The programme is seeking high growth companies with the potential to achieve over £100 million turnover, and aims to raise ambition and support the development of high growth businesses as they scale up.

The programme builds on the success of ScaleupScotland and will provide intensive, strategic support to an initial cohort of 12 Scottish businesses.

Developed after extensive analysis of the challenges facing businesses as they scale up, the programme addresses the lack of strategic support available to high growth businesses and aims to grow the turnover of each business to over £100m.

The package of support is estimated to be valued in excess of £50k. Alongside advice and mentoring from some of the UK’s most successful entrepreneurs and business leaders, including Sir Tom Hunter, Lord Willie Haughey and Theo Paphitis, participants will also receive strategic consultancy support. This will initially provide a deep dive into each business to identify and align the team on the specific challenges and opportunities facing the entrepreneurial leader, the collective executive team, and the individual functional leaders.

Sir Tom Hunter, chair of West Coast Capital and The Hunter Foundation, said: “Through our existing Scale Up Scotland programme we recognised we needed to deliver a programme for the next level up and that’s what we are doing with the 2.0 version offering far more tailored, one to one sectoral growth support.

“Multiple studies, including our own commissioned by Oxford Economics, detail precisely why Scotland needs more scale-ups – this programme will provide precise, laser focussed support to high growth businesses with massive ambition.

“Scotland fundamentally needs far more ambitious scale-ups and to enable them we have to offer the right support – our economy depends on scale-ups, they are the engine of growth and prosperity so if we want to deliver a ten-year growth strategy this is one starting point.”

In addition to individually tailored consultancy and sector specific support, CEOs will participate in quarterly retreats to focus on common challenges through a mixture of specialist and peer to peer learning experiences as well as access to leading entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurs undertaking masterclasses and dinners as part of the ScaleupScotland2.0 programme will include:

• Bob Keiller who sold PSN for £600M
• Calum Paterson, managing partner at Scottish Equity Partners
• Calum Smeaton who recently exited TV Squared
• Sir Christopher Evans, biotech entrepreneur who created and publicly listed 20 of his own companies and built 25 private businesses
• Chris van der Kuyl, founder of Chroma Ventures, games guru and chair of Parsley Box
• Sir Jackie Stewart, former Formula One racing driver and philanthropist
• Kristian Tapaninaho and Darina Garland, founders of Ooni Pizza Ovens
• Mark Beaumont, world record holding endurance athlete, author, broadcaster and partner in EOS Advisory
• Mike Reid, founder and senior partner, Frog Capital
• Theo Paphitis, retail entrepreneur, philanthropist and former panellist on the BBC’s Dragons’ Den
• Sir Tom Hunter, chair of West Coast Capital and The Hunter Foundation
• Lord Willie Haughey, founder of City Facilities Management Holdings
• Willie Watt, chair of the Scottish National Investment Bank

One particular highlight will be a session taken by legendary racing driver and philanthropist, Sir Jackie Stewart on winning mentality and what we can learn from Formula One.

The programme will require a contribution of £10k per business towards costs.

Entries close on Monday 19th September at midnight. All applicants whether successful or not will be offered both advice on their propositions and signposting to ongoing support.