Elixirr International Share Price (ELIX)

Really worth viewing results presentation when its released by 'Investor Meet' later today. Detractors go on about 2H being slower than 1H, dilutive effect of share-based consideration and employee-incentive schemes, and impact of AI. Listen to the presentation and all those issues are well addressed by the executive team.

ELIX is a fast-growth, cash-generative, well-run company with most employees as shareholders, therefore entrepreneurial. Interesting observation, if it had the same forward P/E today as it had at IPO six years ago, it would already be in FTSE250. This company is really going places and the market will eventually realise that. Now Main Market listed, institutions will have to start taking note and buy the shares. Beat the herd and tuck away now.

I wrote back in January after the trading update that ELIX was one of my favourites and well worth tucking away. I received a lot of criticism because much of the growth was inorganic. Well there is nothing wrong with that if you are delivering 36% EPS growth and 27% DPS growth. That is fine by my. Also, ELIX ties in the acquired partners and aligns them with, in-part, share-based consideration.

The numbers speak for themselves and management's aspiration to become part of the FTSE-250 index by the end of the year seems well on course. Stated net debt was GBP24.1m (although I calculate it at -28.5m) from net cash of GBP2.6m, but this is after -36.4m cash payments for acquisitions and -20.7m on share buy-back. Eventually the market will catch up with this well-positioned, strong growth, cash-generative company.

1Q'26 was reported as a record quarter, so excellent start to 2026. Investor Meet presentation is tomorrow.

Challenger management consultancies are poised for exceptional growth. The Big Four aren’t worried – yet

AI-enabled boutique firms are increasingly winning business from their bigger rivals, and attracting private equity investment. But even the biggest among them remain financial minnows. Could Big Tech be the real disruptor in the market?

Whether you call them challengers, disruptors, boutiques or something else entirely, management consultancies operating outside the market’s Big Eight – the traditional Big Four, plus Accenture, McKinsey, Bain and Boston Consulting Group – are having a moment.

Increasingly, according to commentators, clients tired of mounting costs, a sense of sameness and well-publicised conflicts of interest inside the largest firms are casting their advisory nets wider, looking to nimbler, AI-driven rivals with fresh ideas, lean models and no baggage. As Alibek Dostiyarov, a former McKinsey consultant who founded advisory platform Perceptis AI, puts it: “AI-first boutiques will challenge traditional players and often win… AI will flatten the pyramid McKinsey and others have dominated [with] for decades. The monopoly of scale is ending.”

It sounds like a compelling case for change in a market that has exploded – consultancy revenues have increased around four-fold in the past couple of decades by some measures – but has become dominated by the scale of a few incumbents and aggressive growth from the Big Four, whose advisory arms now account for 30-40% of their collective income. But are we just being fed the usual hype from a group of punchy upstarts, or something more?

Dr Emiko Caerlewy-Smith certainly believes in the model – the firm at which she is a partner, Elixirr, has made being a challenger consultancy its tagline. Elixirr, which specialises in digital transformation and operating model implementation, among other services, listed on London’s AIM in 2020 and has been steadily acquisitive for a number of years. It now has more than 700 employees and gets half its business from the US.

Caerlewy-Smith says clients are pushing back on the legacy models of larger rivals. “They’re a bit fatigued with the ongoing 500-slide PowerPoint deck, and the very large-scale transformation projects with big teams that never seem to leave the organisation because they’re implementing one digital transformation after another. What they’re realising they need is the thing in the middle – actionable and executable strategy that will shift something in terms of ROI for their business, incrementally, quickly and in a way they’re excited by.

“We have intentionally created a business model that gives us the ability to challenge the consulting market in the way we show up with clients. We don’t have large pyramid teams, we don’t use cookie-cutter methodologies… we will be bespoke to the clients. Our people are equity owners of our firm, and that ownership culture we have intentionally created attracts a different type of t

I have the juicy bits and forecasts for Elixirr on X: https://x.com/MGinvestor/status/2025858115770503456?s=20

Anyone know how AI would affect things here?