What an average does not tell you

£21m is a real number and it is also a blunt one. A room of businesses all sitting at exactly £21m would produce the same average as a room spread from £4m to £60m, and those are completely different rooms to sit in.

The honest position is that we publish the average because it is the figure we can stand behind, and that it tells you roughly where the centre of gravity sits rather than where the edges are. If you are at £6m you are below the average and that does not mean you are in the wrong place. If you are at £45m you are above it, and the same applies.

Four members, and what they actually run

Rather than describe the membership in the abstract, here are four people who are in it. All of this is public.

• Adam Blomerley, Quick Release. Founder and CEO of a product-data consultancy employing more than 350 experts across seven countries, since integrated into ALTEN Group.
• Clare Harris, Talking Tables. Co-founder of a B Corp certified party-ware brand turning over £25m, and a 2023 King's Award winner for international trade.
• Stuart Miles, Pocket-lint. Founded the business in 2003 and grew it to roughly 1.6 million monthly visits before selling to Valnet in July 2022.
• Dominic Joseph, Captify. Co-founded a search intelligence platform analysing more than 40 billion search events a month, majority acquired by SFW Capital Partners.

Notice how little those four have in common on paper. Consultancy, consumer brand, publishing, adtech. What they share is the stage: past the scrappy phase, running real teams, making decisions where the downside is other people's jobs.

The bar, and what it does not decide

There are three ways to clear it: £3m in turnover, £3m raised, or a previous exit. One of the three is enough, which matters because turnover on its own is a poor measure of how complex a business actually is. A funded business at £1m of revenue and forty staff is dealing with more than a £4m business that is one person and a lot of contractors.

Clearing the bar makes you eligible. It does not make you a member, and the gap between those two things is where most applications are actually decided.

What we look at after that is whether you are the founder or CEO rather than a functional director, whether you are past product-market fit and building or growing a team, and whether you are willing to say the real numbers out loud to seven other founders. That last one filters more people than the £3m does.

How Forums actually get matched

This is the part that answers the question underneath the question. Most people asking what size of business our members run are really asking whether there will be anyone in the room who understands their situation.

Forums are six to eight people and they are matched on three things:

• Stage. Roughly where you are in the arc, which is a better guide than turnover alone.
• Sector adjacency. Close enough that the context translates, far enough that nobody is a competitor and nobody is a customer.
• The decisions you are facing. A founder about to make a first international hire wants someone in the room who did that last year.

You meet ten times a year with the same group, and the chair is always a founder who has already exited a business. That combination is why a spread in turnover does not hurt the room. Someone further along is useful to you, and you are useful to someone behind you.

What to ask us before you join

On the selection call, ask directly. What is the turnover range in the Forum you would place me in? How many of them have made the decision I am about to make? When did that Forum last take a new member?

Those are fair questions and you should expect straight answers. If the honest answer is that we do not currently have a Forum at your stage with a space in it, we will say so. Turning someone down is cheaper for everyone than putting them in a room that does not fit.