The 10 fastest-growing companies in the UK

1. Marshall Arts 

 If only Barrie Marshall had stuck with his plans of working as a civil engineer in local government, he might have put together a pretty decent career from working on building sites and pouring over plans for bridges and roads. 

Instead, he has had to make do with travelling the world as an agent and promoter for Sir Elton John, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder and a dazzling cast of the greats of the music industry. 

Now the man behind Marshall Arts, his playfully named business, has won another accolade: topping Business Leader’s inaugural Growth 500. Revenues at his London-based company have soared to more than £68m, with annual growth of more than 24,000 per cent over the past three years. 

2. Green Create 

Unlocking the value in what others discard can make for a great business. Green Create harnesses methane-rich organic waste produced by agricultural sites including poultry farms and fish-processing plants to create natural gas and other products. 

These can then be either channelled into the domestic supply chain or used to generate electricity. Other byproducts from its facilities include liquid and solid phosphate fertiliser for arable farms and purified water that can be released back into local networks. 

Green Create operates and owns sites in the Netherlands, Belgium, Mauritius and other parts of southern Africa. Earlier this year a partnership was announced between Green Create and a major US poultry producer to build 12 more sites across the country. 

Financial difficulties at one of its plants in Kent have not hamstrung the company’s fast growth. Annual revenues at the London-headquartered group have climbed to £30.1m, an increase of 20,346 per cent over the past three years. 

3. Wendy Wu Tours 

Wendy Wu founded her eponymous travel company almost by accident. Four years after moving away from China, she booked a trip for two back to her homeland. 

At the last minute, her travel companion had to pull out and so Wu placed a small ad in a newspaper offering the place as a 28-day tour of China, billing herself as a tour guide and promising some “hidden gems”. A mass of phone calls ensued, convincing Wu that there was a business to be built from organising holidays to China.

For years, London-based Wendy Wu Tours concentrated on selling trips to Asia but Covid obliged the business to explore new markets. 

“Customers said to us: ‘Europe is open, can you please take us somewhere?’.” Wu has said. “So, we started to select really carefully unique places in Europe and the Middle East because they were already open – and China wasn’t.” 

Those new destinations partly explain Wendy Wu Tours’ strong bounce back from the pandemic. Annual turnover now exceeds £28m, up 19,431 per cent in the past three years. 

4. On the Go Tours 

A chance encounter between Australian Scott Braidwood and British-born Jay Lakshman while holidaying in Egypt would lead to the start of this direct-to-consumer tour operator. 

On the Go Tours’ first excursion in 1998 would be a tour of the pyramids, not far from where the pair had met that year. Priding itself on combining “culture and adventure with a lot of fun along the way”, this London-based travel company now offers trips to dozens of far-flung destinations, including Guatemala, Bhutan and Madagascar. 

With packages offering adventures during the day but “a chilled beer poolside or a soft pillow at the end of the day”, On the Go Tours tries to strike a balance between authenticity and comfort. 

There are now offices in Brisbane and Johannesburg as well as operations in New Zealand, Canada and the USA. 

Grounded during the pandemic, On the Go Tours has now taken flight again, growing revenues to £17.1m during 2023 – a 16,078.4 per cent rise over the past three years. 

5. Green Global 

This low-profile London outfit is billed as the UK’s largest textile-recycling business. It collects more than 400 million unwanted garments a year from homes in England and Wales on behalf of its partner charities. 

After sorting and cleaning at its four processing plants, the clothes and footwear are exported to those in need living in Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa. This work is not only good for the planet but it also helps hard-pressed charities boost their income. 

Green Global has now diversified into other eco-friendly areas such as helping business clients design, install and maintain solar panel systems to reduce their carbon footprint and cut their energy bills. More than 1,200 such systems have been fitted by the company so far. 

It is also helping to deliver large and secure data centres and other IT infrastructure powered by renewable energy. All this drove revenues to nearly £7.7m in 2023-24, up 9,317 per cent over the past three years. 

6. Cyro Cyber 

High-profile and costly cyber attacks on some of the UK’s leading retailers in recent months will only increase the demand for experts offering more robust protections for corporate IT networks. 

Paul Rose and Shannon Simpson already shared more than 50 years of experience safeguarding some of the UK’s most critical commercial and public sector digital networks when they set up their consultancy four years ago. 

London-based Cyro Cyber, a spinout from the telecommunications infrastructure outfit Telent, has swiftly grown its revenues to just over £4.2m, a 7,899 per cent increase over the past two years. 

Its services range from designing and maintaining secure digital networks to testing a client’s defences from hackers and malware. It even tests physical access to an organisation’s offices and data centres with a team of ex-military operatives. 

The National Highways Agency, Network Rail, Royal Bank of Canada and the Police Digital Service are among Cyro’s roster of clients. 

7. Vosaio 

German national Martin Knuepfer founded Vosaio in 2009 after years working in the British travel industry. His London-based business-to-business agency specialises in designing and arranging bespoke tours across Europe and beyond, ranging from school trips and business conferences to cruises and tours of the Vatican. 

For around 95 per cent of its client programmes, Vosaio contracts directly with hotels, restaurants, tourist attractions and its other suppliers, thereby stripping out the cost of intermediaries and ensuring the company can more closely vet the quality of the services. 

Turnover climbed to £39.5m in 2023, a growth of 5,998 per cent over the past three years. International travel of course collapsed during the global pandemic and that largely explains this phenomenal growth. Nevertheless, Vosaio is trading well above pre-Covid levels. Turnover in 2023 was 64 per cent higher than in 2019.

Knuepfer now employs teams across 25 countries and last May secured a multimillion-pound investment from BGF, the bank-backed venture capital investor targeting small and medium-sized enterprises. 

8. Marv Studios 

When Matthew Vaughn makes a movie, he can certainly assemble a superstar cast. Sir Michael Caine, Daniel Craig, Julianne Moore, Ralph Fiennes and even pop queen Dua Lipa are among the household names to have starred in his catalogue of hits. 

Perhaps best known for the three Kingsman spy capers, his more serious works have included the Sir Elton John biopic Rocketman and a surprisingly compelling dramatisation of the origins of the video game Tetris. 

Over the years, films Vaughn has produced are believed to have taken almost £1.4bn at box offices globally. 

Turnover at Marv Studios, his London-based production company previously known as Ska Films, has grown by 3,782 per cent to £246.4m over the past three years. As well as revenues from current film projects, the company also receives a steady income from its back catalogue of films.

Vaughan and his wife Claudia Schiffer each own half the shares in Marv Studios. The former supermodel has worked closely with her husband on his films for years. Their family cat Chip starred in their 2024 espionage-comedy Argylle, garnering plenty of attention at the Leicester Square premiere.

9. Miki Travel 

A clever tour operator keeps a close eye on what its customers really like. 

Some years ago, Miki Travel’s holiday reps noticed how Japanese holidaymakers touring the English countryside were enchanted by the yellow magnificence of a field full of rapeseed and would cluster around coach windows to take photos.

Before long, Miki Travel would start offering tours of fields on the Gloucestershire-Wiltshire border where visitors could happily stroll among the bright-coloured crop, taking pictures to their hearts’ content. The trips didn’t just help banish the UK’s “grey, rainy image”, the tour operator said, they also proved a nice side hustle for farmers.

Founded in 1967, Miki Travel initially did well for Japanese tourists’ fondness for visiting the UK and the European mainland. The London-based business now has 41 offices around the world offering travel to more than 170 countries, operating a business-to-business service to travel agent clients.

Barcelona, Prague, Rome, Kuala Lumpur, Tokyo, Osaka and Bangkok are among the many destinations its website offers. The group prides itself on having “hundreds of multilingual staff”.

Revenues have grown by 2,951 per cent over the past three years, rising to £117.8m in 2023-24.

10. Rayburn Tours 

Barny Rayburn organised plenty of trips to the continent in his days as head of modern languages at Derby Grammar School. After he finished teaching, he set out to help other schools pack off groups of students to Europe to improve their language skills. 

For 19 years, Rayburn ran his small business from his home with three staff. Then in 1984, he approached John Boyden, who until then had been his trusty coach driver, with an idea. 

“Mr Rayburn quietly and fatherly-like told me that I was to buy the company, as he was retiring,” Boyden recalls. 

Boyden and his wife Brenda obliged and have been running the tour operator ever since. Over the years, the business has moved into organising ski trips as well as cricket, football and other sports tours to destinations including the US, Australia and India.

The 100-plus staff also put together concert tours for adult and school orchestras, choirs and bands to places such as Malta, Switzerland and the Czech Republic.

Rayburn Tours is this year celebrating 60 years in business and the 100-plus workforce can certainly raise a glass or two. Annual turnover has climbed by 1,853 per cent to £22.9m over the past three years.