Kirklees Top 100: Focus on SMEs
A list of SMEs by Huddersfield Business School celebrating their contribution to the Kirklees economy.
Professor Jill Johnes PhD FHEA NTF CMgr FCMI, Director of External Engagement (Professional Development) at Huddersfield Business School
For three years the University of Huddersfield has been working in partnership with Kirklees Council and the 3M Buckley Innovation Centre to produce an annual Kirklees Top 100 Companies listing which showcases business activity by – as its name suggests – presenting a list of 100 companies in the Kirklees metropolitan borough of West Yorkshire, derived using 5 metrics. Over time, and with the fourth list due to be launched in October, the Kirklees Top 100 Companies listing has celebrated and raised awareness of business activity in the local area, and led to the organisation of various networking groups and events addressing business challenges and sharing good practice.
At the launch of the third Kirklees Top 100 in 2023, we were asked if we had plans to produce a top 100 SMEs list. There was no plan at that time, but as we considered the idea, we realised there were several good reasons for producing such a list.
Firstly, over 99% of the UK business sector is made up of SMEs and Kirklees is no different, making SME activity very important to our local economy. Indeed, 75% of the regular Kirklees Top 100 Companies listing is comprised of SMEs, and in the last list, a couple of our special performance awards were won by SMEs. Secondly, the 15,000+ active SMEs in Kirklees are spread across a wide variety of sectors and locations, from the highly populated, to the more rural areas. One reason for this wide geographical spread is that, as a legacy of our industrial heritage, we have a lot of Victorian-era textile mills and industrial buildings scattered across the region, and these once-thriving centres of the industrial revolution are now home to many of our SMEs. Finally, our delivery of the Help to Grow: Management Course has strengthened our relationships with SMEs and given us insights into their day-to-day operations and challenges. For all these reasons, we were keen to produce a brochure focusing on SMEs in Kirklees.
But there are challenges in producing a meaningful SMEs list, revolving mostly around data source and metrics. With so many SMEs, all making their own contributions to Kirklees, it’s difficult to select the criteria for what is a necessarily short list in a brochure; the metrics of the regular Kirklees Top 100 Companies listing favour larger organisations and are unsuited to focusing solely on SMEs. We therefore avoided using anything relating to absolute size of company, and instead chose to focus on growth as a more interesting metric and one which would result in a list covering range of companies across the size spectrum.
The next step was to consider growth in what? Smaller companies aren’t generally obliged to comply with the same data submission requirements as larger ones, but there is one variable which is consistently reported: employee numbers. Our list is therefore selected on the basis of companies with high growth (20% or more) or pipeline growth (10% or more) in employee numbers.
The final criteria (details are provided in the brochure) for selecting the 100 SMEs was agreed and finalised amongst the partners, all of whom work closely with SMEs. The resulting list of companies is a very diverse range of businesses – as you’d expect – across 13 different sectors. We decided that unlike the regular Kirklees Top 100 Companies listing we wouldn’t rank the companies as this was perhaps a little misleading when we had businesses of such different sizes. We have therefore chosen to show the companies by sector and then in alphabetical order.
But the brochure isn’t just about the 100 companies being showcased; it also aims to bring to the fore important topics for SMEs and those supporting them. So, in addition to the list of SMEs, the brochure includes a number of feature articles contributed by the partners shining the spotlight on SME activity in Kirklees, their challenges, and the support on offer in the region.