Video: We reveal Yorkshire’s Fastest 50 companies

Alex McWhirter made the comments as he handed out awards at Yorkshire’s Fastest 50, which was held in Leeds City Museum.

More than 200 guests, including representatives of the Yorkshire’s fastest-growing 50 companies and key members of the region’s business community, attended the awards ceremony.

The event is sponsored and organised by top 100 UK law firm Ward Hadaway in partnership with the Yorkshire Post.

The Yorkshire Fastest 50 recognises the privately-owned profit-making companies and organisations in the region which have shown the strongest sustained sales growth over recent years.

Mr McWhirter helped to launch Finance Yorkshire last year and was made acting chief executive of the organisation in October 2010.

It is set to play a major role in the development of Yorkshire’s businesses with a £90m fund drawn from the European Regional Development Fund, the European Investment Bank and regional development agency Yorkshire Forward to invest in small and medium-sized businesses across the region.

Funding ranges from £15,000 to £2m via seedcorn finance, business loans and equity-linked investments.

Mr McWhirter told the Yorkshire Post: “Opportunities can be created in the face of adversity. Some of the companies here today have achieved brilliant growth.

“There were good things in the Budget for businesses and for entrepreneurs. The simplification of the tax regime is a good thing. Everybody’s talked about re-balancing the economy and that means different things to different people – whether it’s rebalancing the North and South divide, re-balancing the public and private sector employment situation, whether it’s rebalancing what we spend on the public sector and what we grow in the private sector – it doesn’t really matter.

“To me, the re-balancing has to have manufacturing and business at its core.

“What I would be looking for in the Budget or through the Regional Growth Fund or through the enterprise partnerships, is a focus on the North. The North needs it.

“We’ve got three funds. Ours is £90m – we’ve got one in the North West and one in the North East, and having some sustainability about those would be a good thing. I’ve only got a four-year window in which to invest. I want to grow this for more than four years. My ambition is to grow it so we have a sustainable source of funding in Yorkshire.

“I want to see it go on, I want to see it raise more money, I want to see it filling the gaps that companies experience as they try to grow.”

The big winner at the inaugural awards was Abbey Business Contracts, based in Wetherby, which was the fastest-growing large business and the overall fastest growing business.

Roger Smallwood, of Abbey Business Contracts, said: “We’re a distressed pub management company. When a pub is potentially failing, the brewery has asked us to go in and we turn those pubs around, so brewers can then sell them on.”

Richard Kitching, the director of Quayside Distribution, based in Grimsby, the winner of the medium-sized fastest growing business award, said: “We have a good relationship with our customers and suppliers. We have a team of people looking for business all the time.” Gareth Davies of Halifax-based Frogtrade, the fastest growing small business of the year, said he was delighted to pick up the award.

He added: “We sell a server into a school with software built into it. It will run all their teaching and learning and much of the administration in the school.

“There’s a number of new products we are building for UK schools. Our biggest growth area is internationally in Europe and the Far East.

“We’ve got a joint venture in the Netherlands to serve the European countries and we’ve also got a joint venture in Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur to deal with the Far East in China and India.”

For more information on the Fastest 50 see the special supplement in today’s Yorkshire Post and see video coverage of the event at yorkshirepost.co.uk/video

Fastest-growing firms in region

The Yorkshire Fastest 50, is a comprehensive list of the region’s fastest-growing businesses.

Sponsored by Top 100 UK law firm Ward Hadaway and backed by the Yorkshire Post, the list highlights and celebrates companies and organisations in the region showing the strongest growth.

The Yorkshire Fastest 50 2011 contains businesses from a wide range of sectors from fashion to food, engineering to information technology, sport to shipping.

It has been compiled in association with Ward Hadaway, which has itself seen strong growth since setting up its Yorkshire operation in Leeds in summer 2008.

Martin Hulls, senior office partner at Ward Hadaway in Leeds, said: “We wanted the Yorkshire Fastest 50 to be a celebration of achievement by companies from right across the region and we think it has delivered exactly that.

“It has also hopefully provided a fascinating snapshot of the region’s economy and the sheer variety of businesses which call Yorkshire home.”