The medium business segment is the growth engine of the UK economy and employs at least 15% of the workforce. Yet, its performance is curiously invisible, hidden as it is in the all-encompassing SME definition. The challenges facing medium organisations are different in scope and degree from those facing small businesses.
The UK government wants to see Britain as the best place in the world to start and grow a business. Yet most of its attention is on policies and measures aimed at start-up businesses. Growing businesses need separate attention.
This report is from M Institute. It is supported by Microsoft and the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW). It seeks to focus attention on the medium business segment in order to help define it better, and to assist in identifying actions that can be taken to support the continued economic growth performance of medium organisations.
The report draws on a number of different strands of evidence:
• Continuous reference to the evidence base used by the Small Business Service (SBS) of the DTI
• Extracts relating to medium organisations from the 2005 Enterprise Survey conducted by the ICAEW, covering 1,214 quantitative interviews with business leaders
• Qualitative interviews and discussions with business leaders from twenty medium organisations, reflecting on the results found through the quantitative studies.
It is our intention, as founders of M Institute, that this report helps make Medium Enterprise a segment on its own, distinct from the SME label that is widely used. We intend that it is used by those in government, in particular, to consider the impact of their policy-making on the performance of medium organisations in the UK. We also feel that it will be helpful to those who are either involved in this segment of the market or observe it.
Jyoti Banerjee and Paul Druckman, co-founders, M Institute
October 2006
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