Business Leader June 2025

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Our celebration of the UK’s fastest-growing companies

How we did it

The largest and most comprehensive work ever done on growing companies

The businesses that added the most money

The top 10 The stories behind the winners

top 100 Vital statistics on the leading businesses

The unicorns Inspiring companies that hit a $1bn valuation

dive: financial services

companies making waves in fintech

Female trailblazers Women setting the pace from films to fashion

An investor’s point of view Why Caspar Lee backed this Growth 500 star

to last Established businesses that have stood test of time

Industry dive: retail & fashion

sportswear to hotshot handbag makers

on and off the pitch

Interviews & Insights

In-depth stories of success and failure from the business world

The secret to Greggs’ success

Members Area

CEO Roisin Currie reveals the recipe that has made the bakery chain one of the UK’s biggest brands

66

Bringing power to the people

Lessons from leading the controversial construction of the new Sizewell C nuclear power station

72

How new Coke fizzled out

An ill-fated product launch by one of the market leaders shows how to deal when disaster strikes 60

84

Bumps on the road can be good for you

Jake Humphrey

86

Advice and inspiration on how to grow your business 76

Success, copied

In this book extract, we explore how businesses can thrive by using the concept of “copy and pivot”

How to avoid slip-ups when going it alone

Catherine Baker

90

Why it’s time to switch off reality TV Ed Smith

92

My Business Leader Secret

Advice on leadership from CEOs and founders

96

Bookshelf

The business books to read in the next few months

98

Member story

Natasha Lyons learnt from problems in her first business to make her second a success

100

Ask Richard Richard Harpin reveals how to grow your business

102

The importance of problem solving How member forums help you overcome challenges

Contributors

Catherine Baker is the founder and director of Sport and Beyond, which applies techniques proven in sport to the business world. She is the author of Staying the Distance, vice-chair of the Dame Kelly Holmes Trust and chair of the consultancy O Shaped.

Tom Beahon co-founded Castore with his younger brother Phil in 2015 after failing to become a professional footballer. He has since built the sportswear brand, which is based in Manchester, into a global company worth more than £1bn.

Szu Ping Chan is economics editor at The Telegraph. A journalist for almost 20 years, she has previously written about economics, finance and business at the BBC and The Motley Fool. She is an expert on the UK economy and its impact on businesses.

Jake Humphrey is co-host of the High Performance podcast, which explores the stories and secrets behind successful athletes, coaches and business leaders. He co-founded the TV production company Whisper and was previously a TV presenter.

Caspar Lee rose to prominence with his popular YouTube channel, which had more than 6 million subscribers. He has used that experience to start several companies including influencer marketing platform Influencer, and the investment fund Creator Ventures.

Ed Smith is a former professional cricketer who was national selector for the England men’s team from 2018 to 2021 and will become president of the MCC in October 2025. He is director of the Institute of Sports Humanities and a prominent author.

Steven Swinford joined The Times as deputy political editor in 2019, becoming political editor in 2021. He has previously worked at The Daily Telegraph and been shortlisted for political reporter of the year at the National Press Awards four times.

EDITORIAL

Editor-in-chief

Graham Ruddick

Deputy editor-in-chief

Sarah Vizard

Online editor

Josh Dornbrack

Senior correspondent Dougal Shaw

Chief sub-editor

Mark Shillam

Sub-editor

Jayne Nelson

Design

Colm McDermott

Jochen Viegener

Cover illustration

Hit&Run

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COMMERCIAL

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© 2025 Business Leader is published by Business Leader Limited. Registered in England & Wales. Company no 08070514.

Business Leader has taken every care to make sure that content is accurate on the date of publication. The views expressed in the articles reflect the author’s opinions and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher or editor. This commentary is provided for general informational purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, tax, legal or accounting advice.

Editor’s letter

“It used to be what you know. Then it was who you know. Now it’s who knows you.”

This is what Amelia Sordell said at an event for Business Leader members with LinkedIn in May. Given how all the founders and chief executives in the room were frantically taking notes, the words seemed to resonate. The event was a masterclass in personal branding. Sordell has well over 200,000 followers on LinkedIn. It felt like the secrets to success on social media were being shared, where previously they would have kept inaccessible to all but a few.

Sordell’s point was that social media offers an unprecedented opportunity to promote your personal brand and business. So, use it. “Just f***ing post it,” were the words she asked everyone to take away with them. You will probably only get one measly “like” on your LinkedIn posts at the start, she explained. And that will be from you. But keep going.

This sentiment also came up in a recent podcast interview I did with John Roberts, founder and chief executive of AO World, the online appliances retailer. When I asked Roberts what the key to success was for AO, the answer was simple. “A refusal to fail,” he replied. “You find a way.” Is it really that simple, I thought. Well, not quite. Roberts didn’t just put his head down and plough on when things got hard. He sought advice and help from other founders and chief executives around the world. Roberts wrote to them by hand to ask for their time.

A couple of weeks after interviewing Roberts I spoke to Fergal Mullen, one of the leading venture capital investors in Europe. Mullen is the co-founder of Highland Europe, which has €3bn (£2.5bn) of assets under management and has backed some of the most promising businesses in the UK, such as Huel. He told me that when Highland is looking at what business to invest in, the factor it considers the most is whether the founder is “coachable”. Noticing my slightly confused face, he expanded on the point: “It definitely means they are good listeners, that they like to be challenged, they like to challenge us, they like to learn and they’re good fun,” he explained. Roberts, for one, certainly fits that bill. But I had another thought. The words of Sordell, Roberts and Mullen – people from completely different parts of the business world – come together to create an unstoppable force. If you can get people to know you, if you refuse to fail, and if you are prepared to listen and learn from the people you know to solve problems, then you can potentially overcome any challenge.

That, in essence, is what Business Leader is trying to do. If you are interested in becoming a member and attending our events, please check out pages four and five.

This is a special edition of our magazine. We shine the spotlight on the fastest-growing businesses in the UK. The stories behind these businesses are remarkable – and remarkably diverse. I was struck by the businesses that have bounced back from near-destruction during the Covid19 lockdowns to post record results. That is a story that hasn’t really been told in the UK amid the doom and gloom about the economy. Until now. Thanks for all your support and feedback. Please continue to get in touch at graham.ruddick@businessleader.co.uk

Graham Ruddick Editor-in-chief

Past Perspectives

Archive images from the stories that have shaped the business world

Streaming kills the video star

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings sitting in a cart of ready-to-be-shipped DVDs

Netflix has revolutionised how we watch films and shows at home. Founded by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph in 1997, it started as “DVD rental by mail”, focused on online orders, no due dates and no late fees. It was not, said Randolph in a Twitter thread in 2023, meant to replace the video store.

But that’s exactly what it did. At one time the company synonymous with video rental, Blockbuster, employed more than 84,000 people worldwide and operated in excess of 9,000 stores. Many were found on British high streets and visiting one was a Friday-night ritual for many families.

But poor leadership, the 2008-09 recession and a failure to understand the shift to digital and streaming led to it filing for bankruptcy in 2010, eventually disappearing from the street. Blockbuster’s biggest Sliding Doors moment came 25 years ago. In 2000 and at the height of the dot-com bubble, Randolph and Hastings offered to sell their young and at the time struggling upstart to Blockbuster for $50m. The then-giant passed on the deal and instead chose to partner with Enron on a 20-year deal to create a video-on-demand service. Enron pulled the plug on the agreement a few months later over worries that Blockbuster couldn’t provide enough content for the service. Enron would declare bankruptcy less than a year later.

As for Netflix, after a successful pivot away from its mailorder service to streaming in 2007, it became one of the most visited websites in the world. It has more than 300 million global customers, a market capitalisation of nearly $500bn and revenue of $39bn in the last financial year. The company’s goal is to close this decade with a $1trn market cap and double its current annual revenue.

It ended its mail-order offering in 2023. As Randolph put it at the time: “DVDs are done. Thank you for your service.”

Will the real Keir Starmer please stand up?

By Steven Swinford, political editor of The Times

A year into his premiership, many questions remain about the prime minister and what he actually stands for

Identity crisis

Starmer welcomes Ursula von der Leyen to a summit on bringing the EU closer, days after taking a tough stance on migration

Sir Keir Starmer is something of a chameleon. The man who once advocated the benefits of free movement and open borders has taken what is arguably the toughest stance on migration since Brexit.

In a Downing Street speech, he warned that Britain risks becoming an “island of strangers” – a phrase some left-wing Labour MPs compared to the rhetoric of Enoch Powell –and unveiled a blitz of measures to reduce numbers. His speech could just as easily have been given by Nigel Farage.

Yet a few days later he welcomed Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, to London for a landmark summit that brings the UK into its closest alignment with the EU since Brexit. The agreement was extensive, with closer ties on agriculture, trade, security and defence – and the promise of more to come. Future discussions will include a youth mobility scheme that will enable under-30s from the EU to live and work in the UK for a limited period.

From the outside, following Starmer can be a bewildering experience. There appears to be no singular ideological thread running through his politics, no lodestar by which he is guided. His critics accuse him of being “Starmer Chameleon”, a man who can change his views as it suits him, and there is some truth in the claim.

The prime minister’s U-turns are extensive and well documented. They include backing a second referendum and then backing Brexit; telling voters he would not raise national insurance and then doing exactly that; and insisting that transwomen are women, only to change his position when the Supreme Court ruled otherwise.

His allies argue that this is entirely the point. The prime minister is at heart an arch pragmatist, taking the positions that he believes will best serve the interests of the British people and, ultimately, the Labour Party as it seeks re-election in three years.

But the result is that Starmer has adopted a myriad of positions, some of which are directly contradictory, amid mounting questions about his political identity.

Take migration. In the wake of the local election results and with many of his MPs increasingly fearful of the threat posed by Reform, Starmer has unveiled the most radical crackdown on migration since Brexit. Foreign students will be allowed to stay in the UK for just 18 months after graduating without getting a skilled work visa, while universities face being charged extra for each student they enrol. Migrant workers will be barred from coming to the UK for graduate-level jobs, while all migrants will have to learn a higher standard of English.

With migration consistently in the top two issues for voters, Starmer’s approach makes sense. But it also cuts across his other priorities. Starmer has pledged to get economic growth going at all costs, yet business leaders are already warning of labour shortfalls, particularly in areas such as hospitality.

The health and social care sector has also raised the alarm amid concerns that there simply aren’t enough workers in the UK to sustain the sector. For a prime minister who has promised to cut waiting lists, this could pose particular problems. Starmer has effectively made

a choice, rejecting what is often described as the “Treasury orthodoxy” that higher levels of migration bring higher levels of growth.

But doing so, given the anaemic state of the economy, is a risk. Last autumn, chancellor Rachel Reeves delivered an archetypal Labour Budget with big tax rises and a big increase in public spending.

The parlous state of the public finances meant that Reeves found herself overseeing a challenging spending review in June, with deep cuts to non-protected budgets, and an even tougher Budget in the autumn.

With economists estimating that the black hole in the finances is now as much as £63bn, further tax rises and deeper spending cuts appear inevitable. That will be controversial. On welfare, Starmer has adopted an approach that bears all the hallmarks of those on the right of the political spectrum. He has announced significant cuts to disability benefits in a bid to stop the ever-rising cost of the welfare state, arguing that if people can work they should.

His own MPs are far from convinced. The prime minister is already facing a significant revolt from backbenchers, one which could see the government defeated when it comes to a vote on the package in the Commons. Eighty MPs have made their concerns known, with more expected to emerge.

During the local elections, ministers and backbenchers alike also reported that the backlash against the government’s decision to end universal winter fuel payments was overwhelming. They are imploring Starmer to reverse the cuts, which they describe as toxic and unnecessary.

Restraint is also the order of the day when it comes to public sector workers. Last year, in one of his first acts as prime minister, Starmer gave nurses, doctors, teachers and other public sector workers bumper pay rises in a bid to end industrial action. He was successful, but the reprieve was brief.

This time the prime minister and Reeves do not have the money for such significant pay rises, with offers of around 4 per cent. Nurses and junior doctors in particular are already threatening industrial action. All of which could see a Labour Party that is funded by the trade unions becoming the victim of a summer of discontent.

For now, Starmer is determined to stick to his guns and to maintain his fiscal rules, which dictate that he must balance the books. How long he is prepared to do so in the face of growing opposition on multiple fronts from within his own ranks remains to be seen.

Then there’s the sentencing review. As director of public prosecutions, Starmer established a reputation for being tough on crime. However, the parlous state of Britain’s prisons means that thousands of inmates will have to be released early from their sentences to stop the jails from being overwhelmed. The decision is one borne of necessity, given that prisons are literally running out of space. That reality will not stop Reform UK from exploiting the situation for all it is worth.

The broader problem of Starmer’s flexible approach is that it means he lacks a coherent narrative. Given the increasingly fractured nature of British politics, that could become an increasing problem.

Great managers can solve the UK productivity puzzle

By Szu Ping Chan, economics editor of The Telegraph

The evidence suggests that Britain is lagging behind on management skills, which makes training and support for businesses vital

End of the road

The last van rolls off a British production line earlier this year.

At the heart of the country’s 15-year economic stagnation lies a chronic productivity problem

Bad managers are bad for the economy. Whether they’re micromanaging, taking credit for others’ work or failing to listen to people in their team, their behaviour has a big impact. A good manager usually means a happy worker, a bad manager a miserable one.

This is important because managers form the backbone of Britain’s companies. There are millions working up and down the country. Yet very few receive formal training in the tenets that make a good manager: effective communication, sensible decision-making or organisational abilities. And they are often asked to do thankless tasks such as performance reviews and HR compliance, as well as to keep the company on the road.

Rachel Reeves spends a lot of her time extolling the benefits of artificial intelligence and new technologies that she believes will help to grow the economy. The chancellor should spend a bit more of it getting back to basics. After all, good people make good companies. And while it might sound boring, having a generation of good managers will add more value to a company than any machine will. This is because at the heart of Britain’s 15-year stagnation is a chronic productivity problem.

Productivity – which measures output per hour worked – tells us how much the economy can grow without generating too much inflation. When productivity increases, so do profits and pay packets. That creates a virtuous circle of stronger growth, a bigger economy, rising tax revenues and lower borrowing.

In the end, people drive productivity through the investments they make and the tools they use. Even a fully automated factory is programmed by a human being.

The role of managers is to organise companies in the most effective way by hiring the right people, using their skills effectively, giving them the right tools and motivating them. Unfortunately, all the evidence suggests that, as a country, we’re not very good at management.

One of the most famous studies on the topic is by Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom and fellow academic John Van Reenen, who now advises the chancellor. They suggested that more than half the productivity gap between Britain and the US can be explained by poor management.

The Resolution Foundation think-tank recently issued a similar warning. “Only a small proportion of UK firms are as well managed as the best 25 per cent of US firms,” it said, with dire consequences for investment, productivity and growth. “Rising interest rates are biting across borders and bad taxes are found in many countries. Bad managers are, however, an area in which Britain stands out,” it noted.

It added: “Well-managed firms make better investment decisions, being demonstrably better at forecasting the growth of the aggregate economy and of their own firm.”

So where have we gone wrong? One of the problems is that we have so many of what the Chartered Management Institute coins “accidental managers”. A study several years ago estimated there were roughly 2.4 million people promoted into leadership roles on merit who were subsequently left to sink or swim.

While some excel, others become an example of the so-called Peter Principle, which says people are promoted

to their level of incompetence and then left to languish. The OECD warns that this is costing the economy £84bn a year and undermining Britain’s competitiveness. Surely there must be a better way.

For inspiration, we should look to the birthplace of the MBA. The US has made an industry out of professional management qualifications, and, in many ways, it has paid off. Bloom and Van Reenan consistently found that American firms are more efficient and hence more profitable than their British counterparts.

Why is that? American managers are better at motivating their staff. Targets are clear and performance is usually monitored. Talent is nurtured and success rewarded.

That usually leads to better paid and generally happier staff. “One reason for the predominance of US firms in management scores is that in the US, better-managed firms appear to be rewarded more quickly with greater market share, while worse-managed firms are forced to shrink and exit,” the pair wrote in one of the research papers.

Of course, the economic backdrop also matters. It’s much easier for bosses to find and manage the right team if they can hire and fire people more easily. I’ve always been surprised at how people can quit their jobs without serving any notice in the US. On the flip side, it means companies are freer to find staff that suit them and if it doesn’t work out, they can always start again.

By contrast, state-backed firms in countries with fewer incentives, such as China, perform less well, according to the research, while many firms in India simply do not have performance targets because wages are so low. As a result, both countries have poor management scores.

But there is one area where America does worse than the UK on management – in schools. US schools were found to be bad at promoting and rewarding high-performing teachers and retraining or getting rid of badly-performing ones. Bloom and Van Reenan blame this on strong union representation. Promotions are sometimes more to do with time served, making it more difficult to get rid of persistent underperformers.

By contrast, UK schools were highlighted as some of the best managed. The researchers pointed to education reforms introduced by Labour and embraced by the Tories that started academies. These are funded by the state but managed outside the public sector and local councils.

Governors have a greater say in how the schools are run, including the hiring of teachers, how much they’re paid and what is taught. It’s been a clear success story, raising attainment across the country.

So what should we do? There are lessons to be learnt both from other countries and other sectors on how to improve management. As a country, we need to start paying attention to them.

But you can do that on an individual level too. Are you running a business full of good managers or bad managers? Have you trained them, given them the support they need to listen to and empower their teams? If not, why not?

And if you’re an employee, do you have a boss you would describe as a good manager? If you do, the chances are you’re working at a successful company.

Who is really driving UK economic growth?

We all notice the official GDP figures and have a feel for which sectors are faring better than others. But who are the entrepreneurs and businesses doubling their annual revenues and creating hundreds, even thousands, of jobs? That is what we have looked to uncover in our inaugural Growth 500.

You may ask why Business Leader is doing its own growth index: there are several closely-followed lists already out there. However, few offer a sample larger than 100 companies. Fewer still look across the whole economy (most confine their scope to specific regions or sectors).

We are doing things differently. What you will find here in our inaugural Growth 500 is the most comprehensive look at which companies have increased their turnover by the greatest percentage over the past three years. Our trawl of thousands of documents filed with Companies House has reached into every sector and every region, setting out to build the most authoritative analysis of this kind available in the UK.

Our aim is to be definitive and inclusive. We have looked at companies with a turnover as low as £3m all the way up to FTSE giants. All we ask is that they have audited public accounts for the past three years. We know that

ambitious founders often sacrifice profitability to go big – so we haven’t excluded businesses that aren’t breaking even.

We also believe our time frame of looking at growth over three years strikes the right balance between giving a hotoff-the-press picture of what’s going on in our economy, while rooting out shooting stars who burn brightly but only fleetingly.

The scale of this work is probably its greatest strength. Our collection of 500 companies means if you’re not leading or working for one of these enterprises there’s a very good chance there is one nearby or operating in a similar field to you. Yes, you’ll see challenger banks, unicorn tech firms and biotech start-ups, but you’ll also find potato farmers, soft-toy makers and car dealers. There are even places for a Hollywood actor (Ryan Reynolds, Wrexham AFC, no 119 on our list), some legendary heavy metal rockers (Iron Maiden, Iron Maiden Legacy, no 172) and a pop star (Victoria Beckham, no 411).

Over the following pages you will find the business that came top of the Growth 500, a run-through of the top 10 and a list of every entry in the top 100. The full 500 will be published online. We have also picked out a collection of compelling stories that have emerged from the impressive numbers. Our inaugural Growth 500 has lessons for us all.

Robert Watts Compiler of the Growth 500 and The Sunday Times Rich List

The UK’s fastest-growing companies have lessons for us all but diversity of enterprise and raw ambition are the most striking features of our Growth 500, writes Robert Watts

It’s one thing to survive a global pandemic, another to thrive in its aftermath.

Business Leader’s first attempt to identify Britain’s fastest-growing 500 companies has inevitably been coloured by the Covid years of 2020 and 2021.

Should our rankings have excluded, say, travel agents and airlines who had to pull down the shutters or ground their planes during the pandemic and therefore started from a very low base when we came to measure their latest years of turnover?

We decided against this for two reasons. First, pubs, restaurants, music venues, theatres, high-street retailers and many other businesses were obliged to close for months during the dark days of Covid. If we stripped out the travel industry, where would we stop?

Second, to bounce back strongly after such a global crisis is an achievement worthy of recognition. All travel agents started from that low base, yet some have flourished while others have continued to struggle.

Excluding certain sectors would also counter the Growth 500’s ambition – to give readers the largest and most comprehensive rankings of which UK companies are growing most quickly. This inaugural dataset, compiled

by combing through thousands of filings at Companies House, compared annual turnover reported in the most recent accounts with those reported in the financial year three years before.

We did not ask for – or accept – submissions. We excluded UK businesses owned by foreign companies. Only firms that grew sales across the period counted.

Our list includes companies with turnovers as low as £3m over the latest reporting year. Hundreds of our entries are quiet achievers often little known outside their industry or home town. But you’ll also see much-heralded entrepreneurial success stories of recent years, including Revolut, Ovo Energy, Atom Bank, Starling and Octopus Energy.

“Our research also tells us a good deal about the UK economy and which companies are thriving in the post-pandemic world

Then there are entries with a flash of celebrity, such as Victoria Beckham’s fashion label, Olympic sailor Sir Ben Ainslie’s Athena Sports Group and the West End musical production empire built up by former stagehand Sir Cameron Mackintosh. One of television chef Gordon Ramsay’s ventures also made our final 500.

Few will have expected to see Iron Maiden Legacy, the company that receives the heavy metal veterans’ earnings from touring, music rights and selling merchandise.

Famed for their zombie-themed T-shirts and posters, the band’s accounts showed plenty of life. Turnover climbed to £27.5m in 2023-24, up 258.5 per cent across the three years.

Our research also tells us a good deal about the UK economy and which companies are thriving in the postpandemic world. Financial services, a sector ranging from retail banks to a gold-trading app, accounted for 101 companies – the most of any sector. Business services (71), travel & leisure (65) and construction (61) are also well represented. London (197) and the South East (59) dominate our list, together accounting for more than half the entries. The East of England (55), the North West (39) and South West (35) follow as the next best-represented regions. But all the regions of the UK are represented.

Not far off a third (154) of our 500 did not show a pre-tax profit in their latest accounts. Sportswear label Castore, Euan Blair’s ed-tech venture Multiverse and fellow unicorn Quantexa all showed a loss over the past year. Ambitious founders understand that investing boldly can be critical to growth. Breaking even is often a longer-term goal.

The research also tells us not to assume it’s only startups that can grow fast. Fifteen of our companies were founded more than a century ago. Three – the private bank C. Hoare & Co, the retail consultancy Herbert Group and the horse-racing group Weatherbys – have histories stretching back more than 250 years.

Our researchers found plenty of other impressive and surprising results. Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou founded not one but two of our 500 companies: budget airline easyJet and hospitality group easyHotel. Fund manager Jeremy Hosking makes the cut not because of his investment expertise but due to his steam train side- hustle.

There are some striking hotspots. Fourteen of our enterprises are based in Cambridge. The Welsh town of Wrexham and Nottinghamshire’s Sutton-in-Ashfield punch well above their weight, each having three companies in our rankings. Their populations number around 40,000.

Wrexham is home to one of three football clubs to appear. Luton Town and Ipswich also feature.

Low-cost and luxury enterprises are both here too. There are seven McDonald’s franchisees and the group behind Michelin-starred London restaurant Quo Vadis.

It’s that diversity of enterprise that is perhaps the most striking aspect of the Growth 500. Yes, you will find founders with ballooning revenues thanks to AI, cutting-edge cybersecurity or innovative payment platforms. But you will also see pig farmers, housebuilders and car dealers. Ultimately, ambition is the most important raw material for high-growth ventures. These are the companies who have it in spades – and they have lessons for us all.

London is the most common base of our Growth 500 companies

Location by region

Top of the charts

No 1 in our Growth 500 is a music promoter to the stars whose down-to-earth approach strikes a chord with industry greats

By Robert Watts & Dougal Shaw

If only Barrie Marshall had stuck with his plans of working as a civil engineer in local government he might have put together a pretty decent career working on building sites and planning bridges and roads.

Instead he has had to make do with travelling the world as an agent and promoter for Sir Elton John, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder and a dazzling cast of music industry greats.

Led Zeppelin. Status Quo. Lionel Ritchie. The Beach Boys. Cher. The Kinks. Whitney Houston. Annie Lennox. Otis Redding. George Michael. Joe Cocker. Pink. Sade. The Spice Girls. A giddying rollcall of stadium-filling acts he promoted over nearly six decades in the industry.

To Beatles legend Sir Paul McCartney, Marshall is “dear old Badger – the coolest promoter in the world” and a “total pleasure to work with”. The late, great Tina Turner would say he was “responsible for the success of my solo career”.

Now the man behind Marshall Arts, his playfully named business, has won another accolade: topping Business Leader’s inaugural Growth 500. Revenues at his Londonbased company have hit more than £68m, with annual growth topping 24,000 per cent over the past three years.

Part-owned by Los Angeles-based entertainment group AEG, Marshall Arts has helped deliver some astonishing tours. During the Covid lockdowns, shows were cancelled and Marshall’s revenues collapsed. But since then the business has soared to record levels thanks to tours such as Sir Elton’s Farewell Yellow Brick Road, a four-year extravaganza that took nearly $1bn at the box office.

Marshall fell into music promotion almost by accident. It started with the death of a friend called Ray Selway whose mother asked if Marshall would take on the job of promoting her son’s band, The Satellites.

“I had no experience whatsoever,” Marshall has said. “I was learning as I went along. I went over to Germany with The Satellites … booked gigs, scrubbed floors and did whatever was needed to keep us afloat.”

He began organising pub gigs for other bands, expanding to shows at American airbases, dance halls and seaside resorts. “I was totally immersed in records and gigs ... I couldn’t believe how music could be so exciting.”

He moved to work for Arthur Howes, then one of the biggest music promoters, who taught him the tricks of the trade. It wasn’t until his mid-30s that Marshall would set up on his own, opening an office in London’s Lower Regent Street in 1976. He had spotted a gap in the market that chimed with his own passions. “I felt the only field of music which wasn’t being promoted properly in the UK was soul and R&B … Luckily, I loved that type of music.”

Early clients would include Stevie Wonder and The Commodores, the band co-founded by the singer Lionel Ritchie, who remains on Marshall Arts’ books to this day. Many of his team have stayed on for years. They include Marshall’s wife Jenny. The pair grew close when she joined The Satellites as a singer. Team spirit is not the only lesson from Marshall’s story. Asked by music industry bible Pollstar for his business philosophy, he said: “Preparation is key,

advancing planning, and visits to meet the personnel we will be working with. It’s important to focus on all aspects and all departments.

“Crucially, attention to details, no matter how small they may seem. On show day they will become very relevant.”

Those founders who recognise the importance of humility will like his modest mantra. “It’s not about me, Barrie Marshall,” he once told Music Week. “I’ve never made a record or written a song. I don’t want to be famous. If I can put the act - using their music, image and artwork - in the right place at the right time, that’s what my objective is.

“Promoters have to remember one thing - we’re only the engine drivers. We’re not the person who gets off the train and entertains people. We’re there simply to support the act. As long as we remember that - and don’t have too much self-importance - things will run smoothly.”

In an age of emails, video calls and Slack, the importance of strong personal relationships can often be forgotten. The affection, as well as high regard, so many of his clients hold for Marshall is an important part of his company’s success.

In 2006 McCartney paid tribute: “Long may the Badger rule!” the ex-Beatle would say. Nearly 20 years later this star promoter remains top of the charts.

Close harmony

Barrie Marshall flanked by Lionel Richie, left, and music industry photographer Alan Silfen at a recent exhibition

Wendy Wu Tours

The accidental business

Wendy Wu founded her eponymous travel company almost by accident. Four years after moving away from China, she booked a trip for two back to her homeland.

At the last minute her travel companion had to pull out and so Wu placed a small ad in a newspaper offering the place as a 28-day tour of China, billing herself as a tour guide and promising some “hidden gems”. A mass of phone calls ensued, convincing Wu that there was a business to be built from organising holidays to China.

For years, London-based Wendy Wu Tours concentrated on selling trips to Asia but Covid obliged the business to explore new markets.

“Customers said to us: ‘Europe is open, can you please take us somewhere?’” Wu has said. “So we started to select really carefully unique places in Europe and the Middle East because they were already open – and China wasn’t.”

Those new destinations partly explain Wendy Wu Tours’ strong bounce-back from the pandemic. Annual turnover now exceeds £28m, up 19,431 per cent over the period we analysed.

Green Create

Give it some gas

Unlocking the value in what others discard can make for a great business. Green Create harnesses methane-rich organic waste produced by agricultural sites including poultry farms and fish-processing plants to create natural gas and other products.

These can either be channelled into the domestic supply chain or used to generate electricity. Other byproducts from its facilities include liquid and solid phosphate fertiliser for arable farms and purified water that can be released back into local networks.

Green Create operates and owns sites in the Netherlands, Belgium, Mauritius and other parts of southern Africa. Earlier this year a partnership was announced between Green Create and a major US poultry producer to build 12 more sites across the country.

Financial difficulties at one of its plants in Kent have not hamstrung the company’s fast growth. Annual revenues at the London-headquartered group have climbed to £30.1m, an increase of 20,346 per cent over the past three years.

On the Go Tours

Far-flung fun

A chance encounter between Australian Scott Braidwood and Britishborn Jay Lakshman while holidaying in Egypt would lead to the start of this direct-to-consumer tour operator.

On the Go Tours’ first excursion in 1998 would be a tour of the pyramids, not far from where the pair had met that year. Priding itself on combining “culture and adventure with a lot of fun along the way”, this London-based travel company now offers trips to dozens of far-flung destinations, including Guatemala, Bhutan and Madagascar.

With packages offering adventures during the day but “a chilled beer poolside or a soft pillow at the end of the day”, On the Go Tours tries to strike a balance between authenticity and comfort.

There are now offices in Brisbane and Johannesburg as well as operations in New Zealand, Canada and the USA.

Grounded during the pandemic, On the Go Tours has now taken flight again, growing revenues to £17.1m during 2023 – a 16,078.4 per cent rise over the past three years.

Green Global

Keeping it clean

This low-profile London outfit is billed as the UK’s largest textile-recycling business. It collects more than 400 million unwanted garments a year from homes in England and Wales on behalf of its partner charities.

After sorting and cleaning at its four processing plants, the clothes and footwear are exported to those in need living in Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa. This work is not only good for the planet but it also helps hard-pressed charities boost their income.

Green Global has now diversified into other eco-friendly areas such as helping business clients design, install and maintain solar panel systems to reduce their carbon footprint and cut their energy bills. More than 1,200 such systems have been fitted by the company so far.

It is also helping to deliver large and secure data centres and other IT infrastructure powered by renewable energy. All this drove revenues to nearly £7.7m in 2023-24, up 9,317 per cent over the past three years.

Vosaio

Bespoke trips for business

German national Martin Knuepfer founded Vosaio in 2009 after years working in the British travel industry. His London-based business-to-business agency specialises in designing and arranging bespoke tours across Europe and beyond, from school trips and business conferences to cruises and tours of the Vatican.

For around 95 per cent of its client programmes, Vosaio contracts directly with hotels, restaurants, tourist attractions and its other suppliers, thereby stripping out the cost of intermediaries and ensuring the company can more closely vet the quality of the services.

Turnover climbed to £39.5m in 2023, a growth of 5,998 per cent over the past three years. International travel of course collapsed during the global pandemic and that largely explains this phenomenal growth. Nevertheless, Vosaio is trading well above pre-Covid levels. Turnover in 2023 was 64 per cent higher than in 2019.

Knuepfer now employs teams across 25 countries and last May secured a multimillion-pound investment from BGF, the bank-backed venture capital investor targeting small and medium-sized enterprises.

Cyro Cyber

Stopping hackers in their tracks

High-profile and costly cyber attacks on some of the UK’s leading retailers in recent months will only increase the demand for experts offering more robust protection for corporate IT networks.

Paul Rose and Shannon Simpson already shared more than 50 years of experience safeguarding some of the UK’s most critical commercial and public sector digital networks when they set up their consultancy four years ago.

London-based Cyro Cyber, a spinout from the telecommunications infrastructure outfit Telent, has swiftly grown its revenues to just over £4.2m, a 7,899 per cent increase over the past three years.

Its services range from designing and maintaining secure digital networks to testing a client’s defences from hackers and malware. It even tests physical access to an organisation’s offices and data centres with a team of ex-military operatives.

The National Highways Agency, Network Rail, Royal Bank of Canada and the Police Digital Service are among Cyro’s roster of clients.

8

Marv Studios

Star-studded film-maker

When Matthew Vaughn makes a movie, he can certainly assemble a superstar cast.

Sir Michael Caine, Daniel Craig, Julianne Moore, Ralph Fiennes and even pop queen Dua Lipa are among the household names to have starred in his catalogue of hits.

years, films produced by Vaughn are believed to have taken almost £1.4bn at box offices globally.

Turnover at Marv Studios, his London-based production company previously known as Ska Films, has grown by 3,782 per cent to £246.4m over the past three years. As well as revenues from current film projects, the company also receives a steady income from its back catalogue.

Perhaps best known for the three Kingsman spy capers, his more serious works have included the Sir Elton John biopic Rocketman and a surprisingly compelling dramatisation of the origins of the video game Tetris. Over the

Vaughn and his wife Claudia Schiffer each own half the shares in Marv Studios. The former supermodel has worked closely with her husband on his films for years. Their family cat, Chip, even had a starring role in their 2024 espionage comedy Argylle , garnering plenty of attention at the Leicester Square premiere.

Star power

Marv Studios founder Matthew Vaughn with his wife Claudia Schiffer at the premiere of Argylle

Rayburn Tours

Schooled for success

Barny Rayburn organised plenty of trips to the continent in his days as head of modern languages at Derby Grammar School. After he finished teaching, he set out to help other schools pack off groups of students to Europe to improve their language skills. For 19 years, Rayburn ran his small business from his home with three staff. Then in 1984 he approached John Boyden, who until then had been his trusty coach driver, with an idea.

“Mr Rayburn quietly and fatherly-like told me that I was to buy the company, as he was retiring,” Boyden recalls.

Boyden and his wife Brenda obliged and have been running the tour operator ever since. Over the years the business has moved into organising ski trips as well as cricket, football and other sports tours to destinations including the US, Australia and India.

The 100-plus staff also put together concert tours for adult and school orchestras, choirs and bands to places such as Malta, Switzerland and the Czech Republic.

Rayburn Tours is this year celebrating 60 years in business and the 100-plus workforce can certainly raise a glass or two. Annual turnover has climbed by 1,853 per cent to £22.9m over the past three years.

Miki Travel

Venturing into new fields

A clever tour operator keeps a close eye on what its customers really like.

Some years ago, Miki Travel’s holiday reps noticed how Japanese holidaymakers touring the English countryside were enchanted by the yellow magnificence of a field full of rapeseed and would cluster around coach windows to take photos.

Before long Miki Travel would start offering tours of fields on the Gloucestershire-Wiltshire border where visitors could happily stroll among the bright-coloured crop, taking pictures to their hearts’ content. The trips didn’t just help banish the UK’s “grey, rainy image”, the tour operator said. They also proved a nice side hustle for farmers.

Founded in 1967, Miki Travel initially did well for Japanese tourists’ fondness for visiting the UK and the European mainland. The London-based business now has 41 offices around the world offering travel to more than 170 countries, operating a business-to-business service to travel agent clients.

Barcelona, Prague, Rome, Kuala Lumpur, Tokyo, Osaka and Bangkok are among the many destinations its website offers. The group prides itself on having “hundreds of multilingual staff”.

Revenues have grown by 2,951 per cent over the past three years, rising to £117.8m in 2023-24.

The unicorns

Inspiring companies that have hit a $1bn valuation with the founders still at the heart of their success

CMR Surgical

A

cut above thanks to robots

CMR Surgical is one of the most exciting businesses in the UK. One of its founders is Mark Slack, a South African doctor who worked in an academic hospital in Cambridge where he would treat patients and work on innovations. He was interested in how much keyhole surgery was being done versus how much could be done. Keyhole surgery reduces the risk of complications compared to open surgery and patients recover faster. However, less keyhole is performed than could be because it takes a high level of skill and it is difficult to train surgeons.

Slack thought robots could help, so he teamed up with robotics expert Luke Hares, as well as Keith Marshall, Paul Roberts and Martin Frost, to develop its technology. The story of CMR Surgical highlights the value of ecosystems such as Cambridge, where people can meet and skills come together. “The ecosystem that existed around us contributed hugely to the success of building the robot and getting it out there,” Slack says.

Its surgical robot system, Versius, is now in 186 locations across Europe, the Asia-Pacific, Middle East, Africa and Latin America. Revenues have more than doubled in the past three years, up by 122.6 per cent to £52.8m. And that growth looks set to continue. CMR Surgical recently won regulatory approval for the US – a significant step in its expansion plans – and it continues to innovate, recently obtaining approval for a new service that uses ultrasonic energy.

Zenobē

Battery business charges ahead

In August 2024, English band Massive Attack put on a one-day festival with a difference. The concert in Bristol was designed to be net zero, from how it was powered to the transport to get there and the food available. One of the companies helping to power the gig was Zenobē. It provided 19 battery units, as well as eight fully electric double-decker buses to shuttle people between Bristol Temple Meads station and the venue.

This is, on a smaller scale, what Zenobē is hoping to do to the UK – and global – economy. The company is developing electric batteries that can store energy generated by renewable power. These are not the batteries in a remote control or watch; they are more like small power stations. And they will be key to the energy transition.

“I really think it’s up to our generation to address some of the challenges that have been set up by previous generations through the use of fossil fuels,” says co-founder James Basden. “We have a unique opportunity to set up a carbon-free electricity power network and transport system that our children and grandchildren will benefit from.”

That unique opportunity is helping to power its success. Revenues are up 253 per cent over the past three years, hitting £53.6m in its most recent results. And its valuation has passed £1bn, suggesting there is far more growth still to come.

Revolut

Upstart fintech aims high

Revolut’s rise has been dramatic. Founded just 10 years ago, it is now worth more than $45bn according to a secondary share sale last year – cementing its position as the most valuable private technology company in Europe and the UK’s most valuable fintech firm. It is also the most profitable company on the list, bringing in more than £1bn in its most recent results.

Revolut is the brainchild of founder Nikolay Storonsky, who was born in Russia but came to the UK aged 20. He worked as a trader for Lehman Brothers, losing around £500,000 when the firm collapsed in 2008.

The service which he founded with now chief technology officer Vlad Yatsenko offers app-based payments, undercutting mainstream banks with services such as fee-free foreign exchange. It has since pushed into other areas, including equity, commodity and cryptocurrency trading, helping to spur its growth.

Revolut was granted a UK banking licence last year, after a threeyear wait, and has just announced plans to invest more than €1bn in France, where it will build its western Europe headquarters as it targets yet more growth.

Storonsky is bullish on the company’s prospects. In 2018, he told The Times that “if we do what we do for another few years, we’ll be five times bigger than any bank”. It still has some way to go for that to be true, but with revenues growing by more than 230 per cent over the past three years, you wouldn’t bet against it.

Serving up an ace

Oliver Kent-Braham, one of the twins behind fintech unicorn Marshmallow, used his early success in tennis to build one of the UK’s fastest-growing companies

By Robert Watts

We are not long into our conversation before international tennis player turned tech founder Oliver Kent-Braham delivers his first winner. “Sometimes,” beams the elder of the 33-year-old twins behind the £1.6bn car insurer Marshmallow, “you need to get comfortable being uncomfortable.”

Meeting at this fast-growing unicorn’s offices, a few moments from London’s Silicon Roundabout tech hub, we have quickly landed upon one of the greatest dilemmas many ambitious founders face. When you’re trying to grow a company at the pace of a Djokovic serve, how much does the bottom line really matter?

“In some markets you will need to be exceptionally aggressive when it comes to attracting customers,” Kent-Braham explains. “You may be building the kind of software that can serve a lot of people, but you just don’t have the customers yet.

“That may mean that you run at a big loss because that monetisation will come later. Some of the biggest business success stories of the past 20 or 30 years haven’t been profitable for a long, long time.”

Uber, for example, took 14 years to break even. Marshmallow, which Kent-Braham launched with his brother Alexander and co-founder David Goaté in 2017, got there in half the time. The next set of accounts will show a profit, I’m told.

When the trio cheekily – and cheaply –started their venture from the lobby of a Virgin Active gym near London’s Embankment Tube station, did they set out to build a big insurance player, one that could shake up the somewhat fusty world of no-claims bonuses and third party, fire and theft?

“We wanted to build something big and impactful, but really we had identified a problem. We thought someone should go and solve that issue – and why shouldn’t that be us?”

That market failure was the high price people who move to the UK from overseas often pay for car insurance. Premiums for these motorists were often 50 per cent higher than for British-born drivers. Marshmallow’s founders felt that more sophisticated profiling by state-of-the-art IT would make it possible to price these groups more effectively, potentially offering significant savings. “We also

had a belief this customer group would grow because the fertility rate within the UK is low. There is an increasing retired population and a decreasing working population, so it looked like the UK would try to solve that problem in part by migration.”

What followed was not an overnight success story. The brothers waited 18 months to sell their first insurance policy. Over the next eight months it would still be a novelty whenever they got an alert notifying them of another customer sign-up.

Turnover jumped from £7.7m in 2019 to £37m in the following year, doubling to £79.3m for 2021. Attracting investment at an early stage – something many founders are wary of – was critical to Marshmallow’s success.

“The companies that inspired us 10 years ago were those that tended to raise capital to grow,” Kent-Braham says. “To achieve scale as an insurer you need lots of capital, and so that was always going to be part of the equation.”

Taking on investment, he stresses, does not necessarily mean losing control. “We believe that founder-led, management-led companies, especially private ones, are in a position to outperform because they can be longer-term focused.”

Marshmallow’s investors include Passion Capital, Hedosophia and Scor. The twins retain almost half of the shares. A fundraising in September 2021 secured a $1.25bn (£930m) valuation and unicorn status. Another investment round in April this year put a $2.1bn (£1.6bn) price tag on the company.

Rising sales help explain this year’s higher valuation. Revenues climbed to £184.1m in 2023, growth of 358.2 per cent over two years, sufficient to put Marshmallow into the top quarter of Business Leader’s Growth 500.

More than half of customers remain drivers who have moved to the UK from overseas, but the proportion of British-born motorists is rising. “These are normally people who have a bit less driving experience, lower credit scores and move around a lot – attributes that they share with our customer base.”

It’s not just Marshmallow’s customers that have similar attributes, of course. What’s it like running a company with your identical twin? “Alexander and I have a deep trust and understanding of each other. We really believe

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“With sport, you lose a lot. Sometimes you don’t have your best day, sometimes the other person is better than you. The next day you still have to get up, go to training and play another match

in the same mission for this company.” Born to a Jamaican father and British mother, the siblings grew up in the affluent west London suburbs of Barnes, Richmond and Surbiton. They both attended the Surrey private school Reed’s, as did four-time Wimbledon semifinalist Tim Henman.

By their mid-teens the Kent-Brahams were both representing Great Britain at tennis. After sixth form, the pair headed to the University of the West of England in Bristol. Apart from a year at different companies, the twins have always worked together.

“Alexander and I are very similar,” Oliver chuckles. “So many companies fail because the founding team falls out. Alexander and I are very aligned for what we want to achieve here for a very long period.”

So how do they divide up their responsibilities? “I honestly see my job as making sure Alexander can be very focused internally,” the elder of the pair continues. “Alexander is very urgent, he’s a good manager, he’s very diligent. Anything that’s more external is what I tend to pick up.”

This means Oliver concentrates on the outward-facing aspects of the business, such as working with the chief legal officer and chief finance officer. Alexander is more involved with product, software engineering and human resources. Despite those delineations, Kent-Braham emphasises that “in fast-growing

companies things need to change rapidly all the time”. “We’ve only ever reorganised too late,” he says. “Changing the structure of the organisation, changing the reporting lines … it can’t make sense to have the same structure when you are 20 people as it does when you are 200.

“You either accept that things need to change or you are going to be a bit of a burden on a company. Be prepared to change things. If it’s wrong, you can always change it again. You should be proud whenever you’re changing things, it’s progress.”

This optimistic, resilient approach must have served the Kent-Brahams well on the tennis court over the years. Alexander still plays, while Oliver says he has been enjoying the fastgrowing racquet sport padel.

“With sport, tennis especially, you lose a lot. Sometimes you don’t have your best day, sometimes the other person is better than you. The next day you still have to get up, go to training and play another match,” he says.

“That’s what life is like – and running a company too. You can still enjoy the process, even if you lose. The most successful people in history have been unsuccessful at things. Sport really teaches you to get up again after you’ve lost, but after a while you do come to see that people who work their hardest do the best. The world is not perfectly meritocratic but if you give it your all, you have much better outcomes.”

Sounds like the ping of another ace.

Fellow hotshot

The twins shared a school with Tim Henman

Financial services

These three companies are taking centre stage in the booming fintech industry in the UK

Allica Bank

A big believer in best practice

Richard Davies says he is a magpie. “I love to see what others have done,” he explains. “I may have experienced it firsthand, I may know someone who has been there, or I have read about what has been done. I am a big believer in trying to assemble what best practice looks like.”

But don’t be fooled into thinking that Davies is some kind of traditionalist. The next thing he says is eye-opening. “I am also a big believer that [best practice] often doesn’t look like traditional management theory. I think a lot of that stuff is wrong. Over the last decade companies have very rarely followed traditional management practice as they have been built.”

What makes this comment particularly noteworthy is that Davies has been at the centre of the blossoming UK fintech industry and played key roles at three of the companies on the Growth 500. He was chief executive of OakNorth, chief operating officer at Revolut and is now chief executive at Allica Bank, the digital bank for small and medium-sized businesses. He arrived at Allica in 2020 to what was effectively a blank

sheet of paper. Allica had just won a banking licence from UK regulators and it had investment from venture capital firms. But its founder had departed and Allica had loaned just £5m to businesses.

Since then, Allica has been one of the fastest-growing companies in the UK. The company’s appearance in the Growth 500 reflects its stellar performance. Our data shows its revenue has grown by 268 per cent, or £213m, across the period we measured to £292m. What’s more, Allica also reported healthy pre-tax profits of £29.9m in its most recent financial year.

Allica has grown quickly, says Davies, by “doing a dramatically better version of what already is out there”. By that, he means that Allica is trying to offer a far better service to medium-sized businesses in the UK than the traditional high street banks.

“Sadly, this space has been vacated by most of the major banks,” Davies says. “They’ve been cutting back on all their client-facing staff. They haven’t really invested properly in the digital services for this segment. I’d say part of the reason we’ve seen such fast growth is that the bar is fairly low.”

But, as his initial comments demonstrate, Davies is also thinking about how to run a business in a different way to others. He recommends the book The Geek Way: The radical mindset that drives extraordinary results by Andrew McAfee as something he has learnt from.

“One of the things I think a lot of large companies, but also many start-ups, get wrong is that execution is such an important thing and iterative execution is super crucial,” Davies says. “The view that you can get decisions right via lots of upfront analysis and brainstorming I think is fundamentally wrong.

“Get the thing live. Get it working with some clients, then iterate it very fast with those clients to develop it. That ability to execute – to get something live, to get feedback and to iterate – is often what sets companies apart. It is very different to the classic process of ivorytower thinking.”

The speed of Allica’s progress since Davies arrived there five years ago shows he is on to something.

Payhawk

Keeping corporate expenses in check

Payhawk’s co-founder and CEO Hristo Borisov experienced at firsthand the headache of managing corporate expenses – and decided to do something about it. After roles in engineering and product management, he quit and, needing to cut unnecessary expenses, cancelled all his subscriptions.

He found it so hard to do so that he thought there might be an opportunity there. So he founded Payhawk, in 2018, to enable companies to manage their spending, from corporate cards and expenses to subscriptions, more easily.

The company was rejected by more than 60 venture-capital firms before getting funding. But within six months of launch it had customers in 16 countries. Recent growth suggests Borisov is definitely on to something. Revenues are up 1,681 per cent in the three years we monitored, hitting £10.9m in its most recent annual results.

ClearBank

Boosted by building from scratch

In 2017, ClearBank became the first new clearing bank in the UK for more than 250 years. Its USP, says founder and former CEO Charles McManus, is that it has been able to build its offering from scratch, unencumbered by the legacy platforms that limit its rivals. That means it can focus on being efficient, cost effective and fast, all areas the other clearing banks are criticised over.

A clearing bank is one that verifies a financial transaction, ensuring for both the payer and the payee that everything goes according to plan. Services include Faster Payments, Chaps and Bacs payments, with the market dominated by the big four of Barclays, NatWest, Lloyds and HSBC. ClearBank counts Chip, Tide and Wealthify among its customers, which total more than 240.

Its 1,175 per cent growth rate over the past three years has been fuelled by expansion following the approval of its European banking licence. To fund that, it received £150m from investors including Apax Digital, and is spending around £70m on its European moves. It became profitable in the UK for the first time last year.

McManus, who is now a non-executive director, believes key to its success has been a focus on product, which is critical to business success. “You really must make sure there is a market – and you can compete and win. Your product has got to be brilliant, and you have to understand what your customers are buying off you.”

Revenue rockets

Standout performers that generated the biggest absolute increase in revenue over the past three years — not in percentage terms, but in real money

Octopus Energy

Spreading its tentacles overseas

In less than 10 years, founder and CEO Greg Jackson has powered Octopus Energy from plucky green start-up into the UK’s largest domestic energy supplier.

There are now almost 13 million household meters measuring electricity and gas served by Octopus, analysis by Cornwall Insights has found. This works out at almost a quarter of the market and a touch above British Gas, until now the dominant player.

Jackson, a member of Greenpeace since his mid-teens, initially set up and ran businesses making mirrors and trading property. He did not start Octopus until his early 40s.

“We became Britain’s biggest energy supplier by relentlessly delivering better services, lower costs and more innovation,” Jackson says. “We’ve

invested heavily in technology to deliver this rare combination of rapid growth and outstanding service.”

Raising hundreds of millions in capital from investors, including former US vice-president Al Gore, is a critical part of the Octopus story. This gave Jackson the financial firepower for a succession of game-changing acquisitions that were also partly made possible due to the energy crisis that began when Russian President Vladimir Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022.

Later that year, Octopus was able to snap up Bulb, until then the UK’s seventh largest supplier with 1.5 million customers.

A year later the company bought Shell Energy Retail, the fuel giant’s UK household electricity and gas arm. This brought in another 1.3 million customers.

Octopus’s tentacles have also spread overseas by buying German green energy outfit 4hundred and France’s Plüm Énergie. Jackson now runs a group operating across 26 countries. Annual turnover has ballooned to £12.4bn, up 194 per cent in three years.

Ovo Energy

Green gamble pays off

Stephen Fitzpatrick set up Ovo in 2009 with a vision to shake up the UK’s domestic energy market, then long dominated by six large players.

It must have seemed quite the gamble. The son of a Belfast grocer, Fitzpatrick had until then been working in investment banking and his entrepreneurial endeavours were largely limited to a property freesheet he ran while studying at Edinburgh University.

Nevertheless, he and his then-wife Sophie sold their home and used £350,000 of the proceeds to set up their Bristol-based green energy supplier.

It took 11 years before they hit the big time. Shortly before the Covid pandemic began, Ovo bought FTSE 100 giant SSE’s domestic energy

business for £500m. The acquisition saw Fitzpatrick’s customer base leap from 1.5m to 5m – and suddenly Ovo was the UK’s third largest energy supplier.

“He went from David to Goliath with one deal,” one industry chief executive says of Fitzpatrick.

Although now overtaken by fellow new market entrant Octopus, Ovo’s revenues have continued to rise, partly due to the recent energy crisis. Over the past three years, sales growth is up 750 per cent, with annual profits exceeding £1bn. Fitzpatrick still controls the company, despite selling stakes to Mitsubishi Corporation, Mayfair Equity Partners and Morgan Stanley Investment Management.

An admirer of Sir Richard Branson, Fitzpatrick shares the Virgin billionaire’s eclectic mix of entrepreneurial pursuits. The Ulsterman has floated his flying taxi venture Vertical Aerospace on the New York stock exchange and dabbled in Formula One. He has also bought Kensington Roof Gardens, a London nightspot previously owned by Branson.

Brand on the run

Ovo Hydro, a venue in Glasgow sponsored by Ovo, hosts US band Vampire Weekend

The top 100

These are the 100 fastest-growing companies in the UK. The table below shows their growth rate over the period we measured and their annual revenues in the final year.

Female trailblazers

We spotlight some of the women leading the UK’s fastest-growing businesses

Seabird Technologies

Making waves in a man’s world

Sophi Horne is quickly making a name for herself in the world of yachting. Born in Norway but raised in Sweden, she is the designer behind the electric powerboat RaceBird, which is used in the championship racing E1 Series, as well as the founder of Seabird Technologies.

to spend hours in bed, she worked on one of her two tech companies – a platform where people could hire power boats. She wanted to add electric foil boats but couldn’t find any so she thought she would design one herself.

Things really took off when Alejandro Agag, chairman of both Formula E and E1 Series, said he would back her project – and then asked her to develop race boats. She turned her hand to that, while at the same time helping development of E1. That has helped to drive revenues to £12.5m, a 620-per-cent increase over the past three years.

Her journey into yacht design started as a side hustle at school. She won a few awards and, aged 18, was hired by a mega-yacht company. She left to go into banking but soon quit to focus on her passion. The inspiration for Seabird came when she was recovering from Lyme disease. Forced

Horne admits it can be a man’s world, particularly in the marine industry. The key to success, she says, is finding the right backers. “As a woman, you need to find people who believe in you, respect you and let you do your thing without coming in and taking over,” she told Fortune magazine.

Victoria Beckham Passion for fashion

Victoria Beckham needs little introduction. A fifth of the Spice Girls, the best-selling girl group of all time, and married to one of the world’s most famous footballers in David Beckham, she is one of the most famous and photographed women on the planet.

Alongside this fame, she is also a successful businesswoman. She had a passion for fashion and made her debut as a model at London Fashion Week in 2000, before designing her first fashion line for Rock & Republic in 2004. When she left Rock & Republic, she launched her own denim label dVb Style, before expanding into eyewear.

However, it is her eponymous label that has put Beckham on the Growth 500. Founded in 2008, it was initially known for dresses but soon added separates and luxury handbags to the collection, as well as denim, eyewear and fragrance. In 2011, she won Designer Brand of the Year at the British Fashion Awards.

Revenues at the company are up 118 per cent over the past three years, hitting £89m in its most recent accounts. But in an interview with Nicole Kidman for Vogue Australia she admits she was “naive and innocent” when she began working on her label and if she knew then what she knows now, she might not have had the “courage” to launch it.

Sister Independence is key to success

Sister has had a bumper few years. Founded in 2015, the independent production company is behind hit TV shows including The Split and This is Going to Hurt for the BBC, Black Doves and Chernobyl for Netflix, and Broadchurch for ITV.

Its three female founders are heavyweights of the media industry. Jane Featherstone was the chief executive of Kudos and co-chair of Shine UK; Elisabeth Murdoch, daughter of Rupert, who founded Shine Group; and Stacey Snider, who was previously chair and CEO of 20th Century Fox, chair of Universal Pictures and co-chair and CEO of DreamWorks.

Featherstone believes its independence has been “critical” to its success. Speaking to Variety magazine, she revealed: “We’ve expanded, we’ve grown and we have investments, but [Sister] can still partner with anybody and work with any talent and create our own deal structures.”

The challenge, of course, is getting a share of the increasingly tight budgets in the media landscape. But its results would suggest its focus on independence, storytelling and stories with international appeal is paying off. Revenue has increased by 680 per cent, to £207.1m, over the three years of our analysis, as it looks to expand both internationally with the opening of its US studio and by taking stakes in smaller businesses.

Doing it for themselves

Elisabeth Murdoch is one third of the powerful creative force behind Sister

Business breakthroughs

Those who have generated £250m or more in annual revenues for the first time, making them large companies

Bright idea

Bayford is backing Raw Charging, which has EV chargers at Thorpe Park

Bayford Group

All aboard for tech transformation

We’ll never know quite what the founders of Bayford Group would make of the technologies this Yorkshire-based business has been investing in over the past decade.

A group of former soldiers from Leeds who fought in the First World War set up the business in 1919, naming their outfit after the Hertfordshire village where their military service officially came to an end when they were “demobbed”.

Bayford began by selling and delivering coal. By the 1960s the Wetherby-based group had moved into oil distribution and petrol

retail, before pushing into property and hospitality. Jonathan Turner led a family buyout of the other shareholders just over 20 years ago and has since driven the company into new areas.

Bayford has become a major shareholder in Raw Charging, a fastgrowing network of electric vehicle chargers now found at shopping centres, National Trust properties and other family-friendly attractions such as Thorpe Park and Chessington World of Adventures.

Turner has also led the move into software used in smart meters, heat pumps and other green infrastructure through an investment in Jumptech, a Cambridge-based tech firm. Plus, Bayford has a 30 per cent holding in Fulcrum, a Sheffield-based busiess helping design and maintain data centres and electric vehicle charging points. It’s all a long way from coal but it is paying off, with revenue growth at 145 per cent over the past three years.

HydraB

Powering ahead with green revolution

Jo Bamford could have spent his career working at JCB, the construction equipment behemoth built up by his father Lord (Anthony) Bamford. But instead of selling those iconic yellow diggers, the younger Bamford is building up a stable of green businesses under the HydraB banner.

So far, he is best known for buying the bus-maker Wrightbus in 2018. Many of the Northern Irish manufacturer’s vehicles are now powered by either hydrogen or electric batteries.

Oxford-based HydraB also wraps in hydrogen distributor Ryze Power and Hygen Energy, an H2 producer. “I first started talking about hydrogen in 2019, and ever since then we’ve been steadily building a network of companies who can get this industry on its feet,” Bamford has said.

“Now we are focusing on the infrastructure to bring it all together … we are putting the ecosystem in place to help businesses realise that hydrogen is a vital part of the UK’s energy mix.”

His father certainly seems to agree. JCB has so far invested more than £100m in a range of hydrogen combustion engines at its plant in Derbyshire. Its growth also shows its success, with revenues up 193 per cent to £290.9m over the past three years.

Zopa

Digital bank cashes in

Few companies have pivoted quite as well as Zopa. Starting out 20 years ago as the world’s first peer-to-peer lender, the London-based fintech wound up this operation in 2021 after transforming itself into a digital bank – jumping through all the hoops necessary to win a full banking licence from the Financial Conduct Authority.

This change of direction was spearheaded by chief executive Jaidev Janardana, who feared that the tough regulatory environment was making it hard for peer-to-peer lenders to grow.

Janardana’s timing is interesting. Zopa began rolling out personal loans, credit cards and car finances in June 2020, soon after the start of the Covid pandemic. By the end of last year, the bank had around 1.4 million customers, lending more than £10bn and taking in more than £5.5bn of deposits.

Partnerships with Britain’s largest electricity supplier Octopus Energy and the retailer John Lewis have helped boost revenues. Growth over the past three years has hit 674 per cent, with revenues at £588.9m.

Zopa, which owes its name to an abbreviation for the lending jargon “zone of possible agreement”, plans to launch current accounts later this year and Janardana is on a mission to grow the customer base to 5m by 2028.

A stock-market float remains on the cards.

Setting the pace

Jo Bamford with F1 race team principal Christian Horner

Call of the Wild led me to invest in a Growth 500 star

By Caspar Lee, co-founder of Influencer.com and Creator Ventures

Natural deodorant brand Wild went from start-up to one of the fastest-growing companies in the UK and a sale for £230m

Green appeal

Wild’s refillable products chime with a world moving away from wasteful packaging of the kind highlighted by Whale on the Wharf, a new art installation at Canary Wharf in London, created from recycled plastic waste found in the ocean

“They managed to turn deodorant into something you could give your sister for Christmas without her being offended

The founders of the natural deodorant brand Wild recently sold their business to Unilever in a deal thought to value the company at £230m. Freddy Ward and Charlie BowesLyon founded the business less than six years ago. That is rapid success in a space not known for moving fast – or for £200m-plus exits.

My cousin and investment partner Sasha Kaletsky discovered Wild five years ago when it was raising seed capital. Although we weren’t keen on direct-to-consumer (D2C) products, we thought Wild could be successful, so we invested and brought in relevant creators to do the same. A few years later, once we had raised our own fund in Creator Ventures, we wrote a large follow-on cheque as the company continued to grow.

The Wild story has great lessons, from launch to exit. To start with, Ward and Bowes-Lyon saw that while reusable products were becoming more common in daily life, the bathroom was still dominated by single-use plastics. They figured that by introducing more sustainable, refillable deodorants made from natural ingredients, they could carve out a market that would interest a growing segment of environmentally conscious consumers.

What is even more impressive is that the first product didn’t really work. When it launched in 2019, there was a lot of negative feedback. Instead of ignoring it, Ward and Bowes-Lyon paused, reworked their idea and came back in 2020 with a better version. That’s not easy to do. Most brands don’t recover from a bad first impression, but Wild did.

Then Covid hit. At-home self-care boomed, which helped, but supply chains were a mess, which didn’t. At one point the business couldn’t even get enough baking soda, a key ingredient. I remember hearing that they literally called around other deodorant companies to see if they had spare stock. That kind of scrappy energy says a lot.

There is also brilliance in the product itself. Not only does the fact it is refillable mean less waste, but it also encourages people to subscribe, allowing for recurring revenue. It also creates a behaviour loop. Once a customer has bought into the system with the physical case, the natural next step when they finish a pack is to restock, not switch. That is powerful, especially in categories such as personal care where the alternatives are cheap, convenient

and widely available. It helps that the product looks good too. The aluminium cases are colourful and nice to have on the bathroom shelf. It’s a subtle thing, but it means people are more likely to share, gift and talk about it with friends. They managed to turn deodorant into something you could give your sister for Christmas without her being offended – true story!

Ward and Bowes-Lyon also recognised the power of an omnichannel approach as we came out of lockdowns and went back to shops. Using their D2C platform as an engine for marketing, they were able to harness brand awareness and love to drive real-world success in big retailers such as Boots, Tesco and Sainsbury’s in the UK, and Target in the US. They didn’t go into retail cold. People already knew the brand – often because they had seen it online – and wanted to try it. That made a big difference.

That marketing engine has been key. On Wild’s socials you’ll notice a clear strategy. While being better for the planet is a theme, it’s not the only thing they talk about. Instead, Wild built a brand around being funny, real and relevant – and by collaborating with hundreds of thousands of people, from celebrities to influencers to microusergenerated content creators.

They really did ride the media democratisation wave better than most. That meant they were able to build impressive cost per acquisition through a combination of paid and organic media. And they did that even as other D2C brands struggled due to Apple’s iOS 14.5 update, which restricted data tracking for advertising. Those that relied heavily on targeted performance marketing saw their customer acquisition costs spiral almost overnight. Wild managed to sidestep the worst of it.

Part of the reason for that comes down to how native its content felt – real people using and enjoying the product in a way that didn’t feel like advertising. The company worked with creators who liked the brand and were able to tell that story in their own way.

Following the deal, we will be seeing a lot more of Wild, especially in the US where it is already building serious momentum. It’s great to see this kind of success coming out of the UK right now. It’s a reminder that with the right backing, the right people and a clear vision, it’s still possible to build something that can genuinely change an industry.

Built to last

These companies were all founded in the early half of the 20th century – or even earlier – proving that rapid growth isn’t just for the young

Howard Ventures

Winning at looking forward

Howard Group is now a property developer and venture investor – but that wasn’t always the case. Founded in 1935 by Jimmy Howard, it was originally a coal and coke delivery business. Its operations expanded during the Second World War to include the manufacture of building blocks and it diversified further into engineering, warehousing, retail and transport.

Mill in Cambridge and has since ramped up its activities. It has been involved in projects including the transformation of the former Lloyds Bank building at 95 Regent Street in Cambridge redevelopment of the Elizabeth and Juno Way industrial estates in Lewisham, London, and Unity Campus in Sawston, Cambridge (pictured above).

A third-generation, family-owned business, it is currently run by Nicholas Bewes. Its venture capital business has invested more than £6m in small businesses including Koalaa, which aims to make prosthetics more accessible and affordable, the digital mapping company Edozo, and mOm Incubators, which makes inflatable infant incubators.

It established its property group in 1985, developing sites including the St John’s Retail Park in Bedford. It moved into residential investments in 2015 with the purchase of Spillers

Revenues are up 621 per cent over the past three years, suggesting that its focus on investing for the long term is paying off.

WHS Plastics

Mighty moulders

WHS Plastics is a fourth-generation family business, having been founded in 1933 by William Henry Smith. The Birmingham-based company has marked some impressive milestones, including expanding into Egypt and opening a 75,000sq ft logistics and warehousing operation.

The company now has the largest machine moulding capacity in the UK, with a specialisation in automotive parts. As group managing director Paul Nicholson told Manufacturing Today: “Anything that is plastic we can do: bumpers, interior trim, under bonnet, engine covers. You name it, we do it.”

Nicholson credits its success to two main things: its location in the heart of the Midlands and its staff. As a family business, it prides itself on its culture and making the company feel like one big family.

That has helped the company through the hard times. During Covid, it was forced to shut down for a few weeks but was soon back through a partnership with Jaguar Land Rover to manufacture face shields. In 2023, the acquisition of Xandor Plastics meant it became a £200m group with more than 1,700 staff and revenues growing by 197 per cent over the past three years.

C. Hoare & Co

Older and definitely wiser

C. Hoare & Co is, by some distance, the oldest company in the Growth 500. When the goldsmith Sir Richard Hoare opened a shop on Cheapside in the City of London in 1672, Charles II was on the throne, Isaac Newton had just made the first identification of the primary colours of visible light and war had been declared on the Dutch Republic.

Hoare’s goldsmith shop quickly evolved into a bank and Hoare was soon knighted, became Lord Mayor of London and was elected an MP for the City. Over the years, the bank has amassed an impressive roster of clients, most of which choose to remain private but have included Samuel Pepys, Jane Austen, left, and Lord Byron.

More than 350 years on, it has survived plagues, wars, market crashes and a “disastrous” seventh generation that amassed huge debts and almost brought it to ruin. Now, however, the bank is arguably in ruder health than ever. Still owned by eight of Hoare’s direct descendants (one of whom is 12th generation) it has seen revenues grow by 265 per cent over the past three years, fuelled by its “conservative approach” to banking and “adaptability and agility”, according to chairman Lord Macpherson.

In an interview with Spears, its former CEO Alexander Hoare says “enough profits will flow” as long as it remains focused on the right things. “What a lot of organisations do is they set a profit target and figure out how they’re going to hit it. And that’s completely not going to give optimal results.”

Movers and shapers

The Midlands-based family business is the biggest machine-moulders in the UK

Retail and fashion

The UK has traditionally been known as a nation of shopkeepers. Amid tough times on the high street, these brands are bucking the trend

Strathberry

Profits in the bag

Husband-and-wife team Guy and Leeanne Hundleby have built handbag-maker Strathberry from their in-home office to one of Scotland’s best-known luxury brands. Starting in 2013, all the bags are designed at the couple’s home in Edinburgh in Scotland but made in Spain. Each bag takes at least 20 hours to create.

The name Strathberry is rooted in its home country –Strath means wide river valley, while in the past berries were used to dye traditional Scottish fabric and materials. “This is where Strathberry comes from,” says Leeanne.

Their hand-crafted leather bags are found on the arms of some of the world’s most famous women, whether they be actors, singers or royalty. Katie Holmes, Jennifer Lopez, Ayo Edebiri, Kate Hudson and Catherine, Princess of Wales have all been pictured using the company’s bags.

That exposure has helped sales soar. Revenue hit £26.9m in its most recent financial year, with sales up 169 per cent over the past three years. Initially funded through a Kickstarter, BGF invested £8m in the company in 2021. Strathberry has set its sights on generating £100m in revenue in the next few years.

Castore

Grow or die says Tom Beahon

Having co-founded sportswear maker Castore with my brother Phil, together we scaled it to more than £250m revenue in less than a decade. At the outset, despite a lack of resources, it is very easy to have a growth mindset – your business is tiny and the only way is up. With 500 staff, international offices and many stakeholders, as Castore now has, growth is more difficult to sustain.

I have used a maxim from day one at Castore: grow or die. It may seem extreme but it focuses not just my mind but my leadership team’s. It is the very clear framework by which we make all big strategic decisions. If something doesn’t support growth, it doesn’t happen. If it does, we try our utmost to make it work.

When I’ve spoken to people outside Castore about my maxim, I’m often met with scepticism (far more so in the UK than the US). People put Castore’s success down to youthful ignorance, benefiting from a market cycle, or my personal favourite – dumb luck.

I like to respond by saying very few UK businesses have scaled the way Castore has and it’s certainly not down to my intellect, so maybe our grow or die philosophy is worth considering.

Kitted out Castore supplies sportswear to the England women’s cricket team

Passenger Clothing

Sharing a love of the outdoors

Richard Sutcliffe and his high-school sweetheart – and now wife – Alexa set up the sustainable outdoor fashion brand Passenger in 2012. The idea to create clothing that “inspired escapism” came to them when they sat on a beach in Canada after a sunset surf.

“We wanted to do something we gave a shit about, so that we woke up in the morning and got excited about the day to come and what we could do,” Sutcliffe told The Times. “I think naivety allowed us to do it.”

They began selling beanie hats and T-shirts made from recycled fibres at festivals in Devon and Cornwall, but soon expanded their lines of clothing, adding footwear and outdoor wear. For every item bought, the company plants a tree. Their nature-focused aesthetic caught people’s attention on social media, particularly Instagram. It also caught the attention of investors, including Growth Partner, which is owned by Richard Harpin, the owner of Business Leader.

That attention has translated to strong sales growth. Revenue is up by 323 per cent over the past three years to £32.5m, while profits are more than £1.7m. Not bad for a couple with no business or retail experience.

By Chris Maguire

Riding the Wrexham Wave

The 2021 takeover by Hollywood actors kicked off three successive promotions for the football club and inspired a feelgood factor that is transforming the local economy

There’s only one place to start for a feature about Wrexham – and that’s Wrexham AFC’s historic Racecourse Ground, also known as STōK Cae Ras.

The world’s oldest international football stadium still in use has enjoyed a renaissance since Hollywood actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney famously bought the club in 2021.

Under their ownership, the club has enjoyed three consecutive promotions and gained a global fan base on the back of the Emmy Award-winning Welcome to Wrexham docuseries. Wrexham will start the 2025-26 season in the Championship, one step away from the Premier League.

Winning ways on the pitch have translated into gains off the pitch too. Wrexham AFC is one of the companies in our Growth 500, with revenues increasing by 347.5 per cent over the past three years to £26.7m. That feelgood factor

extends beyond football, with Wrexham’s tourism and business sectors booming. One obvious beneficiary has been The Turf, which is right next to the Racecourse Ground.

The pub is regularly featured in Welcome to Wrexham and has a mural outside called The Boss, in honour of manager Phil Parkinson.

As I wait in my car on a soggy Tuesday two things happen that illustrate the influence of Reynolds and McElhenney on the club and the city. The first is the sight of a female tourist jumping out of a car and taking a quick selfie, before driving off.

The second is the work taking place inside the stadium, where the old pitch has been removed in readiness for a new stitch pitch. As I peeked through a hole in gate eight, the expanse of sand looked more Blackpool beach than the location of a football pitch. That is not the only improvement

Stars in their eyes

Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds toast promotion to the Championship

taking place. Wrexham AFC is planning a 5,500-capacity Kop Stand, which will be visible from the city centre and include a player tunnel.

Reynolds and McElhenney might be A-listers but one of the reasons for their appeal is how approachable they are. Rich Fay, one of the co-hosts of the Wrexham podcast RobRyanRed recently secured an exclusive interview with the celebrity owners. He says: “It felt like a long shot, but I sent Ryan a DM to appear on the podcast and he replied within a few hours. He even arranged for Rob McElhenney to join him and Blake Lively [his wife] came to say hello and offer us some much-needed fashion advice.”

The region’s business community has also benefited. Wrexham Lager, which was founded in 1882, welcomed McElhenney and Reynolds as co-owners in 2024 and is now available in the US.

Since 2019, tourism spend in Wrexham County has jumped from £135m to £180m, (although there was a dip during the pandemic). That is almost double the increase in tourism spend across the UK.

Joe Bickerton is the destination manager at Wrexham County Borough Council and he puts the “large increase” down to interest in the football club. “It is undoubtedly impacted by the awareness of Wrexham via the documentary and new global awareness of Wrexham as a destination.

“It’s also partly due to the perception of Wrexham as Wales’s newest city and coming second in the UK City of Culture bid for 2025. Accommodation providers have also reported a huge uptake, with occupancy levels frequently over 90 per cent in the area and many visitors finding it hard to get hotel rooms. There’s an incredible wave of optimism and pride locally, so it’s very encouraging for the future.”

One of Wrexham’s biggest businesses is customer services provider Moneypenny, co-founded in 2000 by siblings Ed Reeves and Rachel Clacher. Today, the company employs around 1,000 staff and has group turnover of £75m. Its HQ – complete with a treehouse meeting room – is a mile from the Racecourse Ground.

Chief commercial officer Mark Finlay believes there is a real buzz in the city. He says: “There’s no doubt that the surge in exposure for Wrexham AFC on the back of Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds’s inspiring involvement has supercharged the city’s international profile, bringing global attention to the immense opportunities here.

“There’s a real sense of pride and momentum across the city. The buzz is tangible and it’s something we feel deeply within our own business. This spotlight has real economic value. Wrexham is the largest city in north Wales, a manufacturing and engineering hub, and home to many world-class businesses.

“With its ambitious cultural and economic vision including a renewed bid for UK City of Culture 2029, it’s clear that Wrexham is on the rise. Wrexham AFC’s story has become a symbol of transformation, resilience and pride and it’s helping the entire business community grow with it.”

The biggest impact has come from the boost in recognition. Finlay recalls how when he used to tell people the company was based in Wrexham, they would ask where it is. “Now, when we say we’re headquartered in Wrexham,

Ups and downs - until Hollywood stars took over Wrexham’s journey back to the big time

Wrexham finished rock bottom of the Football League in 92nd place

Promoted to the third division

Promoted to the second division

Relegated to the third division

Relegated to the fourth division

Promoted to the third division

The club is placed in financial administration

Relegated to non-league football

The club is bought by the actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney

The first series of Welcome to Wrexham airs on Disney+

Wrexham win the conference league and are promoted to EFL League Two

Wrexham come second and are promoted to EFL League One

Wrexham come second and are promoted to the EFL Championship

there’s immediate recognition, especially in the US. I remember when the Hollywood stars were first linked to the football club and we thought it was a hoax and fake news. The club had been in the non-league for a long time. It seemed unbelievable that a couple of Hollywood stars would be interested in Wrexham.”

“We take clients to the football, especially from the US, and they love it. There’s a genuine feeling they can get into the Premier League. The football club has really put Wrexham on the map. It’s exciting.”

Another established brand in Wrexham is UK-based commercial property developer and asset manager FI Real Estate Management (FIREM). It has invested more than £136m in Wrexham Industrial Estate, which is home to a mix of companies including JCB, Kellogg’s and Very Group, as well as ambitious start-ups.

Tim Knowles, founder and MD, says inquiries have soared and void rates plummeted since the arrival of the club’s

high-profile owners. It has also helped to attract investment. The UK and Welsh governments are supporting the creation of the £160m Flintshire and Wrexham investment zone, which will create jobs and should, says Knowles, attract high-value businesses to the area.

“There’s a feelgood factor around Wrexham and the impact of Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney and the documentary can’t be understated,” says Knowles.

FIREM itself has a prime development, Wrexham 1M, that it estimates will generate an estimated £1.2bn in economic value and create more than 3,000 full-time jobs, on top of the 1,000 created during construction. With Wrexham’s location near key motorways, airports and ports, Knowles believes that “if you buy and build, the people will come”.

“The Hollywood owners of Wrexham AFC have attracted unprecedented exposure to the region and the business sector has benefited from that. It’s time to invest to enable businesses in Wrexham to flourish.”

“The Hollywood owners of Wrexham AFC have attracted unprecedented exposure to the region and the business sector has benefited from that

Sport

Results matter in sport.

But it takes more than being crowned champion to be one of the UK’s most successful businesses

Queensberry Promotions

Boxing veteran is still swinging

Few names are bigger in British boxing than Frank Warren. Over nearly half a century in the sport he has promoted and managed household-name fighters ranging from Frank Bruno and Chris Eubank to Tyson Fury and Ricky Hatton.

Raised in an Islington council flat, Warren left school at 14 and initially worked as a trainee solicitor. His first foray into boxing promotion came in 1976, when his second cousin Lenny McLean was struggling to find someone to jump into the ring with.

Four years after that first unlicensed bout, Warren managed to secure a licence for a contest between two little-known American heavyweights

at an obscure London hotel. Although he had secured TV rights, these were later blocked by the sport’s governing body, which had a rule banning a promoter’s first licensed fight from being televised.

That would end up costing the young man trying to shake up boxing £17,000 – about £72,000 in today’s money. But before long Warren was back on his feet and money from broadcasters was soon rolling in.

His mission to disrupt the sport was not without its perils. In 1989 he lost a lung when he was shot twice in the chest by an unknown gunman wearing a balaclava. One of the bullets missed his heart by an inch.

Warren’s company Queensberry Promotions takes its name from the rules drafted by the 9th Marquess of Queensberry in the 1860s that still govern boxing to this day.

Over the years the Hertford-based firm has promoted more than 1,000 events and 150 world champions. Warren is certainly still swinging, with revenues up 657 per cent over the past three years to £112.2m.

In the ring Frank Warren, left, with fellow promoter Eddie Hearn

Luton Town Football Club

Breaking into the big time

Promotion to the Premier League doesn’t just make players and fans walk a little taller, it also supercharges a club’s finances.

When Luton Town broke into English football’s top flight for the 2023-24 season it received £116.6m for broadcast rights and commercial revenue from the league.

This was certainly a very different ball game from the £10.1m received from the EFL Championship the year before.

Then there’s the money Luton itself made during the 2023-24 season. Match-day earnings jumped by £1.1m to £6.2m and there was a three-fold increase in the club’s commercial revenues. Overall, revenues are up 632.5 per cent over the past three years to £132.6m.

All this gave Luton the cash to pay promotion bonuses to the squad which led them into the Premier League, spruce up one of the stands at home ground Kenilworth Road, spend £25m on new players and even pay back a loan from the Covid era.

But life for devoted fans of the Hatters – who include the singer-turned-DJ Cerys Matthews and the former England cricket captain Sir Alastair Cook – hasn’t been so sweet of late. Luton’s spell in the Premier League lasted just one season. Then in May this year, after a woeful 2024-25 Championship campaign, they were relegated to League One.

Athena Sports

Ainslie sets sights on new horizons

Sir Ben Ainslie is considered the most successful Olympic sailor of all time, securing four gold medals and a silver. A year after his swansong at London’s 2012 Olympic Games he changed tack, launching his Athena Racing team to contest the America’s Cup and a host of other top events.

Ainslie continues to compete, skippering Ineos Britannia to glory at last October’s Louis Vuitton Cup in Barcelona. A few days later the team delivered the best showing by a British boat at an America’s Cup for some 90 years. Athena Racing owns 60 per cent of the Emirates Great Britain Sail Grand Prix Team, one of 12 team franchises competing in the global sailing competition, SailGP.

Over the years Ainslie has reeled in a succession of big-name sponsors, including Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s Ineos and the US bank JP Morgan. That has helped its revenues to grow by 112.1 per cent over the past three years to £65m.

Athena is now part of a wider group wrapping in Ainslie’s philanthropy and his other business ventures. These include BAR Technologies, a start-up aiming to help tankers, pleasure boats and other vessels harness wind power to cut carbon emissions.

Poole-based Athena Sports Group also includes ainslie + ainslie, a fledgling supplements business Ainslie launched with his wife, Georgie. Its first product, Night Powder, aims to boost recovery, maximise sleep and improve immunity.

Turning industry leaders into bestselling authors

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Interviews & Insights

In-depth stories of success and failure from the business world

60 Bringing power to the people

The secret to Greggs’ success CEO Roisin Currie reveals the recipe that has made the bakery chain one of the UK’s biggest brands

66

72

Lessons from leading the controversial construction of the new Sizewell C nuclear power station

How new Coke fizzled out

An ill-fated product launch by one of the market leaders shows how to deal when disaster strikes

Success, copied In this book extract, we explore how businesses can thrive by using the concept of “copy and pivot”

SUCCESS BAKED IN

Greggs chief Roisin Currie believes its 33,000 staff are the secret sauce that has made the bakery chain one of the UK’s biggest brands

By Graham Ruddick

Greggs is a business success story wrapped as a sausage roll. The Newcastle-based bakery chain has grown into a business with more shops in the UK than McDonald’s or Starbucks. Yet despite its nationwide expansion, the brand is so loved that it is seen as a national treasure rather than a threat to local bakers or sandwich shops.

What’s more, Greggs has grown its annual sales and profits despite macro trends clearly moving against it. Footfall is declining on high streets, rival businesses (such as supermarket convenience chains like Tesco Express and coffee shops like Costa) have expanded dramatically, and low-calorie and high-protein food are promoted as the healthy alternative to sandwiches, pastries or sausage rolls. But Greggs marches on.

Greggs’ unusual approach to marketing is part of its charm. It has launched a clothing range with discount fashion retailer Primark, a champagne bar with department store chain Fenwick, Christmas adverts with chef Nigella

Lawson and is boisterous on social media. But this marketing is a symptom of its success rather than a cause. A weaker brand could not have pulled off these collaborations. Or thought of them in the first place.

Solving the mystery of Greggs’ success lies with Roisin Currie and the team around her. Currie has been chief executive of Greggs since 2022 and has been with the business since 2010, having initially joined as people director. Before that she worked for Asda for 20 years.

At Asda, Currie rose through the ranks in a golden era under Allan Leighton and Archie Norman. People at the supermarket chain during this period went on to run some of the UK’s largest businesses, including Justin King at Sainsbury’s, Richard Baker at Boots and Currie at Greggs.

Norman and Leighton had taken control of Asda in the 1990s when the retailer was struggling. To turn the business around they focused on reforming its culture and desperately trying to find and unlock talent within it. This included offering management training

to promising employees, no matter how young they were. Currie was trained how to manage big groups of people while she was still at university and only working part-time.

Staff were also challenged to take on more responsibility than they were comfortable with and taught how to handle what Asda described as “courageous conversations” – in other words, how to tell someone they needed to improve their performance. The Asda culture at this time was summarised by two words: challenge and involve.

“I was extremely lucky to have grown up in that organisation,” Currie says. “Even though I was there for 20 years, it never felt like that because the organisation was constantly changing and I was constantly being given a new opportunity, which allowed you to continually grow and develop.”

Currie got a masterclass on how to build a high-performance culture within a big business. At Greggs, she has helped to do the same.

“When I first joined Greggs, it almost felt like the Asda I had joined, which was much smaller.

You could put your arms around it, you could be very agile and you could make decisions quickly. As a leader, Roger [Whiteside, then Greggs CEO] had a laser-sharp focus on the areas that we could really move the dial on.’’

Whiteside, Currie’s predecessor as chief executive, noticed there was something special in his people director and gave her additional responsibilities. She took control of retail and property as well as people. Similarly to Asda, Currie had the opportunity to develop far beyond her comfort zone. When Whiteside left, this left Currie as an obvious successor.

“If I’m honest, it was probably Roger that really encouraged me and gave me the confidence to consider putting my hat in the ring for CEO,” Currie says. “I never had an ambition to be a CEO. My ambition was just to do a really good job in the role that I was given.

“He [Roger] really taught me focus, but he also gave me a lot of confidence and pushed me on. Moving from the people role to take on retail was a really scary step. I knew Roger was going to be supportive but also that he

would be brutally honest. I want to trust the people around me to give me feedback. That’s the only way you improve. I think that gives you the confidence to try to be a great CEO, knowing you will get something wrong, but people will tell you.”

As well as putting her trust in Whiteside, Currie also trusted the team around her. “I’ve got the mantra that I surround myself with people who are much better at doing their jobs than I could ever be. I do think that’s why as a team we’re so successful,” she explains.

“When I went into the retail role, I was very aware I had four brilliant heads of retail that reported into me. So, from day one, I was very overt with them: ‘You are all much better retail leaders than I will ever be, so therefore we will make decisions as a team. I will be coming to you with my thoughts, my views and my ideas. I need you to critique them. But I also need you to be open-minded enough that if I’ve got a new idea that didn’t work 10 years ago, that could just mean 10 years ago was a different world – so can we try it again today?’”

Greggs through the ages

Below: a drive-through store in Chelmsford, part of a pivot away from the high street. Right: the original Greggs in Eldon Square, Newcastle, 1977, complete with an earlymorning queue for bread

Currie says this mentality runs throughout Greggs. “The secret sauce of this business is the 33,000 staff,” she says.

Greggs’ staff are encouraged to experiment, give feedback and fail fast if necessary. This approach has led to the launch of successful new products, such as a vegan sausage roll in 2019, which launched after two years of testing.

“There were lots of failures along that journey,” Currie says. “There were lots of products that were developed in the kitchen that they [the team] didn’t think were quite good enough. So they just kept going.” A key part

of making this “fail fast” culture successful is getting honest feedback from staff on the shop floor. This feedback is combined with data so that Greggs can make decisions on what products to roll out across its shops.

“We’re very lucky that there is no politics in this organisation,” Currie says. “Sometimes I think it’s quite trite to say that. But truly, everyone is here for the purpose of delivering great quality, freshly prepared foods and making it accessible to the customers. I think that overpowers anyone sitting around a table thinking it’s just about their function.

“We get a lot of cross-functional working. I’ve had people in the past say it’s a competence that we’ve actually developed. People overcome issues together. You very rarely get people pointing the finger and saying: ‘That didn’t work because of…’ It’s usually: ‘What can I do to help you make it work?’”

This happened recently when Greggs trialled two pasta products in a small number of shops. Staff quickly reported back that Greggs should focus on just one of the products – a mac and cheese dish – and stop the other because it wasn’t selling. “The commercial

“We have a phrase in the business about ‘evolution not revolution’. It is about protecting and nurturing the magic, the secret sauce

“You have to work hard to let people know that you don’t want to hear what they think you want to hear. I want to hear what you truly think

team wanted to give customers two choices. But the colleague feedback was to just give one. That’s what we’ve gone with,” Currie says.

In contrast, when a product does well in a trial, Greggs staff push to get it into their own shops as quickly as possible.

“You always know a product is going to be a winner when you go out and about and the shop teams are going: ‘Why have I not got X yet?’ They can see that’s what our customers are wanting to buy. Iced drinks was a really good example of that,” Currie says.

However, saying you want honest feedback is one thing, getting it is another. Currie highlights a couple of reasons why Greggs actually gets it.

First, Greggs shares 10 per cent of its annual profits with staff through a bonus scheme. This means that staff have a vested interest in the company’s success.

Second, it takes hard work and persistence. Currie says it can often take three or four different questions in a conversation with a staff member before they open up about challenges they are facing.

“Then you can have another 10 minutes of them telling you all the things that we need to do better,” Currie says. “That is so powerful because that forms a lot of our discussions as a top team around what people are telling us and what we need to do better.

“You have to work hard to let people know that you don’t want to hear what they think

you want to hear. I actually want to hear what you truly think.”

Despite the perception of Greggs as a quirky Northern bakery chain, the business has evolved significantly over the past decade. Ten years ago, four out of five Greggs shops were on the high street. That proportion has declined and now only half of them are – the rest are in train stations, retail parks and universities. Greggs has also shifted its production from in-store baking to centralised bakeries and warehouses.

This evolution of Greggs is far from complete. The company has started to offer hot food in the evening as well as online deliveries and wants to grow to more than 3,000 shops.

“We’ve got colleagues that have been with us 40 or 50 years,” Currie says. “When I go round and visit them, they’ll still talk to me about how they used to have to boil the eggs, slice them and put them in the sandwiches. We have a phrase in the business about ‘evolution not revolution’. It is about protecting and nurturing the magic, the secret sauce. We constantly evolve but we do it at a pace that allows our colleagues to come with us. That’s why listening to our colleagues is so important. What’s the point in finding you’re halfway across the battlefield if no one has heard the directions about which way you are marching?”

With that example, Currie shows that the success of Greggs is not a mystery at all. This is simply a business that has been able to build an extraordinary winning culture.

Loafing around Baker Bob Barrass hard at work in the Greggs shop in Gosforth, two days before Christmas in 1978

BRINGING POWER TO THE PEOPLE

The Sizewell C nuclear project in Suffolk is costly and controversial – and a unique management challenge for Julia Pyke

By Dougal Shaw

Not many people get to lead construction of a nuclear power station. Only two projects have been started in the UK in the last 30 years – Hinkley Point C and Sizewell C. But Julia Pyke is one of those people. She took up the role of joint managing director of Sizewell C on the Suffolk coast in early 2023.

This unique challenge is complex and controversial. The final cost of Sizewell C is forecast to lie somewhere between £20bn and £40bn. Contracts worth £2.5bn have already been agreed with 290 suppliers across the UK.

A lot of Pyke’s time is taken up with outreach and engagement work with people living near the project, whether it is taking part in local

film festivals or speaking at schools. Pyke has found that the nuclear industry and its leaders have some work to do to rebrand the sector, particularly when she goes to meet pupils in Suffolk. “They will have watched The Simpsons and wonder if I have an inner Mr Burns,” says Pyke. “I don’t, we’re very nice.”

Mr Burns is, of course, the owner of the Springfield nuclear power plant in the longrunning show. He is rich and powerful, but also greedy and mean and doesn’t put the local community or the plant’s workforce top of his priority list.

Pyke may be nice, but to run a project such as Sizewell C you also have to be tough, focused and highly organised. Building a nuclear plant is highly complex, involving hundreds of

stakeholders and a multibillion-pound budget. It is also controversial. The public – and in particular locals who are meant to be the beneficiaries of the project – are highly sceptical of nuclear power and its benefits.

Then there is the scrutiny. The Sizewell C project is being built in the shadow of the troubled Hinkley Point C plant in Somerset. The UK hadn’t built a new nuclear plant for three decades when work on that project began and it has been beset by difficulties and is behind schedule.

Costs and value for money are under the spotlight from both the public and the government, which is now the majority owner. Sizewell C started out as a joint project between the French-owned energy company EDF and the Chinese energy company China General Nuclear (CGN). But the government stepped in and now owns around 85 per cent of Sizewell, with EDF owning the remainder. In time the government will sell down its shareholding.

To oversee such a huge job, Pyke divides her time between London and Suffolk, where the initial stages of construction work have begun. Earthworks have commenced and an archaeological assessment has been completed. A machine called Mine Wolf has been used to remove ordnance (the area was used as a practice ground for the D-Day landings).

There are around 1,200 people working on the project which is expected to support 70,000 jobs during construction. It is due for completion in the mid-2030s and is expected to deliver £100bn-worth of benefits to the economy, while providing another source of clean energy (so called because it doesn’t generate greenhouse gases). The 3.2 gigawatt plant

should be able to supply enough electricity for 6 million homes.

Building the coalition

The last nuclear power station to go live in the UK was Sizewell B in 1995, adjacent to the Sizewell C site. The most recent nuclear project was Hinkley Point C, which was started in 2016. Sizewell C has found millions in savings by replicating some of the work on the reactor design undertaken for Hinkley. In many ways Sizewell is an “above-ground copy of Hinkley”, says Pyke.

And if there are lessons to be learnt from Hinkley, Pyke and her co-managing director Nigel Cann should be in a good position to pick them up. Her background is in law, working in the field of energy infrastructure. She spent a decade on the paperwork for projects including Hinkley Point C and the renewable project Swansea Bay Tidal Lagoon, while Cann was delivery director at Hinkley.

“We’re very well connected to the Hinkley project,” says Pyke, “both through our own experience and through lots of colleagues and friendships. One of the things about the nuclear industry is that it is extremely collaborative. People don’t tend to compete.”

That knowledge-sharing is facilitated by groups such as the World Association of Nuclear Operators. Pyke is also in close contact with EDF, which has been involved in building nuclear plants at Flamanville in France and Olkiluoto in Finland. One of the board directors from Olkiluoto sits on the Sizewell board.

Pyke took up her current role because of her desire to move into the construction phase of

projects. One of her main responsibilities has been to set up the executive team, which will in turn hire the 1,500 employees needed. She has sought to bring in people from outside the nuclear industry to create “a broad spectrum of experience”. This means reaching beyond the pool of EDF employees, she explains. EDF has been the main civil operator of nuclear energy in the UK for almost two decades.

Challenging nuclear anxiety

Modern nuclear power plants have a good safety record, especially compared to other sources of energy. But there is still a lot of public concern about nuclear facilities.

In the past, when things have gone wrong the fallout has been catastrophic – think Chernobyl in the 1980s or Fukushima in 2011 – and made global headlines. Since 2014, there have been more than 100 serious nuclear accidents and incidents.

A serious incident is not the only cause for concern, there is also the question of what to do with nuclear waste. Once Sizewell C stops operating, attention will turn to this dilemma, although it is expected that the site will run for at least 60 years.

This is another area where Pyke has significant experience. In a previous role, she set up the legal frameworks for nuclear decommissioning, working on the competition rules for procurement. She lists “nuclear decommissioning” as one of her skills on LinkedIn.

Pyke says she feels frustrated because a lot of people’s prejudices about nuclear power are based on outdated ideas. It is not just The Simpsons that is to blame. “A lot of public anxiety about decommissioning comes from

“It’s a human tendency for people to recruit in their own image. So, once you have a balanced executive, you’re more likely to have a balanced senior team

Sizewell C is one of two new power plants being built after a three-decade hiatus Map shows the location of Britain’s nuclear industry sites

Nuclear power reactors

Waste disposal facility

Nuclear energy R&D

The scale and impact of Sizewell C

The new power station is expected to be a significant driver of economic growth and job creation, as well as helping the UK hit its net-zero goals

70,000

jobs are expected to be supported by the project

2,000

UK-based suppliers are expected to generate income

Heysham

Wylfa

Trawsfynydd

homes will be provided with low-carbon electricity

£4 billion

6 million invested in the East of England

Berkeley

Oldbury

Hinkley Point

Bradwell Dungeness

Chapelcross

Hartlepool

Sizewell C

Clyde

Torness

Sellafield,” says Pyke, referring to the former nuclear plant in Cumbria.

This is the legacy of old-fashioned technology developed after the Second World War, she argues.

“With a new nuclear power station, everything is pre-labelled,” she says. “It’s designed to be decommissioned. You can actually take the fuel out of a new nuclear reactor inside days, rather than years, then you decommission the whole thing within around 15 years. There are plenty of examples around the world [of this]. If you’ve got a new nuclear power station, then you’ve got a green site about 15 years later.”

Nuclear waste from a power station such as Sizewell C is cooled for several months in a pond, before being encased in concrete canisters. “You can hug the canisters, if you’re so inclined,” says Pyke. “It is, volumetrically, very small. It’s sitting inside either a large shed or a small warehouse, depending on your definitions. And I think in lots of ways it’s very calming. I think people have images of nuclear

waste which are probably derived from The Simpsons, but it really isn’t like that.”

Nuclear goes inclusive

Championing a diverse workforce amid all the challenges of this unique civil engineering project might seem like adding an unnecessary complication to the mix – especially when many businesses are rolling back on their diversity, equity and inclusion programmes and targets, driven by US president Donald Trump’s hostility to DEI after his return to power.

But Pyke is putting diversity at the heart of her ambitions. One of the first things you see at Sizewell C’s offices in central London is a doormat with a bright rainbow design declaring: “Step this way into an inclusive space.”

It’s clearly an issue Pyke is passionate about, and she wants it to define her leadership. The government has set a sector target of 40-percent female representation in the nuclear industry, but Pyke is pushing this further.

“Your workforce should mirror society,” says Pyke. “If you’re going to do something which

Powering up

Sizewell C is due for completion in the mid-2030s and is expected to create £100bn-worth of benefits to the economy

is quite significant for society and very long term, then you want a workforce which has the right mix of ages. Then you ideally need a balance of men and women and an ethnic mix that is roughly similar.”

Engineering and the nuclear power industry have traditionally been dominated by white men. “We love white men,” says Pyke, “but we’ve now managed to add quite a few women. We have a 65-per-cent female executive team and 43 per cent of our workforce [in total] is female. Nuclear is much less popular among women than it is among men, and I can’t help feeling that that’s something to do with the fact that nuclear has historically been a very male-dominated place to work.”

Pyke thinks a natural shift in construction towards more automated, digital work patterns will make it more appealing to women. “And then women who come to work at the site will feel more comfortable where there’s a reasonably sized group of other women.”

The Sizewell C project will hire 1,500 apprentices, with the first 100 already recruited. So far, a 50-50 gender mix has been achieved.

“We’ve done all of this without quotas,” adds Pyke. Instead, her team has sought to make the jobs more attractive to under-represented groups, removing unnecessary barriers by offering benefits such as childcare and even pet daycare to the thousands of recruits they need, many of whom will live on-site.

“It sounds frivolous, but it isn’t,” says Pyke. “During Covid, a lot of people acquired dogs, so it’s going to be a lot better for us to attract people if we provide dog daycare.”

There are other hiring targets. A third of employees must be recruited from the Suffolk area. Nevertheless, many staff will also come from London. That means constructing a building the size of a large hotel on-site to house workers and provide facilities.

Pyke believes that if she gets diversity right from the outset, it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. “It’s a human tendency for people to recruit in their own image. So, once you have a balanced executive, you’re more likely to have a balanced senior team below the executive –and then all the way down the organisation. That means, as you look at succession plans, you will naturally have candidates available who more closely mirror proportions of different groups within society than just white men.”

She may not like the impact Mr Burns has had on the public perception of nuclear energy. But perhaps she would consider the super-smart Lisa Simpson as a positive role model, in keeping with her modern vision for the industry.

Lessons from building a nuclear plant

If you are running a big, long-term project you need to think much more holistically about what you can do to improve people’s lives, both in the immediate vicinity and more widely in society. For example, how can you improve best practice in the construction industry, since you have a stake in that?

Sizewell C is working with schools to help run courses to build students’ confidence, especially in those most affected by Covid disruptions. You need to “think bigger than your own narrow ambition”, says Pyke.

Nuclear energy is of course a sensitive subject that raises specific concerns, but any large civil project will cause disruption and risk upsetting communities. “I think the more businesses seem to be helping get better futures for people’s kids, and the more businesses seem to be helping improve the landscape around it, the more they can gain social acceptance,” says Pyke.

Businesses need to work together to achieve impact, she adds. Sizewell C has teamed up with the non-governmental organisation WildEast, which aims to return 20 per cent of land in East Anglia to nature. By connecting it to their supply chain partners, they can amplify the impact.

“What goes around, comes around,” says Pyke. “If you fall out with people in a long-term project, it’s probably going to come and bite you again at some point.” You need the right kind of personal skills to build long-term relationships. “The more you can encourage an atmosphere in which people show their human side to each other, the better,” adds Pyke.

Image above: learning on the job

Sizewell C managing director Julia Pyke (left) with one of the apprentices working on the project. It is expected to create at least 1,500 apprenticeships during construction

An ill-fated product launch 40 years ago became one of the biggest marketing blunders ever and still holds lessons today

HOW NEW COKE FIZZLED OUT

By Sarah Vizard

April 23, 1985 has gone down in history as one of the biggest disasters in marketing, PR and innovation. That day 40 years ago provides a cautionary tale for brands about not messing with their core product.

If that sounds like hyperbole then consider this: even the company behind the disaster has called it one of the most memorable marketing blunders ever.

This disaster is, of course, the decision by Coca-Cola to replace its best-selling drink with “new Coke”.

The cola wars

To understand why Coca-Cola made this decision, we need to understand the conditions at the time. While it was the market leader, that leadership was being eroded.

During the 1940s and 50s, Coca-Cola had a market share of more than 60 per cent. However, its nearest rival, Pepsi, was on the up. It had gone bankrupt in 1923 but was rescued by Charles Guth, president of Loft, the world’s largest sweet maker at the time.

Having reformulated Pepsi-Cola and introduced a larger bottle, Pepsi launched a marketing campaign focused on value right as the Great Depression hit. By the 1970s and after a string of successful Pepsi ad campaigns, it was widely reported that Coca-Cola’s market share had dropped to 24 per cent.

Coca-Cola itself admits consumer preference for its drink was dipping and that its lead over its main rival in its principal market was slipping. As the company says: “In 1995, The Coca-Cola Company’s share lead over its chief competitor, in its flagship market, with its flagship product, had been

slowly slipping for 15 consecutive years. The cola category in general was lethargic. Consumer preference for Coca-Cola was dipping, as was consumer awareness.”

Then came the “Pepsi Challenge”. Launched in 1975, it took the form of a blind taste test. A Pepsi representative would set up a table in a public space such as a shopping centre with two white cups: one filled with Pepsi and the other with Coca-Cola. People were then asked to take a sip of both drinks and see which they preferred, with the rep then telling them which drink it was.

In the taste tests, more people liked Pepsi. And Pepsi took that insight and ran with it – running PR and marketing campaigns focused on the results and trumpeting that its product was better.

Not only was Coca-Cola facing competition from rivals but also from itself. To accommodate changing consumer tastes, it launched Diet Coke in 1982. It was an immediate hit, quickly becoming the fourth best-selling soft drink in the US. But that simply meant even fewer people drinking classic Coca-Cola. Over at Coca-Cola HQ in Atlanta, alarm bells were sounding.

The realisation was dawning that something drastic needed to be done.

The launch of new Coke

That drastic something was a reformulation of the classic Coke recipe – the first in 99 years. The aim was to re-energise the brand and the wider cola category in its most important market: the US.

Dubbed “Project Kansas” (a photo of the Kansas journalist William Allen White drinking a Coke was used extensively

New horizons Chief executive

Roberto Goizueta (left) and chief operating officer

Donald Keough

toast new Coke at its launch in New York in 1985

in its ads), the aim was to create a new flavour for Coke, one that was sweeter and would increase consumer appeal.

It might have felt sacrilegious to change the formula of such an icon, but chairman Roberto Goizueta wanted to make his mark. He took on the role in 1981, telling managers at a company conference in Palm Springs that there would be no “sacred cows in the way we manage our business, including the formulation of any or all of our products”.

The new formula for Coca-Cola overwhelmingly beat the old Coke and Pepsi in taste tests, surveys and focus groups. It even beat the old version in the South, its strongest and oldest market in the US, by 52-48, according to data from fact-checking website Snopes. And when they were told it was a Coca-Cola product, its popularity jumped by a further nine points.

Replacing old Coke with new Coke seemed like a no-brainer. In April 1985 and to coincide with the drink’s centenary, Coca-Cola did just that at a press conference. It stopped production of the old flavour just days later.

Initially, the move seemed to have worked. A marketing push led to an increase in sales in key markets and there was not much of a backlash. It didn’t last for long. A piece in Time magazine two months later gives a clue to the mounting dissatisfaction. Time quotes one consumer as saying they

“hate the new stuff… it’s too sweet” and another saying it almost “tastes like it’s flat”.

Groups were organised to force Coca-Cola to switch back to the original formula – or at least provide it as another option. Some threatened legal action, others stockpiled the old Coke, either for themselves or to sell on at a profit to desperate original Coca-Cola drinkers.

The murmur of criticism became a roar that Coca-Cola couldn’t ignore.

The monumental blunder

The big problem for Coca-Cola is that while the critics weren’t in the majority, they were the loudest. Even in testing, according to fact-checking site Snopes, between 10 and 12 per cent of people felt angry and alienated by the new product and said it might cause them to stop drinking Coke. Their presence in focus groups often skewed results. The backlash was biggest in the southern US but spread rapidly.

At Coca-Cola, execs began quietly arguing for the reintroduction of the old Coke alongside the new one. By mid-June, sales, which usually rose in the warmer summer months, were flatlining. Then the bottlers threatened legal action.

This was a crisis Coca-Cola could no longer ignore. Not even three months after new Coke’s launch, production of

Fizzy fanatics

New Coke-hater

Karen Wilson (below) displayed her dislike, while comedian Bill Cosby (right) showed his preference for the original to Canadian Coca-Cola president Neville Kirchmann

old Coke was restarted. In a documentary years later, then company president Donald Keough said they realised that was the right course of action when they visited a restaurant in Monaco and were proudly told by the owner that they served “the real thing”.

At a press conference on July 11, 1985, just 79 days after the launch of new Coke, the original Coca-Cola formula returned. It was named Coca-Cola Classic. New Coke continued to be advertised and sold as Coke until 1990, when it was renamed Coke II. Availability – and sales – slowly dwindled until, in 2002, it was discontinued entirely.

It still had one fan, however: Goizueta. At an employee event to mark 10 years since the launch of new Coke, he said: “We set out to change the dynamics of sugar colas in the US and we did exactly that – albeit not in the way we had planned. But the most significant result of new Coke by far was that it sent an incredibly powerful signal … a signal that we really were ready to do whatever was necessary to build value for the owners of our business.”

That is commendable. Too many business leaders are paralysed with fear when a new competitor comes in or market conditions hit their sales. Being willing to follow consumer trends and understand changing tastes is core to evolving a business for the long term.

So is admitting when you are wrong and rolling back on decisions, as Coca-Cola did.

But what’s clear is that Coca-Cola over-corrected in the first place, throwing out what was good about the old product in favour of the new. So concerned was it about the popularity of its core product that it focused on that to the detriment of its wider business and relationship with its customers.

It also ignored the insights its research threw up. In testing, new Coke may have just won on taste but the impact of the dissenters was clear. That is the ultimate lesson. Most people might not care about a product update but if you alienate your most loyal customers, you are likely to find yourself in big trouble.

“We set out to change the dynamics of sugar colas in the US and we did exactly that – albeit not in the way we had planned

Copying is not bad, it’s essential to success

In an extract from his new book How to Make a Billion in 9 Steps, Richard Harpin explores how businesses can thrive by using the concept of ‘copy and pivot’

Starting a successful business so young gave me a singular advantage: humility. Being “just a kid”, I could never assume that I was cleverer than my competition. I’ve nurtured that attitude. The guys lurking round the corner are, I am sure, powered by some secret sauce. The only way I’m going to succeed is by being more energetic and more determined than them.

From this comes an insight I’ve clung to throughout my business life: there must surely be something I can learn from my competition. And that’s what my colleagues and I did, continually, as we developed my two best-known businesses, HomeServe and Checkatrade.

We watched our competitors. We even consulted our competitors and openly emulated whatever we saw worked well for them. And because we paid attention and spent our time taking notes and knocking on doors and being friendly and fair (while others wasted their

time behind closed doors, poring over their vision statements), we managed to outcompete, outmanoeuvre and, over the course of years, out-evolve every competitor.

You may recall that Netflix began life by copying Blockbuster. They then assessed what the market wanted and how the business could be improved. Sometimes, as an entrepreneur, it helps to be a small step behind the curve. We can still be innovators and pioneers, but we also want to develop our skills as students of the market.

We are taught at school that copying is bad. This is not true in business. Taking personal credit for someone else’s work is bad, obviously, but copying is simply how we learn. And by adapting someone else’s good idea, you can turn it into a new offering.

I got talking about this with Touker Suleyman, a British entrepreneur and investor best known for his appearances on the TV show Dragons’ Den. He’s the owner of fashion

brand Hawes & Curtis and womenswear label Ghost, and has a long history of successful retail and manufacturing ventures.

Suleyman has never lost sight of the fundamental simplicity that underpins all business.

“You don’t have to be a genius to start a business. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist. You don’t have to invent anything new. All you’ve got to do is take a product, look at it, and make it better. Change it. Take an off-the shelf product and adapt it. Simple as that.

“Somebody came to me this week with a pair of sneaker trees,” Touker told me.

“As in—”

“As in shoe trees for sneakers. What’s so great about that? Well, there are, for a start, the over 1.2 billion pairs of sneakers being sold across

the world every year. And that sneaker tree could be sold anywhere in the world. It’s not expensive to make. The moulds are expensive and they’re what I’ve invested in, because once you’ve got the moulds, there’s no more design to do. You might want to ring in a few colour changes to refresh the item, but essentially you just need to turn the product out at scale.”

You’re probably thinking, if business were that simple then we’d all be tycoons. But I promise you, it’s not complexity that makes business difficult. Rather, it’s the ease with which your eyes can come unglued from the ball. Human beings have evolved to be easily distracted, and entrepreneurs, in their pursuit of shiny new things, are some of the most easily distracted people on the planet.

Staying focused on the customer and the customer’s changing needs sounds easy, but it’s genuinely hard to do, especially as a business grows and acquires a more complex structure.

One industry that produces very complex goods came up with a way of doing business that deliberately baked customer feedback into their sales model. Software development can be its own can of worms, but you do have to hand it to the industry for biting the bullet and accepting that they had to release their wares even as they were improving upon them.

If your ambition is to develop something that’s absolutely extraordinary, you can’t afford not to test it as you go. You may want to keep version 1.0 of your idea to a small group of friends; but equally, you don’t want to be

haemorrhaging research-and-development money up to version 6.3, only to discover your product is not quite what the customer wants or needs.

Innovation is about getting your idea 80 per cent right – in other words, to the point where the business case is solid and you know you’re not going to lose your shirt. After that, the best ideas for improvement are most likely to come from your customers.

The continued success of open-source software demonstrates the wisdom of “copy and pivot”. Take what’s out there and fit it to a new purpose. There’s really no need to reinvent the wheel, and there are certainly no awards going for people who do.

“One thing we’ve got today which we didn’t have when I started out is the internet,” Suleyman reflects, “and though it’s a maddening distraction a lot of the time, it feels almost purpose-built for those heady early days of company creation. Within seconds, you can see your competition.

“I spend a lot of time on my iPad at night looking at companies and what they’re up to. If somebody comes in with an idea, I will search to see who their competitors are. There’s no longer any excuse for sloppy or thin research.”

Advancing where others retreat

In business, you need to be dogged in pursuit of your values. This, however, does not mean that you should keep hammering away, doing the thing that you’ve always excelled at. There are always multiple ways to reach your goal, and you may need to switch tactics. Small and medium-sized companies in particular have to be really good at learning how to do new things, to act swiftly as things change and to experiment with products and processes.

1997 was the year I got married and, coincidentally, the year that nearly destroyed HomeServe. In May 1997, the new Labour government finally lost patience with the UK water companies. Some of those privatised companies were generating enormous profits,

Look and learn

According to entrepreneur and Dragons’ Den star Touker Suleyman, all you have to do is look at a product and make it better

“Taking personal credit for someone else’s work is bad, obviously, but copying is simply how we learn

even as their infrastructure decayed and the number of leaks from their pipes soared. The deputy prime minister at the time was John Prescott. He called their bosses in for a “water summit” and – well, Prescott was a bit of a force of nature and let’s just say he made his displeasure known.

The very least these companies could do, he said, given the increasing shoddiness of their service, was to offer their customers free repairs on the pipework leading into their property. Fixing things up to the stopcock and then abandoning the customer to their fates just wasn’t on. Good for Prescott. My admiration for his stand was tempered, though, when I realised that HomeServe’s core insurance product was about to be gazumped, for free, by every water supply company in the country.

We went straight to work, fashioning a new core product from the wreckage of the old. We prepared to write to our customers: “Good news! This part of your policy is now covered for free by the water companies, so the £25 you’re paying us now covers…” – well, what could we make it cover, exactly? We made a list. What did the government’s new legislation not cover?

The water companies, meanwhile, had been put on the defensive, and never thought to see this disruption to their industry as an opportunity. Instead, they did everything they could to mitigate the problem. Let’s cover our customers’ repairs for just the statutory two metres! Let’s lobby our way out of making good our repairs! At HomeServe we watched, with no little amazement, as the water companies successfully argued their way out of one business opportunity after another.

And where they retreated, we advanced. Were our existing £25 premiums enough to cover some household repairs? Yes. Our new “gold standard” policy, which guaranteed customers a two-hour response time and up to £2,000 cover for repairs and reinstatement work, need cost only £20 a year. Over the next 10 years we sold more than 2 million of these policies.

So, 1997 was a bad year for water companies, and if we hadn’t pivoted and adapted, it would have seen the end of HomeServe. But we believe in copying and pivoting, and that out of every problem comes an even bigger opportunity. That’s how, thanks to Prescott, 1997 ushered in our fastest-ever period of growth.

How to Make a Billion in 9 Steps is written by Richard Harpin and published by Piatkus on July 10, 2025

Richard’s key learnings

One

Embrace your second-mover advantage

Don’t waste your time reinventing the wheel. By adapting someone else’s good idea, you can turn it into a brand new offering.

HomeServe’s world-beating market proposition grew out of early efforts to make “man in a van” operations affordable, efficient and worthwhile. We didn’t turn that aspiration into a world-beating brand by waiting around for inspiration. We got there by buying some vans and by making what felt like every conceivable mistake in operating them.

You can bet the farm that your best competitors are even now adapting your offering to create their own unique products and services. This is how markets grow and mature. That’s why, as an entrepreneur, it’s as important to educate yourself about your market as it is to innovate in it.

Two

Stay open and learn

Business rewards curiosity, openness and a willingness to be useful. Your first idea is almost certainly not going to be your best idea. I have never been wildly interested in earrings, but I was very interested when I saw how I could pivot my little fly-tying business to serve an untapped need in the fashion market.

Learn from competitors. Befriend them and consult them and chip in with advice when they ask for it. It’s no skin off your nose. Emulate what works well. Above all, pay attention! Be observant and listen to what people are telling you.

Three Copy and adapt

Copying is not bad. It’s essential for learning and growth. Magazine publishing is a great example of a “copy-and-pivot business”, as my experiences with Business Leader has confirmed. We’re constantly learning from the feedback our content generates.

For a more mainstream example, look no further than the lowcost gym chain Synergym in Spain – a copy of PureGym, which was itself a copy of a German low-cost gym chain. I have invested my own money in Synergym, expanding it from 13 locations in 2019 to 107 today. We’re on track to have 200 gyms by 2027, fuelled by a desire to encourage more active lifestyles in an affordable way.

Four

Mistakes are fuel

As HomeServe’s early struggles all too eloquently demonstrate, the best ideas often come from mistakes. Keep your eyes open and ears pricked to turn setbacks into opportunities. Continuous improvement is key. Don’t expect growth on its own to solve your problems and however successful you become, accept that the journey of improvement is never truly over.

After I sold HomeServe for £4.1 billion in 2023, I looked back at the nine things I know now that I wish I’d known at the start of my entrepreneurial journey. Those nine steps became the basis of this book, and they can help to successfully grow your business and achieve more than you ever thought possible.

RICHARD HARPIN

What others are saying:

Richard is the real deal... If you don’t believe simple steps can deliver a business worth billions, read this, and then think again.

JAKE HUMPHREY author of

High Performance

How to Make a Billion in Nine Steps is a blueprint for success, full of practical strategies that actually work.

SARA DAVIES

TV Dragon and author of The Six-Minute Entrepreneur

There’s nothing that entrepreneurs need more than inspiration and practical advice... Richard’s book has this in bucket loads... This is a crucial toolkit.

THEO PAPHITIS

TV Dragon & Retail Entrepreneur

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Embrace the bumpy road

By Jake Humphrey, host of High Performance and The Room Where It Happened

The best business leaders can tackle challenges head-on and come out the other side in better shape

Celebrate failure

Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard understood the importance of preparing for the unpredictable nature of the market

“Some of the biggest businesses and greatest leaders have had to show grit to thrive in the face of uncertainty and change: so can you

I recently came across the quote “prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child” and it really spoke to me. All too often I see parents trying to make a path less challenging for their child, instead of making their child more resilient to the bumps, twists and turns.

This should serve as a guiding light for entrepreneurs, executives and leaders who seek to build organisations that can weather the storms of uncertainty and thrive in the face of constant change. We regularly see businesses that have become complacent, relying on the false security of familiar paths and well-trodden routes.

In 2025 there is more opportunity than ever, yet the rate of change is greater than ever. The quality that separates the thriving enterprises from the ones that merely survive – or perhaps die – is the ability to embrace the ever-changing and increasingly bumpy road.

I love the story of Patagonia, the outdoor clothing company. Founder Yvon Chouinard, a self-proclaimed “reluctant businessman”, understood the importance of preparing for the unpredictable nature of the market.

Rather than shielding his employees, he encouraged them to embrace the challenges head-on. He created an environment where failure was not only acceptable but celebrated as an opportunity for growth. He empowered his team to take calculated risks, experiment with new ideas and learn from mistakes. This fostered a culture of resilience, where individuals were not only able to navigate twists and turns but also inspired to push the boundaries.

The result? Patagonia has not only survived but thrived in an increasingly competitive and volatile market. By cultivating a mindset of adaptability and grit, the company has consistently stayed ahead of the curve, anticipating and responding to the changing needs of its customers.

Another example is Airbnb. When the Covid-19 pandemic struck, it faced an unprecedented challenge as travel restrictions and lockdowns threatened to cripple its business. Rather than recoiling in fear, its leadership team recognised the opportunity to refine their approach.

They quickly pivoted the focus to domestic travel and short-term rentals, catering to the changing needs of customers seeking safer and more flexible accommodation. By empowering their employees to think creatively and embrace the uncertainty, Airbnb was able not only to weather the storm but emerge stronger with a renewed purpose and deeper understanding of the target market.

We did a similar thing at my production business The Whisper Group. During the pandemic when no sport was happening and no content was being created, we turned our attention to entertainment and IP opportunities. We are now turning over millions in those areas.

True resilience is not about shielding individuals or organisations from adversity but rather equipping them with the tools and mindset to navigate it. By preparing the “child” (the business) for the “road” (the challenges and uncertainties of the market), you can foster a culture of adaptability, innovation and growth that will serve you well in the long run.

This principle is equally applicable to personal development and career advancement. In a rapidly evolving job market, it is essential for individuals to cultivate a mindset of lifelong learning and continuous improvement. The advances of AI in 2025 act as a reminder of this.

Successful professionals these days understand the importance of diversifying their knowledge and capabilities. They embrace the concept of “T-shaped” skills, where they possess a deep expertise in their core competencies while also maintaining a broad understanding of adjacent fields and emerging trends. When faced with disruption or unexpected challenges, these individuals are better equipped to adapt, pivot and thrive, rather than being left behind by the rapid pace of change.

Consider Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. When he took charge in 2014, the tech giant was facing an existential crisis as it struggled to keep pace with the rise of cloud computing and mobile technology. Rather than clinging to the company’s legacy as a desktop software powerhouse, Nadella recognised the need for a fundamental shift.

Under his leadership, Microsoft embraced a growth mindset, encouraging employees to step out of their comfort zones, experiment with new ideas and learn from their mistakes. This cultural transformation, coupled with strategic investments in cloud computing and other emerging technologies, has propelled Microsoft to new heights, with its market capitalisation soaring to more than $3tn.

Some of the biggest businesses and greatest leaders have had to show grit to thrive in the face of uncertainty and change: so can you. It is not about shielding the child from the challenges of the road but equipping them with the tools and resilience to navigate it with confidence and success.

I’m rooting for you.

How to avoid slip-ups when you go it alone

Empowering employees to take ownership of decisions is vital to success, but they must accept the privilege and responsibility too

By Catherine Baker, the founder of Sport and Beyond

Devolved ownership and empowering your people have been key themes in leadership and performance over the past decade or so, not least when talking about long-term, sustained success. Indeed, one of my most-used mantras when working with senior leaders is to involve people because if they help plan the battle, they won’t battle the plan.

Strategy coach David Lancefield wrote in 2023 on empowering employees to make decisions: “Autonomy is a hallmark of an innovative culture. The ability to make decisions for yourself enhances motivation, which in turn contributes to higher levels of performance and wellbeing. It also gives leaders more time to focus on the most significant and complex decisions and explore new sources of value creation.”

This helps explain why leadership has been steadily moving since the beginning of this century from old-style command and control to a new focus on direction and clarity. However, as with any significant change, it isn’t always easy to put into practice.

You often have to shift inbuilt habits and beliefs, both from an individual and an organisational perspective. And you must also ensure your people and organisation are set up correctly to cope with and leverage a new focus on ownership and empowerment.

Let’s look at two case studies that illuminate this. The first is the example of the Norwegian cross-country ski team. I came across this story in Owen Slot’s book The Talent Lab. The 2006 Winter Olympics were a disaster for the team. Used to finishing top of the medal table, they came seventh.

Winning ways Norway won nine of the 12 golds in cross country at the world championships in 2015 after they were allowed to take ownership of their training

Their response was to put together a crack team to try to understand what had changed. The information they discovered was distilled into the ultimate success manual: a book called Den Norske Langrennsboka (The Norwegian Cross-Country Skiing Book). And the result of all this work? A significant turnaround in the team’s fortunes: in 2015 the team won nine of the 12 golds in the cross-country events of the world championships in Falun.

In the spirit of international sharing and collaboration, the Norwegian experts entertained a small group of British Olympic coaches. One of the things they learnt was this: cross-country skiing requires a lot of training and a lot of long distances. This means that 80 per cent of the work is done solo, away from the eyes of the coaches, who have to let their athletes go and who must trust them.

In the Norwegian system now, every young athlete is required to record a training diary. Not only does this mean a significant database and feedback system for the national federation, it also means that the young athletes are encouraged to understand and interpret their own training data.

As Slot says in his book, because cross-country skiers effectively self-train, they are encouraged, as far as possible, to selfcoach. But there is evidence that one discriminatory factor between those who are and who are not successful in their ability to do this is the extent to which they take ownership.

This goes to the heart of the issue. We know that allowing a level of ownership in the workplace can drive motivation and better outcomes. With this ownership, though, must come a willingness and desire to accept the consequences. Ownership is both a privilege and a responsibility.

For the budding Norwegian skiers, it’s not just those who are not prepared to take ownership of their training that you want to worry about. It’s also those who are happy to be given ownership and control, and yet are not prepared to take responsibility for the outcomes.

What you want is those who relish the ownership and the responsibility, and are prepared to be accountable for the outcomes, rather than passing the buck back to the coaching staff. For this transfer of ownership to happen, your people need to have the required skills. You need to have invested in building the right organisational capability.

In her book Powerful: Building a culture of freedom and responsibility, Patty McCord, co-creator of the famous Netflix culture deck and chief talent officer at the company from 1998 to 2012, emphasised the importance of anchoring freedom and responsibility with capability.

She shares her approach to helping teams address the challenges ahead of them. The starting point is to imagine that six months from now you have the most amazing team you have ever assembled. The next step is to write down what the team will be accomplishing in six months’ time that it’s not accomplishing now.

This is where the real magic starts: think about how things are being done differently from the way they are currently. Are people working more cross-functionally? Doing more collaborative problem-solving? Have they developed greater project management skills?

Finally, you must ask: for those different things to be happening, what would people need to know how to do? What kind of skills and experiences would it take for the team to operate in the way you are describing and accomplish the things you will need to do in that future?

And this is the problem that many organisations create: they devolve ownership without making sure their people have the skills to use it properly; without making sure the right systems and processes are in place to facilitate it.

So, what will you do to make sure you get this right? To give your organisation the best chance of long-term, sustained success?

“One of my most-used mantras when working with senior leaders is to involve people because if they help plan the battle, they won’t battle the plan

As reality TV goes too far, it’s time to switch off

By Ed Smith, author of Making Decisions

With television, sport and politics focused on the benefits of live and uncut, we need to return to seeing life through a longer-term lens

Great television

US president

Donald Trump humiliates his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office

“Who wants to sense a foreign president under serious pressure, when instead you can watch an actual humiliation – live, uninterrupted and on high-definition television?

“This is going to be great television.” So ended US president Donald Trump’s humiliation of his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky, in the Oval Office. It was classic Trump – chattily relaxed about his own brutality and slyly conspiratorial with his audience. It was the politics of someone who not only grasps the mob and its baser instincts, but who also understands how to manipulate them.

The irony is that relatively few people will have watched the made-for-television humiliation on TV. Instead, they will have viewed it on their smartphone on social media. It was TV for people too impatient to watch TV.

That is the definitive transition of our time: from communication via television to communication via video clip. And today’s big winners – as Trump would call himself –have navigated the transition by internalising the logic (if that’s the right term) of both mediums.

That’s a lot harder than it sounds. About 15 years ago, I was approached about making a series for broadcast based on a book I’d written. The type of TV programme I admired belonged to an older period, when intelligent authors spoke in full sentences about their ideas, with the presumption that the viewer would make the effort to follow their arguments (in the tradition of Robert Hughes, Jacob Bronowski or Simon Schama).

But I was living in the past. Even back then, producers wanted everything to be turned into a “personal journey” at a bare minimum. Even better was if the show was a kind of reality TV for ideas.

In the post-Big Brother era, who wanted a piece to camera from outside the Colosseum? Boring! No, let’s have the viewers vote on whether the presenter should be eaten alive in the Colosseum by a starved mountain lion.

Years later, reality TV has moved from a fringe innovation to the dominant mainstream, and television has gone from being incidentally to intrinsically voyeuristic. Having been given a taste for real blood and tears, viewers want only real blood and tears.

I was wrong about the transition towards reality TV in sport, too. By the end of my time as a professional cricketer, TV producers had started roaming the outfield before the start of play looking for players to mic up so they could show live on-the-pitch interviews during the match. “Ask someone else,” was my response as a player, “because I’m here to play cricket, not to banter with commentators.”

But television was right about the direction of travel, and I was wrong. The on-field interview went from fad to mainstream. And the latest battleground in sport is no longer between rival athletes, but instead towards a search for any sanctuary from a television camera.

In the 1970s, the scripted documentaries of Roone Arledge, legendary American TV exec, used to promise “the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat”. All that has changed since then is the medium and the timeline. Now we want it live and unedited. There are almost no limits to what people want to see before their eyes, no imagination required.

You will have guessed the next arena to go full reality TV: politics. In the age of traditional television, the American president’s advisers would have agonised about how to use photographs and TV to demonstrate the pressure Trump was exerting on Zelensky. The meeting would have been artfully choreographed, but not much said live on mic.

Carefully briefed broadcasters would have explained what it meant – how Trump was isolating Zelensky, how US patience and resources were finite, how Trump was negotiating hard behind the scenes. We would have understood what was happening, guided by media insiders.

To which Trump intuitively responds: let’s cut out the media insiders! Who wants to sense a foreign president under serious pressure, when instead you can watch an actual humiliation – live, uninterrupted and on highdefinition television? If the people want it live and they want it real, according to Trump’s logic, then give it to them.

Except here things get complicated. Because concurrent with the trend towards real footage is the parallel evolution of increasingly not trusting what’s real in the first place. And with AI so adept at minting fresh realities, judgements about the truth are getting foggier. Trump, of course, also understands and exploits this encroaching wobbliness. “Did I say that?” he’ll ask journalists lightly, as though the historical record is always a question of perspective. He delivers visceral realities while simultaneously undermining our confidence in what’s real. The zeitgeist distilled.

So where next? In sport, media and politics, I’ve often argued we should have confidence in the counter-rhythm, the swing back towards restraint, to understatement, to the longer-term lens and asking more, not expecting less. It will need to be the very long term. Because I’ve been going a while now and there’s no sign I’m right.

Founders and chief executives tell Dougal Shaw the advice that has helped them to succeed

View episodes through our social media channels and on our website at businessleader.co.uk/secret

Janine Chamberlin

Country manager,

LinkedIn UK

Janine Chamberlin may work at LinkedIn, a platform built around online networking, but she is a passionate believer in the power of meeting people face-to-face. “You shouldn’t underestimate the power of being in-person to build relationships,” she says.

Chamberlin has been at LinkedIn for more than 16 years. She’s been UK country manager since 2021. Her team has just opened an experience centre at its office in Farringdon, central London, designed to foster collaboration and knowledge-sharing in hybrid working. Its centrepiece is a theatre that holds 150 people, but it also has meeting rooms, a media studio, breakout areas and an open-plan work area.

“Just recently I was at a networking event where I met somebody who is an important relationship for me in the context of our business,” recalls Chamberlin. “At the end of our conversation, I got this person’s business card with their personal mobile number and the message, ‘If you ever need anything, give me a call.’ If we had been networking online that would have never happened. And that really for me is the power of in-person networking.”

“You shouldn’t underestimate the power of in-person

Aron Gelbard

Co-founder & CEO, Bloom & Wild

Aron Gelbard is obsessed with data and customer feedback, particularly in what he can learn when things go wrong, because these are chances to create loyal customers.

After a stint with a management consultancy, Gelbard decided the world of flower delivery was ripe for a digital update, despite having no background in horticulture. He founded Bloom & Wild in 2013 and went on to raise £100m in investment. The company championed letterbox delivery of flat-packed bouquets. It employs more than 35 people and last year had revenues of £110m.

“We send out millions of flower bouquets, plants and gifts every year,” says Gelbard. “Unfortunately, occasionally we get things wrong. Sometimes there are quality problems or problems with our delivery partners. When our customers complain, we go to extraordinary lengths to make things right for them.

“We see that our strongest advocates aren’t our customers for whom things have just always gone right. They are customers where things have gone wrong and we have gone the extra mile to do something about it.”

“See mistakes as opportunities

Jack Zhang

Co-founder & CEO, Airwallex

Software companies are known for being able to scale quickly once they have a winning formula. But a key lesson from Jack Zhang is to think carefully about who you hire and to prioritise personality traits over experience.

Zhang built from scratch in a decade a global payments platform valued at $6.2bn (£4.6bn).

Airwallex lets businesses handle international payments across different currencies more efficiently. He has 1,700 employees and 37 offices.

Zhang grew up in Shandong, China and moved to Melbourne, Australia at the age of 16, without his parents. He graduated in computer science before working for Aviva and National Australia Bank. He founded Airwallex aged 30 in 2015 after realising that international payments were an expensive pain point.

“I think when a smaller business tries to scale initially, you have a lot of problems,” says Zhang. “You tend to look for experienced people to help you. But finding people with certain personality traits is far more important than the experience. [You need] people who have intellectual curiosity, people able to think deep, people who have hustle and grit.”

“Hire for personality, not experience

Steph Hind

Co-founder, Heka

Steph Hind believes becoming a parent made her a better leader, although it’s not a lesson she learnt straight away.

Her time in supermarkets – Hind left a promising role as an area manager for Aldi – taught her about the link between employee wellbeing and productivity, so she set up Heka, which provides employee benefits for clients. Employees get a monthly credit allocation that can be used to purchase benefits – from gym memberships and pottery classes to health scans.

The company has more than 250 customers, revenues of £3m and 20 employees. But Hind, who has two young children, says that becoming a mother while growing a start-up was a big challenge. She worried about the impact her absence would have on the business she’d “poured her heart into”. During her first pregnancy in 2021 she took very little maternity leave and the stress took an extreme toll on her health.

With her second child she took more time off. “My business thrived in my absence, which is fantastic to be able to say as a founder,” says Hind. “You have to build and trust the team around you, which are two separate steps.”

“Build a business that can thrive without you

Beth Butterwick

Managing director,

Clarendon Fine Art

Beth Butterwick has made the transition from high street fashion to high street art. As managing director of Clarendon, she is responsible for 90 high street art galleries across the UK. Mentoring, including reverse mentoring, is one thing that has helped her make the switch.

Butterwick took on her current role in 2023, teaming up with founder and CEO Helen Swaby. Clarendon’s mission is to “democratise art”, making it more accessible and affordable. Butterwick was previously CEO at high street brands Bonmarché, Karen Millen and Jigsaw.

There are many transferable skills, says Butterwick. A keen interest in your core customers and their retail experience is one, but another is the way you appreciate staff. She is currently being reverse mentored by a younger employee who is an expert on augmented reality and artificial intelligence.

“As an established business leader, it’s so easy to think that you have all the skills,” says Butterwick. “You’ve got to be really open to allow other people, especially younger people, to coach you and educate you, so you become an even more rounded leader.”

“Embrace reverse mentoring

Sir John Hegarty

Co-founder, The Business of Creativity

Sir John Hegarty is a revered figure in advertising, where his career spans seven decades. He’s still inspiring people today and he’s excited about the possibilities of artificial intelligence.

Hegarty took his first advertising job in the 1960s and was a founding partner of Saatchi & Saatchi and co-founder of Bartle Bogle Hegarty (known as BBH) in the 1980s.

He is now creative director of The Garage Soho, which invests in start-ups and helps to build brands. He also runs The Business of Creativity course to challenge companies to think differently and unlock creative potential.

“Think of AI not as a tool, but as something you should collaborate with,” says Sir John. “AI is an incredible development that will democratise opportunity. But it doesn’t have imagination, so it takes you to an interesting place, but then you have to take it further.”

It still takes remarkable humans to build great creative businesses, he believes. “Great brands are a piece of imaginary thinking and that’s where value really resides. AI can help you get there, but it’s your imagination that will make the difference.”

“See AI as a collaboration tool

Bookshelf

The books

you should be reading over the next few months

Taylor Swift’s early career has a lot to teach anyone in the business world. So says Kevin Evers, author of a new book on the music superstar

Taylor Swift’s path to stardom was paved with both privilege and talent. Born into a family with showbusiness ties, Swift benefited from her parents’ unwavering support. They connected her with Britney Spears’ former manager and moved the entire family to Nashville, where Swift could collaborate with top-notch writers and producers.

But a lot of people have talent, supportive parents and the benefits of a secure upbringing. None of them has done what Taylor Swift has achieved because few possess her broad collection of qualities: skills, confidence and determination – attributes that align pretty closely with what scientific research says are the markers of high potential: ability, intelligence and drive.

Swift’s emotional intelligence shone through as she navigated collaborations with Nashville’s seasoned professionals and pushed for her ideas. She demonstrated strategic thinking, a skill encompassing vision, imagination and entrepreneurial instincts. Her insistence on writing songs about her personal experiences and emotions was particularly striking. Typically in Nashville, especially for unproven talent, professional songwriters do that work and the artist does the singing.

“I didn’t want to just be another girl singer,” Swift told Entertainment Weekly. “I wanted there to be something that set me apart. I knew that had to be my writing.”

She aimed to write songs that filled a gap in the music she heard coming out of the Nashville country scene at the time. “All the songs I heard on the radio were about marriage and kids and settling down. I just couldn’t relate to that,” she recalled. “I felt there was no reason why country music shouldn’t relate to someone my age if someone my age was writing it.”

Swift’s clarity of vision impressed many in the industry, including songwriter Jim Beavers, who had a cowriting session with her. “She knew exactly who she was, she knew exactly what she wanted to say, she knew exactly where she was going,” he said. “Now, that’s the number one thing I look for in somebody. It’s not even what their voice sounds like; it’s not what they look like. If they have a vision, and a focus of who they are, that blows everything else away.”

Swift’s vision was crucial for another reason, too. Since her critics would soon outnumber her champions, her vision served as a north star, preventing her from veering off course. Psychologist Michael Gervais, who’s worked with elite athletes and CEOs, has highlighted this. “Because of their clarity, [high performers] are more willing to push themselves, learn more and embrace discomfort,” he says. “They shut out the noise and opinions of fans and media and listen to their own well-calibrated internal compass.”

Swift would need that compass, because for all her clarity of vision, she was up against it. She was trying to do something that hadn’t been accomplished before, at least the way she wanted to do it. “Teenagers don’t listen to country music,” she was told. According to data, her audience didn’t exist. But data is imperfect. She remained committed to writing her own songs and connecting with her peers.

This meant she eventually walked away from one of Nashville’s largest labels, ending her development deal with RCA. “I genuinely felt that I was running out of time,” she recalled later. “I’d written all these songs and I wanted to capture these years of my life on an album while they still represented what I was going through.”

And she was determined to silence critics: “Anytime someone tells me I can’t do something, I want to do it more.”

This is an extract from There’s Nothing Like This: The Strategic Genius of Taylor Swift by Kevin Evers (Harvard Business Review Press, 2025)

Dougal Shaw’s choice

The Female Founder Formula: a real-life roadmap to nailing entrepreneurship by Helen McGuire (Amazon)

Scour your nearest bookshelf and you will find the vast majority of business books are written by men. This made Helen McGuire determined to write her own. The former BBC Radio 1 producer is a tech entrepreneur who has launched two start-ups: DEI platform Diversely and women’s careers site Hopscotch. She has done all this while raising three children, too.

Her formula for female founders is built around seven principles, including collaboration, empathy and persistence. As the title suggests, she’s tried to make her book relevant to female founders by telling her own story, mixing this with practical advice on topics such as dealing with early-stage investors and learning how to become a natural salesperson.

Sarah Vizard’s choice

Is This Working? The jobs we do, told by the people who do them by Charlie Colenutt (Picador)

It’s 50 years since American broadcaster Studs Terkel published Working. It comprised interviews with more than 100 workers, including a nun, a piano tuner and a stone mason. The snapshot it provided of working in the 1970s was both fascinating and moving – and spawned a Broadway musical, graphic novel and Netflix series presented by Barack Obama.

Colenutt, a trainee barrister, toured the UK for two years, talking to people about their jobs. It features interviews with 68 people, from a lawyer to a midwife, a food delivery driver to a primary school teacher. While Terkel heard about the difficulties of manual work, Colenutt hears about growing bureaucracy and decreasing autonomy. It’s a gripping read.

Josh Dornbrack’s choice

The World is Your Office: How work from anywhere boosts talent, productivity and innovation by Prithwiraj Choudhury (Harvard Business Review Press)

The world has been debating the merits of remote-versus-office-versus-hybrid for years. But what if there was another way of working where everybody wins? Here, future-of-work expert and Harvard Business School professor Prithwiraj Choudhury takes a researchbased deep dive into a growing phenomenon: companies allowing employees to work from

anywhere. It’s a culmination of more than a decade of research and provides the blueprint for companies to embrace a way of work that it claims is a win for the employee, the employer and smaller towns and communities that have lost talent for decades. It will take you inside the trailblazing companies that are going all-in on work-from-anywhere policies.

Graham Ruddick’s choice

The Geek Way: The radical mindset that drives extraordinary results by Andrew McAfee (Little Brown)

This book was recommended to me by Richard Davies, chief executive of Allica Bank, one of the fastest-growing companies in the UK. Now I recommend it to anyone who asks. It is the closest thing I have found to a playbook on how to run a modern business. It suggests that entrepreneurs such as Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and

Reed Hastings of Netflix are not just tech geeks but business geeks. They are obsessed with the history of running a company and learning how to improve their own organisations. The book outlines how these businesses run around four key principles: speed, science, ownership and openness. It is full of fresh thinking and great stories: a brilliant mix.

Getting to the point

Natasha Lyons learnt from problems with her first business to make her second, which designs and sells body piercings, a success

By Sarah Vizard

Back in 1991, fresh out of university, Natasha Lyons started her first business. She was –and is – a “complete jewellery junkie” who loved crystals, incense sticks and essential oils. Opening her first store, which she describes as a “hippie store, really”, meant she could buy them en masse and try them out herself.

Her first store was in the Corn Exchange in Manchester. She readily admits she saw it as “just a bit of fun” that she didn’t expect to take off or last – but it did. She ended up with three stores in the city and was travelling around the world to meet suppliers and buy stock.

That was when she hit her first growth challenge. Her lack of experience in running a business meant she had issues with staffing (particularly on Sundays) and with stock control. In the end it was a relief to let the business go, although it left her in debt.

“It was great fun, but it was quite tiring,” she says. “And I made a lot of mistakes. It could have been a really successful business either without me running it or if I knew then what I know now.”

After that first business closed, Lyons took what she loved from it – the products – and started again from her kitchen table with a wholesale business. She began to design and produce her own products to sell to tattooists and jewellers, finding a niche in body jewellery as the market was expanding.

That business, Body Jewellery Ltd, became the biggest wholesaler of that field in the UK with a focus on “ear curation”, or piercings around the ear. Until 2015, she focused on producing titanium products but then moved into

gold. It was at this point that Lyons realised she needed a consumer brand for her products and started her third business, Tish Lyon.

“We were designing and creating more and more products, and I said to my partner, ‘It needs to have its own name.’ He said I should name it after me, but I didn’t want to completely name it after me,” she recalls. “That’s how it started, wanting to create beautiful, usable pieces that were correct for the anatomy of the ear.”

She sold that jewellery to various brands. Then in 2022 at a trade show, she met the head buyer at John Lewis, who said the retailer wanted to move into piercing and asked if she would be interested in selling to consumers. “I was like, ‘Why not?’ That’s how the whole adventure came full circle, back to direct-to-consumer and within John Lewis.”

The company employs around 32 people in the wholesale side and six or seven in Tish Lyon, although that is expanding as it opens more outlets. The brand is already in John Lewis on Oxford Street and will be opening in Liverpool in June and at Bluewater later in the year.

Lyons admits she has found going D2C again a challenge because she’s very product orientated. “I hadn’t thought an awful lot about marketing. We were in such a fortunate position where we were quite niche and we were good at what we did, so we became the go-to place and didn’t have to market to our customers.

“Then we had to go full circle back to retail. I understand retail in terms of stores and the merchandise but social media and marketing is a new landscape.”

Nevertheless, the business is growing strongly. Like many, it was hit by the pandemic and Lyons took a Covid loan to

see her through lockdown – the first outside funding she had taken. Then, after Covid, the business took off, going from around £4m in revenue to £7.2m. It currently generates around £8m in annual revenues.

In part, this is down to growth in the market after pandemic lockdowns and a growing interest in piercings. But Lyons was at a stage where her children were older and she could “fully concentrate” on the business. Lyons also believes the company has scaled this time because she learnt from her early mistakes and spent time putting the foundations in place, whether that was the right warehouse system or the best e-commerce solution.

She has also developed as a leader, learning to be “more professional” and to put the needs of the company first.

“I’m a bit of a rescuer, so I really have to watch that. We’re not a charity. We have to make money and people have to perform,” she says.

“I’m also quite an optimist. In my interviewing technique, I used to see the potential. As we’ve grown, I don’t have time for that. People need to be able to do what they say they can do. I’ve had to get a lot tougher.” Lyons also came up

against one of the big challenges in growing companies: going from doing everything to delegating. That has raised further challenges in finding the right people to do the jobs that are now needed.

She says: “I’ve realised I can’t do everything, so it’s about getting the right people in the right seats and then delegating jobs. It’s that transition from having to do it all to letting go and getting other people to do it. I don’t mind letting go – the hardest thing was finding those other people. I probably work very fast and I’m very driven, and so possibly not everyone is going to want to be part of that.”

As for the future, it’s focused on building her business but also having fun. “I want to give people products that work and fit the way they’re supposed to,” she says. “But the most important thing for me is to have fun, it’s about enjoying the journey. Because it doesn’t matter how much you’ve got in the bank. Money helps but if I’m not enjoying the process, then there’s something wrong.

“It’s up to me to make it the best experience it can be for me, my staff, my customers, my suppliers. To make it a win.”

“It doesn’t matter how much you’ve got in the bank. Money helps but if I’m not enjoying the process, then there’s something wrong

Ask Richard

Richard Harpin, the founder of HomeServe and Growth Partner and owner of Business Leader, answers questions from our members

This issue: Growing your business

In a growth phase, how should leaders ensure they are getting the right sort of advice?

Find a mentor with the right experience of the issue or opportunity they’re trying to tackle. Nine times out of 10, if you ask in the right way and you’re persistent, you’ll get free advice. A great example of that is John Roberts [the founder of AO.com]. He got some advice from some fantastic people and always for free. He would say that that advice was like gold dust. Listen to him on the Business Leader Podcast. It always astounds me that you can get really good people as non-executive directors or advisors for a relatively small amount of money, without giving up any equity. Find people in areas where you want additional help, maybe because you haven’t got executives in the business with that background or experience. We’re planning to have three at Business Leader.

How do you get the best out of an advisory committee?

The key is to give them experience of the business. When we brought new non-execs onto the HomeServe board, we made sure that they went out with one of our plumbers or heating engineers for half a day to visit customers’ homes and really learn the HomeServe business from the sharp end.

We would then send them a couple of hundred pages of bedtime reading of the most relevant documents to get them up to speed with the history of the business. That included an internal history of HomeServe, what we’d

learnt and all the mistakes we made. They needed to read a copy of that to understand our history and our heritage, our failings and our successes.

Then make sure there’s a comprehensive Q&A with you, so that new advisers fully understand the business and can really help you.

What are your thoughts on the buy-and-build model of revenue growth?

Buy and build is an exciting way to grow and one of the seven main growth levers a business can pull. We did it in HomeServe in two areas, both of which were highly successful. The first was buying other home assistance policy businesses that utilities companies were running themselves. The second was buying heating installers.

What’s important is to figure out your model. Are you retaining the local brand or not? Are you buying the whole business or just a majority shareholding? Do you want the owners to stay in and grow? In which case, you should certainly have an earn-out or leave them with a minority shareholding.

One of the biggest and most successful buy-and-build models is Imran Hakim at Hakim Group. He’s bought 500 opticians in the UK and that business is now valued at £800m and should become a unicorn [a business worth more than £1bn] in the next year. Also look at Mohsin and Zuber Issa, who did a roll-up of petrol filling stations. Their EG Group is now valued at several billion pounds.

My recommendation is to try one or two acquisitions to prove on a smaller scale that it works and that you learnt from it. Only when it is working should you look at pushing the accelerator and doing them at a faster rate, maybe with outside investment.

What was your go-to strategy for leading your team through high-growth phases and how did you keep pushing it to grow with the business?

It was about leading from the front and inspiring the team to deliver this next phase of exciting growth. That was the key part of my role, inspiring that breakthrough.

I think if you asked any of my team, they would say I was constantly looking for the next evolution of the business. We never stood still and they were always out of breath trying to keep up with what we were doing.

Pushing the growth curve is important. If I was looking back, I would ask how I could have remained a bit more focused and not tried to add too many ideas. And I’d have tried to recruit ahead of the curve. It’s very easy to get fast growth and then think, “Well, the business is struggling to keep up, we need more pairs of hands, they need to be more experienced people.”

Inevitably, you’ll have to say goodbye to a few people where the business has outgrown them and, equally, promote a few of your team that are up to the challenge of growing even faster. And then bring in a few from outside.

What do you look for when hiring senior management to take over responsibilities as you focus on growth?

Number one is cultural fit, somebody who is from a medium-sized business, not a large corporate where they turn up and hire loads more people and bring big cost into the business. That’s normally why a senior hire goes wrong.

Make sure it’s somebody who has a track record of doing it before. In Procter & Gamble on recruitment, we had a saying: “Has done, can do, will do.” They’d already done that role and therefore it was safer to bring them in because they had a proven track record.

Within my ninth step in building a billion-pound business is hiring hard-working people focused on the growth of the business, who are curious and always wanting to learn, will roll up their sleeves, have low ego and aren’t political.

How do you balance delivering on what’s been promised versus always being on the look-out for the next growth opportunity?

It’s about having a disciplined operating plan, a business plan that’s prioritised, not trying to do too much at the same time and setting out an order of doing things, but equally making sure that the business is constantly growing and evolving. Ask which growth lever you really want to focus on next and go for that, ideally pausing for a breath, then going with the next growth lever, the next evolution. Although I think my team would say we never pause for breath.

To grow your business, answer this question

Many people would rather win an argument than solve a problem, but to get the best out of your business you must focus on the latter

By Craig Wilmann, Business Leader forum facilitator

Would you rather win an argument or solve a problem? That’s a question that Rory Sutherland, vice-chairman of advertising agency Ogilvy UK, loves asking.

According to Sutherland, the education system in this country selects people who can do the former, not the latter. And while winning arguments can help individuals thrive in their own career, solving problems is far more important to the success of a business. It is, says Sutherland, “a fundamentally messier, more creative and less certain process” than winning arguments but utterly essential if a business wants to stay alive.

In 1975, Steve Sasson, a recent graduate working for Kodak as an electrical engineer, built the world’s first digital camera. When he presented it to senior leadership, they rejected it, believing it would threaten their existing paper and film-based business model. The company filed a patent but didn’t take it to market. Kodak’s top brass won the argument but their rivals, Canon and Nikon, ended up solving the problem. Digital photography took off in the late 1990s; Kodak filed for bankruptcy in 2012.

In early 2000, John Antioco, CEO of the video rental giant Blockbuster, won an argument against Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings, who wanted to sell him their online DVD rental service for $50m. Antioco explained that people enjoyed coming to Blockbuster stores and wouldn’t want to wait for their DVDs to be delivered.

He won the argument, but his guests kept working on solving problems, switching from DVD rental to online streaming. Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy in 2010. Randolph and Hastings’ business, Netflix, is now worth around $500bn.

Conversely, when Stewart Butterfield tried to pitch the chat system from his failed multiplayer video game, Glitch, as an internal communication tool for businesses, he was told there were already too many on the market. He ignored the naysayers and focused on solving problems for teams. The resulting business, Slack, was sold to Salesforce for

$27.7bn in 2021. Perhaps most famously of all, investors were forever telling the founders of Airbnb that strangers won’t sleep in strangers’ homes. But last year around 275 million did exactly that.

Since last writing in these pages, I have started facilitating a Business Leader forum group, which is proving to be the perfect opportunity to help founders and CEOs solve problems rather than win arguments. Forums are the cornerstone of the Business Leader membership. We put our founder and CEO members into curated groups of between eight and 10 people, and get them together in person eight times a year to share experiences and solve problems.

Key to the format’s success is the experience share. One person will explain a challenge they’re facing and other members will share first-person experiences of how they dealt with similar challenges. By framing the discussion in this way, we avoid opinion or conjecture and focus on real-life examples of what has worked.

The approach is remarkably effective and it’s a wonderful experience to witness important breakthroughs happening in the room.

According to Julia Langkraehr, fellow Business Leader forum facilitator and founder of executive training business Bold Clarity, the effects of this practice can have benefits far beyond the initial peer group discussion. Strengthening this component means becoming great at solving problems throughout the organisation – setting them up and knocking them down. If you can’t problem solve, how do you imagine your business will be successful?

Running a business is a time-consuming endeavour. If you are a CEO, it might seem counterintuitive to give up eight half-days a year to get together with your peers and share challenges. Surely you need to be cutting down your meeting time and creating the space for deep work?

Well, I’m certainly not going to argue with you. Instead, I’ll leave you with another of Sutherland’s often-quoted nuggets of wisdom: “The opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea.”

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If you are interested in becoming a Business Leader member and joining our peer-to-peer forums with founders and chief execs visit businessleader.co.uk/membership