FY16 Q1 CEO Update

Hi everyone. We have just completed the first quarter of FY16, so I wanted to take an opportunity to update you on how the business is progressing. Before I go into that, I wanted to talk to you a little bit about an exciting initiative that we've kicked off as a leadership team. You recall that four years ago we brought our leaders within the business together to develop a strategy in how we move and shift to become more of an integrated communications agency. Over the last few years, we've done an extraordinary job against that strategy. The business itself has grown by over 30%, but most importantly we've shifted from just 5% of our work being digital to over 50% of our work involving some form of integrated communications campaign work on behalf of our clients. We're now up to 600 people across 24 offices, and we hit every single one of our key performance indicators within that plan. So now it's time to kick off Vision 2020. What will our business look like by the year 2020? And to do that, we started by getting some feedback from you through our staff survey, but we also went to 30 leaders— communications leaders—across the world to get a perspective from them on what their needs for an agency are today and what they will be in the future. With that, we took a team together here in New York a couple of weeks ago to really focus on what are the key areas that need to evolve in our business? We're kicking off six work streams involving people across the world on that development. We will present that work to the ELT in the July time frame. And then we'll look to present it to the leaders within our business in October, all of that being prepared for the kick-off of that strategy across the Text100 business in its entirety in FY17. So with that as the backdrop, let me share with you a little bit about what's happening within the business over the last quarter. Specifically we've been at the forefront of the award circuit. In particular, I wanted to highlight the IN2 Saber Award that we won in North America for the best use of LinkedIn. I also wanted to highlight that we won Agency of the Year in India at the prestigious Indy Awards. Our Stockholm office also developed and launched a monthly podcast which had tremendous success and garnered interest from a number of key new prospects. San Francisco hosted a fantastic panel in our new office space and it was led by Jeppe Christensen from Republic Publishing. There was an amazing debate within both current clients as well as prospect on what are effective content distribution strategies. Lastly I had the opportunity to speak at the 2015 Edison Awards, and my topic was translating innovation into corporate reputation. We've included a link to the video of that if anybody would like to look at it at the end of this presentation. One of the things I would like to do in these quarterly updates is to look at the specific campaign work that we're doing within the business. And today I'd like to highlight the Nordics campaign for Orange Business Services. Our team there developed a digital strategy, which was focused on moving from a push to pull traditional outreach to a campaign which was based more on digital and social activity. The goal was to establish Orange as a highly respected influencer and the go-to expert in their key business areas. The program was incredibly effective and got really great feedback for Text100 from the Orange executives. So along with this video, at the end you will see a link to that creative work as well as links to some of the other great campaign work that's going on in the business. Now let me shift gears a little bit and talk about our people. In particular, it was fantastic to see the Global Appreciation Day. It's always amazing to me how every single office takes a unique approach to celebrating our employees and then takes the opportunity to share all of that across our social channels. I also mentioned earlier that we have now fully acquired Republic Publishing and I'm very excited about the fact that JBC is going to join our ELT. And he will move to New York in July. My expectation is that he will be a key contributor both to Vision 2020 as well as to our business over the next 5 years. And lastly I just wanted to mention that we have completed the integration of Bite in France into the Text100 office. And I wanted to welcome Annie Hurley to lead Text100 Paris as our Managing Consultant. She joins a tremendous group of leaders across Text100 worldwide. Now I wanted to look at operations because they have been incredibly busy over the last quarter. They've rolled out a new upgraded Wi-Fi system to all of our offices, but they also undertook a huge effort to support the business move into our new offices in 100 Montgomery Street in San Francisco. Not only did they move Text100, but they also moved a number of our sister brands within Next 15 which was an extraordinary effort. In addition after countless hours of hard work, we launched text100.com this quarter along with a new website for our HyperText brand, our integrated communication specialists in India. I encourage you to check out these sites if you've not seen them. Sarah MacKenzie and the IT team did a great job of re-imagining our website so that it's more welcoming, more intriguing, and is a much better representation of the Text100 brand. Lastly, let me take you through the financials of our business over the last quarter. As you can see, the business is strong, and we're continuing to grow. However, we had a number of unexpected client losses early in the year which have impacted our revenue targets. But we did complete a Q1 reforecast, and that brings us back to plan from an operating profit point of view. So from my perspective, I'd like everybody—encourage everybody to put a key focus on revenue growth from current clients as well as new business. Please look and find new opportunities for leads within the business. Think outside the box and continue to remain creative. You guys are at the heart of Text100, and I know that we will continue to make incredible strides within the business over the coming quarters. So thank you for your contribution in Q1. I'm very much looking forward to Q2 and for all of the excitement and the opportunities that that brings.