Tortilla Mexican Grill plc

Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the Tortilla Mexican Grill plc interim results investor presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation investors will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged and can be submitted at any time via the Q&A tab that's just situated on the right hand corner of your screen. Please just simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However the company will review all of the questions that are submitted today and publish responses where it is appropriate to do so. These will be available via your InvestorMeet company dashboard. Before we begin I would like to submit the following poll and if you could give that your kind attention I'm sure the company would be most grateful and I'd now like to hand you over to CEO Richard Morris, good afternoon sir.

Good afternoon, good afternoon everyone, thank you for joining. Andy and I will take you through our presentation. We envisage it will be around 25-30 minutes and obviously then you can do the questions as discussed and we'll answer those and the ones that we can answer at the end. I'm not sure how many people fully aware of Tortilla so I will assume that maybe some of you are not fully up to speed with the business so a little quick resume of where we're at and who we are. Tortilla is a fast casual Mexican business that's been trading had some private equity investment around 2011 and I took over from the founder Brandon Stephens in 2014 when the business had between I think it was 10 or 11 sites at that stage. We're now up to 84 worldwide through a mixture of company owned sites and franchises and we IPO'd the business in October last year and this is our first interim statement. So a little bit of background on myself I'm Richard the CEO I've been with the business since 2014 as I said my experience has been consistently in hospitality having trained in the states with TGI Fridays back in the day ran some of their businesses in the UK opened Brain Forest Cafe in Disneyland Paris and in Shaftesbury Avenue in London and then moved on to be one of the opening management part of the opening management team of Lock Fine Seafood Good Restaurants which began in 99 and we sold in 2007 to Green King with 50 sites in the business and very successful good business that was great. did a few things after that spent some time with Daylesford Organic but ultimately saw Tortilla in 2014 and really believed that this fast casual sector was going to be the way forward in the hospitality sector. Casual dining was becoming very overheated and lots of people doing much the same thing at much the same price so decision made to move into this sector and If you'd asked me six months ago I'd have said it was a brilliant decision but things have been slightly more challenging but even so still very positive about the business and where it's going.

and I'm Andy Naylor, I'm the CFO at Tortier. I started my career at one of the big four accounting firms and did the classic chartered accountancy route then I went into working for the Russian gas giant Gazprom and various other, I had lots of exposure to oil and gas back then but I fancied doing something more tangible, got into the restaurant sector, took a head of finance role at Gaucho we sold the business whilst I was there in a private equity transaction and then I joined Richard at Tortier in 2017.