Insight
Growing pains: placing value on scale-up brands
Words by Jesse Basset
1 July 2025
Growing up. It’s never easy.
It takes a while to get into your stride and come of age. The thing is, growth is what makes the world go round, especially when it comes to the economy, businesses and brands. For scale-up businesses, reaching that next stage can be especially tricky.
Scale-ups are particularly crucial to the UK economy. The OECD defines a scale-up as an SME that grows 20% or more over three consecutive years, and in the UK, we’ve got over 34,000 of them. While they make up just 1% of SME firms, scale-ups actually account for 8% of SME employment and 20% of SME turnover. Scale-ups are an engine that drives job creation and economic growth, and they need extra-special attention to become tomorrow’s corporate powerhouses. In other words, we couldn’t do without them.
Brand + business = success
If you look at the success stories of scale-ups in the last couple of years, there’s a consistent thread connecting great businesses that have all invested in building strong brands.
They’re in every corner of the UK economy, from fast-casual food brand Wingstop to the trading app Freetrade; both have sold their businesses based on these firm foundations. The same applies to scale-ups that raised significant investment, with healthcare brand Cera Care or AI-powered commerce platform Shop Circle perfect examples.
The same combination of sound business and strong brand underpins the world’s most successful brands. In fact, BrandZ’s Most Valuable Global Brands have outperformed the S&P 500 by 82% and the MSCI World Index by 264% over the last two decades.
Helping scale-ups soar
So, scale-ups have huge potential — no doubt about it.
If you’re a leader in a scale-up company or aspire to be one, it’s a challenging environment where support and finances can often be thin on the ground. With a funding gap for expanding scale-ups estimated to be as much as £15bn per annum, you must be smart in your strategies for driving rapid growth.
Developing and supporting your brand should be essential to your growth strategies. Brand accounts for between 30% and 50% of your total company value and is the difference between success and failure. It’s the ingredient that attracts consumers to your product or services and builds a relationship that drives loyalty and advocacy. It’s the emotional foundation for being front of mind at the point of purchase, supporting price premiums that maximise profits and underpinning your competitive strength.
The benefits of a strong brand are manifold; therefore, it’s vital to quantify its ultimate value. By valuing your brand, you’re quantifying its positive impact and demonstrating its financial and commercial rigour, which can be critical in attracting fresh rounds of investment.
Our passion for elevating scale-up brands
Without scale-ups, the economy is out for the count.
That’s why, at UnitedUs, we feel passionate about applying our expertise to help scale-ups flourish and thrive in a tricky economic landscape. We understand the intrinsic value of brand, expertly crafting them for our clients. All of our work is a testament to the power of brands, especially for businesses looking to scale up and sell.
We’re entrepreneurial to our core, and we get the challenges and ambitions of scale-ups. We invest in and build them every day. For example, we created and invested in the boutique estate agent brand Mr and Mrs Clarke, leading it through to a successful exit to a leading property franchise group. We did this through Heavy Industries — our investment arm — which has successfully invested in and built brands in categories that range from professional services to padel to ice cream.
We’re nowhere near finished, either. Today, we’ve expanded our remit to assemble a new generation brand valuation tool for scale-up brands. The tool combines the best in brand and financial thinking, understanding the ambitions and challenges for growing brands, including a lack of time, competing demands, and the need to justify every investment.
By creating a tool that combines deep brand understanding with financial acumen, we can calculate an accurate monetary value that helps companies move forward and achieve their plans, whether seeking investment or selling.
Are you a scale-up? Are you shaping or creating a new category? Are you a brand that needs a leg up on your growth journey?
If the answer’s yes, we can value your brand with our unique brand value tool and help elevate your business to new heights.
Let’s get the conversation rolling. Natalie, our Strategy Partner, and Luke, our Creative Partner, are ready to chat.
