That's the maximal price we should set to combine essentially profitability but also, you know, protecting the demand flow. Yeah, that's our price.
We're incredibly competitive versus physical programs that are much more expensive but deliver, you know, much less time, never mind quality. We've always been in that really advantageous place. We're high margin. We're a very decently priced product. You get 12 weeks of training for that, so that's really something that gives us a strong leverage in the market.
In terms of acquiring new customers, one of the reasons why we're confident in the pricing that we are, is our online digital marketing really is acquiring customers at somewhere between GBP 350 and GBP 400. Selling for GBP 2,000 at full price makes a huge amount of sense for us. The overall margins of the business are still very strong. The MiniMBA is probably our highest margin, our highest operating margin business because the incremental cost of serving an additional customer is obviously so low.
The content is pre-recorded, and we only teach twice a year. Everything gets crammed into individual periods of operating. The business, you know, when we acquired it, was doing around GBP 10.5 million of revenue, but it only employs, at that point, around 18 people. It was a very profitable business indeed.
We wanna keep it profitable, right? I think we've all agreed on that point. We're very proud of our profit, and we look at the top line, but we look a lot at the bottom line, too. Remember, we haven't really leveraged our electives against our alumni yet. Once we really begin to activate that, you'll see that profitability, at least per head, go up even further. Yeah, we're proud of the profit, and we look at it very carefully. Yeah, I think it's a big part of it.
One final question. Someone's asking whether or not we think there will be any operational synergies with System1. We're still exploring what a partnership means, but I think the short answer is yes, we do. We're already in talks with the guys over at System1 about how we might throw an event in Cannes together and leverage some of the phenomenal talent that they have out in System1 alongside Mark and the guys from MiniMBA.
We're also talking to System1 at the moment about a possible opportunity inside one of our existing customers. We're taking them an opportunity. I think it's for, there's a piece of brand tracking that they might be able to help out with. There are already ways of us working together, both at a sort of marketing level but also at a sort of delivery client level.
Great.
That's it, guys. I want to say a big thank you for everyone who dialed in, and thank you for all your support. We look forward to updating the market with more good news over the next few months. Thank you very much.
Fantastic. Thank you all very much indeed for updating investors today. Could please ask investors not to pause the session as you'll be automatically directed to provide the feedback which will help the company better understand your views and expectation. On behalf of the management team, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good morning.