Five questions for: Amy Golding, CEO of Opus Talent Solutions

What does your business do?

We help companies build teams in the technology and energy sectors. We focus on recruitment and training to fix the skills gap in these industries, which is critical to our future.

What's been your greatest achievement?

Our niche focus on technology and innovation has enabled us to expand globally very quickly. We opened our first international office in 2015, and now achieve international sales of around $50m (£41m) across Asia Pacific, Europe and the US.

So 50% of our total sales now come from outside the UK. This year, we were named as one of the top ten companies with the fastest-growing international sales by The Sunday Times.

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What has been your biggest challenge?

We are a privately-owned company and have expanded to $100m turnover in a decade without ever taking a penny of investment. Sustaining that organic growth at this size makes for some quite lively boardroom discussions and a constant focus on innovation.

What are your plans for hitting your targets this year?

We want to achieve more depth of industry and breadth of client base.Depth in that we are becoming more and more focused on innovative sectors. We are investing heavily in our clean and renewable energy practice and are constantly updating our technology markets.

We are also focusing on increasing our breadth by diversifying our client base and our geographical coverage. International growth remains a big focus.

We have opened five new offices in the last four years and plan to add to our portfolio in 2020. The US and Europe remain huge growth areas for us.

What's the one piece of advice you'd give fellow entrepreneurs?

It's easy to allow market uncertainty to become your excuse. But uncertainty can bring opportunity. Someone, somewhere, is always buying something. Opus launched in 2008, the first year of the last recession.

In order to stay alive, we always ask ourselves: "If our clients are going to buyone thingright now, what is it?"And then we make sure we work harder than anyone else to give it to them.

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