Yes, hi and welcome everyone for the last presentation of the day. My name is Daniel Thorsson, covering IT and technology companies at ABG. And for the last presentation, we have through video BTS and BTS CEO Jessica Skon based in the western part of the U.S., so it's early morning for her. So Jessica, good morning, and just let me know when to flip slides, and I'll do that for you so that everyone in the room and on the webcast can follow the presentation. And I will have a couple of questions in the end.
Perfect, you can go ahead and change then as a start. Hi everybody, thank you for the time. I realize I'm going last. I will try and make this very interesting for you all, and the sun is rising over here in San Francisco. I'm excited to introduce BTS to you. This is the overall kind of mission and intention of the firm: a strategy made personal. BTS has been around for over 30 years, and our focus has been on change and specifically the people side of change, because if you can't get the people to change, you probably really haven't implemented it very successfully, and if you go ahead and go to the next slide, and then just a few seconds after that, feel free to continue. I'm really proud. I've been with the firm. I took over from our founder two and a half years ago.
I've been with the firm 25 years, and I've been able to experience this firsthand, right? We are a story of long-term profitable growth year after year. And on the next slide, you will see the data behind that claim, right? So we went public in 2001. Our average revenue CAGR since we went public is 12% per year. Our average profit growth is 15% per year. And so the data shows the data, you can see the main drop in 2020, but then the growth in 2021 was faster and better than 2019, which is important. Okay, and so as we go, then we answer the question of like, well, how do we do this, right? How did BTS, this cool, unique consulting firm founded in Stockholm, how did it become in 24 countries, 36 different offices, and have that type of long-term superior financial performance?
And it basically boils down to these six things, right? And I'll double-click into each one of these, but essentially we have the pleasure of operating in a global, growing, and highly fragmented market, which makes our destiny much more in our control, right? And also gives us a strong position when it comes to not just organic growth, but acquired growth as well. We have a very strong competitive position. We have, since the beginning, I'd say we think differently about consulting and training and all of that, and I'll explain more in a minute. We invest every year in organic growth. We have a highly innovative culture, a high entrepreneurial spirit, freedom at the front line. So our account teams innovate new things every year.
Then on top of it, we invest in digital R&D, obviously marketing and selling, and try to get the best talent out there. In addition, as I mentioned, we've also been fairly acquisitive. In general, we target one to two acquisitions a year, not for a quick hit, but for acquisitions that either strengthen our geographical position or increase the portfolio, which would drive longer-term organic growth. Then probably the true secret sauce, the thing that really is critical to all of those other four, is the unique culture and talent that we have. Go ahead and move forward, and we'll kind of talk through each one of these. Global, you know, growing and fragmented market. I have had the personal pleasure of winning business and taking share from two types of competitors.
One, you could say, is the traditional HR market, which is a huge market, and here we're just simply seen as more strategic, more strategy-centric, more business-centric, more business acumen-centric, more on point. We're not the firm that, you know, creates some books and then tries to push our books or our point of view on the world. We are the firm that enables the CEO's strategic priorities and cultural shifts through training, through leadership development, through helping them decide who to hire, and we do it in a high fidelity, super, super practical way. There's a couple of builds on this slide. You can go ahead and build them out, and on the other hand, we take share from the traditional consulting firms, so McKinsey, BCG, Bain, Booz, and so forth.
And specifically on this side, we typically win when we're competing head-to-head with them on big transformation or big change initiatives. Again, because BTS believes that they have to drive the change. So we keep the ownership and the authorship with the Executive Teams and with the Team Leaders who actually have to change the ways of working. But our approach, our simulation methodologies are super unique. And again, they're practical, and people feel proud when they're done working with us, right? They feel like they did it, and they got stronger through the process rather than feeling that some other firm is smarter than them or did it for them or something else. So from our perspective, you know, the total market, if you look at both, is over $30 billion. We're $250 million approximately, so we have a lot of runway.
The historic growth for the industry, obviously this varies a lot, even over the last six years, but on average, it's 4%-5% growth per year. It's still very fragmented, especially the left-hand side, and we, you know, we think we approximately have a 1% market share. If we move to the next thing, probably no surprise to you, right? Our BTS market and demand for our services is primarily driven by the constant need to adjust, right, and to adapt and to strengthen cultures or to get strategic priorities moving throughout the organization, and it could be any one of these trends.
There's more that would drive a CEO to invest more in their people, either invest more in training their people, giving them a chance to prepare and practice for a new way of selling, a new way of teaming, a new way of adopting technology or whatever, whatever it might be. And if you please move forward, you can go ahead and just go to one more slide, please. If we look at the strong competitive position, when BTS was founded, we only did what was in the upper left, right? So our founder came from strategy consulting and decided that there's probably a powerful way to help with step two. So once the firm has the direction, how do you get everybody in the company to understand that and to make the right decisions and to move forward quickly?
That's how the company was founded, which we refer to here as strategy alignment, getting alignment of every person in the company and giving them the acumen to actually make the right daily decisions based on their roles. Over time, you can see the expansion, right? So we went from being seen as like the strategy implementation, strategy alignment partner to broader leadership development. There's many clients where we do everything from executive to front line to onboarding, and we own the whole curriculum. We also have assessments, so we help our clients, in particular, and I'd say North America and the Middle East, select their top executives. We put them through job-specific simulations. We can assess readiness. We have a change in transformation practice, executive presence, and team performance. We do now CEO to front line coaching at scale, innovation, digital transformation.
We have a whole go-to-market side that we help clients with their revenue initiatives and all their sellers and teams on taking their value proposition to market. And then we also have an inclusion practice. And basically what this has allowed us to do, which has been both from innovating together with clients and through acquisitions, is increase the average client spend and the longevity of client tenure. So in many deals right now, in many client projects, we pull from many of these areas in terms of the services that we are delivering. So if we, you know, it's interesting if I reflect back even probably 15, 20 years ago as I was a consultant and a selling consultant coming up, I can remember like the top 10 account leagues might have been $300,000, $400,000, $500,000 a client.
And now our top 10 range from $15-$5 million a year. So it shows the evolution of the firm and being able to bring more and more services to our clients. And what's underneath this? What's really the secret sauce against all those capabilities? I think the thing that's still our biggest differentiator outside of our culture is this, right? It's our simulation and modeling capabilities. From a business model perspective, this has been really cool because it gives us a licensing and then more recently a subscription stream to this part of being a professional services firm, which is very unique. From a client reaction perspective, they love them, right?
Because, I mean, if you look at strategy modeling, the power of visualizing a complex strategy or the power of visualizing an entire company, all the businesses, the functions, the dashboards, the metrics for leaders is extraordinarily helpful because many of them are stuck in their silos and their BUs, and they don't often have a chance to have the big picture, and so the range of simulation capabilities that we have is quite broad, from multi-day to micro. We might just simulate a conversation or a moment, and this portfolio continues to evolve rapidly. We have a bot platform now that sits inside of simulations. It runs separately than simulations. It's just one example, and if you move forward, we can just kind of get a sense of some of our clients, so we were founded in Stockholm.
Our biggest market is North America, which is where I have been for 25 years. This is just a quick snapshot of some of the clients we're working with, but we, a unique thing to BTS, even as a startup and a small company, was we decided to go after the top of the house as opposed to kind of front line or easier access points. And given our relationship with the executives, then we can expand the account both broader and down, I think was a really wise way to start the company, so you could say we were not just enterprise first, we were top 50, top 100 global companies first. And in order to serve them, that's what drove the rapid expansion globally, right? To today where we have 24 countries.
So if you go ahead and go to the next slide, you can get a sense of our overall financial health and geographical footprint. Yeah, so 240 million year-on-year net turnover, rolling 12 months, been around for 38 years. We have approximately 1,200 full-time people in the 24 countries. We have 38 different offices. In addition to those full-time people, we also have, it says here, 600 accredited freelance associates. And what I appreciate about that is it allows for some flexibility in our business model. So if the demand is faster than we predicted, we can pull in and have these external people do the work. If the demand slows down, we can also reduce our spend with the freelancers. I'd say the other benefit of being in all these offices and countries is I have, you know, pretty wide geographical portfolio base.
So when some countries are up, other countries are down. And in general, that's been helpful as well. Yeah. So if we move to the other areas in terms of investing in organic growth and leveraging our scale, feel free to build these out. We're now, given the breadth of our services and the number of different kind of buyers we can serve in a client, I would say the last seven years has been marked in particular by the next level of scale, right? So I can with a couple of our biggest clients, they have an operating model where their CEO tends to dictate on a pretty regular basis a shift in market priorities. Let's say it's once a quarter or once every other quarter or something. And on the go-to-market side of that company, they have 45,000 people.
So if that's the type of operating rhythm and you have 45,000 people talking to customers, what's the most efficient way to help them understand how to change their dialogue, how to ask different questions, how to position products differently? And in those situations where clients want to use us real-time, ongoing, and at scale for 45,000 people, we have what we've called the BTS Total Access Partnership model. And this allows our team to work kind of week to week, day to day with the clients. We can pump out custom simulations very quickly, so days instead of weeks or months. And they have an economic model that they can afford to constantly drive the preparation and the practice and the alignment of the masses. I've already mentioned the 24 entrepreneurial countries mixed with one company.
So when I took over, I would say there was some fresh interest in the 24 entrepreneurial countries to decide what they could better leverage from each other, right? So what I don't want to do and have no interest in doing is taking away their ownership and their accountability and their sense-making of their local markets, because what's trending in Tokyo is different than what's trending in Abu Dhabi, for example. At the same time, because we've run so entrepreneurial for so long, there are some really easy things we can do to better leverage our scale, right? That has everything to do with finance and accounting systems, better legal support, back-end help desk becoming global. The team that actually codes our simulations has merged themselves into one global team, and that's led to cost savings, higher win rates, higher quality around the world.
So this is a balancing act. But even if we just move a little bit and we kind of let it be country leader and team leader led and when it feels right to do that, I think there's a lot of lift there from a cost efficiency perspective. And then, yeah, I mean, we've been leaning in as fast and hard as we can on the latest technology and what's possible, right? With AI, we made a small acquisition of a startup in the second quarter called Wonderway, which gives us a really cool bot platform.
It is both being used right now as a subscription so that teams and leaders can practice real-time and real-time conversations that listens in to their Zoom and team meetings if they want, or it can be used to launch really custom bots on the most important conversations or moments that teams need to improve their performance. And it's all custom to our clients' strategy and performance standards. So that is taking off quite well with really, I would call it A-plus data report generation and architecture on the back end is just one example that our clients are really excited about. And it's allowing us to show up with kind of AI built into our services and continue to innovate close to the customer. Next slide will show you the history of inorganic growth, right?
Over time, we have, as I mentioned, on average, we typically do one or two a year. Of course, there are some years where we don't find somebody, a company that's a good fit, you know, strategically or culturally or so forth. We have some gaps, but in general, it's a pretty constant flow for me and for some of the other leaders in terms of getting a chance to benchmark who's out there and get a sense of the market and then make the right decisions here. The point of the acquisition strategy, as I mentioned, is both to continue to widen the service offering over the overall portfolio as in addition to expand our geographical reach and make us stronger in some of the units and countries that we are now.
It's been really successful for us, given the highly fragmented nature of our market, to focus on small to mid-sized companies. One of BTS's secret sauces is we have, as I mentioned, this kind of entrepreneurial high apprenticeship culture. And in some of the smaller companies that maybe only make it to $10 million or $15 million in business, they are too dependent on just a couple of revenue generators. And if they add a new capability for us and we can teach them how to unlock the talent growth inside their firm, that's been the secret sauce over time. And then lastly, the culture, right?
It's hard for you to get a sense of the culture in just 30 minutes, but I would describe the culture with the words that are on this slide, which is it's an even combination of high-performing entrepreneurial, a lot of freedom and trust, a lot of innovation close to the customer. There's no hierarchy or need to get approval on things, although pricing and scoping is approved at the country level, with fun-loving and big-hearted, right? I think I consistently hear around the world from our global clients how consistent our culture is, how refreshing it is, how typically non-corporate, smart, high energy.
We consistently get phone calls or we hear that when the BTS team has interacted with their employees, even like I had one the other day of front line kind of biotech fab that the team was in operating fab, the leader of the plant called me and said, "I just want you to know that you're the first consulting firm that, having worked with our front line workers for a couple of days, made them feel proud of themselves, inspired. They felt listened to.
They're excited to help define what high performance looks like now for them in the new phase, and they're excited to be working with you." He said, "All of the other firms have come in here with their checklists and clipboards and look kind of skeptically and makes the team feel like they're looking for the flaws, but not you guys." And I, you know, basically said, "I'm really appreciative of that because your culture is strengthening our culture at the same time." And if we look at the overall financials and the most recent ones, go ahead and click the next one, sort of the third quarter results. Our big news there was that our European unit returned to growth. And with that, you know, overall contributed to overall BTS global net sales grew 8%.
EBITDA is 13%, and the margin went from 8.4% to 9.2% in the third quarter. So overall, I mean, in general, we target double-digit organic growth. And so while we're happy with 8%, I think it's probably better than the industry average right now. It's still not at our target. Yeah. And overall, the strategy was, you know, focus accounts, the things we've been doing for the last 10 quarters, right, to better weather the softer consulting market right now seems to be working very well. And the launch of the new AI tools in the third quarter, we also gave an update on this, which is, you know, one of our strategies is to have AI at the forefront of our portfolio, of course.
So the Verity product, which came from the acquisition in the second quarter, launched live in all of our markets, North America, Europe, and also actually most of the world. The Tiger team we put around that is successfully bringing it into our clients, and there's already fresh innovation happening. So I'm excited by the fast movement there. And more specifically related to the Verity product and the platform, the number of clients doubled who are using our BTS bots. It was approximately 15, and it went to 30 or 31 from Q2 to Q3. And with that, the last final thing that's probably important for you to know, or actually two final points, is BTS has a history of providing a stable and growing dividend since 2001. The only exception to that was in the pandemic year.
The goal is to distribute between 40% and 65% of the profit after tax in the long run. Our outlook for 2024, which is the final slide, basically remains unchanged at the third quarter, and we expect our EBITDA to be better than 2023. Thank you, everybody. I hope I didn't speak too fast. I have a tendency to do that. You and I.
Thank you very much, Jessica. That was very helpful. Good introduction. I have a question on a theme that you mentioned in Q3. Europe started off weak in the first half of 2024, recovered in Q3 as you promised. What signs have you been seeing throughout the fall? We all see European weakness across some countries like Germany, some postponed projects in the Nordics as well. What do you see out there on your side?
From our side, it's very positive.
So the first half was really tough for us, but the projects that were postponed in the first half played through, and we're not further postponed in the second half. In addition, our pipeline is strong. It's the strongest it's been all year. And what's interesting about your Germany comment is our German team told me the other day that they said I have too many proposals that we can respond to, which probably is not true. My guess is they will respond to all of them, but it was this sense of a big shift for them, which feels great. On the other hand, I would say our Nordics business is still soft in the fall, right? But overall, European business turned around in the third quarter and feels even stronger since then.
Yeah, I see.
Looking into 2025 already now with interest rates coming down, large enterprise spending coming up likely, do you see any scenario out there or any feeling to expect a lower growth rate in 2025 versus 2024 or lower than your target? Any risks out there, or should it just be better from here?
You know, after the two years we've had, it's hard to just be 100%, you know, perfectly optimistic with the market. There's, of course, risks, right? And I think at least in the U.S., people are waiting and watching for the Trump moves that they're going to make. We still see, I would say, in some of our industries, I'll just talk about the North American market, there's still some planned reorgs and layoffs.
You know, even though the companies have really improved their profit over time, there's still some conservativeness compared to, I would say, the average before 2020, right? However, given that, yes, things to be moving in the right direction. I expect 2025, well, we will give our guidance for that, I guess, in February.
Yeah. I see. A final question on the margin target and trajectory. You reached 15% margin and EBITDA margin in 2021. That was a year when nobody could travel. OPEX was very low and utilization was realistically quite high. Now you're down to 13%, but you raised the target to 17%. What's the main drivers to go from 13% today up to 17% in a couple of years' time? What's the main drivers for us to understand? Sure, sure. I mean, it's a combination of a few things.
One is simply getting back to double-digit organic growth. If we would have hit the double-digit organic growth this year with our cost base and the efficiencies, we would have had significantly better margins, right? And so double-digit organic growth, if you double-click under that, it's the ability to continue to have the competitive portfolio and raise our prices, of course, every single year. And then the third one is the global efficiencies I mentioned in terms of some of our back-end operations, just further automating that using AI to give us the lift. Those are the three big ones.
Yeah, I see. That's very helpful. Time is flying, Jessica. Look forward to speak to you again in February on the Q4 report. So thank you very much. Thank you very much for the presentation. Of course. Bye. Bye.