Mission
Goldman Sachs has been running the 10,000 Small Businesses (10KSB) programme in the UK for a decade, offering significant insight into what small businesses need to unlock growth and productivity. Our mission is to create a campaign that gives the programme a stronger voice in positioning 10KSB UK as an influential champion for small businesses across the country.
Campaign
Seven Hills developed and launched a new campaign for the Goldman Sachs 10KSB UK, Generation Growth.
Generation Growth is the platform for raising the profile of the 10KSB brand to stakeholders through a programme of events, media coverage and social content. It seeks to give the 10KSB UK team a point of view on the big debates around the state of the UK economy today, creating conversations with policymakers and key figures across the small business ecosystem, and with the media.
Proprietary research, delivered in partnership with Mark Hart of Aston Business School, identified how to ensure the UK’s 5.5 million small- and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) can reverse more than a decade of stalled productivity.
Right now, only around 36,000 of the UK’s 1.2 million established SMEs (operating for three years or more) qualify as “Productivity Heroes” — businesses that are scaling their headcount while growing their revenue at an even faster rate, over a sustained period. During an average 12-month period, this group of businesses increased revenues by 196% and headcount by 29%.
The country has had bursts of new, high-productivity companies in the past, such as the years just before the financial crisis or in the decades following World War II. Matching that performance again could have a profound impact on the UK economy, potentially increasing the number of “Productivity Heroes” by 22,000, helping to generate an additional £106 billion in revenues and 88,000 jobs.
We launched the Generation Growth campaign with this research and a manifesto for small businesses at Mansion House in February 2024, to an audience of more than 250 business leaders, members of the enterprise ecosystem, press, and policy influencers. The audience heard from the Minister and Shadow Minister for Small Business, political heavyweights Ed Balls and George Osborne, as well as Goldman Sachs International CEO, Richard Gnodde.
Media has been a central focus of the campaign, and Generation Growth has been covered across the UK’s top tier media, including the BBC Today Programme, 5Live’s Wake Up to Money, Ian King Live on Sky News, Bloomberg Radio and The Times newspaper.
“Small businesses are not just a part of the UK economy. Frankly, they are the UK economy.” – Charlotte Keenan, Head of Corporate Engagement and Global Head of 10,000 Women, Goldman Sachs
Momentum
Seven Hills has since worked with Goldman Sachs to take Generation Growth around the country; holding a series of “City Summits” in Birmingham with the Mayor of the West Midlands and a second in Manchester that featured investor and entrepreneur Piers Linney, amongst other enterprise speakers from the region.
A series of policy-focused roundtable discussions have brought together leading academics with small business stakeholders, hosted in Oxford by 10KSB partner Saïd Business School. Insights from these roundtables have provided insights for further evidence-led thought pieces.
