The Insights That Drive Meaningful Growth: Meet James Endersby, CEO Of Opinium

James Endersby is CEO of Opinium, the international insights consultancy he has grown from a three-person UK business into a company with more than 100 employees and £15.5 million in revenue. Growing up in South Africa during its transition to democracy sparked an early fascination with human behaviour, the power of different perspectives and what shapes the decisions people make.

His subsequent experiences as a rugby journalist and living and working in India and the US deepened that curiosity, revealing how differently people can see and interpret the same world. He settled in the UK 21 years ago, where his fascination with people and human understanding has remained central to his life and career.

James Endersby has helped build employee ownership into Opinium, where around a third of employees hold equity. A former Chair of the Market Research Society and a trustee of several charities, he also founded Significant Insights to champion the next generation of research talent. He is now focused on Opinium’s international growth and the opportunities and challenges AI presents for research.

He is also writing Blind Spot, a book exploring why, in a world overflowing with information, we so often misunderstand one another, and why better decisions begin with deeper human understanding.

Tell Us About Your Background And The Story Of How Opinium Came To Be?

I’ve always been fascinated by people, what makes them tick and why they make the decisions they do. Having grown up in South Africa during its extraordinary transition to democracy, worked as a rugby journalist and lived in four very different countries, I suppose I’ve always been curious about the world and the people in it. So perhaps ending up in the research industry was inevitable!

When I took over leading Opinium, we were a tiny UK research agency with just three people. Today we’re more than 100 strong, with teams in London, New York, Amsterdam, Cape Town and São Paulo. Last year we generated £15.5 million in revenue, growing 18%. It’s been quite a journey!

I wish I could tell you there was some extraordinary masterplan, but there really wasn’t. I saw an opportunity to build a different kind of business. One that was entrepreneurial, where talented people could share in its success, and where clients valued us for our thinking rather than simply the data we produced.

In the early days, I was involved in absolutely everything, from winning clients and delivering projects to hiring people, marketing, operations. I loved it. There’s something incredibly exciting about building a business from almost nothing and that hands-on approach was a huge part of our early success.

As we’ve grown, so have our ambitions. One of our biggest shifts has been moving away from simply doing more research towards delivering more value for clients. We’ve invested heavily in technology and consultancy skills, and encouraged our people to challenge thinking rather than simply take briefs. Last year our average project value grew 44%, while the number of projects we delivered remained broadly unchanged. A pretty good illustration of why bigger doesn’t always mean better!

But what gives me the greatest satisfaction is watching people grow alongside the business. Seeing graduates become brilliant researchers, leaders and eventually owners of Opinium is something I’m enormously proud of. And the exciting thing? I genuinely feel we’re only getting started.

What Is Your Approach To Leadership?

I think people sometimes make leadership unnecessarily complicated. Hire brilliant people, give them a clear sense of where you’re going, trust them to get on with it and don’t take yourself too seriously. That doesn’t mean avoiding difficult conversations. quite the opposite. I think honesty and transparency are absolutely essential.

In the early years at Opinium, I was involved in pretty much everything, and loved it! That entrepreneurial energy helped us build a fantastic business. But as we’ve grown internationally, my role has naturally evolved. A couple of years ago, we created a new Management Board, giving brilliant people across the business genuine responsibility for shaping our future.

It’s been one of our best decisions. Ultimately, great leadership isn’t about making every decision yourself. It’s about building a team capable of making even better ones.

I’m also a huge believer in sharing success. Alongside our founders, we’ve built a business where around a third of our people now own actual equity, with an ambition to reach 50%. Not phantom shares or a glorified bonus scheme but genuine ownership.

There’s something incredibly powerful about people knowing they’re building their own business, not just somebody else’s. We also share 20% of our profits through bonuses and I’m convinced this approach has played a huge part in our success.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m fiercely ambitious. I love growth, winning new business and making healthy profits. But I also want to build something that lasts, where people love working and have a genuine stake in its future. That’s a much more exciting definition of success to me.

And I’d love to see more people given the opportunity to build businesses of their own. Our latest Global Entrepreneurship Index found that the UK has slipped from 19th to 24th over the past decade, while 57% of British entrepreneurs believe starting a business is harder than it was ten years ago. That’s worrying. Entrepreneurship is an extraordinary force for good, but we need to create the right conditions for people to take risks and invest for the long term.

Britain has phenomenal entrepreneurial talent. We should be doing everything we can to help it flourish.

What Does The Future Hold For Opinium?

There’s an enormous amount happening at Opinium, which is exactly how I like it! We’re growing internationally, strengthening our teams and investing heavily in technology, consultancy and AI. The ambition is to build a truly global insights business that punches well above its weight.

I’m hugely excited about what AI means for our industry. The ability to conduct research, analyse information and uncover insights at extraordinary speed is transforming what we can do. We’re embracing it across Opinium, and I think any business ignoring these opportunities is making a serious mistake.

But I also think there’s a danger in confusing more information with better understanding. We are not short of data. We are short of understanding. AI can help us find answers faster, but it doesn’t necessarily mean we’re asking the right questions. That’s where human curiosity, judgement and empathy become even more valuable, and it’s why diversity and inclusion matter so much. If we want to understand the world properly, our industry needs to reflect the people we’re trying to understand.

I’m equally passionate about the next generation. Through Significant Insights and our Global 30 Under 30 programme, now in its sixth year, I’ve seen some extraordinary young talent from across the world. We need to do a much better job of opening doors, championing these people and making research a genuinely exciting career choice.

Ultimately, I want Opinium to keep growing, challenging the industry and proving that you can build a hugely successful international business while sharing ownership and investing in your people. We’re ambitious, we’ve got some brilliant people and there’s an awful lot more we want to achieve.

The future looks pretty exciting to me!

What’s Your Favourite Business Tool?

My running shoes! Not sure that’s quite the answer you’re expecting. Running is where I do some of my best thinking. When you’re growing a business, there’s a constant stream of emails, meetings, messages and decisions competing for your attention.

It’s incredibly easy to spend your entire day reacting to things rather than actually thinking. Getting outside for a run gives me the headspace to work through problems, come up with ideas and occasionally realise that something I was worrying about really wasn’t worth worrying about at all. I’ve probably made more good business decisions out running than I have sitting in meetings!

What’s One Lesson You’ve Learned The Hard Way?

That what makes you successful at one stage of building a business isn’t necessarily what will make you successful at the next. In the early years at Opinium, I was involved in absolutely everything: Winning clients, delivering work, hiring people, operations, marketing, you name it. And I loved it! That hands-on, entrepreneurial approach was a huge part of how we built such a successful business. But as we’ve grown internationally, I’ve realised that my greatest contribution isn’t necessarily doing everything myself anymore.

It’s building a brilliant team of leaders who can take the business even further. Learning to shift from being involved in everything to empowering others has been a fascinating journey. Still unfinished, but probably one of the most important lessons I’ve learned about scaling a business. Although, if you ask my colleagues, they’ll probably tell you I still like to get involved in quite a lot!

What’s One Future Trend You’re Watching?

Across business and society, we’ve never had more information at our fingertips. So why do we still get so much wrong? It’s something I’ve become increasingly fascinated by and it’s actually at the heart of a book I’ve been writing called Blind Spot.

We’re living in a world absolutely drowning in data. And with AI, we’re about to produce more analysis, predictions and answers than at any point in human history. Extraordinary stuff. But here’s what worries me. We’re becoming increasingly confident in our ability to explain the world, without necessarily getting any better at understanding it.

Data can tell us an awful lot, but it doesn’t always tell us what we’re missing. The voices we haven’t heard, the questions we never thought to ask or the assumptions we’ve made without even realising it. And sometimes those blind spots can lead to spectacularly bad decisions, even when the data looks convincing.

I think that’s one of the great challenges facing business leaders over the next decade. Not how to get more information but how to get better at questioning what we think we know, because in a world where everyone has access to artificial intelligence, genuine human understanding might just become our most valuable competitive advantage.

What’s A Quote You Live By?

“The most expensive mistake is answering the wrong question efficiently.” It’s something I come back to a lot. In business, we’re often so desperate to get moving that we don’t spend enough time making sure we’re solving the right problem. And with AI accelerating everything, I think that risk is only getting bigger.

Sometimes a really good question is worth far more than a hundred clever answers.

What’s One Book Or Podcast You’d Recommend?

I’d recommend The School of Greatness podcast with Lewis Howes. What I like is that it doesn’t treat success as purely a business or financial achievement. There’s a lot about personal development, relationships, resilience and what actually makes a fulfilling life. I think entrepreneurs can become a bit obsessed with business books and business podcasts.

There’s a whole world of interesting thinking outside that bubble and some of the best lessons about leadership come from places you wouldn’t necessarily expect.

Opinium: Strategic Insight Agency – Insights with impact