All right, well, it's 10:32, and we said we'd start at 10:30, so I guess we should get started. Can you hear me, Kenny?
Yeah, I can hear you perfectly, Brett.
Great. Hopefully, Joyce is all set up. Joyce, you're okay to go?
Yep, good to go.
Terrific. Well, good morning, everyone. We'll just give you a quick presentation and then take some questions. It's been a good year to be an accountant. The numbers we have are really set out nice and clearly. I'll just move to page one. We have KPG in 10 seconds. What we try to do with this slide is just give you everything you'd need to understand the business. We think it's important in a professional services business that revenue grows in order to provide opportunities for your people. We're pleased that we've been able to, again this year, grow our revenue strongly, which means strong opportunities for our people. In a market that the talent is a challenge, we're told, people are ultimately always going to be looking for opportunity in growth organizations.
Margin is strong, remains very, very much stronger than the industry. We're integrating a lot of businesses at the moment, so we will see that margin expand again soon. Parent NPAT is strong, has grown by 23%. Return on equity remains very strong. Gearing is very much under control. Cash flow is very strong. The cash conversion, we're very pleased with. We've broken the presentation into four parts. About KPG, Financials, Outlook, and Quality Shareholders. I'm joined by our Chief Financial Officer, Kenneth Ko, who'll present on section two. I'll give you a quick overview about KPG and also comment that we updated our owner's manual with version two recently, and this presentation is best read together with that owner's manual.
The track record of the business since its inception in 2006 is that we've managed to double the business now 5x in a row. We think that's very important because it speaks to the business system that is operating under the business that has a proven track record of growth. We like to say that that sort of ideas lead to actions lead to habits, and habits are your destiny. This business has a good habit of growing and growing profitably. You'll see on the next page that per-share growth continues to grow and accelerate. We very much focus on recurring revenue per share since IPO and owners' earnings per share since IPO, both of which are compounding strongly.
We know the market is enormous, and that if we can continue to do that, then that will stand the business in very good stead. Return on invested capital is our next metric, which we like to focus on, because we think that it's a good measure of the behavior generally of the business. You can see that our ROIC plus organic revenue growth is very strong. On the next page, our friend taught us about owner earnings, and here it is. It's the way we think about the business. There's a strongly CAGR-ing owner earnings, and you can see it growing year- to- year very strongly. For all of you as partner owners, I feel very pleased that we're managing the business in a sustainable long-term manner that will grow owner earnings over time.
In terms of capital allocation, we're informed by William Thorndike's amazing book called The Outsiders, which we love and resonates with our mindset of being sort of outside of people. We're pleased that we've improved the earning power of our businesses, of our operating business. We've further increased our earnings through acquisitions this year, growing our existing accounting subsidiaries, growing our existing complementary businesses, making programmatic acquisitions and making an occasional large acquisition, which in the last five years we haven't done and we don't expect to do any time soon. We've purchased KPG shares over time, and we've held the number of shares on issue. In fact, reduced it since IPO, which is great. The growth that's being achieved is being achieved on the same number of issued shares. Programmatic acquisitions is our game.
It's taken a while for people to understand that what we do, we've done over 50 small acquisitions. We're gonna continue to do. There it is, transaction 55. We use our Partner-Owner-Driver model and we do that over and over again, and we think that there's huge opportunity to just keep doing that. That number will go up some years and down others, but what this graph seeks to show is that we've been doing it for a long time and we expect to do it for a lot, a lot longer. On the next page, I've just emphasized that five years, we think, is the appropriate period we've always thought to judge our performance as a management team. This is this year's results of five years since IPO. We're pleased with the progress we've made. We're setting a plan for the next five years.
I think you'll be confident that over time we've always out-achieved whatever plans we might have shared publicly. We've done a summary on the next page of the performance of the business since IPO. We're very pleased to now, you know, consider that we've done sort of training wheels first five years as a listed company and we're getting a little bit better at, you know, what we do. The group now has 436 team members across 20 offices and 31 operating businesses spanning New South Wales, Victoria, and in terms of global, Hong Kong. Our ambitions are to continue to grow wherever we can find people that share our values, which are all about making our people and clients better off.
We'll grow as fast as we can find those people, but in a considered way, and we will not drop our standards with respect to how we treat our people, the work we produce for our clients, or how we integrate businesses into our group. On the next page, you'll see that our people have rated us a great place to work. 90% of our people rated us in that way. Our people are owners. They're not just employees. They own a significant chunk of our business, and they're sharing in the performance of the business. Our team member satisfaction measured through our Employee NPS score is very high.
We are the only listed certified B Corp accounting firm in the world as well, which very much appeals to our people because it reflects their values as to wanting to be part of a cooperative business endeavor with a strong purpose to make our people, our clients, and our communities much better off. In terms of services, our services are very focused, and you'll see an increasing focus around accounting, tax, audit, finance, insurance, and wealth in estate office. Very pleased with how the clarity of our services to our clear private business owner clients are being refined and delivered in the market. We think this depth and this focus makes an enormous difference. Today, there's 13,500 client groups that have grown by 40% over the last 12 months.
You'll see there's a very strong NPS of 68, with over 700 responses to date. Our revenue growth is very strong. You can see that, we are experts at acquiring, sourcing, and integrating amazing businesses into the group. I could not be more pleased with the quality of the businesses and the people that lead those businesses or are in those businesses that are approaching us to join the group. We'll move as quickly as we can to bring the best people into the business, the right people. We'll continue to do as we've always done that in a very considered way. Our business is a branded offer.
We haven't emphasized this as much as I will today, but you know, through 101 percenters signage, fit-out, digital onboarding process, etc , we are getting people to join our community, our tribe of accountants who want a change to the status quo, a better way to do things to make ourselves, our people, our clients and communities better off. This has been consistent since our inception in 2006. It's becoming more obvious as we grow, but there's really compounding effects to the effort that we're putting into the brand against others in the industry. It's growing very, very strongly. That's particularly relevant when you're trying to bring great people into the business.
Great people wanna join a brand that stands for something, that's consistently presented and consistently behaves and delivers, you know, in a way that aligns with their values. That's certainly the case with our group. Now I'm gonna hand over to Kenneth Ko to take you through the financial section.
Thanks, Brett. Hi, everyone. I will go through the financial section now. The first slide is the highlight slide. Brett has covered a lot of these metrics in the previous slides, but this slide gives you a quick side-by-side with our prior year results. We can see that in most of the metrics, we've increased 20%-30% from the prior year, which is pleasing. Some of the ratios here, I just wanna point out, such as ROE, ROIC, cash conversion, et c. They're impacted by the prior year acquisitions that were completed during the year. I'll leave you to go through this slide yourselves in your spare time, as we'll cover a lot of these other metrics in the later slides.
In terms of the metrics since IPO, as Brett has gone through in the previous five-year IPO slide, this gives you a lot more detail. Again, I'll leave you to look at in your spare time, but you can see that we've basically grown the business at a CAGR of in the mid-teens and basically doubled the business over the last five years since IPO. In terms of the income statement, our revenue grew at 32.6% to AUD 64.9 million through organic growth of 6.2% and acquired growth of 26.5%. We're pleased that both of these metrics have exceeded our group's target growth of 5% organic and 5% acquired.
Our EBITDA margin is slightly lower than what it was last year, and I'll explain that later on in the slide that better explains this. Our underlying NPATA attributable to our shareholders grew at 23.2% to AUD 6.3 million and is a very strong result. Other than this, I just wanted to point out a few items here on the income statement that's grown disproportionately to the revenue growth, which includes depreciation and amortization, which is mainly due to the fit-outs that we've done for the offices, the right-of-use assets that we've acquired as we have more offices open through acquisitions and more office leases. Obviously, an increase in amortization expenses due to the increase in intangible assets that we have acquired from the completed acquisitions this year.
In terms of revenue growth, again, this shows us the organic and acquired growth since IPO throughout the years. You know, we're pleased that the organic growth averaged 5.1%, and it's consistent with our 5% target. We have had strong acquired growth throughout the years, and it continues to be our focus to acquire quality accounting businesses. In terms of the underlying NPATA reconciliation, this slide gives the reconciliation of the reported NPAT to the underlying NPATA, which is the number that we measure ourselves against. We have excluded any government grants that we received from COVID, as well as any subsidies that we received during the year. We've also excluded any direct non-recurring costs related to the eight acquisitions that we completed during the year.
This includes inheriting various leases that we no longer occupy after we've completed the acquisitions. For example, Sydney, Canberra, Penrith, Narrabeen, these acquisitions we've all inherited leases or we've had overlapping leases. Also, we've excluded any one-off costs such as transition and migration costs in relation to the acquisition. This slide summarizes the key measures we see that drive the cash flow and profits of the business. Our lock-up days is at our benchmark of 55 days. We're very pleased with this. Given, you know, the number of acquisitions we've made throughout the year, and some of these acquisitions have historical lock-ups of 150-200 days, we're very pleased that we've been able to reduce a lot of these very quickly to our benchmark days.
Note that here, obviously, the lock-up was calculated based on the analyzed revenues, as that makes sense to do so. Our cash conversion is lower than previous years at 83.3%, and it's impacted by the first year accumulation of lock-up. Now, I've put two slides in the deck that explains this, and we'll go through that as we approach those slides. In terms of the balance sheet, lock-up, as I said, continues to be managed tightly and is at our 55-day benchmark. Continues to be very strong, our balance sheet. We've had increases in both our assets and liabilities due to the acquisitions we've completed. An increase in right-of-use assets because of the additional leases, increases of intangible assets, and increasing borrowing.
Our group and parent ROE, as Brett has covered off, continues to be very high, and it shows return that we were able to generate with the minimal capital that we require. In terms of the profitability, this slide explains the EBITDA margins. This year, our EBITDA margin is at 30.9% for our operating businesses. Last year, it was 33%. This explains the contributions of the EBITDA margins from the various cohorts. We can see that it's due to a couple of reasons. Obviously, the in-year acquisitions we made during the year, although you can see 30.3% for the first year is pretty amazing for the number of acquisitions we've done. Also due to the small number of growth and soft scale businesses. The definition of those are provided.
Their growth is AUD 1 million-AUD 2 million and small scale under AUD 1 million. These businesses are generating small scale EBITDA margins. The great thing, though, that I want everyone to focus on is our established businesses, which account for 65% of our businesses, continues to operate at 34.2%, which is excellent. We continue to focus our efforts to scale up the small scale businesses and also improve the profitability of our acquired businesses. Regardless of the above, you know, we continue to operate significantly above the industry average of 19%. In terms of gross margin, this year, our gross margin is impacted because of the higher cost of sales from our acquisitions. We continue to aim for a gross profit margin of more than 60%.
Again, we continue to operate significantly above our international peers, and we continue to focus on this because we believe it's a very important metric for long run performance. In terms of cash flow, we summarize the cash flow here from our operations and the uses of those cash flows. Cash from operations has increased 10%. Free cash to the business has increased at a lower rate, 5.6%. This is because of the scheduled debt reductions increase because of the increased debt that was taken on to make the acquisitions. You'll see there below all the items, all the financing and investing cash flows that we've used during the year. We've drawn AUD 23 million of debt. We've used 12.5% of that for acquisitions.
AUD 6.1 million of that for growth CapEx, which includes buying the Cammeray property and various fit-outs of the six offices we've just done during the year, paid dividends, additional debt repayments, et cetera. I'll leave that for everyone to go over themselves. On the next slide. These two slides are the ones that explain the acquisition impact on the cash conversion. You can see it here. I think I included this in the first year in the first half results presentation as well. In the first year, basically, there's an accumulation of debtors and WIP, and that creates basically a reduction in cash conversion. That doesn't happen anymore in the second year. In all the first year acquisition, it always creates an impact on the cash conversion percentage.
On the second slide here, I do a reconciliation. Basically if you basically add in that first year accumulation of the lock-up from the in-year acquisitions, our cash conversion is actually at 98%, which is excellent. You can see there the lock-up from the in-year acquisitions at 72.8% is excellent. As I said before, our historical lock-ups from a lot of these businesses that we acquire are at 150-200 days. Being able to reduce it to that level is really great. You can see the WIP days is at 17.5 days, which is within our metrics of 20 days. On debt and liquidity, you know, our net debt has increased significantly.
What I wanna point out here is even though we've borrowed AUD 21.2 million throughout the year for our acquisitions, for our fit-outs, et cetera, we've made principal repayments of AUD 7.5 million. To us, it's not a concern at all because we're repaying these debts through our cash flows generated from the acquired businesses and generally repaid over a four to five-year period. We should see this come down very substantially over the four to five-year period. Obviously we continue to maintain a significant headroom on that. Net debt per partner has obviously increased because of the increased debt, but we don't see this to be an issue. We are repaying the acquisition debt very quickly, and we should see this amount drop down over time. Parent and NCI, I'll leave everyone to look at.
We always get asked why doesn't the NPAT percentage align with our ownership percentage? It's basically because of tax and the additional investment we make in the parent entity. I'll leave everyone to look at this in their spare time. In terms of dividends, we continue to pay monthly dividends. We have increased our monthly dividends by 10% since July. Well, actually July last month. We have paid one final dividend that we're due to pay on the fifth of August. We expect the total dividends paid for FY 2022, including final and special dividends, to be around AUD 0.079 per share, and it represents a 57% dividend payout ratio. In terms of cash reconciliation, again, I'll leave this to you to look at.
This is a reconciliation of our reported NPAT and the cash from operating activities disclosed in the cash flow statement. You can see the non-cash movements. There's a huge amount there, AUD 3.1 million, and that represents all the balance sheet movements that are non-cash, resulting from our acquisitions, right. Mainly employee liabilities that would carry over, et c. You can see that that actually offset against that positive movement in trade and other payables and deferred tax assets. In terms of cash flow since IPO, as the businesses that focus on cash flow, our cash from operations have increased at a CAGR of 20.5% since IPO, and we've reduced our lock-up dates considerably. I think we started there in IPO at 94 days, and now it's at 55 days, which is excellent.
In terms of first half, second half SKUs, excluding acquisitions and focusing on accounting businesses, first half, second half seasonality is consistent with prior years. It's at 53% for the first half and 47%-48% for the second half. This year, including acquisitions, obviously it's skewed towards the second half as we've completed a lot of acquisitions towards the latter half of the year. In terms of the issued shares, we just wanna have this slide to show you that we haven't issued any shares since IPO, and in fact, obviously we bought back shares. Our shares at the moment are at 45 million, which makes it very easy for everyone to calculate the key measures such as EPS, etc . That's it from me. Brett, here's the outlook section.
Terrific. Thank you, Kenny. Just before I move to the outlook section, there were a couple of questions that have been typed in. One was, what is your estimate of KPG share price currently? I always like that one. I say that the intrinsic value that we focus on of the business is best calculated using Hagstrom's two-stage dividend discount model that you can find in the back of The Warren Buffett Way and make two assumptions, one around expected future growth and the second around appropriate discount value. I've always used since inception, the U.S. thirty-year Treasury bond rate because that's what Mr. Buffett himself used. We are determined not to be involved in businesses that present any risk to us.
We think that with our deep expertise in accounting firms present the lowest level of risk that we can involve ourselves in. Second question was, "Do you see rising interest rates affecting the company's ability to make further acquisitions?" I've answered there, no. The first firm that was acquired by the group was acquired with interest rates of 11.1%. I remember paying those rates. We don't see interest rate increases having an impact on our ability to make acquisitions. Off to outlook. What do we say about the outlook?
The two big learnings that I've shared before the last twelve months is you know meeting Lawrence Cunningham, who's now on our board, and you know confirming through his involvement with translation software and subsequent introductions that he's made for me with executives of that business, that we should keep making many small deals in the domain within which we're experts, and that we should look to win in Australia and then look to find ways to take our model to be used by anyone who shares our values and wants to make a difference to their people, clients, and communities. Second one was Will Thorndike his book, The Outsiders, where he approached us and said, look, he could see that we had this flywheel turning. For us, it has been our focus.
Everyone who's ever joined the business has been given Good to Great to read, the book by Jim Collins, which talks about six steps to, you know, breakthrough performance and building a flywheel. We, you know, love to—I guess it's always good to meet fellow travelers who get you to continue to focus on the things that makes us. In terms of the five-year plan that we published three years ago, we expect that we are on track in terms of revenue run rate to do AUD 80 million in revenues this year. Our numbers should look something like that, which is great.
I would emphasize that knowing that we've got that AUD 80 million tucked away in our view we will look to continue to accelerate our growth and to invest in our platform to allow us to achieve you know our next set of goals which is very very exciting. In terms of the management bench I've been quietly building out management bench. We have senior leaders now across people operations, client experience, finance, IT, and digital, as well as legal and risk. I feel very confident that our senior executive team is in place to take this business to at least twice its current size which is very exciting.
In terms of management alignment, we'll do that through an LTI program that'll be based on what Macquarie and Macquarie Bank and Constellation do, where we'll look for doubling of the business cash-based performance, no options, and maintaining our share count of 45 million or less. There'll be no handing out of share options at Kelly Partners on a confetti basis. In terms of our next five years, we're naming a clear set of objectives, and that is to see the accounting group as one of the top 10 largest firms in Australia, and that would mean we'd need revenues in excess of AUD 120 million across a scope of accounting, tax, audit, business advisory, finance, insurance, and wealth, what we call complementary services in a state office.
We believe that we can do that because of our Kelly Partners system, our business model, our Partner-Owner-Driver model, and our central progress team that are, you know, very unique, and I'd say original, ways of doing business in our market that are insurgent in their mindset and, having a real effect and a compounding with positive effect. Our second objective is to scale our complementary services by either building, buying or partnering. We've partnered in the insurance space with Oxley Insurance Brokers. We're considering how to substantially grow finance and wealth. I've set the targets of those three businesses that if we are not within 10 years businesses in those spaces that can do AUD 4 million minimum NPAT, which is last year's NPAT of KPG, then we would not be keen on being in those areas.
We intend to discover what we call a natural conversion rate of finance, insurance, and wealth services required by our clients. That's really important. It's what is natural? What do the clients want? What do they need? What do they ask for? There'll be no cross-selling at Kelly Partners and no sense that the business is about selling things to clients that they haven't asked for. The final objective is we wanna see the business go global. You can see that by bringing Lawrence Cunningham onto our board, by building out a global shareholder base, we are looking and being encouraged to explore how do we take this system that we built and have other people that share our values deploy that system.
We think that the obvious markets of New Zealand, the U.K., Canada, and the U.S. represent an expansion of our total addressable market of nearly 20x . We very quietly sort of kept these aspirations, you know, internally to date. I think it's time that we share with you guys as investors that the investment that we're making to build this business has been very substantial, and we just believe that we can grow with our clients into the markets that we see in their future. We see Australian businesses are staying private longer and looking to export and grow into the U.S. and U.K. in particular. I'd just love to share these four models that we've built.
It's our business model at a group level, our business model at our operating level, our partner-owner driver structure, and our central progress team. These are four very unique ways of thinking that have been developed into ways of doing and have been practiced now for a long time. Ever since we started Kelly Partners, we've never owned a firm 100%. We've always done a 51-49 style structure, so that it is a genuine partnership with genuine owners who are driving that business with us together. Our business is partnerships. We think it's very, very unique in our industry, certainly.
The central progress team that gives us a team of experts working on the important parts of our partner firms just delivers the building of moat, the building of competitive advantage in each of those areas. We're particularly excited about what that means for the business. Our final section that we've got is quality shareholders. I just direct you to read the owner's manual version two. If you haven't read that, I think you'll find it sharpened up, even more focused. The first version was to answer a lot of the questions that we've been given out over time. This is an even more focused document which we think will help. We want.
On page 49, you'll see that we've built out a global shareholder base, and our shareholders now are all over the world. We've got an incredible group of shareholders. You know, I was very pleased recently that we were able to see the back of the last shareholder that sort of ended up in our register by accident, and replaced by really focused quality shareholders. Finally, I'd like to just draw your attention to our expanded board. There's now myself, Stephen Rouvray, Ryan Macnamee, and Lawrence Cunningham as independent directors, non-exec directors, and Paul and Ada, together with me as people with a deep operating experience in our industry.
I think that you can see that there's a reason for everything that's going on within the group, and I hope that that fills you with confidence as to where we see the future. I'll just answer some of the questions that I can see on the Q&A chat, which is always the most interesting part. When reviewing potential acquisitions, how do you discern between a firm that is operating sub-optimally but can be improved up to KPG standards in the system versus one operating sub-optimally that you conclude won't improve enough? Very, very good question from Brett Dorendorf.
Brett, first, if people don't have the values that things can improve, and they don't have the values to actually wanna go on the long march to actually make the difference, to make the effort, to make the investment, it's really about the attitude and the energy of the ownership group. You know, are they people that really wanna make a change to make things better or not? We do an enormous amount of analysis so that we can see whether the client base itself would be receptive. We look at the reputation of the business in the market, the strength of its brand, et c. There's an enormous amount we do. Fundamentally, leadership is critical in all businesses and in all spheres of life.
If the leadership group, they actually don't believe things can be better and they don't believe that by partnering with us, we can substantially improve the business, then that would be the reason that we wouldn't play overwhelmingly. From Trevor Mukadezi, how do you think about the impact of rising interest rates on the growing net debt to expect to keep borrowing at this rate going forward? It's a great question. We don't really fear interest rates, Trevor. As I mentioned in an earlier question. You know, I started a group, I was borrowing at 11.1%, I was always confident that if we're making 35% EBITDA, that interest rates would have little to no impact on the business.
In the short term, we might pay a little bit more interest, but in the long term, we'll be the owner of absolutely tremendous businesses that are enormously advantaged in the markets within which they operate. It depends. If you're here for a short time, then you might be worried about that. If you're here, as I intend to be, for a very long time over the cycle, I'm not concerned at all about interest rates. We also paid AUD 7.5 million of principal back last year.
The actual level of net debt, if you take level of net debt and take 7.5+ the increase that we'll pay back in principal this year, we've always aggressively paid down the debt of the businesses we acquire. In fact, we typically seek to pay down 100% of our share of the debt of that business before we draw dividends that get paid out to the shareholders. Our approach to debt has always been to be happy to take it on to buy a great business, but to be even happier to pay it off very, very aggressively. We are paying in those acquisitions, you know, 100% of our cash flows, profits from those businesses, less tax against the debt.
Fiona Preston, great results and nice interview on the Rask podcast. It was great. Thanks Fiona to be asked by them to share that information. Just wondering why there is one office in Hong Kong when the business otherwise largely Sydney-based. It's a great question, Fiona. Ken's been up in Hong Kong for six years. I'll share the story. He came to me with tears in his eyes and said, "I like working at Kelly Partners, Brett, but my mom wants me back in Hong Kong." He'd been educated here in Sydney. I said, "Ken, call your mom, tell her she can have you tomorrow once you've opened an office for Kelly Partners." The reason I like to share that story is our business has always been talent-led.
If you've got talented people in your business and they wanna open an office, you know, on Mars, and you can make it work, then that's been our mindset. I will give you another comment there, Fiona. I always believed that by locating Ken and his finance team in Hong Kong, we would start to learn how to work remotely and have a much more global view of the opportunity in the business. We've now got 10 people in that office, and it's worked really well, and it's acclimatized our group to being able to work cross-border. To Jani, inflation, how well are you able to increase prices along cost of inflation? It's a very good question, Jani.
We've always thought that we should grow at minimum 5% a year organically, 3% price increase, 2% volume increase. We can probably get 5% at the most. Inflation in Australia is running at 6%. We've done 6.7% organic growth. I'm trying to grow organically faster than inflation, as a group. And we're pretty confident that we can do that. We're very confident. Now, if we get inflation of 20%, well, let's have another special call about that. I'm not anticipating that, although I don't view inflation as transitory. Edward Vesely, thanks for the clear explanation of the business. Much appreciated. Two questions. Are the EBITDA margins achieved for your growth and subscale acquisitions within expectations? And how soon would you expect these to rise towards your margin?
As I recall, you stated your EBITDA margin target was 37.5%, but it now appears to have lowered slightly to 35%. Is there a reason for this? Was the previous target too optimistic? I'll deal with question one. Ed, we often buy firms to get into a location, even if they're subscale, knowing that we can add to them. In each of those instances, one's in the Southern Highlands, for example, in Sydney, where we believe we can continue to grow out that space appreciably. One's in the Blue Mountains, where we've got a large firm now that's joined us in Penrith, and so the Penrith business is large. We sort of look at that business across regions. They may in the future come together.
We expect that, you know, we're pretty patient, happy to be in a location, do whatever margin makes sense, and grow that business. On a portfolio basis, it really makes little to no impact. Our EBITDA margin has always been 37.5%. We typically share that it's 35%. When you look at our base model for an operating business, it's 37.5%. It's not too optimistic at all. If you do, I think we've done AUD 21 million of acquisitions on AUD 64 million, you know, run rate. If you grow by 30%+ via acquisition in a given year, you'll see a little bit of short-term margin compression. We can see the numbers. We're not challenged by that at all.
You'll see that come back to where we would like it, and we're aggressive about it, so it'll happen quickly. Sebastian Campbell, thank you for your question. Great year, KPG. I see that your acquisitions have been increasing since 2019. Hang on, somebody move that. That your acquisitions have been increasing since 2019. Do you believe the opportunities presenting themselves to you are increasing? Sebastian, yes. The opportunities coming to us are increasing. We're still being as selective as ever. You can see we've bought three groups of, you know, approximately AUD 5 million revenue each in over the last 12 months. Absolutely superb business, and we're very humbled that they have approached us and entrusted us, you know, with their babies, with their business to join us.
We expect that our branded offer, the quality of the activities of all of our businesses and the progress that we're making is likely to be very attractive to firms that really, you know, wanna do business at the highest level. Ricardo Gonzalez. As you gain trust of international shareholders, are there plans to add OTC? Interestingly, Ricardo, options, so the purchasing shares or reinvesting dividends can be done at a cheaper price. The answer to that is probably yes. I think it's about $20,000. We've been pretty busy. We'll ask the lawyers because we've been asked by a number of people, could we add OTC options, for U.S. shareholders? We'll get back onto that, and we'll do that for you. What is the repayment profile of debt? Question from Sameer. Sameer, we've got eight-year debt.
Typically on a practice, we'll pay ours back, our KPG share back within four years. We're very aggressive and do that as quickly as possible. To your question about average life of the debt, if you go back and recreate, you know, look at. We're a public company. Look at last five years accounts and the principal we're repaying and look at the acquisitions we're making, you'll be able to work that out. Andrew Ing, people can change over time, how does KPG have partners whose values no longer share the same values that KPG does? That's a good question, Andrew. We work strongly to keep our group together focused on the right values, which are very clearly acting in others' interests, doing what you say and working as part of a team.
We've proven, I think, that we've held the partnerships together for a long time and grown them. If there's a partner who doesn't share those values, you know, as revealed by their behavior, then we typically seek to deploy them to our competitors. Kieran Robinson, thanks for taking my question. Amazing results. Well done to all the team. We've already touched on it, but you've taken on AUD 21 million of debt this year for the acquisitions and yet while paying it down relatively quickly, would it not be more rational to retain all earnings to fund the acquisitions instead of paying a dividend? Yeah, it's a great question, Kieran. We're often asked, would it be more rational? We don't think that at this point.
I wanted to demonstrate as the listed company, and I think I've been proven, you know, to be prescient in this respect. I had the view over the last decade there are a lot of companies that, you know, spin a lot of hot air but don't pay out on a partnership basis, their profits to their investors. With debt at, you know, sub-4%, it's very difficult to justify not taking on the debt and sharing the repayments or sharing the dividends with our investors. Our partners take dividends every month in cash. Now, our view is that gives the investor the option to simply repurpose those dividends into further KPG shares or do other things with them.
In the future, if we can get a structure that I think is appropriate, then we might at one point become like Berkshire Hathaway and not pay dividends. I want to make very clear to the market and our shareholders who are our partners, that we can pay a monthly dividend fully franked in cash because this is a superb business, I think very, very well- managed. Andrew Ing has asked the questions. Our filings indicate that Westpac has been our bank since I started. Is there financing risk with any particular bank? Andrew, all of the Big Four banks and many, many others have approached me for many, many years asking us to do business with them. We see no challenge with raising debt to fund our acquisitions.
Should that challenge occur, then we would, as we've always done, find ways to solve that problem. Andrew Cominos. Great result in difficult times. You have a policy regarding directors owning shares in terms of minimum holding or loans? Great question, Andrew. No, we don't, but we're pleased that our, you know, if you look up the filings, our directors do hold a lot of shares and, no, we don't have a minimum holding, and no, we don't give anyone a loan to ever buy our shares. We like them to do that. Vincent Ding. I like the gross margin quote. Very interesting, Vince. In working out our hedgehog, you know, the financial measure's always been gross profit at the operating business level. Can KPG be a 100 bagger?
Well, you know, we've shared the 100 Baggers book because we think its principles are excellent. I think one of the principles of that book, I've been asked this a lot, is that, you know, would it be bad if KPG was a five-bagger, 10-bagger, 20-bagger, 50-bagger, 75-bagger, or a 100-bagger? You know, my focus is for us to build a 100-year, amazingly high quality business that makes a difference to people, our people, our clients, and our communities. I think if we do that, it's quite likely that the business will do well, and as a shareholder, you'll do pretty well. Final question, Zach Lamb, do you know if any of your offices servicing mining fossil fuel exploration companies are there any restrictions in place?
That's a good question, Zach. No, I'm not aware that we have. Firstly, we don't have any significant exposure to clients in particular anyway. But I'm not aware that we have any particular exposure to those industries. That said, we haven't sort of gone out of our way. It's not our history to find that type of business. It's not typically where our expertise has been. I hope that helped, so those questions. We've got about another four minutes if anyone's got any further questions. I'd like to thank everybody for the faith that they've shown in the company and their support of the business. You know, I'd encourage you as shareholders, if you can find clients to refer to the firms, please do.
If you can find talented accountants that wanna join what we think is as good an accounting firm as exists anywhere in the world for that services private clients, then please send them our way. I wanna thank our teams right across all of our offices, and certainly in our services team, Kenneth Ko, our CFO, Joyce Au, our General Counsel, and our whole senior exec team. It's been another great year. We are pushing ourselves to find ways to innovate. I'm excited about the investments we're making for the future. As always, you know, the first five years as a listed company, I think have been a good warm-up to what we think is possible.
Now we've sort of limbered up and we know what we're doing to a much greater extent than we did when we listed. I think that will be very helpful for the future prospects of the business. As I always like to say, if there's no other questions, have a great day.