Looking back over the last three decades, I count myself lucky to have been involved in a range of activities to develop and support entrepreneurship and small businesses here in Wales.
Back in 1996, I became the first ever professor of entrepreneurship in Welsh higher education when I was awarded a chair at the then University of Glamorgan. Working with an amazing group of people, we created several new important projects including the first ever Welsh programme for female entrepreneurship and the first postgraduate qualification in entrepreneurial practice.
We were also involved in developing several strategic interventions to boost the Welsh economy with the most important of these was the creation of the Entrepreneurship Action Plan for Wales. This was the first regional enterprise strategy in the World and the precursor to the thousands of enterprise ecosystems we now see flourishing in every economy.
And through my academic career since, I have been proud to have established a range of programmes and initiatives across Wales to promote enterprise, including the Management Development Centre at Bangor University and, most recently the Start-Up Stiwdio incubators at the University of South Wales.
But probably the most important idea I had wasn’t even my own and yet has now evolved into one of the most influential initiatives to support and celebrate Welsh business.
As a young researcher, I was fortunate to be able to go to the annual Babson College Entrepreneurship College to present my latest paper.
Every year as I was travelling back through Logan Airport in Boston, I would drop into Hudson’s newsagents to buy a copy of the one business magazine which was required reading namely “Inc” which was targeted at American entrepreneurs.
One year, I picked up a special edition which was highlighting the Inc 500, namely the list of the fastest growing firms in the USA. It caught my imagination immediately as it contained stories of these incredible individuals who were driving the economy through their ideas, innovation, and sheer hard work.
And as someone who came from a family of small business owners in Wales, I immediately thought whether the same could be done over here to recognise those firms that were creating employment and prosperity in every part of the nation.
So after taking up the chair at the University of Glamorgan, I put together a strategy to launch a similar initiative in Wales albeit on a smaller scale.
And after a year of planning, 1999 saw the launch of the Wales Fast Growth 50 in partnership with the Western Mail with the first list of the fifty fastest growing firms being published in May of that year.
Since then, we have seen the massive impact that the fastest growing firms in Wales have had on the economy with 701 businesses that have appeared on the 24 lists creating 55,000 jobs and generating £30 billion of additional turnover.
Whilst it has been enormously successful here in Wales, there was always the thought at the back of my mind that we could do the same to recognise high growth firms elsewhere.
However, time and other work always got in the way until I was approached last year by the world’s leading global wealth manager, UBS, to consider an expansion across the UK.
So we are now taking the massive step of taking this important programme and series of events nationally as the time is right to highlight the impact that the best-performing businesses have on every part of the UK.
Essentially, the plan is to replicate the Wales Fast Growth 50 in seven other nations and regions and create a list of 400 fast-growing ‘local heroes’ that will encourage many other businesses to follow in their footsteps to generate wealth across every part of the UK.
And we’ve estimated that the 400 high-growth firms we will be identifying in 2023 will have increased their sales by £4 billion per annum and generated 20,000 new jobs every year, demonstrating the impact that a small number of firms can have on every part of the UK economy.
We will also be celebrating the achievements of these firms at awards events to be held in the cities of Belfast, Birmingham, Bristol, Cambridge, Edinburgh, London and Manchester.
This will culminate in the 25th Wales Fast Growth 50 awards at the Cardiff International Arena at the end of November. This will be a special occasion where we will not only celebrate the fastest growing firms in Wales but all Welsh entrepreneurs who make such a difference every day to the economic prosperity of our nation.
More importantly, it will enable us to recognise and appreciate the impact that Welsh businesses make every day on the economy and promote those small and medium-sized enterprises that may well prove to be the innovators that lead our local towns and regions through some tough economic times.
