Celebrating the UK’s scale-up community

On Thursday night, the ClearCourse team are heading to Tobacco Dock for the Business Leader Scale-Up Awards evening, honouring the dynamic scale-up businesses fuelling the UK economy. As a team, we’ll be there to celebrate ClearCourse as a finalist in two categories – Technology Scale-Up and Overall Scale-Up Business.

Over the course of our own journey, we’ve found that a core part of being a scale-up is ambition. ClearCourse was launched to be a diverse and innovative group that approached software development differently. We’re now a four-year-old business on target to have 1000 people employed next year – just one example of the aspirations and achievements that we can expect to see highlighted at this year’s ceremony.

But while we’re focused on advancing our own growth, it’s important not to overlook the vital wider ecosystem in which we operate. When we talk about boosting the economy and supporting local communities, people are rightly inclined to mention start-ups as a driving force for investment and innovation. Less discussed is the integral role of scale-up businesses – those who have been through their first rounds of funding, who see a high rate of growth and have built the strong foundation of expertise and support required to scale even further.

In the technology sector and beyond, scale-ups are a lynchpin to the collective process of growth itself. How so? They attract investment, having built the capability to mitigate early risks and promise more stable returns. They create new jobs and lean into untapped pools of talent, striving to build an integrated and focused workforce from the small and mighty teams we see at businesses just starting out. And finally, they encourage new thinking and innovation, with the interest and material capacity to truly invest in the potential of their partners and the people within their teams. The time and commitment that go into scaling a business cannot be underestimated. It’s certainly not for the faint of heart, but it can also be incredibly rewarding – and its ripple effect is huge.

At ClearCourse, our ‘Working Better Together’ philosophy echoes our approach to growth as a group. Scaling up doesn’t just describe our development as a collective, but it applies to the integrated back-office infrastructure we provide for our product teams, and the collaborative way that we develop our payments service alongside growing businesses.



To be recognised as one of the organisations helping to drive this vital part of the UK business world is a huge accolade, and we’re looking forward to celebrating the success and achievements of every business in the scale-up community on Thursday night.