What 300 Founders Taught Us
In 2021, BizSmart surveyed over 100 business owners about why 96% of UK businesses never scale beyond nine employees. Then we spent four years finding out, interviewing more than 300 founders who tried, on ScaleUp Radio. Three million words later, this is what the survey couldn’t tell us.
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Every claim in the report is tested against both bodies of evidence: what founders said in 2021, and what founders actually did across four years of recorded conversations.
The nine chapters are not nine separate lessons. The report traces a single chain through them: how one strategy move sets up the next, why the money findings and the people findings turn out to be the same finding, and what holds the whole sequence together. The founders describe it link by link, in their own words. It starts with going narrower.
Scaleup Challenges II is a BizSmart Research report, published in partnership with Smart90. It follows the original 2021 Scaleup Challenges study and draws on the ScaleUp Radio archive: 305 unique founder interviews recorded between 2022 and 2026. Every named quote has been verified for wording against the original interview transcript. The report is written by Kevin Brent, founder of BizSmart and Smart90, author of The Entrepreneurial ScaleUp System, and host of ScaleUp Radio.
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