Steven Smernicki founded Strachan & Kemp Commercial Services Ltd in 2014 with a straightforward premise: stop making clients manage a dozen different contractors and give them a single point of contact for facilities management. A decade later, the South Lanarkshire firm has hit £4 million in turnover and completed a structural overhaul to handle what comes next.
The milestone matters beyond the headline number. Facilities management is a sector where margins are thin, competition is fierce, and client retention is everything. Reaching £4 million as an independent Scottish SME, without the backing of a national FM group, signals that the single-point-of-contact model still commands a premium when it is executed well. According to the British Institute of Facilities Management, the UK FM sector is worth over £50 billion annually, yet the majority of contracts still flow to a small number of large players. Firms like Strachan & Kemp carving out regional territory is exactly the kind of market correction smaller operators can drive.
Business Gateway was central to the journey. The publicly funded advisory service, delivered across Scotland through local councils and supported by the Scottish Government and European Regional Development Fund money, provides everything from one-to-one business mentoring to financial planning and growth diagnostics. For Smernicki, that support helped the business navigate the structural decisions that often trip up founder-led companies at the transition from small firm to mid-market operator: when to hire, how to delegate, and how to restructure without destabilising what already works.
This is precisely the gap Business Gateway is designed to fill. According to Scottish Enterprise's own data, SMEs that engage with structured business support programmes are significantly more likely to survive beyond five years and more likely to export or scale. The Scottish Government's National Strategy for Economic Transformation identifies business support infrastructure as a core lever for inclusive growth, and stories like Strachan & Kemp's are the ground-level evidence that the investment is landing. Business Gateway handled over 35,000 client interactions in a single recent year across Scotland, and the pipeline of firms at exactly this inflection point, profitable but needing to restructure for the next stage, is substantial.
The restructure itself is the part worth watching. Many SMEs hit a revenue ceiling not because demand dries up but because the organisation has not kept pace with the workload. Founder-led firms in particular tend to reach a point where the owner is simultaneously the salesperson, the delivery lead, the finance director, and the HR department. Restructuring to distribute those functions, whether through new hires, better systems, or clearer accountability, is what converts a good small business into a scalable one. That Strachan & Kemp has done this deliberately, with external support, rather than reactively, under pressure, puts it in a stronger position than most.