Sapio Turns 4

It’s been a year where time has both stood still (March!) and seemly disappeared in the blink of an eye (did anyone see August?), and for much of it we didn’t know what day or month we were on. Yet somehow, we have reached September and with it looms our fourth anniversary.

We started Sapio in 2016 with humble ambitions; but through some luck, a lot of hard work and many incredible clients we have grown beyond our expectations. And 2020 was not going to be an exception, we had plans! Our ‘we hope to do’ list included expanding our team to ten, launching a consumer quoting platform and increasing our annual revenue by 40%.

Then as we all know, the pandemic happened and our team dispersed, some locking down in London, others decamping to family in the country, or simply staying put in Kent. The start of a beautiful love/hate relationship with video calls.

Yet Sapio is sailing the storm. OK, we haven’t quite reached ten, but we have just hired our latest team member taking us to nine. We are so excited to be starting our fifth year with Catherine de Kiewiet joining us as a Research Manager. Catherine has spent much of lockdown expanding her personal training skills but has worked most recently at Savanta and Circle Research.

We’ve also developed stronger and more collaborative relationships with our clients, helped along by our business barometer.  A few days into lockdown and we started to wonder how other business decision makers were feeling. So, we looked for some research (secondary research is not second rate!) and found an abundance of consumer trackers and indexes, but not much on the business front.  Thus, our business barometer was born. Through this we have been able to offer something genuinely useful to clients who were weathering their own storms.

The other big news is our Gold Award at the UK Business Awards in the Professional Services category.  We were up against some strong competition, and are thrilled to have won, with a special shout out to our founder and managing partner Jane Hales who worked tirelessly to get our application and presentation through.

You may have seen recently the launch of our ’powered by Sapio’ brand, Opinipoll.  Opinipoll aims to provide instant consumer research quotes, removing the need to wait for a response to an email or call, whilst also allowing the user to play around with interview numbers and survey length (amongst other features) to adjust the brief to fit budgets.  We know that specs can change quickly, and although we don’t (usually) work around the clock, Opinipoll can!  Whilst this is a few months behind schedule, it has stayed within budget (woohoo!) and is ready to be put to the test.

One of Opinipoll’s taglines is ‘quick and clean’.  Everyone knows what ‘quick and dirty’ is, but quality has always been our main agenda.  Throughout the whole research process we aim to provide the best possible experience and will always be transparent.  This is what drives decision making within our company. But we want to be louder about it, because quality data means confident decision making, accurate and believable stories and true insight.  And you can have it all, there does not have to be a trade off; we will not sacrifice quality for speed, nor speed for quality.

Our speed and quality are some of the reasons that our clients return year on year.  We are so thankful to those who keep coming back to us – we love working with every single one of you and look forward to welcoming new partnerships in the coming year.

Whilst that all sounds pretty rosy, don’t be deceived; we’ve had our challenges as well.  But the important thing is that we keep going, we look for solutions or innovations and we have an incredible team that produce exceptional research time and time again.

So what are we looking forward to in our fifth year?  Well, at the moment we’re just glad that EastEnders and the Bake Off are back. Is that enough?