Welcome to London Stock Exchange Group’s 1000 Companies to Inspire Britain: a landmark report that identifies some of the UK’s most exciting and dynamic small and medium-sized enterprises.
When we began this project six months ago, our aim was to bring to life what we knew instinctively to be true: that these companies are the lifeblood of the UK economy.
The term SME describes a very broad church of businesses, from the high-street greengrocer to the high-tech manufacturer and exporter. Within this group of more than 4.5 million UK companies there is an exciting subset of fast-growing, dynamic businesses. These "gazelle" companies, as the CBI calls them, or the "vital six per cent", as think-tank Nesta describes them, are of exceptional importance to UK economic growth and job creation.
Our own research, and that of many other organisations, has shown that it is almost exclusively these companies that have generated new, net job creation in the UK since the financial crisis. The public sector has shrunk and while large-caps are recovering, their hiring has not. Gazelle companies, post-2007, are proving to be the lifeblood of the UK economy.
Celebrating the success of these SMEs is a shockingly under-reported story and we are determined to change that. Our report, 1000 Companies to Inspire Britain, seeks, for the first time, to identify 1,000 of the most exciting small and medium-sized companies in the UK.
