Small Cap Awards 2026: Workplace Excellence Award

Inaugurated in 2013, the Small Cap Awards is an annual event celebrating and rewarding the finest in the sub-£350m market cap quoted company sector.

The Awards celebrates those professionals and companies that work within the AIM and Aquis communities and is attended by listed companies, institutions, fund managers, brokers and advisors.

The 2026 Awards will be held on Thursday 11th June 2026 at Merchant Taylors Hall in London.

The nominees for Workplace Excellence Award are as follows:

TPXimpact Holdings PLC

TPXimpact is a digital transformation partner to the UK public services sector, helping government and public sector organisations solve complex challenges through design, data, technology, and AI. As a proudly Certified B Corporation™, we combine deep technical specialism with a genuine mission: to build a future where people, places, and the planet are supported to thrive.

FY26 marked a significant commercial milestone for TPXimpact. We successfully completed our three-year integration plan, uniting our legacy organisations into three cohesive, high-performing businesses. This structural consolidation has sharpened our focus, improved operational efficiency, and created a more resilient platform for growth. Our strategy of prioritising account-based growth and securing multi-year, long-tail contracts has delivered exceptional revenue visibility, providing a stable foundation despite a challenging macroeconomic environment. The result is a business that is leaner, more focused, and better positioned than at any point in its history.

Our shortlisting for the Small Cap Awards’ Workplace Excellence award reflects what we believe is our most important competitive advantage: our people. TPXimpact’s culture is built on our PACT values: Purpose, Accountability, Craft, and Togetherness, and we invest heavily in making that culture real. This year, we’ve recognised over 50 colleagues for their exceptional demonstration of our values. In FY25, over 200 colleagues completed our Leadership Essentials programme, building the management capability that underpins a high-performance environment. Our commitment to diversity is equally tangible: we maintained a 51% female workforce representation and have halved our median gender pay gap over the last two years. Employee engagement scores significantly rose across many areas such as innovation and leadership confidence and communications, last year, with standout results around work-life balance and the quality of day-to-day management.

We believe this is not soft differentiation; it is a commercial strategy. Engaged, empowered teams deliver better outcomes for clients, drive stronger retention, and attract the talent required to win in a competitive market. Our investment in neurodiverse inclusion further ensures we unlock the full range of cognitive diversity within our workforce, a genuine source of creative and analytical edge.

Looking ahead, TPXimpact is well-positioned to capture growing demand for digital transformation across the UK public sector. With a proven delivery model, a stable contract base, and a workforce that is both highly skilled and deeply motivated, we enter FY27 with confidence.

ActiveOps Plc

ActiveOps is a global leader in automation and Decision Intelligence software that helps highly regulated organisations run smarter and more efficient operations. Its technology delivers high levels of ROI, through providing operations leaders with the insight to make better decisions faster, improving productivity and freeing people to focus on higher value work.

Founded in Reading, UK, the Group operates across five continents and supports over 130,000 users in more than 40 countries. Customers include many of the world’s leading banks, insurers, healthcare providers and business services organisations.

At the heart of ActiveOps’ offering is Decision Intelligence which combines human and artificial intelligence to improve how operations are planned and managed. Its products draw on two decades of experience and are powered by the proprietary AOM (Active Operations Management) methodology, which turns complex data from disparate systems into clear, actionable insight.

The year to 31 March 2026 saw strong commercial momentum, with Group revenue rising by 48% to £45m (28% on an organic basis) and Annual Recurring Revenue reaching approximately £41.5m. Growth was driven by new account wins alongside high levels of customer retention and expansion. Net Revenue Retention increased to a record 119%, and the Group remained highly cashgenerative and debtfree.

Innovation continues to lead the way. The launch of the latest iteration of the Group’s ControliQ platform introduced new AIdriven capabilities, and development of further AI features is progressing strongly. The earnings enhancing acquisition of Enlighten Group in June 2025 brought new capabilities and strengthened ActiveOps’ presence in North America and the Asia Pacific region.

The market for the Group’s solutions is large and global, due to the scale of operations in its target markets of banking, insurance, financial services and healthcare administration. The need to reduce cost bases and increase output per employee, combined with the urgent desire to adopt agentic AI are powerful long-term trends driving demand for ActiveOps’ products, supporting the Group’s ambitions. 

At a Capital Markets Day in November 2025, the Group launched medium-term growth ambitions of £100m ARR and a 25% EBITDA margin. These will be achieved thorough the continued deepening with its enterprise customers, expanding through partners, the acceleration of R&D activities to deliver unique capabilities that support further customer expansion, and continued disciplined execution and increasing operational leverage.

Stelrad Group Plc

Stelrad Group plc is Europe’s leading specialist radiator manufacturer, selling an extensive range of hydronic, hybrid, dual fuel and electrical heat emitters to more than 500 customers in over 40 countries. These include standard, premium and low surface temperature (LST) steel panel radiators, towel warmers, decorative steel tubular, steel multicolumn and aluminium radiators.

The Group has five core brands: Stelrad, Henrad, Termo Teknik, DL Radiators and Hudevad.  The Group is market leader by volume in the combined UK, European and Turkish steel panel radiator market, with market share of 19.3%. Excluding the Russian market, Stelrad’s share was 24.2% in 2024.  The Group is market leader in six countries – the UK, Ireland, France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Denmark, with a top 3 position in a further 12 territories in 2024.

Stelrad is headquartered in Newcastle upon Tyne in the UK and in 2024 employed 1,400 people, with manufacturing and distribution facilities in Çorlu (Turkey), Mexborough (UK), Moimacco (Italy) and Nuth (Netherlands), with further commercial and distribution operations in Kolding (Denmark) and Krakow (Poland).

The Group’s origins date back to the 1930s and Stelrad enjoys long established commercial relationships with many of its customers, having served each of its top five current customers for over twenty years.mpany’s strategy focuses on continuing to delivery excellent customer services to its core newspaper and magazine customers and partners, driving operational efficiencies, disciplined capital allocation, and expanding into adjacent logistics and recycling services.