In a post-Brexit, post-Covid world, the need to develop fast-growing Welsh businesses has never been more vital.
Creating more growth in existing businesses can help create much-needed sustainable employment opportunities, support the Foundation Economy, drive prosperity and contribute to thriving communities. Ultimately, more high growth businesses will allow us to develop a more skilled and prosperous nation and contribute to a healthier, happier Wales.
Growing a business is a continuous process of overcoming challenge and risk, and failure is possible at any time. Maximising sales opportunities and mitigating risk is rarely about funding constraints; instead, it is about continuous learning – often from mistakes. Access to impartial advice based on real-world experience is critical to sustainable business growth; it informs decisions, provides reassurance and often avoids expensive failure. Notably, the failure rate of businesses that don’t access support is twice that of those who do. But what should that support look like?
Having run the Accelerated Growth Programme (AGP) for six years in Wales, our team offers valuable insight into the most cutting-edge methodologies for delivering business growth. We have supported more than 1,000 businesses to create more than 9,000 well-paid jobs. Research by Professor Max Mundy of Cardiff Business School shows that for every £1 spent on the programme, £17 is generated in the Welsh economy.
As the most successful business support programme ever run in Wales, we have developed a unique insight into what works to support ambitious businesses to grow.
What we have found – and what all the latest research bears out – is that the most significant limitation on the growth of many businesses is not market opportunity or accessing finance, but the mindset and limiting beliefs of the leaders.
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Only about 6%-8% of businesses achieve high growth each year.
So, what superhuman abilities differentiate these high performers?
The difference between the most successful entrepreneurs and the millions of hard-working business owners is not intelligence or funding; it’s their mindset and the way they think. It’s in the stories they tell themselves about what is possible.
In many ways, this is unsurprising. Businesses don’t grow on their own, after all. It’s the business leader that formulates and implement ambitious plans. It’s the business leader that makes courageous decisions about returning staff to the office, investing in equipment or selling and competing in new markets.
As someone who supports and advises business leaders in the psychology of business success, I know first-hand just how critical an entrepreneur’s mindset is to success. If the business leader manages their inner game and gets “it” right, they are the business’s greatest asset.
But if they get it wrong, they can be its biggest liability.
It’s my experience in business – just like in elite sport – successful performers do not vary significantly in their abilities. Where they differ is in their desire to reach their potential.
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That’s why elite performers in sport, politics, the military and the performing arts work with coaches to enable them to be the best they can be. The best business leaders increasingly take the same approach. The Welsh Government and the Excelerator Consortium – which delivers the AGP – commissioned PhD research by Rachel Rees Jones at the University of South Wales exploring what type of business support achieves the best results. The research found that entrepreneurs attribute significant value to the personalised coaching and support from their dedicated relationship managers, all of whom have experience in running and growing businesses.
This makes sense when you consider how growth happens. The mind is where ambition is fired, where every business idea, strategy and tactic begins. It’s also where every decision gets evaluated. It follows, therefore, that the most valuable thing entrepreneurs can do for their business is proactively manage the mind. Business support programmes that focus on developing our entrepreneurial leaders will be much more successful at unlocking growth.
If we are to stimulate the level of growth we need for the Welsh economy – and our communities – to recover and prosper, supporting entrepreneurs in a way that recognises the importance of mindset will be vital.
The Accelerated Growth Programme is delivered on behalf of Business Wales by the Excelerator Consortium, a partnership between Innovation Impact and Winning Pitch.