All right. Well, good morning. Thanks for everybody joining us this morning on this nice Monday morning in Sydney. My name's Brett Kelly, the Founder and CEO of Kelly Partners, and I've got with me Kenneth Ko, our Group CFO. Good morning, Kenny.
Hi, everyone.
Ken's tuning in from Hong Kong. Hey, Ken.
Hey, Brett.
Happy Chinese New Year, mate.
Thanks. Thanks, Brett.
All right. Well, without further ado, we'll try and whip through this presentation quite quickly and then take some questions. We've got a substantial presentation we've pulled together for all of our shareholders in the hope that as you continue with your shareholder journey with us, you can understand the business as an owner and feel comfortable about the long-term prospects of the business. There's about 80 pages for you to have a good read through. Our mindset is to be transparent, make the numbers very simple to understand, and have a level of consistency so that over time we can hold ourselves accountable and show you as a partner in the business, the progress that we're making quite simply. We'll just go to the first slide.
That's KPG in 10 seconds. We've developed this slide over time because we're a small and not necessarily meaningful company in the context of the ASX, where we're listed currently. This allows anyone who wants to follow the progress of the business to see that revenue continues to grow strongly. There still is a huge amount of opportunity in our industry. We've got very strong margins versus our industry here and versus the industry globally. We think 33%-35% is maintainable over the long-term journey of the business. That'll move up and down as we continue to make a large number of acquisitions over time. Underlying NPATA growth is very pleasing and strong. Our return on equity has always been a focus. You know, we're very careful.
This business has been bootstrapped essentially from scratch to IPO, and we're careful with making sure that we don't grow for its own sake, that we continue to have strong returns on the equity invested in the business by all shareholders. Net debt to underlying EBITDA has grown as we've just put into the business a bunch of acquisitions. But again, it's at very comfortable levels. Very strong cash flows in the business, and our cash conversion remains very high. In 10 seconds, it's easy for anyone to continually look at this slide that we prepare each set of results so that you can see progress in the business. Now in terms of per share growth, we like to show that recurring revenue per share continues to grow strongly.
We think that in low growth Western economies, strong growing recurring revenues will be very valuable over time, and that owner earnings, our focus at the parent level per share, and EPS per share continue to grow very strongly. We think that growth is achievable over a long period of time. We've introduced this slide in this presentation, inspired by Mark Leonard at Constellation Software listed in Canada. He has a strong return on invested capital focus, and he uses this table to add organic revenue growth so that he can get this return on invested capital plus organic revenue growth.
We think it's a meaningful way to think about the progress of the business and shows an average growth rate in return on invested capital plus organic growth that looks a lot like our 16-year CAGR, revenue CAGR for the business. It shows that we're converting our revenue growth into strong return on invested capital. Most notably there, you can see that since IPO, we've grown from the total invested capital of AUD 34 million to AUD 58 million at this half. We're maintaining strong returns on invested capital, while I think materially growing the amount of capital that we're able to deploy in the business. On the next page, we're sharing that our focus of programmatic acquisitions has been a focus since the inception of the business.
Started the business in June 2006, and we started to make acquisitions, you know, essentially from day dot. It was always a focus of the business to build a system to be able to continually acquire appropriate firms, bring them into the business, integrate them strongly at a high level of return, and continue to grow the business at those returns. I'm pleased that you can see that in five-year periods, we've been growing the cadence at which we, you know, have the ability to bring businesses into the group.
We listed in 2017 because we thought it would give a level of transparency and credibility to what we're doing, and that's certainly proven to be the case, so that the incoming interest in the group has grown and today is at the highest levels. You know, really every six months, it just increases the level of interest in joining the group and we're successfully bringing businesses into the group. You'll see that, 2016, we're only halfway through. We've done six acquisitions to date, and we've got a very strong pipeline, as we always have, to be fair, at a much higher level even today to continue to make acquisitions. As we've said many times before, we're not looking to grow by making a transformative large acquisition.
We're looking to grow by making numerous smaller acquisitions over a very long period of time. Hence the reference earlier to Constellation as being a good example of a group that's made 600 acquisitions over 25 years in many countries. On the next slide, you know, right since the IPO, we've shared this slide to demonstrate that there's been a 30% revenue CAGR from day one over now more than 15 years. We were told consistently that we would need to buy bigger businesses to keep growing, that we would not be able to continue to double, et cetera. What you can see is that there's a consistent pattern of growth and consolidation, growth and consolidation over time. We expect that we can continue to do this for a very long time.
There's a huge AUD 12.5 billion-plus addressable market in the SME accounting space. There's no one who has built their business from the ground up with this partner-owner driven, 51-49, with one brand and a centralized services system that has a track record of being able to double the business essentially consistently now five times in a row. The reason that we share this is while you know, history is not a predictor of the future, it's at least a bit of a wink to the future that you've got a team here who does know how to grow these types of businesses. Not every type of business, but at least these types of businesses.
On the next page, you know, because of who our investing heroes are, we've always had a clear line of sight to owner earnings and a real focus on growing owner earnings over time. You can see the CAGR on owner earnings is very strong. It continues to grow, which we're pleased with. It is at a head co level, the focus of the business. At a head co, our focus is owner earnings. At a sub co, at an operating business level, it's gross profit percentage. These are two, you know, idiosyncratic or, you know, unique measures of performance that we've always been very, very focused on.
Those terms come from, you know, books like William Thorndike's The Outsiders, in terms of knowing clearly what's the sort of one number to focus on for performance. On the next page, we have this slide. You know, we're obvious about where we get our inspiration from. This capital allocation table just simply comes out of the tremendous book, The Outsiders by William Thorndike. If you're a shareholder and you haven't read that book, you really won't understand the business to the depth that you could.
Again, we recommend reading with us because we believe that, you know, a group of people that reads a core diet, if you like, of outstanding books, are likely to build a culture of understanding each other's language. We're improving the earning power of our operating businesses. It's a clear focus. We're further increasing their earnings through tuck-in acquisitions. We're growing our existing accounting subsidiaries organically. We're growing our existing complementary businesses. We're making programmatic acquisitions. We'll make the occasional large acquisition. Now, you know, the top 100 firms in Australia out of 32,000 approximate firms in all of Australia in accounting, only 100 of them have revenues over AUD 4 million.
You know, we're not looking to do these big transformative acquisitions, but we won't say no if the right one turns up. Number five, repurchasing shares when they're available at a meaningful discount. Ken there, we should also probably add a meaningful discount, and we're not in blackout. Our head co team remains in blackout very often throughout the year. We're looking at numerous acquisition opportunities, many of which can be material to the group. We're very careful that we're not trading in our own shares, obviously, when we're in blackout or even if there could be a perception that we're in blackout. I'll whip through quickly and take as read most of the next section.
The business today, of which you own a share, there are 271 team members. There's 58 partners, 18 offices and 26 operating businesses. You can see this geographic spread of winning in tremendous markets that are strong and growing. I'm extremely pleased with the progress of the business today. In terms of mission, we exist to help our people, our private business owner clients, and the communities we work in be better off, healthier, wealthier and wiser. In terms of values, our values have been clear and set from day dot. You know, we want people that want the best for others. We do what we say, and we work as part of a team to make other people better off.
We know that if we do enough of that, then over time, we will all be better off as owners and in the business. In terms of vision in the operating businesses, to be the first choice advisor to private business owners in Australia. We think it's achievable. We're the only firm certainly in the top 25 firms that's 100% focused on servicing private business owners. That's not going to change. We think that we are strongly approaching this position in New South Wales, and we're looking to grow that position into Victoria and then into Queensland. In terms of strategy, we've laid out here clearly how we think. There's a great Harvard Business case, can you say what your strategy is?
It talks about knowing clearly your objectives, scope, and advantage. Our objective's to grow to be a top 10 accounting firm by size at some point. We've made that clear here as to who we service, what we provide, and where we're aiming to do that, and why we see ourselves as advantaged. Now, we've just shared here what we think isn't giving up too many of our trade secrets. We think we've got a lot more advantages than what we've listed here, for example. But we just want to bring you into our confidence and make sure you clearly understand that this is a very, very focused business pursuing a very deliberate strategy now for more than 16 years.
In terms of structure, our partner-owner driver model here is very unique, developed by us and, you know, let me just say it works. At a KPG level, we've published on our website and in our owner's manual, which I'd encourage you to read, that our business system powers our performance, builds our culture, and drives our competitive advantage. We are continuing to build dominant firms and seeding network effects. We generate superior cash flow and we believe we are proving that we're superior capital allocators. This is a value driven business that wants to make people better off. We do that by making, you know, wanting the best for others, doing what we say, and playing as part of a team. Our product is forward-looking financial advice.
We do that 24/7. We provide no surprises, and we are helping our clients make progress. We have in the middle there our progress pyramid. A lot of this we can talk about in much more detail one day, but I'm just sharing here with our team that we are a systems business, a systems driven business. In terms of our operating business model, on the next page, we're driven by our mission and values. We've got a clear focus on the SME market, and we believe focus is very determinative to long-term results. We think our structure is unique and we're proving the difference that it makes. Every business has been structured in that same model, essentially since inception. We've developed it in-house and refined it to a huge degree.
It makes our partners, our teams, and the business better off. Number four, we've got a centralized specialist back office management team. We've got a clear system, number five, for our clients. It's a branded solution. Number seven, we're growing network. We're growing a network and services. Our partner-owner driver model was shared before on page 19. You know, I guess if we want to be friends, don't call me and call our business a roll-up. It's not a roll-up. It's a 51-49 partner-owner driver. What that means is we're not rolling up all the responsibilities to head co while leaving the rights in the subs, which is a model we know doesn't work in professional services.
We've pioneered this 51-49 partnership where we deliver centralized management services that make businesses perform better and help our partners and our teams be better off, while providing a unique way of servicing clients that drives growth and margin over the long term. We've documented that, you know, to a degree we feel comfortable with. We think that distinction is hugely important to the long-term ability of this business to create value and not that well appreciated. Partly because we try not to tell everyone our insights too clearly on how to make these businesses amazing. In terms of the next page, people first, this is get the right people into the business and look after them in the right way.
Our employee NPS score is very, very high. We've just been certified as a great place to work the first time we entered. We're a certified B Corp, one of only four listed companies that are reflecting the values of our people in that designation. We've been awarded an employer of choice, and we're using our unique structure to continually make and grow the employee ownership of the head co. Every team member today should be, and we expect, is an owner of the business, and we started that at the IPO. In terms of COVID-19, I try not to talk about it, but the business is definitely recession proof as well as pandemic proof, which I think we've proven. We've done that by looking after our people.
We provided rapid antigen test kits for all of our offices, for all of our people. We've run a Detox Your Home workshop during lockdown. We've taken our people virtually to Rome. We've had Winter Olympians Steve Bradbury speak to our people. We've given a virtual tour to Australian Reptile Park, and there was a magic show. All of that was done to keep our people energized and engaged during what's been odd times with lockdowns and different things. I've just mentioned our employee NPS score, which we'll continue to report on, which shows that our people are strongly engaged and huge supporters of the business versus global workplaces. In terms of remuneration of our teams for the first time, I've published here some of our thinking about how we're differentiating the remuneration of our team members.
We are building the business in a way that makes our people better off. They can all have share ownership, strong learning and development, flexibility, and the growth of the business provides growth opportunities to our people. We think the top 25 accounting firms of which we're part in Australia, excluding the Big Four, are growing at about 2.5%, 2.4%. That lack of growth means that there can't be upward opportunity for their best people. We want to provide a high growth, strongly growing environment that attracts the great talent that exists in our industry to the business and know that when they become a partner, they get their base profit distribution, their profit share, KPG stock.
They can own part of the growing wealth businesses, our investment fund, and also own part of our portfolio of properties. What that means is that a partner that is with Kelly Partners for 25 years will be much wealthier over time than they can be in any other accounting firm in Australia. That's an example of using our unique structure to make our people, you know, strongly better off at employee level and at partner level. The next page is about focus. Why are we talking about that?
Well, when Warren Buffett and Bill Gates are asked at the same time, what's the one thing that makes the most difference in business? They both in unison said, focus. We want all of our partner owner shareholders to know that our focus on private business owners is not going to change. It is the thing that is driving depth in our understanding, depth in our systems, depth in our processes, and depth in our brand penetration that is allowing us to attract great people and continually grow our amazing client base. The client base is frankly incredible. We've broken out the split between services, accounting and tax, wealth management, mortgage and finance, and special opportunities to underlie that this business is a recurring revenue business. And, you know, virtually to 100% the case.
In terms of client groups, we've grown our client groups by 21%. We think over time that will drive strong network effects. We'll talk about that more in the future. We're in a strong growth phase of bringing amazing clients to the group and servicing the hell out of them to make them better off. We believe that the opportunities that will provide us over time will be very, very significant. Our NPS score is very high. The global average for our industry is basically in negative numbers. So we're pleased that out of a good number of responses of our top 20% of clients, we've had 25% of what we think are our top 20% of clients respond, and that's a very high NPS score.
In terms of experience, we've used the lockdowns to go and refit many of our offices and the government program of 50% instant asset write-offs to create the best environments that exist in our industry for people that want to get the best from themselves in our profession. As people return to our offices, North Sydney will have been refitted. This is Wollongong on screen that's been refitted. Penrith is being refitted and grown. We're building a new office in Melbourne for the growing firm there, and a new office in Canberra for that new firm so that we will have environments that will stand the test of time over the next decade to attract the best talent in the industry.
In terms of risk, we just want you to know that there's a very famous individual who says that first job of a CEO is risk management, chief risk officer. I keep my eyes very clearly on the risk of the businesses with our team, and we've just simply restated there the risks that were outlined in our prospectus so that you are aware of them. Understand this presentation in the context of every six months, it's a way that I can get our team to refocus on the core activities and the future of our business. It's, you know, it's a very worthwhile exercise. In terms of brand, our brand continues to grow in strength and resonance to our target audience, which we think is important.
We think a branded professional services offer will do a whole range of things for the businesses. Primarily, it will attract really talented people that want to be part of what we're doing, and it will also continue to continually attract, you know, the best driven, successful private business owner clients in the market. We're restating on the next slide our growth targets of 5% organic and 5% acquired for 10% per annum.
I'm very often asked, hey, Brett, if you've got a 30% CAGR but a 10% growth target you keep talking about, you know, how does that work? I say, well, we're in the business of under promising and over delivering. We'd like to think we can do 10% every year for a very long time, and we may well do better than that. In terms of succession, we're specialists in succession. We look at the market and we know that there are more than 10,000 firms that need our services and our expertise, our very deep and proven expertise in succession in these firms. We're increasingly getting firms with partners in their forties wanting to join us, which is interesting.
Part of the mix always is that there are older partners who are looking for the best succession that they can have for this firm that's really, you know, one of their babies that they've often put in a lot of time to and want to make sure that the firm that it joins is going to be the best steward of that firm, and that's what we aim to be. I think in more than 50 transactions now, we've proven that very strongly. I'm not sure there's anyone else that can point to that track record. In the next section, I'd love to share with you our revenue growth. We know that a growing business is important to attracting great talent, and so our focus is to continue to grow in this way.
We've come up with this scoreboard inspired by a business called CBIZ out of the U.S., which is a large listed accounting group. They had a really nice scoreboard, so we've helped ourselves to that. We're sharing it with you here. Here's internal accounting, 5.1% growth, which we think is terrific. Internal complementary. Just on that 5.1%, on nearly AUD 60 million plus of revenues we expect this year, at 5%, we're growing, we're virtually growing a top 100 firm every year organically, in its own right. Then we're growing internal complementary services, and we're making acquisitions. We think that we're the first choice acquirer for an accounting firm run by a driven owner, who really cares about his people and clients, or her people and clients.
You can see the market coming to us in this space. Now, we're not going to do that every half year, those sorts of numbers, but we may well. We'll just continue to be focused on bringing people into our group that share our values and our mindset around how to grow. Our compound annual growth rate since 2006 is 30%. Our earnings per share growth since IPO is 10.6%. We expect that we can continue to grow strongly over time. We've said it a few times, you know, the aim is in every five-year period to prove out those numbers. In terms of revenue growth, we've got the breakout here on the next page.
Over the last five years since IPO, our averages, I think, you know, are higher than that 10% target, which is great, it's 15.6%. We've listed again our criteria on page 36. It hasn't changed. I'm not sure that it will ever change. We're looking for people that share our values. People that care more about other people than themselves. They're not me, me, I, I. They want to do the right thing by other people. They'll do what they say, and they'll play as part of our team. No more than five regional offices. It's pretty clearly spelled out there. Acquisitions for this financial year to date are clearly laid out here. Next page has some detail of those acquisitions. I'd like to spend some time in page...
In part three to talk about, you know, what we've never spoken about publicly before. We'll show you just a little hint here of the way we think. You know, unless a company has some kind of economic moat, it's hard to understand how it's going to create value in the long term. We've been thinking very hard about economic moat since the inception of the business, but I hope you can see in terms of the way we go about doing what we do. On page 41, we've shared, you know, nine sources we think of moat building, and you can take from us calling this out that we spend a lot of time thinking about each of those dots and how we're actually building those moats.
I'd like to share with you in this next slide, something that's often not understood by people we speak to. Our firms agree to pay 6.5% of their revenues for our central management team and 2.5% for IP. That 9% is reinvested into the businesses continually in this flywheel. I had a very fantastic individual from right across the other side of the world send me an email and say, I can see this flywheel that you're building. Now, Jim Collins, in Good to Great, talks about flywheel effect, and he says it's powered on the one hand by your mission to exist to help our people and our private business owning clients and our communities be better off. On the other side, you have to fuel it.
We've got a very strong mission. We've got a way to continually fuel these businesses. The reason it's important is that most chartered accounting firms are structured as partnerships. What that means is that the partners, if they earn a dollar and there's two partners, they take 51 cents each. They certainly don't reinvest 9% of profits continually into strengthening out the moat and growing those businesses. We believe that over the long term, this 9% continually being reinvested and intelligently moat building in the group is already and will continue to have a very profound effect on the future prospects of the business. It's a very unique part of our structure, and it is a huge source of competitive advantage.
When you consider our margin, you need to say that if at the practice level we make 33%-35%, and we're paying our partners 10%-15%, some number, and we're paying 9% to continually reinvest in these businesses, then there's a huge amount of good stuff going on in these businesses. We aim on the next screen, we're just calling out that 44% of our businesses now qualify in their own right as top 100 firms by size. While you might see dots on a map, we are trying to build each of those firms into top 100 firms in their own right, and we're already halfway there.
Now, that's in the context of the fact we keep adding sites, new places where we know we can grow, and we know in the short term, those firms won't necessarily be top 100 firms. Most of our firms are very dominant firms in their locations, and we think that's important to understand. On page 44, we've been cheeky enough to sort of give you a sense of where we see our value proposition. We think in this day and age of technology and the quality of our people, that we can match anyone in the industry for technical expertise and resource. We believe that we can be the most attractive place for somebody who wants to work in a chartered firm on private clients to work and be a part of a real team.
We believe that we can maintain, as we grow through our local structure, a personal client relationship with all of our clients. That is, I think, a unique way of thinking about the business. If you want more detail on what we're trying to do there, grab a book called The Founder's Mentality. This is a terrific book. Have a read of this book. What it talks about is how do you become a large business while keeping your insurgent mentality. Don't get large and bureaucratic, don't get large and fall for the sort of behaviors that you see in your industry that you're not excited about. Don't lose your mission to want to make a difference and change, but become large and keep that insurgent mentality.
This slide just gives you a little bit of a hint as to the way we think about that. For any one of the shareholders that reads that book, I think it'll resonate very, very strongly with sort of what we're on about. Part four, Quality Shareholders. We believe with Lawrence Cunningham, who wrote this book, Quality Shareholders, that as a management team, we should put in a huge amount of effort. There's 80 pages here to speak to that today in building the right type of shareholder base. We've been listed for five years now. We've met a lot of investors or a lot of people that deploy capital in public markets and, you know, not everyone's for everyone.
Really what Cunningham points out is that you need to be deliberate about the types of people that you want as shareholders. I'm very, very pleased and frankly humbled by the quality of the people that have chosen to be investors and go on this journey with us, building a business that can really make a difference and change the way the game is played in our industry. Our owner's manual is getting a bit of an update, but it's the current one is there. If you haven't read it, please have a read. You'll see our principles very clearly laid out on page 48. It won't take much to work out where these ideas have come from, and we make no apology for trying to find the wisest people that we can that can teach us.
We want to be humble enough to just point out, you'll see book covers on slides because we don't pretend any of these great ideas come from us. We are shameless about meeting amazing people and being students, really reading their books. You know, a book that's been read should look like this, and it should have lots of tags on it, and it should be underlined and highlighted and look like somebody's really tried to eke some insight out of it. We should go and try and apply it in our business. We're continually just trying to share with you as a shareholder really what we're on about. On page 49, there's a tremendous book called The Checklist written by a surgeon.
We're just using these checklists straight out of The Outsiders, and we're calling out here that we think that a very large scale buyback at one time or over time, if the opportunity is ever presented to us where we're not in blackout, where we have the capital that's better used in a buyback than other situations, then we will act as the outsiders have. We will not hesitate to own as much of this business as we can. But we don't expect our good long-term holders to offer that opportunity to us too often. We also noticed that we haven't had a very strong focus on tax.
Our own, the taxes that we pay, but we've called that out in this presentation, and we are just trying to tick off these checklists. If we go to the next page, another checklist. As an owner, give us the feedback, but we're just trying to show you where we get our ideas and how we think about what we're doing. On page 51, if you haven't read this book, read Christopher Mayer's 100 Baggers. It does a couple of things for us. It just helps us continue to focus on the very long term. What's tremendous in that book is that it points out that on average it takes 23-25 years as a listed company to be a 100 bagger. It's easy for me to help our team.
You know, we think fundamental second of focus is being long-term. This book's been great to share with a lot of our people and our senior team to get them to think long-term about the business. On the next page, we've shamelessly taken a checklist from 100 Baggers and said, Righto, we need to tick these boxes and make sure we continue to tick the boxes. You know, part of us sharing this is you might think that we're speaking to you, but we're not. We're speaking to ourselves and you as a partner in our business. First, we must hold ourselves accountable to good ideas and consistently focus on the things that matter. We'll just share that with you in these presentations. In terms of share count, we'll put a slide in here.
We expect to continue to do. We expect that our slide that we shared a couple of years ago to double business by FY 2024, we're well on our way to doing that. We'll continue to only use cash-based performance payments for our people. We don't use exec options. Our share count's down to an even 45 million. We're not intending now, and never say never, but it would take an extraordinary situation for us to issue shares. And that protects your investment and mine as an equity owner in the business and all of our people and anyone who's had the good sense to be an equity owner. In terms of tax, we think it's important to pay tax.
We think our sector in terms of the small and medium sized enterprises that can't move their profits around the world pay an undue level of tax. We're just making clear here that that'll be a focus of ours to continue to make sure we're paying the right amount of tax. We think there's a strong opportunity for the business as the world moves to more ethical investing. We've always tried to run this business in an ethical way, and we believe that we meet very clearly the criteria as an ethical investment. We know that as the market cap grows over time, there'll be a more and more weight of dollars come behind the company because we meet the criteria that I think many, many owners of equities are looking for.
We're currently undergoing the net zero certification process. It's long and drawn out. We'll see how we go. It's not really a difficult thing for a business like ours to do. We'll make sure we tick that box, and we're doing everything we can to run the business in the best way that we can, for all stakeholders. Now, I'd love to hand over to Ken to go through the financial section of the presentation. I want to thank Ken for all of the work that he's done with his team to get these results out so swiftly. I'm really proud of the fact that we've been able to get these results out early in the reporting cycle. It's a testament to you, Ken, and your team.
I'll hand over to you, Kenny, to share what I think are a really great set of numbers.
Thanks, Brett. Hi, everyone. Great to see everyone again. I'll go through the financial section now. Slide 57. This is our highlight slide. I actually won't go through any of the numbers here because most of these numbers we will cover off in the later slides, but please feel free to go through this in your own time. It contains all our key stats and metrics and is in a format that we've always published consistent with previous years. On the next slide, this is a republish of the annual numbers, again, in the same table from IPO to FY 2021. Again, we'll leave this for you to review. Slide 59, our income statement. As Brett has covered off previously, our business has performed extremely strongly for the half.
Revenue is up 24.5% to AUD 30.9 million, and it's driven by both organic revenue growth of 7.5% and acquisitions that we've completed last year and this year of 17%. We're extremely pleased of this as it exceeds our targeted annual organic growth of 5% and acquired growth of 5%. Our EBITDA margin is consistent at 33.2%. Last year was 33.3%. Our underlying NPATAttributable to shareholders has grown 18.3% to AUD 3.3 million. I just wanted to highlight two line items here that is, has grown disproportionately to our revenue growth, and they are amortization and income tax. In terms of amortization, that has increased because of the increase in customer relationship intangible assets that has come about from our increased acquisition activities.
Hence there's an increase in that amortization expense line. In terms of our income tax, that has increased because our group is on track to exceed AUD 50 million in revenue this year, and hence will cease to be a base rate entity, and our tax rate has increased. It will hence move up from 26% to 30% for the year. On the next slide, here is a reconciliation of our statutory NPAT to our underlying NPATA, which we believe to represent the true performance of the parent entity and the business. Here we deduct any non-recurring income and expense that we would consider one-off and non-recurring in nature. Again, I'll leave this for you to review yourself. On slide 61, this is our trinity.
You can see on the top there and on the bottom left, our WIP and debtor days add up to 57.1 days, which is in line with our benchmark 55 days metric. Our cash conversion is at 88.9%, and our revenue growth we've previously covered. On our balance sheet, you'll see on the graph there, as I've said just now, our lockup is consistent with prior periods. Our group return on equity is outstanding at 42.2%. Our parent return on equity at 28.7%. Again, looking at our table there summarizing our balance sheet, you can see that there's a significant increase in our intangibles and an increase in our borrowings and both as a result of the increased acquisition activity in the current half.
In terms of our profitability, our operating businesses continues to perform extremely profitably compared to our industry. You can see the accounting industry is at 19%, whereas for the half, our accounting businesses, our operating businesses are generating 33.5% in EBITDA margin. I want to note here that excluding the India acquisitions, our EBITDA margin is actually at 34.7%, which we're very pleased about. Again, this speaks to our circle of competence in, running and operating accounting businesses, which continues to be our focus. On the next slide, gross margin. This is a new slide that we've put in. As Brett said earlier, 100 Baggers, which is a book we really like, notes the importance of gross margin.
There's a quote here, high gross margins are the most important single factor of long run performance. The resilience of gross margin pegs companies to the level of performance. I'll actually read a quote from the book, which I reread over the weekend, the gross margin section. Here it says, that part about pegging means that if a company started with a high gross profit margin, it tended to keep it. Conversely, when it started off with a low gross profit margin, it tended to stay there as well. You can see there our gross margin has stayed consistently high at 60-odd%. Whereas, you know, we've put here some of our other accounting business listed comparables, and they're operating obviously at a lower gross margin.
Again, this proves our leading operating business model and speaks to our moat in operating our accounting businesses in a way that generates high profitability. On the next slide here, cash flow. Our cash flow from operations has increased 12.9% to AUD 9.2 million. We have a strong conversion, cash conversion of 88.9%. But note that this year it's slightly lower than what it was last year because of the lockup, relating to our India acquisitions, which contributed less than the full year's revenue. On the next slide, I've actually put an example, which shows you the accounting and mathematics behind it, which I'll leave to you to review, how that all works. Back onto the cash flow slide.
There's a table here reconciling the cash from operations to free cash and then to the change in net cash per our statutory accounts. Our net debt drawn has obviously been quite big this half year to complete our acquisitions. I also want to state here that we've also repaid a lot of debt. If you add in the scheduled debt reductions and the additional debt repayments, we've repaid a total of AUD 5.2 million for the half. Onto the debt and liquidity slide. As per what I said previously, we have put on more debt this half to fund our increased acquisition activity. At the same time, our group remains amply capitalized with AUD 10.3 million of headroom in both cash and facility limits. We're also repaying our acquisition debts fast, over a four-five-year term.
We don't see an increase in the gearing, which is currently at 1.32x EBITDA to be an issue. In terms of net debt per partner, we have continued to put on more partners this half year, with three partners joining us from acquired businesses, one new partner promoted internally and one recruited externally. While our number of partners have increased to 57, our net debt per partner has also increased to AUD 415K per partner. Again, that is a result of the increased debt in the business from completing our acquisitions. In terms of our parent and NCI, this is a question we often ask in terms of the disproportion between our NCI earning, parent and NCI earnings compared to our equity interests. Again, I'll leave this to you to review.
That's just a reconciliation back to our 51-49% interest. In terms of our dividends, we have grown our dividends more than 10% per annum since the IPO. In the half year, we paid one final and three special dividends related to FY 2021, so that our total dividends paid for FY 2021 is AUD 0.0702 per share. We continue to pay a monthly dividend this year that we've increased 10%. Last year, we paid AUD 0.0033 per share monthly dividend. This year, we continue to pay AUD 0.00363 cents per share per month. We again expect to pay a final and special dividend post the completion of the financial year.
Kenny, just while we're on that .
Yeah.
We get asked, you know, why do we pay monthly dividends? We pay all of our operating partners monthly, their share of profits. You know, my theory always was that we should pay our external partners in the same way that we pay our internal partners. Hopefully nobody's upset to get sent money every month. We think it's a good way to keep discipline in the business and make sure that we're treating both our group of partners, internal and external, in the same way.
Thanks, Brett. The next three slides, it's the first one is a reconciliation of NPAT to operating cash flow, which again, I'll leave for you to review. The next two slides is a republish from the FY 2021 results presentation. Our cash flow from operations since IPO, as well as a slide explaining the seasonality between the first half and the second half, which again, I'll leave for you to review. I'll hand it off back to Brett now in terms of the outlook for the business. Thanks, Brett.
Thank you, Kenny. So very quickly, I just want to get to slide 75, and it might look like a strange slide unlikely to see in most listed company presentations. We believe that ideas lead to actions, and actions lead to habits, and habits are your destiny. Essentially, the ideas that populate the business are critically important long term in terms of what's actually going to happen. During the last 12 months, both of these gentlemen sent me an email out of the blue from the other side of the world. They may not realize, although I have shared it with them both, that made a big difference to me personally.
You know, when you start a business in a small room from scratch in 2006, you often have people telling you you're crazy and you don't know what you're doing, and that what you're doing can never work. When two really high quality people come to you and Lawrence Cunningham's particular contribution, he wrote The Essays of Warren Buffett, which I'd read numerous times, and then he's the deputy chairman of Constellation Software, probably the greatest decentralized programmatic acquiring business in the world, AUD 40 billion market cap. What Lawrence said to me just you know resonated so much. He just said, keep focused.
Making many small deals. Which is what we've been doing and what often people have said to me, no, Brett, you need to buy bigger, sexier things. Never really understood those people, our mindset and why we think what we do, what we do makes so much sense. There's a great book by Mohnish Pabrai called The Dhandho Investor, and each of our small deals, none of those deals can blow the business up, and that's really important. We're not doing anything transformative, we're just doing. We're bringing the right people into the business in a consistent way over a long period of time. Lawrence has been a real inspiration in that sense, and you know, very important.
With Will Thorndike, his book, The Outsiders, which, you know, as you can tell, we really love. We think makes a lot of sense and that we aspire to, you know, behave in that way. You know, from the other side of the world, he said to me, I can see that you've got this flywheel and just keep turning that flywheel. Think about, you know, building the moats that continually, in a friction-free way, build that flywheel and do it for a very long time. Just want to call out both of those gentlemen, their you know, eminent scholarship and their encouragement to keep us moving in the right direction.
Because we believe focus and a long-term approach is so critical to ultimate outcomes over time, you know, it's really important that you get around people that can encourage you, inspire you, and challenge you. I'm just calling out those two gentlemen for doing that. Thank you. On slide 76, you know, we had this plan that we shared. You know, one of the Outsiders traits is that they don't share guidance with Wall Street, but we were under a lot of pressure at one point. People couldn't really understand what we're doing, so we tried to make it really clear and put forward our five-year plan. That has helped people to sort of better understand what we're doing. You know, we're giving a little scorecard there.
We're well ahead of that scorecard. We expect to remain well ahead of that scorecard and continue to grow the business. Hopefully it's becoming more, you know, more obvious in this fifth year as a public company, what we're doing. What are we doing? Well, we're accelerating the business at the moment. We're doing that comfortably without putting any stress into anyone or any part of the business in particular. We'll grow out the NPATA, as we promised in that green there, and we look to get to a leadership position of AUD 80 million plus in our revenue with a 100% focus on private business owners with a 100% long-term mindset, to make our people, our clients and our communities better off.
We think that the opportunity now is stronger than it ever has been. We've included a slide on our complementary businesses. Again, that's just a nudge to, you know, to some of these other places that you can see some growth coming through in terms of private wealth finance, general insurance, alternative assets and property. You know, there's some 20-year growth to come out of all of those places. I'd like to thank everyone for tuning in today and we've got a little text message way that you can put questions in and we're happy to take any questions that anyone has. Thank you.
You can go to the bottom of your Zoom setup and type in any question into that Q&A section, and we're happy to take any questions. For Johan, thank you for your question. When do you plan to enter the Queensland market? I was speaking to a firm actually just, I think it was maybe Tuesday last week or Wednesday. We've got a lot of interest from Queensland, and as I said to them, our plans in Queensland are determined by when a firm with the right people want to join us. We think that may well be imminent, but we're not in a rush as always. We just want to meet the right people. To Joris, complementary businesses are maturing and new ones added.
Do you expect higher contribution to revenue from these? Yeah, we do. Joris, we expect our complementary businesses to grow over time. They're definitely not our focus. We don't see them as necessarily offering any. Certainly no more opportunity than the accounting firms that are part of the business. We know that they're a way to service our clients and partners and communities. We'll continue to grow those businesses in a moderate way over time. Low priority question. Michael, if you remember, can you repeat what you said immediately after, please don't call KPG a roll-up. It's not a roll-up, it's a partnership model. If you can't recall, no matter. While I can't recall the exact wording, I sensed it was something seminal. It's a good call, Michael.
I've explained to many, many people, being an accountant, a roll-up is where you have a head co and you buy other businesses and you roll up what tends to be the debt and the responsibilities to the head co, while leaving the sub co often with no responsibilities and a bunch of rights. We just see that as not a partnership model. What I mean by partnership, I mean in the way that that word is typically defined. There's no alignment of interest. It just doesn't make sense. We think that this 51-49 genuine partner owner-driver model makes much more sense because it creates more alignment of responsibility and rights.
It's a very deep document that people sign that shows clearly what our values are, how we will operate the businesses, and what the long-term plans are for that business with KPG as a permanent long-term owner. I guess permanent is long-term. And so, you know, it is a very different way to structure. It's the only. We're the only group that we're aware of in the world that has that structure. But we would point to Austbrokers and Steadfast as having done numerous acquisitions in the general insurance broking space to very great effect. When we listed, we'd said to people, we want to be the Austbrokers of the accounting industry in Australia. You know, I think they did 60-odd deals in insurance broking and we're well on our way to that number.
We think that that's important. It's a very, very important distinction and, you know, critical to what we're doing, the way we think. Another question there, how do you know a partner won't go rogue in the future and damage the group's reputation? You know, to Wei Min who's asked that question, that's always an issue in any business that has people in it, which is every business. You know, the values and behavior of our people are really important. And we continually do quality reviews every year on each partner. The Institute of Chartered Accountants does that. Accountants does that once every seven years. We're doing that every year. And we quarterly train, and we regularly monthly meet with all the partners.
We think we're a good chance of, you know, of avoiding that. You know, it's certainly a risk in any business where there are people. Fiona's asked a question, can you talk about the investment side of the business, the purpose management of criteria, for example? It's a great question. We established Kelly Partners Investment Office, which you can find on the Internet under kpinvestmentoffice.com.au. I think that's the domain name. We based that on McKinsey's investment office. Many years ago, McKinsey were having issues with their partners. Obviously, they advised largely listed companies and they had issues with partners trading stock with clients, I believe that was part of the issue. They set up their own investment management group.
We believe that the best way to have the best partners in the business long term is to make sure that they can earn more working with us than they could anywhere else. We essentially started a partners fund where we allowed some key clients to invest and then some other people who've been introduced typically by clients to us to invest in that fund. That fund is to provide equity to people who are part of our network and relationships to help them grow their businesses. It's a special opportunities fund, and I'm pleased that that's actually going very well. The gentleman running that fund, Anoop Kalra, I first met when he led Ellerston Capital's investment in the pre-IPO round of Kelly Partners.
His background includes time at Perpetual, Caledonia, Ellerston, and I think he's one of the leading investors in Australia in that market space. That's particularly exciting. There's more information on the website. What that means is that we've got a full service cradle to grave multi-generational service offer for our clients, and we do think that funds management area offers some opportunity for the group over time. We are also acquiring the offices of many of our businesses where that makes sense, and that will be held in a multi property fund so that our partners can own their offices. If they had their own firms, they'd be able to own property.
This will give them the opportunity to own a portfolio of the group's properties, which we think again, makes our partners better off over time. We may allow some clients to invest in that, in those offices as well. We're building out that multi-office property fund at the moment. Ultimately, we will have a value fund to manage partners' money and other people who are interested in owning the world's best businesses for a long time. There's a 25-year play there, which I hope that answers some of your questions, Fiona. Tristan's asked a question. Congratulations, Brett and team. Have you looked at ECIT in Norway as programmatic acquirer of accounting firms?
If so, do you have any lessons learned? Tristan, we have looked at ECIT, and we think it's a good business. They've got a focus on accounting and IT. We may one day, you know, do more in that space but at the moment, we see the opportunity in accounting as being huge. ECIT is structured quite differently. They have a two-class share structure that allows them to raise more capital, take on more debt, and make much larger acquisitions while maintaining control of that business. We've been urged by some investors in Sweden, and Norway, and Finland to look at the structure that we operate under. I believe we're going to meet the senior management of ECIT imminently to find out more about what they do. That looks like a good business.
Scott, thank you both for the presentation. How large is the overall opportunity in Hong Kong for acquisitions and growth? We're not particularly interested, Scott, at all in acquiring firms in Hong Kong or China. I consider the values difficult to align with the group's values and the opportunity here in Australia and in other markets is so significant as to not warrant that attention. You know, we just believe home games are easier to win in the short term or certainly the medium term than away games. Chris, great question, w hat happens if I'm suddenly incapacitated? There's a partner in the business who knows that he's the person if anything happens to me for a short time or long time.
There's a documented succession plan in all of the partnership agreements and has been for many years. We have a very strong team that while you may see me and, you know, I might front the business and explain what we're on about, and it may be true that I bring some skills and abilities to the business that others may not have. I'll leave that for other people to judge. I think we're setting up a set of ideas, processes, procedures, and a way of going about business that is duplicatable, scalable, and inspired by businesses like Constellation to teach other people and be very much able to grow and definitely not be key person dependent in any way, shape, or form. Julian, congratulations on the results.
How does KPG ensure the quality of their services remains high and uniform between the different KPG offices? That's a great question, Julian. We have a very detailed and extremely rigorous process of integration and of quality review. The Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand commits to review chartered accounting firms in Australia once every seven years. Our checklist is their process plus at least 50%, and we are doing that every year on every single partner. The real question is, what is the Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand doing to ensure any quality full stop in our industry, hence the opportunity.
I know we're doing an enormous amount of training, development and detailed quality review, which, you know, we think again, with that eye to risk management, ensures that we are going to continue to have very high quality services right across the businesses. We believe that quality is an absolute foundational value of this business in everything that we do. Hopefully you can see that in the quality of materials that we produce and the way we go about everything that we do. Akash, you always feel energized after hearing us speak. Can you give some details on the 9% reinvestment on how we deploy the money? It's a great question, Akash, so I'm glad you're energized.
We believe that we are energetic people in a slovenly industry or a not very energetic industry. We think that that is a huge advantage. I'm glad that you can pick that up. Look, I have to tone down my enthusiasm for these events such that we don't set expectations that it gets anyone too excited. I think Akash knows me well, and anyone that's met me knows that we're very quietly determined people that see an enormous opportunity here. We're having a lot of fun going about doing what we're doing. In terms of that 9%, 6.5% is on the management of the businesses.
We take out anything that's extraneous and that does not relate to the looking after a team or servicing of a client from these operating businesses. We do here at the head co we manage mission, vision, values, strategy, structure. They're the core foundational elements of a business that we don't think are defined or managed in any businesses that we're aware of in the market that we're targeting in our industry. We get above that, and we look at people, process, clients, financials, digital and IT, brand, growth and succession. We invest heavily in those in each of those areas. There's 2.5% in on IP. A lot of that's going in at the moment to a program of digital and brand building.
We'll give some more color to that over the time. We don't like to tell people too much about how we're investing, but you can be assured that we're investing deeply for the future. What we see is a strong 10-20 year future. We are thinking about not just what we can invest in today, but what we can invest in that has a material impact on the business long term and allows us to compete in any market that we choose to enter in a very interesting and unique way. I hope that gives you some sense. Leon, not a question, but a comment.
Every time I see an update confirms what a great job the team are doing to build long-term amount of growth, and I intend for my children to inherit my shares, hopefully in the very distant future. I hope that's a very distant future as well, Leon, that you have good and long-term health for you, me and everyone else. I appreciate your comment. You know, we take our role seriously as stewards of people's capital, but also as trying to provide, you know, a good example of what can happen if you do the right thing for a long time, and the compounding effect of doing things in our way, in our view, in the right way.
You know, our heroes are really exemplars of what is the compound return, not just financially, but in terms of, you know, health, wealth, and wisdom and a great life of doing things the right way for a long period of time. Kieran, one of the main emphasis in the book, The Outsiders, that lead to Outsized Returns was management's emphasis on share repurchases. How do you think about capital allocation in this sense, and decide if capital should be allocated to repurchases versus acquisitions? It's a great question. We think that our return on acquisitions is very, very large. And we think that our return on share repurchases will be similarly large. It's always a battle of, you know, what capital we have available to do each and both.
Most importantly, we wanted to make people aware of how many shares we have on issue and to be very clear internally and externally that using other people's equity, in fact, you know, essentially by allocating other people's shares to management or acquisitions just long term doesn't make sense. We can show you the numbers, and we may well publish that in the future. We think that acquisitions make the most sense in terms of return for the capital that we have. There's a way that we can make those acquisitions with little equity involved. We're also super keen on stock repurchases with one eye on you know what's the impact on liquidity generally.
You know, one of our heroes, you know, always thought that if you have great quality shareholders, you shouldn't try and steal their shares with a purchase, with a share repurchase when markets are dislocated. We're probably clearer than you know, than he might have been over time, that if there is an opportunity to buy our shares at a large discount in a time where we're not blacked out, then we will be in their boots, and all. Be assured, that's the large acquisition that I'd be very pleased to make at some point. Michael, from a key person risk standpoint, does the business need to become somewhat de-Bretted? Look, Michael, I couldn't have done more to make the business de-Bretted, frankly.
What you've got is, you know, 20-plus decentralized businesses run by tremendous partners who day-to-day are running those businesses using our system and insights to make themselves, their clients, our teams better off. You know, it's embarrassing to the degree that we're decentralized. I wouldn't say that I have no value. But you can be assured that from the beginning of time, this business has been built to not be key person dependent, and I think we've proved that. I have an ability to communicate and explain things that others don't have.
You hear me doing that from time to time, but you know, I'm doing everything I can to make clear that this business is a team effort in every sense. Scott, great question. What books are on my reading list at the moment? Well, you know, to give an indication of how much I think 100 Baggers is a good book. I've just bought a whole bunch of them to give to our services team so that they can all read it. I think that's a tremendous book. I followed, as I often do, The Bloodline.
I'm reading a book at the moment called Invest Like a Dealmaker, I think it's called, by Chris Mayer as well. I was reading over the weekend, which is terrific. I like that book as well. You know, always be learning, always be reading is pretty much the way we think about things. I'd also like to call out Oddbjørn who runs REQ. We published a quarterly shareholders letter today, which has some of his content. He's a terrific writer, so look him up and I'm really impressed with a bunch of the stuff that he shared. Cameron's question, when you talk about recurring revenue, do you actually have contracted multi-year revenue streams, or is it just recurring in nature?
Well, Cameron, I wouldn't describe it as just recurring in nature. We describe it as recurring in nature in that we know that most people will stay with their accounts for between 10 and 30 years if you're any good. We think we're a little bit better than average, certainly a little bit better than any good. So we expect that revenue to turn up every year for the next 30 years. But no, we're not like Otis Elevator Company where we've got an installed lift, you know, with a facilities contract. Although I'd like to think that that either deal you've got really depends on doing a good job, and certainly that's our focus.
Another question there from Wei Min, how many people and who are involved in identifying vetting acquisitions? That's a great question. We have an acquisition team that is based on the outside is basically me with a yellow pad and a pen, helped by Kenneth, who's our CFO, and Joyce, who is our General Counsel. Joyce was our first employee team member and is still with the business. That goes, you know, we have a database of about 18,000 firms that we continually contact, and we have been doing that for 15 years.
We have hundreds of firms that would consider, in my view, joining us and do just tend to pop up and say, hey, Brett, remember we spoke five years ago? In one case, we've recently done a deal that was 14 years that it took to get that deal done. We don't need, nor do we intend, to take that acquisition piece and spread it over a huge headcount team with a lot of cost. There's a few good reasons for that. It's a very good question. If we put into our team here a whole bunch of acquisition professionals, there's that old chestnut quote that says, you know, If you go to a barber, you're going to get a haircut. If you put acquisition team members into the business, they tend to want to do acquisitions.
Whereas what we really want to do is sort of sit here, and just have this steady flow of incoming, which we've got another one coming this morning, which is nice. It's a very steady flow of people inquiring, and we can then just simply look at those deals and decide how we want to move forward. There's no pressure in terms of investment head count cost to actually do anything. It's very accretive for the business. It's very effective from a cost point of view. From an institutional point of view, we're not sort of institutionalizing activity for its own sake. I have absolutely no interest in growing the group to be larger than it is great. I've often said the Big Four are called the Big Four, not the Great Four.
Now, they may be big today because at some point in the past they were great, but I look at those businesses today as being more big than great. What we want to do is we want to just one at a time bring businesses into the group that can help us be excellent at what we do. Rather than us be, you know, the next Big Four and be the Big, you know, number five in the big five. We're trying to create blue ocean over here away from the industry and just be the excellent one.
That excellent one, that first choice advisor to private business owners wherever we play, we think is a market position that's worth owning and worth owning deeply in every market we play for a long, long time, and is likely to generate very superior returns to shareholders over time. That's a long answer, but it's a very, very good question. You know, I see other companies saying, we're investing in our team to make more acquisitions. We just don't believe it works like that. We believe that you need to be attractive to the target that you're trying to acquire, and that you need to put together that really recognizes their needs as a person and as a professional and as a firm.
That takes a personal engagement to do with our team here that's small, has other jobs, and isn't fixated on just buying things for the sake of it. I think we've got a good track record of that now. With that, thanks, Cameron, for the congrats on a great half. I appreciate that. I'd just like to call out our team. Our team, from the most junior person to the most senior person, are just excellent people. The thing that makes me most pleased about the life that I lead is the quality of my family, my friends, and the people that I work with and that I have as clients, because ultimately the quality of life that you have is hugely determined by the people that you spend time with.
I just really want to emphasize that this is not the Ken and Brett show. This is, you know, just us fronting an amazing team, and it's an incredible privilege. One that every day I'm increasingly humbled and grateful to be in a position to be able to work with the team and the clients that we have. I'm also incredibly pleased to have the shareholders that we have. The quality of our shareholders has improved over time, so that now globally, we have incredible people contributing to our thinking and our ability to improve the lives of our people, our clients, and the communities that we're operating in to really make a difference. That's what happens when you give me a great idea.
It comes into our team and, you know, our great passion and love is to execute that to make a difference. I just want to say thank you. I hope everyone has a great day. If there are no more questions, I'll leave you to contemplate that excellent piece of work that Kenny's produced with me and the team. If there are any questions, please feel free to be in touch and we'll be happy to answer them. As I love to say, have a great day. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thanks, Kenny.
Thanks, Brett.
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