A decade in, a decade ahead

 

After a decade of building scale, we have elevated our reputation through our innovative culture and corporatised model, making Knights ever more attractive to its existing and new clients, top industry talent and high-quality acquisition candidates.

 

After a decade of building scale, we have elevated our reputation through our innovative culture and corporatised model, making Knights ever more attractive to its existing and new clients, top industry talent and high-quality acquisition candidates.

Elevating our credibility as a leading legal and professional services business.

Knights has continued to grow at pace this year, welcoming new colleagues and outstanding businesses that are closely aligned with our culture and vision. Our successful approach to integration is recognised and respected across the industry, with businesses acquired over recent years performing well.

We have continued to build on this strong track record, executing our strategy of organic growth through strategic recruitment and carefully targeted acquisitions, expanding our geographic footprint and broadening our scale and range of complementary services. The sector remains favourable for further consolidation, and we continue to explore a range of acquisition opportunities across the UK.

Our business model, which has proven resilient across the economic cycle, continues to serve us well and has allowed us to navigate recent challenges, facilitating growth and development.

Knights’ model is driven by a highly commercial mindset, excellent operational infrastructure, a strong management team, ongoing investment in best-in-class technology and processes to boost efficiency and performance across the business. This positions us strongly to continue to scale the business sustainably.

Financial highlights

Despite trading headwinds at the end of the financial year, the Group has delivered good revenue growth and excellent cash conversion with year end net debt ahead of expectations.

Revenue

£125.6m

Post tax (loss)/profit

£(2.5)m

Underlying PBT

£18.1m

Reported PBT

£1.1m

Cash conversion

109%

Net debt

£28.9m

Underlying EPS

17.23p

Reported EPS

3.02p

Investment case

Premium quality from a competitive cost base

Professional advisors with a commercial mindset

A scalable model

A diversified, premium provider of legal and professional services with national scale.

A strong track record in a highly attractive market.

View our full investment case here

Our strategy

Underpinned by our vision of creating the leading legal and professional services business outside London, our unique business model enables us to build value by executing our strategy across four pillars:

Organic growth delivered despite a challenging operating environment.


Despite the challenging year, we still delivered growth in the period as the underlying drivers of organic growth remained healthy. We continued to attract new clients, deliver more services to clients across existing new service lines, attract highly talented professionals, grow our talent and support the development of our people.

Over the past decade, strategic acquisitions have enabled us to achieve critical mass. Our increased scale and expanded geographical presence have delivered a step change in the Group’s credibility, expanding our pool of high quality acquisition targets.


Building on our track record of acquiring high-quality businesses with a strong cultural and strategic fit, we have continued to execute our strategy by adding businesses to the Group that facilitate entry into key markets, and either provide a platform for
organic growth in the region, or that can be bolted on to build our presence in our existing locations.

We have continued to strengthen the operational infrastructure to support our ambitious growth plans.


Investment in our operational platform ensures the sustainability of our success across future growth periods creating greater operational capacity across our leadership team.

Utilising technology to grow margin and differentiate our services is a core part of our strategy.


Having created a robust, scalable platform able to integrate acquisitions in a matter of weeks, our focus is shifting to enhancing client services by creating a client experience based on speed and quality of service that differentiates us from the competition.


In parallel, we continue to focus heavily on increasing efficiency and reliability by automating a number of routine tasks, and using technology and data analytics to grow revenue.