An audience of successful entrepreneurs from some of the UK's most exciting and innovative sme's attended the half day event at the offices of leading tax and financial advisory firm Smith & Williamson.

Speakers on the day included industry thought leaders Duncan Cheatle from the Prelude Group and a co-founder of StartUP Britain, as well as David Scholtz of corporate advisory firm Ariadne Capital, Travers Clarke-Walker of global banking giant Barclays, Darren Hopper of leading sme mobile telecommunications provider Orange, Jasdev Dhaliwal and Chan Mannakkara from internet security leaders AVG Technologies and Guy Rigby and Adrian Walton of Smith & Williamson.

Opening the event Michael Tinmouth, Editor of Entrepreneur Country Magazine discussed how entrepreneurs are encouraged to take calculated risks, be innovative, 'think big' and build start-ups that have the potential to become not just growth businesses but industry changers.

Growth needs scale- without it a start-up is quite simply a lifestyle business. Building a scalable start-up requires an understanding of the consumer market that enables an entrepreneur to take an innovative idea and develop into a scalable and repeatable business model that will turn an ordinary start up into a high growth, high profit company.

During the past decade, we have lived through an era of disruptive technology. Start-ups were combative and disrupted markets by taking share away from incumbents or by creating a new market and growing it rapidly. But we no longer live in such a time and instead the new metric is the value of your ecosystem and of the relationships and partnerships you build to drive growth in the your business.

In a time of sluggish economic growth, entrepreneurs use technology to their advantage, maximising new technologies such as cloud computing to keep overheads low and flexibility high, thoughts echoed by Darren Hopper of communications giant Orange who have become increasingly engaged in the sme sector. Smart businesses leverage social media to replace expensive traditional marketing tools and they reach audiences far beyond the UK borders and Jas Dhaliwal of AVG Technologies shared pointers as to how to build a community and convert a network into an ecosystem.

Whilst much media and government attention has focused on the important role that start-ups will play in the future growth of the UK economy it appears that more urgent attention needs to be given to supporting high-growth businesses.

Research earlier this year by National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (Nesta) shows that these high-growth businesses have continued to perform strongly despite the recession and that during the period 2007-10 just 7 per cent of UK businesses generated 49 per cent of new jobs created by companies with 10 or more employees.

In the past year alone, there have been nearly 400,000 new private sector jobs created. The overwhelming majority of these coming from just 10,000 UK growth companies which now employ half of the country's working population. The stats are not lost on Business Secretary Vince Cable who recent spoke of them as "these are brilliant companies, but there just aren't enough of them. To get more of them, we have to create environment of entrepreneurship."

Guy Rigby and Adrian Walton provided informative summaries on the importance of the budget in March, including the major changes, implications and benefits of EIS tax relief.

One of the major obstacles facing growth business has been the perceived failing by the banking sector to back potential high-growth companies. The danger highlighted in recent reports is that the credit-scoring systems used by banks for making lending decisions is prone to rejecting the riskiness of growth-businesses who require liquidity as opposed to investment.

The result of a failure by banks to lend to potential high growth companies has serious implications for jobs and economic growth and suggests that banks may still, despite government intervention and imposed lending levels, be losing out on opportunities for profitable lending. The question was tackled by Travers Clarke-Walker Product and Marketing Director at Barclays who provided an honest and frank account of bank lending to small business. He was adamant that banks are lending to sme's but the due diligence process is more strictly adhered to than in the past too ensure that the right lending and support is going to the right type of business. Reflecting back on earlier presentations by Duncan Cheatle on the 'Right Type of Growth' and David Scholtz on 'Tailoring Your Business Plans for Investors', Travers discussed the importance of credibility within your business and financial plans and of building a story about your business and knowing your banking relationship manager.

Consensus at the event was that whilst the political climate supporting entrepreneurs and small businesses was overwhelming positive more practical efforts need to be made to support growth businesses.

Understanding the needs of sme's was identified as a critical factor for not only government but also larger corporate organizations as the winners in this next era are those companies who are organising their business models for the transactions in their ecosystem where they have sought out their natural allies, and make it in everyone's interest for them to win together.

The next Entrepreneur Country event featuring James Caan of Hamilton Bradshaw, Martyn Dawes of Coffee Nation and Julie Meyer of Ariadne Capital will be held on the 27th September 2011.

Early Bird tickets are available now - click here

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