Okay, we are now live, and so we'll begin. Good morning everyone, and welcome to Xref's Results and Strategy webinar. Thank you for joining us today. If you're not joining us right now and seeing a recording of this, then welcome to you as well. This will go live as a recording after this, this morning. My name is Lee Martin Seymour. I'm the CEO and Founder of Xref. We're thrilled to have so many of our valued shareholders and partners with us today. Even some of our shareholders that are also employees are with us today, so welcome to you guys. Many of you have spent time with me, so I'm particularly excited to be able to pass the microphone to some of the members of our board and executive team today to give a chance for you to hear from them directly.
Now, for those who are new to our community, a wealth of information is available for your review on our new, revised investor hub, including today's presentation, the FY25 investor presentation, and previous financial reports, etc. What you can also find on there is a library of founders' takes. On the new investor presentation, on certain slides where you see the button "View Investor Present Founder Take," you can click on that and go straight to the video, and you'll get a bit of a deeper insight into my thoughts around that content. We therefore will not be presenting the full presentation slide by slide today, as we thought it would be really quite nice for you guys to meet our panelists. Without further ado, I'd like to introduce our panelists today, our board members and execs from our leadership team.
Thomas Stianos joins us as our Non-Executive Chairman, Jake Philpot, Non-Executive Director, Sharon Blesson, our Chief Technology Officer, and Avi Lewis, our Chief Financial Officer. Today's session will be an interactive discussion covering all of our recent performance, our strategic direction, a little bit of outlook. The presentation speaks to our investor presentation and the highlights from our recent annual report. To start us off, our platform, the Xref Platform, now enables clients to perform several key jobs, mission-critical jobs: reference checks, background checks via Trust Marketplace, pulse surveys, engagement surveys, exit surveys, and the creation of talent pools. This is all a unified effort to help organizations build better workplaces, and we'll discuss all assets of that at a high level today.
Please take time, if you haven't already, to get through that investor presentation and have a look at those founders' takes because it does walk you through our very clear, clearly defined strategy for future growth. If we do not answer one of your questions today and you cannot find your answer on all of the content on the investor hub, then I ask you to reach out to me directly and we can have a one-on-one. Now, we have an agenda prepared to guide our conversation this morning. We've also allocated time at the end for any questions. We encourage you throughout the presentation to add any questions to the Q&A box as part of this webinar.
To kick things off, I'd like to hand over to Thomas Stianos, our Chairman, for his perspective and some of the questions that I'm interested in, Tom, to kick us off this morning. I'll give you three, and I'm sure you'll cover this within yours. What were the most significant operational highlights from the past period, particularly our positive operating cash flow and reduced costs? How do these results align with Xref's long-term strategic vision, especially given the outcome of the proposed acquisition by SEEK and ultimately a failed vote in February of this year? Can you discuss the company's capital allocation strategically moving forward, including the recent placement we did of $3.6 million? I'll hand it over to Tom. Thank you for joining us this morning.
Thank you, Lee. It's certainly been an eventful year for us and our shareholders. In February, as you know, SEEK made a takeover offer by our scheme of arrangement, and as it represented a 61% premium to the prevailing share price at the time, the board felt obliged to put it to shareholders. Indeed, many shareholders supported the offer, but not enough to get it over the line. Subsequently, we secured a $3.6 million placement from a strategic partner, which strengthened our balance sheet and allowed the business to progress its growth plans. That's turned out to be quite successful. The board is pleased that the business achieved a $5 million turnaround in EBITDA, moving from a loss last year to a positive $2.5 million. This was largely enabled by an 8% reduction in expenses, which has led to a positive operating cash flow.
Most importantly for me, our revenue is now largely subscription-based, which we always intended to do, and it's outperformed the rate of credit usage in past years. On the operational front, a highlight for me was that the company has streamlined its operations to a single technology platform and a single product brand. This has the effect of simultaneously simplifying the Xref Platform and reducing overheads while allowing the company to exploit growth as the market improves. Regarding that last question, Lee, about our planned debt reduction, our debt facility is now no longer based on interest-only payments. With each payment, there is also progressive retirement in our principal. The board has resolved not to pursue any additional capital raising for the purpose of retiring debt, at least preferring as far as possible to pay down debt from operational cash flow.
This avoids equity dilution, and if profits continue to improve, as we hope, we will explore the possibility of replacing the remaining facility with a lower interest debt. The other important thing to note, not so much on operations and finances, is that we did add two new directors in, John Newbury and Jake Philpot. They are already making an excellent contribution to Xref, and I'm certainly delighted to have their contribution to the board. You'll hear from Jake shortly. Unfortunately, John is in England, so we thought not to wake him at 2:00 A.M. We also welcome new substantial shareholders in Bovis Capital, Richmond Hill, and of course, Tanda, who made the strategic placement. Without further ado, I think I'll hand over to Jake or back to you first, Lee.
Thank you, Tom. That was very good. A key part of our strategy at Xref is our ability to scale effectively, a very exciting prospect for the whole team here at Xref. Jake Philpot, our Non-Executive Director, has a deep understanding of these market dynamics and has already impacted life at Xref. Thank you to you. Can you share your thoughts on Xref's scalability and our ability to capture these market opportunities? A couple of things that I would like to ask you, Jake. How are we positioned for scale? Especially with the fact that we are feeling like we're entering a growth market, especially with our new subscription model, what are the key drivers of our user and our client?
I think the key point is the transition to ARR. We already spoke about this a little bit, but this is what got me interested in Xref in the first place, so I really want to highlight it. Last year, the MRR number grew 29% to $19.3 million. That's with total revenue growing by 7% to $21.3 million. I cannot sort of overstate this enough that the amount of effort and the lift that the team has put in moving from a consumption model to a subscription model has been enormous. We can see the positive results in the numbers here, but everyone just wants to think about it for a moment, the amount of effort that's gone into that and how hard the team has been working and how focused the sales team in particular has been on that over the last couple of years.
Most of that's now behind us, so it allows us to refocus on this opportunity we have in front of us to hopefully grow revenue. Which brings me to the second point. Now that transition's behind us, it's about the focus on new business. We have more time now to focus on getting new customers in the door. I'm really excited about some of the work Lee and the team have been doing, focusing on getting new leads into the pipeline and turning that into a funnel. I think the funnel's really exciting, and it's the right way to do it, which is that we have self-sign-on. Now anyone who is interested in Xref can come to the website, they can sign up for a trial, they can have a look themselves.
There's a team focused on engaging those leads, getting them into experienced account executives who can now close those leads. I think as you get those parts of the funnel working, there's lots of room for optimization and growth. This is exciting because we have a lot more capacity and effort to work on it now. We have a business that's mostly driven by MRR. That brings me to the third point, which is the platform transition, what we call the new Employer Intelligence platform. I've done this before, and I can testify it is exceptionally hard to get to $19.3 million ARR. Once you're there, you have a flywheel from which you can expand your product offering, which is exactly what we're doing with the Employer Intelligence platform. Adding new features should both help us appeal to new customers and broaden the market that we can sell to.
This is really key. It will help with retention. As you add more features, more people will want to stay. It'll just improve all the metrics of the business across the board. I think we're in a great position to be doing this. Xref has great market share because we got there early, and the market share is also highly diversified. I just want to highlight that Xref's top 20 customers are only 5% of the revenue. You can sort of see some early wins here. 40 of our 600 clients are using this new Employer Intelligence platform, but there's lots of room to grow. I want to conclude all that by touching on that point that Lee asked about, which is how we keep efficient as we scale.
As you look at all these results and all these sort of things that are going on and the things we touch about today, it looks like we're very busy, which we certainly are, and we have been. It could be a little bit deceptive because what all this is really resulting in is the business is getting a lot simpler. You think about it, we're going to have one platform, which you can sell with one contract, with one sales team, on one code base, and you get the whole flywheel and the whole motion going. I think once we get, as we get all this working, the business is going to get a lot simpler. It's going to be easier to sell and scale the product going forward. Yeah, up to you, Lee.
A couple of times there you mentioned flywheel. I think we'll just take that and we'll keep using it through the year. Thanks ever so much, Jake. I think that was brilliant and nice and succinct in three key points. I think we might take your snippet and list those three points and put it on as a separate video because I think it told the whole story. Thanks ever so much. Let me just get down to my notes here. Our future, as a nice onward from what Jake was saying, our future is intrinsically linked to our technology. I'd like to introduce you to Sharon Blesson, who has led our technology at Xref for a very long time. I think we're nearly 10, are we nearly 10 years, Sharon? Yeah.
We're nearly 10 years.
is our Chief Technology Officer. Sharon leads our whole technology business, including development, testing, project management, DevOps, and our data science team. Sharon has a direct hand in shaping our technology future. I've got three questions for you, Sharon. Hopefully, you can walk us through, and there's an awful lot to unpack, even down to the technology that we've recently delivered. What technologies or features have we recently released, such as talent pools and AI summaries? What does the product roadmap look like for the next 12 or 24 months, particularly with the transition to a single platform and what that means? How does Xref plan to use or is using AI and machine learning to enhance not just the user experience on the Xref Platform, but also internally to make sure that we're shipping code and far more efficient in the way that we bring things to market?
Thanks for joining us this morning, Sharon. Over to you.
Thanks, Lee. Thanks for the questions. Okay, some big questions there. We'll start with product innovation. At Xref, we've successfully launched, as Lee just spoke to, talent pool tools and AI summaries. We've also launched a new permissioning product and sign-on for all new customers. We're seeing a significant reduction in our infrastructure costs due to our one-platform strategy, which involves consolidating all of our technology assets. This approach is also reducing our subscription costs as we thin out the number of third-party platforms the business uses. The company is implementing, as Jake spoke to, a one-platform strategy to integrate all of our technology into a single unified platform. We're also focused on a record strategy, creating a continuous profile for our users, sorry, for our individuals, from candidates to employee to ex-employees.
Our new AI products don't just benefit our users; they also make our internal development processes faster and more efficient, allowing us as a team to ship high-quality code and new features much quicker than before. We've strategically leveraged our offshore development team in Lahore. This has been a key factor in our team's ability to deliver new products at a lower cost, increasing our development velocity and operational efficiency. We're also continuing to expand our Trust Marketplace by adding new vendors and checks. This is a low-cost, low-risk revenue driver because the providers provide the service, and we're simply taking a margin on each check sold. We're also focused on new integrations, especially with our new metadata API, and we've been working on exciting projects with new partners this year.
Future roadmap, we plan to continue the momentum of releasing our new products through AI-driven technology upgrades, including the use of an AI support agent and a planned AI survey builder and advanced engagement tools throughout 2026. There's a lot there to unpack, and I look forward to questions at the end. Over to you, Lee.
Thank you, Sharon. I think there possibly will be some questions. In fact, we've already had a few in, so that's great. Thank you ever so much. From Tom, we've talked this morning about our corporate headlines. We talked about Jake around scaling, Sharon around technology. Let's turn to the numbers. The path to profitability is a major focus for all of us. I'd like to welcome Avi Lewis as our CFO. Now, Avi will walk us through the financial results. We have obviously just released our annual report and ninth successful audit. In February, we've been on the ASX for 10 years. Ninth successful annual report and our 18th successful audit. Let's pass on to Avi next. I think that's about up there. I've got a couple of questions for you, Avi.
Can you explain our progress towards EBITDA profitability in detail, including, as Tom talked about, the $5 million turnaround in 2025 to the $2.5 million EBITDA figure? What are the primary drivers behind our improvement of our financial health, such as revenue growth, cost management? What is the company's outlook in terms of revenue and cost management for the next financial period? Welcome, Avi. Thanks for joining us. Over to you.
Thank you, Lee. Thanks for the questions too, and morning to everyone on the call today. I'll start with the EBITDA result for FY25. As you may have noted, we have achieved a significant 237% increase in EBITDA over FY2024, moving from a negative result of $2.4 million to a positive $2.5 million. That by in itself is a remarkable result. What it means to the financial health of the company is that the company's net loss after tax narrowed by 61% to $2.2 million. This was driven by a 7% increase in total revenue to $21.3 million, as was noted by the earlier speakers, and a net 8% reduction in total expenditure.
In terms of cost management to reduce overheads and ensure a lean operating structure, we've made some strategic adjustments to our physical footprint, and this includes moving our head office in Sydney and our Toronto office to more cost-effective serviced environments. The business also had to absorb significant one-off costs during FY25. SEEK, which is a strategic review that we were talking about, cost us $700,000. In addition to that, there were approximately $500,000 in redundancy payments, which were a part of our cost management, the cost reduction program in FY25. We expect to see the full benefits of these reductions in the upcoming financial year as our 2026 budget does not include these one-off strategic costs and redundancies, and we enter the year with a new renewed FY25 exit rate which has adjusted all these one-off costs to a more business-as-usual run rate.
In terms of operating cash flows on our cost management initiatives, a transition to our SaaS model and the receipt of $2.3 million in R&D incentive funding through the ATO tax system were the primary drivers of the increase in EBITDA for the year, which resulted in a net positive cash generated from operations of $1.3 million, substantially funding investments into R&D. That would have been a prettier picture if we didn't have to incur $1.2 million in one-off costs during the year, as you would note. As for marketing, we are meticulously planning our marketing spend, ensuring every dollar drives positive ROI. As we see a positive return on investment from our self-sign-up platform, we will continue to strategically increase our marketing investment to fuel further growth. Last but not the least, the main driver of our costs, headcount.
I want to briefly touch on one of the most critical achievements of the past year, the dramatic improvement in our business efficiency. By strategically reducing our headcount from 102 to 74 employees, we've seen our revenue per employee jump from $163,000 in FY24 to $217,000 in FY25. This significant leap in productivity demonstrates the effectiveness of our streamlined operations and our team's ability to drive growth with a leaner structure. I think that's about it from me. Over to you, Lee.
Thank you, Avi. I think, on that note, we're not shy, and I think if you've been a shareholder of Xref for some time, you know that we as a group are not shy of making hard decisions. I think if you go back in history and have a look at the releases, we've certainly made the hard decisions that have liberated this business. Over the last, particularly over the last 18 months, in terms of our headcount reduction, our headcount's reduced actually 40% over that time. As Avi alluded to, we measure RPU and how efficient the business is running. That does put some stress on our employee group.
We've asked our client set to not only move from one business model to another, we've asked them to move from one platform to another without seeing that traditional sort of valley of death going from one platform to another and losing clients on the way. We haven't seen that. Next week, you're going to actually see an interview between myself, our Chief Customer Officer, Dr. Louise Parks, and our Head of HR and Payroll, who leads our People and Culture at Xref, Melanie Seymour. We talk about the two most important groups within our business, and they are our employees, who we measure our employee engagement using our own platform, and our customers, who we measure on our own platform for customer satisfaction data. We're going to interview those two to talk about, yes, we've made the hard decisions.
Yes, we've pushed the business through a tremendously hard period of transformation. Actually, how have we done that to make sure that we retain incredible people, some of which you've heard from this morning? How do we retain the clients through that journey as well? Keep an eye out for that webinar, and it will be posted. It's already been recorded. It's in the editing room at the moment. That will be released next week, and a great conversation to follow up our webinar this morning. I've been pretty average at switching the slides this morning, but this slide deck will be appended to the webinar. It concludes the sessions from the guys this morning, and I think there were some really nice nuggets to walk away with. The main goal this morning was to hear from Tom and Jake and Sharon and Avi.
We have had a few questions that have come in, and I am going to point those to the relevant people. There was one that came in around approaching international expansion. If you have known the business for a while, I will actually personally take this one, particularly international expansion in new markets. We've always had clients from overseas purely because our history is in reference checking. The sheer nature of reference checking is that if you do reference a candidate, and they are, and most commonly in Australia, they are from overseas, their referees are from overseas. When we actually ask those referees for feedback on that candidate that has just arrived in Australia, we're actually showing the platform and the benefit and the value of the platform to people overseas. We always tend to have this viral marketing effect of our platform.
Those referees walk into their HR teams' offices and ask why they are still doing references the old way and why we shouldn't look at something like Xref. We've always had a level of global business. I think in the COVID era, as well as the follow-on reduction in the employment market, we've seen our efforts globally withdraw for cost pressures. Actually, now we're seeing all those lights light up again in those areas. I'll give you this to walk away with this morning. When we originally built Xref, as in the original reference platform, which is all but replaced now with the new platform, the original reference platform was built for companies that didn't have HR teams, and it would give them enterprise-level HR technology, but for the SME. We couldn't have got it more wrong.
In fact, Xref was then used by predominantly enterprise clients, and for the last 16 years, we have sold into the enterprise around the world. When we launched the Employer Intelligence platform with all of the tools and whistles and bells, we built it for the enterprise. In fact, internally, the project name was actually Xref Enterprise. We've had to replace that, and we now call it the Employer Intelligence platform. In fact, what we're seeing, and not just in our home territory, but overseas, we're seeing that this lineup of this one record on one platform for hire to retire of talent within businesses, the mid-market is getting very excited about this prospect. In fact, we got it wrong again. We built a platform for the enterprise, but in fact, we're really finding some fun in selling the market. What does that mean for international expansion?
At home, it means an awful lot to us because there's 5,000 enterprise clients in Australia and 70,000 mid-market. What it means is that we can go far deeper in our revenue growth within our home market, but it also means that we can play a scale game within new territories. Using the partners that we have around the world, background screening partners, ATS partners, job board partners, we can also hang on to other coattails and offer a far more enriched platform in those markets. Hopefully, for the person that asked that question, I sort of answered it there, but I have one here for Tom. Given the current economic climate, what do you see as the biggest risks and opportunities for Xref?
Tom, I think you're on mute, mate.
You're on mute.
Thank you. I didn't want to do that, didn't I? Thank you, Lee. Look, I think the biggest risk is actually behind us because, as has been alluded to, the biggest risk for companies doing what Xref has done is basically losing business at transition. It's not to be underestimated. When you move from what we had to a subscription model, you're actually changing buying patterns. You have to change your incentives for staff, your business processes. Invariably, business declines, and you, I think Lee mentioned the valley of death you've got to go through. We've been through it, and Xref has come through at a time when there wasn't a strong demand. There was actually a declining recruitment activity. We've maintained and slightly grown revenue, and we're now out through the other end with a fantastic product. I don't think we've yet seen the benefits of the auto sign-on.
This is people signing on as customers without human intervention, without salary cost, and the auto renewal where we don't have to go back and resell a subscription. I think that's just still beginning. I'm feeling optimistic about that. In terms of other risks, there's always risk of competitors coming out with something fantastic that disrupts. If you lie awake worrying about that, you never start a business. I'm not seeing anything that could possibly be more challenging than what we've just gone through. The management team was distracted with the strategic review and the SEEK deal, which cost us dearly. In terms of direct expense, paying advisors and lawyers, and Avi mentioned some of the one-off costs there. It's gone through a process where we thought, you know, we're going to have to do a massive ongoing capital raise to pay down that debt.
We're now in a position where we don't think we need to. Certainly, we're not going to embark on issuing more equity under current circumstances, given that we can see the light at the end of the tunnel in terms of generating cash to pay down debt. Yes, I worry about will sales fall off, but I'm encouraged with the extra insight that Jake's brought into the business in terms of, you know, his mention of the flywheel, that, you know, perhaps it's all up from now. Obviously, we'll watch. If we need to take other action, if the market deteriorates, we will. I'm very worried. In my time in this company, I've never felt as good as I do right now. Part of that is the additional strength I've brought onto the board.
You've heard from Jake, but John, who you didn't hear from today, is also a fantastic contributor. He's taken charge of the audit committee, very solid guy. He's been CEO and CFO, chartered accountant at a listed company. He's been a real benefit to us. I think our biggest risks are in the past. There's any number of risks. If you read the annual report, it talks about what they are, and we'll face those. I'm not sure if that answered the question fully, Lee.
No, I think that's brilliant, Tom. What you've just said is our biggest risks are behind us. We have a line of sight to generating cash. Our focus is on improving revenue through new business and all the things we're doing there. We are not entertaining adding to equity through a raise because we, you know, we're onto a good thing. Hopefully, that summarized what you just said. Thanks, Tom. There's a couple of questions here. What does Xref or XF1 do better than its competitors? What services does it provide that are difficult to replicate for competitors? I will take that one. I will take a bit of the stage this morning. If you have a look at how Xref stacks up in G2, which is an external reference site, we are number one globally for reference checks.
Have a look at how we rate across Google, Capterra, and all of these sites that rate what we do in market. That pretty much tells you how we differentiate. To really sort of clarify, yes, we do references. The best in the way we do them is the best in the market. We keep innovating, which keeps putting us ahead. Now, if we spoke to a client, this is our conversation with a client, a new client. If you join us today, you're going to get an immediate value because within the next 24 hours, you're going to be able to reference a candidate a lot faster and get far more insight than you ever have. You're going to identify fraudulent candidates. You're going to be able to benchmark those people against all the other people you've ever hired.
You're going to be able to add background checks from some of the best vendors in the world on our platform against those references. In the next 24 hours, Mr. Client, you are going to get some super value. However, let's think about the conversation that we're going to have with you in 12 months. We're going to hire better. Therefore, when people come into our organization, we're going to run pulse surveys and engagement surveys and identify through org metrics where in our business we should focus our efforts to improve the environment of our organization. We're going to make sure that when people leave, which they do, 15% of employees leave the business in any one year, that we are going to run exit surveys on those. We're going to encourage those candidates to come back to the business.
Through what we do, throughout hire to retire, we're going to measure feedback, and we're going to build talent pools from candidates we never hired, from referees that gave our candidates feedback, from exited staff that feel that they would like to come back at some stage in the future. We turn all of that into insight, which is why we call employee intelligence. We want to track talent all the way through from hire to retire. In terms of the market and where we sit on the market and where we compete, to round out what I've been saying, most applications out there that are mission-critical focus either on a candidate or an employee or an ex-employee. They are tending to be ATSs, HRISs, and payroll systems. Not an awful lot is being done around identifying one person as or one person as each of those personas.
We bring all that together in one platform. I think that really is our current focus. Obviously, we're number one in what we do in referencing. In the future, in terms of lining up all of those personas on one platform and bringing it under one profile for that individual, it is going to be our next number one position. Thanks for whoever asked that question. If you go to the founders' takes, there's a little bit more information on that for you.
You might have heard us add one thing to that that I think might be a little subtle for someone who doesn't have a background in HR SaaS, which is compared to other enterprise applications, polish is very important. When you're selling HR SaaS, you have really two sets of customers. You have the person who buys the product, the person who comes and buys Xref, but then you have the people who are completing the references, the HR managers who are using it every day. The incremental improvements that you build on a product over time to make it easier and more polished and easier to use are very important and very hard to do. Those things take like a decade to make those incremental improvements and make it really good.
It would be possible to go and make another platform that, on any HR SaaS platform where you can check off all the requirements next to each other. It's kind of like comparing a 2015 iPhone to today's iPhone. If you put them next to each other on a side-by-side comparison with checkbox, they're going to look very similar. The new one is a lot more polished and a lot more refined. I spent a lot of time looking into this before we came on the cap table. My view is that Xref is the most polished and most refined, and that's reflected in the G2 ratings and how people think of the product.
Good, very, very good point. Thanks, Jake. Sharon, I've got for you the biggest technological challenges Xref faces, and how are we addressing them today?
I think the challenges that we're facing are challenges that every business out there is facing at the moment. It's the rise of AI. What are we doing at Xref? We're focusing on making sure we're building responsible, ethical, innovating, and ensuring that our AI features are enhancing our customers' decision-making without introducing any bias or risk to their processes. That's the take for our customers internally. We're using them to streamline development processes, which is helping us ship new features quicker to our customers. The releases that we've been making over the last six months, and I spoke to them earlier in my products innovation update, talent pools, AI summaries. It's really helping us get momentum and to be able to listen to our customers and deliver to our customers much, much quicker.
Yeah, great. Thank you, Sharon. Avi, one for you. Someone's asked to provide a little bit more color on the company's cash flow position and runway. Obviously, we've got to be careful that we're not forecasting, but probably also add to it the kind of metrics that we're going to focus on during the year when we do report and the metrics that are important to us most.
Thanks, Lee. Look, I think I probably have a very simplistic response to that. In terms of cash flows, the business, we have right-sized the business and we've exited FY2025 with a cost structure that is something that the business can sustain. Therefore, we do expect positive operating cash by and large throughout the year. That's something that we would track very closely in terms of KPI reporting, and we would track how cash progresses on a month-on-month basis against a background of sales performance. As Tom mentioned, sales performance is critical in modeling cash. Apart from that, in terms of runway, I think we exited FY2025 with $5.2 million in cash. That's quite a bit of money, and that's going to last us for a while. In terms, as we've just finished the FY2025 audit, we were subject to a grueling going concern examination, as every auditor would do.
We kind of provided an assessment of going concern, which clearly demonstrated that the business has a cash runway of 12 months with the amount of cash that we exited FY2025. Unsure if that answers your question. I know it's very high level, but getting into detail is possibly not the intention of this forum.
Thanks, Avi. I'm just checking that you guys can hear me because I think we've got some bandwidth issues maybe. You can hear me, Avi?
Yes, I can hear you clearly, yeah.
Excellent. All right. Yeah, great. Look, I think the high-level message is that, you know, back to Tom's comment that, you know, we're ultra-focused on generating cash, and you know, we're in a great position to do that. I think in terms of there is a question around, are we, you know, are we going to continue to cost cut? I think we're in a position now where we've turned around EBITDA $5 million within, you know, from period to period and from FY2024 to 2025 in a period where we've undergone so much transition. Not forgetting, of course, that we've grown revenue by 7% in a market, in a recruitment market that every other recruitment provider is publicizing that it's 20% underwater because people are just not hiring. We can see that within our own usage metrics that the recruitment market is just not where it should be.
I think in a tough market, in an area's transformation, and considering the strategic review and the distraction of SEEK's potential acquisition, we had a tremendous outcome of FY2025. I think we are best placed in FY2026 to report on our horizon goal of generating cash. What we do with it when we get there, I'm sure we'll clarify whether we invest in product or marketing to grow or to reduce debt off our balance sheet. All of the above apply. I'm sure, given the team that we've heard from this morning, we're in a great company. I think we haven't got any more questions to answer this morning. If we didn't answer something that you would like to ask, please come straight through to myself. Always happy to have a one-on-one and add any color. That concludes our Q&A session this morning.
A huge thank you to Tom, Jake, Avi, and Sharon for their contributions. Most importantly, thank you to our shareholders for your ongoing support and for joining us today. We look forward to connecting with you again soon. As I said, keep an eye out for more posts on our hub and come through to us at investors.xref.com. Apart from that, thank you very much, everybody. Have a great rest of your day. That concludes our webinar.