Family Business Scale-ups: Breaking Barriers to Growth
Executive summary
Family businesses are a significant contributor to the UK business population For the first time, this report shows that one-third of all active companies with employees registered at Companies House are family businesses (under the ONS definition whereby a family holds a majority stake and one or more family members are directors), numbering 766,847 in total (excluding sole traders); with an estimated revenue of £1.6 trillion 1 and employing over 3 million people . Family businesses are a regional powerhouse The vast majority of these businesses, 84.3% , are based outside London, and 68.2% outside London and the South East , highlighting their role as key contributors to regional economies, with the East of England (11%), the North West (10.5%), the South West (9.1%) and the West Midlands (8.3%) contributing 40%.
Family businesses are embedded across core sectors of the UK economy, with strong representation in the UK’s Industrial Strategy growth priorities Family businesses are present in traditional and Industrial Strategy sectors, with a growing number in the professional services, science and tech economies: 35% of family businesses operate within the government’s Industrial Strategy 2 sectors, with professional science and tech businesses the second largest sector in family-business make-up (14.5%); 29.8% of family businesses operate in real estate and construction, and 10.9% in wholesale and retail. Figure 6 details how family businesses are clustered in key Industrial Strategy sectors.
This report from Family Business UK (FBUK), working with the ScaleUp Institute, presents a fresh analysis of the UK family business landscape. It focuses exclusively on mid-market and scaling businesses, using firm-level data from Companies House. It represents a first-of- its-kind approach to analysing Britain’s family business sector moving beyond other survey-based reports. It shows that family businesses reaching the mid-market and scaling-up stages play a distinctive and significant role in the UK economy, anchoring jobs and investment in local economies while supporting long-term, sustainable growth that is internationally driven with strong representation in our industrial sectors and heartlands.
1 Based on average reported turnover at different stages of evolution. 2 https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/industrial-strategy-sector-plans
Page 7
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online