Not many business reach ‘scale’, however you define it. UK Government statistics show the range of company sizes in 2019:
5.9 million (total number of UK businesses in 2019)
Even if you exclude sole traders from the total, and only look at the 1.4m companies that have employees, if you pass 50 employees, it means that you are moving from a population of 15% of companies to one that represents just 2.5% of companies. If you exceed 250 employees, you are one of just 0.55% of companies.
On a chart it’s even clearer what big jumps these are. Even if we remove the 4.5 million sole traders, the number of companies decreases by orders of magnitude as you increase the size of company. When compared to the number of micro businesses, large companies are barely visible.
It’s also interesting to note, by the way, what the average sales and sales per employee are for companies of different size:
Where do you benchmark with respect to these figures? There is truth to the notion of economies of scale – by and large bigger companies are more efficient, as measured by sales per employee.
Interested to talk through any of these ideas?
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