Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Bow Street Group PLC interim results investor presentation. Questions are encouraged. They can be submitted at any time via the Q&A tab that is just situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Please just 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 will publish our responses where it is appropriate to do so on the Investor Meet Company platform. Before we begin, we would just like to submit the following poll, and if you could give that your kind attention, I am sure the company would be most grateful. I would now like to hand you over to the team from Bow Street Group. David, good morning, sir.
Good morning. Hello, everybody. My name is David Page. I am the Chairman, and this is Nick Wong.
Good morning.
My colleague, FD. To kick off with the presentation, which I hope you all have in front of you, we bought into this company a year ago, and it currently has Wildwood, which is a 25-strong restaurant brand with Italian dishes, and it has dim t, which has three restaurants, Asian inspired cuisine. As I say, a year ago, we raised GBP 10 million for expenses. I became chairman and chief executive, and we embarked on a policy of turning the company around. Excuse me. The three-prong policy is we are investing in the estate, which we will talk about in detail later, going through the whole estate, and we are closing and selling restaurants that we do not think are viable.
We are investing in new technology and EPOS systems. More exciting, we are actually using this as a platform to acquire other restaurant brands and use the buying capacity we have and the knowledge we have rolling out restaurant brands in the U.K. Trading stabilized and grew when we bought the company, and it has grown since, but we will come onto that. Excuse me. In a minute. If we turn the slide, we come onto the interim results, which we published on Tuesday morning, and Nick will talk about them in detail.
Let me take you through the interim results for the six months to June 28th, 2026. We reported like-for-like revenues, and that is excluding any restaurant closures that we have had last year and this year, and any refurbishment days that has been lost due to closure for refurbishment. The like-for-like revenue was 5.6% positive against last year, same period.
That really reflects the benefit of the management action that has been taking place over the last year, both from the investments in the estates as we are rolling through the refurbishment program, and also the investment in the people and the operational structure. Once you add in the closures and the lost days, the reported revenue was down from GBP 15.1 million to GBP 14.4 million. The primary reason for that are the closures. We had four restaurants that has been closed since our involvement back in September last year.
That gap has flowed through to EBITDA and operating loss. Our EBITDA was GBP 0.5 million against GBP 1.2 million the previous year. Our operating loss before highlighted items was GBP 0.7 million against GBP 0.2 million the previous year. We did benefit from a highlighted item credit from the fact that we disposed of a number of leases, and the lease liabilities were extinguished at that point. That amounted to GBP 1 million.
That compares to last year, where we had significant amounts of impairment losses, where we wrote down assets following a full review of the estate, and the losses were GBP 7 million last year. Therefore, the loss after tax has narrowed significantly to GBP 0.2 million for the first half against a loss of GBP 7.5 million last year. As we mentioned, we had a number of refurbishments during these months, and in fact, we have completed nine to the end of June.
We spent capital expenditure of GBP 0.9 million against a backdrop of very little CapEx, which is GBP 0.1 million the previous year. Our net cash balance at the end of June, excluding property lease liabilities or IFRS 16, was GBP 7.9 million, up from GBP 2.4 million the previous year. The reason for the significant change is the fundraising that David talked about earlier. On the operational side, we saw really strong improvements and like-for-like performances, as mentioned before, where we have targeted the capital investments. As I mentioned, nine has been refurbished so far. What was very encouraging was that previously underperforming locations were returning to like-for-like growth following the refurbishments. We introduced a new Wildwood menu in May 2026, so fairly recently, with really positive customer feedback. This was a touch later than we had hoped.
We planned to put that in in April to align with the increase in living wage and various employment rights as added cost to business. During the trial phase in similar test locations, we found a few areas that could be improved and therefore we launched the revised menu in the middle of May. dim t, with three restaurants, has recently put in a new menu, and we will be focusing more attention into the dim t business over the next nine months. I will also take you through a little bit more detail around the investment in technology and an update of where we have got to.
Excuse me. As you can see from the map, we are widely spread in the U.K., from York to Plymouth and Loughton now to Canterbury. The restaurants, in fact, surprisingly, that are performing the best are the ones outside London, where they have had a stormy summer. When we sat down after three months of looking at the company when we bought in, we realized there were 280 things we could improve in the company, and we have got down to just over 150 that are left. We have completed over 100. We looked at the estate, so we closed four restaurants. We have closed another one since the year end, two since the year end, and we are looking to complete our refurbishment program, which Nick referred to, by spring next year.
We are just nearly halfway through the estate, and the stores of the refurbished stores are showing sales way in excess of the group average, as you can see on that slide. The first four we refurbished did 18.6% like-for-like sales increase in July and August. Obviously, if we can get the whole estate up to that figure, we will be doing what we hope to achieve. We have also introduced new incentive schemes for the employees. We have put in share options because we are a public company, and we are putting in bonus schemes based on performance. We also have hired recently, in the last three months, a human resources director who came to us from Franco Manca, so we know her very well.
She is putting in place lots of programs to increase the incentives for the staff and make sure they know what they are meant to be doing, and we know what they are meant to be doing. If you look at the pictures down on the next slide. Thanks. You can see that the previous owners of the business spent quite a lot of money on these restaurants, but they did not really concentrate on the signage and the outside.
You can see in Telford that the signage was oblique, to say the least, and the outside looked a bit drab. This is what we have done to Telford. At the bottom, you can see Loughton now, and the change is miraculous, really. It is a real eye-stopping event. It is eye-swiveling, head-swiveling, whatever you call it, event in Loughton now on the street. Sales immediately increase when we spend money on the stores. Nick, technology.
Let me take you through the technology piece. It is maybe a little bit dry, but it is a necessity for us. The first part, dashboarding system. We introduced a new dashboarding system to the business to allow our operational team better visibility and understanding of the core KPIs and the various detail that historically would have been analyzed through spreadsheets and manual work. They now have almost instantaneous visibility across the estate, whether it is sales mix or discounts or loyalty or customer base.
They can see everything to do with their restaurants at a touch of a button, and we are now rolling this out to the wider audience within the business. We have reviewed and audited all our restaurants and identified that the estates have not had much investment over the last 5-10 years, and therefore, the whole networking infrastructure needed investment. So we are just upgrading.
We started the process, and we are hoping to complete the upgrades by Christmas this year, and that will give our staff, and more importantly, our customers, better connectivity in our restaurants. We have been undertaking a program. We are updating our EPOS system, and that starts going live in October this year, and will hopefully complete by Christmas. That comes with it full integration with our booking platform, giving our staff in the restaurants and our managers much simpler integrated processes to speed up the work and also improve on customer experience and less mistakes. With that, we are also consolidating our booking processes and how we take big party bookings to maximize efficiency and, more importantly, having the ability to upsell to some of our potential customers even before they step into the restaurant.
More work will be undertaken after all these systems are live to integrate them to the single customer view that we have in the business. That will, next year, allow us to design and launch a new loyalty program, which will offer us much better targeting of offers and loyalty incentives to our core customer base who are returning time and time again. Other areas that we are working on include energy monitoring, obviously very topical with the cost of energy going up consistently over the last couple of years. We are introducing a time and attendance system that is fully automated to allow our managers better manage the time of our staff who turn up every day. The most important of this piece of work is working on the labor efficiency.
We have started trialing in two restaurants, new smart scheduling systems and forecasting tools. We are introducing additional AI tools to help our staff and our managers particularly, to forecast better and to deploy our team members in the right places at the right times. That will help us streamline our labor costs.
Yes, the first two strategies were turning around the existing estate by selling stores and handing them back to the landlords if they are not working. That is still an ongoing process. Refurbishing the stores we want to keep and boosting sales, that is the first platform for growth. Second platform is to increase the technology, which Nick has just talked about, which is making the business more efficient and how we can understand the data. The third and most exciting part of the growth strategy is to actually purchase other companies and expand them and use this public company paper to help with that process. We are very attractive for growth brands because we have got experience in rolling out businesses like this, letting the management control it, whereas we give them advice, and we have done it many times before.
We have both been involved in Gourmet Burger Kitchen. Previously, I was at PizzaExpress, and my most recent venture together was Franco Manca and The Real Greek, where we grew brands and then sold them. So we are using Bow Street Group as this platform to buy businesses. In the last year, we have looked at many businesses. We have probably signed over 10 NDAs to look at these businesses in more detail, and we are looking to buy between four or six of these businesses over the next three years.
We have got a top four at the moment, which we are engaging with. But these businesses, we are buying profit effectively, and then we are growing the businesses. So these businesses do not have to sell. They are making money, but they are reaching a stage, for whatever reason internally, that they need to move on and get some advice, maybe raise some money or maybe a combination of a number of things.
We feel we can help them, and then we can invest in their business and help them grow. We have looked at almost every cuisine you can think of. We have looked at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, so three-day pub businesses. We have looked at a couple of four or five businesses from the Far East Asia. We have looked at pizza businesses again. But we are really only interested in things that are making money. So we are going to buy the profit, and essentially, like we have done before, we are going to work with the management over two or three years. They will receive a payout dependent on the profit that they contribute to the company. So we give them, say, half the price of the business up front.
They carry on working for two years, then we give them a second payment when they've proved that they're contributing a certain amount of money, and we just give them a multiple of that. Our ideal business that we would buy would be somewhere between two and 15 sites. They've got to be a sort of GBP 10 -GBP 30 a head. We think that's much more defensive than GBP 100 a head in the U.K. at the moment, given the economy. We've got to be able to open 40, 50, 60 around the U.K. minimum. We've got to work with the existing management team, and we've got to work with them for a couple of years so that we can help them, they can build their knowledge, and we can maybe add some people from our past to help them as well.
We may be able to change some of our sites that aren't working to a new business that we buy. Of course, the buying power of them joining a bigger group is very helpful to their bottom line. That's something else that would be attractive to them so they can make more EBITDA, which effectively then relates into what price we pay for their business. As we reported on Tuesday, the next slide, current trading and outlook. We had a good first half, and as you can see from the top slide, I think we disclosed just over between 5% and 6% for the first half. Then we did 8.5% like-for-like sales in the first eight weeks of the new year in the summer. The refurbished restaurants did 18.5% increase. We're still managing the estate.
As I say, we closed one further restaurant since the year-end, which was loss-making, so that will add to profits next year. Currently, we trade out of 25 Wildwoods and three dim t's. We have net cash of GBP 7.5 million on September 13th. Although various governments have not been very helpful to this industry, we think this is a business that will thrive. As you can see from the sales, even in dire times for the general economy, we've been managing to buck the trend. I'll say the last point is we are very keen to do at least one acquisition in the next few months, maybe two, and that'll get us going with what the main platform of the business is, which is to provide help to growing brands, of which there are a few out there.
Despite this economy being in not very good shape, there are some great businesses with queues out the door, which is ones we're going for. That is the end of the presentation. There are some appendices at the end for people to look at when they get the presentation. I think there are some questions. I'm going to have trouble reading those.
Right. From the Q&A, let me pick the first one. There is a question on how much the like for likes was price taken. Generally, we look at increasing the menu pricing around 2-3 percentage points in order to cover the labor cost increases that we see every year. So we are seeing perhaps half the benefits in the first half from pricing and half from footfall and increased customer numbers. It is important to note also that we had much stronger trading over the summer months, and a lot of that is down to during the refurbishments, we had extended some of our external areas, whereas previously they were not so attractive for customers to sit in. Following the refurbishments, we have been able to fill those outdoor terraces over the summer months, pretty packed.
Lincoln, we doubled the number of seats outside and gave it an awning, so it was much more attractive to sit in. That is just one example.
Just given us a fantastic uplift over the summer. The second question probably to David.
I cannot read it, sorry. Can we do up the font? No?
"How have you selected the outlets for refurbishment?"
I see. Yes, we've actually left the more profitable ones to the end of the refurb because we thought it would be more, because they're working, they're flying. We started at the lower end, and we decided which we were going to sell and close and give back to the landlord, and which we were going to spend some money on. So we worked our way through the estate into stores that we couldn't understand why they weren't taking so much money, and then we thought with a lot of money, if we spend, say, GBP 80 on them, that'll uplift the sales to both profitability and more, which is what we've been doing. We're now, after we've gone through half the estate, we're now going to concentrate on the restaurants like Rushden Lakes, which is contributing well over GBP 250,000.
We're actually going to spend quite a bit of money on it, and we would hope that in 2027 it'll contribute even more because of the money we're spending on it. We're putting in a bar, refurbishing it outside, rearranging the seating, new lighting, rearranging the kitchen, things like that. So the answer is we started at the lower end in terms of contribution, and then we're working our way up the estate.
The next question, "It's been a year since the fundraising. It's good that the funds are not burning a hole in your pocket. But what is the reason for the delay in acquisition?"
I can talk about the top four. As I said before, these people don't have to sell. They're profitable, and they've got great businesses, so their urgency is not quite the same as ours. We've got a top four out of the 10 that we're looking at, but they're all different. One of them, unfortunately, suffered a loss of one of the shareholders. Others have five or six different shareholders who all have slightly different agendas, so we have to address them. One of them, it's so profitable that the business owner who owns 100% of the company went away for three months this summer, which is not very helpful when you're trying to engage. So each situation is different, but we are as keen as all our shareholders to actually get one or two under our belt quite quickly.
I think the rest of the questions, and there are a few, really is around the acquisition targets. We can go through some of that again, just in terms of the key criteria when we're looking for acquisitions.
We sort of covered it, but let's do it again, shall we?
So it is very much about a brand with 2 - 15 sites, must be value for money offer. Needs a really scalable footprint and, as David mentioned, queues out the door is a very good indicator that they're successful and it's popular with the customers. But we are quite flexible whether it's counter service or full service. Today, with the labor cost challenges, a quick service or counter service business will naturally thrive with lower labor costs and a smaller footprint. So we are very much open to both types of restaurants.
Yes, it's a virtual spiral, basically. If you look at a business like Farmer J in London, their property costs are lower because their stores are smaller. It's a QSR operation. It's got great It's got great It's got queues out of the door, because the pricing is lower, because all their costs are lower than a full-service restaurant. That's not one of the people we're looking at, but that's one of the type of business we'd be looking at.
A question about management. "What are we looking for in the management of an acquisition?"
T he management will have grown the business to a certain scale and size. They should be enthusiastic, hardworking, honest, it goes without saying, and really driven to actually take the business from where it is at the moment to a different level. Then they may choose to exit in three or four years' time, or they may choose to carry on growing the business with us.
We've done this in the past with, a typical example was Gourmet Burger Kitchen where they had four or five sites. This was two public companies ago. We gave them half the money. We agreed a price we thought the business was worth, given that it was meant to be making GBP 2 million. They told us it was going to make GBP 2 million in two years. We said, "Okay, you can have half the money now.
We give you two or three more sites. You work hard, and we put in a parallel management team to learn how the business grows, and then we'll give you the rest of the money dependent on the performance of the business." The three New Zealanders who founded it walked away with GBP 10 million because the business was making well over GBP 2 million at the end of the two-year anniversary. We like to do that sort of arrangement, so we're making sure that we're buying the profits. We only give them, say, half the money straight away, and then half two years down the line.
The final question is one around deal structure, which I think using the Gourmet Burger Kitchen example shows-
That is just one example.
as one example.
We can sort of play with it. That was all cash, wasn't it, Nick?
That was all cash.
That was all cash. What we quite like to do is if somebody, if we're buying a business, they can take some cash now, which once again, we've done in the past, and they then take some shares in the business so that they're aligned with us. Then on the second payment in two years' time, maybe the same thing happens. They take some cash, but they also take some shares in the business. A very long time ago at PizzaExpress, I had a private business that had 14 of the franchises, and my partner took half cash and half shares, and I took all shares. The shares went up 20 x. So he didn't regret taking half cash, but in retrospect, he probably should have taken some more paper. Yeah, some more paper. He took GBP 1 million in paper.
David, Nick, if I may just jump back in at this point, and thank you very much for your presentation and for addressing all of those questions that came in from investors this morning. Of course, if there are any further questions that do come through, we'll make these available to you immediately after the presentation has ended. But David, perhaps before, really now just looking to redirect those on the call to provide you with their feedback, which I know is particularly important to yourself and the company. If I could please just ask you for a few closing comments just to wrap up with, that'd be great.
Yeah. As I say, we got involved in this company two years ago. We put in a lot of our own money, and we raised the money from people we knew. Some existing shareholders actually put in quite a lot more money to reboot the company. It's been a pretty good ride so far. It's been just as we expected. The slightly frustrating thing is we haven't bought anything yet, but these things take quite a long time. But we're looking to buy at least one or two things in the next six months.
Perfect. David, Nick, thank you once again for updating investors this morning. Could I please ask investors not to close this session as you will now be automatically redirected for the opportunity to provide your feedback. On behalf of the management team of Bow Street Group PLC, we would like to thank you for attending today's presentation. That now concludes today's session, so good morning to you all.