Advisory and corporate finance
If you are a scale up business, you know the challenges of aligning the development of talent and productivity. The Scale Up Institute lists access to talent as one of the key “significant pain points and barriers to scale further”. To resolve the issue they focus on the education system in lobbying the Government. Without … Continue reading Talent and productivity gap: Solving the challenges for scale up businesses
If you are a scale up business, you will already be familiar with the challenge of growing with limited financial resources. Our article ‘Considerations for Scale-ups when raising funds’ outlines some of the common solutions in addition to fundraising support we provide clients. Do you lack financing to sufficiently scale? The Scale Up Institute notes … Continue reading Access to Finance Challenges for Scale up Businesses
The Scale Up Institute’s last report identified ‘infrastructure’ as one of the key challenges for scale up businesses. While not clearly defined, the term appears to refer to the ecosystem of local hubs and enterprise agencies available. If you are a scale up business (sales growth > 15%; hitting sales of £10m or more; or … Continue reading Time short entrepreneurs understand that a reliable infrastructure scales their business
Leaders read articles like this one, but if you do, you’re probably alone. The Scale Up Institute’s last report identified one of the biggest challenges for leaders as ‘the solitary nature of leadership.’ So what does it mean to go it alone? There are a variety of approaches to developing personal leadership skills, from peer-to-peer … Continue reading Common pitfalls for high growth business leaders
While there is extensive analysis available on how boards of established companies should operate, especially those in the public interest or publicly traded shares, there is very little guidance on how to make venture boards (for fast growing scale up businesses) work effectively. Most companies have a set of obligations in their Articles that are … Continue reading Five steps to creating an effective Venture Board
‘Only 4% of UK businesses grow to have more than 10 staff’ is the worrying statistic released in this year’s Scale Up Institute report. Whilst the UK typically ranks highly when it comes to the level of entrepreneurship, James Anderson of Baillie Gifford’s Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust acknowledges that ‘the UK culture doesn’t celebrate the … Continue reading Top five reasons why businesses fail to scale
In 2021 Office of National Statistics estimated that the UK was in sixth place for productivity compared to other G7 countries, with output per worker being 10% less than the average, and output per head in the US being 1.5 times higher. Despite the need to improve productivity never being more important for business leaders, … Continue reading Are you missing two hacks to improve productivity?
High growth businesses rarely stumble into success instead consciously develop a growth mindset. Based on our experience of creating high growth cultures to deal with disruptive markets and competitive challenges, successful leaders focus on getting these four hacks right: We work with scale up businesses to established businesses to help them accelerate business outcomes, drawing … Continue reading Four hacks for creating a Growth Mindset
Value creation is an integrated approach to optimising shareholder value. Value creation is based on developing and applying value drivers (sometimes called ‘value builders’) that help articulate commercial development and also support higher transaction values. By not drawing on the experience of best practices successfully applied by other businesses, founders can risk leaving money on … Continue reading Time to focus on value creation