The Business The £50m Club: The hard truth about scaling a business
Mar 13, 2026
Helen Cannon, founder and CEO of Ice&Travel who scaled her corporate travel company to tens of millions, and Sam Smith, co-founder of Super Scalers supporting underrepresented founders to reach £50m+, discuss routes to super scale. They cover definitions of scale-up, why passing £1m is pivotal, bootstrapping versus outside capital, recruiting the right team, international expansion and missing long-term UK capital.
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What Counts As A Scale-Up And Why £50m Matters
- A scale-up is defined as a company growing 20% a year for three years with at least 10 employees.
- Sam Smith highlights 'super scale' as passing £50m revenue when a company gains a serious voice and room-level influence.
How A Chance Conversation Led To A Service-First Travel Business
- Helen Cannon founded Ice&Travel after a chance conversation and leveraged her experiential marketing background.
- She built the business on service-first (people before tech) to exploit a gap as competitors moved online.
Rapid Rise In Female-Founded Scale-Ups
- Female-founded scale-ups grew from ~200 in 2019 to nearly 1,900 today, showing exponential increase and rising role models.
- Sam Smith attributes growth to visibility, role models and a decade of female founders gaining traction.