Scotland is Excellent for Helping Entrepreneurs Start Businesses, But Must Get Better at Helping Them Scale, Grow and Thrive
In this article, published in The Herald in October 2026, Gregor Ross examines the challenges facing growing Scottish businesses and explores how better access to experience, expertise and responsive support could help more companies successfully transition from promising start-up to sustainable, high-growth enterprise.
By Gregor Ross, Lincsus Group Ltd. | Herald September 2026
Richard Lennox's recent Framing Scotland's Entrepreneurial Economy report makes a compelling argument: Scotland does not necessarily need to spend more money supporting entrepreneurs. Instead, it needs to get much better at directing the money and support it already provides towards businesses with the potential to grow.
I think he is right. But there is another part of the problem we need to confront.
Scotland has become pretty good at helping people start businesses. Unfortunately, we are considerably less good at helping those businesses become substantial ones. That matters because starting and scaling a business are not simply different stages of the same journey. They present fundamentally different challenges.
An entrepreneur starting out needs help testing an idea, understanding a market, developing a product, finding initial customers and accessing early finance.
Then, if things go well, something changes. The business starts growing. Suddenly, the founder who once knew everything happening within their company is managing people who manage other people. Processes that worked perfectly with 10 employees begin breaking at 40. Customers become bigger and more demanding, while compliance requirements increase. Cash becomes more complicated, new markets beckon and the business needs senior expertise it may not yet be able to employ permanently.
These are not signs of failure. They are the consequences of success.
Yet this is precisely the point at which many Scottish businesses discover that the support surrounding them becomes harder to navigate and less obviously suited to the problems they now face.
There is an analogy I often use. We are rather like someone who carefully feeds a baby to help it grow and then, delighted that it is getting bigger, takes the bottle away.
Scotland has no shortage of business support. Scottish Enterprise, Business Gateway, Techscaler and numerous other public, private and third-sector initiatives provide valuable assistance.
The problem is not that nothing exists. It is that too much of our entrepreneurial infrastructure has historically been designed around starting businesses and delivering programmes, rather than responding to the unpredictable challenges of growing them.
And growth does not happen according to programme timetables.
A company can unexpectedly win a major contract. An overseas opportunity can suddenly emerge. Demand can outstrip operational capacity, or a founder can discover almost overnight that the management structure which worked at £1 million turnover can be wholly inadequate for a £5 million business, or a business that starts to sell globally and operate across different regions.
At those moments, telling someone about a programme beginning in three months' time is of limited value. They need the right expertise now. This is not simply anecdotal.
Mark Logan's influential Scottish Technology Ecosystem Review identified the problem of scaling several years ago, describing the inflection points growing companies encounter as the people, processes and structures that served them at one stage cease to work at the next.
More recent evidence points in the same direction. The independent evaluation of Scotland's Techscaler programme found that later-stage founders require more specialised and targeted support, while stakeholders described parts of the wider support landscape as cluttered and difficult to navigate.
So perhaps the next stage in Scotland's entrepreneurial strategy should be less about creating additional provision and more about changing how we think about support.
Three things would make a substantial difference.
First, we need to become much more responsive to growth inflection points.
Rather than expecting businesses to fit predetermined programmes, support should increasingly respond to identifiable moments when intervention could unlock growth, such as winning a major contract, entering a new market, raising investment, expanding a workforce or professionalising the organisation.
Second, growing businesses need greater access to people who have actually done these things.
There is an important place for general business advice. But when you are trying to expand internationally, build a senior team, restructure operations or prepare a company for investment, there is enormous value in talking to someone who has previously faced the same problem.
Scotland has plenty of those people. We need to become better at connecting their experience with the companies that need it.
Third, our funding mechanisms need greater flexibility. Eligibility criteria and governance are necessary when public money is involved. But the more rigid the system becomes, the greater the danger that businesses end up pursuing the support for which they qualify rather than the support they actually need.
None of this necessarily requires another institution, another programme or even significantly more public money.
In fact, creating another programme may be exactly the wrong response. Instead, it requires us to think differently about what successful business support looks like. For years, we have understandably celebrated the number of businesses created, founders supported, programmes completed and grants awarded. Those things matter. But ultimately, the measure that matters most is what happens next.
Did the company grow? , Did it create jobs? Did it increase productivity? Did it enter new markets? Did it attract investment? Did it become more resilient and capable?
Scotland's entrepreneurial ambition is not in doubt. Nor is our ability to produce innovative companies.
The bigger opportunity now is ensuring more of those companies make the difficult journey from promising start-up to substantial, sustainable business.
Richard Lennox is right that this does not begin with asking how much more money we should spend.
It begins with a much simpler question.
When a promising Scottish business reaches the point where its next stage of growth depends upon getting the right help, can we put the right expertise in its hands at the moment it needs it?
Too often, the answer is still no.
Changing that could be one of the most effective economic interventions Scotland makes.
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