Southampton knows how to start a business. Learning how to grow one shouldn't be left to trial and error.

Too many ambitious local businesses make it through their first year only to stall, not for lack of ideas, but because they lack the agility, digital capability and strategic leadership needed to turn early promise into sustained growth, writes Matt Sanger, Lecturer at Southampton Solent University’s School of Business, Law and Society.

As a lecturer for business management, I spend a large part of my time talking to people running their own businesses. Before moving into teaching, I spent years working across events and industry partnerships, which is where I first saw how often that gap between starting something and growing it shows up.

In that time, I've been close to plenty of ideas that worked, and just as many that didn't. Both taught me roughly the same lesson: the difference rarely came down to the quality of the original idea. It came down to whether there was a plan and the knowledge to back it up before things went wrong, rather than after.

The conversation often starts in much the same place. A business owner has built something real, out of very little, and reached the point where the next step isn't obvious. Not because they've run out of ideas, but because growing a business calls for a different set of skills to starting one, and those skills aren't always easy to develop.

The city's own numbers reflect that pattern. Southampton was home to around 7,400 businesses as of March 2024, contributing to a local economy valued at £10 billion. That's a meaningful economy built in part on the ambition of individual business owners, which makes it worth asking why so many of them stall exactly when they should be building on that early success.

Getting a business off the ground here is no harder than anywhere else: 92.3% of Southampton businesses survive their first year, almost exactly matching the national average of 92.4%. But look further down the line and the picture changes. Of the businesses that started in Southampton in 2018, only 33.1% were still trading five years later, compared with 39.4% nationally.

That's a six-point gap that opens up somewhere between year one and year five, which is precisely the stretch where a business needs to move from surviving to actually growing.

That gap appears when a business gets through its hardest early months without ever building the productivity, digital and leadership skills that keep it moving once the initial momentum runs out.

It's the reason I think our Help to Grow: Management Course, back this month, matters so much. Delivered as part of the national Help to Grow scheme, it's open to leaders and senior managers from businesses across Southampton. Participants work through strategy, the latest digital tech, marketing, finance and organisational design, building a genuine growth plan rather than a set of ideas, and it's backed by ten hours of one-to-one mentoring from someone who's helped other businesses make the same leap.

Nationally, the results reflect exactly that shift, from getting by to properly growing. Since the scheme launched in 2021, over 14,000 SME leaders have enrolled, with nearly 12,000 completing the programme by June 2026. Three-quarters of those who finished said it improved their business's resilience to economic pressures, more than two-thirds made concrete changes within six months, and 92% reported improved leadership and management capability, the exact combination of skills the course sets out to build.

I don't think Southampton has a shortage of people capable of starting a business. What I see, again and again, is people left to work out the next stage alone, learning the hard way exactly what this course sets out to teach directly. Getting a business off the ground is the easy part, relatively speaking. Building one that's still standing five years on is the actual test, and it's one that shouldn't have to be faced without any support.