The U.K.'s Fastest-Growing Startups. What Are Their Growth Secrets?

Forbes

15 hours ago

Marisa Poster says her company identified an unmet need
What does a successful British startup look like in 2025? Well, viewed through the prism of VC funding, a typical fast-growth company is probably developing AI solutions or working in quantum computing, climate tech or life sciences.
But that's not the whole story. Founders club, For Entrepreneurs By Entrepreneurs (FEBE) has just released a list of 100 rapidly growing businesses, painting an alternative picture of entrepreneurship in Britain today.
Styled as the FEBE Growth 100 and produced in collaboration with Virgin , the list draws on a list of metrics - including two-year compound growth, revenue performance and founder involvement - to create a ranking of private companies that are still owned and run by their creators.
And while technology ventures certainly do feature, the majority of the companies are consumer-facing and not necessarily tech-driven.
A case in point is the company that occupies the 'number one' slot, namely Perfect Ted. Co-founded by Marisa Poster, Levi Levenfiche and Teddie Levenfiche, the business specializes in Matcha drinks, including lattes. Close behind is haircare brand REHAB at number 2, with food delivery service Simmer Eat and party games company, Lucky Egg at positions 3 and 4, respectively. Tech enters the picture at number 5, in the shape of Manchester-based innovation studio Conductr. Elsewhere, you'll find fintechs, restaurant chains, fashion retailers and business service providers.
But here's the question. Other than providing a talking point and perhaps also a celebration of entrepreneurship, do lists of this sort provide any insights into business success? Or to put it another way, do they point to any common factors that have helped some very diverse ventures to pile on sales year-on-year?
To find out, I spoke to three of the entrepreneurs whose companies are featured. The aforementioned Marisa Poster, Simmy Dhillon of Simmer Eats and Jacyn Heavens of B2B business services platform EPOS Now.
Leveraging Personal Experience
There were some common threads, perhaps the most obvious being the ability of the founders to identify hitherto untapped demand.
'I'm very happy with our growth so far, and I think it's a testament to serving a need that was unmet,' says Marisa Poster. 'I personally had a problem with the type of caffeine that I was consuming and couldn't find anything that would work with my kind of neurodivergent brain.'
If conventional lattes and espressos didn't work, neither did energy drinks, seen by Poster as hyper-masculine. What she did hit upon was Matcha, based on tea leaves and used in Japan for ceremonial purposes. Detecting a gap in the market, Poster launched a drinks brand.
It was a play based on personal experience. The same could be said for the thinking behind EPOS Now. As Founder Jacyn Heavens explains, when he launched a restaurant and bar he quickly realised that small businesses can struggle when it comes to administration.
'I really wasn't prepared for how complicated it is to run a small business,' he says. 'I remember when I started our business, I needed to do everything from stock control to employee management, to negotiating with suppliers to figuring out what my prices should be. Literally everything.'
EPOS Now started out as a cloud provider of point-of-sale services. Since then, features have been added to the platform, including. Perhaps not surprisingly, given the activities that Heavens found so onerous, the functions include stock control, employee management and pricing advice based on data.
Finding Customers
Having an idea is one thing, connecting with customers is quite another. Heavens' approach was to use a combination of SEO and Google Adwords. 'I learned AdWords, learned how to build a website, and built it all up in a basic e-commerce site. And off we kind of went.'
The model, as he describes it, was to augment SEO marketing with paid ads, with everything feeding through to a landing page and call centre.
Simmy Dhillion took a different approach. Simmer Heat started out using a university kitchen to create and then deliver healthy meals that could simply be heated up, with students as a key customer group. The approach the company took was direct.
'It started off me going into university halls and handing out little business cards, speaking to people on the bus,' says Dhillion.
Social Media was also important. Simmer Heat asked their customers to post pictures online when they received deliveries. By replying to the posts, the company built a relationship with buyers. In addition, the company has worked with influencers to get the story across.
For its part, Perfect Ted has something of a kick start. Following an appearance on the U.K. entrepreneur pitch show Dragons Den - modelled on Shark Tank - the company gained an angel investor (Stephen Bartlett) and a lot of publicity. There was a further boost when supermarkets began to stock the brand.
Building Momentum
The challenge facing all businesses is to build momentum and how that is done clearly depends on the nature of the business.
Working in the B2B market, Heavens says the biggest challenge was to stay ahead of the competition. When the company started, there were very few cloud-based POS providers. Now it is common. To maintain growth, the company expanded the platform into a complete business admin service while also taking a risk on expanding to the U.S. Turnover has now hit £150 million.
Dhillon says that building fundamental skills with Social Media have enabled Simmer Heat to grow without a large marketing budget. 'A lot of brands start off with a large budget and they are a bit lazy in terms of thinking 'we can pay to force ourselves in front of customers, so let's just keep paying and paying and paying.' We had to kind of do that the other way in terms of earning our place in front of customers,' says Dhillon.This was then augmented by some, but limited paid advertising.
Perfect Ted has taken a similar approach. The company uses employee created content on social media. There is some paid marketing, but the budget isn't huge,
Is there a secret sauce that helps to underpin growth? For Heavens, the key is listening to the customer and being fanatical about acting on feedback. Dhillion says it's important to test out new things and not be afraid of failing. Poster agrees that it's important to try out ideas even if some fail. Both see it is important to have staff who are themselves entrepreneurial. As Poster puts it:'willing to drive the car.'
And of course, there is no common route to success, aside from the drive of the owners, finding a product that resonates with the target market and then finding a means to connect with customers and keep on connecting.