Family Business Scale-ups: Breaking Barriers to Growth
Scaling family businesses
The ScaleUp Institute’s 2024 ScaleUp Index provided insights into the 10,859 visibly scaling firms 8 in the UK, generating £384bn in turnover and employing 2.05m people. Through this new research we can reveal that more than 27% (2,985) – 1 in 4 – of these are family businesses. They contribute £72.4bn (19%) of the total turnover and have almost 500k employees (24% of all scaling businesses). Similarly to the mid-market, 88% are based outside London and 76% outside London and the South East; however, the North West has the second largest cohort of scaling family businesses after the South East, with London third. This emphasises the local nature of family businesses that are scaling up and, along with their mid-market presence, their importance to the UK’s regional growth dynamics, which are anchored locally with long-term sustained growth and strategic decisioning/plans for expansion.
Figure 13: The Spread of Scaling Family Businesses across the UK
Total employment from Companies House filings
Total turnover from Companies House filings
No scaling family businesses
Region
East Midlands
261
£5.0bn
39,434
East of England
288
£5.7bn
40,679
London
360
£10.9bn
58,125
North East
110
£3.1bn
19,725
North West
366
£8.8bn
79,554
South East
371
£11.2bn
55,116
South West
294
£5.6bn
50,296
West Midlands
243
£6.0bn
52,035
Yorkshire and The Humber
257
£8.0bn
43,695
Scotland
198
£4.3bn
32,097
Northern Ireland
114
£1.9bn
15,233
Wales
123
£1.9bn
13,706
Grand Total
2,985
£72.4bn
499,695
8 A scaling firm is a business that is growing its turnover or employee headcount or both by 10% or more each year over a monitoring period of three years, with at least ten employees at the start of that period. Scale-ups are firms growing at a rate of 20%+ by the same parameters.
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