Good morning, everyone. It's good to see you all virtually as it were. We're here today, of course, to talk to you about the first half of our financial year. As usual, I'm joined by Neil, our finance director, and by Nick, our acquisitions director. We'll disappear off screen and, Rosie, if you could bring the first slide up, please, that would be great. In overview, the first point that I'd like to make, and it's a point to our people as much as to the market is, you know, I'm incredibly grateful to the whole team at Gateley who've clearly worked very, very hard to deliver what I think is an excellent set of results.
I think that this set of results demonstrates that really for our clients and consequently, of course, for us, the early months of the pandemic represented what I'm gonna describe as a trading pause rather than a structural shift in activity. For Gateley, I think this is evidenced by the fact that the pre-pandemic team or equivalents, which of course we've said in the past we deliberately maintained throughout the low activity periods during the pandemic, it's that team that's delivered this excellent set of results. Acquired income in the period was really de minimis, only GBP 400,000 from the Tozer Gallagher acquisition. As you'll have seen from the RNS, our organic revenue growth was an impressive 23%.
Off the back of the results, we're pleased to have declared an interim dividend, you can see on the screen here, of 3p per share. Our policy, of course, is to pay an interim dividend equal to one-third of expected full year dividend. While we're touching on dividend and shares, I'm also pleased to be able to report in the RNS that 72% of our current employees are now either shareholders in Gateley or option holders. Of course, the ability for our employees to share in the ownership of the business was one of the core reasons for our decision to float back in 2015. Unsurprisingly, our risk-free all-employee Save As You Earn share plan, Sharesave, that's been particularly popular with our employees.
One of the other highlights of the period is that we resumed, initially in a small way, M&A as one of the key components of the continued development of our platforms. I should remind you all that our platforms are the four market-facing structures that we've got. On those we place complementary legal and professional services which we point at our chosen markets. Those markets, those four markets are in property, in people, human capital, in business services and in corporate. The rationale here is that our ever-increasing range of professional services, well, it gives us a wider reach, a deeper reach into our chosen markets.
The platforms are now very well established as the vectors for growing our market share with our existing services and developing and acquiring new services for our existing and new markets. This time, for the first time, we've changed our segmental reporting to report our platforms. Here I'm pleased to say that we're showing not less than 20% like-for-like growth on each platform. We'll pick platform activity up in more detail during the presentation. In the meantime, I'm delighted to be able to say that we've welcomed two businesses into Gateley during the period. The first being Tozer Gallagher, which joined our property platform in July of last year, and more recently, as this week, you'll have seen the acquisition of Adamson Jones to our business services platform.
As I say, that was as recently as this Monday. Demand for our services is good across the group and very, very high in certain parts of the business, particularly in our core transactional services. Our balance sheet, you'll have seen from the RNS, remains strong, and I believe that we're very well positioned for further organic and acquisitive growth on each of our platforms. Rosie, moving on, if you would to the next slide, the financial highlights slide. Neil will obviously pick up financials in a little more detail in a moment. I'd just like to pull one or two highlights out per this slide. Firstly, as you'll have seen from the RNS, like-for-like revenue increased by over 23% and profit before tax by over 19% during the period.
As I mentioned a moment ago, more or less all of that growth is organic, only a very small amount of revenue generated through businesses acquired during the period. It's worth me mentioning that the H1 revenue was ahead of the whole year revenue during our IPO year back in 2015, and I think that's a clear illustration of the growth since we floated back in 2015. We're delighted really with our post-IPO growth. I'm pleased to see margin back ahead of pre-pandemic levels. It would be remiss or wrong of me really not to mention the fact that our personnel cost has, of course, significantly increased on a like-for-like basis. You'll have seen that in the RNS. Of course, that's a consequence of two or three factors.
The first is, we had a pay freeze during the first half of the last financial year, and we also had pay cuts during the first half of the last financial year. If you ally that to the well-publicized salary inflation in the legal services sector, it becomes understandable as to why there's such a big differential in personnel costs. In terms of salary inflation in the sector, we're absolutely not in denial about that. It remains a pressure point within the sector. We very much believe that we addressed that pressure point in our annual pay review in May of last year. Bearing in mind the prior year pay freeze, our first May pay review really was a double pay review. In practice, it was a review for both FY 2021 and FY 2022.
The average increase in pay in the business that was realized on that pay review is no different really to the increase that we would have seen if we'd had two consecutive pay reviews. Of course, for our people, market facing pay is important, but there are lots of other reasons why people work at Gateley. I think our ever-increasing range of professional services presents an ever-increasing opportunity for our people, and it makes Gateley a more interesting business to work in. In addition, and importantly, our people have got the opportunity to participate in the ownership of our business. As I mentioned a moment ago, many of them either are shareholders or are in schemes through which they will become shareholders.
I think when you layer on top of that our very clear purpose, which I'll come back to in a moment, you know, we are a compelling business to work in. We have had good stability in terms of headcount in the business. Our increase in personnel costs is offset by three or four important factors. The first, of course, is revenue growth, and we reasonably project continued growth here as demand for our services does remain strong and our platforms are releasing more opportunities to us. Secondly, we're seeing ongoing savings in other operating expenses, and some of those we just don't anticipate will ever return to pre-pandemic levels. A good example of that is travel costs, where annualized savings are projected to be significant.
Historically, we've spent about GBP 2 million on travel, and in the first half of this financial year, that was down to GBP 200,000. Given the way people are working now and moving forward, we think that that's one area where we'll see significant cost savings moving forward, sustainable cost savings moving forward. In similar terms, we think that we'll see sustainable cost savings in marketing. There are, of course, ongoing opportunities to realize operational gearing synergies, particularly in office space. We've reported in the past some of the savings that we've realized, and there are opportunities to realize more savings moving forward.
For example, the acquisition that we made the other day of Adamson Jones means that we now have four offices in the East Midlands, and there's a clear strategy there to rationalize office space in that region. In-period activity levels were good across the group, and the 84%, circa 84% utilization rate that we're reporting at the moment represents what we'd recognized as being something akin to normalized trading. Finally on this slide, underlying diluted earnings per share increased by, as you'll see, in the RNS, 16.5%. That's great. That's good news for both shareholders and of course for our LTIP holders, that being the hurdle in our current LTIP plan.
Our interim dividend, I think, compares favorably to our last interim dividend, and that'll be paid on the 31st of March to those on the share register on the 18th of February. Moving on to the next slide, please, Rosie. Purpose and impact. Really just very briefly on this slide, I mentioned purpose a moment ago in the context of our people, and I'd like to go just off on a tiny tangent here for a brief moment to touch on our ESG strategy, which we launched enthusiastically during the period. We launched that in September. About 800 of our people attended our virtual launch event, which was fantastic.
We took some time during the last calendar year really to consider how we should characterize our purpose, and we landed with the purpose statement that you can see here on the slide. We've extrapolated that into our ESG strategy, where we've resolved that we can make most impact as a responsible business, both with our people and in our communities, really by aligning ourselves to the U.K.'s 14 Leveling Up Goals. There's much more about this in the Responsible Gateley report, which again, we released in September of last year and I'm pleased to say was described as excellent by Justine Greening of the ESG consultancy This Is Purpose, and that's a consultancy that we're partnering with in the context of our ESG strategy. Moving on to the next slide, please, Rosie.
Update and outlook. Update and outlook really is just notification or highlighting of a couple of changes in the business. As I mentioned in the RNS, we're in the process of implementing a new financial accounting system, and that system's scheduled to go live in June of this year. Our current system unfortunately is being discontinued by the provider, but the new system is more sophisticated, and it will be much more functional across our expanding range of businesses, across our platforms. Now, we'll be in a position to issue a full year trading update towards the end of May, but our year-end audit and reporting timetable it will be slightly disrupted by the implementation of the new system. The net effect of all of that is that we've rescheduled our final results to September rather than July.
I also refer in the RNS to an intended year-end change at our Holdings Board level and a related senior management change which will take effect on the 1st of May next year, the 1st of May 2023. Victoria Garrad, who's currently our Group HR Director, is going to join our Holdings Board on the 1st of May this year. Our Chief Operating Officer, Peter Davies, he'll step down from that board. This is a planned step in succession which will see Victoria take on Peter's role, the COO role, on the 1st of May next year, 1st of May 2023. Now, Victoria spent her entire career with Gateley. She was a solicitor. She started as an article clerk, a trainee in the business many years ago. Before becoming our HR Director, she was a partner in our legal services employment team.
She's Gateley through and through. She's been on our operations board and our strategic board for a number of years, and she is immersed in the business. Peter's going to remain on the strategic board, and he will continue to chair our operations board until the end of April next year. In the meantime, Victoria will be working very closely alongside Peter, as she has been in practice for over a year now. In terms of outlook, well, activity levels and pipeline, they remain robust in both our transactional and non-transactional teams. Across, I'm pleased to say, both legal and consultancy services. We will have a look at activity levels in more detail in a moment. The group, in my opinion, is well-positioned to achieve our full year-end results in line with market expectations.
Looking further forward, we've worked really hard to understand our clients' needs and their desired outcomes in the context of complementary legal and consultancy services. The plan for the long-term development of Gateley is, I believe, now very clearly characterized in our platform strategy. Our platforms are the established really growth vectors of our business. We're committed to continuing to grow the platforms both organically and by acquisition. So far as acquisitions are concerned, we're currently actively appraising opportunities in both legal and consultancy services. We're committed to scaling each of our platforms. Really the key criteria for us here is the acquisition of professional services businesses that match our objective of delivering results that, as we say in our purpose statement, delight our clients and also businesses that share our ambition for success.
To date, we've self-funded our acquisitions. We're now very close to finalizing an acquisition facility to assist our growth strategy. Enough from me for now. Neil, over to you on the financials.
Thanks, Rod. Good morning, everybody. I'm gonna apologize in advance of, I'm just finishing off the tail end of a COVID-related cough, as is the times we're in. I will try and put myself on mute if I feel a need to speak. But if there is a break, please bear with us. Thanks, Rod. Yes, as you can tell, it's been another busy H1 for everyone here at Gateley, and also for our valued clients we're pleased to say, 'cause without them we wouldn't have a business alongside our people. Activity levels you'll have seen from the RNS have remained strong, 84% of budget. That's 5% greater than this time last year.
Very much in line with our normal business as usual, expected activity levels around that sort of 84%-85%. We've grown organically by 23% and made acquisitions again using our own cash. As Rod's indicated, we're well positioned for the second half of the year and are looking to add further staff at all levels across the business to service that client demand. Against an extremely strong H2 last year, growth in H2 this year will be lower than the growth we've seen in this H1 comparative period, but overall still ensure we stay on track to meet our market expectations. My first slide highlights the H1 performance for the last three financial years.
While it's not easy to compare our last three first half-years due to the decisions made as a result of the pandemic last year, what I can highlight is that we continue to win work without needing to travel or spend as much on marketing as we've done previously. You've heard from Rod on wage inflation and the measures we've taken to address that challenge head-on. Really, the reality is we continue to be successful as a group, to attract people as a result of what we're doing with not just our purpose, but the day-to-day work and the interaction they have with each other. No matter what they wish to do, they will continue to join a successful business.
Against the second half weighting of fees, that will be greater than the first half weighting, as is our normal trait. I'm expecting our staff costs ratio to decrease in H2, but our overall underlying adjusted margin this year to remain above 15%. It still remains, in my opinion, unhealthy to predict significant margin growth in the short term. I'm as confident as I can be that we've good control over our costs and lots of opportunities to benefit from operational gearing in the future, not least of all through our acquisition strategy. We've seen successes again this half year in the renewal of various panel appointments, and while these don't guarantee work, they do ensure that at least we're considered for that work.
As the number of panel firms on each panel continues to shrink, appointments should give investors confidence of significant inflows of work over a typical panel appointment period of a three-year period. As I say, a full year margin of 15%+ remains our goal alongside ensuring that margin is sustainable for the longer term. The decisions we've made, such as retaining fee capacity, fee earning capacity last year to service demand are good examples of these long-term decisions. If you'd move to my next slide, please, Rosie. Platform revenue growth. As you will have seen in the RNS, we've aligned our segmental reporting with our platforms, the table here showing compound annual growth over the last six years up to the end of FY 2021.
It was a chart that I used in our last presentation, which I've now aligned to our platforms. Investors should now clearly be able to see how each platform performs in terms of growth and direct margin from our segmental analysis. Direct margin's very consistent across the platforms in this half year period. It's probably unhealthy to try and compare it to the previous half year period for all of the reasons mentioned previously. Going forward, I'd like to talk to you more about this and you'll be able to see where we're investing and where we're benefiting from those investments.
Once we have installed our new financial accounting system, which we're all looking forward to having on board in June of this year, we plan to be able to bring even greater analysis in the years to come on platform growth, that margin progression, and also, more importantly, the interaction between the growing number of service lines, both consulting and legal. This chart really shows that the developed platforms, property being the best example, have enjoyed the greatest growth. I'm pleased to welcome the acquisition of Adamson Jones on our Business Services Platform, and Nick will add color to that platform later in the presentation. If you could move to my next slide, please, Rosie. We ended the half year with GBP 8.8 million of net cash and again, no debt, Adamson Jones and earlier in the year.
Obviously, Adamson Jones was post year-end, but earlier in the year, Tozer Gallagher was also funded out of our existing cash resources. Our movement in net working capital is probably the number that stands out on this slide, but that's predominantly to do with the return to normalized spending. In H1 2021, the previous half year, we paid out very little. What I mean here is that we paid out no bonuses and held back on numerous overheads. In contrast, this half year, we've seen a reinstatement of bonus payments being paid between June and October and a return to a more normalized spending pattern in terms of overheads. Debtors haven't moved much in value since the end of the FY 2021 financial year.
Whilst there is a small increase in debtor days compared to last half year, my next slide demonstrates that debtor days trends are not out of kilter to our traditional profile. If you could move to my next slide, please, Rosie. Yes, we're constantly striving to find ways to improve collections, and I'm confident our new financial system being installed in June will assist greatly with this. Also, as our litigation funding facility kicks in, we will see an acceleration of collections on those large litigation cases as they come on stream, which will ease pressure on normal working capital levels. It's been a busy period, and I can't criticize our teams for the unrelenting focus on delivery of service and the billing of unbilled time in H1. Our level of statutory recognized unbilled revenue remains a strength of the business.
We're only recognizing GBP 14.7 million of unbilled revenue in our balance sheet, which represents just 11% of annualized revenues. All in all, we're very pleased with where the business is positioned. Looking forward to the second half of the year and happy to take some questions later on in the presentation on any more detail anyone wants around the numbers that's not here or in the RNS. On that note, I'll hand back to Rod and Nick.
Thanks, Neil. I appreciate that. Rosie, if we could just go to the slide which is headed Platform Performance Review. I've already explained our platform strategy and the rationale behind that, making us more diverse, giving us deeper reach into our chosen markets, making us more resilient, making us a more compelling business. The continued aggregation of these complementary legal and consultancy services is clearly differentiating Gateley and strengthening our appeal to clients. We are continuing to work very hard with all of our key stakeholders to embed the platforms as the growth vectors of our business, and therefore, it's a progressive step that our segmental reporting is now by reference to our platforms. That reporting is showing not less than 20% like-for-like growth on each platform during the period.
One of the impressive characteristics actually of the first half of our financial year is the growth in like-for-like revenue from our consultancy businesses. Those consultancy businesses in aggregate are showing over 38.7% growth. Consultancy revenue accounted for almost 14%, 13.8% to be precise, of all revenue during the period. I think that is a combination of a couple of factors. In part, it's due to the alignment of some of our consultancy services to the legal services transactions that we've been dealing with during H1, and our transactional teams have been very busy. It's also because we are seeing steady recurring income from some of the larger, longer term projects that we've previously reported that we've won through our platform offer.
The projects that we've reported have principally been in infrastructure and regeneration space. Also, it's due to the organic creation of some new services, and in the case of our people platform, it's due to clients refocusing now on leadership assessment and development and of course, new world cultural change projects. We'll take a look at some activity on each platform. Nick, perhaps before we do that, can you quickly remind everyone of the current platform composition?
Morning, everybody. Yes, very happy to do that. On the next couple of slides, Rod and I will provide you a little more detail on current sales mix and growth on each of our four platforms. Adamson Jones, while our eleventh acquisition since flotation, is our first onto our Business Services Platform. At present, revenues are 100% legal. Before I come onto that, though, just on the platform overview slide, Rosie. This slide shows you the progress that we've made since flotation in constructing each of our platforms. It's in a format which I've used to update you previously, but this time around you'll see that the additions in red are Tozer Gallagher, acquired onto our Property Platform last July, and Adamson Jones, our first acquisition onto our Business Services Platform.
Tozer Gallagher enhances our capability in Gateley Vinden built environment surveying, adding capacity, but also enhancing our credentials through the acquisition of market-leading teams in guarantee bond claims. In Adamson Jones, we've acquired a first-rate team of chartered patent and trademark attorneys. The business is well known to our IP team in the East Midlands who've worked with AJ on a number of occasions over recent years. While legally trained, patent attorneys are not solicitors, their specialist skills in IP registration, protection, and strategy represent a significant step forward in IP capability in group. Adamson Jones have particular experience in biotechnology, engineering, pharmaceuticals, and software, which represent both traditional ground and growth opportunities for the wider group.
The addition of Adamson Jones not only builds and strengthens our IP offering, but also links well into the corporate platform with links into international investment services and the property platform into Gateley Capitus. IIS, in its advice to international companies entering the U.K. and E.U., regularly engages with clients on IP protection matters, where requirements can now be met in-house through AJ. In Gateley Capitus, while capital allowances for real estate represent the largest part of its business, it also offers advice and support around other government-approved allowances and reliefs, including Patent Box and research and development credits, being sales lines clearly enhanced by the acquisition of a patents attorney business. Rosie, if you can move on to the timeline slide, please. This slide gives a little more detail on the evolution of our platform approach.
You'll see the order in which our platforms have been created, with the property platform launching in 2016, people and corporate in 2018, and business services coming together this week with the acquisition of Adamson Jones. Rod's already reminded you of the logic behind and the benefits to be delivered, we believe, from a platform approach. In terms of the businesses we're targeting on each of our platforms, we're looking to acquire complementary growth phase, profitable UK professional services businesses. On to the next slide, please, Rosie, the business services platform. On the next couple of slides, Rod and I will provide a little more detail on current sales mix. Adamson Jones was our 11th acquisition since flotation, but it's the first onto our business services platform, as I've mentioned, so revenues at the moment are 100% legal.
However, the platform grew by over 20% period-on-period, with a doubling of revenues in our complex international dispute resolution team and a strong contribution from our IP and commercial lawyers who support continuing strong PE and M&A markets. The pipeline of case opportunities for our litigation team remains good, enhanced as we announced in September last year by a litigation funding line of up to GBP 50 million provided by Bench Walk Advisors. That facility enhances case pipeline opportunities for Gateley by creating a genuine no win, no fee arrangement for clients in appropriate cases, whilst at the same time being non-recourse to Gateley. Gateley Omega, our forensics and business intelligence business, also launched last year, further enhances our litigation offering by providing clients with deep insight into true recovery potential of claims and assisting them in informing their decision as to whether or not to proceed with litigation.
You can see there the investments we've already made in our business services platform as regards litigation. In addition, and placed alongside legal, our IP and brands reach enhanced through the acquisition of Adamson Jones represents the launch of our business services consultancy offering, potentially our widest opportunity in terms of possible further service line expansion. The M&A pipeline for the business services platform remains strong for further investment. Moving on, Rosie, to the corporate platform slide. Our corporate platform is up 44.4%, principally as a result of a blistering performance from our legal M&A, PE and banking teams. Corporate markets have been very strong since summer 2020, and there's currently no sign of any change in that. Consultancy revenue will likely always be relatively modest on this platform, as in most cases consultancies acquired will sit more naturally on other platforms.
Our international investment services consultancy, which also links strongly into Adamson Jones, as I've mentioned, has performed well, growing headcount and revenues as the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority contract has started to flow, and also securing other strategic wins such as the Australian Trade and Investment Commission, where we've engaged on a series of programs to support high-growth Australian companies establish, expand and scale in the U.K. Onto the people platform slide, please, Rosie. Our people platform has performed extremely well in period, up 21.5%, which I believe demonstrates the resilience that stems from a diversified but complementary offering. In the early months of the pandemic, while employment legal services were in high demand as employers rapidly adjusted, clients' expenditure on strategic people and cultural investment programs was paused.
Our consultancy teams in the meantime continued to continue to innovate and develop, expanding their online offerings and working to further integrate our assessment, development and cultural change lines. As we move through the pandemic and clients' businesses stabilize, budgets return, and so too has revenue growth in our people consultancies, contributing 27% to overall platform revenues. Longer term, the impact of the pandemic on businesses, their markets and working practices should drive growth in our people consultancies as businesses reassess their new normal leaders and plans for and manage the changes that have impacted all businesses to a greater or lesser extent. Rod, back to you.
Thanks, Nick. Rosie, just moving on to the property platform. I've got a particular affinity with this platform because I am a real estate lawyer, so I feel very close to it and occasionally get my hands dirty at the coalface. On this platform, while the legal and consultancy revenue split is similar actually to the split that Nick's just reported on the people platform, the property platform is currently our most scaled, and therefore it's probably our most balanced platform actually. The strength of the combined services on this platform is continuing to assist us winning work, particularly in large scale transactions and projects.
Again, sorry I'm repeating myself here, you know, we often illustrate that success through the regeneration and infrastructure projects that we're currently working on, which of course are long-term projects with long-term recurring income streams across both legal and consultancy businesses. In legal services, just taking legal services separately for a moment, activity in our core markets is strong and has been throughout the period, and the pipelines are good there. One of our principal core markets, of course, is house building. Another one is warehousing and distribution, and also we have cross-team expertise in supported living. Like for like revenue in our market leading house building team actually grew by 36% in the period that we're reporting on, H1 2022.
This of course, it's worth bearing in mind, this is referable to what was actually a buoyant H1 2021 housing market. I think it's therefore quite a powerful comps, post period highlights for that housing team include panel reappointments to three of the top 10 house builders, and that secures current and future workloads from those clients for three years. That's alongside existing panel positions with each of the other top 10 operators that we act for in this sector. In fact, we continue to act for all of the top 20 house builders. Clearly, house building remains a very strong part of our property platform. I think it accounted for about GBP 24 million worth of revenue last year.
We are genuinely market leading there and those panel positions, those post-period panel wins are very encouraging for us, moving forward. In our property consulting businesses, Nick's already touched on Tozer Gallagher. Tozer Gallagher definitely added capacity to our built environment team in Gateley Vinden, which is integrating very nicely with the platform and with the wider group. It's also importantly enhanced our leading credentials in guarantee bond claims in the construction industry, where we have a specialist team in legal services that have historically worked alongside Tozer Gallagher, as consultants. That combination is a powerful combination to take to the surety market, where we do expect to see increasing levels of activity, as strain impacts the construction industry.
It's the fixed price contract versus inflation in material costs and salaries in that industry that could cause some problems. We're well-placed to take some leading advisory positions there, I think. Gateley Capitus is seeing improved levels of activity as businesses now refocus on maximizing fiscal incentive opportunities. Although Gateley Capitus do R&D allowances, their principal business is in capital allowances in the property sector. Gateley Hamer's growth trajectory, it does remain impressive and its range of services continues to expand. Most of the investment that we've made in Gateley Hamer has been of an organic nature to extrapolate expertise in that business into new areas. The latest investment is into the telecoms sector.
We now have a new head of Hamer's telecoms team, and that team, working in tandem with our legal services team, is actually expected to generate significant revenues during the medium to long term. That's a great new service line that we're holding out to clients through our Gateley Hamer business. Overall, like-for-like revenue in Gateley Hamer increased by 70% period on period. It's worth pointing out that our investment in Gateley Hamer since we acquired it back in 2016 has seen its revenues increase by 224% or 26.5% compound annual growth over a five-year period. I think that's a real success story and a really good example of how we can continue to scale the complementary consultancy businesses that we're now carrying on our platforms.
It won't surprise you to hear that we're actively looking at opportunities for further expansion on this platform, in both existing and potential, new markets, which is really quite exciting. Before we move to Q&A, just a very brief summary from my point of view. It goes without saying that we're very pleased with our first half, outturn. We had a strong first half, and we believe that we're well-placed to deliver full year results in line with market expectation. Activity levels remain strong and, the business is busy. We're pleased to have resumed M&A activity, and we're committed to and genuinely excited by opportunities to further develop the established growth vectors in our business, which of course are our platforms. More news to follow on that front very hopefully.
I think that's it from myself and Neil and Nick. Of course we're very happy to take any questions.
Thank you. If you would like to ask a telephone question, please signal by pressing star one. Please ensure your mute function is turned off to allow your signal to reach our equipment. We will take our first question today from Robert Plant of Panmure Gordon. Please go ahead.
Morning, Rod, Neil and Nick. What level of pay increase do you think you'll be giving come the 1st of May, and how would that compare, do you think, to your markets? Thanks.
Yeah. That's a difficult question to answer, Robert, because pay in the legal services sector is pretty fast-moving at the moment. But we think that we fundamentally addressed any pay differentials in our 1st May 2021 pay review. We don't think that we need to get caught up in the battle that appears to be going on, particularly in the city between Magic Circle and American firms. For sure, to some extent, we get caught in some of the crossfire there. But to be honest with you, we think we've got different ways of appealing to talent in the business and potential talent joining the business. We touched on some of that in the presentation, particularly on the ability for people to share in ownership of Gateley. It's a really difficult question to answer.
We hope that we're going to get back to a more normalized pay round, on the 1st of May, so single digit rather than double digit. You know, we just have to wait and see. We do think that we've settled down the pay issues, but the market is fast-moving, albeit more obviously in a different space to the space in which we operate.
Understood. Thanks, Rod.
We will take our next question from James Allen of Liberum. Please go ahead.
Hi. Morning, guys. I've got three questions, if I may. First question. I think you mentioned that you expected sustainable cost savings in marketing going forward. How are you making sure that the reduction in marketing costs does not impact things like work winning, marketing at things like recruitment fairs to attract new talent, and strengthen the brand, et cetera? Second question, consultancy services looked to have bounced back quite nicely in the first half. Were there any specific consultancy acquisitions that performed very well in the mix in the first half period? In contrast, were there any consultancy businesses where they are yet to bounce back but which could provide upside in H2 as that work comes back?
Final question, I was just wondering what the growth rates were historically for Adamson Jones, which I know you announced earlier this week.
Yeah. Okay. Well, I'll take questions one and two, and Nick, I think, will probably pick up on question three in relation to Adamson Jones. In the context of marketing, James, we are sensible about the way that we deploy our marketing spend, and we always have been. We will not curtail in any way any marketing spend that is necessary spend either in the context of client winning or in the context of people recruitment. Evidentially, we haven't absolutely constrained marketing spend in any sense during the first half of the financial year. Evidentially, people are not feeling the need to spend on marketing in the way that we've seen historically. That has not impaired workflows.
You know, despite a significant drop-off in marketing spend, we are still seeing high levels of instruction, consequently high levels of activity. I just think people are being more sensible about the type of spend that they're deploying in the marketing space. I also think that things that we have previously done in person en masse will not necessarily return to in person en masse. We do a whole range, for example, of training programs for clients. We do a whole range of sector updates for clients. We do updates for clients, and so on and so forth. Historically, they would have taken place on premise with people traveling to present, people traveling to attend, and I think they are, those sort of events are forever going to be virtual and much more efficient conducted virtually as well.
I do see long-term sustainable marketing savings as against marketing spend pre-pandemic, but we are not going to do anything silly around marketing spend. Sensibly deployed spend will, of course, be sanctioned and encouraged. On the consultancy services questions, just a couple of illustrations on the consultancy services referable to the questions that you asked, there, James. On the people platform, we've amalgamated the management of t-three and Kiddy, and we are seeing really good trajectory with t-three and Kiddy during the current financial year versus the last financial year. In answer to your question about an example of a consultancy or consultancy businesses that are performing well, there is a really good example, and that's a combination of a couple of things I think, James.
The first is, businesses may have viewed in the early parts of the pandemic, maybe throughout the whole of their pandemic financial year, spend on people assessment development as discretionary spend, whereas now they are refocusing in a more normalized market on the importance of senior people selection, senior people assessment, senior people development, and critically, in the brave new world, cultural change. We're seeing clients re-engaging with those very important projects and the guys in t-three and Kiddy have actually designed some very compelling new programs which they've been able to sell into the market and which people are buying. We see a strong year in the people consultancies on our people platform.
Conversely, you know, to give it balance and again to answer one of your questions directly, Capitus, our fiscal incentives business, had a fairly slow start to the financial year, and I think that's because during the pandemic, businesses were not necessarily deploying as much as they would normally do in capital expenditure. Of course, the Capitus business has at its heart capital allowances as its core business. Now, CapEx, capital expenditure is now back, and actually businesses that have disregarded or deferred analysis of allowable expenditure throughout the pandemic, where they've been focused on managing other parts of their business, are now returning to wanting to maximize the benefits of fiscal incentives.
We are seeing a tick up in activity levels in Capitus, and the Capitus business is expecting to have a much better H2 than the H1 that we've seen from it. It's been okay in H1, but it hasn't performed as well as it would do in a traditional cycle. Nick, do you wanna pick up the question about AJ?
Yeah. We're very excited about Adamson Jones joining the group for all sorts of reasons in terms of our reach, further differentiation and the additional capabilities that it gives us within the intangibles environment. Some of its core characteristics we recognize, and in the two years to FY 2021, it had a compound growth rate of about 12% over those two years. That was slightly impacted by the pandemic as some research and development slowed down in the early part of that year. Its traditional pre-pandemic growth rates on the top line would look very similar to those within the wider group, and that's what we're expecting, and that's what we'll be looking to see going forward.
Thanks, Nick.
Thank you very much.
Cheers, James.
We will take our next question from Sam Dindol of Stifel. Please go ahead.
Morning, guys. Thanks for the presentation. Three questions from me, please. Firstly on the litigation funding. Given you're taking a share of settlement value, is there potential for revenues and margins to be more volatile going forward as cases are realized, and how do you see that progressing? Secondly, on the platform M&A, it sounds like the Business Services platform very much in focus, and corporate maybe not so much. Would that be fair, and is there any other preference in terms of properties already quite well developed, so maybe that's less of a focus? Finally on price and cost inflation.
Given your margins are ahead of where they were a couple of years ago, is it sensible in that you're able to offset the majority of your staff inflation through passing that through to clients? Thanks.
Sam, just on that third question. Sorry, you broke up on the third question for me. Could you just repeat the third question?
Yeah, of course. It's just, are you able to predominantly offset your staff cost inflation through increasing client prices?
Okay, well, I'll take the third question, and perhaps Neil take the first and Nick take the second. The answer to the third question is predominantly we can offset the increase in staff costs through continued revenue growth, and I'm confident that the continued revenue growth that we'll see in the business will spin out of the platform strategy that we're seeing. We are in a situation where we operate a business where we can sensibly increase pricing in line with expertise and excellence of service. I referred in the presentation, didn't I, to a core part of our property platform, a core part of our wider business, where we've just been through a number of panel reviews with significant clients of the business.
In each of those panel reviews, we've been able to negotiate hourly rate increases and fixed fee increases. We expect to see an improvement in revenues moving forward, which will in part offset salary inflation. The flip side of that is we also expect, you know, sure as eggs are eggs, that at some point the salary bubble will burst, and there'll be a calming down in the salary pressures that we're seeing in the sector. Thirdly, as I mentioned in the presentation and touched on separately, we do see ongoing operational cost savings embedding in the business, i.e., we do not see a return to pre-pandemic levels of cost in certain parts of the business.
When you align that with operational gearing opportunities that we see in some of the acquisitions that we're making, as well as in some of our existing businesses, particularly in the context of office space, I think we've got a sensible mix of offsets to the personnel cost issue that we are confronting at the moment, at least in the short to medium term. That would be my answer to the third question. Nick, do you wanna pick up the platform M&A question?
Yeah, very happy to do that. Yes, the most current addition obviously onto the Business Services Platform. Business Services Platform is potentially the widest of the four that we have. AJ focusing on intangibles alongside our legal teams that do that, but also housing our litigation function as we've discussed, but potentially including things like other forms of regulatory procurement, et cetera. There is potentially the broadest scope of opportunity. On our Business Services Platform, Sam, I would agree with that. Are we interested in developing and further developing? Is it the end of the story with regard to AJ and investment IP and brands, for example? No, that wouldn't be the case. There's plenty of opportunity for us to continue along those lines.
More broadly, we are looking at opportunities across all of the platforms, and the short answer is we close them in the order in which they occur. If there are transactions that meet the tests that are appropriate, we close them, so we don't prefer at any one time the next investment on a per platform basis on any other or for any other reason. Corporate is quite interesting, and I'm not making excuses for corporate. I'm a corporate lawyer myself, but I do think that ultimately the corporate platform, in terms of the businesses that sit on it, will likely be the narrowest. That is because a corporate can draw on the services of the full spectrum of consultancy businesses that we have, might have in group on a per customer basis or on a per transaction basis.
What that tends to mean is that those consultancies will, as I said in my section, more naturally sit and be predominantly housed on other platforms. I don't think it's the case that there isn't a corporate opportunity. I think that the corporate opportunity is spread in reality across all four of the platforms, where other businesses acquired might sit more naturally, principally on one of the other three.
Neil, would you like to take that first question from Sam?
No, I don't believe there will be Sam. It's as simple as that. We've been managing big cases. You know, the biggest one we've had is a GBP 6 million bill, which was in 2010, and that had quite a significant margin on it. We've been doing this for a good number of years now. I suppose if we start getting up to the levels of using up to the full GBP 50 million, then that's gonna have quite a significant effect on the size of the cases that we're bringing in. I would hope the rest of the business will have grown, you know, proportionately with it anyway. The other point to make is we're already a very diverse margin business, and that is the real reason why we focus on one margin.
Underlying that, we obviously look at all our different margins across our different parts of our business. No, I don't think there's any volatility that we need to be worried about.
Brilliant. Thanks, Neil.
Thank you very much.
There are no further telephone questions. I will now hand over to Rosie for any questions from the webcast.
Thanks, Molly. We've had a number of questions come in from Andrew Simms of Arden Partners. First, non-legal services revenue growth was very good in the first half, but can you tell us what the crossover is between legal and non-legal clients? How many of your clients take legal and non-legal services, and how do you monitor and promote this cross-sell internally?
Neil, do you want to take that one?
Yeah, can do. The short answer is it's increasing with every working month effectively. As the platform strategy continues to get embedded across the business, as clients become alive to it, as we seek out more opportunities, as we bring more acquisitions and more service lines, and as we actually develop service lines within those acquired businesses as well, which we've done on a number of, you know, Capitus and Hamer, you know, the guys have touched on those. They're really good examples of that. The number of projects, the size of projects are all increasing in terms of value for us and benefit for our clients as well, because the clients are able to come to us for various different services where we've got the expertise.
The new system that we're putting in will enable us to monitor that better. It's very sort of. It's more on being in touch with our people and understanding the projects that they're on, as opposed to being able to empirically show you a set of numbers at the moment. I would like the numbers to sort of support what we know is happening in the future, and that's why we need to move to that new system in June.
Neil, there's probably just one other point I would add there, which is I think the way to look at it is as one group. Yes, we're right to look at the instances of legal and consultancy sales, but we're also seeing increasing numbers of interconsultancy sales, which are particularly strong in that department, International Investment Services, which regularly refers opportunities into legal, but also increasingly is referring opportunities into other parts of the business, including in intellectual property terms, for example. IIS and patent protection advice to incoming entities historically effectively paying that away to out-of-group service providers can now do that in-group through AJ. There are other examples as well between the consultancies.
Including Adamson Jones, notwithstanding the fact that we've only had Adamson Jones in the group for two days.
Yeah. I mean, we've got. Again, that's an IIS one. So we've already got a lead, which we're very hopeful of bedding in that would generate from IIS a very significant number of patent applications and an existing patent portfolio into the U.K. and the E.U. One of the reasons why we've high hopes for Adamson Jones in the same way as every other business joining the group.
Thank you. The second question from Andrew is, following on from that, what is your approach to either individual service line pricing or total contract value as you cross-sell and clients take more services in both legal and non-legal?
Yeah. We try not to package up projects from a pricing point of view. In other words, on those large projects that we've previously reported, again, I hark back to infrastructure and regeneration projects, the service lines are aggregated for the purposes of providing the services to the client, but the pricing of those service lines is separate. If the question is around are we lumping together services, producing a blended rate, and providing the services under the blended rate, the answer to that is no. We're pricing our services according to the expertise that we're delivering on the project in a way that we would with any project if that service was a standalone project.
The compelling proposition for the client is service management delivered in a coordinated and constructive way for the project, but the pricing isn't aggregated.
Thank you. Finally, where do you think group margins could or should get to? At what level do you think? What level would you need to think about raising investment levels?
Neil, one for you.
I think I answered the first part of that in the presentation in that, you know, we're looking to maintain a sustainable margin. There's always a balance that you have to draw between investing in your people, investing in your infrastructure, so therefore costs always need looking at. We believe margins can grow beyond the 15% as a result of increasing activity and top line performance. I’m not great at guessing where they'll be in the future, but I think it would be unwise to assume they'd go, you know, above 20% in the sort of medium term. Operational gearing opportunities always come along. For instance, we've got. We've shown this in the past that we can do that.
Really the key to growing the margin for us is lighting up the activity on the top line and increasing the services that we generate revenue from.
Thanks, Neil. Now finally, we have a last question from Mike Allen from Zeus. To what extent did lateral hires play in your organic growth performance? I assume this is included in your definition.
That is included in the definition, yes. I couldn't actually put a number on the contribution from lateral hires in this particular presentation. We did make a number of lateral hires in FY 2021, but I don't think I could give a number on that. Neil, I don't know if you can extrapolate that any further than what I've just said.
No, I don't think it's significant enough to make a difference. I think we did do some lateral hires during the year, you know, at the start, just before the pandemic came, didn't we? You know, all those people are performing well within the business. You know, that's what they promised and brought and said they were gonna bring to us, you know, they're delivering that. But we've got a lot of workforces within the business that are long-established, and we've got the opportunities that the business structure and what we're trying to do with the platform approach brings. All of that is attracting the growth in my view.
The more it comes to the brand, to the business itself and to us as a collective rather than specific individuals, the better and stronger that work within performance will be.
Yeah.
Fantastic. There are no further questions on the webcast, so I'll now hand back to you, Rod, for any additional closing remarks.
I have no additional closing remarks other than to thank all of the analysts for attending today. I'm sorry we can't literally see you, but, as always, thanks for your time and interest in Gateley.