Best Place to Work: Opinium Research

Winning an award two years in succession is never easy to do, but Opinium Research has succeeded in one of the most competitive categories.

Founded in 2007, in the past year it’s achieved 34% revenue growth and 30% staff growth. It has also had extremely high staff retention with more than half its staff being promoted in the past two years.

Training and development is given high priority in its personal-growth based agency culture, including broad-based commercial external training, MRS courses and tailored in-house training.

But one of its standout features, is its ownership structure: 25% equity has been awarded to its research team and this will increase to 50% owned by people working at Opinium eventually.

James Endersby, its managing director, says: “We're absolutely delighted to have won the best place to work in market research for the second year in a row. It means so much to everyone – which is why our 35-strong Opinium crew storm the stage at the awards. We were also finalists in the Best Agency under £20m category for the fourth time in five years.

“Five years ago, we sat down as a group and redesigned the structures and strategy needed to build the kind of insight agency that we had all always wanted to work for – and that would genuinely put our clients first – while also ensuring our teams were able to work for an agency that helped them to grow, develop and to be proud of the work they do.

“Since then we've attracted and built an extraordinarily talented and motivated group of people, from a wide variety of research backgrounds, and 30% now own a share in our agency. Eventually 50% of the business will be owned by our team.”

The Research Live judges said: “Opinium stood out from the pack in terms of the opportunities it offers employees to share in its successes, going above and beyond to help its people thrive.

“Being such a great place to work has clearly also benefited the bottom line, and we were impressed by the strong growth that has been the result of Opinium’s people-centric approach.”