I am pleased to present Incremental Group’s annual review for the financial year ended March 2018. We are proud of the growth we have achieved this year and we are excited to continue our progress in the year ahead.

Incremental is founded on 2 core beliefs: firstly, digital technology has the power to help every organisation achieve more; and secondly, the best way to ensure sustainable success is to make small incremental improvements as often as possible. These core beliefs are immutable, providing the cornerstone upon which our foundations rest.

In a world where digital technology has the power to disrupt entire industries our mission is clear: to enable government and industry to digitally transform, one step at a time. Disruption happens to organisations and industries, but transformation is self-perpetuating. Transformation is a never-ending process of renewal, but disruption is shock with the power to fundamentally undermine business performance.

Our beliefs and our mission define why we exist. A major reason for our success this year has been our explicit focus on communicating our “why” to employees, customers and investors. From this foundation our core values, our “how” flows, defining how we behave:

Reflecting on this year’s performance, if I was asked to describe this year in one word it would be “growth”. In the last 12 months we have managed to achieve a 60% increase in revenue and we have doubled our EBITDA. This performance is even more impressive when we consider that we entered this year with minimal momentum from the previous year. Indeed, as we look quarter to quarter our rate of growth in the last 6 months of the year is significantly greater.

This growth has enabled us to structure and strengthen our organisation to prepare for rapid growth.  We have adopted a 2-tier governance board structure with our Leadership Board focusing on the day-to-day performance and our Supervisory Board focusing on strategically driving the business quarterly.  This shift has enabled our senior leaders to take ownership of the tactics employed to achieve our targets whilst simultaneously allowing our Supervisory Board more time to ensure the bigger picture is properly considered.

This year has also seen us open 3 new offices in strategic locations across the country.  We opened our new Glasgow office just as this financial year closed.  Situated in the heart of Glasgow’s new City Innovation District it is perfect for attracting the highly skilled people we require to achieve our long-term ambitions.  Elsewhere, we opened sales offices in London and Manchester demonstrating our commitment to transition from being a Scottish business to one with a UK wide presence located closer to our customers.

I am delighted that we have concluded our acquisition of GAP Consulting Limited. Based in Northwich, Cheshire, this acquisition broadens our technical capability with Microsoft Dynamics and gives us critical mass in the North West of England adding almost 40 new people to the organisation. In line with the strategy adopted during the integration of First eBusiness, GAP will be fully integrated into the Incremental organisation as quickly as possible.

As we have expanded our UK footprint, we have taken the opportunity to invest in our commercial team, which has had a significant impact on the performance of the organisation; we entered FY2019 with an order book that was five-fold larger than the year prior.

To deliver our larger order book, we accelerated our recruitment in the second half of FY2018, closing the year with more than 70 Incrementalists from an opening position of 40. This level of growth has only been possible by also investing in our People function. We recruited a new People Director in FY2018 and made the important decision to in-house our talent acquisition function, ensuring that we remain in control of all aspects of our people’s experience.

With our material reinvestment we have remained prudent and in control of our expenditure, while our cash conversion has remained strong at 75%. I have been delighted that with our significant growth our Finance Team has remained focused on the prudent fundamentals of good business and this has enabled us to make all of our investment without the need to draw on any of our existing banking facilities.

We have seen growth across each of our service lines, with our Dynamics service line growing very strongly. Our reputation for technical excellence and our focus on customer outcomes has seen us win several new and exciting customers while significantly growing revenues from our existing customers.  Many of these customers have committed to multi-year contracts to support their core business applications.

Elsewhere, our Cloud service line has grown gradually, with our focus being to advance our technical capability and I am pleased to say this focus is bearing fruit. Our new service lines of Intelligence, Applications and Consultancy have emerged this year and crucially each has been able to point at the winning of anchor customers which provide us with strong foundations for growth through FY2019.

For the year ahead, our focus shifts to improving the quality of what we do. I am delighted that this year we have achieved ISO9001 and ISO27001 accreditations, demonstrating publicly our commitment to excellence. I am pleased that in this last year growth has become Incremental’s new norm but if this growth is to continue, ensuring that our standards improve will be crucial. Our strategy is to be the supplier that delivers greatest value to our customers. A commitment to excellence is the only way this can achieved.