Nigel Le Quesne, CEO of JTC PLC, the leading professional services business, has won the ‘Outstanding Company Leader’ award at the 2021 Esop Stars, which were presented at a ceremony in London on 6 April 2022.
The annual Esop Stars awards are organised by the Employee Share Ownership (Esop) Centre, a non-profit organisation that promotes all forms of broad-based employee ownership. The awards recognise the achievements of companies that offer employee share plans and hold up best practice models for other companies to follow. Previous winners of Esop Stars awards include household names such as, Marks & Spencer, BT and Google.
Nigel is the architect of JTC shared ownership, which ensures that 100% of employees are owners of the business. He created the programme in 1998 by gifting half of his own equity to the company’s first Employee Benefit Trust and since that time, over £350m of value has been created for JTC employee-owners. JTC enjoys market leading employee retention rates and in 2019, its shared ownership programme became the subject of a Harvard Business School MBA case study. The business listed on the London Stock Exchange in 2018 and is now a member of the FTSE250 index with a market cap of over £1.2bn. The Group has over 1,300 employee-owners globally, servicing more than 7,000 clients and is trusted to administer $200bn of assets. In July 2021, it made its most recent shared ownership award, distributing £20m of JTC PLC shares to employee-owners globally.
Nigel Le Quesne, CEO of JTC, said: “Whilst it is a great honour to receive this award, I do so on behalf of every JTC employee-owner that has been a part of our journey. We created JTC shared ownership because we held the simple belief that everyone who contributes to the company’s growth and success should have the opportunity to directly share in that success over time. It has become part of our DNA and the foundation of our culture. Our shared ownership programmes have evolved alongside the business itself, adapting from a private company, to private equity backed and now a listed business. I thank all my colleagues, past, present and future, for their passion and commitment to shared ownership.”
