The Lloyds leading SME business of the Year Award
Small to medium-sized businesses are the UK’s biggest employers and wealth generators. In 2025, there were 5.68m SMBs in the UK (up to 250 staff), employing 16.9m people and generating £2.8 trillion in revenues.
Are you proud of what your company has achieved, how you have been successful, and why people choose to work with you in such an intensively competitive market?
Celebrating the economic contribution of Small to Medium-Sized Businesses, this award recognises SMBs that have maintained consistent growth and strong financial performance, understand their customers, have an engaged workforce with effective leadership, and are continually innovating to support future growth.
Open to all organisations with no more than £25 million turnover in their last financial year, this Award will go to the company that best demonstrates the following:
• An established market position
• Plan for sustained growth
• Innovation in products, services or processes
• Optimisation of technology & communication
• Customer and staff engagement
• Effective leadership and management
• An ethical approach to business
• Strong commercial results
SCORING
In this category judges will compare the extent to which each candidate has demonstrated excellence in the following areas:
Employee & Customer Engagement 25%
- How have you attracted, retained, motivated and optimised your team to help you win or retain clients?
- What talent strategies, workforce models or initiatives have improved employee engagement, increased productivity and enabled you to achieve your growth objectives?
- Provide case study examples and top line data to demonstrate how you have increased your customer base or market penetration over the last 18 months.
Leadership & Innovation 25%
- What significant innovations have been implemented and how have they contributed to your overall success?
- How have you used technology, processes, platforms, data or automation in an innovative way? Demonstrate how have you optimised any of these, or innovated, to increase productivity or measurably improve service.
- How has management structure and / or leadership approach improved employee performance?
Financial Performance & Growth 30%
- Explain your key growth metrics, including financial targets, KPIs, timescales and overall ambitions plus examples of milestones and barriers/challenges that have been overcome. Growth metrics can include adoption, lead generation, client base, NPS scores, etc.
- How do you benchmark against your peers in terms of sales, profitability or market share?
- How has your company performed against your growth plan and what will help you to sustain future growth?
- Show examples and/or case studies of what has supported, or will drive further, commercial success.
Purpose Beyond Profit 20%
- How does your guiding mission, values or purpose align with growth objectives?
- What is your company doing to improve environmental, social or governance impact and how are these initiatives aligned with commercial success?
- How does your approach to diversity, equity and inclusion align purpose with profit and how has this differentiated your business or made you more competitive?
