Two Bristol recruitment firms have been named in a prestigious league table of the UK’s fastest-growing businesses.
Privately owned Rise Technical Recruitment and Opus Recruitment Solutions appear at 51 and 53 respectively in the annual Sunday Times Virgin Fast Track 100. Opus previously appeared in the list in 2012 and 2013.
Rise, which specialises in the engineering and manufacturing sectors across the UK, had sales of £9.1m in the year to June – giving it an annual growth rate of 62%. The firm was established in 2005, employs 73 people and has 290,000 engineers on its database.
Opus, founded in 2008 by Darren Ryemill, pictured, and now employing around 90 staff in Bristol and around 170 globally, opened offices in Sydney last year and in Amsterdam and New York this year. It achieved growth averaging 62% over the past three years. Its 2014 sales reached £25m. 
Published this weekend, the 19th annual Sunday Times Virgin Fast Track 100 league table ranks Britain’s private companies with the fastest-growing sales over three years.
Rise and Opus – the only two Bristol firms on the list – are included alongside high-growth fashion retailer Missguided, restaurant operator Bill’s, brewery BrewDog, and premium cycling clothing brand Rapha.
The league table and awards programme is sponsored by Virgin, Barclays, BDO and BGF, and is compiled by Fast Track, the Oxford-based research and networking events company.
Sir Richard Branson of Virgin, the title sponsor for all 19 years, said: “This year’s Fast Track 100 is packed full of entrepreneurs and family businesses tackling many different challenges head-on and thriving thanks to their team spirit and togetherness.
“Entrepreneurship and family values are at the heart of everything we do at Virgin. Like many on the Fast Track 100, we’ve turned a family business into a business family. Working with family works.”
Top-ranked of the six South West companies in the table is Bath-based superfood wholesaler Supernutrients, which appears for a second consecutive year, at No 26.
Founded in 2010 by Martin Kemp, it supplies Holland & Barrett and Waitrose. Rising demand for healthy and natural foods helped sales grow 86% a year to £12.5m this year.
This year’s Fast Track 100 companies achieved, on average, sales growth of 65% a year over three years, from a total of £816m in 2011/12 to £3.7bn in 2014/15. They more than tripled their combined workforce to 19,500 people over three years, having added 13,500 jobs over the period, some as a result of acquisitions.
