Sir Tom Hunter is leading a drive to increase the number of Scottish businesses generating turnover of more than £100m.
ScaleupScotland2.0, also backed by entrepreneurs and the Scottish National Investment Bank, will provide strategic support to Scotland’s high growth, scaling companies.
The programme aims to raise ambition and support the development of high growth businesses as they scale up.
Increasing the number of successful scaleup businesses in Scotland, growing the size and productivity of their business operations, and raising their ambition has the potential to transform the Scottish economy.
The programme builds on the success of scaleupscotland.co.uk and will provide intensive, strategic support to an initial cohort of 12 Scottish businesses.
Developed after extensive analysis of the challenges facing businesses as they scale up, the programme addresses the lack of strategic support available to high growth businesses and aims to grow the turnover of each business to over £100 million.
The package of support is estimated to be valued in excess of £50K. Alongside advice and mentoring from some of the UK’s most successful entrepreneurs and business leaders, including Sir Tom Hunter, Lord Haughey and Theo Paphitis, participants will also receive strategic consultancy support. This will initially provide a deep dive into each business to identify and align the team on the specific challenges and opportunities facing the entrepreneurial leader, the collective executive team and the individual functional leaders.
In addition to individually tailored consultancy and sector specific support, CEOs will participate in quarterly retreats to focus on common challenges through a mixture of specialist and peer to peer learning experiences as well as access to leading entrepreneurs.
Wider leadership teams will benefit from retreats specific to functional heads where they can access specialist and peer to peer interactive learning.
Commenting on the launch, Willie Watt, chair of the Scottish National Investment Bank said;
“I am delighted that the Bank is partnering with The Hunter Foundation to launch this exciting programme to Scotland’s scale-up companies. The ScaleUp2.0 programme aligns with the Bank’s missions and a key strategic priority for the Bank is to support businesses looking to scale.
“The Bank is committed to investing in innovation and industries of the future with the aim of supporting a more resilient and productive economy.
“We know that the success of high growth business is critical to boosting Scotland’s productivity and this programme not only looks to address the financing gap for scale-up businesses but will provide future business leaders with mentoring and expert advice to support their growth ambitions. This will enable CEOs to take a longer-term approach to value creation and help Scotland to build more home-grown businesses.”
Sir Tom Hunter added:
“Through our existing ScaleUpScotland programme we recognised we needed to deliver a programme for the next level up and that’s what we are doing with the 2.0 version offering far more tailored, one to one sectoral growth support.
“Multiple studies, including our own commissioned by Oxford Economics, detail precisely why Scotland needs more scale-ups – this programme will provide precise, laser focussed support to high growth businesses with massive ambition.
“Scotland fundamentally needs far more ambitious scale-ups and to enable them we have to offer the right support – our economy depends on scale-ups, they are the engine of growth and prosperity so if we want to deliver a ten-year growth strategy this is one starting point.”
How to Apply
Companies should email scaleupscotland@thehunterfoundation.co.uk with entries closing on Monday 19th September at midnight. All applicants whether successful or not will be offered both advice on their propositions and signposting to ongoing support.
Should companies not be successful for ScaleUpScotland2.0 they will be considered for scaleupscotland.co.uk
