Pets at Home Group Plc (LON:PETS)

Investor Update

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Oct 1, 2021

Right. Good morning, everybody. Welcome welcome to Pet2Home. I'm Peter Pritchard. I'm the group CEO. And welcome to our home. And I think as you probably discovered today, those who arrived on the bus, there's more than one building on this campus. So apologies for your walk from our old building to our new building. But across the road, we also have another building. So actually, we've grown enormously in this position over the the eleven years I've been in. And actually, we've done so well. We've now afforded ourselves windows. For those of us who've been around long enough, and actually those of you thought you pulled our side an old distribution center because that's what it was. We lived in there for many years. And the biggest thing we ever did for our colleagues when we moved here two years ago, we gave them the free we give them light. And so we're very proud of our home. It's one of two locations for us. Our retail business is mainly based out of here with our support functions. But our Swindon office is where is the home our vet business. I'm delighted we've got a number of our vet team here today. It's also the home of our latest pet care center, which you'll see is actually just through that window behind the trees is our Hanford Pet Care Centre. It's our twenty third pet care centre and we're really excited to be able to show you that today and there's nothing like seeing it or feeling it. And I'm very conscious I think for most people is this probably the first time you've been let out? Yeah. Yeah. Bit weird, isn't it? I know. Yeah. I was I was in London last week, and I just got incredibly excited the fact I was on a train. It was just like it was amazing. So the fact you've actually given your time today to come and see us today, we we are so appreciative because we know your time is valuable. And the fact that actually you've you've you've come out and seen us and hopefully we'll make today really worthwhile and hopefully you'll get a lot out of the business. Because we want you to really get underneath the bonnet of our business and understand what we're trying to do. There's quite a lot of subtleties about our business. I think actually once you see, touch, and feel, it really does bring the whole thing to life. So we wanna try and help you today understand all those drivers and understand what our business is all about, but more importantly, meet the people who do it. I know many of you get to see Mike and I, but there's an army of 15,000 of us behind this business who make things happen. And I have to say, the really special people in this business aren't Mike and I. Sorry, Mike. It's not you. But when you see the people who bring this business to life, that's really what Pets at Home is all about. It's about our people. And it's an opportunity for you to ask as many questions you want. So all the guys you're seeing today are going to be around all day and we're going to do a Q and A at the end of the day for us to answer any of the questions that you may have about our business. So our purpose for the day, we've really tried to focus it down. So we're not going try and bombard you today, but we're going to focus on a few key things that we think are really important in telling our story. And to start off with our ambition, our ambition is to be the best pet care business in the world. And I'm hoping by the end of today, we'll persuade you that actually we've we've we're developing the capabilities and the capacity to do that. We're not there yet. In fact, actually, we've been on this journey now for the last three and a half years really building out the capacity and the capability of this organization to make it a business that is truly omnichannel. Hate that set of words actually because what the hell does that mean? What it really means is absolutely everything for the customer in a way that they want to access it. Because the facts of life are customers want to spend time with their pets. That's a thing that they want. They don't want to spend their entire life navigating the world of pet care. We do, but they don't. So our job is to make pet care really easy, dead convenient, unbelievably supportive because those of you who are pet owners know pets don't do what you want them to do and they're going to make you cry at some point in your life and unbelievably rewarding. And that combination of digital, physical, vets, services, product and most importantly people that hang it all together really is what Pets at Home is all about. And we're quite simply aligning our business around the total needs of a pet owner. That's what we're trying to do. Which is different to many others who are taking a sliver or a slice or a channel. We think down to sits in the hole. And it's delivered through a unique combination of products and services. Nobody quite looks like us. We're a bit of a one of a kind, certainly in The UK we are, because we recognize that there's a lot of complexity in pet care and actually what we try and do is we try and knit those things together in a way that are really relevant for our customers. So combining products and services together which is why we've been able to create things like subscriptions because we understand the needs of those owners and we've been able to take our capability of product and insight and knit it into a service which is really easy for pet owners. I've already just started on that journey and there's a lot more that we expect to do because by personalizing it we make it really easy for customers. They haven't got to navigate us. We try and make it easy for us to navigate them. Now we absolutely get this, we have thirty years of expertise in pet care and we think that gives us an enormous insight. But we've also been sat on an incredible rich asset which is our data. And you've heard us talk an awful lot about this. And today we're gonna spend quite a lot of time really going through what does this mean. Because we genuinely have an unparalleled view of the pet owning population like nobody else has. And one of the secrets, and if I've learned one thing in my thirty five year history of serving customers, is there's a really important truth. You've got to know your customer better than your competitor knows your customer. And for us, that's exactly what we're trying to do. Knowing, however, is not enough. Know, Rob will tell you later, he's got something like a 158,000,000,000 is it 158,000,000,158 bit of data. Well, that's helpful. Not. What's really helpful is how we use that to better serve our customer. And we're gonna give you some examples of how we're using that data to provide an insight which allows us to provide a service or a solution which actually allows us to do the most important thing is drive share of wallet. And that's what our game here is all about, is driving our share of wallet because that's a big wallet. It's over a 6,000,000,000 wallet. Not a slither of it, it's a 6,000,000,000 opportunity. And we're slightly greedy. We want all of it. That's where we're focused. We're trying to get as big a share of that wallet as we possibly can do. And because of our unique combination, we think we're in a unique position to be able to do that. So today, we're hoping that we're gonna demonstrate to you the capacity and the capability that we're building inside this business. And hopefully demonstrate what best really means. Because we recognize that to be best you've got to be better. The problem with better is it never stops. You know what's best today? Some booger comes along and does it better and you've got to move on. And in our world we recognise that the expectations of our customers whilst we're in pet care aren't set within pet care. They're set within fashion, they're set within food, they're set within the whole environment in which our customers interact. They see brilliant experiences elsewhere. What we try and do is learn and adapt and bring it to pet care. And that will make us the best in pet care, but it means our journey never ever stops. And I'm hoping what you see today is the capability we're building isn't just about today, it's about really leveraging the capability for tomorrow. Because we see a big opportunity. We see a 600,000,000 plus opportunity in pet care. We know the pet care market is in an incredible position. I mean you can't help but fall over the headlines regarding the growth we've seen, not just in The UK but internationally around the growth in pet. Frankly, if you're in the pet care space today and you're not growing, you've done something really bad because all ships will rise in this tide. And that gives us a great opportunity. However, what we're interested in is growing faster than the market, in growing share. And what we've been able to demonstrate for the last three point five years is we've consistently grown ahead of the market. And what we're going to hopefully share with you today is our plans to continually grow ahead of the market. So our ambitions today really are down to three things. We want to give you appreciation of not just the what of our plan, but the how we're going to do it and how we are doing it. And more importantly, the who are the people who are doing it for you. Because ultimately, I want you to see the people who deliver it and say actually do you believe them? Do think they're capable? Because actually ultimately that's that's what you've got to believe in. That actually we've got a great plan, we're executing and the people we've got are really capable. Hopefully what you'll also leave with is a huge positivity that we've got for our business. We are really we're really proud of what we've built but we're really excited about our future as well because what a great space to be in. And frankly, what a great place when you can bring your dog to work. I mean, we're very lucky. But more importantly, how we're going to become the best pet care business in the world. So our agenda today, The first thing we're going to do is we're going to show you it. We're going to bring to life what does omnichannel pet care really mean. And Jane and David, who run our vet and our retail businesses, are going to come together with probably somebody who's more important than those two, Heather who runs the Pet Care Centre over in Hanford. And we're gonna bring to life what omnichannel really means and we're gonna show you it. And we're gonna show you that actually that is not a store. And hopefully when you leave you'll realize why it's a Pet Care Centre, but also the capability inside that center for things that we can do gets really, really exciting. Then we're gonna take you so Rob Kent, our chief data officer, he's gonna showcase the capability we've built in data. But more importantly, we're gonna show you how we're leveraging it. We're gonna give you a sneak peek of some of the things that we're building, seeing, but more importantly, utilizing in how we're growing our business. And I have to say, that for me is probably one of the most exciting things, no pressure Rob. The most exciting things that I think we're gonna share with you today because the capability we're building really is just phenomenal and I think is gonna become a true competitive advantage of this business. Then you've heard us talk about project Polestar. So Polestar is our digital transformation. And in some respects, it's very similar to what we've done in data. We're actually building a capability. The team are now live. They're actually building the first releases. And we're to share with you what you can expect from us over the next eighteen months. And actually, what can you expect in the next couple of months as things start to land. So we've got John and Chris are gonna be here today. Unfortunately, William, who is our chief information officer, discovered at the weekend that cycling can be quite a dangerous sport. Having collided with a classic car, breaking a femur and a hip wasn't a good combination. Now that meant apparently he couldn't be here today, which frankly, I think we do have to test his his commitment to the business. But he only got out of hospital yesterday. So John and Chris are gonna bring that to life for you today. And then we're gonna spend a bit of time really focusing on our veterinary model to really help you understand what's different about our model. But you're gonna see it as well. And across in Hanford, you're gonna see something which we are very excited about, and it's called Pathfinder. And I promise Jane I'm not gonna steal any thunder, but we're gonna bring to life how the future of vet care is incredibly exciting and how we've got an incredible part of our ecosystem, which really is a jewel in our crown. And then Mike is going to bring that back together to talk about how this all knit up together to our 600,000,000 opportunity. And then we're going to open up for q and a's. We're going to feed you all. But most importantly, I know getting home will be very important because as much as we love Hanford, a weekend stop in Hanford is probably not something on the top of your agenda list. So we'll make sure we get you off on time for your journey. So few final some so a few final points we're gonna do now. So what we're gonna do is when you get across the store, we're gonna break you into two teams. So I was gonna try and do it here, but actually when you get outside the store before you go in, because obviously the store is quite tight, we're gonna break it down to group a and group b. One's gonna go with David, the other one's gonna go with Jen. They're gonna swap you over seamlessly. The store's obviously trading. You'll get a good view of actually what life looks like now. So if you're worrying about availability and freight and all that stuff, you gotta see what life looks like. So it's a good point to ask all those questions. And really enjoy it because actually for us, the real magic is what happens over in that box over there. The good news is, hopefully, bus is on standby because we are in Manchester and the potential for rain is high. And even though the store's there, that is at least two showers worth on the way. So we're gonna get you across there and enjoy that visit. So then we're gonna bring you back here and actually any major question on the on the on the store and the the center probably best taken here where we can probably do that in a in a more informal situation than doing it in the store. So I'm gonna hand over to Chris and we're gonna get you parceled off onto the boss. So thank you very much. Hi and welcome to our brand new pet care center here in Hanford in Cheshire. It's just a stone's throw away from our support office. This pet care center contains the very best pet to home. It's got full digital integration, a multi use event center, and of course, our fantastic service proposition of vets, groomers, self wash, and a brand new service desk. The Hanford Center is also the first to incorporate our brand new vet operating model, the start of an exciting new initiative. Before we go inside our pet care center, I wanna show you our two contactless delivery points. These are dedicated spaces where customers can park up, scan a QR code, and then the colleague will come out and place the items directly into the boot of your car, providing a really convenient solution for customers. So now, let me take you inside. Right away, you're greeted by our pet village where customers can learn about and interact the pets that we have in our store. You can also see that this pet care center features both of our primary services, the groom room and a vet's practice. It's really clear and very simple for customers to navigate their way there. Looking around the rest of the pet care center, you can see all of our product ranges divided clearly into cats, dogs, small animal and easily signposted for customers. To my right, we've got our brand new service desk. You've noticed we've positioned it right at the front of the store, but it's a multi use desk. Of course if you're here for a click and collect order, what you want is speed and convenience with a great storage area behind so colleagues can quickly get your order. But this is you the can sign up for a subscription, have your name tags engraved for your dog, plus engage and consult with one of our experts. You'll notice here and right throughout the pet care centre a digital screen showcasing all our services, food consultation, weight checks, and all the services that we provide in this pet care center. Pet's a home is the home of nutrition. In this pet care center, we've added an additional bank of freezers in the home of nutrition for all our customers' frozen and raw food needs. Now let me take you to our aquatic center. This is brand new. You'll see it's a wraparound unit, so customers can walk around and they can see all the various different species of fish we have, from cold water fish through to tropical fish. You'll notice that there's a brilliant blue ambient lighting above. So wherever you are in the store, can see it. And this is a brand new state of the art tank system. It's so sophisticated, it even cleans itself. Now you probably know that we've got groomers of a 300 barrel store, but this one's quite special. Let me take you to the new part first, and it's called self wash. In our self wash, it literally does what it says on the tin. Why destroy your very expensive bathroom when you can come and use ours? It's really simple. You swipe your card, a fully integrated unit, all the water you need, all the soap you need, all the towels you need. Job done. Our customers absolutely love it. But let me show you the normal groom room. And welcome to our groom room, but it's not a normal groom. Firstly, welcome to our reception desk where you're gonna be greeted by one of our grooming professionals to check your dog in. We can check the coat and make sure we know exactly what you want for your groom. And then into the grooming salon, salon, you can see straight through. Everything we do is on display. We think it's a fantastic area for us to really demonstrate our skills and capabilities from our qualified groomers. So your dog is looking absolutely tip top and you wanna share that image with all your friends and family. So what of course do you need? You need a selfie spot. And we've given that to you here. So you can put your dog, you can choose your background on our digital screen, take your selfie and share it with all your friends. Alongside our groom room, we've got our brand new Vets for Pets practice. This is the first practice to include our new operating model. But from the outside, what you see is a brand new look, it's open, and we think it's got a really premium feel. In the reception area, where we've traditionally had a desk, we now have a podium to make our vet partners and our colleagues much more accessible and allow them to have a great conversation with the client. Removing the desk as a barrier also helps integrate the practice into the watch store environment. We've also added a coffee machine, a new digital screen showing the message with our clients, and this really helps us cut down on paper as we work towards our Better World Pledge. So we've really redesigned our practice from the front outwards and we're starting to employ our cat and dog waiting areas. But the way we've designed them is so actually our vet care advisors can come and sit alongside a client and speak to our clients about their needs. Now if you're a cat owner, the last thing you want is to be sat next to a dog owner in reception. You don't want to scrap between your cat and dog, which is why we've got a dedicated cat area. But we also understand that cats, when it comes to vet practice, often are very stressed. To help alleviate that, we've created a cat tower, and that allows you to position your cat at height. That gives the cat real security. Plus also, if you've got your cat out the basket, we have some grey blankets here so you can cuddle and give them some comfort before they go and see the vet. The changes aren't just on the front. The changes also take place through behind the scenes and also through the whole of the operating model. So let me take you behind the scenes and show you our brand new glass see through operating theatre. The heart of a Vet practice is the theatre. Here we've created a state of the art see through operating theatre with two tables which means we can complete two procedures at once. The reason why it's made of glass is because we believe transparency is really important. It's really important that clients can see, if they want to do so, what's going on. And it means everything we do is on display. It's not just how our vet practices look, it's how they operate. That's really important. That's why we've equipped our practice here in Hanford with all of the latest technology to ensure that our vets and nurses can deliver the very best experience to clients. In the consult room we've introduced a platform which provides interactive videos and models to show the customer a clear visualization of what's happening medically to their pets and how proposed treatment will work and help manage a particular condition. We also have microscopes linked up to screens in the consult room so the customer can see exactly what the vet is seeing, which helps bring to life what the vet is describing for the customer and they can see evidence of any condition. One of the key changes we've made in this vet practice is when you arrive you're met by your pet's health advisor. This is a crucial brand new role. In effect, this is the person who helps interpret exactly what the Vets and the nurses are saying in a language that you can really understand. And they can spend more time with you really talking about your pets needs, understanding your insurance requirements and talking through you after you've left the consult room and explain it in a way that when you go home you know exactly what you need to do. We think this is a crucial role in breaking down the barriers and helping our customers really understand how they best care for their pets. But crucially, it also means that the vets can spend their time on clinical matters, and we think this is a really exciting way forward in how we deliver the best pet health care to our customers. For our colleagues, we've got one further to enable our teams to work closely together between the retail team, the groomers, the vets. With a single shared colleague room where all our colleagues can relax together and build relationships over a cup of coffee. So there you go. That's a really fast fly through of our brand new pet care center here in Hanford. I hope you agree it's absolutely jam packed full of lots of touches and new initiatives that make pet care so much more rewarding for our customers. Because we know it's really important that our pet care centers need to be fully integrated into your digital experience, but above all, when you come here, want to create an experience which is really easy, convenient, supportive and really rewarding to visit. This is now the format that we're rolling back through our store refits and of course into our brand new stores. I hope you've enjoyed it. I hope you found it informative and we'll see you again soon. So let's talk about our unique data assets. I get to talk about data for the next twenty minutes, half an hour. If I'm fast, favorite subject, talk about me. So I've been working in data for about thirty years now, coming up to thirty years across a range of sectors. I built my first data warehouse in '92. I probably worked on the first internet data platform probably in the world in '97. I did a bit of algorithmic marketing in the early two thousand, the .com boom, so the people that say people who buy this will sometimes go on to buy that. I got involved in that. And then more recently, for eight years, I was a chief data officer at Royal Mail. And then, as Peter just said, joined PETS in 2018. So I had a blank sheet of paper, and part of the attraction of joining the company was that it was a blank sheet of paper. What we did have, as you've heard and you've seen today, is a well thought through pet care strategy and lots of data. The VIP loyalty scheme had been running for about six years, and we managed to collect a lot of data about pet owners. But unfortunately, it was all outsourced. So it was all with an agency who helped us with our VIP scheme. And strategically, if you're going to do something with your data, you need to get your hands You need to create an internal capability. So our approach and our strategy was very much about creating an internal capability. When I talk about capability, it's not just about the people. It's about the platform. It's about the culture. And we had a three prong attack. One, build a team. Two, build the platform. And three, build a culture, create a culture, create an atmosphere, create an environment within the company that was curious, asked lots of questions, knew how to harness the capabilities that we were about to deliver across all 15,000 people in the company. That still remains our ambition. Today, I'm only going to focus on the first two and tell you a little bit about what we've been doing with it. But I'm going to talk a lot about the team and the platform that we've built and how we've been using it. Our ambition remains to try and put artificial intelligence at the point and the crux of every key decision we could take and make around our customers, around our colleagues, around our partners and across the entire business. And the capability we've created will enable us to do that. However, eyes on the first prize, we wanted to harness the data that we had, the insights we could get generate and bring our VIP data in house to create value for our customers. We want to be become more relevant, more personalized, and know everything we can possibly know about the pet and the pet owner. And hopefully, I'm gonna show you how we've done that. So creating the team. I've done this two or three times before, created from a blank sheet of paper to something a little bit substantial. The key is to take your incumbent talent because people clearly know a lot about the business you're in, a lot about the data you've got, but they don't necessarily have the technical skills or the latest technology skills to be able to do what you need to be able to do in the twenty first century. So the first thing was about centralizing our incumbent data science, and that amounted to I'll talk in I'll talk in years experience rather than the number of people we've got. About sixty years of pet care experience, knowing our data, knowing how the business ticks, knowing all the foibles and nuance around our data. Bring that into one central capability so that they could ramp up the effectiveness of the people we're about to bring into the organization. And we did that. We went on a we went on a bit of a shopping spree for for talent out in the external market to work alongside these guys across the other three areas. So first of all, we created analytics platform with cloud native. So we went out and built a team that knew how to manage cloud, got about sixty years experience about building and managing cloud platforms, and got two hundred years experience in digitally native companies and data functions across some of the brands such as BT, Dunhamby, Microsoft, some of the high street banks. We've managed to attract talent from all those, the Hutt Group, particularly in the Northwest. We've We've managed to attract that sort of talent to us to come and help us build that platform where all our data sits. Data science and insight, so understanding the algorithms, machine learning, the artificial intelligence. You get a right balance of academic pedigree and commercial know how. So nearly everyone we've has come from industry, but they've got a good pedigree in academia, and it's a stats based subject. So we have people with big brains. So we've got a professor, we've got three PhDs, we've got four masters, and we've people who just like to churn out algorithms for the work that we do. And I'll come on to talk about a little bit more about that. And then finally, the CRM team. So loyalty, personalization is key. It's at the fulcrum of what we're trying to do. So we try to bring in about fifty, sixty years' worth of experience of running CRM systems, marketing systems, and people who knew how to select audiences that were optimal for what we were going to try and offer them talk to and have the right conversation with those customers. At the backdrop of all this, we're doing a lot of communicating with our customers. We're dealing with a lot of customer data, a lot of colleague data. So customer privacy, data privacy and data protection is front of mind always. So we make sure we're having the right ethical and permission based conversation with our customers at all times. I think we've built strength and depth in the team that we've got. I'm a proud dad today because for the second year running, we've had young talent of the year award presented to us in the data industry. So we've had two years running now. Our talent's been recognized against the biggest and the best in The UK. So we're not doing too bad. Once you've created a team, need to give them something to play with. So I'm going talk about our platform. When we talk about our pet ecosystem, what we're effectively saying is that we need to know about the pet or pets, the pet owner, and their relationship with each parts of our group. Now, like lots of organizations who've got who've got a legacy platform, we've got lots of systems over many years, they'll know about Rob, and I'll be Rob online, and I'll be Rob as I come into store, and I'll be Robert as I go into vets, and I might be R Kent as I go into groom. We have to create a single customer view to know that there's one Robert Kent, and in my case, this is my dog Kenny, there's one Kenny. And first thing we had to do was build the asset that formed the single view of the customer, the pet, and the household. And this basically enables us to have and manage that relationship across each of the different channels and products and products and services across the business. So this is real data. It's my data, so I don't mind showing it to you. And you'll see you you won't be able to see, but what what what this tells you is that in our household, we have a single dog. My wife pays for all the vet bills. I pay for the treats, and my wife does a bit of shopping in store as well. So we know every store that we've been into, what we've bought. We know what dog treats Kenny likes. We like what dog food Kenny likes. We know what treatments Kenny's had. Kenny's a fussy eater. Well, we thought he was a fussy eater. He's actually allergic to nearly every food you can possibly have. So he's had a lot of treatment for food allergies. So we know his blood tests. We know when he's been to see a vet, when he hasn't been to see a vet. So we know as much of a three sixty degree view about Kenny and a little bit about the pet parents in terms of how who we talk to. This is how we really personalize the conversation that we have with VIPs like myself. And we can tailor whether we're talking to the pet and we frequently do, we address mail to the pet. We know if we just want to target the household because we know there's multiple VIPs in that household, but we just have one conversation, then we can do that. Or we can talk to individual VIPs because we know that one VIP spends a lot in store and one VIP spends a lot in vets. Gives you the real dynamic to have a different type of conversation depending what the relationship is between us and the pet owner. Okay. Where does that get stored? So a little bit about the tech. We've gone cloud native. We've been able to leapfrog directly to cloud native, so everything sits in the cloud. And as Peter referred to it earlier, we have about 158,000,000,000 data points on pet care stored in the cloud. And the power, the scale and the security that the cloud affords us means that we can rebuild our data platform weekly and it takes us about an hour. We run about quarter of a million queries every period and every one of them takes less than four seconds. And what does that mean? What does that mean in reality? So if we want to go and search through every single basket that's shopped in the last three years and find every basket that's bought a dog treat and a cat and a cat collar, then we can go through every single basket and we'll return that result in less than four seconds. If we want to find out every vet customer that doesn't have a health plan but does have flea and worm in store, then we can make sure that when we're targeting people for health plans or flea and worm, we can either remove them or include them depending on what we want to try and do. What we don't know about the customer is just as important as what we do know about them because by inference, we can start to target them for the subscriptions of products and services that we haven't yet managed them to get them to buy. The real key to this in the world of artificial intelligence is that we're allowed to iterate fast. You never get it right. Sophisticated customer insight and artificial intelligence algorithms are never right first time. You have to go through and train and train and train over again. The platform is no longer a constraining factor in our ability to be able to do that. We can iterate very fast on a large volume of data sets as we see fit. And I think the final point I want to make on this is that it's not a linear relationship between the amount of use that we have of our platform and the cost of running it. So the chart in the bottom right hand side is just an indication that we manage our given the cloud experience that we've got, we are managing our costs really tightly. So we grow our use of the platform every single day, every hour within every single day. But compared to our peer group, we're keeping our costs flat. And again, we keep more than half an eye on the fact that we're doing things sensibly in the cloud even though that we've almost got infinite capability in what we can actually generate. Once you've got the data and you've a single customer view and you've got it on a platform, you need then need to enrich it. And we've created something called customer DNA. So we've taken profile of every single pet owner that we know about. And we've talked in the past quite a lot about the 6,500,000 VIP customers. We actually know about just coming up to 8,000,000 pet owners because there are a number of vet customers and a number of online customers that are yet to become VIP in itself an opportunity. So we've taken this this just under 8,000,000 customers, and we've we've we've run some machine learning across every single one of them to build a profile of up to 300 attributes of what we could know about them. So some of those are definite. We know that you buy this food. We know that you live in this town. We know that you have this type of pet. But more but more and more, we've we've worked out the propensity of their likelihood to like something else. So are they are they are they likely to take on a subscription? Are they likely to go from bridging food to advanced nutrition? Are they likely to respond to a campaign? Anything that we want to try and predict that we want the customer behavior to entice is that we can come up with some kind of probabilistic model that tells us what's going on. And we have that store and we recalculate that on a weekly and monthly basis to make sure that it's dynamically up to date with what we can do. So we use this in multi so this underpins a lot of what we do. So whether we're marketing people, we're making decisions in store, whether we're running supply campaigns and insights for suppliers, we try and use this DNA to underpin most things that we try and do. Talk about some of our bread and butter. Now our campaigns and our marketing throughout the whole life of VIP has been special. It's been rich. It's bread and butter to us and generates a fair bit of return for us. But since we've introduced this new platform, we've been able to increase the velocity of the communications to our pet owners. And the communication can be anything. It's not just about offers. We offer advice. We point them to information they should read about, point them to YouTube to look at our pet care channel. We have a regular level of engagement across a range of subjects with each of our pet owners. But we've been able to increase the velocity of that. And you can see in the last six months, we've done over 300 campaigns, over 90,000,000 emails, 10 millions of direct mail. And there's two examples here. One on the left is a direct mail that we personalized to the pet, and it's our plus one. So we talked about I think we've talked about our plus one model in the ecosystem, trying to get nudge customers to take on more services. This is something that we ran to try and encourage people who've just shopped in store to shop online as well. So they would have got a 20% discount, we would have targeted a specific audience for them to try and take on that offer. And on the left is what you'd see on an app. So in the old world, you'd see one offer, one voucher, and you probably have a stream of six of them. Now we can layer on the offers that are all personalized to your pet, are all relevant to who you are and what you spend. And again, when you're in store, you're on your phone, you can use your app, you can use the voucher directly when you're at the till. We've seen a significant uplift on some of our campaigns, some of our bread and butter campaigns. We've seen a significant uplift in the response rates. Our more focused targeting has been enable us to get a bigger return from the campaigns we've been sending out, particularly voucher redemption. One of the first things we did to underpin the marketing we send out is to come up with a new level of segmentation of our customers. We've run two types of segmentation. One, we call life stage and one based on transaction. The diagram on the right is very much on the transactional side. So we looked at recent see if we've seen monetary segment, and we've got much more precision than we used to have in understanding where people sit in each segment and where customers sit in each segment. And what we do is we monitor who's moving up and down segments because obviously the growth we want everyone to be in the top right. And we need to move people up the spend levels and to Peter's point earlier, increase the share of wallet that they spend. The tone of voice we use, the imagery we use, the nature of the communication we use can all be tailored according to which segment we think you sit in. And again, we calculate this dynamically on a regular basis. So this isn't static. And our life stage. If you take something like our puppy and kitten scheme, that's a journey. And throughout from the point of signing up, we have a level of engagement with you throughout that puppy and kitten journey, offer you discounts, offer you advice, offer you communications. But our puppy and kitten sign ups, we'll look at the life stage we It's purely demographic, geographic and demographic. So we'll know whether you're an empty nester, whether you're a young family, whether you live in a particular area of town, whether you live in the country, whether you're a pensioner. And again, it starts to drive the types of decisions we could make around the type of customer you are. And again, we've done that for all of our customer base. I just wanted to dig into a bit of detail about something more specifically done in optimization. Forgive the granular charts here, but I'll try and explain what they we one of our bread and butter campaigns is depending on how much you spend with us on regular basis is that we will issue a set of vouchers that will give you some money off and some discounts. And we send these about four to six times a year, and each campaign will be about 2,000,000 customers. What we do using AI is that we calculate and we predict what we think you're likely to spend in the next four months. And based on that prediction, we then try and stretch your spend with the incentive of the voucher to go to that next level up. So what this table tells you is to say, we predict that you're going to spend GBP24 next month. We'll give you a voucher if you spend we'll give you GBP3 off if you spend GBP30. And the same, we'll give you GBP4.50 off if spend GBP40. So we're trying to nudge you up to that next level of spend. What we did we've run this a couple of times now on a decent scale. And what we found is that for those people that we say received the voucher and pushed this threshold are typically spending twice the basket that someone who should have got the campaign, who didn't, our control group, who didn't get the voucher, they will spend pretty much what we predict. But we're managing to double that amount for those people that respond with the voucher. So we're particularly excited by this campaign because this seems to be it's early signs, but it seems to be bearing real fruit. And it's a real indication of the type of power that machine learning can have when we put all this data to the test. We're using about four fifty different features of customer and pet to try and understand what that looks like. Churn, sadly some customers leave us or look like leaving us and we try to do something about it. So in our world, sometimes churn is sadly the death of a pet, and there's not much we can do about that. But we do try and find out which customers are looking like leaving us before they actually leave us. And again, we've done some leading edge modeling on trying to predict a slight downward trend, a downward tick on customers who've been spending quite a bit with us, and it started to slow down. And again, we're on a weekly or monthly basis, we're trying to anticipate who they are, build an audience, send them out an incentive to try and sell. And again, we've run this a couple of times now, decent scale and the signs are really, really positive in terms of people responding. And more importantly, getting them to buy once with a discount voucher, could argue is the easy bit. Getting them to come back a second time and a third time is the real test. And we're seeing up to twothree of those customers that respond return for a second and third time. We're now moving now because we think we we I won't go as far as to say we've cracked it. Well, I will say the early signs are really positive, so we're going to put that on to an Always On campaign. Lifetime value is a big deal for us. So in most retail organizations, obviously, the lifetime of a customer is trying to base how long they're going to spend some money with you. And to some degree, we're different. But the beauty of what we've got is that we've got a living animal that we need to try and understand how long that pet might be alive for. And I think we've talked previously, an industry and a profession talks broadly that a dog will live between twelve and fifteen years. And as a rule, that's fine. We've gone far more precise. So our lifetime model looks at breed and looks at age at the likelihood of how long that pet will be alive for. We can even introduce our understanding of anticipated ailments for that breed to see if that's going be any shorter. We think all research to date has been based on samples of 4,000, 5,000 dogs. We've done it on 4,000,000. And what we've got is a lot more precision. So we'll say, for an example as an example, Labrador, some research would say that Labrador will live for eleven point five years to twelve years. We anticipate that they'll live for about thirteen point five, fourteen years. So we can do that by breed, we can do that by practice, we can do that by age, and we know the spend at each one of those granularity. So the opportunity here is that for a particular practice, we can almost understand what their likely spend is given their profile of breed that they're actually that are actually the clients within that practice. And we've got to test that, but that's the opportunity that we've got with this. And we use it as a blend of what we know about the clinical side of a pet's life with the retail side of a pet's life, we've got an upper and lower range of how long a pet might live for or how long someone might be a customer for. And clearly, our opportunity there is to maximize that for the life of the pet. I just want to move off algorithm slightly. I'm coming to the end. I'm doing all right for time. Same data, same platform, different audience. So we're trying to push out as much insight to our stores and to our vets practices in time, so that they've got enough information, enough insight to make decisions locally and quickly. So the two examples I've got here, and I know you can't read them. That might sound a deliberate. Reason on the left hand side, we've got you've seen the contactless delivery. People come up and pull up in their cars. So our store manager will be able to monitor the average wait time that you've that the customer is waiting and again take action when that starts to get too long, if it does get too long. And on the left hand side is something we're just starting to roll out into the practices around best plan, best pet consult. So we're able to see the best preventative measures that we should be taking around the pet. We tell the practice how much of that they've done for the clients that they see. And then we also make recommendations of where there's opportunity of where we're not applying too much preventative treatments to other types of pet or dogs in this case. So there's two examples of where we've generated using the same platform to generate insight out locally to our front line. Another example we've got, again, it's not necessarily customer related, is around availability and ranging in store. So we've done a lot of work, algorithmic work around looking at each of the SKUs that we sell and looking at those that have got complements and those that have got substitutes. And where we can do is that we can again be a little bit more precise on the range that we have in each store, and we've even been able to cluster stores. So we're not going four fifty different versions of ranges, but what we've been able to do is cluster stores into like minded store groups that serve certain populations. They over or under index in certain types of product like own brand, advanced nutrition. And what we can do is we can be a lot smarter about the ranging that we put into store. And these are two examples here. So something like puppy chicken food has one substitute and 43 complements. So people typically spend on 43 other products when they buy this product. So clearly, it's not a great candidate for range optimization because it's such a winner for us. Conversely, something like the dog lead, it's got 16 substitutes. There's many different dog leads. It's got one complement. People don't buy anything else with it. So therefore, it makes it a high candidate optimization and maybe even removal in certain stores. So again, we've got a lot more focused in what we should or shouldn't have in stores depending on the population they serve and how successful those SKUs are in terms of being purchased. Okay, last slide. So I've talked a lot about some of the green shoots that we've seen. These are material green shoots. Some of the audience we've gone out to are tens and hundreds of thousands of customers. We've not tested this on 100 customers and said we've declared victory. These have been significant success. But we've got to continually refine. Artificial Intelligence is about continually training the data and training the model to come up with the right answer. And consumer behavior does sometimes change. You need to be able to react to that. So we've got a lot of work to do in terms of refining and establishing a more industrial method to the model so that every it's always on everywhere then and we can move on to the next set of opportunities. Enhancing personalization and enabling the right conversations at the right time. So as I've described, up to 8,000,000 pet owners that we could be talking to across any of our channels at any point in time. They come to us, we go to them. We should be using our intelligence to have the right type of conversation. Could we offer the next best action knowing what type of pet you have, what type of customer you are? We know that when you come online, and Chris is about to talk about our digital opportunity. If you marry the digital opportunities that Chris has just described with the intelligence of what we're doing with the data, you have a real powerful method of having the right conversation with the pet owner at the right time. And I think this is where it offers us a significant runway of what we could be doing because that's a huge population and a huge knowledge about the pets that we could be driving a different type of nuance in the level of engagement that we have with them. Lifetime value, I talked briefly about. That's really exciting for us. We've established what we think lifetime value is across our customer base. We now need to apply it. We need to find the lookalike customers that we know are typically high spenders and find other people that look like them. And then we can either do go through our digital channels and make sure that Facebooks and the Googles of the world are either giving us similar customers or excluding people who are customers already for us. Or we can start to do our own internal audience segmentation based on lifetime value and what we think we're going to do with them. So that's a really important area for us over the coming months and into next year. As I said from the beginning, we've designed a capability to do lots for our colleagues, our partners, our customers. And our cost base is no different in terms of our opportunities, whether it be our supply chain, workforce management, store location, property management. There are lots of different examples where we could be being smarter and applying the data that we have to drive in more optimized decisions in nature of those areas. And again, that's an untapped area for us at the moment. But I think there's plenty of opportunity. Talking of untapped areas, we've got just wanted to put a couple of blue sky on here that are actually very real in the market, but again, just demonstrates where we can play in this space. One, telemedicine proposition. So again, in the triaging, the conversation you have with a customer and a pet owner over the phone or online is that you can use the data that we have, the clinical data we have married with the retail data that we have to have a more sensible triage conversation to route them in the right direction. Sometimes that will result in going to see the vet, and sometimes that will just put them at ease. It's not too bad. And we think we can play in that space. And then finally, I think this is one I joined on the back of this because I think this is one of the real ethical things that we can do. Preventative action that we could take, and I know you'll hear from Tanya briefly. If we if we can complement all the brilliance of our vets with some of the artificial intelligence we can generate in terms of identifying and preventing disease, in particular species or breeds of animal, then again, there's no reason why we shouldn't be playing in that space. Sort of thing that Mars have been doing and been looking at, and I think we've got every opportunity to be doing something similar. I hope that makes sense. I'm going to hand over to Chris, who's going to talk to you a little bit about Polestar. Really, if you're a pet owner like myself, our digital transformation makes it really easy for you to do the things you need to do with us. So whether that's coming in to, get an appointment in the vets, or whether you're gonna go and, take your dog to to to get a groom or get the products and service solutions that you need through through, the shopping channels, our transformation is about bringing all of those things together. And Polestar is really the glue that brings this together from a digital perspective for the pet owner, and we're gonna bring that to life as we go through go through the presentation. I think there's two bits just before we start. One is that only we can really do this. We've got all the unique ingredients to be able to bring this to life and really play to our omnichannel strengths and and really dial dial this up as we go forward. And then the second point is that this is really a big unlock and enabler for us to take off our our share of the 600,000,000 opportunity that we're that we're working towards. So all of the work that we're doing on the customer experience, the joining the dots for the pet owner, and building out our omnichannel capability is really all driving towards those those things. So introduce John. Hello to everyone again. My my name is John Carson. So I'm director of change here. So I have the responsibility for all of our technology and our our business change delivery. So background for me is twenty five years of change delivery. I've come through change both inside organizations and delivering as a consultancy. Most recently, I joined here in 2019 coming from United Utilities where I led digital strategy planning and and change delivery for them. And I'll we'll share through this section with with Chris. Brilliant. Thanks, John. So so I'm Chris Hovieland. I'm group digital director here at Pets. I've been here for just over six years actually, But I've spent the last twenty years in retail, and I've been fortunate enough to have sort of seventeen years of that in digital roles. I worked for Dickson's Car Phone, worked for Walgreens Boots Alliance, and then more recently at pets. So, really, I'm accountable for the end to end user experience. So all of the digital touch points and how it shows up for customers sits within within my my my team's accountability. So together, John and I are gonna take you through this this session. Now Polestar is a really, really big investment for us. We're investing over £20,000,000 in the digital experience. It is about transforming what we've got today, but the really important thing is we're building from a really strong position today. Polestar gives us lots of new capabilities and enablements, and that really moves us towards being really pet owner centric. But the good news is we're starting from a really strong position. Now, Polestar really, when we first started this initiative, we really focused in on what is the experience we want to create. What does joined up pet care really mean for for our customers? How can we make it really easy, really convenient? How can we be there to serve more of their pet care needs and bring everything together under one place? So that's really where we started from. We didn't go looking at technology. We didn't go looking at what platform should we should we look and build and buy and partner with. We we started with the experience. So that was really, really important. And very quickly, we realized for us to do this really well, we need to actually look at really bringing together more of a hybrid build approach with with with this initiative. We didn't wanna go to a big platform. We didn't wanna be at the at the mercy or we wanted the destiny to be in our our hands as we went through how how we're gonna do do some of this. So you can sort of see, today, we move move from where we are focusing on on on the channels and the experiences, and we really get lots of new capabilities with Polestar. So we're gonna create this new joined up pet care experience. Gonna play a short film in a moment that will bring that to life. We're actually, most importantly, gonna be building our new experiences with an in house digital capability, and John will come on and cover that later on. That's really, really important. And then coming out of this over the next eighteen months, we're gonna have a new ecom and subscriptions engine, really, really important to power a lot of the transaction elements of our experience. We're gonna have a new product and content management capability. And what's really important as well, we're gonna develop a new pet care app experience. So today, you'll know we've got multiple apps. We're gonna be bringing those together to create a really strong pet care app that has the pet owner at the center and then all of our unique pet care assets all around it. And that's a really, really important thing. And also, by the way, we're gonna make it really easy for you to register and sign on. So we're gonna create new identity experiences for you as a customer. So you can register with us once, you can log in once, and you can access all of our pet care services in one way and in one place. Now that's gonna really take us on a journey to become this pet owner centric organization. And and at the heart of that, we want to have a connected ecosystem of products and services. It's really important that we we focus in on that. It's not just about the single transaction. It's not just about a subscription. It's about bringing together the whole pet care needs in a joined up ecosystem. Our customer journeys are going to be really seamless, and they're also going to be really consistently joined up. That's really, really important. The platform that we're building, to to Rob's points earlier, we're gonna really have the capability to build lifelong relationships so that we can be there for the customer at the very beginning. We can work with them all the way through their pet ownership, and we can be there to look after them, to give them advice, to give them information, and to serve them all the way through their pet ownership journey. And as we go forward as well, using the data at the heart of this, we're gonna be able to personalize and have pet specific conversations. So for example, I've got a boxer dog. He's called Charlie. Charlie's actually quite an old boxer dog now. He's 10. When I first joined, he was obviously, a lot lot younger. But Charlie does this really strange thing where he does four little turns on himself before he sits down and and lays down. He does it every single day, every single time, and I thought that's really unique. When I sort of sort of googled it, apparently, lots of other pet owners have the same experience as me, whether Charlie will do this thing. And apparently, it's from historic reasons when they used to be in the snow and they would create a little hole in the snow before they'd lay down. But going forward, knowing all of these things that what does a 10 year old boxer need, what does it do, we can actually have a really specific, pet specific Charlie boxer breed conversation with Chris as the pet owner, and and the capability we're gonna create is gonna gonna give us that. At the end of this, we will have a pet care platform, and we are on the journey of changing over around about eighteen months. So you'll see things come to life as we go through this transition phase. But that gives you a little bit of a flavor of where we're going from and where we're coming to. Now the next bit, I'm just gonna play a short film that aims to bring to life some of the aspects. When we describe what we mean by a joined up pet care experience, the video that we'll play will bring to life some of those elements. It's not everything we're gonna be doing, but it will give you a really good, indication. So I'll just play this. Brilliant. So I hope that sort of brings it to life when we talk about what we mean by joined up pet care experience. The interesting thing in all of this is technology and digital plays a really important part, but you can see there it's brought to life by people and customers obviously experiencing it. Now at the heart of any good user journey or any good experience is UX. User experience is an area that we're really building capability internally on. And every single part of our journey, when we're looking at whether a customer is gonna get their first shop, whether they're gonna join and sign up to register, or they're gonna join one of our clubs like the puppy and kitten club, the user experience sits at the heart. When they log in, they need to have the the kind of anytime, anywhere feeling. So the single sign on, the capability that we create, when we look at the pricing or the proposition, you know, it has to be affordable and predictable. And and also it has to bring to life things like holistic care when we're thinking about the types of food that we're gonna we're gonna you're gonna be feeding your pet. So the nine principles, every time our team in the background, our UX capabilities, building new journeys, they're running everything through the nine nine design principles to make sure everything matches back. So we shouldn't end up creating anything that doesn't really adhere to this. This is really, really important for us. Just an example, you know, the first impressions really count, don't they? So when you're a new pet owner for the first time and you come into one of our pet care centers and you experience the amazing expertise from our colleagues in our retail, our groom room, and our vets, it's really important. That sets the tone for the journey that you're gonna then go on as a pet owner. So if we're there to help you find the products, to give you the advice, to really nurture and tell you how how you can do things, but be there also be there to sort of support when you want to ask us questions, we can really take you on that journey. You know, when you get a new pet for the first time, there's quite a big long list of first pet shop that you need to do. There's also lots of advice you need around, you know, a flea treatment or a worming treatment for a cat or a dog. I guess what I'm sort of saying on this is that our user journeys are gonna be there to sort of really help you and take you along the journey. So whether you're a new pet owner or an expert pet owner, we'll be able to cater for your pet care needs. But essentially, we're gonna be bringing everything together into these experiences. Now what will customers see over the next eighteen months? So so we're starting with building the foundations at the moment. We've got a lot of work going on in in the background. John will bring to life the number of people that are working on Polestar for us at the moment. We've also got lots of really good stuff that's gonna be coming to customers soon. So new sign on and registration experiences, so creating a single sign on that will then allow you to access all of our services in in one place, in one way. We're also working on an iteration of our current app to bring to life shopping and loyalty and bring all of that together. So really over the next eighteen months, you'll see how our experiences and our journeys make it really easy, really convenient for pet owners to do the things that they need and want to do for their pet. So at the heart of this is really, you know, the evolution of this experience as opposed to waiting eighteen months and then there's a big big reveal. So you start to see things as customers over the next eighteen months as we step towards this. It's really, really important. We didn't wanna have a big bang kind of the old experience and then the new experience. We wanted to evolve and and move towards it. So hopefully that gives you a bit of bit of a flavor. I'm now gonna hand over to John who's gonna take us through the the last part of the presentation. Okay. Thanks, everyone. John? This is this is about kind of trying to bring that convenience together. Hopefully, some of these things you'll have seen in the in the visit across the pet care, but just about the convenience for the customer. Things like our click and collect in less than an hour. That is about bringing making sure the customer can get what they want when they need it and in the way that they expect it. Making sure that when I've ordered something, I can go and collect it. It's there, and it's available it's available for me. Next day and and same day delivery from store. Again, accessing what I want when when when I need it. Joining up that experience so that it's a it's a true kind of omni channel experience. It doesn't matter. I don't have to just do the store and online. Really powerful contact collection. Say, I know everyone's mentioned it. I'm sure you've seen it when when you're over there. But that that truly ability to be able to go and drive up, park up, open the booth, have the order going to deliver it delivered into my car. That brings again the accessibility to be able to go on and the convenience for the for the customer within our entire kind of omnichannel experience. So really, really, kind of really, really important to to make sure we join that digital, use the power of the store that part of store network, and give that convenience to our to to our customers. And allowing our colleagues as well to be able to go and do that and be able to give that best experience to to our customers. So it's about giving them the right information. Robert's talked about the kind of the data and the insights and availability of of that information that that we can really give value to our customers. So things like our Pet Expert Live, which is in in cooperation with with GoIn GoInStore, which means I can go on the website. If I'm if I'm struggling through some sort of complex purchase, I'm I wanna get a bit of advice and guidance, I can go on. I can talk to those colleagues in store. I can get that information. I can get the help through that journey, making sure that I can get what I need, how I how I need it to be. And that's really important therefore that we give the right technology to our colleagues in store so that they have access to that information. They can access that in the way that they that they need to go and access when when they need to do that. So hopefully, again, you've seen in you've seen in the visit some of the technology that's going in the store and that technology enhancement that is just giving that colleagues that ability to be able to give our customers what they need and what they experience and really joining up those those very that kind of that true omnichannel experience. Going even a little going a little bit further, kind of actually developing that kind of in house app development, doing what we are kind of working alongside our colleagues in store. So this one here, I don't know if you can see the photograph, but this is this is Blue. He's our he's our store manager in our Liverpool Edge Lane store. We've got a a development hub directly in that store. Our developers are there. They're placed in in that store. So they can go and they can go and create the apps. They can test the apps, they can iterate the the content there. So what we're doing is we're developing what's needed, what works, and then when we roll it out more broadly, we have it tested and we can land it really, really well right across our site. So really bringing that kind of digital and and that that kind of store and that that center experience all all coming in together. What's really important is actually what we can do is is build the the ability and the capability to make that a long lasting capability. We can sustain it. We can build out. We can iterate. We can we can go from where we are today and continue to sustain it and grow that out. So where where where are we on the team that we've been building? So over on the on the left hand side, as you look there, you kind of some of the senior leaders, some of them some of the people you've you've met today kind of steering and guiding, kind of giving those guiding principles, knowing the right direction, knowing where we're heading, being really, really clear about what it is we want to achieve, how we how we wanna go achieve it. In the sense there, we've kinda got core delivery leaders. They are they're a leadership team focused on delivering this. This is this is their role. This is their focus. They have that core delivery leadership, and that team has been brought together, bringing experiences from where organizations other organizations have done those, digital investments, the the digital pure plays. There's there's experience, multi multi year experience in there. Places coming from boots.com, from Next, from JD Sports, from Boohoo, from Bet365. You've got you're getting that experience that's coming together, different sectors, different teams to really be able to go and lead and make sure the way we're set up and continue to set up continues to deliver this and be to go enhance it. And actually then, the scale and the capability to continue to go into delivery. So our delivery squads there built out to be able to go and build this capability, build this capability at scale, build this capability at pace, and build it in a sustainable way. Over a 100 colleagues working in the in house digital capabilities being able to really bring this true kind of omnichannel capability together, a really lasting platform and power for us. So for what you've what you've heard and what you've run through there, Polestar guiding us towards our kind of digital journey, bringing our true omnichannel experience together, building a long lasting in house capability, building that team, building the experiences, building in the right way so it's not just build up today, it's something that we can sustain, we can scale, and we can work from. It's a new unique joined up pet care experience. That whole the whole journeys that we can bring our customers through, the convenience that we can buy, the various different channels we join together means that actually that is a a truly kind of joined up pet care experience. It supports all those plans for growth. You've heard the plans for growth. You've seen the plans for growth. This is about having that lasting team, that lasting setup, which means we can support that. And all built on best of breed technology, which brings those kind of those platforms and those stores together. Technology, which means we can be agile, we can scale, we can flex, we can develop out, and we can sustain and continue to respond by having those kind of those kind of joined up journeys. I'm gonna I'm gonna talk to you about our unique vet model and why we're so excited really about the headroom for growth that we see there and and how we're gonna actually try and grab the the opportunity that's in front of us for our jewel in the crown as as Peter's described it. So you met Jane Balmain earlier this morning, and hopefully, you got to to know a little bit about her. What you wouldn't necessarily know is that she actually launched the established the first the original joint venture partnership model back in 2001 and actually then led the merger of Vets for Pets or the acquisition rather of Vets for Pets back in 2013. I met Jane in 2019 when I joined the business, having spent about twenty years of my career in FMCG. So in one respect, I'm relatively new to the vet business, but in another respect, I'm married to a vet, so I've sort of lived vicariously through the profession the last twenty plus years. So as I said, I'm really excited to talk to you about the growth opportunities that we see in in the sector, in our business in particular. But to do that, I wanted to to provide a bit of context. So I think sort of starting from a level playing field so we all understand the same thing is is a really good place to start. So we look at our track record, we've got a track record of taking share, and we think that, obviously, there's a there's a a number of reasons that drive that that performance over that such a long period of time. But, actually, some of the things that really stand out to us are the fact that we've got, a unique owner managed, business model where our joint venture partners really have skin in the game, and that that truly came to the fore during the recent pandemic. In addition to that, we're also very aware that, and you've heard it a lot today about our ecosystem, the joined up way we work. The vet part of the business really benefits from having a national brand, Pets at Home, Vets for Pets, and also the interaction through an omnichannel shopping experience for our customers and clients. So that really helps our model and differentiates us. And importantly, we're the only group, that consistently opens from Greenfield, and that we believe gives us the most headroom for growth in our business. And we've built scale. So we currently have over four forty practices across The UK, and that compares really well whether we're looking at our clinical excellence, our customer revenue or just the market share across the business. And we think that compares really well and stacks up very well against our competitive set. And we really expect the maturity profile of our business to continue. We think there's a lot of headroom for us to keep taking market share and to see that to take up more than our fair share in that growing segment. So our unique joint venture model. What makes it different? Well, we create a relationship where all parties benefit. It's a capital light model for us, but actually we share equitably with our joint venture partner throughout the life of of our of our normal practice life cycle. For the joint venture partner, they take a competitive salary from day one, And of course, when their practice becomes debt free, they're able to take dividends and take any equity value on exit. Vets for Pets or the Vet Group brings the leverage, the business leverage to the relationship, and all of the support services that we provide, whether it be marketing, our people team, our finance team, IT, and we allow then the vet to go on and do what they do best, which is run their vet practice with complete operational and clinical freedom. And Vets for Pets receive fees from day one, so that sort of derisks us from the early part of the business start up and protects us as vet partner is building their client base. Our expectation is that a vet practice will become debt free within ten years, and all of our funding facilities, financing facilities are set up around that. So when we talk about maturity, what we're really talking about is when that practice becomes debt free. And we've got lots and lots of examples where practices have accelerated really quickly through that journey and become debt free in a much shorter time frame than our than our, model would suggest. The other thing that's worth calling out is that our company managed or group owned practices represent about 10% of our overall first opinion practice footprint, And that gives us a really, really good environment to test, develop and learn and then ultimately roll out those initiatives that are successful into our joint venture business. And if we look at the unit economics of of our practices versus the competitive set, we think that our model is superior. So if you're a if you're a a vet that's entrepreneurially minded, then this is a really, really attractive model to you. And of course, the other thing that the model does, because of our long term relationship with our partners, it actually creates a scenario where the vet is more locked in. And of course, because the vet is the main revenue generator for the overall business model, that gives us more security of income going forward. And it also allows the vet to become locally established. It's their business in their local community, and that's really important as you're going to see in a little while when we talk about the long term relationships that exist between vets and their clients. And the other thing that's worth noting is that a vet that opens in one store or even in a stand alone practice isn't restricted to staying in that practice. There's plenty of opportunities for that vet to expand. We refer to it as taking the town, but really what we're talking about is giving the vet the opportunity to establish their business, grow it, and then move outside of their original premises. We have about a third of our practice base as a stand alone premises, and about two thirds are in store. The economics of both are pretty equal for us, so we don't really see material outputs different between the two models, but they do offer different things and they do allow us, especially with our stand alone practices, to fill in gaps around the country where we don't have a pet care centre. So I wanted to just set that context, so I think that's really important before we move forward and look at the growth opportunities that we see that exist. But before I do that, I'm really, really pleased to say that we've actually got a real life joint venture partner to talk to you here today. So But I think it would be really nice for you to hear her journey and her story. Lovely. So hi, everybody. I'm Kelly. Thank you for my introduction, and thank you guys for inviting me today. This is not my usual forum, not my usual I'm normally in scrubs. I very rarely wear a dress, let alone heels these days, but thank you for having me. So as Jason said, I qualified twenty years ago, and I well, I've pretty much worked as vet all the way through, and then I've been a joint venture partner for eleven eleven years now. And back in 2010, I got to the point of my career where I'd worked in a in a fair few different settings, and I had worked as an employed vet and also as a self employed locum. And you get to the point where you think, well, what next? What what's my next career move? And that's when I met Jane, and the rest is history. At the time, Jane also gave me the reassurance that if for any reason it just wasn't for me, that there would be a way of removing me from that situation safely without damaging without too much damage to me or to the the clinic or to the wider the wider group. So for me, it really felt like quite a low risk, no brainer, really. I had a young family then, a lovely, very supportive husband who I still have, and actually, it really felt like it was the right thing to have a go and to see. And, again, for me, it was about being taught and mentored and coached and learning all things business that I needed to learn to be to be a successful partner in in the clinic. I really believe it's a very true partnership. It's truly symbiotic. It's synergistic, and it's one based on mutual trust and respect both ways. So if I do my job well, the support office benefit. If the support office do their job well, I benefit, as you've seen from from the side. It's very exciting, by the way. I've been party to all sorts of things today. Partnership, as everyone will know, is not always plain sailing, but I feel always that my opinion is welcomed, heard, and valued, which is really important to me and also reflects my own values in in in my own clinic. It's very much like being on the London Eye. So you've got the support office at the hub supporting all the practices, but we're all in different practices on this same wheel. We're all having our own little parties. So we all are part of the same banner, but we all are actually quite different than what we might offer. And that's, again, something really nice for me as a vet to be able to play to my strengths within my role as a vet. And this this picture is it's been edited. I will warn you, but I'm actually quite glad because being that we're now on at lunch, basically, all the gory pictures have been removed. But if any of you want to see the unedited version or any number of photos that live on my phone, I'm I'm more than happy to share. But this is basically a reflection of literally a day in the clinic. So as a vet, I wear multiple hats. I can be the geriatrician, the pediatrician, the soft tissue surgeon, the orthopaedic surgeon, the dentist, the behaviourist, the counsellor, the grief counsellor, the undertaker, sadly, as part of the job, all all in a day. And clearly, life is very fast paced, very challenging, not very glamorous. As I say, I spend most of my day in scrubs with various animals and it can go from what feels very much like a doctor's surgery and it's all very calm and serene to what feels more like an accident, an emergency centre in a heartbeat. Just one phone call, one emergency and the day can change I can be consulting and then in theatre within half an hour. So it's a very varied pace. And and our ethos in our clinic is that we're able to provide excellent cradle to grave care for every single one of our patients and their owners and to support them through the whole journey of the life of their pet. Obviously hoping that we keep them happy and healthy most of the time, but fixing them when they're sick and certainly, as I say, saving lives as and when we need to. Some dogs particularly are are more prone to being a bit than others. The clinic itself, we have multiple consult rooms. We have a dedicated laboratory, a dedicated pharmacy. We have a dent diagnostic suite where we're able to perform X rays, ultrasound, endoscopy. We have a sterile surgical theatre. We have a non sterile area to work in. We have full dentistry, surgical dentistry facilities, separate dog, cat and rabbit wards, which is super important for their welfare while they're in with us. We have these facilities to isolate any patients that might be infectious and therefore might pose a threat to other pets or to ourselves. The team itself is a very close knit team. I really think we're in quite a unique position as vets. We, as I say, we work in a very fast paced environment that's ever changing, and we work physically and emotionally very closely as a team. And we, being in store, have the the the real benefit of being able to work with our pets at home colleagues as well. So for example, if the if the grooming parlor, for example, have a dog that they're concerned about for whatever reason, they they think something's not quite right with with with the the dog, they'll come and and give us a shout, and we can arrange for a consultation to take place for that owner. In the same way, the pets at home colleagues, if they're asked anything that they feel is outside of their their area of expertise, they'll pop over. And they will also bring people to register at the clinic. In the same way, we will absolutely refer dogs to the grooming parlor. It's not necessarily for fun. Dogs don't choose to go to the hairdresser. They do need to be groomed as and many breeds need to be groomed as a welfare from a welfare point of view. And in the same way that the pets at home team are really, really, really well versed in nutrition. They know an awful lot there. I actually went on the course out of sheer nosiness, and and they they really do learn a heck of a lot, and it's great to be able to to refer the right owners back back to them. So we work really well with them, and it's it's just nice to be in a in a team where there's always somebody even if you feel like you're on your own. I am really blessed with knowing that there's a whole load of JVPs like me out there that I can just get the phone up to. I can email. I can meet for a coffee, and we can share experiences, whether that be clinical or or business. And then, of course, I've got the the support office behind me every step of the way. And I do just want to say that this last two years, as you all know, has been really hellish. We've been on the front line from day dot. We we none of us as a clinical team have had a break. Most people haven't had proper holidays this year. It's been incessant and relentless. And these guys have led from the top. They have supported us every step of the way. They've put people head and shoulders above profit, and they have made sure that we have felt safe and secure in our workplaces for the entire eighteen months, and I'm really grateful for that. Alongside all of that, they've also been doing all this amazing background work, there are so many other exciting initiatives coming through. There's work with more work with inclusion and diversity that needs to happen. There's a lot about becoming greener as a business, and I am I'm really proud to be part of a company that I genuinely feel needs doesn't follow it doesn't follow, and and that has a really strong moral compass. Thank you, Tanya. I think that's really, really powerful to hear your perspective. And I suppose as Tanya's just brought to life, we know that our vets are hugely value valuable to to the group as a whole. Because given that clients and vets form long term relationships, that creates a really significant cash flow opportunity for us out into the future. And our vets form a really key part of our overall ecosystem as well, because importantly what they do is they move us away from being a single service operator. We know that customers or clients that shop across multiple channels become stickier, and they tend to spend more per channel when they shop across more than one channel. Also, potential for long term customer value, as Rob was alluding to earlier on, is significant because remember we've got 6,600,000 VIPs and 1,600,000 active vets. There's a lot of space between those two numbers, and it really does provide us a great opportunity to grow into that space. And the relationship that hopefully you saw this morning over in Hanforth between our vet team on the ground, our retail team and our grooming team pretty much creates a virtuous circle in terms of offering customers and clients a way to interact with us on a sort of a more dynamic basis. But I wanted to demonstrate the opportunity for customer lifetime value in a slightly different way. So the chart on the left really relates to that recurring revenue that exists between a vet and a client. Of course, it's not only about the same type of treatment year on year. In the early years of owning a pet, you probably would pay for more preventative interventions. And obviously, as the pet matures, then you're more likely to have curative interventions required by the vet. So the way that the revenue curve changes over time is interesting, but the constant is that relationship between the vet and the client. And a good indicator of future growth, we think, is the chart on the right. If you look at the average age profile for our clients, we significantly over index on younger customers and clients in our Vet business, and that obviously provides a much clearer runway for growth into the future. And interestingly, know that clients that are in who are 45 are approximately twice as likely to shop multiple channels, which actually brings us back full circle effectively to the virtuous circle across our different parts of our business. So, maturity. I've told you earlier on that actually maturity equals when a practice becomes debt free, and we've talked previously about the long term free cash flow opportunity for the business linked to the maturity profile of our practices. And obviously this is not only driven by adding active clients to each practice, but it's also back to that point I made about the effective curve of the type of spend a client will have. So as a pet matures, typically we'll need more curative interventions. They are typically more challenging, more advanced, and therefore typically will be higher revenue drivers. So that affects the shape of the revenue curve for each of the practices as well. But what's important to say is that we've made really great progress over the last year to eighteen months in terms of our long term targets here, and that's primarily down to the amazing work that our frontline colleagues both in the vet business but also our retail teams have done as well. And the support office, as Tania refers to, our ability to navigate and guide the vets through that last period of time, it demonstrates the resilience, I think, of our model. So we're really very much on track to deliver our targeted £60,000,000 free cash flow when our vet estate becomes mature or debt free. So I wanted to very quickly talk about some of the future opportunities that we see out there, and the first one is linked to the client experience. So you'll have seen our Project Pathfinder over in the Petcare Centre earlier on today, and clearly Pathfinder is designed to deploy our clinical teams more effectively, more efficiently. But one of the consequences of that is the way that our customers and our teams are interacting both digitally and in person, and that's becoming really effective. Now, the Vet's trusted status gives us the opportunity to point customers and clients to other services and products right there in arm's reach of the client and customer. So Tanya alluded to groomer relationship with nutrition. If a vet notices a problem with an animal which requires regular grooming, the groomer is there on-site. If one of the solutions to managing that condition is better nutrition or other products in the retail environment, then the retail team are there on-site to support the vet. So this is this virtuous circle, and we really see that the Pathfinder experience is actually unlocking more and more value as we're bringing it to life. The other thing that we're very conscious of is that clients are now obviously wanting to interact with us pretty much on a 20 fourseven basis, whether it's in person or digitally. And to tackle that, we've integrated our business, the Vet Connection, into our group managed practices. Remember I said we can test and learn in that environment, so we've integrated them into our group managed practices and our out of hours service as well. And we think that there are other opportunities for growth there. Online pharmacy, for example. There's a massive opportunity of clients and customers that don't shop in our shops or visit our vets today, but who are accessing medicines online, so that's something that we're really keen to investigate further. Now, the profession and clinical talent. The challenges around recruitment are quite well written in terms of the vet profession at the moment, but there's more going on than that. I think there's a recognition of work life balance for vets, so we're working hard with the British Veterinary Association to try and understand and tackle the challenges and needs of the modern day clinician in more detail. We're also investing really heavily in our graduate recruitment programme. We're also looking to improve our benefits packages, our remuneration packages, to make sure that we're the employer of choice and the partner of choice, and we're also trying to disrupt the employment market as well, trying new ways to attract vets and clinical teams to our businesses, so that whether they be UK based or overseas based. And we're really focused on our green agenda as well, both in practice and as a group as a whole, obviously. But actually, the way that plays out in practice is about making sure we are reducing our energy consumption by either using air sourced heating or collecting rainwater, etcetera, etcetera. We're also looking at waste management as well, recycling, backhauling waste to DCs, zero to landfill. But we're also focused on very much on the client, of course, and actually our partnership with the Woodland Trust for the pet memory scheme, where we're planting trees when clients are bereaved from losing a pet, is a really, really positive way to help the environment and also have a long term connection with the client. And there's another piece that's pertinent to practices. We're working hard to see how we can unlock some of the challenges around harmful gases like anaesthetic gases, reduce the reliance on those without impacting the sort of the the level of pet care that we provide. So, in summary, I'd say that we really believe that our joined up pet care ecosystem provides significant headroom for growth and long term customer value. We can see lots of new connection points that exist and will either enhance or underpin our ecosystem. And we're investing in a digital future to be able to mobilize our business so that we can provide clients with the convenience, the speed, the interaction that they want when they want it, without obviously impacting the clinical standards that we hold really dear and the best care for their pets. And the final point I'd make is that we are absolutely on track to deliver our, target of unlocking £60,000,000 free cash flow from our state as it matures. So that's it from me, and I'm gonna hand over to Mike now, who's going to talk to us about our GBP 600,000,000 opportunity. And then I'll hand over to Peter to wrap up, and then we'll do Q and A. But it's a pretty important slide and one we shared before, which is how we see a really strong runway of sustainable high quality growth ahead of us. And hopefully, what you've heard and what you've seen in the store will help you understand why we are so convinced this is our opportunity ahead. So we shared this slide originally back in May, and it shows how we go from £1,400,000,000 of customer revenue and grow that by £600,000,000 plus to a £2,000,000,000 customer revenue business. If we look back over the last five years, we've consistently outgrown the market in terms of market growth. You see the market has grown about 3% to 4%. We've grown about double that over the last five years. And that's taken us to the £1,400,000,000 reported back in May. We have seen a step up in the market. If you like, the market's become supercharged because of the number of new households acquiring a pet in addition to what we normally see as renewal in the market. So that 3% to 4% market growth rate, we believe, will step up between 45% going forwards. And us taking our share of that market will give us that first green bar there. We think 55% of our growth will come from taking our share of a market growing between 45%. But in addition to that, what we're building in terms of capability, in terms of our digital capability, and how we think about our bet business, you can see we're still planning to outgrow the market by about what we've outgrown in the past. And that will take us to £600,000,000 additional customer revenue, but underpinned by a lot of the things you've seen today. So we're convinced this is our opportunity. We've got the plans behind it to support it. We're laying in the capability and the capital to deliver that, whether it's our new DC that's going in Stafford or the digitization that Chris and John talked to you today or the capability we're unlocking through data and through what we're doing in our Vet business. So at that point, I'll stop. I'm sure you've got loads of questions, but Peter will wrap up and then we're going go into Q and A. So first I hope you found today just really insightful to try and bring who Petahome is and what we're trying to do and bring it to life. It starts off with we can't avoid the fact actually we're in a market which is a really buoyant, dynamic, exciting market because it's being driven by a structural change of pet ownership. And we have to remind ourselves that that's not a one year bounce. It's here now for the next twelve to fifteen years on an enlarged pet ownership market. So the dynamics are incredibly favorable. But what we're doing is building a scalable omnichannel platform. And hopefully today you've got some examples of how we're doing that. You've seen it in practice and you can hear how we're going to continue to build that out. I think most importantly what we're trying to do is, as I said, right at the very beginning we're trying make pet care really easy and really convenient because actually by doing so, remove points of friction, it allows us to grow our share of wallet with customers quite simply. You've heard today about our vet services business and it is truly differentiated because it's the way that we do it that really makes a difference. I thought, Tanya, I thought you really brought that to life amazingly well because our business it's really hard, by the way, being in partnership with 400 people. It's really, really hard, but it's incredibly rewarding because you can see the dynamics that we build and it's a real win win for us and for the vets and for our and for our consumers. I still believe the data capability we're building is probably one of the most exciting things. The level of insight we're building around our customers and then our ability to leverage an action that I think is truly gonna differentiate us because it brings, as a pet owner and knowing me and knowing Oscar my cat and talking to me about Oscar is the most powerful thing in the world. And our ability to bring that and drive our business I think puts us up against some of the best in class. We know Oscar is five years old. It's his birthday actually this month. I know that because Petter Home sent me a birthday card and a treat for Oscar. And I think we're in such a unique place that as we build that out that just becomes incredibly exciting and the best is still yet to come in this space. Today we've demonstrated how we're transforming our business and we've made enormous inroads over the last three years. Actually we're going to that next stage now which is truly moving to best in class by building something which is built for our business in the way that our pet owners want to integrate with us. And again, this builds I think a point of capability which we own. And it's something which is absolutely right for our business, but more importantly the capability we're putting in the business allows us to move at pace moving forward and I think that's probably the most exciting thing. And you know we're financially strong and resilient and continue to do so so we can execute and we can make sure that we're building the best pet care business in the world for our customers but also for our investors. And finally we are really proud if we run a good business. We have done for thirty years but we're also building a sustainable business. And it's a little tiny thing I've just put on top of your bags which is the poppy. And I put that for one very simple thing for you to take away. That was something we launched three years ago. This year we will donate a million pounds to Royal British Legion off a poppy. Off that poppy. And that just really goes to demonstrate I think the benevolence of our pet owners, really understanding our pet owners in such a unique way that they of course want to celebrate in the poppy day in a unique way and look at the amount of good we've been able to create. And that's a small example of how we really understand our customer base and how we're driving forward.