Hello. Hi, I'm Rod Waldie, CEO of Gateley Group. I'm joined today in this presentation by Neil Smith, our Chief Financial Officer, and by Nick Smith, our Acquisitions Director. I think if we could just go straight to the FY24 overview slide, please. This is a really good set of results, and I'm proud of the team here at Gateley for delivering them. The outturn maintains our unbroken track record of revenue growth, and it's a further demonstration of the value of the resilience derived from our disciplined investment in our diversified model. We've made balanced investments in the group since IPO, consistently in line with our DDI strategy, meaning our strategy of differentiating Gateley by diversifying our service lines beyond pure legal services, and doing so in a structure that enables us to incentivize our people in different ways.
Our investment has always been self-funded and has never compromised our balance sheet, which has strengthened year-on-year, including a consistent year-end net cash position, which is increasingly rare across the sector. This position is net of consistent delivery of strong dividend. I do concede that we are showing a like-for-like decrease in our profit metrics and net cash at the end of FY24, but we did still deliver underlying PBT of GBP 23 million in a tricky market, and we delivered a net cash outturn. The important point to emphasize here is this is despite our deliberate ongoing investment in four main areas for long-term return. Those four areas are, firstly, continuation of investment in the DD elements of our strategy, and that's exampled by the acquisition of RJA Consultants onto our property platform, which I'm delighted to say is immediately returning for us, and it's growing.
We enhanced recruitment into Gateley Smithers Purslow, which is performing very well and giving us deeper inroads into the UK property insurance market, which does continue to develop for us as a new sector. We also seeded a new IP valuation and commercialization team, making us unique in the range of our intellectual property services. Secondly, in the context of focused capital deployment, we continue to invest in existing and new service lines, particularly in specialist areas or deep sector expertise areas, where we can price specialism and expertise accordingly. And in period, this is exampled by our investments in international arbitration, class actions, and post-period in a senior environmental specialist. These are all new service lines to group. Thirdly, we necessarily invested in systems and system development.
In period, that's exampled by development of our class action management system, where we spent about GBP 500,000 in FY24. We're also actively confronting AI, and in this regard, we have procured some off-the-shelf product, but we've also recruited specialist developers to create bespoke product for us. Investment here is expected by our clients. It's required, in fact, and ultimately, it will deliver long-term margin-enhancing returns for us. Fourthly, and finally, and vitally for a business like ours, we continued our investment in people. And in period, that meant necessarily matching salaries in an ongoing inflationary market for professional services and recognizing strong performers in a difficult year through reintroduction of staff bonus as a considered means of fairly balancing returns to our key stakeholders.
Finally, we further advanced some of our thinking around the I, the incentivization bit of our DDI strategy, by taking progressive and proactive steps to flexibly utilize our Restricted Share Award Plan as a key differentiator to attracting and retaining senior talent, and I will touch on that later. In summary and overview, these are the four key areas where we have and will continue to apply our investment focus and are the routes to margin enhancement over the medium to long term. Importantly, our track record should give all of our stakeholders confidence that we will remain forward-looking and disciplined in progression of our strategy, including, at all times, employing the right balance in capital allocation between organic and acquisitive growth opportunities, system investment, and investment in people. Just moving on to the next slide, which is a reminder of our diversification strategy.
And here, Nick, this slide is highlighting the 15 acquisitions made by us since IPO in 2015, and reminding people where each acquired business now sits in our four-platform structure. I think it's fair to say we started with adjacency being a key acquisition criteria. Could you just remind us, what we mean by this and what the resultant benefits are for the group?
... Sure, happy to do that, Rod. So in 2015, our stated long-term strategic plan was to build on the foundations of our quality UK top 50 law firm to establish a broad-based professional services group. It was never our intention to invest outside of professional services, and although diversification was our goal, so too was preserving the one team, one business culture, which has always stood us in good stead. We invested in businesses adjacent to our legal services offering. Adjacent so as to create opportunities, but also to preserve that culture and identity. By adjacent, we mean services which sit naturally alongside legal services, supplied to the same clients alongside legal services, supplied in the same commercial context, transaction or circumstance.
Fundamentally, our business is all about our people and our clients, and so being in a position to supply adjacent services to our clients, we believe creates multiple opportunities for our business, which include: we can capture more of our clients' professional services budget for a particular matter, we can be more effective in sales terms with more to offer than single service providers, we create more sales channels with more routes into a new client or a new project, we have more flexibility in pricing terms than single service providers, and we can build broader, deeper and stickier client relationships than single service providers. But just as importantly, we build a business with a new entrepreneurial and client-facing brand that is differentiated and of greater appeal to both clients, but also to talent across the wider UK professional services industry.
Okay, Nick, so thanks for that. That's adjacency, but I think it's fair to say that we've developed confidence to go beyond obvious adjacency in the context of acquisitions. Can you just example that for us, and how might that inform our strategy as it matures and progresses?
Yes, in recent years, we've moved beyond, as you say, Rod, obvious adjacency. But we've done that not because we don't believe anymore in our original thinking, but rather because of the progress we've made and the successes we've had in our diversification strategy. So the confidence that's given us is to push where it makes sense a little further away from legal services, but always preserving adjacency with other established service lines offered within the group. So the links to legal may not be as direct, but our investment principles and the benefits which result remain the same. So to bring that to life, I'll give you a couple of examples. We acquired a land referencing business, which is a tech-enabled land and legal title identification and mapping business, which sits naturally alongside and complements our compulsory purchase surveying business in Gateley Hamer.
We acquired Gateley Smithers Purslow, which supplies quantity surveying and project management services to the insurance industry in major loss insurance claims. It's true to say, within our legal business, we provide relatively few services to insurers, and legal services don't regularly form part of a property major loss claim process. But GSP, apart from being a quality growing business in its own right, sits naturally alongside our other surveying operations in Gateley Hamer and Gateley Vinden and RJA, as Rod's mentioned earlier on. And I guess the last example I'd give is investing in a new intellectual property valuation and commercialization offering, which fits hand in glove primarily with our two patent and trademark attorney businesses, Adamson Jones and Symbiosis.
So we see our ability to expand in this way as being evidential of our successes to date and a measured maturing of our M&A thinking. Without having already acquired and successfully integrated obviously adjacent businesses, acquiring more distant operations would not only have represented a risk we don't see we need to take, but would also have broken the linkage that we believe is the power in our multi-service offering to clients.
Thanks for that, Nick. Just moving on to the next slide, sticking momentarily with the theme of diversification in service lines, this slide is a clear illustration of significant growth in non-legal services revenue since implementation of our diversification strategy. From a standing start nine years ago, our consultancy revenue is now touching GBP 50 million, as you can see from this slide. The accelerated growth that you can see over the last three years is a factor of our confidence in strategy and action, allied to our increasing scale, giving us more optionality as to where we invest. Really good progress in the context of strategy in this regard. Just moving on to the next slide.
Following on from what I just said in relation to the last slide, the obvious point for me to make here is that our overall revenue growth has been enhanced since implementation of our diversification strategy in 2015. This slide clearly shows at the top our amalgamated revenue, which has consistently grown since 2004, but in a more enhanced way since 2015. And I'd also like to emphasize a point that I made in opening, really, which is clear from this slide, and that's that despite periods of macro volatility since 2015, our resilient business model has consistently delivered strong dividend returns. Okay, so moving on to the next slide. This slide, busy slide, simply an illustration really of FY24 revenue splits at both group level and individual platform level.
What I mean by splits here is the split between legal and consultancy revenue on each of our four platforms. You can see them there, on the slide. Taken as a whole, this slide shows that in a tougher year for transactional legal services, combined consultancy services revenue grew strongly, alongside a robust performance by more countercyclical legal services, and the overall outturn was, group revenue growth of 6%. At IPO, we loosely talked about a medium-term ambition for the circa 70-30 legal consultancy revenue split that we generated in FY24, but that doesn't necessarily inform how that split might develop moving forward. We will continue to take both legal and consultancy growth opportunities on their merits as they present themselves. We've successfully adopted this approach to date, and we don't really see any reason to deviate from it.
When turning to the next slide, I'll pick some platform highlights, but in the meantime, what you can see from this slide is that we delivered really good revenue growth on our business services platform. That's 14% up on a like-for-like basis, and that's partly derived from recently made investments on that platform. The corporate platform remains dominated by legal services, which we think will always be the case, with teams on that platform utilizing expertise from every other platform and referring significant amounts of work to the other platforms. Given the transactional services dominance on this platform and the challenging transactional environment throughout most of the year, I think we'd describe ourselves as being content with relatively small contraction in revenue on this platform. However, and really importantly, the outlook for FY 2025 from this platform is more positive.
Current pipeline is strong, and this is reflected in a continuation of the improved activity levels that began to show in the final quarter, Q4 of FY 2024. Turning to the people platform, we saw a slight contraction of revenue on that platform, but our now leaner private client and employment teams are well-placed to deliver moving forward, and the balance between legal and non-legal revenue does continue to mature nicely on the people platform. Finally, we delivered a really strong performance on the property platform. It remains our largest and most mature platform, and, you know, the performance in period is clear, I think, and strong in terms of illustrating the resilience derived from the increasingly broad range of specialist services that we now point at the property sector.
I think this now enables us to compete in range, if not yet scale, I'm not getting carried away here, but in range with the largest property consultancies in the U.K. Overall, 11.4% revenue growth on this platform is stellar, given a generally difficult property sector over the last two years. Moving on to the next slide. Again, this is quite a busy slide, but it shows relevant service line revenue contributions on each of our four platforms, and it is also an opportunity for me to give you a handful of platform highlights. Starting with the business services platform again, our legal services regulatory team had a record year, and that's for the second year in a row. That's reflective of the increasingly regulated environments in which businesses operate and the need for support and guidance through this.
Our litigation teams on this platform were busy throughout the year and continue to carry good pipelines of work generated in both the U.K. and increasingly overseas. In addition, as I've already mentioned, our specialist class actions team, in which we are heavily invested, has launched its first case. In consultancy services on the business services platform, our patent and trademark attorney businesses had a strong year and are proving to be well-made acquisitions for us, and this is an area that we are targeting for further growth. Moving on to the corporate platform, the already mentioned challenging environment for our corporate and finance transactional teams eased a little during Q4, since when both activity and pipeline has improved. In the meantime, we saw a strong contribution from our legal services restructuring advisory team, which grew its revenue and which remains busy.
This countercyclical activity is proving valuable for the corporate platform. On the people platform, we saw a contraction in private client revenue, but that's reflective of headcount reduction in that team. Revenue from our people consultancy businesses also reduced against a very strong FY 2023 for those two consultancy businesses. But our legal services pension team, pensions team, sorry, and our pension trustee businesses, Entrust, delivered strong revenue growth, benefiting from more outsourcing of management of pension schemes to businesses like Entrust. This again is an area in which we would like to make further investment. On our property platform, as already mentioned, we were delighted, we really were, to deliver 11.4% revenue growth in a difficult property market.
Particularly strong contributions were made by our legal services construction team, which delivered record revenue for the second year in a row, and our real estate dispute resolution team also delivered a good growth outcome. In consultancy services, RJA had an excellent part year in group, exceeding expectations, actually, and both Gateley Vinden and Gateley Smithers Purslow increased revenue, including from services to the U.K. property insurance market, which remains a strong growth area for us. Turning to the next slide: balanced investment for growth. Well, I mentioned in overview the like-for-like decrease in our profit metrics, and explained that these are a product of ongoing strategic investment for long-term returns. We've got a consistent policy of carefully considering how we balance our capital allocation period-on-period, year-on-year.
Given that our spend has been self-funded, we've done so responsibly since IPO, and this necessarily means taking account of the relative importance and value of each key spend area in each year. As already mentioned, for us, the key spend areas are investment in organic and acquisitive growth, systems and people. So our investment in organic and acquisitive growth in FY 2024 was focused on supporting capacity in service lines that have proven resilience to us, and in seeding or enhancing new specialist service lines, and service lines where we have deep sector expertise and can therefore charge accordingly. Our investments are for long-term returns, and as I mentioned in overview, are exampled by our acquisition of RJA Consultants, which gives us deeper specialist reach into the U.K. property market.
Also our investment in class actions and international arbitration work, which are new to group specialist services and which are beginning to deliver complex, long-term, valuable mandates for us. Our investments in systems is exemplified by procurement and development of new AI-driven product. In our opinion, spend on suitable AI isn't optional. Our clients require and expect us to be at the forefront of innovation. Ultimately, we expect our investments here to be margin-enhancing. When it comes to our people, our in-period consideration of requisite balance in priority spend resulted in us returning to a year-end staff bonus in recognition of those who had made strong contributions to our outturn, in what was a challenging environment for parts of our business.
We also made further investments in our almost unique opportunity to use our structure as a differentiator in a competitive employment market, which is a really good segue into the next slide, please. The investment I've just alluded to is progressive investment in our incentivization program, our equity journey. The I in our DDI strategy focused on our ability to incentivize our people in a way that creates an attractive alternative to the competing LLP model. Nine years post-IPO, we are delighted to be able to say that 70% of our people are either shareholders or are in share schemes.
We compete in a sector in which potential overall reward for the best emerging and senior talent is really high, but we operate a model that enables us to reward our people with equity at an earlier stage on the career path than might otherwise be the case, and to spread that reward more widely than might be the case in a tightly held equity partnership structure. So in 2022, we launched our Restricted Share Award Plan, and we pointed it at senior leaders in the business. And what I mean by senior leaders in the business is partners and partner equivalents. The plan gives recipients immediate economic interest in the awarded shares, subject only to a five-year retention and non-dealing restriction. And the plan's been really well received, both internally and by actual and potential lateral hires.
So we see huge value in it as an almost unique way of attracting and retaining quality senior people. Our belief in the effectiveness of the plans, now reflected in, firstly, it being our only senior team share plan moving forwards, we won't be making any further LTIP awards. And secondly, in us recognizing the value of the plan in the context of our year-on-year balanced capital allocation. So in April, we announced that our EBT had been funded to acquire circa 1.9 million shares at GBP 1.26, mainly from IPO beneficiaries internally.... Those shares are currently warehoused in our EBT to satisfy imminent restricted share award plan awards, ensuring that as the group evolves, a meaningful number of shares remain in the hands of our key senior people.
The mechanism now gives us the flexibility, when appropriate, to fund the EBT to acquire and warehouse shares for award purposes, and that will facilitate further internal recirculation of stock. We do understand that any business with a high internal share ownership will suffer from overhang perceptions. In our case, this perception hasn't actually materialized. However, the mechanism that I've just spoken to will help, I think, offset the risk. The EBT will be matched over time by new share issuance, but at a lower level of overall dilution than is currently forecast. That's because, as mentioned, we are ceasing the LTIP award scheme. In summary, I think the plan makes our internal equity journey powerfully different, transparent, and really meaningful. That takes me nicely into the next slide, our people slide. Just a couple of points on the slide.
I think the slide pretty much speaks for itself, really. Our ongoing investment in strategy means that total group headcount increased by 6.7% to 1,536 people in FY 2024, and that includes 6.8% growth in fee earner headcount to 1,068 people. We were really pleased to make 159 internal promotions at year-end. As mentioned by me earlier, 70% of our people are now share or option holders, which is an increase of 5% on prior year. This further emphasizes our strategy of creating wider equity participation for our staff, which differentiates us from most of our competitors and generates alignment between our internal and external stakeholders.
We continue to make progressive steps in rollout of our internal diversity and networking groups, all very much in line with the people elements of our purpose as a business. Finally, I mention here our landmark annual internal conferences, which remain very popular, and there was a great atmosphere at those in late June and early July. Really, really positive events. Then finally, before I hand over to Neil, just moving on to the Responsible Business Report slide. As I've said before in presentation, like our clients, we absolutely recognize that business is a really important catalyst for change, and therefore, being a responsible business is a deliberate component of our purpose statement. You can see our purpose statement on the slide here, highlighted in yellow.
For us, our responsible business strategy is developed to positively impact the well-being of our employees and to help unlock potential in the communities in which we're based. I'm really proud of the progress that we've made since launching our responsible business strategy in October 2021, and that progress is necessarily measured, and it will be detailed in our fourth annual Responsible Business Report, which is to be released in late July. I'd actively encourage people to engage and read that report. We're not complacent in any way about our progress. We know that maintaining momentum is important, and we're certain that we can continue to enhance our community impact and make more meaningful progress in relation to objectives to help our environment. So on that note, Neil, over to you for some financial highlights.
Thank you, Rod. My first slide signposts some of the themes I wish to pick up with you today. I'm gonna start by highlighting the activity backdrop and my current thoughts on this. I'll then touch briefly on areas of investment in both fee generation, capacity, and costs, pick up on margin, and finish with a reminder of our strong cash generation and balance sheet. Let's start with my overarching CFO summary of the year. It's, it's as simple as this: we've invested in the group during a period of decreased activity, hence why this year's results are at the lower end of the forecast range that you may have been expecting from Gateley. However, we're still pleased with the group's performance, given the economic backdrop. So my next slide, key financial highlights.
So I'd like to pick out, as I said, activity at 83%, down from 89% last year, but for those that were with us in previous presentations, it was 83% in FY 2022. Our normal benchmark budgeted activity is 85%. So FY 2024 saw decreases in transactional areas, which impacts all of our platforms. This is well documented and highlighted by us in our H1 results presentation. Total contentious activity continued to increase during FY 2024 as the flip side to a transactional activity decrease, and as we come out of this transactional activity dip, I'm not expecting to see contentious activity decline. Quite the opposite in today's ever-increasingly litigious environment. Our time activity isn't the only measure of how busy we are across the group. We have many, but-...
For example, GSP measure claim instructions, whereas our house building sector measure the number of exchanges or completions. The good news is that all measures we looked at showed an increase in Q4. Q4 utilization was 92%, compared to 91% in Q4 of the previous year. So I'm expecting a much stronger organic growth performance in FY 2025. This will be H2 loaded as election-led changes come into effect, but it is starting to come through in mandates we're seeing. So what else can I pick up on this slide? Despite the activity headwinds, we've continued to invest as I said. A significant amount of investments in new work streams have commenced on the business services platform.
Not all of this revenue is revenue-generating at the moment, hence the investment focus of this announcement, which in cost terms, is people cost, and specifically in the case of the class action work, is also overhead investment in new IT systems. However, despite this cost out period, we are already showing an improvement in the contribution margin at the business services platform, even in FY 2024, from 24.4% to 30.2% in just one year. We see the business services platform as significantly profit-enhancing going forward, be that through higher charge-out rates for this specialist work or through success fees. The business services platform is also a significant driver behind the 30%+ growth in international work, which is proving lucrative for professional services, essentially law at the moment. We expect this to continue further from the investments we have made.
If we could move to my next slide, please. Highlighting the profit bridge slide, and I want to use this to emphasize the backdrop for cost and margin movements. So it's important for me to take a minute to focus on cost and margin. Acquisitions feature in this bridge, namely the acquisition of RJA in July 2023. The other key components are the reinstatement of the group bonus award again this year and the continued profit from interest income, a by-product of legal activity we're engaged in. The best way to look at the key metrics here, I find, is to look at cost as a percentage of fees. If we take people costs, we are 62.9% of fees in FY 2024, including the bonus. 60.4%, excluding the bonus, which compares to 59.5% people cost last year.
An increase of 0.9, despite the most illogical wage inflationary environment I can ever imagine experiencing. So FY 2024 is another well-managed year in our most significant cost. The bonus has decreased the margin by 2.6%, but as explained, notwithstanding the economic backdrop, it was necessary to reward both professional and support staff that have put in a tremendous shift over the last 2 years. Ironically, people often work harder and have to be exceptional when the economic conditions are not favorable. We've also taken a few difficult decisions this year to release people that are not performing or their markets are not support—do not support the level of resource we were geared up to. These costs are shown as exceptional in the income statement.
Our other operating overheads amount to 22.5% of revenue, compared to 22.2% of revenue the previous year. This proves that while inflation remains, we are offsetting year-on-year savings being made to ensure overall, we are not incurring significantly more overhead budget than we need to, to run the business. This is how we intend to maintain cost control going forward, seek out sensible centralization or consolidation opportunities that help pay for investments and any continued rises in operating costs. I believe we're at the bottom of the margin position, and all reasonable expectations are that we should improve steadily from here. Hopefully, by now, you are getting the impression that we have managed the business sensibly again this year on costs. This is in our DNA.
Looking forward, with a new government, with interest rates falling, with inflation falling, we remain cautiously optimistic for the short term but believe we have invested well for our long-term success. If we could turn to the cash flow slide, please. I'm pleased with our cash generation this year. We've focused specifically on cash generation and, and the collection of debtors, and I'm pleased with the reduction so far in the group. Our free cash flow is over 170% of PAT or 95% of adjusted PAT. This enables us to maintain our dividend, our strong dividend of 9.5p. Other cash outlays this year of significance to note have been the acquisition of RJA, the successful earn-out in GSP, and our support of the EBT to make the purchase of shares for the equity recirculation.
So these investments are all performing very well. I'm confident RJA will soon receive an ahead of expectation earn-out top-up for exceeding fee targets of GBP 4 million by almost GBP 1 million this year, and GSP has now achieved 80 million of consideration due to expected earn-out performance in line with pre-deal promises by vendors. Both businesses are operating above pre-acquisition expectations, or more importantly, ahead of the propositions as sold to us by their vendors. So just move to our balance sheets slide. So our balance sheet remains strong, with the most conservative policy around WIP in our peer group. We've improved our cash generation and have significant headroom remaining in our facilities ahead of the imminent renegotiation of our banking facilities at the end of this new financial year.
Our balance sheet is also light on risk, as there are very little intangible assets or goodwill, assets retained in the balance sheet due to the conditions around the consideration, the accounting treatment or consideration that's applicable to our treatment. So on that note, I'd like to hand back over to Rod.
Thanks, Neil. So just moving through to the summary and outlook slide, please. Just very briefly, really in summary, our FY24 outturn is definitely a product of the deliberately designed resilience in our business, and that resilience is derived from our focused investments since IPO in 2015 in our strategy to grow a business characterized by a unique diversity in service lines. We firmly believe that strong outcomes will continue to be gained from our measured period-on-period balanced investment in and between our service lines, our systems, and our people. And as you'll have gathered from what I said earlier, our underlying focus is on long-term margin improvement, and that's reflected in the nature of recent investments that we've made. Our investments in systems target operational efficiencies and efficiencies in service delivery.
Our investment in service lines and people is focused on quality, specialist, and/or deep sector expertise, staffed by quality teams attracted by our strategy to maximize the opportunity in our model, to incentivize our people in a different way, and our commitment to investing in this for all stakeholder benefit moving forwards. So in summary, we're really pleased to deliver these results, and as I said in overview, I am super proud of the team here at Gateley for doing so. As we enter FY 2025, we remain absolutely confident in our strategy, and we're optimistic in our outlook. Thank you for listening.