Insider Growth 100

10 June 2010

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The recession is starting to redraw our annual list of the fastest-growing companies in the region.

Insider's North West Growth 100 ranks the 100 fastest-growing companies with a registered office in the region. Their turnover over five years, as submitted to Companies House, is used to calculate an average percentage gain each year. The gain must be positive in the latest year.

We only consider companies with a turnover more than £1million in the first year (to avoid sharp rises among very small businesses) and those that have supplied turnover figures for each of the five years (many small companies are not obliged to submit detailed account each year).

We don't include overseas-owned companies, either owned by a quoted company or a quoted company themselves. We also try to avoid accounting anomalies, for instance, where growth has soley been achieved because the group company accounts have been consolidated in five years.

UKFAST

This feature is all about numbers, so here are some more: internet business hosting provider UKFast has been named UK's best internet hosting provider for four years running by the Internet Service Provider Assosciation. It has more than 400,000 web domains on its network and more than 3,000 clients including UKTV and Chelsea Football Club.

"Our specialism is speeding up the internet, from your own office computers, to your customers trying to access your account," says managing director Lawrence Jones, who founded the company 11 years ago. "Our job is to provide you with machinery that will outperform your competitors and deliver information faster than anyone else. That will put you higher up the search engines, give you better cost per click and a feel-good factor. Nobody likes to wait these days."

Indeed, and the growth of the internet means allied businesses have been moving quickly. The company has been ranked as one of Europe's fastest growing in the sector by Deloitte's Technology Fast500, which, like us measures growth over five years by revenue performance. It has also managed to maintain that expansion alongside a healthy working environment after being named as one of The Sunday Times best companies to work for in 2009.

But there's still a long way to go to change the attitude of businesses to the internet,says Jones. "There are very few people doing very, very well. But these are the ones taking hosting seriously," he says. "People spend thousands on websites, then host them on a tiny server. It's the same as building a shop and sticking it on Denbigh Moors. Yet, you take a small site and put it on a massive server, that is like putting a shop on Oxford Street in London."

Growth is expected to continue in the core market of hosting, but Jones is aware of the need to diversify. PLans include developing a recruitment business, mysort.co.uk, and an IT security arm to formalise in-house capabilities in these areas.

"We've always taken our own recruitment seriously and have had our own department. And I don't think there is anything new to this IT security section. But we've never badged things up," he says. "It makes sense that we should be able to offer the service for other people and grow the business."

Will that take away from being a a specialist? "There are very few people who can Daly Thompson and be good at everything," he says. "But I don't want to be a one dimensional business and wake up in 30 years and be a dinosaur. Having lots of different products will help us spread the risk."

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