Did you know that 75% of businesses in the UK private sector have no employees apart from the founder? That's over 4.2m businesses. A further 1.15m are micro businesses, employing between 1-9 people, and then there's a bigger drop to ‘small' businesses - those that employ 10-49 people. There are 220,000 of these small businesses in the UK.
We rightly celebrate entrepreneurialism, with TV shows such as Dragon's Den showing that the UK has plenty of people who want to set up a business. Survey after survey shows the same result. For example, in its Intuit QuickBooks' Entrepreneurship in 2026 study, Intuit found that one-third of adults (33%) say they intend to start a new business or side hustle over the course of 2026.
At Start Up Loans, we're all about helping people take that first step into setting up a business. This comes not only through providing finance, but also giving business owners and their businesses the best chance to survive and then thrive - we do this by providing post-loan support.
We've provided more than 135,000 loans since 2012, with a value of more than £1.4bn. That's a lot of support for the UK's start-ups.
The most recent evaluation of Start Up Loans found that each loan added 1.03 net additional employees - and these are jobs created in addition to the role the loan recipient has.
The point here is that Start Up Loans is helping people to start businesses in the first place, or access finance early on in their growth to invest in the business.
Following recent changes, we are now in a position to support even more businesses. A Start Up Loan can now be accessed by a founder within the first five years of them starting their business (previously within three years), providing up to £25,000 per director, up to a maximum of £100,000.
As well as helping businesses to start, we're keen to help more Start Up Loans-supported businesses to grow and create jobs - in line with the objectives of the British Business Bank. Already many of our Start Up Loans go to businesses that have already been set up, one major use of a Start Up Loan for example is buying a commercial vehicle and that's an important point because this provides access to finance to fund business growth.
Making further progress with helping businesses to scale in the UK has huge economic potential for the UK.
According to the Social Market Foundation, companies with turnover between £1m and £100m account for just 8% of firms, but account for 37% of the UK's business employment.
Further up the scale, NatWest's report, ‘The Critical Middle' reveals mid-market companies (MMCs) represent just 0.5% of UK companies yet account for 26% of employment and 30% of UK economic GVA.
With this economic opportunity for the UK in mind, as well as the finding that most businesses have no employees, I asked one of our Start Up Loans Ambassadors who has managed to scale their business for their insights.
Our Yorkshire Start Up Loans Ambassador, Janet Packer from Growing Wild Outdoor Nursery, who employs 20 permanent employees and has eight additional staff running holiday clubs and short breaks for families with children with SEND, spoke about what helped her business survive and then scale up:
"Determination, resilience and an enormous amount of hard work. We were prepared to put in the hours, learn quickly and take advantage of every training opportunity we could afford. We constantly looked for ways to improve and adapt as the business evolved."
Janet also recognises the importance of peer support and the sort of mentoring Start Up Loans offers loan recipients, commenting:
"These can provide reassurance, practical advice and the confidence to take calculated risks. Growing a business is rarely about one big decision - it's about making lots of small, brave decisions over time, with the right support around you."
More widely, the Government recently announced a package of measures to support smaller businesses through the British Business Bank, which Start Up Loans is a part of. This includes a £6.5bn uplift to the Growth Guarantee Scheme to unlock further lending to smaller businesses over the next four years and setting up a joint British Business Bank-UK Export Finance scheme to help smaller businesses access the finance they need to grow exports. These measures will in the coming years help more UK businesses achieve their growth potential.
There's a great economic opportunity if we have more businesses make that journey successfully. We're determined at Start Up Loans to play our part by providing finance, mentoring and other post-loan support to smaller business owners, as part of the British Business Bank's overall mission aimed at helping UK businesses start up, scale up and stay in the UK.
For more information on scaling up you can read our ‘A founder's guide to transitioning from start-up to scale-up finance' covering topics such as scale up financing, financial management and using AI in growing a business.
