Opus Trust Marketing commits to living wage following sales growth

Opus Trust Marketing has started paying all staff the 'Living Wage' or higher following “double-digit growth” at the Leicester company.

The change came in from 1 April. The company employs 140 staff.

Sales director Mark Hetem said the decision was made as part of this year’s budget following strong growth at the company, which specialises in transactional and hybrid mail.

Clients include Npower, Reed and Severn Trent Water.

“We can afford it. We want our people to be happy and motivated. We have excellent staff retention,” he said.

The company was appointed to a massive pan-government framework agreement for transactional mail last month.

It joined 36 other suppliers including Banner Managed Communication, Capita Business Services and Critiqom (formerly Document Outsourcing) on The Postal Goods and Services Framework. The framework, which is valued at between £400m and £11.5bn over four years, will supply the Crown Commercial Services and members of the Pro5 Yorkshire Purchasing Organisation and Eastern Shires Purchasing Organisation.

In its last accounts for the financial year to 31 March 2014, Opus Trust Marketing reported a 13% rise in sales to £17.1m. Gross profit rose from £4.2m to £5.3m between 2012/13 and 2013/14.

Hetem said accounts this year would show “fantastic growth”.

“We have overhauled our entire business front to back since 2011 and spent more than £7m on investment. A large chunk of that – three quarters – was on hardware,” he added.

The Living Wage is currently set at £9.15 an hour in London and £7.85 an hour in the rest of the UK. The National Minimum Wage is £6.50 an hour for adults aged 21 and over, and £5.13 for those aged 18 to 20.

Opus Trust Marketing prints and mails almost 8m business-critical communications and delivers close to 2m electronic documents each month on behalf of customers. It runs two Pitney Bowes Intellijet 20 inkjet webs, based on HP's T200, which print at 400ft a minute full colour, two Océ CS665 cut sheet digital colour printers, one Océ ColorStream 10000 continuous feed machine, an Océ VarioPrint 5160 MICR and two Ricoh Pro 1357 mono cut sheet printers. 

It also has two 9000 six-station CMC Multimailers with CMC JWR paper wrapping system and five Kern 2500s, two of which are continuous feed.