Full Scale: How Do We Unlock UK Business Growth?
The UK has earned its reputation as a hotbed for start-ups, boasting a vibrant ecosystem that nurtures new ideas. More people in Britain are stepping onto the entrepreneurial path and launching start-ups with dreams of innovation and success. However, while we’re known for creating promising new businesses, it’s what comes after the creation phase – scaling up so they can realise their full potential and positively impact society – where we often let ourselves down.
OakNorth knows from first-hand experience that many innovative businesses across Britain have ambitions to scale up, but face obstacles to achieving this at every turn. Why do so many businesses in the UK struggle to make the leap? And how do we address barriers to growth, so businesses have the means to lead Britain’s post-Brexit, post-pandemic economic recovery?
To answer these questions, OakNorth recently hosted a roundtable with the Social Market Foundation (SMF), which brought together a diverse array of thought leaders representing government, business, and academia. The discussion shed light on the obstacles that prevent our budding enterprises from blossoming into major players, providing essential insights that have informed a brand-new report by the SMF, commissioned by OakNorth: ‘Full Scale’.
This report examines the range of factors holding back Britain’s promising businesses from making the essential steps towards growth, and – critically – provides actionable solutions to address them. While access to capital is a challenge, the report argues that it’s not the only one – in fact, it’s not even the primary one our businesses face:
1.???? Access to Human Capital – skilled people – is the greatest obstacle holding businesses back from contributing more to the economy. They need the right talent and skills to grow and give themselves a competitive edge, but struggle to find and retain these.
2.???? Infrastructure and Planning is another issue. Across Britain, restrictive planning regulations hold scale-ups back by preventing them from building physical infrastructure at the pace of requirements. Without physical growth, we lose out on economic growth.
3.???? Cultural Values and Attitudes is one more. The British cultural landscape suffers from a lack of grand ambition for our businesses and an inability to recognise what our most successful entrepreneurs deliver for our economy and society.
The UK's potential for growth is immense, but it's currently held back by these challenges and more, as the report details. Using the insights garnered from our roundtable and research, it proposes a set of recommendations for the UK Government to systematically address each of these obstacles to growth, including:
1.???? Establishing a cross-governmental Scale-ups Unit, with the mission of creating ￡50bn in public market cap value from UK growth start-ups;
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2.???? Identifying priority industries where the UK has or can develop advantages in their global sectors, attracting talent and up-skilling within these industries, increasing their access to growth capital, and reforming planning to facilitate their physical expansion;
3.???? Making public and private sector procurement more favourable and reduce bureaucracy to create an environment and business culture in which scale-ups can thrive;
4.???? Providing training and mentoring for leaders?by increasing funding for schemes like Be the Business;
5.???? Removing barriers to university spin outs by offering better terms for those who develop them.
6.???? Promoting increased ambition in the UK with success stories and by mentoring entrepreneurship at schools, colleges and universities.
By adopting these recommendations, the government of the day will foster a thriving landscape for scale-ups to meet their full potential and breathe life into our economy.
OakNorth, the SMF, and roundtable participants have put this report out into the world because we share a belief in British businesses’ potential and a desire to see their growth ambitions made a reality – not just for their sake, but for our economy’s, and therefore everyone’s. Using the recommendations in ‘Full Scale’, we can create an ecosystem where scaling up is not just an aspiration, but a reality.
Empowering Entrepreneurs Craft their Own Reality - Intuitive Coach - Tarot Card Reader - Theta Healer - Angel Therapy Practitioner - Reiki Healer - Psychology Counselor
5 个月Breaking through the barriers to growth for UK startups requires a holistic approach addressing talent, infrastructure, and cultural attitudes, as outlined in the 'Full Scale' report. Rishi Khosla How do you think the government and other stakeholders can best prioritize and implement these recommendations to catalyze scalable success for British businesses?
Senior Financial Services Professional | Africa & Emerging Markets Business Strategy Consultant | Board Member | Part time University Lecturer | Cranfield Doctorate Researcher, Digitalisation for Gender Finance
11 个月Great read Rishi Khosla! Further to the point you make about the lack of human capacity, I believe there is an underutilisation of the existing talent in the UK. There have been massive changes in the dynamics of our economy from the 60’s when our parents worked here to our present day technology-driven, multi racial and diverse skilled economy. Business-mentoring and entrepreneurship training as a core of the British curriculum is mandatory and not a nice-to-have. A more proactive stance of the Government to engender business growth irrespective of political leanings cannot be overemphasised. It’s been great following OakNorth’s progress. We certainly need more OakNorths!
Board Member -Association of Foreign Banks (AFB),London ,UK, Non Executive Director/Board Member -Union Bank of India(UK) Ltd, Board Member
12 个月Great initiatives Rishi , one observation - I feel that the culture of complacency or lack of desire to go beyond the extra mile looks missing underpinned with the undue delay in execution in the name of regulation is hampering the desired pace of growth .
Yes attitudes tend to be short term and not helped by constant changes at ministerial level whatever government is in place. Above all good one to one mentoring at an early stage in life is invaluable as has been proven by the Princes Trust as with others.
Managing Director at Mithra Capital Advisors Limited
1 年Rishi For what it is worth my experience and knowledge has shown me the following obstacles: 1. There is no equity risk culture in the UK by investors in the UK becsuse of the lack of an ecosystem that promotes such investment. Your finding that barriers exist for Uni spin offs proves un part the point; 2. Unlike Oaknorth most lenders are not assessing credit capability but require historical and more importantly the corporate bankers are not trained to consider risk mitigation or otger solutions; 3. The BBB has fsiled to provide such scale ups with risk capital. Compare it to what South Korea offers; 4. The British successive governments have been bad in considering the promotion of the LSE for tech companies and instead where happy with the City leading! 5. The P2P model has been a disaster as it was opportunistic and offered expensive finance to existing firms and nothing to scale ups. The whole environment has been short termist and opportunistic. Just my observations of the last decade