Growth Company Awards 2004

Having swept the board last year – picking up a total of three gongs – mid-cap investment bank Numis was forced to play second fiddle to rivals Evolution Beeson Gregory and KBC Peel Hunt at the Growth Company Awards 2004

Now in their fourth year, the Growth Company Awards strive to acclaim those contributing most to the UK's SME sector. Each winner is judged against its peers in terms of performance over the past 12 months, through Growth Company Investor's exhaustive research. Many thanks to KBC Peel Hunt who generously supported the awards again this year.

With more than 350 AIM and OFEX companies offering the Growth Company Investor team their opinions on the services provided by various advisers, each and every shortlisted Nomad, broker, accountant and lawyer should feel particularly proud of their achievements.

Perhaps even more heartening to these groups will be the news that in almost every one of these categories customer satisfaction levels reached record highs. A staggering 82.8 per cent of AIM respondents, for example, described the service received from their Nomad as being either 'Good' or 'Very Good', an improvement of nearly 12 percentage points on 2003.

Record satisfaction levels, of 72.2 per cent and 86 per cent respectively, were also reported in the AIM broker and AIM lawyer categories, while an impressive 79.8 per cent also rated the performance of their accountant as being either 'Good' or 'Very Good'.

Of course, some room for improvement remains, the finance director of one up and coming AIM venture noting that, 'in terms of value for money I feel that our solicitors would be top. As for our broker, adviser and accountant, I think that they could all go the extra mile to support small companies and look after their clients a bit better'.

Yet, on balance, the comments offered were highly positive, ranging from the likes of 'we are very happy with our advisers and the support we get from them', all the way through to one CEO lavishing praise upon his 'masterful' nominated adviser/broker.

The shortlists for each of the adviser categories were derived from a survey of AIM and OFEX companies, asking each one to rate the performance of its Nomad, broker, accountant and lawyer on a five-point scale from 'Very Poor' through to 'Very Good'.

From the responses received, a shortlist of the five most highly regarded advisers in each category was drawn up and sent to the judges, who then ranked these businesses in order of preference. As in previous years no judge was asked to vote on a category in which his own firm was eligible.

Shortlists for the company and investor categories were constructed following a quantitative analysis of performance over a set time period. Once again, the judges were then asked to rank the shortlisted firms in order of preference, before their individual scores were aggregated to reveal the winners and runners-up.

As a final point, we would like to thank all of the AIM and OFEX company directors who took the time to share their opinions and all those industry experts kind enough to act as judges. Without their support these awards would not have been possible.