Lester Knight, Chairman of Aon's Board of Directors. At this time, it's my pleasure to welcome all of you to Aon's 2014 Annual General Meeting of Shareholders and call the meeting to order. In accordance with the notice of the meeting, given that it's now past 8:00 A.M., I'm informed that there is a quorum present, and I declare that the annual general meeting is open. There are 10 items of business on today's agenda. First, the re-election of directors. Second, the receipt of Aon's annual report and accounts for the year ended December 31st, 2013, together with the reports of the directors and the auditor. The ratification of the appointment of Ernst & Young LLP as Aon's independent registered public accounting firm for 2014.
The reappointment of Ernst & Young LLP as Aon's United Kingdom statutory auditor under the Companies Act 2006, to hold office until the next annual general meeting, at which accounts are laid before the company. The authorization of the board of directors to set Ernst & Young's remuneration in their capacity as statutory auditor. An advisory vote on the compensation of the named executive officers as set forth in Aon's proxy statement. The receipt and approval of directors' remuneration policy included with Aon's annual report and accounts. An advisory vote on the directors' remuneration report included in Aon's annual report and accounts. The approval of an increase in the number of shares available for issuance under the Aon plc 2011 Incentive Plan.
Finally, the approval of the forms of share repurchase contracts and the counterparties through which Aon may conduct repurchases pursuant to the company's share repurchase program. There will be an opportunity later in the program for questions. We are also joined by representatives of Ernst & Young, and they will be available for questions during the Q&A portion of the meeting. For those of you listening to our meeting this morning via audio webcast, the slides that accompany this presentation can be viewed on Aon's website at www.aon.com. Now it's my pleasure to introduce Peter Lieb, the Secretary of the company, who will provide the Secretary's report.
Thank you, Lester. Notice of this annual meeting, together with Aon's proxy statement and annual reports for the year ended December 31, 2013, were made available beginning May 5, 2014, to shareholders of records as of the close of business on April 25, 2014. Aon has appointed Michelle Davies of Computershare Investor Services PLC as Inspector of Election for the voting at the annual general meeting. As noted by our chairman, a quorum is present at today's meeting. Based on a preliminary report from the Inspector of Election, of the 296,680,024 shares entitled to vote at the meeting, more than 256 million shares, representing more than 86% of the total voting rights of all the shareholders entitled to vote, are present in person or by proxy at the meeting. As a result, I declare that a quorum is present, and we will proceed with the meeting.
A list of the shareholders eligible to vote at this annual general meeting, as certified by Computershare, as well as a copy of the minutes of the 2013 annual general meeting of shareholders, are available at this meeting for inspection. I would like to turn the meeting over to Aon CEO, Greg Case.
Peter, thank you very much. Let me first say on behalf of the management, just want to welcome our shareholders on the webcast and in the meeting today. Very much appreciate having you here. Also want to say on behalf of management to our board of directors, we just thank you very much for your dedication and support throughout the year in helping our team and supporting our team. Thank you very much for that on behalf of management. I'm going to offer a very brief strategic overview and efforts that we're pursuing to build our firm, and then my colleague, Christa Davies, is going to offer some thoughts on our overall financial performance. When you think about our firm, Aon, think about two global platforms, two global businesses, one on the risk side and one on the people side.
On the risk side, helping companies understand, measure, and mitigate risk. That represents about two-thirds of your firm. On the people side, HR Solutions, helping companies with their most important areas around retirement, health, talent, and rewards. This is the essence of our firm. We spent many, many decades building these two platforms. This is how we compete, and these are two of the foremost platforms in the world in these categories. Number 1 in risk and number 1 in HR Solutions across a range of services. We have these two platforms for our shareholders at a time that's very unique in global economic history. We are fortunate in that as our clients think about the challenges here, they continue to be very substantial and growing. On the risk side of our business, our clients are facing more risks than ever before.
These risks are greater in magnitude than they have ever seen before. They're greater in complexity, and they're actually changing at a more rapid pace. These include all the traditional risks that one might imagine in property and casualty and coverage of officers, et cetera. Also in the non-traditional risks or new risks that are out there. Things like cyber risk and global warming, the impact of sustainability and pandemics. Our clients are now facing an unprecedented level of risk that they have to deal with every day on behalf of their businesses.
They're also facing a similar set of challenges on the people side of their business, helping to think through their employee retirements and how those work through and how they fulfill promises that have been made, how they think about the health of their employees and paying for health and support from that standpoint, as well as on the talent and reward side. In essence, at a time in global economic history, our clients are facing unprecedented challenges on risk and people, and we are fortunate we've got two of the leading platforms in the world on these two topics. We've also got an approach that our leadership has taken over the last number of years around how we actually are going to bring those assets together to serve our clients.
In essence, it would come down to a phrase we call Aon United. When we bring our global capability on behalf of our clients in a very local way, we do exceptional, compelling, really almost non-duplicatable work on behalf of our clients. This is really the foremost of the focal point of our overall value proposition. We've continued to invest behind this. We invested behind this in ways we think about bringing our data together, how we go to market, whether it's salesforce.com, our revenue engine, a number of other initiatives we've taken, as well as how we think about the global operations of our overall business. You step back, think about where we are at a time in global economic history where our clients have great needs.
We have two exceptionally strong platforms, we continue to invest behind those platforms around innovation and understanding. We have a very clear view that if we don't evolve faster than our clients on these two topics of risk and people, it will be difficult for us to actually have the same level of impact over the coming years that we've had historically. We have a very strong focus on innovating and investing behind these two topics of risk and people. We have a set of clients that we really worked hard to try to build, these are clients that are large in stature, medium, or smaller in stature. In that sense, we actually serve the global economy, big companies, medium-sized companies, and small companies.
Here representing some of the larger companies in the world, whether Fortune 500, the largest P&C insurance companies, technology, healthcare, consumer, financial, et cetera. We're fortunate. We serve some of the largest companies in the world. Equally important is what we do in the middle market parts of the world and in the smaller companies around the world. In fact, 80% of your firm is really middle market and small commercial, so very important part of our overall investment. We've gotten some reasonable feedback from some external sources in terms of our overall progress. We feel good about that. We don't take it for granted in any way, shape, or form, what is clear to our management team is we have a long way to go as we continue to strengthen and build your firm.
One last takeaway we'd like you to understand is that while we've made progress and we feel good about that progress, we recognize and we think about the opportunities in the world today and the challenges our clients face, the road ahead for Aon, the road ahead for your firm as shareholders is more substantial, more exciting than it's ever been before. We're in a great position to actually go attack those. With that, I'd like to ask Christa to come up and talk about where we are from a financial standpoint.
Thank you so much, Greg, and thank you very much, everyone, for joining us here today. I wanted to take a few moments to talk about some financial highlights of the firm over the last couple of years and where we're going over the next couple of years. I'm going to start with our four key metrics that we report to shareholders every quarter and every year. Organic revenue growth, operating margin expansion, EPS growth, and free cash flow growth. I am pleased to report that over the last eight years, we've made solid progress in all four of these areas. You can see in organic revenue growth that we've grown organically every single year with the exception of 2009, where we faced the worst economic recession in our lifetime. We continue to grow strongly in both the Risk Solutions and HR Solutions segments.
On operating margin, we've grown operating margins 490 basis points over the last eight years, a very impressive achievement. Possibly one of the most impressive areas here is growing EPS compounded 14% a year, a very impressive achievement. Probably our most important metric for shareholders, free cash flow, is continuing to grow, and we delivered record levels of free cash flow in 2013 of $1.4 billion, and we expect to grow that further going forward. As we look out going forward, we have two long-term targets on operating margins, 26% Risk Solutions and 22% for HR Solutions. There are really kind of three areas in each segment that will operationally help us achieve those targets.
On the Risk Solutions segment, it's the flow through of the remaining restructuring savings, it's the continued rollout of the revenue engine, and most importantly, it's the investments we've made in GRIP and data and analytics and monetizing those investments, which results in higher yields per dollar of premium placed. We believe those three initiatives will help us achieve 26% operating margin. We're continuing to show progress in operating margin expansion each year in Risk Solutions. On the HR Solutions side, three key initiatives will help us deliver the 22% operating margin goal. The first is the flow through of the restructuring savings in HR Solutions. The second is the return on the investments we've made in continuing progress in improving operating performance in that business, most notably in the consulting area of that business. The third is the improvement in our HR BPO business.
This is really the shift from on-premises BPO to the cloud. We invested significantly in a company called OmniPoint in 2012 to help us accelerate that trend. Moving to the balance sheet and cash flows. We have a very strong balance sheet, as you can see, and free cash flow is growing quite substantially. You saw free cash flow grow, and we define free cash flow as cash flow from operations straight off the cash flow statement, less CapEx. Free cash flow grew 22% from 2012 to 2013, a very impressive achievement. As we look out over time, possibly even more impressive is we expect free cash flow to double again over the next 3-5 years. They're really to more than $2.3 billion in free cash flow per year. There are really three big drivers of this free cash flow growth.
The first is growth in revenue and expansion in operating margins, hitting our long-term operating margin targets. The second is decreased usage of cash on pension and restructuring. You can see here through all the work we've done in our pension plans and the closing of our restructuring plans, that we'll free up more than $600 million of free cash flow annually. The third is the re-domestication that we completed in 2012 for the U.K., which is allowing us to manage cash globally and redeploy it freely and decrease our global tax rates. Those three areas are really helping us more than double free cash flow over the next 3-5 years. With that, I'm going to turn the meeting back over to Lester, our chairman.
Thank you, Greg and Christa, for the update. We appreciate all the hard work for our shareholders this past year. We're now ready to take any questions. If you have a question, please come to the microphone in the middle of the room. Please state your name or who you represent before you ask your question. Do we have anybody who has anything for Greg or Christa or I? Not seeing any questions, we'll now turn the meeting back over to Peter for the resolutions we want to act on today.
Thank you, Lester. The following individuals have been nominated for election as directors of the company. Each will be reelected by way of a separate ordinary resolution of the company. Lester B. Knight, Gregory C. Case, Fulvio Conti, Cheryl A. Francis, Edgar D. Jannotta, James W. Leng, J. Michael Losh, Robert S. Morrison, Richard B. Myers, Richard C. Notebaert, Gloria Santona, Carolyn Y. Woo. There are nine additional matters scheduled to be acted upon at this meeting. In accordance with the recommendation of the board of directors, I move the following proposals for approval. The receipt of Aon's annual report and accounts for the year ended December 31, 2013, together with the reports of the directors and the auditor. The ratification of the appointment of Ernst & Young LLP as Aon's independent registered public accounting firm for 2014.
The reappointment of Ernst & Young LLP as Aon's U.K. statutory order under the Companies Act 2006 to hold office until the next annual general meeting at which accounts are laid before the company. The authorization of the board of directors to set Ernst & Young's remuneration as statutory auditor. An advisory vote on the compensation of the named executive officers as set forth in Aon's proxy statement. The receipt and approval of the directors' remuneration policy included with Aon's annual report and accounts. An advisory vote on the directors' remuneration report included in Aon's annual report and accounts. The approval of an increase in the number of shares available for issuance under the Aon plc 2011 Incentive Plan. The approval of the forms of share repurchase contracts and the counterparties to which Aon may conduct repurchases pursuant to the company's share repurchase program.
As an ordinary resolution, each resolution requires a simple majority of the votes cast to be voted in favor of the resolution to pass. As required by our articles, the vote will be taken on a poll. As a result, each person represented in person or by proxy is entitled to one vote for every share held. I will now turn the meeting back to Lester.
We will now conduct the official business of the meeting. It's now 8:19 A.M. British Summer Time. I formally propose that each of the resolutions set out in notice of the meeting are put to the meeting and declare the polls open for voting on all resolutions. Let me spend a moment reviewing the voting procedures. Proxy statements and proxy voting cards were sent to all shareholders prior to this meeting. Those of you who returned proxies prior to this meeting authorized the persons named in the proxy to vote on all proposals coming before the meeting. Similarly, if you granted your proxy over the telephone or internet, you do not need to vote during the meeting. Any shareholder who has not submitted a proxy or wishes to change his or her vote, please stand and you will be given a ballot.
Anyone who still has a proxy card should now hand it to the Inspector of Election so it may be counted as a vote executed in person at the meeting. Will the Inspector of Election please collect all ballots at this time? Are all the ballots in? All the ballots are in. I now declare the polls closed. Peter, please note the time of the closing of the polls for the minutes. Inspector of Election requested to tabulate the proxies and ballots and report the final voting results to the secretary. Peter will announce the provisional results as soon as possible. Now it is my pleasure to introduce our non-executive directors. I would like to ask those who are seated in the first row, please, to stand and be recognized as I call your name. Fulvio Conti. Cheryl Francis. Ned Jannotta. Jim Leng. Mike Losh. Bob Morrison. Dick Myers. Dick Notebaert.
Gloria Santona. Carolyn Woo. Please join me in thanking the directors for all the time and effort they devote on behalf of Aon and its shareholders. I'd also like to thank Greg, Christa, and their management team for all the efforts on behalf of the company and its shareholders, as well as Freshfields for providing the meeting space for this annual general meeting. I'd like to ask Peter to report on the voting.
Following a review of proxies received and tabulated before the start of the meeting, each nominee for election as director received a majority of the votes cast at this meeting, with the number of votes cast for each nominee for director exceeding the number of votes cast against each nominee for director. In addition, each other proposed resolution has been approved. These results are provisional. The inspector of election will furnish a written report of the final vote count, which will be attached as an exhibit to the minutes of this meeting, reported in a filing by Aon with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and made available on the company's website. I will now turn the meeting back to Lester for closing remarks.
Thank you, Peter. That now concludes the business of the meeting. I'd like to express our sincere appreciation to all the shareholders who attended today and those who submitted proxies but were unable to attend. I now officially declare this meeting closed. Thank you very much.