If you want to understand what a more balanced, inclusive high‑growth strategy looks like in practice, it is worth looking beyond Scotland’s big cities to the South of Scotland. Dumfries and Galloway and the Scottish Borders are emerging as a testbed for how to back ambitious founders early, widen participation and link local programmes into national growth policy.
At the heart of this story is South of Scotland Enterprise’s Pathways Pre‑Start programme. Launched as a pilot, Pathways has provided specialist business coaching to 269 existing or prospective entrepreneurs across the region, many of whom had ideas but lacked the confidence or know‑how to take the next step. It has gone further than advice: 391 people have received grants of up to £1,000 to explore or start a business, and the programme has already helped create over 100 new, innovative businesses in the South.
Critically, Pathways has been designed to tackle the structural barriers that can hold back high‑growth potential in rural areas. South of Scotland Enterprise reports that the programme has focused on women and other under‑represented groups, and that participants say it has helped to remove obstacles that previously stopped them considering entrepreneurship at all. That matters for a high‑growth agenda: if large parts of the population are effectively excluded from starting up, the pipeline of future scale‑ups will always be thinner than it could be.
The model is clearly convincing policymakers. Following the success of the pilot, Pathways has secured a further £1.5 million of Scottish Government funding to continue through 2025/26, as part of a wider £6 million investment in support for entrepreneurs who face additional barriers. In a January statement on “growing Scotland’s entrepreneurial economy”, ministers highlighted the South of Scotland programme by name, positioning it alongside a £2.5 million package for young entrepreneurs and a record £45 million innovation and enterprise budget for 2026–27.
That same statement pointed out that Scotland’s startup economy has been growing at around 19% a year, faster than the UK, France or Sweden. It is always hard to isolate cause and effect in ecosystem statistics, but it is reasonable to see initiatives like Pathways as part of the infrastructure that helps sustain that pace of company formation. They show how national ambitions filter down into specific interventions on the ground – in this case, helping hundreds of people in the South turn ideas into trading businesses.
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For readers of High Growth Scotland, the South of Scotland story is not just a regional curiosity. It suggests that a rural high‑growth thesis is starting to take shape, with Pathways acting as a pre‑start engine that can feed into later‑stage support from agencies such as Scottish Enterprise, Scottish EDGE and national young‑entrepreneur schemes. The businesses emerging from Dumfries and Galloway and the Borders are likely to span sectors where the region already has strengths – from food and drink and tourism to renewables and advanced manufacturing – all areas flagged by national agencies as key growth opportunities for Scotland.
If Scotland is serious about lifting long‑term growth, it cannot afford to treat regions like the South as afterthoughts. The early evidence from Pathways – hundreds of people supported, hundreds of grants awarded, and more than a hundred new ventures created – shows what happens when tailored coaching and modest amounts of capital are deployed with intent. The next challenge is making sure that the most promising of these firms can access the follow‑on finance, talent and infrastructure they need to become the high‑growth companies High Growth Scotland will be profiling in the years ahead.
