October 28, 2026
28 October 2026 | Stonor Search
There's been plenty of discussion about start-ups, scale-ups and the next generation of British unicorns following today's Autumn Budget.
The government has announced measures aimed at supporting high-growth businesses, although how much difference they'll make remains to be seen. As ever, the small print matters.
But it did get us thinking about something we know a bit more about. And even if the small print rules you out, it's not all bad news.
The people you need when a business starts to grow.
Some of the most interesting hiring challenges we see come from relatively small businesses.
A SaaS company expanding into Europe. An independent agency that's just landed its biggest client. A tech start-up appointing its first commercial director.
These are moments when one great hire can make an extraordinary difference.
But competing with established employers for talent isn't always easy, particularly when budgets are tight.
Fortunately, smaller businesses have more to offer than they sometimes realise.
Imagine joining as the first Head of Marketing.
You're not inheriting somebody else's strategy, attending meetings about meetings or spending six months getting approval to change the website.
You're building something.
For the right candidate, that's enormously attractive. The challenge is finding someone who genuinely wants the opportunity, not just the job title.
When you're running a growing business, every appointment matters.
The right person can transform what you're capable of achieving. The wrong one can be an expensive mistake.
And even when the need to hire is obvious, the financial commitment isn't always straightforward.
It's one of the reasons we introduced our Pay As You Grow recruitment model, allowing businesses to spread recruitment fees over 12 monthly instalments rather than paying everything upfront.
Because sometimes the biggest obstacle to growth isn't ambition. It's finding a sensible way to invest in the people who can help you achieve it.
Whether the latest measures will make a meaningful difference to start-ups and scale-ups is something we'll leave to the economists.
What we do know is that growing businesses need good people, and those people aren't always easy to find.
Some of today's start-ups may become tomorrow's unicorns. Most won't.
But plenty will become successful businesses employing talented people and doing interesting things.
And that's something worth getting behind, whatever their eventual valuation.
Stonor Search helps ambitious businesses find talented people across marketing, creative, digital, sales, SaaS and technology.
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