Good afternoon, and welcome to Gateley's final year results presentation. Today's webcast will be recorded, and you're able to submit questions to the management team throughout the presentation. I'd like to welcome Rod Waldie, CEO, Neil Smith, Finance Director, and Nick Smith, Acquisitions Director and Head of Investor Relations, who will be presenting today. Rod, over to you.
Scott, thank you very much. Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. I think before we actually talk about our FY 2022 results, I should probably just give you a very, very brief overview of Gateley. Some of you on the call probably won't know Gateley, and I think that would be helpful. Until 2015, Gateley was a pure legal services business, headquartered in Birmingham, providing a broad range of commercial legal services to our clients nationally. In 2015, in the build up to 2015, we took a strategic decision to go in a different direction structurally, and that decision was to list Gateley on the alternative investment market, the AIM market. We took that decision because principally we wanted to incentivize our people in a different way, and also characterize our business in a different way.
We wanted to diversify the business to differentiate it from what was and what remains a very crowded, pure legal services market. We listed in 2015. We were the first law firm to do that, and the principal strategy behind the listing was to build complementary services lines into what was then a pure legal services business, so that we could offer our clients more professional services, gain ourselves deeper reach into our chosen markets, and make the business more resilient. We'll talk about resilience again in a moment when we look at the FY 2022 results. The net effect of all of that is, since 2015, we've grown the business from 600 people to almost 1,400 people, and we've increased the number of service lines we provide to our clients.
Our revenue has more than doubled from GBP 60 million to GBP 137 million. Importantly, we've recharacterized the business, and the recharacterization is in the form of creating what we call our platforms. We have four platforms in the business. On each platform, we've aggregated legal services relevant to the chosen market that we point the platform at, and we put alongside that an increasing number of complementary consultancy services. Our four platforms are property, focused on the property market, obviously. Corporate, focused on the corporate market in the wider sense. Business services, and we'll come to some characterization of that in a moment and p eople. Our people platform focuses on legal and consultancy services in the human capital space, broadly speaking. Having given you a really broad overview of Gateley, Scott, let's go to the actual overview slide in the deck.
Bear in mind, everybody, that this presentation is referable to the financial year that closed on the April 30th, 2022. The first point to make is that I and the board remain incredibly grateful to the whole team at Gateley. They've all worked very, very hard to deliver what I think we would all agree is a very, very strong set of results in the period. That service delivery has been in a period where new ways of working have really manifested themselves, and we as well as our clients, have had to adapt to those new ways of working while, of course, delivering service excellence in a very, very fast moving market.
The big point that we're trying to get across in the presentations that we're doing this week is that the very strong performance in FY 2022 should not be taken in isolation. They represent a continuation of Gateley's unbroken pre- and post-IPO track record of delivering year-on-year growth in revenue and year-on-year growth in profit. At the back end of this presentation, in the appendix pages, there's a nice staircase slide that illustrates from 2004 all the way through to 2022, the consistent year-on-year growth in revenues. Our growth, our revenue growth in the year that we're reporting on, FY 2022, was 13%, and our profit before tax increased by 10.4%.
For those of you that don't know Gateley, what that means is that in the seven years since flotation, we've delivered compound annual revenue growth of 12.3% and compound profit before tax growth of 9%. Now, all the while since we listed, we've been enhancing our balance sheet, and at the end of the financial year that we're reporting on, the balance sheet had increased by almost 23% to a net assets position of just under GBP 73 million. We've increased adjusted fully diluted earnings per share to GBP 0.143 , and the proposed final dividend of GBP 0.55 is progressive. That takes total dividends for the financial year, FY 2022, to GBP 0.85.
If you were an investor back in 2015 at GBP 0. 95, you've had GBP 0. 43 back in dividends so far. Just for the avoidance of doubt, our dividend policy remains to distribute up to 70% of profit after tax. In terms of growth, one of the characteristics in the financials that we've released this week is the really good growth in organic revenues. Across the group, our organic revenue growth was 10.9%, and that included stellar organic revenue growth in our consultancy businesses, which was up 26.7%.
That story I told you, that vision that we had in 2015 about diversifying the business so that we're not completely reliant on legal services, the tangible product of that, as at the 30th of April, is that 15.5% of our group revenue was in non-legal services. About GBP 32 million worth of our revenue sat at the end of the year in consultancy services. That's now annualizing at about 20% given the investment and growth in consultancy services during the period. Just moving on to the second of the overview slides. One of the things that we've had to grapple with in professional services over the last two years is salary inflation. That's definitely a factor that's played in over the last two years across the sector really.
We've had two years where we've adjusted pay to match market rates. What that meant was that in FY 2021, we boosted pay across the business to match what was a fast-moving market, and which really was a race for talent across most of our businesses. Last year, in legal services, our total pay review resulted in 11.1% increase in legal services salaries. The group's overall increase was 10.8%, and that's because we saw a little bit less pressure in pay in our consultancy businesses where the increase was 6.8% rather than 11.1%. Yes, we've seen pressure in the sector around pay, but actually there are some positive dynamics around that now.
Our pay as a percentage of overall revenue decreased from 65.5% to 63% in FY 2022. We've also got some offsets on our cost line, as I say, to offset some of the pay pressure, some of the personnel cost pressure that we're seeing. For example, I think new ways of working have meant that we can now bake into our cost line some reductions referable to the pre-pandemic period, particularly around things like travel, which I don't see coming back to pre-pandemic levels in the foreseeable future. We've also made some significant savings in premises. A number of our acquired businesses now sit in premises that we had in our real estate portfolio before we'd made the acquisitions.
A number of the premises that we've got, we've reduced the operational space in those premises in line with a more flexible way of working that we see as one of the indelible characteristics of the pandemic moving forwards. Importantly, of course, as well as on the cost side of the equation, we've been having discussions with our clients about fees. I'm pleased to say that we've moved our fees up across most parts of the business by at least 10%. Of course, with the agreement of our clients. In addition, as I've mentioned, we are sheltered from absolute exposure to wage inflation in the legal services market because of the fact that our business is now a broader business that's not just reliant on legal services.
23% of the people in the business are now non-legal facing professionals. In terms of people, yes, I've talked about rebalancing pay for our people, but there are certain other characteristics in our business model that make us attractive to our people, both in the context of retention and in the context of recruiting. Of course, critical amongst that is the ability for our people to become shareholders in Gateley. I'm really pleased to say that 75% of our people are either shareholders in the business or are sitting on options that will manifest themselves in shares. Finally, in overview, made three acquisitions during the period that we're reporting on. We'll touch on those later in the presentation.
It's great for us to be back in acquisitions mode, and we have a commitment to continue to grow the business. We've got a good foundation for that. I've talked to you about the strength in our balance sheet. During the period, we also agreed a revolving credit facility of GBP 30 million. We've used a little bit of that in one of the acquisitions that we did last year, the Gateley Smithers Purslow acquisition, but we've still got GBP 24 million that's undrawn. Scott, just moving on to the investment case slide. One of my main points in overview, I think, was that the long-established fundamental strength in our deliberately designed business model is manifested in a really strong pre- and post-IPO track record. I think what this slide nicely shows pictorially is the longevity of performance.
It's mapped out over an 18-year period that you can see on the slide. During that 18-year period, we have seen challenges as a nation that could have challenged growth in businesses. Dotcom bubble burst towards the beginning of that period. We've got the obvious, global financial crisis that occurred during that period. Brexit, pandemic, Russia's invasion of Ukraine. On all of those fairly big macro events, coming to fruition, the business, the Gateley business pivoted. The deliberate design in the Gateley business pivoted such that our revenue and our profitability weren't impacted, they continued to grow. In parallel with that, coming back to the reliability of earnings point, our dividend has been progressive and our aggregate dividend since float, as already mentioned, sits at GBP 0.43.
I think that looking backwards at how the business has performed should give us some confidence about how the business will perform moving forwards. The resilience in the business has been enhanced by the acquisitions that we've made to diversify our range of services. Moving on to the people and ESG slide, please, Scott. During FY 2022, we continued to grow our staff headcount. Our people are our most important component of the business, of course. That growth was partly through acquisition, but partly through targeted investments in parts of the business that we see as strong in any economic conditions. Our total headcount at the end of the financial year was just short of 1,370 people, 145 of which joined the group through the acquisitions that we made.
Importantly, our total professional staff, that's our fee-earning staff, increased by over 23% to 948. The biggest shift in headcount was in the consultancy businesses, where our headcount grew by 62%. That's very much in line with our ongoing strategy to further diversify the business. Our people have adapted very well to what we call Gateley Agile. Gateley Agile is basically our flexible working policy. We definitely recognize that one of the characteristics of the pandemic, one of the legacies, is that people crave a more flexible working environment. It's the second-most asked question that we get during interview process, and therefore, we recognize that we have to have a viable and meaningful flexible working policy as part of our overall workplace culture. It's working well. Flexible working is working well.
Our maintenance of service delivery to the level of excellence to our clients is unaffected. From the employee perspective, they are welcoming of more flexibility in their working pattern week on week. We're also maximizing opportunities for cost savings that flow out of that, and I've already alluded to the key cost savings really being in the premises space. Our share schemes remain very popular and very important, both in the context of recruiting and incentivizing our people, and in the context of differentiating Gateley from a traditional professional services business. We introduced a new share scheme during FY 2022, being our Restricted Share Award Plan, and that scheme's very much pointed at emerging senior talent in the business.
Now somebody that's promoted to partner in Gateley or to a role equivalent to a legal services partner in our consultancy businesses or in our administration teams, those people are all awarded restricted shares. The economic interest in those restricted shares begins from the day of the award. They all get the benefit of dividend income, but the shares are not tradable shares for a period of five years. The restriction on the shares remains for five years, and therefore, you can see that they're a valuable tool, both from an incentivization perspective and from a retention perspective. Finally, on this slide, you'll see some stats.
One around a survey that we did during the period, which was a valuable survey to us in terms of taking staff views, but which also fed back to us the stat that you can see on the slide here, which is an 83% staff engagement score against a private sector average of 63%. I think in many respects, I'm more pleased with the Glassdoor ranking. For those of you that don't know, Glassdoor is a world leader in insights into jobs and companies, and the ranking here was determined purely by reference to feedback from our staff. A score of 4.4 out of 5 is actually very strong, and we're delighted that we're the only professional services business, law-led professional services business in Glassdoor's U.K. top 25 companies for senior leadership, as published as recently as June.
In ESG, we released our first-ever responsible business report last September. We've had some fantastic feedback to that report. Our ESG strategy, as stated then and moving forward, is very much set against the categories of people, potential, and planet, particularly in the context of the government's 14 leveling up objectives. There's a lot more about that in the report that we released last autumn, and there'll be a lot more about that in the annual report that's about to come out.
Of course, our second annual responsible business report will be out in the autumn, and it will give some real insight into the progress that we're making around those categories of people, potential, and planet. Just before I hand over to Neil, just to give you some further headlines around the financials, let's just have a quick look at outlook. I think in the context of outlook, the starting point really is to look at the macro position in professional services. The professional services sector, well, that's traditionally shown really good resilience, great resilience and adaptability over the years. If I take our core business of legal services as an example of that, ONS data shows us that revenue generated by legal activities in the U.K., well, that's trended really strongly upwards in the last decade.
That decade, of course, includes, as I've mentioned already, Brexit, the pandemic, and so on and so forth. So the sector has been really resilient taken in macro terms. I think the professional services press that we're seeing at the moment suggests that most parts of the sector had a very strong FY 2022. That's certainly the case in legal services. Based on track record, there are good reasons to be confident, I think, in the sector as a whole moving forwards. I think we've got to acknowledge that business leaders are beginning to view economic uncertainty as a constraint, and therefore, here at Gateley, we're monitoring our core markets and our core clients' activities very carefully.
We're doing that so that we can align what their needs are to our increasingly diverse menu of professional services. We'll give you some examples of that actually when we talk about platform activity in a moment. What we learned during the pandemic is that acting as trusted advisors, we've got a really important role to play helping our clients as they confront challenges and pivot to deal with those challenges. Given the fact that we've got a much wider range of skill sets in the business, and therefore a much wider range of client contact points in our clients, we feel that we've got greater access to pre-read, if you like, the likely change in our clients' buying habits so that we can tailor our services to their needs.
Of course, as I've already mentioned, Gateley's own track record gives us a good deal of confidence looking forward. If, as it seems, economic uncertainty is a constraint, we're not yet seeing that manifest itself in our business. Activity levels at the end of the financial year, FY 2022, were strong, and we've had good activity levels in the early part of the current financial year. They are in line with expectation. We're happy to say therefore that we maintain our expectations for growth in the current financial year. I'll come back to you in a moment alongside Nick to talk a little bit about activity in our verticals and our platforms. Perhaps now, Neil, do you want to pick up some of the financial detail?
Yes. Thank you, Rod. Hello, everybody. If we could move to my first financial highlights slide, please. This slide summarizes the strong income statement performance achieved this year in both revenue and profit growth that Rod has already alluded to. We are really pleased that while demand remained high, the group was able to convert that activity into fees at a level to cover last year's biggest challenge, which was the rise in staff costs. Gateley has never suffered from huge swings in profit volatility, and despite the inflationary impact still working through the sector, our underlying trading margin has been virtually unaffected again this year. We have further diversified our future revenue mix through the three acquisitions made during the year. While the issue of new shares for these acquisitions and t he introduction of our new restricted share awards have reduced EPS growth below that of PBT growth.
All three acquisitions contain opportunities for operational gearing, which I fully expect to enhance future shareholder returns. After settling our remaining group debts, which were very small during FY 2021, we ended that year with net cash of GBP 19.6 million. It was important to redeploy this cash back into key strategic investments such as our M&A strategy and our new finance system. M&A activity has continued to help strengthen our already strong balance sheet. Next slide, please, another financial highlight slide. Looking back, since IPO, our revenue has now more than doubled since we billed GBP 60 million prior to listing in 2015. At that time, we had one small consultancy business and six offices.
We now operate from 17 geographical locations, not necessarily offices, and have continued to grow the group aided by our market position. We continue to demonstrate an ability to grow organically, both legal and consultancy revenues, while adding earnings enhancing acquisitions that deliver more to our clients. Compound annual revenue growth since IPO has been 12.3%. All of our platforms last year have shown over 10% revenue growth during FY 2022. After a welcome return to acquisition activity during that year, I expect FY 2023's annualized revenue from consultancy service lines to achieve north of GBP 32 million, the equivalent to 20% of forecast group revenue against a self-set target of circa 30% of consultancy revenues in the medium- term.
Our overriding target market remains commercial corporate clients with a regional focus, and we remain careful to ensure no one client speaks for more than 2% of revenue. Despite the challenges of the recruitment market, we have grown staff headcount where needed during the year. Recruitment remains important. Against our target of around 85%, utilization rate, that's how busy our people are, activity levels, we showed a number of 83% last year against a very high comparative of 88% the previous year. Post-year-end activity levels are higher despite the distractions of the installation of the new accounting system. Our staff costs to revenue ratio, a key KPI for us, has remained similar to the previous year. It's actually dropped. Our underlying trading margin due to the strong conversion rate of recorded time into fees.
Overheads have not returned to pre-pandemic levels, in particular cost categories, and I don't believe they will return to the levels of spending we have seen before the pandemic. If you could move to my next slide, please. Just a continuation on that, on that theme. While I present on screen the FY 2022 income statement, I feel it's important to highlight the change in mix that has been happening over the last two years in our overheads as a percentage of fees. Yes, personnel costs have risen as we've moved with the market conditions from 61% of fees three years ago to 63%. However, fixed operating overheads, as I mentioned previously, have remained low.
This is in part due to the group having sufficient capacity in its property fleet, as well as other fixed costs remaining static while we continue to expand and grow organically the group and through acquisition. I do not believe the reduction in marketing spend is hindering our top line growth and the almost complete removal of travel costs and the shift to a more virtual meeting culture has reduced travel costs permanently for specific types of meetings. It has also increased significantly the amount of time staff have available to service clients or spend it with their families, an important aspect of staff wellbeing. Dividends remain important for our 46.5% internally held shares and the shareholders, as well as our external investors.
Our final year dividend of GBP 0.55 will go ex-div on the September 22nd, taking dividends for the year to GBP 0.85 . Next slide, please. Balance sheet. The acquisitions we've made during the year have increased the growth percentages between FY 2021 and FY 2022 shown on the right-hand side of this slide. Key highlights for us in a, in an ever-growing and strengthening balance sheet have been that contract assets, our unbilled time as a percentage of fees remains low, while significant activity levels towards the end of the year have resulted in higher level of unpaid bills. This, in part, was due to the increases in time it took for assignments to complete during January and February, which sped up again as we approached our April year-end.
Liabilities have only changed materially in the non-current categories due to the inclusion of contingent consideration following the acquisition of Gateley Smithers Purslow and the first drawdown of our RCF facility. Net assets have grown to by 22.9%, and we're well-placed in case negative economic headwinds arrive later this year with our unused financing facilities. My next slide highlights the movements in cash flow. There have been some material movements as we return back to a more normalized level of trading post the pandemic year. Three areas of increase. We brought bonuses back in FY 2021 after pausing them in FY 2020. That accrual of bonus. Bonus is typically 10% of our payroll cost on any one-year basis in our P&L.
That accrual of bonus following the pandemic year has been paid out in FY 2022. You'll see a reduction in working capital in the cash flow as a result of us returning to bonus payments. Post the pandemic year dividend pause as well, where we were in conservation mode because of the pandemic, we reinstated dividends following a very strong performance in FY 2021 and therefore made three dividend payments during FY 2022, where we made two interim payments and a final dividend payment. That is shown by the GBP 12.4 million of dividend outflows in the year. As previously mentioned, we drew down GBP 6 million of our GBP 30 million RCF facility in order to assist with the acquisition of Gateley Smithers Purslow. Gateley typically is a very strong cash generating business.
It generates typically 100% of its profits after tax into cash, pays up to 70% of that out in dividends and retains 30% of its after-tax profits for continual strength and in reinvestment within the business. We continue to look at exciting ways to redeploy the remaining GBP 10.4 million of net cash we finished FY 2022 with and usage of those facilities alongside that. My next slide talks about working capital trends.
For those of you that are not familiar with the business, I wanted to demonstrate to you the resilience of the working capital within the business and the typical trends we see over the year in terms of sizeable swings that we can see in working capital, especially on debtor days. Yes, we are at a bit of a peak at the moment, just purely due to timing of some long-term projects. It's very important for us to continue to invest in the growth of the business. As you'll see from these swings that you can see between sort of 60 and 100 days in debtor days on this slide, you won't see that any one year is any too dissimilar to any previous year.
While WIP days remain low, debtor days have increased during FY 2022 as the group continued to grow. Activity levels, as I mentioned earlier, and the position of Easter last year didn't help with collections before the end of the year. However, we've made a very good start to collections in FY 2023. My next slide on performance by platform, so going back into P&L performance then to a direct line margin analysis. What you will see here is the underlying service line performances of each platform. However, I wish to point out the strategic people investment we've made in the business services and the property platforms during FY 2022. These, yes, have reduced margins direct level for a short-term basis.
All of our recruitment decisions are supported by approved business cases and foresight of future demand, which Rod and Nick will explain shortly. We'll see that margin performance will turn around in the second half of FY 2023 as activity levels being serviced by that extra headcount will come on stream. After reductions in direct margins between FY 2020 and FY 2021 in our corporate and people platform as we invested in those years, you will now see on those two platforms an improvement and an increase in FY 2022 of their direct margins, which are now actually back ahead of the FY 2020 margin rates that we saw a few years ago.
The key takeaway here is the long-term nature of the investment decisions we make on a platform and business basis when we support the recruitment into our group for long-term returns. On my next and final slide, growth enhanced by our platforms. This is a really nice segue before handing back to Rod that highlights the significance of our go-to-market platform strategy. As consultancies attach themselves to established legal service lines, we can see that 2+2 is definitely equaling more than four in growth terms. It's worth you following the blue line as the best example of the point I wish to emphasize here. Blue line is the property platform line.
It started off in 2010 below the yellow corporate line until we listed in 2015 and seeded our first two acquisitions on the property platform with the introduction of Gateley Capitus and Gateley Hamer. The dotted lines of each acquisition highlights the point of acquisition and the start of the boost each acquisition gives to the growth of each platform. Excuse me. As internal introductions continue, clients are using more of our services. We're convinced that the combination of legal and consultancy services attracts more instructions as well as a higher caliber of work, often jointly worked on across platforms. We look to replicate success of the property platform across as many as of our other platforms as possible. It's exciting to see us make a start to expanding our business services platform with the acquisition of Adamson Jones. I'm convinced our new IT system will be a huge help in tracking the progress of platform growth. On that point, I'll hand back over to Rod.
Okay. Thanks for that, Neil. Moving to the property platform slide. What I think I'll do here actually is I'll just explain what the component parts of this platform are very briefly, and then give you some insight into the latest acquisitions that we've made onto the platform and how they're working. By way of reminder, I think Neil made it pretty clear actually, the platforms are internal virtual structures on which we aggregate legal services and consultancy services that are complementary to each other that point at the market in question. Our most material platform is the property platform. On that platform, what we're doing is continuing our mission to become a significant integrated property services provider.
The component parts of this platform, like all platforms, we have our legal services team providing legal services to the property industry in the widest sense. You can see some of those legal services very clearly on the wheel on the slide. We've got house building services, construction services, commercial real estate services, et c. Sitting alongside those, we have a number of consultancy businesses that are increasingly valuable to this platform. 21% of platform revenue, as you can see from the slide, is now contributed by our consultancy services. Those consultancy services can broadly be described as follows.
Firstly, we have a business called Capitus, which is a fiscal incentive practice that specializes really in fiscal, that's tax incentives obviously, in the real estate space, predominantly capital allowances. Secondly, we've got a business called Gateley Hamer, and if I had to really briefly characterize that, it's providing professional services referable to large infrastructure and regeneration projects. Recently we've made further investments in that business to expand its skill set into the telecom sector. One of the standout statistics in our market announcement released yesterday is that revenue growth in Gateley Hamer was 42% last year, and that's reflective of the investment that we've made in that business since we first acquired it back in 2016. It's grown from GBP 1 million of revenue in broad terms to about GBP 5.5 million revenue in broad terms last year.
A clear investment in a growing business that's adding real value to the range of services that we can provide to our clients and also bringing into the business some fantastic large-scale regeneration and infrastructure projects. Gateley Vinden, which now includes an acquisition that we made in FY 2022, being the business of Tozer Gallagher, that provides property consultancy services in the wider sectors to the built environment market. The Tozer Gallagher acquisition was made in part to enhance areas of the Gateley Vinden business and also in part to enhance a very niche legal service that we provide to the construction sector. That legal service is that we have a leading advisory team that supports insurance companies that bond construction projects.
That expertise spans across our construction team, our corporate recovery team, and now into our consultancy teams in the form of Tozer Gallagher. What we're seeing in the construction industry at the moment is an increase in the number of contractors that are distressed or defaulting. A combination of our legal services expertise and our Tozer Gallagher people is market leading now in helping support insurance companies that bond construction contracts through the difficulties associated with that. In Gateley Smithers Purslow, what we are seeing is a maturing of our model for the development of consultancy businesses within Gateley. Gateley Smithers Purslow does provide general surveying expertise to the built environment market, but its specialist area is in the U.K. property insurance sector. In that sector, we have some expertise in Gateley Vinden which Gateley Smithers Purslow exponentially increases.
It's the largest acquisition that we've done to date. Its revenue is annualized circa GBP 12 million, and 130 people joined the business when we made that acquisition. The team have settled in really quickly and really well, and the business is performing very, very strongly, and that's partly due to events that will be well known to all of you. The heatwave fires unfortunately spiked a number of property insurance claims, particularly in the southeast of England. We've had flash flooding across the country that property insurers have had to grapple with. What we are now being told by the sector is that there is likely to be an increase in the number of subsidence claims resulting from the long, hot summer.
What we think we've done is invested in a business that is going to continue to grow as the U.K. property insurance market outsources claims to experts like Gateley Smithers Purslow. We're already backing the business in terms of recruitment. We've got 24 new starters who've either recently started in the business or are about to start in the business. You can see how these consultancy businesses are operating really, really well for us in parallel with our legal services business. The manifestation last year for us was that our like-for-like revenue on the property platform grew by 15.7%. I think on that note, I'll probably hand over to Nick just to take you through some of the characteristics on our other platforms.
Thanks, Rod. FY 2022 was another really strong year for our corporate platform, with growth of 12.7% on the top line and with legal still accounting for the lion's share. Consulting in the form of our inward investment, International Investment Services business also growing and playing its part. Just to explain, and I've mentioned those of you who know us will have heard this before, that of our four platforms, corporate will inevitably remain the most heavily skewed towards legal services. The reason for that is, in all but very few cases, the consultancy businesses that we would acquire more naturally find their home on one or other of our other platforms. The flavor of a corporate matter or a banking transaction will vary on a deal-by-deal basis.
Sometimes it will require heavy property input, sometimes intellectual property will be key, sometimes the people component will be the focus, and so on. The corporate lawyers and the bankers in context of financings, both of whom sit on the corporate platform, will draw support from different Gateley consultancies on a deal-by-deal basis. In the meantime, those consultancies will day-to-day sit alongside and enhance the offering of our legal and other teams who share that specific focus. As a result, all of our four platforms will play their part in developing our corporate opportunity, but our corporate platform will remain our most narrowly defined in service terms. I wouldn't want you to think that it's not playing its part in referral terms, internal referral terms.
Within the core M&A private equity banking context within legal on the corporate platform, they are large net exporters of services to other parts of the group on a transactional basis. The flip side of the point that I made earlier on. Just looking at deal activity for the moment. Although deal volumes came off slightly as against the manic second half of financial year 2021, this was still another very busy year. We are and have been for a number of years a leading market participant in mid-market deal market terms, deal volume terms. Within that, private equity is one of our strongest suits. In private equity, deal activity remains strong across the country, but we also added to our client roster with new foreign funds engaged in Manchester and Reading.
It was a similar position within our banking teams, so deal-related financings following the same path, but also real estate financing remaining busy within that period. While obviously some sectors have been less focused, such as consumer and high street retail, others remain strong, including healthcare, distribution, and the care sector. Our restructuring team had another relatively quiet year, but those of you who do know us will recall that our deliberate policy is, and always has been, to maintain the breadth of our offering so as to create the flexibility we need so that we can trade well in both good and more challenging times. As of today, although activity levels remain pretty constant within our restructuring team, it is the case that a pipeline of potential administrations is beginning to build.
If it does, our team will be in place to meet that demand. Very quickly on the consultancy component, our inward investment business, International Investment Services, had in itself a very strong year, growing its top line by 86% and headcount by about 1/3 . It strengthened its position with public sector clients, growing revenues with Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority and other local authority clients, but also with overseas agencies, bodies and governments, including the Australian government, where we're active in promoting Anglo-Australian trade. However, IIS recognize revenues are only part of the story here and only part of the strategic rationale behind acquiring that business as IIS introduced new legal work equivalent to around 45% of its own revenues into legal within the year.
Post-year-end, the position currently remains unchanged with continuing strong activity levels and near-term, three to six-month pipeline visibility also remaining good. To the extent that there has been any change which has become visible, it's that transaction timelines are becoming a little more stretched. The corporate finance community, our contacts in that sector remain very active and busy, and acquisition finance is still available in both the banking and funds markets. If we could move on, Scott, to the people platform slide. This was an excellent year for our people platform, not just because the group moved its commercial proposition forward, and I'll come back to that shortly, but also because it saw strong revenue growth up over 20% on the top line.
It's also, as you can see in terms of mix, a maturing platform, pleasingly, with consultancy revenues increased to around 1/3 of total platform revenues. Within people consulting, we have two consulting businesses, Kiddy & Partners acquired in 2018, and T-three just before the pandemic in December 2019. Kiddy specialize on talent assessment, C-suites and higher. T-three, their focus is on leadership development and cultural change programs. The strategic opportunity was always to pull those service lines together into one seamless people consulting offering to large-scale employers, itself sitting alongside our employment, legal and pension service lines. While the pandemic dampened demand slightly for people consulting as human capital development budgets were tightened to an extent, pleasingly, we're seeing those budgets being released and the reflection is in our top line.
The team, to their dedication and hard work, also used that period to complete the integration project, complete their go-to-market thinking, and recently we've launched the Gateley Transform combined offering during the year, and there's been some really excellent early results with combined services already sold to large-scale employers such as the BBC, Hg and Toyota. The sales line for that integrated offering looks strong going forward. In legal, on that platform, we continue to invest in our national private client offering, making strategic hires in London and producing our strongest revenue results to date in that space. In our specialist independent pension trustee advisory business, Entrust, this was another excellent year, producing again our strongest results in revenue terms, but also passing a strategic landmark in securing our 50th pension scheme client. Moving on finally to the business services platform.
We added to this platform during the year, but this is a business which supports our clients around their commercial and litigation needs. Again, there was good growth in the year despite certain macro headwinds in parts of the business. Overall, the platform grew by around 15% with a solid contribution from our domestic commercial litigation team. In January, we, in a sense, launched the platform in that we added our first consulting business, and that is the patent and trademark attorney business, Adamson Jones. In respect of them, early results have been very pleasing. We've seen and expect to continue to see strong global growth in intellectual property-led business propositions and sectors such as internet, life sciences, retail, and corporate brands.
Adding patent and trademark capability to our offering creates stronger and deeper client relationships and additional channels to market in these growing, and we believe, somewhat resilient sectors. We see good growth potential as well in this business by adding additional areas of patent specialism and also new geographies. There are also obvious links across not only to our legal offering, and IP is legal-heavy in its nature, but also to certain of our other consultancy subsidiaries. Our inward investment business that I mentioned earlier has a heavy life sciences and technology leaning, as you'd expect. Gateley Capitus, our fiscal incentives business that Rod mentioned earlier, also covers research and development credits, and therefore they are clearly relevant, here. Early signs have been very positive with multiple referrals across the businesses.
On this platform also sits our complex international litigation team, which did make a solid contribution to the platform during the year, notwithstanding something of a setback in the form of the terrible tragedy ongoing in Ukraine. While Russia and Ukraine have been important jurisdictions for team, the invasion clearly led to the end of mandates already in place in those countries. That said, the highly specialist skills and track record of this leading team are not jurisdiction-specific. During the year, the team has made great strides forward in securing new mandates in new geographies in the CEE region and elsewhere. While the war may continue, we expect this team to recover in time to pre-invasion levels. Rod.
Okay. Thanks for that, Nick. You know, in summary, just moving to the summary slide, Scott. Just in a handful of bullet points, obviously we're talking today about the performance of the group in FY 2022, and we're delighted with that. It was strong. We are emphasizing, as I said at the outset, that this is just a continuation of the group's pre and post-IPO track record of growing revenues and growing profit year on year. It was great to be back into acquisition mode during the year, as well as making further investment to strengthen those businesses that are well established within the group.
Our strong balance sheet and our committed funding line, as I mentioned earlier, they definitely give us the confidence and the ability, the financial foundation, to continue to build this differentiated business model that we've talked to you about, today. If economic conditions are a constraint, we look backwards with confidence because of our track record, and we look forwards with confidence because of the resilience that we built into the business and the diversity of service lines that we can now offer. At the moment, our activity levels remain good. We are, as I mentioned earlier, holding out our expectation that we'll maintain a growth trajectory in the current financial year, FY 2023. Thank you for listening to us, guys.
Rod and team, thank you very much for the presentation today. Just a reminder for people, if you'd like to ask a question to the management team, please use the question functionality in the toolbar below. We're going to go to our first question, which is, how do you perceive activity levels in your sectors going forward? Will recession impact them or any in particular?
I think that's a really good question. I think the answer to that is, the starting point is we're not yet seeing an impact in activity levels. The activity levels that we saw towards the end of the last financial year were strong, and they are continuing to be strong. Looking at the pipeline, certainly for the foreseeable future looks good. It would be absolutely ridiculous to sit here and suggest that, you know, we are not planning for the possibility of a recession of some sort moving forwards. That planning goes to the investment point that I was making earlier in the presentation. We have consciously invested in parts of the business that we see as being strong and resilient in any economic conditions.
Our track record looking backwards gives us confidence that the core parts of the business, in any event, can successfully pivot to meet whatever economic conditions we're facing. Our track record from that point of view is really, really clear. Some parts of our business have got interchangeable skill sets in them. When I was talking earlier about the expertise that we've got in our construction team with Tozer Gallagher in that building, that construction space where we're seeing more contractor distress at the moment, the people that do non-contentious construction work are also qualified to do contentious construction work.
We have flex within the business to meet market condition changes, and I think we have to anticipate that our clients will remain active in terms of engaging with Gateley, but that the projects may have different characteristics to them moving forward, and their characteristics that we're tooled up to provide services for. You know, we learned during the pandemic that as trusted advisors, we are valuable to our clients no matter what market conditions, what may be, and that we're valuable really in helping them pivot to meet challenges in the market. Activity may change. There might be different types of activity moving forward. We remain positive based on current levels of utilization in the business.
Rod, thank you very much for that. Next question, what are the key criteria for acquisition targets? Is there a service in particular you would like to add to the platform?
Nick, do you want to take that question?
Yeah. Well, hopefully we've illustrated that there's considerable breadth to what we now do within the group, but there is a consistent and a common thread through all of it, which is that the businesses that join the group must all be professional services businesses. What we've learned over the last years is that although there are differences, there are common themes that run through professional services businesses that we can manage, and we can help facilitate growth within those businesses because of that common thread. I think that's the commonality. Then we afterwards deploy what you might regard as being normal M&A evaluation to any particular target. We do look at margin, but critically, margin, for example, but critically, we are targeting businesses which can grow with us.
We look for businesses which have intrinsic growth potential, their sales, but also ones which can contribute to the growth of the group as a whole. Our strategy is long-term. We hopefully it will become clear are trying to continue to develop and invest in a resilient business, and that's about long-term, sustainable, profitable growth, which we do by adding businesses to the group that have those characteristics, both in isolation, but also in playing their part to the group's return.
Wonderful. Thank you for that. Another question around acquisitions, and it just says, "Would a large acquisition be on your agenda?"
Yeah. Okay. Well, that's another good question, actually. I mean, most of the acquisitions that we've made so far have been small, but they represent steps in space that we recognize as being space that's ripe for growth. You know, the best illustration of that, live and kicking illustration of that, would be Gateley Hamer. I mentioned earlier in the presentation that Gateley Hamer came to us with revenues of about GBP 1 million that have grown to north of GBP 5.5 million in the five years that that business has been within the group. We invest in businesses that are at a point where they are ripe for further growth and can benefit from being part of a larger group within which to grow.
The last acquisition that we made, the Gateley Smithers Purslow acquisition, was the largest acquisition that we made. I think I mentioned that in the presentation as well. It gives some sort of sign of our appetite for larger scale. We absolutely do not rule out making larger acquisitions moving forward. To date, we funded acquisitions with our own cash and shares. Use of the revolving credit facility with the acquisition of Gateley Smithers Purslow was the first time that we'd used external finance. For a much larger transaction, you know, we'd be looking, I think, to the market for some support. Yes, our appetite for scale remains. But scale can be achieved in more than one way, of course. We're not fazed by making a large transaction, a large acquisition.
Thank you for that. Just as a reminder, if you'd like to ask a question, please use the question functionality in the toolbar below. How do you see wage inflation panning out over the next 12 months? Do you think this will affect your ability to grow?
I wish I had a crystal ball. It would be a wonderful thing to have, wouldn't it? Sort of looking backwards to answer the question looking forwards, I think we've recognized that in our sector, in professional services, particularly in legal services, pay has been the single biggest issue that we've had to confront over the last two years. We've done what we believe is the right thing for the business and our people in addressing that pressure. Over a two-year period we've enhanced the packages that our people have to become fully market facing, and I think we are feeling a little less pressure than we have previously felt in that space. It certainly hasn't constrained us in recruiting. I think the steps that we've taken have helped us in our ability to recruit people.
I mentioned earlier in the presentation that our headcounts increased significantly during FY 2022. I think we've done what we had to do for the business, the right thing for the business and our people in addressing the pay inflation that we were confronted with in both FY 2021 and FY 2022. Looking forward, what we don't do is we don't do in-period pay reviews. We do our pay review at the beginning of our financial year. We set a budget referable to that, and we don't flex our pay during the year. On the May 1st, next year, we'll sit down again and look at what the market's telling us we need to do.
My own view is that it's reasonable, I think, for me to suggest that pay pressure may be a little less in May 2023 than it was in May 2022 and May 2021. I base that on the likelihood of there being a little bit of a slowdown in the economy, and therefore a little bit of a slowdown in the race for talent, and therefore a little bit of a slowdown in expectation, if you like, in the market from a salary point of view.
Superb. That is great. Well, Rod, Neil and Nick, thank you very much for your time. We've got no further questions at the moment, so Rod, maybe I'd like to pass back to you for any closing remarks.
No, I don't have any massive closing remarks. Thanks for that, Scott. I mean, thank you everyone for joining us today. It's very difficult to cram into one hour, you know, the essence of Gateley. But hopefully we've given you some insight into the way the business performed in the last financial year, which is what our mission is this year in the presentations that we're making. If anyone does have any questions, above and beyond the ones that's been asked, please don't hesitate to get in touch with any of Neil, Nick, or I.