What does it take to successfully scale? Six lessons from this year’s BIBAs – By Tom Smith, partner at Sponsors Brabners

Six lessons from this year’s BIBAs
By Tom Smith, partner at Sponsors Brabners

Scaling a business is exciting but it can also be one of the most challenging periods in the life of a company and the people running it.

The best scale-up businesses make growth look straightforward from the outside. In reality, rapid expansion brings evolving challenges across people, process, leadership, cashflow and culture. Things that worked perfectly well when a business employed 10 people can become much harder when there are 50, 100 or more.

The changing dynamics of scale-up businesses was one of the things that struck me the most while judging the Scale-Up Business of the Year at this year’s Be Inspired Business Awards (BIBAs), run by the North & Western Lancashire Chamber of Commerce, which Brabners was proud to sponsor.

The process is deliberately rigorous. It began with interviews at Preston North End in May, followed by the hugely enjoyable BIBAs on Tour, when the judging panel visited shortlisted businesses in their own environments.

These visits are particularly valuable. They enable judges to get beyond the presentation and numbers, meet the people and see first-hand how growth is being created.

Six things stood out for me:

1. There is no single route to scale

One of the first things that struck me is that there is no single blueprint for scaling a business.
Companies scale at different stages of their development and in very different ways. For some, growth might be relatively modest and incremental. For others it can be genuinely transformative.

What matters is recognising when the opportunity is there and understanding what that next stage requires from the business. Sometimes companies spend years refining their offer or finding their place in the market before the opportunity to scale becomes clear.

The strongest businesses we saw had reached the point where growth was no longer simply happening to them. They had identified an opportunity and made a conscious decision to pursue it.

2. Successful scale-ups need a driving force

There was a real passion behind the strongest businesses we met.

Scaling is rarely something that happens by committee. Usually there is an individual or a small leadership team with the ambition and determination to push the business forward.

That also requires an appetite for risk. Genuine scale often involves a leap of faith, for example taking on additional borrowing, investing in new premises, buying equipment or recruiting people before all the extra revenue has arrived.

Those decisions are never completely comfortable. But the scale-up leaders we met were prepared to make them because they believed strongly enough in where the business could get to.

3. Find your niche and then commit to it

A clear sense of direction tended to emerge once businesses had really understood where their strongest opportunity lay.

That does not necessarily happen on day one. Businesses can take wrong turns, experiment with different markets and learn lessons along the way. The important thing is recognising when you have found the product, service or niche that gives you a genuine platform for growth.

A scale-up journey is not necessarily a straight line. Successful businesses find a strong niche, a product with real potential and a way of operating that they can take confidently to market. Once that opportunity becomes clear, successful scale-ups are prepared to double down on it.

4. The leader cannot do it alone

Strong leadership matters, but so does having the right people around that leader. One thing I noticed among the most impressive businesses was a willingness from leaders to give credit to the team around them. They may provide the vision and energy, but they recognise they cannot execute the plan alone.

That becomes increasingly important as a business scales. The founder or chief executive cannot continue to be involved in every decision, customer conversation or operational detail.

You need capable people who understand the vision and can turn it into action. In many ways, building that team is just as important as having the original ambition to grow.

5. Design the business for where you want to be next

The best scale-ups design the growth journey. That means thinking ahead about people, processes, products, systems and physical capacity, rather than waiting until the business reaches breaking point.

One of the clearest examples from the judging process was seeing businesses investing in infrastructure with significant room to grow. The thinking was not simply about what they needed today, but what the business might require at the next stage and the stage after that.

That is the difference between accidental growth and deliberate growth.

Successful scaling requires a business to design its operating model so it has the capacity to absorb growth rather than constantly playing catch-up with it.

6. Expect bumps in the road and build the right support around you

No scale-up journey runs perfectly to plan.

The strongest businesses recognise that there will be mistakes, unexpected challenges and periods when things do not work out as intended. What matters is having the resilience to address those problems, learn from them and keep moving.

Experience helps, as does surrounding yourself with people who can provide the right advice at the right moment.

That includes the management team. but also the wider network of lawyers, accountants, funders and other advisers supporting the business. As companies scale, the challenges inevitably become more complex. Having trusted advisers who understand the business and its ambitions can give leaders greater confidence to make those bigger decisions.

Congratulations to the BIBAs scale-up ‘class of 26’

This year’s BIBAs reinforced the strength and depth of the businesses we have here in Lancashire.
The standard throughout the Scale-Up Business of the Year category was exceptionally high. Every shortlisted business had its own approach to growth.

Huge congratulations to Group55, which was named Scale-Up Business of the Year 2026, and to every business that made the shortlist.

If there was one overriding lesson from the process, it is that successful scaling is about building the right foundations, making brave decisions at the right time, investing in people and maintaining a clear sense of where the business is going.

That is what turns growth into sustainable growth.

Scale-up partners

As a leading independent law firm with a national reach and an office in Lancashire, we work with businesses throughout their growth journey, from ambitious SMEs and founder-led companies through to large and mid-sized organisations.

That means supporting entrepreneurs and management teams as they raise investment, recruit and reward people, enter new markets, acquire businesses, protect intellectual property, secure premises, strengthen governance and ultimately consider succession or exit.

What makes working with scale-up businesses particularly rewarding is that legal advice cannot sit in isolation. You need to understand the ambition behind the business, the pressures its leaders are facing and where they want to get to.

Our purpose at Brabners is to demonstrate that business can bring about positive change by being innovative, diverse and sustainable. As a certified B Corp with close to 600 colleagues across Lancashire, Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds and London, that ambition also shapes the way we support our clients.