What Wales’s most productive firms can’t afford to lose
New research on the small firms driving productivity in Wales names succession and leadership as what keeps them going. The handover it describes depends on something the figures don’t count: why the business decided what it did.
Who they are
In September 2026 the Enterprise Research Centre at Warwick Business School published a study for Economic Intelligence Wales of what it calls Productivity Heroes: small and medium-sized firms, at least three years old, that grow both their revenue and their workforce, with revenue growing faster. They are firms that take people on and become more productive at the same time.
Wales had 1,732 of them in 2024–25, about 4.1% of its established small and medium-sized firms. Between them they turned over £6.04 billion that year and created more than 5,200 jobs, and their revenue per employee rose by about a quarter, to around £165,000. Most are small: 58% employ fewer than ten people.
What keeps them going
The study also asked the firms themselves. Its authors are careful to say these answers are indicative rather than representative, because only 16 firms replied in full. But the pattern is consistent. Almost all had invested in staff training in the past year, and half in leadership and management training.
The five chief executives and senior managers interviewed say similar things in their own words. One firm converted to an Employee Ownership Trust earlier this year, partly to protect the legacy of the business, and now wants to plan the current chief executive’s succession. Another chief executive called staff attrition a big issue for productivity. A third credited bringing operations, legal, finance and the technical functions into one aligned system.
The study’s recommendations follow from this. Among them is more support for leadership succession and business transition planning, because management capability is what sustains productivity growth.
What the figures don’t count
From here this is our argument, not the study’s.
A firm that grows revenue faster than headcount asks more of each person. In a business of fewer than ten people, that means the reasons behind its decisions live in very few heads: why one supplier was kept after a bad quarter, why a price was held, what a customer was promised and in return for what. While those people are there, nobody needs it written down.
Succession is the moment it is needed. A founder retires, a management team buys the business, a trust takes ownership, or a key person simply leaves. The accounts, the contracts and the customer list all survive a handover. The reasons don’t, unless someone kept them.
That is what Pohja does: it keeps each decision with the reasoning behind it and the options turned down, so that when someone asks why, months or years later, the answer is still there.
What it looks like
The owner retires shows it in four screens: a founder hands his hotels to the team that runs them, and the lender’s question is answered by the decision itself, in the words used at the time.
Source
Mark Hart, George Paily and Adam Hardy, Enterprise Research Centre, Warwick Business School. Productivity Heroes in Wales: who they are and why they matter, Economic Intelligence Wales, September 2026. The figures are from the ONS Business Structure Database as reported there; the survey and interview findings are the authors’ indicative results. The link from the study to Pohja is ours.