Dataworkforce and Jobserve top Sunday Times growth league tables
The Sunday Times' and Virgin Atlantic league tables have listed Dataworkforce and Jobserve at No.1 in their Fast Track 100 and Profit Track 100 lists respectively.
Since 1997, the self-proclaimed 'barometers of entrepreneurial activity' have been clocking the performance of the UK's fastest growing and most exceptional companies. The league tables show that this year's Fast Trackers have, collectively, almost doubled their sales each year between 1996 and 1999 with an average annual increase of 98 per cent.
Dataworkforce, this year's Fastest Tracker, started in Managing Director Neil Franklin's South London flat when he invested £5,000 of his savings into an idea he had. His company now supplies specialist telecoms engineers the world over and has watched its sales increase 273 per cent over the past three years from £388,000 in 1996 to £20.1 million in 1999 making it Britain's fastest-growing unquoted business. The company also has offices in America and Brazil as well as a subsidiary in Singapore.
Fast Track companies are high manufacturers of jobs and on average double their workforces every 18 months. The list shows that there has been a five-fold rise in workers from 3,100 in 1996 to 16,200 last year, not including the growth in part-time and contract positions which have been additionally generated.
Thirty-one per cent of Fast Track companies are based in Greater London and 27 per cent in the South East compared to last year's 34 per cent in Greater London and 35 per cent in the South East. Many of them are classed within the TMT grouping (Technology, Media and Telecoms) with more than 60 of the 100 companies belonging to the services sector and in particular, IT recruitment.
Internet Recruitment Publisher Jobserve is this year's No.1 in the Profit Track 100 list. Its annual sales growth was 111 per cent from £877,000 in 1996 to £8.3m in 1999.
Robbie Cowling Managing Director of Jobserve, who plans to launch two new sites each month for the first four months of 2001, told UKTECH: "We're very pleased to see Jobserve measured against other companies' performance and for it to do so well but we don't want to get complacent. The biggest deal for us is always what's currently on at the moment and not what's just happened. We're still a start-up really."
Asked about his thoughts regarding the future of the company he said "We want to move into more industries - we're best known for IT, but we've recently gone into Engineering and just last week we additionally moved into Marketing. We don't have any plans to relocate and we've just completed a new office building for £1.2 million in Tiptree, Essex."
--
Richard Powell