The Government has announced a ‘concierge’ style support service for high-growth businesses in all sectors, in a move aimed at boosting the UK’s attractiveness for entrepreneurs.
The new service, unveiled by Business Secretary Peter Kyle during London Tech Week, will offer tiered support to fast-growing firms to navigate regulation, finance, and public procurement. The announcement also covers a visa fee reimbursement scheme for scale-ups in tech, life sciences, and clean energy.
The aim is to nurture the UK’s first trillion-dollar company. Currently British scaleups – which represent just 0.8% of businesses – bring in more than £2.2 trillion in turnover and support 3.9 million jobs.
The centrepiece is a visa scheme that will reimburse scale-ups for the cost of hiring international talent, alongside a fast-track sponsor licence referral for overseas firms looking to expand into the UK.
Details aren’t yet nailed down: the Government is still tendering for a private sector partner to run a pipeline pilot, and says the offer will “develop as it progresses” with input from founders. Irene Graham, CEO of the ScaleUp Institute, said the “introduction of concierge structures to help fast-track these companies to the connections, opportunities, and support they need represents a significant step forward.”
Also in this week’s ScaleUp Standard, we meet Nnamdi Emelifeonwu, CEO of legal tech Definely, who discusses what he learned building a company for a market that didn’t exist yet.
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What I learned building a company for a market that didn’t exist yet – by Nnamdi Emelifeonwu, CEO of Definely
“By the time you can see a market clearly, you are already too late to build the company that wins it,” so says Nnmadi Emelifeonwu, founder of legal tech Definely, which helps lawyers review complex contracts.”Most founder advice tells you to find a hot space and run at it. I’d argue the opposite. If everyone can see the opportunity, you’re queuing behind better-funded competitors for a prize that’s already been priced in. The companies that matter are the ones that picked a fight five years before anyone else thought it was worth having.
Here are five things I’d tell any founder starting out today:
1. Try to see around corners
When we started, contract review was a task, not a category – something lawyers did at the end of drafting, half-administrative and half-invisible. We bet as AI made drafting faster and cheaper, the bottleneck would move from creation to verification. That call looked eccentric for a long time, but now generative AI has flooded law firms with text, managing partners are asking, ‘how do we know what went out the door is right? ‘
2. Specialise until it hurts
The temptation, especially when you’re raising money, is to widen the pitch. Bigger market, bigger story, bigger round. I went the other way. We do one thing: structured review of complex legal documents – not drafting, not storage, not workflow. Saying ‘no’ to everything adjacent made us credible. Just ensure your market is large enough to reward it.
Nobody warns you about this. There were stretches sometimes eighteen months at a time when I wondered if we had called it wrong. Being early feels identical to being wrong, right up until the moment it doesn’t. Founders who cannot hold a thesis through that difficult middle period do not make it.
4. Find visionary customers
What gets you through the lean times are the firms that see what you see. They tell you what is wrong and stay with you when it is easier to wait for a polished competitor.
We sell to the best law firms and largest banks. They expect excellence and are right to. We sweat every detail and every fix. There is no clever substitute for hard work – I’ve stopped looking for one.”