Super scaling: what founders need to know about reaching £50m and beyond

At a recent Scale Summit event, Sam Smith, former finnCap CEO and founder of Super Scalers, spoke to ScaleUp Institute CEO Irene Graham about what it really takes to scale a business to £50m and beyond.

Sam Smith has had a varied and enriching career, including 24 years spent building finnCap into the UK’s largest investment bank for growth companies and advising hundreds of businesses along the way. Since leaving in 2022 her focus has been on a problem she has long observed: founders who scale to very large sizes tend to look the same.

“So few of them were women. So few of them were underrepresented founders from different backgrounds. They all were generally the same type of guy. Many (though not all) had been to private school, they seemed to know exactly what they were doing, and they had this playbook.”

That unwritten playbook circulates through networks and rooms many founders never access. Super Scalers is now trying to democratise it.

Belief is the biggest barrier

When asked what holds founders back, most point to talent, capital or market access. Sam says the biggest barrier is belief. She knows this from the inside. After floating finnCap and leading it to become the UK’s largest SME investment bank, she only realised at age 50, speaking at the Guildhall, that she truly belonged in the room. “It’s taken a long time,” she said. Even people who have demonstrably achieved super-scale status did not always believe they could. “Everyone’s been at your stage. At some point, everyone thought they couldn’t do it.”

Who you surround yourself with changes everything

Sam illustrates the power of environment with the Mars family. Frank Mars, having grown up around corner shops and small business, was content when the family company hit $25 million revenue. His son, Forrest Mars, having studied at Yale and spending time with the DuPont family and General Motors, saw that as just the beginning. “That’s the impact of the people you’re around,” Sam notes. She advises founders to deliberately build a tribe that includes people much further along their growth journey, a mix of peers, the next stage and ten-times-bigger players.

Growth works by doubling, not by percentages

One of Sam’s most useful frameworks is what she calls the doubling principle. Growth works by doubling, and each doubling journey tends to take roughly the same amount of time. Sam’s own business took about four years to move from £3m to £10m, another four years to £20m, and a further four years to £50m. The maths of compounding show that growing at 26% a year for ten years makes a business ten times larger; repeat the decade and you are a hundred times larger. The planning implication: your next target should be a double of where you are now, your medium-term target a double of that, and your long-term vision ten times the current size.

How to superscale isn’t always obvious early on

For Sam, the key differentiator at finnCap was culture. The way the team was treated gave a retention advantage and a feel that clients could sense. No competitor was doing it, making it a genuine edge. She says there are essentially three ways to scale: add a new product or service, move into a new sector, or enter a new geography. “Every competitor will have done one of the three. Find the one you most respect, study their numbers and see where they were when you are now.”

Scaling gets easier, not harder

Sam’s biggest myth-busting insight is that scaling gets easier, not harder. “The easiest part of my journey was going from £20m to £50m. The hardest was going from zero to £1m, and the second hardest from £1m to £2m.” If you have reached a million, you have already done the hardest thing. “You have totally got this. Just keep going.”

Sam Smith’s work with Super Scalers focuses on supporting underrepresented entrepreneurs scaling between £1m and £50m in revenue.

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